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Doug Casey on the Fed to Address Inequality And Climate Change

Posted by M. C. on December 25, 2020

Doug Casey: The Fed is one of the main creators of inequality. The Establishment, the Deep State types, and the other cronies who hang around the government are closest to the fire hydrant of money spewing from the Fed. They get their fill of it before any trickles down to the “little people.”

The solution to the problem is to abolish the Fed. But it’s so entrenched and so central to the corrupt system, that’s impossible. At least short of a monetary collapse—although a monetary collapse is in the cards. But, at a minimum, the Fed shouldn’t try to act as a social engineer.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-fed-to-address-inequality-and-climate-change/

International Man: Recently, the calls for the Fed to add a third mandate to address racial and economic inequality have grown louder.

Will we see a redistribution of wealth soon?

Doug Casey: It seems the movement towards black “reparations” is building momentum. These things always start small, testing the water, then grow when nobody either laughs at them for being stupid or decries them as evil. Most Americans are now too intimidated and confused to do that, however.

It’s similar to MMT. A year ago, the notion of Modern Monetary Theory was too outrageous a notion for a sensible person to bother considering; now, it’s practically public policy.

And, incidentally, when I say “black,” I don’t capitalize the word, as very recent politically correct fashion dictates. Capitalizing it just emphasizes and accentuates racial differences—as do most “woke” practices.

It’s another sign of the mass insanity that’s sweeping the world. Like almost everybody wearing masks when walking down the street, or even bicycling in the countryside. Not to mention locking down the whole country, practically the entire world, like a prison. It’s quite ironic to me. In the past, I’ve often joked that the Earth was a prison planet. Now it’s no joke.

Anyway, the idea of reparations is even more insane, but it’s taking off. It’s the destructive, racist idea of affirmative action on steroids.

It’s one genuinely crazy thing after another, like NASDAQ requiring listed companies to have at least two board members of so-called minority groups, including one non-white person and one with a sexual aberration.

Movies are expected to have the same kind of composition now. You see it to a large degree in commercials on TV. When I watch the boob-tube, I feel like I’m the only straight white male left in the US.

The discrimination against Asians is equally criminal, especially when it comes to getting into college. If you’re a smart and hard-working Asian, you now have to be even smarter and harder working to compete.

These PC fools are making accidents of birth into defining features of existence. The only good thing about the trend is that these people may be overreaching and will self-destruct. Hopefully, that will happen before they destroy society itself.

International Man: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has spoken in length about the Fed’s interest to address economic inequality.

Ironically, the one institution that is single-handedly responsible for destructive monetary policies and money printing of epic proportions plans to do more of the same to “solve” the very problem they created.

What are your thoughts on this?

Doug Casey: The Fed is one of the main creators of inequality. The Establishment, the Deep State types, and the other cronies who hang around the government are closest to the fire hydrant of money spewing from the Fed. They get their fill of it before any trickles down to the “little people.”

The solution to the problem is to abolish the Fed. But it’s so entrenched and so central to the corrupt system, that’s impossible. At least short of a monetary collapse—although a monetary collapse is in the cards. But, at a minimum, the Fed shouldn’t try to act as a social engineer.

It certainly shouldn’t give money to blacks just because they’re black in the form of reparations or for any other reason. The notion is criminally stupid. All exchange must be mutual and free. If it’s not, it breeds resentment for both the giver and the receiver.

Free stuff, like welfare and free government housing, has already destroyed black families and black individuals. Places like Cabrini-Green and Pruitt-Igoe are monuments to government planning. If the Fed gets involved in passing out more free money, it’s only going to cement the average black more solidly to the bottom of society and create more race antagonism.

Well-positioned blacks like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, and hundreds of others who are getting rich by virtue of being black are all for it, of course. There’s big money in disguising race-baiting as virtue signaling.

International Man: Recently, Joe Biden announced that he would nominate former Fed Chairman Janet Yellen for US Treasury Secretary. In her first remarks, Yellen spoke about her plans to address racial disparities and inequality.

Is there a trend developing here where racial and economic inequality has become the justification for dangerous monetary policies?

Doug Casey: Race has become a justification for practically everything today. Deep State types in general, and the Democrats in particular, emphasize race and gender differences, which does nothing but aggravate the situation.

This nomination is an excellent deal for Yellen, who’s moved from being a nothing nobody academic to Fed Chair, and now Treasury Secretary. By the time she finishes her term in office, she’ll be a centimillionaire—the usual drill, six-figure speeches, seven-figure book contracts, fat directors fees, consulting fees, and insider investment deals. She’ll do well for someone who has zero business experience and has detracted hugely from the world’s real wealth.

She’s a model for the kind of people who want to go into government to become rich and famous.

International Man: Fed chairman Powell has made countless remarks about the need for the US central bank to address climate change.

What is going on here?

Doug Casey: It’s a good question.

How can they address the so-called problem of climate change? Climate change has been going on since the Earth came together 4.5 billion years ago, and it will continue on its own path, primarily influenced by the sun and secondarily by things like volcanism, cosmic rays, and peculiarities of the planets orbit, long after mankind has gone.

But destroying the economy by printing up more money certainly isn’t an answer to climate change. However, I’m sure that what’s on Powell’s mind is making money easier to get for things like windmills and solar panels. This is more state direction of investment. It was a disaster for the USSR and every other socialist and state-directed economy and will be for us as well.

You’ll notice that the Chinese and other Asian economies don’t indulge in this kind of politically correct investing. It’s a major reason why they’re on the way up, and we’re on the way down.

Janet and Jerome’s excellent adventure in climate engineering won’t end well.

International Man: With climate change and racial inequality, the Fed is creating all sorts of new ridiculous pretexts to justify whatever it wants to do. It would be comical if the consequences weren’t so destructive. What do you think comes next?

Doug Casey: At this point, the Federal Reserve, which most Americans barely even know exists, has become extremely important to everybody.

It’s now the main source of government income—greater even than the income tax—and this is likely to continue. Agencies like the Fed grow when they have unlimited funding. But it’s more than just mission creep at this point.

We saw mission creep during the Vietnam war and all other wars. Now the Fed has been enlisted to fight the war on poverty, the war on racism, and global warming. The problem is that war is the health of the State—but a catastrophe for society.

The Fed started out as essentially a clearinghouse for banks; it was instructed to maintain the value of the currency. It has totally failed at that mission since its creation. The US dollar was stable from 1789 up until 1913 when the Fed was instituted. Since then, the dollar lost has about 97% of its value, and the degeneration is radically accelerating.

Now the Fed is supposed to ensure full employment, racial and gender equality, and sunny days in addition. The next abomination will be Fed Coin, a digital dollar, which will eliminate all privacy from financial transactions.

I don’t think anything can turn the situation around at this point. The only thing you can do is become as wealthy as possible to insulate yourself.

The next step will be something resembling World War III, probably with China. The US will turn into a police state, which in many ways, it was during World Wars I and  II.

It’s going to be much more serious this time around.

Editor’s Note: Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path that’s not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country, but accelerating quickly toward boundless decay.

