marsh
On TB every waking moment
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GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread
- Thread starter marsh
- Start date
marsh
On TB every waking moment
8:35 min
This pandemic treaty is the greatest power grab any of us has seen in our lifetime, says Neil Oliver
GBNews
(did not have time to make notes)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Dave Walsh Breaks Down Diesel Shortage In America
Dave Walsh Breaks Down Diesel Shortage In America
rumble.com
Dave Walsh Breaks Down Diesel Shortage In America
Bannons War Room Published May 13, 2022
^^^^
Dave Walsh on U.S. Energy and the Lack of Action from the Biden Admin. 7:36 min
Dave Walsh on U.S. Energy and the Lack of Action from the Biden Admin.
Bannons War Room Published May 14, 2022
(Did not have time to watch)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Mary Holland: “A technocratic approach to global health”
Mary Holland: “A technocratic approach to global health”
rumble.com
Mary Holland: “A technocratic approach to global health”
Bannons War Room Published May 14, 2022
(Will watch later. This is on WHO. It is coming so fast and some of this stuff has no pre-printed summary. My brain just does not do summary. It goes from detail to intuitive analysis. All my life, I have always struggled with simplification. It may seem inane to others, but summarization has been weeded out of my skill set. I cannot comply with board rules for a summary. That is why I do notes. I am trying. It is collapsing so fast and there is so much info and so little time you can either get the links or nothing on some things, at this point)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
9:17 min
#economy #credit #NinjaWarning, If You Do Not Have Extra Food You Will Suffer As Famine & Food Shortage 2022 Starts
May 14, 2022
The Economic Ninja
Warning, If You Do Not Have Extra Food You Will Suffer As Famine & Food Shortage 2022 Starts. Not only do we have a supply chain breakdown but now a baby formula shortage. Prepare now before SHTF!
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Mark Zuckerberg & Pals Have Stripped Away Free Speech: We Need to Reclaim Our God-Given Right 2:37 min
Mark Zuckerberg & Pals Have Stripped Away Free Speech: We Need to Reclaim Our God-Given Right
The Vigilant Fox Published May 14, 2022
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: "[The government] has turned [big tech companies] into the most effective weapons of the emerging totalitarian state, and they have successfully de-platformed us, they've gaslighted us, they've marginalized us, they've vilified us, and they've made us disappear from the public square... We want our right [back] to criticize public policies that are affecting all of our lives that are enriching the few and impoverishing the many."
Mark Zuckerberg & Pals Have Stripped Away Free Speech: We Need to Reclaim Our God-Given Right
The Vigilant Fox Published May 14, 2022
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: "[The government] has turned [big tech companies] into the most effective weapons of the emerging totalitarian state, and they have successfully de-platformed us, they've gaslighted us, they've marginalized us, they've vilified us, and they've made us disappear from the public square... We want our right [back] to criticize public policies that are affecting all of our lives that are enriching the few and impoverishing the many."
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Dr. Mark Trozzi on the WHO Pandemic Treaty 33:47 min
Dr. Mark Trozzi on the WHO Pandemic Treaty
AKStraightSpeaks Published May 14, 2022
Part of a conversation I had with Dr. Mark Trozzi, MD, ER Surgeon on the W.H.O and their efforts to gain penultimate control on sovereign nations over pandemic controls. No thanks, we don't want them telling us what to do...as recent history is showing us, they do not have our best interest in mind. We can do something about this, please check out link below on Dr. Trozzi's website. With a couple of clicks, we can send a message directly to the WHO's who and say no. Put your message on record.
Stop the IHR now. Powerful action made easy ‣ Dr Mark Trozzi
Dr Mark Trozzi ‣ Home
Dr. Mark Trozzi on the WHO Pandemic Treaty
AKStraightSpeaks Published May 14, 2022
Part of a conversation I had with Dr. Mark Trozzi, MD, ER Surgeon on the W.H.O and their efforts to gain penultimate control on sovereign nations over pandemic controls. No thanks, we don't want them telling us what to do...as recent history is showing us, they do not have our best interest in mind. We can do something about this, please check out link below on Dr. Trozzi's website. With a couple of clicks, we can send a message directly to the WHO's who and say no. Put your message on record.
Stop the IHR now. Powerful action made easy ‣ Dr Mark Trozzi
Dr Mark Trozzi ‣ Home
marsh
On TB every waking moment
(Excerpt from the CHD Catherine Austin Fitts show previously posted)
rumble.com
Access Denied: Implementing Complete Control Through Centralized Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
The Vigilant Fox Published May 14, 2022 114 Views
Catherine Austin Fitts: "Let's say I want to mandate a vaccine. Your financial transaction ability can be turned off; your access to your financial assets can be denied or stopped if you don't do what you're told."
Full Video: ‘Financial Rebellion’ Episode 20: Using Cash to Avoid Mr. Global - ‘Financial Rebellion’ With Catherine Austin Fitts - CHD TV: Livestreaming Video & Audio
Access Denied: Implementing Complete Control Through Centralized Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
Catherine Austin Fitts: "Let's say I want to mandate a vaccine. Your financial transaction ability can be turned off; your access to your financial assets can be denied or stopped if you don't do what
rumble.com
Access Denied: Implementing Complete Control Through Centralized Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
The Vigilant Fox Published May 14, 2022 114 Views
Catherine Austin Fitts: "Let's say I want to mandate a vaccine. Your financial transaction ability can be turned off; your access to your financial assets can be denied or stopped if you don't do what you're told."
Full Video: ‘Financial Rebellion’ Episode 20: Using Cash to Avoid Mr. Global - ‘Financial Rebellion’ With Catherine Austin Fitts - CHD TV: Livestreaming Video & Audio
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
The Real Reason Behind The EU's Drive To Embargo Russian Oil
SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2022 - 04:00 AM
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,
This week the European Union is expected to announce a complete import ban on Russian oil. Hungary, in its first real act of defiance, is threatening to veto this; Germany, after some hemming and hawing, has finally decided it can survive such a ban.
Assuming Hungary’s objections are eventually overcome, at first blush this looks like yet another energy “own goal” by the people obsessed with soccer. The U.S. has already issued this ban.
Because European industry is heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas, the conventional wisdom is that the EU Commission is just petulant and incompetent.
Are they petulant? Yes. Incompetent? Possibly? But only if you think in conventional terms of doing the right thing for their people. What is clear to any serious observer of EU politics is that they are not interested in what their people have to say or want.
Theirs is an agenda which will brook no opposition, even if it means destroying its own economy to bring a rival to its knees.
That said, I sincerely doubt there will be a “buyers embargo” on natural gas because there is no viable substitute for it.
Hungary is using the need for unanimous consent within the European Council to block any ‘gas ban’ in any new economic sanctions package. There are at least three other countries which are happy Hungary is willing to suffer Brussels’ wrath.
But banning Russian oil, on the other hand, is different.
So, it is interesting that Hungary would do this, given they import no oil from Russia. {Ed. this is wrong, Hungary imports 65% of its oil through the Druzhba pipeline} This veto was predicted by me the morning after the Hungarians overwhelmingly rejected George Soros’s anti-Viktor Orban coalition and handed it an ignominious defeat.
Hungary, on the other hand, has energy independence from Brussels by having contracted directly with Gazprom for natural gas via Turkstream’s train that goes into Serbia and Hungary. This should give you some context as to why the EU is trying to sanction Serbia and cut off the flows of that pipeline where it crosses EU territory in Bulgaria.
With a fiscally, monetarily (they are not on the euro) and energy independent Hungary there is little argument for them staying in the EU if Brussels is going to treat them as second class members. Orban and his government have been resolute in their refusal to get involved in the Russia/Ukraine conflict even though there has been serious pressure applied by NATO.
It is almost as if Orban and the Hungarians are now daring the EU to advance Article 7 procedures to kick them out. The problem with that is, if they do, it would begin the fracturing of the EU.
So, what is more likely to happen now is Hungary will use this veto to get the EU to back off on the ‘rule-of-law’ violations which are justifying cutting off Hungary from its EU budget distributions. The horse trade here should be obvious.
Because Brussels and their behind-the-scenes backers absolutely want this ban on Russian oil as much as the U.S. and the UK want it. It is part of their long-term strategy to bleed Russia out, after turning Ukraine into Afghanistan 2.0.
And it is in the differences between the oil industry and the natural gas industry where they think they can achieve this goal.
Of Pipes and Populi
In both the oil and gas industries, pressurizing a well is, for the most part, a one-way process. You dig a well and pull the oil and/or gas out. It produces until the well is depleted. You replace the well’s natural decay in production by drilling a new well.
But even if there is a big demand shock to the downside, rarely an issue in the oil industry in the aggregate, then those wells keep producing. The market is temporarily glutted with oil, the price drops and old wells are not replaced until such time as supply-and-demand balance is restored.
Oil futures curves get constructed by traders to anticipate these effects on prices. And for normal volatility of oil demand, these curves should be reasonably predictable.
Unfortunately, we are living through a time where the most powerful people in the world (at least in their minds) are openly trying to destroy the petroleum market for their own purposes and agenda. They are actively working to make oil and gas prices volatile to the point of destroying investment in the industry.
They make no bones about this. Oil is the bane of the planet!
I call these people The Davos Crowd (for a description of them see my podcast, Episodes 75, 76, and 77 for the background information). They are the unelected oligarchs, bankers, hereditary power and newly Made Men (in the mafia sense) who gather at Davos, Switzerland, every year to decide on the future of humanity.
And it is their agenda, using Climate Change and international threats like biowarfare and terrorism as their justifications for a massive expansion of the surveillance state and their control over all things, but especially money.
Russia’s massive natural resource pile and sovereigntist-minded government stands wholly in the way of that. If you believe otherwise, you have been gaslit by Davos propaganda. I urge you to put away childish things, some rabbit holes are just holes, not warrens.
Back to the oil industry. Capping either a gas or oil well is dangerous because there is no guarantee it can be re-opened. Wells can be damaged and the oil/gas they contain lost without drilling a new one.
With gas you can just “flare it off” by burning the excess if your storage is full, rather than capping the well and wait for demand to return. With oil, on the other hand, you cannot really do that. You have to store the stuff somewhere. From all accounts so far, Russia’s oil storage capacity is already full, if not overflowing.
The oil industry in general is not geared for massive long-term storage due to supply/demand shocks because there is literally no need for it. What expands is the capacity to move oil around to consume it, not store it in big tanks hoping someone will buy it.
The industry has all the spare capacity it needs to coordinate supply and demand within pretty tight tolerances. It is not “just in time” delivery tight, but it is not capable of absorbing a 20% demand shock.
And this is where the West thinks it has a big lever to use against Russia right now. By all accounts, Europe is one of Russia’s biggest oil customers, with the port at Rotterdam taking in and refining as much as 1.4 million barrels per day before the war.
Believe it or not, The Washington Post had a decent article breaking down where Russia’s exports go. Of the approximately 7.2 million barrels per day Russia exports to the world, 4.8 million go to countries, most of them in Europe, that say they no longer want to buy it from there.
Lack of storage capacity should not be a big deal if Russia exported most of the oil to Europe by ship, which it does. According to a recent report by Transport & Environment, an NGO which is wholly geared to convincing Europe to get off Russian energy, the Druzhba pipeline only supplies around 10% of Russian oil to the European market.
This is a paltry 250,000 barrels per day. The U.S. embargo is more dangerous to the Russian economy, where in 2021 the U.S., having to replace barrels sanctioned from Venezuela by former President Trump, imported an average of 600,000 barrels per day.
Those imports began drying up in 2022, well before Russia invaded Ukraine, so chalk that up as another data point that this war between the West and Russia was planned well in advance of the actual start date back in late February.
The point is that the talking point going around the press today is that Russia does not have the storage capacity to deal with a European embargo and as such will have to cut production.
Estimates of production cuts from Russia are around 1.8 million barrels per day, while the West is hoping for 3 million.
Similar to what Trump did in 2018 against Iran, the shock-and-awe campaign of sanctions froze many oil trading firms in their tracks, not knowing what the future would hold, and refused to do business with Russia for fear of running afoul of sanctions.
From Shell to Glencore to Trafigura, Russian oil tenders have become persona non grata and it created a complete mess of their trading books and the commodities-trading industry as a whole, as Credit Suisse’s Zoltan Pozsar’s note from last month described.
Because of this financial dislocation in what should be a boring, brain-dead stable industry—trading the most important commodity in the world with the biggest infrastructure to service it—chaos ensued.
The collective West, following Davos’s game plan, is hoping for even more.
Pozsar’s conclusion was that all these firms will either need a bailout at some point (with possible nationalization the price they pay) or be allowed to go bankrupt to serve the plan of radically overhauling the global energy economy away from petroleum of Davos.
At the same time, they would put a major dent in Russia’s economic prospects. Viewed that way, this is a kind of Evil Mastermind Two-fer.
But, if backing up the pipeline oil is not that big a hit to Russia’s production, what is the EU trying to accomplish here?
By disrupting the routes oil normally takes around the world, there is now a structural shortage of tankers to move oil demanded. Since many of those barrels, more than 2 million per day, now must go on much longer voyages.
Instead of the coffee and cake run from St. Petersburg to Rotterdam, those same ships now, at a minimum, must go to storage facilities in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, if not all the way to China or India, their final destination.
Read Pozsar’s post, or the ZeroHedge article linked above, to get a sense of the scale of the disruption.
This supply shock within the tanker market and the downstream effects of the added costs to the voyages, it is hoped, will create a cascading back-up within the Russian oil industry, forcing the forecasted production hits.
This will, in turn, eat into its positive trade balance which is “fueling Putin’s war machine.” It will also present the opportunity for Russia’s competitors to come in and steal market share from them.
Through this mechanism and efforts in the West to change Europe’s energy usage, the long-term effect is to destroy Russia’s ability to continue the war by starving it of needed capital.
Davos Rhymes with Thanos
The U.S. is happy to push Europe to this point and many commentators are happy to end the conversation there: Pick your epithet, but the line is the “Empire of Lies” or “Zone A” or whomever, feels their hegemony is threatened and they are bullying everyone, especially Europe, into their preferred strategy.
But I think that story is more of the “Made for TV” version than it is an accurate representation of reality.
It leaves out the larger goal structure of the people behind this mess in the first place. Rather than be captives of a hyper-belligerent U.S., the EU nations are absolutely willing partners in this.
Davos’s Great Reset strategy is built on the same mistakes about resource scarcity that Thomas Malthus made back in the early 19th century. Theirs is an economic model which does not believe people respond in real time to incentives, pro and con, which moderate their behavior. Rather, they see humans as a virus unleashed upon the world that needs to be controlled.
The entire Great Reset can be boiled down to the same argument the villain in the Marvel films, Thanos, made about having to kill off half the life in the Universe to make things “sustainable.”
And the power center of this type of thinking is not in the U.S. and the U.S. Empire. We are the hyper-capitalists growing the virus in our Petri dish of individualism.
No, this thinking comes squarely out of European critiques of capitalism. To be reductionist it is just Marxism warmed over and given a fresh gloss of rhetorical paint—sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), shared purpose, etc.
The proof that the EU is just as happy with war in Ukraine as neoconservative forces in the U.S. and UK is evident in their unwillingness to end the war through diplomacy.
But Europeans are the ones who will suffer the most from this strategy.
Bad Scripts Beget Bad Policy
If EU leadership, owned by Davos, were acting on average Europeans’ behalf, they would be using the obvious costs of cutting Europe off from Russian energy to tell the US and U.K. to go scratch.
Instead, all we hear from them is how Germany can wean itself off Russian energy completely within a year.
It does not matter that this is not good for German industry or the German people in the long run. Russian energy is by far the cheapest solution for them, making their labor the most competitive it can be.
Instead, after helping manufacture the crisis in Ukraine, they now uphold the notion that it is a moral imperative for Germans to suffer without food, heat and other basic necessities of a supposed advanced first-world society to defeat the evil Russians.
In the years leading up to this conflict they would have worked to implement the Minsk Accords. They would have lifted the economic sanctions on Russia and come to an agreement about Crimea and the Donbas politically, and let the U.S. and the UK twist in the wind.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron did the opposite. They blew smoke up Putin’s ass while running the clock out until Macron was re-elected and Merkel could exit the scene, leaving a weak Davos-approved coalition to blame the collapse on.
Deepened trade between Russia and the EU would have eventually ground out the animosity and the U.S.’s insistence on arming Ukraine would have become an albatross politically while Europe would be staring at a potential renaissance, instead of an economic black hole.
France and Germany would not have betrayed their own attempts at diplomacy.
This, I believe, is much closer to the real story of the conflict, which serves a far larger purpose clearly stated by the architects of our misery than the simplistic framework of just blaming the U.S. for everything.
The idea that Europe fears a Russian invasion of Poland or even Germany, which necessitates NATO’s expansion to its border in the Donbas, is ludicrous. Russia’s military is not built along these lines nor is its performance in Ukraine evidence it is capable of such an operation.
What is unfolding now is a script that was written a long time ago. The war by the West against Russia has long been in the planning stages.
The Russians understand this better than many are willing to accept. Their leadership, Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have articulated this very clearly at every stage of the war to date.
They are under no illusions about where the West and Davos are willing to take this conflict, which is why they have made serious threats about striking out at the real “decision centers” who give the Ukrainian Armed Forces their marching orders.
These are warnings not to our politicians, but to us. This is where things lead.
They have asked for a parting of the ways, peaceably, between East and West, but that is not part of the agenda. Like classic narcissists with the burning need to control everything, Russia and the rest of Asia will not be allowed to walk away from Davos and their Eurocrat quislings, because they are the righteous saviors of humanity.
And we are just, at best, “the help” and at worst an inconvenience.
The bigger Davos plan of destroying the old global order to Build it Back Better, where they own everything and you will own nothing and like it or else, is the script.
They are now committed to this plan. It does not matter now whether it will work or not. This is what we have to realize in all of our analyses. Do the Russians and their friends in Asia and across the Global South have the means and the tools to come out on top? Possibly.
But the bigger question is whether or not this conflict escalates to the point where winning is an irrelevant concept. When you see a bloc as powerful as the European Union willing to commit acts of domestic vandalism this big—and blaming the victim of their unbridled aggression—it tells you we are far past the point of rational settlement.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
India Halts Wheat Exports As "Food Security At Risk"
SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2022 - 02:00 PM
India prohibited wheat exports effective immediately, saying the nation's food security was under threat, partly due to heatwaves that damaged yields in the country and disruptions to global grain markets in the Black Sea breadbasket region.
The notice was published in the government gazette by the Directorate of Foreign Trade on Friday. It read, "there is a sudden spike in the global food prices of wheat arising out of many factors, as a result of which the food security of India, neighboring and other vulnerable countries is at risk."
India said it was still committed to exporting wheat to "neighboring and other vulnerable developing countries which are adversely affected by the sudden changes in the global market for wheat and are unable to access adequate wheat supplies."
The move by the world's second-largest wheat producer comes as food protectionism runs rampant worldwide as countries limit or restrict exports of food staples to rein in domestic prices.
Wheat futures are expected to jump Sunday evening and add to record-high food inflation, crushing emerging market economies the hardest. High food prices have already resulted in inflation riots in several countries, one being the ongoing social instability unfolding in Sir Lanka.
The ban comes as no surprise considering India has been mulling trade restrictions this month as heatwaves have damaged wheat yields.
Wheat production this year in the South Asian nation is expected to decline after rising for a half-decade. Other top-producing wheat countries will experience production drops by the end of the growing season and may exacerbate the fall in global wheat production.
"We now have an environment with another supplier removed from contention in global trade flows," Andrew Whitelaw, a grains analyst at Melbourne-based Thomas Elder Markets, told Bloomberg. "The world is starting to get very short of wheat," he added.
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1525390386952187905
2:48 min
A Mumbai-based commodity dealer with a global trading firm told Reuters the ban is "shocking." The trader added: "We were expecting curbs on exports after 2-3 months, but seems inflation numbers changed the government's mind."
Add protectionism to the list of what could spark even more chaos for global food markets. If countries continue to place export restrictions on food, the crisis could deepen.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Egg Prices Soar As 10% Of Nation's Hens Wiped Out By Devastating Bird Flu
SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2022 - 01:00 PM
Food prices are rising across the U.S., but the latest sticker shock at the supermarket is in the eggs and poultry aisles, as the deadly bird flu wreaks havoc on the country's egg-laying hen flock.
Inflation data tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found a dozen of eggs jumped 23% in April compared with the month before to $2.52. Prices reached levels not seen since early 2016, a period that followed the highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak of 2014-15, which led to a 50% increase in egg prices in the second half of 2015.
Since January, the outbreak has spread to 32 states, killing more than 37 million chickens and turkeys. Of that, 29 million egg-laying hens have died, or about 10% of the U.S.' total flock of 300 million. Bloomberg says the bird flu is "shaping up to be the worst outbreak of its kind."
Breakfast has become the most expensive in years. It's not just eggs, orange juice and wheat prices are also soaring.
Egg prices could be headed higher as there are no indications the avian influenza spread is under control. This is just another sign that food shortages could get much worse in the second half of the year.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Biden Oil And Gas Lease Sale Cancellations Draw Strong Reaction
BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2022 - 11:30 AM
Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
As gas prices continue to break records, the Biden administration’s cancellation of two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one lease sale in Alaska’s Cook Inlet has drawn clashing responses, including an accusation that the administration is “blatantly lying.”
Fishing boats entering Cook Inlet via the Kenai River, Kenai, Alaska, on July 1, 2020. (Beeblebrox via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)One political figure who weighed in was Donald Trump Jr., who recently campaigned with successful Republican Senate primary candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio.
“Looks like Joe is doing a great job of making inflation his top priority,” he wrote in a tweet.
The Cook Inlet oil and gas lease would have covered 1.09 million acres in the Cook Inlet, a body of water connecting Anchorage with the Gulf of Alaska.
A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told The Epoch Times the Cook Inlet sale was canceled due to a “lack of industry interest in the area.”
“I’m not sure that’s completely accurate,” Kara Moriarty, president and CEO of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), told The Epoch Times.
