*** FUTURE POSTS WILL ALSO APPEAR AT 'NOW AND NEXT' : https://rolfnorfolk.substack.com
Thursday, March 31, 2022
The new MULTIPOLAR world order, by Sackerson
Monday, March 28, 2022
Ukraine: the big picture, by Sackerson
He has rightly earned our condemnation but securing a legal
judgment against him is a different matter. Following the International
Criminal Court’s ruling that the annexation of Crimea counted as an armed
conflict with Ukraine, Russia withdrew from the ICC in 2016 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38005282
; but then, the US itself rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction in May 2002, ahead of
Congress’ October vote giving President Bush the discretion to attack Iraq. Peace
is of no account when sovereign nations adopt an à la carte approach to the
rules-based international order.
What could Putin’s motives for the invasion have been?
An appeal to Russian nationalism? One of the reasons for
Putin’s continuing domestic support is that he cultivates the mythos of
protector of his people, and according to Article 69 (3) of his revised
Constitution of 2020, that includes ‘compatriots living abroad… exercising
their rights, ensuring protection of their interests and preserving all-Russian
cultural identity.’ https://rm.coe.int/constitution-of-the-russian-federation-en/1680a1a237 In Article
79, the statement ‘Decisions of international bodies, taken on the
basis of provisions of international treaties of the Russian Federation in
their interpretation that contradicts the Constitution of the Russian
Federation shall not be executed in the Russian Federation’ means, says Russian
political analyst Elena Galkina https://bylinetimes.com/2020/03/11/the-true-goals-of-putins-new-constitutional-amendments/
, that ’The Kremlin wants to show that regardless of the decisions of any
international authorities and courts, it will consider the [Crimean] peninsula
a part of Russia.’
Defence? Putin has been referencing the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis since 2019 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-idUSKCN1QA1A3
, when Washington withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF)
Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty#US_withdrawal_and_termination
. The US nuclear missiles at Izmir, Turkey (removed in 1963) were 1,500 miles
from Moscow; Kyiv is a thousand miles closer. President Zelenskyy is now, at
last, talking about accepting Ukrainian neutrality and non-nuclear status https://www.ft.com/content/c5aa8066-715d-43dd-8a3c-b6907d839a36
; this could potentially save us all from the horrors of nuclear war; yet
surely no major nation would be so lunatic as to provoke Russia into using its
weapons of last resort?
Resource wars? Ukraine, whose citizens are the poorest in
Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
, is rich in agriculture and minerals. That said, Ukraine is a vast country and
much harder to hold than to invade, as the Russians are discovering; and Russia
is already the world’s biggest exporter of wheat and boasts huge mineral
reserves of its own. That is not to say that the West is not tempted, and
finance plays its part: Professor Prabhat Patnaik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhat_Patnaik
argues that the IMF, once simply an international rescue-bank, is now used to
enforce ‘investor-friendly’ economic restructuring on the borrower https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2022/0306_pd/imf-connection-ukraine-crisis ; in Ukraine’s case this entailed reforms such as
cutting spending on education and health and slashing the gas price subsidy to
its consumers. Patnaik claims that the IMF deliberately loaned more than
Ukraine could ever repay, so paving the way for taking land and mineral
resources in lieu; it will end, he says, by turning Ukraine into Greece and the
economy will be smashed as masses emigrate for better pay abroad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDkkGvKtlVg .
There is, perhaps, an even bigger picture, in which geography
is key.
Locally, assuming negotiated peace is possible, Lt Gen Riley
has sketched out a possible end position here https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/if-ukraine-rejects-a-deal-there-could-be-much-worse-to-come/
: Russia to control the Donbas (including the western coast of the Azov Sea),
Crimea (plus its water supply from the Dnieper) and a land corridor linking the
two. It would be a partition akin, say, to the creation of South Sudan in 2011.
