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http://edwardcurtin.com/trying-to-put-all-america-behind/

Trying to Put All America Behind

Sixty years ago this summer, on August 7, 1961, President John Kennedy signed the bill creating The Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts.  It consists of forty miles of immaculate sandy beach, marshes, ponds, and upland along the Atlantic Ocean, with some portions stretching across the land to Cape Cod Bay in the west.  Henry Thoreau walked this wild Outer Atlantic Beach in 1849.  He said you can stand there and look out to sea and “put all America behind” you.

I am trying to do that as I stand looking at the waves breaking on a foggy early morning shore.  I am alone except for the hundreds of seals moaning on a sand bar and the gulls fishing in the tidal inlet at the far southern end of Coast Guard Light Beach.  A few laughing gulls swoop by as if to mock me with their laugh-like calls.

It is very hard to put the United States of America behind you when the fog of an endless propaganda war warps your mind and tries to crush your spirit even when you look away as far as the eye can see.

Across the ocean to the northeast, Mathew Arnold, on a far distant shore in England, wrote his famous poem “Dover Beach” at about the same time that Thoreau was walking where I stand.  Two very different men standing in different worlds, not just one at a window and the other in the blowing wind.

The former was an academically connected school inspector whose faith, vague as it was, was falling away as he described in “Dover Beach”: the turbulent ebb and flow of the breaking waves of faith that was being replaced by the sad withdrawing roar of melancholic human misery, devoid of love, light, joy, certitude, or help for pain.  It was the rhythmic sound of world weariness and declining faith in the Old World.

The latter, a child of the New World, harsh critic though he was of the resigned lives of quiet desperation most people live, was still a man of deep if unorthodox faith in the divine, telling us that most people are determined not to live by faith if they can help it, as if anyone could live without faith in something, whether that something be God, skepticism, atheism, or the then emerging new god of science. He considered people’s constant distrustful anxiety an incurable disease and he would no doubt consider the current religion of science a subject for his withering scorn and underappreciated humor.  Try imagining the government telling Thoreau that he had to be vaccinated and he needed a document to travel by stagecoach from his home in Concord to the Cape.

The young rebel Thoreau (he was in his early thirties like Arnold) still held to the conviction that if enough people gave serious attention to the transcendent nature of their natural surroundings and lived by its divine revelations, a new world was possible.  But also only if they simplified their lives and lived by principles that excluded the mad pursuit of money, slavery, and the worship of false gods.  This was eleven years before the American Civil War, which Thoreau didn’t survive.  He died on May 6, 1862.  His final words were: “Now comes good sailing.”

Arnold died at age sixty-six of a heart attack while running to catch a train.

Old and new symbols of power marked their final journeys: the iron horse and wind-filled sails.

Where Arnold saw a nightmarish illusion in the sea, Thoreau saw wonder and possibility, but not devoid of possible doom.  Although often cast as a wild dreamer, Thoreau had his feet planted solidly in plain reality.

“I sat down on the boundless level and enjoyed the solitude, drank it in, the medicine for which I had pined,” wrote Thoreau, so I followed his lead and sat on a stretch of sand with no human in sight and gazed at the glimmer of a fading moon until I lost my senses.  For a few minutes I was gone.

But nature and solitude do not necessarily quiet the mind, and when I returned from my cataleptic state the wind was blowing from the west and the USA snuck up behind my back.  America may be hard to find, but it’s also hard to lose. The wind blew my mind’s eye straight across the imaginary northern latitude line to Cannes, France and its Film Festival where Oliver Stone’s new documentary, “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking-Glass,” written by James DiEugenio, has just premiered.

It is hard here on the sands of the Cape not to think of JFK, especially since he saved these sands for posterity, a bit of the USA that remains if you ever go looking for it. He saved this land whose evil CIA forces slayed him. And the ironic thing about Stone’s documentary is that he could find no US backers for his film and had to go to Arnold’s Old-World England to get the money to tell this inherently American story, which still doesn’t have a distributor in the United States..

Thirty years ago, his movie JFK was sabotaged by the CIA-controlled media as a fictional illusion, and now the truth is still verboten here.  But Stone will win out.  For his new work tells the same story but tells it straight with facts, the same facts, and more, that supported JFK in 1991.  And the facts tell an overwhelming tale of truth, not the nonsense still proffered by disinformation specialists that JFK was a war-monger, a phony, and a cold warrior to the end.  Those accusations are either lies or ignorance, as if the CIA would want to assassinate him if they were true.

JFK was murdered because he was trying to end the Cold War, eliminate nuclear weapons through negotiations with the Soviet Union, withdraw American military advisers from Vietnam, reign in the CIA, and reduce the power of the military industrial complex.  This is why he was killed. These are among what Stone calls “conspiracy facts,” and even as I look out at the wild Atlantic and try “to put America behind” me for a short respite, the wind fills my mind with their contemporary importance.

Stone is out front where you can see and hear him, while the CIA always operates behind our backs.

As I return to myself and my contemplation of the ocean, a lone fisherman approaches and passes me with a nod and a rod.  I soon see him disappear around the strand where the inlet flows like a strong river deep into the marshes.  Memory tells me Thoreau was right to say that “many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish that they are after.”

Thoreau knew he was always obsessively fishing for elusive truth and needed no bait, only his eyes and ears and the deep state he entered when he cast his pencil across the vastness of an empty page.

Oliver Stone, too, has spent his life chasing the light of truth to expose the crimes of another deep state, the despicable men who conspired to execute JFK, the man who many a day looked out upon these waters and saw a vision of a new country he hoped to bring to reality even at the risk of his life.  A country devoted to peace and domestic tranquility.

It is so beautiful where I sit.  The sun is breaking through the fog and blue patches stipple the heavens. Call it dreamy. Here the Nauset Indians fished these waters long before Thoreau.  Fishing for them was like the clam shells that litter the beach.  It was bifold, providing sustenance for body and soul, and their connection to the Cape eco-system was sacred. (I ask them for forgiveness for using the word eco-system.) This was long before the profane skepticism and faith in science of Arnold’s mind and times seeped in to poison land, water, and consciousness, not to mention human and animal bodies.

As I recall, “Dover Beach” was composed a few decades after the first generally accepted laboratory synthesis of a naturally occurring organic compound from inorganic materials. Only yesterday I saw many beachgoers spraying themselves with canisters of chemicals that are the offspring of that original synthetic creation that is called urea but which I call piss.  I don’t know what the Nausets called it, but I am sure they did what I did as I got up and pissed into the wind and water, hoping it wouldn’t come back to get me.  It was a relief, although my mind kept reeling backwards historically.

The white invaders – they like to be called explorers – led by Captain Thomas Hunt, arrived on the Cape in 1614 and captured seven Nausets together with twenty from the Pawtucket tribe and sold them into slavery.  There is so much US history that is hard to stomach. Thinking of the slaughter of native peoples from California to the New York island can only make a US American deeply ashamed.  When Woody Guthrie composed and sang “This Land Is Your Land,” I hope he had a double entendre in mind, for surely the shore I sit upon is soaked with the blood and tears of many an innocent soul whose land was stolen from them.

It is no exaggeration to say that from the enlarging sandbar the seals’ moans sound like restless ghosts. The wind carries their ancient calls like a Greek chorus above the crashing waves.  I feel as though I am attending a sacred rite that is both a funeral, a celebration, and a call to resist. The music haunts me.  My mind’s eye ebbs with the receding tide.  More sand bars emerge as the sun pierces the fog veiling the water and my mind.

