Illuminations Never Come from the Crowned: Carbon Credit, New Reserve Currency, & the Oligarchic Green Lock-Step to a Post-Covid-19 World

 
by J & M Horsley
 
“The crisis effort, however vast and necessary, must not crowd out the urgent task of launching a parallel enterprise for the transition to the post-coronavirus order.”
~Henry Kissinger, 2020
 
What follows is inspired by my wife’s recent hypothesis and research, concerning the present cessation of economic activity as a pre-planned response to the Covid-19 “outbreak” and the means to create a new pseudo-green economy including coupling currency to carbon rather than oil to create a new reserve currency. Much of this was well outside my range of interest before my wife brought it to my attention, so what follows is an accordingly rough-drawn picture of an extremely complex subject.
 
TLDR: The purpose of the current “pandemic lockdown” is to slow down global financial activity in order to facilitate an economic reset and re-appropriate power. Powerful individuals and organizations around the world are colluding to reconfigure the economy and create a new reserve currency uncoupled from oil and coupled to carbon. The aim is to consolidate their power; restrain or destroy competition; impose, in a seemingly benign way, limits to acquisition; and re-institute and reconfigure social order, all the while being able to claim to be “saving the environment.”
 
Whether or not you believe in the threat of covid-19 virus, there can be no doubt that we are currently in a crisis of potentially global proportions. So why a pandemic? Why now?
 
Whether manufactured or merely exploited, the basic challenge of the social engineering think tanks and agencies of change in 2020 is: how to make the necessary global transformation with the least amount of infrastructural destabilization (e.g., rioting and insurgency)? Timed with the usual flu season, are the dangers of Covid-19 being exaggerated, either to convince everyone in the world to stay at home for (at least) a couple of months, or to justify forcing them to? (Thousands of people die of flu each year without comment; this is many more than have died so far of Covid-19).  Once the manufactured or exploited crisis is over, and even before that happens, will the public have been softened up to accept the new economic and sociopolitical regime, gradually being unveiled as a necessary response to the crisis, and to future crises?
 
One way to gauge the plausibility of this scenario is to ask if something similar has happened in the past. In fact it has: when gold was de-coupled from cash back in 1931 (UK) and 1933 (US). The Great Depression started at the end of 1929, and FDR instituted the New Deal i.e., welfare and make-work programs. The Depression was ended by World War II, from 1939 to 1945:
The vast majority of the world’s countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from more than 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources.
 
So a major Depression, followed by massive, global government and military action, by which people everywhere had their standard ways of living and doing business drastically interrupted, permanently transformed, or simply unceremoniously ended. 
 

 

Economic Collapse 2020

From “4 Financial Savants Warn About The Great Crash Of 2020,” by Larry Light, Forbes, July 31, 2018:
 
They ought to know. To hear some of the financial world’s smartest folks, today’s buoyant times are numbered. Hey, they’ve been through it before. And they know the odds are in favor of a skid.
 
Some day, maybe next year, maybe in 2020, the economy will take a swan dive and the market will take the plunge with it. This is as inevitable as getting a cold: There are some germs lurking that eventually will make you sniffle, cough and feel sorry for yourself. The same goes with the economy and the stock market. . . .
 
Ben Bernanke, former chair of the Federal Reserve. “In 2020, Wile E. Coyote is going to go off the cliff and look down.”. . .
Alan Greenspan, also former head of the Fed. “There are two bubbles: a stock market bubble and a bond market bubble.”. . . 
Scott Minerd, Guggenheim Partners chief investment officer. The market “is on a collision course with disaster” and the catastrophe will hit in late 2019, with stocks losing 40%. . . .
Jim Rogers, founder of the Quantum Fund. “When we have a bear market, and we are going to have a bear market, it will be the worst in our lifetime.” 
There are other indications that a financial crash was predicted and deemed inevitable for 2020. For example, a January 2020 article “IMF Chief Warns of Financial Disaster Driven by Inequality
 
highlighted new IMF research that compares the current economy to the “roaring 1920s” economy that culminated in the great market crash of 1929. “The IMF delivered a stark message about the potential for another massive financial disaster that we last experienced during the Great Depression,” noted United Nations finance expert and Jubilee USA Director Eric LeCompte. “With inequality on the rise and concerns of stability in the markets, we need to take this warning seriously.” In addition to financial sector stability and growing inequality, Georgieva shared that we face additional challenges in the current economy. “Trade problems and climate-driven weather events pose additional risks at this time,” said LeCompte. “It’s imperative that we ensure the financial sector is free of risky behavior and corruption if we want to protect ourselves from another global financial crisis.”
 
On January 4, 2020, UK’s The Observer ran an article “Debt will kill the global economy. But it seems no one cares,” by Phillip Inman:
 

Warnings from the IMF and World Bank have been dismissed. But even if they are wrong, a demographic crisis looms. The warning signs are clear. Debt is rising on every continent and especially in the business sector, which has spent the past decade ramping up its borrowing to previously unheard-of levels. Last October, the International Monetary Fund said that almost 40% of the corporate debt in eight leading countries – the US, China, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain – would become so expensive during a recession that it would be impossible to service. In other words, tens of thousands of businesses, employing millions of people, would have gambled with high levels of borrowing and lost, making themselves insolvent. Worse, the IMF said the risks were “elevated” in eight out of 10 countries that boasted systemically important financial sectors, adding that this situation was a repeat of the years running up to the last financial crisis. . . . Most of the problems afflicting the global economy relate to a lack of demand for goods and services, at least on average, compared with the years prior to the 2008 crash. And much of the weak demand relates to our ageing populations, which, in the main, focus more on storing up savings for retirement than on spending (emphasis added).

The Covid-19 has been jokingly referred to by black-humored and resentful youths as “boomer remover.”

 

Kyoto Protocol & Carbon Credits in Brief

 
The initial seed of an international low-carbon economy was at the inaugural UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, in 1972. The most significant early step was the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, on February 16, 2005, under which most industrialized countries committed to reduce their carbon emissions. All member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development except the United States have ratified the protocol, and Europe remains the leading geopolitical continent in defining and mobilizing decarbonisation policies. Europe is quickly losing ground to Asia, however, to countries such as China and South Korea.
 
The US signed the Protocol on 12 November 1998, during the Clinton presidency. To become binding in the US, however, the treaty had to be ratified by the Senate, which had already passed the 1997 non-binding Byrd-Hagel Resolution, expressing disapproval of any international agreement that did not require developing countries to make emission reductions and “would seriously harm the economy of the United States.” So even though the Clinton administration signed the treaty, it was never submitted to the Senate for ratification. George W. Bush opposed the Kyoto treaty because “it exempts 80% of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy.”
 
As of 2016, the US is the only signatory that has not ratified the Protocol. The US accounted for 36% of emissions in 1990. As such, for the treaty to go into legal effect without US ratification, it would require a coalition including the EU, Russia, Japan, and small parties. On 8 December 2012, at the end of the 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference, an agreement was reached to extend the Protocol to 2020 and to set a date of 2015 for the development of a successor document, to be implemented from 2020. 
 

Many a slip between an oil drum and a gas tank:

 
 
 
The Petrodollar & Signs of Economic Geo-Warfare

 

The term petrodollar warfare refers to the alleged motivation of US military offensives for preserving by force the status of the US dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency and the currency in which oil is priced. The term was coined by William R. Clark, who has written a book with the same title. The phrase oil currency war is sometimes used with the same meaning.

The petrodollar system originated in the early 1970s. In a series of meetings, the United States—represented by then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—and the Saudi royal family made an agreement. The United States would offer military protection for Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, and in return the Saudis would price their oil sales exclusively in United States dollars (in other words, the Saudis were to refuse all other currencies, except the US dollar, as payment for their oil exports). 

The US dollar remains the de facto world currency. Accordingly, almost all oil sales throughout the world are denominated in United States dollars (USD). Because most countries rely on oil imports, they are forced to maintain large stockpiles of dollars in order to continue imports. This creates a consistent demand for USDs and ostensibly supports the USD’s value, regardless of economic conditions in the United States. Political competitors of the United States therefore have some interest in seeing oil denominated in euros or other currencies. The EU could also theoretically accrue the same benefits if the euro replaced the dollar. 

Flashforward to 2020, as Russia and allies are conspiring to bankrupt US fracking companies. This is from “Trump, Putin Will Discuss The End Of U.S. Shale Oil,” Moon of Alabama, March 30, 2020:

The Trump administration has asked the Saudis to produce less oil but as the Saudi tourist industry is currently also dead the Saudi clown prince needs every dollar he can get. The Saudis will continue to pump and they will sell their oil at any price. The White House is now concerned that it will completely lose its beloved shale oil industry and all the jobs connected to it. Russia of cause [sic] knows this and a few days ago it made an interesting offer: A new OPEC+ deal to balance oil markets might be possible if other countries join in, Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund said, adding that countries should also cooperate to cushion the economic fallout from coronavirus. . . .

As Ria reports (in Russian) the topics of upcoming phone call [between Putin and Trump] will be Covid-19, trade (???) and, you guessed it, oil prices.

Trump, who sanctioned the Russian-German Nord-Stream II pipeline while telling Germany to buy U.S. shale gas, is now in a quite bad negotiation position. Russia does not need a new OPEC deal right now. It has many financial reserves and can live with low oil prices for much longer than the Saudis and other oil producing countries. . . .

The carnage in the oil markets will continue and will ravage those producer countries that need every penny while the corona virus is ravaging their people. Meanwhile the U.S. shale market will go bust. The minute the Al Saud family begins accepting yuan for oil their days are numbered.

What this looks like is aggressive geopolitical economic warfare that is making it increasingly expedient to uncouple the US dollar from oil production and hitch it to a new resource. Or, put differently, and to link it back to the current thesis, whichever nation state gets its currency hooked to carbon looks likely to become the new superpower.

A blogger, Katchum, predicted this back in 2012: “Euro To Replace U.S. Dollar As Reserve Currency By 2020.

And this is from a Foreign Affairs article “The Dollar & the Euro,” back in 1997 (archived version to get past paywall):

The euro’s rise may have to await a serious policy lapse by the United States, as in the late 1970s, or a renewedexplosion of America’s external debt position, as in the mid-1980s. Even the most successful and best-managed countries undergo occasional setbacks, and the euro’s rough parity with the dollar is probably inevitable. . . . When French President Valerie Giscard d’Estaing and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt decided to create the European Monetary System in 1978, one of their goals was to foster a more stable global monetary regime. The creation of EMU could bring that vision closer to reality. However, in the absence of cooperation between the European Union and the United States, the euro could create greater instability. It is up to the governments of the two regions to achieve a smooth transition from the sterling- and dollar-dominated monetary regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to a stable dollar and euro system in the early 21st century.