However – and this is not to defend Russia’s actions - foreign
minister Lavrov sees his country as embroiled in the implications of the
Wolfowitz Doctrine. He refers to ‘the United States’ desire – which has been
much more manifested by the Biden administration – to come back to a unipolar
world’ http://thesaker.is/foreign-minister-sergey-lavrovs-interview-with-rt-moscow-march-18-2022/
and says ‘the West has repeatedly attempted to stall the independent and
autonomous development of Russia.’ http://thesaker.is/foreign-minister-sergey-lavrov-leaders-of-russia-management-competition-moscow-march-19-2022/
The development he mentions has a maritime dimension. Until
the Soviet Union collapsed, the Black Sea was very largely a Red lake, except
for the shores of north-eastern Greece and northern Turkey. Since then, EU/NATO
has gradually encroached and if we look at the map and visualise both Ukraine
and Georgia within the fold (still under consideration), Blue is certainly
crowding what is left of (what was once) Red.
Russia has long been working on strengthening its facilities
in the Black Sea. The Sochi Olympics served a dual purpose: in 2014 America’s
The Nation magazine https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-did-sochi-get-51-billion-highways-railroads-and-lot-white-elephants/
scoffed at Putin’s $51 billion dollar ‘white elephants’, missing the greater
potential of the new Sochi airport, and of the development of the ports there,
at Novorossiisk (in preparation for oil and gas shipping https://tass.com/economy/718145 )
and at Port Kavkaz - which faces Port Crimea across the Kerch Strait, the two
linked (road and rail) since 2019 by Russia’s Crimean Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge
, Europe’s longest. South Stream, the planned undersea gas pipeline to
Bulgaria, jinking through Turkey’s zone to avoid Ukraine, had to be scrapped
because of political fallout from the Crimea annexation, but it is clear that
the Black Sea is a hugely important trade nexus for Russia.
The Sea of Azov is also a keystone in Russia’s plans for
growth and it is likely no coincidence that Ukraine’s hardest-line regiment is
named after it. Until 2014 the Sea was jointly controlled by Russia and the
Russophile eastern Ukraine. The River Don empties into it, and is connected to
the Volga, which flows into the Caspian, by the Volga-Don Canal, which strains
to accommodate modern shipping needs. One proposal is/was for a vast Eurasia Canal linking the Caspian to the Azov
and so on to the Black Sea; in 2007 Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev enthused
that the canal ‘would make Kazakhstan a maritime power and benefit many other
Central Asian nations as well’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasia_Canal#Recent_developments
; an alternative Russian plan is to widen the Volga-Don Canal. Either way, a
hostile Ukrainian force on the western shore of the Azov would again pose a
threat to Russian trade and prosperity in the area, and indirectly to long-term
plans for a Eurasian trading bloc such as Damir Ryskulov’s 2008 dream of a
Trans-Asian Corridor of Development https://en.paperblog.com/trans-asian-corridor-of-development-russia-s-super-canal-to-unite-eurasia-734226/
.
It could be argued that Russia has been provoked into a
hot-headed, deeply wrongful act, one that any empowered independent tribunal
would condemn, by an outdated geopolitical policy originally aimed at
containing the spread of Communism. The
mystery is why the US continued to foster China’s ascendancy after the Soviet
collapse; Professor John Mearsheimer https://www.mearsheimer.com/
, who in 2015 blamed America for the Ukraine crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
, sees this as a ‘colossal strategic blunder’ https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/U.S.-engagement-with-China-a-strategic-blunder-Mearsheimer
, saying we should settle with Putin and ‘pivot’ towards Asia.
Is it not time to stop the war, care for and compensate its
innocent victims and negotiate a fresh approach to international relations that
allows for peaceful global economic growth?
Sunday, March 27, 2022
EMAIL FROM AMERICA (3): misinterpreting the Founders and the Bible, by Paddington
Tracking the chaos...
This week brings the confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. The GOP members in the Senate have vowed to vote against her, even though she is more qualified than most of the more junior members on the Court. At stake is her refusal to embrace 'originalism', a philosophy that we should do EXACTLY as the Founders said, not necessarily what they intended. In support of this onerous and odious idea, the conservatives repeatedly make up quotes by people such as Madison, and simply lie about the rest.
Via Heather Cox Richardson, US historian: A 2019 speech by then–attorney general William Barr at the University of Notre Dame offers an explanation.
