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There was some sense in the air in the spring of 2020 that many things were not quite normal. Here we had most governments in the world locking down their populations with extreme policies, wrecking economies and long-settled traditions of rights and liberties, while fake scientists took over the airwaves and blasted us daily and hourly with crazy messages of compliance.

It was a lonely time to be incredulous. Most of the people I would have thought would cry foul simply stopped talking. Most of what I saw on social media seemed all about conformity with the insanity. When someone would pop up to raise questions here and there, the account was shouted down brutally and socially punished for deviating from the narrative. This further discouraged people from objecting.

So on it went for months, and then got worse with the nutty masking practices and the vaccine. Suddenly every major voice from pop culture and the movies became a voice for the practice of medicine. These are people who would never recommend pharmaceuticals to people they don’t know. They are not professionals and are in no position to do so. But when the time came, they were all cocksure that getting the shot was the way to go for absolutely everyone.

One possible explanation of the unfolding frenzy was simply that society had gone mad. There is surely truth in that. History is replete with examples of such things, and I had studied them for years. We always believe that in our own times, we are too enlightened and informed for such things but apparently not. The same mad passions that led to the witch burnings, the red scares, and even the bonfire of the vanities are still with us, ready to be unleashed under the right conditions.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

It Will Happen Suddenly

November 27, 2023

It Will Happen Suddenly

As the Great Unravelling progresses, we shall be seeing many negative developments, some of them unprecedented.

Only a year ago, the average person was still hanging on to the belief that the world is in a state of recovery, that, however tentative, the economy was on the mend.

And this is understandable. After all, the media have been doing a bang-up job of explaining the situation in a way that treats recovery as a general assumption. The only point of discussion is the method applied to achieve the recovery, but the recovery itself is treated as a given.

However, as thorough a distraction as the media (and the governments of the world) have provided, the average person has begun to recognise that something is fundamentally wrong. He now has a gut feeling that, even if he is not well-versed enough to describe in economic terms what is incorrect in the endless chatter he sees on his television, he now senses that the situation will not end well.

I tend to liken his situation to someone who suddenly finds all the lights off in his house. He stumbles around in the dark, trying to feel his way. Although he can picture in his mind what the layout of his house is, he is having trouble navigating, often bumping into things. This is similar to the attempt to see through the media and government smokescreens during normal times.

But soon, as his government undergoes collapse, he will be getting some bigger surprises. He will find that the furniture has inexplicably been moved around. Objects are not where they are supposed to be, and it is no longer possible to reason his way through the problem of navigating in the dark.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Crash Will Be Spectacular

November 22, 2023

THE CRASH WILL BE SPECTACULAR

“Interest on the federal debt is now so immense that it’s consuming 40% of all personal income taxes… If federal finances continue on their current path, we are only a few years from the entirety of income taxes being needed to finance the debt…”

The government collects $2.6 trillion of individual taxes at the point of a gun and threat of prison. Meanwhile they still operate at an annual deficit of $2 trillion. And this is before interest on the national debt starts to really skyrocket. Our Troll Secretary of the Treasury Yellen had the opportunity to lock in trillions of our national debt for 30 years at 2% rates, but purposely kept rolling it on a short-term basis.

Interest on the debt will surpass $1 trillion annually within the next year, and, as you can see, will be approaching $2 trillion per year in a few more years. The government already spends every dime of the taxes they collect. That means they are already printing more fiat and borrowing from the rest of the world in order to pay the interest on the debt they already have.

Foreign countries, in particular China and India, are not only not buying any new US Treasuries, but unloading the Treasuries they already have. With the BRICS purposefully moving away from the USD for their trade, it’s only a matter of time until our mountain of debt crashes down in an epic avalanche upon the unsuspecting American public. The writing is on the wall, and if you refuse to read it, you will be shocked and devastated when you see your supposed paper wealth evaporate.

Now you know why Biden and his handlers are attempting to provoke wars across the globe against those countries who they realize are engineering the demise of the USD as the basis for world domination and control. We have evil men ruling our nation and they would rather burn it all to the ground than lose their wealth, power and control.

JFK Assassination Doctors Break Silence, Dispute Key Government Claim

November 22, 2023

JFK Assassination Doctors Break Silence, Dispute Key Government Claim

Multiple doctors who were in the emergency room with President John F. Kennedy raised doubts about official narratives.

Several doctors who were in the emergency room when former President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 raised serious doubts about the official narrative that says a lone gunman was responsible, according to a new documentary featuring interviews conducted in 2013.

The federal Warren Commission established that two shots fired by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, who was located in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, struck President Kennedy from behind as he was traveling in a motorcade in Dallas. One of the bullets entered his upper back and exited near his larynx, while the second bullet entered the right side of his head and exited via his forehead.

The former president was breathing when he entered Parkland Hospital before he was pronounced dead about a half an hour later. However, what seven doctors said in the recent footage disputes the commission’s claims about the event.

Jacquelynn Lueth, executive producer of “JFK: What the Doctors Saw,” interviewed the seven Parkland doctors for the documentary. She wrote for CBS News last week that the doctors’ “recollections were precise and clear, as if the intervening decades had melted away.”

“Each of them reacted strongly when the autopsy pictures were projected on a screen,” Ms. Lueth wrote. “They didn’t agree on everything, but it became obvious that the way the president looked at Parkland did not match the autopsy photos taken at Bethesda even before the official autopsy began.”