In the years ahead, there will likely be much less stability of any kind.

That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the Raging 2020s.

Click here to download the free PDF now.

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Automobile tires, not climate change, are killing West Coast salmon – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/automobile_tires_not_climate_change_are_killing_west_coast_salmon.html

By Anthony Watts

From the “where the rubber meets the road” department comes this bombshell finding that flies in the face of claims about the universal boogeyman of “climate change” killing salmon due to it supposedly raising water temperatures in streams where they spawn.

Just last year, PBS and Popular Science were screaming about “climate change” being the cause of salmon deaths with headlines like “Climate Change is Killing Salmon in the Pacific Northwest” and “Climate change is cooking salmon in the Pacific Northwest.”

It seems they were wrong — dead wrong.

New research from the University of Washington published December 3 in the journal Science, exonerates “climate change” in the salmon-killing caper and finds a surprise villain: an additive to automobile tires, not “climate change.”  In fact, the researchers specifically ruled out climate change-driven water temperature increases as a cause.

Basically, the process works like this: stormwater runoff carries tire wear rubber particles into streams from the nearby roads, where a chemical called 6PPD-quinone, a biproduct from the 6PPD preservative added on tires to prevent breakdown by ozone, leeches into the water.  It has been determined that this chemical is highly toxic to salmon.  Researchers say they identified 6PPD-quinone as the “smoking gun” behind salmon deaths in freshwater streams.

Here are some relevant quotes from the University of Washington press release, “Tire-related chemical is largely responsible for adult coho salmon deaths in urban streams,” italics mine:

“We had determined it couldn’t be explained by high temperatures, low dissolved oxygen or any known contaminant, such as high zinc levels,” said co-senior author Jenifer McIntyre, an assistant professor at WSU’s School of the Environment, based in Puyallup. “Then we found that urban stormwater runoff could recreate the symptoms and the acute mortality.”

“[We]…found something called 6PPD, which is used to keep tires from breaking down too quickly.”

“It’s like a preservative for tires,” Tian said. “Similar to how food preservatives keep food from spoiling too quickly, 6PPD helps tires last by protecting them from ground-level ozone.”

“But when 6PPD reacts with ozone, the researchers found that it was transformed into multiple chemicals, including 6PPD-quinone (pronounced “kwih-known”), the toxic chemical that is responsible for killing the salmon.”

“This chemical is not limited to the Puget Sound region. The team also tested roadway runoff from Los Angeles and urban creeks near San Francisco, and 6PPD-quinone was present there as well. This finding is unsurprising, the researchers said, because 6PPD appears to be used in all tires and tire wear particles are likely present in creeks near busy roads across the world.”

The findings suggest that this is a worldwide problem, and because this research focused only on salmon, who knows where else in nature this chemical might be causing trouble?

Historically, climate activists like to use “climate change” as an immediate go-to cause for anything they can’t explain, which is why I refer to it as the “universal boogeyman.”  Now that real science without a climate-change agenda has been published on the salmon issue, we can move from a baseless blame game to a solution.

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.  Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.  He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.  He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

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No Privacy, No Property: The World in 2030 According to the WEF | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2020

https://mises.org/wire/no-privacy-no-property-world-2030-according-wef

Antony P. Mueller

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded fifty years ago. It has gained more and more prominence over the decades and has become one of the leading platforms of futuristic thinking and planning. As a meeting place of the global elite, the WEF brings together the leaders in business and politics along with a few selected intellectuals. The main thrust of the forum is global control. Free markets and individual choice do not stand as the top values, but state interventionism and collectivism. Individual liberty and private property are to disappear from this planet by 2030 according to the projections and scenarios coming from the World Economic Forum.

Eight Predictions

Individual liberty is at risk again. What may lie ahead was projected in November 2016 when the WEF published “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” According to the WEF’s scenario, the world will become quite a different place from now because how people work and live will undergo a profound change. The scenario for the world in 2030 is more than just a forecast. It is a plan whose implementation has accelerated drastically since with the announcement of a pandemic and the consequent lockdowns. 

According to the projections of the WEF’s “Global Future Councils,” private property and privacy will be abolished during the next decade. The coming expropriation would go further than even the communist demand to abolish the property of production goods but leave space for private possessions. The WEF projection says that consumer goods, too, would be no longer private property.

If the WEF projection should come true, people would have to rent and borrow their necessities from the state, which would be the sole proprietor of all goods. The supply of goods would be rationed in line with a social credit points system. Shopping in the traditional sense would disappear along with the private purchases of goods. Every personal move would be tracked electronically, and all production would be subject to the requirements of clean energy and a sustainable environment. 

In order to attain “sustainable agriculture,” the food supply will be mainly vegetarian. In the new totalitarian service economy, the government will provide basic accommodation, food, and transport, while the rest must be lent from the state. The use of natural resources will be brought down to its minimum. In cooperation with the few key countries, a global agency would set the price of CO2 emissions at an extremely high level to disincentivize its use.

In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:

  1. People will own nothing. Goods are either free of charge or must be lent from the state.
  2. The United States will no longer be the leading superpower, but a handful of countries will dominate.
  3. Organs will not be transplanted but printed.
  4. Meat consumption will be minimized.
  5. Massive displacement of people will take place with billions of refugees.
  6. To limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a global price will be set at an exorbitant level.
  7. People can prepare to go to Mars and start a journey to find alien life.
  8. Western values will be tested to the breaking point..

Beyond Privacy and Property

In a publication for the World Economic Forum, the Danish ecoactivist Ida Auken, who had served as her country’s minister of the environment from 2011 to 2014 and still is a member of the Danish Parliament (the Folketing), has elaborated a scenario of a world without privacy or property. In “Welcome to 2030,” she envisions a world where “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” By 2030, so says her scenario, shopping and owning have become obsolete, because everything that once was a product is now a service.

In this idyllic new world of hers, people have free access to transportation, accommodation, food, “and all the things we need in our daily lives.” As these things will become free of charge, “it ended up not making sense for us to own much.” There would be no private ownership in houses nor would anyone pay rent, “because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it.” A person’s living room, for example, will be used for business meetings when one is absent. Concerns like “lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment” are things of the past. The author predicts that people will be happy to enjoy such a good life that is so much better “than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth.”

Ecological Paradise

In her 2019 contribution to the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils of the World Economic Forum, Ida Auken foretells how the world may look in the future “if we win the war on climate change.” By 2030, when CO2 emissions will be greatly reduced, people will live in a world where meat on the dinner plate “will be a rare sight” while water and the air will be much cleaner than today. Because of the shift from buying goods to using services, the need to have money will vanish, because people will spend less and less on goods. Work time will shrink and leisure time will grow.

For the future, Auken envisions a city where electric cars have substituted conventional combustion vehicles. Most of the roads and parking spaces will have become green parks and walking zones for pedestrians. By 2030, agriculture will offer mainly plant-based alternatives to the food supply instead of meat and dairy products. The use of land to produce animal feed will greatly diminish and nature will be spreading across the globe again.

