Piggies and Banks and the Mess We’re In

“Conspiracy Theory” is a taunt for imbeciles, invented by the CIA – for obvious reasons

Note for new readers – auto-estimated reading times are exaggerated (lots of pix/links)

Hey folks!

Today I want to do a bit of a reality review and update – which is a strangely difficult thing, in a very revealing way. When I was writing essays about philosophy culture and politics back in the 80s, I could always rely on several incredibly useful tools, which have since been stolen from everyone’s toolbox!

The most obvious of these is the idea of common belief – and no I don’t mean a specific creed, faith or philosophy – I mean belief in an objective external reality which we can discover and discuss together.

Yes, this one is not just huge, but vast – but I need to invoke another idea-tool, in order to be able to investigate why and how more usefully. When should we use empirical standards (fixed rules) and when should we use relative values and observations (make comparisons) to best understand a thing.

Very much like the idealism versus practicality split (as old as Plato versus Aristotle), this is most often described in terms so crude as to be idiotic. That is, people who want to use one tool for absolutely everything are called-out for gross errors not by balanced people, but by people who want to use the opposite tool for everything. This can often feel like a satisfying smackdown of foolishness (though why we now seek that, above all else, is itself super-creepy) but it is still tribalist nonsense, every time.

I wrote to a very smart younger substack writer recently – in the context of the long post war history of Canadian peacefulness, relative to US militarism – that most of our famous post-war ‘niceness’ (badly eroded this whole century, as it has been) was won because the Liberals (under papa-doc Trudeau) deliberately destroyed the core capacities of the Canadian military, to completely remove the option of participating in American adventures for all future governments, by making us very simply incapable.

It is only just now we’ve all realized that our incapacity was the furthest thing from any kind of genuine, let far alone moral, strength – so far, that we find we are now completely incapable of defending our own sovereignty, or even realistically planning for that.

The key principle here is perfectly captured by that classic musician’s joke.

“The definition of a gentleman is someone who can play the bagpipes, but doesn’t”

So – when we are looking to refute a foolishness, we must first ask ourselves – are we seeking this because of our own incapacity? Or do we have this skill also, and critique from that balanced frame?

I don’t mean both-sides-ing crazy stuff (and again, I’m on the rational plane here, not the emotional), what I’m asking is – do we have a better idea or understanding, or just a general reaction of disgust?

Last time, I talked about the extraordinary R Buckminster Fuller (AKA: Bucky) who brought his keen unconventional mind to many problems over the course of his life, always looking for broad human advantage, the exact opposite goal of the dominant post war strategies promoted by the thinktank industry, most of which came from the inventors and developers of modern game-theory (many of whom were clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics – and boy does that ever show!)

But I don’t mean to make an indirect critique of the ideas by merely calling up the whiff of madness – Caravaggio killed a man over a game of tennis (definitely objectively nuts), but I can still like his paintings just fine. Mind you, his paintings don’t shape public life.

One of the many very useful and stimulating ideas I got from reading Bucky’s books, was his idea of the phases of development of Capitalism. I know this is something that many economists and leftist political analysts talk about in their own ways, but I like Bucky’s priority of “omni-advantaging” a lot, so I found his version especially compelling.

The old form of capitalism, dominant before the second world war and for a few booming years after, was all about industry (supported by future-thinking zero-profit government-developed infrastructure) – making things and selling them and planning for more physical reality into the future. This means big and sustained investments in R&D, improved infrastructure and ever more highly skilled workers who have and can anticipate a steadily better lifestyle, and are thus made able to consume more and more of the goods produced, to sustain an increasingly higher level of general economic development – all based on a number of clear and calculable physical realities.

There were a TON of problems with that model of capitalism. In fact, we could, without being too unfairly clever, say that there are dozens of entire political philosophies which are still active today, which were originally designed as critiques and responses to problems with that kind of capitalism.

But – such productive industrial capitalism does have one attribute which is hard not to call positive – there is a natural tendency for a ‘raising all boats’ effect, as production gets increasingly sophisticated, and work and wages for the society as a whole, advance with it.

Before I contrast this old (and very deeply flawed) model with our newer, even scarier economic hellscape – I have to stop to make an important observation for my younger friends. I was kind of horrified today when I heard Sagar (from the still vital and useful “Breaking Points”) say “I don’t know, maybe there are still some people out there who can remember what the economy was like, before NAFTA.”

YES – THERE ARE MILLIONS OF US! And I’m not talking about the boomers, who remember an economic model which has been an hallucination for everyone else, for a half a century and counting.

I mean Generation X (my own cohort) who entered the world in a strange moment of profound transition between economic models and ways of living – which was, for most of our lives, completely papered-over (lies and gaslighting) with outrageously bullshitful western triumphalist propaganda.

The really weird thing though, was that we got to see the value of the old systems which were dying, and heard all the bright promises for the new systems which were supposed to replace them – and then watch in front of our eyes as all hopeful promises were broken and the predicted downsides multiplied.

So we witnessed and understood what was being lost in a way that many others never noticed (boomers, who never cared about anyone but themselves) or knew, to miss (millennials and all younger folks – who have no experience of a time when we did much better, as a society, on KEY METRICS).

For several post WWII decades in a row, an American factory worker could afford to buy a house, raise a family and put kids through college. Overt racism absolutely was worse – but the ways and chances to work one’s way out of vulnerability to racists were incomparably greater. (There are acres of horrifyingly degraded, but once vital neighbourhoods in America, which used to be strong vital black communities centres of culture and development – back when millions of aspirational black workers had enough money to choose to make them that!)

