One World Governments–Debunked!
By SlayerX3
This article which debunks the ridiculous “one world government” conspiracy nonsense in Thrive is closely related to my previous article about “world domination conspiracies,” and Muertos’s article debunking the Global Domination Agenda.
The Norm Prison
At 1:18:02 of Thrive David Icke speaks about the fear of what other people think. He cites the ridicule he went through when he lost that fear and decided to speak out. (I’m sure the ridicule has nothing to do with the things he publicly speaks being completely unfounded and insane).
He states how by dictating what is right and wrong, weird and normal, the Illuminati/GDE (Global Domination Elite) have created a prison for the population who is afraid to speak its own mind.
His main point is how these groups would use norms and social standards to keep people from stepping out and showing their “uniqueness,” for if they did the rest of the society would shun them. This would create a social prison where you’re not as afraid of the reaction from the “elites” as you are of the reaction from your relatives, friends and co-workers.
There is a problem with this line of thought, however. Social norms have existed since humans started to live in society and as society changed so did the norms. Social norms weren’t invented by some “global elite.”
I’m certain this segment is aimed towards the people who honestly believe in conspiracy theories, in an attempt to vindicate their status as social rejects.
Icke’s argument seems to equate believing in conspiracy theories–free energy and other pseudoscience–with social injustices. Like a few decades ago interracial marriage and gay marriage were taboos (in some places they still are) but the norms changed for those to be accepted.
But you can’t equate ridiculing someone’s conspiracy beliefs with social injustice. They’re not the same thing. Thrive’s and Icke’s claims have no foundation in reality, and I don’t mean the reality of what is acceptable and what is not. I mean that these beliefs have absolutely no foundation in observable facts. Gamble and Icke make absurd statements and expect people to accept them as if they were a completely valid view of the world.
If you’re an adult male who goes to a “My Little Pony” fan convention you can’t expect people not to give you weird looks. And you shouldn’t expect people to accept that shape shifting reptilians control the world, the Illuminati is responsible for everything important since the 19th century and that Elvis Presley was an alien without them thinking there is something wrong in your head. While the former is a matter of taste and generally harmless, the later represents a group of beliefs that have no foundation in reality, and is extremely harmful.
The World Government Unions
The European Union
Gamble claims the GDE has plans to split the world in several power blocks to make it easier to control. He cites the European Union and the African Union as examples and mention how the Pacific and American Union are on their way.
If I were to talk about how the European Union worked in real life it’d take an entire full length article just to do that, so I’ll summarize and show how things aren’t exactly what Gamble thinks they are.
The European Union is a loose federation of countries, that include most of Europe, with the intent to ease the movement of people and merchandise across its members’ borders. Defense is in the hands of NATO (which includes the U.S.A and Canada).
It has achieved these goals by unifying the currency, applying several legislative policies that are voted on in the EU parliament with the approval of each of its member states.
I also have to mention that the countries who have adopted the Euro as a currency are referred as the Eurozone. Some member states decided to maintain their own currency, like Sweden and the United Kingdom.
There are as many arguments against the EU as there are in favor of it. It is worth mentioning that even among the EU members it is common to disagree with each other whenever a new law or policy is to be applied.
The most recent example is the Greek financial crisis and the “austerity measures” proposed by Germany and France which are being opposed or severely criticized by several other EU members, especially Portugal, Spain and Greece.
Most of the laws (save those on importation tariffs, unions and industry regulations) aren’t directly imposed on its member states. Nor does the EU dictate the policies its members will adopt in their own countries as long as it doesn’t directly harm other members.
http://www.brugesgroup.com/HowEULawsAreMade.pdf
http://www.ngoeuconnect.ie/content.php?area=3
http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/index_en.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union (This splits into several sub sections and main pages)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroscepticism
http://www.economicshelp.org/dictionary/c/criticism-eu.html
http://econ.economicshelp.org/2008/04/problem-with-euro.html
This is not a unified “world government” body. It just isn’t.
The African Union
The AU is a political block to push for development within Africa’s borders, defend Africa’s interests and security and promote democratic governments and human rights.
If you have been keeping tabs on the news, you know the AU exists on paper only.
With its massive history of corruption, internal conflict and sheer incompetence, the African Union is anything but unified.
Claiming the AU has created a unified Africa is almost comical. The AU reactions to Somalia’s lawless state, Sudan’s Darfur humanitarian crisis and Libya’s civil war can only be described as totally absent.
Along the history of ethnic, religious and political conflict and with at least one war with one African state against another or a civil war within a member state occurring at least once every decade makes the African Union the exact opposite of what a unified continent should look like. Not to mention the continent is rife with poverty and disease giving the AU more important problems to deal with than trying to take over Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union
http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/Problems-Plaguing-the-AU-Forces.pdf
The American Union
Gamble claims an American Union is on its way citing trade policies involving the USA, Canada and Mexico (forgetting both South and Central America).
While there are free trade treaties with those countries, there is no political will to unify the American continent. There are people who advocate a unified America much like the European Union. Politicians and citizens from left and right (see what I did there?) have vocal stands against such a union. South and Latin American countries fear more US intervention, abusive policies and lack of sovereignty and the US fears massive immigration, the loss of power in case the US dollar gets replaced by the Amero (theoretical Trans-American currency) and being saddled with the burden of solving several of those countries’ problems.
If the proposed American Union also includes the Central and South American nations, there will be even more problems than just turning the USA, Canada and Mexico into a Union.
There is a massive anti-American sentiment in South and Central America mostly due to past policies US imposed in South and Central America during the Cold War and the economic practices the US adopts which are viewed as unfair in most South and Central American nations.
There is also a strong nationalist fervor and idealism against imperialistic policies (which without doubt the Unification would be perceived as so) within South and Central American countries.
Even if you decided to unify South America into a South American Union there would be a strong political and civil resistance against it. It’s just not going to happen.
The closest thing we have is the Mercosul, which is another free-trade-treaty accepted by most of the South American countries. This is also a source of major political and economic disputes among its members.
NAFTA is currently the only integration treaty ratified by USA, Canada and Mexico. It is a political and economic treaty to promote free trade among those countries.
There is a good share of conspiracy theories regarding the creation of an North American Union, specially about the proposed NAFTA super highway (firmly opposed by Ron Paul).
Why is creating an American Union a challenge? The only fully developed countries in the Americas, economically speaking, are USA and Canada. While most European countries have similar political and economic set ups (which facilitated the creation of the EU), the American continent doesn’t have this advantage. USA’s economic policies are radically different from Canada’s and Mexico’s, let alone all the other Latin American countries. For example, Brazil has major differences with Argentina and Venezuela in how their economies function, and integrating those differences into a single power block would be a political and economic nightmare. Who would make decisions? How would anything get done?
Creating a Union would force the USA and Canada to elevate the status and the condition of all the other members, given the state of poverty the majority of the countries in the Americas are in. This alone would be a gargantuan task big enough to stop a unification process in its tracks.
In the real world, discussions about “unifying” American countries weren’t about creating a European Union-like power, but instead stimulating better cooperation and integration among the American nations using the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) as a mediator.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/nau.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercosur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Union
http://www.cfr.org/canada/building-north-american-community/p8102
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_currency_union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement_%28NAFTA%29_Superhighway_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_Prosperity_Partnership_of_North_America
http://factcheck.org/2008/02/wrong-paul/
Pacific Union
Australia is already a member of the Commonwealth and feels little need to integrate itself with the rest of Asia. Japan and China hate each other. North Korea and South Korea unification is a nightmare by itself and if you want to have an idea of how troublesome it would be creating a Pacific Union, put all the issues I mentioned in the American Union with the ones in the African Union together.
Thrive’s lack of gasp in geopolitics is astonishing. Gamble simply doesn’t understand how the world works.
One World Government and “Economic Hit Men”
At 1:20:48 Gamble shows videos of the EU leaders talking about “Global Governance,” again taking it out of context. Both videos refer to how governments all over the globe worked to avoid the worsening of the economic crisis that started in 2008 and the efforts of the G8 and G20 to cope with the economic issues. Both also deal with mentions to create a set of rules to stabilize the financing sectors across the world and the importance of the G20 in future policy making.
Gamble claims groups like the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the IFM are tools for the GDE to impose their plans.
Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfnTOm3xZp0&feature=related (The part shown on Thrive is at 0:25:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIFvwwIFZ58
The “Economic Hit Man”
Gamble introduces the controversial book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. The book is about how governments and corporations employ “economic hit men” to bribe leaders in undeveloped countries and “Jackals” to assassinate leaders who don’t comply.
This book was met with a lot of criticism, from how poorly written and simplified it was to the absence of citations and complete vagueness in its assertions.
The book itself is Perkins’s account of the job he did. As for its veracity, basically he says “trust my word on this one.” The book has also been criticized for several inaccuracies regarding policy making and how intelligence agencies work. For example, attributing the NSA (cryptography and code breaking) to an economic organization.
Perkins has explored the conspiracy theory ground both in his book and in his interviews. As result he has become popular in conspiracy theory circles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perkins_%28author%29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/26/AR2006022601265.html
http://www.putnampit.com/reviews/hitman2.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/business/yourmoney/19confess.html?pagewanted=all (The text of the interview I mentioned, which is the clip shown in Thrive)
http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/February/20060202155604atlahtnevel6.165713e-02.html
The reverse Hanlon’s razor
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.“
The above is an idea called Hanlon’s Razor. Gamble and Ms. Fitts subvert Hanlon’s Razor by claiming the government is not only using its incompetence as a facade to hide its plans, but is actually extremely competent in furthering its plans.
I could fill this article with examples of how this is wrong, but I’m just going to cite the latest. SOPA and PIPA, law that would have given corporations and the government a green light to do as they wanted with the Internet, didn’t pass despite heavy political support and corporate lobbyism. If the government can’t pass laws like this, how are they supposed to create a “one world government?”
Pyramids of information
Right after this, David Icke discusses the “pyramid organization” where the knowledge of the real intentions of the GDE decrease the further down the pyramid you go. Icke cites the Manhattan Project as an example of how such big secret can be kept hidden.
Bad example, the Manhattan Project did have leaks. They stemmed from accidents, incompetence and active espionage. If that was the case how did Gamble stumble with all his “evidence” and lived to tell the tale?
https://www.fas.org/irp/ops/ci/docs/ci2/2ch1_f.htm
There is also a big difference between the Manhattan Project and the kind of “secret” Icke claims is being hidden here. The Manhattan Project was a plan to win the war, which everybody thought was a good goal. People were not likely to object to something that would win the war for their side and save millions of lives. With the GDE plan though, you have to convince people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise want to do. You just couldn’t do it. Also, keep in mind the Manhattan Project existed for a very short period of time (1942 to 1945). You didn’t have to keep it secret for very long. The GDE has to be kept secret over decades or even centuries. It just wouldn’t work.
Conclusion
I’ve shown here how these “one world government” theories are false. Gamble and Icke don’t understand how the world really works, they take information out of context and hope nobody will notice. I noticed.
World Domination Conspiracies–Debunked!
By SlayerX3
This article presents more on the “Global Domination Agenda” at the heart of Thrive and why the assertions in the film related to this conspiracy theory are ridiculous.
Global Domination Agenda and the New World (lack of) Order
Roughly at 1:05:00 we have Mr. Gamble giving a speech claiming the secret agenda of the banking elite is nothing but “total global domination.” Gamble states for the Global Domination Agenda to work the powerful elites would need to have total control of key sectors of society. Such as the money (Central banks and such), natural resources, energy (save “free energy”), health (save natural alternative medicine) and the media. He also alleges that the US government is hell bent on controlling the internet (more on that later, but I have to add thanks to the democratic process it has failed to do so). Gamble also adds how the PATRIOT Act (won’t argue much with this but the PATRIOT Act was hardly effective), surveillance and RFID chips (useless for anything but control of inventory and pets).
He alleges that the Big Brother police state isn’t coming, it has already arrived. In a bait and switch argument he states the members of several wealthy families, such as the Rockefellers, Rothschild and so forth, are part of a secret group. Supposedly, while most of the members of these families are not aware of this, the headmasters are pulling the strings without their knowledge.
Gamble then proceeds to drop some names of royal family members and high influence people to make a point, implying they are the headmasters behind the global domination agenda. People like the David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of Netherlands. Needless to say this falls more under speculation and guessing than verifiable fact.
One of the pieces of “evidence” he brings to make his point credible is the symbolism of the Eye of Providence (A.K.A the “all seeing eye of God) used on the U.S. $1 bill, in Masonry images and by other justice and intelligence agencies worldwide.
The problem with this kind of argument is the blatant use of unfounded implications. The Eye of Providence is a quite old symbol which is mostly used to represent religious zeal, like a shepherd watching over his flock. The Eye of Providence is used in the same manner by groups heavily influenced by the Christian church (especially regarding the Holy Trinity).
Mr. Gamle also shows several companies using eyes on their logos–conveniently forgetting that most of the examples he listed are from audio-visual companies like CBS and AOL.
Gamble claims one of the uses of the this information is to promote anti-Semitism by labeling the Global Domination Agenda as “a Jewish agenda.” Perhaps the irony was lost to Gamble, but having the overtly anti-Semitic David Icke as a key figure in Thrive and then drop this gem on the viewer was a little too much for me to bear. Given how much anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories tend to overlap, this is ironic.
Later both Gamble and Edward Griffin speak about how after the secret elite consolidated their wealth they aimed for the next big thing: power. The power to rule people and their freedom as they see fit under the premise of “we’re more intelligent than you and we know how you should live better than you.”
After that there are several clips from politicians like George Bush, Gordon Brown and Henry Kissinger using the phrase “New World Order”. This is another case of quote mining. Muertos already talked about this in this blog.
One of the reasons why this footage has been carefully edited is to change its meaning. Showing the clips in full would only undermine Gamble’s statements because it would show that the New World Order phrase refers not to the Global Domination Agenda but about economic plans and free market trade (Henry Kissinger) and the state of the power balance post Gulf War (George Bush). The “New World Order” is not about creating one single governmental entity to rule the world as Gamble implies in Thrive.
Next the movie gives us this quote from Pope Benedict: “There is urgent need for a true world political authority.” In a rare case of quote accuracy in Thrive it turns out the Pope’s quote is legit, but it doesn’t mean what Gamble wants you think it means. The Pope’s quote is completely against the Global Domination Agenda and the elites, and it condemns the accumulation of wealth and criticizes the ways globalization can be badly directed. In fact the Pope says this can “lead to an increase in poverty and inequality, and could even trigger a global crisis”
Here is the full quote:
“There is a strongly felt need… for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth… there is urgent need of a true world political authority.”
The rest of the quote and the context is in this link. The pope wasn’t defending the creating of a super state, but the re-management of the UN and other groups like the FMI to help the redistribution of wealth and lessen poverty. This is a much more benevolent goal than anything Thrive suggests, and it is the opposite of the what the elite would want.
After abusing the Pope’s quote, Mr. Gamble alleges the world is moving towards a more militarized and authoritarian rule. He conveniently uses footage from North Korea and Pakistan trying to make you think about the worst places to live on Earth.
In reality the world has been advancing by leaps and bounds against militarization. The European nations–with a special mention of Germany–have shrunk their military capabilities. The Arab Spring has led to the downfall of dictatorships in North Africa and Middle East. Even countries like Myanmar (Burma) have taken measures to depose their military rulers in favor of reforms to open the way for a civil government (I’d also like to add this may not work as it is under process in a unstable region).
There is a clear picture of how people worldwide do not want to have a military or a militarized government.
Conspiracy theorists are (mentally?) challenged
Kimberly Gamble later makes an “observation” about how bringing up conspiracy theory topics is a “socially challenging” and whoever does is prone of being ridiculed.
This wouldn’t be the case if conspiracy theorists didn’t show/make use of:
- Misquoting, just as Thrive does (Henry Kissinger, George H.W. Bush).
- Quote mining, just as Thrive does (see the quote from Pope Benedict).
- Circular logic, unfounded accusations, mass guessing, selective editing, and trivializing.
- Failure to understand the laws of nature (physics, math, biology and chemistry). Thrive does this too by relying on people like Nassim Haramein whose reputation is built on wildly inaccurate conceptions of physics.
- Failure to provide conclusive and observable evidence.
- Dismissing rebuttals and criticism as “trolls” or “paid disinformation agents.”
Gamble reflects to the current state of the world where there is a major disparity between rich and poor, there is an use of power to keep the plebes in control and debt as a form of slavery.
Now there is something interesting in Thrive, actually a characteristic shared by most if not all conspiracy theory movies and “documentaries”: it is completely American centric, it was aimed towards the American population and nowhere else.
Mr. Gamble cites the US’s history of armed revolt and free speech as a hurdle to the Global Domination Agenda, completely ignoring the rest of the world, including totalitarian countries and/or bankrupt countries where the Global Domination Elite (if they existed) could implement their plans easily and without much trouble.
Maybe I’m overreacting as I write this–I am not an American–but for Gamble and crew it seems that USA is (most of) the world and if you subdue the USA you’ll be able to do with the rest of the world. This completely disregards all the countries and populations that have an anti-western and/or anti-American sentiment. The world is a place where no one agrees with anyone. Thrive focuses on groups that have power and influence in USA and Europe but not anywhere else. In the USA last case of real armed revolt was during the Civil War 150 years ago. In the Middle East and South Asia cases of armed revolt are occurring this very year, South America is virtually starting its second generation of people who have not witnessed the authoritarian dictatorships we faced in the 20th century, with most of the able bodied population having vivid memories of what it was like and they don’t want it to come back (I myself was born at the start of the democratic governments that succeeded the dictatorships in my country).
Even if the Global Domination Elite had seized control of the continental USA they wouldn’t be any better in much of the world considering that some countries have made resisting western powers a tradition, and they have been doing that for generations.
Pushing for a global currency and the global tax
Global currency
There are a few problem with this. First at 1:25:00 Gamble states the US dollar is being devalued, more correctly was being devalued, as it is regaining strength in face of other currencies like the Brazilian Real, the Chilean Peso, the Russian Ruble and even being almost toe to toe in value with the Euro.
Second the I.M.F one currency wasn’t meant to be used as Gamble implied to be. First, it isn’t meant to be used as a daily currency for citizens but as a reserve for countries to avoid the fluctuating exchange rates. Currently the US dollar is used as the reserve currency for governments worldwide. An I.M.F. currency would lessen the dependency of USA as a provider of currency and it would shield other countries in case of any crisis or economic problems in USA.
It is noteworthy that the major promoters of the global currency idea were China and Russia (two countries that aren’t keen of depending on USA), while the idea of an I.M.F. currency was completely rejected by USA in front of a stable and strong US dollar.
The movie talks about a single day-to-day global currency only in the realm of “what ifs”, as it would be extremely challenging to impose one, not to mention practical and ideological problems this would bring.
For example, to adopt a single currency the other countries would basically have to adopt the debts of every other country using the same currency, regulate how it is being spent and distributed in a world wide scale and face the resistance of people who are against it in said countries.
And there is no global digital currency being implemented nor has any country or major group pressured for its creation (unless you count PayPal as one).
Of course I assume Gamble was referring the latest G8 and G20 Summit in 2009.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6YzcXlgBTn1fLXu1iFIFS3vIkNQ
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7961106.stm
http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/text/docs/2009/03/213995.shtml
Global tax on carbon emissions
Gamble cites the possibility of a global tax on carbon emissions as one step towards a single global government and tyranny. (For Gamble any kind of tax is bad, mmm’kay? He hates any tax, anywhere, by anyone, any time, for any reason).
The chances are, if you’re living in the European Union or in California, you’re already paying the tax.
Gamble obviously has a few misconceptions about it. First it wasn’t imposed on any country, it was a suggested implementation for countries and state/provinces to adopt.
For example, a few states in US adopted the tax (like California), while several other countries decided to implement it. In most cases this implementation was voted in by the country’s population representatives in their respective legislatures.
Second, the money doesn’t go to a global central bank such as the I.M.F. It goes to the country’s own reserves. In other words the money collected with this tax stays in the country.
Third, there is no global police enforcing its implementation nor has the G8/G20 or U.N. ever proposed one to enforce this policy. Neither U.N., NATO nor any other entity k has either the legal power to impose the policy and the support to do so.
So what is this “carbon tax” you hear Gamble complaining about?
The carbon tax is a value imposed on a fixed quantity of emitted carbon dioxide resulted from industrial activity/power generation. The same way you pay for the litter/gallon of water or the KW/h of power your house uses, industries would pay for the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during their activity. For example 12.50 U$D per ton of CO2.
The main idea behind the carbon tax is to hit industries on where they feel the most, their pockets. By making inefficient and dirty energy generation methods more expensive, it gives more motivations for said companies to either adopt more efficient and clean methods or to invest more in clean energy (like free energy? har har). Of course the initial price will be reflected upon the customers, but this would also pressure the same companies as they would risk losing customers to companies that did make the investments and provide cheaper and cleaner energy. This also makes alternative energies like wind, solar and nuclear more attractive, by lessening the cost gap between those and fossil fuels.
There is also the idea of a cap and trade system, where governments set a limit of how much industries can pollute. Those who keep their emissions under said limit can sell their difference to industries who can’t.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/carbon-tax.htm
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/carbon-trading.htm
http://environment.about.com/od/carbontaxfaq/f/what-is-a-carbon-tax.htm
http://environment.about.com/od/capandtradefaq/f/capandtrade.htm
False Flags, Lasers from the outer space and FEMA death camps.
Following this, Gamble and David Icke talk about crisis or disasters that would be created or used to implement measures that follow the GDA by manipulating the media and the facts to suit their needs. In other words, a larger scale “false flag” operation, which my colleague Muertos has already debunked.
Its also worth mentioning that there are several cases where the media goes exactly against the government’s interest, for example while Fox News was in support of the Iraq War, CNN wasn’t.
Once again Thrive is quote mining and using selective editing to get its point across.
Gamble later claims the US government has the legal power to arrest and assassinate US citizens at will, but without providing any examples or occurrences of this happening.
Then Gamble mentions Radio Frequency Identification chips (RFID) as a tool to keep constant check on every citizen.