She added that the Parkland doctors “had no agenda other than trying to save the president’s life” but stipulated that those who witnessed the wound to the president’s neck “believed it was an entrance wound,” which would dispute the Warren Commission’s findings. “Several of them saw a gaping hole in the back of JFK’s head,” she said.…click on the above link to read the rest…

U.S. Financial Death Spiral – John Rubino

November 20, 2023

U.S. Financial Death Spiral – John Rubino

Analyst and financial writer John Rubino has a new warning about being fooled into thinking the economy is improving because inflation and interest rates have fallen some recently. Rubino says, “If the U.S. government is running crisis level deficits, which it is right now, borrowing money and paying interest on it means we are in a financial death spiral. The debt goes up, the interest on the debt goes up and that raises the debt even further, and you just spiral out of control. We are there right now. The official U.S. debt is $33.5 trillion. It’s growing by $1.7 trillion a year, and $1 trillion of that is interest costs. Interest costs are rising as the overall debt goes up. Then throw in this incredibly reckless military spending in the guise of foreign aid, and you get a society that has completely lost control. That’s where we are now. We are in the blowoff stage of a 70-year credit super-cycle. Those things do not end with a whimper, and they certainly do not end with a soft landing. They end with a bang, and the bang is going to be centered on the currency. People are going to look at this and say, ‘Do I really want to hold the currency or bonds of a country that is destroying its finances at this trajectory and this scale?’ The answer will be ‘No.’ At that point, it is game over for a deeply indebted economy. We are headed that way fast, and these wars are taking us that way even faster.”

If the Fed keeps raising interest rates, the economy tanks, but you protect the dollar. If you cut interest rates, you spike inflation even more, and the U.S. dollar tanks. Rubino says in the end, we get a “massive reset,” and the everything bubble explodes.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXX–Ecological Overshoot and Political Responses

November 20, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXX

September 21, 2021

Ecological Overshoot and Political Responses

Today’s post has been prompted by some thoughts regarding the inability of our political systems to respond in a timely manner to our plight of ecological overshoot penned by Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace, and posted by Alice Friedemann of energyskeptic.com.

I agree with virtually everything Rex argues, especially the role of self-interest by our political class for their apparent rejection of the notion of ecological overshoot and what needs to be done to address the negative impacts this predicament will have on our societies (we can’t avoid these impacts but we might be capable of mitigating their worst outcomes somewhat). My experience with government (I spent many years involved with unions/federations/councils and their political action committees, including chairing some and being directly involved in negotiating contracts, thus having to deal directly with senior administrators and politicians) and readings pertaining to various sociocultural areas (e.g., economics, geopolitics, political systems, pre/history, etc.) have solidified for me the notion that our sociopolitical institutions are for a variety of reasons the last place we should be looking to ‘correct our course’ and attempt to confront the many complex issues of our overshoot and that are beginning to become more obvious. In fact, it is likely (I believe guaranteed) that our ‘ruling class’ will continue to do the exact opposite of what is needed.

Government systems appear to be a means to an end for maintaining the power (and thus wealth) structures within our complex societies. The ‘elite’ of society uses the various governmental bureaucracies/institutions/agencies (as well as other areas they tend to control such as media, education, entertainment, etc.) to meet their primary objective: the control and/or expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams. Everything they do more or less is to help meet that end. And, yes, they do throw some bones to the masses periodically if only to keep them mollified, distracted, and less likely to rebel (as Noam Chomsky has argued so well, control of the people is one of the most important concerns of those who hold power and privilege); one of the more ‘effective’ means in my view is the theatrical performance we refer to as ‘elections’ — convincing the masses in ‘representative democracies’ that they have agency via the ballot box is perhaps one of the most successful scams the ruling class has accomplished for as Johann von Goethe observed: the easiest slave is the one who believes he is free.

Growth, the very antithesis of addressing ecological overshoot, is promoted by government to help in their pursuit of both wealth and power. But it also addresses the unfortunate consequence of the way we have sustained growth the last few decades: exponentially-exploding debt (somewhat north of 200 trillion U.S. dollars at present for the globe, and the larger the debt the larger and more sustained the payments to the ‘lenders/creators’ of the world’s various currencies — the financial institutions that seem to work hand-in-glove with our governments). This debt has not only turned our financial/economic/monetary systems into gargantuan Ponzi schemes, it has necessitated the continuation of growth in perpetuity to help pay off the debt (significant revenue for the financiers) and keep the Ponzi schemes from collapsing.

Of course, such infinite growth is a tad difficult on a finite planet so the other options of addressing our financial dilemmas is to increase taxes and/or inflate away the debt. Our feckless ‘leaders’ are attempting all three of these approaches to keep things from collapsing. They cheerlead and encourage growth, telling the masses it has only beneficial properties and minimising, ignoring, or denying the negative aspects. Taxes are expanded continually and applied to increasing numbers of economic interactions, although the wealthy have an almost infinite number of ways to minimise their tax obligations, unlike the masses. Inflation (which in its original form refers to ever-increasing money/credit printing but eventually results in price inflation which is what most people think of) is, in perfect Orwellian language use, said to be a positive force for our economy while it actually debases our currency which serves the purposes of the large debtors (governments and large corporations) but harms the masses because of the debauching of their ‘money’ as is becoming increasingly obvious as wealth inequality continues to explode.