Behind me across the narrow strip of land and Cape Cod Bay lies the city of Boston.  It was built to its current renown on the money made by its famous blue blood families through the opium trade that killed so many Chinese in the 19^th century.  They were money-obsessed, bloodthirsty killers. I don’t think they warned the Chinese that they were being sold a drug pandemic.  You have heard their “illustrious” names: Forbes, Cabot, Cushing, Weld, Delano (the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Perkins.  These drug dealers laundered their massive drug profits by giving to Harvard, founding Massachusetts General Hospital, and creating Boston’s renown reputation for culture and education.

First the native Americans and then the Chinese and Vietnamese and Afghanis, et al. – it makes no difference whose blood was shed to create an elegant city upon a hill, a beacon of human benevolence – and to keep it going.  The beat goes on.  It is a war of drugs, foreign and domestic.  Follow the trail.

These “illustrious” families were also crucial in the founding of the CIA whose tentacles stretch their banking interests in black operations worldwide.  These are the criminals they like to call the Agency whose existence is sustained through drugs and blood.  Agents of death.

It is terrible to think such thoughts on this beautiful beach, but my forgettery seems to fail me when the wind is blowing from behind.

And to think the disinformation specialists doing the CIA’s bidding have for years tried to denigrate those Irish upstarts, the Kennedys, by falsely claiming Joseph Kennedy made his fortune in the illegal liquor business and in association with the Mob.  The CIA’s war on the Kennedys, and their murder of their leading men, is a multi-faceted operation, as Oliver Stone will show you.

Here on the beach the light now seems to be chasing me.  I look to my left and see a figure walking my way.  It is time for me to leave.  I turn and start walking north, back to civilization.  As the figure gets nearer, I see it’s a woman.  I gasp at the mask she is wearing.  No doubt she has taken the drug the authorities have told her was necessary to inject if she wanted to be safe and join the crowd.  The drug trade is where the money is. It runs on lies, but it brings power and glory and will anesthetize your fears until it is too late.  It’s not a new story, and it brings death.

We pass and she looks away.

I hear the laughing gulls and turn to see the seals standing on the waves howling in delight as they clap their flippers in applause.  I’m happy to laugh along.

In the distance I see a boat heading for land.

The wind off the water blows this Dylan song into my ears:

“When the Ship Comes in”

Comment to article:

" “It is very hard to put the United States of America behind you when the fog of an endless propaganda war warps your mind and tries to crush your spirit…”

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines…
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

“Build therefore your own world”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

“Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.”
-Denis Diderot- "

....

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly21/breakdown7-21.html

How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse

The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.

Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.

The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy's connections run. Put another way, the economy's as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.

One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It's such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.

The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.

Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources. We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.

This is how you end up with thousands of newly manufactured vehicles parked in lots awaiting one critical part that is in short supply.

Another key weakness is the entire system's reliance on debt, leverage and speculation. Few seem to understand that physical production and delivery systems can grind to a halt for financial reasons--for example, lines of credit being pulled, a counterparty to some arcane commodity swap goes under, taking the presumably solvent corporation down with it, and so on.

The more debt that's been piled up, the greater the instability of the entire system. Risk always appears low until the system destabilizes, and then all the hedges fail and risk breaks out, flooding through the entire financial system.

Leverage is great fun on the way up, as it magnifies gains. Since the Federal Reserve implicitly guarantees that "buy the dip" will generate massive gains, why not ramp up leverage ten-fold to maximize those Fed-guaranteed gains?

Leverage is less fun on the way down. When the underlying collateral has shrunk to 20% of the leveraged bets being made, a 21% decline in the asset wipes out all the collateral holding up the palace of leveraged debt.

The Fed can print money but it can't create collateral, nor can it make insolvent entities solvent. All the Fed can do is increase the debt and leverage, which is not the solution, it's the problem.

Speculation is also inherently unstable, as the euphoric herd, once startled, turns in panic and stampeded in fear. Markets which appeared liquid--i.e., sellers could count on someone buying as many millions of shares as they desired to sell--become illiquid, as buyers vanish like mist in Death Valley. With buyers gone, prices plummet to levels the herd reckoned "impossible" just days before.

The Fed's entire strategy in the 21st century has been to inflate asset bubbles that generate the illusion of wealth--the so-called wealth effect which is presumed to inspire voracious borrowing and spending.

Unfortunately for the Fed, most of the gains flowed to the top 0.1%, and an economy based on a handful of billionaires buying super-yachts and spaceships is a line of dominoes awaiting the inevitable "accident." So there are two systemic problems with relying on asset bubbles to generate "wealth": 1) since 90% of the assets are owned by a thin slice of the populace, bubbles increase destabilizing inequality, and 2) bubbles are intrinsically unstable. So the U.S. economy, dependent on the Fed for the "juice" of monetary stimulus, is now dependent on incredibly unstable bubbles in assets, debt and leverage, bubbles which have generated extremes of wealth/income inequality that are destabilizing the social and political orders.

As the three charts below illustrate, the fragility and instability are well hidden until it's too late: bubbles, debt, leverage, budgets and revenues can only click higher because the system breaks down if there is any sustained decline (the rising wedge model of breakdown). Once the subsystems fail, there's no putting the eggshell back together.

The second chart depicts how buffers thin beneath the surface, masking the systemic fragility. The loss of redundancy, the decay of maintenance, the loss of experienced workers--all of these are hidden from public view until the system breaks down.

The third chart tracks the S-curve of expansion, confidence, complacency, delusion and collapse followed by human systems, from nations to empires to corporations: as the buffers thin and the rising wedge reaches an apex of vulnerability, the leadership evinces a delusional confidence in the permanence and stability of increasingly fragile, unstable systems.

Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.

This is how breakdowns in apparently stable subsystems triggers the fall of dominoes throughout the larger system, leading to a collapse that was widely viewed as "impossible." Such is the power of complacency and delusion. 

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https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/07/15/to-be-sustainable-green-energy-must-generate-adequate-taxable-revenue/

To Be Sustainable, Green Energy Must Generate Adequate Taxable Revenue

What allows any type of energy to be sustainable? I would argue that one of the requirements for sustainability is adequate production of taxable revenue. Company managements depend upon taxable revenue for many purposes, including funding new investments and paying dividends to shareholders. Governments depend upon taxable income to collect enough taxes to provide infrastructure and programs for their growing populations.

Taxable income is a major way that “net energy” is transferred to future investment and to the rest of the economy. If this form of net energy is too low, governments will collapse from lack of funding. Energy production will fall from lack of reinvestment. This profitability needs to come from the characteristics of the energy products, allowing more goods and services to be produced efficiently. This profitability cannot be created simply by the creation of more government debt; the rise in the price of energy is tied to the affordability of goods, particularly the goods required by low-income people, such as food. This affordability issue tends to put a cap on prices that can be charged for energy products.

It seems to me that Green Energy sources are held to far too low a standard. Their financial results are published after subsidies are reflected, making them look profitable when, in reality, they are not. This is one of the things that makes many people from the financial community believe that Green Energy is the solution for the future.

In this post, I will discuss these ideas further. A related issue is, “Which type of oil production fell most in the 2018-2021 period?” Many people had expected that perhaps high-cost energy production that would fall. Strangely enough, the production that fell most was that of OPEC oil exporters. These oil exporters often have a very low cost of energy production. The production of US oil from shale also fell.

If the ratio of Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI) is to be used as a measure of which type of energy best meets our needs, perhaps the list of items to be included in EROEI calculations needs to be broadened. Alternatively, more attention needs to be paid to unsubsidized taxable income as an indicator of net energy production.

