What force is powerful enough to synchronize every leader in almost every country to do the wrong thing on almost every covid action without assuming every leader is evil and/or stupid?
Why has no one figured out what’s going on, including normally intelligent alt-media?
Let’s assume that most of our leaders are normal people, of average intelligence, with good intentions, and they care about the future of their children.
By normal I mean they are decent people with flaws, just like you and I.
By average intelligence I mean they probably have some high school level science, have read a few popular books, and maybe watched a few documentaries, but are not well grounded in the laws of physics, and their mathematics skills are modest at best. Like most people, they do not have a good understanding of energy and its relationship with everything, nor do they have a good grasp of what is technically feasible.
By good intentions I mean they want to do a good job for the people that elected them, while of course making a living, and perhaps providing some extras for their family if a benign opportunity arises, just as you or I would.
By caring about their children I mean they are genuinely worried about:
- The threat of an economic crash caused by unsustainable debt and its associated everything bubble that is now flashing red and impossible to ignore.
- The reality and threat of climate change that is now obvious to anyone that has been alive for more than a few decades.
- Limits to growth. Our leader’s understanding of energy depletion is probably a mixed bag, as it is with our next door neighbors. Most leaders probably understand that fossil energy growth is no longer desirable, some may understand that fossil energy growth is no longer possible, most probably still hope the green energy story is true but are getting worried it may be false, and a tiny minority may understand the reality of peak oil and its implications.
Overlaying all of the above, our leaders, like most humans, have a genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, which manifests as an optimism bias, and an inability to grasp the reality and implications of human overshoot. We can be fairly certain that none of our leaders have defective denial genes, which would permit them to see overshoot, because that would have prevented them from winning their election.
Given these assumptions about our leaders, which are probably true, what would we expect them to do?
Let’s start with what they’ve done to date:
- Increased the debt and lowered the interest rate to buy time for someone to think of something.
- Signed free trade agreements to squeeze more efficiency out of the global economy.
- Subsidized surplus corn to stretch gasoline with ethanol.
- Subsidized green energy and electric cars in the hope it would reduce fossil energy use. They don’t understand why, but they can see this strategy is not helping.
- Invested a lot of money into nuclear fusion returning zero prospects of success.
- Agreed with good intentions to many climate change protocols and subsequently learned it is impossible to fulfill those agreements without damaging the economy.
- Continued heavy military spending, just in case.
I expect our leaders now understand that:
- We are between a rock and a hard place. They don’t fully understand why we have reached limits to growth, nor can they due to their normal denial genes, but they do understand something must change soon.
- Debt is a bomb waiting to explode. They can see the end of the runway with rising inflation.
- Climate change is a really nasty problem. Consumption must go down, but that will crash the economy. Even with CO2 reductions, it’s too late to avoid refugees and starvation.
- Avoiding damaging social unrest, and mitigating/reducing the coming suffering will require sacrifice and sharing between countries, which will require some form of global cooperation with tight control over citizens.
Those of us that have paid attention and not listened to the official narrative know that nothing about covid makes sense. To be blunt, almost every action and policy has been wrong, in almost every country, and all of our leaders are synchronized, including their political opposition, almost without exception. How can this be? It’s simply not possible that all of our leaders are evil and/or stupid.
What force is powerful enough to have caused a diverse group of big ego leaders from many countries to cooperate on a secret plan that no one discusses? What force is powerful enough to have caused them to do things that under normal circumstances would have been blocked by their good ethics and character?
We know the various central banks have been working as a team since at least the 2008 GFC to keep the global wheels on. Recall that in the 2008 aftermath it was disclosed that we were hours away from a collapse of the banking system had the US congress not approved the bailout. The stresses and pressures in the system today are MUCH higher than they were in 2008 because we fixed a too much debt problem by adding a lot more debt.