For all of these reasons (and more) it is unlikely (I would actually put the likelihood at zero) our political systems would ever intentionally curtail the pursuit of growth for it is their seed corn. They will pursue and cheerlead it right up until collapse can no longer be denied, and then attempt to push it some more as they tell those experiencing precipitous decline to stop believing their lying eyes; and/or blame our failing societies on some foreign/domestic bogeymen, but certainly not them and their policies.

The government, as with the rest of the ruling class and unfortunately most people, will not hear the arguments about ecological overshoot at all. It matters not how much ‘science’, data, or evidence is thrown at them. Almost everyone but especially the elite are in total denial (or at least feigning it, perhaps just to reduce their cognitive dissonance). This is why I have abandoned any ‘hope’ that our ‘leaders’ will in any way address ecological overshoot even if they do admit it exists — if they do, it will likely be leveraged to pursue activities that not only enrich the ruling class further but make our overshoot worse, such as ‘clean’ energy which is anything but clean and certainly not sustainable as sold. And, unfortunately, the political systems (at least in so-called ‘representative’ democracies) have morphed into out-promising the other parties for what ‘goodies’ they will provide freely to citizens. More. More. More. Which, again, is the opposite of what is needed to counter our going even further into overshoot…not that it may matter much at this point given how far we are likely already past the most important tipping points.

As Rex argues, the ‘solutions’ that will matter most to people will be at the local level. Relocalistion of as much production and distribution of goods as possible (but especially potable water, food, and shelter needs — including that which is needed to deal with local weather/climate, such as wood for winter heating) is the best approach to be taking to help one’s community mitigate as much as possible the coming storm. It’s likely to get ugly and ‘government’ will be nowhere to be found to turn to; you will need to depend upon immediate family, friends, and community members so cultivate those relationships and work on getting them to understand our predicament and begin making your local community as self-sufficient and resilient as possible.

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXIX–Are We Being Duped Regarding Global Warming?

November 20, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXIX

August 17, 2021

Are We Being Duped Regarding Global Warming?

Today’s contemplation was prompted by an email my mum sent me. As she closes in on 80, I find that she’s becoming a bit more open-minded about things but remains somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to global warming/anthropogenic climate change. We periodically share thoughts on the state of the world, especially politics, and I think I’ve almost got her convinced to abandon her faith/trust in government…

Anyways, here is the comment about global warming she forwarded to me and my relatively quick response (typed up while I was engaged in replacing a floor/foundation for one of our greenhouses — I never considered a decade ago when I installed the first greenhouse, of three, that the mini-garden ties I was using to terrace our backyard would decay/rot so quickly so I am replacing them with concrete blocks and putting in a patio stone floor so that my eldest daughter who has taken over the greenhouse can have many years of use with it, hopefully). I have added some minor supplemental thoughts (in italics) and supporting links to a few sources (see endnotes).

Comment:

With global warming having become as much a political issue as a scientific inquiry, I went from wondering whether mankind might really be influencing the climate to someone questioning a science I do not understand. I am now worried we are being duped by people with an agenda, like keep the money gravy train running. No one has yet explained to my satisfaction the big ice age followed by warming then a mini-ice age, followed by warming, all before mankind was a significant presence on earth and did nothing but have a few campfires.

Response:

That human activity has an impact on our environment and ecological systems, I have little doubt. How could almost eight billion of us and our resource demands not? Especially the so-called ‘advanced’ economies[i]. There is growing evidence that shows that our industrial civilisation has surpassed several planetary biophysical limits and likely overloaded a number of the planet’s compensatory sinks due to the vast amounts of waste material produced in its quest to procure the minerals and energy that our tools require for their manufacture and pollutants produced through their use.[ii]

The issue with the focus on global warming/climate change/carbon emissions is multi-faceted —such stories are never as simple as we’re led to believe. Geologic history shows pretty clearly that the planet’s climate changes and probably most significantly as a result of the sun’s cycles.[iii]

Is human activity exacerbating natural cycles? Quite possibly[iv]. Is it as catastrophic as painted by some?[v] Only time can truly tell since modelling of complex systems is fraught with difficulties.[vi] One minor variation of one of many variables that are used to create future predictions can shift the eventual outcome significantly.[vii] Of course, humans don’t like uncertainty (which is really all that can be provided about the future — probabilistic scenarios that may or may not occur — no matter how complex one’s predictive model is) so we cling to and tend to believe forecasts that are at their root uncertain; their potential accuracy matters not.[viii]

One of the other complications of the narrative is that our ruling class always leverages crises to their advantage. Always. I have little doubt that the hyper focus on climate and carbon emissions is being used to pursue the ruling class’s primary motivation: control/expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams.[ix]

The ‘problem’ of climate change is always presented with ‘solutions’ but those ‘solutions’ do not address carbon emissions in the least; in fact, there’s a good argument to be made that they actually increase them.[x] Much as the ruling class manufactures consent for any policy that the masses might question/reject (almost always via significant propaganda campaigns), they have created a narrative that is designed to persuade people to believe something that is increasingly being shown to be completely false and little more than marketing/sloganeering.[xi]

These ‘solutions’ also, conveniently, increase the revenue streams of the ruling class via taxes and complete replacement/overhaul of virtually all important technology (e.g., ‘renewable’ energy, electric vehicles, etc.). Scratch even gently below the surface of the ‘clean/green’ energy story and you discover it’s all basically bullshit.[xii] These technologies not only are not sustainable because of their dependence upon finite resources (including very much on the fossil fuel platform itself), but their production is hugely ecologically destructive. We are being sold a load of crap on various fronts so that the sociopaths that ‘control’ our world can profit. This being said, we do face some significant environmental and resource depletion challenges.