[1] According to EIA data, world crude oil production hit a peak of 84.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in the fourth quarter of 2018. Production fell as low as 72.3 million bpd in the third quarter of 2020. Production rebounded to 75.4 million barrels of oil a day, still 9.1 million bpd below peak production in the 4th quarter of 2018.

Figure 1. Quarterly crude and condensate production, based on international data of the US Energy Information Administration.

This drop in oil production was unprecedented. It far exceeded the drop in oil production at the time of the Great Recession of 2008-2009. As of the first quarter of 2021, crude oil production was roughly at its level in 2011. It still has not rebounded very far.

[2] The biggest drop in crude oil production during this period was that of the cartel led by OPEC and Russia. United States’ oil production also fell during this period. Production of the Rest of the World, in total, was fairly flat.

Figure 2. Crude oil production through the first quarter of 2021 based on international data of the US Energy Information Administration.

The big concern of OPEC and Russia was that crude oil prices were too low to provide adequate tax revenue for the governments of these countries. This is especially an issue for countries with few other industries besides oil. These oil exporting countries tend to have large populations, with little employment besides government-sponsored projects. Nearly all food needs to be imported, so subsidies for food need to be provided if the many people earning low wages are to be able to afford this food.

If oil prices are high, say $150 per barrel or higher in today’s dollars, it is generally fairly easy for governments to collect enough oil-related taxes. The actual cost of extraction is often very low for oil exporters, perhaps as little as $20 per barrel. The need for tax revenue greatly exceeds the direct expenses of extracting the oil. Companies can be asked to be pay as much as 90% of operating income (in this example, equal to $130 = $150 – $20 per barrel, probably only relating to exported oil) as taxes. The percentage varies greatly by country, with countries that have higher costs of production generally paying less in taxes.

Figure 3. Chart from 2013 showing “government take” as a percentage of operating income by Barry Rodgers Oil and Gas Consulting (website no longer available).

When oil companies are asked about their required price to break even, a wide range of answers is possible. Do they just quote the expense of pulling the oil from the ground? If so, a very low answer is possible. If shareholders are involved in the discussions, this is the answer that they would like to hear. Or do they give realistic estimates, including the taxes that their governments need? Furthermore, if the cost of extraction is rising, there needs to be enough profit that can be set aside to allow for the drilling of new wells in higher-cost areas, if production is to be maintained.

Because of the need for tax revenue, OPEC countries often publish Fiscal Breakeven Oil Prices, indicating how high the prices need to be to obtain adequate tax revenue for the exporting countries. For example, Figure 4 shows a set of Fiscal Breakeven Oil Prices for 2013 – 2014.

Figure 4. Estimate of OPEC breakeven oil prices, including tax requirements by parent countries, by APICORP.

If a country tries to maintain the same standard of living for its population as in the past, I would expect that the fiscal breakeven price would rise year after year. This would occur partly because the population of OPEC countries keeps rising and thus more subsidy is needed. The fiscal breakeven price would also tend to rise because the easiest-to-extract oil tends to be depleted first. As a result, new oil-related investments can be expected to have higher costs than the depleted investments they are replacing.

In fact, if a person looks at more recently published fiscal breakeven prices, they tend to be lower than the 2013-2014 breakevens. I believe that this happens because oil exporters don’t want to look desperate. They know that attaining such high prices is unlikely today. They hope that by using more debt and reducing the standard of living of their citizens, they can somehow get along with a lower fiscal breakeven price. This is not a long term solution, however. Unhappy citizens are likely to overturn their governments. Such a result could completely cut off oil supply from these countries.

[3] A cutback in oil production is not surprising for the OPEC + Russia group, nor for the United States, given the chronically low oil prices. The profitability was too low for all of these producers.

Figure 5. Inflation-adjusted historical average annual Brent oil price for 1965 through 2020 from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2021. 12-Jul-2021 amount is the actual Brent spot oil price for that date.

Oil prices fell in late 2014. Fiscal breakeven prices calculated before that date likely gave a somewhat reasonable estimate of the needed prices for oil exporters to make an adequate profit, at that time. By early 2019, when the first decreases in oil production began, these countries were beginning to become fed up with chronically low oil prices.

It is interesting to note that Qatar, the country with the lowest breakeven price on Figure 4, decided to withdraw from OPEC effective January 1, 2019, rather than reduce its oil production. For Qatar, oil prices in late 2018 and early 2019 were close to adequate. Qatar mostly produces natural gas, rather than oil.

The decrease in US shale oil production reflects somewhat the same low profitability issue as OPEC + Russia exports, with an additional factor added. Besides low prices, there seems to be a well-spacing issue. There are reports that the spacing of shale wells gradually got closer and closer, until the closer spacing became counter-productive. The more closely spaced wells “cannibalized” the output from nearby wells. The extra drilling may also have released needed pressurization, reducing oil availability.

Such a problem would have been a difficult issue to pick up from EROEI analyses because there are not enough of these EROEI studies to see sudden changes. Figure 6 shows the timing of the drop in US oil production, relative to the drop in oil prices:

Figure 6. Monthly average crude oil and condensate production and prices for the United States excluding the Gulf of Mexico, based on US Energy Information Administration data. Oil prices are West Texas Intermediate spot prices, not adjusted for inflation. Amounts shown are through April 2021.

Figure 6 omits oil from the Gulf of Mexico, because its quantity tends to bounce around, especially when a hurricane hits. Because of this exclusion, the oil shown in Figure 6 reflects a combination of declining oil production from conventional oil wells plus (after about 2011) rising production from shale wells.

Figure 6 shows that production of oil from shale was developed during the 2011 to 2013 period, when oil prices were high. When oil prices suddenly fell in late 2014, shale producers suddenly found production very unprofitable. They cut back on production starting in April 2015. Shale production started rising again in 2017 after prices moved away from their extreme lows. Growth in oil production began to slow in late 2018, when oil prices again began to fall.

The big shutdown in world oil demand associated with the COVID-19 epidemic began in the second quarter of 2020. Shale production fell in response to low oil prices in March through November of 2021. As of April 2021, production does not seem to have rebounded significantly. We have seen reports that workers were laid off, making it difficult to add new production. If, indeed, well-spacing had become too close, this may have played a role in the decision not to ramp up production again. It is quite possible that many drilled but uncompleted wells will permanently remain uncompleted because they are too close to other wells to be useful.

Based on this analysis, it seems likely that US oil production for 2021 will be lower than that for 202o. Ultimately, the lack of adequate profitability can be expected to bring US oil production down.

[4] There are some high-cost oil producers who continue to produce increasing amounts of oil.

Figure 7. Crude oil and condensate production for Canada and Brazil, based on international data of the US Energy Information Administration.

The keys to maintaining high-cost oil production seem to be

• Large up front investments to make this production possible with little new investment
• Governments that are not very “needy” in terms of revenue from oil taxes

Even with these considerations, having an unprofitable or barely profitable oil industry weakens a country. Neither Brazil nor Canada is doing very well economically in 2021. These countries will likely reduce new oil investment in the next year or two, if inflation-adjusted oil prices do not rise significantly.

[5] Somehow, “Green Energy” has been allowed to compete in the energy field with huge subsidies. If Green Energy is actually to be successful long-term, it needs to be profitable in the same way that fossil fuel energy needs to be profitable. If wind and solar are truly useful, they need to be very profitable, even without subsidies, so that they can support their governments with taxes.

There tends to be little recognition of the extent of subsidies for renewable energy. For example, allowing the electricity from wind turbines and solar panels to be put on the grid whenever it is generated is a huge subsidy. Such generation mostly substitutes for the coal or natural gas used by electricity-producing plants, rather than the electricity generated by these plants. The many reports we see that compare the cost of intermittent electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels with the cost of dispatchable electricity generated by fossil fuels are simply misleading.