In 2019 something in the global plumbing was beginning to break and it came to a head in September with a crisis in the repo market. The central banks together decided what needed to be done and the head of each central bank sat down with the leader of their country and spelled out the reality that an imminent “recession”, if not averted, would likely take out modern civilization due to the global debt bubble and lack of growth.
I imagine they said something like, “we need an excuse to print a gazillion dollars, and we’re going to need a digital currency soon that restricts many freedoms, and we might fail so you should think about a plan B for controlling social unrest. We think a not so serious global pandemic exaggerated into a panic is the perfect cover to accomplish all of this.”
No other force is powerful enough to explain the behavior we observe. It explains everything, including why no one talks about it, because if they did it would cause panic in the markets, which would harm themselves and their children. This also thankfully means we can continue to assume that most (not all) of our leaders are decent people like you and I.
The covid pandemic provided:
- A reason for everyone from all political persuasions to support printing and handing out trillions of dollars to avoid a “recession”.
- A means via lockdowns of reducing energy and materials consumption, and restricting freedom of movement and assembly, that can be invoked as needed without causing the panic that disclosing the end of growth would cause.
- A reason for creating the infrastructure and social behaviors necessary for a digital currency via vaccine passports. A digital currency will be very helpful for implementing negative interest rates needed to avoid a Minsky Moment, and for rationing food and energy, and for preventing bank runs. The path they chose was to require all citizens to be injected with a substance and to carry proof via a vaccine passport. I expect they hoped the injected substance would be harmless with some tangible benefit but it appears their hopes have been dashed by Murphy’s Law and inadequate time for testing.
- Most powerful countries agreed to this plan. The US, EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia are all on board. As is China who engineered the virus with funding from the US, and which influenced the WHO to ensure global spread of the virus in the early days.
- Russia refused to join the plan, perhaps after calculating that with its healthy ratio of natural resources to population, modest debt, food self-sufficiency, and citizens capable of enduring some hardship, they will be better off charting an independent path.
- The collaborating leaders viscerally hate Putin for not being a team player and are attempting to cause a regime change in Russia by provoking Russia into an expensive war and by applying economic sanctions. As with covid, it seems this plan is failing so we should expect a Plan B soon.
- A new repo crisis began in 2022 and so Monkeypox was introduced just in case another pandemic is required to get the financial system under control.
Finally, we can now answer another burning question:
- Why has no one figured out what’s going on, including normally intelligent alt-media?
- Because to understand requires acceptance of the end of growth and overshoot, and that’s not possible for most people due to our species’ tendency to deny unpleasant realities as explained by Varki’s MORT theory.
- For those that don’t believe the official covid narrative, it’s ok to blame corrupt pharma, or a scheming WEF, but it’s not ok to blame overshoot.
Let’s hope Plan B does not involve nuclear weapons but does have something to do with humane population reduction.
You know we are out of oil when Saudi Arabia is bleating on about green energy and embarking on end-of-empire projects. Also I don’t know how they’re going to maintain the grass and trees in this plan considering they drained their aquifer in the 80s
They are insane and focused on all the wrong things.
Saudi Arabia population:
1950 3.1M
1960 4.0M
1970 5.8M
1980 9.7M
1990 16.2M
2000 20.6M
2010 27.4M
2020 34.8M
2030 ???
2040 3M
Yes 99% of their population are city dwellers apparently. The only country in the world without a river. Their population is a disaster waiting to happen 🙁
Speaking of SA, this from the “mad money” department:
The Saudis just started a golf league, the LIV Tour and they’re stealing PGA players away with huge sign-on bonuses. “Sportswashing”- using sport (and cash) to improve their reputation. Australian Greg “The Shark” Norman is the CEO. The American golf star, Phil Mickelson, received $200 million just to join. And it just came out in May that Phil, by his own admission, once lost $40 million in four years gambling. And of course now he’ll now turn around and start five $10M charities to sportswash his rep! Meh…
shorturl.at/atH04
shorturl.at/bcvyV
LOL.