Probably the most dire predicament we face is ecological overshoot — too damn many people (especially living in ‘advanced’ economies) for a planet with finite resources.[xiii] The constant push for growth (which really is just to prolong/support the gargantuan Ponzi that our financial/economic/monetary systems have become) is the exact opposite of what we likely need to be doing; as is the push to ‘electrify’ everything.[xiv] The unfortunate thing for the future is that any species that overshoots its natural carrying capacity has only one way to be rebalanced: a massive die-off.[xv] When that occurs (and how it unfolds) is anybody’s guess…

As much as we tend to believe we understand our world and its complexities, I would contend we do not; at least, not very well. To compensate for this uncertainty we have developed all sorts of psychological mechanisms that lead us to believe particular narratives with some ‘certainty’. The beginning of a recent paper that challenges the mainstream story surrounding ‘renewable’ energy (that has been presented as a panacea for reducing carbon emissions; although I would argue Peak Oil is a more troubling issue in the energy needs of industrial civilisation[xvi]) is pertinent to this idea: “We begin with a reminder that humans are storytellers by nature. We socially construct complex sets of facts, beliefs, and values that guide how we operate in the world. Indeed, humans act out of their socially constructed narratives as if they were real. All political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, cultural narratives — even scientific theories — are socially constructed “stories” that may or may not accurately reflect any aspect of reality they purport to represent. Once a particular construct has taken hold, its adherents are likely to treat it more seriously than opposing evidence from an alternate conceptual framework.”[xvii]

[i] https://archive.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/the-environment/general-analysis-on-the-environment/45393-how-much-of-the-worlds-resource-consumption-occurs-in-rich-countries.html; https://www.livescience.com/20308-greedy-nations-top-resource-users-earth.html

[ii] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800914001323; https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/1259855.full; https://ideas.ted.com/the-9-limits-of-our-planet-and-how-weve-raced-past-4-of-them/; https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2015-01-15-planetary-boundaries—an-update.html

[iii] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-does-sun-affect-our-climate; https://phys.org/news/2017-03-sun-impact-climate-quantified.html

[iv] https://sciencing.com/what-human-activities-affect-the-carbon-cycle-12083853.html; https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/680; https://phys.org/news/2010-12-human-affect-carbon.html

[v] https://www.populationconnectionaction.org/2021/08/12/ipcc-catastrophic-climate-change-is-coming/; https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1025898341/major-report-warns-climate-change-is-accelerating-and-humans-must-cut-emissions-; https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/deepadaptation.pdf

[vi] https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/complexsystems/introduction.html; https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf

[vii] https://issues.org/climate-change-scenarios-lost-touch-reality-pielke-ritchie/?fbclid=IwAR1dbpSNqPXWr9QyfC-fDzlWrvfswO3LLZKj08szexcCb_7h7uRW2j7Qv54

[viii] https://www.amazon.com/Future-Babble-Pundits-Hedgehogs-Foxes/dp/0452297575

[ix] https://www.counterpunch.org/20 , 15/10/06/yes-there-is-an-imperialist-ruling-class/; https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_globalelite07.htm

[x] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/jan/09/wind-turbines-increasing-carbon-emissions; https://www.amazon.com/Life-after-Fossil-Fuels-Alternative/dp/3030703347; https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/opinion/mondaycop22-lower-co2-emissions-with-lower-carbon-solar-energy/

[xi] https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499; https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598; https://planetofthehumans.com; https://www.brightgreenlies.com

[xii] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-renewable-energy-technologies; https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/715’ https://www.nap.edu/read/12619/chapter/7; https://www.altenergymag.com/article/2015/08/the-dark-side-of-renewable-energy-negative-impacts-of-renewables-on-the-environment/20963/; https://www.routledge.com/Environmental-Impacts-of-Renewable-Energy/Spellman/p/book/9781482249460; https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-environmental-impact-of-lithium-batteries/

[xiii] https://www.pnas.org/content/99/14/9266; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319810.Overshoot

[xiv] https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/our-economy-is-a-ponzi-scheme-8fc56b9e594f; https://eand.co/how-the-economy-became-one-giant-ponzi-scheme-4ac84bf18738; https://moneyweek.com/economy/global-economy/601657/why-our-economy-is-a-giant-ponzi-scheme

[xv] https://thesenecaeffect.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/humans-in-ecological-overshoot-collapse-now-to-avoid-a-larger-catastrophe/; https://www.earthovershoot.org/who-we-are/frequent-questions.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)

[xvi] https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/29458/peak-oil-decline-coronavirus-economy/; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/has-peak-oil-already-happened/; http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/liegl1/

[xvii] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4508/htm?fbclid=IwAR2ISt5shfV4wpFEc8jxbQnrrxyllyvZP-xDnoHhWrjGTQRIqUNfk3hOK1g

Big Brother Unchained: UK Government to Abolish Biometrics and Surveillance Safeguards As It Embraces Facial Recognition

November 1, 2023

Big Brother Unchained: UK Government to Abolish Biometrics and Surveillance Safeguards As It Embraces Facial Recognition

“The lack of attention being paid to [public safeguards] at such a crucial time is shocking, and destruction of the surveillance camera code that we’ve all been using successfully for over a decade is tantamount to vandalism.”