Furthermore, electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels doesn’t need to be sufficiently profitable to pay for the much larger grid they require. The larger grid requirement occurs partly because the devices tend to be more distant from users, and partly because the transmission lines need to be sized for the maximum transmission required, which tends to be high for the variable production of renewables.

The lack of adequate of profitability of wind and solar on an unsubsidized basis strongly suggests that they are not really producing net energy, regardless of what EROEI calculations seem to indicate.

It might be noted that in past years, oil exporters have been accused of giving large energy subsidies to their oil producing companies. What these oil exporters have been doing is charging their their own citizens lower prices for oil products than the high (international) price charged to foreign buyers. Thus, high taxes were collected only on oil exports, not from local citizens. With the fall in oil prices in late 2014 (shown in Figures 5 and 6 below), this practice of differential pricing has largely disappeared.

“Oil subsidies” in the US consist of financial assistance to low income people in the US Northeast who continue to heat their homes with oil. These subsidies, too, have mostly disappeared, with lower oil prices and the availability of less expensive forms of home heating.

[6] It seems to me that an economy really has three different requirements:

1. The total quantity of energy must be rising, at least as rapidly as population.
2. The types of energy available must match the needs of current energy-consuming devices, or there needs to be some type of transition plan to facilitate this transition.
3. There must be enough “net energy” left over, both (a) to fund governments with taxes and (b) to fund any transition to different energy-consuming devices, if such a transition is required.

Thus, in order for a transition to Green Energy to really work, it must be extremely profitable on a pretax, unsubsidized basis, so that it can pay high taxes. The greater the need for a transition to different energy consuming devices, such as heat pumps for buildings and electric vehicles of many types, the greater the need for more net energy generated by Green Energy sources to help facilitate this transition.

High profitability for energy products is normally associated with a very low cost of energy production. Furthermore, the type of Green Energy available needs to be in a very useful form. In a sense, there are really two different energy transitions required:

• The output of intermittent electricity devices must be brought up to grid standards, using a combination such as many long distance transmission, very substantial battery backup, and the use of many devices to provide the electricity with the precise characteristics it needs.
• As mentioned above, if greater use of electricity is to be made, a transition to electric devices is required.

Both of these transitions will require significant quantity of energy (really net energy not used elsewhere in the system) to accomplish. If fossil fuel energy is being phased out, an increasing share of this net energy will need to come from the Green Energy sector by way of the tax system. Such as system will only work if the Green Energy sector is very profitable on a pre-tax basis.

[7] Figure 8 suggests that the world has a problem with low energy consumption per capita right now.

Figure 8. Energy consumption per capita for all energy source combined based on data from BP’s Statistical Review of Energy 2021.

There is a strong correlation between growth in total energy consumption per capita and how well the economy is doing. The slight downward slide in energy consumption per capita in 2019 indicates that the economy was already doing poorly in 2019. The huge downward shift in 2020 dwarfs the downward slide in 2009. My earlier research, looking back 200 years, indicates that low growth in energy consumption per capita is likely to lead to conflict among nations and collapses of governments. Epidemics are also more likely to spread in such periods, because greater wage and wealth disparity tends to occur when energy supplies are constrained.

Any shift away from fossil fuel energy to Green Energy will almost certainly mean a huge drop in world energy consumption per capita because the world doesn’t produce very much Green Energy. Such a drop in energy consumption per capita will be a huge problem, in itself. If the Green Energy sector doesn’t generate much taxable income without subsidies, this adds an additional difficulty.

[8] Conclusion: Examination of the EROEIs for various fuels, using calculations the way that they are performed today, gives inadequate information regarding whether a transition to another set of fuels is feasible.

Researchers need to be looking more at (a) the total quantity of energy produced and (b) the profitability of producing this energy. An economy is only possible because of profitable businesses, including energy businesses. A person cannot assume that energy prices will rise from today’s level because of scarcity. Today’s huge debt bubble is producing very high copper and steel prices, but it is not producing correspondingly high oil prices.

Heavily subsidized energy products look like they might be helpful, but there is little reason to believe this to be the case. If Green Energy products are truly producing net energy, we should expect this fact to be reflected in the unsubsidized profits that these products generate. In fact, if Green Energy products are are truly producing large amounts of net energy, they should be so profitable that businesses will be rapidly ramping up their production, even without subsidies or mandates.

" Green Energy " will never run modern industrial society. Severe contraction of economies around the world is our future.

....

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-ice-cream-flavor-next-time/

The Ice-Cream Flavor Next Time

A nation mesmerized by its own weakness wanly celebrated the long-ago and faraway memory of standing up for itself, while it passively endures the current orgy of tyrannical cancellation and suppression of anyone talking back to the present folks-in-charge. Over just a few years, this tyranny has grown like a toxic slime mold from such an unlikely place, the Internet social app ecology of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, as they took over the public arena — where the battle of ideas is supposed to live — and did the government’s dirty work, complete with adorable emojis. You’re fired!

Who will stand up to Zuck, Jack, and Sundar Pichai? Who elected these megalomaniacs boss of the USA? What will it take to end their reign of terror? Some sort of… revolution? (Shhhh! That must be a dirty word, even considering we just celebrated the high point of the American Revolution: The Declaration of Independence, signed July 4, 1776.)

Don’t look to “Joe Biden,” the nation’s putatively elected leader — about whose election back in November, 2020, you are liable to hear more about as the summer stickily unspools. Zuck, Jack, and Sundar managed to protect “Joe Biden” from the stupendous depredations of his offspring, Hunter Biden, recorded in explosive detail on a laptop the public was not allowed to hear about. Don’t look to the Department of Justice, supposedly “investigating” that horde of memos and emails detailing the Bidens’ influence-peddling to the CCP and others — they’re busy surveilling “white supremacists” on the apps run by Zuck, Jack, and Sundar. And for sure don’t look to the news media, that coalition of sell-outs and quislings, busy decoding the foreign policy moves signified in “Joe Biden’s” ice-cream flavor choices. (Rocky Road means: Oh, let China have that….)

Wondering who is actually running the “Joe Biden” government? Some of us out here are. (Do you think we’re allowed to say that?) For instance, have you tried googling the name Susan Rice lately? Remember her? Maybe not. “Joe Biden” appointed her Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. From the looks of things across the country, you’d think her plate would be heaped mighty high, what with “insurrection” and other white mischief threatening to take down the republic.  Anyway, I googled “news” for her. Hardly a goshdarn thing came up that wasn’t from months ago, and most of that was sheer puffery about how accomplished she is, and what a fabulous person. Don’t you wonder what her phone log looks like? All those calls to the Obama residence, day after day, hour after hour?

All of which raises the question: is the USA just floating merrily merrily down the stream of events under the beneficent reign of “Joe Biden” (Susan Rice, Barack Obama & Co…)? Or are we, rather, freefalling? I suspect it is the latter. And toward what? It being mid-year, I will venture a few guesses. Enjoy the summer while you can because Corona Virus is coming back in the fall and watch out for people who are vaccinated getting sicker than the un-vaxed. That will be a mind-bender, as if Americans are not already utterly perplexed and bewildered by one political swindle after another. The whining will drown out even the news of more “white supremacy.” But they told us….

