Whatever happens in Sunday’s bitterly divisive parliamentary elections in France, we can be sure that the next government will be committed to economic growth and technological progress.
This is exciting. Descaling and simplifying haven’t seemed to have much traction since the 80s and 90s. That young folks are getting it is encouraging. Politics with some soul.
I realised a couple of years ago that I had this sort of jaded view about young people, that they were sort of lost. But not anymore. they're just what we need - I guess they just simply don't have anything to lose anymore. There's a real gentleness and openness there. I feel hopeful for our future
“How long that will be allowed to continue, with the global “managed retreat” agenda of forcing people out of the countryside and into smart cities, remains to be seen!” — Yes indeed!
Interesting that Tertrais lists cash dispensers as one of the targets of sabotage. One would think that cash, in opposition to the total-control grid of CBDC's , would absolutely NOT be a target for someone concerned with freedom. Strange.
In your April 15, 2024, article, "Clarity and Focus," you state the Rothschilds are engaged in sophisticated self-concealment. Yet despite their purported superordinate wealth, their power of self-concealment seems to be amiss, given the Rothschild name is widely associated with being the "secret” rulers of the world. This is not concealment but its antipode—a pre-packaged meme wrapped up with a pretty bow.
Your own syllogistic logic exposes the fault in your argument:
1. Great wealth is sophisticated at concealing itself.
2. The Rothschilds have great wealth.
3. Therefore, the Rothschilds should be able to conceal themselves.
The widespread belief however, that the Rothschilds are the preeminent earthly power, contradicts this conclusion. If they truly possessed superordinate wealth, they would be able to effectively conceal themselves, which they clearly have not.
Conversely, you dismiss those who posit that the old European aristocracy linked to the Roman Catholic Church are the true earthly powers, because no one can name them. Ironically, this anonymity actually supports the argument for their superordinate wealth and power far better than it does for the highly visible Rothschilds.
That's an interesting point, especially when we bear in mind the infiltration of the church over the course of at least 1700 years. Possibly even going all the way back to Saul/Paul & the fake conversion on the road to Damascus.
Very good, Paul, thanks. But my question is this: what are the odds that such a view as this, absolutely necessary, will ever be embraced not only by a colorful minority but by a majority of humanity as a whole? How is that to be accomplished? Because otherwise the massive, unrelenting forward motion of commodity culture, materialism and colonization will ever plunge forward -- most people have rent or mortgage to pay, families to keep together, jobs they can't see quitting, etc. How do masses of people who have been brainwashed in a certain way since childhood, mutually reinforcing the worldview of one another -- how do they suddenly wake up? How can they see on a personal, everyday level, a totally different way to live their lives?
I'd say that people will wake up because the conditions under which we live are incompatible with the innate needs of human beings. Young people of every generation can feel this, and express it in various ways, but often then lose touch with that feeling as they are sucked into the domesticated way of life. However, the further that the system tries to take us from what we know, deep down, is the way we should be living, the more this resistance will surface - the more people will find adapting to the prison-camp artifice to be utterly unacceptable. The system has to keep expanding, encroaching, in order to continue, and therefore it will increasingly come up against this limit of what authentic human beings are prepared to tolerate. Covid was a great example, setting so many previously non-politicised people on a path of questioning and challenging the spectacle within which they have spent their lives.
Those “previously non-politicized people” are the ones who have changed the debate landscape the most... they are similar to the reformed Hooker or reformed Smoker. Their animus is forcefully moving the dial faster than the original COVID skeptics. Its not an organized movement but instead a result of their own decisions being expressed instead of someone else’s. Most of those previously non-politicized people never wanted to be different... they trusted “authority”, trusted newspapers, felt that nobody purposely lies, all medications are safe, and most of all that hospitals and doctors are put on Earth to save us all. Now that the lack of reporting Biden’s frailties, since 1919 is exposed, there is no therapeutic treatment that will bring them back to complacency. There will be those who will continue to believe in the policies set forth by authorities but those who do will appear like Japanese Fighters who weren’t aware that WWII ended.
