Category: the narrative

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Club of Rome at 50 years old

I used to believe the following tenets of the Club of Rome. I did so for about four years (from the age of 22 to 26) until I woke up from ecodoomism. It is apparent that millions have been sucked into this cult and have never found a way out. Yet. Indeed, ecodoomism is the world’s leading cause of depression, suicide, sexual ambiguity,  non-replacement and cultural anomie. It is immediately the cause of policies designed to immiserate the population (viz. Dutch government putting farms out of business to control world atmospheric nitrogen levels).

Here are the doctrines of the Club of Rome, circa 1972. Look familiar?

 

• “The Limits to Growth” contains six main messages:
ƒ Firstly, that the environmental impact of human society
had become heavier between 1900 and 1972 due to
both an increase in the number of humans and the
amount of resources consumed and pollution generated
per person per year.
ƒ That our planet is physically limited, and that humanity
cannot continue to use more physical resources and
generate more emissions than nature is capable of
supplying in a sustainable manner. In addition, it will
not be possible to rely on technology alone to solve the
problem as this would only delay reaching the carrying
capacity of the planet by a few years.
ƒ Third, the authors cautioned that it is possible, and even
likely, that the human ecological footprint will overshoot
the carrying capacity of the planet, further explaining that
this would likely occur due to significant delays in global
decision making while growth continued, bringing the
human footprint into unsustainable territory.

ƒ Once humanity has entered this unsustainable territory,
we will have to move back into sustainable territory,
either through “managed decline” of activity, or we will
be forced to move back through “collapse” caused by the
brutal inherent processes of nature or the market.
ƒ The fifth message is one of hope. The authors state
that: “The challenge of overshoot from decision delay
is real, but easily solvable if human society decided to
act”, meaning that forward looking policy could prevent
humanity from overshooting the aforementioned
planetary limits.
ƒ Lastly, the authors advocated for an early start – in 1972
that was 1975 – to achieve a smooth transition to a
sustainable world without needing to pass through the
overshoot and contraction phases.

 

The World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab have followed as night follows day. They key assumptions are that the current population/ resource consumption mix is unsustainable, and the second is that a process of managed decline can smooth the transition to sustainability. I am about to say something at once paradoxical and true. Humans have more to fear from the managers of population reduction than we do of civilizational collapse. Because the population reduction is being planned by people who think they are doing good  and the old adage of C. S. Lewis applies: that the robber barons might have their greed satiated, and stop, but the person who tortures for you own good does so with a clean conscience and will not stop. Hence Stalin. Hence Klaus Schwab, and his minions and acolytes.

Collapses are random and bring their own correctives. They are chaotic. If the Roman Empire has to fall, it is better that it occur without central planning, administered by mad tyrants. I realize this is offensive to those who believe that civilizational change can be planned, but it cannot.

The  assumption that needs to be challenged the most is that collapse is somehow inevitable because we have gone beyond limits set by Gaia, that this unsustainability is somehow new, and that we can plan our way out of it.

We went beyond the limits set by Gaia since we domesticated animals, invented agriculture and mined metals. I would not wish to say there are no limits, but I would say that the collective intelligence of mankind has continually found solutions to the problems we have ourselves created. We went into the realm of the “unsustainable” tens of thousands of years ago. We are still in “unsustainablity”. There is no stable state. The Club of Rome published its manifesto in 1972. It had a tremendous negative effect over time. It resuscitated the idea of a centrally planned economy when the central conceit of Marxism had collapsed: that a planned economy could prevail over the chaotic forces of the market, or of nature.

The close relationship between the idea of sustainability and the tyranny of all-wise central planners needs to be made clear.

________________________-

Regarding solutions that appear without planning, population growth is collapsing through the very process of unsustainable wealth generation that has come from burning fossil fuels. Women reach a level of prosperity where their kids will survive until adulthood, and – bingo! – they produce at most two children. It is enough to make the most hardened ecodoomist pause and reconsider.

