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The PM’s Pandemic Power Grab
The PM’s Pandemic Power Grab
Trudeau has pushed for lifted restraints, less transparency. Why we should be deeply concerned.
“Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis.” — Niccolo Machiavelli
Machiavelli’s words, borrowed by Rahm Emanuel during the 2008 financial crisis when he was Barack Obama’s chief of staff, offer a stark warning about the COVID-19 pandemic: it kills human beings and economies on a massive scale, but it also puts democracy itself in mortal danger.
Everyone can appreciate that things like war, insurrection or disease may require extraordinary powers to manage the risk. President George W. Bush assumed police state surveillance powers over his own citizens in the wake of 9/11. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared the War Measures Act to deal with the FLQ crisis in Quebec. And president Franklin D. Roosevelt placed 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during the Second World War.
But the current pandemic also shows that an alarming number of leaders know that a crisis allows them to impose transformative change — less because of COVID-19, than their lust to extend and consolidate their own power. We’ll get to the son of Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s current prime minister in a moment. But first, the poster-boy of authoritarian opportunism is Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban.
Reporting just 700 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in his country, Orban has used the pandemic as a fig leaf to cover his dictatorial impulses. It is not a new story. Since coming to power in 2010, he has fiddled with the constitution, stacked the Supreme Court with loyalists, altered the electoral process to favour his own party, and co-opted the media. As reported by the New York Times, there were just 31 pro-government news sources in Hungary in 2015, including newspapers, broadcasters and social media outlets; that number is now 500.
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The Real Conspiracy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The Real Conspiracy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Some conspiracy-type people say the world is messed up because we’re ruled by illuminati or reptilians, but I’m way more out there than that: I say our entire society is made of imaginary thought stories with little relation to objective reality, and some clever manipulators have figured out how to exploit this.
I say even what we take to be our very self is an ultimately illusory narrative construct made up of a disconnected network of thought, language and memories; look hard for a solid “me” entity and you’ll never find one. Same is true of most things people value in this world.
Some people lack healthy empathy centers, and as such they don’t use language the way the rest of us do: to understand and connect with each other. Instead, they use it to get things they want. They figured out how to trade stories for material goods, narrative for actual wealth. You can trade narratives about love for sex, narratives about God for tithes, narratives about terrorists or Russians or Democrats/Republicans for votes, narratives about the economy for wealth, narratives about government for real power, etc. Manipulators learn this and exploit it.
Manipulators without empathy rise to the top, because they’re willing to do whatever it takes and manipulate whoever they need to in order to get there. This problem is further compounded by the fact that wealth itself kills empathy. In a system where sociopaths are rewarded with wealth, and where wealth equals power, we naturally find ourselves ruled by sociopaths. They manipulate our faulty perceptions of objective reality to amass wealth and power, which they use to grab more.
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The Propaganda of Terror and Fear: A Lesson from Recent History
The Propaganda of Terror and Fear: A Lesson from Recent History
The ongoing and unfolding reactions to the Corona Virus look set to have wide-ranging and long-lasting effect on politics, society and economics. The drive to close down all activities is extraordinary as are the measures being promoted to isolate people from each other.
The deep-rooted fear of contagious disease, hardwired into the collective consciousness by historical events such as the ‘Black/Bubonic Plague’ and maintained through popular culture (e.g. the Hollywood movies Outbreak and Contagion), means that people are without question highly susceptible to accepting extreme emergency measures whether or not such measures are rational or justified. The New York Times called for America to be put on a war footing in order to deal with Corona whilst former Army General Stanley McChrystal has been invoking his 9/11 experience in order to prescribe lessons for today’s leaders.
At the same time, political actors are fully aware that these conditions of fear and panic provide a critical opportunity that can be exploited in order to pursue political, economic and societal objectives. It is very likely, however, that the dangers posed by the potential exploitation of Corona for broader political, economic and societal objectives latter far outweigh the immediate threat to life and health from the virus. A lesson from recent history is instructive here.
9/11 AND THE GLOBAL ‘WAR ON TERROR’
The events of September 11 2001 represent a key moment in contemporary history. The destruction of three skyscrapers in New York after the impact of two airliners and an attack on the Pentagon, killing around 3000 civilians, shocked both American and global publics. The horror of seeing aircraft being flown into buildings, followed by the total destruction of three high rise buildings within a matter of seconds, and the spectre of a shadowy band of Islamic fundamentalists (Al Qaeda) having pulled off such devastating attacks, gripped the imagination of many in the Western world.