The United Kingdom is at the leading edge of many of the digital authoritarian trends sweeping ostensibly democratic nations. In one of the many dark ironies of our age, it is the government of George Orwell’s native Britain that is seeking to massively escalate its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technologies, despite the concerns raised about its potential impact. In late September, 180 rights groups and tech experts called on governments around the world to halt their use of facial recognition surveillance.

On the other side of the English channel, the EU Parliament has voted for a blanket ban on the use of LFR in public spaces, as too have some US cities. By contrast, the UK government is escalating its deployment of the controversial surveillance technology.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the son-in-law of Indian tech billionaire N R Narayana Murthy, is determined to transform the UK into a world leader in AI governance. Said governance apparently involves gutting many of the limited safeguards protecting the public from the potential downsides and dangers of AI, of which there are many. This, of course, is no accident; if there was any time the British public needed those safeguards, it would be right now, as the government unleashes facial recognition technologies across the urban landscape.

As we reported in early August, live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance, where people’s faces are biometrically scanned by cameras in real-time and checked against a database, is being used by an increasing number of UK retailers amid a sharp upsurge in shoplifting — with the blessing, of course, of the UK government…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Newsguard Case Highlights the Pentagon’s Censorship End-Around

October 28, 2023

Newsguard Case Highlights the Pentagon’s Censorship End-Around

The Consortium News lawsuit against a private news rating system lays out how the government can suppress speech by proxy

Monday, the independent website Consortium News filed suit against the United States of America and Newsguard Technologies. The complaint targeting both the government and a private media ratings service is an important one, putting the censorship-by-proxy system on trial.

On September 7, 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense gave an award of $749,387 to Newsguard Technologies, a private service that scores media outlets on “reliability” and “trust.” According to the suit, roughly 40,000 subscribers buy Newsguard subscriptions, getting in return a system of “Nutrition Labels” supposedly emphasizing “safe” content. Importantly, Newsguard’s customers include universities and libraries, whose users are presented with labels warning you that CBS is great and Tucker Carlson is dangerous:

Consortium News was labeled a purveyor of “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “false content,” and, worst of all, “anti-U.S.” This is despite the fact that, according to the suit, Newsguard only flagged six articles out of the tens of thousands Consortium News has published since the late award-winning reporter Robert Parry founded it in 1995. As Consortium News points out, Newsguard downgrades its entire 20,000+ library of available online articles with these flags based on the handful of edge cases, all of which involve criticism of U.S. foreign policy.

A particular irony is that Parry, a decorated AP and Newsweek reporter, founded Consortium News specifically to address topics suppressed by mainstream editors. Now Parry’s old site is being downgraded for dissenting reports on subjects like the 2014 Ukrainian coup and neo-Nazism in Ukraine, coincidentally topics that are “the subject of NewsGuard’s ‘Misinformation Fingerprints’ project that is under contract with the Cyber Command,” as the suit reads.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXI–Loss of Trust in Government: A Stage of Collapse

October 24, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXI

June 16, 2021

Loss of Trust in Government: A Stage of Collapse

Today’s contemplation is prompted by an online media article that argues for cancelling Canada Day, our national ‘celebration’ for the day the nation state of Canada was ‘born’ (July 1, 1867). I raise this topic for the growing sense of ‘disappointment’ with our national government and, more generally, of all government/politicians. A feeling that seems to be fairly widespread around the globe and, of course, waxes and wanes depending on media attention and events.

I am thinking of this loss of ‘trust’ within the framework of Dmitry Orlov’s thesis of societal ‘collapse’ that is presented in his book The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivor’s Toolkit.

Orlov argues that “my five stages of collapse…serve as mental milestones…[and each breaches] a specific level of trust or faith in the status quo. Although each stage causes physical, observable changes in the environment, these can be gradual, while the mental flip is generally quite swift” (p. 14).

Here are his five stages:
a) Financial collapse where faith in risk assessment and financial guarantees is lost.
b) Commercial collapse that witnesses a breakdown in trade and widespread shortages of necessities.
c) Political collapse through a loss of political class relevance and legitimacy.
d) Social collapse in which social institutions that could provide resources fail.
e) Cultural collapse that is exhibited by the disbanding of families into individuals competing for scarce resources.

The concept of the ‘nation state’ and how the ‘patriotism’ one feels towards it is manipulated by the-powers-that-be/elite/ruling class are interesting sociological/psychological areas to explore and reflect upon. One of the more interesting books/essays I have read about the ‘State’ is Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State. This particular section has stuck with me:

“The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service…[and that] we are the government…[But] the government is not ‘us.’ The government does not in any accurate sense ‘represent’ the majority of the people…Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area…Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate other actions of its individual subjects…[Moreover, the] State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively ‘peaceful’ the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society…The State has never been created by a ‘social contract’; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation…While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a ‘democratic’ government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects…[Thus] the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens…For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives…Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage.”

The ‘State’ works hard to legitimise its position and power (their primary motivation being the control/expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams). For the most part, it ‘controls’ (or, at least, heavily influences) all of those aspects of society that help to do this: legislative powers, military/security, education, money creation/distribution, taxing power, communications/media, etc..