For some reason he implies those can be used to track anyone anywhere on the globe with pinpoint accuracy. Well, this is not the case. RFID chips aren’t GPS (Global Positioning System) transponders. There’s a difference. Even the relatively large active RFID tags (which carry their own power source) have a limited range which can go up to a little more than a 100 feet (approximately 33 meters) with the smaller, passive RFIDs having their range limited at a few feet. They are also useless if there isn’t any active scanner looking for them, are they are prone to suffer interference from other chips and can be easily tampered with.
The only things RFID chips are useful for is to make it (arguably) harder to falsify and easier to verify documents (this is a really good thing), keep stock control in warehouses and to keep important information at hand for security concerns. While animal chipping is common to keep track of pets, human chipping isn’t. There isn’t any government or companies forcing its citizens/customers/employees to use sub-dermal RFID. It is offered as an option by some companies and yet there aren’t many people actually using it.
Not to mention those chips can be relatively easily destroyed, have their information altered or decrypted (thanks to the low processing power and limited information storage).
Gamble states that these chips would be used to track citizens and use orbital lasers to assassinate dissenters from orbit. This is so ridiculous as to be almost funny.
He claims the name of the project is “Full Spectrum Dominance.” While there is a program called Full Spectrum Dominance, it is a military doctrine which calls for winning battles by using land, air, sea, space and cyberspace to control all elements of the battle. It has nothing to do with RFID chips or controlling dissenters against the government. Absolutely nothing.
This is by far one of the most unfounded and absurd statements Gamble has made in Thrive. What makes it even more absurd is how Gamble seems to be the only one to know about this, since a project of this size would fall on the radars of many other countries opposing the US and be certainly leaked at one point or another by people inside. If this plan exists, why hasn’t Iran said anything about it?
And even how Gamble claims it will be used is absurd. A laser satellite is even less subtle than a predator drone flying above its target or a sniper waiting to take his shot, not to mention extremely expensive, prone to error and easier to fool.
Besides, if the US had this kind of technology it would certainly be put to better uses such as a defensive ballistic missile shield or a tactical and strategic weapon to be used on enemy assets, not on angry YouTube commenters or armchair tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists.
Besides, any amateur astronomer would be able to verify the presence of these satellites with a powerful scope and a computer.
If there is an award for the single stupidest claim in Thrive, this should win it.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/technology-article.asp
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/rfid.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_dominance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identification
The FEMA camps
I’d give a good chunk of time to debunk the F.E.M.A. camps if that hasn’t already been done to death everywhere else. But this falls under the same problems of most conspiracy theories: there is hardly any evidence supporting its existence, most of the “evidence” is either edited to look like it’s suspicious and strange when in fact it isn’t.
The F.E.M.A. camps started to become popular again thanks to ultra right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. It’s also very popular with far right groups who hate the government.
Here are some links debunking the conspiracy theory of F.E.M.A. camps.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/4312850
http://conspiracies.skepticproject.com/articles/fema/camps/
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/fema-concentration-camps-militia-goo
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/36526/fema-camps-jesse-venturas-conspiracy-theory-debunked/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,513024,00.html (Even Fox News doesn’t believe it!)
Rockefeller quote
“The social experiment in China under the chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history” – David Rockefeller
Unlike some other quotes in Thrive which are just made up, this gem was actually said by David Rockefeller in an article in the New York Times.
But after reading the article I drew the conclusion that Rockefeller was talking about the differences of philosophy between the West and China about the reforms China undertook during the 50’s through early 70’s and how it would fare against the Western economy after opening up its borders to foreign products and investments. It has nothing to do with conspiracies.
Here is the link with the article, in case you want to draw your own conclusions.
As usual, Thrive is wrong. What else is new?
Noted Canadian Skeptic Show Examines Thrive—And Tells the Truth.
A podcast called “Life, The Universe and Everything Else,” a program put on by the Winnipeg Skeptics association, has turned its sights on Thrive. I spent the morning listening to the podcast, and I recommend it very highly. You can play it from your computer here. The host of the show is Gem Newman (founder of Winnipeg Skeptics, computer science expert), and the guests include Gary Barbon, Mark Forkheim, Robert Shindler, Richelle McCullough and Greg Christiansen. You can see information on who these people are, and what their backgrounds are, here.
The Winnipeg Skeptics are a group of skeptics and critical thinkers who apply fact, logic and critical thinking to wild claims made on the Internet. Just as this blog has done since the beginning, the Skeptics have exhaustively examined Thrive and their review is, needless to say, highly negative. While they find some things to praise in the film, they are extremely critical of the film’s shoddy research, its trafficking in bizarre and divisive conspiracy theories, its promotion of far right-wing Libertarian propaganda, and its reductive and harmful worldview that obscures real problems of income inequality, political corruption and environmental degradation.
Thrive Debunked is mentioned prominently in the episode and I’m proud to say this site was used as a significant source to fact-check and analyze the film. You’ll see links to various articles here on the blog page discussing the episode.
At one point, Mr. Newman reads verbatim from the statement made by John Robbins repudiating Thrive and criticizing its conspiracy worldview—a statement published on this blog with Mr. Robbins’s permission.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, very little on the podcast will be news to you. But it is noteworthy that whenever anyone approaches Thrive with a desire to check its facts and think through its conclusions, they invariably conclude that it is faulty, false and dangerous. We can therefore add the Winnipeg Skeptics’ review to the lengthening list of similar reviews catalogued on this site, such as JREF’s, Transition Culture’s and the Praxis Institute’s.
Do give the podcast a listen. It’s very well-done.
Humanity and Sanity: The Full Text of John Robbins’s Repudiation of Thrive and its Conspiracy Theories.
Probably the single most important event in Thrive‘s short history was the announcement, on April 10, 2012, that nine of the people interviewed in the film had signed a letter repudiating it and claiming that Foster Gamble misrepresented the film to them. (A tenth signatory, Adam Trombly, later joined the letter). Those events as well as the Gambles’ response were covered on this blog as they happened. The architect of the repudiation letter was John Robbins, who was nice enough to write me a note a few months ago specifically expressing his displeasure with the conspiracy theories advanced in Thrive. I found Mr. Robbins’s reasons for opposing the movie closely congruent with my own.
Mr. Robbins recently contacted me with a revised and complete version of his letter regarding Thrive, which he titles “Humanity and Sanity.” Although many of the words and especially the sentiment of Mr. Robbins’s statement have been reproduced here before at Thrive Debunked, I feel it’s important to produce the entire text all in one place for you to see. I think this is the best and most coherent repudiation of Thrive that we’re ever likely to see. Therefore, I offer it to you full, unedited and unabridged.
I haven’t put Mr. Robbins’s letter in block quote format because it’s so long and it would be distracting to read. Everything below the line comes from John Robbins, not me. I thank him for making his letter available to me and giving me permission to post it in its entirety here.
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Humanity and Sanity: Standing for a Thriving World
(and challenging the Movie Thrive)
By John Robbins
Thrive is the name of a richly produced and controversial film that asks, and attempts to answer, some of the deepest questions about the nature of the human condition and what is thwarting our chances to prosper. Elaborately funded, with appealing imagery and beautiful music, it features interviews with many leading progressive voices. And yet ten of these leaders have taken the highly unusual step of signing a statement formally disassociating ourselves from the film.
Why have Amy Goodman, Deepak Chopra, Paul Hawken, Edgar Mitchell, Vandana Shiva, John Perkins, Elisabet Sahtouris, Duane Elgin and Adam Trombly, as well as yours truly, gone to the trouble of signing our names to this public statement?
“We are a group of people who were interviewed for and appear in the movie Thrive, and who hereby publicly disassociate ourselves from the film.
Thrive is a very different film from what we were led to expect when we agreed to be interviewed. We are dismayed that we were not given a chance to know its content until the time of its public release. We are equally dismayed that our participation is being used to give credibility to ideas and agendas that we see as dangerously misguided.
We stand by what each of us said when we were interviewed. But we have grave disagreements with some of the film’s content and feel the need to make this public statement to avoid the appearance that our presence in the film constitutes any kind of endorsement.”
I have joined the other signers of this statement, even though there are aspects of the film that I find inspiring, and even though the makers of the film, Foster and Kimberly Gamble, are old friends.
In Thrive, the Gambles have attempted to address some of the crucial challenges of our times. I appreciate their idealism, their commitment, and their passion. And I agree with them about some things they state in the movie and on their website — such as that the political system is depraved, the Federal Reserve has been used to consolidate economic power, fiat currency tends to produce a corrupt financial system that depends on ever increasing debt, the tax system is unfair, and enormously powerful economic interests often collude with one another to deceive and defraud the public. I stand with them as they promote the labeling of genetically engineered foods and in their desire to see our nation cease spending enormous sums on war. I appreciate that they support local and organic agriculture, their passion for credit unions and local banking, and their opposition to governmental invasion of privacy. They recommend many action steps that I support.
But I do not agree with some of the core conclusions they draw. Nor do the other signers of the statement of disassociation from Thrive. Duane Elgin, one of the signers, says: “Thrive is idealistic, naive, narrow, shallow, and focuses attention away from more productive areas of engagement.”
At the very heart of the Thrive message is what it calls the Global Domination Agenda. Foster Gamble explains:
“A small group of families are actually controlling virtually every sector of human endeavor… Their agenda… (is) to take over the lives of all people across the entire planet… to collapse the economies throughout the European Union… to devalue the dollar to almost zero… and to create a one-world government, with them in charge.”
The Thrive movie and website also state that this “small group of families” are developing and experimenting with plans to radically reduce the world’s human population to make us “easier to manage.”
Could this be true?
There is no doubt that staggering wealth and power is today concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of humanity. The combined net worth of the world’s richest thousand or so people — the planet’s billionaires — is almost twice that of the poorest 2.5 billion. I believe this disparity to be nothing less than an indictment of our civilization.
It is also certain that networks exist among the most powerful that enable a remarkably few people to shape the world’s economy, to determine what is known and what is not, which views are accepted and which are not, and what priorities and policies will prevail. More than most of us realize, they decide whether we will live in war or peace and how our treasure will be spent. And they have proven to be eminently successful at enriching themselves, often at the expense of the common good. Exposing the global power elite is tremendously important work. And this, Thrive purports to do.
But the Thrive movie and website are filled with dark and unsubstantiated assertions about secret and profoundly malevolent conspiracies that distract us from the real work at hand. The conspiracy theories at the heart of Thrive are based on an ultimate division between “us” and “them.” “We” are many and well-meaning but victimized. “They,” on the other hand, are a tiny, greedy and inconceivably powerful few who are masterfully organized, who are purposefully causing massive disasters in order to cull the population, and who are deliberately destroying the world economy in order to achieve total world domination.
This way of thinking has an allure, for it distracts and absolves us from the troubling truth that the real source of the problem is in all of us, and in the economic systems we have collectively produced. If the ills of the world are the deliberate intentions of malevolent beings, then we don’t have to take responsibility for our problems because they are being done to us. Thinking this way may provide the momentary comfort of feeling exonerated, but it is ultimately disempowering, because it undermines our desire to be accountable for the way our own thoughts and actions help to create the environmental degradation and vast social inequity of the world in which we live. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”
The Thrive movie has lavish production values, and presents interviews with many leaders in the consciousness movement, all of which lend a beguiling aura of credibility. Foster Gamble himself comes across as soft, warm, and inquiring. Those who have only seen the film may not recognize the agenda and belief system that actually underlie Thrive.
For example, Foster Gamble says that the Japanese earthquake that caused the tsunami that wreaked havoc on the nuclear plants inFukushimawas deliberately created by those seeking absolute world domination, in order to punish the Japanese for not acceding to their wishes. He explains that “they” are able to use an electromagnetic array project inAlaskacalled HAARP to create earthquakes and tsunamis at will, anywhere on earth. The catastrophic earthquakes that devastated Haiti and Chile in 2010, he says, were intentionally created via HAARP. According to this view, these earthquakes were not the result of tectonic stresses and geologic processes. They were intentional acts perpetrated by a ruling elite with unimaginably sinister intent.
I’m tempted to think that Foster Gamble has watched too many James Bond movies. But the level of diabolical malevolence in the Thrive worldview makes the villains in James Bond movies seem like Mother Teresa in comparison.
There are many things that are terribly wrong in our world, and some of them are dire. All living creatures are poisoned and compromised by surging levels of human-made toxins that spew into our environment, relatively unchecked. We are experiencing unprecedented levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity and childhood diabetes. Our financial institutions and to a large extent our political system have been hijacked by greedy and at times even sociopathic individuals who seem to feel no sense of responsibility to the well being of the whole. The world’s military industrial complex is spending more money than ever on guns, bombs, and the machinery of unfathomable destructive power, while governments learn little about how to make peace and hundreds of millions of people go hungry.
But holding these tragedies as the deliberate acts of a tiny group of families seeking total world domination via a global police state distracts us from the arduous work of confronting the true challenges before us.
For example, as an environmentalist I heed the monumental evidence that global warming may be one of the most serious threats faced by humanity and many of the other species on this planet. Those who have merely seen the movie might not know that Foster Gamble and the Thrive website strongly recommend a film (The Great Global Warming Swindle) which states that man-made global warming is a “lie” and “the biggest scam of modern times.”
The Thrive website opens its climate change discussion with this question:
“How does the premise of man-made global warming relate to the banking elite’s effort to transcend national sovereignty, establish global governance and create a global tax to fund their dominance?”
The insinuation is that the idea of human-caused global warming is being fabricated as an excuse to create a global police state and a tax basis for tyranny. If this is true, just about every scientific expert in the world has been taken in by the hoax. A 2010 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent of scientific experts agree that it is…
“very likely that anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases have been responsible for the unequivocal warming of most of the Earth’s global temperature in the second half of the 20th century.”
It has been personally painful for me to witness friends of mine become caught up in seeing just about everything on earth as part of a vast demonic conspiracy. When I wrote Foster Gamble to voice my disappointment with many of the ideas in the film and website, he wrote back, encouraging me among other things to study the works of David Icke, Eustace Mullins, Stanley Monteith and G. Edward Griffin. These are among the people he repeatedly refers to in the movie as his “sources.” It is in these people’s worldviews that Thrive has its roots.
I find this deeply disturbing. Here’s why…
David Icke is a major player in Thrive. In fact, he is featured more prominently in the movie than anyone other than Foster Gamble. An extended interview with him, intercut with supporting material, forms much of the middle section of the film.
Though this is not mentioned in Thrive, Icke is well-known for advocating utterly bizarre theories, including that the entire world is run by a secret group of reptilian humanoids who drink human blood and conduct satanic rituals. Forty-threeU.S. Presidents, he says, have been such reptilian beings, and many of them have been part of global satanic pedophile rings that murder hundreds of thousands of children a year. I wish I was making this despicable stuff up, but I’m not. This is what Icke teaches.
What is Thrive’s relationship to these beliefs? Foster Gamble explains:
“In our film, we do not go into his (Icke’s) research on reptilians, nor his immensely important investigations into global satanic pedophile rings, because it does not serve our film. That does not mean that revealing what is happening to hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable every year should not be exposed and stopped.”
Icke’s war on common sense goes even further. He says that the Global Elite’s plan for world domination was laid bare in a document titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This document is actually a notorious hoax, published inRussia around 1903. It supposedly presents a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world, and was a primary justification used by Adolph Hitler as he initiated the Holocaust. This fraudulent document was also used to justify the violent pogroms and massacres of the Jewish people in pre-SovietRussia.
How anyone could take seriously a man who espouses such “information” is beyond me. Thrive not only takes Icke seriously, but relies more heavily on his “insights” than on any other source, both in the movie and as a source of “data” for its website.
In a recent interview, Icke seemed to be competing for lunatic of the year: “What I’m explaining now,” he said, “is that the moon is not a heavenly body but a construct.”
One of the signers of the statement of disassociation from Thrive, former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, has grounds to disagree. As the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, he spent nine hours working on the moon’s surface.
Another of Thrive’s primary sources, and another of the authors Foster Gamble told me I should read in order to better understand Thrive, is Eustace Mullins. I honestly find it difficult to convey the level of anti-semitism in Mullins’s books, without it seeming that I am exaggerating. So I will let Mullins’s own words speak for themselves:
“We must remember that there is no Jewish crime per se, since the existence of the Jewish parasite on the host is a crime against nature, because its existence imperils the health and life of the host…
This religious ceremony of drinking the blood of an innocent gentile child is basic to the Jew’s entire concept of his existence as a parasite, living off the blood of the host…
The Jews do not want anyone to know what Nazism is. Nazism is simply this–a proposal that the German people rid themselves of the parasitic Jews. The gentile host dared to protest against the continued presence of the parasite, and attempted to throw it off.”
The title of one of Eustace Mullins’s books is: Hitler, An Appreciation. While Foster Gamble evidently believes that Mullins has shed valuable light on banking systems and other aspects of the “Global Domination Agenda,” I have no interest in looking to such individuals for insight into anything.
The Gambles state that they do not necessarily agree with all of the thoughts and beliefs of their sources, but rather that they have incorporated only those ideas they find useful and with which they agree. I’m sure the Gambles do not condone Mullins’ overt anti-semitism, but I find it disturbing that the thinking of these men has been used as the foundation for some of the key ideas presented in Thrive. While I do not believe the Gambles are themselves guilty of anti-semitism, I do believe they are naïve and gullible, and that in depending heavily on sources such as Icke and Mullins they have unwittingly allowed anti-semitism to become a subtext in their work.
As journalist Eric Johnson points out, viewers of the movie may not realize that Gamble’s central thesis, that a handful of families, many of them Jewish, control the world and plan to enslave humanity, is nearly identical to the argument that Joseph Goebbels made in his notorious Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew: that a handful of banking families, many of them Jewish, run the world and seek global domination.
Two of the other sources that Foster Gamble recommended to me so that I might better understand the philosophical underpinnings of Thrive are Stanley Monteith and G. Edward Griffin. Monteith, who happens to be a neighbor of mine, has long been involved with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, and professes that the environmental movement is a pretext for the effort to create a global police state. The author of two books on AIDS, he says “the vast majority of AIDS information available to the American public has only one purpose – and that purpose is to deceive the people of our nation.” Monteith’s answer? He calls for schools to “abandon all comprehensive sex education” in favor of “abstinence only sex instruction.”
G. Edward Griffin is showcased in both the Thrive movie and website. Both he and Monteith have long been members and officers of the John Birch Society, a far-right political organization that first came to public attention when one of its founders, Robert W. Welch, proclaimed that Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t the genial war hero and popular President he seemed, but rather “a conscious, dedicated agent of the international communist conspiracy.” G. Edward Griffin has written an admiring biography of Welch, who co-founded the John Birch Society along with Fred Koch, the father of today’s notorious Koch Brothers.
Both Thrive and the John Birch Society view government, in Welch’s words, “as always and inevitably an enemy of individual freedom.” And both see a small group of families, including the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, as behind an utterly malevolent conspiracy seeking total global domination. The Thrive website features this statement from the second president of the John Birch Society, Larry McDonald:
“The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government…all under their control… Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in cope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”
There are only a few of the ultra-right wing sources whose ideas and agendas pervade Thrive. Another is the economist Ludwig von Mises, whose words and beliefs are cited frequently and sympathetically on the Thrive website. Many Americans first learned of von Mises when Michele Bachman, seeking the Republican nomination for the Presidency, said she read his books at the beach. Von Mises’s brand of laissez-faire capitalism is hard-core. In his eyes, nearly all government intervention in the economy is strictly verboten, and taxes are a crime against freedom.
Buoyed by lush visual effects and lovely words, the Thrive film has been attractive to many who know how often we are deceived and exploited by the powers that shouldn’t be. “In times of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
But what is the revolution Thrive would bring? Both the Thrive movie and website call for the end of taxation even for the rich. Thrive’s goal is a world in which public schools and welfare programs, including social security, have been terminated. Instead of police, we have private security forces. As Foster Gamble puts it, “Private security works way better than the state.”
That may be true for the rich who can pay for it. But who, I might ask, would pay to protect low-income communities if all security was privatized?
Eventually, if Foster Gamble had his way and the Thrive vision was fully manifest, there would be no taxes, no government, and everything would be privately owned, including roads. “It’s clear that when you drive into a shopping center you are on a private road, and almost without exception it is in great shape,” explains the Thrive website, as though a free market unfettered by concern for the 99 percent would somehow magically meet the needs of all.
I am saddened to see Foster Gamble, an heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, so oblivious to the realities of those who do not share his privileges. If all roads are privatized, how will the poor get anywhere?
It is hard to overstate how opposed Thrive is to taxes, even on the ultra-wealthy. To Foster Gamble’s eyes, any form of government that depends on taxation, including democracy, is unconscionable. He writes on the Thrive website:
“Democracy…which is born of and sustains itself by taking people’s hard-earned money, whether they like it or not, and calling it ‘taxation,’ – is in and of itself a violation [against life].”
No wonder Amy Goodman, who appears in the film, is one of the signers of the statement repudiating Thrive. She has long been the host of what may be the most significant progressive news institution of our time. While Thrive finds democracy abhorrent because it depends on taxation, her outstanding program is called Democracy Now.
How, you might be asking, did those of us who have signed the statement of disassociation from Thrive ever allow ourselves to be filmed for a movie that advances such ideas? The answer is simple. We were grievously misled about what the film would be.
I want to underscore that although I think the Gambles are promoting a destructive agenda (which they kept secret from those of who were interviewed for their film), I do not think either Foster or his wife Kimberly are sinister or malicious, which is why it has been a very painful process for me to write this critique. I have known them to be kind people who mean well, and I have long considered Kimberly in particular to be one of my closest friends. But I have found it necessary to speak out in this way, because some of the ideas at the heart of Thrive strike me as frightening and misguided, and they most certainly are not ones with which I or the other signers of the disassociation statement can condone.
I have spent decades exposing and seeking to undermine powerful industries whose ways of doing business are diametrically opposed to the public welfare. In my view, the deregulation of the economy and the demolition of government programs that Thrive proposes, would take us even further in the direction of a winner-take-all economy in which wealth would concentrate even more in the hands of the financial elites.
As one of the signers of the disassociation statement, evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, writes:
“Without community, we do not exist, and community is about creating relationships of mutual benefit. It does not just happen with flowers and rainbows, and no taxes.”