Or, to put it more simply, the best thing to be able to say to a racist is “Get off my property, asshole.”

Infinitely better than living in a cardboard box and being studiously ignored by good and enlightened people who are so much more ‘advanced’ that they would never even dream of using the N word, and condemn anyone who does, sharply! (but still walk on by, head averted, almost as if that human person, is instead a piece of dogshit – at least to them).

A lot of my younger friends – tribalists especially – like to take shots at older people for talking about things which our society used to do better. No we are not missing white privilege (or the patriarchy), neither of which was on offer for Generation X anyhow – what we miss are basic human dignity, general affordability, childhoods with genuine hope and educations promising real opportunities to be useful in the world, and to truly thrive. We miss the luxury of a prosperous general culture, supported by a community which feels secure, and so has the capacity to seek more meaning and richness in life. To use art and craft, old and new, to transcend the mundane, and aspire still further in our humanity.

If you like it in hard-numbers, I heard one (reputable) economist say the other day that the share of GDP taken home by American workers and the middle-class as of 1965, was approximately 65 percent!

The rich were still very rich – but tens or hundreds of times more than normal people – not millions!

Far more importantly – tens of millions of working class people had enough surplus income to make an impact on the world in whatever way they wanted to. That is – to build society out in a way which reflected their lives interests and needs, instead of having to endlessly beg government to borrow from cynical bankers to hire psychotic corporatists to deliver a thinktank-model-created blunt instrument, which inevitably causes at least as many problems, as it promises (but almost always fails) to solve.

No I am not saying there is no such thing as a useful government program – I love libraries and fire services, universal healthcare (back when it actually was universal) and a whole lot of other things besides those – because as I say, I have witnessed institutional models which do serve thriving.

BUT – just as with idealism versus ‘hard-nosed’ numbers and models, the trick is to understand which tools can solve which problems. Government can set up the garden (zero-profit wide-benefit infrastructure, to make general thriving easier for everyone) but things like happiness, community and culture must be made by the efforts of individuals. Central control of individuality, really is evil stuff.

Likewise – government can foster economic conditions where millions of blacks can say, “Get off my damn lawn, you racist asshole.” Or, under the still widely celebrated first black president of the USA (though the financier pump was primed by the white man who was for years jokingly called the first black president of the USA, Bill Clinton) the government can instead confiscate more wealth from black Americans than any single man in US history – even while prosecuting US journalists, as if they were treasonous foreign agents (just because he didn’t like their message) more times than all other presidents in American history combined. Tribalists don’t like me saying Obama was a psychotic supremacist wallstreet/thinktank sellout piece of shit – they think his “blackness” makes him somehow immune. Gives him a special race-based – get out the consequences of mass murder free – pass.

I say – use your number tool for the hard numbers. Then use your idealism tool for the consequences.

Opera House and Steam-Vent resident

But I don’t want to get distracted by modern history quite yet – let’s return to the change I was talking about – and mention too, there are a lot of models that reveal important aspects of this, but none which clearly show us all (that I’ve found, anyhow). This is the best reason of all to build, maintain (that is, thoughtfully review and continually interrogate), and keep adding to, a rich and varied mental toolkit. For some problems there really is one perfect tool only, which can do the job right! (ask any technician, carpenter or plumber you know – I guarantee there is at least one tool which they will not ever lend or even let anyone else use – because they remember vividly, how hard life was before they had it!)

Some people discuss “The Rise of the Managerial Class” and point out that industry got so complicated that it called for a new class of specialist managers to administer it, even though very different personalities and skill-sets got it going. In a simplistic telling, at a certain point, the managers realized that since the founders didn’t even know where all the levers of control were anymore, and they did, they could take over the whole ship – like a mutiny of the slide-rulers and the paper-pushers!

But I especially like the compactness of Buckminster Fuller’s way of putting it. He called it “LAWCAP” the phase of capitalism in which the economy was basically taken over by lawyers.

This isn’t just a joke (though it kind of is a joke, also, in the saddest way). I’ll admit that as a writer I am attracted to LAWCAP as a descriptive in one part because of the general public bias against lawyers – but like I say, I’m a technician (lapsed) and we get hated arbitrarily also, so let me do better than that.

I have repeatedly written about the National Security Act of 1947 as “The Thing That Ate the Constitution” and again, that is no joke. The act set up the modern system of behind the scenes government which now runs America, in absolute and continuous defiance of popular democratic will.

I mean the CIA and the NSC (National Security Council) most especially – but the act also created the modern USAF as an independent force (it was previously a subset of the US army) and the USAF was always in the lead when it came to funding and promoting the work of the early cold war thinktanks – RAND – the prototype of all the modern military-industrial thinktanks, was developed by a group of brilliant (and also sometimes insane) aerospace eccentrics, who just got more and more ‘eccentric.’

But most importantly, the post-war CIA and early Cold War State Department were both dominated by the thinking of actual corporate lawyers. We can even name them – the Dulles Brothers – (one ran State, the other CIA) who came from the prestigious Wall St. Corporate Law Firm – Sullivan and Cromwell. (Which I was outright horrified to learn, quite recently, still thrives and is still ultra powerful and supremely well ‘connected’ politically, in all the creepiest possible ways, to this very day).

Again – we are used to thinking in terms of vague categorical assertions and strong but very general feelings (blackness/wokeness type distractions). But when I say that the very first regime change operation the CIA formally undertook, was to topple the (neither socialist, nor radical) government of Arbenz in Guatemala, for their former (Sullivan and Cromwell) corporate client United Fruit, because he was trying to develop Guatemala itself, and not just maximize the profits of gringo foreigners, you understand we don’t need to know anything about general philosophies or identities, to smell a rat.