Be wary of overreaching government responses to coronavirus: Ron Paul
Be wary of overreaching government responses to coronavirus: Ron Paul
Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them.
After 9/11, for example, Americans accepted the near-total destruction of their civil liberties in the PATRIOT Act’s hollow promises of security.
It is ironic to see the same Democrats who tried to impeach President Trump last month for abuse of power demanding that the Trump Administration grab more power and authority in the name of fighting a virus that thus far has killed less than 100 Americans.
Declaring a pandemic emergency on Friday, President Trump now claims the power to quarantine individuals suspected of being infected by the virus and, as Politico writes, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease.” He can even call out the military to cordon off a US city or state.
State and local authoritarians love panic as well. The mayor of Champaign, Illinois, signed an executive order declaring the power to ban the sale of guns and alcohol and cut off gas, water, or electricity to any citizen. The governor of Ohio just essentially closed his entire state.
The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the seasonal flu, a claim without any scientific basis.
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Understanding The Keys To Power
Understanding The Keys To Power
Will be a survival requirement for the coming decade
The past decade was undoubtedly shaped by the policy adopted by the global central banking cartel to flood the world with massive amounts of liquidity (over $15 trillion) to “rescue” markets following the Great Financial Crisis.
It’s becoming increasingly clear who benefitted most from this: the ultra-rich
As $trillions flowed into financial assets pushing them higher every year throughout the twenty-teens, those who owned those assets — disproportionately the very rich — saw their wealth soar.
We’re now at the point where the richest 1% owns nearly half of the world’s assets, while the bottom 60% have (often much) less than $10,000 to their name:
How has the distribution of wealth become this distorted?
The harsh simple truth is that those who run the system manipulate it to their benefit.
This is true in both government and industry. Those in power do ‘whatever it takes’ to remain in power and enjoy the fruits of their advantage. Any sort of social ‘duty’ is secondary (at best), and will be sacrificed if necessary.
Perhaps one of the best analyses and explanations of this is put forth by the book The Dictator’s Handbook, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. For politicians and CEOs alike, maintaining control of the “keys to power” — those who support and enable your rule — is essential.
This is why we’ve ended up with the bastardized crony form of capitalism now in place. Those running the system work hard to reward/punish anyone who aids/threatens their power base.
Like it or not, this is the world in which we live. And it’s critical to understand its nature if we want to avoid becoming unwitting serfs to it.
The most important tenets to be aware of are laid out very effectively in this short video called The Rules For Rulers, created under the supervision of Bueno de Mesquita and Smith:
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Farewell to Paper Money?
Farewell to Paper Money?
A decade or more ago, I began to discuss with associates the possibility of governments and banks colluding to eliminate physical cash. Back then, the idea struck most everyone as poppycock, that governments could never get away with it.
I didn’t write on the subject until 2015, when several countries had begun to limit the amount of money a depositor could extract from his bank account. At that point, the prospect that central banks might conceivably eliminate cash was looking less like an alarmist fantasy, and it became possible to write on the nascent issue.
In a nutshell, today, in most of the world’s most prominent countries, the people who control banking are the same people who pull the strings in government. A cashless system therefore seemed to me to be a natural, as it dramatically increased both profit and power for both banking and government – an opportunity that can’t be passed up.
The Benefit to Banking
Some banks have been delving into negative interest rates, which is a euphemism for charging you to keep your money in the bank, so that they can loan it out for their own profit. You actually lose money annually by having it on deposit.
Of course, some people accept negative interest rates in order to retain the imagined safety of having their cash in a bank vault, rather than at home. Others tolerate it because they value the convenience of using ATMs and chequing.
But anyone else may simply decide to store their money at home and save the “reverse interest” charges.
But what if cash were eliminated? No one would have a choice. They’d have to have a bank account and use it for all transactions, or they couldn’t purchase goods or pay bills.
