CJ may believe in miracles but I don't

Why Everything Is Fucked. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec 21, 2019.

We all slid out of the womb an itty bitty helpless information sponge into a world full of mentally ill giants who couldn’t wait to fill our tiny skulls with all of their inner demons. And now everything, understandably, is fucked.

That’s basically our whole entire situation in a nutshell. You can add on as many extra details as you like–plutocracy, corruption, mass media propaganda, billionaire wine cave fundraisers, whatever–but ultimately our plight is due to the fact that every single human showed up on this planet completely helpless and knowing nothing, forced to trust crazy giants to give them the grand introductory tour.

Why were those giants crazy? Well you see, they got here the same way you did: small, slippery and completely clueless, surrounded by enormous gibbering lunatics who were all in a mad rush to teach them how to be insane.

And those giants came into the world under the exact same circumstances, as did the giants who came before them, and the giants who came before them, and so on.

It’s a grand old tradition of ours, ultimately stretching all the way back to our own evolutionary birth in this world and the emergence of a massive cerebral cortex in a mammal who up until that point had been primarily concerned with sneaking in a snack and a quick shag in between mad sprints away from sharp-fanged predators. This newfound capacity for complex abstract thought burst onto this frantic, confusing scene and was quickly seized and manipulated by the cleverer primates.

And thus human madness was born.

The most powerful early humans were the cleverest humans, the ones who understood how to use this new capacity for language and abstract thought to their own advantage. They realized that by simply saying something is true in a sufficiently confident way, they could persuade the less clever humans to treat it as true.

Those clever humans used this newfound ability to place themselves in charge, and to make a bunch of rules to be passed down from generation to generation proclaiming that the less powerful humans must submit to the more powerful humans. Over the generations these rules became more and more numerous and complex, weaving in moralism, codes of filial piety, and insane, power-serving religions glorifying meekness, obedience and poverty.

These power-serving rule sets were picked up and used to justify highly traumatizing behavior in the service of the powerful, from wars to genocides to institutionalized torture and brutal executions of the disobedient, and just within domestic power structures the institutionalized normalization of spousal rape and physical abuse in households all around the world.

This eons-long tidal wave of deep trauma and power-serving rules structures passed from generation to generation to generation picking up more and more demented flotsam and jetsam as it went along, to ultimately come crashing down upon your crowning head as you emerged from your mother’s body.

That is your legacy. That is everyone’s legacy. Countless generations of cumulative madness, washed into the present moment on a current of eons of exploitation and senseless cruelty stretching all the way back to the dawn of our species on this planet.

This heritage of madness is funneled straight into our sponge-like brains from the moment we emerge from the womb and all the way through an extremely traumatic and confusing ordeal known as childhood, after which we are handed the keys to the world and told “You’re an adult now. You’re in charge. See if you can figure out how to run this place better than we did.”

And we’re just like:



We never stood a goddamn chance. None of us did. The deck was stacked against us long before we got here.

And now you get political commentators constantly railing on about “Gosh, if only we could get people to stop listening to their televisions and vote third party and read World Socialist Website and turn up to demonstrations and take back the power of the people from our oppressors, we could turn this thing around!” Not realizing that everyone else in their country went through the same traumatic, confusing ordeal that they went through at the beginning of their lives, the only difference being that most of them got a lot less lucky in sorting out reality from madness. And not realizing that they themselves are still quite mad.

This is ultimately the answer to every question about why things are fucked right now. Why does it seem like nothing changes no matter who wins the election? Why do the wars keep expanding instead of ending? Why is the news man always lying? Why are they locking up that white-haired fellow for publishing facts? Why are those nuclear superpowers hurtling closer toward direct confrontation? Why are the rainforests vanishing? Why are the whales dying? Why are the mass shootings increasing? Why is everyone so miserable?

Because every adult on this planet started off tiny, helpless, impressionable, and surrounded by gargantuan madmen, and it made it almost impossible to be sane. That’s why.

Notice I said “almost”. It is still possible to find one’s way into a relationship with reality that is guided by truth and untainted by madness, but you’ve got to start way, way, way back at the beginning and deeply re-examine even your most fundamental assumptions about what’s true and real. Because it turns out that while the mad giants gave us information that was very useful for interacting with other mad giants, it was almost entirely useless for learning how to navigate through life in a wise and truthful way.

And that’s what I’m pointing to here: it’s important to get clear on just how far back the crazy goes and how fundamentally interwoven it is with the situation in which we now find ourselves. If you begin with the assumption that our problem is simply due to humans not voting and mobilizing correctly in alignment with the correct ideology, you’ll miss the real obstacle entirely. You’ve got to zoom the camera out much, much further to see the full picture.

Can you become a deeply sane individual, untainted by your ancient heritage of madness? With a lot of work and uncompromising self-honesty you can.

Can all humans become deeply sane and untainted by their ancient heritage of madness? It would take a miracle. A whole lot of miracles. Billions, to be precise.

But then, I believe in miracles.

_____________________________

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Heresies!

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• Heresies! The Obstacle to Solving Our Current Problems. Guy Crittenden. Dec. 2, 2019.

Paradoxically, global warming will unevenly affect the poles, disrupt the jet stream, and create colder winters in some places.

This article is not about the world's problems — though I'll use examples to make my point. Instead, the concern is how we discuss important issues, or rather our inability to do so due to a phenomenon that polarizes, nullifies or stultifies attempts to rationally evaluate challenges and solutions. I refer to the concept of "heresy" — a phenomenon that arises naturally from people's biases or circumscribed states of consciousness, that's sometimes encouraged as agitprop by individuals, governments and corporations, to achieve objectives of hegemony or natural resource exploitation (or other objectives).

We can most easily appreciate what a heresy is by considering ones that prevailed in older or very different cultures, where their absurdity is pronounced with distance; it's often tougher to identify and see past contemporary ones, in which we may be immersed like the proverbial fish that doesn't know about water.

