Party On Wayward Sons & Daughters

The Titanic sinks and you are on board

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/tverberg-todays-energy-bottleneck-may-bring-down-major-governments

Recently, I explained the key role played by diesel and jet fuel. In this post, I try to explain the energy bottleneck the world is facing because of an inadequate supply of these types of fuels, and the effects such a bottleneck may have. The world’s self-organizing economy tends to squeeze out what may be considered non-essential parts when bottlenecks are hit. Strangely, it appears to me that some central governments may be squeezed out. Countries that are rich enough to have big pension programs for their citizens seem to be especially vulnerable to having their governments collapse.

So then facing old age with no income, no state, no one, no direction home.

Everything changed in 2020. The Revolution arrived. It won and now consolidates power by war.

Berdyaev writes - The rationalisation, the technisation, the machinisation of the whole of human life and of the human soul itself cannot but provoke a reaction against itself. This reaction existed during the XIX Century. The romantics always protested against the might of technology, the dissociating of the organic wholeness, and they appealed to nature, to the elemental foundation within man. A strident protest against technology was made by Ruskin. He did not want to reconcile even with the railroad and he journeyed in a carriage parallel to the rail tracks. The romantic reaction against technology is understandable and even indispensible, but it is impotent, it either does not decide the problem or it resolves it too easily. To return to former times, to the organic lifestyle, to the patriarchal relationships, to the old forms of the familial economy and handicrafts, to the life with nature, with the land, with plants and animals, is impossible. And indeed this return would be undesirable, for it is connected with an exploitive use of people and animals. In this is the tragedy of the position. And it remains but for spirit creatively to define its own relationship towards technology and towards the new epoch, to master technology in the name of its own ends. Christianity ought creatively to define an attitude towards the new actuality. It cannot be too optimistic. But it also cannot run away from the human reality. This presupposes an exertion of spirituality, an intensification of the inner spiritual life. Soul-emotive sentimentalism within Christianity has become already impossible. Soulful emotionality cannot bear up under the harsh reality. Indifference is possible only for the hardened, the obdurate spirit. Spirit can be an organiser, it can master the technical for its own spiritual ends, but it would have to resist itself being turned into a tool of the organising technical process. In this is the tragedy of spirit.

Giorgio Agamben has diagnosed modern policies and practices of state control over the bodies of citizens as the ‘biopolitical paradigm of the modern’, a ‘concealed matrix’ of contemporary political life that usually hides behind the civilized mask of liberal democracy. In times of emergency, however, modern state power tends to show its true face, resorting to the ‘state of exception’ in which the bare life of citizens is subject to unmediated power. In Agamben’s view, the current response in western countries to the outbreak of the coronavirus is just another example of this. In a weblog dating from 26 February 2020, with the number of confirmed corona cases in northern Italy quickly rising, Agamben defies emergency decrees issued by the government as irrational and unfounded. In his view, the establishment of quarantine zones in Lombardy and the Veneto and the closure of schools and universities – some of the early measures that were soon followed by a lockdown of the entire country – amount to a response that is completely disproportionate with regard to an illness that is not too different from the normal seasonal flu.

The Rise of Tyranny in the United States and the Western world

Paul Craig Roberts

In every country of the Western world freedom and civil liberty are being destroyed by governments, none of which represents the people. One of America’s last remaining journalists, Glenn Greenwald, sees hope that people are catching on and the process can be stopped. My fear is that Western peoples are too weak and uninvolved to reclaim their freedom and that they will accept tyranny with minimal opposition, thus committing all future generations to life under tyranny.  In contrast, the elite are determined and have demonstrated the power to discredit, to remove, and, it seems, to indict an elected President of the United States who attempted to represent the people against the elite.  Moreover, with control of the media, the elite were successful in turning Donald Trump into a hate figure for roughly half of the US population. The same will happen to anyone who attempts to restore government accountable to law, the Constitution, and the people.

Perhaps the most important lesson in Greenwald’s report, essentially a history of the development of the national security police state in the 21st century, is that no President regardless of political party or ideology, neither Bush nor Trump, Obama nor Biden, can refuse legislation that builds a police state in the name of national security. Those Democrats who once opposed police state measures now favor them because they are useful in getting rid of Donald Trump. In Congress, Republican patriots and leftwing Democrats rush to the support of legislation that destroys their own freedom and turns the US Constitution into a dead letter document.

“No matter how much you hate the corporate media, it’s not enough. It is literally impossible to overstate not only the damage that they do but the malice with which they do it. And by malice, I don’t mean that they’re evil masterminds. I mean malice in the sense of the “banality of evil.” The people who go and punch the clock every day, never question what they’re doing, but whose work is nonetheless incredibly toxic and harmful. They’re just basically sociopathic careerists. But no matter sometimes those people can be the most destructive. “ — Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald is a rare honest media voice of our time. Edward Snowden understood this and entrusted Greenwald with the documents that proved the Nazi National Security Agency was spying on all Americans in violation both of law and the US Constitution. It was Snowden who was punished for telling us the truth about how far we were down the road to tyranny. The NSA’s crimes were defended and covered up by the Corporate Media. Congress and the White House did nothing to stop the NSA’s disregard for law and the US Constitution. Indeed, they facilitated the NSA’s transgressions.

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