Fabricating Social Consent

How can people be brought to accept such a system? The bait to entice the masses is the assurances of comprehensive healthcare and a guaranteed basic income. The promoters of the Great Reset promise a world without diseases. Due to biotechnologically produced organs and individualized genetics-based medical treatments, a drastically increased life expectancy and even immortality are said to be possible. Artificial intelligence will eradicate death and eliminate disease and mortality. The race is on among biotechnological companies to find the key to eternal life.

Along with the promise of turning any ordinary person into a godlike superman, the promise of a “universal basic income” is highly attractive, particularly to those who will no longer find a job in the new digital economy. Obtaining a basic income without having to go through the treadmill and disgrace of applying for social assistance is used as a bait to get the support of the poor.

To make it economically viable, the guarantee of a basic income would require the leveling of wage differences. The technical procedures of the money transfer from the state will be used to promote the cashless society. With the digitization of all monetary transactions, each individual purchase will be registered. As a consequence, the governmental authorities would have unrestricted access to supervise in detail how individual persons spend their money. A universal basic income in a cashless society would provide the conditions to impose a social credit system and deliver the mechanism to sanction undesirable behavior and identify the superfluous and unwanted.

Who Will Be the Rulers?

The World Economic Forum is silent about the question of who will rule in this new world.

There is no reason to expect that the new power holders would be benevolent. Yet even if the top decision-makers of the new world government were not mean but just technocrats, what reason would an administrative technocracy have to go on with the undesirables? What sense does it make for a technocratic elite to turn the common man into a superman? Why share the benefits of artificial intelligence with the masses and not keep the wealth for the chosen few?

Not being swayed away by the utopian promises, a sober assessment of the plans must come to the conclusion that in this new world, there would be no place for the average person and that they would be put away along with the “unemployable,” “feeble minded,” and “ill bred.” Behind the preaching of the progressive gospel of social justice by the promoters of the Great Reset and the establishment of a new world order lurks the sinister project of eugenics, which as a technique is now called “genetic engineering” and as a movement is named “transhumanism,” a term  coined by Julian Huxley, the first director of the UNESCO.

The promoters of the project keep silent about who will be the rulers in this new world. The dystopian and collectivist nature of these projections and plans is the result of the rejection of free capitalism. Establishing a better world through a dictatorship is a contradiction in terms. Not less but more economic prosperity is the answer to the current problems. Therefore, we need more free markets and less state planning. The world is getting greener and a fall in the growth rate of the world population is already underway. These trends are the natural consequence of wealth creation through free markets.

Conclusion

The World Economic Forum and its related institutions in combination with a handful of governments and a few high-tech companies want to lead the world into a new era without property or privacy. Values like individualism, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are at stake, to be repudiated in favor of collectivism and the imposition of a “common good” that is defined by the self-proclaimed elite of technocrats. What is sold to the public as the promise of equality and ecological sustainability is in fact a brutal assault on human dignity and liberty. Instead of using the new technologies as an instrument of betterment, the Great Reset seeks to use the technological possibilities as a tool of enslavement. In this new world order, the state is the single owner of everything. It is left to our imagination to figure out who will program the algorithms that manage the distribution of the goods and services. Author:

Antony P. Mueller

Dr. Antony P. Mueller is a German professor of economics who currently teaches in Brazil. Write an email. See his website and blog.

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We Are Pawns In A Bigger Game Than We Realize | Peak Prosperity

Posted by M. C. on November 2, 2020

https://www.peakprosperity.com/we-are-pawns-in-a-bigger-game-than-we-realize/

by Chris Martenson

“I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others…. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”

 ~ Sherlock Holmes – The Adventures of Silver Blaze

Is it possible to make sense out of nonsense?

So much these days is an incoherent mess.  It’s complete nonsense.

Page 1 excitedly beams about a glorious rebound in GDP.  Yay economic growth!

Page 2 worryingly notes the near complete failure of Siberian arctic ice to reform during October and that hurricane Zeta (so many storms this year we’re now into the Greek alphabet!) has made punishing landfall.

Each is a narrative. Each has its own inner logic.

But they simply do not have any external coherence to each other. It’s nonsensical to be excited about rising economic growth while also concerned that each new unit of growth takes the planet further past a critical red line.

These narratives are incompatible. So which one should we pick?

Well, in the end, reality always has the final say. As Guy McPherson states: Nature bats last.

So better we choose to follow the narrative that hews closest to what reality actually is, vs what we desperately want it to be.

‘They’ Don’t Care About Us

While issues like climate change and economic growth may be difficult to fully grasp and unravel, direct threats to our lives &/or livelihoods are much more concrete and something we can react to and resist.

Such immediate and direct threats are now fully in play and, once again, they’re accompanied by narratives that are completely at odds with each other.  I’m speaking of Covid and the ways in which our national and global managers are choosing to respond (or not).

It’s a truly incoherent mess about which both social media and the increasingly irrelevant media are working quite hard to misinform us.

The mainstream narrative about Covid-19, in the West, is this:

  • It’s a quite deadly and novel disease
  • There are no effective treatments
  • Sadly, no double-blind placebo controlled trials exist to support some of the wild claims out there about various off-patent, cheap and widely available supplements and drugs
  • Health authorities care about saving lives
  • They care so much, in fact, that along with politicians they’ve decided to entirely shut down economies
  • There’s a huge second wave rampaging across the US and Europe and there’s nothing we can do to limit it except shut down businesses and people’s ability to travel and gather
  • You need to fear this virus and its associated disease
  • All we can do is wait for a vaccine

The alternative narrative, one that I’ve uncovered after 9 months of almost daily research and reporting, is this:

  • It’s not an especially dangerous disease and it’s certainly not novel
  • There is a huge assortment of very effective, cheap and widely-available preventatives and treatments including (but not limited to)
    • Vitamin D
    • Ivermectin
    • Hydroxychloroquine
    • Zinc
    • Selenium
    • Famotidine (Pepcid)
    • Melatonin
  • Use of a combination of these mostly OTC supplements could reasonably be expected to drop the severity of illness and the already low mortality rate by 90% or (probably) more
  • Western health authorities have shown either zero interest in the results of studies mainly conducted in poorer nations on these combination therapies or…
  • They have actively run studies designed to fail so that these cheap, effective therapies could be dismissed or…
  • Set up proper studies but which started late, have immensely long study periods and most likely won’t be done before a vaccine is hastily rushed through development.

By the way – every single one of my assertions and claims is backed by links and supporting documentation from scientific and clinical trials and studies.  I am not conjecturing here; I am recounting the summary of ten months’ worth of inquiry.

The conclusion I draw from my narrative (vs. theirs) is that we can no longer assume that the public health or saving lives has anything to do with explaining or understanding the actions of these health “managers” (I cannot bring myself to use the word authorities).

After we eliminate the impossible – which is that somehow these massive, well-funded bodies have missed month after month of accumulating evidence in support of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, NAC, zinc, selenium and doxycycline/azithromycin – what remains must be the truth.

As improbable as it seems, the only conclusion we’re left with is that the machinery of politics, money and corporate psychopathy is suppressing life saving treatments because these managers have other priorities besides public health and saving lives.

