trillions · essential learning experiences and exposure to toxins means that a large percentage of...

www.Trillions.bizVol. 4 Issue 01 Jan-Mar 2019

Managing Millennials & Gen Z

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In this Issue03 Managing Millenials

08 Trump's Tariffs Driving Automation

10 Largest Cell Tower Radiation Study Confirms Link to Cancer

12 Sci-Hub: An Illegal Scientific Research Article-Sharing Site Which Could Help Save the World

14 Solar and Wind Farms in Sahara Could Increase Rainfall and Farm Output

15 Canadian Tax Agency Enables Scammers in India

18 Canada To Finally Make It Easier To Get Off Their Bogus No-Fly List, Maybe

20 New Study Says Endangered Species Act Works

22 Revolutionary Program Uses Neurofeedback to Reduce Parolee Recidivism

25 The EU Takes Two Big Swings At Tech Industry in New Copyright Law

27 Converting Ocean Plastic Waste to Fuel Becomes The Ultimate Recycling Win

28 Trump Orders The Destruction of Essential Public Records

29 New Approach To Photosynthesis Could Revolutionize Renewable Energy

30 Columbia Court Bans Odebrecht From National Contracts for 10 Years

31 Plant-Based Diets Help Athletes Reach Higher Performance

32 The Failure of COP24: Fiddling While the Earth Burns

33 Academic Experts Collaborate to Create a Truly Scalable Digital Currency

34 How Glyphosate Kills Bees and Other Species

36 The Greenland Ice Sheet Is Melting Faster Than Ever

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What follows may include generalizations that certainly do not apply to all Millennials. For every observed trend or common trait there are many exceptions. The follow-ing is not intended to belittle, deride or diminish anyone.

Our modern world was built by all those who came be-fore us, with each new generation being a bit different than the one before as our civilization and technology evolved.

Perhaps the most productive, industrious and creative generation in modern history were the baby boomers that were born in the ten years after World War II.

Then came Generation X born in the sixties to seven-ties, a product of the drug revolution, free sex, TV, day-care, working mothers, fast food and divorce.

Generation Y, also called Milleniums or Millennials, were born in the mid 1990s to mid 2000s and have grown up with video games, cell phones, vastly more TV, hormone imbalances and gender dysphoria, abun-dant porn and the Internet.

Gen Y is going to comprise nearly half of the work-force by 2026, so it is important for employers to un-derstand who they will be dealing with and how they can benefit from Millennials.

Millennials are very different from any generation in human history due to their immersion in electronic media and a more toxic environment.

Starting in the 1990s, studies consistently showed that the average North American youth spent at least 4 hours a day interacting with electronic media. Some researchers put the current figure at about 7 hours/day, with the most recent studies showing many kids spending 9 hours a day interacting with electronic me-dia in some way.

In recent years, most youth in developed nations spend much of their free time watching videos, surf-ing the web, playing video games, chatting or texting. They are not engaged in meaningful play, doing chores, involved in a hobby or sports, working or otherwise in-volved in the essential activities required for children to acquire the skills to develop into the capable and fully functional adults that society needs. Many Mil-lennials (but not all) are highly dysfunctional and lack basic skills required by employers.

The constant exposure to microwave radiation from cell phones and Wi-Fi is causing significant neurolog-ical impairment. Studies have shown that even a few minutes of exposure to microwave radiation causes hours of brain dysfunction. Most children are now ex-

Managing Millennials

Photo: Matthew-Kenwrick

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posed to harmful levels of radiation 24/7 and so their brains become permanently altered.

Even many infants are given tablets or other electron-ic devices to entertain them as soon as they are able to hold one. Newborns are placed next to microwave emitting baby monitors.

Computer manufacturers have been able to convince educators that holding an electronic device equals a great education and children who do not have a lap-top or tablet are somehow being deprived. Most pub-lic schools in developed countries no longer provide printed text books but instead give students only Wi-Fi linked laptops or tablet computers.

Well funded efforts by powerful entities are being made to get a digital device into the hands of virtually every child on Earth.

Millennials are also different because they have been injected with much larger doses of toxins in the form of vaccines at one time than any prior generation. Generation Y was given vaccines one at a time spread out over time so that the child's immune system could process the mercury and aluminum adjutants. Millen-nials are given multiple vaccines containing harmful toxins in concentrations sufficient to cause wide-spread and permanent neurological damage. And yes, the data really does strongly suggest that the toxins in vaccines do cause autism spectrum disorders, along with many other neurological disorders.

It is a well established and undisputed fact that the methylmercury that Millennials were exposed to through vaccines can cause deficits in attention, be-havior, cognition, and motor skills.

The food supply for Millennials has become increas-ingly genetically engineered and contaminated with herbicides and pesticides. Virtually all humans now have high concentrations of toxic chemicals in their body. Many of these chemicals are neurotoxins and inhibit normal brain function. They also radically alter the human microbiome—the colony of about 1,000 different microbes in the human intestines that con-vert food into the essential nutrients required by the human body. Proper brain function is dependent upon a healthy microbiome and few people have one these days.

The combination of exposure of digital media, lack of essential learning experiences and exposure to toxins means that a large percentage of Millennials suffer from neurological damage, cognitive impairment and underdevelopment to one degree or another.

While IQ scores and testing methodologies vary great-

ly from one country to another and much of the data is contradictory, the most recent data generally sug-gests that Millennials in many countries are less intel-ligent than previous generations.

Studies showed a consistent increase in IQ in the U.S. until recently but not any more. And according to re-search from the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway, the IQ of adult males in Norway has been in decline since 1975.

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense reported that more than 70% of 17- to 24-year-olds are ineligible for military service. The Army and Air Force have been forced to relax their requirements for recruits, seek more foreigners and women and spend more on re-cruiting campaigns. Even with the changes, the Army still missed its recruiting goal for 2018.

There are different kinds of intelligence and different ways to measure them. Millennials are much better at accessing information through digital devices than previous generations and this helps them to compen-sate in some ways for their cognitive impairment.

Millennials also generally have a much higher level of cultural intelligence than previous generations and are more able to think more independently.

Smart phones have become an extension of the hu-man mind for many people and in some ways they do make us smarter in ways that traditional intelligence tests fail to measure. So even if human IQ has dropped in some respects it has increased in other ways. The decrease may be compensated for by smarter devices and ready access to endless amount of information.

More Millennials = Fewer Functional Workers

Despite there being an abundant population of people of working age in much of the world, many of these people of working age are unemployable or very chal-lenging to employ and many employers around the world are facing a growing shortage of functional workers. Some companies are even going out of busi-ness because of labor shortages.

In many developed countries the labor problem is reaching a crisis level for many companies and it is going to get far worse without a different approach to the problem.

According to a recent study by the Business Develop-ment Bank of Canada (BDC), over 39% of small and medium sized enterprises are struggling to find new employees and the problem will not improve for at least a decade. The actual number is likely much high-er.


The U.S. National Association of Manufacturing and Deloitte claim that the U.S. will need to fill about 3.5 million jobs by 2025 but as many as 2 million of those jobs may go unfilled. Recent immigration policy changes will make it even harder to fill many vacan-cies.

Bar exam scores have dropped in recent years and en-rollment in law schools has plummeted as fewer stu-dents can handle the mental challenges of law school. The new shortage of skilled lawyers able to pass the bar exam has increased entry-level wages for new le-gal associates significantly.

With fewer workers available that meet employer's needs, many International corporations are forced to scour the planet to find the workers they need while also automating as many business processes as pos-sible.

Tech companies like Google and Microsoft recruit ag-gressively at most relevant Universities around the globe.

Successfully attracting, training, managing and re-taining new workers with the new generation presents unique challenges to employers in most countries and meeting the challenges first requires understanding the new work force and its specific characteristics and needs.

Millennial Challenges & Opportunities

Don't Really Want to Work, No Loyalty

Millennials can perceive work differently and some approach employment merely as a temporary way to fill an essential need for financial income. They may not see a job as a career or integral part of their adult identity and they can be quick to leave jobs that don't fully meet their needs.

With access to the Internet comes access to greater information and the erosion of long-held popular cul-tural beliefs about authority, the nature of capitalism, corporate social responsibility, the role of the work-place, etc.

Some Millennials perceive corporations as inherent-ly evil or at least disingenuous, self-serving and ex-ploitive—and in reality many are. Some may even view employers as the common enemy and take advantage of opportunities to sabotage the company they work for.

Millennial attitudes towards their employer presents an important opportunity for companies to restructure themselves in light of Millennial's perceptions and cre-ate a more meaningful and authentic corporate mis-

sion and more engaging and satisfying work place.

Because many Millennials spend so much time in the cybersphere and that is where their peers are, it can be important to extend a company's presence more into social media and engage Millennials in that sphere.

Millennials need meaning, authenticity and honesty and won't buy into corporate hype. So, employers re-ally need to focus on social responsibility and adopt a greater mission that actually benefits local communi-ties and contributes to humanity's future. How a com-pany fills its customers needs should be made very clear and highlighted.

Millennials also need structure and clear boundaries, frequent attention from a supervisor/mentor they can respect and training that is tailored to their specific needs. They need greater engagement with upper management and to know that their needs will be ad-dressed on a meaningful level.

Companies also need to clearly define what they need from employees and to celebrate the characteristics of highly effective employees and their beneficial im-pact on the company, other workers, the local commu-nity and the world at large. Millennials need real-world examples of the value of their work and to know the impact of failure to meet employer's needs.

Don't Know How to Work, Lack Basic Skills and Common Sense

Many Millennials do lack even the most basic skills that they should have developed in childhood. This includes simply showing up at work on time, focus-ing on work instead of texting or other activities, hav-ing a positive attitude, completing tasks as required, pattern recognition, physical strength and stamina, spatial skills, simple logic, physical dexterity, avoid-ing injury, communicating, understanding the chain of command, not acting entitled, etc.

Helping a Millennial acquire the basic life-skills they should have developed as a child can be difficult but with sufficient effort and time many can develop the necessary skills.

Employers should not make assumptions about a Mil-lennial's skills and must do a thorough skills assess-ment and then structure a training program to fit each individual's needs.

In some ways Millennials must be managed as young children, which some of them may find offensive. Han-dling adults as children requires tact and clever pack-aging.

Recruiting Millennials provides employers an opportu-

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nity to improve their recruiting, applicant assessment and interviewing process and make the process more effective and meaningful.

Training Millennials may require that employers re-think work processes and better document them. Some jobs may be need to be broken into multiple simple jobs that can be handled more easily by those with limited skills.

Emotionally and Mentally Unstable

Because a significant percentage of Millennials do suffer from some degree of autism spectrum disor-der or other neurological or cognitive impairment, it is important to identify the needs and special abilities of each worker and structure the work environment to support them but also prevent disruption by them.

Millions of Americans now suffer from Asperger's syndrome. Those with the condition may have un-usual speech patterns, lack of empathy and confuse feelings with thoughts. They may also be very detail oriented and not be able to see the bigger picture. De-tecting or understanding subtle social cues may be beyond them.

Coping with someone with Asperger's syndrome pres-ents its own unique challenges but also potential rewards because those with Asperger's may be able to think in new ways and provide unique solutions to problems. But they can be prone to serious dys-function when not at their best. Some may be more productive under the right conditions but may have a melt-down and pose a threat to others when their needs aren't met.

Adapting to a worker with Aspberger's may provide benefits to other workers as well by providing a more supportive environment with clear expectations, boundaries, requirements and the tools and resources for success.