In that speech, Barr presented a profound rewriting of the meaning of American democracy. He argued that by 'self-government' the Framers did not mean the ability of people to vote for representatives of their choice. Rather, he said, they meant individual morality: the ability to govern oneself. And, since people are inherently wicked, that self-government requires the authority of a religion: Christianity.
Saturday, March 26, 2022
WEEKENDER: Changes Afoot, by Wiggia
I am with Anna on this one, or would have been, though I doubt it would have saved any water - after all, who would want to leave the shower in a situation like that !
On the same page Matthew McNulty, actor, has a question and answer session. If you could eat anywhere in the world today where would you go? Now a decent modern progressive would say ‘my local Chinese’ as we can walk there and cut emissions, but McNulty makes a statement that will turn Greta apoplectic should she read it, how dare you indeed, by declaring ‘The Arctic. I’d catch fish then cook and eat it in the cold, appreciating hot food in a cold place is the ideal.' I have news for McNulty: appreciating hot food in any climate may soon be a luxury at home, never mind the Arctic.
Friday, March 25, 2022
FRIDAY MUSIC: The Brothers Comatose, by JD
Thursday, March 24, 2022
EMAIL FROM AMERICA (2): exploiting 'States' rights', blamestorming on energy price hikes; by Paddington
Guess Who? by Sackerson
Okay Wayne, we've got five minutes left, fancy a game of Guess Who? World Leaders Edition.
How do I play, Sir?
I give you a clue, you flip down all the ones that don't fit. Ready?
Yes.
I think I got that on the first one, Sir, you don't have to go on. Why does his name end in two Ys?
It should end in Y-O-Y, because we can't understand why he hasn't negotiated a peace settlement yet.
I think I know, Sir. New game?
Okay.
Old crook (flip)... serves the rich and the military-industrial complex (flip)... going gaga (flipflipflip)...
It's okay, son, I think I've got it.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Inflation protection doesn’t, by Sackerson
- The Bank of England has a general inflation target of 2% p.a. as measured by CPI https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation , so clearly price inflation is getting a little out of hand. If we were on track at 2% then pensioners would benefit in real terms from the minimum 2.5% element of the triple lock.
- Last year, the Government suspended the NAEI part of the guarantee for 2022-23, which would otherwise have triggered a pension increase of some 8% following a higher rise in wage inflation owing to the pandemic. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/money-mentor/article/pensions-triple-lock/ Darby and Joan would have been drinking champagne and doing an arthritic dance in the street.
- So CPI it is, oldies. Setting aside quibbles about exactly how CPI is calculated, and whether RPI would be a more appropriate yardstick (the switchover of measures came in 2011, affecting social security benefits and public sector pensions), we note that the Government measures CPI in September but does not apply increases to pensions until the following April; a lot can happen between those dates. For example, we now read that the latest CPI figure for the last twelve months is 6.2%, exactly double what we are to get from the Pensions Service. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/23/uk-inflation-highest-level-in-three-decades
Yet even in an ideal world, where inflation was absolutely fairly
and accurately calculated once a year and pension increases applied
immediately, our bank accounts would still spring a leak.
The full rate of new State Pension will increase to £185.15
per week in April. For a couple each qualifying for that, the total income works
out at £19,255:60 p.a. or a shade over £1,600 per month; let’s work with that
round figure.
Now let’s assume that our couple spends every penny of their
pension, but that prices go up another 6% over the year, jumping suddenly by 0.5%
per month simple. Darby and Joan cope okay for April, but outgoings exceed
income by £8 in May, £16 in June and so on. At that rate, it’s easy to show
that they end the tax year £528 behind the line. Either they will borrow to
meet the shortfall (and pay interest – credit cards are charging something like
35%) or, more realistically, they will manage with less and/or lower quality in
the way of goods and services.
The following April, under this fantasy arrangement, inflation
indexing sets them straight again; but that £528 is never recouped; and they
face another year of the same process of gradual immiseration; and it goes on
forever.