This is a terribly difficult conclusion, because it means suspending so much that we hold dear.  Things like the notion that people are basically good. The idea that the government generally means well. The thought that somehow when the chips are down and a crisis is afoot, good will emerge and triumph over evil.

I’m sorry to say, the exact opposite of all of that has emerged as true.

Medical doctors in the UK NHS system purposely used toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine far too late in the disease cycle to be of any help simply to ‘make a point’ about hydroxychloroquine.  They rather desperately wanted that drug to fail, so they made it fail.

After deliberately setting their trial up for failure, they concluded: “Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help, and it even makes things worse.”

Note that in order to be able to make this claim, they had to be willing to cause harm — even to let people die.  What kind of health official does that?

Not one who actually has compassion, a heart, or functioning level of sympathy.  It’s an awful conclusion but it’s what remains after we eliminate the impossible.

Getting Past The Emotional Toll

Science has proven that cheap, safe and significantly protective compounds exist to limit both Covid-related death and disease severity.

Yet all of the main so-called health authorities in the major western countries are nearly completely ignoring, if not outright banning, these safe, cheap and effective compounds.

This is crazy-making for independent observers like me (and you) because the data is so clear. It’s irrefutable at this point.  These medicines and treatments not only work, but work really, really well.

However most people will be unable to absorb the data, let alone move beyond it to wrestle with the implications.  Why? Because such data is belief-shattering.  Absorbing this information is not an intellectual process; it’s an emotional one.

I don’t know why human nature decided to invest so much in developing a tight wall around the belief systems that control our actions and thoughts. But it has.

I’m sure there was some powerful evolutionary advantage. One that’s now being hijacked daily by social media AI programs to nudge us in desired directions. One that’s being leveraged by shabby politicians, hucksters, fake gurus, and con men to steer advantage away from the populace and towards themselves.

The neural wiring of beliefs is what it is. We have to recognize that and move on.

Some people will be much faster in their adjustment process than others.  (Notably, the Peak Prosperity tribe is populated with many fast-adjusters, which is unsurprising given the topics we cover…tough topics tend to attract fast adjusters and repel the rest)

To move past the deeply troubling information laid out before us requires us to be willing to endure a bit of turbulence.  It’s the only way.

For you to navigate these troubling times safely and successfully, you’ll need to see as clearly as possible the true nature of the game actually being played.  To see what the rules really are – not what you’ve been told they are, or what you wish or hope they are.

The Manipulation Underway

The data above strongly supports the conclusion that our national health managers don’t actually care about public health generally or your health specifically.

If indeed true, then the beliefs preventing most people from accepting this likely include:

  • Wanting to believe that people are good (a biggie for most people)
  • Trust and faith in the medical system (really big)
  • Faith in authority (ginormous)

There are many other operative belief systems I could also list. But this is sufficient to get the ball rolling.

Picking just one, how hard would it be for someone to let go of, say, trust in the medical system?

That would be pretty hard in most cases.

First not trusting the medical system might mean having to wonder if a loved one might have died unnecessarily while being treated.  Or realizing that you’re now going to have to research the living daylights out of every medical decision before agreeing to it.  Or worrying that your medications might be more harmful to you over the long haul than helpful (which is true in many more cases than most appreciate).  It might mean having your personal heroes dinged by suspicion — perhaps even your father or mother who worked in the medical profession.  It would definitely require a complete reorientation away from being able to trust anything you read in a newspaper, or see on TV, about new pharmaceutical “breakthroughs”.

Trust, which is safe and warm and comforting, then turns into skepticism; which is lonelier and insists upon active mental involvement.

But, as always, hard work comes with benefits — with a healthy level of skepticism and involvement, the families of those recruited into the deadly UK RECOVERY trial could have looked at the proposed doses of HCQ (2,400 mg on day one! Toxic!) and said, “Not now, not ever!” and maybe have saved the life of their loved one.

Look at that tangled mess of undesirables that comes with unpacking that one belief: regret, uncertainty, shame, doubt, fallen idols, and vastly more additional effort. Are all up for grabs when we decide to look carefully at the actions of our national health managers during Covid.

Which is why most people simply choose not to look.  It’s too hard.

I get it. I have a lot of compassion for why people choose not to go down that path.  It can get unpleasant in a hurry.

But, just like choosing to ignore a nagging chest pain, turning away in denial has its own consequences.

The Coming ‘Great Reset’

My coverage of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and Covid-19 (the associated disease) has led me to uncover some things that have made me deeply uncomfortable about our global and national ‘managers’.  Shameful things, really.  Scary things in their implications for what we might reasonably expect (or not expect, more accurately) from the future.

Once we get past the shock of seeing just how patently corrupt they’ve been, we have to ask both What’s next? and What should I do?

After all, you live in a system whose managers either are too dumb to understand the Vitamin D data (very unlikely) or have decided that they’d rather not promote it to the general populace for some reason.  It’s a ridiculously safe vitamin with almost zero downside and virtually unlimited upside.

Either they’re colossally dumb, or this is a calculated decision.  They’re not dumb.  So we have to ask: What’s the calculation being performed here?  It’s not public safety. It’s not your personal health. So… What is it?

This is our line of questioning and observation. It’s like the short story by Arthur Conan Doyle in Silver Blaze that many of us informally know as “the case of the dog that didn’t bark”.  As the story goes, because of a missing clue – a dog who remained silent as a murder was committed – this conclusion could be drawn: the dog was already familiar with the killer!

The silence around Vitamin D alone is extremely telling. It is the pharmacological dog that did not bark.

One true inference suggests others.  Here, too, we can deduce from the near total silence around Vitamin D that the health managers would prefer not to talk about it. They don’t want people to know. That much is painfully clear.

Such lack of promotion (let alone appropriate study) of safe, effective treatments is a thread that, if tugged, can unravel the whole rug.  The silence tells us everything we need to know.

Do they want people to suffer and die?  I don’t know. My belief systems certainly hope not. Perhaps the death and suffering are merely collateral damage as they pursue a different goal — money, power, politics?  Simply the depressing result of a contentious election year?  More than that?

We’ve now reached the jumping off point where we may well find out just how far down the rabbit hole goes.

A massive grab for tighter control over the global populace is now being fast-tracked at the highest levels. Have you heard of the Great Reset yet?

If not, you soon will.

In Part 2: The Coming ‘Great Reset’ we lay out everything we know so far about the multinational proposal to transform nearly every aspect of global industry, commerce, trade, and social structure.

If you read on, be ready and willing to let go of cherished beliefs and to suspend what you know to be true. Because none of us has that in hand.  It’s going to be a wild ride from here.

Something very big is afoot and I suspect that Covid-19 is merely an excuse providing cover for a much bigger power grab over the world’s wealth and peoples.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).

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The West Coast burns, and leftists blame climate change, but they’re wrong – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2020

Others wiser than Obama have pointed out that climate change is not the problem.  Instead, the problem is environmentalism.

