Steve Bull's Blog, page 61
April 3, 2024
Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different, Part 2
January 4, 2023 (original posting date)
Going to ‘try’ and take a bit of a break from my self-indulgent Contemplation posts and specifically the energy series I began (see here for Part 1, Part 2). I do attempt to take time to reflect upon and do additional reading when I’m in ‘the writing zone’ so it takes some significant personal time and energy, that I tend to have more of during the Canadian winter months when my food gardening chores are on hold.
The break is to pursue some ‘action’ on my part — something I am attempting to do more of. I am initiating a Food Gardener’s Guild in my local community and wish to put my energies into that for the next week or more (in between my hockey playing). I threw the idea out this morning to local residents on our community’s Facebook group and got a resounding positive response in the first hour or so.
In light of this, I will be devoting some time to trying to get this off the ground.
However, having written a few chapters in the fourth book of my fictional novel series (that stalled a few years ago but have ready), I will share some of these over the next little while. Here are the links to PDF files of Chapter 1 (shared a few days ago), and now Chapter 2.
Scotland Implements Controversial Hate Legislation That Damages Free Speech
Implemented on 1 April under the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, the laws aim to bolster protections for individuals and communities vulnerable to hate crimes.
These laws offer a unifying structure that both consolidates current legislation and introduces new offenses. Now, any threatening or abusive conduct intended to inflame hate, rooted in prejudice towards various characteristics like age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity, constitutes wrongdoing.
The law, applicable even within the boundaries of private family homes, penalizes behavior devised to incite hatred, a provision previously only applicable to racial matters in Scotland.
Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s First Minister, stated emphatically that a “zero-tolerance approach” is needed to combat hate. He expressed his confidence in the police’s ability to handle investigations related to alleged hate.
The majority of the Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) approved the legislation in 2021. High-profile figures like J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk have publicly expressed their disapproval of the act, highlighting its threat to free speech.
A recent letter to Holyrood’s criminal justice committee from the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents (ASPS) raised concerns that an activist fringe might “weaponize” the law.Police Scotland has pledged to examine every hate crime reported.
The First Minister reaffirmed his “absolute faith” in the abilities of the police force to filter out frivolous complaints at the First Minister’s Questions session.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Psychological Battle for Truth – And the Power of the Farmers’ Uprising. The WEF’s “Disaster Agenda”
The ‘deep state’ has no power over you. None. It can only try and make you believe it does.
And in this it is very clever, using sophisticated psychological techniques that give the impression of holding the dominant position and exercising the dominant power.
But this is a chimera; and immediately one sees it as such one manifests the authoritative position and the deep state is in check; it can only operate defensively.
This it does by putting up ever greater barriers to freedom of expression, movement and choice.
It knows it’s on the losing side, so has to pull all the tricks in the trade to make itself appear to be in control. It’s a psychological battlefield.
Edward Bernays, the founder of modern advertising, has had much to do with weaponising the powers of perception and deception. He found that you can get people to believe and do almost anything once you learn how to exploit their psyche with carefully chosen imagery and words.
Once you tap into people’s widespread subconscious attraction to the trappings of seductive consumables.
The deep state’s corporate/banker led ‘seeming’ global dominance draws on Bernays’s cunning, using advanced insights concerning how to influence the functions of different areas of the human brain.
The objective is to come up with a blanket like web of virtual signposting pointing to the direction life must go in in order to overcome some purposefully manufactured crisis. A crisis that is claimed will otherwise cook, starve or destroy people and the planet.
People in a state of funk take all this to be real, of course, and plod on with their tunnel vision acceptance of the pathological diktats of the status quo.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
German domestic intelligence chief defends his efforts to police the “thought & speech patterns” of citizens, outlines the novel offence of “systematic delegitimisation of state conduct”
The German Interior Ministry continues to defend its controversial and widely criticised plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), our domestic intelligence service and political police, have sacrificed substantial popular regard in the face of this campaign. According to a poll published last month, a plurality of Germans believe that the BfV are being misused for political purposes. The sentiment is prominent across all parties, except of course for the Greens, who believe that all is well with the Federal Republic.
The creepy, dissolute and rodent-looking BfV chief, Thomas Haldenwang, has taken to the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine to defend the conduct of his office and his plans to shape the “thought and speech patterns” of ordinary people through official repression.