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A Surefire Cure For Despair
A Surefire Cure For Despair
“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
~ Samuel Beckett
Sometimes it just gets to be too goddamn much. You just finished a soul-draining argument with a family member who insists that Putin controls all major world events because that’s what the TV said so it must be true, then you check the poll numbers for the upcoming elections in the US and UK and you see your favorite candidates just don’t have the kind of numbers they’re going to need, the latest revelation that the US and its allies deceived the world about what’s happening in Syria has been completely swept under the rug by the establishment news churn, Bolivia has been taken over by US-backed Christian fascists, and now you’re watching Mike Pompeo’s stupid asshole face spouting some made-up bullshit about Iran that you know the news media will never hold him accountable for.
And it’s just too goddamn much.
To become oppositional to the status quo is to enter into a long-term relationship with despair. It’s not a monogamous relationship; you’ll have the occasional affair with anger, a fling with fear, a rendezvous with rage, and every once in a while even a brief tryst with triumph. But you always end up drunkenly stumbling home to bed with the old ball-and-chain despair.
Every time you think you might have the bastards on the ropes, every time you see a shining crack in the cage, a glowing glitch in the matrix, it’s quickly covered up by some gibberish about Russia or empty shrieking about Donald Trump, and then everyone’s herded along into the next authorised imperial narrative.
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The Origins of the Thought Police—and Why They Scare Us
The Origins of the Thought Police—and Why They Scare Us
In a sense, “1984” is largely a book about the human capacity to maintain a grip on the truth in the face of propaganda and power.
There are a lot of unpleasant things in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Spying screens. Torture and propaganda. Victory Gin and Victory Coffee always sounded particularly dreadful. And there is Winston Smith’s varicose ulcer, apparently a symbol of his humanity (or something), which always seems to be “throbbing.” Gross.
None of this sounds very enjoyable, but it’s not the worst thing in 1984. To me, the most terrifying part was that you couldn’t keep Big Brother out of your head.
Unlike other 20th-century totalitarians, the authoritarians in 1984 aren’t that interested in controlling behavior or speech. They do, of course, but it’s only as a means to an end. Their real goal is to control the gray matter between the ears.
“When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will,” O’Brien (the bad guy) tells the protagonist Winston Smith near the end of the book.
We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.
Big Brother’s tool for doing this is the Thought Police, aka the ThinkPol, who are assigned to root out and punish unapproved thoughts. We see how this works when Winston’s neighbor Parsons, an obnoxious Party sycophant, is reported to the Thought Police by his own child, who heard him commit a thought crime while talking in his sleep.
“It was my little daughter,” Parsons tells Winston when asked who it was who denounced him. “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”
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Peak Hubris
Peak Hubris
“Hubris” is defined as rash and foolish pride, a dangerous overconfidence, manifested with arrogance. The Deep State vaunts our “exceptionalism”, and since Reagan’s “City on a HIll” trope Americans have been assured by all succeeding Presidents that ours is the “indispensible nation”. The word describes the way America sells itself to the world, and has for generations.
The yawning cognitive gap between our nomenklatura’s relentless self-promotion and its pathetic history of botched, humiliating failures in every single act of Imperial overreach, demands examination. Are we at Peak Hubris? When exactly should the hubris of a vicious, lying, sloganeering criminal state be identified as what it is, a cover for unhinged stupidity?
Viz. the deranged, hysterical Democratic Party, a subsidiary of the Deep State, led–if that term applies–by a geriatric clutch of morally squalid throwbacks and vacuous nonentities, which has its Depends in a knot in the effort to blame the entire debacle of recent U.S. historic crime on the repulsive Yahoo squatting in the White House. As Einstein observed, all explanations should be as simple as possible…but no simpler.
Of all the villainies attributed to Trump by Democrats and the Deep State–the Power Elite, Establishment, Ruling Clique, Permanent Unelected Government–the most egregious and only unforgivable one, is that his gross and vulgar bathos in Holy Office has exposed and profoundly embarrassed them, punching holes in their diligently crafted image. The Masters of Disaster can’t tolerate open revelation of their evil, witness the methodical crushing of a roster of whistleblowers, among whom the most damning and brutally handled are Manning, Assange, and Snowden. Two are jailed on bogus “charges” in peril of their lives, and Snowden is in exile, only free because the vengeful engine of American “justice” can’t nail him.