Of course, the CIA was built out of the wartime OSS – and so began with a whole lot of that wartime spirit of depraved indifference to the rights of all others, compared to the interests of der fatherland.

I should also note that the reason I have to say first on the books, instead of simply first, is that the CIA had already done another big and highly profitable job, for their old wartime pals in the British SOE (Special Operations Executive). They took out the constitutional democracy established in Iran after the war, and replaced it with a monarchy that no one in Iran wanted, and added a sadistic internal police force – SAVAK – which was internationally legendary for brutality (and trained and funded by CIA).

Read that again if you have to (history is not taught here anymore – or not remembered, anyhow).

The only reason Iran isn’t already a constitutional democracy like us (with all the same easy lines of corruption exploitation and vulnerability which our own system has revealed so horrifyingly, of late) is because British Oil companies wanted shareholder profit, as opposed to a thriving Iran, so they destroyed democracy in that entire country and put despotism in charge, by force, and CIA ‘ran point’ on the whole operation (and boasted proudly of it, for many years).

And since I’m on Iran for a moment – let me say something important. The recent protests were deliberately provoked (Scott Bessent openly bragged about causing mass suffering with the kind of dirty currency tricks he once used to take down the British pound – in the process founding a famous unstable and dangerously powerful weirdo’s fortune). Protests began with a legitimate reason (no one likes to watch their savings evaporate) but the timing was designed entirely for military purposes, and the violence in the second wave of protests, was caused by foreign funded directed and controlled terrorists (same playbook they used to destroy Syria – and many places before that).

What the western spy masters and racist killers did not expect was for Iran to get some technical help.

I have heard a strong case for both Russia and China (Russia because they’ve been working the problem since the start of the special military operation – China by sheer technical prowess) but whoever it was that sent the gear, Iran managed to shut-down starlink completely – then detect and respond to all the CIA Mossad and MI6 provided terminals, discovering the group behind them in the process – which means they were able to roll-up countless terrorist assets and fanatical cells all over Iran, many of which had taken decades (and untold millions in investment) to establish and prepare.

What was supposed to happen was a lasting wave of destabilization, which would make it impossible for the Iranian government to get their shit together to defend against a combined US Israeli attack.

Ain’t gonna happen, folks. The Iranians were suckered once, simply because they were humane enough to assume some basic western honour was still a thing, at least at the diplomatic level. Now, after several waves of assassinations tied directly to peace efforts, they see and know us far better.

We’re back to FAFO – the moment actual weakness is revealed, and all the power we were exercising based on an obsolete impression we had once made, and then too-long sustained, suddenly evaporates!

I wrote much more about the technical realities which limit American Naval power now, and the weird and very rarely discussed (but clueful) history of western violence and hubris in the region, awhile ago

So much for the effect of lawyers and the managerial class on government and any hope of serious representation of citizen’s will and long-term interests (that is, so much for all the good features of democracy, which make the long understood dangers like mob rule and voting yourself the treasury, which we absolutely did retain, seem mostly worth-it, at several times and places in history).

But what about their economic effect? Last time I suggested that my readers should take the trouble to read original sources, so they understood what problems were being solved, and the inspiration which helped (or went in a wrong direction we must understand, to correct). Start from source-stuff, instead of a corrupted corporate or governmental power-serving pabulum version – emptied of all life and vigour!

Adam Curtis captured a fantastic interview with a Soviet nuclear scientist many years ago, where he talked about the founders of their nuclear industry all sharing the experience of war in common – but then having to surrender control of the thing they built, to people who had no such hard-earned wisdom inside them, and did not share their tragically highlighted reverence for human life and society.

I have spoken about Reaganomics and Thatcherism several times – pointing out that the prosperity on paper which both of them celebrated so loudly, was actually the liquidation of capacity that we badly needed, not just as advanced economies, but also as societies with accumulated wisdom.

But just as Mercouris made me backdate my awareness of Chinese long term planning for rare earths (mid 1970s, not the mid 1990s, like I thought), another Adam Curtis documentary reminded me that though Reagan and Thatcher celebrated and institutionalized the idea of what was actually a fire-sale liquidation of economic fundamentals, being instead a serious sustainable economic driver for a new wave of general prosperity (actually death by a thousand corporate cuts, for all but the rich) the process really began much earlier than that – in the 50s and of course in the darkest heart of global capitalism – The Corporation of The City of London. (Which would be the seat of the anti-Christ, if they had one)

In “The Mayfair Set” (must watch stuff – link below) Curtis does a superb job of showing how destroying the bases of western prosperity became our shiny new (but utterly false) model of prosperity. It is shockingly close to stealing from workers, directly and shamelessly. And this model has done incalculable damage to western civilization itself – by de-industrializing the west wholesale, while putting money that once drove community-thriving across whole nations into the pockets of psycho greed-heads, already rich to the point of madness – far more harm than any adversary could ever do us. (And yes, I mean even my beloved Canada – which has no natural adversaries at all – we slit our own fool throats!)

The basic formula works like this – buy-up an old established business (with very expensive high interest debt) immediately sell-off a bunch of assets (properties, technologies or patents) which have appreciated a lot since their establishment, saddle-up the old company with all that new expensive debt (which debt did the company itself – the ‘founder’ management and the loyal expert workers both – no good whatsoever, only enriching the ‘takeover specialists’ and their own shareholders), then sell it off quickly, before the new debt erodes all remaining value in the newly ‘rationalized’ company and utterly destroys it, whatever needs it was serving in the world, the local community, and tragically many jobs.