“A lot of times, companies don’t want to tip their hand about participating in lease sales. The only time you really know if there’s interest or not is when you have the lease sale.”
“As the former Natural Resources Commissioner for Alaska, I know there is no way they could have confirmed ‘no interest’ until they held the lease sale,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who said the Biden administration was “blatantly lying to the American people.”
Both he and Moriarty referenced correspondence on the Cook Inlet sale from AOGA, which represents more than a dozen oil and gas producers in Alaska, as evidence of industry interest.
“The nature by which this announcement came to news—from the White House’s ultra-left climate czar Gina McCarthy, just down the hall from the president, [and] not the Department of Interior—raises further questions over who is crafting these disastrous energy policies,” Sullivan said, referencing the accidental email to a CBS reporter from a Biden administration official that first revealed the Cook Inlet lease’s cancellation.
Moriarty told The Epoch Times that “baffling is the nicest word I can come up with” for the cancellation.
Some local environmentalists, by contrast, expressed strong support for the decision.
“I’m very excited that we aren’t going to see an oil and gas lease sale that would really hurt our local economy,” Liz Mering told The Epoch Times.
Mering is advocacy director and inletkeeper of Cook InletKeeper, an Alaskan group opposed to oil and gas leasing in the region. Its website states that it seeks to “accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to an equitable, renewable energy future.”
The Interior spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the two Gulf of Mexico leases were canceled because of “delays due to factors including conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales.”
In June 2021, Louisiana federal Judge James Cain, a Trump appointee, struck down the Biden administration’s pause on oil and gas leases. That pause had commenced with Executive Order 14008.
Yet in January, District of Columbia federal Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, ruled that the November 2021 federal offshore oil and gas sale, the largest in history, was invalid. He argued it violated the National Environmental Policy Act because it didn’t take greenhouse gas emissions into account. The Biden administration didn’t appeal the ruling.
The administration announced its plans to resume lease sales in March after an appeals court ruled it could incorporate a raised “social cost of carbon” factor when assessing permits.
When he was a presidential candidate, Biden’s promises included “banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.”
The latest lease cancellations come as inflation and high gas prices wrack the nation.
AAA reported that regular gas on May 12 averaged $4.418 a gallon, the highest average price it has ever recorded.
Diesel is also at the highest price point ever recorded by AAA, averaging $5.557 a gallon.
“Prices for gasoline, diesel, and other products are high and climbing. Further, those high prices are raising the cost of other goods and services, and here we are with extraordinarily high rates of inflation at both the consumer and producer levels. The actions of this administration suggest little relief anytime soon,” energy economist Karr Ingham told The Epoch Times.
He said Biden hasn’t yet provided the next legally mandated five-year offshore leasing plan. The current plan ends in June.
“At this late hour, were they to set this new plan in motion today, it would be a year or so before it is in place. That means a significant gap in the time period during which companies may be able to reasonably make plans and allocate capital to drill new projects in these areas.
So, in many respects, these canceled leases were the ‘last hurrah’ before that plan expires.”
Lawmakers in Impacted States React
Senators and representatives from Louisiana and Alaska, two states affected by the cancellations, have voiced anger and disgust.
“Pres. Biden has killed more energy lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. He’s killing jobs, has killed America’s energy independence, and is fueling inflation that is killing Louisiana families. And he’s doing it on purpose,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) wrote in a May 12 tweet.
Kennedy’s senior colleague, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), voiced his concerns in similar language.
“President Biden’s administration is actively making high gas prices worse,” Cassidy said. “When we need to unleash American energy production, the Biden administration kills opportunities at every turn.”
“Rather than using American energy sources to help solve the problem and lower prices, the Biden administration continues to carry out policies that only benefit Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and other apparent allies of this White House. It is past time for the administration to put Americans first,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), who serves on the House Natural Resources committee.
Sullivan said: “The timing and nature of this decision display a disturbing disregard for the pain American families continue to feel at the pump, for the hard-working Americans whose livelihoods and communities depend on the American energy industry, and for the grave consequences, these policies have on America’s energy and national security. As Gina McCarthy celebrates this decision from the White House, rest assured Vladimir Putin is popping corks in the Kremlin.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) hasn’t yet commented on the decision.
The Epoch Times has also reached out to the only Democrat representing Louisiana, Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.).
Different Views From Environmental Activists and Industry
Some environmentalists in and around the Cook Inlet celebrated the cancellation.
“There’s a lot of tourism industry that would be really harmed by this lease sale,” Mering said.
She said locals have fought oil and gas activity in the area since the 1970s when Cook Inlet’s Kachemak Bay was protected from drilling enabled by state leases. Commercial fishermen helped lead that pushback.
“There has to be more and more pushback as climate change hits Alaska.”
Moriarty noted that the Cook Inlet has been producing oil and gas for six decades. It generated 293,000 barrels of oil in March. All the oil produced in Cook Inlet is refined at the nearby Nikiski refinery.
“There’s no evidence that production from Cook Inlet has hampered our ability to coexist with commercial and sport fishing interests,” Moriarty said, arguing that oil and gas had helped diversify the Kenai Peninsula’s economy beyond the norm in Alaska.
Referencing the fight over oil in the 1970s, she said that “trying to pick out one incident negates the longstanding tradition we have of coexisting in Cook Inlet.”
Yet environmental activists present a contrasting narrative.
“This news means that the waters of lower Cook Inlet, which nourish the Gulf of Alaska as well as a watershed the size of Virginia, will continue the essential ecological function they’ve served since the last ice age. The people of this region who fought this lease sale will also continue their role in the ecology of placemaking, honoring our collective dependence on clean water,” said environmental activist Marissa Wilson of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council.
Josh Wisniewski, a fisherman in the Lower Cook Inlet, also praised the decision.
“Our fisheries, our quality of life, and regional economy depend on the health of this wild landscape we are privileged to live in. We now have the chance to build on this moment and seek a permanent withdrawal of this region from all future oil and gas lease sales to protect our home waters for future generations.”
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Wisniewski conceded that oil and gas are currently valuable to the larger state but argued that it “doesn’t make sense in this particular context.”
“We’ve got existing oil and gas infrastructure in different places.”
Yet AOGA’s Moriarty argued that Cook Inlet’s production is particularly critical for use within Alaska, including for jet fuel at Ted Stevens International Airport.
“We should be thinking about, ‘How do we get our next barrels of oil from the United States?’” Moriarty said, arguing that greater energy independence was vital to national security.
“The U.S. supplies the cleanest barrels of any major producer on the globe. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have been declining steadily for more than two decades now and continue to do so,” said energy economist Ingham.
“Constricting U.S. production in no way means those barrels will not be consumed—it just means those barrels will come from somewhere else, and that somewhere else will not produce that oil nearly as cleanly as the United States.”
He speculated about the motives of Earthjustice, which praised the cancellations as “good for the climate” in CBS coverage.
“Is Earthjustice in favor of acquiring America’s energy needs from countries and regions who produce dirtier barrels than the United States? Or are they simply anti-U.S. oil and gas, and ultimately, anti U.S.-consumer?”
The Epoch Times has also reached out to the Environmental Defense Fund, often seen as a left-wing environmental group, and to the Property and Environmental Research Center, a free-market environmental group.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
El-Erian Warns: Beware A Global Economy With Little Fires Everywhere
SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2022 - 07:30 AM
Authored by Mohamed El-Erian via Project Syndicate,
Rich countries have shown impressive unity in helping Ukraine counter the Russian invasion. They now need to demonstrate the same level of resolve to prevent the global economic fallout from the conflict from destroying the lives or livelihoods of many of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Big shocks to the global economy, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, understandably capture the most attention. But a new worldwide pattern of “little fires everywhere” may be equally consequential for longer-term economic well-being. Over time, these small fires can coalesce into one that is just as threatening as the initial large fire that acted as the catalyst.
In addition to causing widespread death and destruction, and displacing millions of people, the Ukraine war continues to stoke strong stagflationary winds throughout the global economy. The resulting damage – whether in the form of higher food and energy prices or new supply-chain disruptions – cannot be easily or rapidly countered by domestic policy adjustments.
For most countries, the war’s immediate economic consequences include higher inflation (which erodes purchasing power), lower growth, increased inequality, and greater financial instability. The multilateral system, meanwhile, now faces greater obstacles to the type of cross-border policy coordination needed to deal with pressing global problems such as climate change, pandemics, and life-threatening migration.
The challenges are particularly acute for fragile commodity importers in the developing world, especially when compared to the problems facing advanced economies. It is the difference between legitimate worries about the cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom, for example, and fear of famine in some African countries. The United States’ higher trade and budget deficits appear considerably less problematic than potential defaults by heavily indebted low-income countries. And while the recent decline in the yen’s value may be attention-grabbing in a Japanese context, a disorderly collapse of poorer countries’ exchange rates could fuel widespread financial instability.
As Michael Spence, the Nobel laureate economist and an expert on growth and development dynamics, pointed out to me recently, the probability of simultaneous growth, energy, food, and debt crises is worryingly high for too many developing countries. If that nightmare scenario materializes, the effects will be felt far beyond individual developing countries – and will extend well beyond economics and finance.
It is therefore in advanced economies’ interest to help poorer countries reduce the mounting risk of little economic fires everywhere. Fortunately, there is a rich historical record, especially from the 1970s and 1980s, to draw on in this regard. Effective action today will require policymakers to refine proven solutions and support their sustained implementation with strong leadership, coordination, and perseverance.
For starters, a preemptive multilateral debt-restructuring and relief initiative is needed to provide essential space for overly indebted countries and overstretched creditors to achieve orderly outcomes on a case-by-case basis. A multilaterally-coordinated approach is also crucial in order to reduce the disruptive – and sometimes paralyzing – risk of free riders, and to ensure fair burden-sharing among official creditors, as well as with private lenders.
Reinvigorating emergency commodity buffers and financing facilities is critical in order to reduce the risk of food riots and famines. Such measures can also play a useful role in countering some countries’ understandable but short-sighted inclination to ban agricultural exports and/or engage in inefficient self-insurance through excessive stockpiling.
Finally, rich-country governments will need to provide more official development assistance to support individual countries’ reform efforts. This aid should be extended under highly concessional terms through long-maturity, low-interest loans or outright grants.
Absent more rapid progress in these areas, the little-fires-everywhere phenomenon will damage global economic well-being by further weakening growth, increasing the risk of a recession, and fueling additional financial instability. This would add to current migration challenges, impede efforts to tackle the climate crisis, and delay the worldwide vaccination drive that is key to living more safely with COVID-19. Moreover, all these problems would promote geopolitical instability at a time when the global system is already subject to growing fragmentation pressures.
The rich world has shown impressive unity in helping Ukraine counter the Russian invasion. It now needs to demonstrate the same level of resolve to protect the well-being of its own citizens and of the world in the face of mounting economic and financial challenges.
Policymakers must aim to ensure that the many economic fires fueled elsewhere by the Ukraine conflict do not end up causing a second devastating inferno that destroys the lives or livelihoods of many of the world’s most vulnerable people.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Beginning of the End: Why Volodymyr Zelensky’s Upcoming Virtual Appearance at Davos Is a Bigger Deal Than Most Realize
When news broke yesterday that the globalists at the World Economic Forum expected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to attend their
jdrucker.com
The Beginning of the End: Why Volodymyr Zelensky’s Upcoming Virtual Appearance at Davos Is a Bigger Deal Than Most Realize
To those who aren't prepared to fight the globalist elites or who believe we still have years or decades to get ready, we may be seeing the first public round of the next step of The Great Reset.
by JD RUCKER
May 14, 2022
When news broke yesterday that the globalists at the World Economic Forum expected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to attend their annual Davos conference, most conservative news outlets pounced on the notion that he’s going to be wasting his time with his buddy, Klaus Schwab, instead of focusing on bringing peace to his nation and protecting his people.
This is a valid argument, though one that has been made every time Zelensky appears to be doing something other than focusing on the war efforts. What seems to have gotten lost in all of this is that Zelensky is almost certainly going to be positioned as not just a victim, but also a potential leader to spearhead the stated purposes of this year’s meeting: Advancing the world toward The Great Reset, ending capitalism, and subverting Western domination over the world.
There was a time not too long ago when such devious plans were only fodder for conspiracy theorists listening to Alex Jones at Infowars. Today, the machinations of the globalist elites are being displayed proudly by the architects of The Great Reset. This New World Order no longer exists solely in the shadows. They’re branching out into the light and Volodymyr Zelensky is one of the keys to normalizing their plans to the masses.
Here’s the solid report about it all from Breitbart with emphasis added to key points:
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky will address the globalist forum of elites in Davos, Switzerland later this month, the World Economic Forum (WEF) announced on Friday.
The annual meeting of business elites and government leaders will once again take place in the Swiss ski resort of Davos later this month after being held virtually during the prior two years during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
On Friday, the Klaus Schwab-led group announced: “The President of Ukraine, [Volodymyr Zelensky], will join our Annual Meeting virtually as the war continues to devastate his country.”
The meeting, which will run from May 22nd to 26th, will feature globalist heavyweights such as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, Joe Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, German climate and economy minister Robert Habeck, the director-general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February by Russian forces, Zelensky has become a staple on Western media, and has frequently appeared via video link in parliaments and congresses around the world, including the British, Canadian, and German parliaments, and the Congress of the United States.
The comedian turned president previously addressed the World Economic Forum in January of 2020 and has a biography page on the WEF’s website dedicated to him.
Following the escalation of the invasion of Ukraine, which began with the annexation of the Crimea in 2014, the World Economic Forum announced that it would be suspending ties with Russia.
President Putin has previously been featured at Davos meetings.
“We are not engaging with any sanctioned individual and have frozen all relations with Russian entities,” a WEF spokesman said in March.
Describing what is to be expected this year, the WEF, which has spearheaded the idea of a “Great Reset” of capitalism in the wake of the Wuhan virus pandemic, said: “Against a backdrop of deepening global frictions and fractures, it will be the starting point for a new era of global responsibility and cooperation.”
The announcement of Zelensky’s Davos attendance comes after the European Union announced that it would be sending an additional €500 million in military aid to Ukraine. This follows the U.S. House of Representatives, including all but 57 Republicans, voting to send another $40 billion in military and other forms of aid to Ukraine on Tuesday.
The U.S. bill still needs Senatorial approval, but despite widespread economic issues across the U.S. under the Biden administration there is bipartisan support to send more American taxpayer dollars to the war-torn country.
It also comes as the NATO is looking to expand its membership to include Sweden and Finland, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson already signing defensive pacts with the two Scandinavian countries and pledging British soldiers to their protection while they consider joining the military alliance.
The global food crisis, in part a result of the invasion of Ukraine, which is one of the top food producers in the world, will also likely serve as a topic of conversation at Davos.
Under the WEF’s previously stated goals for its Great Reset, the globalist group has advocated for humans consuming lab-manufactured meat and sustaining themselves with protein from bugs for a supposedly more sustainable future.
What this All Means
The first time I ever had a “prophetic” moment (no, I’m not claiming to be a prophet!) in which I turned out to be correct in my assessment of a political figure was in 2004. I was watching the Democratic National Convention and a young Senator took the stage who struck me in two ways. Number one, he was a dangerous politician with radical views. Number two, he was so convincing in his delivery that the Democrats were likely going to try to make him president someday. I wasn’t surprised when four years later Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination and eventually the presidency.
The last time I had a similar feeling was when I watched Zelensky’s first speech at Davos. He hammered home globalist talking points like a seasoned politician, drawing wild applause and the adoration of Klaus Schwab. I thought at the time that they’re going to try to position this guy as the face of the globalist movement.
Fast forward to the upcoming Davos meeting and I feel it’s almost certain he will be elevated there as well. It will be like an ascension as they discuss the three important goals of the New World Order. Zelensky will be positioned as the ultimate avatar for these goals. Sympathy toward him and the plight of his people will be translated into pure goodwill. It’s all a setup for the next stage, whenever that may be.
This next stage will be peace. Zelensky will negotiate a peace agreement with Russia that allows him to either remain in power or not. If he remains in power, Ukraine will be the centerpiece of rebuilding the world in a post-pandemic and post-war era. Build back better, so to speak. If he’s not allowed to stay in power, he will be adopted by some large organization, likely the World Economic Forum or World Health Organization but possibly the United Nations or someone else, and from there he will be established as a true world leader of world leaders.
If this all sounds Biblical, that’s because it possibly is. But I’m not into speculation about Bible prophecy until it’s clear and right now all I have are theories. We’ll have to see how it plays out.
Be watchful of what we’re allowed to see coming out of Davos in less than two weeks. It will be stunning to see how Zelensky is treated even for those of us who expect the worst.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Bird flu continues to spread among domestic, wild animals throughout North America
Avian illness has resulted in culling of millions of chickens, rising egg prices.
justthenews.com
Bird flu continues to spread among domestic, wild animals throughout North America
Avian illness has resulted in culling of millions of chickens, rising egg prices.
By Just the News staff
Updated: May 14, 2022 - 5:45pm
Strains of H5N1 avian influenza continue to pop up in birds around the country, with authorities reporting infections in both domestic and wild animals, including some wild mammals.
Officials in Washington state late this week confirmed two more outbreaks among flocks of birds there, stating that the infections were found in non-commercial backyard flocks of poultry.
Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, meanwhile, said the infection had been detected in three wild baby red foxes which subsequently died from the illness.
“At this point, it is unclear how the fox kits became infected, but it’s possible that they were exposed by consuming infected birds, such as waterfowl,” DNR Veterinarian Megan Moriarty told media.
Moriarty predicted additional infections in mammals in the state but said “they likely will be isolated cases.”
Another baby fox reportedly died in Minnesota after testing positive for avian flu, as did two in Ontario, Canada.
Three wild red foxes in Wisconsin also reportedly tested positive for the virus, with officials stating that they likely ate infected birds in the wild.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Take a Look at the Positive Side of Anarchy
Conflict is a bedfellow of oppression. Therefore we must end the conflict and, in doing so, end the tyranny. Here’s the positive side of this war...
www.americaoutloud.com
Take a Look at the Positive Side of Anarchy
by Dr. Steve LaTulippe | May 14, 2022 | Education, Politics
Only the dimmest of minds cannot see how the world is rapidly sliding into a lawless free-for-all. The World Economic Forum must be commended, in a nefarious kind of way, for its great efforts to seize the opportunity of the pandemic to introduce the Great Reset. But as we observe the details of their villainous surge, we also see rising a new army of resistance in all sectors of the war. If ever there was a bright side to anarchy, the source of light is the resistance of the common people like you and me.
If you’re a wishful thinker, you might entertain the possibility of a Hegelian dialectic taking place, surmising that the present conflict (thesis v. antithesis) will lead to a greater good. You might opt to “just let it play out.” This repeatedly has proven to be a fallacy. All we see is more conflict. Recall that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels adopted this method, which yielded only more chaos. The only solution leading to a good outcome is to oppose evil by directly fighting it with the right weapon. That weapon is truth, and it must derive from a proper standard.
As we focus on America, the evil is ever before us. The pandemic has done significant damage to us all, and the fire continues to burn. As mutated viruses cause new infections, those who received fake vaccines are much more prone to serious infection and hospitalization. A fourth jab is now on the horizon. Not good for us. But Big Pharma will fare well, despite the increasing harm from further spike protein dissemination. Recently, evidence has shown Tony Fauci has reaped his millions from participation in the genocide. Did Fauci and Francis Collins receive royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies? It’s a silly question. Of course, they did. The Pfizer data now reveals evidence of the sinister plan to vaccinate the world with a proven toxic shot, this evidence being clearly understood by Pfizer and its minions before the shot ever was rolled out to assault the public. Very bad. And what goal do they now entertain? Inject the poison into every arm in America, including the very young. Very profitable. Very deadly.
More recently, we are facing an infant formula crisis because the Biden cartel shut down the largest baby formula producer. Election fraud is still a major problem, and midterm primaries are already underway. We are being increasingly taxed at the same time that inflation surges.
The Obama-fabricated destructive foreign policy continues via the demented puppet to destabilize the world and undermine American sovereignty.
Meanwhile, our children are being devoured by the public school system, by attacks against responsible parents properly raising and protecting their kids, through fear-mongering by new threats of masking and social distancing again, by pushing to jab young children (risking death and infertility), and via the Marxist indoctrination and pornography to which every child is subjected in the classroom. Any evidence of real education is dismally small, as schools are dummied down by common core. Let’s face it, brainwashing takes much time and reinforcement, leaving little time for reading, writing, and arithmetic. And you can forget about American history; it’s been permanently banned in nearly all states.
Now that you are sufficiently depressed and hopeless, let me ask, do you think we should just surrender and accept the inevitable?
Remember that according to Hegel’s dialectic method, conflict is good, however unfruitful.
Conflict is never a solution that leads to peace and prosperity. The only way to achieve liberty and peace is to restore law and order. And the only way to restore law and order is to literally crush the forces of evil. When that begins to happen, we do actually see the positive side of tyranny and anarchy. Conflict is a bedfellow of oppression. Therefore we must end the conflict and, in doing so, end the tyranny. How are we doing right now? Here’s the positive side of this war.
Since the heart of the coup began with the planned pandemic, let’s start there. Right now, we have over 17,000 medical doctors signed on with the Global Covid Summit Declaration. This is a joint statement of physicians and medical scientists whose goal is to restore integrity to science and address the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the corrupted pharmaceuticals and organized socialist medical system.
As we speak, more doctors wake up and spurn the dark side, acknowledging the holocaust we now face. New independent clinics, surgery centers, and hospitals are beginning to crop up, offering principles of sound medical practice once again. Desiring a clear conscience, many medical personnel are now joining the fight to expose and topple the evil empire of Anthony Fauci and all of our rogue government institutions. This is a huge shift in the freedom fight. But it doesn’t stop there.
We have seen the fateful product of lawlessness that has arisen from the globalist insurgents who have infiltrated our government beyond our most dreaded imagination. We now are suffering at their hands, fully recognizing their blatant tactics to enslave us. And now we are finally taking action. The positive side of anarchy is a fervent resolve to end the suffering that lawlessness engenders.