The Fourth Estate is under a microscope, if Journalism is to survive, it will need to eat it’s own. Journalism drastically changed when TV highlighted “style” instead of content which morphed into corporate messages/sponsorship (when MSNBC established itself it brought forward the ideals of a captured audience). NBC couldn’t change because of FCC restrictions and their parent company RCA had massive government contracts but when two big companies (Microsoft, RCA) created a new entity, it not only provided cover for their intent, it was “independent” of their creators... or at least that was the narrative.
But today the curtains are drawn, no longer is it unprofessional to express political affiliation when broadcasting which makes the playing field uneven but you know the flavour of what is served. There will always be those who will never change but the changed are speaking up and out like Old Time Revivalists banging their Bibles to those under the tent.
How is the word "growth" defined here? I hear/read people say "degrowth" but I don't know specifically what policy actions that would entail, like, is the literal removal of physical objects like infrastructure or buildings or whatever, or is it constraints on building new stuff, or something else?
It's changing the monetary system in which we live, which is based on debt, so that everything has to keep growing and growing just to sustain everything. Every dollar created into existence is borrowed by someone who has to pay it back with interesr. The cancer model of economics. It ultimately leads to the rich getting richer and the poor poorer and destroys the earth, which has to be converted into money in order for the cancer to keep growing.
Yes, I'd say that economic growth is the physical manifestation of usury. There has to be more and more production (and destruction) to pay off the interest on the previous debts incurred in a spiralling process that I would describe as never-ending, if that weren't a physical impossibility.
So is degrowth simply about getting rid of the debt systems and returning to closed loop systems? I need to go back and read up on it all again, memory like a sieve.
I think there is more than one version of "degrowth". But the one that interests me involves rejecting the model of necessary economic growth and "development" as the basis of our society - to base our way of living on human values rather than on money.
Thanks for the reply! During the pandemic I rabbit holed the history of the United State's (thats where I am) banking and monetary system, and it took a long time because I kept encountering immense inaccuracies (in most cases, I assume its intentional, at least at their ultimate source) in every opinion direction; I had to go back to the source, banking and law journals from the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, so on, congressional hearing minutes, etc.. The initial Fed's design was roughly essentially a compromise between Big Finance, Big Gov technocratic types, and populists (by populists here just mean the large mass of people and businesses of all types that weren't the Super Bigs, yes very day people and everyday businesses could effect major policy back in the Old Republic), the 1913 original version of the Fed was very diff from what we have today, you could say that we’re on our 4th, 5th or 6th, and almost the whole time its been being pushed, at an accelerating pace, in the direction Big Bank/Big Finance wanted and to lesser but still significant extent in the direction Big Gov technocrats wanted. The first big milestone for them was the Banking Act of 1935 which took leaps towards centralizing it, for example, it completely removed from open market operations from the regional Feds and placed it solely in the hands of the Center (up until then the center didn’t do them at all). Its both centralized and changed since then, we may be on out 4th, 5th, or 6th iteration.
And that's just the Fed itself, Big Banks/Big Finance wanted to both consolidate nationally and cartelize, and ten by extension, effectively backdoor semi-cartelize most of the whole economy and introduce private sector central planning, it took them a long time but in the late 1970s they began to make their final big move and by the mid 1980s they'd mostly succeed, by 2010, they got us to where we are now. One of their biggest goals was to get rid of the interstate banking competition inhibitors and other forms of interstate capital flow inhibitors that had been around for the entirely of the nations whole existence (and from before it in its predecessor colonies), they failed to to do that back then, in fact those restrictions were the big important feature of the Old Republic and remained an important feature during the entire phase space between the Old Republic and where we are now. Then they were de jure and mostly (and in some big ways arguably illegally!) done away with between the late 1970s and mid 1980s (it began, like many other features of the so called Neoliberal Era, under the Carter admin, not the Reagan admin, actually) and were then fully ad de jure done away with in the late 1990s (the biggest tool of their destruction was the Interstate Banking Efficiency Act of 1994 one of its key provisions didn't take effect until 97 and couldn't be executed upon until 98). There were other big elements to the capital flow inhibitors, were about or maybe even more important, such as state usury laws (which also had a big moral and economic fairness aspect as well!) that the Supreme Court granted the Federal gov the power to nullify in 1978. Also, other stuff like state/city pension funds investment restrictions, insurance company funds (big one!) geographic investment restrictions. Plus others...