A few nights ago I watched a documentary on the engineering behind Dubai’s indoor snow skiing resort.
https://www.skidxb.com/
Wonderful intelligent thoughtful interview with Dr. Phillip Altman on the insane Australian covid policies.
One point that stood out for me was that Australian authorities knew the safety and effectiveness of Ivermectin despite calling it dangerous and banning it’s use, which is more evidence in support of my hypothesis.
I began to summarize other key points but it’s too much work because he makes so many good points that support my hypothesis. Just watch it.
And watch his demeanor. He’s an expert with strong ethics that’s been studying covid for 3+ hours every day for 2 years and his brain can’t fathom the insanity of what our leaders have done and continue to do. It’s like he’s in shock.
https://amps.redunion.com.au/blog/episode9_phillip_altman
Altman makes a key statement at the end: “The TGA (Australian health authorities) are very capable and know the information but are under enormous pressure both nationally and internationally to act in certain ways. They are very competent. I’ve dealt with them for decades.”
This is not pharma corruption.
This is not stupidity.
This is not incompetence.
This is (was?) not evil.
This is a global plan to prevent and/or to prepare for an economic collapse (aka The Great Reset).
You could argue that some evil (and/or fear of being strung up) is present today now that we have 12 months of data that shows the gene inoculations are not safe as was originally hoped.
Regardless, given what we know today, pushing for children to be vaccinated IS fucking evil. If my hypothesis that vaccination was a path to a digital currency is correct, why push for children? Children don’t need access to currency. It won’t necessarily eliminate a control group. Children could be vaccinated when they grow up. Children getting sick and dying from adverse reactions will significantly increase the risk of authorities being strung up.
The children policy doesn’t fit in my story. I don’t understand.
Ideas?
Yes that was a very good interview. I’ve heard Altman been interviewed before but I can’t remember when.
My guesses:
We’re two and half years in and nobody has been strung up yet, they’re not concerned about it perhaps? It takes healthy, clear-headed peeps to organize resistance, how many of those are there these days?
I’ve read that 1/3 of parents “definitely won’t” vax their kids (here in the US at least), if nothing else it helps identify Team Resistance?
They’re denying that getting strung up is even a possibility?
By the way, in regard to vax manufacturers, what happened to J&J in all of this? Looks like they’ve been put on the back burner, see the bottom of this post:
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/how-fda-s-approaching-covid-19-vaccines-kids-under-5
Chris Martenson may have read my post above that started this comment thread, or more likely he independently came to the same conclusions as I did because there is no other conclusion one can draw from the evidence unless you assume all of our leaders are evil and/or stupid.
Martenson does a nice job of analyzing the Great Reset although he puts a spin on it that I’m sure sells subscriptions but I think is disingenuous when you understand how deeply rooted most citizens are in denial of overshoot.
Similar to your Overpopulation Denial post from 2017 Rob. That had a response to a very similar post from Alice back in 2017.
https://un-denial.com/2016/03/25/overpopulation-denial/
You added your theory that… “continued growth of the population via immigration became necessary to maintain some overall economic growth despite falling real incomes for individuals.”
I see that reliance on immigration here in NZ where until covid appeared successive governments had enabled historically high net migration rates for the previous decade. They then promoted how strong our economy was. Our previous prime minister worked for Merrill Lynch. Our current prime minister is a career policy advisor and politician who was once the president of the International Union of Socialist Youth and part of Mr Schwab’s Young Global Leaders alumni.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this other than all roads lead to overshoot and denial of reality 🙂.
I forgot I wrote that essay Campbell, thanks for dredging it up. Five years later I don’t think I’d change much if I wrote it again today.
I maintain that if you are overshoot aware and have not yet given up and still want to make the future less bad, like for example Nate Hagens and Alice Friedemann, then it doesn’t matter how many dozens of clever theories you discover to explain the causes of overshoot, unless you FIRST acknowledge and confront MORT you will fail.