Potential for Violence

Many Millennials have spent more than 100,000 hours playing video games in which extreme violence is re-warded. After about 10,000 hours, their brains became hard-wired to associate violence with pleasure and re-ward. Winning equals causing death and destruction.

Most can separate fantasy from reality but when those same people have other neurological damage from environmental toxins and underdevelopment from a lack of healthy play and social interaction, they can be prone to violence.

When such a person is put on anti-depressants some of them can become homicidal and/or suicidal.

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It is important for employers to be aware of potential risks of violence from all employees and to manage those risks.

One way to reduce the risks is to simply not hire or retain those who take pleasure in violence. Employ-ers should try determine what kind of video games an applicant likes to play and if they like to watch hor-ror movies. While it is probably illegal to discriminate against someone based on their entertainment pref-erences, employers can do their best to not employ someone who takes pleasure from violence and the pain of others.

It is also illegal to ask employees what drugs they are taking and to fire them for being on dangerous drugs, but employers can provide mental health services that help resolve the root causes of depression and don't prescribe potentially harmful medication.

Cultivating a supportive culture where employees can thrive and resolve deep-seated psychological issues is one of the best ways to manage the risks of vio-lence from Millennials.

One way to help manage the risk of violence is to teach employees the highly effective and simple emo-tional management technique known as EFT (Emo-tional Freedom Technique) and encourage its use in the workplace. Incorporating the practice of EFT into the corporate culture can make a huge difference.


Steps to Coping With and Benefiting From Millennials

• Cultivate a corporate culture and mission that bet-ter meets Millennial's needs for authenticity, integ-rity and meaning.

• Clearly demonstrate the company's value to its staff, customers, community and humanity.

• Anticipate higher labor costs and lower productivi-ty. Greatly expand recruitment efforts and process substantially more applications to find the most qualified. Adopt much more in-depth and effective applicant evaluation.

• Document work processes and provide more train-ing from very basic to advanced with regular up-dates and refreshers.

• Provide mentors with great communication, lead-ership and relationship skills.

• Provide well defined structure and written rules and guidance and provide regular reminders of expectations. Ensure that rules are observed by management and managers aren't perceived as outside the structure or above the rules.

• Increase security and monitoring to identify those who might be stealing, sabotaging or pose a safe-ty risk.

• Engage with workers and their peers in positive ways through social media and maintain a strong, positive but authentic social media presence. If you aren't feeding enough information about your company through social media then your staff's gossip may be what shapes public opinion and in-fluences employee's feelings about their employer.

• Engage a psychologist with the right skills to help assess, monitor and support workers.

• Provide an effective company-wide communica-tion system where everyone can have a voice and be heard. Share challenges, successes, failures and opportunities. Avoid hype and share the good, bad and ugly.

• Make upper management accessible and respon-sive to staff's needs and feedback. Train manage-ment on how to recognize and respond to Millen-nials' unique needs.

• Provide a work environment with clean and un-cluttered work areas that are well lit and which incorporate principals of feng-shui (aesthetically harmonious) but which are also interesting and engaging. Provide workers with personal space they can make their own.

• Impose clear written labor contracts that suffi-ciently manage risks. Provide clear explanationson clauses that may rub workers the wrong way.Review contracts with staff at least once a year.

How Millennials Could Change the Future

When presented with unrestricted access to informa-tion, Millennials are less likely to buy into traditional cultural dogma and are prone to perceiving the world around them from a more realistic perspective. In this case they can be an effective force for good with a unique opportunity to create a new and more effective culture.

However, when Millennials are given access to infor-mation that is filtered and limited by a central author-ity like the Chinese or Saudi Arabian dictatorships or an algorithm of Facebook or Google, many of them integrate the information without question.

Absent altruistic leadership or access to multiple per-spectives, Millennials may be harnessed for negative purposes. Social media giants such as Facebook and Google divide and segment users by their interests and feed them data that supports a limited perspec-tive. This is how Donald Trump was elected and how governments have been overthrown.

Social engineering through digital media provides a mechanism to weaponize Millennials, or merely divide and conquer and pit one group against another.

Businesses can provide an important buffer against the coercion of their Millennial employees, not by get-ting involved in politics or sensitive social issues but by providing a foundation of humane ideals and help-ing employees find common ground with each other. Doing so is essential to preventing division and idea-logical conflict among employees.

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Trump's well-meaning tarriffs aren't always having the impact desired. In some cases they are hastening the demise of not just U.S. manufacturing jobs but all manufacturing jobs worldwide.

A prime example of this is one of Hong Kong’s biggest manufacturer of cotton shirts. It has come up with a plan to hang on to its U.S. sales despite high tariffs. The answer is all about automation, not job creation.

With cotton shirts subject to a 19.7% import tax in the U.S., Esquel Group, Hong Kong’s biggest manufacturerin that category, has a lot to be concerned about. Italso makes 41% of its total revenues of $1.3 billion peryear in America. It cannot afford to lose the business,since unlike other companies affected by U.S. tariffsit cannot just seek other markets. So it had to dosomething.

The first means Esquel had used to prepare itself for tariffs was to set up manufacturing sites outside of the U.S. to avoid high labor costs. It also picked places without major trade barriers in selling to America.

One such location was Mauritius, a relatively tiny island in the Indian Ocean. That country is a long-

standing signatory to the Multi Fibre Agreement of 1974 and the American Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), first passed in 2000. Under those agreements, apparel exports from Mauritius to the United States are duty free.

This is part of why Mauritius is especially of interest to companies like Esquel, with local tax rates for manufacturers there running about 3%. The country also has no withholding tax on dividend payments to companies headquartered outside of Mauritius.

The Esquel Group has stayed in Mauritius “because of the African growth initiative”, according to Marjorie Yang, daughter of Esquel’s original founder Yang Yuan-loong. It has cut back on production there, however, dropping from $123.6 million in sales for Esquel (Mauritius) in 2015 to $87.3 million in 2017.

Marjorie Yang comes from a far more tech-savvy generation than her father. She is a graduate of M.I.T. with mathematics as her focus. She also hasa Harvard MBA. When she looked at how to expandthe company’s already-successful business, the waysof others would have suggested she should invest inother companies and form a conglomerate. Insteadshe doubled-down to become even more successfulin the company’s core business of cotton shirtproduction.

She did so by instituting tight and modern supply chain management techniques and greatly expanding the use of technology.

As one example, the current CEO invested in 1998 – 20 years ago – in genome sequencing for cotton.The purpose was to increase production yields and toprovide a better, more consistent quality of cotton forher company.

A second example was the now visionary decision in 2012 to build both an advanced R&D center and ultra-modern factory in Guilin. It is located in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, an area noted for advanced technology startups and its emergence as an eco-tourism hub. The new factory and R&D center cost $320 million to build.

Third came a major strategic investment Esquel made in San Francisco-based Grabit. That company created a unique means for robots to grip fabrics and other

Trump's Tariffs Driving Automation


materials using electrostatic adhesion. That method, which is the same means by which balloons stick to walls after being rubbed on fabrics, is expected to provide Esquel with a major breakthrough for its factories.

Garment production has traditionally required much manual labor. That is part of why low-cost labor locations were a must to avoid the cost of things like shirts from spiraling out of reach. With Grabit’s technology, however, it is already clear from initial tests that its more “sensitive” approach to handling cloth that it should allow companies like Esquel to smooth fabrics for stitching without wrinkling. That, along with automated folding and packaging of the shirts, could eliminate much of the labor required for making them.

Esquel is not Grabit’s only customer but is certainly a significant one. Grabit recently disclosed that it has already built several production lines for Nike, a major sports garment supplier with a strong interest in getting away from low-cost factories in Asia where it has come under criticism for poor labor conditions. Grabit is planning to build a shirt production robotic line for Nike sometime in 2019.

Besides Grabit, another American company working in a similar space is Softwear Automation out of Atlanta. The Georgia company has made two interesting partners of its own involving what are called “sewbots” to automate clothing sewing processes. One is Wal-Mart, whose Wal-Mart Foundation provided a critical research grant to Softwear to develop some of its key technology; that project was considered critical to the formation of Softwear as a company in 2014. The second partner is Li & Fung, a major supply chain master based in Hong Kong which produces two-thirds of its revenue from garments. Li & Fung also – and not coincidentally – is one of Wal-Mart’s bigger suppliers.

Although Esquel is protective about the timing of its own plans, it intends to bring highly-robotic factories leveraging the Grabit technologies to build garments into markets like the U.S. in the near future. With tariffs for its shirts running close to 20%, investments in fully robotic factories can pay off fast.

Softwear agrees with that. According to Peter Santora, Softwear’s Chief Commercial Officer, the use of its technologies in an automated T-shirt factory could drive production costs to as low as $.33 per item. He calculates that out as saying a new U.S. factory could pay back its investment in less than 12 months. That is behind why Tianyun Garments of Sunzhou, China, another customer of Softwear who happens to supply T-shirts to Adidas, is building a new automated T-shirtfactory in the United States.

Tianyun’s customer, Adidas, is also planning big moves of its own in the automated manufacturing of clothing and shoes. It already has fully automated clothing factories in place in both the U.S. and Germany. It has further developed a means of using these “Speedfactories”, as they are called, to allow cutting the production startup time for a new shoe variant from what used to be as long as 18 months to now sometimes less than a week. When the latest improvements to this approach to factory automation have been “ironed out” – as the industry used to say – Adidas plans to move even more such factories intothe U.S.

The story of high tariffs on clothing imported into the U.S. is therefore going to do one thing Donald Trump might be happy to hear. It will result in building far more clothing factories in the United States. But while building such factories is good for the construction industries and startups like both Grabit and Softwear will benefit from the sale and licensing of their technologies for them, those factories will employ only a fraction of the people these places used to require. Worse still for the American economy, the innovations which enabled these highly-automated factories to enter the U.S. will quickly spread to other places – and put even more people out of work in the long run.

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It has been well known since the 1950s that even very low levels of microwave radiation damages biological tissue and it was observed that those with the most exposure had increased rates of cancer. However, it was not until the 1990s when technology became sufficiently advanced that there was irrefutible proof that microwave radiation damages human DNA.

Despite the fact that hundreds of well designed studies published in peer-reviewed journals have exposed the hazards of microwave radiation, our exposure to it continues to increase rapidly.

How stupid are we?

As the new 5G cellular communications networks begin to roll out across the world, the largest study investigating links between cell phone radiation and cancer says we should back off from using the new technology, but of course we won't. We should also dramatically reduce our usage of 4G and other telecommunications devices, but that won't happen either.

That large study, conducted by L. Falcioni and others at the Ramazzini Institute (RI) in Italy, was released to the public as a paper in the August 2018 issue of Environmental Research. For that work, the researchers studied the possible carcinogenic impacts on Sprague-Dawley rats exposed to 1.8 GHz Trillions January-March 2019

radio frequencies via a GSM antenna similar to that of the radio base stations used for mobile phones.

That study showed “a statistically significant increase in the incidence of heart Schwannomas” in male rats used in the research. It also noted that there was “an increase in the incidence of malignant glial tumors [of the brain]” in female rats used in the study, though the amount found here was not statistically significant.

The RI study also noted precancerous conditions including Schwann cells hyperplasia in both male and female rats.

2,448 animals were involved in the study, making this the biggest long-term study ever run on the health effects of Radio Frequency Radiation (RFR). The overwhelming conclusion was that there is a direct link between exposure to normal levels of cellular radiation and certain heart and brain cancer types.