This is our time to show the world what America is really made of, to sound the freedom bells once again. And so… defend your children. Expose the lies and propaganda. Let no home be without a gun! Be the resistance. Learn the power of a nation that prays to the one true and almighty God! The coup is still in progress, but the Giant has awakened.
All we need do now is finish the fight that the radical left started and never turn back. God bless America!
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Nantucket Crowd and Their Breezy Windmill Fantasies
In 2007, John Kerry had posted on his website: “You can’t just have someone plunk something down wherever the hell they want.” Among other Cape Wind opponents
www.americaoutloud.com
The Nantucket Crowd and Their Breezy Windmill Fantasies
by Larry Bell | May 9, 2022 | Climate Change, Energy, Feature 1, Politics
President Joe Biden boasted to a staged throng of dozens assembled for his Earth Day speech that he had “made it clear to [his wealthy] friends up in Nantucket and that area” that they were to drop their objections to offshore wind farms planned for the Martha’s Vineyard area.
Lowering his voice to a whisper for dramatic effect, Joe claimed to have told them, “I don’t want to hear any more about you don’t like looking at [wind turbines]. They’re pretty.”
This presumptive list of deep-pocketed pals would likely include his former boss Barack Obama’s $12 million home there … and also his “Climate Envoy” John Kerry’s objection to harnessing all that “green” wind energy blowing right off the coast of his $12 million Nantucket Sound property.
Former Massachusetts Sen. Kerry hadn’t been the least bit keen on having a 24-square-mile, 130-turbine offshore Cape Wind development, which would have supplied 75% of the Nantucket, Cape Cod, and Martha’s Vineyard electricity clutter his panoramic view or interfere with his windsurfing.
In 2007, Kerry had posted on his website: “You can’t just have someone plunk something down wherever the hell they want.”
Among other Cape Wind opponents were former Sen. Ted Kennedy and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who cited environmental impacts and economic concerns about project damage to local tourism.
Many self-proclaimed environmentalists, in fact, aren’t all keen on wind turbines. A Sierra Club official described them as giant “Cuisinarts in the sky” for bird and bat slaughters.
President Biden’s most recent Earth Day speech, as with his previous one last year, expands on an overblown wind-powered proposal to transition America to “100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035” and to a “net zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.”
Unfortunately, wind doesn’t afford the benefits marketers promise. It isn’t an abundant, reliable power source; it doesn’t appreciably reduce fossil dependence or CO2 emissions; it isn’t free or even cheap; it doesn’t produce net job gains; nor does it cool brows of feverish environmental critics.
Many green energy advocates have exaggerated the capacity of wind power to make a significant impact on U.S. electrical needs.
According to that “net-zero-emissions” plan, the U.S. would need to replace the 80% of energy provided by hydrocarbons by increasing the 4%, or so we get from wind and solar combined — plus adding millions of power-thirsty electric vehicles to already strained energy grids.
Compare these paltry total energy yield amounts with about an 80% split between petroleum (35%), natural gas (43%), and coal (19%).
In addition, let’s not forget that wind and solar intermittency requires access to a second-by-second “spinning reserve,” or “shadow capacity” (typically natural gas, coal, or hydropower generator turbines), which enables utilities to balance power grids when wind conditions aren’t optimum … which is most of the time.
This requires inefficiently throttling the fossil-fired turbines up and down … like driving a car in stop-and-go traffic.
Electricity must be instantaneously available day and night to meet “baseload” requirements.
When peak loads exceed supplies, such as during hot summer days when demands for air-conditioning are highest, bad things quickly happen. Electrical frequencies and voltages drop as power line currents increase, necessitating automatic or manual interruption of loads (blackouts) to protect grids.
Since wind power must be integrated as part of a larger, balanced, grid network, when that wind generation component increases, the temperatures of fossil-fueled boilers must be dropped to maintain demand-supply equality.
This involves wasteful shedding of heat for cooling — then more wasting to add heat back into the system without accomplishing any additional work. And since the spinning reserves don’t stop consuming fuel when wind generation is occurring, claims of energy savings or CO2 emission reductions are largely mythological.
Then there’s the matter of real, versus theoretical, wind turbine capacities.
A major point of public confusion in this regard lies in a failure to differentiate maximum total capacities, typically presented in megawatts (MW), with actual predicted kilowatt-hours (kWh), which are determined by annual average wind conditions at a particular site.
Wind turbine energy generating capacities (average power output divided by maximum capability) range from 26% to 52% on land, with an average of 41% for projects built between 2014 and 2018.
Whereas offshore winds are generally stronger than on land, with higher capacities reaching 51%, they are also much more expensive to build in deep water and maintain due to corrosive effects … plus add the costs of providing the power cables to shore.
Wind and solar also require huge amounts of land and expensive transmission lines to deliver electricity from remote sites to high-power demand metropolitan centers.
Wind turbines — and solar panels as well — are short on longevity, and long on maintenance. Since many of those already installed are reaching their 15-20-year end of life, their phased replacement will be enormously and constantly expensive.
During his Earth Day speech, President Biden made a big point in touting his administration’s crackdown on cement, a substance he said was responsible for 8% of the world’s carbon emissions.
Biden said: “I set new standards for cleaner cement. Cement is an incredible pollutant.”
Not mentioned was that constructing and replacing each wind turbine consumes about 50,000 tons of concrete, 30,000 tons of iron ore, and 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics for the huge blades, which will wind up in landfills.
In summary, any breezy fantasy that an unlimited, free and clean alternative to carbon-cursed fossil-fuel sources is blowing by with scant appreciation is exceedingly naïve and misguided.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Biden Handing Over U.S. Sovereignty to WHO
We must act now to prevent the passage of the amendments, including putting sufficient pressure on the United States to withdraw them from consideration...
www.americaoutloud.com
Biden Handing Over U.S. Sovereignty to WHO
by Peter Breggin MD and Ginger Ross Breggin | May 4, 2022 | Feature 2, Health, Politics, World
Please take seriously the severity of this existential threat to everything free people hold dear. Do everything in your power to pass this report on to others and to find ways to communicate with and to influence people to stop empowering WHO to take over our national sovereignty and freedom.
On May 22-28, 2022, ultimate control over America’s healthcare system, and hence its national sovereignty, will be delivered for a vote to the World Health Organization’s governing legislative body, the World Health Assembly (WHA).
This threat is contained in new amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations, proposed by the Biden administration, that are scheduled as “Provisional agenda item 16.2” at the upcoming conference on May 22-28, 2022.1
These amendments will empower WHO’s Director-General to declare health emergencies or crises in any nation and to do so unilaterally and against the opposition of the target nation. The Director-General will be able to declare these health crises based merely on his personal opinion or consideration that there is a potential or possible threat to other nations.
If passed, the Biden Administration’s proposed amendments will, by their very existence and their intention, drastically compromise the independence and the sovereignty of the United States. The same threat looms over all the U.N.’s 193 member nations, all of whom belong to WHO and represent 99.44% of the world population.2
These regulations are a “binding instrument of international law entered into force on 15 June 2007.”3 U.N. members states can be required by law to obey or acquiesce to them.
How It Became Official
On January 18, 2022, with no public awareness, officials from the Biden Administration sent the World Health Organization these extensive amendments to strengthen WHO’s ability to unilaterally intervene into the affairs of nations merely suspected of having a “health emergency” of possible concern to other nations.4 The U.S. amendments cross out a critical existing restriction in the regulations: “WHO shall consult with and attempt to obtain verification from the State Party in whose territory the event is allegedly occurring…”5 By eliminating that, and other clauses (see below), all the shackles will be removed from the Director-General of WHO, enabling him to declare health emergencies at will.
The amendments would give WHO the right to take important steps to collaborate with other nations and other organizations worldwide to deal with any nation’s alleged health crisis, even against its stated wishes. The power to declare health emergencies is a potential tool to shame, intimidate, and dominate nations. It can be used to justify ostracism and economic or financial actions against the targeted nation by other nations aligned with WHO or who wish to harm and control the accused nation.
Although sponsored by an American administration, WHO’s most significant use of this arbitrary authority to declare national emergencies will be used against the United States if our government ever again dares to take anti-globalist stands as it did under the Trump administration.
How Much Time Do We Have to Stop the Amendments?
The contents of the proposed amendments were not made public until April 12, 2022,6 leaving little time to protest before the scheduled vote. As noted, the amendments are scheduled and almost certainly will be enacted May 22-28, 2022.
The existing WHO regulations then provide for an 18-month grace period during which a nation may withdraw its “yes” vote for amendments, but the current proposed amendments would reduce that opportunity to six months. If the U.S.-sponsored amendments are passed, a majority of the nations could, in the next six months, change their individual votes and reverse the approval. But this is a much more difficult proposition than stopping the whole process now.
Without Organized Resistance, the Amendments Will Definitely Pass
On January 26, 2022, the same U. S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva sent a one-page memo to WHO confirming that the amendments had been sent. It also contained a brief report by the same Loyce Pace, Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs HHS.7 Most importantly, the memo listed all the nations backing the U.S. amendments. The size and power of the group guarantee that the amendments will be passed if unopposed by significant outside pressure.
Here are the 20 nations, plus the European Union, listed by the U.S. as supporting the amendments:
Albania, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, India, Jamaica, Japan, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, Peru, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United States of America, Uruguay, Member States of the European Union (EU).
The European Union, a globalist organization, has been among the biggest backers of increasing WHO’s global power. The EU includes the following 27 Western nations:
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.
That’s a total of 47 nations supporting the U.S.-authored amendments. All of them have endorsed empowering WHO to declare a possible or potential health emergency or crisis within any nation despite its objections and refusal to cooperate. To repeat, these amendments will pass unless American citizens, as well as citizens worldwide, mount a very strong opposition.
World Health Organization
Defining “Health” and WHO’s Domain of Authority
According to the Foreward to WHO’s regulations, there is no specific limit to what constitutes a health emergency, and it is certainly not limited to pandemics. WHO’s domain includes:8
a scope not limited to any specific disease or manner of transmission, but covering “illness or medical condition, irrespective of origin or source, that presents or could present significant harm to humans…
WHO’s powerful reach is also defined by the number of other organizations it is authorized to cooperate with once it has declared an emergency or health crisis: “other competent intergovernmental organizations or international bodies with which WHO is expected to cooperate and coordinate its activities, as appropriate, include the following: United Nations, International Labor Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Atomic Energy Agency, International Civil Aviation Organization, International Maritime Organization, International Committee of the Red Cross, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, International Air Transport Association, International Shipping Federation, and Office International des Epizooties.”9
The Preamble to the WHO Constitution (separate from the International Health Regulations) summarizes WHO’s concept of what is included under its mandate of improving, guiding, and organizing world health:10
WHO remains firmly committed to the principles set out in the preamble to the Constitution
- Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
- The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.
- The health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security and is dependent on the fullest cooperation of individuals and States.
- The achievement of any State in the promotion and protection of health is of value to all.
- Unequal development in different countries in the promotion of health and control of diseases, especially communicable diseases, is a common danger.
- Healthy development of the child is of basic importance; the ability to live harmoniously in a changing total environment is essential to such development.
- The extension to all peoples of the benefits of medical, psychological, and related knowledge is essential to the fullest attainment of health.
- Informed opinion and active co-operation on the part of the public are of the utmost importance in the improvement of the health of the people.
- Governments have a responsibility for the health of their peoples which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures.
WHO’s Sweeping New Powers
The sweeping new powers will be invested in the Director-General of WHO to act on his own. The Director-General is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, commonly known as Tedros. Tedros, the first non-physician director-general of WHO, is an extremely controversial Marxist activist and politician from Ethiopia installed by the Chinese Communist Party. Despite the fact that his role as the cover-up apologist for the Chinese Communists at the onset of COVID-19, this “dear friend of Anthony Fauci” was re-elected without opposition in 2022 to a second five-year term.11 His original election in 2017, followed by his re-election without opposition in 2022, is an ominous display of Chinese Communist influence over WHO,12 which makes further empowering the U.N. agency extremely dangerous.
Under the new regulations, WHO will not be required to consult with the identified nation beforehand to “verify” the event before taking action. This requirement is stricken by the U.S. amendments (Article 9.1). The amendments require a response in 24 hours from the identified nation, or WHO will identify it as “rejection” and act independently (Article 10.3). If the identified nation “does not accept the offer of collaboration within 48 hours, WHO shall … immediately share with the other State Parties the information available to it…” (Article 10.4).
Under the proposed regulations, WHO itself would develop and update “early warning criteria for assessing and progressively updating the national, regional, or global risk posed by an event of unknown causes or sources…” (New article 5). Notice that the health-endangering event may be so nonspecific as to have “unknown causes or sources.” Thus, Tedros and any future Director-Generals of WHO will be given unrestricted powers to define and then implement their interventions.
The proposed regulations, in combination with existing ones, allow action to be taken by WHO, “If the Director-General considers, based on an assessment under these Regulations, that a potential or actual public health emergency of international concern is occurring…” (Article 12.2). That is, Tedros need only “consider” that a “potential or actual” risk is occurring.
Global Supporters of WHO
WHO is not a global powerhouse by itself. Early in the pandemic, it acted as a front group for the international exploiters of humanity, whom we describe in our new book COVID-19 and the Global Predators. In particular, it made certain the Chinese Communists could hide the seriousness of the pandemic while spreading to the world on passenger airplanes from its major cities, including Wuhan itself. We have already noted and documented that the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping have enormous influence over WHO.
Even after Donald Trump slashed the U.S. contribution to WHO in February 2020, the U.S. remained the largest donor to WHO. On March 31, 2020, the U.S. contribution was $115.8 million, followed by China at approximately one-half that amount, followed by Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Brazil.13
Then in early July 2020, Trump notified Congress and the U.N. that it was formally withdrawing from WHO. Bill Gates quickly announced he was increasing his contribution from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to $250 million.14
After the Communist Chinese Party, Bill Gates probably has the most influence over WHO. In our book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, we describe in Chapter 15 how Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and the giant medical foundation Wellcome Trust created CEPI — The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. This became the center of global predatory activities in preparation for the anticipated pandemic. It brought together key U.S. agencies, including the FDA, CDC, NIAID, NIH, the U.N., WHO, giant pharmaceutical companies, banks, and multiple other sources of wealth and power.
In 2017, or earlier, CEPI made an agreement called a memorandum of understanding with WHO. CEPI then presented a PowerPoint presentation to WHO in July 2017, in effect dividing up the world between the Gates’ CEPI and WHO in the coming pandemic. Gates would handle the financing, supply, and distribution of the vaccines, and WHO would control and monitor the scientific and medical community. Among the stipulations of the PowerPoint, which the Gates-created foundation presented, was that the pharmaceutical companies would be reimbursed for all direct and indirect costs by the government for developing their high-speed manufacturing platforms.
WHO was highly effective during COVID-19 in implementing the aims of the global predators, led by the groups around Bill Gates and the Chinese Communist Party, in their organized assault and terror campaign against the Western democracies. This purposely resulted in the vast weakening of any potentially anti-globalist, freedom-oriented, patriotic nations, including the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and others. That success may explain why the global predators chose WHO to now deliver a major and potentially lethal death blow to the sovereignty of the world’s nations.
Part 1 of 2
Last edited:
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2
Europeans Call for Additional Further Increases in WHO’s Power
There is a growing debate over further increasing the power of WHO to punish uncooperative or dissident nations.15 Some “have sounded the alarm about giving the WHO too much power at the expense of national sovereignty.” Some have voiced concern about China’s influence on WHO: “Not only has it increased its payment to the WHO in recent years, but it also enjoys a special relationship with its leader.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, with President Xi Jinping.
But others are calling for increasing WHO’s ability to sanction non-compliant nations. Echoing recent plans publicized by the Biden administration, some nations are calling for “national and global coordinated actions to address the misinformation, disinformation, and stigmatization that undermine public health.” German Health Minister Jens Spahn has proposed “that countries that fail to follow up on their commitments to the WHO should face sanctions.” Tedros has said, “maybe exploring the sanctions may be important.”
Treaties with WHO: Another Enormous Threat to Sovereignty — With a Longer Timeline
Before we learned about this current and more immediate threat to U.S. sovereignty, we were focusing on WHO’s plans to begin making treaties with individual nations to take over their general healthcare structures, making WHO the guiding and central authority for the world’s healthcare. In addition to many radio, TV, and public appearances giving the details about this threat, we have written a column on America Out Loud, dated February 18, 2022, “Tedros Introduces Globalist Plan to Take Over World’s Health Systems.”16
If implemented, the treaties become an even greater threat than the amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations, but we have more time to deal with the treaties than with the amendments.
Why Would the U.S. Government Surrender Its Sovereignty
Why would the U.S. give away its sovereignty to other nations? In reality, that process has been going on at least since President Wilson’s failed attempt to get the Senate to approve U.S. membership in the League of Nations. It has escalated since World War II, often under the umbrella and authority of the United Nations, with which many global predators are enamored and use as the cover story for their predations. As documented in our book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators, Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab have both worked out cooperative agreements for their versions of the New World Order with the U.N.
President Biden has recently told the Business Round Table — the presidents and CEOs of the wealthiest 200 corporations in America — that they must lead the growing New World Order:17
“And now is a time when things are shifting. We’re going to — there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”
John Kerry, the President’s climate czar, had announced that when Americans elected Biden, they voted for the Great Reset, whether they knew it or not.18
Discussion and Conclusions
The planning for these devastating U.S.-sponsored amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations has been so stealthy that it might have escaped attention except for the efforts of one individual, James Roguski. He was the first to recognize this threat, and on March 31, 2022, he published a report headlined, “WAKE UP and Smell the Burning of Our Constitution.”19 He also helped us by reviewing the material and this report with us. Fortunately, our courageous medical colleague Robert Yoho originally alerted us to Roguski’s work and its importance.20
We are facing an imminent threat to U.S. sovereignty by these legally-binding amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations that — without stiff opposition — will almost certainly be passed during the upcoming meeting of WHO’s governing body, the World Health Assembly, May 22-28, 2022. As noted earlier, there is a six-month grace period following approval of amendments during which countries may withdraw their approval, but a majority doing so seems highly unlikely. Right now, we must focus on preventing the WHA from approving the amendments.
We must immediately mount an international campaign, especially focused within America, to force the U.S. to withdraw these amendments before they come to a vote. Otherwise, America and the nations of the world will take a giant stride toward forfeiting national sovereignty to WHO and the U.N. In reality; they will be forfeiting their sovereign powers to the global predators who rule the U.N. and WHO, including the Chinese Communist Party and supporters of the Great Reset, like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and giant foundations and corporations — all of whom benefit from weakening or destroying the sovereignty of the Western nations. Western civilization, and mainly the United States, is all that stands in strong opposition to the globalist takeover of the world, called the New World Order or the Great Reset.
Primary Author Peter R Breggin MD
References:
1 https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf#page=4 Top lefthand corner provides the date and proposal ID.
2 Members of the UN - United Nations
3 International Health Regulations (2005) (who. int) These are the original WHO International Health Regulations before the proposed amendments by the U.S.A. The Overview on this page (before going to the link to the Regulations) in the second sentence contains the statement about their legally binding nature.
4 https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf#page=4 Note: “Security” warnings sometimes prevent downloading; but changing browsers or repeatedly trying has always succeeded. We are planning an alternative link from www.breggin.com. The document dated January 18, 2022, is found on pages 3-4, From the “Permanent Mission of the United States of America to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.” It lists the Amendments as an enclosure, along with a “Letter from HHS Assistant Secretary Loyce Pace.”
5 https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf#page=4 See p. 6 of the amendments, Article 9 (1.).
6 https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf#page=4 The date is in the upper righthand corner.
7 Strengthening WHO Preparedness for and Response to Health Emergencies This is a One-page statement from U.S. to WHO about amendments. Lists supporting nations and DHHS support.
8 International Health Regulations (2005) (who.int). Download the Regulations and go to the Foreward.
9 International Health Regulations (2005) (who.int). International Health Regulations, Section on Revision Of The International Health Regulations, pp. 3-4.
10 Constitution of the World Health Organization
11 Controversial World Health Organization chief Tedros unopposed for second term. Even The New York Times had serious reservations about Tedros’ initial nomination, citing allegations of his covering up epidemics in his home country of Ethiopia: Candidate to Lead the W.H.O. Accused of Covering Up Epidemics (Published 2017)
12 How WHO Became China’s Coronavirus Accomplice
13 Infographic: The Biggest Financial Contributors To The WHO
14 https://www.usnews.com/news/article...-to-who-nearly-match-those-from-us-government
15 Swab, Petr. Proposal to Sanction Countries Disobeying WHO Pandemic Response Rules is Concerning: Author. The Epoch Times, April 14, Updated April 19, 2022. Swab’s report is the source for all the quotes in this section. isProposal to Sanction Countries Disobeying WHO Pandemic Response Rules Is Concerning: Author
16 Tedros - Globalist Plan to Take Over World’s Health Systems
17 Remarks by President Biden Before Business Roundtable's CEO Quarterly Meeting | The White House
18 John Kerry: 'Great Reset' Will Happen We have also checked a video of Kerry’s remarks.
19 WAKE UP and Smell the Burning of Our Constitution
20 100: THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO) IS TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD - SURVIVING HEALTHCARE
Europeans Call for Additional Further Increases in WHO’s Power
There is a growing debate over further increasing the power of WHO to punish uncooperative or dissident nations.15 Some “have sounded the alarm about giving the WHO too much power at the expense of national sovereignty.” Some have voiced concern about China’s influence on WHO: “Not only has it increased its payment to the WHO in recent years, but it also enjoys a special relationship with its leader.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, with President Xi Jinping.
But others are calling for increasing WHO’s ability to sanction non-compliant nations. Echoing recent plans publicized by the Biden administration, some nations are calling for “national and global coordinated actions to address the misinformation, disinformation, and stigmatization that undermine public health.” German Health Minister Jens Spahn has proposed “that countries that fail to follow up on their commitments to the WHO should face sanctions.” Tedros has said, “maybe exploring the sanctions may be important.”
