The Pattern
Chapter Two
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+
Allow me to present to you the handiwork of the opposition during our lifetime—dots connected, methods exposed. Not to drop something on you that you are helpless to correct and so it’s only going to give more anxiety and depression to focus on it, but instead to show that there are tools still available, within our reach, and very crucial to the correction. As exciting and precious as unopened gifts still sitting under the Christmas tree in January, we haven’t fully received all that we’ve been given. And I can prove that they haven’t been opened.
Although we can at times feel inconsequential to the greater darker picture, there is always a choice for us to make, even if we can’t always see where it is. We choose the route we take in this life. Our goal is to pursue the way forward and upward. To do this we must go through their lies. The alternative is to stay frozen in our tracks, deer in the headlights style, and we know what can happen there.
I recently read a blurb in the NYTimes Saturday section about the “It’s a lot” feeling, referring to the quantity of information, the state of overwhelm which results, and that people are “opting out” of news altogether. I admit, I’ve succumbed to this approach in the past myself, prioritizing the need to protect my mental health. This method is not an unreasonable one, considering the airplane emergency logic that says you need to breathe from your own oxygen mask before helping your child with theirs. What can we do for anyone, or for our society, if we’re too spun out to function? But, it is our opponents who benefit the most from the apathy that comes from this overwhelm. The lack of agency we feel against all the news turns into a passive nihilism which serves to keep us inactive. This inactivity doesn’t mean there isn’t a choice being made, it means something else is making the choice for us.
If we really do accept the idea that nothing gets changed until it’s faced, then not facing facts can only be a limited short term strategy. The more effective way to protect your mental health, to protect anything or anyone, is not to build a life upon the avoidance of reality because it’s a lot, but instead to think matters through and get to cognitive closure. I understand there isn’t enough time in the day to do that with every issue from every headline. That is the purpose of this book here, to train our focus on the persistent and recurring pieces which illuminate a particular overall signature. It’s not so much the individual we need to concentrate on, or even the individual news story, but more the repeated malicious behavior. The players involved come and go and the news stories will never cease. What needs to be addressed is the concentrated and collaborative effort to keep us from seeing their actions clearly so They can continue this behavior without consequence.
What most all of us share is the desire to live a healthy life, in peace, and build a better future for the children who follow us. If our goal is to achieve these things, and our fight is to preserve these things, then the enemy we fight would be those who compromise those goals, those who make our lives less healthy, less peaceful, and the future less stable. Who is that enemy? When we answer this question incorrectly it exposes a crucial misdiagnosis of the most serious problems we face and explains the ongoing failure to solve them.
Let us reduce what is “a lot” down to plain brass tacks. Across all sectors of big industry, the following dynamic repeats in a clear PATTERN:
Bad Company creates a product they need us to buy. We don’t yet want it or need it and it may not be good for us.
Bad Company uses their powerful Sales & Marketing and Public Relations departments to convince us to buy their product.
Once Bad Company gets initial market share they must continue to sell more, must expand their market, their profit line must go up.
The product contains a hidden harm. Bad Company does not disclose this to the public, instead attempts to cover it up.
The citizenry have questions and concerns about the product. Relying on watchdog tools like government regulatory agencies, whistleblowers, litigation, quality journalism, and the public’s activism, there is exposure of the deception and harm.
Bad Company then utilizes a Playbook of tactics to deny the harm, avoid accountability, protect their business, and keep product on the market where harm is extended and compounded.
Note: THE PATTERN IS ALSO EVIDENT AND WORKS THE SAME WHEN THE COMPANY IS THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AND THE PRODUCT IS WAR.
This Pattern is not inherent in a capitalist system, it is an aberration in it. What seems to have happened, because of some very crafty tricks of persuasion, is instead of businesses adapting to our consumer preferences, we have allowed them to operate however they choose and we have adapted ourselves to whatever they have produced, even if it kills us. The people have handed over the power of their precious consumer sovereignty to the producers.