Each of us who have signed the statement have dedicated our lives to creating and conveying positive visions of how to create a truly thriving, just and sustainable way of life. We have been part of vast movements toward generating a human presence on this planet that is spiritually fulfilling, socially just, and environmentally responsible. We do not want to see our names, reputations, and influence used to fuel unsubstantiated claims or misguided policies. We want to see them used to strengthen individuals and communities, and to serve the ability each of us possesses to live with respect for ourselves, for one another, and for the truth of our interdependence.
As another of the signers, Paul Hawken, writes:
“The world is riven by people who are convinced they are right, while others are wrong. Dualism permeates political, economic, cultural and religious conflict. It is the true source of suffering and the despoliation of the world. This wound cannot be healed by the us/them divisions that inform Thrive. Evil most certainly exists, but the core of evil is ignorance, and it cannot be repelled by righteousness or by making others wrong. It is only through compassion that we can create true transformation.”
We do not deny the evil in the world. It is here and it is real. But there is also hope here, and it too is real.
It is hope that believes we can build trust, build community, and build a better world. Such hope is not the blind belief in something which has little possibility of ever materializing. It is the hope which remains open to miracles while investing the sweat and perseverance to lend the Universe a hand in creating those miracles. It is the hope that is borne from knowing that it is far too late, and our situation far too serious, to indulge in the luxuries of pessimism, paranoia, and finger-pointing.
The state of the world is perilous. But it is not too late to love, not too late to work to realize our dreams, and not too late to believe in ourselves and each other.
In the end, we are all in this together. Each step you take to lessen the amount of fear in yourself and the world brings us closer to a world reflective of the beauty that exists — sometimes buried and other times apparent — in each of us. Every act you take that increases the amount of trust and compassion in your relationships helps us move from a world created by privilege to a world created by community.
As the poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed. I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”
Foster Gamble Responds: Thrive and its Solutions are (Evidently) Only For Conspiracy Theorists.
Foster Gamble, the man behind the Thrive documentary, has responded to the open letter I addressed to him last week as well as other statements I’ve made on this blog. He responded in the form of a comment to the blog. I’m going to reproduce the text of Mr. Gamble’s statement in its entirety here in this article. Then, at the end, I will offer my own remarks in response.
Note: some commenters have taken Mr. Gamble to task by putting many of his thoughts in all caps, as if he is shouting. I don’t see it that way. Just how the blog comment system works on WordPress, there was really no other way for him to set off his text from words of mine that he was responding to.
Further note: Mr. Gamble’s statement contains some quotations of mine. Below the line that appears beneath this paragraph, all the words that are not set off in blockquotes are Foster Gamble’s (until we get to my remarks), and the ones in blockquotes are from me. I just want to state this to avoid confusion.
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Mr. Dead Ones (Muertos)
I was told before launching THRIVE that I would know we were having significant impact when debunkers started devoting entire websites to negative-only commentary. So I guess I should thank you for fulfilling that role.
You claim there are no real conspiracies – despite vast documentation and court cases. You state there are no real zero point energy devices – despite a huge number of eyewitnesses, gag orders, court cases etc. You write off the possibility of contact with UFOs / ET – despite thousands of credible reports, hundreds of hours of footage, over 500 high level military, government, pilot and FAA accounts, and other country’s formal acknowledgement of UFO’s. You seem to think there is not any chance we could actually thrive with freedom for EVERYONE.
Clearly, we disagree. That’s fine- I just wonder what you base your opinions on?
If our predicament on this planet is the result of coincidence and incompetence, why do you hide your true identity? You claim to be afraid of repercussions from actually taking a transparent stand – Afraid of whom? What integrity is there is hiding and then deliberately trying to thwart the efforts of those who would transparently stand for our values, for deeper truths and for new paradigm solutions? I believe such cowardice and shortsightedness feed into the much more dangerous looming police state that you end up supporting through your denial.
If there is no destructive conspiracy to be concerned about and if you are sincere, why not just post your real name, picture, bio and affiliations?
I highly recommend that you take a fraction of the vast amount of time you put into creating only negative and baseless smears against THRIVE and actually do some real investigation so that we can engage in an informed dialog that will add something of value in these perilous times.
I am pausing to take some time to expose some of your most blatant misrepresentations of THRIVE. My input to your assessment is in all caps below.
“How Does Thrive Divert Attention from Real Problems?
Thrive is deeply misguided because it’s diverting its viewers’ attention away from the real solutions that we must pursue to these very real problems. My core grievance with conspiracy theories is that they are false.”
FG – I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU RELY ON COINCIDENCE THEORY AND NOTIONS OF GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE TO EXPLAIN THE CONSOLIDATION OF POWER THAT HAS THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD IN SHACKLES AND AMERICA CAREENING TOWARD A POLICE STATE. I USED TO BELIEVE THAT ALSO. THEN I IMMERSED MYSELF IN RESEARCH AND FOUND CREDIBLE EVIDENCE ACTUALLY MADE MORE SENSE THAN THE MODEL OF INTERPRETATION YOU ARE RELYING ON. HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THESE “33 CONSPIRACIES THAT TURNED OUT TO BE TRUE? http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread531572/pg1
“However, it’s the effect of that falsity in the real world which is why opposing conspiracy theories matters. Conspiracy thinking reduces the world into a simplistic black-and-white, good-versus-evil, lightworkers-versus-disinformation paradigm. Against that background, nothing productive can get done.”
FG – AS A 3RD DEGREE BLACK BELT IN THE NON-VIOLENT MARTIAL ART OF AIKIDO, I LEARNED AND TAUGHT THAT THE FIRST IMPERATIVE OF DEFENDING ONESELF AND OUR LOVED ONES IS AN ACCURATE AND THOROUGH ASSESSMENT OF REALITY. CONSIDERING THE VIABILITY OF A CONSPIRACY AND UNDERSTANDING THE CLAIMS OF THOSE OF US WHO SUPPORT CONSPIRACY ANALYSIS IS FRUITFUL- NOT FOR YOU TO BELIEVE IT WITHOUT YOUR OWN DEEP ASSESSMENT, BUT TO CONSIDER IT SERIOUSLY. WHAT IS IT THAT SO MANY INDEPENDENT RESEARCHERS DISCOVER AND RISK THEIR LIVES TO SHARE? WHY JUST DISMISS IT WHEN SO MUCH IS AT STAKE? AN HOUR ON OUR WEBSITE, MUCH LESS AN OPEN-MINDED VIEWING OF THRIVE, WILL MAKE IT VERY CLEAR MY VIEW IS NOT SIMPLISTIC AND NEITHER ARE OUR SOLUTIONS UNPRODUCTIVE. MY INTENTION IS TO EXPOSE THE AGENDA SO THAT OUR SOLUTIONS CAN BE INFORMED. IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE THE FEDERAL RESERVE IS INTENTIONALLY CORRUPT YOU WILL CONTINUE TO LOOK TO THEM TO BAIL US OUT OF THE MESS THEY GOT US IN TO. OR IS IT THAT YOU BELIEVE THAT THIS IS ALL OUR FAULT? I HAVEN’T YET MET A PERSON WHO BELIEVES THEY RIGGED THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM TO SCREW THEMSELVES.
ALREADY CITIES ALL OVER THE WORLD ARE SELF ORGANIZING INTO SOLUTIONS GROUPS BASED ON WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON BEHIND THE SCENES AND GROUNDED SOLUTIONS THAT ADDRESS THE REAL PROBLEMS WITH RESPONSES. THIS IS THE VALUE OF PUTTING THE UNDERSTANDING THAT OUR RESEARCH AFFORDS INTO ACTION.
“Here’s how Thrive operates in this regard.
Problem: environmental degradation caused by reliance on fossil fuels.
Real solution: Work toward developing economically and socially realistic alternatives to fossil fuels, such as renewable energy resources (solar, wind, water power, etc.) as well as smarter solutions in building, land use and lifestyle.”
FG – ALL THAT IS GREAT…AND THERE ARE OTHER OPTIONS TO SUPPLEMENT THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS.
“Thrive solution: “Free energy” machines developed from technology given to us by aliens will save the world without us having to do anything (except to oppose the “Global Domination Elite.”).”
FG – YOUR PROPOSAL THAT WE ARE ADVOCATING DOING NOTHING UNDERMINES YOUR WHOLE ASSESSMENT OF THRIVE FOR ANYONE THINKING FOR THEMSELVES. AND IF THERE WERE “FREE ENERGY” DEVICES ALREADY DEVELOPED BY CURRENT INVENTORS IN VARIOUS COUNTRIES (WHICH I HAVE SEEN), WOULD YOU WANT PEOPLE TO HAVE ACCESS TO THEM? AND DO YOU REALLY THINK THE GOVERNMENT DOES ALL THESE RAIDS, GAG ORDERS, INTIMIDATIONS AND EVEN ASSASSINATIONS ON HOAXERS? THERE IS HUGE EVIDENCE THAT THEY RECOGNIZE THE REAL INVENTORS BECAUSE THEY HAVE THESE TECHNOLOGIES THEMSELVES. WE HAVE SEEN DEVICES THAT PRODUCE MORE ENERGY THAN THEY USE- THAT IS A FACT. GIVEN THE REALITY OF THIS TECHNOLOGY, AND THE TREMENDOUS POTENTIAL IT HAS FOR RESTRUCTURING THE POWER DYNAMIC ON THE PLANET, HEALING LIVES, CLEANING WATER, RESTORING THE ENVIRONMENT, AND SO MUCH MORE THAT WE MUTUALLY WANT, WHY DO YOU CHOOSE TO PROMOTE SUCH AN UNIFORMED AND CYNICAL RESPONSE? WHY NOT CONSIDER SERIOUSLY THE SENSE IT MAKES THAT AN OIL ECONOMY WOULD DENY THE EXISTENCE OF TECHNOLOGY THAT WOULD OBSOLETE THE OIL ECONOMY? YOU SIMPLY LEAVE YOURSELF OUT OF MORE MEANINGFUL AND FRUITFUL DIALOG BY SHOWING NOT JUST YOUR LACK OF RESEARCH, BUT YOUR LACK OF INSIGHT.
“Problem: income disparity and poverty.
Real solution: Work toward meaningful and fair reform of the economic system, policies that promote economic opportunity at the bottom, and make sure businesses and corporations pay their fair share and contribute to our society.”
FG – SOUNDS NICE. HOW DO YOU DO THIS? WHAT IS THE PRINCIPLE IT’S BASED ON? HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM WHAT WE HAVE BEEN HOPING FOR ALL ALONG THAT HASN’T WORKED? NOW WE ARE SPIRALING TOWARD TYRANNY AND YOU ARE HOPING THAT IT MIGHT JUST SOMEHOW START WORKING? I THINK THAT’S REFERRED TO AS THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE– NOT A GOOD STRATEGY WHEN ALL OF LIFE IS ON THE LINE.
“Thrive solution: Take out the “Global Domination Elite.” Taxation is theft; abolish it.”
FG – NOT “TAKE OUT” AS IN “KILL.” BUT YES, REMOVE THEM FROM THEIR POSITION OF DOMINATION OVER AND DESTRUCTION OF BILLIONS OF LIVES. WOULD YOU LEAVE THEM IN PLACE WITH MONOPOLIES ON MONEY-MAKING AND FORCE? CAN YOU DISTINGUISH BETWEEN OBSOLETING AND KILLING? IT’S A VALUABLE ONE TO RECOGNIZE. WE HAVE THE POWER TO OBSOLETE THROUGH NON-VIOLENT NON-PARTICIPATION, AND THAT IS WHAT WE CLEARLY ADVOCATE.
THE INCOME TAX IS ONLY 100 YEARS OLD – DURING WHICH TIME OUR ECONOMY AND THAT OF THE WORLD HAS BEEN DECIMATED BY THE SAME BANKING ELITE YOU SUGGEST WE LEAVE IN POWER AND HOPE TO REFORM. REVIEW OUR 3 STAGE SOLUTIONS STRATEGY – WHICH YOU HAVE NEVER MENTIONED ONCE – TO SEE THAT THE DISNFRANCHISED WILL BE CARED FOR IN STAGE ONE TRANSITION – NOT WITH NEW TAXES, BUT WITH MONEY FROM STOPPING THE WARS, CUTTING THE IMPERIALISM BUDGET OF THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX EISENHOWER AND KENNEDY WARNED ABOUT, AND FROM ABOLISHING THE FEDERAL RESERVE.
IF SOMEONE TAKES THE MONEY YOU EARNED UNDER THREAT OF VIOLENCE IT IS THEFT. THAT IS HOW INCOME TAX OPERATES. I BELIEVE THE KEY QUESTIONS TO HELP US MOVE BEYOND THIS FAILING OLD PARADIGM ARE:
1) If there were a way to have accessible and good roads, education and healthcare, help for the poor, a respected system of justice etc. – without anyone being violated against their will – as in involuntary income tax – would you want that?
FG – IF SO, THEN WE CAN ENGAGE IN THE IMPORTANT AND DIFFICULT WORK OF FIGURING OUT HOW TO DO THAT. LUCKILY MANY PEOPLE HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT IT AND THEIR INSIGHTS AND STRATEGIES CAN HELP INFORM US. THAT IS WHAT WE HAVE EXPLORED IN DEPTH ON OUR WEBSITE IN HOPES OF SAVING PEOPLE TIME BY OUTLINING KEY PRINCIPLES SO THAT TOGETHER WE CAN FORGE A NEW PARADIGM OF SOLUTIONS TO GET BEYOND TWEAKING THIS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED AND FAILING SYSTEM.
2) Just exactly when, for you, is it OK for one human being to take the rightfully gained property of another under the threat of violence?
FG – IF IT IS NOT OK THEN HOW DO WE MOVE BEYOND THE INVOLUNTARY TAX-BASED SYSTEM INTO NON-VIOLATING, VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS? ISN’T THAT WORTH CONSIDERING SERIOUSLY TO YOU? IF NOT, PLEASE GET OUT OF THE WAY OF THOSE OF US WHO WANT TO EXPLORE AND STRATEGIZE A PROCESS THAT WILL TRULY CARE FOR PEOPLE IN THE PROCESS, USING THE BEST OF THE PROGRESSIVE AND CONSERVATIVE WORLD VIEWS BUT ULTIMATELY TRANSCENDING THEM TO A PRINCIPLE-BASED NEW PARADIGM OF HUMAN INTERACTION AND ORGANIZATION.
I TRULY HOPE YOU WILL TRY TO ANSWER THESE TWO QUESTIONS SINCERELY AS I BELIEVE OUR RESPONSES TO THEM, AND OUR ABILITY TO CREATE SOLUTIONS TOGETHER WILL DETERMINE THE SURVIVAL AND THRIVAL OF OUR SPECIES.
“Problem: government corruption.
Real solution: Meaningful campaign finance reform; eliminate (or at least reduce) corporate/business influence in politics; punish wrongdoers; elect honest candidates.”
FG – FULLY AGREED…ALL GOOD…WE LIST CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM AMONG THE TOP 10 RECOMMENDED ACTIONS. BUT WHEN THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE WERE AGAINST THE IRAQ WAR, THE AFGHANISTAN WAR, THE BAILOUTS, THE PATRIOT ACT, THE NDAA ETC. AND THEY GO AHEAD ANYWAY…AND THEN OBAMA DICTATES WITH HIS EXECUTIVE ORDER SIGNED MARCH 16 THAT HE CAN TAKE OVER ALL RESOURCES, INDUSTRY, LABOR ETC AND RE-INSTITUTE THE DRAFT – JUST BY DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY -…. MAYBE THERE IS MORE TO THIS PICTURE THAN CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM CAN ACCOMPLISH ON ITS OWN. THE PURPOSE OF OUR FOLLOW THE MONEY PYRAMID ON THE WEBSITE (http://www.thrivemovement.com/followthemoneypyramid) IS TO SHOW THAT THERE ARE AT LEAST 5 LEVELS OF CONTROL ABOVE THE SO-CALLED “GOVERNMENT.” THAT IS WHY THRIVE SOLUTION STRATEGIES ENGAGE AT ALL THE LEVELS.
AND THAT IS WHY WE WANT TO ENVISION AND WORK TOWARD A WAY OF LIFE THAT TRANSCENDS INVOLUTARY GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS THAT RELY ON INVOLUTARY TAXES – COERCION- AND BEGIN THE DISMANTLING OF THOSE CORRUPT SYSTEMS. IF WE HAD THE MONEY THAT WE NOW PAY IN INTERST TO THE CORRUPT PRIVATELY OWNED FEDERAL RESERVE AND CUT THE PENTAGON BUDGET IN HALF, WE COULD AFFORD TO DECIDE FOR OURSELVES HOW TO CARE FOR OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER. WE WOULD HAVE THE MONEY NEEDED TO RESTORE THIS PLANET AND CARE FOR PEOPLE.
WE BELIEVE THAT WHEN PEOPLE HAVE WHAT THEY NEED, THEY WILL BE RESPONSIBLE AND COMPASSIONATE. AND WE DO NOT SUGGEST TAKING AWAY GOVERNMENT SUPPORT UNTIL PEOPLE HAVE THE RESOURCES- WHICH IS WHY YOU AND WE BOTH CONSIDER CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM AND HONEST VOTING AND UNDOING CORPORATE PERSONHOOD TO BE SO VITAL.
WHY NOT ENGAGE IN HOW TO BE SURE PEOPLE ARE CARED FOR (AS WE ADDRESS IN STAGE 1) AND ENGAGE IN A THOUGHTFUL EXPLORATION WITH US? WHAT IF THERE WERE RULES PROTECTING EVERYONE’S HUMAN RIGHTS, CONTRACTS, PROPERTY ETC. BUT NO RULERS WITH AGGREGATED RIGHTS TO TAKE MONEY, WAGE WAR, BAIL OUT CRONIES ETC.? REMEMBER THE “NATION STATE” IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MORE VIOLENCE AGAINST ITS OWN PEOPLE THAN ANY OTHER ENTITY IN HISTORY.
“Thrive solution: All corruption is the fault of the “Global Domination Elite.” Rise up against them and destroy them, and everything will be fine.”
FG – OF COURSE IT IS NOT “ALL CORRUPTION.” BUT THE BIGGEST AND MEANEST TRACES BACK TO THEM TIME AFTER TIME. THEY ARE THE ONLY ONES WITH ENOUGH POWER IN PLACE TO BE SO VASTLY CRUEL. “DESTROY THEM?” I NEVER SAID THAT AND NO ONE CAN FIND A PLACE WHERE WE HAVE EVER SUGGESTED THAT. OBSOLETE THEM? ABSOLUTELY! AND SOME TRUTH, RECONCILIATION, RESTORATION AND PROSECUTION TO GO WITH IT!
“Problem: disease in the developing world.
Real solution: Develop medical technology and healthy vaccines, and put social and political institutions in place to distribute medical care to as many people as possible.
Thrive solution: Vaccines are evil tools of the “Global Domination Elite” and should be banned.”
FG – I NEVER SAID ALL VACCINES ARE EVIL TOOLS. I SAID MANY VACCINES ARE DANGEROUS AND THEY HAVE ALSO OFTEN BEEN USED TO HIDE TOXINS AND ENDOCRINE DISRUPTORS, LIKE MERCURY, SQUALENE AND MORE, AND USED TO SICKEN OR STERILIZE COVERTLY. THIS IS FULLY DOCUMENTED ON OUR SITE. PLEASE DO YOUR HOMEWORK IF YOU ARE GOING TO SPEAK PUBLICLY AT SUCH A CRITICAL AND DANGEROUS TIME.
“Problem: anthropogenic global warming.
Real solution: Massive worldwide mobilization by governments and business interests to develop clean technology as rapidly as possible, reduce carbon emissions and mitigate areas impacted by global warming disasters. International cooperation on political, economic, and scientific levels.”
FG – AH…DEVELOP CLEAN TECHNOLOGY! AND IN ADDITION TO THE SOLAR, WIND AND GEO THERMAL (ALL GREAT – MY HOME RUNS ON SOLAR – BUT EACH TAKES SUBSTANTIAL RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE TO BUILD AND OPERATE). WHAT IF DEVICES HARMONIOUSLY TAPPING THE LIFE FORCE – RATHER THAN RADIATION – ALREADY EXIST AND ARE BEING REPRESSED AS COUNTLESS EYE WITNESSES AND COURT CASES AND GAG ORDERS ATTEST? WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN THAT? IF IT IS NOT SOMETHING YOU WANT TO FOCUS YOUR ATTENTION ON, THAT’S FINE- BUT WE DO. WHY IS IT EITHER/OR? ISN’T THIS THE BLACK AND WHITE THINKING YOU ARE ACCUSING ME OF?
“Thrive solution: The problem does not exist. Global warming is a hoax, a sham and a conspiracy by the “Global Domination Elite.””
FG – THIS IS AN UTTERLY FALSE CLAIM. WE DO NOT BELIEVE AND HAVE NEVER SAID THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS A HOAX. WE SAID AND DO BELIEVE THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS USED AS AN EXCUSE FOR THE GLOBAL TAX. NOTE THE DISTINCTION. THAT THE CLIMATE IS CHANGING IS NOT IN QUESTION- IT’S WHAT IS CAUSING IT, WHAT SHOULD COMMUNITIES BE DONG TO PREPARE, AND HOW CAN WE STOP IT FROM BEING USED TO CONVINCE GOOD PEOPLE TO SUPPORT A TAX TO FUND THEIR OWN DEMISE.
GLACIERS DON’T MELT ON THEIR OWN. AND WE NEED TO STOP POLLUTING OUR ATMOSPHERE – AS THE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY DEVICES WOULD ACCOMPLISH FASTER THAN ANYTHING. (ALONG WITH PROSECUTING THE INDIVIDUALS RUNNING THE CORPORATIONS WHO ARE DOING IT.)
I AM ASTONISHED THAT JUST QUESTIONING IF THE SUN IS PLAYING A ROLE IN THE WARMING AND WANTING TO HEAR FROM PEOPLE WHO DISAGREE ON THE SUBJECT HAS HAD YOU AND OTHERS WRITE US OFF AS CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS. THIS IS A CRITICAL ISSUE AND SOME DISCTINCTION HERE WOULD GO A LONG WAY. CLEARLY PEOPLE NEED TO STOP POLLUTING. OUR WORK WITH FREE ENERGY IS IN PART TO HELP IN THIS REGARD.
