I am so happy to read your piece as it makes sense and gives us reason to be optimistic. You explain a lot here John and I appreciate the note that they are doomed to fail, and why that is so.
They are not "doomed to fail," unfortunately. Well, long-term, yes, probably they are "doomed to fail." Probably. But in the present and near-future (from now through possibly as long as the next century), they are very much convinced their victory is assured and near. They wouldn't be getting so casual in public if they didn't think they are on the cusp of or indeed have already achieved practical invincibility.
I'm convinced they know something we don't know. Or they think they do. I read an article today about CRISPR 2.0 which I am still digesting. It's not good, that much is certain. It is possible already to tailor biologics to specific individuals and delivery mechanisms are known to include aerosolized "vaccines" in addition to transdermal infection through contact alone.
No. They are far from "doomed to fail," I'm sorry to say. They are capable of mass genocide and they are, I think, close to being convinced that is the best way forward for them. The Human delusion of "the Other" is powerful. And they are insane. So it's a crapshoot at this point.
[EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention that the obvious model for global control is communist China. It is absolutely terrifying what those poor people are enduring.]
Exactly right. Shit is going to get real and we'll probably go through some trying times before we come out the other side of this process, but the incompetence and insanity of the globalist ruling class and external threat posed by Putin, who does not share their delusions or ideology, are grounds for hope that ultimately their "agenda 2030" will not succeed.
Your analogy of WEF-aligned governments to the franchise model of corporatism is perfect. Whatever comes next, I think localism -- local culture, local supply chains, local governance, local businesses, etc. -- is going to be very highly prized. We've learned our lesson the hard way about globalism. Old Ross Perot's warnings in 1992 proved too accurate.
Yep. Covid killed my company when the next generation, who were to take the business over, decided it wasn’t “ safe” to be in the office. I knew I could never be a virtual manager so, for the sake of our clients, sold the practice to a larger advisory firm which is owned by a bank. I think they are now learning the hard way the value of trust and in-person connection.
Meanwhile, my husband and I started a permaculture farm that is open-arms to any who want to work hard, *together*, to build a better future
"Whatever comes next" will most likely be more of the same on a different scale and with different PR. Instead of a globally integrated economy, we'll see transnational economic integration limited to specific regions. And supply chains will be arranged to suit multinational firms (as always) and governments. Don't forget that supply chains include labour markets too, so immigration will still be managed to suit the needs of whichever industry dominates decision-making at any given time. Post-globalisation will involve governments applying the lessons of the past...just don't assume that these will be the lessons that you expect.
That will probably eventually be true no matter what happens: the rich and powerful ultimately figure out how to game any new "reforms" to suit their interests. But in the short term -- and from a historical perspective, the short term could be several decades -- the regional elite will become more important and (with probably a few exceptions) will want their regions to be as prosperous and powerful and free from foreign interference as possible, in much the same way Vladimir Putin is doing today with Russia.
One of the things that annoys me the most is that these “elites” have appointed themselves. Many of them are govt bureaucrats or connected to “non-profits “ or friends/family of left-wing politicians.....you get the point. And they are funded by self serving billionaires seeking power. Irritates the hell out of me (and many others, apparently)😎
To a certain degree elites are always self-selecting. Reality isn't terribly democratic; power tends to accrue to those who are worthy of it, those who seek it, and those who simply take it. It's usually only a problem when they're really bad at wielding it, as in the current case of our deeply irresponsible, childish ruling class.
Power also accrues to those who are simply handed it. Proximity and affinity pay a huge role.
In addition, for elites to maintain their integrity (in the non-ethical sense of the word) they need to exclude those who might disrupt anything or weaken the pursuit of the collective self-interest of the group. The risk of exclusion plays a big role in managing relationships within the elite and the incidence of exclusion explains a lot about relationships with other classes. The over-supply of potential recruits to the elite is destabilising politics and society across the West.
Concerns expressed about Gates, WEF, and other global "elites" are canards invoked by the more local tyrants who actually rule us, to distract us from their failures. They are the only ones who can actually oppress us. Gates can buy all the land he wants, but is always bound by the laws in the jurisdiction where each property resides. Schwab can publish his nefarious plans to gain practical control, but a PowerPoint and five bucks will only get you a cup of coffee. WHO and other UN agents can issue orders, but they're only valid if local rulers adopt them. They can bribe local rulers to support their plans, but the real crime is the acceptance of those bribes. Every human on the planet chooses his rulers, or chooses to tolerate rulers others have chosen. DeSantis proved a state can defy and withstand national tyranny. Trump showed a country can defy and withstand global tyranny. The war is not between us and globalists, its only between us and our rulers. All oppression is voluntary. Competent people cannot be oppressed.
I don't think it's a distraction exactly, as the big picture is important to keep in mind. However, I see what you're saying, which is that resistance to tyranny is best fought at the local level, against the petty tyrants who are the actual flesh and blood responsible for implementing the agenda, and who can additionally be much more effectively opposed than the big boys on the global stage. That's 100% correct, and if that mindset proliferates, that global agenda is dead in the water.
The best opposition for the big globalists is ridicule. They don't need the money, it's just ego. Malone posts cartoons on Sunday mornings that have some good material. Target rich environment.
I think that the WEF globalists although they still have a decent chance of getting their way have been so unhinged and incompetent there is some non-negligible chance they are just another controlled front group. There to inflict misery and chaos to destroy the West or more likely since the same malaise in different manifestations afflicts Russia and China, to cause the population to rise up and destroy the leadership/globalists paving the way for a one world government. Some plans really are that simple and the perpetrators of such plans are just that crazed/unhinged/incompetent/bold though so more than likely it is just the WEF maybe as a front for some older organisations. I think whatever happens it will be a rough few years and not everyone is going to make it even it fails to take, or a rough few centuries if it does.
I've wondered if those at the hidden top of the pyramid of evil may be wanting to do major culling of the parasitic "elite" they've accumulated as they bought control of the world's institutions. I assign a non-zero probability that the top-level parasitic 'elite' are setting up many of their minions for human sacrifice, heh.
Culling the herd at the elite level would strengthen the system. There are various motivations behind a purge: clearing out obsolete or non-performing elements, creating room at the top for new entrants to the elite who might otherwise prove disruptive if they were left outside it.
A purge would also be essential for preparing for the rise of the next elite, which will incorporate elements of the old.
