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Seasonal Greetings and State of the World

By Karl North | December 23, 2021

As the old Teutonic pagan rite approaches, we sally forth, hatchet in hand, seeking evergreens to deck the halls. O Tannenbaum! Conveniently, our mile-long track to the woodlot snakes through ten acres of clearcut logged by the previous owners in a vain attempt to cover their debts from a failed ‘back to the land’ venture. Wunderbar! Blossoming after 15 years with fragrant firs of all sizes, the clearcut is tannenbaum heaven.

So, Jane and I are still kicking, thankfully, cheerfully, albeit more slowly, still fattening a few lambs and growing a couple dozen fruits and vegetables, for us mainly, and the excess for the local food bank, and for bartering with neighbors.

Thanks to an unusual summer of rains, we enjoyed record harvests of most crops, much to the dismay of the Gretas of the world who,

unaware of the complexity of the earth system, assume that simulation modeling and its practitioners in the IPCC can predict the degree of human contribution to climate change.[1]

We are both experiencing the memory problems that come with age – difficulty dredging up words and phrases from deep memory, especially proper names, names of things and phenomena. (Jane says less with her). We each have somewhat different memory problems and can therefore help each other to trigger words and phrases otherwise lost to the archival cellar of the mind.

We are enjoying the active rural life despite increasing aches and pains, but also enjoy living in a kind of outback, on the geographical margin of the slow-moving disaster of a collapsing industrial civilization. That spectacle, however insufferable it will be for the victims, is a source of endless fascination, study and occasional writing for people like me trained and dedicated to the study of nature and its laws (systems ecology) and the study of the errant behaviors of its wholly owned subsidiary, human society (a subject sometimes known as political economy[2]). The many signs of collapse have been evident for decades, but are invisible to most people because conventional schooling provides little notion of how these complex systems work. Also, the mass media indoctrination machine constantly softens each gradual change into a new normal[3], affording an endless vista of safe spaces – hélas temporaire -

On the other hand, by now, a whole network of collapsists exists online across the planet with which I can discuss prospective scenarios, many of which I have written about for years. Unfortunately, allowed little access to the public, or disparaged as ‘chicken littles’, this network can only preach to the choir, at least when not yet censored by the Silicon Valley multi-billionaire moguls. An up-and-coming example of the genre, not yet deplatformed like many of its peers, is Titanic Lifeboat Academy.

An unusual proportion of these energy descent writers[4] are impressive polymaths, from the geologists who pioneered the warning of resource depletion, to systems ecologists and political economists, with whom I am grateful to learn. Most of the above are relatively rare in academia, because they are not made welcome. Some are good fiction writers who in my envious estimation are creating the most persuasive visions of likely futures. An example is James Kunstler’s World Made By Hand series. What follows is an attempt to put conspicuous short-term consequences of long-term collapse into some historical context.

The Decline of the West (and its Discontents)


The West claimed to be the civilization that embodied free expression. Now its censors run rampant.

The West once offered the world an example of prosperity and fairness, at least the best one available under a system of complete freedom of concentration of private capital – “A rising tide lifts all boats”. Now, the US and UK especially have become like banana republics, where a tiny obscenely rich elite exports the industrial economy to foreign shores and now presides over impoverished masses. Long ago The American Dream began to fade away.

As early as the 13th century in the Magna Carta, the West stood for the rights of individuals – to due process among others – and against dictatorship. Now after the various “patriot acts” and Corona virus decrees, anyone, including US citizens, can be held incognito in indefinite detention. Or simply be assassinated along with others on the white house extermination list.

The US proclaimed a system of government responsible to its people. Disasters of government negligence like Katrina, the Corona virus debacle, and now the grid failures across the plains states have repeatedly shown the world that its leaders don’t care for its citizens.

The West was the place where everything works. Now it is a picture of ghost towns and farm ruins in depressed rural economies and urban slums and dilapidation: the New York City subway is one of the worst in the world.

The gradual shrinkage of Western economies from global resource depletion is giving rise to a gradual increase in disorder of all sorts – military (resource wars), economic (the trap of massive debt financing and other shortsighted props), social (antifa/BLM/school shooting violence), political (Trump/Biden psychopathic governance), cultural (extreme ethnic polarization from extreme identity politics).  The constituted authorities either cannot or dare not explain underlying causes, all to the increasing discredit of mainstream institutions – govt, mass media, medicine, academia – for Americans all across the political spectrum.

The dilemma of the elites[5]


Faced with a permanent decline of industrial civilization that they cannot prevent, and a narrative of endless progress with which they have indoctrinated the masses, ruling elites first sought props to give the illusion of prosperity-as-usual. An impressive one has been years of money printing to replace real wealth production, among whose consequences has been an obscenely overvalued stock market.  As the crisis deepened, elites staged false flag episodes (9/11 and war on terror, Covid scamdemic) designed to scare the public into accepting increasingly tyrannical policies of social control (Patriot acts, strict media control of information, internet censorship, vax passports and mandates). One result is different forms of mass psychosis, a kind of collective hypnotism that persuades people to grasp at straws so outlandish that they would be ashamed of such behavior in normal times.