BUT IT IS A FACT THAT THERE ARE OTHER PLANETS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM WHICH ARE WARMING ALSO, AND I DON’T THINK IT’S OUR CARS AND FACTORIES THAT ARE DOING THAT. WE NEED TO FIGURE OUT THE INTERFACE OF HUMAN AND COSMIC FORCES WITH REGARD TO OUR PLANET’S CLIMATE. FOR REAL SELF-DEFENSE…AN ACCURATE AND THOROUGH ASSESSMENT OF REALITY MUST COME FIRST…NOT PARTY POLITICS OR CLAIMING ALL SICIENTISTS AGREE WHEN AT LEAST 31,000 CREDIBLE SCIENTISTS, MANY FORMER AGW ADVOCATES HAVE COME OUT AGAINST THE THEORY THAT HUMANS ARE THE SOLE CAUSE CLIMATE CHANGE.
NO MATTER WHAT THE CAUSE, IT IS HAPPENING, AND WE NEED TO STOP HUMAN-CAUSED POLLUTION – BUT NOT BY LETTING THE CORPORATIONS AND THE RICH BUY THEIR WAY OUT AND THEN TAX PEOPLE TO CREATE THEIR GLOBAL POLICE STATE!
I AM AFRAID THAT IF WE STAND AROUND BICKERING WE MISS THE OPPORTUNITY FOR COMMUNITIES AROUND THE WORLD TO PREPARE ADEQUATELY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE THAT MAY NOT BE ABLE TO BE AVERTED BECAUSE EITHER 1. IT IS CAUSED BY WHERE WE ARE IN OUR CURRENT ORBIT IN RELATION TO THE SUN OR 2. CARBON TAX AND OTHER INNANE RESPONSES ARE INADEQUATE TO MEET THE CHALLENGE IN TIME. IN EITHER CASE, WE NEED TO BE STRATEGIZING TOGETHER AND SUPPORTING THE INVENTORS WHO ARE DEVELOPING THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES- LIKE FREE ENERGY- THAT CAN TRULY IMPACT THIS IN THE SHORT TERM.
I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO GET A SINGLE PERSON WHO IS IRREVOCABLY IDENTIFIED WITH A PARTICULAR POLITICAL PARTY TO ENTER INTO A MEANINGFUL DEBATE ABOUT ALL OF THIS…STARTING WITH SERIOUS RESEARCH FROM ALL PERSPECTIVES AND ADDRESSING AT LEAST THESE QUESTIONS:
What is causing other planets in our solar system to warm at the same time as our planet?
What caused the medieval warming period?
Why can’t polluters be prosecuted directly instead of letting the corporations buy their way out of responsibility with cap and trade?
Are you aware of the plan to make carbon credits the new “one-world currency”?
Why doesn’t someone like Al Gore debate someone like Bjorn Lomborg or anyone publicly?
Why does Gore not mention that in his hockey stick graph the rise in temperature precedes the CO2 instead of vice versa? Since this was pointed out he refuses to discuss it.
Is it possible that the good intentions of environmentalists are being manipulated to create a global tax paid to the world bank that would transcend national sovereignty and fund the one-world government?
FG – WHAT INTERESTS ME IS AN OPEN, HUMBLE EXPLORATION OF THIS CRITICAL AND VAST ISSUE.
“Do you see how this works? This is why Thrive is worth speaking out against.”
FG – YES, I HOPE THIS IS BEING HELPFUL FOR YOUR READERS IN SEEING HOW THIS WORKS, WHAT THRIVE IS REALLY ALL ABOUT AND WHY I AM TAKING THE TIME TO ADDRESS SOME OF YOUR CARELESS MISREPRESENTATION.
“One Last Example: the HAARP Earthquake Machine.
A totally shocking detail included in Mr. Robbins’s letter is his statement of Foster Gamble’s statements about the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami which devastated Japan early last year. Mr. Robbins says, “He has said that “they” have a machine in Alaska that enables them to create earthquakes at will, anywhere on earth, and of any desired strength.”
This is a very old conspiracy theory called HAARP. You can read a debunking of HAARP conspiracy theories from noted skeptic Brian Dunning here. It’s one of the stupidest, most irrational and most paranoid conspiracy theories out there, but many people, unfortunately, believe it. I didn’t know until I saw Mr. Robbins’s letter that Foster Gamble has expressed belief in HAARP, but it doesn’t surprise me. It’s also a perfect illustration of how conspiracy theories, once they get inside a person’s head, can totally corrode their ability to think rationally about world problems.
If people who believed in HAARP had any significant positions of power, what sort of world would we have? An earthquake and tsunami in Japan, caused by tectonic stresses and geologic processes, would be interpreted through the lens of this conspiracy theory as a man-made act of war, quite naturally inviting some sort of retaliation or response. If Foster Gamble could identify a specific individual or groups of individuals that he thought caused the Fukushima disaster, I would venture a guess that he would want those individuals to be held accountable in some way. This is in the total absence of any evidence whatsoever that an earthquake and tsunami in Japan was caused by HAARP.
Can you see how dangerous this type of thinking is? Furthermore, does the fact that this sort of thinking is on the rise scare you as much as it scares me?”
FG – THIS IS A GOOD ONE TO END ON BECAUSE IT EXPOSES SO CLEARLY THE LACK OF RESEARCH THAT YOU DO, OR WORSE, THE AGENDA THAT YOU MAY HAVE. HAARP IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY OR A BELIEF. IT IS A GOVERNMENT / CORPORATE OWNED ANTENNA ARRAY IN ALASKA – THE LARGEST OF ITS KIND IN THE WORLD.
HAARP CAN FOCUS 3.6 BILLION WATTS OF RADIO-FREQUENCY ENERGY INTO A SINGLE AREA OF THE ATMOSPHERE. WE NEVER SAID WE THOUGHT HAARP WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR JAPAN’S QUAKE. IN FACT, WHAT WE SAID IS THAT WE CHECK INTO MAJOR EARTHQUAKES NOW THAT WE ARE FAMILIAR WITH HAARP’S INVOLVEMENT IN CAUSING OTHER QUAKES. WE CURRENTLY HAVE NO EVIDENCE OF HAARP CAUSING JAPAN’S EARTHQUAKE, HOWEVER, THERE IS AMPLE EVIDENCE OF HAARP INVOLVEMENT IN BOTH THE CHILE AND HAITI QUAKES.
BOTH THE CHILE AND HAITI QUAKES IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED MAXIMUM CHARGING OF THE HAARP ANTENNA – WHICH WAS CUT OFF JUST AS THE QUAKES STARTED. IN THE CASE OF HAITI, THE US JUST HAPPENED TO HAVE 10,000 TROOPS AT THE SOUTHERN TIP OF FLORIDA WHO MOVED QUICKLY TO TAKE OVER THE HAITIAN CAPITOL AIRPORT. CLINTON AND BUSH SR. TOOK OVER THE RELIEF EFFORT, WHICH HAS DONE LITTLE. MEANWHILE, THE GOLD AND OIL DISCOVERED IN A RECENT RESOURCE ASSESSMENT BY PRESIDENT ARISTEDE BEFORE HE WAS OUSTED IN A CIA-BACKED COUP, ARE NOW LOOKING LIKE THEY WILL END UP IN THE COFFERS OF THE NORTHERN ELITE. THERE ARE MANY PICTURES, PATENTS, VIDEOS, BOOKS, CONTRACTS ETC. WHICH PROVE HAARP’S EXISTENCE – MANY OF WHICH ARE AVAILABLE HERE ON THE THRIVE WEBSITE: HTTP://WWW.THRIVEMOVEMENT.COM/HUMAN-GEO-ENGINEERING-CHEMTRAILS-AND-HAARP.
WE SPENT A DECADE DOING ALL OF THIS TO SAVE LIVES AND TO SAVE PEOPLE TIME. WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO USE IT.
PERHAPS THEN WE CAN GET ON WITH AN INFORMED AND RESPECTFUL DIALOG THAT CAN REALLY HELP GENERATE EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS FOR THRIVING.
___________________________________
My Response
Mr. Gamble, thank you for responding to my open letter. If having a debunking site devoted to your film is a mark of accomplishment for you, then, you’re welcome.
The message I take from your response is a fairly simple one: Thrive and the “solutions” you want to implement are for conspiracy theorists only. Your film and its ideology spring entirely from your conspiracist worldview; nothing that you propose as a “solution” is aimed, in any significant measure, at anything other than curing the horrible conspiracies you see all around you. You say you approve of proposed solutions that address non-conspiratorial issues, such as my suggestion of campaign finance reform, but then you turn around and say that dealing with these horrid conspiracies is so much more important. How is a rational person supposed to respond to this?
Considering that the vast majority of society regards—and rightfully so—conspiracy theories as being fundamentally at odds with objective reality, your approach leaves those who do not share this worldview with little or nothing to take from Thrive and little incentive to get behind your proposed solutions.
I don’t think you realize that you’re doing this, but you are doing it. Go back and look at your response. Every single issue you raise either relies on a conspiratorial assumption, asserts the literal truth of conspiracy theories, or asserts that real solutions to genuine world problems (government corruption, income inequality, etc.) actually involve addressing the perceived causes of conspiracies, or else dismisses those who do not share your belief in conspiracy theories as somehow not offering anything of value.
In short, you have made clear something that I began to suspect some time ago—that literal belief in conspiracy theories is the prerequisite, the litmus test, for being taken seriously by you as someone who has a “solution” to offer. The only “solutions” you truly seem interested in implementing are those that address the conspiracy theories you believe in. Any other benefit is incidental, but in any event irrelevant. For example, if you think the way to tackle income inequality is to “obsolete” the “Global Domination Elite,” I can guarantee you 100% that that solution will fail, because income inequality is not the fault of a “Global Domination Elite.” This is what people mean when they say your proposed solutions are misguided.
Let’s look, very briefly, at a few examples of the issues you raise and see how every single one of them departs from a conspiratorial mindset or asserts that real world problems are actually the result of conspiracies.
The issue of my identity: “I believe such cowardice and shortsightedness feed into the much more dangerous looming police state that you end up supporting through your denial.”
Thrive’s diverting attention from real problems: “I understand that you rely on coincidence theory and notions of government incompetence to explain the consolidation of power that has the majority of the world in shackles and America careening toward a police state.” (Deriding skeptics as “coincidence theorists” is an old conspiracist trope. Coincidence is not the opposite of conspiracy).
Imaginary “free energy” machines: “And do you really think the government does all these raids, gag orders, intimidations and even assassinations on hoaxers?”
Anthropogenic global warming: “How can we stop it from being used to convince good people to support a tax to fund their own demise.”
HAARP: “We currently have no evidence of HAARP causing Japan’s earthquake, however, there is ample evidence of HAARP involvement in both the Chile and Haiti quakes…both the Chile and Haiti quakes immediately followed maximum charging of the HAARP antenna…”
You see? Conspiracy. Over and over again. Conspiracy is the alpha and the omega of your worldview, Mr. Gamble; it is the departure point from which every single one of your proposed solutions proceeds. If a person does not accept the literal truth of the conspiracy theories that you believe in, you dismiss them as not “working toward real solutions.” That’s exactly how you reacted to John Robbins, whose opinion you used to value, at least to the extent that you asked him to appear in the movie; as soon as he repudiated it, though, suddenly you accused him of engaging in a “disinformation campaign.”
This is really the bottom line. I cannot get behind your solutions, because, fundamentally, the problems you want to solve are not the problems we really have. You say you want to address the effects of problems that exist in the real world, such as income inequality, but your analysis of the root cause of these problems is always the same: conspiracy. But the fact is that these conspiracies do not exist. The world you want to change is not the world we live in. It’s just that simple.
What You Don’t Address—Icke and Mullins.
In my open letter I challenged you to repudiate the bizarre theories of David Icke, who believes in shape-shifting reptilian aliens ruling the world. If you believe it’s unfair for critics of your film such as John Robbins to raise Mr. Icke’s bizarre beliefs as a point against you, then why wouldn’t you be willing to denounce those beliefs, if you don’t agree with them?
You did not mention David Icke once in your statement.
Furthermore, I challenged you to explain to us what you like about Eustace Mullins, a conspiracist author whom Mr. Robbins says you recommended to him. I’m particularly curious about what you find redeeming about Eustace Mullins, because you are clearly not an anti-Semite, and yet so much of Mullins’s work is scathingly anti-Semitic. A commenter on this blog posted some quotes from Eustace Mullins’s work. They were so sick, disgusting, racist and offensive that I considered deleting the quotes even though there was no question that they were presented as an example of how hateful, wrong-headed and destructive Eustace Mullins and his views actually are. Ultimately I decided to leave them up, but I feel cheapened and dirty by having them anywhere on my blog. I would really like to know what Eustace Mullins material you think is valuable to your efforts to improve the world.
You did not mention Eustace Mullins once in your statement.
So what do you have to say, Mr. Gamble, about David Icke and Eustace Mullins? The world is waiting to know.
Your Two Questions For Me (Both Trick Questions)
You specifically asked me to answer two questions you posed. Here they are.
“1) If there were a way to have accessible and good roads, education and healthcare, help for the poor, a respected system of justice etc. – without anyone being violated against their will – as in involuntary income tax – would you want that?”
I reject the premise of the question, because it’s a trick question. This question posits an assumption that has not been proven—that accessible and good roads, education, healthcare and justice only come about today by people “being violated against their will” in the form of taxes. That’s not even close to the way things really are.
“2) Just exactly when, for you, is it OK for one human being to take the rightfully gained property of another under the threat of violence?”
I reject the premise of the question, because it’s a trick question. Again, you’re equating the paying of taxes to the “threat of violence.” Maybe your local IRS office is more aggressive than mine, Mr. Gamble, but I have never been threatened with violence if I did not give up my property in the form of taxes. Equating taxes to theft is bad enough; equating them to armed robbery is simply ludicrous.
The purpose of these two questions is to trap the listener into an indictment of the concept of taxation. Since I don’t share your views on the evils of taxation, these questions are meaningless to me.
Conclusion: To Thrive or Not to Thrive?
Mr. Gamble, I received an email yesterday from a woman who had recently seen your movie. She wrote to thank me for creating this blog, for deconstructing the film and for laying out the truth about the claims made in it. She complimented me on being very brave to take on this project.
This woman, and the others like her who’ve written to me, are the true audience of this blog. I didn’t create this blog to harass or annoy you, and I don’t do it to provoke confrontation with fans of the movie (although that of course does take place, as you can see). I do this to reach people like the woman who wrote to me. She didn’t simply take my word for it. She did her own checking, her own research and her own analysis. (And she didn’t even ask me my name!) She came to the same conclusion I did. I guess she won’t be “thriving” any more than I will.
Today we passed 100,000 unique page views on this blog. If even as many as 90% of them are fans of your movie, that’s still 10,000 people who won’t be “thriving” either.
The world I live in—the world which I evidently won’t be “thriving” in—is one where belief is supported by evidence, where argument is logical, where cause and effect have a predictable relationship, and where real problems can be solved by the application of rational solutions. That is the real world, because that’s the way the real world works.
I do not know how your world works. But however it does, I’m glad I don’t live there.
My Open Letter to Foster Gamble: Turn Your Back on Conspiracy—Don’t Let Thrive Define You. (UPDATED!)
This blog, originally published April 30, 2012, was updated May 4, 2012. Scroll to the end for the update.
Dear Mr. Gamble:
I have been motivated to write this letter by yours and Mrs. Gamble’s response, posted yesterday on your Thrive website, responding to John Robbins’s recent statement entitled “Humanity and Sanity: Standing for a Thriving World.” The text of that statement has been reproduced here on John Robbins’s website. I was quite interested to hear what your response would be to Mr. Robbins’s critiques. As I pointed out to the readers of my blog in a recent article, one of the main reasons why John Robbins has felt the need to dissociate himself from your film—its advancement of conspiracy theories—is the core basis of the disagreement I have with Thrive. In fact, John Robbins’s statement expresses my disagreements with you and your film in some ways better than I can myself.
Consequently, I was extremely disappointed by your response. You have not only failed to address the substantive criticisms of the film, but your dismissive and reductive attitude toward the most serious issues with Thrive makes it harder, not easier, to move forward in assessing what’s wrong with the world and how we can make it better. More troubling than that, at least for me, your response indicates that you’ve become very deeply invested in conspiracy thinking and conspiracist ideology—and you’re not doing the world any favors by trying to advance this ideology through your film.
I wish to make several major points here. Some will deal with your response to critics such as John Robbins, while some will go beyond that. I hope you take this criticism in the spirit in which it is intended—which is to help right what I see as a dreadful wrong being done, especially to the young people who’ve seen Thrive and who may choose to believe it without thinking critically about exactly what it is you’re asking them to accept.
You are not a bad person. You are an intelligent, thoughtful, well-meaning person with a very deep desire to help make the world a better place. This much has been extremely obvious from the get-go. If I met you in person I think I’d like you, and you might be surprised to find that I am considerably less nasty or trollish than some of your fans seem to think I am. But, Mr. Gamble, you’re wrong. You’re as wrong as you can possibly be, and you’re becoming part of the problem—you’re not helping us get to a solution. I’m just a blogger on the Internet. I don’t have the resources or clout at my disposal that you do, and I don’t claim to be an activist trying to save the world. But I’m not alone in my criticisms of your film; some very prominent people feel the same way I do.
What is the basis of John Robbins’s disagreement with Thrive?
In your statement, Mr. Gamble, I believe you have seriously mischaracterized the nature of John Robbins’s disagreement with your movie. Your statement yesterday, and previous statements made by you responding to critics of the film, seem to indicate that you think the main basis of disagreement is political—that the film is caught in the traditional left-right divide that you say you want to transcend. This is not the case, and it’s very clear from Mr. Robbins’s statement that this is not the case. He says:
“[T]he Thrive movie and website are filled with dark and unsubstantiated assertions about secret and profoundly malevolent conspiracies that distract us from the real work at hand. The conspiracy theories at the heart of Thrive are based on an ultimate division between “us” and “them.” ”We” are many and well-meaning but victimized. “They,” on the other hand, are a tiny, greedy and inconceivably powerful few who are masterfully organized, who are purposefully causing massive disasters in order to cull the population, and who are deliberately destroying the world economy in order to achieve total world domination….If the ills of the world are the deliberate intentions of malevolent beings, then we don’t have to take responsibility for our problems because they are being done to us. Thinking this way may provide the momentary comfort of feeling exonerated, but it is ultimately disempowering, because it undermines our desire to be accountable for the way our own thoughts and actions help to create the environmental degradation and vast social inequity of the world in which we live.”
Your response was:
“We believe this is an uninformed and dangerous interpretation that undermines people’s ability to recognize the power we have to change the dynamic.
If you feel you are personally responsible for the mortgage fraud, for the devaluation of the dollar, for the wars of aggression killing millions of innocent people with your money, for the lack of decent health care, and for the lies of the corporate media, then what THRIVE offers is not for you. If you instead believe that we have been deceived and deprived of our power and feel ready to reclaim it, then we encourage you to join with the millions of people empowered by THRIVE to come together in this bold time of awakened action to stand up for our lives and our future.”
This fundamental misunderstanding of John Robbins’s central argument is nothing less than tragic. John Robbins takes Thrive to task for establishing a pernicious “us vs. them” mentality, which he finds (and I agree) dangerous and counterproductive; in your response, however, you get right back up on the soapbox, point an accusing finger at the evil “them” and rage at the people you blame for “deceiv[ing us] and deprive[ing us] of our power.”
In your worldview, Mr. Gamble, bad things are done to us by evil people. Of course I can’t speak for him, but my interpretation of what John Robbins is saying is that we have done this to ourselves. There is no “Illuminati” out there trying to enslave the world. Who put the politicians into office who rolled back regulation of our economic and banking systems, thus leading to the 2008 economic collapse? We, the people did. Who supports, works for and buys the products of the corporations who are profiting from the destruction of our environment? We, the people do. Who is buying the fuel-inefficient cars that are contributing to anthropogenic global warming? We, the people, are. Who is consistently voting against property tax measures that fund schools to educate our children? We, the people, are doing that.
You want to blame a “Global Domination Elite,” or people who happen to be born with the names Rockefeller or Rothschild, for these problems. What I read from John Robbins’s letter is that, instead of looking for someone named Rothschild to blame for our problems, we should instead look in the mirror.
How is it that you don’t understand this is what he’s saying?
Do you not see what you’re doing, Mr. Gamble? You’re holding up a small group of people and telling the viewers of Thrive that they—this evil, sociopathic “other”—is responsible for their problems. You are encouraging the viewers of Thrive to hate those evil people who supposedly did this to us. This is so horrendously destructive, so antithetical to the central ideas of civil cooperation in a democratic society. But the conspiracy theories you espouse, and that you’re pushing through Thrive, reduce the complexities of our modern problems to a very simple and very cynical solution: hate them, the evil “other,” for doing this to us. As soon as the “other” is overcome, our problems will be over.
I cannot get behind this worldview. From my reading of his essay, I think it’s clear that John Robbins can’t either. Speaking only for myself, a worldview such as this is so harmful, negative, toxic and divisive that it absolutely negates the effect of what you think is the positive work you’re doing to improve society. You can do better, Mr. Gamble.
David Icke: do you believe in his “reptilian shape-shifting aliens” theories or don’t you?
Another key part of Mr. Robbins’s disagreement with the film is his objection to the presence of David Icke in Thrive. I agree. I would have to say that, if I were to make a list of the things that bother me the most about your movie, I’d probably put David Icke as #1.
You said:
“Robbins also does not feel comfortable being in a movie with David Icke, who he says “advocates utterly bizarre theories” –although none of the theories John objects to are in THRIVE. Instead, Icke provides a very sound critique of the money system: that banks have the power to create money out of nothing; that the Federal Reserve can rig “booms and busts” by lowering and raising interests rates; and that “the greatest prison people live in is the fear of what other people think.” We benefitted from this analysis, and find that millions of others feel similarly, which is why he’s included in THRIVE. We stand by what Icke says in the film.”
Mr. Gamble, I believe this is totally disingenuous.
You could have gotten any number of people to appear in your film to give a “very sound critique of the money system.” Instead, you chose to get David Icke. Why?