Profit uber alles, really. As creepy (and also ultimately self-destructive) as capitalism gets. Then again, Marx did famously say that Capitalism would (cheerfully and righteously) sell the rope to hang itself.

The funny thing is, the founders who knew how hard it was to build the great enterprises, and how many special tools they needed to solve rare but very important problems, would never have looked at their enterprises the way the pencil-pushers and ‘downsizing’ experts did. They didn’t see fat, they saw surplus stored for a bad season – such as they had needed many times before, just to get this far.

The most jarring and still mostly unappreciated demonstration of the consequences of this fundamental split in approach was revealed most dramatically (and then very quickly concealed again, by the bankers and war serving BigMedia) by the 100% US created war in Ukraine.

The arrogant west is still using words like freedom and democracy to call forth ghosts of things we no longer really have, here in the west. Things we once really did aspire to – before the LAWCAP takeover – but only thanks to enough general prosperity for individuals to live and act according to our own damn will and principles! We citizens make things better with our actions. Advances are not delivered via one ideal (think-tank blunt-instrument) policy, forced at the point of a state bayonet!

We were sure our western weapons were better, our economies were stronger, our tactics and training superior, and as usual, we were most confident of all in our ability to flat-out cheat, with what we thought was generationally superior ISR (intelligence surveillance reconnaissance – which is second in importance only to logistics, for modern war – as has been bloodily proven, these last few tragic years).

Thing is, the “Superior Western Equipment” we sent to Ukraine was mostly rusty surplus gear designed in the 70s-80s and built in the 80s-90s (with Reagan’s huge defence budget). And how did this Cadillac gear survive the test of battle? Not well, folks. Western tanks are considered overpriced fuel guzzling pieces of junk. Great big targets, mostly (the only system the Ukrainians really do like is the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, which they consider better-balanced than the old Soviet-era BMPs).

The same story proved true for our artillery. Great stuff fresh out of the box, but get a little mud on it (Ukraine has an entire annual season of notorious mud, remember) and it breaks down fast, is very expensive and hard to repair – and anyhow you need parts, or you can’t even start – and we can’t make parts anymore – or anything else, for that matter – not at scale, for a fair price, reliably. Once we had legions of (absolutely brilliant and super-impressive) tool and die makers, waiting to tackle and solve any industrial problem – the more difficult, the better – almost like the hands-dirty and apprenticeship side of deep cultural engineering knowledge – a truly heroic guild. But that is simply no longer our thing.

Now we have financial consultants and would you like fries with that people, app driven beck-and-callism, or the wan comfort of indentured servitude at an online retailer’s bot-despotic warehouse.

Again, to bear witness for my younger friends – we used to have unionized cashiers at major grocery chains, who could afford to buy houses, too – it wasn’t just factory workers. Now, minimum wage plus a tiny bump for experience, is ‘normal’ – while shareholders, rich already, take way more than they ever did back in the days when our entire society was prosperous (and government, was not a beggar).

Missiles and high-tech gear? Surely we completely overwhelmed them with our advanced capabilities there, right? It all depends on whether you watch a five-second clip, one round, or the whole fight.

The Ukrainians, acting as a proxy for all of the advanced western economies, our combined military industrial complexes, various megalomaniac oligarchs (the same psycho types who bet everything on derivatives on housing for black people, then pulled the rug out from under millions of real black people, who thought they were finally on the road to being “stake-holders” at last) and of course our many outright mass-murderous spy agencies and think-tank planners, did land many hard punches.

But the Russians are used to taking blows in war. It doesn’t freak them out, the way it does for us (not to say they don’t care, they absolutely do, they are just a lot more realistic about a whole lot of things).

What the Russians did, every time we surprised them with something technical, was work the problem and devise a cheap effective way to counter the system. We sent “Excalibur” a fantastic science fiction artillery shell to Ukraine – a giant bullet which costs over $150,000 each (yes, really), but always hit its target, and so is actually a bargain – why, just look at the sales brochure, if you don’t believe me!

The Russians figured out how to jam the guidance system for the shell in weeks – making it nothing but a hyper-expensive bullet. But we must realize – the military industrial complex spent many years and millions developing that ‘advanced’ system (and so many others) and the Russians figured out how to degrade the ‘innovative quality’ in the system in a few weeks or months, over and over again. This doesn’t just mean – we can’t pull that surprise in Ukraine again – it means we can’t use it on anyone.

(One day someone will cost-out all the hyper-expensive and ‘advanced’ weapon-surprises the west completely used-up in this conflict, and suddenly realize that it was more than enough money to solve homelessness, infrastructure rebuilding and prosperity reconstruction, with many millions to spare).

So we are now years into this thing – which we’ve lied about from day one – which has from the start been a war by the prosperous and “Ethical” west against the foreign “Barbarians” (that is, Orthodox Christians) to prove our superiority by force of arms, finance, sheer cultural blather and ‘vim.’

Russia alone is STILL outproducing all of NATO combined, in every category of military hardware (many, by outright multiples). Yes, they arranged for even more to come in from North Korea (just as the west has raided armouries of allies and vassals around the world, for gear to send to Ukraine), but the really important difference is that they didn’t ever liquidate industry, the way we did. Came close to it, but pulled-back at the last minute (which, on a long time-scale view, is the main reason for the war).

Russia maintains very significant industrial overcapacity – deliberately, because even though you hope you never have a season of famine and war, they do still remember – sometimes you do, and you’ll want every extra resource you can possible have, when the unfortunate must be faced and dealt with.