See

Or more brutal yet, try David Goldman (known as Spengler)

 

 

My sentiments exactly: the catastrophe that is Canada

My consternation about the descent of Canada into politically generated distrust, fascism and chaos are well expressed in the video conversation above. The press is bought. The opposition from the Conservatives is weak and tepid. The NDP is a lapdog of the Liberals. The government is unhinged. It believes – or acts as if it believes – that the Canadian working class is a force needing suppression. I am out of words.

Then, having discussed Canada,  they get on to the real issues driving the whole mess: the World Economic Forum, the capture of the elite by the global warming madness, and the measures that have been taken by the federal government to ruin the oil and gas industries. Note that the attack on the Coastal Gas Pipeline construction site was mentioned only 24 hours after it happened by State News under the caption “alleged attack” on pipeline worksite.

Canada’s GDP per capita has remained at about $45,000 for a decade, while the US figure has gone from about that level to about  $67,000 per capita. Canada is stagnating.

Watch this for confirmation.

us gdp per capita – Google Search

 

 

Stuart Parker deserves your attention

Stuart Parker, previously unknown to me, has precisely described the dynamic driving Canadian cultural and ideological conformity.

Quote-

As I predicted back in 2008, the people who now hold this belief that anything less than total control and absolute discipline is a sign of weakness and illegitimacy are now what pollsters politely call “the centre-left.”

Sadly, as with all broadly held cultural assumptions, these values concerning control, submission and dissent eventually escape their original context and run rampant through society. If people become convinced of a new moral order for how the world above them should run, it ultimately shakes down to the world below.

And we see this here with centre-left reaction to the national truckers’ protest in Ottawa. No permanent organization is running this protest, which appears to be built around social media, a GoFundMe page and a loose affiliation of local leadership groups developed in provincial protests by truckers over the past few years.

And of course, it does not represent all or even most truckers in the industry. The crew who are in Ottawa are whiter, more rural and more right-leaning than the industry as a whole, which is, in turn, whiter, more rural and more right-leaning than Canadian society as a whole. The folks in Ottawa are also more likely to be “owner-operators,” who have financed their heavy equipment through financial institutions. Those driving trucks owned by extended families or by trucking companies directly are much less likely to be part of the protest.

There is no doubt that a small fraction of these individuals are members of Canada’s tiny fascist militias, the Sons of Odin, the Proud Boys and other far-right political groups and that a disproportionate number voted for the People’s Party. In addition, the spirit of the protest and the issue it is taking up, vaccine passports, have attracted members of right-wing groups that are not themselves truckers but wish to express solidarity or see the protest as an organizing and recruitment opportunity.

Those of us who cut our teeth in the 1980s peace movement know this story well. The Vancouver Peace March used to attract 10% of the city’s population (50,000 protesters at its peak) for its annual walk across Burrard Bridge to support global nuclear disarmament. And, consequently, the vanguard of the march comprised the Trotskyites, Maoists and other communist sectarians and foreign dictator fan clubs who saw this as their big annual opportunity to radicalize and recruit ordinary anti-nuclear activists.

snip

Because Canadians, as a whole, but especially centre-left voters have now come to believe that the legitimacy of a movement inheres not in its size or the diversity of people and views it represents but rather in its ability to discipline and control its supporters, this protest looks both illegitimate and frightening. Not only is this protest not controlling the speech and signage of its members; it is celebrating its refusal to control these things and instead sticking to the basics of making sure protesters are nonviolent and law-abiding.

And, in progressive, urban Canada, this broad-brush guilt-by-association strategy exhumed from the 1980s appears to be working, no matter how intellectually lazy its journalistic practitioners are being.

snip

I am not writing this piece to advocate for the protest and its participants. I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today. I am asking us to think about what happens to the horizon of possibility for mass organizing when we throw in with the idea that actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past and the only legitimate public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants carefully disciplined into reading from an identical script or into silence.

snip

As a person who, because I dissented from the progressive consensus on a single issue, has been smeared as a transphobe, homophobe, pedophile, white supremacist, racist and ableist in the past year and a half, I can no longer simply accept the opinion of centre-left media on whether someone is a dangerous, bigoted member of the alt-right. I can no longer trust the government-financed Canadian Anti-Hate Network on whether someone is a dangerous hatemonger because many of my comrades and I are on their list. And not everyone is going to be like me and check those claims against the facts. Most people will just start ignoring those claims.