Meanwhile, our rulers are casting around for degrowth strategies, starting in the US and Western Europe – the first area to experience degrowth – a plan that will insure degrowth for us that preserves growth and prosperity for them. Evidence that at least one faction of transnational capital and national ruling elites realize the implications of inevitable degrowth and the need for an elite-orchestrated version is the “Great Reset” narrative promoted in Davos meetings of the World Economic Forum.[6] Such narratives are a marketing plan[7] that hides a more radical scheme by promoting a ‘reset’ as green, socially just and technologically cool. So far, this propaganda is aimed at political liberals who have tended to accept its implicit totalitarian aspects as a necessary ‘war economy’ (think WWII ration book). By rolling it out slowly like a slow-release drug, elites hope to avoid resistance.

The actual plan was quietly elaborated by the G7 central banker elite at its annual gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and given a façade of public sponsorship as UN Agenda 2030[8]. The central hub of its many components is a scheme to solve the two looming global crises – the next financial crash and the end of the dollar as world’s reserve currency. Called Going Direct Reset[9], it resets global finance in a centrally controlled, universal digital currency, using 5G wireless to connect everyone, then uses control of money in combination with existing surveillance state technology to minutely regulate individual behavior with rewards and penalties, along the lines of the Chinese credit system. If this agenda is real and makes any headway, can it work? I address this question in the next section from my perspective as a holistic thinker.

The Great Unraveling

“The world functions in wholes; we must manage it as such, or court failure” – Alan Savory

The connectedness of the universe in which we live presents such a complexity of interactions and interdependencies that has never yielded completely to the efforts to understand and manage it.
Hence, what we call “science” has mostly retreated to laboratory conditions where reduced

interactions can generate predictable results. The trouble with that stratagem is that when the products of science are brought out into the real world and applied, albeit often in dazzling technologies, eventually all sorts of inconvenient consequences and long-term ripple effects occur. Our bodies, for example, present such complex wholes that medicine men (and women) often must resort to treating symptoms because we don’t know enough to do any better. We cover up the limitations of medical knowledge with fancy language – NSAIDs, non-steroid anti-inflammation drugs, for example, are just pain killers.

Likewise, the clusters of interacting species we call ecosystems and human societies are complex wholes that pose stumbling blocks to understanding how they work, and therefore to management efforts. Students of complexity observe that throughout history, elaborate attempts to shape whole societies eventually break down as events spin out of control. Apparently robust social constructs like the Roman Empire ultimately collapsed in chaos and disorder.

Applying the revelations of complexity science and its understanding of the limits of the advancement of knowledge, what can we say about the prospects of the extravagant plan of global private capital to address the breakdown of industrial civilization with a central banker controlled digital technocracy?

Many big picture thinkers like Catherine Austin Fitts, longtime relocalization advocates like myself, share my view, voiced in Who’s Afraid of the Great Reset? Fitts says the blueprint of the international banker elite is going to be too complicated, too outside the laws of nature, but extremely messy (think Iraq ever since the attempt at US subjugation began in the first Gulf War), and will therefore fail, perhaps not for the lack of trying. Fitts says (and I agree) that people should face this unprecedented situation squarely, and begin to build a relocalized economy, a parallel economy from the bottom up.

What is the evidence that the Great Reset will fail? First, regarding failures of such grandiose schemes, there are a lot to choose from. Consider the track record of the CIA, tasked, as agent of elite interests residing inside the US government, with interference in other nations, interventions that had to be clandestine because they violated international law, the UN Charter, and the US Constitution and proclaimed US ideals of foreign relations. Most of its so-called color revolutions either failed outright or turned the victim nations into economic, political and ethnic disasters. The list is long – Russia in the 1990s, the former Yugoslavia, the former Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Venezuela, and most recently Belarus, one that failed to even get off the ground. And yet the CIA is supposed to be the main US source of intelligence about world affairs.

Closer to home, another example of a power elite scheme going awry began with the attempt, starting already in the 2016 election campaign, to remove by fraudulent means the elected Trump administration. First, it fueled the existing standard divide-and-rule political polarization strategy by making the mass media into the attack dog of the Democratic Party. The result was a mass media that dropped all pretense of journalistic neutrality and became deeply discredited among political conservatives already prone to criticize it as a tool of liberalism.

Then, when medical authorities rolled out the ‘pandemic of fear’ narrative (whose crimes under the direction of Anthony Fauci[10] I have detailed elsewhere), the conservative pole, half the electorate, no longer disposed to believe anything coming from the mass media, was effectively immunized as it were, against the official pandemic narrative trumpeted from Washington and amplified faithfully by the mass media from CNN to NPR.