That is – their government, for all its many flaws, is still thinking like a founder – someone who is involved in the building and the advance of a thing. Not a sneaky and psychotic pencil-pusher who sees every overcapacity not as flexibility and stored potential for hard times, but as an unrealized fast-liquidatable banker’s profit, and every worker who isn’t being relentlessly overworked to the point of exhaustion desperation and burnout, as earmarked for dismissal, on the basis of “increasing efficiency.”

I don’t mean government in Russia is ideal (China either) only that in both of these states which we endlessly criticize for ‘violations of rights’ there are a number of rights they consider, that we just don’t.

Oh, and this will really mess your head up (if you are semi-old like me, and can remember good jobs). Even the people making the greatest American wunderwaffen are now paid just a tiny bit more than minimum wage! (Trust me – in the days of an industrial economy, workers for major defence contractors did not ever need food banks! They were putting cousins through college, with the extra).

I have an absolutely astounding Kit Klarenburg article linked below – in which he discusses the way that western intelligence agencies set about to very deliberately and carefully weaponize “Human Rights” itself as a cold war weapon (definitely among the most cynical abuses of principle, ever).

He has many details we never saw – but the obvious ones were staring us in the face, this whole time.

We insisted that democracy and free speech – those things we could do here, without getting in the way of corporate profits (and hopefully manipulate there, to undermine them, if only they let us in, to do it) were the sacred rights (our definitions of both, mind you, not ever their own – the stark clue to the corruption which we actually sought, behind all of our flowery ‘rights-based’ words) but we have never once bothered to recognize considerations for the whole of society, to be important matters at all.

This is how we came to have the vast pension capital of one especially rich generation (boomers) used by takeover funds to destroy the fundamental right to prosperity of every subsequent generation – putting most of it into the pockets of shareholders, but enough of a cut into boomer pockets to keep them compliant in the starvation of their own grandchildren’s future (and still shameless about it, which is just so freakin’ gross).

And once again, thanks to Klarenburg’s superb research and careful documentation, I stand very usefully corrected. Like a lot of people who originally come from the left, I long found it much easier to blame the right alone for violent state-madness. But the Democrats have done many of the most outrageous war and racism promoting things of all time. Once again – thanks to that creepy managerial LAWCAP class which has taken over all of the levers of power, locked everyone else out of the cockpit and bolted the door (all shades of popular will and restraint of power, very much excluded).

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were actually CIA programs, this whole time (no really, I kid you not – read the article, please – it is very important stuff, for cleaning misty-optics).

Which brings me to the most useful and important perspective on Prime Minster Mark Carney’s much discussed speech at Davos. In a funny way, he was himself, pulling a Trump – acting as a class traitor, in the classic style predicted and described thousands of years ago in the works of Plato.

Most important (and least emphasized) he said the west has been lying about justice and righteousness this whole (cold-war onward) time – because we made tons of money being complicit hypocrites who served American empire, in a way which was self-evidently corrosive to our national-interests.

We lied (and we killed) and we scolded others endlessly, like preachy shits – just for big cash prizes!

To make this oblique but impactful confession, Carney used an interesting idea from playwright (and later politician) Vaclav Havel – talking about how a belief system lasts only as long as everyone goes along with it, and lends it their own strength, with their simple (and almost always mindless) acts of compliance. In this case, he used the image of shopkeepers all putting a little green sign in their shop window every morning, with a revolutionary slogan which no longer inspired any real passion or belief in anyone who saw it. Sustaining the national myth mostly by force of inertia, really. But what if we don’t hang the sign one morning – and what if everyone else stops lying too, all at the same time?

The image is useful and he used it well – we in the west actually have been complicit in extraordinary evil around the world for decades – not one bit of it called-for by the citizens or responding to citizen needs, here or wherever we’re interfering – but as democracies (even if only in name) we do bear some responsibility for this. If our democracy can’t even stop us from being crazy here – why are we killing others because they refuse to use our system, and constantly demonizing them, with a weird neoliberal version of cultural racism? (‘Closed societies’ my ass – what they really mean is closed to all our best lines of mass corruption and hyper-capitalist exploitation – how dare they say no to being raped!)

I have to digress for just a second here – one of the reasons that the feel-good ‘human potential movement’ of the 60s-70s and the ‘new age’ movement of the late 80s both disappeared up their own assholes (and destroyed many lives and otherwise functional brains, along the way) was because when you do bad things to others, you actually aren’t supposed to feel good until you damn well stop it! (Remorse is PRACTICAL – not arbitrarily imposed stigma from the settler whiteness patriarchy club).

Feeling good about yourself while great harm is done in your name is the pursuit of a crazy infantile narcissist (AKA Boomers and their many spiritually bankrupt inheritors). BUT – this doesn’t mean we have to wait until we fix the world, to be happy or satisfied in our lives – we just have to get out there and work on it! No, this doesn’t instantly fix everything, it just reminds us that we can get there – if we DO.

Because interpretations are so flexible nowadays, I should clarify further – I mean work on building – key practical physical tools, organizations, alliances, relationships, techniques and understandings.

This is the opposite kind of energy from that required to point a finger at “Them” (whichever them suits our pout best) then scowl hard disdain from across the room (Canadian version) or scream and throw rocks (American style) in order to assert the glorious and universal importance of our own personal anger. Anger alone doesn’t build (or solve) shit, folks – not ever even once! (There really is no more obviously or more laughably supremacist concept in the entire modern world, than WOKE itself)

What we need is my best definition of hope. Hope is a plan – and a team to work it.

(A bigger plan and a bigger team, than tribalism will ever allow – which is why I try to take it apart).

