Recommended Reading

5 star choices (ranked)

1. Losing Earth: A Recent History 
1. Rich, Nathaniel
2. Already Extinct: A Parrhesiastic Statement 
1. Kyo, Minoru
3. The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change
1. McKibben, Bill
4. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century 
1. Kunstler, James Howard
5. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization 
1. Homer-Dixon, Thomas
6. A Short History of Progress 
1. Wright, Ronald
7. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed 
1. Diamond, Jared
8. The Limits to Growth 
1. Meadows, Donella H.
9. Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope 
1. Flannery, Tim
10. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (fiction) 
1. Quinn, Daniel

additional choices, alphabetical by author

4 star choices

• The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth 
• Flannery, Tim
• Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America 
• Friedman, Thomas L.
• Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead 
• Greer, John Michael
• Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change 
• Hamilton, Clive
• The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality 
• Heinberg, Richard
• The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? 
• Homer-Dixon, Thomas
• Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization 
• Jensen, Derrick
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate 
• Klein, Naomi
• Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change 
• Kump, Lee R.
• Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth 
• Lovelock, James E.
• Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change 
• Marshall, George
• Comfortably Unaware: Global Depletion and Food Responsibility... What You Choose to Eat Is Killing Our Planet 
• Oppenlander, Richard
• The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future 
• Oreskes, Naomi
• Green Earth (fiction: cli-fi) 
• Robinson, Kim Stanley
• Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization
• Scranton, Roy

3 star choices

• Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future 
• Alley, Richard B.
• A Passion for This Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Explore Our Relationship with Nature
• Benjamin, Michelle
• Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man 
• Boulter, Michael
• Building a Sustainable Society
• Brown, Lester R.
• The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations 
• Fagan, Brian M.
• Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley 
• Faris, Stephan
• Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis 
• Flannery, Tim
• The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World 
• Gilding, Paul
• Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit 
• Gore, Al
• Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis 
• Gore, Al
• The Assault on Reason 
• Gore, Al
• Affluenza: Reality Bites Back 
• Graaf, John De
• Carbon Shift 
• Homer-Dixon, Thomas
• The Battle For Paradise 
• Klein, Naomi
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History 
• Kolbert, Elizabeth
• The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene 
• Lewis, Simon L.
• Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy 
• Macy, Joanna
• Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet 
• McKibben, Bill
• Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning 
• Monbiot, George
• Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge 
• Simpson, Jeffrey
• Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth 
• Wackernagel, Mathis
• Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand 
• Washington, Haydn
• Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? 
• Weisman, Alan
• The Future of Life 
• Wilson, Edward O.

Climate Links Sept 2020

‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary. Max Blumenthal. GrayZone.  Sept. 7, 2020.

The Michael Moore-produced ‘Planet of the Humans’ faced a coordinated suppression campaign led by professional climate activists backed by the same ‘green’ billionaires, Wall Street investors, industry insiders and family foundations skewered in the film.

... Yet according to Josh Fox, the most vehement opponent of “Planet of the Humans,” the planet-saving capacity of solar and other supposedly clean forms of energy was so well-established it was beyond debate.

“The premise of the film is renewable energy doesn’t work and is dependent on fossil fuels. And that is patently ridiculous,” Fox remarked to me. “And the reason why I got into this is because I had young environmentalists – young people who are steadfast campaigners – calling me in the middle of the night, freaking out, [telling me] ‘I can’t believe this!’ And I looked at them and I said, ‘Well, there’s a reason why you can’t believe this; it’s because it’s not true.'”

But was the presentation of renewable energy sources in “Planet of the Humans” actually false? Ecological economist William Rees has claimed that “despite rapid growth in wind and solar generation, the green energy transition is not really happening.” That might be because it is chasing energy growth instead of curtailing it. Rees pointed out that the surge in global demand for electricity last year “exceeded the total output of the world’s entire 30-year accumulation of solar power installations.”

Are there not reasonable grounds then to be concerned about the practicality of a full transition to renewables, especially in a hyper-capitalist, growth-obsessed economy like that of the United States?

A September 2018 scientific study delivered some conclusions that contradicted the confident claims of renewables advocates. A research team measured solar thermal plants currently in operation around the world and found that they are dependent on the “intensive use of materials,” which is code for heavily mined minerals.

... 

Even mainstream environmentalists acknowledge that rising reliance on renewable energy “means a lot of dirty mining” to extract the minerals required for electric batteries and solar cells. This prospect has sparked excitement within the mining industry, with the editor of Mining.com, Frik Els, dubbing Green New Deal spokeswomen Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg “mining’s unlikely heroines.”

“Going all in on the green economy and decarbonisation requires siding with the greens against fossil fuels,” Els informed fellow mining industry insiders. “It means selling global mining as the solution to climate change because mining metals is the only path to green energy and green transport.”

... 

The 2050 transition goal: real science or a murky crystal ball?

In his piece hammering “Planet of the Humans” in The Nation, Fox touted “the proliferation of 100 percent renewable energy plans put forward by Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson” as one of the most important pieces of evidence refuting the film’s grim narrative.

Jacobson’s study, according to National Geographic, was “a foundation stone” of the Green New Deal proposal put forward by Democratic Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was also central to the energy plan advanced by the presidential campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who co-authored an op-ed with Jacobson that called for a full transition to “clean” energy by 2050.

Jacobson, like Ingraffea, is an environmental engineer and political partner of Fox. The Stanford professor helped Fox found the environmental advocacy organization the Solutions Project, alongside actor Mark Ruffalo and the banker and former Tesla executive Marco Krapels in 2011. (More on this group later.)

Besides his working relationship with Jacobson, Fox failed to acknowledge that the professor’s all-renewables projection was strongly challenged by 21 leading energy scientists in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. The scientists concluded Jacobson’s paper was rife with “invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.”

A survey of the debate by Scientific American scoffed at Jacobson’s remarkable assumption “that U.S. hydroelectric dams could add turbines and transformers to produce 1,300 gigawatts of electricity instantaneously… or the equivalent of about 1000 large nuclear or coal power plants running at full power.”
... 

Missing from nearly all of the takedowns was the documentary’s scathing critique of the corruption of environmental politics by billionaires and elite family foundations.

“The conversation our critics really didn’t want to have was about the last one-third of the film,” Zehner remarked, “which dealt with the influence of billionaires and money in the environmental movement, and the divestment sham.”

...

 It was a classic case of greenwashing, in which corporate behemoths burnished their reputation among progressives by embracing cosmetic reforms that did little to challenge their bottom lines.

...

For raising questions about the efficacy and environmental cost of renewable projects like these, and proposing an explicitly anti-capitalist solution to the corporate destruction of the planet, the makers of “Planet of the Humans” were steamrolled by a network of professional climate activists, billionaire investors and industry insiders.

Now, with the Biden campaign promising a new flood of renewable subsidies and tax breaks under the auspices of a “clean” energy plan, the public remains in the dark about what it is signing up for. Even if the ambitious agenda fails to deliver any substantial environmental good, it promises a growing class of green investors another opportunity to do well.

Keen re Nobel-winning economic garbage

Nobel prize-winning economics of climate change is misleading and dangerous – here’s why. Steve Keen, The Conversation. Sept. 9, 2020.

While climate scientists warn that climate change could be catastrophic, economists such as 2018 Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus assert that it will be nowhere near as damaging. In a 2018 paper published after he was awarded the prize, Nordhaus claimed that 3°C of warming would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, compared to what it would be in the total absence of climate change. Even a 6°C increase in global temperature, he claimed, would reduce GDP by just 8.5%.

If you find reassurance in those mild estimates of damage, be warned. In a newly published paper, I have demonstrated that the data on which these estimates are based relies upon seriously flawed assumptions.

Nordhaus’s celebrated work, which, according to the Nobel committee, has “brought us considerably closer to answering the question of how we can achieve sustained and sustainable global economic growth”, gives governments a reason to give climate change a low priority.