Portrait of Giordano Bruno in "Opere." Unlike Galileo who compromised with the church elders, Bruno was burned at the stake for committing the heresy of saying the Earth revolves around the Sun. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org

Consider the situation in which  Galileo found himself when he explained to the medieval church elders his observing more planets in our solar system than the number recorded in the Bible. When the elders rejected his claim, Galileo invited them to look through his telescope and see for themselves.

"That device is an instrument of the devil," the elders replied, refusing to look through it.

Galileo had stumbled into a heresy: for the church authorities, a truth that contradicted the sacred text of the Bible was an impossibility. For them, the Bible was truth itself. Their dogma conditioned their thoughts such that anything counter to the dominant narrative was not only deemed wrong, automatically, but a dangerous affront. Subversion! Sedition! Galileo was sanctioned by the church and threatened with burning at the stake, not (as we'd assume) to punish him for his wayward thoughts so much as in the hope a short bout of intense suffering would cause him to accept and confess the truth in his dying moments and thereby be spared eternal suffering in the flames of hell. (Galileo played ball with the elders, at least enough to avoid this fate.)

When a friend gave me Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At years ago it was so outside my assumptions at the time I dismissed its claims about telepathy out of hand. It was a "heresy" to my world view in those days.

Naturally, we moderns think ourselves superior to these christian dogmatists, yet we should consider that every age has its dogmas, and ours is no exception. And neither am I. Years ago a friend gave me a book for my birthday. It was Cambridge scientist Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Unexplained Powers of Human Minds. The book — which you can read about here — is a serious scientific exploration of telepathy — a phenomenon that Sheldrake (in this and other books and experiments) demonstrates is real. (Really!) I started reading the book, but put it down quickly when the author explored how a person can somehow sense an unseen person's gaze, even from afar. At that time I firmly believed in a physical world made up of atoms in which telepathy simply wasn't possible. This so-called "realist" view contrasts with the "idealist" viewpoint (which I now espouse) that admits of such possibilities as the universe being made of conscious awareness (mind stuff, from which matter is derived).

Sheldrake has spent his career exposing the gaping holes in the materialists' assumptions. Using a theory of "morphic resonance"  Sheldrake has exasperated promoters of the materialist orthodoxy such as Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene), who generally refuse to debate him or look at his work, despite that Sheldrake's results are replicable using the scientific method. For them, telepathy is simply impossible in a material world, just as the number of planets stated in the Bible was an unshakable truth for the church elders. Telepathy is therefore a heresy, and heresies cannot be entertained.

Unlike a mere difference of opinion, a heresy threatens a dogma and its admission risks undermining the world view of adherents. (For some people, my statement about Sheldrake's telepathy findings will be reason enough to stop reading this article.) Sensing a threat to their comfortable view of a given matter, or even existence itself, many people will defend their paradigms unto their last dying breath, even if those paradigms don't ultimately serve their own interests, and even if they threaten to degrade or end life on this planet.

The CIA promoted the term "conspiracy theorist" to discredit anyone who dared question the official narrative of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Most people would be shocked how much evidence has surfaced in recent years that multiple gunmen fired on the president, and that Oswald might not have fired even a single shot.

Here's a list of some heresies I've discovered in contemporary culture — some substantial and others more trivial — the existence of which make discussion about problems and collaboration on solutions difficult, if not impossible. In no particular order:

• Paradoxes in climate science: At the top of this column I posted a chart from an article that discusses the paradox that global warming is expected to heat the planet unevenly, potentially confusing observers with conflicting signals. Warmer air in the far north will disrupt the Arctic jet stream, causing it to "wobble" and spread cold Arctic air further south for periods of time. How often have we heard someone say, "If global warming is real, how come this is one of the coldest winters we've ever experienced?" My point here isn't to make any final pronouncement about the degree to which human activity is causing this or that specific change to the climate (I leave that to the experts); instead, I present this as an example of an issue that will play into many people's confirmation bias. If they're inclined to believe the narrative of anthropogenic climate change, they'll accept the paradox of colder winter spells in a world that's warming overall. If they're inclined to think it's all a hoax, they'll place greater weight on their direct observation of cold weather contradicting (what they regard as) dubious claims.
  
  This bifurcation of opinion is actively stoked by activists on both sides, who are bellicose at times, to the extent that some very important conversations have become almost impossible. Anyone questioning the global warming narrative is labeled a "denier" which, as with the Holocaust, silences discussion. People on the other side may similarly consider believers "dupes." Meaningful debate doesn't occur because the issue is somehow sacrosanct. This is dangerous in regard to such a potentially serious concern. Discussion of climate change is a heresy now if it doesn't conform to prescribed boundaries.
  
  Some readers might think I'm offering a dog whistle here to those who don't believe the burning of fossil fuels poses a risk to the climate and ecosystems. Not at all. Instead, I invite people to look at the risks that arise when a viewpoint is deemed heretical. In the case of global warming, Canadian journalist and activist Cory Morningstar encountered vitriol from some readers to her in-depth article series The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg because they couldn't distinguish the point Morningstar was making from their ideological assumptions. (I took some arrows even defending her.) Morningstar argues that the same network of  neoliberal policymakers, global monopoly capital corporations, and non-profit organizations that have helped facilitate neocolonial and regime-change agendas cannot be trusted to democratically discover and  implement solutions for climate, especially since some helped caused (or funded) the problem in the first place.
  
  Ergo the absurd spectacle of Extinction Rebellion members protesting outside the Bolivian Embassy in London, repeating propaganda that socialist president Evo Morales helped set the Amazon fires which he in fact helped fight directly. (The Guardiannewspaper ran a particularly odious articleasserting this claim.) Extinction Rebellion was led to unwittingly support a narrative that was ultimately part of selling a violent US-backed coup against one of the world's most egalitarian countries, and a popular democratically elected president who has done more for the majority of his country's population — most of whom are indigenous — than any other. (US-trained death squads are now hunting down political dissdents in that country and killing them, and the new government's first action in power was to transfer Bolivia's reserves to the United States.) This dovetails nicely with Morningstar's concern: that we'll find the right answersto the wrong questions. That top-down solutions will be imposed by corporate and other oligarchies rather than upward-flowing solutions from society's grassroots. That technocratic schemes that don't solve the problem (but which enrich investors) will win favour via public relations schemes from "Astroturf" groups in what Morningstar calls the Non Profit Industrial Complex, in place of sweeping cultural and other shifts that could come from other places (e.g., from speaking with indigenous leaders).
  