There is a high price to pay when you decide to cry “wolf” over fascism in a political situation like our own, where the authoritarian threat is real and society-wide.

More importantly still, I am trying to sound a cultural alarm bell about the exaltation of order, disciple and control as Canadians’ primary political values. The fact is that those values are authoritarian. In a nation wherein rapid, dramatic change is not just a moral necessity but an ecological one, we need to retain the capacity for mass mobilization and our capacity to resist an authoritarian regime, irrespective of whether it calls itself progressive or conservative.

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Amen

Yesterday’s heresy, today’s truth

Yes it was cooked up in a lab. Yes they organized a campaign to tell us it was not cooked up in a lab.    Yes it was the product of US government funding through Fauci’s efforts to get research conducted in China that would have been illegal to conduct in the United States – ‘gain of function’ research. Even DARPA turned down the opportunity to conduct this research.

I cite the article in City Journal, “A Covid Origin Conspiracy” by Nicholas Wade.

“A striking feature of the excerpts released in the committee’s January 11, 2022 letter is that the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation. The focus of their attention was a genetic element called a furin cleavage site. This short snippet of genetic material is what makes the virus so infectious for human cells. Scientists sometimes add this element to laboratory viruses to make them more virulent, but in nature, viruses usually acquire runs of genetic material like this by swapping them with other members of their family. The furin cleavage site in the Covid virus sticks out like a sore thumb because no other known member of its family—a group called Sarbecoviruses—possesses a furin cleavage site. So how did the virus acquire it?

“A member of the Andersen group, Garry of Tulane University, remarks in the latest emails on the fact that the inserted furin cleavage site, a string of 12 units of RNA, the virus’s genetic material, was exactly the required length, a precision unusual in nature: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”

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“So what induced these virologists to such a radical change of view? “The February 1, 2020, telecon sent a clear message to participants that Fauci and Collins regarded discussion of the lab leak possibility, even though plausible on scientific data, to be politically unacceptable and something that had to be blocked,” says Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, a molecular biologist and a leading critic of gain-of-function research.

“Fauci oversees a large portion of funds available for virology research in the U.S. It is not unreasonable to suppose that virologists keen on continuing their careers would be very attentive to his wishes. Both Garry’s and Andersen’s labs receive large sums of money from the NIAID. “Telecon participants with current and pending grants controlled by Fauci and Collins could not have missed or misunderstood the clear message,” Ebright says.”

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“But the lab-leak theory gained in plausibility as more facts emerged about the research NIAID was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The program followed a debate among virologists as to how far one should go in enhancing a virus’s abilities in the lab in order to study its properties. Collins and Fauci were proponents of “gain-of-function” research, as it is blandly known. “Important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” they wrote in the Washington Post in 2011.

Some virologists questioned whether the possible gains were worth the substantial risks. But Collins and Fauci prevailed over the doubters, and in 2014 they began supporting a program of manipulating SARS-related viruses in Wuhan. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York, managed the program, using NIH money to fund Shi Zhengli, the chief expert on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

 

Hubris. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Wade;’ complete article is damning, in part because it is so factual, in part because his tone is so moderate.

The same message is conveyed by Megyn Kelly here,

 

 

Addendum

In the Guardian’s review of the Ridley-Chan book, epidemiologist Mark Honigsbaum wrote (in November 2021):

“The tragedy is that in their desire to make a plausible case for a lab accident, Chan and Ridley neglect the far more urgent and compelling story of how the trade in wild animals, coupled with global heating and the destruction of natural habitats, makes the emergence of pandemic viruses increasingly likely. That is the more probable origin story and the scenario that should really concern us.”