 

Foresight is 2020: Event 101

So what does all this have to do with Covid-19 in 2020? As many people are now aware, an inter-org simulation/drill of a coronavirus pandemic was run just weeks before the outbreak in China in 2019. This is from “Pandemic simulation exercise spotlights massive preparedness gap,” by Katie Pearce, Nov 6, 2019: 

Event 201, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, envisions a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact. . . .
 
“Once you’re in the midst of a severe pandemic, your options are very limited,” says Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Center. . . . “The greatest good can happen with pre-planning.”
 
That center’s latest pandemic simulation, Event 201, dropped participants right in the midst of an uncontrolled coronavirus outbreak that was spreading like wildfire out of South America to wreak worldwide havoc. As fictional newscasters from “GNN” narrated, the immune-resistant virus (nicknamed CAPS) was crippling trade and travel, sending the global economy into freefall. Social media was rampant with rumors and misinformation, governments were collapsing, and citizens were revolting.
 
For those participating in New York City on Oct. 18—a heavyweight group of policymakers, business leaders, and health officials—Event 201 was a chance to see how much catch-up work is needed to bolster our disaster response systems. . . . Event 201 is the fourth such exercise hosted by the Johns Hopkins center, which works to prepare communities for biological threats, pandemics, and other disasters. 
 
The simulations started with 2001’s Dark Winter, which gathered national security experts for its simulated smallpox outbreak. The groundbreaking event turned out to be influential in shaping U.S. efforts around pandemic preparedness—particularly due to its timing, right before 9/11.
 
Event 201 Pandemic Exercise: Highlights Reel: 
 

 
 
 

Evidence that Reports of Covid-19 Pandemic Have Been Grossly Exaggerated

From “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data” by John P.A. Ioannidis, March 17, 2020:
 

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.

This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror—and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.

Read the rest here. Further evidence of cooked books & fake news has been gathered at Swiss Propaganda Research:

A new epidemiological study (preprint) concludes that the fatality of Covid19 even in the Chinese city of Wuhan was only 0.04% to 0.12% and thus rather lower than that of seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1%. . . .

According to the latest data of the Italian National Health Institute ISS, the average age of the positively-tested deceased in Italy is currently about 81 years. 10% of the deceased are over 90 years old. 90% of the deceased are over 70 years old. 80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases. 50% of the deceased had suffered from three or more chronic diseases. The chronic diseases include in particular cardiovascular problems, diabetes, respiratory problems and cancer. Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons, i.e. persons without pre-existing chronic diseases. . . .

In many cases it is not yet clear whether the persons died from the virus or from their pre-existing chronic diseases or from a combination of both. . . . Furthermore, studies have shown that the internationally used virus test kits may give a false positive result in some cases. In these cases, the persons may not have contracted the new coronavirus, but presumably one of the many existing human coronaviruses that are part of the annual (and currently ongoing) common cold and flu epidemics. . . . .

Current all-cause mortality in Europe and in Italy is still normal or even below-average. . . . A hospital doctor in the Spanish city of Malaga writes on Twitter that people are currently more likely to die from panic and systemic collapse than from the virus. . . .

German immunologist and toxicologist, Professor Stefan Hockertz, explains in a radio interview that Covid19 is no more dangerous than influenza (the flu), but that it is simply observed much more closely. . . . most of the Eastern European nurses who worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week supporting people in need of care in Italy have left the country in a hurry .  . . . because of the panic-mongering and the curfews and border closures threatened by the “emergency governments.” As a result, old people in need of care and disabled people, some without relatives, were left helpless by their carers.

Many of these abandoned people then ended up after a few days in the hospitals, which had been permanently overloaded for years, because they were dehydrated, among other things. Unfortunately, the hospitals lacked the personnel who had to look after the children locked up in their apartments because schools and kindergartens had been closed. This then led to the complete collapse of the care for the disabled and the elderly, especially in those areas where even harder “measures“ were ordered, and to chaotic conditions.

The nursing emergency, which was caused by the panic, temporarily led to many deaths among those in need of care and increasingly among younger patients in the hospitals. These fatalities then served to cause even more panic among those in charge and the media, who reported, for example, “another 475 fatalities.“ “The dead are being removed from hospitals by the army,“ accompanied by pictures of coffins and army trucks lined up.

However, this was the result of the funeral directors‘ fear of the “killer virus“, who therefore refused their services. Moreover, on the one hand there were too many deaths at once and on the other hand the government passed a law that the corpses carrying the coronavirus had to be cremated. In Catholic Italy, few cremations had been carried out in the past. Therefore there were only a few small crematoria, which very quickly reached their limits. Therefore the deceased had to be laid out in different churches. . . .

Hospital situation in the US, Germany and Switzerland
 
  • The US television station CBS was caught using footage from an Italian intensive care unit in a piece on the current situation in New York. In fact, dozens of recordings by citizen journalists show that it is currently very quiet in the hospitals on the US East and West Coast. Even the “corpse refrigerator trucks“ prominently shown in the media are unused and empty.
  • Contrary to media reports, the register of German intensive care units also shows no increased occupancy. An employee of a Munich clinic explained that they had been “waiting for weeks for the wave to hit,“ but that there was “no increase in patient numbers.“ He said that the politicians‘ statements did not correspond with their own experience, and that the “myth of the killer virus“ could “not be confirmed“.
  • Also in Swiss clinics, no increased occupancy has been observed so far. A visitor to the cantonal hospital in Lucerne reports that there is “less activity than in normal times.“ Entire floors have been closed for Covid19, but staff “are still waiting for patients.“ The hospitals in Bern, Basel, Zug and Zurich have also been “cleaned out.“ Even in Ticino, the intensive care units are not working to capacity, but patients are now being transferred to the German-Swiss departments. From a purely medical point of view, this makes little sense.

 

Here Come the Enviro-Fascists?

 

This is from “A Green Reboot After the Pandemic,” Mar 24, 2020, by Sandrine Dixson-Declève , Hunter Lovins, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, and Kate Raworth:

 

In addition to threatening millions of lives and the global economy, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that human societies are capable of transforming themselves more or less overnight. In fact, there’s no better time than now to usher in systemic economic change. . . .

The Club of Rome issued a similar warning in its famous 1972 report, The Limits to Growth [1972 was the year of the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm mentioned above] and again in Beyond the Limits, a 1992 book by the lead author of that earlier report, Donella Meadows. As Meadows warned back then, humanity’s future will be defined not by a single emergency but by many separate yet related crises stemming from our failure to live sustainably. By using the Earth’s resources faster than they can be restored, and by releasing wastes and pollutants faster than they can be absorbed, we have long been setting ourselves up for disaster. . . .

Rather than simply reacting to disasters, we can use the science to design economies that will mitigate the threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemics. We must start investing in what matters, by laying the foundation for a green, circular economy that is anchored in nature-based solutions and geared toward the public good. The COVID-19 crisis shows us that it is possible to make transformational changes overnight. 

Who wrote this piece? Sandrine Dixson-Declève is Co-President of the Club of Rome. Hunter Lovins is President of Natural Capitalism Solutions and a member of the Club of Rome.Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is Director Emeritus of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a member of the Club of Rome. Kate Raworth is Senior Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, and a member of the Club of Rome. 

 

 

Scenario-Planning a Post-Covid-19 World

This is from “The Clairvoyant Ruling Class [“Scenarios for the Future of Technology & International Development” 2010 Report],” at the Wrong Kind of Green blog, March 25, 2020, by Cory Morningstar:

“The ruling class exists, it’s not a conspiracy theory. They operate as a class, too. They share the same values, the same sensibility and in Europe and North America they are white. They act in accordance with their interests, which are very largely identical. The failure to understand this is the single greatest problem and defect in left discourse today.” —John Steppling, Author, Playwright

Scenario planning [as discussed in Prisoner of Infinity] for corporate strategy was pioneered by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s. [Further reading on scenario planning: The Art of the Long View] The following excerpts are highlights from the May 2010 “Scenarios for the Future of Technology & International Development” report produced by The Rockefeller Foundation & Global Business Network. 

Following “Event 201” (Oct 18, 2019), we must concede that the ruling class has been gifted with phenomenal and prophetic intuitions and insights. (They truly are the chosen ones.) Thus it is worthwhile, even mandatory, to study their scenario exercises and simulations.

“We believe that scenario planning has great potential for use in philanthropy to identify unique interventions. . . scenario planning allows us to achieve impact more effectively.” [p 4]

“The results of our first scenario planning exercise demonstrate a provocative and engaging exploration of the role of technology and the future of globalization.” [p 4]

 
 
From that 2010 report, which can be read in full here:
 

In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s HlNl, this new influenza strain — originating from wild geese — was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months, the majority of them healthy young adults. The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers. . . .

During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems—from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty—leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power. . . . In developed countries, this heightened oversight took many forms: biometric IDs for all citizens, for example, and tighter regulation of key industries whose stability was deemed vital to national interests (p.18-19).

*
 
 
From “Did Bill Gates Just Reveal the Reason Behind the Lock-Downs?” by Rosemary Frei, Off-Guardian, Apr 4, 2020:
 

It appears that rather than let the population be exposed to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines.

And then, when the virus comes back again a few months later and most of the population is unexposed and therefore vulnerable, selling billions more test kits and medical interventions. . . .  Gates talked about how he sees things rolling out from there:

“Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person . . . Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around. So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

 
 
 
Carbon-Based Solutions
 
In the process of formatting and editing my wife’s thesis for the blog, I asked her if anyone else was talking about a carbon dollar; she said they weren’t, so I suggested she find out if anyone was, because, if they weren’t, either she was way ahead of the curve, or she was barking up the wrong socioeconomic tree. In the time it took to say, Geo-Bingo, my wife came upon a 1995 New Scientist article, “Towards a single carbon currency,”  in which Judith Hanna proposed:
 
that we introduce a system that apportions responsibility to individuals, and accommodates the fact that human nature clings tighter to luxuries than the boring necessities of life. My proposal is to set a global quota for fossil fuel combustion every year, and to share it equally between all the adults in the world. Individuals would be entitled to take part in any fuel-consuming activity —whether flying in an aircraft or using electricity to heat their house or to cook by—only if they had enough Fossil Fuel Rights to cover it. Anyone wanting to consume more than their quota would have to buy extras FFRs from one of the underconsumers. . . .
 