The U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) conducted another large study of exposures to much higher levels of cell phone radiofrequency (RF) radiation. That study, which cost $25 million to carry out, saw links between RF radiation exposure and the same unusual Schwannoma tumors in the hearts of rats undergoing the tests.

The NTP study also verified that the Schwannoma

Largest Cell Tower Radiation Study Confirms Link to Cancer


tumors were of the same histotype seen in other tumors from cell phone users.

Further analysis of NTP’s data showed a “statistically significant” amount of increased harm to heart muscle tissue.

Some who had seen the NTP results questioned whether the tests were valid, in part because relatively high power outputs were used for the tests. As other researchers noted, however, the current cell tower systems already are operating at output powers beyond those designated as safe by the FCC.

As David O. Carpenter MD, former Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Albany said after reading these latest results, “This study raises concerns that simply living close to a cell tower will pose threats to human health. Governments need to take measures to reduce exposures from cell tower emissions. Cell towers should not be near schools, hospitals or people’s homes. Public health agencies need to educate the public on how to reduce exposure from all sources of wireless radiofrequency radiation—be it from cell towers or cell phones or Wi-Fi in schools.”

Carpenter went on to say that, “This is particularly urgent because of current plans to place small 5G cell towers about every 300 meters in every street across the country. These 5G ‘small cell’ antennas will result in continuous exposure to everyone living nearby and everyone walking down the street. The increased exposures will increase risk of cancer and other diseases such as electro-hypersensitivity.”

5G, also known as the “Fifth Generation” cellular technology, is another serious concern which will play itself out soon in neighborhoods across most of the developed countries in the very near future. Besides the proliferation of 5G cell towers which will be deployed at high density levels in every urban area, there are already new concerns about the side effects which might be connected to 5G usage.

5G will use frequencies in the microwave range of 600 MHz to 71 GHz, which includes frequencies well proven to have severe detrimental biological effects.

In San Francisco, one of the earliest places 5G equipment was installed was around some firehouses. As the firefighters noted, not long after it went in, workers there reported serious brain effects. They experienced memory problems and difficulty concentrating, suggesting that the output radiation was literally “scrambling their brains”. Further evidence of the likely connection between the 5G outputs and the symptoms was confirmed further, when it was

discovered that when the firefighters were transferred to other fire stations without any 5G devices in the vicinity–the symptoms went away.

In Gateshead, England, another accidental 5G experiment showed up when the city switched on its new wireless streetlight systems. Those living near the streetlight installations reported increased levels of miscarriages and still births, insomnia and nosebleeds.

When 5G becomes commonplace, the number and seriousness of these effects can only multiply.

Part of why is that while the technology is projected to deliver data transfer speeds up to 100 times faster than current 4G systems, 5G waves are not able to travel as far as 4G because of how the radiation is shaped and is transmitted. What that means in practical terms is that one new base station will need to be put in place for every 12 homes. So while in the past the cell towers were often placed at a considerable distance from homes–and people could plan to live a bit away from them–soon it is going to a lot more difficult to stay far away from any of these towers. Free cancer for everyone!

As the links between cellular phone radiation and both brain and heart tumors, plus the new 5G effects become more concrete, it is time to look even harder into past studies by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. Cellular phones clearly pose a much higher risk to physical health and brain disorders than most medical professionals ever imagined.

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Sci-Hub: An Illegal Scientific Research Article-SharingSite Which Could Help Save the World

The current model for publishing scientific research stifles innovation and imperils us all.

A website the public knows little about has become a critical tool for researchers to share their work without paywalls.

In the world of online copyrighted material shar-ing, most people think only of sites like The Pirate Bay and people illegally downloading movies and television shows. There is another illegal sharing site that most have never heard of and which to many provides a critical service to the scientific community. That site is Sci-Hub.

What the site does is it makes it possible for sci-entific researchers to get past often very expensive paywalls to read other articles written by colleagues in their field.

Reviewing the latest published research is a critical part of the research and development process for scientists. Without it, knowledge of current think-ing and breakthroughs already made by others is far less available. That information helps stimulate new ideas for further research by others and reduce duplication of effort. With enough background on

what has gone before, new approaches to not just treating but even curing cancer might emerge faster. Climate researchers seeing what others have done might uncover a new way to draft damaging carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at lower costs than ever before. Such breakthroughs are often impossi-ble without understanding what others have done in their fields.

The legal approach to doing this is to do your own research, submit it to a publisher of a scientific jour-nal. That journal’s editors send out the articles to experts for what is known as “peer review”. They comment and suggest edits. After some final back-and-forth with the original article writers, the arti-cles are published.

One might think that the act of publishing would make the articles available for many to see, but that is not the case. Often the scientific journal publishers, like Elsevier, publish the final edited article in their journals and at the same time take away the copyright control of the article from the researchers who submitted it. The double-bind which results is the published journal version of the articles is only available to subscribers or as a per-article purchase. Titles, abstracts, and sometimes summaries of the


articles are available for all to see, but that is all. For everything else, researchers must pay high fees for access. Worse still, because the researchers often have to give away copyrights to their own work to get it published in these journals, they often do not even have the right to distribute their own copies of their own work. Most get no money at all for publish-ing their articles either, with only the journal being the one which makes a profit on the submissions. And even if they want to share their research with others, they are barred from doing so even through distribution of the very article they just wrote.

Another problem with this model of publishing is that some of the so-called peers that might do a re-view have their own agenda and can block the pub-lication of work that is too innovative or might con-tradict prior research or deeply entrenched dogma.

The time it takes for an important paper to get pub-lished is also a problem. At at time when humanity faces the threat of its own extinction, new infor-mation needs to be made available quickly so that our technology and the understanding of the world around and within us advances fast enough for real solutions to be implemented.

Enter Sci-Hub. This online service allowed those who have copies of scientific articles to post them for distribution, just as online pirate firms upload movies and episodes of television shows. Then researchers can go to the service, search for articles relevant to their field, and download the articles at no charge. All of which is good for the advancement of science except that it is illegal be-cause the material is copyrighted.

The site was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan. She created it as a tool to help important research to be shared. She thought that making papers available to the public would be a good test case of copyright law. It could even be argued that making the articles available was a sort of “fair use” provided the readers did not resell the material further. But that argument failed when the whole idea went to court.

As Elbakyan wrote about her experience, “When Sci-Hub became known, I thought it might be a good case against copyright law. When the law prevents science to develop [which Elbakyan insists it does when research is closeted away behind firewalls], that law must be repealed.” The publishers fired back quickly with lawsuits. After that, Elbakyan wrote, “Sci Hub was quickly banished as an ‘illegal’ service.

Alternate solutions and projects like Unpaywall emerged and started promoting themselves as ‘legal’ alternatives to Sci-Hub.”

It seems like a logical argument. The U.S. Constitu-tion describes the concept of copyright as intended to aid the progress of arts and science.

Despite that logic, Sci-Hub has since lost two ma-jor U.S. legal fights over what it was doing and had its domain names seized. Like The Pirate Bay and similar file-sharing sites, Sci-Hub has continued to reemerge under different names and continues to operate. It does so both because of the strong beliefs of its founder about its importance, and because researchers find it very useful to their work. In fact, researchers who find important articles on Sci-Hub often even reference the Sci-Hub versions of the articles in the list of citations included with their own research publications.

As to the next step, Elbakyan hopes the public will help her fight for changes in copyright law which will break down these paywalls and help research-ers get access to the papers they need. As she wrote, “Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.”

Trillions does not advocate the illegal sharing of copy-righted material. In the case of Sci-Hub, however, it urges those reading this who believe there should be freer access to critical research information to lobby for change in copyright laws at the Federal level. There must be a better way than just locking up the infor-mation, especially after much of the research that is being published is often paid for with public funds or research foundations who want the research shared as widely as possible.

We encourage scientists to boycott for-profit publish-ers who stifle scientific innovation and discovery.

14

Solar and Wind Farms in Sahara Could Increase Rainfall and Farm Output

A new study says investing in large wind farms and solar energy in the Sahel and Saharan desert regions could boost rainfall and vegetation.

The new climate modeling study focused on the climate-changing impacts of installing major solar and wind power installations in the region. The area is considered a prime candidate for renewable energy as there is always plenty of both sun and wind in the region. That such installations would avoid the need for other fossil fuel-based plants, and therefore avoid dumping more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere was straightforward as part of the conclusions.

The surprise was that putting these installations in would increase rainfall and spur vegetation growth, both in significant amounts. They would also raise the ground surface temperature slightly at night.

Past research into the impacts of solar and wind energy installations has showed sometimes positive and sometimes negative contributions to the climate just by their existence. The impacts varied based on where they were installed and in many cases the impacts were negligible.

In this study, headed up by Yan Li at the University of Illinois, the researchers showed that the high solar absorption was a benefit to the region just by absorbing the energy into solar cells rather than just into the ground. Large wind farms tended to raise air temperatures near the surface of the ground. This is especially important at night when temperatures can often be much colder than in the day. The researchers also found that rainfall could be boosted by around 0.25 millimeters per day.

All three effects provide major benefits to growing crops. The higher rainfall could also create long-term changes to the entire climate of the region, lower the high temperatures and perhaps creating more green areas where right now there is mostly desert.

As the authors stated about their study, “The greater nighttime warming takes place because wind turbines can enhance the vertical mixing and bring down warmer air from above. This increase in precipitation, in turn, leads to an increase in vegetation cover, creating a positive feedback loop.”

A co-lead in the study from the University of Maryland, Eugenia Kalnay, explained further that, “The rainfall increase is a consequence of complex land-atmosphere interactions that occur because

solar panels and wind turbines create rougher and darker land surfaces.”

A key to why the impact was so significant was the scale of the potential installations. As Li noted in his comments about the work, “Previous modeling studies have shown that large-scale wind and solar farms can produce significant climate change at continental scales.”

The three co-leaders of the study, Li plus Kalnay and Safa Motesharrei of the University of Maryland, chose the Sahara and the Sahel for their analysis in major part because it is wide-open for potential renewable energy installations. As Li said, “We chose it because it is the largest desert in the world; it is sparsely inhabited; it is highly sensitive to land changes; and it is in Africa and close to Europe and the Middle East, all of which have large and growing energy demands.”

The region also happens to have so much space available – without any real competitive use for it – that if it were fully-populated with wind and solarinstallations it could produce over 3 terawatts ofwind power and 79 terawatts of solar power. That’sover 4 times the entire energy demand of Earth in2017, which was only 18 terawatts.

The amount of power to be generated could do far more than just drive the economy while helping with vegetation and rainfall in the region. It would also have enough excess to run seawater desalination plants, something which might prove increasingly valuable as drought increases in areas around the continent and fresh water becomes in higher demand.

The authors hope the results will drive others to move faster on building potential renewable energy installations in desert regions throughout the world. The potential to, as co-lead Motesharrei said in comments about their work, drive “agriculture, economic development and social well-being” on the African continent and beyond, could transform ways for the globe to transform as climate change grows fiercer everywhere.


A group operating out of India’s biggest city has stolen over $10 million from Canadians over the past five years in an elaborate phone scam. They are just one of many such operations.

The scheme is terrifyingly simple. Using widely-available robocall technology, a group of Indian criminals call every Canadian phone number. The computer messages left on your phone – or what you hear if you pick it up – announce you owe unpaid taxes and will probably be arrested. You must call back immediately.