It took them a long time to get here, but they got here! Kudos to you for entering into the history of it all. It's all so dry and abstracted and boring and manipulative and creepy that I just can't go there with my flimsy concentration levels 😄
When is there enough “progress”? Sometimes you hit the apogee with product d development yet we continue to make “improvements”. Example: The Cork Screw... for centuries the cork screw was a piece of wood with an attached metal in the shape of a pointed “curley que”. It worked but the 20th century came around... we then made that perfect wine bottle opener be flexible (we can fold it), then we combined it with a bottle opener... now it has dual powers. The wood is gone in favor of light metal (easier to manufacture). Then “leverage” was introduced, we needed to put the now collapsible cork screw on the lip of the bottle and make an upward slide to open the bottle. Modification continued in various fashions as a started to become some sort of fashion statement by packaging it differently (within gift boxes, displayed with fine china, and eliminating the multipurpose capabilities). As for today, we have a cork screw that is a hypodermic needle, powered by a CO2 cartridge that the User plunges, into the now totally confused cork, activates the release of the CO2 and the removal of the cork.
I’m not sure we improved on anything except that we are proud to display how lazy and stupid we are.
Hi, thanks for the reply! An a fun and interesting analogy! Some supposed progress, or at least individual manifestations of them, may even be regressive. For example, has automating so many cognitive tasks over the past 50 years at and accelerating rate diminished cognitive abilities and most of creativity?
I'm still unclear though as to what this means in practice, does it mean to, as a matter of public policy, stop using the awesome powers of concentrated centrally directed private sector and concentrated centrally directed public sector to direct great resources towards the development of new things? If so, depending on the details, I may have sympathies with it
This is exciting. Descaling and simplifying haven’t seemed to have much traction since the 80s and 90s. That young folks are getting it is encouraging. Politics with some soul.
I realised a couple of years ago that I had this sort of jaded view about young people, that they were sort of lost. But not anymore. they're just what we need - I guess they just simply don't have anything to lose anymore. There's a real gentleness and openness there. I feel hopeful for our future
“How long that will be allowed to continue, with the global “managed retreat” agenda of forcing people out of the countryside and into smart cities, remains to be seen!” — Yes indeed!
Interesting that Tertrais lists cash dispensers as one of the targets of sabotage. One would think that cash, in opposition to the total-control grid of CBDC's , would absolutely NOT be a target for someone concerned with freedom. Strange.
Yes, I had the same reaction. I suppose the idea is that the bank is being targeted, but...
In your April 15, 2024, article, "Clarity and Focus," you state the Rothschilds are engaged in sophisticated self-concealment. Yet despite their purported superordinate wealth, their power of self-concealment seems to be amiss, given the Rothschild name is widely associated with being the "secret” rulers of the world. This is not concealment but its antipode—a pre-packaged meme wrapped up with a pretty bow.
Your own syllogistic logic exposes the fault in your argument:
1. Great wealth is sophisticated at concealing itself.
2. The Rothschilds have great wealth.
3. Therefore, the Rothschilds should be able to conceal themselves.
The widespread belief however, that the Rothschilds are the preeminent earthly power, contradicts this conclusion. If they truly possessed superordinate wealth, they would be able to effectively conceal themselves, which they clearly have not.
Conversely, you dismiss those who posit that the old European aristocracy linked to the Roman Catholic Church are the true earthly powers, because no one can name them. Ironically, this anonymity actually supports the argument for their superordinate wealth and power far better than it does for the highly visible Rothschilds.
That's an interesting point, especially when we bear in mind the infiltration of the church over the course of at least 1700 years. Possibly even going all the way back to Saul/Paul & the fake conversion on the road to Damascus.
Very good, Paul, thanks. But my question is this: what are the odds that such a view as this, absolutely necessary, will ever be embraced not only by a colorful minority but by a majority of humanity as a whole? How is that to be accomplished? Because otherwise the massive, unrelenting forward motion of commodity culture, materialism and colonization will ever plunge forward -- most people have rent or mortgage to pay, families to keep together, jobs they can't see quitting, etc. How do masses of people who have been brainwashed in a certain way since childhood, mutually reinforcing the worldview of one another -- how do they suddenly wake up? How can they see on a personal, everyday level, a totally different way to live their lives?