One prime candidate for the task is the Global Environmental Facility, which was set up by the World Bank and the UN Development Programme to fund major environmental projects. But with a monopoly in FFRs, the GEF might all too easily become yet another ineffective and elite-dominated UN bureaucracy. The same applies to governments. The solution seems to lie with a Fossil Fuel Forum. Its members would be a mix of UN agencies such as the GEF, UNICEF, the WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization, along with charities such as Oxfam and the World Wide Fund for Nature. . . .
 
The task of setting the total global quota for fossil fuel combustion each year would have to be a matter for governments, and doubtless the UN too. 
Then there’s “A New Currency,” from a 2004 issue of the Harvard International Review:
 

For those keen to slow global warming, the most effective actions are in the creation of strong national carbon currencies. . . . For scholars and policymakers, the key task is to mine history for guides that are more useful. Global warming is considered an environmental issue, but its best solutions are not to be found in the canon of environmental law. Carbon’s ubiquity in the world economy demands that cost be a consideration in any regime to limit emissions. Indeed, emissions trading has been anointed king because it is the most responsive to cost. And since trading emissions for carbon is more akin to trading currency than eliminating a pollutant, policymakers should be looking at trade and finance with an eye to how carbon markets should be governed. We must anticipate the policy challenges that will arise as this bottom-up system emerges, including the governance of seams between each of the nascent trading systems, liability rules for bogus permits, and judicial cooperation.

These and other data points were gathered together in “Carbon Currency: A New Beginning for Technocracy?“, by Patrick Wood, which also cites UK Environment Secretary David Miliband, who in 2006 spoke to the Audit Commission Annual Lecture about

a country where carbon becomes a new currency. We carry bankcards that store both pounds and carbon points. When we buy electricity, gas and fuel, we use our carbon points, as well as pounds. To help reduce carbon emissions, the Government would set limits on the amount of carbon that could be used.

The following year, in 2007, New York Times published “When Carbon Is Currency” by Hannah Fairfield, who stated “To build a carbon market, its originators must create a currency of carbon credits that participants can trade.” Wood’s article continues:

PointCarbon, a leading global consultancy, is partnered with Bank of New York Mellon to assess rapidly growing carbon markets. In 2008 they published “Towards a Common Carbon Currency: Exploring the prospects for integrated global carbon markets.” This report discusses both environmental and economic efficiency in a similar context as originally seen with Hubbert in 1933. [And] on November 9 2009, the Telegraph (UK) presented an article “Everyone in Britain could be given a personal ‘carbon allowance.’”: [I]mplementing individual carbon allowances for every person will be the most effective way of meeting the targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It would involve people being issued with a unique number which they would hand over when purchasing products that contribute to their carbon footprint, such as fuel, airline tickets and electricity. Like with a bank account, a statement would be sent out each month to help people keep track of what they are using.  If their “carbon account” hits zero, they would have to pay to get more credits.

 

 

Carbon as the Anti-Currency

 
On Carbon Becomes Latest Startup to Launch a Dollar-Pegged Stablecoin
 
Following an eventful week that saw the release of dollar-pegged stablecoins from both Paxos and Gemini, crypto project Carbon has now launched one of its own, dubbed CarbonUSD, that is based on ethereum. Starting Wednesday, the new “compliant, price-stable” coin is being made available for institutional accounts, hedge funds, traders, and exchanges. Carbon said in a press release that it is “actively pursuing” exchange listings for CarbonUSD. . . . If and when CarbonUSD reaches a $1 billion market cap, Carbon will transition to a hybrid algorithmic model, Miles Albert, co-founder of Carbon, told CoinDesk.
 
“We’ve already developed our algorithmic scale model, we’ve already done simulations as well, to test the resilience of our model,” he said “We plan to whitelist our algorithmic stablecoin into the ‘metatoken’ structure after CarbonUSD has reached sufficient scale and liquidity.”
(There is also an international company called Carbon Dollar X.)
 
 
I admit that this is all new to me, and even the notion of carbon credit is one I hadn’t fully grokked until recently, much less the idea of coupling it to an existing currency. From what I am able to understand, coupling carbon credit to an existing currency, be it euro, dollar, or yuan, is like the inverse or negative equivalent of the petrol-dollar, or of oil resource + currency. The more oil is produced, the more industry, the more profit, hence its fairly easy to see how the value of oil is directly tied to the value of the dollar as long as you need dollars to buy oil (and as long as that is enforced by US military power). In the meantime, however, a massive government deficit has been created, as the US continued to print up money that lacks any correlation to an actual resource (gold or oil), so as to keep its economy afloat.
 
In the potential new economic model, carbon credit is like the anti-oil, because carbon is something created by industry that (we are told) is destroying the environment, and so must be reduced. Hence the less carbon we produce (the lower our carbon footprint), the more credit we receive. Linking a currency to a negative resource (something that the goal is to reduce rather than produce) turns a deficit into a surplus, in a both a symbolic and a strangely literal sense. Yet as the second video above on carbon credit shows, the oil industry continues unabated, while we the people are coerced, cajoled, and con-vinced to surrender our personal freedoms to save the planet.
 
Literally, of course, this new economy also corresponds with a cashless society in which all monies become digital (something that may also be fast-tracked due to Covid-19 crisis), while at the same time, it potentially resets the “counter” to zero, since all printed money would of necessity be withdrawn and destroyed, even as currency itself is linked to a new negative resource (i.e., non-production of carbon).
 
There’s no reason to assume that the current carbon credit will be tied to existing currencies, however. There may be a whole alternate version in the works. It’s fair to assume that, if a rapid transition from petrodollar to carbon euro is coming down the pipeline, then insider trading is already underway, and the way the wind is blowing won’t be apparent to us rubes on shore until the new ship of industry has set sail. We are then left to study the after-image of the Empire’s latest reality simulation, as it is biometrically burned onto our stunned and unnaturally exposed retinas.
 
 
 

The Geo-Politicians’ Playground

To round up this bare-bones thesis, a few more quotes from “The Clairvoyant Ruling Class,” by Cory Morningstar, again quoting the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Scenarios for the Future of Technology & International Development” report:
 

“In 2017, an international agreement was reached on carbon sequestration . . . intellectual and financial resources were pooled to build out carbon capture processes. . .  A functioning global cap and trade system was also established.” [p 27]

“Centralized global oversight and governance structures. . . not just for energy use but also for disease and technology standards. . . systems & structures required far greater levels of transparency, which in turn required more tech-enabled data collection, processing, & feedback.” [p 27]

“Enormous, benign “sousveillance” systems allowed citizens to access data—all publically available—in real time and react.” [p 27]

“Nation-states lost some of their power and importance as global architecture strengthened and regional governance structures emerged. International oversight entities like the UN took on new levels of authority. . .” [p 27-28]

“The worldwide spirit of collaboration also fostered new alliances and alignments among corporations, NGOs, and communities.” [p 28]

“In many places, traditional social barriers to overcoming #poverty grew less relevant as more people gained access to a spectrum of useful technologies—from #disposable #computers to do-it-yourself (DIY) windmills.” [p 29]

“Over the course of two decades, enormous strides were made to make the world less wasteful, more efficient, and more inclusive. But the world was far from perfect. There were still failed states and places with few resources.” [p 29]

“Indeed, demand for everything was growing exponentially. By 2028, despite ongoing efforts to guide “smart growth,” it was becoming clear that the world could not support such rapid growth forever.” [p 29]

“There are considerable flows of talent between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, and the lines between these types of organizations become increasingly blurred.” [p 30]

“. . . the global have/have-not gap grew wider than ever. The very rich still had the financial means to protect themselves; gated communities sprung up from New York to Lagos, providing safe havens surrounded by slums.” [p 37]

“In 2025, it was de rigueur to build not a house but a high-walled fortress, guarded by armed personnel.” [p 37]

. . . .

Let’s circle back to the beginning. Schwartz, report lead, is Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning for Salesforce. Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff serves as the inaugural Chair of the World Economics Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco. On June 13, 2019 the World Economic Forum partnered with the United Nations. On March 11, 2020 the World Economic Forum announced a partnership with the World Health Organization (a UN agency) to establish the COVID Action Platform For Business. This same day the World Health Organization officially characterized COVID-19 a pandemic. [Source] This is the consolidation of global power, happening in real time.

 
 
You know this is a turning point in geopolitics when 96-year-old Henry Kissinger (who I assumed was long-dead) comes out of the shadows to make a statement:
 
Drawing lessons from the development of the Marshall Plan and the Manhattan Project, the U.S. is obliged to undertake a major effort in three domains. First, shore up global resilience to infectious disease. . . . We need to develop new techniques and technologies for infection control and commensurate vaccines across large populations. Cities, states and regions must consistently prepare to protect their people from pandemics through stockpiling, cooperative planning and exploration at the frontiers of science. Second, strive to heal the wounds to the world economy. Global leaders have learned important lessons from the 2008 financial crisis. The current economic crisis is more complex: The contraction unleashed by the coronavirus is, in its speed and global scale, unlike anything ever known in history. . . .
 
Third, safeguard the principles of the liberal world order. The founding legend of modern government is a walled city protected by powerful rulers, sometimes despotic, other times benevolent, yet always strong enough to protect the people from an external enemy. Enlightenment thinkers reframed this concept, arguing that the purpose of the legitimate state is to provide for the fundamental needs of the people: security, order, economic well-being, and justice. Individuals cannot secure these things on their own. The pandemic has prompted an anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.
 
The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally. Yet this millennial issue of legitimacy and power cannot be settled simultaneously with the effort to overcome the Covid-19 plague. Restraint is necessary on all sides—in both domestic politics and international diplomacy. Priorities must be established.
One final observation: if a reduced carbon footprint becomes married to the new “green” currency, what exactly would that entail in terms of changes in lifestyle for the majority of us? Is it roughly what we are currently being trained and conditioned into, Pavlov’s dog style, under the global lockdown? A steadily decreasing reliance on all things that require the production of carbon to work? Less and less reason, opportunity, or incentive to be involved in any sort of industry? Stay at home, plug into the tech, blaze up a (now-legal) blunt, and do as little possible?
 
At first, the notion of a more controlled world gained wide acceptance and approval. Citizens willingly gave up some of their sovereignty—and their privacy—to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability. Citizens were more tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight, and national leaders had more latitude to impose order in the ways they saw fit. (Rockefeller Report, p. 19)
The first casualty of the new post Covid-19 global green economy is, you guessed it: individual autonomy. To save the planet as the geopoliticians’ playground, human nature has been turned into an oxymoron.
 