Mark Honigsbaum is the author of The Pandemic Century

Take a moment to consider the thought that we ought to be more concerned with global warming and destruction of natural habitats than with deliberate efforts, paid for by national health authorities in the United States, to make viruses more deadly.  While the proposition is not ridiculous, it is reveals a bias towards blaming everyone but China and, by extension, the people who paid for gain of function research, who were Fauci and Collins.

 

 

 

New Media: Joe Rogan and the rest

Our federal regulator  (the CRTC) could not be persuaded to call the Internet the Internet; it was always called “new media” because it was a technology invented in the 1970s, not the 1950s, and it came to prominence with the adoption of the world wide web in the 1990s.

In this case, however, it is appropriate to call the Internet “new media”. Legacy TV technology is starting to show its age. There are still people who get most of their information from television, and they are roughly 70 years of age and older.  They end up believing the Narrative in its entirety, for want of competing visions. As Jordan Peterson said, “the younger generation would not even recognize the corpse of the television system if they saw it”.

 

Which leads me to the article by the self-confessed leftie journalist in the Post today: Tara Henley: why I quit the CBC

You don’t need to read the article to know why: racial and sexual identity politics has taken over completely. But why be concerned with the CBC? Its viewership is dropping as its subsidies are climbing. The key to staying misinformed: watch broadcast or cable television.

 

 

 

Rittenhouse acquitted

 

From CBC news, which fails to mention the criminal pasts of the people shot by Rittenhouse:

“Huber was then killed after hitting Rittenhouse in the head or neck with a skateboard, and Grosskreutz was shot after pointing a gun of his own at Rittenhouse.

“After the verdict, Huber’s parents, Karen Bloom and John Huber, said the outcome “sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.”

I thought that was what the Black Lives Matter and Antifa did. Apparently only they are entitled to show up in any town, incite violence, and create the danger that justifies shooting. Defenders of order are criminals if they do the same.

 

The zombification of San Francisco

This is San Francisco on fentanyl.

 

From Michael Shellenberger

“For over a decade, the city of San Francisco has been carrying out an experiment. What happens when thousands of drug addicts are not only permitted to use heroin, fentanyl and meth publicly, but also enabled to do so? The results are in: hundreds of them die annually. Last year, 712 people in San Francisco died from drug overdoses or poisoning, and this year a similar number are on track to do so.

“Worse, cities around the country, from Seattle and Los Angeles to Philadelphia and Boston, have been copying San Francisco’s approach. Partly as a result of these supposedly progressive policies, 93,000 people in the US died in 2021 from illicit drugs, a more than five-fold increase from the 17,000 people killed by illicit drugs in 2000.”

……

“According to critical race theorist Ibram Kendi, whose views are shared by San Francisco’s progressive policymakers, policies that result in racial disparities are themselves racist. As a result, progressives should view harm reduction-only policies, including Housing First, as racist.

“Indeed, San Francisco is engaged in an unethical refusal to mandate proven medical treatment to drug addicts that is no different from the denial of medical treatment to syphilis sufferers by US government researchers in Tuskegee, Ala., between 1932 and 1972. In those infamous, racist experiments, US health and medical professionals denied penicillin to African American men long after it became clear, in 1947, that the antibiotic saved lives.”

 

More is at https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/more-black-americans-died-from-san 

Brexit the movie

 

 

This is an altogether a fine movie, filled with political insight. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Dominic Cummings, the architect of the victorious leave vote. The credits say that some portions of the movie are fictional, leaving one to infer that most of it is just how it happened. The portion I am sure is fictional is a scene near the end between Dominic Cummings and the head organizer of the Remain campaign, a Tory working for Prime Minister Campbell. They are in a pub after a long day’s work.  It is becoming clear to the Stay side that they are losing and they are surprised and outraged. They would stay that way for four more years. The Tory political professional running the Stay campaign accuses Cummings of undermining the rule of experts and of opening up political life in England to a set of forces that will be impossible to control.