Treaties with WHO: Another Enormous Threat to Sovereignty — With a Longer Timeline
Before we learned about this current and more immediate threat to U.S. sovereignty, we were focusing on WHO’s plans to begin making treaties with individual nations to take over their general healthcare structures, making WHO the guiding and central authority for the world’s healthcare. In addition to many radio, TV, and public appearances giving the details about this threat, we have written a column on America Out Loud, dated February 18, 2022, “Tedros Introduces Globalist Plan to Take Over World’s Health Systems.”16
If implemented, the treaties become an even greater threat than the amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations, but we have more time to deal with the treaties than with the amendments.
Why Would the U.S. Government Surrender Its Sovereignty
Why would the U.S. give away its sovereignty to other nations? In reality, that process has been going on at least since President Wilson’s failed attempt to get the Senate to approve U.S. membership in the League of Nations. It has escalated since World War II, often under the umbrella and authority of the United Nations, with which many global predators are enamored and use as the cover story for their predations. As documented in our book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators, Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab have both worked out cooperative agreements for their versions of the New World Order with the U.N.
President Biden has recently told the Business Round Table — the presidents and CEOs of the wealthiest 200 corporations in America — that they must lead the growing New World Order:17
“And now is a time when things are shifting. We’re going to — there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”
John Kerry, the President’s climate czar, had announced that when Americans elected Biden, they voted for the Great Reset, whether they knew it or not.18
Discussion and Conclusions
The planning for these devastating U.S.-sponsored amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations has been so stealthy that it might have escaped attention except for the efforts of one individual, James Roguski. He was the first to recognize this threat, and on March 31, 2022, he published a report headlined, “WAKE UP and Smell the Burning of Our Constitution.”19 He also helped us by reviewing the material and this report with us. Fortunately, our courageous medical colleague Robert Yoho originally alerted us to Roguski’s work and its importance.20
We are facing an imminent threat to U.S. sovereignty by these legally-binding amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations that — without stiff opposition — will almost certainly be passed during the upcoming meeting of WHO’s governing body, the World Health Assembly, May 22-28, 2022. As noted earlier, there is a six-month grace period following approval of amendments during which countries may withdraw their approval, but a majority doing so seems highly unlikely. Right now, we must focus on preventing the WHA from approving the amendments.
We must immediately mount an international campaign, especially focused within America, to force the U.S. to withdraw these amendments before they come to a vote. Otherwise, America and the nations of the world will take a giant stride toward forfeiting national sovereignty to WHO and the U.N. In reality; they will be forfeiting their sovereign powers to the global predators who rule the U.N. and WHO, including the Chinese Communist Party and supporters of the Great Reset, like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and giant foundations and corporations — all of whom benefit from weakening or destroying the sovereignty of the Western nations. Western civilization, and mainly the United States, is all that stands in strong opposition to the globalist takeover of the world, called the New World Order or the Great Reset.
Primary Author Peter R Breggin MD
References:
1 https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf#page=4 Top lefthand corner provides the date and proposal ID.
2 Members of the UN - United Nations
3 International Health Regulations (2005) (who. int) These are the original WHO International Health Regulations before the proposed amendments by the U.S.A. The Overview on this page (before going to the link to the Regulations) in the second sentence contains the statement about their legally binding nature.
4 https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf#page=4 Note: “Security” warnings sometimes prevent downloading; but changing browsers or repeatedly trying has always succeeded. We are planning an alternative link from www.breggin.com. The document dated January 18, 2022, is found on pages 3-4, From the “Permanent Mission of the United States of America to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.” It lists the Amendments as an enclosure, along with a “Letter from HHS Assistant Secretary Loyce Pace.”
5 https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf#page=4 See p. 6 of the amendments, Article 9 (1.).
6 https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf#page=4 The date is in the upper righthand corner.
7 Strengthening WHO Preparedness for and Response to Health Emergencies This is a One-page statement from U.S. to WHO about amendments. Lists supporting nations and DHHS support.
8 International Health Regulations (2005) (who.int). Download the Regulations and go to the Foreward.
9 International Health Regulations (2005) (who.int). International Health Regulations, Section on Revision Of The International Health Regulations, pp. 3-4.
10 Constitution of the World Health Organization
11 Controversial World Health Organization chief Tedros unopposed for second term. Even The New York Times had serious reservations about Tedros’ initial nomination, citing allegations of his covering up epidemics in his home country of Ethiopia: Candidate to Lead the W.H.O. Accused of Covering Up Epidemics (Published 2017)
12 How WHO Became China’s Coronavirus Accomplice
13 Infographic: The Biggest Financial Contributors To The WHO
14 https://www.usnews.com/news/article...-to-who-nearly-match-those-from-us-government
15 Swab, Petr. Proposal to Sanction Countries Disobeying WHO Pandemic Response Rules is Concerning: Author. The Epoch Times, April 14, Updated April 19, 2022. Swab’s report is the source for all the quotes in this section. isProposal to Sanction Countries Disobeying WHO Pandemic Response Rules Is Concerning: Author
16 Tedros - Globalist Plan to Take Over World’s Health Systems
17 Remarks by President Biden Before Business Roundtable's CEO Quarterly Meeting | The White House
18 John Kerry: 'Great Reset' Will Happen We have also checked a video of Kerry’s remarks.
19 WAKE UP and Smell the Burning of Our Constitution
20 100: THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO) IS TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD - SURVIVING HEALTHCARE
Last edited:
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Biden sent baby formula to Ukraine… After he learned about U.S. shortage…
Posted by Kane on May 13, 2022 12:46 pm
1:30 min
Biden is shipping pallets of Baby Formula to the Border…
They’ve known since February, yet they sent tons of baby formula to Ukraine…
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1525094754031218691
1:17 min
marsh
On TB every waking moment
"Equity" Hits the Biden Baby Formula Crisis as Government-Dependent Families Get Access to More - The Liberty Daily
If you love the news, check out The Liberty Daily's homepage. The welfare state in the United States has often been rightly linked to the perpetuation of poverty in a nation with abundant opportunity. We should be compassionate for those truly in need while deriding those who maliciously take...
thelibertydaily.com
“Equity” Hits the Biden Baby Formula Crisis as Government-Dependent Families Get Access to More
By J.D. Rucker • May. 14, 2022
The welfare state in the United States has often been rightly linked to the perpetuation of poverty in a nation with abundant opportunity. We should be compassionate for those truly in need while deriding those who maliciously take advantage of the system. Most importantly, we must not encourage government dependency as a way of life in America.
The tenets of “equity” dictate that those who are most dependent should be given more access to products and services than those who are self-sufficient. We’re seeing this happening on multiple fronts in the current baby formula crisis as governments and retailers allow special treatment for those who are allegedly in greater need. For example, pallets of baby formula were rushed to the border for illegal aliens while American citizens were getting shafted.
Now, we’re seeing it happening at retailers who are offering special treatment to those making their purchases with government assistance:
To be clear, there are circumstance in which preferential treatment for those in greater need is acceptable. This is not one of them. With the specialized needs that babies have in their diets, any child who requires formula is in equal need regardless of the financial status of their family. Reduced supply affects wealthy families just as much as it affects poor families, so allowing one group to have access to more is destructive equity, not equality.
This is the Neo-Marxist, government-dependent world that the Biden regime and the globalist elites are creating. Some say Build Back Better isn’t working. In reality, it’s doing EXACTLY what they intended.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Food Riot Begins As India Bans Wheat Exports & Food Prices Soar / Food Shortages Get Worse IN 2022
The Economic Ninja
Food Riots Begin As India Bans Wheat Exports & Food Prices Soar / Food Shortages Get Worse IN 2022. Riots have broke out in Iran as the prices of food explode and people cant keep up with the food inflation. Also even as America deals with a baby formula shortage we are about to see a food famine in our own country as well. https://news.yahoo.com/iran-protests-... https://www.agweb.com/news/crops/whea...
Last edited:
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Depopulation: "I Hope It Can Occur In a Civil Manner" - Club of Rome's Dennis Meadows 2:03 min
Depopulation: "I Hope It Can Occur In a Civil Manner" - Club of Rome's Dennis Meadows
The Vigilant Fox Published May 15, 2022
"If you want more liberty and more consumption, you have to have fewer people."
Video Source: View: https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1523957090792124416?s=20&t=V-jkDn_Z6btOEY7ebSmkhQ
(Meadows: We are so far above population and consumption levels of this planet - he hopes depopulation can occur in a civil - peaceful way. Peace doesn't mean that everybody's happy, but it means the conflict isn't solved through violence, through force, but in other ways.
The planet can support something like a billion people - maybe 2 billion depending upon how much liberty and material consumption you want. We could have 8 or 9 billion people if we had a very strong dictatorship, which is smart - which is rare, and a very low standard of living. We want a high standard of living and liberty, so we have to get back down to a billion. We are currently at 7 billion.
He hopes this can be slow and done in a way that is relatively equal, so that we share the experience and we don't have a few rich who force everyone else to deal with it. )
Depopulation: "I Hope It Can Occur In a Civil Manner" - Club of Rome's Dennis Meadows
The Vigilant Fox Published May 15, 2022
"If you want more liberty and more consumption, you have to have fewer people."
Video Source: View: https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1523957090792124416?s=20&t=V-jkDn_Z6btOEY7ebSmkhQ
(Meadows: We are so far above population and consumption levels of this planet - he hopes depopulation can occur in a civil - peaceful way. Peace doesn't mean that everybody's happy, but it means the conflict isn't solved through violence, through force, but in other ways.
The planet can support something like a billion people - maybe 2 billion depending upon how much liberty and material consumption you want. We could have 8 or 9 billion people if we had a very strong dictatorship, which is smart - which is rare, and a very low standard of living. We want a high standard of living and liberty, so we have to get back down to a billion. We are currently at 7 billion.
He hopes this can be slow and done in a way that is relatively equal, so that we share the experience and we don't have a few rich who force everyone else to deal with it. )
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Justice Thomas: "You can't have a civil society, a free society, without a stable legal system." 3:19 min
Justice Thomas: "You can't have a civil society, a free society, without a stable legal system."
The Post Millennial Clips Published May 15, 2022
Justice Thomas: "I think we are in danger of destroying the institutions that are required for a free society. You can't have a civil society, a free society, without a stable legal system."
^^^^
Clarence Thomas Gives TERRIFYING Prediction For The Future Of SCOTUS 8:02 min
Clarence Thomas Gives TERRIFYING Prediction For The Future Of SCOTUS
Dinesh D'Souza Published May 15, 2022
The leaker needs to be brought to justice.
^^^^
Trust in the Supreme Court Is 'Gone Forever': Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks Out After SCOTUS Leak 1:53 min
Trust in the Supreme Court Is 'Gone Forever': Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks Out After SCOTUS Leak
Red Voice Media Published May 15, 2022
"It was beyond anyone's understanding or imagination that someone would do that."
Video via: Justice Clarence Thomas Says After the SCOTUS Leak, Trust in the Supreme Court is 'Gone Forever'
Justice Thomas: "You can't have a civil society, a free society, without a stable legal system."
The Post Millennial Clips Published May 15, 2022
Justice Thomas: "I think we are in danger of destroying the institutions that are required for a free society. You can't have a civil society, a free society, without a stable legal system."
^^^^
Clarence Thomas Gives TERRIFYING Prediction For The Future Of SCOTUS 8:02 min
Clarence Thomas Gives TERRIFYING Prediction For The Future Of SCOTUS
Dinesh D'Souza Published May 15, 2022
The leaker needs to be brought to justice.
^^^^
Trust in the Supreme Court Is 'Gone Forever': Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks Out After SCOTUS Leak 1:53 min
Trust in the Supreme Court Is 'Gone Forever': Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks Out After SCOTUS Leak
Red Voice Media Published May 15, 2022
"It was beyond anyone's understanding or imagination that someone would do that."
Video via: Justice Clarence Thomas Says After the SCOTUS Leak, Trust in the Supreme Court is 'Gone Forever'
Last edited:
marsh
On TB every waking moment
(Interesting rant by a disillusioned Millennial Mom.)
Libby Emmons discusses the cause of baby formula shortages 6:16 min
Libby Emmons discusses the cause of baby formula shortages
(with Benny Johnson of Newsmax) The Post Millennial Clips Published May 15, 2022
(Emmons: Her generation has never seen shortages like this before. It is difficult to understand how this could happen. The formula issue, the crumbling of our American supply chain has been so surprising to watch. She can see how difficult and terrifying it must be to not know how you are going to feed your infant.
Johnson: We live in a first world country where there haven't been shortages for generations. We get Biden and all of a sudden we see shortages.
Emmons: She sees complete and total incompetence as the cause. Assumption everything is going to be ok because we're Americans and we can shift to solar from fossil fuels and shift away from any of the things that have made us a prosperous nation and everything will remain the same. It turns out that civilization is not that stable. The stability we have grown up with and Americans have experienced in our lives is based on a lot of things - like fossil fuels and all these other things the Biden Admin thinks we can do without.
It is clear that we can't do without them. We need to feed our children. We need America to maintain its prosperity globally and it seems pretty clear that Biden and the Dems. don't care at all about that. They would rather we be subsumed, perhaps, by some growing other power. It is extremely disconcerting.
Johnson: Communist China really cares about babies. Why does this shortage exist?
Emmons: There was the recall in February. It is hard to ramp up again. If you believe the Biden Admin, it is hard to get materials in the supply chain. It is interesting that Biden is sending another $40 billion to Ukraine to help another nation fight its wars. They talk about evoking the war powers act for all sorts of things, but that doesn't seem to be a priority for America's children.
As a matter of fact, Dems don't seem to be concerned about American children at all. They're perfectly happy to see them ripped out of their mother's bodies way past the point of viability if the Women's Health Act - the one they are voting on. They didn't care about our kids during the pandemic and were perfectly happy to keep schools closed, to keep them masked to prevent them from learning. So what is it the Democrats are looking for. Do they care about America's future at all? Not if they care about America's children, they certainly don't.)
Libby Emmons discusses the cause of baby formula shortages 6:16 min
Libby Emmons discusses the cause of baby formula shortages
(with Benny Johnson of Newsmax) The Post Millennial Clips Published May 15, 2022
(Emmons: Her generation has never seen shortages like this before. It is difficult to understand how this could happen. The formula issue, the crumbling of our American supply chain has been so surprising to watch. She can see how difficult and terrifying it must be to not know how you are going to feed your infant.
Johnson: We live in a first world country where there haven't been shortages for generations. We get Biden and all of a sudden we see shortages.
Emmons: She sees complete and total incompetence as the cause. Assumption everything is going to be ok because we're Americans and we can shift to solar from fossil fuels and shift away from any of the things that have made us a prosperous nation and everything will remain the same. It turns out that civilization is not that stable. The stability we have grown up with and Americans have experienced in our lives is based on a lot of things - like fossil fuels and all these other things the Biden Admin thinks we can do without.
It is clear that we can't do without them. We need to feed our children. We need America to maintain its prosperity globally and it seems pretty clear that Biden and the Dems. don't care at all about that. They would rather we be subsumed, perhaps, by some growing other power. It is extremely disconcerting.
Johnson: Communist China really cares about babies. Why does this shortage exist?
Emmons: There was the recall in February. It is hard to ramp up again. If you believe the Biden Admin, it is hard to get materials in the supply chain. It is interesting that Biden is sending another $40 billion to Ukraine to help another nation fight its wars. They talk about evoking the war powers act for all sorts of things, but that doesn't seem to be a priority for America's children.
As a matter of fact, Dems don't seem to be concerned about American children at all. They're perfectly happy to see them ripped out of their mother's bodies way past the point of viability if the Women's Health Act - the one they are voting on. They didn't care about our kids during the pandemic and were perfectly happy to keep schools closed, to keep them masked to prevent them from learning. So what is it the Democrats are looking for. Do they care about America's future at all? Not if they care about America's children, they certainly don't.)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
The EU Is Streets Ahead Of The US In Electric Vehicle Uptake
SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2022 - 04:35 AM
The best-selling EV may hail from the United States, but when it comes to uptake among the domestic population, the U.S. is trailing Europe by some distance.
As Statista's Martin Armstrong details in the infographic below, using Statista Mobility Market Outlook data illustrates, Tesla has its biggest potential customer base in Europe - and the gap is only set to get bigger.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Come 2026, Statista analysts estimate that there will be 4.4 million EVs sold in E.U. countries, compared to just 1.9 million in the United States - that equates to 997 and 556 vehicles per 100,000 people (using 2022 population figures), respectively. From 2016 to 2019, the U.S. was actually head in terms of adoption, but Europe rapidly became the pacesetter.
Statista estimates EV revenues in the European Union to amount to $120 billion in 2022, compared to just $35 billion in the U.S. By 2026, revenues in the E.U. are set to surpass the $300 billion mark. In contrast, in the same year the U.S. should break the $100 billion barrier for the first time.
In the scope of the estimates are battery electric vehicles (BEVs), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), road electric vehicles and passenger cars. Not included in the analysis are electric vehicles that are not self-contained and cannot be classified as BEVs or PHEVs, rail electric vehicles, surface and underwater vessels, electric aircraft or spacecraft, motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, buses, vans, and trucks.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
PLEASE SHARE! Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger about WHO Pandemic Treaty 2:18 min
PLEASE SHARE! DR. ASTRID STUCKELBERGER ABOUT WHO PANDEMIC TREATY
(An extraordinary session of the World Health Assembly of the WHO was called in late Nov-Dec of last year. The usual Assembly is in May of each year. A guide to a "Pandemic Treaty" popped up at this extraordinary session. They voted to accept the procedure to start and finalize a "pandemic treaty" or international instrument. It is not just about a treaty, it can be anything.
They are going to take the instrument that will be adopted the quickest. This is the International Health Regulation. The Regulation was not signed [like a Treaty] but was adopted.
The WHO has a Constitution - this is key to understanding this last piece of puzzle that this was intentional for a long time. Why is WHO the only agency that has a constitution. She thinks the likely answer is that, as every government has a constitution, the most likely instrument to ensure that you can supersede - take over the world and all its constitutions, is to have a WHO constitution. )
PLEASE SHARE! DR. ASTRID STUCKELBERGER ABOUT WHO PANDEMIC TREATY
(An extraordinary session of the World Health Assembly of the WHO was called in late Nov-Dec of last year. The usual Assembly is in May of each year. A guide to a "Pandemic Treaty" popped up at this extraordinary session. They voted to accept the procedure to start and finalize a "pandemic treaty" or international instrument. It is not just about a treaty, it can be anything.
They are going to take the instrument that will be adopted the quickest. This is the International Health Regulation. The Regulation was not signed [like a Treaty] but was adopted.
The WHO has a Constitution - this is key to understanding this last piece of puzzle that this was intentional for a long time. Why is WHO the only agency that has a constitution. She thinks the likely answer is that, as every government has a constitution, the most likely instrument to ensure that you can supersede - take over the world and all its constitutions, is to have a WHO constitution. )
marsh
On TB every waking moment
(with notes)
PLEASE SHARE !Dr. Robert Malone about WHO pandemic treaty 1:51 min
PLEASE SHARE !DR. ROBERT MALONE ABOUT WHO PANDEMIC TREATY
(Hard to believe the Biden Admin are intentionally undermining the Constitution. Malone feels this is a breach of Biden's oath of office to defend the Constitution. Malone considers this an impeachable offense. There has been a direct attempt on Jan 18, with no public awareness, from the US to the WHO proposing a series of rule changes. In parallel, there are actions in Congress to essentially allow the President to sign a treaty without Congressional authorization.
Furthermore, in parallel, there was action taken at WHO to breech their normal period of review and approval for countries from 18 months to 6 months. What this means is that it will get rammed through the American political system and the WHO before the midterms. This is intentional. They are not only trying to bypass the Constitution and undermine it over this tortured logic that American health should take precedence over the American Constitution, but they have put a series of political plays in place that will allow them to do this without normal review process by the nation states in the WHO or by our own Congress. It's shocking)
PLEASE SHARE !Dr. Robert Malone about WHO pandemic treaty 1:51 min
PLEASE SHARE !DR. ROBERT MALONE ABOUT WHO PANDEMIC TREATY
(Hard to believe the Biden Admin are intentionally undermining the Constitution. Malone feels this is a breach of Biden's oath of office to defend the Constitution. Malone considers this an impeachable offense. There has been a direct attempt on Jan 18, with no public awareness, from the US to the WHO proposing a series of rule changes. In parallel, there are actions in Congress to essentially allow the President to sign a treaty without Congressional authorization.
Furthermore, in parallel, there was action taken at WHO to breech their normal period of review and approval for countries from 18 months to 6 months. What this means is that it will get rammed through the American political system and the WHO before the midterms. This is intentional. They are not only trying to bypass the Constitution and undermine it over this tortured logic that American health should take precedence over the American Constitution, but they have put a series of political plays in place that will allow them to do this without normal review process by the nation states in the WHO or by our own Congress. It's shocking)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
PLEASE SHARE - MP'S NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS - GREEN LIGHT TO START NEGOTIATIONS ON PLANDEMIC TREATY
Here is a great template email to email all your elected representatives https://clifhigh.substack.com/p/legislator-be-advised-collaboration?s=r Legislator Be Advised - Collaboration with WEF or WHO is TREASON You WILL be Punished! You are…
www.bitchute.com
PLEASE SHARE - MP'S NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS - GREEN LIGHT TO START NEGOTIATIONS ON PLANDEMIC TREATY
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Diesel Supply Store Hits RECORD Low, Mass Inflation And MAJOR Economic Crises Inbound 19:50 min
DIESEL SUPPLY STORE HITS RECORD LOW, MASS INFLATION AND MAJOR ECONOMIC CRISES INBOUND
(have not yet watched)
DIESEL SUPPLY STORE HITS RECORD LOW, MASS INFLATION AND MAJOR ECONOMIC CRISES INBOUND
(have not yet watched)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
Ep. 113: WHO Treaty; Israel-Palestine; Dominion; Mules AND MORE! Viva & Barnes LIVE! 2:06 :26 min
Ep. 113: WHO Treaty; Israel-Palestine; Dominion; Mules AND MORE! Viva & Barnes LIVE!
vivafrei Published May 15, 2022
Discussion of the WHO Treaty at 17:00 min to 26 min(I believe both gentlemen are attorneys. Viva is Canadian and Robert is US)
"Viva" - David: Establishing a global pandemic response and many nations have become signatories.