His estimates imply that the costs of addressing climate change exceed the benefits until global warming reaches 4°C, and that a mild carbon tax will be sufficient to stabilise temperatures at this level at an overall cost of less than 4% of GDP in 120 year’s time. Unfortunately, these numbers are based on empirical estimates that are not merely wrong, but irrelevant.

Nordhaus (and about 20 like-minded economists) used two main methods to derive sanguine estimates of the economic consequences of climate change: the “enumerative method” and the “statistical method”. But my research shows neither stand up to scrutiny.

The ‘enumerative method’

In the enumerative method, to quote neoclassical climate change economist Richard Tol, “estimates of the ‘physical effects’ of climate change are obtained one by one from natural science papers … and added up”.

This sounds reasonable, until you realise that the way this method has been deployed ignores industries that account for 87% of GDP, on the assumption that they “are undertaken in carefully controlled environments that will not be directly affected by climate change”.

Nordhaus’s list of industries that he assumed would be unaffected includes all manufacturing, underground mining, transportation, communication, finance, insurance and non-coastal real estate, retail and wholesale trade, and government services. It is everything that is not directly exposed to the elements: effectively, everything that happens indoors or underground. Two decades after Nordhaus first made this assumption in 1991, the economics section of the IPCC Report repeated it:

Economic activities such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and mining are exposed to the weather and thus vulnerable to climate change. Other economic activities, such as manufacturing and services, largely take place in controlled environments and are not really exposed to climate change.

This is mistaking the weather for the climate. Climate change will affect all industries. It could turn fertile regions into deserts, force farms – and the cities they support – to move faster than topsoil can develop, create storms that can blow down those “carefully controlled environments”, and firestorms that burn them to the ground.

It could force us to eliminate the use of fossil fuels before we have sufficient renewable energy in place. The output of those “carefully controlled environments” will fall in concert with the decline in available energy. The assumption that anything done indoors will be unaffected by climate change is absurd. And if this is wrong, then so are the conclusions based upon it.

The same applies to the “statistical method”. As I explained in a previous article, this method assumes that the relationship between temperature and GDP today could be used to predict what will happen as the whole planet’s climate changes. But while temperature isn’t a particularly important factor in economic output today, climate change will do much more than simply raise individual countries’ temperature by a few degrees – the disruption it will cause is enormous.

The damage function

Nonetheless, these optimistic estimates were used to calibrate Nordhaus’s so-called “damage function”, a simple equation that predicts a small and smooth fall in GDP from a given rise in temperature. But climate change will not be a smooth process: there will be tipping points.

Nordhaus justified using a smooth equation by incorrectly claiming that climate scientists, including Tim Lenton from the University of Exeter, had concluded that there were “no critical tipping elements with a time horizon less than 300 years until global temperatures have increased by at least 3°C”. In fact, Lenton and his colleagues identified Arctic summer sea ice as a critical tipping point that was likely to be triggered in the next decade or two by changes of between 0.5°C and 2°C:

We conclude that the greatest (and clearest) threat is to the Arctic with summer sea-ice loss likely to occur long before (and potentially contribute to) GIS [Greenland ice sheet] melt.

The reason these mistakes are so significant is that, despite the flawed assumptions on which it is based, this work has been taken seriously by politicians, as Nordhaus’s Nobel prize recognises. To these policymakers, a prediction of future levels of GDP is far easier to understand than unfamiliar concepts like the viability of the ecosystem. They have been misled by comforting numbers that bear no relation to what climate change will, in fact, do to our economies.

The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change. Steve Keen. Sept. 1, 2020. TandFOnline. PDF available

Abstract

Forecasts by economists of the economic damage from climate change have been notably sanguine, compared to warnings by scientists about damage to the biosphere. This is because economists made their own predictions of damages, using three spurious methods: assuming that about 90% of GDP will be unaffected by climate change, because it happens indoors; using the relationship between temperature and GDP today as a proxy for the impact of global warming over time; and using surveys that diluted extreme warnings from scientists with optimistic expectations from economists. Nordhaus has misrepresented the scientific literature to justify the using a smooth function to describe the damage to GDP from climate change. Correcting for these errors makes it feasible that the economic damages from climate change are at least an order of magnitude worse than forecast by economists, and may be so great as to threaten the survival of human civilization.

Age of Annhiliation, by xraymike

Age of Annihilation. xraymike, Collapse of Industrial Civilization. Sep 4, 2020.

“We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.” ~ Thomas Berry

As governments stared glass-eyed at what was unfolding in China earlier this year, the fragility of modern life’s interconnectedness was soon to be laid bare by a microscopic organism. Within a couple months of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, airline travel from China had spread the novel virus to more than 60 countries. Despite decades of warnings about the inevitably of such an event, politicians had paid about as much lip service to preventing the next pandemic as they had to dealing with climate change. As has been warned by health experts, the best we can hope for is to blunt the effects of the COVID-19 disease on the global population; eradicating it will be futile. Something similar could be said of the legacy effects of our CO2 emissions which will haunt life on Earth for time immemorial.

A study from 2014 found the total number of infectious disease outbreaks has more than quadrupled between 1980 and 2010. Approximately 75% of all emerging infectious diseases originate from animals and chances for pandemics are increasing as humanity’s growing assault on the natural world disrupts what remains of the planet’s ecosystems. If you need further evidence that we are annihilating life on Earth, consider that the microscopic mite, among the oldest and most plentiful invertebrates on the planet and a keystone species in many ecosystems, is disappearing at least 1,000 times the natural rate. More novel zoonotic diseases will eventually be unleashed into the bloodstream of the globalized economy as corporations revive parasitic growth at the expense of a habitable planet. The coronavirus pandemic is a symptom of our unfolding Anthropocene Mass Extinction which is accelerating.

The current pandemic may well mark the beginning of the end for growth as we knew it. In the U.S. right now, there are 29 million unemployed and tens of thousands of small businesses that have closed during the pandemic will never reopen. In the Age of Environmental Breakdown, there can never be a return to normal. For the normal that industrial civilization has become accustomed to is the very thing ripping to shreds those white picket-fenced lives in suburbia. A Biden presidency may bring back some sense of sanity and order to those pursuing the illusion of the American Dream, but it won’t alter global civilization’s current trajectory toward an increasingly chaotic world of never-ending disasters. The synergistic effects of biodiversity collapse, climate change, and industrial pollution will act as a growing weight on the economy.

We just learned that Greenland’s ice sheets crossed a tipping point two decades ago and will never recover, as far as human timescales are concerned. Nothing will bring them back except another ice age, and humans have managed to erase the next one scheduled to have occurred some 50,000 years hence. 100,000 years will have past before the planet completely rids itself of the CO2 humans have loaded into the atmosphere. Second only to Antarctica in terms of ice volume, Greenland’s melt-off could eventually contribute 23 feet of global sea level rise. Antarctica’s ice sheets have also been found to be much more vulnerable to collapse than previously known, as rising atmospheric temperatures melt their surface and a warming ocean destabilizes them from below. Coastal erosion, flooding, and soil saltification from sea level rise are growing drags on the economy. About 40% of the global population lives near the coast and will account for the largest mass migration in human history. Indeed, billions of U.S. tax dollars are now being used in a new strategy to relocate entire neighborhoodsfrom coastal regions persistently hit by flooding in recent years.

With the meltdown of the Earth’s cryosphere, we are witnessing a large-scale catastrophic disruption to a critical part of the Earth system under which all life has adapted. In particular, the relatively stable climate of the Holocene is what allowed for the development of agriculture and human civilization. We no longer live in that era; We have entered the chaos of the Anthropocene, a time of deadly climate disruption, social upheaval, mass extinction, and ultimately collapse of industrial civilization. With arctic amplification weakening jet streams, larger and more intense heat domes now form over geographic regions to help spark megafires, power grid blackouts, and heat-related deaths. In Phoenix AZ, a heatwave just obliterated a previous record of most days over 110°F (50 plus), and another record-breaking heatwave is on its way as I speak. California’s Death Valley just recorded the highest temperature on Earth since reliable records began. The six most recent years (2014-2019) and 2020 have been the hottest ever recorded, with each decade since 1980 being hotter than the previous.