When you call back, the phone number – a Voice Over IP (VoIP) number which appears to be coming from within Canada – reroutes back to a small apartment building in Mumbai where the scammers operate. A person then picks up, claims to be working with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), and then threatens you if you do not pay right now. If you don’t, you’re going to jail, the caller says. The caller also threatens to get you fired, seize your home or other property, and even to take your children from you. It’s terrifying for the people who fall for it.

One of the reasons that this scam is so effective is that it is somewhat believable. Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is indeed a rogue agency that actually does terrify people. It sometimes acts just like a criminal enterprise out to bully Canadians into paying taxes they don't really owe and the Canadian tax code is so complex, convoluted and ambiguous that no one really knows how much tax they really do owe.

Studies have shown that many CRA tax experts usually can't answer simple tax questions correctly and to get an official tax opinion from the agency can cost tens of thousands of dollars and even after paying and waiting months or years the opinion is non-binding.

The CRA is so bad that nearly 10% of Canadians now live abroad, many of them having fled the country as tax refugees. Sometimes permanently leaving the country is the only way to escape the clutches of the predatory CRA, which in some cases doesn't even recognize the authority of the courts when they try to curtail its abuses.

The Indian scammers know how the CRA operates and do a good job of emulating it and exploiting fear of the tax authorities. While most Canadians don't fall for their tactics, enough people do to make it worthwhile for the scammers.

The scammers aren't so easily detected because many of the people working for the CRA have strong accents and aren't native-born Canadians or are but don't speak English very well.

Those working in most government call centers must speak French and English and so the call centers are often in the French speaking province of Quebec where many people have a heavy accent when speaking English.

As one example of the victims of the Indian scammers, take the case of Gehangir Rashidi, 63, an immigrant who moved to Toronto from Iran. For him, the calls are not a surprise. The government calling up to threaten

Canada Tax Agency Enables Scammers in India

in Fraudulent Tax Collection Schemes

16

an individual was just part of daily life in Iran. When he received the call, he did not realize the Canadian government would never do this and would send letters first.

In Rashidi’s case, the criminals eventually took $110,000 from him. When he said he did not have the money they were demanding, they told him, according to Rashidi’s account, “Go and borrow it from a bank. Go to a friend. Go to your employer. Go to wherever you can to make money, but you have to pay.”

He ended up paying the funds via bitcoin machines around the Toronto metropolitan area. For anyone who might have had the chance to calm for a few minutes and consider what was happening, that this was the way to pay the Federal authorities past due taxes might have been suspicious. But the worst victims of the scam artists are operating out of fear for their very lives.

That fear builds because of other tactics the callers use, often brilliantly, to build a sort of trust with their victim while further frightening them.

Once a potential victim calls back, the focus of the scam goes onto threats but also makes time to learn more about the victim. The scammer verifies the name, gets other information about the man’s family, location where he or she lives, where they work and other details. Keep in mind that this call was in response to a robocall and the scammer initially knows little about the person who eventually decided to return their call. The area code of the phone number returning the call is a first step, but there is far more going on behind the scenes with the scammers to pin you down.

After the returned call is well under way and a victim seems to respond to the threat by asking “what can I do?”, the call gets transferred to the equivalent of closers in the sales industry. Those closers ask questions to learn more about the person they’ve reached. They also alternate between “good cop” and “bad cop” approaches to mix threats with “maybe we could settle for less than the full amount”. The closer also uses everything they have learned about the victim to show they – the scammers – are “for real” and that they really know the person they’ve targeted. Few on the receiving side of the robocall and who call back realize they provided the information being parroted back to them as “proof” of the situation.

Another trick, as one victim to the scam found out, include masquerading as the person’s own accountant. The way that worked in one case was that the victim first pushed back, saying that he could not possibly owe the amount the criminals said he

did. So, they asked for his accountant’s name and phone number, then pretended to call the accountant’s office. A line picked up and other person, also part of the criminal gang in India, pretended to be with the victim’s accounting firm and said that yes, the victim did owe the amount the fake Canadian authorities were claiming he did.

A common thread in the process is to arranging payments through bitcoin rather than through banks. The scammers insist those payments go directly to the Canadian Revenue Agency and get logged in faster, which is why they say you can’t just go to a bank or other financial agency to pay directly. There’s also no way someone should just write a check and mail it in. That would take too long.

Because of the amount of money being demanded, while they don’t pay via banks, those who fall prey to these con artists must go to their own bank often as a first step. Since they are withdrawing often very large amounts of cash, the victims now have another problem to deal with. The banks themselves often get suspicious about why so much cash is being withdrawn. Sometimes the victims go to multiple branches of their bank to avoid a single withdrawal that is very large, to avoid scrutiny. That does not really work, as the banks have a record of the other withdrawals and eventually raise the issue as a concern.

There the scammers help them out with advice which again, to someone less rattled than those being threatened, would seem crazy on the face of it. They help their victims concoct a story that might make sense to an individual bank. In one case, the victim was told to tell the bank people he was getting cash to buy furniture. It made sense, so the bank did not flag it.

As to who is conducting the scam, it turns out many of these come from India’s call center industry. They begin with excellent English language skills and an ability to speak it often with minimal trace of their native Indian accents. They also are familiar with handling foreigners on the phone.

This is well known in part because of a raid in India which came via a referral from U.S. authorities in 2016. The same criminal groups that are targeting Canada have also been going after U.S. individuals. The primary change for the U.S. is the scammers say they are from the Internal Revenue Service. They also have been demanding payment in other non-bank forms including, of all things, iTunes gift cards.

That big raid, which started the downfall of at least


some of these call centers, resulted in over 700 people being taken into custody. They were picked up at three office buildings in the northern Mumbai suburb of Thane, based on information suspecting those sites as being the origin of a major fake IRS tax collection scam. 70 of those arrested are now in jail.

The raids also led to the indictments of 60 people in India by the U.S. Justice Department. Follow-up investigations eventually bagged the Thane operation’s mastermind, Sagar Thakkar. He was finally caught and arrested while attempting to buy a private plane, presumably to allow him to flee the country.

The Internal Revenue Service estimates that the operations Thakkar and others like him run in India are responsible for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars just since 2012. More than 15,000 Americans are estimated to have fallen victim to the scam.

While the U.S. has taken an aggressive stance in investigating and referring criminal information on these schemes to Indian authorities, Canadian authorities appear to be lagging in defending the rights of their citizens on this matter. The Indian police say they are more than willing to help out and crack down, but they also say Canadian authorities have not been contacting them – enough at least – for help.

As Indian Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh said in a recent interview, he only accidentally stumbled on that the same scammers targeting the U.S. were targeting Canadians as well. He read about it on the RCMP website. As he said in a recent interview, “Nobody contacted us from Canada. It doesn’t seem right.”

Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale’s response to that statement was that the RCMP was “most definitely” in contact with law enforcement individuals in India regarding the CRA fraud complaints. Goodale’s statement said about the Indian Police Commissioner’s comments that, “Mr. Singh was not among the partners the RCMP works with in India.”

Goodale said further that Canada had assisted with “about a dozen arrests in Canada and others in India” regarding this in 2016. It had helped “cut the volume of complaints to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre by 50% the following year”. He acknowledged that “those complaints…are rising again”. He said the new National Cybercrime

Coordination Unit, part of Budget 2018 and including $116 million for the first five years alone allocated for it, should help shut down even more of these crimes.

The total number of arrests and detentions in Canada still suggests more of a sense of urgency needs to be taken within the Canadian government to protect its citizens better against such scams. With over 60,000 Canadians having registered complaints about the phone scam during the past five years, and over $10 million of Canadian citizens’ money having been taken, this is a serious problem. It is also one would think Canadian authorities’ alleged focus on the crimes – per Goodale, at least -- would have resulted in more than a dozen arrests.

For now, the fraudulent call center operations in India continue to propagate. Even while some may get shut down, others reappear elsewhere quickly, since moving or setting up entirely new operations is a relatively inexpensive operation. Besides, there is the lure of just way too much money made too easily. As Jayesh Dubey, a former call scammer employee who eventually became a whistleblower, said, “It was big money. I cannot make it anywhere [else].”

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After years of frustration and confusion as everyone from babies to veterans have had their right to travel by air violated, the Canadian government may finally do something to help people clear their names when they wrongfully show up on the no-fly list.

Canada is the second largest country on Earth, has few roads and most of the roads are in very poor condition. It takes about 90 hours of actual drive time (excluding any stops) to get from one side of Canada to the other. Many northern communities in Canada can be reached only by air. So, being able to fly from place to place is critically important for many Canadians and being placed on the no-fly list can be far more than just an inconvenience.

The no-fly list is the set of names of people believed by the government as too much of a security risk to board a plane. This list does include infants, little old ladies, loyal Vets and many other people who should not be on the list. The list does NOT include the hundreds of known terrorists that Canada has been importing into the country as refugees under the current Liberal government.

Many people, especially those on the list, feel that Canada's no-fly list is a bad joke and a prime example of government lunacy, malice and criminality.

The list is illegal and a violation of Canada's Charter of Human Rights because it tries, convicts and penalizes a person without any due process and without their knowledge. Given the lack of alternative means of travel, it can deny the fundamental human right of free movement guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To add further insult to injury, a person on the no-fly list is not notified in advance or allowed to know why they are on the list.

Most of the people on the list have not committed any crimes and are not even suspected of committing any crimes. Yet, some government employee somewhere decided to add a name for some reason that can't or won't be revealed.

In addition to its own no-fly list, Canada uses America's Tuscan (Tipoff US/Canada), a database of at least 680,000 names, of which at least 40% of people have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation”. The list is used to screen all travelers coming into Canada from anywhere in the world. This list originated pre-9/11.

Canada's own no-fly list was implemented as a knee-jerk reaction to the attacks of 9/11 in the U.S., even though the attacks have since been proven to be an inside job.

Canada to Finally Make it Easier to Get Off Their Bogus No-Fly List, Maybe


Often the reason that someone is put on the list is that a person with their name or a similar name somewhere posted something or accessed data online or said something in an illegally surveilled phone conversation that some government felt was anti-government or pro-violence, or the person has been tracked to the same location as known terrorists, or otherwise demonstrated suspicious behavior. Much of the information likely comes from the U.S. government, which monitors most of the world's communications and identifies a great deal of anger and hatred towards the U.S. government, especially after the U.S. military bombs weddings and funerals and deliberately targets innocent women and children in Muslim countries to sustain its lucrative war on terrorism.

Canada is part of that war and profits from it and so also plays the game of trying to keep Canadians afraid by having a large no-fly list, even though denying someone the right to fly does nothing to stop terrorism attacks or retribution for its participation in the war of terror for profit.

Canada's no-fly list serves the purpose of being a psy-op (psychological operation) designed to make Canadians think that they are in danger because fear makes them less likely to demand their rights. Most humans are willing to give up some of their freedom in exchange for the perception of safety.

Still, any change could be a good thing and a new approach, referred to as the Enhanced Passenger Protect Program, under pending Bill C-59, would make two changes from the existing program.

One change is that instead of the airlines doing screening for passengers marked as not being allowed to fly under the no-fly list, the government will now be responsible for doing that screening. This will be done starting with the airlines sending passenger data to authorities as much as 72 hours before departures.

The problem with this is that it also enables the government to legally track everyone traveling by air before they begin their trip. Since the government is incapable of keeping hackers out of its computers, this information will also be available to those who pose a real threat. The data is already supplied to the U.S. which uses it to identify people traveling to the U.S. to harrass, such as those who might invest in legal cannabis companies or Americans living in Canada traveling to Cuba, or anyone traveling to Venezuela or Nicaragua to be targeted for political purposes.