As a rocky road map from past to present, we focus here on the producers of the products which have caused the most harm and pose the greatest threats to American health and livelihood. If we were to define our enemies by those who have caused the most death on our soil, then these Bad Companies are our greatest enemies.
So, fair warning, in this chapter we are going to go through these sagas, which from the avoidant perspective would be categorized as “a lot”. The point to keep hold of throughout is that this is about you. This is your saga. These are the opponents launching an unceasing barrage of arrows at you and your loved ones. This is the data of their offensive strategy we need in order to craft our better defensive strategy. If I were to tell you that a fire arrow was aimed at the roof over your head right now and we’ve determined where it is launching from, would you find this information too uninteresting or too depressing to listen to? I honestly don’t feel I’m being hyperbolic to claim that the roof is on fire. But I promise I’ll go quick.
BIG TOBACCO
In 1952, an article published in Reader's Digest (then the country's leading source of medical information) titled “Cancer by the Carton,” cited results of animal studies that found tobacco tar was carcinogenic and highlighted the risk of developing lung cancer. They described the debate over the role of cigarettes in causing lung cancer as a medical controversy largely kept from public notice.
A year later, the CEOs of all the major tobacco companies met secretly in New York City. Their purpose was to counter the damage from these studies linking their product to cancer. Sales had plummeted for two years after the article came out.
And a year after that, working with the public relations giant Hill & Knowlton, the industry created “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” and paid to have it published in 448 newspapers. To give the industry a touch of humanity, the statement included the signatures of the nation's top tobacco executives and assured Americans that “we accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.” Furthermore, they promised that “we always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public's health”. This was the first step in a calculated campaign to mislead Americans about the catastrophic effects of smoking and to avoid any public policy that might damage their sales, a campaign which never ended. Industry documents show the repeated duplicity of its executives for over 75 years.1
Since the “Frank Statement,” approximately 30 million Americans have died from smoking, and millions more have suffered from debilitating diseases ranging from emphysema to heart disease. Smoking is still the number one preventable cause of death in the U.S., killing over 490,000 people per year, and it costs the U.S. economy over $600 billion in direct health care costs and lost productivity every year.
I recommend a rewatch of the film The Insider about Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wygant who broke the story on 60 Minutes about the cigarette company’s intentionally manipulating its tobacco blend with chemicals such as ammonia to increase the addictive effect of nicotine.
It is extremely important to understand that Big Tobacco also transitioned into Big
Food, and brought all their sinister strategy with them. After facing declining sales in the tobacco market due to increased regulation, Bad cigarette Companies like Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds gained control of a significant portion of the U.S. food supply. They acquired major food companies such as Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco, which marks a dominant shift in the industry, in the rise of processed foods and in the rise in obesity and related health problems. Often using similar marketing and product development techniques from their cigarette days, they created "hyper-palatable" foods that are highly addictive and contribute to overconsumption and unhealthy eating behaviors. Those related health problems of high body mass index and high blood sugar are plaguing our nation, especially our children, and directly contribute to the #1 killer of Americans today.
BIG CHEMICAL
In 1945, DuPont began manufacturing Teflon, a product best known for its use in non-stick cookware, but also widely used in a variety of other consumer products, including waterproof clothing and furniture, food packaging, self-cleaning ovens, airplanes and cars.
In 1948, the company 3M acquired the patent for a process of creating compounds out of fluorine. Manhattan Project scientists, several of whom landed at 3M after the war ended, had already used fluorine to separate the uranium used for the atomic bomb. DuPont purchased this toxic, man-made chemical called PFOA to be used in the production of Teflon.
3M would continue to sell PFOA to DuPont for more than four decades. Starting in the early 1950s, the company also made PFOS, a closely related compound that wound up in hundreds of products and in firefighting foam that they provided exclusively to the U.S. military. The company refers to it as C8; we now refer to them as “forever chemicals” because they don't break down in the environment. 3M’s fluorochemicals helped the company expand into a behemoth worth more than $120 billion.