The beauty of having so many incompetent or dysfunctional people in prominent positions is that they make ideal victims when sacrifices are called for. Many of the corrupt and colourful characters in the Biden Administration fit the bill.
Furthermore, incompetent and dysfunctional people members of the elite test the patience and docility of the non-elite...a vital means of managing the masses. The presence of sub-optimal types helps set expectations and relieves pressures for routine high performance at the top. When the dregs of the elite get out of hand, they can be removed easily enough, offering a reliable safety valve that leaves the underlying system in place.
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised, some of the minions they have co-opted are certainly too incompetent to have any uses beyond pushing the current hysterical narratives and their blind loyalty. Something else will replace government by hysteria if they’re successful then these people know too much, and are useless, hence completely expendable and too dumb to realise it.
Good point about the intermarried aristocrats not making war.
Another important difference is that the old aristocrats were hereditary. Genes mix in various ways. Sometimes the heir was crazy, but often enough the heir was relatively sane, so the nation prospered.
The new aristocrats are SELECTED by other aristocrats from the broad population, and they are exclusively SELECTED for maximum evil and demonic lunacy. Any ruler who underperforms on Satan's scale is ruthlessly deselected and replaced by a more effective demon.
If we're going to select on the basis of something other than blood - and I think we should - then we should be selecting for ability and virtue, not willingness to sell one's soul.
"The ruling class are therefore no longer perceived as the elites of their respective countries, organically risen from their local populations to fulfill leadership roles in those national communities. Instead, they are experienced as members of a different tribe, which have been imposed upon the nations from without."
This, precisely. My tribe is America, and more specifically what I consider the real America, which is an idea as much as an actual place or an actual political subdivision of the world. If anyone does not know what that idea is, they need only read the Constitution of the United States, and if that does not suffice, read what the people who founded the country and wrote the Constitution had to say about such matters as the role of government and the importance of individual liberty.
Those people who come from among us and join the globalist elite have no concern at all about the individual liberty of peons like us. They react with visceral anger at the very idea that we should put "America first," as if a political leader elected by Americans to serve the interest of Americans should somehow, as a natural matter of course, sometimes put the interests of Belgians and Chinese and Ukranians ahead of those of Americans. "America first" should be as controversial as "don't kick puppies," yet here we are.
Barack Obama aptly demonstrated his "otherism" when he remarked about American exceptionalism being similar to Greeks thinking they have Greek exceptionalism. Was Greece, unlike every other nation state out there, founded on an idea (for example, "liberty") rather than "welp, we got a bunch of people around here who look about the same and have the same culture, so we might as well make it official and declare borders and a capital city?"
No, that was not Greece, Obama. If you don't understand the difference, you're as dumb as you look with those gigantic "car going down the road with the doors open" ears (h/t to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for the quip). I suspect you do know the difference, but you choose to minimize it by turning it into the caricature that you have.
You continue to knock them out of the park, John, and I sincerely hope your optimism is justified.
Some people see all that is happening as being purely or mostly the result of massive incompetence on the part of the government officials. I tend to see deliberate action... but when asked about it (as I was recently in a Substack discussion), I have to say that no, I don't see a hypercompetent foe playing 5-d chess while the rest of us run around chasing our tails. I see deliberate (conspiratorial) action on the part of the elites, but they're idiots. It does not have to be the either-or they have presented us; either they are legitimately trying to do the right thing for us all but are dumb as posts, or else they are malevolent, megalomaniacal super geniuses who have predicted every response we will have and designed a counter for it before the thing we were reacting to even happened.
About the only thing that is actually true of our opponents is that they are malevolent and megalomaniacal. That, clearly, they are. They clearly are not acting in the public interest in any way, nor do they actually believe that they are. They are neither dumb as posts nor super geniuses, though on balance they are closer to the former than the latter. They are prone to forgetting they are in an echo chamber, and they (along with their useful-idiot servants) often begin to believe their own lies while the rest of us continue to see through them.
One obvious example of this was in the phenomenon of Trump. When he became the frontrunner in the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, they (including their propaganda division, the so-called news media) was perplexed how such a figure could be popular (since none of THEM thought like that), but they had no curiosity to find out why (journalism having been dead for some time now). They simply declared that anyone who supported Trump was a bigoted, stupid, deplorable white supremacist, and that was that. From that point forward, they began to believe this... the thing they made up was repeated so often from within their echo chamber that it triggered their confirmation bias subroutines, and it reached the threshold for it to be considered common knowledge, like in my high school English class when I didn't need to end-note any factoid if I had at least three sources (each on its own 3x5 note card) saying the same thing..
This happened with Trump many times during (and before, and after) his presidency. The lie became the truth; they all believed it, and they were incredulous that many of us out here in flyover country didn't. They never understood that attacking him was not going to make his supporters shy away because we (like everyone else is supposed to) wanted to be in the good graces of Team Globalist. It made it clear that we were the real target, and he was just in the way-- as he said.
Donald Trump is an unlikely champion in a lot of ways, and he has made a lot of the other side's work easier with a lot of rookie mistakes, many of which happened in the latter part of his term, when he should have known who the snakes really were. For all of his faults, though, he appeared to many as a Messianic figure because he possessed some things we have not seen in ages... specifically, as you write, he was one of "us," an American, not a "them" globalist, and he actually has a spine, and won't back down the first time he is threatened with the left's primary weapon, the accusation of racism. It is a very effective weapon for keeping those who oppose globalism silenced, though it has been used so much that we're very much in the "little boy who cried wolf" territory.
That was, and is, at the heart of Trump's appeal, which the other side would know if they had any actual journalists among the legions of operatives they have with exactly that title. Had they known this, they may have countered him in ways that didn't just boost his appeal to his supporters. Nah, they are no 5-d chess players... they are a bunch of dumbasses (in practical terms; some of these dumbasses may well have high scores on standardized IQ tests, which just demonstrates the ongoing inability to put together any kind of test that measures what it claims to), but they are conspiratorial dumbasses all the same, and they do have money, which has given them power.
We can all feel it, I think, that their hold on power is slipping. El gato malo just posted about how the meme is being used to great effect to smash the narrative, and it's another facet of the same thing we are talking about here, where the schism between the elites (acting in their own interests while pretending to be serving us) and the regular people is becoming common knowledge. As the left's patron saint Alinsky noted, ridicule is a potent weapon, and there is fertile ground for ridicule among the globalist set, which is a given when one considers that they are, in fact, ridiculous.