An autumn wave of Covid-19 (one “variant” or another) would take out whatever remains of the service economy, the restaurants struggling just now to return to normality (ha!), the hair salons, the gyms, the florists, booksellers, sports, theaters, live music venues, what-have-you. Since we no longer have much of a manufacturing economy, the only thing left would be Wall Street — which was originally designed to raise money for the manufacturing and service sector but now only raises money for itself via the seemingly magical mingling of “leverage” with “liquidity” to conjure profit from black holes where the ghosts of productivity howl.

It’s some trick but, let’s face it, it’s still just a trick. Also in that picture is the weird three-legged race of deflation tied to inflation running both uphill and downhill at the same time like a nightmare out of M.C. Escher by way of Stephanie Kelton. The USA will be toting up a $3-trillion-plus deficit just for the current fiscal year at the same time that debt becomes ever more obviously unpayable. How does debt even mean anything if there is no prospect of paying it back? Especially in the form of financial instruments, namely: bonds. And how does a financial system based on debt behave when all that is the case? I guess we’re going to find out.

My guess would be a price collapse in financial instruments — abstract things represented by money — and then a collapse of money itself. You may be thinking: not a pretty picture. I know. And we thought the last days of the Soviet Union were bad in 1990. Hoo boy, are we in for a rough ride.  One can hardly imagine the social side-effects of all that, but it would seem to imply people having a rather hard time finding something to eat, or getting anything else they need. Remember good ol’ Ross Perot talking about “a giant sucking sound?” Think of that against a background of things on fire. What flavor ice-cream will “Joe Biden” be ordering on Halloween?

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/80386/bidens-vaccine-strike-force-plan-stinks-of.html

Biden's Vaccine “Strike Force” Plan Stinks Of Desperation

 

 

If there is one rule liberty minded people need to remember, it is that the establishment does not like losing control of the narrative. And when they do, noticeably weird things start to happen. For example, it is becoming painfully obvious that the narrative on the experimental mRNA “vaccines” has slipped right through the fingers of the Biden Administration, and as a consequence they are now in a scramble to get millions of vaccines injected into as many skeptical arms as possible before the public organizes for a full push-back against the agenda. It seems to me that they are in a bit of a panic.

 

The issue became more evident since January when various government entities and the media began to openly complain about the number of vaccine doses that were being thrown in the garbage because of expiration. Why were the vaccines expiring before use? The media spin suggests that it was due to “government mismanagement”, while officials at the state level have admitted that it has been due to a significant drop in demand.

 

In the meantime, Biden has shipped over 500 million covid vaccine doses overseas in June while at the same time claiming that the US was on track to meet his 70% vaccination goal by July 4^th. Needless to say this never happened. The Biden admin now claims that the US population is now 67% vaccinated, and if this was actually true then it would be very close to meeting Anthony Fauci’s original guidelines for herd immunity. So why all the frantic hype about unvaccinated people?

 

Firstly, Fauci has continually moved the goal posts for herd immunity to the point that he is now telling the public to ignore herd immunity altogether and that the only option is to get EVERYONE vaccinated. Many of us in the liberty media said this is exactly what he would do, and he has proven to be incredibly predictable. Secondly, the CDC vaccination numbers seem to be inflated in order to create a manufactured consensus.

 

While claiming an overall vaccination rate of 67%, CDC stats indicate a maximum of around 184 million Americans with at least one dose, then indicate 160 million people with a double dose. Yet, according to the Mayo Clinic data map, only four states have a vaccination rate of 67% or more, all in the Northeast. Even California and New York are well under 67%, and the vast majority of states are sitting at around 50% or less.

 

Frankly, I don’t believe the CDC vaccine numbers at all. New dosage numbers are plunging across the US according to state officials; anyone who hasn’t been jabbed by now is not going to get jabbed unless they are forced to. There are no long lines for vaccines. No wait times. The CDC has even removed the wait time between doses. And still, CVS and Walgreens have been throwing away expired doses by the hundreds of thousands.

 

If we look at the CDC stats for full vaccination we are closer to 51% of the total US population, which matches more accurately with the Mayo Clinic state statistics. There is no indication that this percentage will be growing beyond the 51% mark anytime soon, if the stats are accurate at all.

 

This means that at least half the US population is in defiance of the program. This is probably why Fauci and Biden have become more aggressive in their vaccination agenda the past month. If they were getting the nearly 70% vax rates they claim, then they would not be stomping their feet indignantly over unvaccinated people. The stats show a HUGE number of Americans are refusing to take the jab – There’s a vast army of us out there, and this is a good thing.

 

Why? Because there is simply no reason to take the experimental mRNA vaccine.

 

FACT: Covid-19 has a median IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) of 0.26% or less.

 

Why take an experimental vaccine over a virus that 99.7% of the population outside of nursing homes will easily survive? In my home county, only 17 people died from covid in 16 months time, many of them in nursing homes. The majority of the population also stopped wearing masks and ended the lockdowns about three months after the initial outbreak when it became clear that covid was a nothing-burger. The so-called “Delta variant is also prominent here, and neither deaths nor infections have increased in a noticeable way.

 

Most people here have already had the virus, and it was essentially like a bad flu with an extra kick or extra brain fog. After around a week people recovered. Easy. I perfectly understand people’s concerns when the pandemic first started; we had no idea what we were dealing with. However, after a few months the reality was evident. The continued delusional fear and terror over Covid is just self indulgent paranoia at this point.

 

FACT: Covid infections and deaths started collapsing LONG before the vaccines were widespread.

 

The mainstream media continually suggests that the vaccines are the reason for the fall in infections, but this is a lie. Covid cases peaked in January of 2021 and then plunged precipitously. In February of 2021 only 5.9% of the US population had received at least one dose of the mRNA cocktail. In conservative states where mandates were lifted far ahead of blue states and vaccinations are lower, infections and deaths fell even faster. Vaccines have NOTHING to do with the lower infections. Nothing.

 

 

FACT: At least 81% of people who have had covid are unlikely to be reinfected.

 

Fauci continues to ignore the science on herd immunity and completely dismisses people who have had covid as being immune. Yet, this is the reality. If we count the large numbers of people that have had covid, then the US hit herd immunity many months ago. This is why infections and deaths dropped off a cliff, not because of vaccinations.

 

FACT: The mRNA vaccines have NO long term testing data supporting them or proving their safety.

 

Initial testing for the average experimental vaccine is 2-4 years, and then another several years of observation and further testing is required before approval. Overall, vaccines are supposed to be tested and retested for 10-15 YEARS before being released to the public. The covid mRNA vaccines were released to the public in a matter of months with no official FDA approval and no long term data, at least none that has been revealed openly. The bottom line is that we have no idea what the long term side-effects of these vaccines will be. Though, there are some experts that are sounding the alarm…

 

FACT: Multiple vaccine experts are warning about potentially dangerous autoimmune disorders and infertility caused by experimental mRNA vaccines, including the doctor that helped invent mRNA technology.

 

We have received numerous warnings by virology and vaccine experts calling for caution when it comes to the covid vaccines. Former VP of Pfizer Michael Yeadon and many of his medical associates have published a call for vaccinations to stop until more testing can be pursued. Yeadon specifically warned of possible autoimmune disorders as well as infertility side effects. He has since been attacked relentlessly by the media.

 

MRNA vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone spoke out on the dangers of mRNA gene therapy, specifically noting that the spike protein which the covid vaccine instructs your cells to manufacture could pose long term health risks, including blood clots and infertility in women. Malone’s interview has since been erased from YouTube and his accomplishments have been quietly removed from websites like Wikipedia. He is slowly being non-personed.

 

Finally, in hospitals across the country 30% of medical professionals have refused to take the vaccines. Some have only taken the jab because their jobs were threatened.