The toxicity of the forever chemicals was kept from the Environmental Protection Agency until the late 1990s, and went largely unregulated until the early 2000s. PFOA is a greenhouse gas and has adverse effects on health, including being a probable carcinogen. It is also a suspected hormone disrupter, with its effects made worse by the fact that it lingers in the body and in the environment. In 1973, DuPont’s own investigations found “no safe level of exposure to PFAS in food packaging”. The company’s internal experiments on rats and monkeys concluded that PFOA and PFOS “should be regarded as toxic” and described the finding as suggestive of “a possible human health problem.” This is all according to minutes from Dupont’s own meeting in 1975.2
3M found the presence of the toxic chemicals in human blood of its employees but kept this bad news from leaking out to the public. For decades, evidence emerged that tumors in exposed lab animals were related to PFOA exposure, that the levels of the chemicals in 3M workers’ blood kept rising over time, and their cancer rates were much higher than the general population. But all of these environmental and health consequences remained secret.
PFAS have been linked to birth defects, cancer, obesity and diabetes. Americans have been exposed to the chemicals by direct contact and from polluted ground and surface water and soil, and through their food where the chemicals seep into from the packaging. Potential liabilities associated with the chemicals, both environmental cleanup and ongoing healthcare costs, have been estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Both 3M and DuPont were well aware of the health hazards but continued to expose their employees and dump the toxic waste into local waterways, where it made its way into public drinking water and subsequently sickened thousands of people, ultimately killing many of them. PFOA has been found in the blood of 97% of the U.S. population, including newborns.
I suggest a watch or a rewatch of the film Dark Waters if you want to get the entertaining Dupont Chemical refresher.
Also, links below to some major headlines from just this month about 3M's disinformation campaign and PFAS pollution being "one of the greatest threats" to humankind. The news of the harm trickles out to us, 50 years after Dupont first began discussing these threats internally.
BIG AGRICULTURE
In the 1960s, the companies Bayer and Monsanto produced Agent Orange to be used in the Vietnam War. It was used to clear forest cover and crops, but the spray also predictably landed on Vietnamese citizens and U.S. soldiers. Some 18 million gallons of the highly toxic herbicide were sprayed in Vietnam during a nine year period in the war. The country blames the chemical for birth defects in 150,000 children. Dioxin, the chemical in Agent Orange, is now one of the leading causes of claims for disability among Vietnam War era veterans.
After the war ended, these companies created a new application for their product. In 1971, Monsanto patented Glyphosate as an antibiotic and a few years later introduced RoundUp, a weed killer that became the first billion-dollar herbicide, the most widely used agricultural chemical in the world.
In 1996, Monsanto began to sell genetically modified seeds to farmers—soybean, corn, cotton, and canola. Called Roundup Ready GMO crops, they were designed to be tolerant to the effects of RoundUp, meaning that farmers could treat their entire fields with the herbicide without the risk of losing their crops to the chemical mixture. The impact of the huge increase in pesticide use over the last 40 years has wreaked havoc on biodiversity, on our insect, bee, and bird population. It has impacted the health of the soil and the microorganisms in the soil that are necessary to grow nutritious crops. Many of these pesticides have been shown to not only cause cancer but also neurodevelopmental harm.
Glyphosate is an antibiotic against beneficial organisms, which we rely on in our gastrointestinal track or in the environment to supply us with minerals and the aromatic amino acids that we cannot produce ourselves. Researchers Samsel & Seneff have now produced six studies through 2024 entitled: “Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases” proposing that the ingredient in RoundUp is the most important causal factor in many 21st century diseases.3 Research shows it is a key contributor to obesity as well as other health problems like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, infertility, depression, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, diabetes, food allergies, heart disease, antibiotic-resistant infections, asthma, autism, inflammatory bowel disease, and cancer. The GMO crops also contribute to the rise of new allergens. As anyone in my age group can attest, we lived a life pre-genetic modification never hearing the words gluten-free, and now the majority of us are allergic and gluten intolerant, etc. The genetic engineering disrupts natural ecosystems and also potentially leads to the decline of native plant and animal species.