I recently had this discussion on this with a good friend of mine - are the 'elites' omnipresent, omnipotent 5D chess masters, or are they simply malicious and incompetent? He suggested, and I partly agreed that whilst those on the top of the pile may be very intelligent and can plan ahead, as the various tasks are compartmentalised downstream to their legions of lackeys, the intelligence levels drop. This results in poor execution of the micro-tasks they are assigned with and poor compliance of the masses.
Another idea that relates to this, read in an article here on substack, is the requirements for competency. These being:
- objective thinking, or the ability to accept conclusions that do not align with your opinion/presupposition
- independent thinking, or the ability to avoid your conclusions from being impacted by 3rd party sway
- intelligence, often quantified by IQ score
Whilst the 'elite' can be characterised as intelligent, and they may even be objective thinkers, in that they accept conclusions they don't like but then try to force alignment with what they want (i.e. anti-racism campaigns in light of strong European tribalism), they are definitely not independent in their thoughts. This results in a lack of competence and a self-reinforcing/circlejerk world strategy that is incredibly difficult if not impossible to align with reality. This is a good thing, as reality usually wins out long-term.
Our present elites are very much the captives of wishful thinking. Because they want reality to be a certain way, in their minds, it is, and any evidence to the contrary is either dismissed, ignored, explained away, or punished. Much of their intellectual activity goes into maintaining the integrity of their worldview in the face of disconfirming evidence.
In my research, it comes clear there multiple factions inside seemingly united cabals. Some individuals are members of multiple factions and many don't explicitly know they are a member of any cabal, even while seemingly having great public power.
As such, most factions of the cabal will eat themselves over time, turning on anyone in their quest for further power, wealth, and reputation.
The next few years are going to suddenly become really bad (90s Russia bad)....
Great piece, John. You have teased out the political implications of the social psychology of the elites very well.
One point that people overlook is that globalisation is more than merely escalating mobility of people, goods, capital and culture. These are merely consequential phenomena of economic integration across national frontiers.
Globalisation is essentially the synchronisation of economic production across jurisdictions enabled by co-operation between national governments. Law, finance, corporate regulation, labour markets and consumption are managed to enable this synchronisation. It is about managing supply chains and maximising economies of scale to ensure maximum rates of growth and development in previously neglected or underutilised regions.
Unfortunately, global economic integration provides opportunities for wage and regulatory arbitrage. The profits from this are extraordinary. The adjustment costs are also distributed unequally. Elites seek their own advantage. Interelite co-operation incentivises decision makers to deprioritise their co-ethnics or fellow citizens.
NB economic integration is not simply a matter of liberal political economy. The formalisation of economic thinking behind globalisation began in Europe before WW1 in several countries, was further developed to a great extent by government think-tank efforts in Germany during WW1 itself and spread across Europe and the US in the 20s and 30s. Both liberal democrats and fascists were involved. Global cartels like I.G. Farben and the leading companies in the energy sector played a huge role too.
Ultimately the class to which you refer, John, is simply the managerial class engaged in realising the work of global economic integration. Their ideas and class culture are adaptations for this role.
Spot on, yes. What we're seeing is the apotheosis of the managerial class, reaching their maximum level of bloat. As with any ruling class, what was once necessary and useful has become oppressive and obsolete. They only have one basic trick, which is to insert themselves into human activities by means of erecting permission barriers that they control; modern technology makes that largely redundant, however, and as their response is to erect ever more elaborate, far-reaching, and granular permission structures, their continued domination of the social order becomes intolerable.
The trouble, as I see it, is that the synergies between the emerging technologies for surveillance, the commercial value of data and the geopolitical necessity of maintaining key industries that rely on data harvesting on a massive scale guarantees that the ruling elite have an overwhelming need for maintaining permission barriers that can apply digital control. Entrenching surveillance capitalism is seen by many at the top as essential for remaining competitive with China. It is certainly a priority with big pharma, which needs medical records for research purposes and is envious of the vast reserves of the Chinese data banks.
I would say that they see all of this as essential for maintaining their power in a digital age. Whether any of it is necessary to compete effectively with e.g. China is another question entirely. My suspicion is that, no, it isn't; and that further, there is a more competitive model of social organization that leverages the self-organizing properties of networks to make energetically expensive centralized leadership structures largely redundant. A social order that more efficiently harnesses available resources will tend to outcompete others.
This puts me in mind of the difference between dominance and power. Dominance is essentially a snapshot of all transactions at a given moment, producing a signal of who or what is "in charge" of trends. A dominant force can sometimes manifest a very strong signal, other times a seemingly weak one. What it can't do is openly and brazenly raze your crops, fuck your wife, enslave your children, and murder you and all your friends.
Mere dominance needs to at least pretend to play by rules; a weakness which inevitably results in a lot of lying. Since lies and treachery beget more lies and more treachery, the vicious circle must at some point produce the precarious position the globalist tribe has found itself in. The same entropy applies whether the tech is pitchforks and torches or cell phones and substack posts. Even on those occasions when they apply "force", it is a weak, womanish kind of force: half-apologizing for its existence; promising to eventually relent; nervously measuring reactions and scrutinizing poll data.
Power, meanwhile, can evince something similar to dominance on the outside. But that's because it can evince a lot of things: caudal traps, measured interventions, persuasive arguments and all the rest of the trappings of civilized rule. But when it is threatened (and, in the case of virtuous power, when the *tribe* it belongs to, and is sworn to protect, is threatened), it can regress to relentless, unapologetic force in a heartbeat.
In some ways he reminds me of the Count Zero character, Josef Virek, imprisoned not only by his own wealth, but his own fictions about the nature of true power. I have a feeling that -- were the chalice passed to him -- Gates would likewise (and even happily) convert his body into a biochemical miasma, trapped in a vat and conducting Zoom meetings from hallucinatory replica of Gaudi Park, never realizing how many jails he has willingly marched himself into, in the pursuit of a fleeting and largely illusionary dominance.
Bill Gates strikes me as a tragic, even pitiable figure. Not that I'd piss on him if he were on fire, but indeed I do think he's trapped, quite possibly without even realizing it. The system has granted him wealth, fame, and influence, on the surface; but the devil's bargain is that he may only use these to advance the devil's designs ... and in the process, it is his own face, and not the devil's, that is burned into the collective consciousness as the demonic visage.