These unusual weather phenomena will have nothing to do with the left’s favorite explanation of Gaia in crisis due to evil people.  Instead, they will reflect normal weather patterns around the globe, including in California.  The only unusual thing will have been the California greenies’ failure to take steps that could protect their state from predictable weather events.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/the_west_coast_burns_and_leftists_blame_climate_change_but_theyre_wrong.html

By Andrea Widburg

The West Coast is aglow but not in a good way.  Instead, fires are raging throughout California, Oregon, and Washington.  The property damage is appalling, and ten people have already died.  Leftists, predictably, have announced that their goddess, Mother Gaia, is again crying out from the horrors of anthropogenic climate change.

The reality is that there’s something bigger and more real going on, which is the actual climate. La Nina is afoot in the northern hemisphere, and she’s having some extra fun in the West because the environmentalists have prevented California from protecting against fires.

The data from the fires is appalling.  In California, at least 2.5 million acres have burned.  In Oregon, 900,000 acres have burned, with one of the worst fires being attributed to arson.  In a nod to the cliché that everything that happens hits women and minorities the hardest, the Washington Post reports that “[i]n a small Oregon town, a wildfire devastates a Latino community.”  In Washington State, 480,000 acres have burned.

Leftists know what’s to blame — it’s Anthropogenic Climate Change, which is the nearest thing they have to a religion.  Religions are unfalsifiable because faith ties all events to a deity.  In that vein, climate change is the answer to all weather and climate events.  Whether it’s too hot or cold, too still or windy, too wet or dry, it doesn’t matter.  The blame always falls on humans and their love affair with fossil fuel.

Therefore, it’s unsurprising that one of the high priests of leftism, Barack Obama, would weigh in on the admittedly disturbing orange sky in California.  In his usual pompous way, he announced that humankind is at fault:

 

Others wiser than Obama have pointed out that climate change is not the problem.  Instead, the problem is environmentalism.

Environmentalism is why California stopped grooming forests or doing controlled burns to get rid of deadwood (AKA tinder).  It was because of environmentalism that PG&E poured all of its money into building renewable energy facilities, such as the solar facilities that failed during California’s recent heat wave, and stopped repairing old power lines (some going back 90 years) or trimming back tinder around those power lines.  All this misbegotten environmentalism has controlled California even as more people have moved into fire zones over the past several decades.

Even those awful environmental policies do not tell the entire story.  There are two bigger things at play.  First, there’s California’s actual climate.  For all the hysteria about the epic heat wave this year, back in 1913, the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth was 134 degrees in California’s Death Valley.

That doesn’t even mean it was the hottest temperature ever.  It was just the hottest temperature ever recorded.  People have been recording temperatures in a consistent way only since the Victorian era.  That means that, long before the last 150 years, the earth has almost certainly been setting all sorts of records about which we know nothing.

Second, the leftists are ignoring the most significant thing of all about California’s furnace-like conditions.  This is a La Niña year, and it’s going to wreak havoc all over America:

La Nina — a phenomenon that occurs when the surface of the Pacific Ocean cools — has officially formed, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said Thursday. It triggers an atmospheric chain reaction that stands to roil weather around the globe, often turning the western U.S. into a tinder box, fueling more powerful hurricanes in the Atlantic and flooding parts of Australia and South America.

“We’re already in a bad position, and La Nina puts us in a situation where fire-weather conditions persist into November and possibly even December,” said Ryan Truchelut, president of Weather Tiger LLC. “It is exacerbating existing heat and drought issues.”

The effects are already evident. Rising temperatures and an extreme mega-drought across the U.S. West are fueling fires from Washington to Arizona. California is having its worst fire season on record, torching an unprecedented 2.5 million acres. And in the Atlantic, a record number tropical storms have formed by September, including Hurricane Laura, which killed more than a dozen people across the Caribbean and the U.S. last month.

No matter where you are, you’d better batten down the hatches, because anything that can go wild and dangerous with the weather will.  These unusual weather phenomena will have nothing to do with the left’s favorite explanation of Gaia in crisis due to evil people.  Instead, they will reflect normal weather patterns around the globe, including in California.  The only unusual thing will have been the California greenies’ failure to take steps that could protect their state from predictable weather events.

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Geography of the Ice Age – Fantastic video – Ice Age Now

Posted by M. C. on August 5, 2020

https://www.iceagenow.info/geography-of-the-ice-age-fantastic-video-2/

by

Climate change is normal. In fact, the climate has been in flux for our entire evolutionary history.

We have witnessed two glaciations as a species and have experienced the Eemian Interglacial when conditions were similar to today (probably even warmer).
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During the last glacial, about 25 percent of the world’s landmass was covered by ice. Today, only about 11 percent is covered by ice.

Where did all of the water come from to create that ice? From the oceans. During the last glacial, ocean levels stood about 130 meters (more than 426 ft) lower than today.

Talk about lower sea levels!

At about 6:55 in, look at the map and notice how most of eastern Italy was connected to Croatia. The Adriatic Sea didn’t even exist.

At about 8:35 in, notice the huge land bridge between Alaska and Asia. (I talk about this land bridge in Not by Fire but by Ice.) And contrary to what a lot people might believe, notice that most of Alaska was not glaciated.

At about 9:34 in, notice that the Philippines, Indonesia, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Malaysia, Singapore, all were connected to each other and to the mainland.

Thanks to Winston Smith for this fantastic video

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New Opportunities for Marxists: Climate Change and Coronavirus | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on July 23, 2020

Many people do not know what capitalism really means. Capitalism is the social and economic order in which the means of production are privately owned. In its “pure” form, capitalism means unconditional respect of people’s private property, free markets, and, most importantly, a form of state that is confined to protecting people and their property against aggression from inside and outside the country’s borders. “Pure” capitalism is no doubt conducive to peaceful and productive cooperation nationally as well as internationally.

https://mises.org/wire/new-opportunities-marxists-climate-change-and-coronavirus

In The Communist Manifesto (1848) Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) predicted that capitalism would lead to the impoverishment of the laboring class. Why? Well, to raise profit on capital invested, Marx and Engels argued, entrepreneurs (the capitalists) would exploit the workers. They would reduce wages and worsen working conditions by, say, increasing working hours. From that viewpoint, Marx and Engels put forward an immiseration theory of capitalism.

Worker “Exploitation”

Marxists would not argue that workers’ wages would decline in absolute terms, but certainly in relative terms: the wage incomes of the many would rise less than the incomes of the capitalists, thereby making the former poorer compared to the latter over time. Especially in times of crisis, which are inevitable and recurrent in a capitalist economy, workers would be hit particularly hard, causing their economic and financial conditions to fall further behind of those of the capitalists.

Capitalist “Imperialism”

To make things worse, Marxists argue that capitalism would bring about violent colonialism and imperialism. As capitalists pay less for labor than what is appropriate, the workers cannot buy all available products. Profit-seeking capital is, therefore, seeking to open up new markets in other parts of the world. Conflicts over who controls what arise among nations, paving the way toward war. This is, in fact, the message Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) hammered home to his readers in his 1917 book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

If capitalism is bad—if it brings exploitation, misery, and even war to a great many people, and all this comes to the benefit of the capitalists—isn’t it rightful and consequential to do everything to overcome capitalism and replace it with socialism-communism, the alternatives said to bring peace, equality and happier life for the people in this world? Sound economics reveals that the Marxist critique of capitalism, as well as the high-flying enthusiasm for socialism-communism, is tantamount to outright intellectual confusion.