As I pointed out in my article profiling Mr. Icke, I believe the reason you chose David Icke to make this statement, as opposed to someone far less controversial who doesn’t bring the baggage to the table that Mr. Icke does, is because you wanted access to David Icke’s built-in audience of conspiracy believers—an audience that I think you felt, probably correctly, would be uniquely receptive to Thrive. Given the anti-Semitic flavor of David Icke’s ridiculous and untrue theories, if you had done even the slightest bit of due diligence you would have seen that Mr. Icke is absolutely radioactive from a public relations and credibility standpoint. Don’t get me wrong—I think you knew full well what baggage David Icke carries—but you elected to put him in your film anyway. So, my question is, why?
More importantly, if you’re willing to make a distinction between the “very sound critique of the monetary system” (which isn’t that sound, by the way) that David Icke espouses in your film, and his bizarre theories about reptilian shape-shifting aliens from Draco which he does not espouse in your film, are you willing to go on record as repudiating that very significant portion of David Icke’s belief system? You say it’s unfair of Thrive’s critics to taint you with the extremities of Mr. Icke’s belief system—if that’s the case, will you denounce the beliefs of Mr. Icke that have given John Robbins, and me, and many others, so much consternation?
Are you willing to state, Mr. Gamble, unequivocally and without qualification, that you reject the “reptilian shape-shifting aliens” theories of David Icke, that you dissociate yourself from them, and that you denounce them for the harmful paranoid conspiracy theories that they are?
Don’t just stand on the disclaimer that you’re fond of quoting from Thrive. Tell your audience clearly and without equivocation what you think of David Icke’s reptilian theories. Do you believe them or don’t you?
If you’re willing to make this statement, I think it may help clear the air. If you are not willing to make this statement, would you please tell us (A) what your views are on Mr. Icke’s reptilian shape-shifting aliens theories, and (B) why you included him in your film, when any number of others could have made the same statements about banking that he makes in your film?
What about Eustace Mullins?
In your statement, Mr. Gamble, you breeze casually past the objections to G. Edward Griffin by saying you don’t endorse the John Birch Society. But an even more important objection that Mr. Robbins raised was your apparent endorsement of the theories of Eustace Mullins. Mr. Robbins stated:
“Another of Thrive’s primary sources, and another of the authors Foster Gamble told me I should read in order to better understand Thrive, is Eustace Mullins. I honestly find it difficult to convey the level of anti-semitism in Mullins’s books, without it seeming that I am exaggerating. So I will let Mullins’s own words speak for themselves…”
Mr. Robbins then quoted three utterly disgusting paragraphs, dripping with hateful anti-Semitic vitriol, from this book by an author he claims you recommended highly to him. You do not comment on Eustace Mullins at all in your response. Why not?
There’s obviously something you like about Eustace Mullins, if you recommended him to Mr. Robbins. (If he was in error in claiming you did, now’s a perfect opportunity to set the record straight). This is all the more puzzling because I do not believe you are an anti-Semite; Mr. Robbins did not make that accusation either, and it’s clear that you’re not. But the fact is, once you cut out the anti-Semitism, there’s not much left of Eustace Mullins’s philosophy that stands on its own. So please, Mr. Gamble, educate us. Which parts of Eustace Mullins’s philosophy you like, and why? Furthermore, why did you not even mention this very key point of John Robbins’s criticism of Thrive in your response?
Global Warming Denial—Ignoring the Elephant in the Room.
Your statements regarding anthropogenic climate change are, like your mischaracterization of John Robbins’s central argument, profoundly unfortunate. The fact that you deny the irrefutable scientific proof that climate change is being caused by human activity is deeply depressing, and not just to me. Your denial of global warming seems to have been the key reason why Adam Trombly turned against you. It is also one of the key reasons why I find Thrive, and conspiracism in general, so pernicious, because it’s a prime example of how conspiracy theories divert attention away from real problems.
You stated:
“We do not question that the climate is changing…What’s called for here is to distinguish between denying that the climate is changing (which we do not) and valuable inquiry into some of the deeper issues surrounding climate change (which we do). This is a distinction we feel would serve people far more than name-calling and disassociation.”
So, you don’t deny that climate is changing; you just deny the evidence of what’s causing it. This distinction is utterly meaningless.
If you deny that human activity is causing global warming, you are endorsing an excuse to do nothing about it. By definition, if it’s natural, it will resolve itself on its own, right? If global warming isn’t being caused by greenhouse emissions and industrial processes, then there is no meaningful action that we have to take; in fact we shouldn’t take action at all because that would be tampering with a natural process. It seems that you don’t want us to take any action at all about global warming, other than to overcome the “Global Domination Elite” that you say is withholding “free energy” from us. Once we overcome them, all our problems will be solved. Isn’t that the take-home point from Thrive?
Your claim that you’re simply looking out for people in the hopes that carbon taxes don’t take away their freedom is a chimera. There are other ways to fight global warming besides carbon taxes. (For the record, I don’t believe that carbon taxes are the answer, and everyone who knows me knows that I’m passionate about the issue of fighting global warming). What actions by governments, business interests and individuals are you willing to support, Mr. Gamble, to reverse anthropogenic global warming?
You can’t deny the causation of the problem and then pretend like you’re still interested in solving the problem. This is the biggest problem on the planet today. What do you suggest we do about it?
Will you please tell us, Mr. Gamble, what action you are willing to support—besides reliance on “free energy” machines—in order to combat and reverse anthropogenic global warming?
HAARP—the Final Frontier of Conspiracist Thinking.
Your statement makes clear that you do believe in HAARP—one of the most farfetched, unsupportable and bizarre conspiracy theories out there, with the possible exception of David Icke’s reptile theories—after all. This is deeply distressing to me. Your attempt to address this subject simply digs you deeper into the hole:
“John Robbins claims we said Japan’s earthquake was caused by HAARP – an electromagnetic antenna array project in Alaska that can focus 3.6 billion watts of radio-frequency energy into a single area of the atmosphere. We hope John said this because he misremembered and was not just distorting this for effect. In fact, what we said is that we check into major earthquakes now that we are familiar with HAARP’s involvement in causing other quakes. We currently have no evidence of HAARP causing Japan’s earthquake, however, there is ample evidence of HAARP involvement in both the Chile and Haiti quakes.”
Okay—so Japan wasn’t HAARP, but Chile and Haiti definitely were!
Do you really think, Mr. Gamble, that this makes you seem any more in touch with objective reality regarding this subject than if you had asserted that the Japan quake was caused by HAARP?
You believe in a magical machine, controlled by the U.S. government, that can cause earthquakes anywhere on earth with the push of a button? Really? Do you appreciate how expressing beliefs such as these negatively affect your basic credibility as someone claiming to have answers for moving the world forward?
When you say things like this, can you really blame us for being skeptical?
The Disease of Conspiracy Thinking
Mr. Gamble, I’ve been debunking conspiracy theories, in one form or another, for seven years now. I’ve seen many tragic examples of what conspiracy thinking can do to a person. I had a friend, a young man, who was a believer in UFO/alien conspiracies and NESARA, a supposedly secret law that will bring unlimited plenty to the whole world if only the Global Domination Elite and their evil alien allies would stop obstructing it. This young man chose not to go to college or to prepare for any sort of meaningful future, because he believed NESARA would be implemented any day now and there would be no need to work or provide for himself. Another man, also a believer in the Global Domination Elite, decided to home-school his children because he feared they were receiving “Illuminati indoctrination” through the public schools. The “home schooling” he gave them consisted of making them watch Alex Jones and other conspiracist videos on YouTube, all day, every day, day after day. You may remember the “Don’t taze me, bro!” incident from a few years ago where a man was attacked with a taser gun at a John Kerry rally. Most people don’t know that the man involved in that incident was a conspiracy theorist; he was convinced Kerry was a member of your Global Domination Elite and was shouting questions about Kerry’s involvement with Yale’s “Skull and Bones Society.” These are but a few examples of the harmful effects conspiracy beliefs can have on a person.
Conspiracy theories are like a virus. They infect a healthy person, replicate inside of them, and then spill out to infect others. A person who believes in one conspiracy theory rarely stops there. Usually they end up swallowing them all. The person infected is no more to blame than someone who catches pneumonia or the flu. I know all too well; I myself recovered from this disease. I am a former conspiracy theorist.
I would like to ask you to think—just think—about your conspiracy beliefs in these terms. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the Global Domination Agenda doesn’t exist, that HAARP can’t create earthquakes, and that anthropogenic global warming is real. If it is possible that the things you believe are factually incorrect, how could you have come to believe them so fervently? Could there be an explanation in the way you’ve thought about them, the sort of evidence you find convincing, the questions you ask, or the people you seek out for information? I’m suggesting this because thinking along these lines is what got me out of conspiracy thinking. The more I insisted upon real evidence, solid arguments, and knowledgeable experts, the flimsier and falser became the conspiracy theories that I thought I believed in. I wouldn’t be surprised if you go down the same road someday. In fact I think it’s likely you will, and someday you may repudiate Thrive, the way Dylan Avery did with Loose Change.
We are all members of this society. We all have a stake in making the world a better place for our children. All I’m asking you to do, Mr. Gamble, is consider approaching these problems from a rational, skeptical and logical standpoint. If you do, it doesn’t mean you feel any less or that your passion for improving peoples’ lives is at all diminished. It’s not about taking the government’s word for anything. Approaching the world with skepticism doesn’t mean that you become more gullible, more trusting or more capable of being manipulated. In fact, you will find that the opposite is true. Let’s approach the world from the standpoint of what’s really out there. The disease of conspiracy thinking makes that very difficult, but this disease, thankfully, has a cure: critical thinking.
You Want to Talk About Solutions? Let’s Talk About Solutions.
In your statements you’ve emphasized that you’d rather talk about solutions to world problems than the problems with your movie. Okay, I have a few solutions. Let’s talk about them. As I said earlier, I lay no claim to being an activist, and I don’t pretend to have a plan to save the world. But with as many fans of your movie as have asked me what my solutions are, I guess somebody wants to hear them.
Solution 1: Stop promoting baseless conspiracy theories.
Diverting attention from real problems in the real world is not helping anybody—in fact, it’s hurting quite a bit. The central teaching of the disease of conspiracy thinking is “they are bad.” Whoever they are changes, but it’s always an external enemy, some super-powerful source that’s opposed to what’s good and proper. So long as we’re trying to overcome them, whoever you think they are, we’re not moving forward.
This is why Thrive is not productive, is not constructive, and is not helpful. It has nothing to do with your intentions, which I believe are good. But the simple truth is that the so-called “facts” your movie promotes are just not true. There is no “Global Domination Agenda.” Banks are not tools of the Rothschilds for world domination. 9/11 was not a “false flag” operation. These things just aren’t true, and it’s very easy to ascertain that they aren’t true. So let’s stop promoting them.
Solution 2: Fight anthropogenic global warming.
The warming of our climate, greatly accelerated to disastrous levels by the activity of human beings, is the single greatest threat to this planet right now. Inaction or denial is unacceptable. Neither can we wait for a “transition” to some nebulously-defined future utopian society in order to save us from global warming. We need action now—a mass program of cooperation between governments, business interests, individuals, and non-governmental organizations, on local, national and trans-national levels. We must reduce carbon emissions. We must change the game to make existing forms of clean energy—not magical “free energy” devices—economical and desirable, things like solar, wind and water power. We should have started doing this 35 years ago. We didn’t. Every day we delay means that the effects of our measures will pinch us that much more in the future.
Solution 3: Promote smarter, better, more compassionate government.
There are very few people in America who believe that our political system couldn’t stand drastic improvement. We need to reduce the impact of corporate money on politics. We need to make sure that government makes decisions that benefit real people before corporations and business interests. We need to increase funding for public education at all levels—and by increase I mean a vast increase, an increase of staggering proportions, a massive diversion of a significant chunk of America’s GDP to education. If we spent on public schools what we spend every year to fight the war in Afghanistan, the entire country would begin to reap immediate and dramatic benefits. Even a five-year program to fund schools at the level that we today fund military expenditures would profoundly transform this country. Education is the cure to so many problems in our society, and it’s a cure that exists now, without waiting for magical technology to swoop down from the sky, as Thrive asserts.
We, the people, have the power to enact these solutions. We can do it right now, in our existing communities; the politicians we send to our statehouses and to Washington, after all, are put there by us. This is what I think John Robbins meant, Mr. Gamble, when he talked about the problems being caused by us. But we have to recognize what our problems really are. Your film does not present the problems as they really are.
Why Listen to Me At All? Because It’s Not Just Me Saying This.
I doubt you’ll think very much about my solutions. Your past statements have indicated that the price of admission to a debate you’re willing to have about solutions is acceptance of the conspiracy theories contained in Thrive. Most likely you won’t take me seriously because I reject those theories. You took a similar tack toward Rob Hopkins and Georgia Kelly, both of whose criticisms you refused to entertain. What you’re doing, therefore, is to close yourself off into an isolated universe—where only the voices of fellow conspiracy believers are heard, a universe where the key litmus test of legitimacy is conspiracist thinking, and where input from the fact-based world is rejected as a mortal threat. Forgive me for being skeptical that any reasonable solutions to societal problems can emerge from such a universe.
If it were just me, some random guy from the blogosphere, saying this, that would be one thing. It would be very easy to dismiss me. Your spokesperson, Lee, has come to this blog several times to insist that because I don’t advertise my name on this blog, somehow this makes my criticisms unworthy of attention, as if the facts and reasoning I present here have no persuasive value unless my name is attached to them. I think this is nothing more than an excuse for refusing to engage with the serious problems surrounding Thrive. You’re fond of citing statistics on the number of people who have seen your movie, or the fact that it’s been translated into such-and-such languages. These statistics do nothing to bolster the veracity of your claims. In fact, they underscore the urgency of the mission of this blog. You claim your film has been seen a million times; my blog has been read by about 100,000 people. If an untruth can circle the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on, those of us who profoundly disagree with your movie have a great deal of work ahead of us.
But it’s not just me. Look at the main points I’ve made here. I take issue with your inclusion of David Icke, with your praise of Eustace Mullins, with your assertions about HAARP, and your conspiratorial worldview. Your friend John Robbins was bothered by these exact same points. Others are too; I’ve talked to many of them, some of them your personal friends and acquaintances. Your response to their very cogent criticisms has done nothing to ameliorate our concerns. If I went off into the sunset or deleted my blog tomorrow, these concerns about Thrive would still remain. That’s one reason I say that this blog is not about me.
Mr. Gamble, I believe you are a good, kind, compassionate and intelligent man. That’s one reason why Thrive bothers me so much, because I think you can do better. We could all benefit from your immense energy and passion to help the world, if it was directed toward that end. Please, Mr. Gamble: turn away from conspiracism. Don’t let Thrive define you.
Sincerely,
Muertos
Update 4 May 2012
Foster Gamble responded to this letter. His response is reproduced in its entirety here, along with my own remarks regarding his thoughts.
“Follow the Money”–Debunked!
By SlayerX3
One of the central passages of Thrive is a section often referred to as “Follow the Money,” which Thrive fans treat as some sort of slogan. This section contains Foster Gamble and others’ views on fractional reserve banking, the Federal Reserve, the economic crisis, and conspiracy theories related to these. This article debunks those ideas.
Fraction Reserve Banking
Disclaimer:
Before the Wikipedia bashing begins, I’m using Wikipedia for two reasons: (1) Simplicity, and (2) it works well for summaries of information, even though I will provide further sources and more detailed information links than Wikipedia can provide.
PS: This part of the movie is incredibly complicated for anyone involved here to deal with, as given that most people don’t understand how economy and politics work by themselves, much less together, unless you’re well-versed in mathematics, economics or political science. Comments that simply complain about how wrong or rigged the actual political and economic systems are will be seen basically as an opinion and not fact.
It also doesn’t help that for the makers of Thrive the current economic system is a scam/conspiracy created by a powerful Financial Elite to perpetuate their own power. Arguing the existence of this conspiracy (Thrive mostly uses misinterpretations and opinions that they exist instead of verifiable facts) feels like beating a dead horse, thanks to our good old friend Confirmation Bias.
When they begin talking about Fractional Reserve Banking, Foster Gamble and and David Icke get a few things right at the beginning. They are right about how saving deposits are used by banks for loans and financing, but the film cuts short the explanation of why this happens and the economic reasons to use fractional reserve banking. Instead of explaining the real reasons behind this, the movie simply dismisses it by saying “it creates money out of nowhere.”
What is Fractional Reserve Banking?
Fractional Reserve Banking (FRB) is a form of banking where the deposits made on the bank are separated in two parts. The first is the amount the bank is allowed to loan and the second is the part the banks is obligated to keep as a reserve. This amount is dictated by the central bank of the country where the bank is operating.
Does it really “create money out of nowhere?”
The answer will depend of which kind of money you’re talking about. If you’re referring to printed money, it can’t “create money out of nowhere,” as the values being loaned and being circulated haven’t been made or printed yet.
If you’re talking about value: yes it can create more value since there is more money circulating than there is physical printed money.
This is much better explained by the links I’ll provide.
Why do banks work with FRB and how come they don’t “run out of money”?
Because it is fluid, FRB allows banks to generate profit and still provide access to people or business to acquire money for whatever reasons they need it–for example, to buy a house or start a business. FRB guarantees there will be money circulating for investments, consumer goods and to accommodate a growing and active economy.
[Muertos comment: this is not a new invention. If we did not have FRB in some form, our economy would be stuck in the early 19th century. The whole concept of modern banking, historically, developed as a means to permit sufficient capital to be accumulated to fund large-scale projects, both public and private. Without something like FRB, we would not have public works projects like dams, sewer systems or transportation, and we would not have privately-funded industries such as computers and information technology, because it simply wouldn’t be possible to get enough capital together to even begin to pay for these things. This is the historical reality that critics of FRB refuse to understand.]
The influx of savings deposits and payments on loans that they make usually are enough for most banks to be secure they will have the money needed to honor the withdrawals, as there are more people making payments and saving deposits than there are people making withdrawals of their own savings and assets.
What if there are more people making more withdrawals than the bank has money on reserve?
Remember the credit crisis that started in 2008 and is still kicking? One of the reasons why it went from bad to worse and from worse to a total disaster was because of this–people making more withdrawals than banks had in reserve. In times of economic crisis, if there is a doubt that the banks will be able to honor the deposits made on them, this leads to people and investors to withdraw all their assets within the bank in a really short amount of time, before other depositors can withdraw their share. This creates a cascade effect that can possibly (almost certainly) cause a bank run. This forces the bank to call in its short term loans, draw upon credit lines with other banks or ask for last resort rescue loans from the central bank.
Okay, but how this is bad for people?
In time of a stable economy this not bad for financially responsible people, those who take out loans that are smaller than their average yearly income and can make sure that the accumulated interest won’t surpass all their earnings during the intended financing period. Take for example financing the purchase of a house with a 10 year mortgage plan. It is, however, extremely dangerous for people who to borrow who are in unstable financial situations (like no job security, health problems, addictions) or do not measure how much interest they’re incurring compared to how much they earn, or people who simply don’t care about the long term consequences of their lack of foresight (I can’t miss the chance to throw this jab at the American reader).
In times of instability, however, irresponsible borrowing (and lending) can hit hard even the responsible people hard. This is what happened in 2008.
Gamble continues with a story telling how the fractional reserve banking system was born.
Setting aside Mr. Gamble’s implications of how it is used to create money on the backs of people (which is an arguable question), if you want to know how central banks and fractional reserve banking came to be, look for the history of the Bank of Amsterdam.
Here are some links that further explain what FRB is and how it came about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking
http://www.canadabanks.net/default.aspx?article=Fractional-Reserve+Banking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH2-37rTA8U (Khan Academy on FRB, quite educational I must add, as long as you avoid the comments section).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Modern_Money_Mechanics.pdf
http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/wpawuwpma/0203005.htm (look for the download link)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_fractional_reserve_banking
Later Gamble states how FRB is used to create a population that is tied to their debts to the bank.
Then Thrive provides us with this quote: “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning” – Henry Ford, 1922
The quote appears to be completely fake. Although it is commonly cited on conspiracy theorist, 9/11 Truth and “End the Fed” websites, there is no source and no context linking it to Henry Ford. Not even the dates that Ford supposedly said it are consistent.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_Ford
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Conspiracy#Attributed
[Muertos comment: conspiracy theorists love to use fake quotes, and this is not the only fake quote in Thrive–there’s a quote by Henry Kissinger that is equally false. The problem with these quotes is that, once it gets out there and conspiracy theorists decide they like it, a quote gets repeated all over the place on all sorts of conspiracy theorist websites–thus creating the erroneous impression that, because the quote appears so often, it must be true and accurate. If you don’t believe that this happens all the time, just think back on all the things comedian George Carlin is supposed to have said–only a small fraction of them are actually real Carlin quotes, and as he is dead, he can’t dispute that he didn’t say them.
When conspiracy theorists are challenged on fake quotes, many of them will say something like, “Well, you can’t prove that he didn’t say it!” That, of course, is asinine. You can’t just make up any crap you like, put it in someone’s mouth and then challenge people to prove they didn’t say it. But, sadly, this is how conspiracy theorists think. Quotes about banking are particularly attractive to conspiracy theorists because they love the idea of respected figures from history having supposedly “warned” us about the dangers that they (conspiracy theorists) insist are right around the corner.]
After the fake Henry Ford quote, Gamble resumes his rant on how we have become debt slaves of a financial elite who has rigged the system to their benefit.
Take this as you will, but you’ll become a debt slave if you decide to acquire (too much) debt in the first place. For many this seems unavoidable.
[Muertos comment: the term “debt slave” bothers me because it’s misleading. Suppose you have a good job and a family. You take out a 30-year mortgage at a reasonable interest rate in order to buy a bigger house to raise your kids in. You can easily make the payments and your house increases in equity in the meantime. Are you still a “debt slave” for the next 30 years? If you decide to sell the house you pay off the mortgage, and can take the equity and invest in a bigger house elsewhere. How is this “slavery”? And what’s the alternative–live in a smaller, crappier place and try to raise your kids there, where you don’t have room for them? Why is taking advantage of the opportunities that debt creates necessarily a bad thing? Thrive doesn’t see distinctions along these lines. In its ideology, all debt is bad.]