They constantly ‘market’ themselves as representative, transparent, responsive, responsible, accountable, etc. when, in truth, the exact opposite tends to (is always?) the case. When one scratches at the surface, even gently, of the facade of what we are told is true about our governments and ‘representatives’ we find an upside down world of corruption, nepotism, self-serving interests, and manipulation. But question the status quo belief system and you are often characterised as traitorous or a conspiracy theorist because the curtain can never be drawn aside to show the emperor has no clothes. The group think and reduction of cognitive dissonance that maintains the illusion is strong.

Don’t like what the government is doing? Go vote them out of office. Problem is, citizens have zero agency via the ballot box. Nothing ever changes. The system remains. It continues to extract wealth (in terms of labour and resources) and expand ruinous policies (both environmental and social). The rich and powerful continue to pull the strings of, well, virtually everything.

And this is not some new historical phenomenon. The ‘evolution’ of complex societies and the hierarchical power structures/sociopolitical systems that develop in response to the growth of populations has often (always?) been dominated by a certain ‘caste’ of people who find themselves ‘above’ the others. This is particularly true as the society gets larger (both in numbers of citizens and geographic size) and ‘representatives’ lose touch with the ‘average’ person, socialising primarily within an echo chamber of sycophants and like-minded/educated people. As the saying goes: power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I’ve come to the conclusion that government, especially big government, is virtually the last place I am going look to for leadership, virtue, or even just common sense since their motivation is to subjugate the majority of us to serve their interests and that of their close supporters (primarily the rich and influential financiers), not mine, my family’s, or my community’s.

The System Isn’t Designed to Help You

October 20, 2023

The System Isn’t Designed to Help You

If climate change doesn’t kill you, it will bankrupt you.

It’s been about two months since the Lahaina fire, and the long term nature of their recovery is just starting to set in — for some at least. I know from first-hand experience that it takes months for some people to emerge enough from the fog of trauma to even start thinking about recovery.

Personally, I don’t like the word “recovery”.

It makes it sound like things can — and do — go back to the way they were before the fire (or the hurricane or the flood — pick your own mass climate disaster).

But they don’t. They can’t. Lahaina is gone. Forever.

Sure, something will come back — probably cookie-cutter multi-million dollar condos that the former residents can’t even dream of affording. But Lahaina is gone. Its residents can move forward, but they can’t “recover”. There is no going back.

And “moving forward” itself a long and cruelly painful process, and one during which I personally came to understand that the “system” — everything from FEMA to insurance companies to the tax system to banks to the government to the legal system — isn’t designed to help you, the disaster victim.

It isn’t that the system doesn’t work. It works exactly as designed.

But it’s just not designed to help you.

It helps others, or maybe no one at all, but if you manage to get what you need from the system, it’s almost by accident, or unintentional, or a byproduct of helping someone else.

I know a lot of people reading this will say, “you’re overreacting” or “you just had a bad experience”. I know that because I’ve been told this before by people who have never been through a climate disaster and who are just repeating the reassuring platitudes that we’re all programmed to repeat.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XV–Finite Energy, ‘Renewables’, and the Ruling Elite

October 20, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XV

May 21, 2021

Finite Energy, ‘Renewables’, and the Ruling Elite

Energy. It’s at the core of everything we do. Everything. Yet we take it for granted and rarely think about it and what the finiteness of our various energy sources means for us.

As Gail Tverberg of Our Finite World concludes in a recent thought-provoking article that should be read widely: “Needless to say, the powers that be do not want the general population to hear about issues of these kinds. We find ourselves with narrower and narrower news reports that provide only the version of the truth that politicians and news media want us to read.”

Instead of having a complex and very necessary discussion about the unsustainable path we are on (especially as it pertains to chasing the perpetual growth chalice) and attempting to mitigate the consequences of our choices, we are told all is well, that ‘science’, ‘human ingenuity’, and ‘technology’ will save the day, and we can maintain business-as-usual with just some minor ‘tweaks’ and/or a ‘green/clean’ energy transition. Pre/history, physics, and biology would suggest otherwise.

Here is my relatively long comment on a Tyee article discussing the International Energy Agency’s recent report that calls on all future fossil fuel projects to be abandoned and drastic reductions in demand in order to avoid irreparable climate change damage to our planet. The answer, however, will not be found in ‘renewable’ energy and related technologies as many contend because the underlying and fundamental issue of overshoot has been conveniently left out of the story.

Having followed the ‘energy’ dilemma for more than a decade I’ve come to better understand the complexities, nuances, and scheming that it entails; not all mind you, not by a long shot, but certainly better than the mainstream narratives provide. I have no incentive to cling to a particular storyline, none. I have discovered the following information through continued reading and questioning. My perspective on almost everything has shifted dramatically as a result — one cannot unlearn certain things once they’ve been exposed to them.

One has to ask oneself a few questions and keep in mind a number of facts when putting the puzzle together as to what exactly is going on; and energy applies to many, many issues in our world far, far beyond climate change because it is the fundamental basis of life and all this entails. I won’t/can’t post everything since it would involve a massive text, but here are a few pertinent issues to consider in the energy story and our fossil-fuel future.

First, fossil fuels are indeed a finite resource so their coming decline in use was inevitable. This is not only because they are finite but because of falling energy-return-on-energy-invested (EROEI). Given our tendency to exploit the low-hanging fruit first (use up the easy-to-access and cheapest-to-retrieve), the law of declining marginal utility (also known as diminishing returns) was destined to occur and our use of them diminish significantly. We now have to rely upon oil sands, tight oil, and deep-sea drilling to sustain or just barely improve extraction rates. This is not only not economical because of the complexities involved, but uses up increasing amounts of the energy extracted (to say little of the environmental impacts).