***
With thanks to James Howard Kunstler’s tireless blogging at Clusterfuck Nation, on peak oil & the long emergency, which helped sow the seeds of this present piece.
 
 
 

67 thoughts on “Illuminations Never Come from the Crowned: Carbon Credit, New Reserve Currency, & the Oligarchic Green Lock-Step to a Post-Covid-19 World”

  1. They’re calling this thing…..a “novel” virus. According to Wikipedia: A novel is a long, fictional narrative which describes intimate human experiences.

    I have not seen anyone mention the connection of Lent with this global lockdown. Jesus was sent into the desert for 40 days by the holy spirit (god as in 1 of 3.) Talk about social distancing and no toilet paper.

    As I’ve mentioned before, I’m quite certain we are in the end-times as the bible says in a round-about-way. I’ve read the bible far more than I like to admit. You can go in circles for days/months trying to get to the real meaning. I always come up short. I doubt any of the events in the bible actually happened in the past, I think someone is playing a game with us. The bible hints at events to come /Sodom and Gomorrah being incinerated. The Nicene Creed and the other creeds tell us about OUR GodS and that the crux of the matter.

    If Jesus and Satan/Lucifer were tossed down from heaven? Would they even know who they were? I think they are here now and have no clue who they are (until now.) Jesus is a child sacrifice. This Friday is “GOOD” (or GOD) because Jesus is crucified. The Sun, Moon and Stars say a true transformation (or crucifixion) is happening to our ‘Jesus’ as the week events ramp up…. Jupiter conjunct Pluto. Mighty weird.

    Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) is the story of Jesus as Anakin Skywalker who goes to the dark side because of his mother. Anakin had no father. I’m waiting for Jesus to return to the light.

    Trump said this is going to be a “sad Easter.”

    Reply
    • That is curious about the Lent connection, and that I hadn’t thought of it, esp. since I am “doing” Lent.

      As if we are religio-culturally primed to give essential things up right now, during this first stretch of the lockstep sacrifice as we prepare for the idle economy, & all in the context of being a good “citizen.”

      Reply
  2. Structure is neccessary to provide a means of protecting information and compexity gained from exploration and experience. Too much structure kills the aquisition of new experience and information. Life strives for an increase in information and new experience. This requires structure to save old information. If old information is lost as new gained there will be no increase. Likewise, if too many individuals take up a certain space, movement and exploration will be slowed, thus new information aquired will be less. Structure and numbers must be periodically destroyed for life to keep progressing. Nature will eliminate any structure that is too controlling, which is why no entity will be able to control the world. Human numbers and resources used will be greatly lowered for reasons stated above. Complexity and quality does not equal growth. This virus is not a hoax, our reaction to it is the effect of our materialist viewpoint and trying to base behavior on models. Without the lockdowns this would have been an exponential growth pandemic with 10 percent of population dead. As it is, less people died but our economies will greatly suffer leaving the world much more susseptible to the next threat to our structure and numbers. This is life, do not try to find a pattern in world dynamics it is ruled by chaos theory. Human society is naturally evolved to be tribal of a couple hundred. Anything more is beyond human control without the use of huge amounts of resources which nature will limit eventally. If the supermarkets are empty nobody will care about green bucks or carbon footprints. You cannot control an avalanche. The internet is too polluted to use as a research tool and you don’t need it to see the global shitstorm coming. Stay local, keep your awareness in your body and immediate surroundings. There is a lot here, have at it.

    Reply
    • This is a hoax. There has been no rhyme or reason to any decisions being made. It’s been a terrific exercise to see how people everywhere will react to the creeping removal of liberties and to create nonsense excuses for the new draconian future.

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  3. This is so good. My husband was furloughed from his job due to this global insanity, and so we’ve had plenty of time to speculate on what this is about. It’s obvious it has something to do with the financial markets but what exactly. Your wife’s theory makes sense and now it makes sense the way they’re going about it. All I can say is that the evil that runs this world did not have to work very hard to get the masses to capitulate. The most astonishing thing has been the ease with which they’ve managed to get people to fall in line.

    I knew K was still alive; the evil ones seem to live forever.

    Reply
    • If you think it is a hoax that means tens of thousands of very intelligent people who have dedicated their lives to studying and curing disease are in on it. Is this more likely or is it more likely that this is a very contagious and virulent virus that the for profit and globally connected economy was not prepared to handle. Basically you are insulting all the doctors that you would run to to save your life from breast cancer.
      Lets not get crazy here.

      Reply
      • Maybe “hoax” isn’t the best word. “Planned Event” is what many people have given very powerful evidence about. There is a huge power incentive in forcing bilions of people to be “tested” and to submit to forced vaccinations in order to be allowed to travel or work in the New World Order that has been promoted by the elites for decades. Doctors are blatently encouraged to lable deaths as having been caused by COVID-19 without testing at all and not question medical authority figures. You have to realize how easy it is to “encourage” people in the medical community top down to do what they are told or given big money incentives to support. Then the “News” ignores the renegades that point out the logical fallacies at the risk of their livelihoods. Check out YouTuber “Richie From Boston” who has compiled very compelling footage. Also “PressResetEarth” has a compelling summary of the motivations and incentives of the (true) world leaders to lead you and me to what can be the most profitable plan in history.

        Reply
      • “Basically you are insulting all the doctors that you would run to to save your life from breast cancer.”

        Doctors, meaning well, routinely give patients terrible advice that leads them to chronic disease or death. To act as though medicine is the one uncorrupted industry is absurd in theory, and completely laughable when evidence is collected. Millions of intelligent people are socially engineered to believe and do all sorts of things, to imagine that doctors are beyond such things is naive.

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  4. or better yet, let’s stay liminal and don’t jump into unnecessary & illogical either-or thinking; this being a directed crisis for specific ends doesn’t even imply, much less argue, that there is no “virus” or no deaths (I put virus in quotes because there are reasons to doubt that particular model of biology, IMO). That’s an extrapolation of the reader.

    Another false dichotomy is either people (in this case doctors) are in on a conspiracy or we can trust their judgement 100%. Mass delusion, mimetic contagion, fudged data, opportunistic press and govt programs and officials, there is a vast number of variables here, and a very wide continuum ranging from honest endeavors to well-meaning ignorance, conscious skullduggery and unconscious complicity, all the way to deranged superegos plotting to save the world by subjugating it to their wills.

    Reply
    • You are right in stating we shouldn’t trust doctors 100%. But over time the system improves the outcomes of their treatment, whether the disease is man made or non man made. Doctors are not so good at promoting healthy lifestyle or evaluating environmental cause of new diseases, that is another branch of science. Doctors give advise to politicians on best way to treat a public health problem but it is not up to them to weigh the cost to the public in terms of economics, freedoms, environmental damages, ect.. This discussion of treatment vs side effects to the group is what is missing in the media which shows that the media are a bunch of dolts that aren’t any more useful than telling us the weather tomorrow or which group of millionaires beat another in some ballgame.
      Likewise I worked in the government and found them equally incompetent which is why I find it hard to believe they could manage anything more complex than putting their hats on their heads. Now secret groups I’m leaving open as far as their abilities but this pandemic is just a governmental mismanagement of massive proportions where the greed of corporations and the arrogance of European and American attitudes lead to slow reactions of shutting down travel in and out of China back in January. There is no way America will give up the petrodollar without invading Saudi Arabia if it comes to that. No way we will give up our pickups, suvs, guns, and hamburgers. You’ll have to pry them from our cold, dead hands.

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      • didn’t you say you were going to take some time off JC? I’m wary of tackling your points as I think to do so might be to miss the point; the piece will stand or fall on its merit, any factual errors or typos I appreciate being pointed out. But generalizations and expressions of personal opinion soon lead to straw man arguments (or double as them) that proliferate fast and can turn Chinese whispers into Mongolian screams.

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          • not in the way I am avoiding alligators or people smoking on the sidewalk… I skip that aisle in the supermarket though.

            Interesting coz Kate mentioned Lent.

            One man’s c-theory is another man’s data bank.

      • “You’ll have to pry them from our cold, dead hands.” — sorta happening as we speak, eh? How do you think THIS CURRENT WORLD WIDE media blitz and economic shutdown was coordinated so easily? Who got everyone to agree to agree? Or maybe I shoud assert WHO instead of asking Who? Heh

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  5. Interesting idea.

    Reserve currencies seem to be closely tied to destructive power and an acknowledged respect for the people who possess it. That aspect seems a bit tenuous in your hypothesis as a digital reserve currency linked to carbon credits would need to be backed by people who unassailably control and implement biological weapons on a transnational basis. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence for that.

    Also observe how far governments are becoming indebted in order to preserve their existing economic structures.

    Time will tell.

    Reply
    • Your second point is addressed in the piece, tho admittedly only in passing (I freely admit to being out of my depth when talking about currency!)

      Regarding your first point, what would such evidence look like, and have you looked for it? Who does “unassailably control and implement biological weapons on a transnational basis,” do you think? I presume it would be the military and intelligence community, with their ties to medical and science industries. Are you talking of open backing?

      Reply
  6. Nobody does in my opinion.

    I’m not really much interested in these things now to be honest. The amount of specialised knowledge involved to make accurate statements seems arduous and overwhelming.

    I am finding what I need doing energy work in nature.

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  7. “IMAGINE a virus – the most terrifying virus you can, and then IMAGINE that you and you alone have the cure.”

    May you live in interesting times.

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  8. How do you like your “Planned Contraction” now, boys?

    A long article, right on-message. The first paragraphs tell a tidy narrative linking Covid-19 to climate change etc and the concluding paragraphs point out (remarkably though cursorily) the problems with Peak Oil and alternative energies and drives home the need for economic reforms:

    The Earth Is Telling Us We Must Rethink Our Growth Society

    Why COVID-19 previews a larger crash. What we must do to save ourselves.
    William E. Rees Yesterday | TheTyee.ca

    William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.

    To save itself, society must adopt an eco-centric lens. This would enable us to see the human enterprise as a fully dependent subsystem of the ecosphere. We need to script a new cultural narrative consistent with this vision.

    To those still committed to the pre-COVID-19 perpetual-growth-through-technology paradigm, economic contraction equates to unmitigated catastrophe. We can give them no hope but to accept a new reality.

    Like it or not, we are at the end of growth. The pandemic will certainly induce a recession and possibly a global depression, likely reducing gross world product by a quarter.

    There are good reasons to think that there can be no “recovery” to pre-COVID “normal” even if we were foolish enough to try. Ours has been a debt-leveraged economy. Thousands of marginal firms will be bankrupted; some will be bought up by others with deeper pockets (further concentrating wealth) but most will disappear; millions of people will be left unemployed, possibly impoverished without ongoing public support.