Catherine Austin Fitts
From Muertos’s article debunking the trailer:
“Catherine Austin Fitts was Assistant Secretary for Housing in 1989-90 under the first George Bush. She is also a Wall Street banker. She currently works for an investment advisory firm called Solari, Inc.”
Ms. Fitts, along with Mr. Gamble, keeps reaffirming how FRB is used to print more money and enslave more people through debt. Later she makes a comparison with ordinary people counterfeiting money being a crime, while the [central] banks printing money being called “increasing the money supply” as if there’s no distinction here. There is a distinction. I don’t know, maybe it’s related to the fact that central banks are trusted institutions, and they are an effective way to control interest rates and the amount of money being circulated so as to make sure hyperinflation or hyper-deflation do not take place. Yes, said measures can fail, but it’s certainly not the same as “printing money” just for the hell of it.
Gamble then cites the gathering of the “secret” Morgans and Rockefellers on Jekyll Island, where (he says) the draft of the Federal Reserve was created.
First he fails to mention that a central banking system was already in place in Europe–especially in Germany–long before the bankers and politicians in US were considering using a central banking system. Second, politicians in US were already studying alternatives to the US Treasury bonds and lack of liquidity and access to credit, mostly in response to the Panic of 1907.
After this Gamble beings talking about the creation of the Fed and the Internal Revenue Service in the same year, “forcing us to pay for the politicians’ debt”, and introduces the viewer to G. Edward Griffin and his book.
G. Edward Griffin
Writer of “The Creature from Jekyll Island” which is about the creation the Fed, Griffin is a critic of the current banking system and advocates private currency as being “real money.” Needless to say, his ideas are quite popular amongst libertarian circles.
(If you want to know how bad this idea of “real money” is, just imagine going to the state next to yours just to find out that the private currency of your local bank, backed by a commodity like silver or gold, is worthless because the other state operates at different standards or doesn’t accept your currency. Or, worse yet, imagine if the bank goes bankrupt, all your assets in said bank are gone, and there is no central bank or institution to guarantee the bank will have the resources to honor its deposits).
[Muertos comment: we had precisely this problem in the Great Depression, which resulted in an entity called the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation–an agency that makes sure that you, as a bank depositor, will be able to retrieve your money from that bank (up to $250,000, I think) even if the bank fails. Where would the money come from if the FDIC had to make you whole after your bank fails? It would come from a fund administered by the federal government. Doesn’t sound so bad when you think about it like that, does it?]
Griffin goes on about how the central banks are cartels that work with governments and have the legal power to create money out of nothing when the government needs it.
I think the “out of nothing” part of the money is not entirely nothing. There seems to be a massive misconception that when a central bank prints more currency, it’s simply creating more money out of nothing. First, it doesn’t happen this way. Even though the money is not backed by a scarce commodity (like gold), the value attributed to it is related to how trusted and reliable the country’s central bank is. Printing more money without the generation of wealth decreases the value of the money. This is why you can trade one US Dollar for 10,000 Zimbabwe Dollars, and the same reason why the Zimbabwe 1000 Dollar bill is worth less than the paper it’s printed on. Printing more money without generation of wealth will lead to inflation and the loss of value for the currency.
[Muertos comment: this has been proven time and time again historically, such as in the U.S. when “greenbacks” were printed to help finance the Civil War. It didn’t work then either.]
The central banks are not only able to create more money. They are also capable of removing money from circulation when needed. For example, during Christmas the US Federal Reserve prints more money to assure all the withdraws will be possible, and then they remove the extra bills from circulation afterwards.
When this happens, the fiat currency doesn’t lose its value because it is just a representation of the wealth that already does exist, even though most of this wealth is in form of data like the amount you have in your bank or how much all your declared belongs are worth. It doesn’t mean it’s worthless. It’s a representation. It’s not wealth itself.
Let’s put this way. The amount of wealth in dollars is X and the amount of printed paper money is Y. Because most of the wealth being traded, stored or transferred is in the form of savings, credits, stocks, checks and representations other than printed fiat currency, X will be always higher than Y, but when people are making withdrawals, collecting their payments or selling things, more money will begin to circulate from hand to hand. Since there is more money in data form than there is in the form of printed money, the Central Banks print the money and send bills to the local banks to make sure they are capable of handling all the money being moved and spent. This will make Y approach the amount of X, but if the amount of Y being printed and in circulation is getting closer to the amount of X, there is a chance that Y will surpass X. This will lead to the devaluation of the currency on which X and Y operate, leading to inflation.
To put it in even more simple terms: when you print currency to represent wealth, you’re not creating money out of nowhere. When you print more currency than you have wealth, you’re lowering the value of the money. The amount of wealth is still the same but the value of the currency changes.
Bill Still on the Federal Reserve
Bill Still is another Libertarian film producer, highly critical of the monetary system in US. He is also seeking the nomination from the Libertarian Party for the 2012 elections.
During his short appearance in Thrive, Mr. Still claims that the Fed is a privately-owned bank made to look like a government bank. To get his point across he says the Federal Reserve, instead of being on the blue government pages in the Washington DC area phone books, is on the white pages. He thinks this is evidence!
Since I don’t live in the US and I didn’t look at a phone book from the DC area during my short but pleasant stay in US, I have to say that was a really bad choice for evidence.
[Muertos comment: there are a lot of stupid assertions in Thrive, but this one has got to be in the top five most ridiculous things in the entire movie. I can’t believe Mr. Gamble let this one through–it’s simply insulting to the intelligence.]
Alan Greenspan on the government’s relations with the Federal Reserve
At 1:00:02 of the movie there is a short video clip in which Alan Greenspan claims that the Federal Reserve doesn’t take direct orders from the president or the Congress. This is used to show the Fed as a rogue agency that answers to no one.
This is totally wrong. Mr. Greenspan’s quote is taken out of context.
For starters, all members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, are handpicked by the president and approved by Senate vote. They are required by law to have a “fair representation of the financial, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests and geographical divisions of the country.” This means they have to be scholars in economics, politics and above all they must represent the economic interests of the nation, not the interests of the Congress and not of the president. They are accountable for their actions which can lead to members of the board not being nominated again as well the formal and informal relationships of the board members with the president and the Congress.
There is a really good reason why the central banks usually don’t answer directly the executive chief in office and the Congress: if they did, politicians could use these banks for political gain and directly affect the economy. We need an independent Federal Reserve.
A brief study of history, especially looking at some South American countries and African countries, will show that when the politicians can control the decisions of the central banks and therefore dictate the course of the economy, the results are not pretty. More often than not this is completely disastrous for the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QkmLnNEvdU
Even though the title of the linked video and the comment section of the youtube page follow the same line of thought of the people featured in Thrive, I’d like the viewer to see the part beginning at 8:00 where Greenspan remembers that the actions taken by the Fed would hurt G.H.W. Bush’s reelection. Just think about that for a few minutes. What if Bush was able to change the decisions of the Fed for his own political gain? What would that do to the economy of the United States? This could potentially harm the economy more than it was already harmed in 1992 (which at that time was in a deep recession). This is why the Congress and the president don’t have much say in the decisions of the Fed, but the Fed is still accountable for its decisions. The people on the Federal Reserve Board were chosen by the president and approved by the Senate in the first place, making them accountable for their actions inside the Federal Reserve.
Here are some documents containing detailed explanations of the relations of the Federal Reserve with other branches of the US Government. As you will see, it’s far from an unaccountable rogue entity.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-federal-reserve.htm
http://useconomy.about.com/od/governmentagencies/p/fed.htm
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2000/20001024.htm
http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/flaherty/flaherty3.html
“Economic parasite”
After this, Mr. Gamble and Ms. Fitts give us analogies on how the bankers use their data on the economy to benefit themselves at expense of others. I won’t argue much with that because it is happening, but not for the reasons Gamble & friends would you like to believe.
FBI Raid
Since it is Mr. Gamble talking about the FBI raiding her (Ms. Fitts’s) company not her saying it, and nowhere in her company’s website or her bio mentions the said raid, I’m skeptical that it even happened. I also tried to look for news articles mentioning this raid hoping to see something like the paper shot Gamble gave us on the screen, but the only places I saw any mention of it were 9/11 Truth websites and a few truthers’ blogs without any external links or sources to this event beyond what their word for it.
[Muertos comment: always be skeptical of anything that appears on 9/11 Truth websites and nowhere else. 9/11 Truthers are notoriously incapable of getting almost anything right.]
Unless Ms. Fitts herself can come forward and explain in her own words what happened, or if someone can provide me a reliable link or newsfeed with info validating Mr. Gamble’s characterization of what happened, I’ll keep my sense of disbelief about the big government suppressing her findings, specially someone with credentials and political reach like her. (Blogs or forums do not count as reliable source; I’m talking about newspaper articles or public data).
[Muertos comment: given the fact that ten people who appear in Thrive have signed a letter repudiating the film and saying the movie was misrepresented to them, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if what Ms. Fitts would say about what happened would differ significantly from the way Mr. Gamble puts it in the film.]
The Dollar and the Sub-prime crisis:
Gamble begins this part with a moot point about the devaluation of the dollar, showing it from 1913 to 2010.
Remember when I discussed the matter of currency in circulation vs. the real value of wealth? Well, this is what happened: when the Federal Reserve came into being, having a regular universally recognized currency made trade easier both on the internal market as well the international market. It made the US economy more open to these markets, generating more trade, and as result more currency started to circulate. To compensate for the new amount of money circulating and more people earning more money, prices rose, because people where consuming more. This effect is called “demand-pull inflation.” This is regarded as the good kind of inflation because it shows that the country is THRIVING.
This doesn’t make people poor. If the prices are rising, so are peoples’ wages. Even if products have higher prices they still hold the same value. (The kind of inflation that rises both price and value is called “cost-push inflation,” and this happens due to the increase of production cost or scarcity. This is the bad kind of inflation).
But why doesn’t the currency return to its original value after a while? This happens because of an economic effect called “built-in inflation,” where past experiences dictate how the wages and prices will rise. Workers expect inflation to pinch in the future, so they start asking for higher wages to compensate. As a result, companies start raising the price of their products so they don’t lose their profit margins. Because this builds over time it becomes something like a change of currency or a hard economic crisis, where money is being hoarded and trading comes to a halt.
Even if you look to Mr. Gamble’s graph you’ll notice the periods when the dollar’s value rose were in the interwar period and during WWII, when US was still suffering from the 1929 stock crash that brought the US economy to its knees, and during WWII where all the US economy was focused on the war effort instead of producing consumer goods and trading. After those periods were over, trading resumed and, as expected, the value of the dollar declined as more currency began circulating again.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-causes-inflation.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built-in_inflation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-push_inflation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-pull_inflation
Wealth Gap
Same case as the “economic parasite” claim: the gap in wealth is a big problem, but Thrive has the wrong take on what is the cause.
No, I don’t have a magic bullet solution for wealth disparity. No one does. I do, however, support several policies involving fiscal responsibility, fair taxation, better public health and education plans, transparency from both government and corporate business and not reelecting the same politicians with histories of corruption and incompetence.
Bankers and crisis
Gamble tries to correlate the stock crash of 1929 and the Great Depression to the creation of the Fed. Logically correlation does not equal causation. If you take a look at what happened, the stock crash of 1929 was caused by reckless investments on high risk and speculative shares. With the investments boom more people where buying shares and raising market prices. This would only become viable if the stock market kept rising at a quick rate. If the rise wasn’t fast enough, halted or went into a downturn, those shares would lose their value. This was combined with the massive loans stock brokers were making to investors (called “margin”). The investor only had to pay 50% of the share value and the broker would complete the rest with his own money. Thousands of people taking loans to purchase more shares didn’t help as it was creating a massive economic bubble. As expected, once the stock market faced a downturn, mass panic selling followed, forcing the share’s values down creating a cycle where investors had to sell their shares to pay their brokers and avoid losing too much money with shares that by this time had lost all their value.
[Muertos comment: the causes of the Great Depression are still highly controversial today. There is no one clear answer, but what you’ve identified is clearly part of the problem–any basic book on the crash will make this case. It’s also not limited to 1929. I was working in the financial sector during the “dot com bust” of 2000-2001, and much the same thing happened–shares were grossly overvalued, and there was too much credit attached to financial speculation. When dot coms started to post less than impressive profit numbers, the whole thing collapsed. Something similar happened in 2008, except instead of stocks it was financial products tied to real estate.]
It is also worth remembering that the both people buying and selling the shares are normal people, prone to make mistakes, get nervous or act on impulse. This means one bad rumor in a highly volatile place such as the stock market can cause many stocks’ value to plummet. Do this on a large scale and you can get yourself a nice big crisis on your hands.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Bierman.Crash
http://stocks.fundamentalfinance.com/stock-market-crash-of-1929.php (this is a TL;DR version of the previous link)
I also would like to have access to this “research” Mr. Gamble claims did on the “major banks” moving their money away from the stock market before the crash, because I’m not able to find any reliable link or article showing that this in fact happened.
The 2008’s credit bubble crisis
This is the only thing preventing me to copy paste the debunking of Zeitgeist here and calling it a day.
But where do I start? First Foster Gamble and David Icke and their “research” (really, I’d like to see the data Gamble uses to make his statements) want to lead the viewer to believe the 2008 economic crash was a ploy engineered by the major banks to consolidate their power by breaking smaller business and seizing their assets.
But there are a few problems with this. For one those assets (mostly houses) have become worthless, and the bail outs are not even close to the amount lost by the banks during the crisis. Plus, why create an economic crisis in the first place? The last thing you want, if you’re a banker or an industrialist, is an economic crisis where people stop spending and the economy stagnates.
So what happened in the 2008’s subprime crisis?
It was caused by a combination of lack of foresight, greed, high interest rates, high risk investments and a complete lack of regulations for the financial sector (I can hear from here all the libertarians shrieking in horror after reading this).
Putting it in layman’s terms, before the 2008 crisis the housing sector in United States was one of the most attractive investments for a few reasons. First, the continuous rise of housing prices and the demand for new houses, and second the too low interest rates from the Federal Reserve that were not attractive to the investors anymore (they were around 1% during 2008).
Okay, what was the banks’ deal then?
They were buying the mortgages from lenders and then reselling them to investors looking for investments with better rates. The banks would proceed to lend more money, mostly from other major banks and from central banks, to acquire more mortgages. Then the banks would generate massive profits from all the homeowners paying their mortgages.
So far so good. But for them there was a problem: since this was one relatively safe and high profit deal, the banks wanted more people paying more mortgages on the rising housing prices.
When a financing company sold the mortgages for the banks, if the homeowner went into default the bank would get the house. This was attractive for the bank because the housing prices were rising at the time. This meant that when the mortgage broker sells the house at a new higher price, the lenders and the banks would make a better profit with the new mortgage payers.
Okay, but where do the problems begin?
The number of AAA home buyers (meaning, reliable and financially responsible people) buying houses was too low to sustain the kind of profits they wanted to make selling and flipping mortgages. So, not wanting to miss the opportunity of selling the houses at higher prices and collecting the higher mortgages, the banks and lenders started selling the houses to subprime families (non reliable people) that they knew would go into default in a matter of time so they could resell the house again and again. Major profits were made this way. The lender would sell the mortgage for the banks and then the bank would sell it to an investor willing to take the risk.
With this happening soon the number of houses going into default was increasing. The number of houses being placed on the market for sale was also rising, but the number of people looking for a house was not. Actually most of the people who could afford a house already had one and with the subprime families simply not paying, this was starting to drive the housing prices down. To make things worse, the people who could afford their high mortgages simply started abandoning their houses because now they were worth a fraction of what they used to be worth, and yet their mortgage was the same.
This left the banks with a lot of houses, but with no one paying for them. The banks borrowed massive amounts of money to buy those mortgages, and the lenders had a lot of houses with people who were going into default, and the investors had a lot of high risk deals that have become worthless. The investors were not able to sell the risk to anyone because by this time everyone noticed that things were not going as planned and stopped buying or selling, essentially freezing the banking and the financing market, bankrupting the banks, the investors and the lenders.
And the banks owned a lot of money they couldn’t pay back, usually to other large banks either in US or Europe, thus dragging those banks down into the crisis with them.
This is the simple explanation, but there are other factors that contributed to the crisis. For example, easy credit (it stimulated not only banks to borrow huge sums of money but also common folk), predatory lending (lending deals so long and prone to change that people were deceived into deals that aren’t what they are advertised) and underwriting (banks with mortgages that didn’t meet proper standards and selling them to other banks and investors) and deregulation of the banking industry (this made easier for banks and financing companies to pull their stunts without the government being able to interfere).
This showed that the banking system had serious problems both ethically and financially, but the reality is much less Machiavellian (and boring) than Gamble would you like to believe.
Back to the movie. We have Mr. Gamble explaining the crisis using a fish hook analogy to show how the financial elites consolidate their power. I’d bother to explain who this logic is wrong if I didn’t do it already above.
Again the banks won’t make major profit from a lot of houses with devaluated prices and with their credibility shot.
Gentlemen! Behold the links!
http://crisisofcredit.com/ (a friendly video explanation about how the crisis came to be)
http://www.mortgageguideuk.co.uk/blog/debt/credit-crunch-explained/
http://useconomy.about.com/od/criticalssues/f/What-Is-the-Global-Financial-Crisis-of-2008.htm
http://useconomy.about.com/od/themarkets/f/hedge_funds.htm
http://useconomy.about.com/b/2008/09/23/why-the-bailout-is-necessary.htm
http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/foia/emergency-lending-financial-crisis-20111206.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/21/imf-huge-global-bank-losses
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/global/22fund.html?_r=1
http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/banking/a/aa062405.htm
“Give me control over a nation’s money and I care not who makes her laws.”–Baron Mayer Amschel Rothschild
I can’t find this quote in any history source or website. The only result that purported to show where it came from besides attributing it to Amschel Rothschild is from The Creature of Jekyll Island.
And it featured in America: Freedom to Fascism.
Too bad Mayer Amschel Rothschild died in 1812, virtually a hundred years before the quote started making its first appearances during the early 20th century.
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/mayer_amschel_rothschild_quote_8bed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America:_Freedom_to_Fascism#Quotation_of_Mayer_Amschel_Rothschild
[Google Books link discussing the quote]
Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
There isn’t much to talk about the BIS and the IMF. The BIS acts like a hub for central banks to organize themselves, regularize the sector and push for transparency on the business. The IMF is a bank responsible for money lending programs enjoyed by its contributors. It is infamous for cases of sheer incompetence due to lack of touch with the reality of the countries they were lending money to or how the assistance programs are perceived by the local population. Depending on who you ask or which country you’re talking about, the IMF can be either seen as a major tool for the development of a country or just a means for the developed and industrialized nations to explore the undeveloped ones.
Like the Federal Reserve and other “major banks,” Gamble also claims they are controlled by the financial elite.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bis.asp#axzz1sXrQrlhd
https://www.imf.org/external/index.htm
Conclusion
As with much else in Thrive, the “Follow the Money” section is long on rhetoric and short on identifiable facts. There are oversimplifications, important concepts left out, quotes whose truth can’t be identified, and a lot of distortions. This section isn’t done very much better than any other section in Thrive.
As difficult as this subject is, hopefully this analysis gives you something to work with as you evaluate the claims made by the movie.
Why We Fight: Progressive Leader Who Repudiated Thrive Explains Why Its Conspiracy Theories Are Harmful.
This week I had an email conversation with John Robbins. Mr. Robbins is a well-known environmentalist author and lecturer, undoubtedly a leader in the intellectual progressive movement in this country. He appears in Thrive, and is one of the ten people who signed an open letter declaring their disassociation from the movie. I wrote an article about this development earlier this weekend, which includes the text of that letter.
The text of the letter does not mention conspiracy theories. I was curious whether Mr. Robbins had an opinion on the conspiracy content of Thrive and whether this was a motivating factor in his decision to disassociate himself from the film. The response I got from him was very interesting and illuminating. When I read it, I was amazed at how cogently he was also expressing my own reasons for opposing the movie.
The Text of John Robbins’s Letter to Me
Mr. Robbins gave me permission to post his response here on this blog. Here it is.
“There is a great deal about Thrive that I find untrue and dangerous. You ask if I have any comment on the film’s promotion of conspiracy theories. Yes, I do.
There is no doubt that staggering wealth and power is today concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of humanity. The combined net worth of the world’s richest thousand or so people — the planet’s billionaires — is almost twice that of the poorest 2.5 billion. This disparity is nothing less than an indictment of our civilization. It is also certain that networks exist among the most powerful people that enable a remarkably few people to shape the world’s economy, to determine what is known and what is not, which views are accepted and which are not, and what priorities and values will prevail. They decide whether we will live in war or peace, how our treasure will be spent, and they have proven to be eminently successful at enriching themselves at the expense of the common good.
But fantasies about secret conspiracies distract us from the work at hand. Those few who hold immense wealth and power are still people. They are not reptiles in human form. They are perhaps pathologically competitive or greedy, but still human, riven with differences and egos, and not particularly good at sustaining relationships, much less of organizing massive secret cabals to dominate all life on this planet.
Thrive promotes conspiracy theories that are based on an imaginary division between “us” and “them.” “We” are many and well-meaning but victimized; while “they” are a tiny, greedy and immensely powerful few who are masterfully organized, who are purposefully causing massive disasters in order to cull the population, and who will do absolutely anything in their quest to achieve total world domination. I think the allure of this way of thinking is that it distracts and absolves us from the troubling truth that the real source of the problem is in all of us, and in the economic systems we have collectively produced. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”
Foster Gamble has said that the earthquake that caused the tsunami that wreaked havoc on the nuclear plants in Fukushima was deliberately created by those seeking absolute world domination to punish the Japanese for not acceding to their wishes. He has said that “they” have a machine in Alaska that enables them to create earthquakes at will, anywhere on earth, and of any desired strength. In my judgement, this is the thinking of someone who has lost all grounding in reality.