The recent heatwave that thawed Siberia’s tundra, set it on fire, and caused an ecological disaster by collapsing a diesel fuel reservoir, could never have happened without the massive spike in CO2 emissions from mankind’s fossil-fuel binge. Summer wildfires in the Arctic set a record this year, emitting 34% more CO2 than in the prior year. Fires in the Amazon jungle are the worst in a decade. Wildfires in Arizona this year have already scarred more land than in the prior two years. Colorado just logged the biggest fire in its history and California’s wildfires are already on track to break records even though the fire season has just begun. Globally, wildfires have increased 13% over the prior record-breaking year of 2019. A more apt name for the Anthropocene might be the Pyrocene – Age of Fire.

Heatwaves aren’t just striking on land; they are also cooking the oceans. Increasingly severe and frequent marine heatwaves (MHWs) have surged by more than 50% in recent decades. Warming oceans help create more destructive and more frequent hurricanes and typhoons. They also threaten biodiversity and ecosystem function on a global scale. Scientists have observed that stony corals around the world are hunkering down into survival mode, exhibiting the same traits as they did prior to the last great extinction. Let that sink in for a moment…Yes, a relatively primitive organism with a rudimentary nervous system is actually preparing for a mass extinction while the so-called ‘Wise Ape’ blissfully carries on destroying his very own life-support systems.

“It was incredibly spooky to witness how corals are now exhibiting the same traits as they did at the last major extinction event,” said Professor David Gruber, a researcher and marine biologist with The Graduate Center, CUNY and Baruch College. “Corals seem to be preparing to jump across an extinction boundary, while we are putting our foot further on the pedal."

Apparently, coral are not hampered by politics in their decision-making processes. These creatures of the primordial seas will likely outsurvive the Self-Absorbed Ape who has insulated himself in a technological cocoon of false security, oblivious to the harsh physical laws of nature indifferently working to take him down. Hell, scientists are now finding microplastics in every human tissue they examine, and the health effects are unknown. How’s that for forethought?

Scientists can issue warnings about our impending demise until they are blue in the face, and they have, but they and the public are at the mercy of economic, financial, and political forces beyond anyone’s power. Couple that with the fact that the average person on the street has a Trump-level of comprehension about these existential crises and is being bombarded on social media by fake news that plays on emotions and deep-rooted inter-group distrust. Cheap energy and the individualistic consumer culture have created an illusion of abundance and destroyed any sort of communal cooperation which was once the basis of everyday life. I’ve walked this Earth for over five decades and have seen a steady and continuous degradation of the natural world; corporate greenwashing is rampant. The growth in ‘green energy’ has not displaced fossil fuel fuel consumption to any great degree; fossil fuels still supply 84% of global energy consumption. Worse yet, just to maintain our current growth in energy consumption would require an unattainable expansion in alternative energies. If one connects all the dots on our current state, then there is no refuting this most clear-eyed of scientific assessments:

“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse.”

The end of the world is the ‘cha-ching’ of a cash register as the last vestiges of nature are converted to dollars. Lest we forget, 71% of global emissions come from just 100 companies and more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 originated from 25 corporate and state-owned entities. While the ultra-wealthy reap the profits of a poisoned ecology, the rest of the world is left to take the brunt of consequences from an increasingly dangerous world. Those living on the edge who lost their livelihood during this pandemic are the collateral damage of an out-of-control socio-economic system whose incompatibility with life on Earth becomes more evident with each passing year. There’s nowhere to escape for most people because, to one degree or another, we are all entrapped in this system. The immutable laws of biology, physics, and chemistry have set an expiration date on America’s non-negotiable way of life, ensuring that many more will soon fall victim to the short-term greed of capitalism. As Stephen Hawking warned, “Stupidity and greed will kill off humans.”

If it wasn't someone like Ed Curtin writing this, I wouldn't post it

So, I'm convinced COVID-19 is not a hoax --- there are serious health risks; I'm not one to downplay the mortality risk, nor am I, like some, an anti-masker.... but, like those anti-maskers who believe their freedom and/or civil rights are being infringed on, if not trampled on, I too am concerned that governments, intelligence agencies, plutocrats (the Deep State?) is using this opportunity to advance their nefarious agendas (including but certainly not limited to further enriching the rich at the expense of the majority of the population).... and, given my skeptical nature and of all I have learned about the unscrupulous abuses of power by the sociopathic powers-that-be, I am certainly not inclined to dismiss Curtin's suspicions out-of-hand as being wildly fantastic. Conspiracies happen all the time, because criminals and sociopaths do conspire. And they have shown time-and-again the ability, opportunity and willingness to use evil means to pursue evil ends. And I have no doubt that a global pandemic could indeed be utilized to promote and advance pre-existing agendas. So, the question is, is Curtin, and those he references, correct to imply that, like 9/11, COVID19 was purposefully planned and orchestrated?

From Terrorists to Viruses: Dystopian Progress. Edward Curtin. Sept 7, 2020.

For anyone old enough to have been alive and aware of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and of so-called COVID-19 in 2020, memory may serve to remind one of an eerie parallel between the two operations. However, if memory has been expunged by the work of one’s forgettery or deleted by the corporate media’s flushing it down the memory hole, or if knowledge is lacking, or maybe fear or cognitive dissonance is blocking awareness, I would like to point out some similarities that might perk one up to consider some parallels and connections between these two operations.

The fundamental tie that binds them is that both events aroused the human fear of death. Underlying all fears is the fear of death. A fear that has both biological and cultural roots. On the biological level, we all react to death threats in a fight or flight manner. Culturally, there are multiple ways that fear can be allayed or exacerbated, purposely or not. Usually, culture serves to ease the fear of death, which can traumatize people, through its symbols and myths. Religion has for a long time served that purpose, but when religion loses its hold on people’s imaginations, especially in regard to the belief in immortality, as Orwell pointed out in the mid-1940s, a huge void is left. Without that consolation, fear is usually tranquilized by trivial pursuits.

In the cases of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the current corona virus operation, the fear of death has been used by the power elites in order to control populations and institute long-planned agendas. There is a red thread that connects the two events.

Both events were clearly anticipated and planned.

In the case of September 11, 2001, as I have argued before, linguistic mind-control was carefully crafted in advance to conjure fear at the deepest levels with the use of such repeated terms as Pearl Harbor, Homeland, Ground Zero, the Unthinkable, and 9/11. Each in its turns served to raise the fear level dramatically. Each drew on past meetings, documents, events, speeches, and deep associations of dread. This language was conjured from the chief sorcerer’s playbook, not from that of an apprentice out of control.

And as David Ray Griffin, the seminal 9/11 researcher (and others), has pointed out in a dozen meticulously argued and documented books, the events of that day had to be carefully planned in advance, and the post hoc official explanations can only be described as scientific miracles, not scientific explanations. These miracles include: massive steel-framed high-rise buildings for the first time in history coming down without explosives or incendiaries in free fall speed; one of them being WTC-7 that was not even hit by a plane; an alleged hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, who could barely fly a Piper Cub, flying a massive Boeing 757 in a most difficult maneuver into the Pentagon; airport security at four airports failing at the same moment on the same day; all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies failing; air traffic control failing, etc. The list goes on and on. And all this controlled by Osama bin Laden. It’s a fairy tale.

Then we had the crucially important anthrax attacks that are linked to 9/11. Graeme MacQueen, in The 2001 Anthrax Deception, brilliantly shows that these too were a domestic conspiracy.

