Rob’s comments are in italics.Derek’s comments are in normal font.
I've got a short quote from Caitlin Johnson to share today. We both follow Caitlin, she's at https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/. She says in one of her articles:
Market forces are not guided by wisdom, they are guided by greed and fear, and by the unresolved early childhood trauma of the Musks and Theils and Bezoses of this world. Capitalism is a great way to guarantee more production and consumption, but it is completely useless for curbing ecocide and restoring planetary health.
As long as ecocide remains profitable under a system where mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit, ecocide will inevitably continue. What we need, then, is a completely different system. One where we move from competing with each other at the expense of our biosphere to collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem. Collaboration-based systems are inherently incompatible with the competition-based ones we live under today — but they are also the only way we are going to be able to continue living on this planet.
That seems to summarise much of what we've been discussing over the last year. I think that is the change that we want to hopefully do our part to push towards.
Absolutely. Last week a joke popped into my head that I was told when I was about eight. I don't know how often I've thought of it since then, but not many. It's quite funny at an eight-year-old level, but it's also got a profound point that was probably lost on me at that age. So the story is that
There was this guy who was employed to paint a line on the ground for the border between Russia and Georgia. He was going along and suddenly found a house right in the middle of where he was going to paint the line. So he knocked on the door and said, I'm painting the border between Russia and Georgia. It goes right through your house. Can you let me carry on? The guy said, no, I don't want half of my house in Russia and half of it in Georgia. Can you go around it?
The guy goes, all right, which side would you like me to go? He said, well, go around the house on the Russian side. The guy says, all right, I'll do that. But I just have to ask you why you chose that side and not the other? The guy said, well, I couldn't face the thought of living through all those Russian winters.
The point being, of course, the more profound point, I mean, obviously it didn't make any difference to what the temperature was when they drew the line. The more profound point is that all of these borders are arbitrary.
All the rhetoric about the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine at the moment is nonsense. It would be great if ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians could recognise that they're all human beings and live together, or if enough of them could do that, that the minority who fought in terms of separation could be prevented from inflicting indignities and attacks on the others. Given that they haven't, it seems that one of the things which is missing from the public dialogue in the Western world is the fact that in Crimea, there was an overwhelming majority in favour of being part of Russia. That was ratified by the Crimean Parliament. Similarly, with the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zafrosia and Khursan, there have been considerable indignities and restrictions placed on Russians and actual attacks by the Ukrainian army. Those people wanted to be in Russia rather than in Ukraine as well. The phrasing of the discussion in terms of the fact that these are areas that Russia is annexing seems to me backwards.
It seems to lack any historical understanding of the history of these regions anyway.
Positive Events This Week
Yeah. Anyway, to positive reflections on the week. The mere fact that there's been a very detailed meeting between a Russian delegation and a US delegation in Saudi Arabia has got to be positive. The idea that you can engage in megaphone diplomacy and not talk to each other, not try to understand what their perception of the situation is, seems to be a recipe for chaos and lunacy to me. So the fact that this talks going on at all, and, of course, Trump has been usually blunt and undiplomatic, but the howls of protest and outrage in the American press were predictable.
And the European press, but they've been largely sidelined, I think.
Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, of course, the Europeans had their own meeting in Paris. A bit of chest-thumping. It seems to me that both the UK and the European Union are hanging on to a completely outdated perspective of how the world is. I'm concerned as a British citizen that our Prime Minister seems to have taken it upon himself to suggest that we send troops over there.
The idea of us effectively opening hostilities against Russia is frankly chilling. Apart from the obvious lack of wisdom of going into any conflict on what is clearly the losing side.
Haven't seen various people try this over the last few hundred years and come off much worse??
I think both Napoleon and Hitler were better equipped militarily than Britain is now.
Anyway, I don't know how it's going to work out. The other thing which has been two pretty striking speeches this week, one from Robert Kennedy Jr, his opening address to the staff of the Department of Health and Human Services.
It's well worth a listen. It's a 20-minute speech. Every point is spot on. He emphasised the need for openness, transparency, and open debate and pointed out that this is the essence of what makes science workable. He said he's going into it without any preconceptions of his own. He's also said that there's no area which is going to be off-limits for discussion. So I think it'd be interesting to see what comes of that.
It's very interesting, I think. The other thing I noticed this week was I noticed that Trump, obviously Trump says a lot of things, so it's hard to know what is serious and what is not. That's always the issue, but he did make some comments about denuclearisation.