Thrive advances the idea that vaccinations have been purposefully created by the global elite to decimate the population, an idea that I find both ludicrous and dangerous. There is no doubt that vaccinations have troubling side effects. Some of them may be more toxic than we know. But it was a vaccine that enabled the elimination of smallpox, a scourge which was responsible for approximately 500 million human deaths in the 20th century. Thrive promotes the idea that the U.N. and world treaties are the work of evil-doers intent on total world domination. These institutions are far from perfect. But it was only through the concerted efforts of the global health community and the World Health Organization that smallpox, perhaps the killer of more humans than any other in world history, was eradicated.
There are many things that are terribly wrong in our world. All living creatures are poisoned and compromised by surging levels of man-made toxins that spew into our world, relatively unchecked. We are experiencing unprecedented levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity and childhood diabetes. Our financial institutions and to a large extent our political system have been hijacked by greedy, sociopathic individuals who seem to feel no sense of responsibility to the well being of the whole. Our military industrial complex with its voracious appetite for new markets, and its obscenely paranoid world view, expands unchecked with frightening and horrific speed.
But holding these tragedies as the intentional acts of a tiny group of families seeking to rule the world distracts us from the arduous work of confronting the real challenges before us.
I hope this is helpful.
Warmly,
John”
My Own Thoughts
I find myself in virtually total agreement with the points Mr. Robbins raised in his letter. He’s not only expressed his own reasons for turning his back on the film, but he’s very neatly and eloquently summarized my own motivations for opposing it.
Some readers of this blog may be surprised to see this. The tone taken in many comments by Thrive fans who disagree with me seems to indicate that many of them assume that because I don’t believe in the film’s conspiracy theories, this must mean I agree with every action taken by the government or by economic interests, or that I don’t think there is corruption, or that I must think our current economic system is fair and just. Although I’ve stated repeatedly, beginning in the FAQ, that I don’t hold any of these views, many—perhaps even most—Thrive fans just don’t get it.
I believe that income disparity is a huge problem in the United States and the world. I believe that the economic system in America isn’t functioning fairly or properly. I believe business and corporate interests have too much influence and control over policy. I believe that we spend too much on wars and military interventions and not enough on helping Americans here at home. Above all, I believe that anthropogenic global warming is a dire threat to our planet and that immediate and decisive action must be taken—by governments, by businesses, and by individuals—to combat it. From his statement, I gather that Mr. Robbins probably shares these views.
How Does Thrive Divert Attention from Real Problems?
Thrive is deeply misguided because it’s diverting its viewers’ attention away from the real solutions that we must pursue to these very real problems. My core grievance with conspiracy theories is that they are false. However, it’s the effect of that falsity in the real world which is why opposing conspiracy theories matters. Conspiracy thinking reduces the world into a simplistic black-and-white, good-versus-evil, lightworkers-versus-disinformation paradigm. Against that background, nothing productive can get done.
Here’s how Thrive operates in this regard.
Problem: environmental degradation caused by reliance on fossil fuels.
Real solution: Work toward developing economically and socially realistic alternatives to fossil fuels, such as renewable energy resources (solar, wind, water power, etc.) as well as smarter solutions in building, land use and lifestyle.
Thrive solution: “Free energy” machines developed from technology given to us by aliens will save the world without us having to do anything (except to oppose the “Global Domination Elite.”).
Problem: income disparity and poverty.
Real solution: Work toward meaningful and fair reform of the economic system, policies that promote economic opportunity at the bottom, and make sure businesses and corporations pay their fair share and contribute to our society.
Thrive solution: Take out the “Global Domination Elite.” Taxation is theft; abolish it.
Problem: government corruption.
Real solution: Meaningful campaign finance reform; eliminate (or at least reduce) corporate/business influence in politics; punish wrongdoers; elect honest candidates.
Thrive solution: All corruption is the fault of the “Global Domination Elite.” Rise up against them and destroy them, and everything will be fine.
Problem: disease in the developing world.
Real solution: Develop medical technology and healthy vaccines, and put social and political institutions in place to distribute medical care to as many people as possible.
Thrive solution: Vaccines are evil tools of the “Global Domination Elite” and should be banned.
Problem: anthropogenic global warming.
Real solution: Massive worldwide mobilization by governments and business interests to develop clean technology as rapidly as possible, reduce carbon emissions and mitigate areas impacted by global warming disasters. International cooperation on political, economic, and scientific levels.
Thrive solution: The problem does not exist. Global warming is a hoax, a sham and a conspiracy by the “Global Domination Elite.”
Do you see how this works? This is why Thrive is worth speaking out against.
One Last Example: the HAARP Earthquake Machine.
A totally shocking detail included in Mr. Robbins’s letter is his statement of Foster Gamble’s statements about the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami which devastated Japan early last year. Mr. Robbins says, “He has said that “they” have a machine in Alaska that enables them to create earthquakes at will, anywhere on earth, and of any desired strength.”
This is a very old conspiracy theory called HAARP. You can read a debunking of HAARP conspiracy theories from noted skeptic Brian Dunning here. It’s one of the stupidest, most irrational and most paranoid conspiracy theories out there, but many people, unfortunately, believe it. I didn’t know until I saw Mr. Robbins’s letter that Foster Gamble has expressed belief in HAARP, but it doesn’t surprise me. It’s also a perfect illustration of how conspiracy theories, once they get inside a person’s head, can totally corrode their ability to think rationally about world problems.
If people who believed in HAARP had any significant positions of power, what sort of world would we have? An earthquake and tsunami in Japan, caused by tectonic stresses and geologic processes, would be interpreted through the lens of this conspiracy theory as a man-made act of war, quite naturally inviting some sort of retaliation or response. If Foster Gamble could identify a specific individual or groups of individuals that he thought caused the Fukushima disaster, I would venture a guess that he would want those individuals to be held accountable in some way. This is in the total absence of any evidence whatsoever that an earthquake and tsunami in Japan was caused by HAARP.
Can you see how dangerous this type of thinking is? Furthermore, does the fact that this sort of thinking is on the rise scare you as much as it scares me?
Why is conspiracy thinking and conspiracy ideology on the rise? Because of people like Alex Jones, Eustace Mullins, David Icke, and Jeff Rense—and because of movies like Loose Change, Zeitgeist, and yes, Thrive.
So, those of you who wonder why I created this blog, why I speak out so forcefully against conspiracy theories and conspiracy thinking, you now have your answer.
When I open my email inbox every morning to see the host of comments posted on this blog during the night—the majority of them highly negative—I sometimes think of this old song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “You can stand me up at the gates of Hell, but I won’t back down.”
Free Energy Fracas: Adam Trombly Attacks Me (And Thrive)—But Is There a Silver Lining?
Adam Trombly, the inventor who appears in the movie Thrive and who the film asserts created a “free energy” machine that has been supposedly suppressed by conspiratorial powers, has made a lengthy statement on his website responding to this blog, to me, and to allegations made against him on this blog by one David Farnsworth. Mr. Farnsworth is another inventor who claims Mr. Trombly stole from him the photos of the supposed “free energy” machine that appears in Thrive. When I presented the questions raised about Mr. Trombly and his work, I pledged that I would offer him a chance to respond fully and completely on this blog. Today I make good on that pledge.
The statement by Adam Trombly does not defend Thrive unequivocally. In fact, I was told yesterday that Adam Trombly has joined the nine other people interviewed in Thrive who recently signed an open letter disavowing the film and maintaining that its contents and approach were not appropriately disclosed to them at the time their participation was secured. Mr. Trombly’s essay doesn’t state that he signed the letter, but he’s certainly now on record as having expressed criticism of the film. This is a surprising development and a positive one, in my view. In fact, as you’ll see at the end of this article, I think there are several issues on which Adam Trombly and I agree. Thus, while certainly this article is going to include plenty of conflict, there’s a silver lining too.
There are a lot of issues here, and I’ll get to them all in my own comments, but first, I’m going to present Mr. Trombly’s statement in its entirety. My own comments regarding it will appear after the text of the article.
Adam Trombly’s Essay: “Really Correcting the Record”
Before I address any other issues I must address the individual who hides behind the pseudonym Muertos. I will henceforth call him only Pseudonym. He has collaborated with others to attempt to defame and slander my name, my character, and my work. He has attempted to stir up a mob mentality against the movie Thrive and most of its participants.
Most of the people who appear in Thrive are good human beings who care about the future of this planet and unlike Pseudonym, are attempting to do something positive about it. Pseudonym and his allies are a dull spearhead of the forces attempting to
undermine fuel and pollution free forms of electrical and mechanical energy production.
Pseudonym criticizes Foster Gamble for his fact checking but he himself posts the utter nonsense of David Farnsworth without any fact checking at all.
It is strange to me and my friends and colleagues that I should have to write this narrative.
I harbored no angst against my former friend and co-worker David Farnsworth. I did feel sadness about the decision I was forced to make (over ten years ago) to no longer work with the mercurial Mr. Farnsworth. To say that David has been episodically unstable would be a profound understatement.
I realize in retrospect I over compensated in my accommodation of David. I actually loved him like a brother and wished the world could one day see his real gifts beyond the tornadic blur of his troubled soul. There is good and genius buried in him no matter what he says about me. There is also an incredible and destructive schism in him.
He signs off on the last email I received from him prior to this recent set of new attacks by calling me “old friend”. You can imagine my chagrin when he began publicly flailing against me once again a few weeks ago. I thought that by removing a photograph, which he suddenly objected to after it had been posted for over twelve years on the Project Earth website, David’s concerns had been assuaged. Alas, this was not the case. The “other David”, as we used to call him around here, reappeared with a vengeance.
In the process David cited some witnesses he said would corroborate his claims. The first person he cited was Elizabeth Rauscher who needs his nonsense no more than the rest of us. I would not even mention her name regarding this unpleasantness but for the fact Mr. Farnsworth left me with no choice.
I am very grateful to my friend Patrick Flanagan for putting me in touch with Elizabeth Rauscher just two days after David’s latest tantrums began. She did not and does not corroborate the claims David made against me when he cited her and her deceased husband Bill as witnesses providing prima facie against my person.
It had been too long since she and I had last spoken. She is now and always has been a leading edge thinker and genius of remarkable breadth.
It was RJ Reynolds III who gave me my formal introduction to Elizabeth and Bill in the early 1980’s. This was during the time right after he hired ten top professionals to test the voracity of my scientific arguments in their related fields, while I visited his (and his brothers’) twelve thousand acre estate at Devotion, North Carolina. As the result of ten days of oral examination, these men unanimously recommended that Josh take the next step, which he called, “a life endowment”. Josh announced that I was the first “RJ Reynolds III scholar” to receive this stature since Andrea Puharich. His brother Will Reynolds joined him in generously supporting Project Earth.
The original proposal I had written to Mr. Reynolds stated, among many other things, my belief that there are real ELF electromagnetic precursors to earthquakes to which certain biological organisms were sensitive. I wrote that these “signals” might be generated by pressure changes that appear at a lock on a seismic fault and cause the piezoelectric constituent minerals to express current in such a way that the electrical polarity of the ground proximate to these locations would actually change from positive to negative. I wrote that this might be detectable by instrumentation and not just by the symptomatic fight or flight syndrome observed in certain species (including many humans) prior to quakes. (This is very abbreviated.)
Josh responded, “Do you know Elizabeth Rauscher and Bill Van Bise? If not, then I need to introduce you to them because I believe that is exactly what they have discovered.”
My time with them in the 1980’s was a period of remarkable learning and exploration for me. I am forever grateful. As anyone who has followed Project Earth over the last few decades already knows, I have always stated that Elizabeth Rauscher and Bill Van Bise discovered the use of extremely low frequency spectrum analyzers for the forecasting of earthquakes.
I was sorry to have to disrupt her day or that of Patrick with the vacuous fiction portrayed by David Farnsworth in his “For the Record”. David fails to realize that there actually is a record and his brazen lies about me do not stand up to the witness and witnesses of history. Nobody wants to be drawn into David’s self-serving and self-generated maelstrom.
David has claimed that I have a pathetic memory. However, his recounting of events either stems from a pathology, drug abuse, or it is intentional fraud. It is beyond my purview to say either way. I am not a psychiatric clinician.
Regarding the famous picture of the magnetic motor:
Dave sent me the picture (which he admits to) after I asked for it to post on the Project Earth.com website (which he denies). You see, at that moment, we were friends and coworkers. He scanned it and freely sent me the digital scan. We published the photo.
He stated nothing about a “copyright” or anything stating that this was his and only his technology until shortly before the release of Thrive. TWELVE YEARS LATER. Very curious, don’t you think?
David scanned the Polaroid(s), he sent the scan(s) and we published it (not them). What could be simpler to understand than that? David posing, glaring into the camera holding two Polaroid’s convicts him of misrepresentation. He has the originals in his hands! No one stole a thing! Pirate a Polaroid? Get a life.
The Project Earth site stated clearly that this photo was not of a Closed Path Homopolar Generator.
The first actual generator I worked on would have never been successfully designed without the brilliance and extremely hard work of the then young Joseph Kahn. I have always said this. It disappeared from a warehouse/laboratory in an industrial park North of LA shortly after Project Earth Co-founder R. Buckminster Fuller’s death.
In its final embodiment I redesigned the liquid metal brushes as a refinement to the original Trombly/Kahn design. I called the new brush design the Micro-Turbulent Magnetohydrodynamic Liquid Metal Brush. It created micro-turbulent vortices, which acted as tiny pushing bearings and assisted the rotation of the rotor. Prior designs, including the initial design that was used in the first Closed Path Homopolar Generator design, could actually create a back torque on the rotor.
After the theft/confiscation of this generator in 1983, I never worked with a Closed Path Homopolar Generator again.
I next worked with the late Marcel Vogel of IBM to whom I was introduced to by Lee Sannella, a dear friend and an early champion of Project Earth after Bucky’s death. Marcel was a genius of considerable stature in the scientific community in spite of his lack of complete “credentials”.
He was a lead scientist on many of the basic Patents filed by IBM for things like the Liquid Crystal Display, the Hard Drive, the Floppy drive, etc. He was one of the most productive scientists in the history of IBM. Thomas Watson, Founder and long time Chairman of the Board for IBM, called Vogel, “One of the most creative individuals I have ever had the privilege to know. He has produced more basic Patents for our company than all but one other individual.”
It was an honor to work with him.
That work occurred years before I met David. My task with Marcel was to work on the first Piezo-Ringing Resonance Generator. This was a very different device than the one David and I worked on. This device was designed to use actual quartz crystals. However, it was fundamentally based on the same principle as the device David and I demonstrated in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and other venues. I know that the principle utilized in these technologies could one day provide a brighter tomorrow.
I told David about Piezo-ringing resonance theory and reduction to practice early in our working relationship. We discussed the concept, settled on a simple design and shortly thereafter he called me and asked me to come to Oregon. When I arrived he had a case of newly wound Piezo-ringing-resonance coils. Coiltron, Inc. had beautifully wound them at no small expense.
I asked Dave where the money to create these coils had come from and he told me he had acquired it from an investor named Pete Karkonan. I don’t really know much about who Pete Karkonan (sp?) really was but he poured a lot of money into the work.
To the best of my knowledge he provided funds for David’s first HP 3561a and several other instruments as well. I never knew where some of the funds came from. I was somewhat baffled that this man (David), who said he was “completely broke” around the time he introduced himself to me at and after the 1988 Tesla Symposium in Colorado Springs, had managed to acquire so much costly electronic equipment, which he had housed in a nice home on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon. His wife at that time was named Tina and she was a member of the tribe. She was always very hospitable.
Things progressed rapidly in 1989 and by early June David and I took off for physical demonstrations in New York and Washington D.C. in a motor home filled with newly acquired and/or leased scientific instruments and a veritable forest of antennae. Senator Timothy Wirth of my home state of Colorado in cooperation with Friends of the Earth had arranged for the D.C. demonstration. My friend Electra Briggs and colleague Noel Brown had arranged for the United Nations demonstration. David’s affable brother-in-law Terry, who was a tremendous help on our journey, drove and accompanied us for the entire trip.
It felt good to be on the road to provide physical proof that efficiency of greater than 100% was attainable in relatively inexpensive and compact technologies.
It was an inspiring and heart breaking adventure for all of us. President H.W. Bush actually proposed tradable “carbon credits” at the White House while Fmr. Ambassador James George, David and I stood in the Senate Banking and Finance Committee Hearing Room with a handful of people who had chosen to come to the demonstration of a revolutionary energy technology rather than attend the White House announcement of Bush’s “Clean Air Act”.
It is hard to imagine why David now declares that we never worked together. We worked and laughed and wept together. To deny all of it is beyond the pale and is utterly absurd.
In his missive David tells of the raid by several Federal Marshals in 1997 but suggests that it was “his lab” that got confiscated and that I was somehow behind the raid itself. (Huh?) It was in fact supposed to be our lab and he admitted to that fact, prior to the confiscation, in front of his ex-wife and in-laws and my daughter and I. No one benefitted from that raid. No one won. We all lost.
Since David states that he got his “first earthquake forecasting equipment from William Randolph Hearst II” I have to point out that this was impossible. I had not even met Will Hearst II when Dave got his first equipment. It was the aforementioned “Pete” Karkonan or individuals or entities unknown to me who provided funds for a copious amount of leased and purchased equipment.
Since I am the one who introduced David to Will Hearst II it is another perplexing misstatement. Will did provide us with funds to lease equipment but told me he was dismayed by David’s usurpation of everything that was leased for us. I emphasize for us. The equipment Will had provided funds to lease could not be returned at the end of the lease because David had so modified it that HP would not take it back. Will had to buy it and thenceforth withdrew his support.
David never “gave” me any earthquake forecasting equipment. I actually purchased (with funds from Will Hearst) and physically picked up an HP 3561a at the Hewlett Packard facility in the “Tech Park” of Denver, Colorado. Mr. Farnsworth cannot claim that this was “his” machine because he could not put his name on the warranty. We discovered, over the years of working with him, that this is his modus operandi. Without any financial contribution on his part, David simply put his name on all the warranties such that all of the equipment became his and not the property of the corporation for which the funds had been raised to purchase said equipment.
Nancy and I affectionately called our one HP 3561a instrument “Quency” (after frequency). “Quency” died a month or so ago after thousands of hours of use and many successful forecasts.
We forecast many quakes with that instrument, both in cooperation with David and also many times without him. This is a matter of public record and refutes Mr. Farnsworth’s false claim to have given me my only equipment and to his claims of being the only one to forecast quakes!
As a case in point: In March of 1993 I was communicating on a nearly daily basis with then Commander Michael Egan who was the Head of Strategic Planning for the US Coast Guard at the time. The reason for our conversation was to articulate our contribution to the National Performance Review, which for our part was an endeavor to reinvent Science in the US Government.
During our daily multi-hour conversations I told Mike of the earthquake forecasting technology. When I saw the signature’s pass across the analyzer screen indicating a break, deep in the earth’s crust, over twenty four hours prior to the “surfacing” of a quake, now known as the Scots Mill quake in Oregon, I reported it to Commander Egan. I had not heard from David for many days because he actually thought that there was going to be a “9 point quake” and had packed up his motor home and gone to the country side. After he “hit the road” he had become incommunicado for several days.
David and I were both watching the same signatures on our analyzers but he was so close to the epicenter that the amplitude of the signal at his location was much higher than it appeared in Aspen, Colorado where we watched from the Institute for Advanced Studies at Aspen. In Aspen we forecast a quake of between 5.6 and 6.0 on the Richter scale. This is many orders on magnitude less than a 9.0 quake and was an accurate forecast.
Cmdr. Egan called the Portland Oregonian to report the forecast and this is also a matter of public record. Both the US Coast Guard Station in Portland and FEMA were put on alert prior to the quake. It was the first time in United States history that such a preparedness exercise had been initiated prior to an actual quake.
When an article acknowledging the forecast of this quake appeared in the Portland Oregonian, David became furious because Commander Egan said, “Adam Trombly is extremely brilliant” and said nothing about him. This was not an intentional slight on Cmdr. Egan’s part it was just a reflection of the fact that he and I had been in constant communication. Commander Egan knew I was working with David, but while we were in conversation regarding this actual event, David was absent and for whatever reason not answering his phone. The next article in the Oregonian included David’s name.
The point I want to make is this. Elizabeth Rauscher and Bill Van Bise revealed their discovery to me and spent their time generously with me regarding the forecasting of earthquakes when the study of this process was in its infancy. I then passed on what I had learned to Mr. Farnsworth. He in his inimitable way picked up on the thread and we went forward rapidly as our understanding of the process improved over time.
Earth taught us all directly as we watched the patterns of stress/strain excitation and release. We watched and learned. Hour after hour, day after day, night after night we observed the pre-seismic spectral signatures, which sometime manifest as quakes, volcanic eruptions, or just gradual release with little or no seismic expression.
I consider it one of the great blessings of my life that I have had the time, energy, and money to learn from Elizabeth and Bill, discoverers of the process and from Mother Earth the signs of her increasingly unstable seismic and volcanic processes. I have also been very grateful for much of the time I spent learning with my former friend and colleague David. My life partner Nancy also spent countless vigilant hours learning from the Earth by my side and frequently had insights that deepened our mutual understanding of this process.
It is very exciting to be on the leading edge of discoveries that could positively impact all of our lives. It is disconcerting ad nauseum to have a former colleague attempt to obfuscate a formerly productive working relationship.
Dave claims to have introduced Nancy and I. That is complete bs. I had been speaking to Nancy on the phone for months before he claims to have introduced us. We were actually introduced by a mutual friend in Aspen.
David claims to have never screwed his investors. The record reflects this as a grossly inaccurate statement.
Here a case in point is his relationship with Geordie Hormel, a primary heir to the Hormel Meat dynasty. David took a large amount of money from Geordie Hormel, who was my friend and sat on the board of my company Zero Point Technologies, Inc. before I ever met Farnsworth. I introduced David to Geordie and then Mr. Farnsworth abused my trust by doing everything in his power to undermine my relationship with my friend. Geordie himself said this to me. Geordie and I reconciled our friendship before his death.
This leads us to a very different understanding of the cause of the 1997 raid mentioned above. Within the last week a friend pointed me to an Associated Press article stating that a Federal Judge ordered the raid because of a lawsuit against David Farnsworth that was initiated by Geordie Hormel. The headline reads, “Spam Heir Files Suit Over Investment.”