These planned events led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, the invasion of Iraq , the ongoing war on terror, etc.

Let us not forget years of those fraudulent color-coded warnings of the terrorist levels and the government admonition to use duct tape around your windows to protect against a massive chemical and biological attack.

Jump to 2020. Let me start in reverse while color-coded designs are fresh in our minds. As the COVID-19 lockdowns were under way, a funny thing happened as people were wishing that life could return to normal and they could be let out of their cages. Similar color-coded designs popped up everywhere at the same time. They showed the step-by-step schedule of possible loosening of government controls if things went according to plan. Red to yellow to green. Eye catching. Red orange yellow blue green. As with the terrorist warning following September 11, 2001. In Massachusetts, a so-called blue state where I live, it’s color chart ends in blue, not green, with Phase 4 blue termed “the new normal: Development of vaccines and/or treatments enable the resumption of ‘the new normal.’” Interesting wording. A resumption that takes us back to the future.

As with the duct tape admonitions after 9/11, now everyone is advised to wear a mask. It’s interesting to note that the 3 M Company, a major seller of duct tape, is also one of the world’s major sellers of face masks. The company was expected to be producing 50 million N95 respirator masks per month by June 2020 and 2 billion globally within the coming year. Then there is 3 M’s masking tape…but this is a sticky topic.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, we were told repeatedly that the world was changed forever. Now we are told that after COVID 19, life will never be the same. This is the “new normal,” while the post-9/11-pre-Covid-19 world must have been the old new normal. So everything is different but normal also. So as the Massachusetts government website puts it, in the days to come we may be enabled to enact “the resumption of ‘the new normal.’” This new old normal will no doubt be a form of techno-fascist transhumanism enacted for our own good.

As with 9/11, there is ample evidence that the corona virus outbreak was expected and planned; that people have been the victims of a propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus to scare us into submission and shut down the world’s economy for the global elites. It is a clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel Chossudovsky in this must-see interview, that is not a conspiracy theory but a blatant factual plan spelled out in the 2010 Rockefeller Report, the October 18, 2019 Event 201, and Agenda 21, among other places.

Like amorphous terrorists and a war against “terrorism,” which is a tactic and therefore not something you can fight, a virus is invisible except when the media presents it as a pale, orange-spiked bunch of floating weird balls that are everywhere and nowhere. Watch your back, watch your face, mask up, wash your hands, keep your distance – you never know when those orange spiked balls may get you.

As with 9/11, whenever anyone questions the official narrative of Covid-19, the official statistics, the validity of the tests, the effectiveness of masks, the powers behind the heralded vaccine to come, and the horrible consequences of the lockdowns that are destroying economies, killing people, forcing people to despair and to commit suicide, creating traumatized children, bankrupting small and middle-sized businesses for the sake of enriching the richest, etc., the corporate media mock the dissidents as conspiracy nuts, aiding the viral enemy. This is so even when the dissenters are highly respected doctors, scientists, intellectuals, et al., who are regularly disappeared from the internet. With September 11, there were initially far fewer dissenters than now, and so the censorship of opposing viewpoints didn’t need the blatant censorship that is now growing daily. This censorship happens all across the internet now, quickly and stealthily, the same internet that is being forced on everyone as the new normal as presented in the Great Global Reset, the digital lie, where, as Anthony Fauci put it, no one should ever shake hands again. A world of abstract images and beings in which, as Arthur Jensen tells Howard Beal in the film, Network, “All necessities [will be] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.” A digital dystopia that is fast approaching as perhaps the end of that red thread that runs from 9/11 to today.

Heidi Evens and Thomas Hackett write in the New York Daily News:

With the nation’s illusion of safety and security in ruins, Americans begin the slow and fitful process of healing from a trauma that feels deeply, cruelly personal…leaving citizens throughout the country with the frightening knowledge of their vulnerability.

That was written on September 12, 2001.

Climate Links: August 2020

130 Degrees. Bill McKibben, NYRB. Aug. 20, 2020.

book review of: Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas

The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming. Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization. The latter is a distinct possibility, as Mark Lynas’s new book, Our Final Warning, makes painfully clear.

Lynas is a British journalist and activist, and in 2007, in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference, he published a book titled Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. His new volume echoes that earlier work, which was by no means cheerful. But because scientists have spent the last decade dramatically increasing understanding of the Earth’s systems, and because our societies wasted that decade by pouring ever more carbon into the atmosphere, this book—impeccably sourced and careful to hew to the wide body of published research—is far, far darker. As Lynas says in his opening sentences, he had long assumed that we “could probably survive climate change. Now I am not so sure.”

...

 

Tuna Salad, Egg Salad, or...

The Left Wing “Shit Sandwich” Dilemma. Ian Welsh. August 14, 2020.


Kamala Harris and Joe Biden each have terrible records. There is no reason to believe they will do much that is good, and every reason to believe they will do much that is bad.

Trump will, at least for Americans, probably be even worse. (It is less clear he will be better for foreigners.)

The issue is simple, both choices are bad choices.

The left wing dilemma is simple: if you always vote Democratic, then why should they give you anything? If, however, you don’t vote Democratic, Republicans are likely to win and they are generally even worse (though not in every way.)

If you vote, you’re stuck with a choice of endorsing a shit sandwiches. One has slightly less shit and a single leaf of lettuce, but they’re both shit sandwiches.

The “don’t eat a shit sandwich” vote happens, usually, in the Democratic primaries. This time and last the “don’t eat a shit sandwich” candidate was Bernie Sanders. His offering was a spam sandwich. He lost because Obama convinced every remaining candidate except Sanders and Biden to all drop out nearly simultaneously.

Thanks Obama! You sure deliver!

So now the choice is simply which shit sandwich to vote for or whether to not vote. Not voting doesn’t mean you don’t get to eat a shit sandwich, it just means you aren’t saying “yes, please feed me a shit sandwich!”

Shit sandwich eating is, alas, compulsory, unless you are rich. Rich people are a bit stupid, not understanding that having to live with people, 96% of whom eats shit sandwiches, is gross.

What tires me out, beyond the obvious (mmmm, shit sandwich) are the people who pretend, every election, that the Democratic Presidential candidate is not a shit sandwich candidate.

Don’t try and tell me that Biden is offering brie and thinly sliced apples on a croissant when I can see that what’s in his hand is shit sandwich.

Anyway, it’s almost time to decide which sandwich to eat. The only forbidden option is not eating.

The Gerontocracy Strikes Back

The Gerontocracy Strikes Back. Alexander Aston, Automatic Earth. Aug. 14, 2020.

Is there any more perfect metaphor for a society in terminal decline than the senescent Joe Biden? The U.S. election has boiled down to a choice between the authoritarian versions of Mr. Magoo and P.T. Barnum. Truly, “there’s a sucker born every minute” is a far more apropos motto for the country than E. Pluribus Unum. The Republicans have adopted a Christian Nationalism that identifies with a New York shyster that says all the shitty things they’ve been feeling for decades while blaming the least powerful. It’s always easier to kick down than punch up and moral courage is not a common trait.

Likewise, the Democrats smug self-satisfied conviction of ethical superiority and sense of entitlement to the votes of every women, brown person and leftist makes them not only insufferable but delusional. The DNC managed to crush the momentum and energy of one of the most significant left- wing grassroots movements in US history. They have demoralised a huge swath of the under-45 crowd and subverted an actual political vision (regardless of whether you agree with it or not) in favour of a man with an abysmal record and signs of growing cognitive impairment. The DNC platform offers zero substantive policy other than “not Trump” (a policy that’s going to have a very short honeymoon in the face of cascading systems failure).

