Why Bill Gates’ #StopTheMyth Campaign is Mistaken, Part 1

Truth Matters. It matters a lot. That’s why I named my blog www.truthmatters.info. I should purchase the .com and .net as well because it’s so important. Jesus  said “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” FREE. Truth = Freedom. Wow. And yet today, truth is hard to find. And the most powerful lies are the ones that are *close* to the truth, but they are not quite.

Enough intro.

Let’s talk about Bill Gates and the untruths that are a part of his #StopTheMyth campaign. (and the repeating of those by untruths by Bill Nye the Science Guy and others). Massively wealthy guy. Tons of influence. His annual 2014 letter can be found HERE. BUT … I believe he is seriously wrong about some very important things.

Let’s look at his 2014 letter piece by piece …

By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient.

By almost any measure? What about this measure? What about the most fundamental measure of national wealth that can possibly be imagined – the measure of a nation’s ability to feed itself in the future? The measure that no one is talking about? Would you agree with me that if a nation goes from being able to feed itself to NOT being able to feed itself over time, that this is a serious problem? Would you agree with me that if a nation moves from being a lush, fertile country with plenty of ability to grow food and feed it’s people to being a country which is essentially a desert, then clean water and clean cities and clean hospitals and empty prisons and A+ schools don’t even matter? Can you see that? Desertification_CirclesThe picture at right shows how many areas in our world today have become deserts, or are in the process of becoming desert.

DESERT, folks!

No water. Hot. Dry. Desolate. Lifeless. You cannot have a wealthy country in the middle of a desert.  (#understatement) I don’t care what you do.  North Africa used to be a lush, fertile country 3 or 4 thousand years ago. Don’t believe me? Read my article HERE. Let me give you a quote. This quote is not from a quack website. It’s from a prestigious science journal not too long ago. It says …

During the latest Pleistocene and early Holocene, [ED: never mind the long timeframes implied by these names – those are way off because mainstream science ignores the largest “elephant in the room” that ever was – the Global Flood of Noah … anyway, please keep reading] the now hyperarid Saharan desert was a verdant landscape nearly completely vegetated with annual grasses and shrubs (COHMAP Members, 1988; Jolly, 1998; Sarnthein, 1978). At that time, subtropical North Africa was characterized by numerous large and small lakes which supported abundant savannah and lake margin fauna such as antelope, giraffe, elephant, hippopotamus, crocodile, and human populations in regions that today have almost no measurable precipitation (McIntosh and McIntosh, 1983). Quaternary Science Reviews 19 (2000) LINK TO MY ARTICLE AGAIN

“Verdant landscape,” “completely vegetated,” “abundant giraffe, elephant, hippopotamus, crocodile, and human populations.” But it’s not anymore. It’s a desert. What happened? Tillage mainly.  North Africa used to be called “the granary of Rome.”  Millions of acres of wheat were grown there and shipped to Rome.  What does tillage does to land?  IT KILLS IT.  And if you keep doing it year after year, soil will erode until one day you won’t have any soil anymore and Britain facing food crisisbecause you don’t have any more soil, you don’t have any more vegetation, and because you have no vegetation, it stops raining (Topic for another day: scientists’ computer simulation of re-greening Sahara desert restarting the rain), no water, no animals, no food, no life, no humans, no country.  In the USA, we are making great progress toward that situation already.  Watch this documentary “The Dust Bowl” to see what I mean.  So this is exactly what happened in N. Africa many years ago.  Guess what’s happening in the rest of the “civilized” world? Same thing. There is nothing new under the sun, Solomon wrote. We are doing the very same thing that the North Africans did 3000 years ago. We are destroying our land – the most fundamental thing that gives us health and wealth. We are destroying it.  And quickly!   Yet, we have Bill Gates proclaiming that “by almost any measure the world is better off.”  Except the most important measure!  Lest you think I’m an alarmist, read this article from the UK at left. LINK TO FULL ARTICLE HERE.

British farming soil could run out within 60 years, leading to a catastrophic food crisis and drastically higher prices for consumers, scientists warn. [ED: these are scientists saying this, folks, not a quack website] Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard. Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said. An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land “moderately or severely eroded”, the Carbon Farming conference heard.

But Hold On, There’s More

As if it’s not bad enough that the richest man in the world is not even aware of this problem – Desertification and Loss of Topsoil, consider this …

The very foods that are killing *our soil* are also killing *our bodies* early as well – obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, auto-immune disorders, etc., etc.

Get a preview about this by reading this recent (2009) scientific paper from the Journal of Dental Research.  LINK HERE. I’ll cover this more in Part 2 of this series. Our health in the “developed world” is TERRIBLE if you make a fair comparison. Yes, of course living to 80 is great compared to living to age 40. But that comparison that’s always made is so unfair it’s not even funny.  I’ll talk about that another day.

For now, I’ll leave you with a quote from one of the “fathers” of the modern conservation movement, Aldo Leopold. Aldo Leopold said …

The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health. There are two organisms whose processes of self-renewal have been subjected to human interference and control. One of these is man himself (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and conservation). LINK HERE

Stay tuned for more on Bill Gates’ “better world” … coming soon.

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