Since Elizabeth and Bill discovered the real method for using ELF precursors to forecast quakes only a few have been able to pursue it. It is a very important area for scientific investigation, which could be applied towards the safety and welfare of the people of this unstable planet. Those of us who have learned and continue to learn could contribute greatly to the security of populations who are proximate to both seismic and volcanic regions of the earth.
As elucidated above, Former Ambassador James George did not arrange for me to speak at the United Nations nor for David and I to do our demonstration down the street from the UN in 1989.
Ambassador George is one of my dearest friends and colleagues and a mentor for whom I will always offer up thanks. It would be difficult to count number of times of I relied on his counsel. He is a rare gem in this world. Although David references Jim as a witness on his behalf, Jim does not support a word of David’s attacks.
As mentioned above it was Electra Briggs, who organized the UN event and invited me to speak because she knew of my work from well before any relationship with Mr. Farnsworth. She confirms this.
Noel Brown, then the Head of the New York Office of the United Nations Environment Programme helped arrange for an alternative demo venue for the technology at Holy Covenant Church down the street from the U.N. because of last minute security concerns at Dag Hammerscold Auditorium where I spoke immediately after the successful demonstration.
Anyone who was there knows that it was a very special moment. Some of us felt briefly that the world might change as a result. David had no problem saying we were working together back then.
As for the Liquid Nitrogen Snuffer technology used to put out several oil fires in Kuwait I have always said that David called me in the wee hours of the morning (2 am) in February of 1991with this fantastic idea for putting out oil fires with large tanker trucks of liquid Nitrogen being used like giant pulsed fire extinguishers with a circle of nozzles at the end of gantry arms to shear and suffocate the high pressure flames. (This is a really oversimplified description.) He and I spent several hours on the phone that night and in the days following fleshing out the details. David never before objected to me being cited as his co-inventor.
I will not bore you with the litany of that process and who contributed what. All I cared about was getting the fires out. I promised my daughter.
Boots and Coots did indeed try to patent the technology. I was one of the people who called the US Patent Office to prevent that because I knew very well where it came from.
David’s claims of doing earthquake forecasting and having patents pertaining to ELF earthquake forecasting before knowing me are not even close to being true.
After introducing himself to me at the 1988 Tesla Society Conference in Colorado Springs, David called my office every day and begged to work with me. That is how this whole thing started. I certainly had no need to pursue this man or to learn “buzz words” from him. I already had a successful career and had I known then what I do now I would have made very different decisions regarding working with this man.
David’s claim that he used me, as a sounding board for “his” ideas is ridiculous.
On more than occasion after not speaking to David for months and even once for well over a year (because of his violent mood swings and methamphetamine abuse) I received conciliatory calls in which he said things like, “I need you to come back and work with me. I need your ideas.”
On more than one occasion David tearfully apologized for abusing our working relationship and our friendship. He would apologize for not giving me credit where credit was due. Then, like many other addicts, he would revert to his old pattern of self-deception and abuse.
This is a sad thing to have to say. Anyone who has had an acquaintance, a friend, or a loved one who is or has been addicted to methamphetamine can understand. This dreadful poison has ruined millions of lives worldwide. It is a toxin, which often causes human beings to become monstrously deluded and abusive. I cannot say conclusively that David Farnsworth is currently using this substance but his recent behavior does suggest either residual damage or current abuse.
The Emergency on Earth is too far along to sustain this kind of dissipative distraction. I say in all of my lectures that this is not about any one individual. It is about the contributions we can all make to the healing of our Wounded Earth and ourselves.
It may be of interest to some that I was invited to join the group of fellow interviewees who wish to dissociate from the movie Thrive. I have great respect for all of them. I received a lovely letter of invitation to join this group from my old friend John Robbins. Like Robbins and other signers of the letter I have serious differences with the final edit of the movie.
Even so, I am saddened by attacks on Foster Gamble (or anyone else for that matter) by individuals who hide behind pseudonyms and take pleasure in causing pain. I am not speaking of the signers of the aforementioned list. I am speaking of bullying cowards who place no value on the accuracy of their statements.
Let no one fool you into believing that there is not an Emergency on Earth. David Icke and those who say that Climate Change is a scam do a great disservice to us all. I cannot be associated with nor endorse anything that embraces such a view on this subject.
At Project Earth we have always supported fuel free and pollution free energy producing technologies that could help heal the Earth. These technologies have been suppressed since Tesla. This is not a new issue.
Millions know of my work with Project Earth over the decades. I am so grateful for the support of honest witnesses and the real friends that Project Earth and I have. My record is clear. I stand for the Earth and her creatures. I stand for solutions.
Our planet is now at the fulcrum of great change. We could move into a future that would be wonderful or we could continue on a path that leads to an environmentally bankrupt world. We all need for our governments to invest in Life worth living. The only way this will happen is if we find and raise our voices above the tide of lies.
Sincerely,
Adam Trombly
My Response
Obviously, there’s a lot here. As you can see, the bulk of Mr. Trombly’s essay is devoted to responding to the allegations of Mr. Farnsworth. I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again now, that I don’t know where the truth lies in this dispute between the two of them. I reported Mr. Farnsworth’s allegations; I have now reported Mr. Trombly’s. Although Mr. Trombly’s statement makes it sound like I’ve reported Mr. Farnsworth’s claims as if they are absolutely true and factual, I’ve never done any such thing, because I don’t know which one of them is telling the truth. Go back and look at the article and you’ll see this is the case.
As for the portions of the statement directed at me, I wish to raise three main issues.
“Mob Mentality?”
Mr. Trombly’s statement that I’m stirring up some sort of “mob” against Thrive is a grotesque mischaracterization. I’ve presented facts and arguments that refute many of the claims made in the movie. I’ve reported, as accurately as I can, questions that have been raised by others about the work and the credibility of people who appear in the film, most notably David Icke, Nassim Haramein and Adam Trombly. I believe Thrive is a deceptive film, and my entire purpose in creating this blog has been to lay out the case for why I believe this is so. How is this in any way stirring up a “mob?”
Have I ever advocated hurting anyone over Thrive? Have I ever told people that I think they should take action against anyone connected with the film? Indeed, have I ever even stated or implied that I think Thrive should be banned, censored or suppressed? The answer to each of these questions is a resounding no.
Indeed, if there’s any sort of “mob” here, it’s definitely looking for me, not the other way around. One need only glance at some of the comments to any article posted here to see numerous examples of the extreme hostility with which many Thrive fans have responded to this blog. I’ve been accused of causing wars, suicides and depression. I’ve been accused of making up sources. I’ve been accused of “collaborating” with evil forces bent on enslaving the world. And yes, as most readers well know, I’ve been accused of being a “paid disinformation agent.” Right now about 30% of the readership of this blog believes someone is paying me to trash Thrive.
So let me ask Mr. Trombly—if I’m the one stirring up a “mob,” how come I’m the one getting death threats?
Undermining Pollution-Free Forms of Energy?
Mr. Trombly states that I am “undermin[ing] fuel and pollution free forms of electrical and mechanical energy production.” This is untrue.
I do not and never have opposed pollution-free forms of electrical or mechanical energy production. I would love to see a cheap, reliable form of pollution-free energy production. The world needs that sort of technology desperately. Personally, my belief is that the governments of the United States and other industrialized countries should devote considerable resources to the development of solar, wind and other renewable forms of energy. I believe a symbiosis of public-private interests, geared with great urgency and coordinated toward common goals, can develop realistic clean alternatives to fossil fuel power generation within the next ten years. I would support massive increases in public expenditures to bring about such a result. I’m willing to have my own tax burden raised significantly if I knew that the money was going toward development of clean, renewable energy on a wide scale, and I would whole-heartedly support political candidates who would advocate this. (Barack Obama has been a disappointment in this regard).
How have I “undermined” the cause of advocating environmentally and socially responsible energy? By asking for evidence that supports claims of “free energy” machines? How is this in any way unreasonable?
I would like to ask Mr. Trombly, if I had a million dollars that I was thinking of investing with him to develop the technology he’s working on, would he think it unreasonable if I asked for evidence that his claims are, in fact, supportable? Would he expect an investor to simply give him money on faith, without seeing anything? I’m not sure how the inventing business works, but I’d be very surprised if it actually works like that.
If a person makes a very broad and sweeping claim about something, they must be prepared to be asked for evidence that what they claim is true. If what they claim is true, they should have absolutely no fear of being asked to prove it. In fact, they should welcome the opportunity to prove themselves right, because the process of proving it will eliminate any potential doubt.
This is why I’ve stated before, and will state again here, that it would be very easy for Mr. Trombly to silence my criticism of “free energy” once and for all time. All he need do is show me (and the rest of the world) a working “free energy” device that actually does what is claimed of it. That demonstration needs to be out in the open and done in such a way that others can replicate the result, or at least verify it beyond all doubt. This can be done without jeopardizing patent or other intellectual property rights to which the inventor of such a device would, quite justifiably, be entitled.
That’s all Mr. Trombly has to do. Show me a working “free energy” device and prove that it really works. That’s all. If he does that, I’m a believer. It really is that simple.
Mr. Trombly’s Disagreement With Thrive—Is There Common Ground?
I now wish to get away from the obvious points on which I disagree with Adam Trombly. Let’s move toward a place where we might be able to find common ground.
For the first time I see in Mr. Trombly’s statement an indication that he’s unhappy with how he and his work was portrayed in Thrive. Whether he has actually signed the letter that John Robbins and eight others have signed is unclear from his statement, but he clearly indicates he’s thinking about it. He also clearly indicates that he strongly disagrees with David Icke and others who deny the proven scientific fact of anthropogenic global warming.
Here, then, are two points where I couldn’t agree more with Adam Trombly. I would say that, if I had to jettison every one of my issues with Thrive except for one, the presence of David Icke in the film is the one that would stand out as most bothering me. I do not like David Icke. I believe his theories are extremely harmful and damaging. As a human being who strongly opposes racial prejudice, I am deeply offended by the racist implications of Mr. Icke’s theories. My position on this is well-known.
I also believe that anthropogenic global warming is the single most important problem facing the world today. This is an issue that must be addressed. We can’t ignore it. Fighting global warming is of absolutely vital importance to every human being on the planet. And it is a crisis. If that’s what Mr. Trombly means about an “Emergency on Earth,” I agree. Mr. Trombly is wrong when he suggests that I’m not doing anything about the future of the planet. The work I’ve been doing in my everyday life for the past two years has significant implications for the understanding of climate change and how to deal with it.
I also commend Mr. Trombly for stating that he can’t endorse or be involved with anything that embraces the denialist view that global warming is some sort of scam. I would like to know if this is Mr. Trombly’s main basis for criticizing Thrive. Foster Gamble has made statements that indicate that he’s a global warming denier. I think it’s great that Adam Trombly is taking a stand against that. It’s an important stand.
A common thread is emerging from the various criticisms of Thrive that are out there. Many people oppose the film because they believe its unsupportable and sensational claims divert people’s attention away from real issues that need to be solved. This is certainly the basis of my disagreement with the film. Blaming the problems of the world on imaginary conspiracies created by an imaginary “Global Domination Elite” draws attention away from solving real problems that exist, not in Foster Gamble’s fantasy world, but in the real world where the rest of us live. I suspect that Adam Trombly’s disagreement with the film comes from a similar perspective. If that’s true, there’s some more common ground.
I’ve never stated that I think Foster Gamble is a bad person. In fact I’ve gone out of my way to stress that I believe he’s a good man with good intentions and who really does want to help the world become a better place. If I was stirring up a “mob,” or if I didn’t care about accuracy or fairness, why on earth would I say this about him? I think Foster Gamble is misguided in many of his beliefs. I think that he made numerous errors of fact and judgment in putting Thrive together. But none of that makes him a bad person. Mr. Trombly makes me out as some sort of demagogue who will stop at nothing to tear him down. Why, if that’s the case, haven’t I been far harsher on Foster Gamble?
Thus, I would suggest that perhaps my opinion of Foster Gamble, as a human being, is probably not too different from Adam Trombly’s. This is some more common ground.
So there are four issues on which Adam Trombly and I agree. If he’s willing to stand up and be counted with those who oppose and distance themselves from this deceptive film, as others have done, at least from my perspective the issues on which we continue to disagree will attain much lesser importance.
Conclusion
I started this blog because I was very bothered by the factual and logical errors and inaccuracies of Thrive, and I didn’t want the people out there on the Internet who were its most likely fans—young people, mostly, who are concerned with the direction our global society is taking—to accept it unquestioningly without at least being aware that the film has very serious problems. The bulk of Mr. Trombly’s statement is aimed at countering allegations made by David Farnsworth. I understand and appreciate why he’s doing that, and if I hadn’t been willing from the get-go to air both sides of the story, you would not see Mr. Trombly’s statement reproduced here in its entirety.
Setting aside for a moment his conflict with Mr. Farnsworth, there are indications in Mr. Trombly’s statement that he is also bothered by certain aspects of Thrive—bothered enough to join, or at the very least consider joining, a group of people who appear in the movie and who now want to distance themselves from it. I think that’s very positive. Considering that Mr. Trombly and I seem to agree on other issues—the urgency and importance of solving the problems of anthropogenic global warming, for instance—I’d venture to say that perhaps there is room to move forward in a constructive manner to evaluate Thrive and the issues it raises. For that reason, there is a great deal about Mr. Trombly’s statement that I welcome.
Throwing Thrive Under the Bus: Progressives Interviewed in the Film Distance Themselves From Its “Dangerously Misguided” Ideas. (UPDATED!)
This blog, originally published April 12, 2012, was updated April 13, 2012. Scroll to the end for the update.
It seems that the honeymoon the public has had with Thrive as a result of the film’s release free on the web has already come to a crashing halt. Yesterday, nine of the people interviewed in Thrive—John Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Paul Hawken, Elisabet Sahtouris, Duane Elgin, Vandana Shiva, Edgar Mitchell, Amy Goodman and John Perkins—issued a public statement denouncing the film and stressing their profound disagreement with it. They also claim that Foster Gamble and the makers of the film misrepresented it when securing their participation. This is potentially an extremely serious development for Foster Gamble and Clear Compass Media, whose film is already under heavy attack from anti-conspiracy skeptics, progressive political thinkers, and environmentalists.
Who Said What?
An article in the Santa Cruz News (online) by reporter Eric Johnson quotes portions of the statement as well as remarks by John Robbins. Mr. Robbins is an environmentalist, an advocate for sustainability and a health/fitness author best known for his book Diet for a New America, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He lives in the Santa Cruz, California area and knows Thrive makers Foster and Kimberly Gamble personally. According to the article, Mr. Robbins was invited to an advance screening of Thrive at Mr. Gamble’s house. Here’s how he describes what he saw there:
“Robbins, who makes a brief appearance in the film, says he was “overwhelmed” by what he saw.
“There were parts I liked, but there were other parts that I just detested,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to be rude—we were there with our families—so I just didn’t say anything.”
According to the Santa Cruz Weekly News article, Mr. Robbins told the reporter that Foster Gamble didn’t tell them about the real contents of the film beforehand. They didn’t know what was in it until it came out publicly. Additionally, Paul Hawken and Elizabeth Sahtouris told the news outlet that Mr. Gamble had actively misrepresented the film.
Just this evening, John Robbins posted a comment on my blog which included the full text of the statement signed by himself and the six other interviewees who have denounced Thrive. Here is the text of the statement as it was presented to me:
“We are a group of people who were interviewed for and appear in the movie Thrive, and who hereby publicly disassociate ourselves from the film.
Thrive is a very different film from what we were led to expect when we agreed to be interviewed. We are dismayed that we were not given a chance to know its content until the time of its public release. We are equally dismayed that our participation is being used to give credibility to ideas and agendas that we see as dangerously misguided.
We stand by what each of us said when we were interviewed. But we have grave disagreements with some of the film’s content and feel the need to make this public statement to avoid the appearance that our presence in the film constitutes any kind of endorsement.
Signatories (in alphabetical order)
Deepak Chopra
Duane Elgin
Amy Goodman
Paul Hawken
Edgar Mitchell
John Perkins
John Robbins
Elisabet Sahtouris
Vandana Shiva”
I am not surprised by this move. Since at least December I’ve been hearing rumors that numerous interviewees in Thrive were upset at how the movie came out and appalled that their words and images appear in it. This clearly indicated that there were problems with how the makers of the film presented the project when they went to secure these commentators’ interviews. However, at the time I had no hard knowledge that these rumors were true, so I didn’t feel comfortable publicizing them. I expected that eventually one or more of the interviewees would go public. Now they have.
Why now? It’s clearly because of the recent free release of the film, which seems to have boosted its popularity. The Santa Cruz Weekly article states that the nine who disavowed the movie had hoped Thrive would simply go away. It didn’t, and has become “something of a Web cult phenomenon.” Because of the popularity of the movie, they decided to go public at this time.
Why Am I Not Surprised?
There is a clear division among the people interviewed in Thrive. Some of them are people who have severe problems commanding credibility in the mainstream—David Icke, Adam Trombly and Nassim Haramein all fall into that category. However, there are also others interviewed in the film who do not appear to be conspiracy theorists, pseudoscientists or otherwise makers of wild and unproven claims. That doesn’t mean I agree with them on everything they have to say; however, I suspected from the very get-go that these people weren’t being told the full story of what Thrive was about before they agreed to appear in the film.
I will direct the readers to a passage in my very first article about Thrive, which was a debunking of the trailer, even before I’d seen the full film. Here’s what I had to say about Elisabet Sahtouris, Paul Hawken, and Amy Goodman:
“Dr. Sahtouris is the first person in this movie [at the time I meant the trailer] who actually has a real, verifiable Ph.D…. She lectures on evolution of humanity and how to create a better future. Given that she, like Catherine Fitts, sounds completely sane, I suspect that her inclusion in this movie is somewhat unwitting. Another clue that tells me this is that she appears to believe in global warming. While global warming isn’t mentioned in the Thrive trailer, I would lay odds that most of Thrive’s target audience believes that global warming is a hoax. Most conspiracy theorists do. I do not think Dr. Sahtouris is a conspiracy theorist….
Paul Hawken is a California businessman and environmentalist. He advocates for socially and environmentally responsible business practices (and I certainly agree with that). He hosted a 17-part series on PBS about running socially responsible businesses. Again, another sane person who makes me wonder if he was told he was going to be in the same movie as David Icke and Adam Trombly…
Democracy Now! is a radio program on the Pacifica radio network, dedicated to progressive causes. I’ve never listened to the show, but browsing their material there seems to be a lot of stuff I agree with. Amy Goodman was arrested along with two other reporters at the 2008 Republican National Convention despite having committed no crime. The charges were eventually dropped.
As with several other respectable names here (Fitts, Hawken, Sahtouris, williams) I wonder what she is doing in a conspiracy theory movie.”
In fact, it is noteworthy that Mr. Robbins is most upset about the very same aspect of Thrive that most upsets me—its inclusion of David Icke. According to the Santa Cruz article, he was especially concerned with the inclusion in the film of Mr. Icke as well as G. Edward Griffin, both of whom are detailed on the Thrive website. The Santa Cruz Weekly article reports that Griffin is associated with the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. As for David Icke, whose claim to fame is obviously (as I pointed out in my own piece on him) the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by a race of shape-shifting reptilian aliens from the constellation Draco, the Weekly article raises exactly the same concerns about the anti-Semitic aspects of Mr. Icke’s theories as I’ve noted on this blog.
Furthermore, Mr. Robbins told the Santa Cruz Weekly that Foster Gamble has taken a lot of inspiration from the work of Eustace Mullins. Mullins is, in Mr. Robbins’s words, “the most anti-Semitic public figure in U.S. history.” The article mentions that Eustace Mullins is the author of a book called Adolf Hitler: An Appreciation. The mere title of that book should tell you what it’s about–and in this case the cover of the book is quite a good advertisement for what you’ll find inside. In that book Mullins rails against “Jewish international bankers” and alleges a plot by them for world domination. Near the end of the article, Mr. Robbins is quoted as saying, “Foster is extremely naïve about the political consequences of his film.”
I’ve stated on more than one occasion that I think the main problem with Foster Gamble is that he is naïve. I don’t think he’s a racist and I don’t think he’s a bad person. I’ve even begun to question whether I think his commitment to conspiracy theorist ideology runs very deep. But what I hear Mr. Robbins saying here is exactly what I’ve been thinking for the past five months.
What Does This Mean For Thrive?
In my view, the statement issued yesterday, and the public dissociation of nine prominent people interviewed in the film from the finished product, is devastating. If Foster Gamble and the makers of Thrive had to misrepresent the film in order to sell it to the people they wanted to appear in it, as the nine undersigned allege, what does that say about the validity of the film and its message as a whole?
Thrive’s credibility has already suffered so many blows that very little of it remains. The inclusion of David Icke as a reliable source was just the tip of the iceberg. This very blog exposed further questions of credibility, when I published statements by inventor David Farnsworth who claims that the “free energy” device shown in Thrive and attributed to Adam Trombly was not in fact invented by Trombly, and does not do what the film says it does. The implication of that crisis is that, if Mr. Farnsworth’s claims are true, Foster Gamble seems not to have done a very good job in checking his sources and vetting the people who appear in Thrive. Yesterday’s allegation complicates further the question of how this film was made and what was said to the people who participated in it.
I’m curious if Foster Gamble will respond to the statement and if so, what he has to say about how the film was made and what was told to Mr. Robbins and the others who signed the statement.
There will probably be further developments regarding this story in the future. I’ll update this article as events warrant.
Update: 13 April 2012
John Robbins posted a comment on this article today in which he states that Adam Trombly has also signed the repudiation of the film.
I’m trying to learn more about this, especially Mr. Trombly’s reasons for doing so. If he has indeed walked away from Thrive, this represents the most significant defection yet–and an even more serious blow to the Thrive organization.
In a note posted on the movie’s official Facebook account, an unnamed spokesman said that Foster and Kimberly Gamble are traveling and will respond more fully later, but they didn’t knowingly misrepresent the film. The response quotes the disclaimer on the film that says they (the filmmakers) don’t agree with everything the people in the movie say. Presumably that works both ways.
I look forward to hearing what more the Thrive people have to say. But if even someone as closely identified with the film as Adam Trombly has been (up until this point) is scrambling for a life preserver, I’d venture a guess that Thrive is starting to resemble a sinking ship.
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Thrive Debunked 
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