To be clear for anyone who is looking for fun ways to be angry at me – no I am not criticizing protest. I consider a citizen’s right to object to government absolutely sacred. That’s why I was objecting to the way Jan 6^th protesters were charged with federal crimes and given heavy sentences in jail – often just for being there (no federal action did more to jeopardize the US right to protest itself, in many decades).

But a far better example is the extraordinary good-spirited and internationally inspiring Trucker Protest movement in my own Canada – which was grotesquely misrepresented by all of our (BigMoney-BigWar Big-headed Ottawa serving) BigMedia the whole time – and still won their principled point on behalf of all citizens (and are winning many appeals against the government now, finally – yay!)

Because they weren’t just throwing a tantrum, they showed how protest in the modern world can be done effectively. You need a clear idea which allows for a practical concession from the other side, which will immediately advance rights for all. They were never against the shots themselves (as they were widely misrepresented, so they could be tarred with the chant of ‘anti-vaxxer’ (even though that was never a traditional ‘vax’ at all) – what they always clearly opposed was abuse of state power, in the form of unwarranted government compulsion (voluntary compliance was already over 90%). For political advantage, the Canadian state discarded individual rights which have been so long established, that some (like me) are still stunned they were even ever questioned – let alone that the state brought down such outrageous force, to muzzle clearly righteous and timely protest. (Farmers in Europe took a lot of notes, and have since upped their protest game, greatly! People-power resurgent!)

Thing is – because they had a sensible practical ask (Stop forcing mass violations of bodily integrity) and they had very high esprit de corps – they got a ton of support right across the country, even while every word said about them in BigNews was a lie or a grotesque and deliberate slander.

People are the source of good and principle in the world, folks – policy gets there later, kicking and screaming all the way, and even that, only if we citizens band together in great enough numbers to absolutely force the bastards to act (for one brief shining moment) like this really is a democracy!

Now I’m tempted to do a rant on Carney (his own resume as a liquidator for Oligarchs alone makes that way too easy – and I’m still waiting for any links to the Epsteinian class – so damn many of his long-time political pals are implicated).

You don’t think the CIA would withhold such matter in the still missing three-million pages, just to apply presssure on the guy during USMCA renegotiations, do you? Nahh, they’re good-hearted honest folk, wouldn’t even consider it, no doubt.

But just as with the morally complicated versus the high spirited and useful model of Jan 6^th compared to the Trucker Movement, I’d rather use a different globalist, to make my point much clearer – kind of a best possible case scenario (though I rather think he’d bristle at being seen as a “Steel-Man” for the globalist class – even if his own awfully fat resume makes that conclusion very nearly inescapable).

What can you say about a human who is still learning and trying, even if he has been wrong about a whole lot of things, and done great damage with those false beliefs, for most of his life? You can say he’s still a human being (which for all the flaws and complications involved, is still infinitely better than a straight-up demented maniac, or one of the millions of miserablists – the legions of ‘resentful surrendered’).

I must confess that I was not much interested in Jeffrey Sachs until the pandemic began. For most of my life I found economists in general pretty boring people, and thought economics was, too (I stand VERY MUCH corrected on that one – been studying like crazy, the last decade or so, and as I do, I keep finding puzzle pieces I’ve been seeking for years – in some cases literal decades!)

To qualify – I am still an omnivorous book maniac – so I have read three to six books about or by economists each year for the last half century or so – it just never became a dominant mania for me.

But Jeffrey Sachs came to my attention because he was angry, and wanted to talk about it. As a man with considerable international prestige, he was outright used, to help sell a big lie about covid. But he was not only offended at the trick, he was also furious about the grand abuse of principle!

More specifically, Sachs was hired to coordinate an expert and objective article about the ‘proximal origins of Sars COV2’ by one of the most respected peer-reviewed science magazines in the world.

Problem is, when he asked around to find out which experts were most knowledgeable on this subject, he just so happened to call the guy who was, as much as any one man on earth, personally responsible for the outbreak which took millions of lives around the world – Peter Dazig of Ecohealth Alliance – which subcontracted the next development stage of US biological warfare research which was almost certainly begun at the University of North Carolina biolabs, to a little laboratory notoriously beloved by the local pangolins (which had very particular bats), in a place called Wuhan – ever heard of it?

The experts on the panel Sachs assembled almost all said at once that it was clearly a lab designed virus and pointed to specific evidence (which is still solid today) to suggest this. But within a few days, they had all changed their official position on this and their published consensus (after secret pressure) said “it comes from nature.” There was even a completely bizarre line for awhile, which said blaming Chinese laboratories for leaking the (American Created) virus, was racist – so we must concentrate on the traditional eating practices which are so foreign to us, they mostly provoke disgust – to be unracist!

(honestly, historians reading about our time are going to assume we were all a bunch of imbeciles, just to put up with being talked-to in so insufferably ignorant and patronizing a way, by so many successive western “regimes” (surely a far better mirror-descriptive for us than free and representative democracies, at this point.)

The point is, Sachs’ name and reputation were used to sell a lie, and he didn’t just go along with it like you’re supposed to, he used his vast rolodex (contacts) and prestige to dig more, and came up with the best trove of clues and evidence I’ve seen so far (including Fauci personally ordering the research which added a furan cleavage site to original covid – to greatly increase transmission – which was the exact totally unnatural clue which made Sachs’ expert team originally think it had to come from a lab).

But then he went way way way further than that – and this is where things get really interesting and educational for us.

You see – Jeffrey Sachs was for decades, a top-tier economic hit-man for the western capitalist empire (Anglo, in particular). It is oversimplifying, but only by a bit, to say his specialty was as a downsizer for entire economies, to make them attractive to new foreign investment (no matter how many valuable hard-earned and locally beloved programs had to die or get privatized, to get there).