  No discussion was possible even (and especially) with committed environmentalists because Morningstar ran into a heresy: she sounded the alarm against the possible hijacking of the environmental movement by forces such as the deep state and neoliberal foundations; but all the activists could hear — because of the heresy — was Morningstar "attacking" idealistic young Greta Thunberg (which she was not) like she was kicking Bambi. Fronting their plans with a young woman arguably enabled the backers of questionable schemes to silence debate, and avoid a conversation we desperately need to have. The proponents of globalized monopoly capital now control a conversation that should include questioning the future of globalized monopoly capital! Many activists can't see this; instead, it looks to them like the polluters and proponents of endless war have come around at last! Pity the fool who gets in their way, as they cheerlead for solutions that may not work.
• Political "conspiracy theories": The CIA famously promoted the term "conspiracy theory" to discredit anyone questioning the official findings of the Warren Commission in regard to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This was so effective that for more than a half century the reality of what happened on that fateful day in 1963 has remained obscured for most people, even though subsequent investigations (including some official ones) substantiate there was a conspiracy to kill the president and Oswald didn't act alone (or even at all). Though the sands of public opinion are shifting and more than 70 per cent of Americans today believe there was a coverup in regard to JFK's murder, for the longest time the JFK narrative was a heresy and anyone questioning it was deemed a tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. The same is now true for anyone questioning the official explanation for the events of 9/11, with skeptics labeled "truthers" despite the emergence of disturbing evidence that at least some people within the US government knew about the attacks ahead of time. (Again, I'm not saying what happened, but find it galling we can't talk about this stuff, especially with Facebook and other social media platforms now regularly deleting and programs or articles that run counter to official narratives.)
  
  Fast-forward to today and we see all kinds of "heresies" that propagandists from the state, the corporate world and the mainstream media promote, to manage public opinion and manufacture consent for perpetual war. As much as a billion dollars (perhaps more) has been spent by the United States, the UK and other countries reframing President Assad of Syria as a "brutal dictator murdering his own people" to build acceptance of the invasion of that country by violent militants in a proxy war that has little to do with humanitarian concerns and everything to do with the hegemonic goals of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, plus Israeli and the US regional interests, and competing gas pipe projects, as Robert Kennedy Jr pointed out in a brilliant article in Politico: "Why the Arabs don't want us in Syria."
  
  Questioning the official Syria narrative is a heresy, as US presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (who met with Assad) has discovered, with talk show hosts sandbagging her with leading questions that assume, for instance, Assad has used poison gas against his own people (the presumption being that a person of conscience would not meet with such a monster). Gabbard is in a double bind: she's damned if she says nothing, and also if she takes the time (which most TV programs don't afford) to explain that these accusations are false, having been debunked by Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh in a series of articles in the London Review of Books (the only outlet that would publish the news). Unsurprisingly, the shills for war on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News never mention Hersh's articles "Whose Sarin?" and "The Red Line and the Rat Line" the content of which were enough to stop President Obama's plan to put a No Fly Zone over Syria, which would have ultimately led to ISIS and al-Qaida affiliates taking over the country and destroying it just as they did Libya.
  
  Recently a similar debunking occurred when first one, then a second, whistleblower, emerged from within the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPWC) to reveal the organization falsified results of their investigationinto an alleged chemical weapons attack in a "rebel controlled" area of Syria, supporting the story that chlorine gas bombs were dropped by Assad's forces on a building, when it was apparent they'd been manually placed, and tests showed no signs of chlorine beyond normal background levels. This is a very serious matter: an international organization that evaluates the threat of chemical warfare has been caught lying about events that provided the excuse for cruise missiles attacks against against a sovereign country, one of whose allies is a nuclear power. With a narcissist in the White House with access to the nuclear launch codes, can the world really endure "heresies" such as the one that prevents informed discussion about the proxy war on Syria? And with what's been threatened against Iran, are we not risking a nuclear conflagration here?

James Le Mesurier, a former British military officer, founded the White Helmets rescue operation in the so-called "rebel-controlled" area of Syria. Le Mesurier was found dead under suspicious circumstances in Turkey and the White Helmets have been exposed as a propaganda construct. Perhaps your opinion differs. Only you can discover if this is a heresy (for you).

It would be a long article indeed that listed and evaluated every heresy out there that stifles informed debate. You can seek out other heresies for yourself, of which there are many. Here's a short list of ideas to get you started. Again, my purpose in listing these items isn't to sway your opinion one way or another; instead, it's to alert you to the heresies associated with them that may prevent an open-eyed investigation and subsequent conversation. I invite readers to look past their own confirmation bias and investigate at least a few of these subjects for themselves. Some of these items are so heretical that my even listing them will trigger some people, so be warned! (And note that  a strong emotional reaction is often a tell that a heresy is in place.) My list for your consideration includes:

• Coup d'état in Latin America (and elsewhere): In a disturbing recapitulation of the dirty wars of the 1970s and 80s in places like Chile, Argentina and Guatemala, CIA-backed coups are underway in Central and South America. Compare the way events are reported in the mainstream news about Venezuela and Bolivia (especially in regard to securing cheap access to Lithium for Green New Deal technologies) with reports from independent alternative media such as Pushback with Aaron Matéor The Jimmy Dore Showand you'll find yourself going through the looking glass into apparent alternate realities. You'll soon find yourself picking up on other heresies in mainstream reporting.
• Middle East and African conflicts: I've already mentioned Syria. Dig around a bit and you'll find more heresies associated with that conflict zone, and others in the region. MSNBC managed to go a whole year without mentioning (even once) the siege war Saudi Arabia is waging with US help against Yemen — the poorest country in the Middle East. It's a heresy in mainstream media to talk honestly about the so-called White Helmets rescue organization about which a flattering Academy Award winning documentary was made, that UK independent journalist Vanessa Beeleyhas exposed as a propaganda construct founded by former British military officer James Le Mesurier (who was recently found dead in suspicious circumstances). Of course, the media disparages Beeley and the independent outlets that publish her work as "conspiracy theory" outlets, when the real conspiracy the one from the corporate and state media that keeps the public in the dark about the real nature of the Syrian war. Heresy also swirls around the State of Israel and its relationship with the Palestinian people, about which insights may be gleaned from such films as The Occupation of the American Mind, narrated by Roger Waters (which compares and contrasts how the conflict in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem is reported in the United States against coverage of those topics in other places, such as Europe).
• Vaccines and cancer treatments: It's impossible to question such the current vaccine schedule for children in the United States and its growing number of jabs without being called a child or baby killer. Without trying to convince you of anything, I simply invite readers to consider that questioning vaccine safety is a heresy — so much so that no link can be found on Google to an excellent documentary series I wanted to share. That's right: the world's largest search engine is making it impossible (or at least difficult) to find information that contradicts mainstream assumptions about vaccines. Even if you think vaccines are generally safe, please understand: this is an example of a heresy.  I believe (and Robert Kennedy Jr has won court cases over this) that corruption can arise when a whole class of drugs is deemed too important to discuss critically, with anyone who dares to do so deemed unstable and dangerous. The same is true of cancer treatments, where acceptance is widespread of conventional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation, some of which oncologists (when polled) would not accept for themselves. It can be heretical to question these treatments and also to promote alternative ones such as high-THC cannabis oil, despite mounting evidence about cannabis' potential efficacy in killing cancer cells with minimal side effects.
• Other heresies: There are many heresies and orthodoxies in politics, geopolitics and religion (to name but a few categories). it's actually fun to discover new ones for yourself. The more obvious ones are less interesting (e.g., adultery is a heresy in fundamentalist religions). More interesting are the ones that fly under the radar, subtly conditioning people's minds to accept policies and practices that aren't in their interests. One example is the way many Americans think they must support either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and that no new third party could ever win an election. For a while it was a heresy to question the Russiagate conspiracy theory that was heavily promoted by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. (The theory was eventually debunked, notably in an article series Aaron Maté wrote for The Nation.) For some people it's a heresy to question "capitalism," as though any investigation of its pros and cons opens the doors to a totalitarian dystopia. (Ironically, failing to question capitalism may be leading to just such an outcome in North American and some European countries.) Many people cannot distinguish capitalism as an economic system from forms of governance such as socialism, and this is not an accident. Capitalist countries tend to encourage just such confusion. And then there are the whistleblowers, some of whom have been vilified in the press. Julian Assange, for example, languishes in a British prison and has been abandoned by many liberal supporters after a multi-year smear campaign impugned his character, funded by intelligence agencies furious about his exposure of American war crimes in Iraq (among other things). The man has become a living heresy. (Thankfully Australian blogger Caitlin Johnstone wrote a detailed refutationof each and every aspersion.)

Here's to your happy hunting for heresies! May you have the courage to confront them whenever you find them, and especially to your having the courage to consider the options that challenge your most deeply-held beliefs. To help you in your search, I suggest you cultivate news and information  resources outside the mainstream that are (ideally) audience funded and not beholden to state or corporate agendas. I wrote an article about just that recently with useful links that you can find here and another one about the propaganda bubble in which we live (that I call The Construct) which you can read here.

Is Net Zero Emissions an Impossible Goal?

Is Net Zero Emissions an Impossible Goal? John Baez, Nautilus. Nov. 28, 2019.

What it would take to suck more carbon dioxide out of the air than we put in.

Water rushes into Venice’s city council chamber just minutes after the local government rejects measures to combat climate change. Wildfires consume eastern Australia as fire danger soars past “severe” and “extreme” to “catastrophic” in parts of New South Wales. Ice levels in the Chukchi Sea, north of Alaska, hit record lows. England sees floods all across the country. And that’s just this week, as I write this.

Human-caused climate change, and the disasters it brings, are here. In fact, they’re just getting started. What will things be like in another decade, or century?

It depends on what we do. If our goal is to stop global warming, the best way is to cut carbon emissions now—to zero. The United Kingdom, Denmark, and Norway have passed laws requiring net zero emissions by 2050. Sweden is aiming at 2045. But the biggest emitters—China, the United States, and India—are dragging their heels. So to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels by 2100, it’s becoming more and more likely that we’ll need negative carbon emissions. That is, we’ll need to fix the air. We’ll need to suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than we put in.

This may seem like a laughably ambitious goal. Can we actually do it? Or is it just a fantasy? I want to give you a sense of what it would take. But first, here’s one reason this matters. Most people don’t realize that large negative carbon emissions are assumed in many of the more optimistic climate scenarios. Even some policymakers tasked with dealing with climate change don’t know this.

In 2016, climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters published a paper on this topic, called “The trouble with negative emissions.” The title is a bit misleading, since they are not against negative emissions. They are against lulling ourselves into complacency by making plans that rely on negative emissions—because we don’t really know how to achieve them at the necessary scale. We could be caught in a serious bind, with the poorest among us taking the biggest hit.

So, how much negative carbon emissions do we need to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, and how people are hoping to achieve them? Let’s dive in!

In 2018, humans put about 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air. A “tonne” is a metric ton, a bit larger than a U.S. ton. Since the oxygen is not the problem—carbon dioxide consisting of one atom of carbon and two of oxygen—it might make more sense to count tonnes of carbon. But it’s customary to keep track of carbon by its carbon dioxide equivalent, so I’ll do that here. The National Academy of Sciences says that to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by the century’s end, we will probably need to be removing about 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year by 2050, and double that by 2100. How could we do this?