Broadly speaking, the accusation is true. What kept politics manageable for the ruling classes was a consensus that experts in fact knew more than most people and that their rule was legitimate. This is under challenge in the English-speaking democracies.

Curtis Yarvin, of Mencius Moldbug fame, explains this as the rule of the Cathedral. It is a vitally important concept, and Brexit the movie touches upon it in the exchange between Dominic Cummings and the lead organizer for the Stay campaign.

“The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

Most notably, this pseudo-structure is synoptic: it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together.”

I am uncertain whether the term “the Cathedral” has to be conceived as Yarvin does. Yet it is stands as a useful metaphor for the collective inertia of received ideas that dominate political discourse these days.

Watch the Brexit movie. It will get you to the core of the issues. As the referendum approached, there was a telling scene during a focus group being held by the Remain side where some frizzy blonde-haired working class woman entirely loses it, and starts screaming that she is absolutely fed up with being told she is a racist for having a dim view of current rates of immigration, and that she has been fed up with this state of repression for the past twenty years. The meeting descends into chaos. At that point the chief organizer for the Remain side knows for sure that he is going to lose.

I wonder when that point will be reached in Canada.

 

 

Trump is making things worse – Andrew Sullivan with Sam Harris

This is a full and complete explication of Trump Derangement Syndrome by two highly articulate men who are suffering from it.

According to Harris and Sullivan, Trump is guilty of the following:

 

  • He is worsening the leftism of BLM and the extreme Left, by everything he does and is
  • He worsens the faults of all his opponents
  • He is greedy and malevolent and unaware of this deficits
  • He has denounced white supremacy in insufficiently strong terms
  • He is charcterized by extraordinary and extreme pathological narcissism,
  • Which prevented him from making objective and useful judgments about COVID
  • It is almost supernatural how he manages to skate through situations that would have torpedoed the Presidencies of anyone else
  • It is as if he were an extra-terrestrial put down among us to upset all our ideas and values
  • He is the object of a cult
  • His self confidence and psychological tenacity force those around him to accept his reality
  • It is a warlord mentality, and the capacity to pull this off is a disability on his part
  • He has the virtue of energy, and only mental illness can explain it
  • He has never spent a moment in silence or self-reflection
  • There is no governing process in his mind
  • He would need more virtues to be a more dangerous man
  • He has not sought to persuade; that would have given the persuaded some deference to their independence of mind
  • He wants to be a talk show host sitting in the Oval Office
  • He considers the entire political constitutional system to be a reality entertainment show.
  • Our judgments are objective.

The two of them are frankly in awe of a person whom they hate, or cannot figure out. “I think he has gotten into my head”, said Sullivan. Sullivan likens him to a totalitarian despot whose poster is on the walls everywhere.

Sam Harris:

“There are people who just don’t see this about him… I don’t have a theory of mind for those who don’t feel this way.”

Go to minute 43:00 of the podcast for Sullivan’s understanding why people who don’t like what the Left are doing to the United States would vote for Trump. It is as close as they get to understanding the other side, which is not close at all.

Sullivan and Harris also decry the New York Times, the Steele dossier, CNN, and the obsession with Russia-Trump collusion. It is as if their Trump derangement syndrome is rational, but the lower orders of the media are not entitled to their biases. They are alike with Scott Adams in their denunciation  of the “fine people” hoax that Trump had not sufficiently denounced white supremacy after the Charlottesville riots. They denounce the racialization being practised by the left wing media. They denounce the suppression of news regarding Hunter Biden by major news outlets.

These are two rational people who are caught on the narrow ledge afforded by reasonable views about the Left, and what I consider irrational fear of Trump. I think a lot of people are on that ledge.

And “of course” says Sulivan we should not be examining too closely the revelations from Hunter Biden’s computer about influence peddling with China and Ukraine. They go back and forth between understanding the causes why Trump was voted into power, and not understanding what he is doing to answer the constituencies that elected him.