According to the CDC, 81% of the U.S. population had detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine, and these levels were nearly 87% f or children aged 6 to 18.4
In 2018, Bayer merged with Monsanto Company, thus acquiring RoundUp and its entire product line along with it. You will discover that these Bad Companies are highly consolidated; the largest seed companies are also in the pesticide business, and vice versa. A tsunami of mega-mergers in the last eight years accelerated this trend. By 2020, just four firms—Syngenta Group, Bayer, Corteva, and BASF—controlled 60-70% of the global pesticides market and 50-60% of the global seed market. Bayer (Monsanto), Corteva (Dupont), and Syngenta own 95% of the patents in the United States for GM corn, 78% of the patents for GM soybeans, and 93% of the patents for GM canola issued between 1976 and 2021.5 This is an absolutely dominating monopoly.
Three quarters of all our food now comes from just twelve plant varieties and just five animal species, as our agricultural biodiversity has been reduced by 75% since 1900. Yet, biodiversity is the basis of human’s food security.
Bayer has faced approximately 180,000 lawsuits alleging that glyphosate in its product caused cancer, so far reaching settlement agreements in nearly 114,000 of those cases. In only the latest one, from March 2025, the state of Georgia found the company guilty in RoundUp causing the plaintiff’s cancer, ordering them to pay $2.1 billion to the individual. The week prior though, Georgia’s state lawmakers passed a bill heavily lobbied by Bayer that would protect the company and all pesticide manufacturers from being legally liable for any harm in the future.6
Update— As I am writing this, Big Ag is successfully lobbying the federal government for this same forever unaccountability. The legislation, written by the agrochemical giants, is hidden in a provision of a bill that has already passed through the Appropriations Committee in the House, and is headed for a vote there, followed by the Senate. There is a broad coalition trying their best to stop this from going any further.
There are many excellent documentaries about Big Agrochemical available online if you want to familiarize yourself with what they’ve been doing, for so long. I suggest starting with Seeds of Death on GMO and on Into The Weeds on Glyphosate.
BIG PHARMA
In the 1800s and early 1900s doctors prescribed various opioid tinctures and syrups. But by the late 20th century, physicians understood the dangers the drug posed—addiction, misuse and death. The medical profession of our era had been very reluctant to prescribe opioids for routine pain.
In 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, which was the drug oxycodone with a tablet coating. Oxycodone was much stronger than other opioids but the company assured doctors that this drug was different, due to the time release factor the coating innovation offered. The marketing campaign suggested the product was a less abusable drug, one that doctors could prescribe for moderate pain, in addition to severe pain. Doctors began writing prescriptions for painkillers more liberally, for wisdom tooth pain, backaches, sciatica, and a whole variety of conditions classified as non-cancer-related pain. From 1999 to 2014, sales of legal opioids quadrupled. In 2012 alone, clinicians wrote prescriptions for 259 million bottles of narcotic painkillers—one for every adult in the country, according to the CDC. Since the year 2000, the annual number of overdose deaths in the U.S. has multiplied six times over, rising from 17,500 to over 107,000 people in 2023.7
In the United States, opioid use disorder (OUD) and opioid overdose were once rare. But over the past 25 years, the number of Americans suffering from OUD increased exponentially and in parallel with the unprecedented increase in opioid prescribing. Today, OUD is insanely common and opioid overdose is the leading cause of injury death. The “pill mill industry” that fueled these addictions and deaths and destruction of families was made up of our own pharmacists and primary care doctors. They had been heavily marketed to by Purdue, where risks of the product were minimized and benefits were exaggerated. Assured that the drug was safe, those medical professionals rarely warned patients of its potential for dependence, or worse.