I'd say that people will wake up because the conditions under which we live are incompatible with the innate needs of human beings. Young people of every generation can feel this, and express it in various ways, but often then lose touch with that feeling as they are sucked into the domesticated way of life. However, the further that the system tries to take us from what we know, deep down, is the way we should be living, the more this resistance will surface - the more people will find adapting to the prison-camp artifice to be utterly unacceptable. The system has to keep expanding, encroaching, in order to continue, and therefore it will increasingly come up against this limit of what authentic human beings are prepared to tolerate. Covid was a great example, setting so many previously non-politicised people on a path of questioning and challenging the spectacle within which they have spent their lives.
Yes, I agree with what you're saying. I hope for the awakening of the sleeping millions. My work too aims at that
Those “previously non-politicized people” are the ones who have changed the debate landscape the most... they are similar to the reformed Hooker or reformed Smoker. Their animus is forcefully moving the dial faster than the original COVID skeptics. Its not an organized movement but instead a result of their own decisions being expressed instead of someone else’s. Most of those previously non-politicized people never wanted to be different... they trusted “authority”, trusted newspapers, felt that nobody purposely lies, all medications are safe, and most of all that hospitals and doctors are put on Earth to save us all. Now that the lack of reporting Biden’s frailties, since 1919 is exposed, there is no therapeutic treatment that will bring them back to complacency. There will be those who will continue to believe in the policies set forth by authorities but those who do will appear like Japanese Fighters who weren’t aware that WWII ended.
The Fourth Estate is under a microscope, if Journalism is to survive, it will need to eat it’s own. Journalism drastically changed when TV highlighted “style” instead of content which morphed into corporate messages/sponsorship (when MSNBC established itself it brought forward the ideals of a captured audience). NBC couldn’t change because of FCC restrictions and their parent company RCA had massive government contracts but when two big companies (Microsoft, RCA) created a new entity, it not only provided cover for their intent, it was “independent” of their creators... or at least that was the narrative.
But today the curtains are drawn, no longer is it unprofessional to express political affiliation when broadcasting which makes the playing field uneven but you know the flavour of what is served. There will always be those who will never change but the changed are speaking up and out like Old Time Revivalists banging their Bibles to those under the tent.
This harkens back to the “back the land” hippie movement, but with more rage, steel toed boots, and a healthy dose of Luddism.
Here’s one illuminating and humorous discussion on the threat of runaway tech: https://www.patreon.com/posts/107362218
How is the word "growth" defined here? I hear/read people say "degrowth" but I don't know specifically what policy actions that would entail, like, is the literal removal of physical objects like infrastructure or buildings or whatever, or is it constraints on building new stuff, or something else?
It's changing the monetary system in which we live, which is based on debt, so that everything has to keep growing and growing just to sustain everything. Every dollar created into existence is borrowed by someone who has to pay it back with interesr. The cancer model of economics. It ultimately leads to the rich getting richer and the poor poorer and destroys the earth, which has to be converted into money in order for the cancer to keep growing.
Yes, I'd say that economic growth is the physical manifestation of usury. There has to be more and more production (and destruction) to pay off the interest on the previous debts incurred in a spiralling process that I would describe as never-ending, if that weren't a physical impossibility.
So is degrowth simply about getting rid of the debt systems and returning to closed loop systems? I need to go back and read up on it all again, memory like a sieve.
I think there is more than one version of "degrowth". But the one that interests me involves rejecting the model of necessary economic growth and "development" as the basis of our society - to base our way of living on human values rather than on money.
I call it the musical chairs version of economics - in other words it's not economics, it's a system of social control.
The solution is for the people to own the money supply.