There is something of a... domesticated look about him. I've long said it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if he turned tranny one day. Not because of any autogynephillic kink, but as an act of ego desperation, when some part of him senses the jig is up..
Spot on about power, dead wrong about the history. Previous generations of globalists conquered the world (or at least leveraged the US role in two world wars into global hegemony), but they frittered it away over several generations. The deceit and hypnosis came to the fore from the 80s onward and has accelerated as the US has weakened industrially and militarily. The current generation of the oligarchy inherited an empire increasingly maintained by bluff and they were too self-absorbed and dumbed down to realise how precarious the whole enterprise really was. The bluff has been revealed slowly, since the NATO trained army of Georgia collapsed under Russian pressure. Now things are becoming apparent to everyone.
I really enjoyed this and will share it. Thank you. It's nice to see someone wrap their head around this weirdly sudden and new and earth-encompassing power grab. I always knew the shit would hit the fan in approximately 2020, bye I didn't expect the collapse to be accomplished as a deliberate act of sabotage. And what gets me is how many people they have in their claws - like the ENTIRE world media. Right now it's as if every single person who is paid right now to fabricate "news" (which is nightmarish in itself) is pulling out all the stops to fake-explain all the people dropping dead from the "vaccines". It literally is probably the biggest conspiracy In Human history.
I'm not an economist, and have never been too sure how much of that discipline was real or bogus. I'm interested in your dismissal of the minimizations of the Russian economy that I have heard elsewhere, e.g. the size of those of Italy or Texas.
How do we measure the size of an economy, anyway? As an evolutionary ecologically-minded person, I tend to read the size of the economy to be proportional to the growth and maintenance of the human biomass it supports: population, not credit slips. You treat it in terms of hard assets, like wheat, coal, and steel. But do our professional economists really roll these into the debt instruments we owe to each other in terms of dollars, and treat whatever inflating bubbles that creates as a measure of our economy? If so, has it always been thus?
I tend to look at the economy in real terms: amount of stuff vs. number of people. A good economy has a high ratio of stuff to people, and the stuff is reasonably well distributed. Numbers on a spreadsheet are just abstractions. They can be useful for keeping track of stuff, which can help to use it in more efficient or sophisticated ways, but at the end of the day the stuff is primary. By contrast, a lot of Western economies involve a whole lotta abstraction and very little stuff. They look good on paper but don't move the needle much in real terms.
Financial metrics are smoke and mirrors. Food, medicine, energy, resources, production of advanced goods (tool-making, weapons, communication and medical equipment) are way more significant than any financial flows. IMHO the essential metrics are biomedical: morbidity and mortality rates, life expectancy. These capture wellbeing better than anything else.
Pregnancy related mortality is a reliable measure of the quality of health-care. Population increase per se is a tricky one. Excess civilian deaths in peace-time indicates a real crisis: the collapse of the USSR was predicted on the basis of rising mortality rates. Similar trends amongst working class whites in the US in recent years suggests that a systemic crisis is underway.
I'm thinking in terms of natural growth as a measure of wellbeing. Life expectancy, morbidity, and mortality rates, as you mentioned, would be one kind of wellbeing measure, as how long a person lives. But quality of life might be measured another way, by how many children a normal person can afford to have and raise.
I think these might both be measures of wellbeing, but not necessarily the same sort of wellbeing.
I see what you're getting at, but I'm wary of trading one numerical measurement (GDP) for another (e.g. life-years). Quality of Life isn't necessarily the same as length of life or number of children. The Choice of Achilles makes this clear: is it better to have a short but glorious life, or a long, unremarkable, and dull life? If we take maximizing life-years as the metric, we end up forcing the second option, which will be fine for some but intolerable for others.
You are 100% spot on. Mechanistic metrics like GDP simply reduce us to machines, medical ones reduce us to mere life. Both make a mockery of our humanity.
The rise of involuntarily disrupted or postponed fertility, involuntary solitude and the normalisation of family fragmentation indicates a catastrophic collapse in wellbeing is underway. Quality of life comes from relationships, a sense of purpose (both collective and individual), meaningful recognition and the good mental health that these make possible. Societies that make these goods unavailable to a significant proportion of their people are failed societies by definition.
I like that distinction. But even "amount of stuff" seems problematic to me, given different dimensions of utility. How do we compare amount of land with amount of oil with amount of corn with amount of automobiles with amount of televisions with amount of covid shots, and get a meaningful number? And how do Western economies work to incorporate that "abstraction", and others don't? If you were designing a measure by which to compare the Russian economy with the US one, would that Western economic "abstraction" be something you would even have to consider?
I agree, it gets complicated. That's why having a stable, trustworthy, and objective value standard - a currency, in other words - is essential. Combine that with a market and price signals and revealed human preferences will pretty quickly tell everyone what things are worth, making it much easier to evaluate the total size of a real economy. Needless to say the Federal Reserve Note isn't that - and it's precisely the distortions introduced by the money printer that have enabled the fictitious economy to eclipse the real economy.
Complicating things further is the issue of technology, which can turn previously unrecognized resources into valuable assets (see: aluminum, rare earths, oil), render previously important assets irrelevant (e.g. whale oil), and increase the amount of utility that can be extracted from a given quantity of the same resource (e.g. modern chips compared to those of 20 years ago).
A further complication is that some forms of 'growth' aren't growth, they're just the marketization of services or activities that were previously provided outside of the monetary economy on an informal basis. For instance, childcare used to be outsourced to close relatives and friends in the local mommy group; now you need to pay for it. There was no increase in the quality of life, actually if anything the opposite, but the economy 'grew'. Charles Eisenstein has had a lot to say on that particular aspect.
I am so happy to read your piece as it makes sense and gives us reason to be optimistic. You explain a lot here John and I appreciate the note that they are doomed to fail, and why that is so.
We're not out of the woods yet so don't get too blindly optimistic. Next few years are gonna be a bag full of suck.
They are not "doomed to fail," unfortunately. Well, long-term, yes, probably they are "doomed to fail." Probably. But in the present and near-future (from now through possibly as long as the next century), they are very much convinced their victory is assured and near. They wouldn't be getting so casual in public if they didn't think they are on the cusp of or indeed have already achieved practical invincibility.
I'm convinced they know something we don't know. Or they think they do. I read an article today about CRISPR 2.0 which I am still digesting. It's not good, that much is certain. It is possible already to tailor biologics to specific individuals and delivery mechanisms are known to include aerosolized "vaccines" in addition to transdermal infection through contact alone.
