Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXLIII–Ruling Caste Responses to Societal Breakdown/Decline
August 3, 2023 (original posting date)
Mexico (1988). Picture by author.
Today’s Contemplation is composed of my comments on two different FB posts I came across yesterday.
The first is a reply to a comment to a MSN article regarding a possible Covid-19-type lockdown scenario based upon the declaration of a climate emergency. The second to an observation regarding Big Tech narrative management.
EF:
Warning: Doomer Alert…. IMHO Carter is the only prez in my living memory that ‘got it’ and tried (very unsuccessfully) to push an agenda of reasonable austerity to curb consumption growth rates. Almost 50yrs later and while trending along predicted curves (a la Club of Rome), we’re deeper in the muck than the 1970s predictions. This rumoured ‘climate emergency’ response is suspiciously a thinly veiled cover for “oh crap, there really is no more cheap energy and we can’t get away with unjust resource wars anymore, the sheeple are on to us”. How would the White House propose moving forward? Are they going to demand all nations take action? Let’s see them try that with China, etc. (or a small town😉), or perhaps Biden’s handlers are just ignorant enough to think they can launch a political solution that only addresses national actions. It’s all likely irrelevant anyhow. The lag in climate response to radical step function changes its decades long, and we haven’t yet even experienced the fallout from GHG warming from the time of Carter’s presidency. People think this is a hot, dry, fiery summer? Pffft. Hold my beer. The only ‘solution’ in the pipeline is one that’s neither voluntary, nor negotiable and deferrable. Collapse (due to PO) is going provide the radical step function change needed for the climate to respond. But, those of us alive today will never see the warming reversal, we’ll just be the last generation to experience life awash with the fruits of petroleum’s positive effects and be the first to experience exponential declines in late life standards of living as supply chains dry up or rot from corruption among the elites pining for control and insulation to their own losses. Our offspring will ride an accelerating journey over the cliff, and maybe some of their offspring will experience some reversal in 50–60yrs. Doubtful they’ll take notice, life is likely to be days filled with foraging for nutrition and fending off would be pillagers.
Me: Yes, we (the entire globe) needed to step down our expansion and frivolous habits decades ago (probably even longer, like with the first few complex societies millennia ago) but the narratives at the time of Carter’s attempt and the Club of Rome’s warning were increasingly influenced (and directed) by profit-seekers selling a Star Trek-type future full of technology and human ingenuity to counter the ‘doomers’[1].
It was difficult if not impossible to offset the ‘hopeful’ stories that were already circulating and those that arose in response to these warnings. Just as it still is today. The tales pushing ‘sustainability’ and/or further growth ‘powered’ by ‘renewables’ and those repeated ‘breakthroughs’ in fusion power and the like are ever present and everywhere — and they receive one hell of a lot more airtime than those that challenge the utopian future (to say little of most people’s propensity to be optimistic and/or hopeful, and defer to the tales weaved by the ‘experts/authority’ figures peddling them).
The various world governments, however, have known about this endgame of energy decline and eventual ‘collapse’ probably some time ago[2] but have (as sociopolitical ‘leaders’ tend to do with virtually every impending consequence of stupid decisions they have ‘led’, particularly economic) kicked-the-can-down-the-road while continuing to skim and scam what they can while they can, as has happened for millennia with every societal decline. They most certainly seem to be using the ‘climate emergency’ as ‘cover’ to continue their extractive schemes, dialling it down for the masses while attempting to sustain (possibly expand) their share of an ever-disappearing energy pie. And, I would argue that they have fastened upon carbon emissions as THE devil to trounce upon because they not only discovered a means of monetising this ever-present element but they have latched upon profit-gaining technologies that they have marketed as THE ‘solution’ to this particular aspect of human existence.
No surprise since pursing a ‘degrowth’ world (a powering down and simplification of pretty well everything in our complex societies) would put all their current wealth-generation/-extraction schemes in jeopardy — too say little about undercutting the foundation of the Ponzi-type scheme our financialised economic systems have become. Admitting that our overarching predicament is ecological overshoot and that in order to mitigate (or at least begin to reduce) the unavoidable fallout of this phenomena would require killing the goose laying the golden eggs for the ruling caste — as well as for all of us caught up in the scam.