 

The controlled media argument against warnings like these from experts in the field is that they are “crazy” and should be dismissed. So, only the medical professionals that get a government paycheck and agree with the government mandates are somehow “sane”? Interesting…

 

When gaslighting doesn’t work, the spin doctors (no pun intended) pull out some classic fuzzy logic, claiming that there is “no evidence that the vaccines will cause any damage”. Well, that’s verifiably false as anyone doing a rudimentary search will see many people around the world have died or suffered health side effects right after taking the vaccine. But, of course, vaccine apologists then argue that this is not 100% “proof” that the vaccines are dangerous overall.

 

Well, there’s also NO EVIDENCE that the vaccines are safe. There is no long term safety data. And in medical science the rule is to err on the side of caution, not take reckless risks over a virus that is a non-threat to 99.7% of the population.

 

So let me make this perfectly clear to the covid cult which does not understand basic medical science – The burden of proof is ON YOU, on the government and on the pharmaceutical companies, not on on us. YOU must prove that the vaccines are safe, through long term testing. It is not for us to simply take the jab and become guinea pigs in the world’s largest medical experiment based on blind faith and empty opinions backed by zero data.

 

Biden’s “Vaccine Strike Teams”

 

These facts and more are being digested by the American public and the results are clear – Millions upon millions of us will not be taking the jab. It’s not going to happen. We will fight rather than comply, and eventually we will win. The globalist Reset agenda demands total vaccination, vaccine passports and complete compliance. They aren’t getting it, so, the natural outcome will be an attempt to force unvaccinated people to accept the jab.

 

Recently, Biden announced a plan to field “survey teams” across America which would go door-to-door, like census agents, to determine who specifically has taken the vaccines and who hasn’t. These teams would also “encourage” people who are not vaccinated to take the jab at a nearby location.

 

These surveys are, in my opinion, a ruse more than anything else. They could not possibly collect accurate counts because they have no way of knowing if people are telling the truth or not. The likely purpose of the surveys is to locate homes that refuse to talk to the teams on principle and mark them as “problematic”.

 

Biden’s press secretary let slip some interesting language on these teams, perhaps revealing their true intent when she called them “strike teams”. Is this to say that the initial goal will be to force people to take the jab on their own doorsteps? No, not right away. However, I believe the survey teams are the next step towards that very policy in the future.

 

For now, the covid cult is using corporations to enforce medical mandates by demanding employees and even customers get vaccinated before they can have access to employment or services. This is unacceptable, as many of these corporations have enjoyed endless stimulus injections from the government and are therefor beholden to taxpayers. Their private property rights do not extend to control over our personal medical decisions or histories.

 

Any corporation or business that demands proof of vaccination on behalf of the government or the globalists should be picketed and run into the ground. Any competing businesses that refuse to ask for vaccine passports should be supported by the public and protected from government retribution. My home state of Montana has made it illegal for companies to ask for vaccine passports, but many states have not. It is up to regular Americans at the local level to let businesses know you will not be tolerating medical tyranny.

 

By extension, Biden’s survey teams are a no-go. They are a precursor to door-to-door forced vaccinations and invasive pressure from the federal government on any number of other issues. This is called “incrementalism”, and they think we are too distracted to notice it. As the agenda continues to fall apart in the US, the establishment will get desperate. When the vaccine passport mandates by corporations fail (and they will), they will have to take violent action in the near term to get what they want.

 

These teams should be kicked out of any community they show up in. They should not be allowed to go door-to-door. The liberty movement is gaining incredible ground in this fight, but this means that the elites will become more unhinged and more dangerous in their rhetoric and actions. When control freaks and psychopaths do not get what they want, they tend to throw epic temper tantrums.

 

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/mrna-covid-vaccine-not-vaccine/5734464

The mRNA COVID Vaccine Is Not a Vaccine

 

It’s NOT a vaccine. The mRNA COVID vaccine now being militarily deployed in many nations around the world, is NOT a vaccine. I repeat: it is not a vaccine. It is many things indeed, but a vaccine is not one of them. We have to awaken to the fact that the COVID scamdemic has rapidly accelerated the technocratic and transhumanistic aspects of the New World Order (NWO) to the point where people are blindly lining up to get injected with a “treatment” which is also a chemical device, an operating system, a synthetic pathogen and chemical pathogen production device. As covered in previous articles, this new COVID vax is a completely new kind of technology, potentially even more dangerous than your average toxic vaccine. In this article, we will explore in more depth what this mRNA vaccine is.

Doctors David Martin and Judy Mikovits Expose How So-Called COVID Vaccine is Not a Vaccine

Listen to this short excerpt featuring doctors David Martin and Judy Mikovits (who have both been very outspoken thus far in exposing the COVID plandemic) who are speaking with Robert Kennedy Jr. and lawyer Rocco Galati, who is representing a Canadian freedom group suing the government for the entire COVID scam. David Martin makes some extremely important points about how we can’t accurately label the device Moderna and Pfizer are pushing as a vaccine, because both medically and legally, is not a vaccine:

“This is not a vaccine … using the term vaccine to sneak this thing under public health exemptions … This is a mRNA packaged in a fat envelope that is delivered to a cell. It is a medical device designed to stimulate the human cell into becoming a pathogen creator. It is not a vaccine! Vaccines actually are a legally defined term … under public health law … under CDC and FDA standards, and a vaccine specifically has to stimulate both an immunity within the person receiving it, but it also has to disrupt transmission … They have been abundantly clear in saying that the mRNA strand that is going into the cell is not to stop transmission. It is a treatment. But if it was discussed as a treatment, it would not get the sympathetic ear of public health authorities, because then people would say “What other treatments are there?”

The use of the term vaccine is unconscionable … because it actually is the sucker punch to open and free discourse … Moderna was a started as a chemotherapy company for cancer, not a vaccine manufacturer for SARS … if we said we’re going to give people prophylactic chemo for the cancer they don’t have, you’d be laughed out of a room, because it’s a stupid idea. That’s exactly what this is! This is a mechanical device, in the form of a very small packet of technology, that is being inserted into the human system to activate the cell to become a pathogen manufacturing site.

The only reason why the term [vaccine] is being used is to abuse the 1905 Jacobsen case that has been misrepresented since it was written. If we were honest with this, we would actually call it what it is: it is a chemical pathogen device, that is actually meant to unleash a chemical pathogen production action within the cell. It is a medical device, not a drug, because it meets the CDRH [Center for Devices and Radiological Health] definition of a device.

It is made to make you sick … 80% of the people who are exposed to allegedly the virus [SARS-Cov-2] have no symptoms at all … 80% of people who get this injected into them have a clinical adverse event. You are getting injected with a chemical substance to induce illness, not to induce a[n] immuno-transmissive response. In other words, nothing about this is going to stop you transmitting anything. This is about getting you sick, and having your own cells be the thing that get you sick.”

Judy Mikovits also chips in with this:

“It’s a synthetic pathogen. They’ve literally injected this pathogenic part of the virus into every cell of the body … it can actually directly cause multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease … it can cause accelerated cancer … that’s what the expression of that piece of virus … has been known to do for decades.”....

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56638.htm

A Country That Has Lost Its Way: U.S. Government and Corporations Combine to Strip Citizens of Their Rights

The Biden Administration is calling on Americans to spy on friends, neighbors and family and reporting any “extremist” views to the authorities.