Robert: It's misunderstood. There is a belief out there that the Biden Admin is lobbying the WHO to adopt a range of rules governing its members that would empower the WHO to centralize responses to a pandemic. Those rule changes are not legally binding on the US until a treaty is proposed to the US Senate.
We joined the WHO by a Joint Resolution of Congress - not by treaty. This is why Trump was just going to unilaterally withdraw from it and was on pace to do so before the election of 2020.
There will be misleading talk in the press of it being binding; talk of it being a treaty - it's not. The WHO was not formed by a treaty as far as the US participation in it. The only thing we said in Congress was that we would give one year's notice and pay our dues when we leave. Only treaties are the "Supreme Law of the Land." No treaty has passed giving the WHO any legal power in the US.
So even if these rule changes of the Biden Admin. pass, they do not become legally binding on the US until and unless a treaty. They are talking about taking these rules and conforming them into a treaty and proposing a treaty, but that is still, by their own time table, several years away. Also, several nations have already said that they are not interested in delegating that kind of power to the WHO.
So there is a desire for it to occur, but there has been over-reaction from some parts of the political universe because they think it is politically binding. It is not. Any statement you see that it is politically binding is from someone in good faith that has misunderstood it - or someone in bad faith that is trying to mis-portray it.
Whichever that may be, it is not legally binding until a treaty passes and that requires 2/3 of the Senate. It has to go to the Office of Legal Council. It has to go through the State Dept. and have multiple levels of review before it is even proposed to the Senate. Then the Senate has to debate on it and more than 2/3 have to approve it for it to become binding law and we're not near that.
Viva: There are people out there who want to get people to repeat misinformation either to make them look stupid or to create a panic that might serve their interests. Some people might say it doesn't matter if it is in a treaty or not if nations have a willingness to abide by them, treaty or no treaty it becomes a defacto treaty even though it hasn't been passed.
Robert: It is not legally binding in the US. It is like the Climate Accords that we ignored and just walked away from. It is not something that is legally binding. It is something that can be taken on an advisory basis. Countries vary as to the enforceability of such an agreement. For instance, the Geneva Convention is something most countries have joined, Russia and Ukraine are not abiding by it because what's the disciplinary mechanism? There isn't one. That's the other factor - a law isn't a law if it's not enforced.
This goes back to the old UN Treaty. There was a lot of talk in the 50s that it meant they could govern the US. No it didn't. That wasn't the scope of the treaty and it had no enforcement power. So that is even more true with the WHO.
So people have been e-mailing me that it looks like WHO is going to be able to run US policy. No they're not. Nothing about these rule changes gives them any legally binding power in the US.
Viva: I look at Canada and similar it needs to be a treaty. The problem is if the Prime Minister and the Provinces are going to behave in a manner according to the rules
Robert: Nothing is going to prevent Biden from doing what he's going to do but the laws and Constitution, but there were people who thought this rule change would supersede US law, it does not. It doesn't stop politicians from doing what politicians are currently able to legally do, but it does not give them the power to circumvent or over-ride existing domestic law in the US.
Viva: So people can now not panic that it is now International Law applicable to all nations, rather than an indication of where things might go. But the bottom line is in any country, in any given state or province, the government might, nonetheless, implement these rules regardless of whether it is part of a treaty - we'll see.
Robert: Kinda like the Iran deal. Obama used the Iran deal to do what he did, but it was not legally binding, so that is how Trump could reverse it once he got in. Biden is still limited by the Constitution and the laws as to what he's got power in. You can't change the Constitution by just the Executive branch declaring something. You need a treaty to pass 2/3 of the Senate for that to happen.
Viva: Interesting, no panic but...
Robert: People should be aware of it and resisting it and what the Biden Admin is pushing is a bad idea, and treaties would be a disaster of an idea, Part of his concern is that some people are over-reacting now and will lead people to not be alert when the treaty is proposed.
Viva: People say China runs the WHO
Robert: China has influence over the WHO - there is no question about that. They didn't do the meaningful inquiry and covered up in the beginning. China is one of the biggest participants in the WHO. They don't really run it. The US with Biden probably has more influence right now. It varies as to who has power. He would call it a globalist institution that more often serves globalist purposes than any individual nation.
Viva: So be aware of it and we are not yet subject to international Law.
Ep. 113: WHO Treaty; Israel-Palestine; Dominion; Mules AND MORE! Viva & Barnes LIVE!
vivafrei Published May 15, 2022
Discussion of the WHO Treaty at 17:00 min to 26 min(I believe both gentlemen are attorneys. Viva is Canadian and Robert is US)
"Viva" - David: Establishing a global pandemic response and many nations have become signatories.
Robert: It's misunderstood. There is a belief out there that the Biden Admin is lobbying the WHO to adopt a range of rules governing its members that would empower the WHO to centralize responses to a pandemic. Those rule changes are not legally binding on the US until a treaty is proposed to the US Senate.
We joined the WHO by a Joint Resolution of Congress - not by treaty. This is why Trump was just going to unilaterally withdraw from it and was on pace to do so before the election of 2020.
There will be misleading talk in the press of it being binding; talk of it being a treaty - it's not. The WHO was not formed by a treaty as far as the US participation in it. The only thing we said in Congress was that we would give one year's notice and pay our dues when we leave. Only treaties are the "Supreme Law of the Land." No treaty has passed giving the WHO any legal power in the US.
So even if these rule changes of the Biden Admin. pass, they do not become legally binding on the US until and unless a treaty. They are talking about taking these rules and conforming them into a treaty and proposing a treaty, but that is still, by their own time table, several years away. Also, several nations have already said that they are not interested in delegating that kind of power to the WHO.
So there is a desire for it to occur, but there has been over-reaction from some parts of the political universe because they think it is politically binding. It is not. Any statement you see that it is politically binding is from someone in good faith that has misunderstood it - or someone in bad faith that is trying to mis-portray it.
Whichever that may be, it is not legally binding until a treaty passes and that requires 2/3 of the Senate. It has to go to the Office of Legal Council. It has to go through the State Dept. and have multiple levels of review before it is even proposed to the Senate. Then the Senate has to debate on it and more than 2/3 have to approve it for it to become binding law and we're not near that.
Viva: There are people out there who want to get people to repeat misinformation either to make them look stupid or to create a panic that might serve their interests. Some people might say it doesn't matter if it is in a treaty or not if nations have a willingness to abide by them, treaty or no treaty it becomes a defacto treaty even though it hasn't been passed.
Robert: It is not legally binding in the US. It is like the Climate Accords that we ignored and just walked away from. It is not something that is legally binding. It is something that can be taken on an advisory basis. Countries vary as to the enforceability of such an agreement. For instance, the Geneva Convention is something most countries have joined, Russia and Ukraine are not abiding by it because what's the disciplinary mechanism? There isn't one. That's the other factor - a law isn't a law if it's not enforced.
This goes back to the old UN Treaty. There was a lot of talk in the 50s that it meant they could govern the US. No it didn't. That wasn't the scope of the treaty and it had no enforcement power. So that is even more true with the WHO.
So people have been e-mailing me that it looks like WHO is going to be able to run US policy. No they're not. Nothing about these rule changes gives them any legally binding power in the US.
Viva: I look at Canada and similar it needs to be a treaty. The problem is if the Prime Minister and the Provinces are going to behave in a manner according to the rules
Robert: Nothing is going to prevent Biden from doing what he's going to do but the laws and Constitution, but there were people who thought this rule change would supersede US law, it does not. It doesn't stop politicians from doing what politicians are currently able to legally do, but it does not give them the power to circumvent or over-ride existing domestic law in the US.
Viva: So people can now not panic that it is now International Law applicable to all nations, rather than an indication of where things might go. But the bottom line is in any country, in any given state or province, the government might, nonetheless, implement these rules regardless of whether it is part of a treaty - we'll see.
Robert: Kinda like the Iran deal. Obama used the Iran deal to do what he did, but it was not legally binding, so that is how Trump could reverse it once he got in. Biden is still limited by the Constitution and the laws as to what he's got power in. You can't change the Constitution by just the Executive branch declaring something. You need a treaty to pass 2/3 of the Senate for that to happen.
Viva: Interesting, no panic but...
Robert: People should be aware of it and resisting it and what the Biden Admin is pushing is a bad idea, and treaties would be a disaster of an idea, Part of his concern is that some people are over-reacting now and will lead people to not be alert when the treaty is proposed.
Viva: People say China runs the WHO
Robert: China has influence over the WHO - there is no question about that. They didn't do the meaningful inquiry and covered up in the beginning. China is one of the biggest participants in the WHO. They don't really run it. The US with Biden probably has more influence right now. It varies as to who has power. He would call it a globalist institution that more often serves globalist purposes than any individual nation.
Viva: So be aware of it and we are not yet subject to international Law.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Visualizing The Science Behind Cultured Meat
SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2022 - 08:00 PM
Cultured foods - also known as cell-based foods - are expected to turn our global food system as we know it on its head.
In fact, the cultured meat market is estimated to reach an eye-watering $25 billion by 2030 according to McKinsey, but only if it can overcome hurdles such as price parity and consumer acceptance.
To do so, significant innovation in the science behind these products will be crucial for the industry’s growth.
In the graphic below from CULT Food Science, Visual Capitalist's Katie Jones and Sabrina Lam provide a visual overview of some of the technologies behind the creation of cultured meat products.
What is Cultured Meat?
To start, cultured meat is defined as a genuine animal meat product that is created by cultivating animal cells in a controlled lab environment—eliminating the need to farm animals for food almost entirely.
Because cultured meat is made of the same cell types and structure found in animal tissue, the sensory and nutritional profiles are like-for-like. Let’s dive into how these products are made.
The Science and Technology Behind Cultured Meat
The main challenge facing the cultured meat market is producing products at scale. But thanks to the vast amount of research in the stem cell biology space, the science behind cultured foods is not entirely new.
Given that we are in the very early days of applying these learnings to producing food products, those looking to invest in companies contributing to the industry’s growth stand to benefit.
Here is an overview of some of the technologies that underpin the industry that you should know:
1. Bioprocess Design
This is the process of using living cells and their components to create new products. According to experts like the Good Food Institute, bioprocess design holds the key to unlocking cultured meat production at scale.
Specifically, innovation in bioreactor (where the cells grow) design represents a massive opportunity for companies and investors alike.
2. Tissue Engineering
Tissue engineering techniques are used to produce cultured meat that resembles real meat textures and flavors. The first step is taking tissue from the animal for the purpose of extracting stem cells and creating cell lines.
The extracted stem cell lines are then cultivated in a nutrient rich environment, mimicking in-animal tissue growth and producing muscle fibers inside a bioreactor. The muscle fibers are processed and mixed with additional fats and ingredients to assemble the finished meat product.
3. Cell Lines
Cell lines refer to the different types of cells that can be propagated repeatedly and sometimes indefinitely.
Access to cell lines is a major challenge facing the industry today and is an area that requires significantly more research. This is because there is not just one cell type that can be used in cellular agriculture to produce cultured food products.
4. Cell Culture Media
Cells (or cell cultures) require very specific environmental conditions. Cell culture media is a gel or liquid that contains the nutrients needed to support growth outside of the body.
More research in this space is needed to determine optimized formulations and make these products more affordable.
5. Scaffolding
Scaffolds are 3D cell culture platforms that mimic the structure of complex biological tissues, such as skeletal muscle. This platforms can be created through the use of 3D Bioprinting.
Scaffolds are predominantly made up of collagen and gelatin. The problem is these are both animal-derived ingredients which defeats the purpose of cell-based products. Therefore, more sustainable plant-derived options are also being explored.
* * *
Soylent Green, here we come?
marsh
On TB every waking moment
ESG is the Perfect Storm Against Capitalism to Destroy...
Whoever gave banks this sort of control over the world to collude to reshape economies and energy infrastructure? The answer is the World Economic Forum...
www.americaoutloud.com
ESG is the Perfect Storm Against Capitalism to Destroy Our Way of Life
by Dr. Jay Lehr | May 15, 2022 | Economy, Politics
Every Woke, Liberal, Progressive, and straight out Socialist will tell you that Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing is an investment strategy you can use to put your money to work with companies that strive to make the world a better place. What it really is, is an anti-energy, anti-development, and anti-America strategy that helps to destroy our ability to produce low-cost, reliable energy.
Alex Epstein at industrialprogress.net says that “ESG poses as a moral and financially savvy movement that is an immoral and financially ruinous movement. It prevents poor countries from developing and threatens America’s security.
Few knew what the initials “ESG” meant 5 years ago, but it is well-known today among corporate investors. One hundred and eighty CEOs recently signed a Business Roundtable statement on business purpose. They have agreed to move away from trying to improve business and the investment outcome for its stockholders, focusing instead on goals involving political objectives.
Depriving citizens of the more than 6,000 products that were non-existent before 1900, made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil, is immoral and evil as extreme shortages will result in billions of fatalities from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths.
The pretense of liberal investment advisors that the market has long focused on social and environmental issues for companies that they invest in ⏤ is simply not true. A reading of the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) shows that it was written to set minimum standards to ensure financial soundness for the employees. Late last year, the Department of Labor (DOL) published an additional rule aimed at fiduciaries of employee benefit plans.
The new rule states clearly in section C1 that “plan fiduciaries are not permitted to sacrifice investment return to take on additional investment risk to promote non-pecuniary benefits.”
Liberal financial advisors are ignoring this rule as they accept ESG scores from third-party progressive evaluators of scores given to companies based on their environmental concerns, their social responsibility, and the way in which the companies are governed. The latter can be based on diversity and, believe it or not, their support for LBGTQ.
Blackrock, the world’s largest fund manager, is promoting ESG as a marketing pitch to younger investors who are more interested in improving society than investment returns. They ignore ERISA and write their own investing rules and ignore a more honest approach of attempting to repeal ERISA. They do not attempt that as it would alert young investors to the real rules for equitable investment clearly include political motivations.
A little-known fact is that the ESG movement was drummed up by the United Nations, not exactly a financial behemoth. They likely recognized what Ron Stein said in an article at cfact.org on January 17, 2022, that ESG really stands for Extreme Shortages Guaranteed. They were surely guided entirely by socialist goals, and the elimination of fossil fuel utilization around the world. The number one issue giving companies a high ESG score is their efforts to abandon fossil fuels or investment in them.
In doing so, the UN has greatly caused the price of energy to increase and deprived the poorest nations of the opportunity to advance their standard of living through inexpensive energy. The ESG movement is starving energy companies of new investment, but more important yet is that it increases the costs of everything because almost everything requires the input of a hydrocarbon derivative.
These ESG caring people are crazy. But it gets even worse. Almost the entire banking industry has joined an alliance to promote a net-zero economy, meaning investing in things that produce no carbon dioxide. Such a plan eliminates the hope of reducing millions of childhood deaths each year from the lack of the fossil fuel derivatives used in wealthier countries.
The ESG movement is also an enormous threat to our security and that of the free world.
Depriving us and other countries of inexpensive energy gives the edge to China ⏤ which aims to become the dominant force in the world.
The movement claims to be able to generate more income for investors though there are no numbers to support these claims. They do not come from your stockbroker but rather the liberal cabal trying a capitalist seeming plan to bring on more failed socialism in our world. They are the wolves parading most assuredly as sheep.
ESG is underpinning an emergent parallel government to that which we elect with its capital on Wall Street, says Matt Levine, a lawyer, and former Goldman Sachs investment banker, in Bloomberg Opinion on June 25, 2020. It consists of a handful of gigantic institutional asset managers, including Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, etc., who own on behalf of their customers most of the stocks of most of the public companies. These asset managers tell companies to do things that they think are good for society. No longer about just business, it is about how society should be run, decisions on the environment, workers’ rights and racial inequality, and other controversial political topics.
Robert Darrell said in an essay at the Real Clear Foundation titled Capitalism, Socialism and ESG: “that a handful of Wall Street titans should make decisions on behalf of society, gives an ironic twist to the term inclusive capitalism ⏤ which in truth, is the essence of insider capitalism. It would be hard to imagine a more effective way to undermine the legitimacy of capitalism than to have financial oligarchs usurping the functions of democratic institutions and the legitimacy of the ballot box by making political and societal decisions.”
There are no words too strong to describe the evil intent of the ESG movement unless, of course, you are Marxist, Progressive, Liberal, Socialist, or dare say, Communist who sees Capitalism as Dracula would see a wooden Cross. The battle over ESG is for the future of capitalism. Only capitalism has generated economic growth and improved living standards among the world’s competing systems. It is not an instrument of political power. It is not intended to weaponize financial powers. It is intended to maximize the economic benefits and level of happiness for the citizens who are fortunate enough to live within it. Next time you hear or read the words ESG, don’t just sit there ⏤ strike a blow for liberty by explaining its evil intent to others.
Look for Part 2 of this series next week.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
FROM SOLAR GRID TO CATTLE SHED: How Greenpeace’s Dream Of A Solar-Powered Village Fell Apart In Just A Few Years
A solar farm constructed in India eight years ago by the activist group Greenpeace is now defunct and used as a cattle shed, according to local media.
dailycaller.com
FROM SOLAR GRID TO CATTLE SHED: How Greenpeace’s Dream Of A Solar-Powered Village Fell Apart In Just A Few Years
Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images
THOMAS CATENACCIENERGY & ENVIRONMENT REPORTER
May 15, 20228:08 PM ET
- A Greenpeace-funded solar energy project in India has become completely defunct just years after it was built, according to local media reports.
- “When this solar farm went defunct, it was primarily because of two reasons,” Vijay Jayaraj, an India-based researcher said. “One, is the cost of the power and the second is reliability.”
- “No one uses solar power anymore here,” Ravi Kumar, a local shopkeeper, told an India-based news outlet.
Eight years later, reports indicate the solar micro-grid is not only defunct, but being used as a cattle shed. The Dharnai venture is only one of many failed attempts by environmental groups, like Greenpeace, to “green” the developing world, according to one of its co-founders.
“It’s the same thing that’s happened a lot across Africa: goody two-shoes comes in and builds them a small solar facility,” CO2 Coalition Director Patrick Moore, who co-founded Greenpeace in the 1970s, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Then, pretty soon the battery wears out and it just doesn’t get repaired and they don’t know what to do because they don’t have any expertise,” said Moore, who departed Greenpeace in the 1980s after he said the group lost touch with its original purpose. “There’s plenty of those stories.”
In July 2014, Greenpeace celebrated the project, claiming that it made Dharnai the first village in the state of Bihar to run on entirely on solar energy. The project quickly collapsed, though, as batteries became overused, causing the entire grid to fall into disrepair, environment-focused news outlet Mongabay-India reported in December.
Today, paddy straw is piled up around the project, which is now being used to shelter cattle, according to Mongabay-India. In addition, solar panels are covered in dust and rods supporting the green tech are heavily-rusted.
“When this solar farm went defunct, it was primarily because of two reasons,” Vijay Jayaraj, an India-based researcher at the environmental group Cornwall Alliance, told TheDCNF. “One is the cost of the power, and the second is reliability.”
“In 2016 and 2017, when the village was finally connected to the grid — and the grid was powered by coal power plants — they understood that coal power is much more reliable,” he continued.
Jayaraj added that non-governmental organizations like Greenpeace often market renewable energy alternatives to remote villagers with little or no electricity in developing countries. Such groups are able to avoid heavy scrutiny since the areas they approach are in dire need for power.
“These programs and solutions don’t talk about the sustainable nature of the programs, the longevity of the programs, what happens when the technologies age or how much of the current demand it could meet,” he said. “So, by pushing these questions under the carpet, these programs have started to take root in a lot of developing countries. India is no exception.”
While some villagers expressed optimism about Dharnai, India, solar facility in 2014, others protested it saying they didn’t want “fake” electricity, according to Mongabay-India. At the time, Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, applauded the project and told locals that coal power would diminish over time while solar power would always be around.
“In the first three years, it worked well and people were using it. But after three years the batteries were exhausted and it was never repaired,” Ravi Kumar, a local shopkeeper, told Mongabay-India. “So now, while the solar rooftops, CCTV cameras and other infrastructure are intact, the whole system has become a showpiece for us.”
“No one uses solar power anymore here,” he continued. “The glory of Dharnai has ended.”
WATCH:
5:11 min
The number of solar connections in Dharnai and surrounding neighborhoods with access to the solar grid fell from 255 in 2014 to 120 in 2016, a Nalanda University study published in 2020 concluded. The study blamed high prices associated with solar power and the grid’s unreliability — villagers were warned not to use high power appliances like televisions and refrigerators — on the decreasing connections.
“We left solar connection after using it for one year. How can poor people like us pay such amounts of money?” an anonymous local told Nalanda University. “They used to give electricity only for two hours. During rain, they do not use to give electric supply and so does during the fog in the winter.”
Dharnai was eventually connected to the region’s coal-powered grid in 2016, giving villagers access to a much cheaper and more reliable power source, Mongabay-India reported. Coal power also allowed them to use high-power appliances.
Greenpeace apparently stopped posting about the Dharnai solar farm on social media and in blog posts back in 2015. The group didn’t respond to requests for comment from TheDCNF.
Still, developers of the project said the venture was a success because it provided a model for future energy independent solar grids.
“The project first showed how decentralized solar projects can work in such areas. It exposed the state to the idea of the utility of solar energy for the state,” Ramapati Kumar, the CEO of the Center for Environment and Energy Development which helped fund the project with Greenpeace, told Mongabay-India. “It was for demonstration purpose and suffered later due to upkeep issues.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Can We Find Our Way Back to Freedom?
One of the most destabilizing aspects of the chaos of the past few years is that the pillars…
redwave.press
Can We Find Our Way Back to Freedom?