The other improvement is there will be an automated redress system so passengers can immediately

request action to clear them from the list.

Requesting to be removed from the no-fly list and actually getting someone to process the request are two different things. But the automated redress system is something the government is particularly proud of. As a senior official said about the new automated clearing method, “That will help override any false positives. It will be seamless as you check in. When you buy your ticket online you’ll be able to print your boarding pass at home and so on. There will be no interruption on the traveler experience.” Yeah, right.

Currently the only way to clear one’s name from the no-fly list is to go to a government website first, then contact the government for help. The clearing process takes time, is cumbersome and is often threatening, but at least there is a chance that one might one day get off the stupid list. In the U.S. there is little chance of getting off their equally bogus list without a protracted lawsuit and great expense.

The new process is not yet in place. It still requires passage of two laws in the Senate to implement it. It is expected to creep forward and if ever implemented might give some hope to those falsely trapped by the current system.

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A study released on January 16, 2019 showed active intervention by the U.S. on threatened marine mammals and sea turtles made a major difference in growth of the species.

The article, published by Abel Valdivia of the Center for Biological Diversity and other researchers, looked at annual population data for 62 separate marine mammal and sea turtle species listed under the Endangered Species Act.

It focused down further on a total of 14 marine mammal species and five sea turtle species in 23 representative populations. It looked specifically at population growth, magnitude of the population changes, and status of the species’ recovery under active management. The numbers showed that 78% of marine mammals and 75% of sea turtles studied increased significantly after being listed under the Endangered Species Act for government protection.

As the study abstract says, “Conservation measures triggered by ESA listing such as ending exploitation, tailored species management, and fishery regulations, and other national and international measures appear to have been largely successful in promoting species recovery, leading to the delisting of some

species and to increases in most populations. These findings underscore the capacity of marine mammal and sea turtle species to recover from substantial geographical population declines when conservation actions are implemented in a timely and effective manner.”

The study’s findings come at an important time, when the U.S. government has made its own substantial steps away from protecting endangered as well as other species. Everything from large-scale fishing, offshore oil drilling, the recent granting of permits to allow sonar waves and underwater bomb detonations by the Trump administration, and other steps have created havoc with marine life of all kinds. The Trump administration’s recent denial of protection to 13 rare species of wildlife was cited by Valdivia’s group as “shocking” both in the decision and what it might do to those species.

The study abstract points out that the population changes which were most striking came from long-term protection under the Endangered Species Act. It said that, “Overall, the 24 populations that increased in abundance were from species listed for 20 years or more (e.g., large whales, manatees, and sea turtles.”

New Study Says Endangered Species Act Works

The manatee, also known as the "sea cow", is one of many marine mammals which have benefited through U.S. Government protection under the Endangered Species Act.


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At the groundbreaking Wuttke Institute of Neurotherapy in Santa Barbara, California, a program is under way which could change everything we think and do with those we put in prison forever.

It’s called the Neurofeedback Recidivism Reduction Project. As the creators of the project have described it, it “is a privately-funded, four-year, random control trial, designed to determine if neurofeedback training can reduce recidivism.” It is studying a total of 360 selected high-risk parolees, with half receiving guided neurofeedback and half as a control group. The goal of the program is nothing less than changing forever the way we care for those who may end up in prison, are in prison, and are helped after prison. It was created in partnership between Community Solutions, Inc., and the Wuttke Institute.

Marty Wuttke, the founder of the Wuttke Institute, brings the basic idea driving the work into a simple concept: it’s about “focusing on fixing the brain” using decades-proven neurofeedback methods.

Mr. Wuttke himself has extensive experience in the field. He was was affiliated with Ridgecrest Hospital and Woodridge Psychiatric Hospital from 1984 to 1995, where – as his website explains – he designed and directed the first large-scale in-patient neurofeedback program in the United States. During those 11 years, more than 1,500 patients went through his neurofeedback training efforts. Since then, he has dramatically expanded that same category of work through the Wuttke Institute, treating everything from depression to traumatic brain injury, nicotine

dependence, eating disorders, chronic pain, anxiety, chemical dependency and alcoholism.

Trillions spoke with Mr. Wuttke in December 2018 about the Recidivism Reduction Project at his offices in Santa Barbara, California.

Trillions: How did you get involved in the Recidivism Reduction Program in the first place?

Marty Wuttke: There’s a local community center non-profit organization called Community Solutions, Inc. I believe there’s about 16 of them scattered around the United States. The main headquarters is in Hartford, Connecticut.

It was founded by a fellow whose mission was these poor guys who get out of prison. They’re given a stipend of $20-$30-$40, and then just turned out on the street. He saw the problem. He saw the need. He actually started taking people into his home there in Connecticut.

From that involved Community Solutions, Inc., which is sort of a stepping stone for guys after they get out of prison and are on parole. They wanted to learn skills, tools to integrate back into society.

There’s one here in Santa Barbara and another one in Northern California, in Santa Maria. A local fellow who is a retired philanthropist here decided that he wanted to get Community Solutions really going, and through Community Solutions, bring the recidivism rate down.

Recidivism is basically how soon [or ever] a parolee goes back to prison. The statistics vary quite a bit

Revolutionary Program Uses Neurofeedback to Reduce Parolee Returns to Prison


around the U.S. You see a lot of numbers thrown out. 65% of all parolees end up back in prison. Some studies show more, some studies show less, but it’s not great. Every time a person recidivates, it costs the state somewhere between $80,000 and $100,000, because of all the ancillary costs.

So this local philanthropist decided that he wanted to make an impact. He started to pursue me and see if there was some way that I felt I could create a program for them.

There [are] some precedents. Neurofeedback has been used in a prison in Ontario, Canada, many years ago. Nobody’s done a controlled study looking at recidivism and neurofeedback over time.

There were considerable bureaucratic and government hurdles to surmount. This philanthropist spent, I think, three years going through boards and meeting with government lawyers and sheriffs’ offices and so on. And sure enough, last January [2018] the program was okayed.

We have a very large study. We have a very good staff who are helping me with the program. We can already see that the parolees who are getting neurofeedback are changing very rapidly. This goes back to my hypothesis, the title of a book out there, “Change Your Brain, Change Your Life”.

If you’re going to really rehabilitate somebody, no matter if they were a criminal, [subjected to] post-traumatic stress disorder, or substance abuse you’ve got to focus on fixing their brains or bringing the function up to optimal. When the brain’s function is up to optimal, you see various issues and problems begin to be handled better.

It’s subtle. I just gave a lecture the other day. What you see with many people – it isn’t just parolees – many of us are driven by our limbic systems, by the parts of the brain that have to do with primitive impulses, survival, fight or flight responses, competition, and so on. Many of us “know better” than what we do. Knowing better comes from cortex, the neo-cortex, the outer shell of the brain and the more evolved part of the brain. The limbic system is less evolved.

What my hypothesis was that if we can get the limbic system to quiet down, so the person isn’t constantly living in a threat or survival response, that in effect the cortex will work better. That means better thinking, better impulse control, better motivation and so on. Because in many respects, the limbic system holds the cortex hostage. You see it everywhere. It’s in politics, it’s in marketing, etc.

Our hypothesis is testing out. It’s too early to say we’re going to see a massive reduction recidivism. [But] what we’re already seeing is real changes in the parolees who are going through the neurofeedback training. It’s very nice to see. I think it’s starting to take on a lot of interest by various groups around California and around the country. I have a feeing we’re going to see this spread out fairly quickly.

Trillions: That’s terrific news. How long have you been running this program?

Marty Wuttke: This is the first year. The goal is a total of 360 parolees. Half that number will be a control group. To get through scientific scrutiny, especially if you’re publishing, you have to have a control group. [That’s] so you can say the only difference between these two groups is that this group had neurofeedback, and therefore a reduction recidivism would correlate with the fact that they did neurofeedback.

We’ve been at this for four years, but the program only started last January [2018]. So we’re coming into our first year, and then we’ve got a couple more years to go in order to meet our numbers.

All the parolees that are involved in this are volunteers. Nobody’s forced into this. It is completely at their discretion. Eventually we’ll see about not just getting neurofeedback services to these fellows when they’re out of prison but getting neurofeedback services to them when they’re in prison. [We also want to work on this] even before that starting to get the adolescents and adolescents who are at risk and so on and start trying to head off these problems as early as we can.

Trillions: Was there any criteria you used to select these individuals, other than that they were all volunteers?

Marty Wuttke: We use high-risk offenders. There’s something called an LSRI score. When [the parolees] go in these halfway houses for Community Solutions, Inc., they meet with a staff member there. The staff member, through [the use of] a number of measures and questions, determines how at risk they are for re-offending. We choose high-risk re-offenders. We also, according to research guidelines, have to match ethnicity and so on. Then the control group and the intervention group are randomized. We don’t pick and choose after a certain point, because that would be skewing the research, obviously.

We have a person who is a psychologist who is organizing the main part of the research, the Duke University social psychologist, and then my wife Stella, who is also a cognitive research psychologist. So she’s involved in the process as well.

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It’s a very well-designed study. There’s no ambiguity about it.

Trillions: This sounds like it’s well-enough structured so it may propagate quickly afterwards.

Marty Wuttke: The goal is to get this into the rehabilitation system, because it’s broken – at least here in the U.S. It’s quite clear that incarceration and punishment doesn’t solve the issues. We have to start bringing in other methods and means. Primarily my method and means is trying to re-stabilize the brain, and get it back into a level of function that it may not have been in. Not to mention all the head injuries, drug overdoses, and neurodevelopmental issues these guys have. All those respond to neurofeedback quite well.

Trillions: When do you feel there will begin to be public disclosure of any results of this?

Marty Wuttke: Probably not for another year or so. We have a very interesting thing happening here in Santa Barbara. Anybody who is familiar with Santa Barbara knows it is an exclusive community. There’s lots of philanthropists, lots of foundations here. We actually have something called an observation group, which is a group of foundations and leaders of foundations and physicians who we meet with now quarterly. There are judges too watching us. We go over what we’re seeing, what the progress is, the problems, and mostly the solutions. We are keeping everyone abreast who’s interested [in] our progress.

We just had a meeting last week. Everybody’s so interested in this, and it’s not just for parolees. I work with everything from kids with autism to adults who want to learn how to meditate better and everything in between. I put this in an orphanage in Ukraine several years ago, so neurofeedback has lots of applicability.

What I’m saying is these foundations who are watching us have other interests [besides just the parolees]. Women with abuse issues, post-traumatic stress disorder. The opioid epidemic is out of control right now. Veterans from the military, and so on. So, we have representatives from many foundations who are focused on these different areas.

What they’re saying is, “We don’t want to wait five years for your research to be finished before we start neurofeedback training. We know it works. We’ve seen it. We believe in it. How can we get going right now?”

So right now I’m scrambling to create a way to support quite a variety of organizations, to get neurofeedback going within the organization, within the various locations, treatment centers, hospitals. That’s starting immediately.

People have been watching neurofeedback for many years. Yeah, there’s still some that need to be convinced. But most people, the evidence is there. There’s several books written on it now, so people are, like, “It’s here. Let’s use it if we can apply it in our specific population.”