What Capitalism Really Is: Peaceful Cooperation

Many people do not know what capitalism really means. Capitalism is the social and economic order in which the means of production are privately owned. In its “pure” form, capitalism means unconditional respect of people’s private property, free markets, and, most importantly, a form of state that is confined to protecting people and their property against aggression from inside and outside the country’s borders. “Pure” capitalism is no doubt conducive to peaceful and productive cooperation nationally as well as internationally.

It is capitalism that makes mass production possible—the production of goods and services for the consumption of the greatest number of people. The productivity gains that it creates result in a tendency toward a continuous increase in people’s average living standard. Producers are subject to the profit and loss principle: they are economically rewarded only if and when their products meet consumers’ preferences. If they don’t, entrepreneurs will suffer losses, forcing them to improve their output to the benefit of their customers.

Pure capitalism not has only a built-in mechanism to improve the masses’ material well-being. What is particularly wonderful is that under pure capitalism, people’s wages do not depend on individual workers’ productivity, but the marginal productivity of labor in general. Assume a firm makes a productive innovation. To hire new labor, it has to pay higher wages compared to those paid by other employers. The latter, to retain their staff, will also have to offer a higher wage—to the benefit of less productive workers.

It should also be noted here that pure capitalism encourages the division of labor among people, nationally and internationally. This, in turn, entices people to seek peaceful cooperation rather than conflict: everyone realizes that it pays off to cooperate, that this is mutually beneficial to all parties involved. In other words: pure capitalism is a recipe for peace. In a world of pure capitalism, there would simply be no reason for large-scale violent conflicts, let alone state wars.

Interventionism vs. Capitalism

Why do so many people harbor resentment or even hate against the concept of capitalism? One answer is that they presumably look around and see the many evils in this world, such as the recurrence of financial and economic crises; mass unemployment; bailout programs that make big corporations richer, disregarding the fate of small and medium-sized firms; chronically rising costs of living; growing income and wealth inequality; and growing geopolitical tensions and conflicts.

Unfortunately, all these evils are attributed to capitalism. A fatal conclusion, though, because there is no pure capitalism, neither in the US nor in Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa. What we find are interventionist-collectivist and sometimes even socialist economic and societal systems. Especially in the Western world, basically all states, and the special interest groups that exert great influence over them, have succeeded in increasingly replacing what little is left of the capitalist system in recent decades.

States have interfered in all areas of people’s lives. Be it education (kindergarten, schools, universities), health, pensions, transport, law and order, money and credit, or the environment, the states and their governments have become major players in markets for goods and services, turning free markets into hampered markets, raising taxes ever higher, and increasingly undermining and even destroying the institution of private property.

Intervention Cripples the Wealth Creation Offered by Capitalism

Read the rest of this entry »

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Climate Change at Fox News – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 25, 2020

Drowning in the swamp. Holding hands with Trump on the way down.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/no_author/climate-change-at-fox-news/

By Steve Hall

There has been a drastic change in the climate at Fox News.  We used to think of them as a counter-balance to the “mainstream media”; an alternative perspective, with “balance” and yes, with a healthy dose of skepticism about all things government.  Then suddenly, inexplicably, Fox News jumped on the hysteria bandwagon.

– – – – –

Imagine this:  an old white guy is elected President, with AOC as his running mate.  The old guy can no longer do the job, perhaps perishes, and AOC becomes President.  She immediately sounds the alarm:  the threat from climate change, the destruction of the earth, is imminent.  She shows the models and presents the science.  The media shouts “armageddon” day after after day, incessantly, with a parade of experts who agree.

AOC says that we knew this was coming and yet we did not prepare.  That we had ten years, but now there is no time left.  The public is whipped into fear and mass hysteria.  AOC declares a national emergency and a “War on Climate Change” and the people acquiesce.  She orders temporary measures to cut the use of carbon-based fuel: shuts down oil production; shuts down cruise ships; restricts airline flights; orders people not to drive unless it is essential; and shuts down all frivolous activities.  But the two-week “temporary” shutdown quickly turns into another month, and then another, with no end in sight.

People comply voluntarily.  “Everyone agrees” that this must be done.  But voluntary soon turns to mandatory.  Guidelines, when administered by bureaucrats, become arbitrary laws.  Because the economy is so interconnected, because all workers are essential, the economic impact begins to grow and spread.  Hundreds of thousands of workers are unemployed.  Businesses are bankrupted.  The effects ripple through the entire economy and cause a deep recession.  AOC promises to make everyone whole and initiates massive Federal spending, with Congress happily agreeing (it buys them votes, and would be so politically incorrect to question, let alone dissent).

The Federal government has no money except which it first takes from the people; the shutdown drastically reduces the money coming in.  The Federal government has no savings; they were already deep in debt.  The “Fed” was out of “ammunition”; interest rates had been held artificially low for years and they had already been doing bailouts and QE to keep the economy propped up.  So all of the AOC stimulus and Federal aid has to come from additional, excessive debt, or from what amounts to printing money out of thin air.  America wobbles on the verge of an unprecedented depression, perhaps total economic collapse.

– – – – –

Now try to imagine Fox News jumping on board with AOC in that scenario.  Not questioning the models.  Not presenting other perspectives and alternative views.  Not considering the consequences.  In fact, doing just the opposite – sounding the alarm and promoting the panic, actually encouraging the shut downs!   Unimaginable?  Many of us thought so.  Yet that is exactly what they did with this virus!

Tucker Carlson was one of the very first, sensationalizing how dangerous this could be, urging Federal action.  Within weeks, every Fox News anchor was on board, not only agreeing with the unprecedented step of shutting down the nation, but also with the dangerous, dictator-like experiment of quarantining people who were not sick!

That was, in fact, pretty much what communist China did.  Except in America it was to be  “guidelines”?  Voluntary?  Temporary?  No, it’s turning out to be mandatory.  And once that hysteria was in place, the momentum is to remain shutdown, especially from those who have acquired new powers.  “Flatten the curve” we did, but now the new goal seems to be “no new cases” (an impossible goal in any realistic time frame) or “until there is a vaccine.”  A vaccine, by the way, is no silver bullet; we have had seasonal flu vaccines for years and people still die.

Today at Fox, they repeat, “We all know that we had to do it” while at the same time scrambling to address how we avoid the inevitable economic consequences (which would have been so obvious to anyone who bothered to think about that before taking the leap).  But just like the AOC story, we have shut down oil production; shut down cruise ships; and restricted air travel and driving.  But we went even further, locking down a majority of the population, shuttering most businesses.  Now we have the unemployment and the bankruptcies.  And the politicians are making the ludicrous promise that no one will suffer financially.