The thing about “Freedom of expression,” Haldenwang explains, is that it “is not carte blanche for enemies of the constitution.”
Recently, public discourse has repeatedly featured headlines and articles calling the work of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV)into question. There is talk of an “opinion police,” a “language police” and even a “government security service.” They say the BfV discredits political opinions “on command” as extremist as soon as they depart from the social and political mainstream, or when they embark upon criticism of government action or the work of the democratic parties.
One thing should be unmistakably clear: Freedom of opinion prevails in Germany – and that is a good thing! Freedom of opinion is a fundamental element of our constitution and one of the greatest assets of our liberal democratic order. As such, it is also protected by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXIX–We’re Knee Deep In Ecological Overshoot
January 3, 2023 (original posting date)
Chitchen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.We’re Knee Deep In Ecological Overshoot
Another brief contemplation this morning that I put together in response to a post that appeared on a Facebook Group I help to administer. One of our moderators works diligently within the ‘system’ in an attempt to persuade some of the ruling caste to embrace degrowth strategies. While a very noble endeavour, we disagree on the ability of this to bring about meaningful changes.
She posted the following introduction to the image below:
“This is a quote from a friend with an exceptionally high IQ, he has encouraged me ever since I started my Degrowth divining efforts. His Twitter feed is both fascinating and thought provoking, look for JamesCMorrow; he is an expert in Nudge theory and he assures me that the paradigm shift to a united aspiration for altruistic Degrowth is already well underway. Your feedback on the idea expressed in the image below is invited.”
My feedback:
While a lovely sentiment that many will certainly grasp onto and embrace in their attempts to reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts, the harsh reality is that we are probably far too deeply into ecological overshoot that even if we reach a tipping point in the population whereby a cooperative (and agreed upon — the truly difficult (unachievable?) part) mentality sweeps the planet — and not one the ruling caste develops/implements since their plans are always simply a leveraging of crises to control/expand their positions of power and prestige, despite the constant propaganda/marketing that what they do is for the benefits of the hoi polloi — the fact is we are in a predicament that can only be mitigated, not solved (not even, as some argue, if we were to experience an even more drastic population reduction than the 50% as was Thanos’s plan in the Marvel Comics Universe movies).
We have painted ourselves into a corner from which there appears no escape (as I would argue most evidence suggests). Rather than focus our energies (and resources) on unattainable ‘enlightenment’, I’d prefer to see — while we have the quickly diminishing resources — a decommissioning of the dangerous complexities we’ve created (e.g., nuclear power plants and their waste products; biosafety labs and their pathogens; chemical production and storage facilities and their toxins; armament factories and their weapons; etc.) and a concerted effort to push self-sufficiency based upon local and truly renewable resources for as many as possible to help them weather the coming storm. Unfortunately, I no more see this coming down the pike than global cooperation — apart from a few small communities pursuing self-reliance.
Whether any of humanity makes it out the other side of the ecological bottleneck we’ve created is in all likelihood well out of our hands for the biogeochemical limits, physical laws, and biological principles will always, in the end, trump human ‘ingenuity’, ‘technology’, and ‘cooperation’ — especially if the last 10,000 years of our existence is any indication. Human societies grow, increase in complexity, over-exploit their surroundings, encounter significant diminishing returns on their investments in complexity, then eventually (and always) decline and perish. This time, however, this recurrent phenomenon is global in nature — thank you fossil fuels.
We do not and have never stood apart from, outside of, or above the biosphere and its biophysical nature (especially the limits imposed by a finite planet), no matter how much we would like to believe or wish otherwise. For as Guy McPherson has argued: Nature bats last. And nature’s method for rebalancing a species that has shot well past its natural environmental carrying capacity and the waste products produced from its expansion and existence cannot, no matter how much we’d like, be avoided or put off indefinitely. The piper must always and eventually be paid, and s/he is getting ever closer…
March 30, 2024
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVIII–Collapse: Just Like Boiling A Frog
January 2, 2023 (original posting date)
Chitchen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.Collapse: Just Like Boiling A Frog
As I continue to work on my multipart contemplation regarding our energy future (Part 1; Part 2), thought I would throw out this ‘brief’ one that shares my comment on the most recent post by The Honest Sorcerer, whose writing in general continues to parallel my own (probably not surprising given the increasing evidence regarding the trends in the topic(s) we discuss).