When doctors, along with anyone with eyes open, could no longer ignore the epidemic of opioid addiction gripping our nation, they tried to correct by cutting off their patients from OxyContin. Those who had become hooked on the drug were forced to buy painkillers from street dealers and when they started to run out of money they turned to the cheaper alternatives of heroin and then fentanyl. I don’t have to tell you where we’re at with that consequent problem today.
And, you’re probably already familiar with the popular miniseries on this subject: Dopesick or Painkiller.
So, this is a brief summary of offenses by Bad Companies which have most directly contributed to fatalities in our country. These companies were able to subdue all our natural survival instincts and evade every system of protection we currently rely on to keep us from the harm. Facts.
U.S. life expectancy has been in steady decline for the last 12 years. We have one of the lowest life expectancies among high-income countries; Americans die earlier at all wealth levels compared to their European counterparts. An epidemic of chronic illness has taken hold, I’m sure you’ve heard, with rates of heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, and obesity skyrocketing and impacting younger populations. The latest numbers from the CDC, published in April 2025, show 76.4% of U.S. adults had at least one chronic condition in 2023, and 40% have two or more!8 And America has the highest maternal mortality rate among the 14 richest industrialized countries. Something is terribly wrong.
The top three leading causes of death in the United States are heart disease, cancer and unintentional injuries. Those unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for Americans under 44 years of age, and the majority of those deaths are overdose.9 Those numbers have spiked even more since 2020, up 80% since 2019. Opioid drug overdoses represent 78% of all overdoses.10
Prescription drug use has been increasing in the U.S. nearly every year since 2000—a huge jump from the preceding decades. 61% of Americans are currently taking at least one prescription medication, and more than a quarter of us are taking four or more. We are not getting healthier in body or in spirit from the drugs. The suicide rate has increased by over 30% over the past 20 years.
I know that looking at the litany of grim statistics can be disheartening. (That’s why I packed them all into one post! I promise we will soon get to focusing more about you and me.) However, there is a real difference between doom-scrolling or complaining about all that is screwed up in our world and fully educating ourselves on the methods in the madness, so that we can escape from the Pattern that gets us so screwed.
When we don’t have our sights set on the primary sources of injury—the Bad Companies—they move swiftly to accumulate more power under our radar, with transfers of wealth and massive corporate consolidation like what has happened with those handful of agrochemical companies controlling now most of the food production market.
If we were to train our focus in concordance with who is actually killing the most humans, then we would be watching these companies as closely as we watch, say, a Jeffrey Epstein or any other individual who is dominating the headlines at the moment. Can you imagine if instead of a corporation it was just one guy that had been found guilty in over 100K lawsuits of causing death or had wiped out 2 million of our workforce with addiction and overdose, yet still went on to be one of the richest and most powerful free men in the world?
We have to ask ourselves why our relationship with these companies is so different from the other villains we rally around and why we continue to consent to so much of their product. How is that any different from us, say, accepting an invitation to Epstein’s island? Ironically, it appears that the more common and widespread the villainy, the less we attempt to protect ourselves from it. Is there any more insanely unanswered question than: If cigarettes only cause disease and death—how are these companies still legally allowed to sell them? Imagine if my small business was proven to cause cancer and death all over town but no one shut me down!
It gets a little mind-boggling. We are going to dig into this boggling of our minds. It comes down to not only an engineering of consent but an engineered reliance on external systems to tell us what is dangerous and what is safe, what are the greatest threats we face, what we should or shouldn’t worry about, which deadly man-made products we are just going to have to get used to. If we keep pressing on without examination using our own logical reasoning, we are prime targets for the next line up of monopolistic manipulations (which currently take the form of media mergers upon media mergers or the domination of Palantir). We are pretty far down the road of no government push-back against these Frankensteins, but still in the baby steps phase of we as individuals pulling back the blank check we’ve been handing over to them.
Many of these deaths and the chronic diseases that shorten our lives are preventable through lifestyle choices, early detection, and management of risk factors. We need better management of our risk factors.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death. =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….