So now Fox News folks are resorting to the CNN approach – attacking – complaining about a Governor who makes arbitrary rules, how awful that is.  Do you really expect any different when you make such a leap toward authoritarianism?  That’s what always happens when you replace the Rule of Law with the Laws of Rulers.  Why has Fox News not been interviewing Rush Limbaugh and Judge Napolitano and Lieutenant Dan Patrick and Doctor Ron Paul from the very outset?  Why are they arguing that some are “taking it too far” when they never should have been allowed to “take it” in the first place?

It was a mistake to shut down the country.  Because of economic repercussions, of course.  But also in our loss of liberties, another huge step toward an authoritarian America.  Not to mention that the deaths that result long-term are very likely to far exceed the death toll from the virus.  Especially if our economy collapses.  Or if we experience hyperinflation.  Or we we engage in a huge new hot war to “pull us out of the depression”.

What is so sad and disheartening now is the refusal of Fox News to admit that the shutdown was a mistake, or to even entertain the idea that it might have been.  I guess they are in CYA mode, just like so many politicians.  Instead, they continue to straddle the fence – “we all agree that we had to do it, but now we need to decide how best to open up.”  They continue to promote the theory that “if we hadn’t done it, it would have been much worse” – – when there is no valid data to support that (we’ll likely, eventually, prove that theory to be false).

Where are the models and the what-ifs and the projections about what might have happened if we had not shut down?  If we had Instead just issued the guidelines and encouraged people to act responsibly?  Even on Fox, that discussion seems to be off limits.

We were never going to stop this virus, because it is so contagious; they told us that from the beginning.  The bottom line is this:  if someone is afraid, has underlying health issues – in fact for for any reason at all – they have the option of self-isolating.  If they do, and if they sanitize incoming, wash their hands, and don’t touch their face, then they will not get the virus!  (Or at least the chances are so slim as to be statistically negligible.)  No one is stopping them!

But many people are willing to take the small risk.  After contact, there’s maybe a 50/50 chance of contracting the virus.  Of those that do get infected, only 4% will get seriously ill.  In other words 96% – ninety-six percent – will experience mild symptoms, or none at all.  The risk of dying from Covid-19 looks to be about the same as from the flu just a few years ago.  Less total deaths than from driving automobiles.

It is pure irony to see the “awful mainstream media” and Fox News on the same page!  Promoting mass hysteria, crazy models, and un-vetted “science”.  Let alone supporting a national lock down and lock up.  Ironic, too, that it is the Washington Post, of all people, now questioning these trillions of dollars of spending and debt.  Maybe their objectives really are no different?  This pandemic, and our response, is revealing the crumbling infrastructure of the American experiment and our Constitutional Republic.  Perhaps we were unprepared do defend against this latest virus (it is, after all, one of about 200), but neither was Fox News prepared to defend our liberty.

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COVID-19 is a Progressive / Climate Change dream come true. Remember: “Its about the children”

Posted by M. C. on April 19, 2020

Using the state to re-make America, depopulate the world.

In the early twentieth century the progressive goal was population control. Specifically European immigrants and blacks who were willing to work longer hours for less, making life difficult for WASPs. Mental “inferiors” were a target also due to their dilution of the gene pool.

Minimum wage laws designed to price out low skilled labor and sterilization were the progressive weapons of choice.

In short-The birth of modern eugenics.

https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=947

The next generation of progressives were far more ingenious. Population control was still the issue.

Introducing The Club of Rome (TCOR) and one of its enablers, David Rockefeller.

In 1993 the Club’s co-founder, Alexander King with Bertrand Schneider wrote The First Global Revolution stating,

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

http://www.theeuroprobe.org/2014-002-the-club-of-rome-invented-global-warming/

David Rockefeller:

We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years……It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government.

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/418046

“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”

https://endtimesprophecyreport.com/2013/06/05/new-world-order-37-quotes-on-the-new-world-order/

Dr. WHO?

World Health Organization suggests removing COVID-19 infected people from their families

https://www.pacificpundit.com/2020/04/07/watch-world-health-organization-suggests-removing-covid-19-infected-people-from-their-families/

The latest revelation is COVID is now supposedly spread mostly within the home.

Family separation means children separation.

Family separation is family control.

Now we have the World Health Organization running family separation up the flag pole to see who salutes it.

It is only a skip and short jump to separating families for other reasons. Other illnesses, financial reasons, employment…too many people.

The WHO is part of the UN, that should make you feel better. Look forward to your family’s future decided by a faceless bureaucrat in New York or Geneva Switzerland.

Separation means the children get separated from parents. Where do the children go? Who takes care of them? Who “educates” the children? Who vaccinates “separated” children and with what?

The state of course.

When are “separated” children allowed back home?

When the state decides.

Lets hope Cuomo and the left coast don’t hear about this.

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The luxury of apocalypticism – spiked

Posted by M. C. on March 18, 2020

Resisting the apocalypticism of the comfortable doom-mongers who rule over us is unquestionably the first step to challenging Covid-19 and preserving society for the decades after this illness has wreaked its disgraceful impact.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/17/the-luxury-of-apocalypticism/

The elites want us to panic about Covid-19 – we must absolutely refuse to do so.

Brendan O’Neill Editor

People’s refusal to panic has been a great source of frustration for the establishment in recent years. ‘The planet is burning’, they lie, in relation to climate change, and yet we do not weep or wail or even pay very much attention. ‘I want you to panic’, instructs the newest mouthpiece of green apocalypticism, Greta Thunberg, and yet most of us refuse to do so. A No Deal Brexit would unleash economic mayhem, racist pogroms and even a pandemic of super-gonorrhoea, they squealed, incessantly, like millenarian preachers balking at the imminent arrival of the lightning bolt of final judgement, and yet we didn’t flinch. We went to work. We went home. We still supported Brexit.

Our skittish elites have been so baffled, infuriated in fact, by our calm response to their hysterical warnings that they have invented pathologies to explain our unacceptable behaviour. The therapeutic language of ‘denialism’ is used to explain the masses’ refusal to fret over climate change. Environmentalists write articles on ‘the psychology of climate-change denial’, on ‘the self-deception and mass denial’ coursing through this society that refuses to flatter or engage with the hysteria of the eco-elites. Likewise, the refusal of voters to succumb to the dire, hollow warnings of the ferociously anti-Brexit wing of the establishment was interpreted by self-styled experts as a psychological disorder. ‘[This is] people taking action for essentially psychological reasons, irrespective of the economic cost’, said one professor.

How curious. In the past it was hysteria that was seen as a malady of the mind. Now it is the reluctance to kowtow to hysteria, the preference for calm discussion over panic and dread, that is treated as a malady. Today, it is those who prefer reason over rashness, whether on climate change or Brexit, who are judged to be disordered. According to the new elites, their apocalypticism is normal, while our calm democratic commitment to a political project, such as Brexit, or our desire to treat pollution as a practical problem rather than as a swirling, cloudy hint of nature’s coming fury with man’s hubris and destructiveness, is mad, deranged, in need of treatment. Their End Times nervousness is good; our faith in moral reason is bad.