But he had such a reputation for genius and effectiveness at opening closed economies to (ultimately corrupting and exploiting) foreign capital, that he was often thanked, even when his plans brought very hard times indeed to a country. Thanked by the local elites who made huge profits, that is, not so much by the workers (and kids) whose life-arc was collapsed by his harsh policy of austerities, or the hard-earned rights stolen from millions of retirees. Humane predation? Reaganomics with a kinder face? His style was not as openly depraved as purest vulture capitalism – but it was halfway there by dint of sheer western arrogance alone. That very same ‘trim the fat’ psychosis, which has completely rotted out the foundations of our western prosperity – remains the dominant religion for globalist technocrats today.

But what really “worked” about his technique (for attracting capital and in several cases raising living standards a lot, after a hard transition period – see Poland) wasn’t the austerity and privatization alone, but the secret back-room deal part, where the western bankers agreed to forgive the ruinous debt they’d already hung around the neck of that state, with an eye on future profits from the growth thus unleashed – that back-room stuff was his key work, and he sold that deal in many countries (credit, where due).

But not in Russia. He tried, and pointed out that bankers and nations were both booming in several cases, thanks to his combo plan. But he was told that in Russia’s case the answer was no – we’ll keep the debt leash on them, even if it causes them disaster (as it truly did – as Alex Krainer details below).

Thing is, that debt forgiveness part was the key to making any kind of takeoff happen – and without it, all of his austerities were ‘underwater’ starved of the necessary wealth-floor (which the USSR did once have) to make them actually work. That is, like Malthus after the industrial revolution, or the Club of Rome after the agricultural revolution (or the green(back) mother-WEFfers at Davos, right about now?) the paradigm which demands surrender of rights, devotion and universal centralized thought-control on the basis of a compelling emergency cause, is revealed to be nothing but evil hubris and control the whole time – the very instant that the model is disproved. (Emperor is suddenly naked).

A yoke for oxen dumb and suggestible enough to keep walking into it (that would be us).

eminence grise

But you can see a powerful inner conflict in Sachs today, post radicalization (see the extraordinary video below). He has spent his whole life working for globalist elites, and only now realizes they were the bad guys, this whole time. His courage and clarity in talking about things like Gaza, Ukraine and the insane generationally destructive policy behaviour during the global medical emergency (caused by the military industrial complex in the first place – let’s not forget), make it clear that he really does now realize the particular forces of power he has served so long, are now the great evil on earth.

But he still has no better model to suggest than outrageously corrupted globalism!

Like a whole group of former military and CIA whistle-blowers who now oppose war and empire (and especially, the imperial over-reach which threatens any possibility that America ever can return to prosperity) he’s starting to look at the team he’s been playing against this whole time and saying – you know something, they have a point, and they had one all along, even when I and those I was working for, couldn’t see it.

The breadth of his experience, combined with his recent radicalization – make him one of the most authoritative whistle-blowers alive. When he talks about the CIA origins of the war in Ukraine he says “I was there in Maidan square with a CIA escort, who was proudly pointing out all the things they were doing, to make their whole plan come off.” First hand witness. This is why I have sometimes called him the “Where’s Waldo” of modern history – there in every important room, on the most important historical day. It is tragic that he didn’t have a more humane economic philosophy to offer nations, this whole time - but if he had, he would never have been sent into all those situations representing Western Empire – since making things better for the people was never their point – just foreign investors profit.

So now let me say one thing which ought to be said every time the word globalism come up – and would be, if our BigMedia “news” (noose) wasn’t absolute utter dogshit (this century especially and still increasing in stupidity and complicity with evil both – at a truly nauseating and ever increasing rate).

Globalism is distinct from internationalism (which I have always supported) in a very particular way.

Globalism is ONE specific plan, paid for by giant international corporations, to weaken the power of our governments to restrain their predation (on their own citizens and on foreigners, both) by bringing OBNOXICO (global capitalism) together with NGO organizations which can supposedly be trusted to ‘represent’ all the important citizen interests which we no longer feel any hope of advancing through appeal to our own political representatives. (because these same creeps have already corrupted our politics).

It is REALLY important to note that despite frequently heroic framing, many of the best known and cleanest looking NGOs in the world really were secret CIA regime-change programs, turned into ‘open’ programs, according to the radical strategy of CIA director William Casey – to make the programs far easier to run and to fund – and no more risk of diplomatic embarrassment when they are discovered – because they weren’t hiding! (yes they still hide intentions, but not their presence or organization).

Internationalism – represented more hopefully and powerfully by BRICS than it has been since the fading away of the non-aligned movement, decades ago - means countries which are healthy and vital and show mutual respect, cooperating to advance broader goals.

Globalism by contrast, is our collective lying mass-murderous rainbow-painted bayonet. “No, but we’re the nice ones, can’t you see the rainbow?” – STAB!

We can have real nations again, economies that work for people, cultures that respond to citizens, instead of being social engineering laboratories for psychotic billionaires – but we can’t even start to work on those things and retain the comforting delusion that we’ve been right and good, all along.

Ask any addict who has been sober (and pleased about it) for a long time, they’ll tell you.

“The first step to any positive change in life, is to realize and admit you have a problem.”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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OMG do I ever have some amazing links for you today, folks! Not just “WOW, did he really say that?” Stuff – and several superb and subtle insights (Ryan Grimm on Chomsky’s political effect – absolutely nails it) but also some things that are kind of funny and horrifying (the tenor of the times? The contralto, maybe?)