Pre/history, however, shows pretty convincingly that we will experience the typical patterns that accompany all such declines. For example, living standards for the masses will deteriorate due to ever-increasing price inflation (mostly due to currency debasement as a result of money ‘printing’/credit creation) and because taxes will expand as the ruling caste attempts to sustain/expand their own standards. And, it is likely we will witness an increase/expansion of authoritarian/totalitarian sociopolitical systems as sociobehavioural control is attempted and expanded to deal with increasing unrest.
SH:
This is interesting… I posted a link to a Dr. John Campbell video in which he goes over some recent peer reviewed scientific research, from a noteworthy science journal… and Facebook warns that their “independent fact checkers have identified the research as being “false information”… Under the video in question, YouTube posts a notice that recommends consulting the CDC for the verity of the scientific research he’s reading from. Apparently Facebook and YouTube don’t know how science works… If the CDC and “independent fact checkers” are not getting their information from the latest peer reviewed science, then there’s something terribly wrong…
Me: Unfortunately, and as like so much else in our world, science has become quite politicised. It has not only been ‘infiltrated’ (like media) by those seeking to ‘manage’ social narratives but has increasingly controlled ‘incentives’ (i.e., grants, tenure) to ensure supportive ‘evidence’ exists. Perhaps worst of all it has attacked one of the foundations of the scientific process: skepticism. Big tech and ‘science’ have become tools of the ruling caste to steer the beliefs and thus behaviours of the masses. I expect this trend to continue and worsen as our decline speeds up.
Both of my responses (as is much of my thinking around these and related topics) are guided by archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s text The Collapse of Complex societies. Most importantly, in the case of these posts, is what the archaeological record suggests are the responses to societal breakdown/decline by the ruling caste.
Some of what Tainter argues as far as sociopolitical ‘collapse’ is concerned include:
-increasing numbers of citizens detaching from the larger sociopolitical entities and pursuing their own goals as they perceive the costs of participation as outweighing significantly the perceived benefits
-greater legitimisation activities and/or control (especially sociobehavioural) in an attempt to decrease inefficiencies and thereby prolong/sustain complexities; although, this becomes increasingly difficult as rising marginal costs due to declining resources sap economic strength
-this economic decline sees a concomitant rise in peasant revolts or, more often, apathy towards the well-being of the polity increases resulting in local entities breaking away from the centre (perhaps even militarily toppled)
-societal reserves are used to counter unexpected stresses or even just to maintain ‘normal’ operations
-greater investment is made in education and research and development but inflation and increased taxes increase the likelihood of collapse due to ever-increasing diminishing returns
The cyclical ‘collapse’ of complex societies is a result of our ‘success’. In addressing the ‘problems’ that arise from living in large, complex societies we not only create greater complexity (and thus fragility and dependency) but we increasingly drawdown the various resources we depend upon for supporting our living and we contribute, through our waste production, to a polluting of our environment. All of this results in diminishing returns on our investments in this ‘problem solving’ approach to living. These diminishing returns increase over time leading to an eventual ‘pillaging’ of surpluses and reserves, resulting in decreased living standards — particularly for the masses. Unrest increases leading the elite to implement increasing draconian approaches to their ‘rule’. Eventually more and more citizens opt out of the system through either migration or withdrawal of support for their ‘rulers’. Inevitably, sociopolitical collapse ensues requiring just the passage of time or a stress surge that can no longer be offset as societal reserves have been exhausted.
Throw ecological overshoot onto this inevitable decline process and not only are the cards irreversibly stacked against global industrial society but the possibility of any further such complex society arising from our ashes is significantly depressed given the level of resource drawdown and environmental degradation.
Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong?
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars):
Book 1: $2.99
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Book 3: $3.89
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Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.
It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1
A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
With a Foreword and Afterword by Michael Dowd, authors include: Max Wilbert; Tim Watkins; Mike Stasse; Dr. Bill Rees; Dr. Tim Morgan; Rob Mielcarski; Dr. Simon Michaux; Erik Michaels; Just Collapse’s Tristan Sykes & Dr. Kate Booth; Kevin Hester; Alice Friedemann; David Casey; and, Steve Bull.
The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.
Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.