Yeah, well, I think these two wars, especially the war in Ukraine, I mean, Gaza has been more of a massacre than anything resembling a war. The war in Ukraine has flagged up the futility of warfare as a way of resolving matters. The expense must be astronomical.
What is also beginning to be said now is that half of the money and weapons sent to Ukraine have been embezzled. So, if that comes out, it will put a different perspective on things. Of course, the other big announcement was that there is this commission being set up to reveal all of the secrets that have been kept from the American public regarding the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, the COVID pandemic, the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers, numerous other things. I think whatever one thinks about the flawed nature of the individuals involved in this current administration in the UK, there are positive things happening in a matter of weeks that most of us have been resigned to giving up hope for.
I don't know where it's going to go. I don't know what Trump expects to achieve throughout his presidency. I don't know what he imagines he means by making America great again. I feel that some of the things I've said before are beyond his capability to deliver apart from anything else. I don't know how rapidly people who were his enthusiastic supporters are going to get demoralised by that or whether we'll see so many positive effects from some of the things that have been set in motion that it will be liberating. I personally expect that there will be all kinds of unintended consequences particularly of releasing those secrets from the past. Many people will have severe attacks of cognitive dissonance over one of those issues or another.
The parallel I keep thinking of is Gorbachev introducing Glasnost and Perestroika, which was sorely needed in the Soviet Union. The whole country was dysfunctional due to government over control and secrecy.
Gorbachev had no intention of bringing down the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union collapsed because once they started coming straight about some of the things that had been going on, it totally destroyed the population's confidence in the credibility of their government. I cannot but expect that we'll have a similar sort of.
We might well be living in a house of cards. Yeah, who knows.
Yeah, who knows? Anyway, once again, a lot of the events are happening so rapidly that it's impossible to assimilate them as we go along. It'll be very interesting to see what the perspective is with the view from a little way into the future when things have settled down.
Comments on Gold
Finally, there are a couple of things that have come up in the past week. One is that the Bank of England has now slowed down the rate at which it honours requests for withdrawals of gold from its vaults. We would have to wonder whether this indicates that there might not be as much gold in there as has been claimed. Similarly, Elon Musk has said that there must have been a recent audit in Fort Knox. Of course, I'm sure he knew full well that there hadn't been any kind of audit since, I think, the 1970s. That was only a partial one. I believe the last full audit was done in 1953.
That's amazing, isn't it?
There may well be a big shortfall in what is claimed to be in there. This has implications for world finance, particularly given that China, Russia, and other nations in the Brexit Consortium have been steadily building up their holdings as fast as they can over the past decade. There could well be a very serious shake-up in the purchasing power of any fiat currencies in the Western world.
Which is going to happen anyway, but it might happen sooner in a more traumatic way than people think.
Much more abruptly. So, I think that's a roundup of what we have to go on today. Circling around to that quote that you started from Caitlin Johnstone, I mentioned the five whys last week. I talked about it mostly in the context of a business situation or some kind of production bottleneck or equipment failure where you have this technique. When something has not worked out well, you say why was that. Then you get an explanation. Then you say: why was that. You get an explanation. You keep saying why until you get to the root cause of it.
If we look at any one of the major challenges facing the human race, whether it's the increase of any particular form of pollution, whether it's the exhaustion of supplies of some critical material or of the energy sources that we're relying on. Or warfare, which is plainly counterproductive and painful. If you keep asking why, I would suggest that at the end of any of those enquiries, the root cause is that human beings are steeped in the illusion that they are separate from other human beings; separate from the web of life on this planet; separate from the functioning of the planet as a whole, separate indeed from the entire universe.
It's that illusion of separation which has to go. Some people approach that from a spiritual point of view, some people approach it from a scientific point of view. According to quantum physics, any particles which have had any interaction with one another are entangled in such a way that you can do quantum measurements of one of those particles. It will give you instantaneous information about the other one, so from any of these points of view, you could look at it from an evolutionary point of view.
We do have a common ancestor. The biochemistry of all living organisms is based on a common foundation, and their matter is constantly exchanged. That shift of perspective will be necessary as a precondition for resolving any of the specific challenges we're facing now.
My estimate is that far more people are aware of that to some degree than there ever have been, and there is far more interest in that topic from one of those directions or another. I don't know how close we are to reaching the critical mass tipping point where this becomes the prevailing understanding. I think we're living through fascinating times, so watch this space.
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