That’s what we’re doing now. We’re even offering remote neurofeedback, which has been quite effective. That’s simply where people contact my office, and they say, “I want to do neurofeedback but I don’t want to fly all the way out there to Santa Barbara, and I can’t find anybody in my community who does it. Can you help me?”

We send them the equipment. I have technicians who make appointments with them. They rent [the equipment] for a month or so. Our technicians video Skype or VC with them, and they do their sessions. It’s been quite effective. I’ve been able to treat people from all around the world this way. I’m happy with that, and people love not having to get out of their living room and fly over to Santa Barbara to do it.

The application of neurofeedback is spreading dramatically. What I’m just trying to do is to keep up with it. I’ve had to hire lots of staff just to get in line with this.

The parolee project will be a significant outcome, we hope, for government and more traditional academia. The University of Long Beach, California, is involved with it now. They’re going to do a statistical analysis for us, which brings another level of credibility to the whole project.

There’s a lot that’s going to happen in terms of the spread of neurofeedback before the four years are up.

For those interested in learning more about Mr. Wuttke and the Wuttke Institute, please visit his website at: http://www.wuttkeinstitute.com. Trillions also interviewed Mr. Wuttke about the practice of neurofeedback in a 2016 interview entitled, “The Neurowizardry of Marty Wuttke”.


The EU Takes Two Big Swingsat Tech Industry

In New Copyright LawAn as-yet-unpassed proposed landmark copyright law in the European Union now includes a requirement for internet service providers to install “upload filters” to keep copyrighted materials from being uploaded, and a requirement to pay providers when “snippets” of their work show up in a search.

The internet tech industry is very worried.

Current European Copyright Law is very old by tech standards. It dates back to 2001, when social media was in its infancy and the internet was something most people had little contact with. Since that time the industry has changed in many ways, by number of users, how people access it (now via smartphones in addition to desktop and laptop computers), and how it interacts with customers.

Another major change is that in 2001 the big copyright debate was about illegal music sharing. It was something almost all parties agreed was wrong and must be stopped, except for the few doing the sharing. Now the copyright debate is far more complex. There is still little argument that wholesale free sharing of movies, television and music should be a violation of copyright law. Beyond that, it gets complicated.

For social media giants like Facebook, Google and YouTube, Google’s video-sharing service, Pinterest, Instagram and other similar image-sharing services, they exist as ‘free services’ which to a large extent make money based on the data they know and gather about their users, and by encouraging sharing of images, audio, and video among each other. That unfortunately also encourages sharing of copyrighted material, often by uploading of entire copyrighted files (typically in video or image form rather than just audio) and carried out by the services’ users.

Some others, like Twitter, apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and search engines like Google.com and Microsoft’s Bing, work in part by publishing “snippets” of often-copyrighted materials as part of how they display results.

For some classes of applications, when one posts a link to an article or to share with others, the links often show up again with a title/headline, identifying image and a short summary about the item being shared. In search result postings, it’s companies like Google and Microsoft that are doing the posting. In the other applications, it’s the user that’s doing it. In both cases what is being shared often includes explicitly copyrighted material.

In the “snippet” case, all the companies named make money from what is being displayed. The search engines earn by putting advertisements tied to what someone searched for on the same page as the search results. When users put up the content in social media, rapid-fire viral sharing of copyrighted material can produce anything from hundreds to millions of reposts of the same content as it is re-shared. That viral sharing keeps places like Facebook tightly knitted together and users addicted to the service, a key feature of the service.

The new EU Copyright Law, which it should be emphasized is still in draft form and not yet law, takes aim at the ‘snippet’ case with its Article 11. It will require those who post the snippets to pay for sharing copyrighted images, headlines, and content of any kind with their snippets. It appears now it is aimed at the search engine industry as a primary target, but one could easily see news aggregators such as Microsoft News and Google News as coming quickly into the same crosshairs.

For the companies publishing the snippets, they disagree strongly with what Article 11 requires. They argue that just showing the snippets not only falls under what in the United States is called “fair use”, with the idea that just publishing the snippet does not really cause much damage to a publisher. They also argue that publishing the snippets provides a valuable service for those owning rights to the headlines, images and articles “snipped”. Those snippets drive those who eventually click on the links attached to them – to the actual sites themselves.

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If this part of the law stays in its current form, social media and internet search platforms which do not pay licensing fees for the snippets would have to shut down or block users from sharing links with snippets. That would fundamentally alter the entire business model that companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft (via Bing), Twitter and others have based their business on. If they had to pay for everything they display, they might have to raise advertising rates dramatically. If they block display from services they have not paid to access, they might cripple the value of their business offering as it currently exists.

Article 11’s provisions are now seen as so close to becoming law that there is even a name for paying royalties on snippets. It’s called the “link tax”.

Article 13 of the proposed EU Copyright Law covers the issue of copyright infringement in another way. It first protects against those who claim their work was illegally uploaded onto a site without payment or permission by allowing them to demand sites like Facebook and YouTube must take them down immediately after notification. Then it does something more drastic.

That more drastic thing came in an amendment to Article 13 of the draft law, as passed in the EU parliament this summer. With 438 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in support of the change, 226 MEPs against it, and 39 abstentions, almost all internet service providers would have do something proactive to keep copyrighted materials from being uploaded onto any of their sites in the first place.

“Almost all” has been defined for the purposes of the rule change as “small” companies. Under EU law, that means a service with less than 50 people employed, with annual sales or annual balance sheet totals which are smaller than 10 million euros.

The normal way to do what Article 13 would now require is by installing upload filters which inspect content as it is coming through. Copyrighted or suspicious content would be blocked.

Those in favor of the new requirement claim it is the right thing to do to protect creators of copyrighted works. Many groups who hold work copyrights say having this kind of tough law will make it easier to negotiate licensing arrangements with user-generated platforms. Facebook and YouTube are two such platforms.

Those against it include Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda, who says this is going to create an unfair burden for startups and small internet enterprises. She also noted in a statement about this that, “The European Parliament endorses #uploadfilters for all but the smallest sites

and apps. Anything you want to publish will need to first be approved by these filters, [and] perfectly legal content like parodies & memes will be caught in the crosshairs.”

Both Article 11 and 13 present multiple problems for what are sometimes referred to as “the data barons” of the industry, those that use other people’s data and content, sometimes copyrighted, to profit from without paying them anything in return. It changes their business models in a big way, plus it could result in having to block individual users and/or curtail certain service offerings. Internet search as we know it now could become a thing of the past if the EU law goes forward.

The new law also poses a problem for internet service providers (ISPs) and those like Google and Facebook which often “ride on top of” others’ ISPs. If the EU enacts a new copyright law with Articles 11 and 13 intact as currently written, companies like Google and Facebook are not likely to change their services outside of the EU to match the restrictive and presumably expensive provisions required by the European Union. With telecommunications crossing international borders so transparently otherwise, this could mean loading up an application to monitor where the application is being viewed and where potential copyrighted information could be uploaded. That would add further complexity if not cost to an already difficult-to-administer solution to meet the EU’s demands.

On the EU’s part, the situation is no less easy to figure out. Though the words in the proposed law may be clear, their implications are not. Assuming the law is passed in 2019 as it currently expected, how long should companies have before they must comply with it fully? How would rates be figured out for everything from snippets to fines for illegal use of copyrighted materials? Is there now a new definition of “fair use”, where limited access to certain copyrighted materials is okay? How do companies who want to freely share their materials, such as for movie trailers, set that up so it is handled differently by upload filters? Who polices what goes up illegally and what are the penalties for continuing to do so after being ordered to stop?

This is a big messy issue, but there is one big benefit from it. Just as the EU challenges of Facebook’s major privacy violations raised an issue that needed exposing, the new law’s spotlight on an entirely new way of thinking about copyright is also long overdue. Just as with the creation of the internet itself, sorting all this out will likely take a few years to settle. All parties involved, including those consumers who use all these services, will likely be the better for it.


If scientists at a Wales University are successful, the explosive flood of plastic waste in oceans around the world may soon be harvested and turned into clean energy.

The concept, according to lead researcher Dr. Moriz Kuehnel, involves what appear to be some fairly straightforward scientific tricks which will convert that plastic waste into hydrogen.

The concept involves cutting up waste plastic, then roughening its surfaces as the first two steps in the process. Breaking it down into smaller pieces and roughening it makes for larger surface area so that when the plastic is exposed to sunlight it can absorb more of the energy. What the scientists are after for this innovation is much different than just working to break down the plastic.

What this idea does next is to inject a photo catalyst into the plastic. That catalyst absorbs the sunlight and then turns it – via the plastic – into chemical energy.

As Dr. Kuehnel said about his team’s innovation, the “process is based on a principle called ‘photoreforming’ that uses semiconductor nanoparticles [also known as quantum dots] to transform” the sunlight into chemical fuel.

In the lab the way this works is to put the quantum-dot-infused-plastic into an alkaline solution. Just add sunlight or a lamp with similar radiation, and bubbles of hydrogen gas will begin forming on the surface of the plastic.

As Dr. Kuehnel explained further, “The quantum dots can use sunlight to drive two simultaneous chemical reactions: The production of hydrogen gas from water and the degradation of plastic.” Eventually the plastic will be reduced to a smaller net waste volume. There will also be hydrogen gas.

That hydrogen gas could be used in fuel cell vehicles such as Toyota is already building for the implementation of what it calls the “hydrogen-based society”, powered by fuel cells. Toyota already makes the mass-produced fuel cell sedan, the Mirai, going back to December 2014, commercial trucks, its FC (for “fuel cell”) buses starting in February 2017, and even hydrogen-powered forklifts for the shipping and logistics industry. Toyota has placed such a big bet on the future of hydrogen-powered vehicles that it is investing in a major plant to increase its current hydrogen fuel cell production capacity from 3,000 units per year to 30,000 units per year by 2020. The Japan Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2020 will be even be serviced by 100 of its Sora FC buses.

Converting Ocean Plastic Waste to Fuel Becomes the Ultimate Recycling Win

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Toyota’s long term plan is to make and sell a total of 1 million electric and fuel cell cars globally by 2030.

Hydrogen vehicles, trains, and aircraft are all being developed for mass-manufacture throughout the world. All are seeking innovations like Dr. Kuehnel’s team has introduced to produce hydrogen fuel more efficiently for them.

The University of Swansea innovation has multiple advantages in what it does with plastic versus other recycling approaches. As an example, most plastic bottles today are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which must be washed before they can be made into new bottles. The plastic-to-hydrogen team at the University would not require oily or greasy plastic to be cleaned at all. As Dr. Kuehnel said in a recent interview with the BBC, “Even if there is food or a bit of grease from a margarine tub, it doesn’t stop the reaction, it enhances it."

Just recycling plastic is also a process which costs money overall, at least compared to converting that waste into hydrogen. With estimates running about $4,000 to recycle every ton of plastic bags disposed, plastic which is gathered up – either out of the ocean or as part of new waste recycling programs – is going to be a lot more valuable when converted into clean-burning hydrogen.

Dr. Kuehnel’s team is currently working on scaling up their process to larger bulk plastic sizes and a more reproducible high-volume plastic-to-hydrogen conversion process. They have a good chance of making it happen, thanks to backing from an Austrian petrochemical company and the Swindon-based Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Next up is finding a way to gather up all that ocean-borne plastic waste so the University of Swansea team can just “load it in the hopper” and turn on the hydrogen production process.

Trump Orders the Destruction of Essential

Public Records

Trump's war on wildlife and the environment has taken an alarming turn as he orders the destruction of files related to endangered species and the many crimes of the corrupt Department of Interior.