The Democrats have made no concessions on even one important progressive/left issue. Now they have picked a morally bankrupt prosecutor who’s deeply entangled with the prison industrial complex at a time in which “defund the police” has coalesced into a key feature of American discourse. Yet, liberals seem completely shocked and aghast by the fact that there are large numbers of young folks, minorities and women that are unwilling to shut up and put up. The level of enthusiasm beyond the party faithful, for those still willing to vote Democrat, amounts to the ever inspiring “I’ll grit my teeth.”

Meanwhile, I know middle aged folks that have never voted in their lives who have signed up just to support Trump. In other words, they are motivated. Like it or lump it, that’s some of the real political complexity behind the vacuous narrative management of the MSM. On a national level, the American sense of reality is becoming more unhinged than a schizophrenic dropping acid after a weeklong meth binge. George Soros funded Antifa and Putin’s army of trolls are all monsters of the same fevered social imagination. On its current trajectory, the American Right will soon believe anyone to the left of Attila the Hun is a “far-left radical.”

Likewise, U.S. liberals will be left haunted and terrified by the spectre of Russian agents stealing their precious bodily fluids. Meanwhile, the virus will continue to rage, and corporate feudalism will further entrench itself as the benefits of imperial citizenship rapidly fade. The only thing that’s certain is that huge swaths of Americans still won’t actually understand what is happening to them and continue to blame the opposing factions of management, figments of their propaganda, the dispossessed and the marginalised. I don’t believe the specific outcome of the American election is all that relevant anymore.

The sad truth is that the United States is collapsing under the weight of a microscopic entity and its own systemic contradictions. The various narratives of what is happening and what it means to be an American have become so wildly divergent that there are multiple parallel realities operating in the United States. What’s frightening is how few realise the diversity and complexity of these various perspectives, fears and aspirations. Regardless of who wins the election, trust in the political legitimacy of the American system is being fatally undermined. If the margin of the election is close, it is guaranteed that one side will not accept the results.

If the election is swept, then the winning party will be saddled with a crisis of unparalleled proportions in the history of the country. Furthermore, neither party has the political vision nor competence to actually address the challenges that beset them. The U.S. would need leadership on par with a Lincoln or Aurelius to rescue the political system. Whoever is in power will rapidly face multiple and intersecting forms of systemic breakdown, resistance and noncompliance as the extent of the economic devastation becomes truly apparent.

The first part of the 2020’s will consist of material deprivation, civil unrest and increasingly robust challenges to the United States’ geostrategic position. The more that authoritarians try to exert control in a high entropy environment (robbing Peter to pay Paul), the faster the system will fall apart. Ultimately, I believe that the break-up of the United States is all but inevitable at present. What I hope is that it will be a relatively peaceful dissolution and reorganisation. What should terrify us all is the prospect of real violence as the various factions and coalitions jockey for power in the new reality. A few truly smooth brained idiots think that they just need to tool up and go mow down a few “liberal snowflakes” so that they can return to the 1950’s by Christmas.

A conflict in North America would be a clusterfuck that would make Syria’s civil war look like a game of checkers. Forget electoralism and eschew romantic notions of purification through violence. Build solidarity networks, figure out how to make your communities economically, socially and psychologically resilient. My suggestion would be that Mutualism, Libertarian Municipalism and Democratic Confederalism offer some good starting points for thinking about these things. I would recommend setting up a micro- factory in your community so that you can start manufacturing necessary tools and goods on a local level. 

Here are some freely available schematics: Civilization Starter Kit.

Try to appreciate the limitations of your own understanding so that you might be more compassionate towards others. Don’t blame people for having problems they don’t know how to fix, try helping them instead. Some things, once broken, cannot be mended. This is very true for societies. I sincerely wish you all the best of luck. Please be good to one another and defend those less powerful and fortunate than yourself.

P.S. If you are in a swing state you should follow your conscience, but it should be beneath any person’s dignity to vote for either party in their safe states. If you don’t understand how the American electoral system works at this point then shame on you, stop berating people for voting Green in Montana or Libertarian in California, they’re actually displaying some political acumen.

Governments Lie, Media Deceives... What to Believe

we'd like to believe that our governments and institutions are run by good people, or at least normal people, people like us;

but they are not;

normal people, good people, people like us do not get the opportunity to be in their place

we are ruled by psychopaths

if that sounds too harsh, its just because we don't want to believe it;

if it helps, think of them as sociopaths instead; 

(sounds less bad; doesn't mean less bad; psychopaths are mass murderers that maybe kidnap and maybe use torture, perhaps even chainsaws, on their 1, or 4, or handful of victims; sociopaths use drones, or MOABs (the Mother of all Bombs), or Fat Man and Little Boy, or economic (starvation) sanctions, on their hundreds of thousands of victims)

the sociopaths that rule us are MUCH worse than the psychopaths we fear

in any case;

there is so much utter B.S. that it has become very hard to figure out what is true;

I grew up believing what Dan Rather told me on CBS News, or Tom Brokaw on NBC, or Peter Mansbridge on CBC, or just about anyone, with their cool accents, on BBC;

I watched the Gulf War on TV from my first year university dorm room;

so naïve at the time, believing what I was told, captivated by the light show on the TV screen

10 years later, I still hadn't taken the red pill

like most, I too was glued to the TV on that fateful morning, watching as the towers came down

it was only in retrospect that I thought:

how did that 3rd tower, WTC7, come down?

for that matter, how exactly did the Twin Towers come down in the fashion they did, at freefall speed, into their own footprints?

then later...

how exactly did they find the culprits' passports in the debris of the Towers' wreckage?

are you f'g kidding me?!

so many more questions (my questions)

so many B.S. pronouncements,

so few real questions (from the media, not digging into any of the questions that I was asking/thinking)

Red Pill taken

20 years later, I'm so tired of it;

so tired of the naïve complacency of the public believing the 4th Estate;

so tired of the lack of critical thinking;

of the lack of skepticism about the latest B.S. despite all the past BS;

so tired of those features of the public allowing the perversions of justice, the absolute evil, the perpetuation of grotesquely unsustainable practices that are destroying the biosphere that our civilization, nay, our species, depends on

so tired of the public arguing on Twitter about the trivialities... like which corrupt evil con-man should (pretend to) rule the world next, Trump or Biden (while the powers that be behind the scenes really direct the play)... that we keep missing the forest for the trees

its all a mess

and, honestly, we don't really want to know how bad a mess it is, do we?

its better to just believe the lies and try to do our best going on with living our lives

while rainforests get bulldozed,

while species after species goes extinct,

while we keep belching GhGs into our atmosphere,

while we keep acidifying our oceans,

while the coral reefs die,

while keystone species are imperilled, from bees and insects to oceanic plankton

..

while Yemenis starve,

and Venezuelans starve,

and Iranians, who can't be starved b/c of their own agriculture, are deprived of medication for their children,

and Libya has an actual slave trade with active slave markets

...

all because of the evil U.S. warlords (from Trump to Obama to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Reagan to …)

fxck

so...

first rule - don't believe either the government or the media just because they are the government or media -- they are to be distrusted -- instead of believing everything they say is true, we'd be better off believing everything they say is false, unless and until it can be substantiated and proved

how so?

b/c of all the preponderance of lies

what lies?

oh, oh so many

• Guantanamo, illegal rendition, torture
• Osama bin Laden's supposed capture and death
• Saddam's WMD
• the War on Terror
• the War on Drugs
  
• Assad's chemical weapons
• US drone strikes against civilians over and over again
  
• Russia shot down MH17
• Skripal affair
  
• attempted coups and character assassinations of any and all socialist-leaning Latin American leaders, from Venezuela's Chavez to Maduro; from Brazil's Lula to Bolivia's Morales
  
• color revolutions, including to install Nazis in Ukraine
• Russiagate
• DNC server "hack"
• Assange's rape case
• Snowden and Manning persecution
  
• Bezos in bed with the CIA
• Epstein's child sex blackmailing scheme on behalf of the CIA and whomever
• the NSA's surveillance state
  
• WTC7's collapse
• Twin Towers' collapse at freefall speed into their own footprints
• Project for New American Century
• etc etc etc
  

or, how about govt allowance of corporate malfeasance

• corporate capture of EPA
• safety of fracking
• Monsanto's toxic legacy
• tobacco, DDT, PFAS & PFOS
  
• FEMA - Katrina - disaster profiteering
• Halliburton - Blackwater - Afghanistan Inc. - contractors - war profiteering
• etc etc etc
  

how about we go further back?