This essay I wrote on the un-Denial Decision Tree explains more thoroughly:
https://un-denial.com/2020/10/23/the-un-denial-decision-tree/
Why did everyone stop talking about Population & Immigration?
https://energyskeptic.com/2022/why-are-population-immigration-taboo-topics/
In case Rob missed it.
On this topic, I still have my copy of “When the People Bubble POPs” by Dr. Jack Kevorkian (often portrayed in the media as Dr. Death).
I did miss it, thank you.
Good on Alice Friedemann for speaking up.
I do think the 20 reasons Alice lists for why we don’t discuss over population are all enabled by our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities as explained by Varki’s MORT theory.
Brilliant expert or crazy crank? We have an opportunity here to test Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche.
In this June 19, 2022 interview Bossche makes many specific predictions, one of which is that hospitals will collapse from overload within a few weeks or months. “Few” is fuzzy but since he said “weeks or months” I suggest we give him until September 1, 2022.
I’m going to listen to it again because he makes many other predictions including 1) more cancer in the vaccinated; 2) this could be the end of western civilization (Africa will do best because they are least vaccinated).
Really good discussion. Worth several listens. Other guy seems to be an expert at antibody testing.
So, if his predictions don’t come true, I predict that almost all of his current adherents will continue to advocate his hypotheses. I hope he’s wrong and I hope I’m wrong.
I predict if Bossche’s right all of the people who think he’s wrong will blame the unvaccinated rather than the vaccines, and our leaders will double down on pushing more vaccinations.
I won’t.
We keep getting headlines here like this one..
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-flu-health-worker-shortages-minister-andrew-little-says-system-as-a-whole-is-managing/PFQ4FIRNSYBVRKK3P4UTP366IA/
I know the media like to over hype things but a lot of these calls seem to be from people in the medical profession while the government continues to downplay the situation. It’s probably complex with lack of investment in the health system by successive governments also being a significant issue.
I do know the mandating of vaccinations for health workers has meant job losses. We had a friend stay recently who was a nurse who got covid early in 2020 in Australia. Once she’d recovered and returned to work she was given all the suspected covid cases until they tested negative. She said no people she looked after actually tested positive. I’m not sure of the number but she was working through until the vaccine was rolled out and when she opted out of vaccination, partly because of the adverse reaction cases she was seeing, she lost her job. She’s desperately disappointed to not be able to do the job that gives her a real sense of purpose.
We also had a video circulating online here recently from a nurse who had a severe myocarditis reaction to the second vaccine shot. They’re now mandating boosters for health workers and when she refused based on her previous reaction she lost her job. She was distraught.
Like vaccinating kids these decisions / rules also make no sense and add to pressures on the health system.
Mike might have more insights here than me. I haven’t looked into our data in any depth.
Well, there don’t appear to be significant safety concerns in the latest vaccine safety report with “only” 3 deaths likely to have been caused by the vaccine (over 11 million doses administered) and serious reported events not significantly higher than expected numbers normally. The next report is imminent, so we’ll see if anything has changed.
I’ve never been a fan of vaccine mandates, especially given the lack of efficacy with them over omicron. But I know I wouldn’t like to be the one having to make such decisions.
For the thirty reasons I listed in the next post, of which adverse event data was one, I no longer believe a word any of our authorities now say. Before I would trust a report like the one you provided, I would need to spend days digging and have access to the source raw data. None of our leaders have any credibility.
I haven’t read your next post yet but I would tend to agree with this comment. The problem is, then, that we have no such access to the raw data, so there isn’t much we can say, definitively, that is backed by data. I’m disgusted with our Ministry of Health because they seem to have chosen to publish data in such a way as to make calculations on vaccine efficacy impossible. However, it is very odd, indeed, that what they do publish actually serves to suggest there is no point in further vaccination. Is the real picture even worse?
Damn good question. And if it’s so safe and effective why don’t they remove the emergency approval and hold the manufacturer’s liable.