    The oil patch is particularly hard hit. Canada’s tarsands producers who need $40 a barrel to survive are being offered one tenth that, less than the price of a mug of beer. Meanwhile, oil production may have peaked and older fields upon which the world still depends are declining at a rate of six per cent per year.

    This heralds a future crisis: GWP and energy consumption have historically increased in lock-step; industrial economies depend utterly on abundant cheap energy. After the current short-term demand-drop surplus dries up, it will be years (if ever) before there is adequate new supply to replicate pre-pandemic levels of global economic activity — and there are no adequate “green” substitutes. Much of the economy will have to be rebuilt to size in ways that reflect this emergent reality.

    And herein lies the great opportunity to salvage global civilization.

    Clearing skies and cleaner waters should inspire hopeful ingenuity. Indeed, if we wish to thrive on a finite planet, we have little choice but to see the COVID-19 pandemic as preview and our response as dress rehearsal for the bigger play. Again, the challenge is to engineer a safe, smooth, controlled contraction of the human enterprise. Surely it is within our collective imagination to socially construct a system of globally networked but self-reliant national economies that better serve the needs of a smaller human family.

    The ultimate goal of economic planning everywhere must now turn to ensuring that humanity can thrive indefinitely and more equitably within the biophysical means of nature.

    https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/04/06/The-Earth-Is-Telling-Us-We-Must-Rethink-Our-Growth-Society/

    Reply
  9. From Switzerland, a careful analysis of the data reveals the ubiquity of various covid virii in human populations combined with skewed mortality rates due to testing only patients with severe respiratory distress, concludes there’s no THERE, there:

    “Think deep, do good science and do not panic!” A few considerations on the corona crisis Daniel Jeanmonod MD, Roxanne Jeanmonod & Francis Neirynck   Apr 7, 2020   

    Dr. Joel Kettner [1], professor of Community Health Science at Manitoba University and Medical Director of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases declared recently:

    I have never seen anything like this… I am not talking about the pandemic, because I have seen 30 of them, one every year… But I have never seen this reaction, and I am trying to understand why…”

    Conclusion
    As of today (end of March 2020), a death toll of around 35’000 worldwide is being attributed to COVID-19. This is of course a high number but still much less than the flu, which kills every season between half a million and a million people. There are 2.6 million deaths worldwide every year due to RTIs.The world is, in the middle of the corona crisis, mesmerized by one mutated corona virus like hundreds of other ones spreading over the whole world every year.

    It presents no evidence of higher mortality than its earlier yearly mutations. Diagnostic testing is being interpreted as a way to follow the epidemic propagation, whereas it only reveals (partially) the ubiquitous and collaborative presence of common cold viruses worldwide. The mortality rate of COVID-19 has been calculated as the percentage of performed tests coming out positive, not integrating the strong mortality reduction allowed by the presence of a high percentage of mild or asymptomatic disease forms.

    Fear and panic were kindled by these two inaccurate scientific communications and spread over the whole planet like a bushfire, causing the chaos we observe every day on the News. …
    Older pandemics, which are at the source of deep atavic plague memories, were in most cases due to bacterias and related closely to precarious human life conditions.

    The only catastrophic viral pandemic was the 1918 H1N1 flu, which killed millions, but developed in the chaotic and unhealthy aftermath of the first world war.

    Panic seems to be no appropriate, even no feasible way to integrate our interaction with viruses, it would guarantee us a future filled with fear for the next pandemic and repeated panic states and destabilizations of the worldwide human environment.

    Daniel Jeanmonod MD, Professor Emeritus of Neurosurgery at Zürich University and Physiology & Neuroscience at New York University. Roxanne Jeanmonod, Physical Therapist. Francis Neirynck, Civil Engineer
    https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/07/think-deep-do-good-science-and-do-not-panic/

    Reply
  10. Hat off to the wife for researching this extremely important topic. Auticulture needed to cover it as it will shape our external lives and probably condition our inner experiences, not to mention our collective interaction. Although not an authority on any particular topic, I’ve been looking at the same information for a while and to have it so succinctly presented is a gift, the links are top-notch. Now I just need some of my friends sensitive to the official line to read it. I fear I lost them early into the pandemic.

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  11. I wonder what the odds are of a “quarantine” (etymology= 40 days) occurring during Lent (also 40 days) One referring to the Sun and one referring to the Son.

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    • when you first pointed this out to me I felt chills. An ancient program unfolds? A microcosm of social reconfiguration superimposed on spiritual traditions, so we literally follow the program religiously?

      I think it’s also observable in some of the counter-arguments that assign virtue to toeing the official line, and the opposite (irresponsibility or ingratitude) to “conspiracy theories” (inconvenient data) around it. Strange daze indeed.

      Reply
      • The first thing I noticed was that this global controlling force emerged into public view and replaced lent with its own version of lent, using the quarantine word, a word based on Christ’s 40 days in the desert.

        What ever this was, it came in right at the main celebration of the Church and Shut it town and replaced all prayers to god with mesmerization on Covid news.

        Services in the Church have not been globally interrupted like this ever, much less with a nearly identical inversion of the normal lenten practice, minds dropping all other activity and going fully into the dream rather than prayer.

        Reply
    • After I noticed the quite blatant lunar symbolism associated with the last great invisible enemy ISIS, I looked, in this context, into the one before that, Al Qaeda, and found the initiating big event (911) and the subsequent stories and events surrounding it filled with Saturnian symbols and astrological alignments. Years ago this led me to the suspicion that the next great fear inducing event would be distinctly solar in its symbolic markers (as the 3 interrelated idols of Moon, Sun, and Saturn…as in ISIS-Ra-El for instance…seem to be associated with the occult religion of much of the ruling class). Lo and behold it is solar…the CORONA virus has us locked in doors and fearful during the spring equinox, Lent, Easter etc. I just thought it would come in the form of foreign terrorism like the two before it, and not so tiny as to literally be an invisible “foreign” pathogen, but here we are.

      Reply
  12. Somewhat related–or maybe not at all . . .

    This makes me think of a conversation I had with a friend shortly after Trump was elected. We both came to the conclusion–half jokingly–that “The Powers That Be” actually allowing Trump to become president was a sign that something big was coming down the pike, and that they wanted a useful idiot to be caught holding the bag when it all went down.

    Reply
    • That was actually widely promoted in the alternative news I was looking at — at that time! That Trump was put in place to be the “Fall Guy” for the crash of the dollar — the deliberate crashing of the dollar to further One World Order. He’s their guy! He’s got all the “truthers” hoping he will save us all. We shall see! Or not.

      Reply
  13. Hi Jasun

    A very interesting article. Your wife has done some serious thinking on this topic.
    I printed the whole thing up to read. Old school. Prefer paper.
    Thought this might provide some additional interesting background

    The idea of the corporations being opposed to the ‘carbon’ restriction agenda has always been untrue- Big oil has had their hooks in the climate change promotion for decades.

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-corporate-climate-coup/5568
    Written in 07:

    “Early in 2000, “world business leaders” convening at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland declared that “climate change is the greatest threat facing the world.” That fall, many of the same players, including Dupont, BP, Shell, Suncor, Alcan, and Ontario Power Generation, as well as the French aluminum manufacturer Pechiney, joined forces with the U.S. advocacy group Environmental Defense to form the Partnership for Climate Action. Like-minded Environmental Defense directors included the Pew Center’s Frank Loy and principals from the Carlyle Group, Berkshire Partners, and Morgan Stanley and the CEO of Carbon Investments. Echoing the Pew Center mission, and barely a year after the “battle of Seattle” had shut down the World Trade Organization in opposition to the corporate globalization regime, the new organization reaffirmed its belief in the beneficence of market capitalism. “The primary purpose of the Partnership is to champion market-based mechanisms as a means of achieving early and credible action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that is efficient and cost-effective.”

    If we bring this up to what is occurring at this time. It’s unsurprising really that the Hedge Fund, king of kings, Larry Fink’s Blackrock is being called upon at this critical time (allegedly) to save the planet from the Covid crisis. (also alleged)
    https://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/why-the-bank-of-canada-needs-blackrocks-help-while-fighting-the-coronavirus-downturn

    https://business.financialpost.com/financial-times/u-s-feds-big-boost-for-blackrock-raises-eyebrows-on-wall-street

    https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/mexican-president-blackrock-ceo-discussed-coronavirus-impact

    Larry Fink is an avowed “Green”- I take that to mean he loves money
    But the promoted idea is that he ‘cares about the environment’
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/business/dealbook/larry-fink-blackrock-climate-change.html

    So we can see how he will direct all this bailout money towards the “green agenda”
    which is purely profit driven

    Reply
    • Blackrock and Vanguard are the world’s top investors. Blackrock alone owns over $2 trillions in all major holdings such as Goldman Sachs, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, Lockhead Martin, Oracle, MasterCard, Chevron, Morgan Stanley, NYSE and thousands of others. Vanguard’s value actually surpasses the Blackrock’s total value. They own and control about 90 percent of the world.

      Reply
  14. Regan, Jan ’81: “in this present [economic] crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”. and so, neoliberalism, whose “successes” (from an economic growth perspective at least) allowed that particular game to be played by virtually every nation on the planet … The irony in Regan’s words of course is that governmental control of society has continued unabated throughout the neoliberal era (in fact almost certainly it has increased). The so-called problem Regan was talking about was that economic growth had stalled in the 70s, at least compared to the hey day of growth in the 50s and (early) 60s (fuelled by cheap fossil fuels and the early successes of Keynesian economics). I guess the memory of the good old days (when, materially at least, things did seem to be getting “better” for those of us in the West) was still pretty fresh in the 70s, so if we were being generous we might say that governments could be forgiven for wanting so desperately to get back to growth (of course I think they had other agendas as well) – the 70s had shown Keynesianism to be wanting (on its own terms) and socialism was still very much the enemy of course. However, like all good lies there was an element of truth to the idea that Regan et al would relax their grip on the steering wheel, in the sense that economic activity (esp. finance) was deregulated (and taxed less) – the underlying philosophy being that anything that makes money is fair game – the more goods and services that can be monetised the better, effectively: the more money you make, the more we’ll support you – regardless of the harm done to the natural world in the process and regardless of how you exploit your workers, etc – all in the service of GROWTH (and the idea of trickle-down)… (obvs this has been tempered to some degree by the social democratic elements within national governments/EU, etc – but the rules of the economic game have ensured that their voices have remained secondary.)