Whenever I talk about this, I get suggestions. Many ignore the sheer scale of the problem. For example, a company called Climeworks is building machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the air using a chemical process. They’re hoping to use these gadgets to make carbonated water for soft drinks—or create greenhouses that have lots of carbon dioxide in the air, for tastier vegetables. This sounds very exciting … until you learn that currently their method of getting carbon dioxide costs about $500 per ton. It’s much cheaper to make the stuff in other ways; beverage-grade carbon dioxide costs about a fifth as much. But even if they bring down the price and become competitive in their chosen markets, greenhouses and carbonation use only 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. This is puny compared to the amount we need to remove.Thus, the right way to think of Climeworks is as a tentative first step toward a technology that might someday be useful for fighting global warming—but only if it can be dramatically scaled up and made much cheaper. The idea of finding commercial uses for carbon dioxide as a stepping-stone, a way to start developing technologies and bringing prices down, is attractive. But it’s different from finding commercial uses that could make a serious dent in our carbon emissions problem.

Here’s another example: using carbon dioxide from the air to make plastics. There’s a company called RenewCO2 that wants to do this. But even ignoring the cost, it’s clear that such a scheme could remove 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year only if we drastically ramped up our production of plastics. In 2018, we made about 360 million tonnes of plastic. So, we’d have to boost plastic production almost tenfold. Furthermore, we’d have to make all this plastic without massively increasing our use of fossil fuels. And that’s a general issue with schemes to fix the air. If we could generate a huge abundance of power in a carbon-free way—say from nuclear, solar, or wind—we could use some of that power to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But for the short term, a better use of that power is to retire carbon-burning power plants. Thus, while we can dream about energy-intensive methods of fixing the air, they will only come into their own—if ever—later in the century.

If plastics aren’t big enough to eat up 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, what comes closer? Agriculture. I’m having trouble finding the latest data, but in 2004 the world created roughly 5 billion tonnes of “crop residue”: stems, leaves, and such left over from growing food. If we could dispose of most of this residue in a way that would sequester the carbon, that would count as serious progress. Indeed, environmental engineer Stuart Strand and physicist Gregory Benford—also a noted science-fiction writer—have teamed up to study what would happen if we dumped bales of crop residue on the ocean floor. Even though this stuff would rot, it seems that the gases produced will take hundreds of years to resurface. And there’s plenty of room on the ocean floor.

Short of a massive operation to sink crop residues to the bottom of the sea, there are still many other ways to improve agriculture so that the soil accumulates more carbon. For example, tilling the land less reduces the rate at which organic matter decays and carbon goes back into the air. You can actually fertilize the land with half-burnt plant material full of carbon, called “biochar.” Planting crops with bigger roots, or switching from annual crops to perennials, also helps. These are just a few of the good ideas people have had. While agriculture and soil science are complex, and you probably don’t want to get into the weeds on this, the National Academy of Sciences estimates that we could draw down 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from improved agriculture. That’s huge.

Having mentioned agriculture, it’s time to talk about forests. Everyone loves trees. However, it’s worth noting that a mature forest doesn’t keep on pulling down carbon at a substantial rate forever. Yes, carbon from the air goes to form wood and organic material in the soil. But decaying wood and organic material releases carbon back into the air. A climax forest is close to a steady state: The rate at which it removes carbon from the air is roughly equal to the rate at which it releases this carbon. So, the time when a forest pulls down the most carbon is when it’s first growing.

In July, a paper in Science argued that the Earth has room for almost 4 million square miles of new forests. The authors claimed that as these new trees grow, they could pull down about 730 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. At first, this sounds great. But remember, we are putting out 37 billion tonnes a year. So, the claim is that if we plant new forests over an area somewhat larger than the U.S., they will absorb the equivalent of roughly 20 years of carbon emissions. In short, this heroic endeavor would buy us time, but it wouldn’t be a permanent solution. Worse, other authors have argued that the Science paper was overly optimistic. One rebuttal points out that the Science paper mistakenly assumed treeless areas have no organic carbon in the soil already. It also counted on a large increase of forests in regions that are now grassland or savanna. With such corrections made, it’s possible that new forests could only pull down at most 150 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

That’s still a lot. But getting people to plant vast new forests will be hard. Working with more realistic assumptions, the National Academy of Sciences says that in the short term we could draw down 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year by planting new forests and better managing existing ones. In short: If we push really hard, better agriculture and forestry could pull 5.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year. One great advantage of both these methods is that they harness the marvelous ability of plants to turn carbon dioxide into complex organic compounds in a solar-powered way—much better than any technology humans have devised so far. If we ever invent new technologies that do better, it’ll probably be because we’ve learned some tricks from our green friends.

And here’s another way plants can help: biofuels. If we burn fuels that come from plants, we’re taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it right back in: net zero carbon emissions, roughly speaking. That’s better than fossil fuels, where we dig carbon up from the ground and burn it. But it would be even better if we could burn plants as fuels but then capture the carbon dioxide, compress it, and pump it underground into depleted oil and gas fields, unmineable coal seams, and the like.

To do this, we probably shouldn’t cut down forests to clear space for crops that we burn. Turning corn into ethanol is also rather inefficient, though the corn lobby in the U.S. has persuaded the government to spend lots of money on this, and about 40 percent of all corn grown in the U.S. now gets used this way. Suppose we just took all available agricultural, forestry, and municipal waste, like lawn trimmings, food waste, and such, to facilities able to burn it and pump the carbon dioxide underground. All this stuff ultimately comes from plants sucking carbon from the air. So, how much carbon dioxide could we pull out of the atmosphere this way? The National Academy of Sciences says up to 5.2 billion tonnes per year.

Of course, we can’t do this and also sink all agricultural waste into the ocean—that’s just another way of dealing with the same stuff. Furthermore, this high-end figure would require immensely better organization than we’ve been able to achieve so far. And there are risks involved in pumping lots of carbon dioxide underground.

What other activities could draw down lots of carbon? It pays to look at the biggest human industries: biggest, that is, in terms of sheer mass being processed. For example, we make lots of cement. Global cement production in 2017 was about 4.5 billion tons, with China making more than the rest of the world combined, and a large uncertainty in how much they made. As far as I know, only digging up and burning carbon is bigger: For example, 7.7 billion tons of coal is being mined per year.