In a move reminiscent of NAZI book burning and the destruction of public records by Soviet Russia and the Islamic State and other Muslim groups, Trump's minion of madness in control of the Department of Interior, Ryan Zinke, has proposed the destruction of a wide range of documents related to the agency's handling of wildlife and environmental issues.

“Zinke’s effort to destroy these key documents serves political interests and industrial polluters at the expense of wildlife and the environment,” said Meg Townsend, attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Trump administration wants to bury science and hide how mining, drilling and logging on public lands devastate our precious natural spaces.”

In September the Interior Department asked the National Archives to authorize a schedule allowing for records destruction. It applies to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other Interior agencies.

If approved, the plan would shred technical and scientific records on land-use planning, data from water-quality monitoring, and documents used in the development and implementation of recovery plans to restore endangered native species. These are extremely important documents that belong to the people of the United States and destroying them would be a gross violation of the public trust. Such documents are essential to holding the government accountable and conducting scientific reviews of its deeply flawed public-lands and endangered-species decisions made on behalf of the industries who profit from looting and destroying public land.


A University of Cambridge research team is pushing the edges of a new field called semi-artificial photosynthesis in using algae to increase the efficiency of energy production in absorbing energy from the sun.

The concept starts with conventional photosynthesis, the means by which plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. The conventional process, which often involves chlorophyll, is a chemical reaction which splits water in the plant into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is considered critical to all life as we know it on earth, either directly or indirectly. The hydrogen produced, if captured, could be a “free”, clean-burning and potentially nearly-inexhaustible source of renewable energy.

According to a new paper, just published in Nature Energy by researchers at the Reisner Laboratory in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, there is room for a substantially more efficient form of either natural or what is referred to as artificial photosynthesis.

As Katarzyna Sokół, first author and PhD student at St John's College, said, “Natural photosynthesis is not efficient because it has evolved merely to survive so it makes the bare minimum amount of energy needed - around 1-2 per cent of what it could potentially convert and store."

Artificial photosynthesis, which provides a much higher conversion rate for producing hydrogen from a given amount of absorbed sunlight, has other problems. Because it uses special catalysts to nudge the reaction along, the costs can be very high per artificial photosynthesis “cell”. Those catalysts are also toxic and must be cleared out and cleansed regularly to keep the process running effectively.

What the researchers did was something truly revolutionary. They based their semi-artificial photosynthesis solution on hydrogenase, an enzyme which has been in algae for thousands of years.

Sokół explained their idea in terms that sound like science fiction, but they’re real. “Hydrogenase is an enzyme present in algae that is capable of reducing protons into hydrogen,” she said. “During evolution, this process has been deactivated because it wasn't necessary for survival, but we successfully managed to bypass the inactivity to achieve the reaction we wanted - splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen."

By blocking the internal biological systems which caused the reaction to go inactive, they reawakened the algae to do something it had not done for a very long time. They used this hydrogenase and their “photosystem II” to create what the research team calls semi-artificial photosynthesis.

Better still, the whole solution runs entirely on solar power and without the need for intervention.

Sokół sees their innovation, which rests in looking at what nature already created and still exists – and then reawakening it – as opening up an entirely new field of research for photosynthetic reactions. As she noted in other comments on the work, “It's exciting that we can selectively choose the processes we want and achieve the reaction we want which is inaccessible in nature. This could be a great platform for developing solar technologies. The approach could be used to couple other reactions together to see what can be done, learn from these reactions and then build synthetic, more robust pieces of solar energy technology."

Dr. Erwin Reisner, one of the paper’s authors and Head of the Reisner Laboratory as well as a Fellow of St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, called the research a “milestone”. He described what the team had done was to overcome “many difficult challenges associated with the integration of biological and organic components into inorganic materials for the assembly of semi-artificial devices”. He said further that this work “opens up a toolbox for developing future systems for solar energy conversion.

New Approach to Photosynthesis

Could Revolutionize Renewable Energy

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Colombia Court Bans Odebrecht From National

Contracts for 10 Years in Bribery

ConvictionConstruction conglomerate Odebrecht was finally found guilty of a bribes-for-contracts scheme in Colombia, fined $250 million for doing so, and banned from receiving contracts in the country for ten years.

It took over four years since Colombian authorities began digging into it, but on December 13 a Colombia court finally found Odebrecht, a major Brazilian construction firm, guilty of an elaborate scheme of bribery in return for being awarded major construction contracts.

Odebrecht has been the focus of major scandals throughout Latin America for some time, starting with its home nation of Brazil and spreading out from there. The scandals involved an elaborate set of schemes which involved Odebrecht officials bribing state agencies and government agents within them as part of an illegal kick-back scheme, in return for receiving lucrative construction contracts. The bribes totaled around US $30 million just in Colombia alone, according to the country’s Attorney General’s office.

In 2016 after being forced into a corner by multiple investigations, the company admitted it had bribed government officials in over 12 countries to secure these contracts. Investigations to date show the Odebrecht conglomerate paid over US $9.3 billion to various elected officials and other Latin American authorities, in return for being awarded some of the largest public works contracts on the continent.

In the current findings, the Regional Administrative Court of Cundinamarca found four companies guilty of various charges related to the bribery scheme. Besides

Odebrecht, Cass Constructores, Grupo Aval, and Episol, a subsidiary of Corficolombiana, were all penalized in the ruling. Three former Odebrecht Colombia executives also were found guilty in the same trial.

In parallel, 14 other people have been jailed in Colombia as a result of the Odebrecht corruption scandal. These include a former senator and a former transport minister.

This ruling comes quickly on the heels of an agreement the first week of December by Odebrecht’s office in Peru. There company officials agreed to pay the country a multimillion dollar fine – and provide evidence about officials it had bribed there, including two former Presidents of Peru. By paying the fine and agreeing to provide evidence, Peru has agreed to let Odebrecht continue operating there.

All these actions follow from a major investigation in Odebrecht’s home country of Brazil. During the so-called Operacao Lava Jato (“car wash”) investigation, Brazilian officials managed to nail down confessions from dozens of companies admitting they had bribed politicians there in return for Petrobras contracts. Among the actions which has happened as a result of that was the arrest and sentencing of Marcelo Odebrecht, the grandson of the company’s original founder, to 19 years in prison. Within the Brazilian government, the same scandal also brought down Eduardo Cunha, former speaker of the lower house of Congress and former Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.

For Odebrecht, the latest penalties in Colombia are probably not the end of the rapid implosion of the company. And while the current penalties and convictions are not a surprise, what is almost beyond imagination is that Odebrecht itself still exists as a corporation at all.

(See “Brazil’s Corruption Scandal Brings Down Batista”, published in Trillions in July 2018, for more about the entire Brazilian corruption scene in recent years.)


A new scientific review, "Plant-Based Diets for Cardiovascular Safety and Performance in Endurance Sports", is providing some hard evidence that athletes who stay on plant-based diets benefit from improvements in heart health, performance and recovery.

The paper was recently published in the journal Nutrients.

“It’s no wonder that more and more athletes are racing to a vegan diet,” says review co-author James Loomis, M.D., M.B.A., medical director for the Barnard MedicalCenter. “Whether you’re training for a couch-to-5K oran Ironman Triathlon, a plant-based diet is a powerfultool for improving athletic performance and recovery.”Dr. Loomis, who is currently training for an IronmanTriathlon, is also featured in The Game Changers,a documentary on vegan athletes scheduled to bereleased in 2019. He also served as team internist forthe St. Louis Rams and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Plant-based diets play a key role in cardiovascular health, which is critical for endurance athletes. But the review finds that even well-trained athletes are at risk for heart disease. A 2017 study found that 44 percent of middle-aged and older endurance cyclists or runners had coronary plaques. A low-fat, vegetarian diet is the most effective dietary pattern clinically shown to reverse plaque. A plant-based diet also addresses other key contributors to atherosclerosis, including dyslipidemia, elevated blood pressure,

elevated body weight, and diabetes.

Because a plant-based diet is typically high in carbohydrates, it may also offer performance advantages. Carbohydrates are the primary energy source during aerobic exercise, and endurance is enhanced by a high-carbohydrate intake. But a 2016 study of Ironman triathletes found that fewer than half reported meeting the recommended carbohydrate intake for athletes training 1-3 hours per day.

The researchers also find that a plant-based diet boosts athletic performance and recovery by increasing blood flow and tissue oxygenation and reducing oxidative stress and inflammation. A varied diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes, along with a vitamin B12 supplement, provides all of the necessary nutrients an endurance athlete needs, including protein, calcium, and iron.

The old myth that athletes need to eat meat is just that, a myth, manufactured by the meat industry and perpetuated by corrupt government.

“Like any endurance athlete, plant-based athletes just need more calories than less active people,” says review co-author Susan Levin, M.S., R.D., C.S.S.D., a board-certified specialist in sports dietetics and director of nutrition education for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “And if they are eating a wide variety of nutrient-dense fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans, they will easily meet all of their nutritional needs.”

Plant-Based Diets Help Athletes Reach Higher Performance

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The follow-up conference to the original Paris Climate Accords meetings in 2015 concluded with mostly empty promises and little sense of urgency.

After two weeks of meetings in December 2018 at the 24th annual Conference of the Parties (COP24) in Katowice, Poland, the approximately 200 diplomats and negotiators present concluded their meetings with almost nothing to show for it.

Admittedly their starting point wasn’t that good to begin with. It assumed the real target was to find a way for the nations attending to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Considering that a 2012 study from Berkeley Earth noted the Earth has already warmed past 1.5 degrees C, that many temperatures in the northern hemisphere have been running 8-10 degrees C higher than normal for much of last year, and that the Arctic was as much as 60-70 degrees C above normal last winter, that goal does not make much sense.

Yet even if the goal were to keep temperatures from rising a net of 1.5o C from now, the conference did not do much. At the conclusion of the conference, the delegates agreed only on two things: how to measure carbon emissions in a uniform manner and that the nations of the world must be more aggressive

in reaching their specific contributions to global emissions by the time of the next of these summits, in September 2019.

In a world where global warming is already far beyond what the delegates are assuming as the basis for their planning, and where oceans are also hotter than anyone had imagined, the polar ice caps and the Greenland Ice Sheet are melting at a record rates, crops are becoming less nutritious in the face of high carbon dioxide levels, and dangerous diseases spread by warm-weather insects are spreading rapidly further northwards than ever, a group like this should have come up with something far more radical in the way of solutions.

Instead the leaders of the world did the equivalent of what comedian Robin Williams once said years ago. In Williams’ monologue, he imagined a country’s timid President dealing with a dangerous enemy who was about to attack. The most that President could do, not wanting to cause anyone any worry or harm, was to warn that enemy, “Stop – or I will say stop again.”

That sort of approach did not work for Williams’ semi-fictitious leader and will not work for the world now. What should have happened was a bold statement – backed by facts – as to precisely what damage we

The Failure of COP24: Fiddling While The Earth Burns


have caused the world and what we are going to have to deal with as a result of global warming just years from now, followed by a tough course of actions to save what we can of the planet.

Unfortunately, most countries attending had taken little action to control their previously-allocated emissions targets. There was also the appalling showing of the gang of four of major fossil-fuel producing nations – the U.S., Russia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – who refused atthe conference even to “welcome” the frightening butwatered-down conclusions of the IntergovernmentalPanel on Climate Change report.