    I get the idea of a ruling class but I want to make a distinction between A) a global power bloc (“global elite”) consisting chiefly of governments and international bodies such as the UN, but also some influential billionaires/people from the business world and B) corporations (however “powerful”). I get that there is currently a clear overlap between corporate and governmental power, but my thesis here is that while corporations have been extremely influential/powerful during the neoliberal era, if the rules of the game change, those corporations could lose their power pretty quickly…(NB: I don’t necessarily think that entails that all the billionaire shareholders would lose their power concurrently – I think that would depend what else, if anything, individuals brought to the table other than being good at gaming the (current) system.)

    Fast-forward to 2020 and the corona virus crisis… A thought has been brewing in my mind that what we are seeing now is a power grab by those factions in the global power bloc that want to see an end to neoliberalism (with associated loss of corporate power… — whether they manufactured or merely exploited the crisis is not such an important question to me) – the time is ripe for such a grab because as one commenter put it, neoliberalism is already collapsing under the weight of its own junk (and debt). What this faction has in mind to replace neoliberalism with I have no idea but if this is indeed what we’re seeing, I for one hope that economic GROWTH is not part of the plan. The drive for economic growth in the context of an industrialised global economy is destroying the ecology – that’s just a fact – even if we’re ambivalent about the possibility we’re bringing about our own downfall (as a species), should we not welcome any change in the economic system that will mean it is less harmful to LIFE? I get that greater governmental control over our lives and over our economic system is a scary prospect (and that the track record causes one to worry about what’s in store), but so is another 10 years or more of neoliberalism and the destruction of the ecology that would entail… The other thing to throw into the mix is that even if an end to neoliberalism is their plan, it doesn’t mean everything will go smoothly for them, in fact, I would imagine that it won’t (maybe some of ye are right and they can’t resist the impulse to micro-manage us (which could have good intentions behind it of course) – I trust that if they push this too far it will backfire – maybe I’m naïve)…Anyways I’m feeling optimistic that LIFE stands to benefit from this crisis.. and since we’re all connected…

    Reply
    • Bonce “Anyways I’m feeling optimistic that LIFE stands to benefit from this crisis.. and since we’re all connected…”

      There is nothing life beneficial or life affirming about this crisis.
      By it’s very design it is anti life- Particularly anti human.

      ” I for one hope that economic GROWTH is not part of the plan”

      How you’re defining that I’m unsure. If we’re talking the financial aspect of growth there will be lots of “economic” growth- However if you are hoping growth aka jobs for people are not part of the plan then one is actually hoping for mass destruction of humankind.

      “neoliberalism is already collapsing under the weight of its own junk ”

      Neoliberalism is being saved from collapse. It’s being given the liquidity to create yet another bubble. And humankind and the ecology are being sacrificed.

      Reply
      • BTW, I’m fully aware that my thesis could be complete bs but I put it up anyway to welcome comment…

        …I said I’m optimistic that life STANDS to benefit from this crisis — not that this crisis in itself is benefitting Life….

        The economic growth imperative of our current economic system is a consequence of the way money is created as interest bearing debt. In order to service the debt we have to keep growing the economy — that means turning more and more of the natural world into goods and services every year. That’s not the only way to do economics and personally I’d welcome that coming to an end even if it is the result of some globalist agenda (ideally not)…

        You may well be right that Neoliberalism is being saved from collapse — I haven’t been paying enough attention to know tbh — but one wonders how long we can keep propping it up before it becomes beyond farcical, and is revealed as such to us en-masse, thereby depriving it of its remaining lifeblood…

        Reply
        • Hi Bonce:
          I think it’s commonly understood that money is debt- but regarding growth we have to discern between financialization as growth and real world economics or real world growth.

          It seems to me and I could be mistaken you may be confusing the two?

          ” that means turning more and more of the natural world into goods and services every year”

          I don’t know what that means to you? That is not entirely a bad thing.
          I grow a garden every year. And have for decades now. I turn the natural world into food for my family. I use the sun, water and manure to provide energy for sustanence. I store and or preserve the food as well
          That is no different then what any other living creature does for itself.
          It’s an energy exchange at it’s most basic

          Reply
          • yeah capitalism has got a bad rap, probably intentionally, once again to shame small businesses while big corp continues on its murky way; at the thrift store we redistribute capital rather than produce it, and charge a service & handling fee… we certainly get to see how much unnecessary crap has been produced already, never mind that it is still being produced, it’s very triggering for me but – you have to take the good with the bad and sort it all out, that’s what we have inherited, a beautiful planet that is also currently a trash heap.

          • Yeah thanks for that. I was just trying to make the (basic) point that the system is currently rigged for that energy exchange not to be in service of the whole of Life — in theory at least our systems could incentivise regenerative energy exchanges — utopian, sure, but who knows? where intention goes energy flows…

    • Bonce, the only reason why the wealthy/powerful seem to care about the environment is because there is another angle to making more money and centralizing more power unto themselves. There is no such thing as a billionaire/powerful person/powerful entity losing their power and influence. How do you think they got to their position to begin with?! Corporations/ALL governments/banks are deeply interconnected; yes, you are naive. I don’t know how you can say growth is destroying the ecology and call it a “fact”. What facts? What data that hasn’t come from or been corrupted by entities with an ideological bias? (Jasun provides links you should read and the previous commenter, Penny, has provided a good, current example of one of these deceivers.)

      Reply
      • Thanks for your comment. Personally I can’t agree that there is no such thing as a powerful person losing their power and influence — empires come and go, etc.. A basic understanding of ECOnomics and ECOlogy (greek: management and knowledge of “home” — the earth) will tell you that to grow the economy in our system means to use more of earth’s natural “resources” – with associated disruption or destruction of ecosystems — it’s not that we can possibly hope to live on this earth without ANY disruption/damage to ecosystems but the current system only offers incentives to destroy them — it can’t offer incentives to restore or heal them because the return on investment is uncompetitive…

        Reply
        • For me, Bonce’s post provides some welcome nuance and underscores the need to move away from “conspiracy theories”—which invariably have a built-in value judgment and emotional charge—to dispassionate (liminal) social analysis that refrains from reaching unnecessary (and impossible) conclusions about how all these elements are working together or the ratio between conscious design and the unconscious, “natural” (albeit trauma-generated) organization of an organism (humanity) in crisis.

          It’s my view that this is very much about LIFE, and that the net result of this draconian crackdown (though not the intention) is to corral our life force and allow it to emerge in dramatic and wholly unpredictable new ways. That’s apocalypse, not the plan of the devil but the return of the divine after a very lengthy sleep. And the question of ruling powers and principalities that eventually fall is central to my wife’s thesis, since it suggests a power struggle is underway, not merely between Nature and society but within the ruling classes themselves. This stands to reason, if they are divided internally and divided against nature and against the bulk of humanity, why assume that any kind of unification within their own ranks has any kind of true resilience? Demons in Hell hardly make for community living.

          However, that the new reconfigured social systems emerging out of this will be in any way more beneficent to human life and community is, in my view, very naïve. The benefits of what is happening may only available to those parts of the human organism ready to receive the guidance of life force and move with it, away from social dependency and into natural harmony, both through human community and via changing relationship with the land and our own bodies.

          Reply
          • Hi Jasun

            “Demons in Hell hardly make for community living.”

            That is certainly true!

            ” The benefits of what is happening may only available to those parts of the human organism ready to receive the guidance of life force and move with it, away from social dependency and into natural harmony, both through human community and via changing relationship with the land and our own bodies.”

            I like the above statement and agree that for this change to take place and it’s a much needed change, people have to be willing to look within themselves and extend that outwards to the role they are playing in all that is wrong with our modern day social system. That seems to be what you are saying?

            btw: My Dad is from Italy, the very idea of cremation is nearly repulsive to Italians. It makes sense that there would be little in the way of that type of service provided and the backlog mentioned in your wife’s article could very easily occur

          • Thanks for this Jasun…

            “if they are divided internally and divided against nature and against the bulk of humanity, why assume that any kind of unification within their own ranks has any kind of true resilience?”

            Yes I agree that this both stands to reason and for what it’s worth I can also sense it on an intuitive level at the moment…

            “The benefits of what is happening may only available to those parts of the human organism ready to receive the guidance of life force and move with it, away from social dependency and into natural harmony, both through human community and via changing relationship with the land and our own bodies.”

            I love this, and agree it’s a guiding principle whatever else is going on. but in addition (being a good limalist!?) it’s not so clear to me (currently) that what will emerge from this will be “worse” than what has lead up to it…we’ll know more soon I guess… (it also depends what timescales we’re talking about I suppose…)

        • Bonce:

          ” it’s not that we can possibly hope to live on this earth without ANY disruption/damage to ecosystems”

          nothing that lives on the planet can hope to live without disruption or damage to the ecosystems of the planet- not one living thing.

          “it can’t offer incentives to restore or heal them because the return on investment is uncompetitive…”

          Yet, the ‘green’ economy is alleged to be the answer to that problem with a huge return on investment. This is the direction that BlackRock is intending to go. There are all manner of ‘green’ investments. Green funds etc.,
          All supposedly environmentally friendly. Including the opportunity to price carbon or commod-ify it for profit

          https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/why-wall-street-laments-a-missed-chance-to-price-pollution-1.1363354

          Reply
          • “nothing that lives on the planet can hope to live without disruption or damage to the ecosystems of the planet- not one living thing.”

            In the sense of Bill Molinson’s “everything gardens” — sure — but in general that “gardening” of Earth’s many life forms is a key component of making ecosystems more resilient, self-organising and self-healing whilst our current “gardening” clearly isn’t doing that…
            I was just saying that there’s some doubt that homo sapiens could ever have a net benefit to the health of ecosystems going forward but obvs we have been less disruptive than now in the past and in the future who knows?

  15. Great stuff! Probably close to being very accurate. Three scams come together to produce this crisis:

    1. Peak Oil- which Kunstler fell for hook line and sinker. With which he then scared the shit out of many well meaning environmentalists, that catastrophe was coming soon. (Totally Wrong – the world is floating in oil, and the Russians and the Saudis are destroying US shale just by pumping oil that according to Kunstler should have been gone 10 years ago) The Peak Oil scam prepared us for the green new steal and justified incursion and control of the middle east. The new FEAR begins

    OOOps that means a fourth scam- that oil is from dead dinosaurs and carbon. No–Oil is abiotic. It is NOT a fossil fuel. There is plenty of it, and always will be. (Apologize one of these day James)

    Go here for more on that: “Fossils From Animals And Plants Are Not Necessary For Crude Oil And Natural Gas, Swedish Researchers Find” http://viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html

    2. Global Warming. Total scam. The FEAR expands immensely. The world is warming by meaningless amounts and what little warming is happening is not related to carbon at all. Spend some time on this website if you don’t believe me. https://realclimatescience.com/
    or use your common sense. The world is not about to end because of excess carbon, it’s completely absurd but the more educated you are the more you believe it – like Darwinism! another scam

    3. Corona virus. No worse (yes different and scarier) than the flu. Human engineered and (probably) released on purpose. here’s the scoop on that : JC On A Bike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlplnH3VYyc

    No need to plunge the world into a depression and escalate the FEAR by any means. Ridiculous. Sweden has not locked down and has a lower rate of infection than New York State.