• JFK, MLK and Robert Kennedy assassinations
• Operation Gladio
• Gulf of Tonkin
• Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crisis and Operation Northwoods
  
• Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• Pearl Harbor
• the Spanish-American War and other Banana Wars
• the Civil War
• etc etc etc
  

so, I've become convinced that the official stories about all of those events are bullshit;

so, now I'm suspicious about so many other things as well, though perhaps not yet convinced one way or another

like what?

• Boston Marathon bombing
• Sandy Hook shooting
• Vegas shooting
• San Bernardino shooting
• Charlie Hebdo shooting
• Paris shooting
• any accusation made by US against Russia
• any accusation made by US against Iran
• any accusation made by US against China
• etc etc etc
  

and, most recently, George Floyd's death

at the end of the day, I am very much in favor of the social justice movement and very much in favor of reining in the unlawful and egregious actions by the police, (which, in my opinion, is a phenomenon that has certainly been exacerbated by racism, but is mostly about brutality and abuse of power by bullies and sociopaths);

so perhaps it shouldn't matter to me that the trigger for the BLM movement these past few months has been orchestrated on false premises

it sure looked on that video as if George Floyd was slowly asphyxiated by the knee of Derek Chauvin

BUT was that really what happened?

(and I wouldnt be surprised if Chauvin was nonetheless a nasty cop, a brutish cop, a dirty cop.... but, did Chauvin really kill Floyd?)

we saw video of planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the towers then later collapsing; but did the (2) planes really cause the THREE (3!) Towers' collapses?!

I don't always agree with Paul Craig Roberts (I think most particularly when he discusses race issues), but I have come to entirely trust his honest pursuit of truth, wherever that truth may take him/us. He, like me, thinks that if the facts don't fit the story, then there is something wrong with the story. That was true about JFK, 9/11, and his view on mask-wearing now to decrease transmission of COVID (yes, wear them... but not any and all masks are designed to prevent the transmission of virus); and it seems to be the case also with what happened to Floyd, which triggered the social uprising that we've seen in the U.S.

Here's PCR:

Should we be protesting about George Floyd or Julian Assange? Paul Craig Roberts. July 31, 2020.

(Don't let the first 3 paragraphs dissuade you from reading the rest)

if you truly want to know what is going on in the world, you can't choose the blue pill; 

if you want to take the Red Pill:

read less / none of the mainstream media

read more of 

Caitlin Johnstone

Ian Welsh

Chris Hedges

Also (perhaps more selectively than the 3 above):

Paul Craig Roberts

And:

Edward Curtin

Glenn Greenwald

Aaron Mate

Ben Norton

Yves Smith and her contributors at naked capitalism

And also:

Guy Crittenden

John Pilger

Noam Chomsky

Howard Zinn

John Perkins

David Ray Griffin

Oliver Stone

William Blum

Amy Goodman

Abby Martin

Jimmy Dore

Lee Camp

James Corbett

Jeremy Scahill

Sharon Lerner

Krystal Ball

Eva Bartlett

Vanessa Beeley

Finnian Cunningham

Cory Morningstar

Pepe Escobar

Matt Taibbi

Dylan Ratigan

Eric Margulis

Michel Chossudovsky

James Howard Kunstler

Mike Krieger

Dmitry Orlov

John Michael Greer ('s older stuff; i.e. archdruid report rather than ecosophia)

Cognitive Dissonance / Two Ice Floes

The Saker

Moon of Alabama

Chalmers Johnson

Michael Klare

Tom Engelhardt

Andrew Bacevich

My advice, fwiw:

Read the first 4 regularly

Johnstone and Welsh in particular are consistently fantastic

Roberts and Hedges may have some differing views but are candid, honest truth-seekers

Read the rest when you come across them or when you can

 

p.s. update

this from Caitlin Johnstone on Aug. 3:

Here is a link to an article full of tips on how to punch through the obfuscations of propaganda and make sense of things, and here is a link to a Twitter list of my favorite news-gatherers and dot-connecters which you can bookmark and scroll through daily.

Ian Welsh on America's Leaders/Predators

Understand American Elites Means Understanding Predators. Ian Welsh. July 30, 2020.

American elites are not incompetent at what matters to them.

People constantly make ridiculous statements like, “The American government has been incompetent in its handling of Covid-19.”

Anyone who makes such a statement reveals that they do not understand how the US operates.

Fact: According the Princeton oligarchy study, almost the only thing that matters in what policies government pursues in the US is what elite factions want.

Fact: Covid-19 has made the rich in the US much, much richer.

US billionaires saw their wealth increase by 20 percent, or $584 billion, roughly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Covid-19 is enabling the consolidation of US industry. Small businesses have to shut down, large businesses keep running. The oncoming tsunami of renters being evicted (depending on state, 25 percent to over 50 percent of renters are in danger of eviction) will wipe out landlords, allowing the richest Americans to buy up rental properties on the cheap, consolidating them. They will then charge, not market clearing rental rates, but profit maximization rents, leaving many people permanently homeless.

If you’ve ever researched how to make money, you know the standard advice virtually always includes one thing: You must have other people work for you or passive income, or both. You must be making money when you, personally, aren’t doing a thing. Your money must make money for you, and so must other people. Any person worth employing makes more money for you than you pay them. You take the difference.

In kinder capitalist epochs, this is kept under control by wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, high progressive taxation, and aggressive anti-trust policy, along with a monetary policy intended to raise wages and prices, not crush them.

But our era is built on three ideological assertions.

• There is no such thing as society.
• Greed is good.
• There is no alternative (TINA).

Whatever makes a profit, according to this assertion, is good. There is no society, and no social goals. There are only competing people and whatever they get is fair. And this is the only way to run society, there is no alternative. Thatcher noted that her victory was not sealed by Conservative party elections, rather it was Tony Blair’s Labour party adopting neoliberalism that meant that TINA went from assertion to fact; no matter who was elected, the same basic policies would be followed, Labour would just try to thinly mitigate the effects of so many rich people and so many poor people.

In the US, the victory of Reagan was when Bill Clinton helped create the “Third Way,” which was an adoption of neoliberal principle. Again, it would not matter if Republicans or Democrats were in power, the rich would get richer and the social state would be defunded.

Our elites are predators. They are taught that they have no obligation to other people. Greed is good, and whatever makes money is good. If someone else has less money, that’s because they deserve less money, and because they create less good.

In their daily lives, the rich become rich through passive income and exploiting other people; paying the lowest wage or price possible (Walmart and Amazon both famously fuck suppliers over, though in different ways), getting as much government money as possible, and making sure that they don’t have to work to make money, and that the stock market always goes up in the long run, along with other asset prices–no matter what’s actually happening in the economy.

Neoliberal elites are predators. This is true in every neoliberal country. It is simply most advanced in the United States. They view ordinary people as prey or useful tools. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, banks set up assembly lines to sign false paperwork so they could seize people’s homes. The Federal government knew, aided them, and later immunized them by making them pay fines far less than the value of what they stole.

You are food or a money-producing asset to elites.

You are not human, you do not have a right to anything. Not due process of the law. Not food. Not housing. Not affordable medicine or health care. Those things are for people with enough money, and if that’s not you, you don’t deserve them.

This is THE most important thing you can understand about society today. You can’t count on US elites to care about you at all. If it is in their best financial interest to impoverish you, kill you or any other thing, they will do so.

This may seem hyperbolic, but it meets the most important test of truth: It predicts their actions with far more accuracy than any other hypothesis.