Great article. As the saying goes: it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future[1]. We mostly look at current trends and extrapolate them into the future, believing that tomorrow will unfold much like today — and we do this for pretty sound reasons but mostly because our primate brains have extreme difficulty comprehending complex systems and their nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena. In a time of flux/chaos/transition, such an approach is not always such a good strategy — to say little about all the Black Swans circling overhead[2].
One of the places I default to when hoping to give some certainty to the future (something homo sapiens strongly desire[3]) is the past. This is likely because of my ‘brief’ educational background and work in pre/history (aka archaeology)[4].
While technology has dramatically changed some aspects of how we re/act (i.e., adapt) to our changing environment through our problem-solving abilities, we tend to follow a similar path to our distant ancestors by way of leveraging our tools and ingenuity to help us survive and adapt (agriculture being perhaps the big one that resulted in food surpluses, sedentary lifestyles, exponentially increasing populations, and eventually organizational structures that led to differential access to resources, sociopolitical complexity and, perhaps finally, territorial competition[5]); but these solely human abilities can only take us so far in a world of biogeochemical limits — particularly when the energy required to sustain all our complexities have encountered significant diminishing returns and resulted in catastrophic ecological systems breakdown.
Mix in cognitive and social psychology, biological principles, and physical limits and laws, and we humans can more or less get a better picture of the path(s) we are likely to take in our societal evolutionary journey. One only need review the business-as-usual scenario painted by Meadows et al. in The Limits to Growth for a fairly accurate longer-term prediction of how a world with hard limits will unfold[6].
Based upon all previous experiments with complex societies over the past ten millennia or so, ‘collapse’ appears unavoidable. This decline in complexity (which is what ‘collapse’ is when one gets right down to it and ignores all the emotional baggage we’ve tied to the term) manifests itself in less; less in terms of: social differentiation/stratification; occupational specialization; centralised control by political elite; behavioural control/regimentation; investment in the epiphenomena of complexity — i.e., monumental architecture, artistic and literary development; flow of information between groups; sharing, trading and redistribution of resources; and, coordination between polities[7]. This is a simplification (or Great Simplification as Nate Hagens has termed it[8]) of our adaptive complexities, something that likely would have happened much sooner had we not leveraged fossil fuels to hyper-complexify human adaptations and extend/expand — temporarily — the planet’s carrying capacity for homo sapiens.
Given how far we’ve overshot our natural environmental carrying capacity and consequently degraded our much needed environments and ecological systems — and overexploited virtually every corner of our planet — this inevitable simplification may actually end up being even more dramatic than previous experiments as Catton has pointed out in Overshoot[9].
The journey to this endgame of a substantially simpler future is sure to be the hard part. Increasing geopolitical tensions between competing polities for scarcer resources is sure to occur. Concomitantly, the ruling caste is certain to tighten their grip on their domestic populations by way of authoritarian tendencies (e.g., behavioural and narrative control via increased mass surveillance, militarisation of police, media influence). We are going to witness a continuing breakdown of ecological systems and environmental degradation yet be told these are temporary or reflective of ‘natural’ change. Our Ponzi-type financial/monetary/economic systems are going to be further manipulated from their current highly-manipulated states and any ‘temporary’ deviations from the economy-is-great narrative will be blamed on some evil ‘other’ rather than our own ruling caste and their ongoing machinations.
Like the story about being able to boil a frog alive because of minute temperature changes that go unnoticed, we may miss the little steps that take us to an entirely different world than the one we currently exist within and accept that everything is ‘normal’ despite evidence to the contrary. The ruling caste has learned to be quite adept in manipulating our beliefs about life and their abilities to ‘protect’ us.
All of this said, the future is both unknowable and unpredictable. It will hold many surprises, particularly for the vast majority of people who are just struggling to get through another day/week/year and tend to defer to the ‘authority’ figures that promise them this, that, and everything…
[4] Although my career was in education, I spent a handful of years in university studying and practising archaeology — graduating with a Master of Arts in the subject.
The Peacock Joins The Smear Campaign
NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny wrote:
After over a year, the House committee investigating researchers and their work on disinformation… has yet to produce tangible results. Public hearings have not yielded actionable evidence that the federal government has been weaponized… There have been no legal wins and no legislation has been passed.