The result, ironically, was that conservatives, which liberals often disparaged as gullible, redneck illiterates, began to question the official pandemic story while liberals, now habituated to trusting the media as a political ally, bought the story without question. Courageous scientists and medical professionals, aware of the science-free nature of most of the policies decreed by corrupt government medical authorities, organized to fight back[11], but were allowed no access to the public via the mass media. When medical professionals were forced to turn to politically conservative websites and media platforms to expose the official narrative and to reveal cheap and effective therapies that can control Covid 19 as no worse than a bad flu year, conservatives actually became more knowledgeable about the virus and the real nature of the ‘pandemic’ than most liberals. Thus, when the Biden administration and European governments made the fatal mistake of trying to impose a vax mandate, a vigorous resistance took form.

Some critics claim that the goal of the pandemic policies was never merely to generate obscene profits in the pharmaceutical industry, but rather to generate fear of a supposed medical crisis as justification for imposing the next step in a process of habituating Western societies to a totalitarian order. If this were the goal, an open-ended vax mandate certainly fits into the plan. Discovery that what first looked like a botched response to a new virus has become an issue of individual freedom and human rights has caused a violent reaction in Europe, with mass protests occurring over many months. Indeed, the whole official pandemic narrative is unravelling in many directions[12]. Those who still can’t see it happening will no doubt have the opportunity in the near future. Thus, once again, a grandiose scheme of the powerful has encountered the unpredictable nature of our complex universe.

International Speakers Address Rallies in Europe Against the Global War on Freedom, in Medical Disguise

On November 12th and 13th 2021, experts from around the world attended rallies and press conferences in Switzerland and Italy, to support the worldwide resistance against the global war on freedom and democracy.

Blessed are the peasants….

…for they shall inherit the earth. Ignored by elites as remnants of a primitive past, peasants, over fifty percent of humanity by some counts, represent a chance for survival of the species as industrial economies, costly luxuries of the fossil fuel age, gradually fade away. I have explored the potential of this scenario in “The quality of peasant life: a scenario for survival” and “The peasants shall inherit the earth”, as an option to explore by younger generations who might be looking for ways to navigate the energy descent.

Afterthoughts

I am grateful for having lived an incredibly full and exciting life by my rather strict and unusual standards, and enjoy memories of almost all of it, despite the stresses occasioned by constantly having to adapt to the conditions of life in each novel adventure that we embarked on. We engaged deeply with other cultures and worked with people in many places – Geneva, Paris, New York, Bamako, Havana, a Zapatista rebel village in Chiapas, six years in this mountain village in the Catalan Pyrenees:

Most of these locations were at the top of their game at the time we encountered them, but not so much now, according to reports. So, the global tourism that appeals to many retirees is not a temptation. I, for one, am content to live with excellent memories.  Here is one from our farm in upstate NY, caught at full gallop by a farm apprentice, the intrepid cameraman Brian McKay, circa 1995, replete with sleighbells ringing.


And another, five years later, after horses and driver had aged to a more sedate trot.

With such adventures to look back on, I can safely say that I have achieved most of my great expectations, however strange they may seem to the average person.

May your new year be as satisfying as the last,

Karl

[1] Faced with the vast complexity of the earth-sun system, with all its cycles of variable time frame (such as solar maxima and minima, ice ages, etc.) and feedback loops, many unknown, most experienced practitioners in using the method are saying there is no way that system dynamics simulation modeling can show to what extent emissions from fossil fuel use are a significant factor in climate behavior. Sure, we can prove tiny pieces of the puzzle like the causal relation between fossil fuel burning and greenhouse gas production, but so what? Water vapor is a far more potent greenhouse gas, is constantly changing, and has very different effects in different layers of the atmosphere. There is enough complexity in that one variable alone to give one pause.

[2] Political economy is an approach to the study of human society grounded in an understanding of its power structure – including its locus and concentrations and its means and avenues of execution in end point decision making.

[3] See, for example, the latest by C J Hopkins, The Year of the New Normal Fascist

[4] An early example is The Limits to Growth project, originally published in 1972.

[5] See my End Games of Modern Civilization: false flag scare strategies and global cultural revolutions

for a more detailed view.

[6] https://www.weforum.org/great-reset,

Covid 19 – The Great Reset

[7] Agenda 2030/Great Reset marketing video for dummies – 8 predictions for the world in 2030

[8] Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

[9] https://home.solari.com/coming-thursday-2020-annual-wrap-up-theme-the-going-direct-reset-the-central-bankers-make-their-move/

[10] For the whole chilling story, see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s just published The Real Anthony Fauci; Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. If you’ve been buying the official Covid party line and scare campaign; the first 100 pages alone will knock your socks off. Most of the revelations have long been available in online alternative news sites, but Kennedy is the first to break through mass media censorship.

[11] https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/, German Corona Investigative Committee,

https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/math-plus-protocol/

[12] https://doctors4covidethics.org/

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