The Bank of England tries to justify this theft:
‘If inflation is too low, or
negative, then some people may put off spending because they expect prices to
fall. Although lower prices sounds like a good thing, if everybody reduced
their spending then companies could fail and people might lose their jobs.’
Yet the BoE’s own calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
shows that during the century after Waterloo (1815), inflation
ran at an average of -0.1% (yes, negative) p.a.
However, the same calculator says that the cost of goods and
services worth £10 in 1915 soared to £1,093.82 last year; even an apparently
low average inflation rate of 4.5% a year still rots one’s wealth.
Debasing the currency by coin-clipping or forgery used to be
high treason: the last woman to be burned at the stake for it was Catherine
Murphy, at Newgate Prison in 1789. It is high time we tackled this official fraud,
the monetary disease of the twentieth century.
US preparing to attack Russian forces?
ClassicFM's news reported yesterday that President Biden had revealed a plan by Russia to mount a 'false flag' attack on itself.
It could signal a new US Government policy of publicising secret military intelligence, which would be a refreshing change, though at the risk of revealing its sources and resources to the enemy.
But it might also be a public relations technique known as 'getting ahead of the story': taking control of the narrative so that we are primed in advance to discount the enemy's version of events.
What form will this attack take, and who will be mounting it? Maybe we will be allowed to know the truth in thirty years' time.
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
EMAIL FROM AMERICA (1): GOP States net beneficiaries of Fed finance, fake Covid research; by Paddington
Monday, March 21, 2022
Nuclear war: ‘we never expected that!’ by Sackerson
This policy seems inconsistent. It has maintained its focus
on a State that is no longer officially Communist at the same time that hardline
Communist China has been developing her own ‘perches’ in the Pacific, Africa
and South America as part, we assume, of a plan to displace the US as Top
Nation. John Mearsheimer, who in 2015 judged the West responsible for the crisis
in Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
, now says that the US partnership with China was a huge blunder and we should
settle with Russia in order to ‘pivot’ and deal with the Middle Kingdom instead
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/U.S.-engagement-with-China-a-strategic-blunder-Mearsheimer . Seeing how the US has fed the Chinese dragon for
decades and thereby weakened its own economy, it may be too late.
Nevertheless, the signs
are that the unipolar (and monocular) ambition has not been abandoned, even
though it is and has long been insanely dangerous. Next October will mark sixty
years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which all over a certain age will remember,
yet many will not connect this confrontation with the fifteen Russia-targeted US
nuclear missiles set up and made operational at Izmir, Turkey in the preceding
February; which was a factor in Khrushchev’s decision to assent to Castro’s
request to position US-targeted missiles in Cuba. From Izmir to Moscow is about
1,500 miles; from Kyiv, merely 500; no wonder Russia has become so nervous
about NATO’s creeping-up game of ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ Had it not
been for the restraining hand of a Russian naval officer in 1962 https://web.archive.org/web/20210710213948/https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cold-war/sovietsbomb.htm
most of us would have died long ago, or never been born.
When two parties get into a fight, at least one has
miscalculated. In a timely and startling article on Substack https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/people-ideas-machines-ii-catastrophic?s=r
, Dominic Cummings shows that the West’s assumption that Russia would not dare
to escalate from conventional to nuclear war was mistaken:
‘After the 1991 collapse some
scholars went to talk to those actually in charge in Russia. They read
documents. They discovered that we’d been wrong in crucial ways all along.
‘Actually the Soviets planned
early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of
conventional war in Europe.’
In 1963, on the night President Kennedy was shot, British
tank transporters rumbled past our front door (literally) in North Germany, on
their way to what we now know would have been nuclear obliteration. Today, Russia
and the US have between them over 11,000 nuclear warheads, some 3,000 of which
are ready to be deployed. https://sofrep.com/news/100-seconds-to-midnight-a-glance-at-the-worlds-nuclear-weapons/
Cummings claims that our decision makers do not take the
danger seriously. After he was grudgingly allowed three hours to elaborate on
our military unpreparedness, the Prime Minister told him ‘What a waste of my
time.’