If it was just incompetence, like for example, the favorite excuse of liberals, “Never assume malice when incompetence will explain something,” then they wouldn’t keep getting more and more money.

Somehow their “incompetence” just makes them richer. Even the financial crisis made the elites richer overall–the drop was a blip which allowed them to control more of the economy than before.

Neoliberal elites are predators. Their food is ordinary citizens and anything else (animals, plants, the ecosystem which allows human life to exist).

And yes, it’s true, all neoliberal nations are not as far gone. But this is where neoliberalism leads, this is what its internal logic demands.

It’s not an accident that the best Covid-19 performance on the planet was probably in Vietnam, right next to China, with huge trade ties.

Zero deaths.

Anyone who tells you it was hard to avoid Covid-19 deaths is lying. All it required was seeing that a pandemic was underway and doing what the epidemiology textbooks tell you to. The introductory textbooks.

Nor is this all on one person. No one rules alone. Without a huge supporting apparatus, including Congress, Trump could not have done what he did (and didn’t). If his incompetence had been costing elites, you can be sure it would have been brought to an end.

It wasn’t. It was making them richer and furthering their plans. At the end of this, US elites will control a larger percentage of the US economy than before. They will be richer and more powerful. And if that means tens of millions of Americans are homeless and hungry, then that is a price US elites are willing for you to pay.

If you deserved better, you’d be rich. You aren’t, so you don’t.

Your lords and masters kill you for money. That’s their function.

Act on this knowledge, or don’t.

Caitlin Johnstone: Narrative is crumbling

Narrative is crumbling. Caitlin Johnstone. July 26, 2020.

It’s difficult to understand what’s going on in the world.

It’s difficult to understand what’s going on in the world because powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what’s going on in the world.

Powerful people actively manipulate public understanding of what’s going on in the world because if the public understood what’s going on in the world, they would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful.

The public would rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful if they understood what’s going on in their world because then they would understand that the powerful have been exploiting, oppressing, robbing, cheating and deceiving them while destroying the ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of armageddon and waging endless wars, for no other reason than so that they can maintain and expand their power.

The public do not rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful because they have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to.

Narrative is crumbling.

The public have been successfully manipulated into not wanting to rise up and use their strength of numbers to overthrow the powerful due to the way the powerful have been able to shore up mainstream narrative control in the form of purchasing mass media outlets, funding think tanks, buying politicians, implementing government opacity, pushing internet censorship, and other forms of perception management.

The powerful use their control over mainstream narratives to ensure than enough members of the public believe they live in a free democracy where things aren’t perfect but it’s the best you could ask for, instead of in a corporatist oligarchy wherein the powerful exploit, oppress, rob, cheat and deceive them while destroying the ecosystem, stockpiling weapons of armageddon and waging endless wars.

As long as the powerful are able to exert control over mainstream narratives, there will never be enough members of the public willing to use their strength of numbers to shake off the powerful and create a healthy society.

The powerful will remain capable of exerting control over mainstream narratives for as long as the public maintains its current unhealthy relationship with mental narrative.

Narrative is crumbling.

A collective shift into a healthy relationship with mental narrative would mean thought becomes the useful tool we evolved it to be rather than this noisy, compulsive head-chatter which dominates our lives where we are driven by fear and attachment to imbue an endless string of mental stories with the power of belief.

If we had a healthy relationship with mental narrative we would naturally view stories about what’s going on in the world far more objectively, because rather than glomming onto them out of fear and attachment we would have psychological space enough to look at them and critically examine whether or not they are useful tools for us to use in the present moment.

If humanity collectively made such a transition on a mass scale–a transition which sages across the millennia assure us humans are fully capable of–then humanity would become impossible to propagandize effectively.

If humanity becomes impossible to propagandize effectively, the lies will be impossible to conceal via mainstream narrative control, and humanity using the strength of its numbers to create a healthy society will become an inevitability.

And the funny thing is, in a weird way from way out of left field that nobody could possibly have anticipated, humanity’s current relationship with mental narrative appears to be drawing to a close.

Narrative is crumbling.

The narratives are breaking down.

People’s old ways of understanding what’s going on in the world just aren’t holding together anymore.

Trust in the mass media is at an all-time low, and it’s only getting lower.

People are more aware than ever that anything they see can be propaganda or disinformation.

Deepfake technology will soon be so advanced and so accessible that nobody will even trust video anymore.

The leader of the most powerful country on earth speaks in a way that has no real relationship with facts or reality in any way, and people have just learned to roll with it.

Ordinary people are hurting financially but Wall Street is booming, a glaring plot hole in the story of the economy that’s only getting more pronounced.

The entire media class will now spend years leading the public on a wild goose chase for Russian collusion and then act like it’s no big deal when the whole thing turned out to be completely baseless.

There’s a virus causing a massive disturbance in the entirety of human civilization with two wildly different narratives about it running simultaneously, and both sides are 100 percent convinced that all the facts have fully vindicated their position.

There are protests where people are becoming more and more aware that they are being fed empty narratives of approval and understanding while their core demands are going completely unaddressed.

There’s a presidential election between two obvious dementia patients and the mass media are all pretending that’s fine and normal despite what people can see with their own eyes.

New cold war escalations between the US-centralized empire and the unabsorbed governments of China and Russia are going to cause the media airwaves around the planet to become saturated in ever-intensifying propaganda narratives which favor one side or the other and have no interest in honestly telling people the truth about what’s going on.

Now they’re even babbling about UFOs.

Narrative is crumbling.

It’s all accelerating toward a white noise saturation point.

How long do you think we can go on like this?

How far do you think humanity’s relationship with narrative can be stretched before it snaps completely and forces a completely new way of being?

How long before it becomes more and more common for people to begin looking to themselves as individuals to determine which narratives are useful to them instead of looking to establishment narrative managers like they used to?

How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “Is this true?”

How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “What is truth?”

How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “What else have I been deceived about?”

How long before people find themselves more and more often asking the question “How else have I been deceiving myself?”

The current strain that is being placed on our collective relationship with narrative is completely unsustainable.

This would be a bad thing if we’d had a healthy relationship with mental narrative, but we don’t; we have a profoundly unhealthy relationship with mental narrative which has left us susceptible to terrible abuses on a mass scale.

We are now, as a species, collectively squeezing ourselves out of our old unhealthy relationship with narrative.

Narrative is crumbling.

It’s all crumbling to the ground.

This cannot be a bad thing.

It could end up being very, very good.

Ian Welsh on The System

The “System” Did Not Appear Ex Nihilo. Ian Welsh. July 13, 2020.

Last week I wrote an article lampooning the idea that people are only following incentives and therefore are not bad people.

Let’s spell this out clearly.

The system, whatever the system is, whether it is New-Deal Capitalism, Stalinist Communism, English high-Feudalism, Neo-Liberal Capitalism or French late Medieval Feudalism, is a creation of humans.

Our system is always a choice.

It doesn’t feel like a choice to you as an individual, because it is a collective choice which weights a very few individuals preferences much higher than yours. Not being Barack Obama (who had a choice to end neo-liberalism) or FDR (who did choose to create a new type of capitalism) or Khrushchev (who created a different type of communism, recognizably different from Stalinism and much more pleasant to live in), you have never had much of a choice.

So, being weak and only one person, to you the system feels like a force of nature or God, given, not made.

But the system is always made and is always a result of choices. Sometimes individuals at key junctures get to make a choice or a difference, and most people only make choices as part of large groups. But it is a choice.

Even within a system, different results are produced. English feudalism was far kinder than French feudalism, with far more free men and far fewer villeins or surfs. England produced common law and even non-free men and women had rights. Russian serfdom by the end of the Czars was known for its cruelty, but it wasn’t always thus, and so on and so forth.

