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The timing of finally embracing risk and sacrifice as the only option left is exquisitely sensitive: finally caving in a moment too late leads to the system collapsing beyond recovery.

The sense that we’re approaching a tipping point into a crisis with no easy resolution is pervasive, a sense that beneath the veneer of normalcy (the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates and that will fix everything), we sense the precariousness of this brittle normalcy.

While many are uneasily scanning the horizon for geopolitical crises, others see the crisis emerging here at home, possibly a political crisis or a financial crisis that ensnares us all.

Few look at the decay of our social order as the source of crisis. Few seem to notice that corruption has become so normalized that we don’t even recognize the ubiquity and depth of our corruption; we tell ourselves that this isn’t corruption, it’s just healthy self-interest, the “invisible hand” of the market magically organizing our economy to optimize efficiency and productivity. This provides cover for our worship of self-interest, a polite phrase for limitless greed.

While the media glorifies illusions of salvation and grandeur (AI!), few look at what’s been lost in the decay of our social order, a list that starts with sacrifice for the common good and civic virtue.

The American Dream has a peculiarly truncated vision of sacrifice: we make individual sacrifices to advance our personal goals, but sacrifices for the common good are not part of the Dream: sacrifices for the sake of our fellow citizens are at best unnecessary and at worst a waste of money, something only chumps fall for.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Of Economic Crises and Pandemics: Facebook as Fact, Government as Truth, Big Pharma as God

December 30, 2022

Of Economic Crises and Pandemics: Facebook as Fact, Government as Truth, Big Pharma as God

If events since March 2020 have shown us anything, it is that fear is a powerful weapon for securing hegemony. Any government can manipulate fear about certain things while conveniently ignoring real dangers that a population faces.

Author and researcher Robert J Burrowes says:

…if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course.”

No panic because the controlling interests of the global food system have long profited from a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy that ensures people unnecessarily go hungry when corporate profit rather than need dictates policies.

US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and must be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.

During COVID, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated:

Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”

In the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.

Like other political leaders, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’. Those who questioned the COVID narrative – including world-renowned scientists – were smeared, shut down and censored.

It was an internationally orchestrated campaign involving governments, the big tech companies, media and the WHO, among others.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

What are our leaders doing?

June 20, 2022

What are our leaders doing?

What force is powerful enough to synchronize every leader in almost every country to do the wrong thing on almost every covid action without assuming every leader is evil and/or stupid?

Why has no one figured out what’s going on, including normally intelligent alt-media?

Let’s assume that most of our leaders are normal people, of average intelligence, with good intentions, and they care about the future of their children.

By normal I mean they are decent people with flaws, just like you and I.

By average intelligence I mean they probably have some high school level science, have read a few popular books, and maybe watched a few documentaries, but are not well grounded in the laws of physics, and their mathematics skills are modest at best. Like most people, they do not have a good understanding of energy and its relationship with everything, nor do they have a good grasp of what is technically feasible.

By good intentions I mean they want to do a good job for the people that elected them, while of course making a living, and perhaps providing some extras for their family if a benign opportunity arises, just as you or I would.

By caring about their children I mean they are genuinely worried about:

The threat of an economic crash caused by unsustainable debt and its associated everything bubble that is now flashing red and impossible to ignore.
The reality and threat of climate change that is now obvious to anyone that has been alive for more than a few decades.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rest is good, but resolving global crises means not looking away

January 20, 2022

Rest is good, but resolving global crises means not looking away

plastic by Gary Bell — Photo by Gary Bell/gettyimages.ca

When people do things they shouldn’t, they often try to distract attention from their actions. Guardian writer George Monbiot notes that many corporations fuelling the planet’s destruction spend significant resources to shift attention away from themselves and onto us.

“The deliberate effort to stop us seeing the bigger picture began in 1953 with a campaign called Keep America Beautiful. It was founded by packaging manufacturers, motivated by the profits they could make by replacing reusable containers with disposable plastic,” he writes. “In 2004, the advertising company Ogilvy & Mather, working for the oil giant BP, took this blame-shifting a step further by inventing the personal carbon footprint. It was a useful innovation, but it also had the effect of diverting political pressure from the producers of fossil fuels to consumers.”