Western war planners think they are dealing with rational
actors and know all the play variations, but seem not to understand the romance
of death. CD says that as Japan faced defeat in 1945 their General Anami was proposing
to see his nation destroyed ‘like a beautiful flower.’ Churchill himself
stiffened the spines of his Cabinet in 1940 with a moving speech that had them
beating the table with their fists: ‘If this long island story of ours is to
end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood
upon the ground.’ The old soldier was utterly serious – I remember reading how
his wife handed their daughter a large knife against the day the Germans
invaded.
So far, awful as they are, the more reliable statistics for
the Ukraine conflict https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/ukraine-civilian-casualty-update-20-march-2022
show a policy of limited aggression with the possibility of negotiated peace.
We can do without a Fourth Estate fanning the flames of hysteria and a
leadership more engaged in winning the next election – probably soon, once the
Fixed Term Parliaments Act is abolished https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-fulfil-manifesto-commitment-and-scrap-fixed-term-parliaments-act
- than heeding the dreadful warning. https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/the-watersons/christmas-is-now-drawing-near-at-hand-50
So proud and lofty is some sort of
sin
Which many take delight and pleasure
in
Whose conversation God doth much
dislike
And yet He shakes His sword before He
strike
Sunday, March 20, 2022
Science, and religion as magic, by 'Alexander'
Saturday, March 19, 2022
WEEKENDER: Council Tax - Fair or Not? by Wiggia
Friday, March 18, 2022
FRIDAY MUSIC: Chelters and Irish festivity
Wednesday, March 16, 2022
Ukraine: a completely avoidable tragedy, by Sackerson
Other members of our family headed for the Baltic states and
were caught behind the Iron Curtain; we have no idea of their names and
addresses. Axel, the cousin our mother loved, was killed on the Eastern Front.
The farm, annually buried in winter so deep in snow that the family were locked
in and lived off stored provisions, warmed by the high tiled oven (a coffee cup
went missing for months because a tall relative had left it on the top), furnished
with art and fine furniture including an amber-topped table: who knows if it
still stands, or who lives in it.
Mother got to Hamburg, where displaced people were surviving
by stealing from the ships in harbour; her sack of swag turned out to be tobacco,
so she bought a pipe – she had used to half-smoke cigars for a fat old uncle to
concentrate the tar and nicotine in the other half for him. An American GI tried
to strangle her in revenge for the death of his buddy; mother broke his hold, climbed
over a wall and came to see his CO the next day so no-one else would be killed.
Then she met a British soldier.
Her parents made it to Holstein, where father, pushing
sixty, worked with his hands for the first time in his life; we still have a
painting by her mother of haystacks. Then Wiesbaden and a flat paid for out of
government compensation, where Opa helped refugees reunite; we have an oak
plaque from his former neighbours, with the motto ‘Die Treue is das Mark der
Ehre’ (fidelity is the mark of honour.) A big man, squashed down from 600 acres
with dozens of farmworkers, to four rooms in an apartment block.
Survival; but a permanent shattering of community and shared
history.
This is what has been wished on the Ukrainians, and not just
by the Russians. A word inserted by PM Johnson (among others) early into the
narrative of the invasion is ‘unprovoked’, presumably with an eye to dragging
President Putin to a war crimes tribunal. I can hardly wait for that day, so
that the other third parties whose meddling has caused this tragedy can be exposed.
Provocation does not exonerate violence, but can mitigate the punishment; who
would be coming to the court with clean hands?
Not the EU, gobbling one ex-Warsaw Pact country after another
like a Labrador with no appetite off-switch, even though nations it has already
digested have reason to regret their membership; so letting them into NATO, which
has played ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ for thirty years after the Soviet
Union’s collapse, bringing military threat ever closer to Russia’s borders
despite promises that it wouldn’t. Not the offshore-billionaire Zelenskyy,
almost a prisoner of his ultranationalists, trying to draw the wider West into
a conflict that raises the ghost of 1962 and surprised when, like the Syrian
Armenians, his supposed friends have left him high and dry. Not the countries
that have stood off but poured in money and weapons (what a bonanza for the arms
manufacturers who spend so much on lobbying) to ‘help’ Ukraine, so prolonging
and intensifying the conflict.