In 2020 at the onset of the covid pandemic scare and right before the lockdowns I’ll never forget going on a grocery run on a Friday afternoon only to find near empty roads and near empty stores. The few other people shopping had a glassy stare in their eyes, like they were dazed or shell-shocked. For me and those I know that prep, it was just another day; for those that hadn’t prepped it was a nightmare of uncertainty.
In Montana we didn’t pay much heed to the lockdowns after the first month. In three months everything was basically back to normal except for the mask mandates which most people ignored. With more data available on the virus it was clear that the chance of death was greatly exaggerated. What scared us far more was the pervasive talk of vaccine passports in 2021. The proposed state and federal restrictions on people that refused to take the jab were familiar – This was the beginning of full blown tyranny unless we stood firm.
In the meantime there was a public rush to buy up as many necessities as they could afford. And of course, the covid stimulus measures helped to trigger a stagflationary crisis that had already been building in the US for many years.
In the face of so many potential threats preppers were still well protected. If vaccine passports became the norm and access to public places was blocked then we had food storage to get us through for a long time to come. If the buying panic and inflation led to a supply chain disaster then we were ready, along with the guns and ammo and training needed to keep what we had. If a fight was coming then we had the means to defend ourselves.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“…in April of 2020, I got a call from Rajeev Venkayya…he told me on the phone to stop writing about lockdowns…”
Four years later, many people are investigating how our lives were completely upended by a pandemic response. Over my time on the case, I’ve heard countless theories. It was Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, the Green New Deal, the CCP, Depopulation, Get Trump, Mail-In Ballots, and so on.
There is evidence to back them all.
The problem with having so many pieces of evidence and so many theories is that people can too easily get thrown off track, going on wild goose chases. It’s too much to follow through consistently, and this allows the perpetrators to hide their deeds.
For such situations, we can take recourse to Occam’s razor: the best explanation is the simplest one that explains the maximum number of facts. This is what I offer here.
Those in the know will be shocked by nothing herein. Those not in the know will be amazed at the audaciousness of the entire scheme. If it is true, there are surely documents and people who can confirm this. At least this model of thinking will assist in guiding thinking and research.
There are three parts to understanding what took place.
First, in late 2019 and perhaps as early as October, higher-ups in the biodefense industry and perhaps people like Anthony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar of the UK became aware of a lab leak at a US-funded bioweapons lab in Wuhan. This is a place that does gain-of-function research to produce both the pathogen and the antidote, just like in the movies. It’s gone on for decades in possibly hundreds of labs but this leak looked pretty bad, one with a fast-transmitting virus believed to be of high lethality.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“If the government can suspend your rights anytime it deems something is a crisis, you don’t have rights. You have permissions.” — “Pismo” on “X”
While our country sleepwalks through the deadly aftermath of the evil Covid-19 operation, the World Health Organization (WHO) puts the final touches on a nice bit of fuckery called its Pandemic Treaty on International Health Regulations (IHR) or “One Health” initiative, a Globalist power grab disguised in the saintly white robes of public health medicine. The agreement, to be finalized at the end of this month, will cede what’s left of your liberty to this unelected bureaucracy for the sake of global “equity and inclusivity,” meaning more lockdowns, constant surveillance, forced “vaccinations,” restrictions on medications, and censorship of anyone who voices a contrary opinion of these actions.
Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s Covid-19 all over again, a second crack at controlling everything you do and every choice you might make by a cabal of governments and corporations, in other words, an international gang of fascists. The WHO is an agency of the United Nations, run out of Switzerland. You might recall this is the same place where the World Economic Forum (the WEF, a.k.a. “Davos”) has its headquarters. For years, the WEF has been issuing blueprints for a techno-fascist global regime under which, they state baldly, “you will own nothing and be happy.” (And eat bugs.)
These birds are not kidding around, though anyone can see the megalomania on display, the grandiose will-to-power that seeks to subjugate the plebes of the world — and radically decrease our numbers — so that a remaining tiny elite can enter into a post-modern, techno-transhuman utopia uncluttered with us “useless eaters.” The corporate money and organizational mojo out of Davos is behind what amounts to a homicidal racketeering scheme masquerading as disease prevention.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
COVID-19 the path for a cashless future, according to Bahrain’s central bank chief at WEF.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) “globalism caravan” was in Saudi Arabia late last month, when one of these “special meeting” panels heard about the usefulness of what one might call “behavioral population lessons learned” during the Covid pandemic.