“Greenwashing” is another way corporations divert attention from their true ecological impacts. As British psychology professor Steven Reicher points out, “One recent McDonald’s spot boasts of the way the company is recycling cooking oil into truck fuel, coffee cups into greetings cards, and plastic toys into children’s playgrounds. The problem is that it makes no mention of the fact that McDonald’s beef footprint alone constitutes 22m metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year.”

Facing the real issues often leaves us feeling anger, anxiety and despair. While these are reasonable responses to the environmental crises engulfing us, the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry has profited enormously by convincing us that fixing ourselves is the priority.

How do we balance the need for personal change with systemic change, when both are necessary?

Personal actions can create consumer demand for sustainably made products, model greener behaviours and foster empowerment. But focusing on the personal runs the risk of eclipsing our responsibility to also marshal systemic change.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Grappling with growth

August 18, 2021

Grappling with growth

Synergies and tensions between degrowth and people’s movements

We live in an age of converging crises. Only days ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a damning report on the state of the environmental crisis. At the same time, while a few countries are recuperating from the pandemic, an on-going third wave of Covid wreaks havoc across the Global South. In both crises, the economic imperative overrides other concerns and appears to render necessary changes illusory. Even among staunch proponents of our current economic system, calls for reform grow louder.¹ The health and environmental crises are illustrative of broader tendencies: environmental disasters, rising global inequality, political polarization, a strengthening of right-wing extremism, anti-immigrant policies, and accompanying human misery.

In light of this, movements are mobilizing. Beyond reform, they argue that systemic changes are needed. Their struggles take a holistic view, emphasizing how the individual crises are entangled and driven by underlying structural factors. A question moving increasingly to the center of attention is growth itself as a driver of social inequality and unsustainability. Critics of growth argue that reckoning with environmental devastation and social inequality is directly tied to leaving behind the growth-paradigm. Among the frameworks and movements criticizing growth, degrowth is especially prevalent.

Degrowth argues that environmental sustainability and social justice necessitate transitioning beyond growth-reliance. In order to address social and environmental issues, we have to transition towards societies that are not just smaller in size but also operate according to a different logic – a logic that is not determined by the market sphere.²

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nature is a jazz band, not a machine

August 3, 2021

Nature is a jazz band, not a machine

We treat it so at our peril

From genetic engineering to geoengineering, we treat nature as though it’s a machine. This view of nature has deep roots in Western thought, all the way to Descartes and Hobbs, but it’s a fundamental misconception with potentially disastrous consequences, argues Jeremy Lent.

Climate change, avers Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil and erstwhile US Secretary of State, “is an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.” This brief statement encapsulates how the metaphor of the machine underlies the way our mainstream culture views the natural world. It also hints at the grievous dangers involved in perceiving nature in this way.

This mechanistic worldview has deep roots in Western thought. The great pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, believed they were decoding “God’s book,” which was written in the language of mathematics. God was conceived as a great clockmaker, the “artificer” who constructed the intricate machine of nature so flawlessly that, once it was set in motion, there was nothing more to do (bar the occasional miracle) than let it run its course. “What is the heart, but a spring,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “and the nerves but so many strings?” Descartes flatly declared: “I do not recognize any difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone composes.”

In recent decades, the mechanistic conception of nature has been updated for the computer age, with popularizers of science such as Richard Dawkins arguing that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information” and as a result, an animal such as a bat “is a machine, whose internal electronics are so wired up that its wing muscles cause it to home in on insects, as an unconscious guided missile homes in on an aeroplane.”…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?

June 3, 2021

Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?

Back in April I published an article titled ‘Globalists Will Need Another Crisis In America As Their Reset Agenda Fails’. In it I noted an odd trend which many of us in the liberty media have become aware of over the years – Almost every major man-made catastrophe in the US and in many other parts of the world in the past couple decades has been preceded by a government or globalist “exercise”. These exercises and war games tend to mimic the exact disaster that would eventually strike the public only days or weeks later. Sometimes the mock disaster exercises and the real events happen at the same time.

The covid pandemic was no exception. It’s quite miraculous…

I have specifically outlined the bizarre “coincidence” of the World Economic Forum’s Event 201 exercise, a war game co-funded by Bill Gates and Johns Hopkins and launched in October of 2019. Event 201 simulated a global novel zoonotic coronavirus pandemic (supposedly spread from bats to people) that “required” a global lockdown response. Only two months later the real thing actually happened. Almost every aspect of the Covid event has played out exactly as was practiced during the WEF war game.