Right now cement is part of the problem: To make the most commonly used kind we heat limestone until it releases carbon dioxide and becomes “quicklime.” Only about 7 percent of the total carbon we emit worldwide comes from this process—but that still counts for more than the entire aviation industry. Some scientists have invented cement that absorbs carbon dioxide as it dries. It has not yet caught on commercially, but the pressure on the industry is increasing. If we could somehow replace cement with a substance made mostly of carbon pulled from the atmosphere, and do it in an economically viable way, that would be huge. But this takes us into the realm of technologies that haven’t been invented yet.

New technologies may in fact hold the key to the problem. In the second half of the century we should be doing things that we can’t even dream of yet. In the next century, even more so. But it takes time to perfect and scale up new technologies. So it makes sense to barrel ahead with what we can do now, then shift gears as other methods become practical. Merely waiting and hoping is not wise.

Totaling up some of the options I’ve listed, we could draw down 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by planting trees, 1.5 billion by better forest management, 3 billion by better agricultural practices, and up to 5.2 billion by biofuels with carbon capture. This adds up to over 10 billion tonnes per year. It’s not nearly enough to cancel the 37 billion tonnes we’re dumping into the air each year now. But combined with strenuous efforts to cut emissions, we might squeak by, and keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

Even if we try, we are far from guaranteed to succeed. Anderson and Peters are quite right to warn about this. But will we even try? That is more a matter of politics and economics than of science and technology. The engineer Saul Griffith said that dealing with global warming is not like the Manhattan Project—it’s like the whole of World War II but with everyone on the same side. He was half right: We are not all on the same side. Not yet, anyway. Getting leaders who are inspired by these huge challenges, rather than burying their heads in the sand, would be a big step in the right direction.

The portent of runaway greenhouse warming

The portent of runaway greenhouse warming. Andrew Glikson, Earth and climate scientist, Australian National University. Dec. 11, 2019.


Figure 1. Relations between CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and mass extinctions of genera.
Data cited from D. Royer et al. (2002), from G. Keller (2016) and P. Wignall et al. (2002).
Carbon, the essential element underpinning photosynthesis and life, is transformed into toxic substances in the remnants of plants and organisms buried in sediments. Once released to the atmosphere in the form of CO₂, CO and methane, in large quantities these gases become lethal and have been responsible for mass extinctions of species (Fig. 1).




Figure 2. Potential heating, Carana (2019)

Given amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans triggered by rising temperatures, the concept of an upper limit of warming determined by limitation on carbon emissions alone is unlikely, since, under a rising high greenhouse gas concentration, amplifying feedbacks triggered by methane release, bushfires, warming oceans and loss of reflectivity of melting ice, temperatures would keep rising. As an example, findings show that warmer ocean water is melting hydrates and releasing methane into the sediment and waters off the coast of Washington state, at levels that reach the same amount of methane from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Carana (2019) finds a potential for abrupt warming of 18°C or 32.4°F (Fig. 2).

Attempts at CO₂ drawdown (sequestration), if urgently applied on a global scale, may conceivably be able to slow down further warming. This article refers to natural methane reservoirs and human-induced methane emissions, indicating that, once temperatures supersede a critical level, a further rise in methane release would result regardless of restrictions of emissions.

According to Kelley (2003) a planetary “runaway greenhouse event” may be triggered when a planet overheats due to absorption of more solar energy than it can give off to retain equilibrium. As a result, the oceans may boil filling its atmosphere with steam, which leaves the planet uninhabitable, as Venus is now. Planetary geologists think there is good evidence that Venus was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect which turned the planet into the boiling hell we see today. According to Hansen (2010): “If we burn all fossil fuels, the forcing will be at least comparable to that of the PETM, but it will have been introduced at least ten times faster. [. .] The warming ocean can be expected to affect methane hydrate stability at a rate that could exceed that in the PETM, where the rate of change was driven by the speed of the methane hydrate climate feedback, not by the nearly instantaneous introduction of all fossil fuel carbon.” In a critical review of the theory of runaway greenhouse warming, Goldblatt and Watson (2012) state: “We cannot therefore completely rule out the possibility that human actions might cause a transition, if not to full runaway, then at least to a much warmer climate state than the present one.”

The concentration of fossil carbon deposits in the form of coal, oil, natural gas, coal seam gas, permafrost methane, ice clathrates, shale oil, and oil sands, once released to the atmosphere in large quantities, generates powerful feedbacks from land, ocean, atmosphere and cryosphere. This includes further release of greenhouse gases, warming oceans, loss of reflectivity of melting ice, and bushfires, pushing temperatures further upward. With carbon dioxide concentrations rising at a rate of 2–3 parts per million (ppm) per year (October 2018: 406.00 ppm; October 2019: 408.53 ppm) and the Earth heating-up by 0.98°C since 1951-1980, the ultimate consequences of this trend belong to the unthinkable.

Through 2012, total accumulated emissions are estimated to have reached 384 GtC, with an annual amount of 43.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide expected to be added in 2019.

A 2016 IPCC analysis found that no more than 275 GtC of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels of 746 GtC could be emitted, if the global temperature rise is to be restricted to 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, an impossible target since amplifying carbon feedbacks would push temperatures upwards.

According to Heede and Oreskes (2016), global reserves of oil (~171 GtC), natural gas (~95) and coal (479 GtC) add up to a total of 746 GtC. Hansen et al. (2013) estimates that recoverable fossil fuel reserves include ~120 GtC gas, ~80 GtC oil, >10,000 GtC coal, >2000 GtC unconventional gas, and ~700 GtC unconventional oil, adding up to a total of ~13,000 GtC (Fig. 3).



Figure 4. Vulnerable carbon pools. (A) Land: Permafrost ~900 GtC; High-latitude peatlands ~400 GtC;
Tropical peatlands ~100 GtC; Vegetation subject to fire and/or deforestation ~650 GtC;
(B) Oceans: Methane hydrates ~10,000 GtC; Solubility pump ~2700 GtC; Biological pump ~3300 GtC;
Total (A) + (B): ~18,050 GtC (Canadell 2007) 

The amount of unstable methane deposits in permafrost and methane hydrates (clathrates) in ocean sediments is of a similar order of magnitude as the amount of fossil fuel reserves. Vulnerable carbon pools include methane hydrates in sediments (~10,000 GtC), solubility and biological pump (~6000 GtC), permafrost methane (~900 GtC), and peatlands and vulnerable vegetation (~1150 GtC), adding up to a total of ~18,050 GtC (Fig. 4).