Thanks for the reply! During the pandemic I rabbit holed the history of the United State's (thats where I am) banking and monetary system, and it took a long time because I kept encountering immense inaccuracies (in most cases, I assume its intentional, at least at their ultimate source) in every opinion direction; I had to go back to the source, banking and law journals from the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, so on, congressional hearing minutes, etc.. The initial Fed's design was roughly essentially a compromise between Big Finance, Big Gov technocratic types, and populists (by populists here just mean the large mass of people and businesses of all types that weren't the Super Bigs, yes very day people and everyday businesses could effect major policy back in the Old Republic), the 1913 original version of the Fed was very diff from what we have today, you could say that we’re on our 4th, 5th or 6th, and almost the whole time its been being pushed, at an accelerating pace, in the direction Big Bank/Big Finance wanted and to lesser but still significant extent in the direction Big Gov technocrats wanted. The first big milestone for them was the Banking Act of 1935 which took leaps towards centralizing it, for example, it completely removed from open market operations from the regional Feds and placed it solely in the hands of the Center (up until then the center didn’t do them at all). Its both centralized and changed since then, we may be on out 4th, 5th, or 6th iteration.
And that's just the Fed itself, Big Banks/Big Finance wanted to both consolidate nationally and cartelize, and ten by extension, effectively backdoor semi-cartelize most of the whole economy and introduce private sector central planning, it took them a long time but in the late 1970s they began to make their final big move and by the mid 1980s they'd mostly succeed, by 2010, they got us to where we are now. One of their biggest goals was to get rid of the interstate banking competition inhibitors and other forms of interstate capital flow inhibitors that had been around for the entirely of the nations whole existence (and from before it in its predecessor colonies), they failed to to do that back then, in fact those restrictions were the big important feature of the Old Republic and remained an important feature during the entire phase space between the Old Republic and where we are now. Then they were de jure and mostly (and in some big ways arguably illegally!) done away with between the late 1970s and mid 1980s (it began, like many other features of the so called Neoliberal Era, under the Carter admin, not the Reagan admin, actually) and were then fully ad de jure done away with in the late 1990s (the biggest tool of their destruction was the Interstate Banking Efficiency Act of 1994 one of its key provisions didn't take effect until 97 and couldn't be executed upon until 98). There were other big elements to the capital flow inhibitors, were about or maybe even more important, such as state usury laws (which also had a big moral and economic fairness aspect as well!) that the Supreme Court granted the Federal gov the power to nullify in 1978. Also, other stuff like state/city pension funds investment restrictions, insurance company funds (big one!) geographic investment restrictions. Plus others...
It took them a long time to get here, but they got here! Kudos to you for entering into the history of it all. It's all so dry and abstracted and boring and manipulative and creepy that I just can't go there with my flimsy concentration levels 😄
Well, that's a big component of it, I think degrowth means other things too but I can't remember
Mike Moschos: good question.
When is there enough “progress”? Sometimes you hit the apogee with product d development yet we continue to make “improvements”. Example: The Cork Screw... for centuries the cork screw was a piece of wood with an attached metal in the shape of a pointed “curley que”. It worked but the 20th century came around... we then made that perfect wine bottle opener be flexible (we can fold it), then we combined it with a bottle opener... now it has dual powers. The wood is gone in favor of light metal (easier to manufacture). Then “leverage” was introduced, we needed to put the now collapsible cork screw on the lip of the bottle and make an upward slide to open the bottle. Modification continued in various fashions as a started to become some sort of fashion statement by packaging it differently (within gift boxes, displayed with fine china, and eliminating the multipurpose capabilities). As for today, we have a cork screw that is a hypodermic needle, powered by a CO2 cartridge that the User plunges, into the now totally confused cork, activates the release of the CO2 and the removal of the cork.
I’m not sure we improved on anything except that we are proud to display how lazy and stupid we are.
Hi, thanks for the reply! An a fun and interesting analogy! Some supposed progress, or at least individual manifestations of them, may even be regressive. For example, has automating so many cognitive tasks over the past 50 years at and accelerating rate diminished cognitive abilities and most of creativity?
I'm still unclear though as to what this means in practice, does it mean to, as a matter of public policy, stop using the awesome powers of concentrated centrally directed private sector and concentrated centrally directed public sector to direct great resources towards the development of new things? If so, depending on the details, I may have sympathies with it
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.