Julius Ruechel
May 15, 2022
One of the most destabilizing aspects of the chaos of the past few years is that the pillars of society—our democratic and academic institutions, along with our courts, media, police, doctors, corporate giants, and thought leaders—have not only been unable to resist the postmodern deconstruction of society but have become active perpetrators in a war on reality that is turning classical liberal democracy into a parody of itself.
How did the institutions that were meant to prevent civilized society from devolving into a barbarian free-for-all become the drivers of the current descent into madness? How do we wake society from a nightmare in which nothing is sacred, freedom is blasphemy, and roosters are laying eggs… when society merely shrugs its shoulders in resignation?
It’s time to take a deep dive into the myths, stories, and grand narratives that bind society together in order to understand why society is unravelling and how we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
The Unravelled Tapestry
To understand why a society unravels (which seems to happen every few generations — more on that shortly), we first need to understand how it is woven together. If we take a bird’s-eye view of the fabric that binds any healthy society together, at its core we find a complex system of interconnected layers starting with society’s awareness of its history and the stories of its ancestors. Principles are the mental shortcuts we use to condense the lessons from these stories into convenient packages to make them easier to apply to our own lives and to pass on to future generations.
Constitutions codify those timeless principles into law. And then we build legal, academic, and political institutions on top of that constitutional foundation in order to impose those principles onto day-to-day life to ensure that everyone plays by the same set of rules. And that takes us full circle back to the myths, stories, and fables that we tell ourselves about our history, our place in the universe, and about our hopes and dreams, which together form a kind of “grand narrative” to anchor society at the center of its institutional system.
This complex tapestry of interlocking layers is meant to create a deep philosophical counterweight to the fickle trends, self-serving impulses, and dark urges that eat away at the fabric of society. It allows society to grow beyond the cooperation of the family unit by enabling people who don’t know, trust, or like one another to live together without tearing each other to pieces.
From the limited perspective of our short human lifespans, this institutional bedrock (and the principles underpinning it) seems unshakable, permanent, everlasting. We therefore assume (wrongly) that because we have been able to rely on our institutions to safeguard the democratic, legal, and scientific processes that lead to fairness, justice, and truth, we will also continue to be able to rely on them in the future. In other words, once we build a “system”, we delude ourselves into thinking that the system will be self-sustaining. We deceive ourselves into thinking that the government will do the housekeeping required to keep the system running smoothly. It’s an illusion that disguises the fragility of what we’ve built.
It all works reasonably well… until it doesn’t. The institutional checks and balances of liberal democracy are tolerably able to resist society’s short-term impulses and follies. But the system is incapable of holding back the tide if large swathes of society buy into a new way of thinking about fairness, justice, and truth.
Every few generations, seemingly out of the blue, everything comes unglued as the system abruptly dismantles what we thought was everlasting in order to realign itself with society’s “new and improved” view of the world. The clear words of our constitutions tell us this isn’t supposed to happen, yet here we are in the midst of precisely that kind of systematic deconstruction of everything Western civilization supposedly once stood for. Society seems hell-bent on pulling apart all the philosophical threads that were meant to bind us together.
There is a saying that “everything is downstream from culture.” As Sean Arthur Joyce so aptly illustrates in his new book, Words from the Dead (which sparked the idea for this essay), our poetry, movies, art, literature, music, architecture, statues, and comedy are not just frivolous ways of entertaining ourselves during our idle hours. They are the philosophical fuel that keeps the “grand narrative” alive.
Our stories and myths shape our view of fairness, define our attitudes about justice, and teach us our sense of right and wrong. They imprint patterns onto our minds about what an ideal world looks like so we can strive towards that ideal.
The arts are our mirror to reflect the current state of society. They sustain our connection to our history. And they give us a compass by which to navigate the future. They are the equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge’s Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, tasked with holding us accountable to our past, providing us with a lens through which to interpret the present, and inspiring us to become better versions of ourselves.
In short, the arts shape the shared philosophical foundation upon which civilization is built and give us the words and ideas to defend society against those who seek to corrupt it. From Plato to Orwell to the moral dilemmas playing out on the bridge of Captain Picard’s USS Enterprise in Star Trek, our cultural inheritance determines how we think about fairness, justice, and truth.
Uprooting the Tree
Judges, politicians, policemen, and academics do not exist in a vacuum. They too are part of their communities and will bring the changing attitudes and perspectives of the broader community with them into the courtroom, into the police cruiser, to the political stump, and into the press. But they are typically restrained from acting on their impulses by the legal infrastructure holding society together.
Institutions create the inertia that prevents civilization from throwing itself off a cliff every time society falls in love with a dumb idea. Institutional inertia creates a kind of tug-of-war that pulls culture back towards its roots. But when the pull is especially strong and is sustained for long enough, there comes a point when the roots are unable to resist the pull and the entire tree is uprooted.
In normal times, culture changes so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. Institutional inertia further disguises the philosophical currents tugging at the roots. But once culture strays far enough from its roots, the disconnect between culture and institutions becomes irreconcilable, and the system will suddenly lurch in the direction of society’s pull in order to rebuild the system around the expectations of the people. This transition phase creates a dizzying temporary destabilization during which the culture and the uprooted institutional system are no longer pulling against one another.
When a culture is suddenly freed from institutional drag, it leads to an extremely rapid restructuring of society. It also leads to a pitched culture war for control over the new unifying grand narrative that emerges from this chaotic transition period. That’s when it becomes apparent that something truly monumental has shifted beneath our feet. And most of us are caught off guard because these monumental shifts only happen once every few generations.
Culture evolves in long social cycles. If you go by the Strauss-Howe generational theory discussed in the popular book, The Fourth Turning, the long cycles in human history tend to culminate in crisis periods, which happen every 80 years or so. They happen approximately every four generations, which is why the authors call the crisis era the fourth turning. These fourth turnings mark the chaotic transition when one “grand narrative” collapses and is replaced by another after an intense period of destabilization. Prior “fourth turnings” happened in 1459-1497 (War of the Roses), 1569-1594 (Armada Crisis), 1675-1704 (Glorious Revolution), 1773-1794 (American Revolution), 1860-1865 (US Civil War), and 1929-1946 (Great Depression, WWII). Now it is our turn.
The views expressed by Klaus Schwab, Al Gore, and Steve Bannon, among many others, draw heavily upon the study of social cycles (both Al Gore and Steve Bannon have specifically referenced The Fourth Turning as having influenced their ideas). In essence, they all recognize that the post-WWII grand narrative has run its course and that society is adrift and due for a philosophical realignment; they are hoping to capitalize on the period of crisis in order to try to shape the grand narrative that emerges from the chaos once the transition period comes to an end.
Some might even speculate that some of our leaders, fully aware of the lack of philosophical anchors at this stage of the long social cycle, may even be actively working to break society’s connection to its philosophical roots while deliberately stoking crises with the goal of “nudging” society towards their ideological vision of society. Build Back Better. The self-inflicted wounds caused by Covid mismanagement, the energy crisis, the inflation crisis, fertilizer shortages, the Ukraine war, etc, all come to mind.
“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” — Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum*
“I really believe COVID has created a window of political opportunity…” — Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum*
The “pandemic provided an opportunity for a reset” and to “re-imagine economic systems” — Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada*
The abysmal failure of our judges, politicians, doctors, academics, and policemen to speak out in defense of the principles embedded in our constitutions — and the lack of pushback from the public at large — reveals the momentous society-wide cultural shift that happened long before Covid came along. Covid became an institutional crisis because society as a whole — from judges and public health authorities all the way down to the average person on the street — had long-since lost faith in the philosophical anchors of classical liberal democracy. The institutions caved because the bulk of society had come to view the legal and philosophical restraints imposed by our constitutions as problematic obstacles rather than as much needed limits to what government can do. If Covid had happened in 2001, our philosophical roots would have reined in the panic. By 2020, the roots were too weak to resist the pull.
The grand post-WWII narrative and its central principles have ceased to inspire society, leaving culture disconnected from its roots and obsessed with an ever-growing assortment of hobgoblins upon which to project its angst (along with the ever-growing expectation that government is supposed to do something about all those hobgoblins). We were already a society experiencing an identity crisis, casting about for meaning, searching for a sense of belonging, and desperate for a new unifying “grand narrative” to bind us together.
The “emergency” created by Covid and the public demand for “safety at any cost” provided institutions with an excuse to abandon their constitutional restraints, giving the people inside these institutions free rein to act out the philosophical impulses that have been growing throughout society for a long time. Covid was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. It opened the door to a new “fourth turning”. The system is now in flux.
In retrospect, it is easy to recognize society’s growing loss of confidence in classical liberal principles like individual liberty, bodily autonomy, personal responsibility, freedom of speech, tolerance, meritocracy, private property, sound money, inalienable rights, and so on. The postmodernists (neoliberals) have been busily eroding the philosophical foundations of classical liberalism for a long time, robbing society of the words, ideas, and historical awareness with which to defend ourselves against illiberal postmodernist beliefs.
And we have been complacent. We surrendered the landscape of the imagination to the deconstructionists, the activists, and the cynics. How can a constitution provide a philosophical anchor for a society in which nothing is sacred?
What we are witnessing now is the attempted institutionalization of society’s embrace of learned helplessness, safety culture, cancel culture, redistribution, and all the other “gems” of postmodern philosophy. Our uprooted institutions are trying to “re-invent” themselves by attempting to put down fresh roots around postmodern neoliberal philosophy. The institutionalized forms of these destructive cultural trends are unlikely to turn out anything like society’s utopian postmodern fantasies, but at least we know the shape of the mirage they are chasing. Society wanted an all-powerful feelgood shepherd, and there are plenty of grifters willing to cater to that illusion.
But we’re still early in the chaotic transition period. What is being institutionalized now isn’t necessarily going to stick, especially as the yoke of dictatorial government begins to chafe. Brace for the unexpected as other competing visions of the future emerge and are drawn into a zero-sum struggle for dominance. The battle of the grand narratives has begun.
Part 1 of 4
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
2 of 4
The Battle of the Grand Narratives
The war on reality — this postmodern neoliberal culture war against classical liberal ideals and against the objective search for truth — is part of the mythmaking and storytelling phase of an emerging postmodern grand narrative. It is weaving a new tapestry, complete with demons, scapegoats, and hero-myths, in order to try to sustain the postmodern philosophical spark and anchor itself in our institutions. And, like a jealous wolf guarding its territory, there is no red line it will not cross in order to drive the last remnants of its rival philosophy off its new territory.
It isn’t an accident that our statues, history, art, and cultural inheritance are all under attack. The outrage isn’t moral, it is the strategic tool of a rival political ideology. Even the pharaohs defaced statues, monuments, and symbols “to discredit once revered people and repudiate once venerated ideas.”* Breaking the connection to the past, demonizing the ancestral stories, and destroying rival symbols are deliberate strategies practiced by all cultures throughout history whenever there is a war of ideas.
The current public apathy towards the destruction of society’s philosophical symbols are a worrying reflection of how few people still revere the philosophical ideas behind the symbols.
We cannot expect institutions to hold back the tide if society demonstrates that it doesn’t value its foundational ideals and isn’t willing to defend the symbols of its philosophical inheritance.
Fourth turnings are unpredictable and very messy precisely because they always grapple with existential philosophical questions about how society is organized. In effect, fourth turnings are zero-sum competitions between old and new visions of society, and between rival emerging grand narratives that are vying to replace the broken old order.
The cyclical pattern of history is a stark warning that the competition between grand narratives during these crises periods often devolves into a real-life slugfest, fought in blood-soaked trenches on a massive scale. The stakes couldn’t be higher because the winners reap the spoils of the economic system that is institutionalized around the winning grand narrative, while the losers, like their symbols, are sidelined into obscurity or are erased altogether.
The bedtime stories we tell our children and the conversations we have with our neighbors have never been more important — they are the only things that can resolve an existential competition of ideas before the growing rivalry plunges society either into tyranny or war.
Everything is downstream from culture. We must build bridges to those who have fallen prey to the postmodernist ideology. We must take back the landscape of the imagination from the deconstructionists, activists, and cynics. To solve the institutional crisis, we must win the culture war.
The Law Bows to Culture
For lives lived during the relatively stable long periods between fourth turnings (during which a single grand narrative reigns), the idea that institutions could suddenly abandon their respect for constitutional principles in order to yield to such illiberal and destructive impulses is shocking and deeply destabilizing. And yet, when we step back to look at the long view of history, it actually happens far more often than we think.
Perhaps the best example of culture plowing through rock-solid constitutional principles (and a warning to remind us why it is so important to keep trying to build bridges to those we disagree with rather than retreating into our social media bubbles while hoping for sanity to be restored via the courts) comes from one of the most consequential court cases in US history: Plessy v Ferguson. This is the court case that legalized racial segregation across the entirety of the United States from 1896 to 1964.
The US Civil War settled the unresolved constitutional question of slavery. And yet, culture began erecting new artificial barriers between races almost as soon as the dust from the Civil War began to settle. A growing number of segregation laws began popping up at the state and municipal level all across America. In order to challenge the constitutionality of these local segregation rules, Mr. Plessy purposely sat in the white part of a rail car in Louisiana so he could be arrested in order to give his lawyer friends the opportunity to take segregation to the Supreme Court. Until that time, similar to what kept happening throughout Covid, the courts kept finding some excuse or legal technicality to avoid wrestling with the disconnect between constitutional principles and the emerging culture of segregation.
Mr. Plessy and his peers heroically decided to force the issue. They staged a meticulously planned arrest (even the arresting police officer was in on the game) in order to deny the Supreme Court any way of sidestepping the question of segregation. Mr. Plessy and his collaborators were certain that the Supreme Court would be forced to rule in Mr. Plessy’s favor since segregation was such a clear and obvious violation of the principles embedded in the Constitution — principles that their nation had bled and died for only 30 years earlier.
Their plan backfired spectacularly. The Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Plessy, thereby legalizing segregation across the entirety of the United States in one fell swoop. The cultural tide was so strong, and the mood of the majority was so firmly in favor of segregation that the courts found ways to invert principles whose meaning seemed written in stone. To get around constitutional limits, they embraced the perverse idea of “separate but equal”. It’s not a phrase you will find anywhere in either the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. Society invented it to rationalize its illiberal urges.
Plessy v Ferguson is a grim warning from history of how easily society finds creative ways to reinterpret rock-solid principles to suit the spirit of the times:
Never underestimate society’s ability to justify the unthinkable to get what it wants. It took another 68 years for American culture to fall out of love with segregation and for the legal system to reflect those changing attitudes via the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When the tide is strong enough, everything is downstream from culture, including the law. Now is not the time to be quiet.
Thomas Jefferson’s Debts
Once they become institutionalized, big changes in cultural attitudes take generations to undo.
Once a system adapts to a new way of thinking, puts down new roots, and writes those changes into law, an entire economy emerges that is dependent on this new system and is threatened if the changes are rolled back. The majority that benefits from the new order will therefore fight tooth and nail to defend the new system, for generations, even if it is rotten to the core. The illogical, the cruel, and the nonsensical will all be rationalized away for the sake of survival. No-one bites the hand that feeds him.
Even the most inalienable of rights will shatter like thin glass if a righteous majority feels morally justified in stampeding over them to reach for some utopia beckoning on the horizon. Even the clearest of principles will be rationalized away if an indebted majority becomes dependent on a morally bankrupt system. The Covid debacle and the parasitic emerging economy that benefits from postmodern neoliberal ideas is history repeating itself. We are reaping what our changing culture has sown. Woe to us all, and especially to the generations who will inherit what occurs during our watch, if this neoliberal reimagining of society succeeds in anchoring itself in our institutions.
Consider the following excerpt of a letter written by Thomas Jefferson on April 22, 1820, in which he wrestles with the immorality of the institution of slavery and laments his inability to see a way of ending it without splitting their new nation in two. You can read the full letter here.
“A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.“
Throughout his life, Thomas Jefferson called slavery a moral depravity. In 1779 he advocated for the gradual emancipation, training, and integration of slaves rather than immediate manumission, believing that releasing unprepared persons with no place to go and no means to support themselves would only bring them misfortune*. In 1785, Jefferson observed that slavery corrupted both masters and slaves alike.* And in 1824, three years after his letter, he proposed a plan to end slavery (which was rejected) by getting the federal government to buy all slave children for $12.50, and training them in the occupations of freemen.*
Both of Jefferson’s grim predictions came true. America did tear itself in two in a brutal civil war triggered by the unresolved issue of slavery. And when slaves were finally freed in 1863, hundreds of thousands of ex-slaves starved to death and millions more were forced into starvation because they had no place to go.*
And yet, to the day he died in 1827 (more than 50 years after he co-authored the Declaration of Independence to found a nation around the highest of classical liberal ideals, foremost of which is the idea that all men are created equal), Jefferson nevertheless maintained one of the largest slave populations on any plantation (he owned more than 600 slaves over the course of his lifetime). Although he freed a small number of slaves through his will, his remaining 130 slaves along with his plantation lands and home were all sold to pay off his debts.
Jefferson was never out of debt in his adult life. Some debts were inherited from his father-in-law, some he accumulated himself by living perpetually beyond his means, and the rampant inflation caused by the Revolutionary War (“large land sales yielded only enough money to buy ‘a great coat.’”) as well as the financial panic of 1819 frustrated his attempts at repayment.
Once a system is institutionalized, both jailer and prisoner are locked into a rotten system. No-one cuts off the hand that feeds him. Thomas Jefferson understood the corrupting tug-of-war between morality and self-preservation, the vulnerability of both those trapped in irons and those trapped in debt, and the weight of institutional inertia that holds a rotten system in place for many generations.
The checkered details of the lives of Thomas Jefferson and his peers reveal them to be fallible and imperfect mortals, just like the rest of us. The reason they should be revered — the reason we build statues in their honor — is to preserve the story of fallible visionaries who, at the moment of snatching power out of the hands of the British monarchy, chose not to crown themselves as kings but instead recognized their own fallibilities and therefore chose to anchor society around a set of sacred principles and timeless ideals, which were designed to protect the individual from both kings and mobs, and which were designed to inspire society to continually rediscover those principles and ideals as a way to forever strive to become a better version of itself. Immortal ideas created by mortal men.
It is not hard to deconstruct the imagination until all that remains of society is ashes. Swinging a wrecking ball is easy. By contrast, to create a vision that prompts society to lift itself out of servitude and oppression solely through the power of the imagination, and for that vision to continue to re-inspire generation upon generation… now that is something else altogether.
The legacy of the ideals that Jefferson wrote into the founding documents of their nation have created an unbroken philosophical thread that leads directly from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held America to account for its moral hypocrisy. We stand on the shoulders of philosophical giants. Lest we forget.
The Battle of the Grand Narratives
The war on reality — this postmodern neoliberal culture war against classical liberal ideals and against the objective search for truth — is part of the mythmaking and storytelling phase of an emerging postmodern grand narrative. It is weaving a new tapestry, complete with demons, scapegoats, and hero-myths, in order to try to sustain the postmodern philosophical spark and anchor itself in our institutions. And, like a jealous wolf guarding its territory, there is no red line it will not cross in order to drive the last remnants of its rival philosophy off its new territory.
It isn’t an accident that our statues, history, art, and cultural inheritance are all under attack. The outrage isn’t moral, it is the strategic tool of a rival political ideology. Even the pharaohs defaced statues, monuments, and symbols “to discredit once revered people and repudiate once venerated ideas.”* Breaking the connection to the past, demonizing the ancestral stories, and destroying rival symbols are deliberate strategies practiced by all cultures throughout history whenever there is a war of ideas.
The current public apathy towards the destruction of society’s philosophical symbols are a worrying reflection of how few people still revere the philosophical ideas behind the symbols.
We cannot expect institutions to hold back the tide if society demonstrates that it doesn’t value its foundational ideals and isn’t willing to defend the symbols of its philosophical inheritance.
Fourth turnings are unpredictable and very messy precisely because they always grapple with existential philosophical questions about how society is organized. In effect, fourth turnings are zero-sum competitions between old and new visions of society, and between rival emerging grand narratives that are vying to replace the broken old order.
The cyclical pattern of history is a stark warning that the competition between grand narratives during these crises periods often devolves into a real-life slugfest, fought in blood-soaked trenches on a massive scale. The stakes couldn’t be higher because the winners reap the spoils of the economic system that is institutionalized around the winning grand narrative, while the losers, like their symbols, are sidelined into obscurity or are erased altogether.
The bedtime stories we tell our children and the conversations we have with our neighbors have never been more important — they are the only things that can resolve an existential competition of ideas before the growing rivalry plunges society either into tyranny or war.
Everything is downstream from culture. We must build bridges to those who have fallen prey to the postmodernist ideology. We must take back the landscape of the imagination from the deconstructionists, activists, and cynics. To solve the institutional crisis, we must win the culture war.
The Law Bows to Culture
For lives lived during the relatively stable long periods between fourth turnings (during which a single grand narrative reigns), the idea that institutions could suddenly abandon their respect for constitutional principles in order to yield to such illiberal and destructive impulses is shocking and deeply destabilizing. And yet, when we step back to look at the long view of history, it actually happens far more often than we think.
Perhaps the best example of culture plowing through rock-solid constitutional principles (and a warning to remind us why it is so important to keep trying to build bridges to those we disagree with rather than retreating into our social media bubbles while hoping for sanity to be restored via the courts) comes from one of the most consequential court cases in US history: Plessy v Ferguson. This is the court case that legalized racial segregation across the entirety of the United States from 1896 to 1964.
The US Civil War settled the unresolved constitutional question of slavery. And yet, culture began erecting new artificial barriers between races almost as soon as the dust from the Civil War began to settle. A growing number of segregation laws began popping up at the state and municipal level all across America. In order to challenge the constitutionality of these local segregation rules, Mr. Plessy purposely sat in the white part of a rail car in Louisiana so he could be arrested in order to give his lawyer friends the opportunity to take segregation to the Supreme Court. Until that time, similar to what kept happening throughout Covid, the courts kept finding some excuse or legal technicality to avoid wrestling with the disconnect between constitutional principles and the emerging culture of segregation.