Zadrozny in the same article said that “until recently,” people like Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Elon Musk and I have been “extraordinarily successful” in fighting what we call the “censorship machine,” adding, “in the past two years, government efforts to respond to disinformation have been shuttered.” Yet the same efforts, in the same time period, yielded “no tangible results.” This is NBC News. Who edits these people?
Regarding “no legal wins and no legislation”: as Jordan’s Committee noted Monday, the House passed “The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act” last year, and the Censorship Accountability Act recently passed in Committee. If you want to argue a bill not yet signed into law doesn’t count as “passed” legislation, fine, but “no legal wins”? The Murthy v. Missouri censorship lawsuit before the Supreme Court is there because four federal judges already ruled government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are likely in violation of the First Amendment.
Does NBC mean “no legal wins,” except the ones that sent the issue to the Supreme Court?
Those cases came in addition to a long list of developments, like the NIH freezing a $150 million content-flagging program, the shutdown of “Singing Censor” Nina Jankowicz’s infamous Disinformation Governance Board idea, even cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) budget, all of which are at the center of innumerable mawkish media freakouts over the recent slowing of state censorship programs…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Chris Hedges: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange
The Crucifixion of Julian Assange – by Mr. FishProsecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.
The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison until he collapses mentally and physically?
If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an additional five years.
The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.
No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed. No new hearing will permit Julian to mount a public-interest defense. No new hearing will discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
America’s Minsky Moment Approaches
Named after American economist Hyman Minsky, the idea behind a Minsky moment is that a financial markets crisis (especially in credit markets) is caused by a sudden and systemic collapse in asset prices, usually after a sustained period of speculative investment, excessive borrowing, and widespread financial risk taking. In other words, it’s the moment when the music stops playing, investors stop buying, and the Ponzi game ends abruptly. It’s a hard crash.
America may be on the brink of its Minsky moment.
This process, which moves from slowly, slowly, to suddenly and now, goes back decades.
The confrontation with reality that was required to put America’s economic house back in order after the global financial crisis of 2008–09 was deferred to a later date by politicians, central bankers, and government officials alike, presumably when they would no longer be around.
Instead of taking the painful but necessary steps of liquidation—i.e., allowing more over-levered and risk-heavy banks and financial firms to fail, and for the economy to take the short-term pain, then move on—the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve kicked the can down the road by massive money-supply expansion and unproductive government spending.
The same playbook from the financial crisis (i.e., money printing and fiscal excess) was used again in 2020 in response to the pandemic. As the monetary authorities had but one instrument in their toolbox—the blunt-force cudgel of money-supply growth—it was the go-to solution.
As the saying goes, when the only tool available is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In both instances—the financial crisis and COVID periods), the U.S. Congress went on a massive spending spree, not realizing (or, as political animals with short time horizons, not caring) that excess and repeated deficit spending, and the debt creation needed to fund it, would eventually spiral out of control and doom future generations.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
March 29, 2024
Oh Say Can You See?
“A modern nuc can fit in the trunk of a car. When millions of people can walk across our border with impunity what do you think the chances are we would catch something that size?” — Sam Faddi
That’s Sam Faddis, retired CIA (quote didn’t quite fit in block).
Who among you was not impressed seeing the sudden and total collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after getting its pylon bonked by the container ship Dali a few hours before the dawn’s early light in Baltimore harbor? In America’s ongoing death-of-a-thousand-cuts, that one literally severed a major artery, but it may take a while to know how badly the wounded colossus known as the USA is bleeding out.
“Joe Biden” emerged from his crypt pronto to state that the federal government would pony-up the cost of building the bridge back better, meant to reassure the public, you’d suppose. But perhaps the real reason was to obviate an otherwise requisite investigation of the crash by ship-owner Grace Ocean’s insurance company — since legal wrangling over responsibility would add more years to the already years-long estimated bridge replacement time-frame. And Gawd knows what else they might discover about how the darn thing came to pass. . . rumors of a Ukrainian captain at the Dali’shelm. . . stuff that the ruling intel blob might not want to get out there, especially given the still-murky role of the joint USA-UK black-op blobs in the Moscow Crocus Theater Massacre just a week earlier.
The Crocus op, you understand, was probably the worst clusterfuck qua Three Stooges blob operational procedure in memory, since four of the six surviving Tajiki shooters were nabbed in a car enroute to the Ukraine border (where they would’ve been whacked into silence, since they failed to martyr themselves at the scene-of-the-crime)…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