One very disturbing element of the covid response has been the coordinated suppression campaign by Big Tech platforms from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter. This campaign has sought to undermine or destroy any facts, data and opinions which run contrary to the government narrative on covid, even if the official narrative on covid ends up being completely wrong. The strategy was described in detail during Event 201 and it was executed with extreme efficiency among supposedly disconnected companies and governments around the world…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Too Much Centralization Is Turning Everything into a Political Crisis

September 20, 2020

Too Much Centralization Is Turning Everything into a Political Crisis

Is American politics reaching a breaking point? A recent study by researchers from Brown and Stanford Universities certainly paints a grim picture of the state of the national discourse. The study attempts to measure “affective polarization,” defined as the extent to which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than their own, in nine developed countries, including the United States. The study authors concluded that affective polarization has risen much faster and more drastically in the United States than in any of the other countries they studied (figure 1). They then speculated on possible explanations of increasing polarization, suggesting that changing party composition, increasing racial division, and 24-hour partisan cable news are convincing possible causes. Notably, the research was completed before the coronavirus pandemic or the police killing of George Floyd, two events that have only deepened political division.

burkett-trends_in_affective_polarization_by_country.jpg

While the study is interesting and well written, the authors completely fail to consider a more fundamental potential explanation of increasing polarization, one that is likely to be understood well by libertarians and federalists, who have long railed against the trend toward ever more usurpation of local and state sovereignty in American politics. I propose that the real culprit behind worsening polarization is the gargantuan federal government that has turned the entire country into an unceasing political battleground. When virtually all political issues are settled at the national level, the whole nation becomes a source of potential political opponents. Centralization changes the scale and with it the locus of political debate and conflict.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Review of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

May 12, 2020

Review of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

Introduction

This review is a critique of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System by Ian Angus. The review adopted a multi-theoretical framework that combines insights from socio-cognitive terminology theory (STT), legitimation code theory (LCT) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) to respond to some claims and a proposal discussed in the book. The review further appraises two essays in the appendix of the book that clarify some misconceptions and confusions on anthropocene discourse, particularly on whether the choice of the term anthropocene is appropriate. The review concludes with an analysis of the terms (climate change) and (global warming) with a view to show that: (a) the terminology of climate change discourse is also prone to variation and (b) the use of the terms (climate change) and (global warming) interchangeably in the book is indexical of growth in disciplinarity.

Background

Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System describes a new geological epoch (the anthropocene) and its impacts on the earth system. The book further identifies the possible cause of the present crisis of the earth system (fossil capitalism) and discusses the effects of fossil capitalism on the earth system (environmental degradation, climate change). The book concludes with a proposal on what needs to be done (eco-civilization and solidarity) to address the environmental crisis caused by exploration of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) for economic gains. The book is a critique of fossil fuel economy that is underpinned with Marxist Ecological Thinking and backed with epistemic inputs from cutting edge research in the sciences (Chemistry, Geology, Atmospheric Science, Geophysics, Hydrology, Marine, Meteorology and Cosmology) and the social sciences (Neo-classical Economics, Geography).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Could China’s Overlapping Crises Spiral Out of Control?

March 5, 2020

Could China’s Overlapping Crises Spiral Out of Control?

Threats, propaganda and the Orwellian dissolution of social trust cannot stop a withdrawal from the status quo.

Longtime readers know I’ve had an active interest in what differentiates empires/nations that survive crises and those that collapse. There is a lively academic literature on this topic, and it boils down to three general views:

1. Collapse is typically triggered by an external crisis that overwhelms the empire’s ability to handle it. Absent the external shock, the empire could have continued on for decades or even centuries.

2. Crises that could have been handled in the “Spring” of rapid expansion are fatal in “Winter” when the costs of maintaining complex systems exceeds the empire’s resources.

3. Civilization is cyclical and as population and consumption outstrip resources, the empire becomes increasingly vulnerable to external shocks.

External shocks include prolonged severe drought, pandemics and invasion. In many cases, the empire is beset by all three: some change in weather that reduces grain harvests, a pandemic introduced by trade or military adventure and/or invasion by forces from far-off lands with novel diseases and/or military technologies and tactics.