    Foaming at the mouth now-

    Not to mention that central banking and classical economics beyond basic supply and demand is a scam. (currency also out of my league, but I can tell that much)

    AND ONE MORE to set the stage: the moon landing that prepared us all to finally worship Science with a capital S. So that all the scientists under sexual blackmail (thanks for that knowledge Jasun) will toe the party line and we will believe them like we used to believe the priests. Very few think for themselves because the virus is Science and we have to look to Scientists most of whom tell us to be scared. Big thanks you all of them that are speaking truth to the machine.
    When Americans learned about RNA they got really credulous.

    Not that there isn’t a lot of truth in Science. But it is the new religion and it’s being used to make us comfortable and scare shit out of us. Sound familiar?

    it’s a Multi Scam! thanks! peace, b. good luck god bless

    Reply
    • I don’t think the fact that there are some oil wells still producing oil particularly disproves the fact that it will run out one day. Oil wells have consistently run dry, which is why Western governments got so excited about the shale revolution. I don’t find the abiogenic oil theory particularly convincing. If it were true, I think we’d be *seriously* fucked, because there would be no natural break on the current trajectory of our civilisation. I trust that God is too kind to allow us an infinite supply of oil.

      Reply
      • agreed, and the little I know of this admittedly, the above thesis is entirely compatible with Kunstler’s peak oil theory and even supports it (without being dependent on it)

        Reply
        • Anyone can predict social collapse, it’s in the air from nuclear war to flesh eating zombies. His whole theory revolved around peak oil. But there is no peak oil. Abiotic oil is absolutely true. Please look into it more. Many oil fields are refilling! true! it oozes out of the inner earth!
          https://duckduckgo.com/?q=some+oil+fields+are+refilling&t=brave&ia=web

          Of course I agree that we live in a shallow materialistic society that Kunstler derides. But that smacks of smug superiority and elitism when pointed at individuals because I also think we can consume to our hearts content without polluting the planet irreversibly, with the right techniques. The earth is constantly in a process of healing itself. We literally couldn’t destroy it if we tried. We would all die first and it would regenerate in short order. It is designed that way. The flowers always grow back after the armies pass that turned them to muck. Not that the armies should pass. The earth can handle the burning of oil if it’s done right. The air in NYC is incredibly clean for instance. There is no global warming period. That is a lie.

          What’s really fucked up are the pesticides (GMOs) and vaccines and factory farming of animals and the waste and the other agrochemicals…that’s what’s killing us early and probably dumbing us down. it’s definitely what is killing the coral reefs, not a one degree supposed rise in ocean temps. hello.

          Kunstler blames it all on the common man and is very smug about it. There he is wrong as well, and doesn’t understand the conspiracy of social engineering that the innocent masses are subjected to. You’ve even said that about him Jasun. This is a man-made virus and a man-made social collapse that has nothing to do with the general shallowness of the common man, who is generally decent and kind and caring in my experience (just wants a lot of shit and id encouraged in that direction)…unlike the elites like Boil Gates et al. They are the cause and they always are. The shallow populace fill up the drunk tanks and crash cars and rob stores. The elite destroy entire cities in an instant. After creating wars using long range planning and mind control with bodies in ovens. Big difference I’d say.

          And covetousness is no less a part of us than the desire for transcendence, and fairly harmless compared to wanting to control the entire planet, as the Gnostic elite are doing. At this rate they will succeed. The ultimate covet.

          When we all worship technologically superior beings from Sirius and pay with solar dollars for church services we will know they have won.

          Great stuff guys. Thank you so much and keep it up!
          peace b

          Reply
          • I agree with some of what you say, Bob, with regards to pesticides, factory farming, etc. I’ve tried to make this point to my climate-obsessed greeny-leftoid friends – that all this talk of ‘decarbonization’ just lets the extractive industries off the hook to pollute as they wish because they just ‘offset’ their ‘carbon emissions’ with dubious technologies, like alt.energy snake oil, geoengineering (which is possibly worse than anything CO2 is doing to our atmosphere).

            However, although I’m not particularly convinced that CO2 is a primary factor in changing the climate, and far from convinced that it’s the biggest environmental problem we’re currently facing (if predictions about the Grand Solar Minimum we are entering are correct, we need to be preparing for a new Mini Ice Age), I remain unconvinced that abiotic oil is true to any relevant degree. There are some serious flaws in the theory, and while there may be an *element* of truth in it, it would be collectively suicidal to bank our hopes for continuing our affluent industrialized civilization on the fringe theory that oil is actually a renewable resource. I dig fringe theories, as we all do here, but some just seem too implausible (and in this case, potentially damaging to our future adaptability) to buy into on any practical level.

            Kunstler’s latest book, Living in the Long Emergency, comes highly recommended, and deals with the flaws in his 2005 predictions – primarily, that nobody saw the Mickey Mouse industry of shale/unconventional cropping up to such an extent in the 2010s.

  16. Great to see a liminal perspective that ties together some important strands of this bizarre episode. A few thoughts:

    * I saw a video of a NYC doctor saying the symptoms of severe COVID seemed more like ‘altitude sickness’ than anything else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3ka8lo_fZ8&feature=youtu.be

    The discussion of Lent above got me thinking along archetypal lines, and how the two myths that (for me) seem to embody our current phase of Western/post-Western technocratic civilisation are Faust, and Icarus. Altitude sickness certainly fits with the latter… an archetypal expression of our civilisation desperately trying to flap its wings to reach the sun, as the air gets thinner and hotter, and the wax on its flying machine melting faster and faster?

    * The whole 5g situation has gone insane. I run a local 5g activist group, and the Facebook page has gone into overdrive, with people claiming that masts are being put up during the lockdown, birds are dying, and making speculative connections between 5g and COVID in ways that range from fairly plausible to absolutely absurd (deliberately spread disinfo?). Cue social media websites making a crackdown on “fake news ermagerd”. A 5g mast was torched in Birmingham – whether it’s a false flag or not, it shows a level of desperation on the part of… someone? Dichotomies all over the place are being sown to control the narrative bandwidth.

    * I know he’s controlled opposition and all, but I still find Alex Jones’s ‘chicken neck bastard’ rant about Bill Gates to be one of the more entertaining bits of performance art that the loudmouth Texan has produced. Roll up the sleeves…

    * The ecomodernist/transhumanist/psychedelic/dark occult alliance keeps on coagulating, at least in my field of awareness. I was raised with back-to-the-land primitivism as an ideal (although in a family that never really lived according to those principles, leaving me to figure it out as an adult… c’est la vie); it was therefore quite a shock (as I mentioned in my earlier email to you, Jasun) to re-acquaint myself with the contemporary ecological movement and find it saturated with technocratic utopian idiocy about genetically altering the ecosystem to repair the damage we’ve definitely done to it, geoengineering the climate to reverse the damage we’ve allegedly done to it with that pesky CO2 molecule, hydroponically growing our food, creating ‘rewilded’ no-go areas for humans where all those irksome peasants and indigenous people used to live, and such like. No surprise to find from a previous post here on Auticulture that Stewart Brand, signatory of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, is closely associated with John Brockman, and by extension Epstein and the Edge Foundation…

    Reply
  17. Solar Dollars: The World Currency to Price and Finance Carbon Mitigation” (2015)

    Quote:

    The Solar Dollar (SOL) is a world currency for a cohesive social-and-environmental movement that will change everything. The new currency will avoid political delay and will systemically change the global economy to address the true Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). SOL is ‘money’, but unlike traditional banking, SOL will be issued as debt-free rewards for the proven mitigation and sequestration of greenhouse gases. . . .

    SOL will aggregate with carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse pollution
    SOL will complement existing carbon markets (cap-and-trade)
    SOL are not carbon credits
    SOL will not pay twice for carbon offsets

    THE ROADMAP has three stages.
    Stage 1 is launched by a private consortium. New legislation is not needed, and this avoids political delay. Stage 2 begins when enough people (50-100 million) buy SOL to create a political tipping-point for U.N. negotiations. Stage 3 will involve 100+ years of carbon debt de-leveraging and a new monetary paradigm. . . .

    STAGE 2 begins with a U.N. meeting to register SOL as a World Currency […]. A central bank protocol will fund the SOL system with Green Quantitative Easing (GQE). This will avoid taxes and foster real economic growth.

    An alternative proposal discussed in the comments is “A new paradigm: establishing a global carbon market as an element for the foundation of a ‘Low Carbon Bretton Woods’ system

    And the World Economics Association’s journal: “Real-World Economics Review – issue 87, Special Issue: Economics and the Ecosystem

    Reply
      • I’m not sure what your relatonship to words are, but a possible definition of anarchy is basically what you have just written: not having or endorsing any social order (or politics). So would you assent, then, to the reasonability of being described as an anarchist, given you more or less do not prescribe any social order that matches or correlates with your understanding of human nature?

        Having read Brian Hayden, where aggrandizers are conceived as a viral-like influence within a social group, and being so damned educated in the dark side of society, why do you feel so comfortable ‘not having any politics’? Is it possible, perhaps, that not having a politics fits perfectly into the scheme of the, hope you don’t mind me borrowing a biblical metaphor, the “Nephilim’s” hands?

        Order, or self-organization in natural processes, is inevitable. Somebody is going to impose their order: there’s no neutrality in the natural world.

        I have a politics, which reflects my sense of what the social order should look like. Just as nature is composed of a chaos and an order, reflected in the way life arises from non-linear, stochastic, thermodynamic processes (chaos), which via the influence of higher level constraints (like inertia, or gravity, in the formation of a galaxy) imposes order on the mesoscale chaos we see happening all around us, I believe my representation of how reality works should follow – since I myself like all other animals are organized by the same processes – the exact same pattern.