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All It Takes Is a Slipup or a Nudge
All It Takes Is a Slipup or a Nudge
Just prior to a war, the majority of people in the nations that are about to become involved tend to assume that another nation is threatening theirs, whist their own leaders are doing all they can to avoid conflict. This is almost never the case.
The “etiquette” of starting wars is for leaders to claim to their people that the last thing they want is war, but the enemy is goading them into armed conflict and, at some point, retaliation becomes “unavoidable.”
The reason for this etiquette is that, almost invariably, the people of a nation have no desire to go to war.
But if that’s the case, why is world history filled with warfare taking place on a regular basis?
Well, truth be told, there are two groups of people who tend to relish war – the military and the political leaders.
I’ve often quoted Randolph Bourne as saying, “War is the health of the state.” He was quite correct. The larger the nation, the greater the need political leaders have for warfare. After all, there’s no situation in which a people feel more greatly that they need their leaders to take charge, than in a time of war.
Political leaders, after all, thrive on taxation and the oppression of basic rights. And they can get away with taxing a people more heavily during a war. They can also remove basic freedoms “temporarily” in order to keep the people “safe.”
Then, when the war is over, taxes never seem to return to their previous low and freedoms never fully return. With each conflict, the state ratchets up its power over the people.
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On Psychopathy And Power
On Psychopathy And Power
Due to a very painful and disturbing revelation in my personal life I have had the unfortunate occasion to spend the last several days thinking a lot about psychopaths and what makes them tick. I don’t want to get into the hairy details at this time, but I would like to share some of the more general thoughts that have been coming up here on the matter.
It is interesting that psychopathy should have reached a dark tentacle into my life in the way that it did, given that the three years I’ve been at this gig have been spent writing more and more about the way our world is run by calculating manipulators who are devoid of empathy. I often say that we have found ourselves ruled by psychopaths because we have a system wherein (A) those who are willing to do anything to anyone are rewarded with immense wealth, and (B) immense wealth translates directly to immense political power. Add in the fact that studies have shown that wealth itself kills off empathy and compassion, and you’ve got yourself a perfect recipe for a plutocratic dystopia dominated by antisocial personality disorder.
I’m not really interested in getting into the specific clinical diagnoses of psychopathy and sociopathy for the purposes of this discussion. What I’m talking about here is a specific slice of humanity that is neurologically wired in such a way that they experience the world more as a series of puzzles which can be manipulated around to get them them whatever they want regardless of who it hurts, rather than experiencing a world full of fellow sentient beings with whom you can have deep, meaningful connections and interactions.
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California Hit By Dual Shock: LA Gas Prices Spike Above $5 As Residents Learn Solar Panels Don’t Work In Blackouts
California Hit By Dual Shock: LA Gas Prices Spike Above $5 As Residents Learn Solar Panels Don’t Work In Blackouts
Millions of Californians may have just suffered an unprecedented, induced blackout by the state’s largest (and bankrupt) utility, PG&E, just so it isn’t blamed for starting even more fires causing it to go even more bankrupt… but at least the price of gas is soaring.
According to Fox5NY, citing figures from AAA and the Oil Price Information Service, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in Los Angeles County was $4.25 on Wednesday, 4.5 cents higher than one week ago, 57.6 cents more than one month ago and 37.1 cents greater than one year ago. It has also risen 86.4 cents since the start of the year. What is more troubling is that as California gas prices reached the highest level in the state since 2015, some Los Angeles area gas stations are charging more than $5 a gallon.
The gas price spike started last month after Saudi Arabia oil production facilities were attacked, and accelerated after three Los Angeles-area refineries slowed or halted production due to maintenance issues and no imported gasoline was available to make up for the shortfall, according to Jeffrey Spring, the Automobile Club of Southern California’s corporate communications manager.
Only in California…
The shortage was made worse after local refineries cut back production of summer-blend gasoline in anticipation of switching to selling the winter blend beginning Nov. 1.
But wait, there’s more: America’s most “environmentally conscious” state got a harsh lesson in electrical engineering when many of the tens of thousands of people hit by this week’s blackout learned the hard way that solar installations don’t keep the lights on during a power outage.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Can concentrated solar power be used to generate industrial process heat?
Can concentrated solar power be used to generate industrial process heat?