Mr. Plessy and his peers heroically decided to force the issue. They staged a meticulously planned arrest (even the arresting police officer was in on the game) in order to deny the Supreme Court any way of sidestepping the question of segregation. Mr. Plessy and his collaborators were certain that the Supreme Court would be forced to rule in Mr. Plessy’s favor since segregation was such a clear and obvious violation of the principles embedded in the Constitution — principles that their nation had bled and died for only 30 years earlier.
Their plan backfired spectacularly. The Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Plessy, thereby legalizing segregation across the entirety of the United States in one fell swoop. The cultural tide was so strong, and the mood of the majority was so firmly in favor of segregation that the courts found ways to invert principles whose meaning seemed written in stone. To get around constitutional limits, they embraced the perverse idea of “separate but equal”. It’s not a phrase you will find anywhere in either the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. Society invented it to rationalize its illiberal urges.
Plessy v Ferguson is a grim warning from history of how easily society finds creative ways to reinterpret rock-solid principles to suit the spirit of the times:
- “Separate but equal.”
- “Hate speech isn’t free speech.”
- “Freedom is a threat to democracy.”
- “Freedom of speech is wonderful but disinformation has no place in society.”
- “Censorship is necessary to protect the free speech of protected groups.”
- “Liberty must be restricted to protect someone else’s right to life.”
- “It’s just for two weeks to flatten the curve.”
- “Choices have consequences.”
- “It’s not coercion if you voluntarily role up your sleeve to avoid the consequences of making the wrong choice.”
Never underestimate society’s ability to justify the unthinkable to get what it wants. It took another 68 years for American culture to fall out of love with segregation and for the legal system to reflect those changing attitudes via the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When the tide is strong enough, everything is downstream from culture, including the law. Now is not the time to be quiet.
Thomas Jefferson’s Debts
Once they become institutionalized, big changes in cultural attitudes take generations to undo.
Once a system adapts to a new way of thinking, puts down new roots, and writes those changes into law, an entire economy emerges that is dependent on this new system and is threatened if the changes are rolled back. The majority that benefits from the new order will therefore fight tooth and nail to defend the new system, for generations, even if it is rotten to the core. The illogical, the cruel, and the nonsensical will all be rationalized away for the sake of survival. No-one bites the hand that feeds him.
Even the most inalienable of rights will shatter like thin glass if a righteous majority feels morally justified in stampeding over them to reach for some utopia beckoning on the horizon. Even the clearest of principles will be rationalized away if an indebted majority becomes dependent on a morally bankrupt system. The Covid debacle and the parasitic emerging economy that benefits from postmodern neoliberal ideas is history repeating itself. We are reaping what our changing culture has sown. Woe to us all, and especially to the generations who will inherit what occurs during our watch, if this neoliberal reimagining of society succeeds in anchoring itself in our institutions.
Consider the following excerpt of a letter written by Thomas Jefferson on April 22, 1820, in which he wrestles with the immorality of the institution of slavery and laments his inability to see a way of ending it without splitting their new nation in two. You can read the full letter here.
“A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.“
Throughout his life, Thomas Jefferson called slavery a moral depravity. In 1779 he advocated for the gradual emancipation, training, and integration of slaves rather than immediate manumission, believing that releasing unprepared persons with no place to go and no means to support themselves would only bring them misfortune*. In 1785, Jefferson observed that slavery corrupted both masters and slaves alike.* And in 1824, three years after his letter, he proposed a plan to end slavery (which was rejected) by getting the federal government to buy all slave children for $12.50, and training them in the occupations of freemen.*
Both of Jefferson’s grim predictions came true. America did tear itself in two in a brutal civil war triggered by the unresolved issue of slavery. And when slaves were finally freed in 1863, hundreds of thousands of ex-slaves starved to death and millions more were forced into starvation because they had no place to go.*
And yet, to the day he died in 1827 (more than 50 years after he co-authored the Declaration of Independence to found a nation around the highest of classical liberal ideals, foremost of which is the idea that all men are created equal), Jefferson nevertheless maintained one of the largest slave populations on any plantation (he owned more than 600 slaves over the course of his lifetime). Although he freed a small number of slaves through his will, his remaining 130 slaves along with his plantation lands and home were all sold to pay off his debts.
Jefferson was never out of debt in his adult life. Some debts were inherited from his father-in-law, some he accumulated himself by living perpetually beyond his means, and the rampant inflation caused by the Revolutionary War (“large land sales yielded only enough money to buy ‘a great coat.’”) as well as the financial panic of 1819 frustrated his attempts at repayment.
Once a system is institutionalized, both jailer and prisoner are locked into a rotten system. No-one cuts off the hand that feeds him. Thomas Jefferson understood the corrupting tug-of-war between morality and self-preservation, the vulnerability of both those trapped in irons and those trapped in debt, and the weight of institutional inertia that holds a rotten system in place for many generations.
The checkered details of the lives of Thomas Jefferson and his peers reveal them to be fallible and imperfect mortals, just like the rest of us. The reason they should be revered — the reason we build statues in their honor — is to preserve the story of fallible visionaries who, at the moment of snatching power out of the hands of the British monarchy, chose not to crown themselves as kings but instead recognized their own fallibilities and therefore chose to anchor society around a set of sacred principles and timeless ideals, which were designed to protect the individual from both kings and mobs, and which were designed to inspire society to continually rediscover those principles and ideals as a way to forever strive to become a better version of itself. Immortal ideas created by mortal men.
It is not hard to deconstruct the imagination until all that remains of society is ashes. Swinging a wrecking ball is easy. By contrast, to create a vision that prompts society to lift itself out of servitude and oppression solely through the power of the imagination, and for that vision to continue to re-inspire generation upon generation… now that is something else altogether.
The legacy of the ideals that Jefferson wrote into the founding documents of their nation have created an unbroken philosophical thread that leads directly from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held America to account for its moral hypocrisy. We stand on the shoulders of philosophical giants. Lest we forget.
Last edited:
marsh
On TB every waking moment
3 of 4
The Half-Life of Sacred Beliefs
Writing principles into a constitution as sacred, inalienable, and God-given was an ingenious stroke of the pen to signal to society that these are the foundation stones at the core of civilization. It was a way for our ancestors to warn future generations, “don’t mess with these principles or you will bring the entire system crashing down around your ears.” By declaring something to be sacred, we hope to delay the relentless reinterpretation of ideas to give people time to understand the wisdom behind the principles before they are torn down or cast aside.
“Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians — we call them ‘children’.” ~ Hannah Arendt
In effect, culture is a never-ending competition between the wisdom of our ancestors, the blind appetites of the mob, and the thirst for novelty. Each generation must rediscover and be re-inspired by the principles in order to keep them alive. Cultivating a sense of the sacred is a way to intentionally create philosophical inertia in order to give youth the time to acquire the benefit of maturity and the skill of self-reflection before it decides to burn Rome to the ground to make way for a new garden palace.
The Constitution that America’s Founding Fathers placed at the core of their republic stripped leaders of their sacred aura, but they did not leave society without an anchor to guard it against the fickle whims of human nature. They transferred the idea of the “sacred” — heavenly-endorsed authority that shall not be questioned — from people to principles.
By dismantling the sacred pre-Enlightenment idea of “the divine right to rule” and replacing it with sacred (inalienable) rights that supersede the authority of both Church and State, the republic created by the Founding Fathers laid the philosophical foundations for classical liberal democracy. (Even the word “liberal” comes from “liberty”. Liberal democracy is a democracy restrained by the limits imposed by individual rights. The Founding Fathers recognized that if individual rights are not inalienable (sacred), the rule of the democratic majority would soon become nothing more than tyranny by the majority, also known as mob rule.
America’s Founding Fathers broke the stranglehold of hereditary hierarchy. For the first time in history, the fabric of society was anchored around an idea instead of around an entrenched political elite. For the first time in history, society was bound by a constitution designed to protect individuals from both the whims of parasitic rulers and the collective self-interest of the herd. Inalienable constitutional rights for individuals, like freedom of speech, also created space for scientific inquiry to flourish. The search for objective truths depends entirely on individuals having the sacred freedom to confront established dogma and consensus beliefs. As long as no-one has the power to silence another, only evidence remains as the tool to settle the debate.
But the sacred is an elaborate illusion. It is only the belief in the sacred that makes it real. It is only society’s belief in the divine rights of kings or society’s belief in inalienable rights, meritocracy, and bodily autonomy that makes society behave as though those things exist.
Ultimately, the thin veneer of culture nurtured in the grey spaces between our neighbours’ ears is the only safeguard of our rights.
We only exist as free autonomous human beings — independent of the will of both herd and shepherd — as long as the precious idea of individual sovereignty remains sacred in society’s collective imagination. That sacred belief is what is at stake in the current postmodern culture war as society attempts to rid itself of the limits imposed by the sacred principles created by Thomas Jefferson and his peers.
Like the statues once erected by the pharaohs and the golden crowns worn by kings, the paper the Constitution is written on and the stories we tell our children are tools created by our ancestors in an effort to keep essential sacred beliefs alive. Postmodernists discard unconditional rights and timeless principles as archaic fictional limits (social constructs) created by long dead men and view them as a hinderance to “getting things done”. But a wise man recognizes the fragility of a system protected only by the collective beliefs of the majority, understands how easily the raw passions of society can tip such a system into unbridled tyranny, and therefore works extra hard to communicate the timeless merits of these principles.
Even before he sold his soul to commercial interests, Santa Claus was just a fantasy… yet also an existential philosophical experience. Not every construct deserves deconstruction. Some constructs are essential to preserving the tapestry that allows society to exist; our imagination depends on them to sustain civilization.
Invoking a sense of the sacred touches us on an emotional level. It converts a philosophical principle into an emotional experience. That emotional experience is an essential tool to instill timeless principles, which protect us from the relentless strings of words that we cobble together during our lives to try to rationalize our impulsive urges. The easiest person to fool with our own words is ourselves.
The sense of the sacred protects us from rationalizing away vital philosophical limits that we rely upon to protect us from ourselves and from one another. It harnesses the power of the imagination to shape our behaviour. The sense of the sacred is an essential part of the tapestry created in our collective imagination, which enables complex societies to create order from chaos and to live together without tearing each other apart.
Whether the sacred is expressed in secular or religious terms, what we perceive as sacred creates an anchor to bind us together as a functioning society. The symbolism, the emotions, and the sense of awe and wonder invoked by our sense of the sacred have the power to inspire a shared imagination in a way that words alone cannot. When nothing is sacred, we lose our philosophical defenses. When nothing is sacred, we become a species adrift, fractured, impulsive, ruled by our emotions, unable to know ourselves, unable to limit ourselves, and unable to function as a cohesive society.
Whether the sacred is experienced in secular or religious terms (there is more than one way to arrive at the same endpoint), the sense of the sacred protects society’s philosophical tapestry from humanity’s urge to pull at strings to see what unravels.
Postmodernism is the collapse of the sacred. It is a deconstruction of the imagination. It is the destruction of the shared world we create in our collective imagination and a destruction of the philosophical limits we place on ourselves within that imagined world.
The harsh reality is that the lofty ideals of classical liberal democracy are a fragile veneer painted over mob rule. It works only as long as the majority believes in the principles underpinning the system and are inspired to behave as though they are real. In the past, traditional liberals, conservatives, and libertarians argued relentlessly about the exact recipe for how to put those classical liberal principles into practice, but the never-ending argument over the details was itself an essential part of what kept the ideals alive in the public imagination.
The system remained intact because the majority believed that the ideals were real, eternal, and worth defending even at great cost to themselves, which is another way of saying “sacred.”
If we let the nihilism of postmodern neoliberalism destroy the sacred belief in classical liberal principles, society’s rules will be decided by the ever-changing attitudes and appetites of the mob. If nothing is sacred, then society’s only anchors are the whims of its leaders. We will return to the default of history in which “might makes right”, and society will be plunged into a never-ending zero-sum struggle to control the raw power of the throne. Even the sacred belief in the divine right of kings once served a purpose, not only to protect those at the top of the hierarchy from challenges from below but to also protect all of society from being consumed by never-ending tribal warfare.
It is not an accident that society’s nihilistic rejection of sacred principles is accompanied by the rise of a sacred infallible technocracy (“trust the experts”). When principles cease to be the anchor around which society is built, the only alternate anchor that can prevent society from fracturing into a million warring tribes is to anchor society around the raw authority of its leaders, and to defend their authority at any cost even when they lie, cheat, steal, or are grossly incompetent. And right on cue, our technocratic leaders are instinctively trying to wrap themselves in an aura of divinely ordained power that “shall not be questioned” in order to shield themselves from challengers to the throne.
Institutional Scienz ™ and the regime-friendly media have stepped into the role that the Church once played in sanctifying the authority of chosen despots. Challenges to sacred technocratic authority are increasingly viewed (and punished) as blasphemous (defined as “the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things”). Ironically, even the symbolism of the halo is increasingly making a comeback in state-friendly media.
Without sacred principles, authority is a delicate power grab played with illusions and symbols and defended with brute force. The nihilism of postmodern neoliberalism is itself an elaborate illusion; beneath the virtue-signalling and behind the systematic deconstruction of society lie the hardnosed instincts of pharaohs and emperors trying to re-establish their divine right to rule. History reverts to the mean.
Who’s the Boss? Principles vs People
In order to create stability, society requires a way to answer the age-old question at the heart of large complex societies: Who’s the Boss? To prevent society from devolving into a never-ending barbarian slugfest between warring tribal warlords, we must weave an elaborate tapestry of myths, stories, and sacred beliefs around either sacred people or sacred principles. One path leads to classical liberal democracy. The other leads to tyranny. The beliefs we choose to uphold as sacred either cement power or restrain it. By deconstructing sacred principles, postmodernists are paving the way back to a hierarchical system of sacred people and sacred protected groups.
Without sacred principles, might makes right. Without sacred principles, autonomous individuals are reduced to disposable subjects who must submit to the collective demands of the herd… or more precisely, like cattle, they become the property of the strongmen who cement their grip on power by claiming to speak for the herd.
Individual autonomy exists only as long as the majority believes (and behaves) as though the individual has some kind of sacred God-given inalienable rights that supersede the authority of government even when the individual’s interests go against the interests of the majority (or against the interests of the State). The collective belief in sacred individual rights causes every member of society to behave as though individual autonomy exists. Only the shared belief makes it real. Without that sacred belief, the few will once again be sacrificed for the benefit of the many as the crowd cheers in approval.
There is nothing more sacred than the idea of individual rights. That idea, when it is shared by the bulk of society, allows each of us, individually, to be the master of our own destiny. That sacred idea allows us to exist as something other than as resources for the benefit of the herd, as something more than just cogs in someone else’s machine.
To get a judge to defend sacred inalienable individual rights, she must not only believe in them herself, she must also see that the bulk of society believes in them. As long as society stands in silence as the statues fall in the public square and as books are being burnt, few people working inside our institutions will risk the wrath of the book-burners and statue-destroyers by speaking against it. Apathy and outrage teach institutions what society upholds as sacred.
And so, within the span of a single generation, we get from venerating Reporters Without Borders to worshiping Governments Without Limits. Institutions defend what society upholds as sacred.
By deconstructing everything, postmodernism has erased the tapestry upon which society is built. By turning everything to dust, postmodern neoliberalism has created a perversion of the fabric of society, a parody of the sacred, a mockery of the search for objective and universal truths. By destroying sacred principles, postmodernism has opened the door to sacred people.
In a strange sort of way, postmodern neoliberalism is the mirror image of classical liberal democracy. It makes claim to the same history, uses the same language, and mimics the same institutional form. Yet it is a hollow and simplistic plagiarism, a parrot singing a song in which every note is out of tune and the meaning of every word has been inverted. We are living in a cargo culture that has ritualized the words and appearance of science and democracy, without understanding how any of it works.
It is all so recognizable, yet so grotesque.
The Half-Life of Sacred Beliefs
Writing principles into a constitution as sacred, inalienable, and God-given was an ingenious stroke of the pen to signal to society that these are the foundation stones at the core of civilization. It was a way for our ancestors to warn future generations, “don’t mess with these principles or you will bring the entire system crashing down around your ears.” By declaring something to be sacred, we hope to delay the relentless reinterpretation of ideas to give people time to understand the wisdom behind the principles before they are torn down or cast aside.
“Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians — we call them ‘children’.” ~ Hannah Arendt
In effect, culture is a never-ending competition between the wisdom of our ancestors, the blind appetites of the mob, and the thirst for novelty. Each generation must rediscover and be re-inspired by the principles in order to keep them alive. Cultivating a sense of the sacred is a way to intentionally create philosophical inertia in order to give youth the time to acquire the benefit of maturity and the skill of self-reflection before it decides to burn Rome to the ground to make way for a new garden palace.
The Constitution that America’s Founding Fathers placed at the core of their republic stripped leaders of their sacred aura, but they did not leave society without an anchor to guard it against the fickle whims of human nature. They transferred the idea of the “sacred” — heavenly-endorsed authority that shall not be questioned — from people to principles.
By dismantling the sacred pre-Enlightenment idea of “the divine right to rule” and replacing it with sacred (inalienable) rights that supersede the authority of both Church and State, the republic created by the Founding Fathers laid the philosophical foundations for classical liberal democracy. (Even the word “liberal” comes from “liberty”. Liberal democracy is a democracy restrained by the limits imposed by individual rights. The Founding Fathers recognized that if individual rights are not inalienable (sacred), the rule of the democratic majority would soon become nothing more than tyranny by the majority, also known as mob rule.
America’s Founding Fathers broke the stranglehold of hereditary hierarchy. For the first time in history, the fabric of society was anchored around an idea instead of around an entrenched political elite. For the first time in history, society was bound by a constitution designed to protect individuals from both the whims of parasitic rulers and the collective self-interest of the herd. Inalienable constitutional rights for individuals, like freedom of speech, also created space for scientific inquiry to flourish. The search for objective truths depends entirely on individuals having the sacred freedom to confront established dogma and consensus beliefs. As long as no-one has the power to silence another, only evidence remains as the tool to settle the debate.
But the sacred is an elaborate illusion. It is only the belief in the sacred that makes it real. It is only society’s belief in the divine rights of kings or society’s belief in inalienable rights, meritocracy, and bodily autonomy that makes society behave as though those things exist.
Ultimately, the thin veneer of culture nurtured in the grey spaces between our neighbours’ ears is the only safeguard of our rights.
We only exist as free autonomous human beings — independent of the will of both herd and shepherd — as long as the precious idea of individual sovereignty remains sacred in society’s collective imagination. That sacred belief is what is at stake in the current postmodern culture war as society attempts to rid itself of the limits imposed by the sacred principles created by Thomas Jefferson and his peers.
Like the statues once erected by the pharaohs and the golden crowns worn by kings, the paper the Constitution is written on and the stories we tell our children are tools created by our ancestors in an effort to keep essential sacred beliefs alive. Postmodernists discard unconditional rights and timeless principles as archaic fictional limits (social constructs) created by long dead men and view them as a hinderance to “getting things done”. But a wise man recognizes the fragility of a system protected only by the collective beliefs of the majority, understands how easily the raw passions of society can tip such a system into unbridled tyranny, and therefore works extra hard to communicate the timeless merits of these principles.
Even before he sold his soul to commercial interests, Santa Claus was just a fantasy… yet also an existential philosophical experience. Not every construct deserves deconstruction. Some constructs are essential to preserving the tapestry that allows society to exist; our imagination depends on them to sustain civilization.
Invoking a sense of the sacred touches us on an emotional level. It converts a philosophical principle into an emotional experience. That emotional experience is an essential tool to instill timeless principles, which protect us from the relentless strings of words that we cobble together during our lives to try to rationalize our impulsive urges. The easiest person to fool with our own words is ourselves.
The sense of the sacred protects us from rationalizing away vital philosophical limits that we rely upon to protect us from ourselves and from one another. It harnesses the power of the imagination to shape our behaviour. The sense of the sacred is an essential part of the tapestry created in our collective imagination, which enables complex societies to create order from chaos and to live together without tearing each other apart.
Whether the sacred is expressed in secular or religious terms, what we perceive as sacred creates an anchor to bind us together as a functioning society. The symbolism, the emotions, and the sense of awe and wonder invoked by our sense of the sacred have the power to inspire a shared imagination in a way that words alone cannot. When nothing is sacred, we lose our philosophical defenses. When nothing is sacred, we become a species adrift, fractured, impulsive, ruled by our emotions, unable to know ourselves, unable to limit ourselves, and unable to function as a cohesive society.
Whether the sacred is experienced in secular or religious terms (there is more than one way to arrive at the same endpoint), the sense of the sacred protects society’s philosophical tapestry from humanity’s urge to pull at strings to see what unravels.
Postmodernism is the collapse of the sacred. It is a deconstruction of the imagination. It is the destruction of the shared world we create in our collective imagination and a destruction of the philosophical limits we place on ourselves within that imagined world.
The harsh reality is that the lofty ideals of classical liberal democracy are a fragile veneer painted over mob rule. It works only as long as the majority believes in the principles underpinning the system and are inspired to behave as though they are real. In the past, traditional liberals, conservatives, and libertarians argued relentlessly about the exact recipe for how to put those classical liberal principles into practice, but the never-ending argument over the details was itself an essential part of what kept the ideals alive in the public imagination.
The system remained intact because the majority believed that the ideals were real, eternal, and worth defending even at great cost to themselves, which is another way of saying “sacred.”
If we let the nihilism of postmodern neoliberalism destroy the sacred belief in classical liberal principles, society’s rules will be decided by the ever-changing attitudes and appetites of the mob. If nothing is sacred, then society’s only anchors are the whims of its leaders. We will return to the default of history in which “might makes right”, and society will be plunged into a never-ending zero-sum struggle to control the raw power of the throne. Even the sacred belief in the divine right of kings once served a purpose, not only to protect those at the top of the hierarchy from challenges from below but to also protect all of society from being consumed by never-ending tribal warfare.