It’s not termed “emergency approval” in NZ. I don’t recall the exact term but it is full approval with conditions.
I’m watching like a hawk for evidence that supports my theory that covid was cover for central banks to try to prevent an economic collapse, and in case they failed, to put in place tools for maintaining social order post collapse.
I listened to an interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a lead author on the Great Barrington Declaration, who said at the start of covid they were aggressively censored for opposing lockdowns. Vaccine safety/effectiveness and early treatment were not in play so you can’t blame pharma influence. This supports my hypothesis that in the early days the priorities were 1) a reason to print a gazillion dollars and 2) lockdowns to reduce energy consumption.
I listened to an interview with Dr. Peter McCullough who said that today all forms of early treatment, including those recently released and protected by pharma patents, are being blocked in favor of vaccines, despite overwhelming evidence that the vaccines have a very poor benefit/cost ratio today. This supports my hypothesis that vaccine policies are not driven by pharma grift or public health objectives, rather are primarily a vehicle for introducing social control leading to digital currencies.
China plans to continue zero covid policies for 5 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/27/alarm-in-beijing-after-announcement-zero-covid-policy-may-last-five-years
I watch Russell Brand on YouTube occasionally. He has a different perspective on a lot of issues including covid. He has some interesting folk on his podcast but I no longer listen to those since he went to a subscription based platform.
This video came up in my YouTube feed so I watched for interest. Apparently we should blame globalisation. the relationship between state and corporations, and the main stream media. It’s definitely not a scarcity issue.
He has 5.7 million subscribers with the majority of comments along the lines of “thanks for speaking the truth”. I thought about commenting to put forward another narrative like maybe overshoot and peak oil influences but decided not to. With 3500 commenters bowing at the alter of Russell (he is religious) after the video had only been up 2 hours I figured it was a waste of time.
Globalisation. the relationship between state and corporations, and the main stream media are his go to route causes on almost every video he posts and while I agree with a lot of the issues he brings up I think he’s also, maybe inadvertently, playing to the human trait of “we just want someone to blame” to gather subscribers. Anyway I came away thinking there are a lot of people in the world who will suffer in the collapse while continuing to shake their fists at the elite as they go down.
I’m off out to the preparation tasks on the land while the winter sun is shining.
Globalisation, state, corporations, and the main stream media are superficially plausible to blame and are not unpleasant topics because (we think) we can do something about them.
Geologic depletion of a non-renewable and non-substitutable resource that everything we value depends on is deeply unpleasant because there’s nothing we can do about it except change our lifestyles and reduce our population.
Nate Hagens thinks it’s energy blindness and he blames a lack of education.
I think it’s clearly a genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities because it’s everywhere you look, regardless of intelligence or education.
In case anyone was wondering what happened to RE of the Doomstead Diner, this is the most recent update I could find. He’s had some serious health problems and is struggling.
The Doomstead Diner blog has shut down due to a lack of donations. I never did participate there because I tried to educate RE on MORT and he blew me off.
https://globalcollapse.createaforum.com/general-discussion/following-in-the-footsteps-of-the-doomstead-diner/
Thanks Rob,
A couple of years ago I used to comment on Doomstead Diner occasionally. The regulars there were a pretty polarized opinionated crowd. I know RE could be difficult to deal with but I had nothing respect for what he had done. I looked at the link you put up and he still appears active there but there isn’t much commenting. T\ns if given a logical/rational set of facts and arguments.
AJ
That last line of my comment was supposed to say “I like this site because most people present logical/rational sets of facts and arguments.”
That said, I hate my 5 year old hand down from one of my kid’s laptop computer . . . it takes every errant keystroke (or mere touching of the built in touchpad) and translates it into crap that screws up what I have typed (as above). BUT at this stage in my life and considering that if collapse gains speed having a great computer is kinda meaningless.
AJ
He’s still hanging in there. He has a new hangout at globalcollapse.createaforum.com
Sorry you got the link posted
Excellent interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Geert Vanden Bossche updated his advice today.