Specifically, regarding the current push to introduce central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) around the world.
The pandemic itself may have done a sudden “disappearing act” about two years ago – but it’s clearly seen by some as paving the way for a host of other things.
One – the vast majority of people responded to extreme movement and activity restrictions that profoundly affected their lives, plus vaccines – without basically any resistance.
And this by no means went unnoticed.
And that has clearly emboldened a certain class of policy-makers to make further assumptions, about other controversial policies (like CBDCs).
That’s in and of itself not a Middle East thing – many governments around the world want to do the exact same. Nevertheless, Humaidan for some reason “went there” and actually made the link between what some theorists see as “the great social experiment” – namely, the pandemic – and how it has opened the path for, effectively, corralling billions of people into a certain pattern of thinking and acting.
Humaidan had an interesting take on what “control over cash” means – according to him, central banks were previously “very much in control with all aspects of cash.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As we grew up, nearly all of us were inundated with stories of our glorious national fathers, our beautiful democracies, and so on. And being young, we for the most part believed them. The system gave us our prosperity, our comfort, our medicine, our sense of importance.
Soon enough we learned that the system was also stupid and perverse, but we found a way around that contradiction by blaming one segment of the system or another: The Blues or the Greens or the Reds were the problem; it could not, must not, be that the system itself is the problem.
Then came 2020, and the system revealed its true face.
I suppose I should be fair and add that the system wasn’t always as rotten as it is now, but regardless, it wasn’t able to prevent the rot that overtook it.
2020, In A Nasty Little Nutshell
The system would like everything except the daily outrages (one for the Blues, one for the Reds) to go down the Memory Hole. So I think it’s important to recap the revelations of 2020:
The system decreed who could work and who couldn’t.This was not done democratically; it was done by edict. “Democracy” did nothing to stop it.
People were arrested for going to church or synagogue. This was the real disgrace of the police forces. Are there any orders from their paymasters they won’t enforce upon us?
Political gangs roam the streets, beating, threatening and burning. Make no mistake, these are covertly authorized political gangs, serving political ends. This vile tactic goes back to ancient Rome at least, where gangs of thugs beat opponents in the streets.
“Science” said one thing then the opposite, supporting whatever power wanted...
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.”
My first article on the coming backlash – admittedly wildly optimistic – went to print April 24, 2020. After 6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a demand to reject “social distancing” and streaming-only life, plus widespread disgust at everything and everyone involved.
I was off by four years. I wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.
The forces that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and the administrative state at all levels of society.
There is every evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I had anticipated.
Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.
New literature is emerging to document it all.
The new book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is a viciously partisan, histrionic, and gravely inaccurate account that gets nearly everything wrong but one: vast swaths of the public are fed up, not with democracy but its opposite of ruling class hegemony…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
On Thursday, friend-of-the-blog Michael P. Senger posted an important essay to Substack, in which he asks whether the “Response to COVID” was “effectively a coup by the Western intelligence community.” Everyone should read it, as it summarises in one place a range of evidence that Senger and others have collected pointing to the role of the defence and intelligence actors in promoting lockdowns, especially in America.
Many readers have asked me in sometimes polite and sometimes highly hostile and dismissive ways to comment on these ideas for a long time now. I find this surprising, as I don’t disagree with any of Senger’s specific observations, and I don’t think they’re necessarily in conflict with my own theses of What Happened in 2020. I’ve long held that the bureaucracy succumbed to very radical ideas about how to suppress SARS-2 between February and March 2020, and as the defence and intelligence sectors are part of the institutional apparatus of the government, it’s only logical to think that they should’ve fallen prey to these ideas too. Perhaps it is true, though, that my overall interpretation of events departs somewhat from the Intelligence Coup Thesis. In what follows, I’ll try to explain why.
Senger and others have surely shown that key members of the American defence establishment were very worried about SARS-2 and willing to follow the lead of China in pandemic policy from the beginning. Their advocacy, however, seems to be of two types. Either it occurs very early but doesn’t seem to be about mass containment specifically, or it occurs rather later and indicates an endorsement of lockdowns around the same time everyone else was endorsing them.