This post is based on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) paper:
Kurup, P., et al. 2015. Initial Investigation into the Potential of CSP Industrial Process Heat for the Southwest United States. National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
***
Industries use enormous amounts of fossil fuels to generate heat and electricity to make products like steel, cement, chemicals, glass, and refine petroleum, with nearly three-quarters of energy used in the form of heat. Industry uses 30% of all energy, and 83% of that energy is generated by fossil fuels mainly to create process heat directly, indirectly with steam heat, or to generate electricity at the factory for reliability and to operate machine drive equipment (EI 2010).
It is possible for a Parabolic Trough collector (PTC), which looks like a giant upended cattle trough, to make some of this industrial heat and replace some of the fossil fuels used (mainly natural gas).
But the industrial uses this concentrated solar power collection is most useful for are heat applications from 110 to 220 C (230 – 430 F), especially those processes that use pressurized water or steam.
So that leaves quite a few very important industries out, since they use 2000 F heat or more, such as iron, steel, fabricated metals, transportation equipment (cars, trucks), computers, electronics, aluminum, cement, glass, machinery, and foundries.
Industries where solar industrial process heat (SIPH) might be used are paper, dairy, food, beer, chemicals, and washing/cleaning. No doubt some processes within other industries like plastics and rubber, textiles, and others also have a need for industrial process heat that’s less than 430 F.
NREL isn’t proposing gigantic, billion dollar concentrated solar power collectors like the ones that take up miles of land in the deserts of California, Nevada, and Arizona.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Humans Are Waking Up
The Humans Are Waking Up
You run into a lot of despair in this line of work. The more you learn about the mechanisms of power, the more hopeless things seem at first glance.
The political system is totally locked down, with anyone who tries to upend the status quo being aggressively sabotaged by the mass media and their own political party.
Technology, which futurists have long heralded as the deus ex machina which will liberate humanity from its self-destructive ways, is owned by plutocrats with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and is pervasively infiltrated by murderous intelligence agencies from top to bottom.
Even attempts to circulate information about the dangers of war, ecocide and oligarchy are consistently sabotaged by internet censorship, blanket de-platforming and mass media propaganda, and even imprisonment if one’s truth-telling becomes too successful.
Still, I remain unwaveringly hopeful. Not because I foresee any of those massive obstacles vanishing at any time in the near future, but because I see an escape route that none of them are blocking.
I have had a great many bizarre and utterly unanticipated experiences, some of them ongoing, which assure me beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity is capable of far, far more than our consensus worldview about ourselves accounts for. Most of those experiences I will probably never share publicly, because, while I often venture well off the beaten path in my commentary, if I discussed those experiences people will think I’m way more insane than they already believe me to be. But I don’t mind sharing here that I know from my own experience that humans are capable of radically and permanently shifting into a much healthier and efficacious relationship with mental narrative, which happens to be the mechanism by which existing power structures keep us locked down.
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Climate Crisis Means the Ruling Class has Failed. Can the Working Class Inherit the Earth?
Climate Crisis Means the Ruling Class has Failed. Can the Working Class Inherit the Earth?
The climate crisis is proof positive that the ruling class is an utter failure — but it will not fall on its own. Can the working class rise to the challenge? It sure will help if we understand that our class interests are not merely the economic needs of working people — no matter how important that is — but the universal interests of a healthy planet for all the people. Let’s start acting like it.
The corporate solutions to the climate crisis must dodge the causes of the crisis. The ruling class uses deception and secrecy to limit public debate. When the facts become obvious and overwhelming corporate politicians simply refuse to debate it. Gag rules are back in fashion. When the people demand a Green New Deal the same politicians water it down and disarm it.
Power For Profit is Still the Prime Directive
Meanwhile, the Corporate State pursues the only agenda it has ever known: power and profit. If we accept corporate empire as normal, natural or eternal there is nothing left but better management, technical fixes, adaptation, and illusions of endless growth.
Since corporate capitalism is a “grow or die” system, it cannot consider limits even at a time when planetary limits are on display for all to see and verified by our best science. For example, there is no place in corporate plans for the conservation of energy despite the fact that energy not used is the truest form of clean energy. Instead of keeping in the ground, it’s always more and more.
Former Trump Secretary of State and former Exxon-Mobile CEO, Rex Tillerson repeats the managerial view.
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