No. They are far from "doomed to fail," I'm sorry to say. They are capable of mass genocide and they are, I think, close to being convinced that is the best way forward for them. The Human delusion of "the Other" is powerful. And they are insane. So it's a crapshoot at this point.
[EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention that the obvious model for global control is communist China. It is absolutely terrifying what those poor people are enduring.]
Exactly right. Shit is going to get real and we'll probably go through some trying times before we come out the other side of this process, but the incompetence and insanity of the globalist ruling class and external threat posed by Putin, who does not share their delusions or ideology, are grounds for hope that ultimately their "agenda 2030" will not succeed.
Your analogy of WEF-aligned governments to the franchise model of corporatism is perfect. Whatever comes next, I think localism -- local culture, local supply chains, local governance, local businesses, etc. -- is going to be very highly prized. We've learned our lesson the hard way about globalism. Old Ross Perot's warnings in 1992 proved too accurate.
Not just localism. Authenticity. People are exhausted with plastic and virtuality.
Yep. Covid killed my company when the next generation, who were to take the business over, decided it wasn’t “ safe” to be in the office. I knew I could never be a virtual manager so, for the sake of our clients, sold the practice to a larger advisory firm which is owned by a bank. I think they are now learning the hard way the value of trust and in-person connection.
Meanwhile, my husband and I started a permaculture farm that is open-arms to any who want to work hard, *together*, to build a better future
"Whatever comes next" will most likely be more of the same on a different scale and with different PR. Instead of a globally integrated economy, we'll see transnational economic integration limited to specific regions. And supply chains will be arranged to suit multinational firms (as always) and governments. Don't forget that supply chains include labour markets too, so immigration will still be managed to suit the needs of whichever industry dominates decision-making at any given time. Post-globalisation will involve governments applying the lessons of the past...just don't assume that these will be the lessons that you expect.
That will probably eventually be true no matter what happens: the rich and powerful ultimately figure out how to game any new "reforms" to suit their interests. But in the short term -- and from a historical perspective, the short term could be several decades -- the regional elite will become more important and (with probably a few exceptions) will want their regions to be as prosperous and powerful and free from foreign interference as possible, in much the same way Vladimir Putin is doing today with Russia.
One of the things that annoys me the most is that these “elites” have appointed themselves. Many of them are govt bureaucrats or connected to “non-profits “ or friends/family of left-wing politicians.....you get the point. And they are funded by self serving billionaires seeking power. Irritates the hell out of me (and many others, apparently)😎
To a certain degree elites are always self-selecting. Reality isn't terribly democratic; power tends to accrue to those who are worthy of it, those who seek it, and those who simply take it. It's usually only a problem when they're really bad at wielding it, as in the current case of our deeply irresponsible, childish ruling class.
Power also accrues to those who are simply handed it. Proximity and affinity pay a huge role.
In addition, for elites to maintain their integrity (in the non-ethical sense of the word) they need to exclude those who might disrupt anything or weaken the pursuit of the collective self-interest of the group. The risk of exclusion plays a big role in managing relationships within the elite and the incidence of exclusion explains a lot about relationships with other classes. The over-supply of potential recruits to the elite is destabilising politics and society across the West.
Side note ......A good example of ‘the risk of exclusion’ can be found at Twitter.
Thanks for clarifying it for me. That’s generally where I was headed but didn’t get there.
Concerns expressed about Gates, WEF, and other global "elites" are canards invoked by the more local tyrants who actually rule us, to distract us from their failures. They are the only ones who can actually oppress us. Gates can buy all the land he wants, but is always bound by the laws in the jurisdiction where each property resides. Schwab can publish his nefarious plans to gain practical control, but a PowerPoint and five bucks will only get you a cup of coffee. WHO and other UN agents can issue orders, but they're only valid if local rulers adopt them. They can bribe local rulers to support their plans, but the real crime is the acceptance of those bribes. Every human on the planet chooses his rulers, or chooses to tolerate rulers others have chosen. DeSantis proved a state can defy and withstand national tyranny. Trump showed a country can defy and withstand global tyranny. The war is not between us and globalists, its only between us and our rulers. All oppression is voluntary. Competent people cannot be oppressed.
I don't think it's a distraction exactly, as the big picture is important to keep in mind. However, I see what you're saying, which is that resistance to tyranny is best fought at the local level, against the petty tyrants who are the actual flesh and blood responsible for implementing the agenda, and who can additionally be much more effectively opposed than the big boys on the global stage. That's 100% correct, and if that mindset proliferates, that global agenda is dead in the water.
The best opposition for the big globalists is ridicule. They don't need the money, it's just ego. Malone posts cartoons on Sunday mornings that have some good material. Target rich environment.
this was a masterful piece of zeitgeistology...i will forward to it everyone i know (uhh in 2-3 yrs when they're ready for it)...bravo!
The eternal curse of being 2-3 years ahead of my time.
I think that the WEF globalists although they still have a decent chance of getting their way have been so unhinged and incompetent there is some non-negligible chance they are just another controlled front group. There to inflict misery and chaos to destroy the West or more likely since the same malaise in different manifestations afflicts Russia and China, to cause the population to rise up and destroy the leadership/globalists paving the way for a one world government. Some plans really are that simple and the perpetrators of such plans are just that crazed/unhinged/incompetent/bold though so more than likely it is just the WEF maybe as a front for some older organisations. I think whatever happens it will be a rough few years and not everyone is going to make it even it fails to take, or a rough few centuries if it does.
I've wondered if those at the hidden top of the pyramid of evil may be wanting to do major culling of the parasitic "elite" they've accumulated as they bought control of the world's institutions. I assign a non-zero probability that the top-level parasitic 'elite' are setting up many of their minions for human sacrifice, heh.
Culling the herd at the elite level would strengthen the system. There are various motivations behind a purge: clearing out obsolete or non-performing elements, creating room at the top for new entrants to the elite who might otherwise prove disruptive if they were left outside it.
A purge would also be essential for preparing for the rise of the next elite, which will incorporate elements of the old.
The beauty of having so many incompetent or dysfunctional people in prominent positions is that they make ideal victims when sacrifices are called for. Many of the corrupt and colourful characters in the Biden Administration fit the bill.