The American people have increasingly become aware that government surveillance and corporate censorship have combined to keep people ignorant and controlled. What is taking place has generated some dark humor. A friend of mine, also a former CIA officer, wrote to me recently and said tongue-in-cheek that he retains a lot of respect for the Agency because it is the only major government national security entity that does not read our mail and emails. Those jobs are the responsibility of the NSA and FBI. I responded that I would imagine that CIA does in fact read quite a lot of mail where it operates overseas but it is probably done the old-fashioned way by recruiting an underpaid mail clerk as an agent.

The whole issue of the government spying illegally on its own citizens has again made the news with the claims by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that NSA has been spying on him, presumably because he has connections that the government regards either as subversive or, in the new reckoning, as “extremists” who are potential “domestic terrorists.” Given the reasonable assumption that anyone who voted for Donald Trump might well fall under those categories, that means that something like half the U.S. population could be under suspicion.

Mass electronic surveillance of literally trillions of phone calls and messages worldwide without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment restrictions on searches without probable cause or a proper warrant issued by a judge has been the regular NSA authorized procedure at least since 9/11 and there is no reason to assume that it is no longer the practice. It basically is initiated by the agency involved (normally NSA or FBI) going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court or to some other appropriate judge to get a warrant on an individual where there is some probable cause. Probable cause can consist of “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.” The Court then gives its approval, which it does in the case of FISA 99% of the time. When that individual is then surveilled, the names of his or her contacts are also added to the investigation. And it goes on from there, expanding and growing until it includes thousands of phone numbers and email addresses, individuals who are overwhelmingly innocent of any wrongdoing.

So, it is safe to assume that many of us are right at this moment eligible for being monitored electronically by the federal government. If one combines that with the Biden Administration’s June 1st announcement of a war on “domestic terrorism,” which it clearly considers to be a function of “white supremacists,” it is easy to see where all that is going. Biden pulled no punches, describing the threat from “white supremacy” as the “most lethal threat to the homeland today,” so that would mean that the government is doing all in its power to stamp it out, whatever it takes and whatever that means.

Surveilling ordinary Americans for what they might be thinking, which is what this comes down to, would be a George Orwellian 1984 tale for our times, updated from when Winston Smith was doing mandatory daily exercises in front of his television set. He slacked off a bit and the TV instantly admonished him. He then wondered whether it was possible that he and all the other residents of Airstrip One (once called Britain) are surveilled all the time. He concluded that they were.

So, if your television set suddenly speaks to you in the next few months, it might not be Alexa. The other development that has surfaced in the past couple of weeks is the increased corporate cooperation with what the government is saying and doing. Mainstream media has certainly done its share of obfuscation, including the current near total suppression of the story that a key witness who provided false testimony against journalist Julian Assange languishing in a British prison has turned out to be a pedophile, diagnosed sociopath and serial liar. But the major player is inevitably social media, which has enormous power in the United States and also elsewhere to shape opinions and propagate false information that serves the government agenda. The media has banned numerous groups, individuals, and links to sites from its pages, a barrier to free speech and freedom of expression. And it has, for example, enthusiastically cooperated fully with the essentially fraudulent government claims of Russian interference in the two most recent U.S. elections. It is censoring or denigrating material that is at variance with official policies, including, for example, Facebook’s pop-ups that appear whenever there is any article that contests the approved version of the response to the COVID virus.

Back in June, the Biden administration said it would also be working with some of the large high-technology and social media companies to “increase information sharing” to assist in combatting radicalization. Biden announced that his Justice Department would create ways for Americans to report radicalized friends and family to the government. One senior official put it this way: “We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs… If you see something, say something. This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.”

In other words, in plain English, the Biden Administration is calling on Americans to spy on friends, neighbors and family and reporting any “extremist” views to the authorities. Well, Facebook is now fully on board with more of the same, engaged in the “hot” war against the “white supremacists/extremists/domestic terrorists.” It has blocked or shut down many former contributors and also begun posting at least two versions of warnings to users. One targets individuals who might have personally been visiting an “extremist” site while the other encourages users to snitch on friends or family who might be enticed by such material. The personalized pop-up reads as follows: “[Name of Recipient], you many have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently – Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment. You can take action now to protect yourself and others.-Get support from experts-Spot the signs, understand the dangers of extremism and hear from people who escaped violent groups.”

The snitch on friends version reads: “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?-We care about preventing extremism on Facebook. Others in your situation have received confidential support.-How you can help.-Hear stories and get advice from people who escaped violent extremist groups-Get support.”

To be sure, one has to ask how Facebook knows that one has visited an “extremist” site since they have blocked such material. Are they somehow hacking into the personal accounts of their own users? The situation is dire, no doubt about it, but it has provoked a backlash, including this post: “Become the extremist Facebook warned you about!” One also has to wonder how Facebook will deal with individuals who complain about some other groups with a demonstrated history of promoting violence, including black lives matter, that are not white supremacist related. It will almost certainly do nothing, just like the federal government’s demonstrated “racially sensitive” supine response to a year of riot, burning, looting and homicide. In truth Americans are standing at the edge of a precipice with just one more “crisis” possibly coming that will tip everyone over the edge so we wind up with a totalitarian government which works hard to keep everyone safe by doing the opposite. We are almost there, and if you doubt it just go take a look at Facebook.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/tyranny-overran-united-states-we-watching-youtube/5749728

The War on Freedom: How Tyranny Overran the United States

Slowly, against their will, and against their natural inclination to watch football and eat pizza, Americans are awaking to the reality of a totalitarian system with its tentacles wrapped around every aspect of their existence. Sadly, the true nature of this tyranny still eludes the understanding of most citizens, in part because the process by which America was transformed utterly has been slow, in part because the commercial media points us away from the true causes of this slippage and pins all blame on easily identifiable bad guys.

Those seeped in the progressive political tradition sensed a radical loss of justice and transparency under the George W. Bush administration, a trend that only accelerated under the Trump administration—with a perceived reprieve under Obama and the possibility of a positive turn under Biden.

Those marinated in the juices of conservative politics observed an end of freedom and the spread of fake “leftist,” ideology that oppresses the citizen under Clinton and Obama.

Both interpretive communities refer to the same social and political trends, to the war on freedom that renders us up as sacrificial lambs to the cruel gods of global capital. The rhetoric employed by the two groups is so radically different, however, and the histories of the United States that they embrace are so divergent, that they are lost in intense ideological conflicts even as they describe the same creeping totalitarianism.

That conflict is no accident. That ideological battle over the insignificant is just what the doctor ordered for the interests of high finance. Or as J. P. Morgan put it,

“By dividing the people, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.”

The super-rich already had their consultants come up with detailed studies on how to divide up citizens by religion, by ethnic identity, by cultural signifiers, and by class so that they are incapable of unity even in the face of the complete takeover of the economy, the media, education and the political process.

“Progressives” refer to the supporters of Trump in rural areas as “stupid” and fundamentalist Christians refer to the followers of the Democratic Party as “evil.”

This profound misunderstanding is probably reinforced by numerous classified operations in which individuals promoting divisive left-wing, or right-wing, positions are encouraged, and paid, to do so as render those who should have common cause as foes.

There is another reason why we have such a difficult time understanding the transformation of our society. The nature of this totalitarianism runs against the assumptions we were taught by movies, novels, and news reports. Our minds are cluttered with archetypes for dictatorship and evil that are at odds with the reality.

The greatest crime of Hollywood was convincing us that evil takes the form of a monster with fangs and claws, of an evil leader with a sinister smile. Corrupt journalists extend this fiction to the public sphere, explaining how evil is embodied in foreign leaders like Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin, or in domestic ill-doers like Hillary Clinton (for the right) or Donald Trump (for the left).

As a result, we are unable to detect, or to understand, the takeover of our society that has taken place.