More recently, and if not within your memory (though it is within my memory), then certainly within the memory of people you know, the previous form of capitalism running American and most of the “free” world produced the following results:

• steadily increasing incomes after real inflation was measured;
• steadily decreasing share of income being made by the richest in society;
• steadily increasing prices (but slower than wages).

It did all those things because it was designed to do those things. A choice was made in 33 and made pro-actively every 4 years after that to keep doing it. After a while, people became wishy washy about its continuation. You can trace it in stages: the post-war Congress weakening unions; Truman deciding to keep the war time state running; Kennedy deciding to lower top taxes; qualified immunity in the 60s; Nixon deciding to start the war on drugs, and so on.

But it didn’t really end till Reagan. Reagan was a choice, that’s why there were elections. He had been worked for, hard, by various rich people who could see that the current system was slowly siphoning away their power, and they found, with racism and the fear engendered by the oil shock crises, enough of a wedge to get a voting majority of Americans onside.

Then they systematically changed how the system operated so that it would produce:

• stagnant income for the majority of the population (really decreasing if inflation were properly measured);
• steadily increasing share of income and wealth controlled by the wealthiest in society;
• steadily decreasing prices of production of goods. 

At first some of this was passed on, but most of it was kept as profit.

Neo-liberal Capitalism produced different results from New Deal Capitalism because it was designed to do so. It had different incentives, to use econo-speak.

To say “people just follow the incentives” is driveling idiocy when dealing with large social matters, because in large social matters the incentives are dependent variables: they are chosen by the leadership and the mass of the people (who, yes, do have power in large enough groups. Reagan is not possible if enough Democrats don’t defect. They were called the “Reagan Democrats.”)

Nor are people ex-nihilo. We are shaped by the society we live in. Reagan’s revolution could not have happened while the Lost Generation still had large numbers because the Lost generation remembered not just the Great Depression, but the roaring 20s. Knowing that the wealthy had caused the Great Depression, most Lost believed in keeping the rich poor. Those who came afterwards, not properly remembering the 20s, did not feel this in their gut and were willing to sell out.

Neoliberals said “you can have a suburban home, away from the blacks and we’ll spike the value of housing and stocks, so you’ll be rich and you won’t even have to work for it.”  Sub Voce: “since you get it for doing nothing, you won’t care about wages, which we’ll crush.”

More than this, a system selects for people who will do what it requires. You cannot join many gangs without murdering someone first. You cannot be in power in DC or almost any state capital if you are not onside with crushing wages and making the rich richer. You will not be allowed in power. You will not want power, because you will quickly find out that you can’t do what you want, you can only do evil.

The system doesn’t so much turn people evil as it selects for evil. The “incentives” don’t work on everyone, what matters is that if they don’t work on you, you don’t get into power or if you somehow fluke in (like Corbyn) you don’t stay in power. You won’t compromise enough.

People worked hard to create neo-liberalism. Once they were in power they worked hard to create a system which excludes those who don’t want to crush wages and make the rich richer. The rules of the system, the incentives, were created by men and women and are maintained by men and women.

They are not unchallenged, but so far every challenge has lost. Corbyn was a challenge. Sanders was a challenge. There have been other challenges. They all lost. This was true of every challenge to the New Deal order from 36-76. All challenges lost. It looked unbeatable.

One day the New Deal Order lost. One day Neo-Liberalsim will lose. The questions are only “when?” and “to what?”

Hitler and Mussolini and Lenin defeated older orders too.

So the people who run America and the developed world are almost all very bad people. They were selected to be very bad, and they also worked very hard to ensure that only evil people could get power, because only evil people will do what their system requires and it is the system that makes them powerful and rich. (Reminder, Nancy Pelosi is worth 120 million.)

The systems selects for evil, the system was created and is maintained by people who worked and work hard to make sure it selects only evil people to run it.

Just like Soylent Green, the system is people.

OR...

much more sarcastically (and entertaining to boot)...

The Well Meaning American Oligarchy Are SO Misunderstood. Ian Welsh, July 8, 2020.

Just saw a case of the argument that “the people who have been enriching themselves by fucking everyone else for four decades are misunderstood, they’re just following the incentives, and suggesting that the people killing and impoverishing you are bad is polarizing.”

Lovely.

Everyone is well-meaning, and it’s all just a misunderstanding. They don’t mean for people to die or suffer when they cut food stamps or Welfare or start wars or don’t handle a pandemic. Oh no, it’s all just a misunderstanding driven by market laws that the beneficiaries themselves didn’t create (they are far different than the market laws which existed from 33-79 and which produced very different results.)

Those laws just fell out of the sky, and weren’t created by men and women who wanted certain outcomes.

Why if only our rulers understood that the market laws that appeared during their reign without them doing anything to create them were bad for almost everyone, surely they would change those laws to laws which raised wages, removed the wealth of billionaires and ended American oligarchy while relieving poverty and providing universal health care.

It is, indeed, all just a misunderstanding, and I feel terrible that I have suggested that people who fought for well over 40 years (they took power in 80, but fought for 80 long before that) actually understood what they were fighting for. Surely they believed that reducing taxes on the rich and corporations, slashing welfare, creating a carceral state, running asset bubbles and deliberately crushing wage inflation with the Federal reserve would resound to the benefit of every American, not just those they favored.

Why yes, they had no idea that making the rich richer and ensuring everyone else got raises below inflation would not be to the benefit of all.

Phew.

It’s all just a misunderstanding. They didn’t know that they were doing evil. Every time they took food out of a mother or child’s mouth by cutting welfare and food stamps they said “this is for their own good” and believed it.

And a person who believes starving someone else is good isn’t bad, they’re good, just misunderstood.

Every time they crushed wages by raising interest rates to crash the economy when  wages increased faster than inflation, they were doing it for the sake of ordinary Americans, not to keep wages down to benefit their own class. And every time they gave money or tax cuts to the richest, well that’s so that the rich could pay high… er, do something for ordinary Americans, something I’m too stupid to understand, since I thought things like “people create market laws, they don’t drop out of the sky.”

Shows what I know!

Certainly people who crush wages, avoid universal health care, fuck up a pandemic, take food out of the mouths of children and poor people are just misunderstood. It’s all for Americans own good, and we just need to explain to those in power that they’re mistaken and politely ask them to change the rules (oh wait, they don’t create the rules, but perhaps new rules can fall out of the sky). Fourty years isn’t long enough for them to figure out on their own that doing more of the same thing will keep hurting everyone but the rich and the wealthy.

It’s good to live in such a world, a world where we all want the best for humanity, a decent living, kindness, food and shelter for all, and where we are just arguing over means. And surely we are all reasonable and can understand that our policies must change, even if after 40 years they have made a few filthy rich and impoverished everyone else. Who would think that deliberately crushing wages would crush wages? Who would think that running asset bubbles would favor those with more money rather than those with less money?

No one could have anticipated, and Nancy Pelosi, worth 120 million dollars, is aghast that all this happened. Why if only she had understood that crushing wages and favoring the rich would hurt most Americans and help the rich! It’s all just a big misunderstanding, and Nancy just didn’t get it. Neither did Obama, or Trump, or McConnell, or Reagan or Clinton or… why there are so many well-meaning people who didn’t understand. The Koch brothers would never have supported all these policies if they knew they would hurt almost everyone else but help them. Nor would all the other billionaires and centi-millionaries and deci-millionaires and the people who work for them!

This has removed a great burden off me. I know now that it’s all just a big misunderstanding, that the rulers are good people who want the best and are just a little thick, not understanding that policies meant to hurt ordinary people and make rich people richer would, in fact, hurt ordinary people and make rich people richer.

Good people can disagree, and now that we know that the majority of our leaders are good people, who are just a little mentally challenged, why I’m sure we can clear this up in no time, and have a good, kind, fair economy that helps everyone again. Pelosi and Trump will be thrilled to work together on this, I know.

What a RELIEF.