It is not an accident that society’s nihilistic rejection of sacred principles is accompanied by the rise of a sacred infallible technocracy (“trust the experts”). When principles cease to be the anchor around which society is built, the only alternate anchor that can prevent society from fracturing into a million warring tribes is to anchor society around the raw authority of its leaders, and to defend their authority at any cost even when they lie, cheat, steal, or are grossly incompetent. And right on cue, our technocratic leaders are instinctively trying to wrap themselves in an aura of divinely ordained power that “shall not be questioned” in order to shield themselves from challengers to the throne.
Institutional Scienz ™ and the regime-friendly media have stepped into the role that the Church once played in sanctifying the authority of chosen despots. Challenges to sacred technocratic authority are increasingly viewed (and punished) as blasphemous (defined as “the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things”). Ironically, even the symbolism of the halo is increasingly making a comeback in state-friendly media.
Without sacred principles, authority is a delicate power grab played with illusions and symbols and defended with brute force. The nihilism of postmodern neoliberalism is itself an elaborate illusion; beneath the virtue-signalling and behind the systematic deconstruction of society lie the hardnosed instincts of pharaohs and emperors trying to re-establish their divine right to rule. History reverts to the mean.
Who’s the Boss? Principles vs People
In order to create stability, society requires a way to answer the age-old question at the heart of large complex societies: Who’s the Boss? To prevent society from devolving into a never-ending barbarian slugfest between warring tribal warlords, we must weave an elaborate tapestry of myths, stories, and sacred beliefs around either sacred people or sacred principles. One path leads to classical liberal democracy. The other leads to tyranny. The beliefs we choose to uphold as sacred either cement power or restrain it. By deconstructing sacred principles, postmodernists are paving the way back to a hierarchical system of sacred people and sacred protected groups.
Without sacred principles, might makes right. Without sacred principles, autonomous individuals are reduced to disposable subjects who must submit to the collective demands of the herd… or more precisely, like cattle, they become the property of the strongmen who cement their grip on power by claiming to speak for the herd.
Individual autonomy exists only as long as the majority believes (and behaves) as though the individual has some kind of sacred God-given inalienable rights that supersede the authority of government even when the individual’s interests go against the interests of the majority (or against the interests of the State). The collective belief in sacred individual rights causes every member of society to behave as though individual autonomy exists. Only the shared belief makes it real. Without that sacred belief, the few will once again be sacrificed for the benefit of the many as the crowd cheers in approval.
There is nothing more sacred than the idea of individual rights. That idea, when it is shared by the bulk of society, allows each of us, individually, to be the master of our own destiny. That sacred idea allows us to exist as something other than as resources for the benefit of the herd, as something more than just cogs in someone else’s machine.
To get a judge to defend sacred inalienable individual rights, she must not only believe in them herself, she must also see that the bulk of society believes in them. As long as society stands in silence as the statues fall in the public square and as books are being burnt, few people working inside our institutions will risk the wrath of the book-burners and statue-destroyers by speaking against it. Apathy and outrage teach institutions what society upholds as sacred.
And so, within the span of a single generation, we get from venerating Reporters Without Borders to worshiping Governments Without Limits. Institutions defend what society upholds as sacred.
By deconstructing everything, postmodernism has erased the tapestry upon which society is built. By turning everything to dust, postmodern neoliberalism has created a perversion of the fabric of society, a parody of the sacred, a mockery of the search for objective and universal truths. By destroying sacred principles, postmodernism has opened the door to sacred people.
In a strange sort of way, postmodern neoliberalism is the mirror image of classical liberal democracy. It makes claim to the same history, uses the same language, and mimics the same institutional form. Yet it is a hollow and simplistic plagiarism, a parrot singing a song in which every note is out of tune and the meaning of every word has been inverted. We are living in a cargo culture that has ritualized the words and appearance of science and democracy, without understanding how any of it works.
It is all so recognizable, yet so grotesque.
Last edited:
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Part 4 of 4
Bad Ideas Take Root in a Void
Winning the culture war is not a matter of censoring bad ideas out of existence. Exposure to postmodernist ideas is not the problem. The problem is that society has lost its philosophical defenses — it has no immunity to those bad ideas.
The ideas of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and CNN are not a magic wand. Their logic is paper thin and built on a foundation of sand. The problem is that multiple generations have had little to no exposure to the words and ideas of the likes of Thomas Sowell, Karl Popper, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, and countless others.
That void left the door wide open for the rot peddled by Marx, Foucault, and CNN to take root.
The philosophical void has led society to construct a new vision of society based on the envy of Marx, the cynicism of Faucoult, and the victimhood cultivated by CNN.
Like every illiberal regime that has come before it, postmodern neoliberal culture has convinced its true believers that it can build a utopia from the ashes of what it burns, by coercing people into believing in a mirage on the horizon, by making an example of those who express doubt the purity of the vision, by subordinating individuals to whatever it decides is the collective “greater good”, by putting the “right people” with the “right ideas” into positions of authority, and then wrapping it all in an aura of good intentions. The mob has taken the seductive bait. A spoonful of sugar makes the bitter medicine go down in the most delightful way.
As long as we think of the courts and the ballot box as the frontline of this culture war, we might win a battle or two and slow the tide for a short while, but we will ultimately lose this war. For every billionaire like Elon Musk who restores free speech to Twitter, there will be a new Disinformation Governance Board created by the regime to stamp it back out. (In case you missed the announcement in the news, the Disinformation Governance Board is an actual thing; it is a new division being created within the US Department of Homeland Security to monitor our speech in order to maintain control over the narrative. Life imitates art; this is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth come to life.)
The only way out of this mess, the only way to bring long-lasting sanity back to our institutions, is to rescue people from postmodernism’s nihilistic embrace, one at a time, to re-inspire them with classical liberal principles, and for that reawakening to bleed back into the collective culture of the community.
All governments, including tyrannies, derive their powers through the consent of the governed (and/or through the apathy of the governed). Institutions only take orders from above as long as they sense that those orders have support from below (or lack meaningful resistance from below). Once the crowd turns (and grows a backbone), the dirty work of flushing a rotten emperor out of his palace falls to the institutions in order to try to win back their legitimacy in the eyes of the crowd.
Institutions will defend classical liberal principles when Main Street shows that it is inspired by those principles and values, and not a moment sooner. The postmodern descent into madness will miraculously begin to turn around when Main Street begins to reach for something other than the empty vision offered by postmodern nihilism. This is a battle for the landscape of the imagination.
The Berlin Wall fell because blue jeans and video tapes first showed people on the wrong side of the Wall that there was an alternative to the grey hopeless fog of communism — it gave people a vision to strive for and, in time, that vision eroded support for the regime. The first domino to fall was the landscape of the imagination. In time it led the crowd to lose its fear of the regime. And that led institutions to turn on their leaders as those institutions sensed that the regime had lost the support of the crowd.
Likewise, the path to the civil rights movement was paved by things like jazz music, comedy clubs, and the desegregation of the US military during the Korean war, all of which tore down the mental barriers erected by segregation. They exposed the hypocrisy embedded in the system and dissolved the brainwashing that skin color should divide us. Culture leads the way; institutions are dragged along in its wake.
Protests, legal challenges, and elections are an important barometer of the public mood — a way of allowing ourselves to be counted and a way of breaking the illusion that we are alone with our classical liberal ideas — but they are not the primary means by which new hearts and minds are won over to the cause. Changing minds is the job of the poets, the storytellers, and especially of the parents, grandparents, and ordinary citizens who are responsible for planting and cultivating the seeds of our culture in the minds of their neighbors, friends, and children.
No matter how much we would like to pin the responsibility for this chaos on the predatory behaviour of politicians, corporations, teachers, judges, activists, and academics, in the end both the cause and the cure lie in our collective hands. We let this happen.
We surrendered the public square, the library, the school bench, and the movie theatre to the postmodernists. We were complacent as our culture slid into intellectual bankruptcy. We looked the other way because we were busy with our lives. For too long we remained silent to avoid creating a fuss with our friends and co-workers. We failed to ensure that the important stories continued to take root in young imaginations. We let corporations, governments, activists, and media dominate the public square, decide the educational curriculum, and shape society’s vision of itself in order to serve their needs instead of ours. And so, we left entire generations defenseless to the corrosive lure of the postmodernist world view. Now the vultures are circling, attracted by easy spoils of a defenseless society. Servitude looms on the horizon.
“If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” — George Washington
Criticizing the dysfunction of postmodernism is not enough. We need to re-inspire Main Street with the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and the other giants upon whose shoulders our society stands. We need to remind society that there is an alternate vision to the one offered by the postmodernists. A vision that offers dignity, meaning, and freedom.
Grinding the Universe Down
The grip that postmodernism has on society stems from is its ability to make us not care, to destabilize our sense of identity, to rob our lives of meaning, to seed our minds with indifference and despair, to divide us, to demoralize us, to fill us with angst, and to drown us in grey fog of emptiness. It is the Nothing threatening Fantasia in the NeverEnding Story. The dimming of the imagination. The death of fantasy. People who have no hope are easy to control.
The great irony is that, by deconstructing everything, postmodernism has left itself without a deep philosophical well to draw upon to defend itself against competing ideas that bring meaning back to empty lives. It has left itself defenseless against the jester who holds a mirror up to society, the poet who brings history back to life, the parents who refuse to surrender their children’s minds to the activists, the grandparent with a story to tell, the timeless movie that captures the essential struggles of being human, and the world of ideas discovered within the pages of a book. The only way that postmodernism can defend the void it has created is by terrorizing its population through censorship and brute force. The emperor Caligula is laughing at us from his grave.
But forbidden ideas grow. Brute force is a sure way to lose hearts and minds. And human nature gravitates towards ideas that bring hope. Postmodernists are trying to institutionalize an ideology with a shrinking support base. Time is not on their side.
Over the last forty years or so culture has been on a gradual slide into the grey fog of postmodern neoliberalism. Covid, through its excesses of darkness, has rekindled a yearning for freedom. Covid has planted the seeds of a counterculture that is breathing new life into classical liberal philosophy and Enlightenment values. Freedom is contagious. Slowly, the pendulum of culture is beginning to turn.
We have a lot of work ahead of us to undo multiple generations of postmodernist angst and rehabilitate the timeless principles of classical liberal democracy. It falls on each and every one of us who have woken to the threat of postmodernism to nurture the flames of that counterculture in the imaginations of our sleepwalking neighbors, families, and friends. As the sparks spread, our numbers grow.
Half the battle is understanding the philosophical journey travelled by our ancestors. I recently read Sean Arthur Joyce’s aforementioned new book, Words of the Dead, whose essays provide a philosophical springboard into some of the most influential literature, popular culture, and history that once anchored classical liberal society. From Plato to Toynbee and Huxley, from the lynching of Irish bards in Elizabethan England and the checkered history of journalism, to the cultural phenomenon of the Star Trek franchise, he has a rare talent for teasing out the central message of philosophical works and historical events and making them relevant to everyday life.
I initially set out to write a more conventional review of his book (i.e. what I did or didn’t agree with), but the ideas the book sparked lead me to write this essay instead. Perhaps this is the best way of saying that I think the essays in his book are well worth your time without influencing the thoughts they will stir in you. I hope you will find his book as useful (and enjoyable) as I have for gaining clarity about what lies ahead.
The other half of the battle for the landscape of the imagination is ensuring that those ideas bleed out into the community. We must step out of our social media bubbles and reach out to those trapped in postmodernism’s toxic embrace. The real battle is not happening in our courts and political institutions — the real battle is for the hearts and minds of Main Street. So, have tea with your neighbor, run for city council, and take your grandkids fishing. Those are the frontlines of this culture war.
The conversations that happen face to face and the stories that are told while waiting for the fish to bite have a way of leaving an impression that lasts a lifetime. Drip by drip, we seed the ideas that will breathe new life into timeless classical liberal principles. The grand narrative that emerges from our fourth turning is up to us.
Bad Ideas Take Root in a Void
Winning the culture war is not a matter of censoring bad ideas out of existence. Exposure to postmodernist ideas is not the problem. The problem is that society has lost its philosophical defenses — it has no immunity to those bad ideas.
The ideas of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and CNN are not a magic wand. Their logic is paper thin and built on a foundation of sand. The problem is that multiple generations have had little to no exposure to the words and ideas of the likes of Thomas Sowell, Karl Popper, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, and countless others.
That void left the door wide open for the rot peddled by Marx, Foucault, and CNN to take root.
The philosophical void has led society to construct a new vision of society based on the envy of Marx, the cynicism of Faucoult, and the victimhood cultivated by CNN.
Like every illiberal regime that has come before it, postmodern neoliberal culture has convinced its true believers that it can build a utopia from the ashes of what it burns, by coercing people into believing in a mirage on the horizon, by making an example of those who express doubt the purity of the vision, by subordinating individuals to whatever it decides is the collective “greater good”, by putting the “right people” with the “right ideas” into positions of authority, and then wrapping it all in an aura of good intentions. The mob has taken the seductive bait. A spoonful of sugar makes the bitter medicine go down in the most delightful way.
As long as we think of the courts and the ballot box as the frontline of this culture war, we might win a battle or two and slow the tide for a short while, but we will ultimately lose this war. For every billionaire like Elon Musk who restores free speech to Twitter, there will be a new Disinformation Governance Board created by the regime to stamp it back out. (In case you missed the announcement in the news, the Disinformation Governance Board is an actual thing; it is a new division being created within the US Department of Homeland Security to monitor our speech in order to maintain control over the narrative. Life imitates art; this is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth come to life.)
The only way out of this mess, the only way to bring long-lasting sanity back to our institutions, is to rescue people from postmodernism’s nihilistic embrace, one at a time, to re-inspire them with classical liberal principles, and for that reawakening to bleed back into the collective culture of the community.
All governments, including tyrannies, derive their powers through the consent of the governed (and/or through the apathy of the governed). Institutions only take orders from above as long as they sense that those orders have support from below (or lack meaningful resistance from below). Once the crowd turns (and grows a backbone), the dirty work of flushing a rotten emperor out of his palace falls to the institutions in order to try to win back their legitimacy in the eyes of the crowd.
Institutions will defend classical liberal principles when Main Street shows that it is inspired by those principles and values, and not a moment sooner. The postmodern descent into madness will miraculously begin to turn around when Main Street begins to reach for something other than the empty vision offered by postmodern nihilism. This is a battle for the landscape of the imagination.
The Berlin Wall fell because blue jeans and video tapes first showed people on the wrong side of the Wall that there was an alternative to the grey hopeless fog of communism — it gave people a vision to strive for and, in time, that vision eroded support for the regime. The first domino to fall was the landscape of the imagination. In time it led the crowd to lose its fear of the regime. And that led institutions to turn on their leaders as those institutions sensed that the regime had lost the support of the crowd.
Likewise, the path to the civil rights movement was paved by things like jazz music, comedy clubs, and the desegregation of the US military during the Korean war, all of which tore down the mental barriers erected by segregation. They exposed the hypocrisy embedded in the system and dissolved the brainwashing that skin color should divide us. Culture leads the way; institutions are dragged along in its wake.
Protests, legal challenges, and elections are an important barometer of the public mood — a way of allowing ourselves to be counted and a way of breaking the illusion that we are alone with our classical liberal ideas — but they are not the primary means by which new hearts and minds are won over to the cause. Changing minds is the job of the poets, the storytellers, and especially of the parents, grandparents, and ordinary citizens who are responsible for planting and cultivating the seeds of our culture in the minds of their neighbors, friends, and children.
No matter how much we would like to pin the responsibility for this chaos on the predatory behaviour of politicians, corporations, teachers, judges, activists, and academics, in the end both the cause and the cure lie in our collective hands. We let this happen.
We surrendered the public square, the library, the school bench, and the movie theatre to the postmodernists. We were complacent as our culture slid into intellectual bankruptcy. We looked the other way because we were busy with our lives. For too long we remained silent to avoid creating a fuss with our friends and co-workers. We failed to ensure that the important stories continued to take root in young imaginations. We let corporations, governments, activists, and media dominate the public square, decide the educational curriculum, and shape society’s vision of itself in order to serve their needs instead of ours. And so, we left entire generations defenseless to the corrosive lure of the postmodernist world view. Now the vultures are circling, attracted by easy spoils of a defenseless society. Servitude looms on the horizon.
“If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” — George Washington
Criticizing the dysfunction of postmodernism is not enough. We need to re-inspire Main Street with the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and the other giants upon whose shoulders our society stands. We need to remind society that there is an alternate vision to the one offered by the postmodernists. A vision that offers dignity, meaning, and freedom.
Grinding the Universe Down
The grip that postmodernism has on society stems from is its ability to make us not care, to destabilize our sense of identity, to rob our lives of meaning, to seed our minds with indifference and despair, to divide us, to demoralize us, to fill us with angst, and to drown us in grey fog of emptiness. It is the Nothing threatening Fantasia in the NeverEnding Story. The dimming of the imagination. The death of fantasy. People who have no hope are easy to control.
The great irony is that, by deconstructing everything, postmodernism has left itself without a deep philosophical well to draw upon to defend itself against competing ideas that bring meaning back to empty lives. It has left itself defenseless against the jester who holds a mirror up to society, the poet who brings history back to life, the parents who refuse to surrender their children’s minds to the activists, the grandparent with a story to tell, the timeless movie that captures the essential struggles of being human, and the world of ideas discovered within the pages of a book. The only way that postmodernism can defend the void it has created is by terrorizing its population through censorship and brute force. The emperor Caligula is laughing at us from his grave.
But forbidden ideas grow. Brute force is a sure way to lose hearts and minds. And human nature gravitates towards ideas that bring hope. Postmodernists are trying to institutionalize an ideology with a shrinking support base. Time is not on their side.
Over the last forty years or so culture has been on a gradual slide into the grey fog of postmodern neoliberalism. Covid, through its excesses of darkness, has rekindled a yearning for freedom. Covid has planted the seeds of a counterculture that is breathing new life into classical liberal philosophy and Enlightenment values. Freedom is contagious. Slowly, the pendulum of culture is beginning to turn.
We have a lot of work ahead of us to undo multiple generations of postmodernist angst and rehabilitate the timeless principles of classical liberal democracy. It falls on each and every one of us who have woken to the threat of postmodernism to nurture the flames of that counterculture in the imaginations of our sleepwalking neighbors, families, and friends. As the sparks spread, our numbers grow.
Half the battle is understanding the philosophical journey travelled by our ancestors. I recently read Sean Arthur Joyce’s aforementioned new book, Words of the Dead, whose essays provide a philosophical springboard into some of the most influential literature, popular culture, and history that once anchored classical liberal society. From Plato to Toynbee and Huxley, from the lynching of Irish bards in Elizabethan England and the checkered history of journalism, to the cultural phenomenon of the Star Trek franchise, he has a rare talent for teasing out the central message of philosophical works and historical events and making them relevant to everyday life.
I initially set out to write a more conventional review of his book (i.e. what I did or didn’t agree with), but the ideas the book sparked lead me to write this essay instead. Perhaps this is the best way of saying that I think the essays in his book are well worth your time without influencing the thoughts they will stir in you. I hope you will find his book as useful (and enjoyable) as I have for gaining clarity about what lies ahead.
The other half of the battle for the landscape of the imagination is ensuring that those ideas bleed out into the community. We must step out of our social media bubbles and reach out to those trapped in postmodernism’s toxic embrace. The real battle is not happening in our courts and political institutions — the real battle is for the hearts and minds of Main Street. So, have tea with your neighbor, run for city council, and take your grandkids fishing. Those are the frontlines of this culture war.
The conversations that happen face to face and the stories that are told while waiting for the fish to bite have a way of leaving an impression that lasts a lifetime. Drip by drip, we seed the ideas that will breathe new life into timeless classical liberal principles. The grand narrative that emerges from our fourth turning is up to us.
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
Biden's Baby Formula Crisis Exposed: A Slap In The Face To Every Parent In America [VIDEOS]
Washington Post fact-checkers gave it 4 Pinocchios, so they keep on with their story trying to push this crazy agenda.
www.redvoicemedia.com
Biden’s Baby Formula Crisis Exposed: A Slap In The Face To Every Parent In America [VIDEOS]
Washington Post fact-checkers gave it 4 Pinocchios, so they keep on with their story trying to push this crazy agenda.
BY ZACH HEILMAN
MAY 15, 2022
With Joe Biden and his criminal cronies installed into the White House with a stolen election, it’s been crisis after crisis after crisis.
At this point, thinking that everything going on is just from mistakes or missteps would be naive. They can’t get everything this wrong by accident. It’s got to be on purpose to destroy America just to fill their own pockets.
Florida Congresswoman Kat Cammack calls out the latest Biden Crisis, the Baby Formula shortage, in the video below.
WATCH:
Biden's Baby Formula Crisis Exposed: A Slap In The Face To Every Parent In America 1:48 min
Martha MacCallum: Oh, that we just showed everyone the pictures that you sent out of the shelf at the border facility and the shelf at a home grocery store. And then the Washington Post gave your picture, your tweet for Pinocchios. They said it’s not true. What do you say to them?
Kat Cammack: Well, I think that the fact-checkers need to be fact-checked. And listen, we all know that the Washington Post became an army of left-wing activists a long time ago. So they can keep on with their story, trying to push this crazy agenda. But we know that the facts are that the Biden administration and the FDA, they shut down our nation’s largest manufacturer of baby formula with no plan in place to backfill the 43% of the market share that they make up.
And again, the White House says they’ve been working on this for months with no plan. And just yesterday was the first time that Biden met with manufacturers convenient that they left out that they didn’t meet with Abbott, the manufacturer that Biden’s FDA shut down. They can’t get any phone calls returned from the FDA, no emails. And as we saw in there and the FDA’s own press release, Abbott was cleared. And there was no connection between those tragic deaths of those two infants and the findings in their manufacturing facility. Now the White House won’t give any updates about manufacturing coming back online. I can tell you, it takes weeks and for the FDA to continue to wrap this all up in red tape. It’s a slap in the face to every parent in America right now. I think I speak on behalf of all young mothers when I say this is unacceptable. Doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat. This is unacceptable. And no one is debating the morality of feeding children. I think we can all agree this is absolutely critical. But are we America first? Are we America last? That’s the question.