Concerns are rising within energy industry circles that the White House might declare a climate emergency, reminiscent of the COVID-19 emergency declaration.
Tim Stewart, President of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, expressed this apprehension, stating such a move would equip the president with “vast and unchecked authority to shut down everything from communications to infrastructure.”
Mr. Stewart suggested that critical infrastructure, including water and electricity, could be impacted.
“They can literally do exactly what they did in COVID,” he said. He voiced worries over the potential to stifle dissenting voices and the indefinite nature of the ‘climate emergency.’
White House remains silent on speculations on climate emergency
The White House didn’t respond to requests to comment on these speculations.
President Joe Biden, although emphasizing the urgency of the “climate crisis,” has refrained from declaring an emergency. Yet, some Democrats and environmental groups continue to advocate for such a measure.
Momentum grows for climate emergency declaration
Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s (D-Ore.) “Climate Emergency Act of 2021” has received backing from about 60 Democrats. This legislation demands a climate-related emergency declaration from the Biden administration.
On another front, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres issued a dramatic message, declaring that “the era of global boiling has arrived.”
Divergent views on climate change action, criticism from Stewart
Concurrently, media outlets like the Los Angeles Times have suggested deliberate “occasional blackouts” to combat climate change, while The Guardian urges Biden to “declare a climate emergency” immediately.
Mr. Stewart criticized these reports as a “propaganda war” attempting to “condition the public to think it is their duty to the State to be miserable, cold, and hungry.”
I suppose that we should have known that this was inevitable. After establishing a precedent during the pandemic, now the elite apparently intend to impose lockdowns for other reasons as well. What I have detailed in this article is extremely alarming, and I hope that you will share it with everyone that you can. Climate change lockdowns are here, and if people don’t respond very strongly to this it is likely that we will soon see similar measures implemented all over the western world. The elite have always promised to do “whatever it takes” to fight climate change, and now we are finding out that they weren’t kidding.
Over in the UK, residents of Oxfordshire will now need a special permit to go from one “zone” of the city to another. But even if you have the permit, you will still only be allowed to go from one zone to another “a maximum of 100 days per year”…
Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the ’15 minute city’ agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.
Under the new scheme if residents want to leave their zone they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t. Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.
Are residents of Oxfordshire actually going to put up with this?
Update (Friday): The locked-down megacity of Shanghai eased pandemic restrictions this week and will see public transportation networks reopen as soon as Sunday. After two months, the city of 26 million people appears to have contained the spread of COVID-19 via China’s zero COVID policy.
Restarting Beijing could be problematic for the rest of the world. We laid this out Thursday. The city’s lockdown and reduced port capacity created a massive backlog of products that need to be loaded on container ships and hauled westward.
Maersk and Goldman Sachs (in two separate reports) outlined the immediate restart of Beijing would create renewed global supply chain congestion.
We told readers to monitor trans-Pacific container freight rates closely as a proxy for China’s restart.
New data from Fearnley Securities indicates container rates have finally rebounded after slumping for much of this year. This is an early indication that economic activity in Shanghai could be increasing as pandemic restrictions ease.
Fearnley’s Peder Nicolai Jarlsby expects a surge in freight volumes as container rates increase. He added this would be a bullish development for shares of A.P. Møller – Maersk A/S, the world’s largest container shipping company by capacity, and shipper Hapag-Lloyd.
Focusing on 40ft container freight rates on the Shanghai-Los Angeles shipping lane, prices have found higher lows and appear to be turning up after a 30% decline since peaking last September.
Goldman warned earlier this week: “We could see a resurgence of ship bottlenecks if sudden restarts in China lead to renewed sailings all at once.”
And if that’s the case, container rates for major shipping lines in the trans-Pacific region could increase more as shipping volumes surge. This would mean renewed supply chain congestion could hit US shores in late summer, perfect timing ahead of the US midterm elections.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The UK may have avoided a technical recession – two successive quarters of negative growth – in the first half of 2022, but a year from now this will be of little comfort. This is because – despite the protestations of the US Bidon administration – the downturn in economic activity in the latest (February) growth figures – 0.1 percent, down from 0.8 percent in January – has nothing to do with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Rather, the decline in economic activity is the result, primarily, of a massive global shortfall in energy, with fossil fuel extraction impaired by the lack of investment during the lockdowns, and with oil down some four million barrels a day from its November 2018 peak.