In some ways, at least the U.S.’s presentation at the conference of one of the dirtiest sources of fossil-fuel emissions – coal-fired power plants – as a possible part of the solutions to global warming, showed some promise. Not because of the idiotic nature of the what was being pitched, but instead because the delegates had the good sense to laugh when the presenters attempted to convince the audience that coal-burning was really a good thing for the planet.

As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres saw that the conference was going downhill, he did try to rally the audience to do something substantive before they all went home. He said that if the delegates chose “to waste this opportunity…it would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal.”

Stronger still was the warning from Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, the outgoing COP23 chair, about what would happen if the leaders present did not do something big now about climate change. There in Poland along with all the others, he spoke of the possibility of history remembering those who met at COP24 as “the generation that blew it – that sacrificed the health of our world and ultimately betrayed humanity because we didn’t have the courage and foresight to go beyond our short-term individual concerns: craven, irresponsible and selfish.”

Even though what Bainimarama said may have been deadly accurate, unfortunately for the human race and all the world’s ecosystems, we have become just how he said history would remember us. For while it may have been a myth that Emperor Nero was sitting around “playing the fiddle” while letting the legendary fire that destroyed much of urban Rome in 64 A.D., this is no myth now. The leaders of the world are “just fiddling” as global warming overtakes us all.

Academic Experts Collaborate to Create a Truly Scalable

Digital CurrencyA new digital currency is being birthed by research experts from seven leading U.S. colleges, with the goal of achieving transaction speeds even faster than credit cards.

As Joey Krug, co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital, one of the major backers for the development effort, said, “The mainstream public is aware that these [digital currency networks like bitcoin’s] don’t scale. We are on the cusp of something where if this doesn’t scale relatively soon, it may be relegated to ideas that were nice but didn’t work in practice: more like 3D printing than the internet.”

Current solutions such as bitcoin were revolutionary in that they allowed parties to transact data with each other without either a central authority or a means of trust. A technology called blockchain made that possible. Unfortunately, the cumbersome nature of the complex calculations needed to navigate the blockchain network for bitcoin and others have made its use in transactions expensive and slow as digital ledgers are balanced.

The new cryptocurrency, Unit-e, is being developed by Distributed Technology Research (DTR). The team which is creating the technology to back it up consists of computer and network experts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, and other institutions.

The research activities to support this are looking at multiple contributory technology elements. One important one involves the way new records of transactions, which come in the form of “blocks” in the blockchain network, can be created faster. A second involves how nodes in the network are used to maintain the blockchain. By designing the system so each node only has to handle part of the blockchain, the processing speed of the network can accelerate significantly.

The work is progressing along so successfully that DTR expects to launch Unit-e in the second half of 2019. The technology will offer processing speeds of on the order of 10,000 transactions per second. That compares to Bitcoin transaction speeds of only 3.3 to 7 transactions per second. Even Visa’s credit card processing systems typically process around 1,700 transactions per second, on average.

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Humans are not the only ones whose microbiomes get damaged by glyphosate-based herbicides. According to a new study at the University of Texas, bees are also victims and are now dying because of it.

According to Erick Motta, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin who led the research, the theory put forth by Monsanto, the manufacturer of most glyphosate-laced herbicides, is that glyphosate is safe for animals and insects such as bees. The logic on this is that glyphosate does its work primarily by targeting an enzyme found in just some plants and a few microorganisms. The problem is glyphosate is turning out to be a far more dangerous chemical than had previously been realized.

Glyphosate, distributed by Monsanto Corporation as the primary active ingredient in Roundup and other herbicide products, has already been found liable for the death of at least one person in a major court case decided in San Francisco last fall. There Monsanto was found liable for a school groundskeeper, who had applied glyphosate products for years, coming down with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Thousands of others are also involved in suits on similar charges against Monsanto.

What Motta and research colleague Nancy Moran, an evolutionary biologist also at the University of Texas,

discovered is that glyphosate significantly reduces the number of protective bacteria in the digestive guts of bees. That is because many of the protective bacteria have the enzyme which glyphosate attacks.

A second key finding was that when bee gut microbiomes are sufficiently weakened by glyphosate, that reduces the bees’ ability to fight off common pathogens. They die in much larger quantities.

The way Motta and Moran discovered this was by first exposing two groups of a total of 650 honey bees to normal concentrations of glyphosate found in agricultural fields and along roadsides. They painted the bees with non-toxic colors to identify them. Then they brought the bees back to their UT-Austin campus hives.

The researchers studying the bees noted that four of eight species of beneficial gut bacteria in the bees was significantly reduced for those bees exposed to the glyphosate.

The second experiment the researchers launched had the bees exposed to Serratia marcescens. That is a pathogen which currently afflicts bees worldwide, so the implications of the test were very important. What they found was that if bees were healthy, around half of them lived at least eight days after exposure to the pathogen. For those bees with gut bacteria diminished

How Glyphosate Kills Bees and other Species


by exposure to glyphosate, only a tenth of the bees were still alive eight days later.

Motta has extrapolated from this that the global phenomenon of colony collapse may be linked to this. Around 12 years ago, millions of bees began to disappear from hives. The lack of bees created worldwide havoc. In some locations, human pollinators had to take the place of bees just to keep the plants properly cared for.

In the past, exposure to other pesticides, antibiotics, loss of habitat and bacterial infections were considered part of why the bee populations died off so rapidly. The corresponding surge in use of glyphosate-based herbicides on crops over the last twenty years could also turn out to have been a major contributor. The corresponding gut bacteria damage and the weakening of bees’ natural protective biosystems would certainly explain at least part of why this happened.

As to what to do about all this, Motta said glyphosate application guidelines might need to be changed to avoid spraying products containing it on flowering plants during bee-foraging times.

The link between glyphosate and gut bacteria damage has shown up elsewhere than just with bees. In a previous study conducted by Daniele Mandrioli and others at the Ramazzini Institute in Bologna, Italy, the gut bacteria of rat pups were found to present significant damage in a controlled study. As Mandrioli said when the news of the Institute’s work came out, “It shouldn’t be happening and it is quite remarkable that it is. Disruption of the microbiome has been associated

with a number of negative health outcomes, such as obesity, diabetes and immunological problems.”

Not surprisingly Monsanto jumped in quickly to defend itself after the new UT-Austin study regarding the effects of glyphosate on the bee microbiome was published. A spokesman for the company said “Claims that glyphosate has a negative impact on honey bees are simply not true. No large-scale study has found any link between glyphosate and the decline of the honeybee population.”

The new study Motta led should at least give pause to the first of Monsanto’s two pushbacks.

The evidence appears clear that glyphosate is not only doing something bad to bee gut bacteria, but also that it is doing it because the very enzyme glyphosate targets is present there.

As to the second point, Monsanto is quite right. No large-scale study has been conducted to investigate this further. But with the evidence being so clear that glyphosate not only does cause damage in the small study, and that it should cause harm in bees because of the fundamentals of how it works, when a large-scale study does happen it will likely show exactly how damaging Monsanto’s glyphosate products have been to yet another important living species on the planet.

The only question left is as to how much more damage the world will continue to allow to happen until Monsanto’s glyphosate products are forever banned for use around the world.

Photo by Mike Mozart, CC

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According to a just-published study, the ice mass known as the number one source of global sea level rise is melting faster “than any time during the last three and a half centuries”.

The single biggest contributor to rising sea levels on the planet is the Greenland Ice Sheet, also known by the shorthand name GrIS in part because of its significance in climate change analysis. And according to a new paper on the subject, “Non-linear rise in Greenland runoff in response to post-industrial Arctic warming”, the current rate of “surface melting and melt-induced runoff in Greenland [is] occur[ing] at magnitudes not previously experienced over at least the last several centuries, if not millennia”.

With the Greenland Ice Sheet extending for now as a cover over approximately 80 percent of Greenland’s enormous land mass (about the size of Alaska), that much ice melting that fast is an extremely serious problem for the planet.

It is another sign of – this time, literally – how deep the water is and will be thanks to our gross negligence in dealing with global warming fast enough.

As Luke Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University of Glassboro, New Jersey, and lead author for the study said about the new research, “Melting of the Greenland ice sheet has gone into overdrive.”

The current rapid level of melting, stimulated in part by

The Greenland Ice SheetIs Melting Faster Than Ever

Rink Glacier in western Greenland, with a meltwater lake visible center. As NASA noted in a recent report about the accelerated warming of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) recently, "During Greenland's hottest summers on record, 2010 and 2012, the ice in Rink Glacier on the island's west coast didn't just melt faster than usual, it slid through the glacier's interior in a gigantic wave, like a warmed freezer pop sliding out of its plastic casing." This new means of ice sheet melting on Greenland is just one of many reasons why the GrIS is disappearing faster than ever before.

Photo: NASA/OIB


the entire Arctic region often now being warmer than regions immediately south of it, has been thought to be record-breaking for some time. Without some means of looking into the past to understand it further, however, it has until this study not been possible to estimate by how much.

To do these most recent estimates, the researchers used a variety of modern techniques to evaluate how different the Greenland Ice Sheet’s current melting is versus what it was before in history. That included satellite evaluation of current melting rates, sampling of thick ice cores to get historical data, and detailed evaluation of current on-the-ground melting and surface runoff measurements. This has given a unique perspective allowing melt rates to be estimated as far back as the 1650s.

Using that data, the researchers said that, “Our ice-core results… reveal that… 2012 melt rates are exceptional highs for at least the past 350 years.” They go on to say that “If an air-temperature reconstruction from the nearby Canadian Arctic is regionally representative, GrIS melt and runoff experienced in the last decade is likely also to be unprecedented over the last 6,800 – 7,800 years.” In just that one year alone enough icemelted in Greenland to fill 250 million Olympic-sizedswimming pools.

As study co-author Sarah Das, a glaciologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts said about the group’s conclusions after seeing this data, “From a historical perspective,

today’s melt rates are off the charts, and this study provides the evidence to prove this.”

Study lead author Luke Trusel was far blunter in his assessment of what they had all learned. “Melting of the Greenland ice sheet has gone into overdrive.”

In more quantitative terms, the paper noted that “relatively stable and low runoff occurred before the 1990s in all individual basins as well as across the broader ice sheet”. Since that time, “an exceptional rise in runoff has occurred over the last two decades”, equivalent to “an approximately 50% increase in GrIS-integrated runoff compared to pre-industrial runoff, and a 33% increase over the twentieth century alone.”

Worse is that as the melting has increased, for every additional degree of global warming melting will proceed at even faster rates. Trusel said the Greenland Ice Sheet’s current rate of melting was “outpacing” the rate of increase in global warming.

Further, as the ice sheet disappears, the planet’s ‘albedo’, a measure of the percentage of sunlight reflected from the planet into space rather than absorbed by the earth, is dropping significantly. That causes more heat to be absorbed into the earth below where the ice used to be, which in turn creates further re-radiating of heat (rather than light) into the atmosphere.

If – and perhaps when – the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would cause sea levels around the planet to rise by 23 feet (or about 7 meters). Tropical regions would be disproportionately affected just because of the rotation of the globe, but no part of the planet would remain unscathed.

The sea level rise is now so bad that scientists around the world are predicting islands in the tropics and cities along continental coasts will find themselves flooded out forever in just decades from now.

The study by Trusel and his colleagues was published in Nature on December 5, 2018.

Research based on observations from the NASA/Ger-man Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites indicates that between 2002 and 2016, Greenland shed approximate-ly 280 gigatons of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.03 inches (0.8 millimeters) per year.

Photo: NASA

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