Furthermore, incompetent and dysfunctional people members of the elite test the patience and docility of the non-elite...a vital means of managing the masses. The presence of sub-optimal types helps set expectations and relieves pressures for routine high performance at the top. When the dregs of the elite get out of hand, they can be removed easily enough, offering a reliable safety valve that leaves the underlying system in place.
Don't they ever! Great observation!
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised, some of the minions they have co-opted are certainly too incompetent to have any uses beyond pushing the current hysterical narratives and their blind loyalty. Something else will replace government by hysteria if they’re successful then these people know too much, and are useless, hence completely expendable and too dumb to realise it.
Good point about the intermarried aristocrats not making war.
Another important difference is that the old aristocrats were hereditary. Genes mix in various ways. Sometimes the heir was crazy, but often enough the heir was relatively sane, so the nation prospered.
The new aristocrats are SELECTED by other aristocrats from the broad population, and they are exclusively SELECTED for maximum evil and demonic lunacy. Any ruler who underperforms on Satan's scale is ruthlessly deselected and replaced by a more effective demon.
100%.
If we're going to select on the basis of something other than blood - and I think we should - then we should be selecting for ability and virtue, not willingness to sell one's soul.
"The ruling class are therefore no longer perceived as the elites of their respective countries, organically risen from their local populations to fulfill leadership roles in those national communities. Instead, they are experienced as members of a different tribe, which have been imposed upon the nations from without."
This, precisely. My tribe is America, and more specifically what I consider the real America, which is an idea as much as an actual place or an actual political subdivision of the world. If anyone does not know what that idea is, they need only read the Constitution of the United States, and if that does not suffice, read what the people who founded the country and wrote the Constitution had to say about such matters as the role of government and the importance of individual liberty.
Those people who come from among us and join the globalist elite have no concern at all about the individual liberty of peons like us. They react with visceral anger at the very idea that we should put "America first," as if a political leader elected by Americans to serve the interest of Americans should somehow, as a natural matter of course, sometimes put the interests of Belgians and Chinese and Ukranians ahead of those of Americans. "America first" should be as controversial as "don't kick puppies," yet here we are.
Barack Obama aptly demonstrated his "otherism" when he remarked about American exceptionalism being similar to Greeks thinking they have Greek exceptionalism. Was Greece, unlike every other nation state out there, founded on an idea (for example, "liberty") rather than "welp, we got a bunch of people around here who look about the same and have the same culture, so we might as well make it official and declare borders and a capital city?"
No, that was not Greece, Obama. If you don't understand the difference, you're as dumb as you look with those gigantic "car going down the road with the doors open" ears (h/t to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for the quip). I suspect you do know the difference, but you choose to minimize it by turning it into the caricature that you have.
You continue to knock them out of the park, John, and I sincerely hope your optimism is justified.
Some people see all that is happening as being purely or mostly the result of massive incompetence on the part of the government officials. I tend to see deliberate action... but when asked about it (as I was recently in a Substack discussion), I have to say that no, I don't see a hypercompetent foe playing 5-d chess while the rest of us run around chasing our tails. I see deliberate (conspiratorial) action on the part of the elites, but they're idiots. It does not have to be the either-or they have presented us; either they are legitimately trying to do the right thing for us all but are dumb as posts, or else they are malevolent, megalomaniacal super geniuses who have predicted every response we will have and designed a counter for it before the thing we were reacting to even happened.
About the only thing that is actually true of our opponents is that they are malevolent and megalomaniacal. That, clearly, they are. They clearly are not acting in the public interest in any way, nor do they actually believe that they are. They are neither dumb as posts nor super geniuses, though on balance they are closer to the former than the latter. They are prone to forgetting they are in an echo chamber, and they (along with their useful-idiot servants) often begin to believe their own lies while the rest of us continue to see through them.
One obvious example of this was in the phenomenon of Trump. When he became the frontrunner in the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, they (including their propaganda division, the so-called news media) was perplexed how such a figure could be popular (since none of THEM thought like that), but they had no curiosity to find out why (journalism having been dead for some time now). They simply declared that anyone who supported Trump was a bigoted, stupid, deplorable white supremacist, and that was that. From that point forward, they began to believe this... the thing they made up was repeated so often from within their echo chamber that it triggered their confirmation bias subroutines, and it reached the threshold for it to be considered common knowledge, like in my high school English class when I didn't need to end-note any factoid if I had at least three sources (each on its own 3x5 note card) saying the same thing..
This happened with Trump many times during (and before, and after) his presidency. The lie became the truth; they all believed it, and they were incredulous that many of us out here in flyover country didn't. They never understood that attacking him was not going to make his supporters shy away because we (like everyone else is supposed to) wanted to be in the good graces of Team Globalist. It made it clear that we were the real target, and he was just in the way-- as he said.
Donald Trump is an unlikely champion in a lot of ways, and he has made a lot of the other side's work easier with a lot of rookie mistakes, many of which happened in the latter part of his term, when he should have known who the snakes really were. For all of his faults, though, he appeared to many as a Messianic figure because he possessed some things we have not seen in ages... specifically, as you write, he was one of "us," an American, not a "them" globalist, and he actually has a spine, and won't back down the first time he is threatened with the left's primary weapon, the accusation of racism. It is a very effective weapon for keeping those who oppose globalism silenced, though it has been used so much that we're very much in the "little boy who cried wolf" territory.
That was, and is, at the heart of Trump's appeal, which the other side would know if they had any actual journalists among the legions of operatives they have with exactly that title. Had they known this, they may have countered him in ways that didn't just boost his appeal to his supporters. Nah, they are no 5-d chess players... they are a bunch of dumbasses (in practical terms; some of these dumbasses may well have high scores on standardized IQ tests, which just demonstrates the ongoing inability to put together any kind of test that measures what it claims to), but they are conspiratorial dumbasses all the same, and they do have money, which has given them power.
We can all feel it, I think, that their hold on power is slipping. El gato malo just posted about how the meme is being used to great effect to smash the narrative, and it's another facet of the same thing we are talking about here, where the schism between the elites (acting in their own interests while pretending to be serving us) and the regular people is becoming common knowledge. As the left's patron saint Alinsky noted, ridicule is a potent weapon, and there is fertile ground for ridicule among the globalist set, which is a given when one considers that they are, in fact, ridiculous.