More controversial are claims that political structures become sclerotic and top-heavy after long periods of success, and these bloated, brittle hierarchies lose the flexibility and boldness needed to deal with multiple novel challenges hitting at the same time.

We lack internal-political records for most empires that have collapsed, but those records that have survived for the Western and Eastern Roman Empires suggest that eras of stability breed political sclerosis which manifests as a bloated, parasitic bureaucracy or as ruthless competition between elites that were once united in the expansive “Spring” phase.

By the “Winter” phase, the elite hierarchy is willing to sacrifice the unity needed to survive for its own short-term advantage.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Could a Green New Deal Save Civilization?

January 22, 2019

Could a Green New Deal Save Civilization?

To fully and systematically address the climate/energy crisis, the plan will have to be far broader in scope than what is currently being proposed. And while we need to mobilize society as a whole with a World War II-level of effort, the reality is that there’s never been a challenge like this before.

(Image: Michael Duffy)

The idea is infectious. Could a big government jobs and spending program succeed in kicking into gear the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and ultimately save us from catastrophic climate change? The energy transition is currently going way too slowly; it needs money and policy support. And many people would need job retraining in order to work in re-engineered, renewable-powered industrial systems. In the 1930s, the New Deal programs of Franklin Roosevelt helped create jobs while also building critical infrastructure, including rural electrification, roads, bridges, and government buildings. Today, as we confront the requirements to produce energy sustainably; to use it differently in transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture; and to reverse the current trend toward increasing economic inequality—in effect, to save and reinvent industrial civilization—the need is arguably much greater.

The public champions of the Green New Deal (GND) in the U.S. include Democratic progressive representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Deb Haaland, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Antonio Delgado. The idea is also supported by writer-activists Naomi Klein and Van Jones; by the Green Parties in the US and Europe; and by the Sierra Club, 350.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Climate Mobilization. The proposals currently circulating in Washington aim to provide 100 percent renewable energy in 10 to 20 years while supporting job retraining and aiding communities impacted by climate change. Some proposals also include a carbon tax (often with a fee-and-dividend structure that would rebate funds to low-income people so they could afford more costly energy services), incentives for green investment, public banks, measures to re-regulate the financial system, and the first steps toward a global Marshall Plan.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eco Crises: Doom & Gloom, Truth & Consequences

October 26, 2018

Eco Crises: Doom & Gloom, Truth & Consequences

Photo Source Sakeeb Sabakka | CC BY 2.0

…We can’t save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today….To all the politicians that pretend to take the climate question seriously, to all of you who know but choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent the catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself… Please treat the crisis as the crisis it is and give us a future.

— Greta Thunberg, 15 year-old climate activist speaking at the Helsinki climate demonstration, October 20, 2018

When I entered my interdisciplinary environmental graduate program, I already had years of work experience behind me as well as a lifetime of informal environmental education. I recognized the grim ecological picture. Some of my professors, however, were quick to admonish, “We can’t be gloom and doom.” Their other refrain was, “We can’t go back.” They offered no evidence for those two prescriptions with regard to the climate and ecological crises, yet their commands were common among environmental scholars. More than a decade later, we face far more dismal prospects for the future of humanity, but we are still loath to truly address them.

Doom and Gloom

In 1972, the Club of Rome, a consortium of scientists, economists, politicians, diplomats, and industrialists, produced a lengthy scientific report entitled Limits to Growth. Their work predicted a collapse of the human population due to our unchecked economic growth and resource depletion. While their estimates were condemned as alarmist and overreaching, independent researchers have updated the report for the 50^thanniversary of the club’s inception, and have largely found that the conclusions from the original still hold.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our opposable thumb

October 11, 2018

Our opposable thumb

“Stereoscopic vision, depth perception, certain emotions and other perceptions, and the ability to stretch our thumbs farther than most other species, the ability to build and destroy things, and many other traits individually or in combination separate us from other species, not necessarily all species though. Other animals with opposable thumbs include gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and other variants of apes; certain frogs, koalas, pandas, possums and opossums, and many birds have an opposable digit of some sort. Many dinosaurs had opposable digits as well. Granted, most of these are primates, as are we. I wonder if rationalization is something unique to humans. The ability to ponder may be as well.”