        For me, stability is about sticking to the middle path. Because of this, anarchism, which more or less amounts to the refusal to acknowledge the value of representation, or imposing an order (which we do through a shared agreement on language) on the social world around you, will do nothing more than facilitate the world-denying goals of sociopaths; on the other end of the political spectrum, an overly centralized bureaucratic state can easily be infiltrated by sociopaths, and in the process, leveraged to support their ends.

        The middle path would be recognizing the need for a social order, and not assuming, a priori, that language is the culprit behind all human problems (as postmodernists and essentializing mystic alike tend to assume). You want responsibility to the other to be a primary value of every individual, and so, you’d like socialism, or a socialistic ethic, to be the primary economic system. At the same time, however, you do not want to overly arrest the freedom and creativity of the individual, so you’d like some wiggle room for free enterprise, albeit, a free enterprise that is secondary and ancillary to a culture which prioritizes love and connection. Capitalism, then, would constitute a small part within a much larger socialistic system. Perhaps the 70/30 ratio we find in our bodies between water and non-aqueous molecules, and the 70/30 ratio we see between the oceans and the land, might serve not merely as a metaphor, but as structural predisposition of the natural world that has some utility for how we go about conceiving an ideal political and social order? Up until now, humans have not had a very sophisticated relationship between what their made of, what impersonal, material processes undergird their own substantiality, and what kind of social world we all want? Maybe the issue isn’t intention (since the devils in the details, the road to hell is always paved with good intentions) but technical prowess, or semiotic astuteness. If we don’t correlate our minds rightly, or accurately, to what is, maybe we’re doomed to keep falling on our faces in creating the kinds of conditions that aggrandizers can effectively exploit.

        I once mentioned to a group of libertarians (wrong audience!) that perhaps it would be a good idea to use brain-imaging to filter out potential political candidates and government appointees who show tell-tale signs of sociopathy. They didn’t like that at all, but I wonder if that might do the trick to keep certain people out!

        Reply
  18. Since you have refused me the right of non-denomination (though I would say the same about religion, I don’t have one because it’s not possible to restrict perceptual experience to categorization), let’s say, then, that I am a “communitarian,” meaning that I perceive human existence to be self-regulating through and as human community; these human communities are very far from anarchic – we could hardly run our thrift store without some rules & guidelines, tho most are adaptable – but neither are they political, since “polis” implies a city, i.e., a large population, and I suspect that human community becomes unworkable, chaotic, and destructive, when it reaches a certain size, perhaps because there is no longer accountability for the individuals that constitute it, and because accountability is the external aspect of response-ability, i.e., the visible evidence that there are consequences for our every action and reaction. Once a collective becomes too large and too complexified, and technologically mediated (this begins with language), it becomes impossible to see how every word, gesture, and interaction leads to some result or another and that the only way to stay healthy and happy is to maintain healthy loving relations with others in one’s community (even, or perhaps especially, the difficult ones).

    Reply
    • It’s a little ridiculous Jasun that you resist the categorizing property of language and yet make ample use of it as you describe your positions on things. When I say your views amount to anarchism – and as nicely as I could – you still seem to become apoplectic about it. It’s how your way of seeing things would ordinarily be defined by people. Instead of resenting my attempt to categorize, you could assent to the categorization, since that is what language is for to begin with, and then seek to modify the ways in which your views are different from the stereotypical impressions people usually ascribe to anarchism.

      All I really meant to point out is that your description evades the point I made about aggrandizers (if you can, please address this point, as it is the nitty gritty of my argument?). Aggrandizers exist as a spiritual-orientation-to-the-world. Did you read Haydens book? Do you intend to read more of his work? An important thing to pay attention to is that many of the societies he describe have populations under 150 – and guess what, aggrandizers still exist. They exist because they are exploitative, and they succeed at it because they exploit real cognitive and affective vulnerabilities in the human condition. How do we overcome this? How do we persuade aggrandizers to stop being Satanists – to stop distrusting reality, and relating to it as if they we’re some external Godhead “looking in”, ‘hacking’ into an ecologically organized social body as if it we’re a computer system? You have offered no solution to this puzzle, and therefore, have not addressed any of the problems that Haydens writing presents for us.

      As for size and no accountability, I can understand that position (there’s even a theory in cognitive anthropology which claims the brain can tolerate no more than 150 social affiliations) and I recognize it as a legitimate problem, but perhaps not as insurmountable as one would initially think. After all, there are plenty of communities of people – spiritual people, for instance, be they philosophers, Buddhists, Jews, mystics, etc – who live within todays globalized community, use technology, move between many different communities of people far larger than 150, and all the stop are still able to bring within the orbit of their awareness all those structural determinates specific to each community or person that you yourself have just considered. In other words, and this might be the nub in the way you and I disagree, knowledge matters. Knowledge makes a difference. I’m not sure if you’ve ever read Gregory Bateson (though I believe you’ve demonized him in one of your articles before), the man coined a very important conception of consciousness with his pithy axiom, “a difference that makes a difference”. Conceptually speaking, and as I wrote to your earlier (and to which I thought your response was more cynical than you I think you admit to yourself) a statue of responsibility would act upon pre-reflective systems of knowing which would selectively make more salient the concept of responsibility to an person. This, then, is a ‘difference which makes a difference’. Can someone who engages in child abuse feel as comfortable engaging in child abuse in a world where responsibility has become a leitmotif? Human experience is not infinitely mutable; there is a restricted range, an archetypal contour, which makes every human life the same. An adult who has sex with a child knows, at some prereflexive level that is being dissociated, that they are harming that child. They therefore live through the defensive prowess of idolization – through distracting themselves with idealizations. Responsibility as a theme for such a person is thus akin to flies flying around someone’s head; it stokes feelings that would otherwise be suppressed.

      As to being accountable and its relationship to responsibility, there are always mediated forms of relationship between self and other. In each link of the chain, someone is responsible to someone else, and the higher up you go in the system, the deeper and more incumbent becomes your responsibilities, and accountability, to the people around you. There is no pristine world where are senses are always and completely exposed to the real; we have to trust people. I have to trust that so and so said what so and so claimed they said. So as to the relationship between responsibility as an ethical imperative, and the ability to be accountable, I don’t think the size of a system is a necessary constraint in preventing people from caring about the people around them. Indeed, you are ignoring the vast importance of education, in early-childhood education in particular, in creating the conditions that will cultivate (or prevent) a persons prosocial capacities.

      Therefore, perhaps you should consider how metaphysical individualism has played into the bureaucratic apparatuses that the world has evolved today, and perhaps consider how different forms of decision making (such as economic cooperatives) based in democratic processes, could help human beings overcome some of the weaknesses associated with concentrating too much power in a small number of hands. Said another way, there is a bidirectional relationship between the metaphysics that regulates the day to day interactions between individuals within a society – in this society, that being a naïve naturalism – and the material culture which scaffolds the sorts of practices that individuals operate through. In other words, its perfectly conceivable, to me at least, that society can advance to such a state – via the progressive psychosocial development of individuals, generation after generation – where the naïve part within naturalism will be overcome, allowing the growth of a transcendental dimension that robustly links that transpersonal part of our egoic consciousness with the ‘I’ who is conditioned and contextualized by the structure of the physical world – including the intersubjective dynamics which shape our every act of knowing. Such acts, or knowing, is a matter of knowing rightly; and knowing rightly is a matter of having a proper phenomenological take on the development of your experience.

      What I’m saying is, I feel very much inclined to defend the adventure of civilization, and I have no interest at all to treat the whole process as one big callosal miscarriage. I take dialectics very seriously, and I believe, if we adequately bring to conscious awareness the fault-lines that civilization creates (the antithesis relative to the thesis of our naïve impulses), that we can create the sorts of conditions – a synthesis – that will allow all of us to thrive, that is, be happy and feel alive, between the stability of awe, and the adventure of fun.

      When I wrote earlier that the study of physical processes will allow us to better understand how to promote the conceptual awareness that will support healthy human communities, I was seeking to emphasize the wisdom in recognizing the structural continuity that runs through the matter which makes us up, to the formation of our phenomenology from intersubjectivity, and finally, from the role language plays in stabilizing ‘nodes’ of interactive possibility between self and world, via the mediating effects of others. I don’t think I am wrong in the least bit in taking this approach. Language is the same sort of thing as the matter which makes up the physical world; its just a very abstract, ‘object’, but an object nonetheless which is as structurally relevant and real to the regulation of our being as anything else.

      Finally, I would like to ask you a question, and without any cynicism on my part? What are you afraid of? Specifically, I know you distrust, and have reason to distrust, the political world around you; but what specifically is it? I feel there is too much ambiguity here, for me at least, and I think I’d better understand you if you could enumerate the threats you see in relation to, for instance, my advocacy for a limited form of capitalism within a larger socialistic system that is regulated primarily through a much more interactive participatory democracy (such as Richard Wolffs ideas). Is it the pedophilia, and child abuse practiced by elites? or something more substantial, like wars between nations? Are you saying, for example, that an organized world system, is incompatible with peace between countries (and hence, the elimination of wars)? Or that a federal world government – of a democratic nature (in the sense of Switzerland, lets say) would be incompatible with a transcendental worldview? Are you afraid child abuse would continue to exist behind the scenes? Are you skeptical that a “movement” against child abuse could succeed in the same sense that women’s suffrage has succeeded? I want to get a better sense of what in particular motivates your way of describing your political positions.

      There is power in numbers, an economy of scale, which you either don’t understand, or don’t care enough to understand. But perhaps you should allow yourself some space to contemplate this.

      Reply
      • I skipped this after the first few lines, skimmed to the question about what I am afraid of, which you’ve asked before. I am not interested in dialoguing with an autocratic pedant who preaches the essentiality of human relatedness but practices the precise inversion of it. Go away and Till no more.

        Reply
  19. the same changing landscape that causes crisis also creates opportunity; the more things close down around us, the more these odd little openings appear; if we are in tune with our senses, then like water, we naturally flow towards the openings

    Reply
  20. I wonder to what end all the fresh young souls born of this
    ( …the Corona kids ) will be applied.

    I can not imagine that this likely crucial side effect has been over looked by the think tank’s simulations.

    I have yet to see much in the way of pondering this likelihood of vastly skyrocketing birth rates globally, and it would seem worthy.

    My leanings, being a self -proclaimed conspiracy realist, is that seeing this as a planned response, ‘they’ are boosting the numbers of malleable minds, so as to facilitate a more aggressive and expedient transfer to the next faze of industry, however it shall be mandated.

    This, imo , will be a significant factor in the way this plays out in the post- corona shift.

    I appreciate the great thoughts expressed here, and look forward to the exchange…

    Reply

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