The energy industry and governments have known about this predicament for decades. It is not a surprise at all (several ‘research’ reports by government agencies/bureaucrats over the years are available that discuss the issue; to say little about the ‘academic’ discussions). Geophysicist Marion King Hubbert projected this situation while working for the Shell Oil Company in the mid-1900s and developed the Peak Oil Theory, which has more-or-less been quite accurate in its predictions, especially for conventional crude oil production. Given that the largest and most profitable conventional crude oil reserves have all been found and exploited, and the increasing costs and diminishing returns of alternative methods of extracting oil and gas, it’s really not surprising that the industry has greatly reduced capital expenditures in exploration and instead ventured into alternatives; there is little additional profit to be made in oil and gas — better to move to other energy sources and market them as a panacea that will not only address climate change but support our energy-intensive living standards. This dilemma is also outlined in the 1972 text Limits to Growth that used emerging computer simulations to explore various scenarios given the fact that we live on a planet with finite resources. Of the various models generated, we seem to be tracking most closely the Business-As-Usual one that projected problems arising for humanity as we entered this century (and peaking around 2050); problems/dilemmas due to a variety things, not least among them the consequences of population overshoot.

Second, transitioning to alternative sources of energy is not a simple nor straightforward shift; not even close. We have created a complex, interlinked world almost entirely dependent upon fossil fuels. This one-time, finite cache of energy reserves has underpinned virtually our entire ‘modern’ way of living. From the ability to create a complex energy-averaging system via globalised, long-distance trade routes to industrial agriculture that feeds our billions (some quite well, others not so much), oil and gas makes it possible. There are no alternatives that can replace fossil fuels for a number of reasons but mostly because many of our necessary industrial and extraction processes must use fossil fuels since alternatives are inadequate — and alternatives all rely upon these processes for their production, distribution, and maintenance. Rather than acknowledge this dilemma, we have crafted a narrative that such a transition is not only possible but will more or less be forced upon humanity for its own good (more on why I believe this is so below).

Much of our geopolitical and economic chaos over the past number of decades can be tied directly to our energy issues as well. Maneuvering by various nation states, in the Middle East especially, has a link to the massive fossil fuel reserves that have been discovered around the planet. Alliances with questionable governments and proxy wars with competing nations has been the storyline for some years now as access to and control of oil and gas reserves (among other important resources) has been paramount. The untethering of our currency to physical commodities (i.e., gold and silver) in the late 1960s and early 1970s (especially the abrogation of the Bretton Woods Agreement by the United States), and subsequent ever-increasing debasement of it, can be said to be one of the consequences of diminishing returns on our most important energy sources and attempts to counteract the energy decline — especially in the US where oil and gas production peaked about this time. Geopolitics is mostly if not always about control of resources, not about freeing a nation’s citizens from its tyrannical government and bringing ‘democracy’ to them — we chose which ‘tyrants’ we support and which we vilify (even within our own ‘democracies’).

Finally (although I could ramble on forever), the ruling class/oligarchs/elite (whatever you wish to term the power brokers and wealthy in society) have one primary motivation that drives them: the control/expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams — this has been the story of the ruling classes throughout pre/history. All other concerns either serve this first one or are secondary/tertiary. Energy is one of the most profitable of the various wealth-generating systems (control of the creation and distribution of fiat currency perhaps the most; along with taxing powers). What better way to ensure continued wealth generation than convincing everyone that a shift to alternative energy sources is necessary to save ourselves and planet, even if such a shift is impossible and untenable.

We cannot mitigate, let alone solve, the issues at hand for humanity and the planet if we do not correctly identify the cause(s). Clinging to a narrative that is primarily marketing propaganda might help to reduce the cognitive dissonance created by holding two or more beliefs that conflict with each other, but it does zero in addressing our needs. Holding on to the hope that we can continue to live as we have because ‘someone’ will solve these conundrums is in my opinion misplaced faith.

Our major dilemma is overshoot, defined simply as the point where a species has placed more demand on its environment/ecology than that system can naturally regenerate and sustain the population. The one-time cache of fossil fuels has allowed our species to proliferate (and helped to provide amazing wonders) well beyond the natural carrying capacity of our planet. And now that it is in terminal decline nature is sure to bring our species’ population back into alignment. Those at the top of society’s power structures are well aware of these issues for they have driven most of their actions and policies for decades. It is far better for them, however, if the masses are focused elsewhere and their use of propaganda to do this has a long history as well. We are being sold a comforting narrative about ‘clean/green’ energy while the underlying reality of what is occurring is being purposely ignored or dismissed, often as conjecture or conspiracy. The idea that we need to reduce our fossil fuel use to save the planet is convenient cover for the truth that fossil fuels are becoming too expensive to retrieve because the cheap-to-access and easy-to-retrieve reserves are quickly running out.

I’m increasingly doubtful we are going to face the ultimately very difficult decisions that need to be made (in fact, needed to be made decades ago) and we will continue to stumble along hoping and praying that all will work out just fine, thank you. Only time will tell how this all plays out for none of us can accurately predict the future but the path of decline/collapse seems fairly certain. Every complex society that has existed up to this point in history has experienced it and we are not significantly different when push comes to shove. If archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s thesis in his monograph The Collapse of Complex Societies is accurate, complex societies ‘collapse’ due to the inability to deal with stress surges because they have been experiencing diminishing returns on their investments in complexity; and this is exactly the situation with humanity’s investments in fossil fuels.