I recently had this discussion on this with a good friend of mine - are the 'elites' omnipresent, omnipotent 5D chess masters, or are they simply malicious and incompetent? He suggested, and I partly agreed that whilst those on the top of the pile may be very intelligent and can plan ahead, as the various tasks are compartmentalised downstream to their legions of lackeys, the intelligence levels drop. This results in poor execution of the micro-tasks they are assigned with and poor compliance of the masses.
Another idea that relates to this, read in an article here on substack, is the requirements for competency. These being:
- objective thinking, or the ability to accept conclusions that do not align with your opinion/presupposition
- independent thinking, or the ability to avoid your conclusions from being impacted by 3rd party sway
- intelligence, often quantified by IQ score
Whilst the 'elite' can be characterised as intelligent, and they may even be objective thinkers, in that they accept conclusions they don't like but then try to force alignment with what they want (i.e. anti-racism campaigns in light of strong European tribalism), they are definitely not independent in their thoughts. This results in a lack of competence and a self-reinforcing/circlejerk world strategy that is incredibly difficult if not impossible to align with reality. This is a good thing, as reality usually wins out long-term.
Our present elites are very much the captives of wishful thinking. Because they want reality to be a certain way, in their minds, it is, and any evidence to the contrary is either dismissed, ignored, explained away, or punished. Much of their intellectual activity goes into maintaining the integrity of their worldview in the face of disconfirming evidence.
And indeed, this will be their downfall.
Really good piece. Thank you.
In my research, it comes clear there multiple factions inside seemingly united cabals. Some individuals are members of multiple factions and many don't explicitly know they are a member of any cabal, even while seemingly having great public power.
As such, most factions of the cabal will eat themselves over time, turning on anyone in their quest for further power, wealth, and reputation.
The next few years are going to suddenly become really bad (90s Russia bad)....
Great piece, John. You have teased out the political implications of the social psychology of the elites very well.
One point that people overlook is that globalisation is more than merely escalating mobility of people, goods, capital and culture. These are merely consequential phenomena of economic integration across national frontiers.
Globalisation is essentially the synchronisation of economic production across jurisdictions enabled by co-operation between national governments. Law, finance, corporate regulation, labour markets and consumption are managed to enable this synchronisation. It is about managing supply chains and maximising economies of scale to ensure maximum rates of growth and development in previously neglected or underutilised regions.
Unfortunately, global economic integration provides opportunities for wage and regulatory arbitrage. The profits from this are extraordinary. The adjustment costs are also distributed unequally. Elites seek their own advantage. Interelite co-operation incentivises decision makers to deprioritise their co-ethnics or fellow citizens.
NB economic integration is not simply a matter of liberal political economy. The formalisation of economic thinking behind globalisation began in Europe before WW1 in several countries, was further developed to a great extent by government think-tank efforts in Germany during WW1 itself and spread across Europe and the US in the 20s and 30s. Both liberal democrats and fascists were involved. Global cartels like I.G. Farben and the leading companies in the energy sector played a huge role too.
Ultimately the class to which you refer, John, is simply the managerial class engaged in realising the work of global economic integration. Their ideas and class culture are adaptations for this role.
Spot on, yes. What we're seeing is the apotheosis of the managerial class, reaching their maximum level of bloat. As with any ruling class, what was once necessary and useful has become oppressive and obsolete. They only have one basic trick, which is to insert themselves into human activities by means of erecting permission barriers that they control; modern technology makes that largely redundant, however, and as their response is to erect ever more elaborate, far-reaching, and granular permission structures, their continued domination of the social order becomes intolerable.
The trouble, as I see it, is that the synergies between the emerging technologies for surveillance, the commercial value of data and the geopolitical necessity of maintaining key industries that rely on data harvesting on a massive scale guarantees that the ruling elite have an overwhelming need for maintaining permission barriers that can apply digital control. Entrenching surveillance capitalism is seen by many at the top as essential for remaining competitive with China. It is certainly a priority with big pharma, which needs medical records for research purposes and is envious of the vast reserves of the Chinese data banks.
I would say that they see all of this as essential for maintaining their power in a digital age. Whether any of it is necessary to compete effectively with e.g. China is another question entirely. My suspicion is that, no, it isn't; and that further, there is a more competitive model of social organization that leverages the self-organizing properties of networks to make energetically expensive centralized leadership structures largely redundant. A social order that more efficiently harnesses available resources will tend to outcompete others.
I fervently hope that you are right. The suppression of self-organising networks will surely figure high on the priorities of the powers that be.
This puts me in mind of the difference between dominance and power. Dominance is essentially a snapshot of all transactions at a given moment, producing a signal of who or what is "in charge" of trends. A dominant force can sometimes manifest a very strong signal, other times a seemingly weak one. What it can't do is openly and brazenly raze your crops, fuck your wife, enslave your children, and murder you and all your friends.
Mere dominance needs to at least pretend to play by rules; a weakness which inevitably results in a lot of lying. Since lies and treachery beget more lies and more treachery, the vicious circle must at some point produce the precarious position the globalist tribe has found itself in. The same entropy applies whether the tech is pitchforks and torches or cell phones and substack posts. Even on those occasions when they apply "force", it is a weak, womanish kind of force: half-apologizing for its existence; promising to eventually relent; nervously measuring reactions and scrutinizing poll data.
Power, meanwhile, can evince something similar to dominance on the outside. But that's because it can evince a lot of things: caudal traps, measured interventions, persuasive arguments and all the rest of the trappings of civilized rule. But when it is threatened (and, in the case of virtuous power, when the *tribe* it belongs to, and is sworn to protect, is threatened), it can regress to relentless, unapologetic force in a heartbeat.
Well said.
In the final analysis, information is not power, money is not power; power is power. Iron rules gold.
The globalists attempted to conquer the world with deception and hypnosis and the folly of that strategy is becoming apparent.
Here's a question: is Bill Gates even a free man?
In some ways he reminds me of the Count Zero character, Josef Virek, imprisoned not only by his own wealth, but his own fictions about the nature of true power. I have a feeling that -- were the chalice passed to him -- Gates would likewise (and even happily) convert his body into a biochemical miasma, trapped in a vat and conducting Zoom meetings from hallucinatory replica of Gaudi Park, never realizing how many jails he has willingly marched himself into, in the pursuit of a fleeting and largely illusionary dominance.
Meanwhile, in China.....