That is to say that we are confronted by “inverted totalitarianism,” to borrow the term of the philosopher Sheldon Wolin, a cultural and political state in which all aspects of our daily lives are controlled by multinational corporations without our knowing and we lose all freedom.

As a result, our actions are profoundly limited; we are constantly beaten down by an iron fist covered in the soft glove of interest charges, student loans, and constant surveillance.

The totalitarianism that we face is “inverted” in the sense that we expect some dictator standing on top and playing the bad buy, oppressing us out of personal greed, vanity or cruelty. But the true source of our misery is rather the manner in which multinational corporations use supercomputers to calculate profits and then extract as much money as possible from us by making it impossible for us to grow our own food, to heal our own illnesses, to teach ourselves, or to entertain ourselves. Instead, we must buy products, online, or in supermarkets, in transactions from which multinational corporations and banks will invariably take a major cut. The only learning that is recognized and accredited is expensive and is controlled by corporations.

We are offered only false choices between Pepsi or Coke, between Taco Bell or Wendy’s, between action films or romantic comedies, and between the Democratic or Republican Parties.

The process by which citizens lost their self-reliance, their self-sufficiency in food production and in energy production, and the basic skills of sewing, knitting and carpentry, growing dependent on products supplied by corporations, began 100 years ago. We can trace the current crisis back to the campaigns of John D. Rockefeller to force citizens to be dependent on petroleum through the promotion of automobiles and trade, the slashing of budgets for public transportation and the massive funding for highways, the push for the mechanization of farming and the popularization of plastics.

Rockefeller also paid off experts so as to marginalize homeopathic medicine and traditional treatments and create dependency on overpriced hospitals that are tied to corporations, while rendering universities and research institutes dependent on the benevolence of the rich, thus making systematic critiques of the sources of wealth a taboo topic.

To be more specific, the invisible inverted totalitarianism that has taken control of our daily experiences can be traced back to the launch of Windows as an operating system in 1985. Microsoft Word, under the rule of Bill Gates (an ardent student of John D. Rockefeller), set out to control the means by which citizens utilize their computers and later, to control how they interacted with each other over the internet.

Sure, presidential elections were held every four years, and the public was given a chance express itself. Secret secret police did not cart off those who criticized the government—in fact criticism of government was encouraged as way to distract from the impact of bank deregulation.

Most citizens were hardly aware that having one corporation control the system software for all computers that they supposedly “owed” meant that they had lost their freedom.

Yet the shift was profound. Whereas the individual previously could decide for himself where to place files in his office, how to organize documents and layout his papers around his typewriter, the manner in which information is organized within Windows is extremely limited, determined in advance by unaccountable forces and the format and layout cannot be modified by the user.

Needless to say, this first step down the road to tyranny, this fatal loss of basic autonomy, was carefully covered up in the rhetoric of convenience and efficiency, exciting innovation and technological advancement, so that few recognized the loss.

Myths about the importance of convenience, of connectivity and of globalization were swallowed by the entire population. Critical topics like the scientific method, the control of the means of production and the decision-making process in government, and in other institutions, were forgotten.

The next step in this hidden tyranny over our daily lives came in the form of search engines like Google, social networks like Facebook, and other massive, interconnected, corporations that mediated the interactions of the individual with the community, often taking over critical functions that previously belonged to the community or to non-profit institutions like schools or research centers.

Under the guise of greater convenience for the individual, businessmen with unlimited funding from investment banks were able to buy up rivals, block out alternatives that offered search engines as cooperatives, and thereby created search engines that pose as transparent institutions but derive money through the sophisticated manipulation of human interactions using algorithms.

Because Google and Facebook had such resources that they could lose money for years, the manner in which they whittled away at the autonomy of the citizen was almost undetectable. Equally important was the strategy of using short-term stimulation of the brain by postings, instant messages and gaudy news reports, to remap the connections between synapses so as to render most incapable of complex, three-dimensional, thinking. That service, the creation of a dumbed down, passive, population, was true product that internet giants offer to their real clients.

Google controls what information we access to, in what order we have access to it, and it lays out a hierarchy of significance in search results that has some basis in fact, but is primarily a political act for sale to the highest bidder.

Results of Google searches are altered, on a case-by-case basis, in response to the needs of corporations to promote their views to extremely specific audiences.

Although we are trained to think of Google as a public service, its falsehoods, increasingly given authority by the parallel Wikipedia entries created by public relations firms, are not subject to external review. Google users are never permitted to participate in the process of the formulation of policy, or in the review of content. That is to say, the United States calls itself a democracy, but the primary tool that citizens rely on for information is run as a dictatorship.

Another popular cloak for the slip into tyranny is the framing of “opinion” as content in the news. Scientific fact ceased to be central in reporting from 1990s. In its stead, opinion polls of groups selected by polling companies are held up as a confirmation of what is true.

Public opinion polls are the propaganda equivalent of stock buybacks. The billionaires, having radically deregulated the economy and dumbed down the population, merely force-feed their opinions to the public through the media that they control and then claim that the policies they want are demanded by the public.

Facebook gives the appearance that the citizen can express himself freely, and can make friends with anyone. Yet, since Facebook Inc. controls whom a citizen can easily find through its network, and who sees what, and it does not permit users to use their own software, or design their own page, or own the networks they create on Facebook, or to have any say in how Facebook is administered, the freedom is fiction.

Legal concepts like the contract have been twisted beyond recognition in the totalitarian cyberspace that surrounds us.

A contract is a negotiated agreement between two parties. On-line, however, whether it is the decision to accept cookies, or to comply with the rules for a commercial application, the user has no right to make demands of the corporation. He or she is given the false choice of either agreeing with all conditions offered, or not having access to the service. The contract is an empty ritual.

We are accustomed to permitting Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat or Instagram to determine what becomes of information that we share, and we are unaware of the billions in profits those corporations make by selling off the information, the content, and the creative ideas that we supply without giving us any compensation. In a sense, these social networks are a form of virtual slavery.

COVID19 Totalitarianism

Because the thinking of citizens has been degraded for decades, and citizens rely on corporate-sponsored sources for basic information, it became possible, for the first time, to create a virtual pandemic, planned by the super-rich, promoted by the news sources that they own, authorized by experts at the institutes and universities that they fund, and legitimated by government agencies (and international institutions like the World Health Organization) that have been radically privatized.

Previously, a significant number of citizens were capable of assessing the accuracy of information on their own. Research institutes like Harvard University still had an ethical commitment to the scientific method and to academic integrity.

All that is over now. The façades of the NIH and Harvard remain the same, maybe they are even better maintained, but the intellectual innards have rotted away. Distinguished professors are easily assembled to give testimony to ridiculous theories about COVID19.

The dangers of the COVID19 vaccines are not the primary threat. The danger lies rather in the shift of the decision-making process for policy away from science, and away from a transparent policy debate. COVID19 serves a successful precedent for invisible forces at private equity funds to decide medical policy in secret and then feed it to us through authority figures.

Those invisible forces now feel they are free to require of us, without any accountability to science, that we have any substance that they offer injected into our bodies as a condition for the right to attend school, to find employment or to receive medical treatment.

The process was made possible by the interaction of social networks, search engines, commercial media, and other critical components of daily experience that determine opinions concerning reliable and authoritative voices. That process is run as an invisible dictatorship that controls a distracted, confused and unfocused population, drowning in connectivity.

Nothing will get better until citizens recognize the cause of this nightmare was not the legacy of the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas or the Trumps, although they all played their role, but rather the end of the self-reliant and informed citizen with access to the writings of experts with a deep commitment to the scientific method and to ethical principles.