 

 

 

 

 

Television versus Joe Rogan, and other topics

Spotify's dilemma: Censor Joe Rogan or call his podcast free speech? | National Post

 

This past week I spent a few days with friends at their cottage. They have a complete spectrum of broadcast television available, whereas I have not subscribed to cable for at least five years. During that time, I have cultivated my news and opinion sources by selecting twitter feeds, facebook friends, and youtube videos. I am not living in an outrage bubble. I see more of Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray, for instance, than talking heads. Even my favourite broadcaster, Tucker Carlson, is watched solely through the Intertubes. I have become accustomed to conversations on Triggernometry and other interview shows where questions are asked sincerely and answered comprehensively, where issues are engaged, and answers are open to debate rather than assumed to be false or true according to the Narrative – the tale the media are making up today for our consumption.

It was thus something of a shock to the system to watch reaction to the Speech From the Throne on CTV this week. I simply could not believe the rudeness of the chief Talking Head, Lisa Laflamme. Every question was a gotcha or a “when did you stop beating your wife?”. She made the current Finance Minister look good in that Chrystia Freeland answered hysterical questions with factual responses, and kept her cool throughout.

So naturally as Joe Rogan enters the world of broadcasting, he becomes the target of the hysterics and witch hunters of the MSM. The case in point this morning was a hit piece by Sadaf Ahsan, “Spotify’s dilemma: Censor Joe Rogan or call his podcast free speech?”

She writes:

“But here’s the thing: Rogan has long had a habit of spreading misinformation, sharing his own personal feelings and thoughts as facts, and he’s also a very big fan of conspiracy theories. It’s partly why he’s so popular for a very specific brand of fanboy, which Slate once generously described as “freethinkers who hate the left.”

Oh my goodness, how shocking! An opinion journalist who is sometimes wrong! And add to this the phony dilemma of whether Spotify’s staff has some role in censoring Joe Rogan, or Douglas Murray, or amy of the other thinkers who appear in Youtube. Apart from factual errors he is also accused of “transphobia” – the thought crime of insufficiently accepting that biological males are fmals when they declare themselves to be so.

Joe Rogan now draws viewership that competes seriously with entire cable TV networks.

This is from the article hyperlinked above.

  • “Joe probably gets 5-7 million views of full podcasts a day, which makes him far larger than any TV host.

  • Joe gets 200 million podcast views a month. CNN gets 330 million views a month, NBC and Fox are way bigger.

  • Factoring in Rogan clips, and media website views. Joe gets 400 million views a month. CNN 800 million, Fox 1.2 billion, 700 million for NBC. So Rogan is gigantic, but not bigger than the big media corporations. 1/2 of CNN though, and 2/3 of NBC. That’s insane.”

Other sources show cable networks drawing about 2-3 million viewers a month.( https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/)

Our busy little thought controller Sadaf Ahsan writes:

“Relatively politically liberal, Rogan has supported Bernie Sanders (though recently shifted his support to President Donald Trump), is pro-choice and believes in more social spending for the working class, but he also regularly gives right-wing commentators the space to share their ideas and often questions issues of LGBT equality. So it’s not all that surprising Rogan is loved by so many and that, as a figure who perpetuates a kind of toxic masculinity – what with his penchant for hunting, MMA fighting, and heteronormative views – he has become a beloved figure particularly in conservative circles that largely thrive online.”

 

Joe Rogan is a centrist Democrat, a male, a focused martial arts combattant, and a political liberal who likes Trump (sort of). He sounds like a quite typical American male of his generation, and he and millions more like him will secure Trump’s next term as President.

Rebel Yell rightly chides me for my naivety, in that I still think there might be some truth occasionally permitted in the MSM. Maybe there is, but the economics of slime hurling obviously provide more eyeballs than sobriety. The economic incentives of the MSM are skewed towards lies and outrage. Stay away from them.