Bill Gates strikes me as a tragic, even pitiable figure. Not that I'd piss on him if he were on fire, but indeed I do think he's trapped, quite possibly without even realizing it. The system has granted him wealth, fame, and influence, on the surface; but the devil's bargain is that he may only use these to advance the devil's designs ... and in the process, it is his own face, and not the devil's, that is burned into the collective consciousness as the demonic visage.
And the devil's manboobs. Don't forget the manboobs.
Would that I could forget them. They've been seared into my nightmares.
There is something of a... domesticated look about him. I've long said it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if he turned tranny one day. Not because of any autogynephillic kink, but as an act of ego desperation, when some part of him senses the jig is up..
Spot on about power, dead wrong about the history. Previous generations of globalists conquered the world (or at least leveraged the US role in two world wars into global hegemony), but they frittered it away over several generations. The deceit and hypnosis came to the fore from the 80s onward and has accelerated as the US has weakened industrially and militarily. The current generation of the oligarchy inherited an empire increasingly maintained by bluff and they were too self-absorbed and dumbed down to realise how precarious the whole enterprise really was. The bluff has been revealed slowly, since the NATO trained army of Georgia collapsed under Russian pressure. Now things are becoming apparent to everyone.
I really enjoyed this and will share it. Thank you. It's nice to see someone wrap their head around this weirdly sudden and new and earth-encompassing power grab. I always knew the shit would hit the fan in approximately 2020, bye I didn't expect the collapse to be accomplished as a deliberate act of sabotage. And what gets me is how many people they have in their claws - like the ENTIRE world media. Right now it's as if every single person who is paid right now to fabricate "news" (which is nightmarish in itself) is pulling out all the stops to fake-explain all the people dropping dead from the "vaccines". It literally is probably the biggest conspiracy In Human history.
I'm not an economist, and have never been too sure how much of that discipline was real or bogus. I'm interested in your dismissal of the minimizations of the Russian economy that I have heard elsewhere, e.g. the size of those of Italy or Texas.
How do we measure the size of an economy, anyway? As an evolutionary ecologically-minded person, I tend to read the size of the economy to be proportional to the growth and maintenance of the human biomass it supports: population, not credit slips. You treat it in terms of hard assets, like wheat, coal, and steel. But do our professional economists really roll these into the debt instruments we owe to each other in terms of dollars, and treat whatever inflating bubbles that creates as a measure of our economy? If so, has it always been thus?
I tend to look at the economy in real terms: amount of stuff vs. number of people. A good economy has a high ratio of stuff to people, and the stuff is reasonably well distributed. Numbers on a spreadsheet are just abstractions. They can be useful for keeping track of stuff, which can help to use it in more efficient or sophisticated ways, but at the end of the day the stuff is primary. By contrast, a lot of Western economies involve a whole lotta abstraction and very little stuff. They look good on paper but don't move the needle much in real terms.
Financial metrics are smoke and mirrors. Food, medicine, energy, resources, production of advanced goods (tool-making, weapons, communication and medical equipment) are way more significant than any financial flows. IMHO the essential metrics are biomedical: morbidity and mortality rates, life expectancy. These capture wellbeing better than anything else.
How about rate of population increase by births minus deaths per woman per year?
Pregnancy related mortality is a reliable measure of the quality of health-care. Population increase per se is a tricky one. Excess civilian deaths in peace-time indicates a real crisis: the collapse of the USSR was predicted on the basis of rising mortality rates. Similar trends amongst working class whites in the US in recent years suggests that a systemic crisis is underway.
I'm thinking in terms of natural growth as a measure of wellbeing. Life expectancy, morbidity, and mortality rates, as you mentioned, would be one kind of wellbeing measure, as how long a person lives. But quality of life might be measured another way, by how many children a normal person can afford to have and raise.
I think these might both be measures of wellbeing, but not necessarily the same sort of wellbeing.
I see what you're getting at, but I'm wary of trading one numerical measurement (GDP) for another (e.g. life-years). Quality of Life isn't necessarily the same as length of life or number of children. The Choice of Achilles makes this clear: is it better to have a short but glorious life, or a long, unremarkable, and dull life? If we take maximizing life-years as the metric, we end up forcing the second option, which will be fine for some but intolerable for others.
You are 100% spot on. Mechanistic metrics like GDP simply reduce us to machines, medical ones reduce us to mere life. Both make a mockery of our humanity.
The rise of involuntarily disrupted or postponed fertility, involuntary solitude and the normalisation of family fragmentation indicates a catastrophic collapse in wellbeing is underway. Quality of life comes from relationships, a sense of purpose (both collective and individual), meaningful recognition and the good mental health that these make possible. Societies that make these goods unavailable to a significant proportion of their people are failed societies by definition.
I like that distinction. But even "amount of stuff" seems problematic to me, given different dimensions of utility. How do we compare amount of land with amount of oil with amount of corn with amount of automobiles with amount of televisions with amount of covid shots, and get a meaningful number? And how do Western economies work to incorporate that "abstraction", and others don't? If you were designing a measure by which to compare the Russian economy with the US one, would that Western economic "abstraction" be something you would even have to consider?
I agree, it gets complicated. That's why having a stable, trustworthy, and objective value standard - a currency, in other words - is essential. Combine that with a market and price signals and revealed human preferences will pretty quickly tell everyone what things are worth, making it much easier to evaluate the total size of a real economy. Needless to say the Federal Reserve Note isn't that - and it's precisely the distortions introduced by the money printer that have enabled the fictitious economy to eclipse the real economy.
Complicating things further is the issue of technology, which can turn previously unrecognized resources into valuable assets (see: aluminum, rare earths, oil), render previously important assets irrelevant (e.g. whale oil), and increase the amount of utility that can be extracted from a given quantity of the same resource (e.g. modern chips compared to those of 20 years ago).
A further complication is that some forms of 'growth' aren't growth, they're just the marketization of services or activities that were previously provided outside of the monetary economy on an informal basis. For instance, childcare used to be outsourced to close relatives and friends in the local mommy group; now you need to pay for it. There was no increase in the quality of life, actually if anything the opposite, but the economy 'grew'. Charles Eisenstein has had a lot to say on that particular aspect.
"It doesn’t look good for the national globalists. Everyone hates them, most especially including sizable majorities of their own populations."
I have a strong sense that you're correct, and only hope I'm not confusing that with my hope for the same.
And they have perfected their schemes by mastery of details, which the People were trained to look away from. Freedom is in the details.
Great analysis - loving your output John!