Last autumn, these energy shortages translated into painful spikes in prices, which helped fan the flames of a general inflation resulting from broken supply chains and the rapid spending of two-years’ worth of state pandemic handouts – mostly to corporations and the wealthier half of the population. Much of the additional demand generated by state spending, however, has already disappeared – in part due to the additional price of almost everything within the economy at a time when wages are failing to keep up.
In this, at least, the inflation of the 2020s is very different to its 1970s cousin. In those days, wages were protected by a combination of strong trade unions, governments committed to maintaining full-employment, and financial controls that prevented investor-flight. None of those constraints exists today and are not compensated for by a minimum wage which, if set too high, can only result in fewer jobs. In a few sectors of the economy – such as HGV haulage last autumn – market forces have driven up wages. Although even here, employers have preferred to offer golden handshakes rather than an increase in the hourly wage…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
For everything that happens, there is a reason for it to happen. Even for turning the former Free World into something that looks very much like the old “Evil Empire,” the Soviet Union. I understand that this series of reflections will be seen as controversial, but I thought that this matter is important and fascinating enough to deserve a discussion.
It all started two years ago when we were asked to stay home for two weeks “to flatten the curve.” Two years later, we are looking, bewildered, at the wreckage around us and asking ourselves: ‘what the hell has happened?’
In such a short time, we found that our world had turned into something very similar to one that we used to despite. The old Soviet Union, complete with heavy-handed police, censorship of the media, criminalization of dissent, internal passports, and the state intruding on matters that, once, were thought to be part of every citizen’s private decision sphere.
Surprising, perhaps. But it is a rule of the universe that everything that happens has a reason to happen. The Soviet Union was what it was because there were reasons for it to be that. It was not an alien world populated by little green men. It was an empire similar to the Western one, just a little smaller, and it concluded its cycle a few decades before us. We can learn a lot from its story.
Dmitri Orlov, born in Russia, was among the first who noted the parallel path that the Western and the Soviet empire were following. His first book was titled “Reinventing Collapse” (2011). Let me propose to you an excerpt from the book where Orlov tells us of an event he experienced in St. Petersburg in the years just after the collapse of the Union…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwald, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”— Rod Serling, Deaths-Head Revisited
In the politically charged, polarizing tug-of-war that is the debate over COVID-19, we find ourselves buffeted by fear over a viral pandemic that continues to wreak havoc with lives and the economy, threats of vaccine mandates and financial penalties for noncompliance, and discord over how to legislate the public good without sacrificing individual liberty.
The discord is getting more discordant by the day.
In other words, lock up the unvaccinated and use the military to determine who gets to be “free.”
These tactics have been used before.
This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.
For a glimpse at what the future might look like if such a policy were to be enforced, look beyond America’s borders.
Over the past month, as Wall Street turned increasingly optimistic on US growth alongside the Fed, with consensus (shaped by the Fed’s leaks and jawboning) now virtually certain of a March rate hike, we have been repeatedly warning that after a huge policy error in 2021 when the Fed erroneously said that inflation is “transitory” (it wasn’t), the central bank is on pace to make another just as big policy mistake in 2022 by hiking as many as 4 times and also running off its massive balance sheet… right into a global growth slowdown.
And, as we have also discussed in recent weeks, one place where this growth slowdown is emerging – besides the upcoming deterioration in US consumption where spending is now being funded to record rates by credit cards before it encounters a troubling air pocket – is China and its “covid-zero” policy in general, and its covid-locked down ports in particular.
But what until recently was a minority view confined to our modest website, has since expanded and as Bloomberg writes overnight, the effects of restrictions in China as the country maintains its Covid-zero policy “are starting to hit supply chains in the region.” As a result of the slow movement of goods through some of the country’s busiest and most important ports means shippers are now diverting to Shanghai, causing the types of knock-on delays at the world’s biggest container port that led to massive congestion bottlnecks last summer that eventually translated into a record number of container ships waiting off the coast of California, a glut that hasn’t been cleared to this day.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As we grew up, nearly all of us were inundated with stories of our glorious national fathers, our beautiful democracies, and so on. And being young, we for the most part believed them. The system gave us our prosperity, our comfort, our medicine, our sense of importance.