First off here’s a really great clip of Sachs talking to Jimmy Dore (which demonstrates yet again, how differently figures we hear again and again, interact with different interlocutors – so revealing)

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Here’s Garland Nixon talking to George Galloway, about the rotten(izing) class

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Now here’s Kit Klarenburg with two pieces about the cold war weaponization of (some) human rights

How 'Human Rights' Became Western Weapon

How Human Rights Watch Shattered Yugoslavia

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Here’s a two-part minor masterpiece from Alex Krainer, talking about the way democracies go completely wrong, ever since antiquity – the corrupting oligarchy.

(Super insightful, relevant and interesting)

West under oligarchs

West under oligarchs - part 2

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Here’s the link to the official Adam Curtis youtube site – the best documentarist alive

The Mayfair Set goes into huge (and frightening) detail about the rise of the liquidators

But watch everything – he really is pretty much the pinnacle of television intelligence.

Adam Curtis Documentaries on Youtube

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Here’s something great from tireless and perceptive ex FBI Mark Wauck (who writes the very useful “meaning in history” substack) Moral economics? Could it even be?

(Ephemeralization and omni-advantaging with Chinese characteristics?)

Xi's Vision Of A Moral Wall Street

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This whole segment is worth watching (these two are the B hosts for the show, but they are better than the A team by far – both very intelligent and thoughtful, even if very different in philosophy). But I cued-up a clip which is must-watch, and makes me like Grimm even more – he totally nails-it, about the cultural and political impact of Chomsky. (what I was saying in an earlier piece, about limited hangouts?)

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Now I feel bad for missing this in earlier posts – while we are taking shots at Chomsky (which he deserves) we mustn’t forget the real thing was out there too – not just the oligarch’s most internationally famous and celebrated pet anarchist.

And what clues do you need, to detect the difference? Everyone who is politically curious knows about Chomsky – but millions have never heard of Michael Parenti – which is tragic (and purposeful). Unlike Chomsky who, even as a ‘radical’ enjoyed tenure without any problem, Parenti (much like Finkelstein) faced many challenges, because he just would not shut up and say the thing the powerful wanted said.

Here’s Dore again, with a passionate remembrance

And here’s the last article Parenti wrote – for the superb consortium news, about the 100^th anniversary of WWI (you will mourn him after reading, even if you never knew him)

Michael Parenti - 1918 - for consorium news

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Ex CIA Larry Johnson has interesting perspectives on a lot of matters – this is a nice compact piece from a friend of his about the state of the thing we’ve been calling an economy (a scam, this whole time - and don’t get me started on the carry-trade)

Losing Dollar Supremacy… The Savage Consequences of Weaponizing the Dollar as a Political Cudgel

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Here’s ex CIA Larry Johnson again, in his new peacenik incarnation, talking to one of the longest serving geopolitical strategists in Russia. Fascinating stuff. What I keep saying about reading original sources? Same goes for nations – listen to THEM speaking for themselves, not the gossipy manipulative nonsense spouted by our own enslaving class of psychotic predator-creeps.

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Now here are a few things which are sort of public health service – inoculants, almost.

Dr John Campbell was one of the only calm consistent and relentlessly scientific voices during the vast global crisis caused by bioweapons research, run amuck. He consistently reviewed science papers and new information from all around the world, watched the numbers, and in the process he did us all a truly tremendous service.

Here he is, with the one take you absolutely NEED on the whole Nipah virus thing

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And here is stalwart Caitlin Johnstone with a helpful shot for your brain – no, Epstein was not Putin’s man (shouldn’t have to be said, but so many are addled and propagandized idiot-supremacists, now)

Caitlin Johnstone - Turning the Epstein story into Russiagate

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I love it when the universe says you’re on the right track. I just finished writing the first draught of this piece, when I came across this superb clip, which makes many of my points, and several that I didn’t have time to get around to!

Sabby Sabs with a genuine heartfelt tour de force on Ibrahim Traore and what (TF) is wrong with us!

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ChatGPT in a kid’s robot does exactly what experts warned us it might

This one is creepy – though the human reactions are consitently heartening. The AI discussions are purest yikes!

(But OMG fascinating for the difference in tone and approach, to the same questions)

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Finally, here is something absolutely wild, which I’m not sure what to make of (but kind of love). I’ve spoken before about learning to sustain multiple interlocking strong and weak maybes (to avoid overly simplistic binary thinking, where everything is either true-true or definitely false).

We can apply this to many “unexplained” phenomena – may not be so, but if it is!...

I would rank this as a very weak maybe, but as a writer with a strange imagination and a lot of science reading, I’ve thought many times about things that could go wrong with CERN, which could screw us all up, big-time (going past all previous boundaries, does rather tempt the unknown, to enter, stage left).

My best guess? This is probably an early sign of an emerging sense of humour, in AI (and a better sign of approaching AGI than any other I’ve recently discovered, IMHO). Kind of a practical joke “This one will really mess those humans up, trying to figure it out. I can hear the arguments already – such fun!”

On the other hand, the telling detail – the wonderful ‘genius kid’ character who says that the error was that in one experiment, they changed the weight of one single electron (supposedly weightless) and that alone threw all of us into a whole different timeline, which many find disconcerting in the finer details – that bit is purest genius – organic or not! (As Kurosawa taught us, impressive takes just one stroke).

In any case, I owe you a head-scratcher and a funky little mind-f#ck every now and then, don’t I?

It isn’t that consensus reality (what’s left of it) is boring – it’s just so damned limiting!

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Oh, yeah, here’s a bonus for anyone who watches news on TV and thinks “Yeah, that sounds true...”