Now, months after Putin’s demand that Ukraine remain out of
NATO https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/russia-issues-list-demands-tensions-europe-ukraine-nato
was rejected out of hand, Zelenskyy has agreed, saying (he is his own
spin-doctor) that Russia is becoming more reasonable in negotiations; perhaps
the hawkish commentators detecting imminent Russian military collapse are mistaken.
Will we get back to Minsky II, but only after a reported three million refugees
and the vast, heart-breaking wreckage of the nation’s property and
infrastructure?
On the road again, the ordinary people played with by war
planners and geopolitical strategists.
Saturday, March 12, 2022
WEEKENDER: Has Nigel Overreached? by Wiggia
One of the so so green energy by products. |
The rebuff from Dale Vince, carefully groomed to look every inch the eco warrior, about smart grids is a nod to the fact that green energy alone cannot supply energy in a way that could ever be acceptable to the population or industry. Talk of breaks in supply and getting up in the middle of the night to use your energy ‘allowance’ is a step back in to pre industrial revolution times; why should anyone accept that and pay through the nose for it?
Friday, March 11, 2022
FRIDAY MUSIC: Tina Turner, by JD
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Tiddles: a counterblast, by Sackerson
Embarrassingly, Tiddles completed his D.Phil. at my old
college in Oxford in 2002 and I am sorry to say that for an intellectual his
thinking on religion and transhumanism appears jejune and he does not seem to realise
its implications. On the whole I prefer the anarchic yobs and Welsh drunks of
Jesus in the late Sixties and Seventies, whose Junior Common Room once elected
a goldfish as President on the grounds that like other leaders it went round in
circles opening and closing its mouth (an interpreter was appointed to convey
its rulings.) Bawling fools tend not to do much harm; it is the theoretical systematisers
and world-reformers that led to the killing of countless millions in the last
century.
Consider Tiddles’ facile remarks on religion in his 2017
Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book
‘What is a religion if not a big
virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions such as
Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat
the same prayers a set number of times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody
from your own gender” and so forth. These laws exist only in the human
imagination.’
The Abrahamic religions postulate a God who both made the
world out of nothing and set the rules for our behaviour: the Creator and
Law-Giver; but according to Nick Spencer https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-problem-with-yuval-noah-harari/12451764
, Tiddles’ position is that ‘There are no gods, no money, no human rights, and
no laws beyond the “common imagination of human beings.”’
if we accept that moral laws have no basis, then consider
what this implies for a thoroughly consistent rationalist: a world entirely without
moral laws that are binding independently of our wishes and opinions. David
Hume said in effect that one cannot reason from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’; you can describe
what people think is right and wrong, and even why they may think so, but there
is no reason why you should privately adopt their view. In fact, it is
convenient if you don’t: I should like everyone else to believe in queuing for
the bus, so that I can jump the queue; this helps to explain why psychopaths
are over-represented in positions of power. All that matters (if you have any
care for yourself, and there is of course no reason why you should) is to work
out how to minimise the negative consequences for yourself of society’s
disapprobation of your actions.
This nihilism being so, it is difficult to explain why Tiddles
is in Schwab’s caressing embrace. Schwab may have a grand vision for future
society, but as nothing matters, there is no reason to help him bring it about.
Tiddles has expressed concern https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yuval-harari-sapiens-60-minutes-2021-10-29/
that in an AI data-gathering world humans are ‘hackable’, can be manipulated
more comprehensively than ever before. Is this not the WEF’s plan, to design an
environment full of blandly contented Stepford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives
people? Isn’t this what the Chinese are
up to with their ‘social credit’ system https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4?r=US&IR=T
, intended to nudge their citizens relentlessly towards absolute conformity with
the CCP’s commandments? What is the point of creating a perfect world, but not
for us as we have previously and in differing ways understood ourselves?
The resistance to this nightmare heaven may have to come
from the irrational, the superstitious, the emotional, the capricious, violent,
stupid, human-hearted humans.
Dig your claws in, Tiddles, and leap off Schwab’s lap.