This is what I have been able to cobble together in the couple of hours of a few household chores and while enjoying my morning coffee. Now I will prepare to spend my usual day out and about our yard enhancing our fruit/vegetable gardens, and attempting to make our household a tad more resilient in light of the decline that is most assuredly upon us. You may or may not agree with my interpretation of things but I would implore you to explore the issues and certainly step outside of your comfort zone and consider a different paradigm because the ones pushed by the ruling class are not in your best interest.

The Westminster Declaration

October 20, 2023

“Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society”

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India[1] and Turkey[2] have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany[3] and the Supreme Court in Brazil[4] are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill[5], Scotland’s Hate Crime Act[6], the UK’s Online Safety Bill[7], and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill[8] threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.

But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh X–Who Do Representative Governments Actually Represent?

October 9, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh X

April 29, 2021

Monte Alban, Mexico (1988) Photo by author

Who Do Representative Governments Actually Represent?

Circumstances have kept me sidetracked from writing for a few months. As life has settled a bit, although the spring weather keeps me busy working in the food garden, I felt it time to post again. Here is a comment I wrote this morning in the Tyee in response to an article on corporate bailouts and a call to give government more power.

Almost all of us live within a narrative matrix that we exist in a fair and transparent world where the ruling class exists to serve the people of a particular territory, that government and its efforts/energies are directed primarily towards benefitting the citizens it is supposed to represent, and that the resources of the nation will be distributed in a way that is equitable and just. We are taught such a world exists through our government education systems and repeatedly told this via our corporate media. If glitches in the matrix occur, it’s because of some particular individual’s defect but never a systemic problem.

A look through pre/history and a gentle scratch at the surface of this general perspective, however, will show that this view is all bullshit. The ruling class exists to benefit itself, and this is always done at the expense of its citizens. They have created an elaborate narrative to market themselves as ‘representatives’ of the people in an ongoing and expansive attempt to legitimise their rule and power. And the vast majority of people believe the stories (primarily to reduce the cognitive dissonance that is created when the notion of living within a massive, propagandised world where one has little true agency in sociopolitical and socioeconomic matters collides with the sociocultural myths of ‘representative’ government and citizen participation).

Once you realise that the world you thought exists does not, you come to view situations such as corporate bailouts as part and parcel of the ruling class taking care of itself as they always do, and not in the least surprising. We can stamp our feet and shout as much as we want but such travesties of justice and righteousness have been going on since large, complex societies came into existence and it will continue to go on as long as they exist. Periodically a sacrificial corporate lamb is paraded out to demonstrate to the public the government’s not subservient to the oligarchs/elite, but this is all just part of the theatre. Occasionally a massive revolution comes along to try and shift the balance of power back to the citizenry, but mostly this simply results in one set of sociopathic elite being replaced by another equally sociopathic group of elite.

Giving government more power and control, as this author suggests, is not a solution by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it is probably the opposite of what we want and plays right into the hands of the ruling class (for example, the narrative that we can continue business as usual by electrifying everything and transitioning to non-fossil fuel alternative energies is mostly about shifting capital from one dead-end, unsustainable, resource-intensive, and ecologically-destructive industry to another equally dead-end, unsustainable, resource-intensive, and ecologically-destructive one so the financial/economic Ponzi we exist within can continue for a while longer and further enrich those at the top of our social power structures).

The best thing one can do is attempt to remove one’s family and local community from this delusional matrix as much as is possible. Yes, make your displeasure and contempt for the way things are known, especially at a local level, but focus on building your community’s self-sufficiency and -reliance. Reduce your consumption. Grow your own food. Re-localise as much as possible. Stop depending on both government and corporations. Stop feeding the beast for it will consume us all while selling us lies and stealing our ‘wealth’.

The Costs and Casualties of Government’s Information Total War

October 6, 2023

The Costs and Casualties of Government’s Information Total War

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”

This phrase, misattributed to Voltaire, has largely come to dominate—and confuse—our understanding of the importance of free speech in a free society. That misunderstanding seems to be at the heart of the very lukewarm response elicited by the exposure of “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” unearthed through discovery in Missouri v. Biden now before the Supreme Court.

The trouble with this framing of free speech is that it focuses on hateful speech, framing the imperative to defend the utterance of hateful speech as a form of polite, reciprocal tolerance, necessary for the smooth functioning of a liberal society. If ever there were a framing that caused one to miss the forest for the trees, this is it.

The primacy free speech enjoys here in the US has nothing whatever to do with some dewy-eyed ideal of tolerance. Rather, it owes its primacy to pragmatism. Freedom of speech is the best tool we have to ascertain the truth of any given matter. Like a sculptor transforming a shapeless piece of marble into a work of art, free and open debate chisels away at the falsehoods and misapprehensions in which the truth lays embedded. Restrict debate, and the gradual emergence of that truth will be delayed or deformed, with the result imperfect at times to the point of monstrosity.

The reason we must “defend to the death” the right to utter “intolerable speech,” is that failure to do so results in the swift and certain condemnation as “intolerable” all speech that diminishes the power or legitimacy of those in power…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

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