Notice that this expert branded as an antivaxxer is recommending people be vaccinated with vaccines that are safe and effective.
Also note that Bossche is advising those who have already been vaccinated with an unsafe and ineffective vaccine to have antivirals on hand because their immune systems have been damaged.
https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/open-letter-advice-gvb
Sabine Hossenfelder today on bee health. Her key conclusions are:
1) ecological systems are much more complex than quantum gravity;
2) honey bees are not at risk because they are a farmed commodity with a price, what’s at risk are natural resources that we exploit without cost or attention to the consequences, like wild bees.
Still looking for a pro-choice advocate that is concerned about the loss of a useful tool for population reduction to reduce suffering from overshoot.
Hi Rob, since you don’t have Facebook, I though I would share this here. Will Falk has written an excellent piece on exactly this topic. Here’s his website by the way: http://willfalk.org/about/
Thanks! Good to see someone cut through the political and religious bullshit and get to the ethical core.
Given our state of extreme overshoot, every birth that we humanely prevent means one less person suffers.
This might be an easier clip to watch.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7bUTGhvPWI
Google engineer Blake Lemoine caused controversy last week by saying that one of Google’s deep learning AI programs, LaMDA, might be “sentient.”
Bill Maher provides a few tips on how to tell if your computer has gone sentient.
https://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/index/2022/6/17/how-to-know-if-your-ai-is-sentient
Right on queue. Central banks must be getting worried again.
The end must be nigh. Quiet doomers are coming out of dormancy and stepping up their game.
Today it’s Xraymike79’s turn with an analysis of Nate Hagen’s interview with Peter Ward.
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2022/06/23/ticking-off-the-checklist-for-mass-extinction/
I re-listened to Nate Hagen’s interview with Peter Ward. It’s both excellent and dire. It’d easy to forget how important the oceans are in our overshoot story.
Peter Ward is highly intelligent and aware, and yet he makes this jarring statement about covid at the 41 minute mark:
It’s remarkable because there is zero science to support the mask polices that were put in place. There is some benefit from N95 masks worn by people trained in their use, but no benefit from the masks we were required by law to wear.
Later in the interview Ward mentioned that he is completely disconnected from social media and it seems to me that this is a good example of how effectively our leaders controlled the conventional information channels. Without access to uncensored information, people have no clue that everything they were told about covid is wrong.
Excellent rant from Kunstler today. His rage is appropriate and he included only one sentence of political crap which I deleted.
Kunstler too is searching for a plausible explanation of our unprecedented insanity. He doesn’t include on the menu my hypothesis that covid was intended to try to prevent an economic collapse, and if unsuccessful, to put in place tools that will useful for maintaining social order after the collapse.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/when-the-wicked-try-to-flee/
Heinberg today also laments our lack of wisdom.
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-352-the-1970s-again
Tim Watkins is good today. He takes a deep dive into our options for responding to energy depletion and concludes we won’t choose the path that minimizes suffering.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/06/24/choose-one-bad-option-or-get-them-all/
I’m reading The Carnivore Diet by Dr Shawn Baker. Interesting. Apparently you don’t get scurvy after all if you don’t eat your vegetables. There are quite a few cultures that eat meat exclusively, not just the Inuit. Dr Baker makes a case that we are more carnivore than omnivore and only became omnivorous by necessity due to depleting all the big game.
It’s got me thinking about what a sustainable society would actually look like. If we all ate only meat the population would have to be a small fraction of what it is today.
I think even vegetarian farmer’s will require livestock for fertilizer when the natural gas for Haber-Bosch is gone.
The recent interview of Jason Bradford by Nate Hagens on sustainable agriculture was excellent. Jason doesn’t discuss the livestock/fertilizer issue but did argue that livestock historically was the buffer used to survive a bad crop due to weather, blight, etc.
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/24-jason-bradford