Humans are not the only species with an opposable thumb. We are not the species with the largest brain. We are not the only species to communicate or walk bipedal. So what does make Homo sapiens unique? Perhaps it has something to do with our imagination, our ability to ponder “what if?” and our stubborn persistence. Long ago I realized that I depend very strongly on my ability to imagine. Confronted by a challenging situation I imagine choices unfolding into the future. “Will this work?” I let my imagination run and a scenario plays out allowing me to decide “yes, I think this will work” or “no, I don’t think this will work.” I wonder, is imagination the real strength of Homo sapiens? It certainly helps when deciding a direction of action if we can picture a scenario in our head and imagine future outcome, assuming our assumptions are correct.

Now let’s take it one step further, what about belief in the absence of knowing? What does it mean that we can act even in the absence of logical argument? True story.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Three Crises That Will Synchronize a Global Meltdown by 2025

June 6, 2018

The Three Crises That Will Synchronize a Global Meltdown by 2025

We’re going to get a synchronized global dynamic, but it won’t be “growth” and stability, it will be DeGrowth and instability.

To understand the synchronized global meltdown that is on tap for the 2021-2025 period, we must first stipulate the relationship of “money” to energy:“money” is nothing more than a claim on future energy. If there’s no energy available to fuel the global economy, “money” will have little value.

The conventional economists assure us that energy is now a small part of the overall economy, so fluctuations in energy prices will have a limited effect on global prosperity. But what’s left of global prosperity when energy is unable to meet current demand at any price that consumers can afford?

The current “economic understanding” of energy and “money” is an artifact of a unique period of cheap, abundant fossil fuels. It is an article of faith in economics that energy will always become cheaper and more abundant as the pixie-dust of technology is irreversible. By the time fossil fuels become scarce many decades hence, we’ll all have cold-fusion generators, or micro-nuclear power plants or nearly free electricity from solar panels, and so on.

This is of course complete rubbish. To scale up any energy source to replace fossil fuels will require decades and tens of trillions of dollars in capital investment. In other words, energy development is a financial dynamic. Technology is only the first small piece of a much larger puzzle.

This becomes clear when we ponder the unwelcome reality that the fracking miracle has resulted in $250 billion in losses. You mean all those companies lost money exploiting the miracle technologies of fracking?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The environmental consequences of monetary dysfunction

March 29, 2018

The environmental consequences of monetary dysfunction

Dysfunction of the money-system underpins the problems of the world’s multiple converging crises. Discuss.

Might that assertion be taking an ideological position, encouraged by the echo chambers of like-minded twitterati? This piece is an attempt to tease out the nature of the underlying connection, and in doing so describe some of the attack surfaces that are available to those bent on change.

From an environmental perspective the most damaging money-system dysfunction is the misallocation of credit. Commercial banks have been given the responsibility of deciding who should receive loans – for capital investment, mortgages and asset purchases for example – and the privilege of charging interest on those loans. They are largely unconstrained in this process – while there are theoretical constraints, in practice their main concern is making sure they get their full whack of interest due over the term of the loan. They therefore generally prefer lending secured against an asset that they can repossess if necessary than against the uncertain (and difficult to assess – at least for today’s disconnected and centralised account managers) future productive capability of entrepreneurial projects. This is borne out by figures for productive investment which tend to show lending for productive use at about 15%.

The first consequence of this preference is that the banks find themselves in an unholy alliance with asset owners, with a joint interest in ever rising asset prices and a reluctance to moderate activity in asset markets lest their loans lose collateral value. They all know in their hearts that this will eventually mean painful busts. But they also know that when the time comes they will be bailed out by the government, that many of their more savvy and comfortably-connected friends will have disposed of their assets ahead of the peak, and that the greater part of the associated pain will be experienced by less well connected ‘outsiders’. There is no real sanction on the banks or their senior management from buying into this toxic cycle. So we should not be surprised when it repeats. They operate in any case with a sort of herd mentality, and taking a heterodox stance would fail the wine-bar peer-reviews. There is no way that this cycle can avoid the progressive concentration of wealth. (In passing we might note that this in turn puts a misplaced emphasis on philanthropy and volunteerism as means to address society’s ills.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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