Unoxidized metastable deposits of methane and methane hydrates, accumulated during the Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles and vulnerable to temperature rise, are already leaking as indicated by atmospheric concentrations which have risen from 1988 (~1700 ppb CH₄) to 2019 (~1860 ppb CH₄) at a rate of ~5.2 ppb/year, a rise of more than 4 ppm CO₂-equivalent at GWP25xCO₂ or 24 ppm CO₂-e at GWP150xCO₂.

Meinshausen et al. (2011) estimated global-mean surface temperature increases, applying a climate sensitivity of 3°C per doubling of CO₂, resulting by 2100 in a temperature rise of between 1.5°C to 4.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels. By 2300, under constant emissions, CO₂ concentrations would rise to ~2000 ppm, methane to 3.5 ppm and nitrous oxide to 0.52 ppm (Fig. 5). Amplifying feedbacks are taken into account, but the effects of tipping points and of cold ice-melt pools formed in the oceans near Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets are unclear.

Given the estimated total of exploitable hydrocarbon resources (~13.000 GtC) and of vulnerable carbon pools (~18,050 GtC), the amount released under different future climate conditions is subject to estimates:

Assuming mean global temperature of +2°C (above pre-industrial), with allowance made for the masking effects of sulphur aerosols, the combustion of ~2% of the fossil fuel reserves (13,000 GtC), i.e. ~260 GtC, would raise CO₂ concentration by ~130 ppm (100 GtC = 50 ppm CO₂) (Fig. 3). Combustion of ~5% of the fossil fuel reserve would raise CO₂ concentration by ~325 ppm.
Under +2°C above pre-industrial, release of CO₂ from fires and other feedback effects such as melting of permafrost and release of methane would raise atmospheric carbon by at least 1 percent of vulnerable carbon pools (~18,050 GtC). 

The flow of ice melt water from Greenland and Antarctica into the oceans would create large regions of cold water capable of absorption of atmospheric CO₂. Hansen (2010) concludes: “if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there's a substantial chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome [runaway greenhouse warming] is a dead certainty”. Stephen Hawking (2017) appears to agree with Hansen’s warning, stating: “if the US pulls out of the Paris climate agreement it may lead to runaway global warming, eventually turning Earth's atmosphere into something resembling Venus”. Goldblatt and Watson (2012) wrote: “The ultimate climate emergency is a ‘runaway greenhouse’: a hot and water-vapor-rich atmosphere limits the emission of thermal radiation to space, causing runaway warming … This would evaporate the entire ocean and exterminate all planetary life … We cannot therefore completely rule out the possibility that human actions might cause a transition, if not to full runaway, then at least to a much warmer climate state than the present one … However, our understanding of the dynamics, thermodynamics, radiative transfer and cloud physics of hot and steamy atmospheres is weak.”

An analysis by Carana (2013) suggests that accelerated release of methane from permafrost and methane hydrates (clathrates) could trigger runaway global warming (Fig. 6). A polynomial trend for the Arctic shows temperature anomalies of +4°C by 2020, +7°C by 2030 and +11°C by 2040, threatening major feedbacks, further albedo changes and methane releases leading to global temperature anomalies of 20°C+ by 2050.



Figure 6. A polynomial 2 trend line points at global temperature anomalies (Carana 2013). A polynomial function is a function such as a quadratic, a cubic, a quartic, and so on, involving only non-negative integer powers of x.

The magnitude of the runaway greenhouse effect that now threatens to eventuate becomes evident when looking at the geological record. For example, the 55 million years-old PETM event (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), lasting for about 100,000 years, driven by CO₂ levels as hugh as 1700 ppm, does not appear to have triggered a runaway greenhouse process. The PETM is attributed to ¹³C-depleted methane (Zeebe et al. 2009), reaching 5 - 8°C and leading to a mass extinction of 35-50% of benthic foraminifera. By sharp contrast, the current Anthropocene hyperthermal event, commencing with the industrial age and re-accelerating since about 1975, constitutes a temporally abrupt development exceeding the rate of geological hyperthermal events (Fig. 7), a rate which does not allow biological adaptation and thereby enhances a mass extinction of species (Barnosky et al. 2011).



Figure 7. A comparison of Cenozoic CO₂ rise rates and temperature rise rates,
highlighting the extreme rise rates in the Anthropocene. From an earlier post.

As Australia burns, the IPCC maintains there is time left to consume a carbon budget and to keep handing out offsets and carbon credits; at the 25th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Madrid, Australia is seeking to use "carry-over credits" to meet its pledged emissions reductions.


Links

• The RCP greenhouse gas concentrations and their extensions from 1765 to 2300, by Malte Meinshausen et al. (2011)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0156-z

• Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO₂ growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks, by J. Canadell et al. (2007)
https://www.pnas.org/content/104/47/18866

• Planetary ‘Runaway Greenhouse’ Climates More Easily Triggered than Previously Thought, by Peter Kelley (2013)
https://scitechdaily.com/planetary-runaway-greenhouse-climates-more-easily-triggered-than-previously-thought

• How Likely Is a Runaway Greenhouse Effect on Earth? MIT Technology Review (2012)
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/426608/how-likely-is-a-runaway-greenhouse-effect-on-earth/

• Storms of my grandchildren: the truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity, by James Hansen (2010)
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/storms-of-my-grandchildren-9781608195022

• The runaway greenhouse: implications for future climate change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres, by Colin Goldblatt and Andrew Watson (2012)
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2012.0004

• Low simulated radiation limit for runaway greenhouse climates, by Colin Goldblatt, et al. (2013)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1892

• Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature, by James Hansen et al. (2013)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0081648

• Towards the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by Valérie Masson-Delmotte, Panmao Zhai, Wilfran Moufouma-Okia, Anna Pirani, Jan Fuglestvedt
https://wg1.ipcc.ch/presentations/201612_Fuglestvedt_AGU_IPCC.pdf