This strange, fascinating tension between the apocalypticism of the intellectual and cultural elites and the scepticism of ordinary people is coming into play in the Covid-19 crisis. Of course, Covid-19 is very different to both No Deal Brexit and climate change. It is a serious medical and social crisis. In contrast, the idea that leaving the EU without a deal would be the greatest crisis to befall Britain since the Luftwaffe dropped its deadly cargo on us was nothing more than political propaganda invented from pure cloth. And the notion that climate change is an End Times event, rather than a practical problem that can be solved with tech, especially the rollout of nuclear power, is little more than the prejudice of Malthusian elites who view the very project of modernity as an intemperate expression of speciesist supremacy by mankind.

Covid-19, on the other hand, is a real and pressing crisis. It poses a profound challenge to humankind. It requires seriousness and action to limit the number of deaths and to mitigate the economic and social costs of both the disease itself and of our strategies for dealing with it. But what ties Covid-19 to the other fashionable apocalypses of our nervous elites, including the green apocalypse and the Brexit apocalypse, is the interpretation of it through the language and ideology of the elites’ pre-existing dread, their pre-existing cultural skittishness and moral disarray. Predictably, and depressingly, Covid-19 has been folded into their narrative of horror, into their permanent state of cultural distress, and this is making the task of facing it down even harder.

The media are at the forefront of stirring up apocalyptic dread over Covid-19. In Europe, there is also a performative apocalypticism in some of the more extreme clampdowns on everyday life and social engagement by the political authorities, in particular in Italy, Spain and France. Many governments seem to be driven less by a reasoned, evidence-fuelled strategy of limiting both the spread of the disease and the disorganisation of economic life, than by an urge to be seen to be taking action. They seem motivated more by an instinct to perform the role of worriers about apocalypse, for the benefit of the dread-ridden cultural elites, rather than by the responsibility to behave as true moral leaders who might galvanise the public in a collective mission against illness and a concerted effort to protect economic life.

A key problem with this performative apocalypticism is that it fails to think through the consequences of its actions. So obsessed are today’s fashionable doom-predictors with offsetting what they see as the horrendous consequences of human behaviour – whether it’s our polluting activities or our wrong-headed voting habits – that they fail to factor in the consequences of their own agenda of fear. Greens rarely think about the devastating consequences of their anti-growth agenda on under-developed parts of the world. The Remainer elite seemed utterly impervious to warnings that their irrational contempt for the Leave vote threatened the standing of democracy itself. And likewise, the performative warriors against Covid-19 seem far too cavalier about the longer-term economic, social and political consequences of what they are doing.

First, there is the potential health consequences. Is suppression of the disease really better than mitigation? The suppression of disease preferred by China, in very authoritarian terms, or by Italy and France, in less authoritarian terms, may look successful in the short term, but the possibility of the disease’s return, in an even more virulent form, is very real. Likewise, entire economies of everyday life have been devastated already by the severity of government action in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people in Italy and Ireland have lost their jobs already, in the night-time, hotel and entertainment sectors in particular. That is a social and health cost, too: job loss can lead to the loss of one’s home, the breakdown of one’s marriage, and to a palpable and destructive feeling of social expediency. As to keeping elderly people indoors for months on end, as is now being proposed in the UK, it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether this poses an even greater threat to our older citizens’ sense of personal and social wellbeing than their taking their chances with a disease that is not a death sentence for older people (though it impacts on them harder than it does on the young).

The point is, there is such a thing as doing too little and also such a thing as doing too much. Doing too little against Covid-19 would be perverse and nihilistic. Society ought to devote a huge amount of resources, even if they must be commandeered from the private sector, to the protection of human life. But doing too much, or acting under the pressure to act rather than under the aim of coherently fighting disease and protecting people’s livelihoods, is potentially destructive, too. People need jobs, security, meaning, connection. They need a sense of worth, a sense of social solidarity, a sense of belonging. To threaten those things as part of a performative ‘war’ against what ought to be treated as a health challenge rather than as an End Times event would be self-defeating and utterly antithetical to the broader aim of protecting our societies from this novel new threat. To decimate the stuff of human life in the name of saving human life is a questionable moral approach.

 

That the practical challenge posed by this new sickness has been collapsed into the elites’ pre-existing culture of misanthropic dread is clear from some of the commentary on Covid-19. The language of ‘war’ gives Covid-19 a sentience it of course does not deserve, accentuating the idea that this is not just an illness but a fin-de-siècle menace. This illness is being interpreted as a warning. It has been speedily refashioned as a metaphor for our weakness in the face of nature. It ‘has come to tell us that we are not the kings of the world’, says one headline. This malady is blowback for ‘our foolishness, our rapacity’, says Fintan O’Toole. We must now ‘learn the humility of survivors’, he says, cynically using this crisis to seek to diminish the presumed specialness of humankind. ‘Coronavirus is an indictment of our way of life’, says a headline in the Washington Post, echoing the way that natural phenomena are constantly weaponised by apocalyptic greens to serve as judgements against the temerity of the modernising human race.

Here, we cut to the heart of the apocalyptic mindset of the modern elites. Their dread over natural calamities or novel new illnesses is not driven by the actual facts about these things, far less by the desire to overcome them through the deployment of human expertise and scientific discovery. Rather, it speaks to their pre-existing moral disorientation, their deep loss of faith in the human project itself. It is their downbeat cultural convictions that draws them to apocalypticism as surely as a light draws in moths. In her essay on the AIDS panic of the late 1980s, when that sexually transmitted disease was likewise imagined as a portent of civiliational doom, Susan Sontag talked about the West’s widespread ‘sense of cultural distress or failure’ that leads it to search incessantly for an ‘apocalyptic scenario’ and for ‘fantasies of doom’. There is a ‘striking readiness of so many to envisage the most far-reaching of catastrophes’, she wrote. It wasn’t so much ‘Apocalypse Now’, said Sontag, as ‘Apocalypse From Now On’.

How perspicacious that was. From AIDS to climate change, from swine flu to Covid-19, it has been one apocalyptic scenario after another. The irony is that the elites who readily envisage catastrophe think they are showing how seriously they take genuine social and medical challenges, such as Covid-19. In truth, they demonstrate the opposite. They confirm that they have absolved themselves of the reason and focus required for confronting threats to our society. It isn’t their apocalypticism that captures the human urge to solve genuine problems – it is our anti-apocalypticism, our calmness, our insistence that resources and attention be devoted to genuine challenges without disrupting people’s lives or the economic health of our societies.

‘I want you to panic’, they say. But we don’t. And we shouldn’t. Apocalypticism is a luxury of the new elites for whom crises are often little more than opportunities for the expression of their decadent disdain for modern society. To the rest of us, apocalypticism is a profound problem. It threatens to spread fear in our communities, it causes us to lose our jobs, it mitigates against economic growth, and it harms democracy itself. Resisting the apocalypticism of the comfortable doom-mongers who rule over us is unquestionably the first step to challenging Covid-19 and preserving society for the decades after this illness has wreaked its disgraceful impact.

 

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