• Global Carbon Project, Carbon Budget 2019, press release
https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/19/files/Norway_CICERO_GCB2019.pdf

• Potential emissions of CO₂ and methane from proved reserves of fossil fuels: An alternative analysis, by Richard Heede and Naomi Oreskes
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378015300637

• A rise of 18°C or 32.4°F by 2026?
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-rise-of-18c-or-324f-by-2026.html

• Arctic Methane Impact
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/11/arctic-methane-impact.html

• A record CO2 rise rate since the KT dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-record-co2-rise-rate-since-kt-dinosaur-extinction-66-million-years-ago.html

• Another link between CO2 and mass extinctions of species, by Andrew Glikson
https://theconversation.com/another-link-between-co2-and-mass-extinctions-of-species-12906

The Pearl

America’s Two-Headed One Party System. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 14, 2019.

There’s a scene from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl that’s been coming back to me over and over again ever since I started writing about US politics. I find it amazing that this scene hasn’t become a political meme yet, given Steinbeck’s fame and given its perfect illustration of the fake two-party system that we see in western so-called democracies.

The Pearl is a short novel about a poor fisherman, Kino, who discovers the titular enormous gem in an oyster and goes to sell it to the pearl buyers in town. What he doesn’t know is that the buyers, while they have multiple offices and pretend to compete with each other, all actually work for the same owner.

“Kino has found the Pearl of the World,” Steinbeck writes. “In the town, in little offices, sat the men who bought pearls from the fishers. They waited in their chairs until the pearls came in, and then they cackled and fought and shouted and threatened until they reached the lowest price the fisherman would stand.”

“And when the buying was over, these buyers sat alone and their fingers played restlessly with the pearls, and they wished they owned the pearls. For there were not many buyers really – there was only one, and he kept these agents in separate offices to give a semblance of competition.”

When Kino brings the priceless pearl to the sellers, they put on a performance, working together to deceive him into thinking it has no value in order to cheat him out of it for a ridiculously low price.

The man behind the desk said: “I have put a value on this pearl. The owner here does not think it fair. I will ask you to examine this – this thing and make an offer. Notice,” he said to Kino, “I have not mentioned what I have offered.”

The first dealer, dry and stringy, seemed now to see the pearl for the first time. He took it up, rolled it quickly between thumb and forefinger, and then cast it contemptuously back into the tray.

“Do not include me in the discussion,” he said dryly. “I will make no offer at all. I do not want it. This is not a pearl – it is a monstrosity.” His thin lips curled.

Now the second dealer, a little man with a shy soft voice, took up the pearl, and he examined it carefully. He took a glass from his pocket and inspected it under magnification. Then he laughed softly.

“Better pearls are made of paste,” he said. “I know these things. This is soft and chalky, it will lose its color and die in a few months. Look-” He offered the glass to Kino, showed him how to use it, and Kino, who had never seen a pearl’s surface magnified, was shocked at the strange-looking surface.

The third dealer took the pearl from Kino’s hands. “One of my clients likes such things,” he said. “I will offer five hundred pesos, and perhaps I can sell it to my client for six hundred.”

Kino reached quickly and snatched the pearl from his hand. He wrapped it in the deerskin and thrust it inside his shirt. The man behind the desk said, “I’m a fool, I know, but my first offer stands. I still offer one thousand. What are you doing?” he asked, as Kino thrust the pearl out of sight.

“I am cheated,” Kino cried fiercely. “My pearl is not for sale here. I will go, perhaps even to the capital.”

Now the dealers glanced quickly at one another. They knew they had played too hard; they knew they would be disciplined for their failure, and the man at the desk said quickly, “I might go to fifteen hundred.”

This is exactly how the two-headed one-party system works, in America and elsewhere. One party owned by one imperialist oligarchic class is placed in two separate offices “to give some semblance of competition,” just like Steinbeck’s pearl buyers. And just like Steinbeck’s pearl buyers they work together to deceive the people into accepting the lowest possible bid, in their case meaning the acceptance of virtually no change at all from the imperialist oligarchic status quo.

You see this kleptocratic dynamic at play regardless of who is in office. When the two-headed one-party system convinced Americans to sell their pearl to Barack Obama, for example, their payment took the form of a corporatist healthcare scam deceitfully labeled the Affordable Care Act and a pathetic temporary band-aid on the sucking chest wound of environmental peril, along with a continuation and expansion of all of Bush’s most depraved foreign and domestic policies.

Then Kino, angry and determined never again to be deceived, sold his pearl to the Republican Party. This time his payment consisted of a tax break for the wealthy and some verbiage about a wall, along with a continuation and expansion of all of Obama’s most depraved foreign and domestic policies.

This pattern repeats over and over and over again, whether it’s the presidency or Congress, and the people never learn their lesson. They’re trained to think of the two parties as competing, when really they’re more like the left fist and the right fist on the same boxer. An orthodox-stance boxer uses the left jab and the right cross in conjunction with each other in one-two punch combinations to accomplish the same goal, namely to leave his opponent staring up at the arena lights and rethinking his life decisions. And in this case, the boxer’s opponent is you.

Ralph Nader, who to this day is still falsely smeared as responsible for George W Bush’s pseudo-victory over Al Gore in 2000, occasionally shares an anecdote about the time he told his father that what America needs is a good third party.

“I’ll settle for a second,” his father replied.

This is the kind of clear seeing we all need to have. We need to not fall into the drama of the two-handed puppet show and mistake what we are seeing for two separate and competing entities. We need to see and be aware of the puppeteer at all times.

Look past the “semblance of competition” and watch what the pearl buyers are actually doing.

Ignore their words.

Ignore their fake pro-wrestling kayfabe combat over impeachment agendas they know will never bear fruit and their Russia conspiracies they know are pure nonsense.

Watch their actual behaviors instead.

Don’t fall for the illusion.

Don’t get sucked into the drama of the two-handed puppet show.

Don’t be deceived, Kino.

Don’t sell your pearl.