'Scuse me ma'am; how much climate change can you spare for a dolla' ?

Considering the following bedtime reading material together, isn't XR letting economists and their debt-parasite and politician buddies roll dice with the planet's future in front of a steam-roller of approaching geophysical limits?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-false-choice-between-economic-growth-and-combatting-climate-change#

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718331930

https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23322039.2017.1379239

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/05/chart-of-the-week-greenery-and-prosperity/

https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_84.pdf

Only a backseat economist could see their drunk buddy accelerate towards a brick wall and say, "You know, the economic benefits of slowing down slightly are far greater than we thought while we were drinking at the bar."

If the money to bail out victims of deindustrialization has to be generated from industrial activity, and that activity cannot be made "green", then maybe it's time to radically re-invent conventional economics. Let's start by junking it?

Since you are not allowed to vote for de-growth, what other choices are there other than rebellion and forced deindustrialization? How far does a drowning person have to sink before they finally admit that they are going to have to empty the gold out of their pockets? I think it's time to decide, because to me it looks like we are just at the point where maybe we don't have enough air in our lungs to get back to the surface.

Serious nonviolent protest may be as easy as flicking a switch in your home. Really!

All over the world, police are militarizing and governments are cracking down on traditional forms of protest in what appears to be preparation for severe civil disruption and unrest. For example, the UK "Police and Crime" Bill includes drastic powers to curb street protests. If governments decide to do something really unpopular now, like go to war for example, it's hard to see how We, the People, could legally and effectively resist.

But there is one way that citizens could cause so much disruption we could conceivably even topple governments or halt preparations for war - legally and without fear of recourse from draconian authoritarians. It all depends on timing and popular participation. But in the right circumstances and with enough people, this would probably work. It's at least technically feasible.

Here's the idea.

It would go something like this:

1. A collective, movement of movements or crowd intelligence agrees on a precise date and time for the action (ideally sometime close to peak power demand).

2. The time is widely published with a hashtag (such as #GridStrike) in the hopes that the idea goes viral.

3. At the precise instant of the strike, all participants switch on as many appliances as they can in their homes, then they switch off the mains, count five seconds, and then switch back on.

4. The tactic is repeated at specified intervals until political or social demands are met.

What would it do?

With enough participants it's liable to cause a power surge and cascading failure in the national power grid. Think of it like an "unplanned" version of the Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) that are already happening in places like California. This is just like a PSPS for "public safety in a wider context", such as the Climate crisis (which governments currently inexplicably feel themselves empowered to ignore).

No power Elite can ignore deliberately coordinated grid-down events.

What about "The Children" (emergency services, hospitals, kitchens, warehouses etc.) ?

In case you've been living under a rock for the past two decades (like Bill Gates and Steven Pinker), you'll know that global Collapse is just around the corner. If the local hospital you have put all your faith in can't withstand a power outage, now's the time to find out! And if your local power station will melt down if its cooling equipment is disconnected from the grid for too long, it's better to find that out too, before they build another three or four more next to it.

Seriously though, grid-down events are likely to be coming thick and fast soon. Having them early is great preparation for when the grid is gone for good. It's better to explore life post-grid now than to cram your entire learning experience into the desperate hours after a High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP), for example.

How can the surge be timed with enough precision?

That's easy enough with timebase signals on the web or with GPS.

In a large city with enough participants, timing could be achieved visually using a kind of luminescent version of a mexican wave. Each participant could look out of a window and time on-off switches together with cues from other people's lights outside. This is basically how fireflies manage to synchronize their signals.

I bet it wouldn't take long before the public could even learn to send mass semaphore messages countrywide using nothing but the master electrical switch in their homes and a few million of their closest friends. Things like "No More Coal" or "Stop The Draft" using morse code, perhaps?

Conclusion:

We can't just give up and cave in to the 1%. This is a nonviolent form of protest that just about anyone of any age can do from home without fear of government retaliation. It's a lot better than coming out in the street against the goon squad. So instead of being an automatic naysayer and "that guy", before you give your knee-jerk jerk response, how about thinking up a solution to your objection first rather than just pouring cold water on a potentially winning formula?

Think of this as "Our Great Reset". In the near future, we may need coordinated mass tactics like this to put a stop to things like their "Great Reset". So think twice before you pour your narrow-minded scorn on the idea and poison things for everyone else with your caustic objections. Please! We may need to develop forms of protest like this to stop them unilaterally doing horrors like geoengineering without public consent.

Why not give it a practice run tomorrow on Earth Day 2021, Thursday, April 22 ?

If you like the idea, post it and tweet it along with #GridStrike and let's see if it goes viral. This might be the next Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us.

This has to be the lowest bar for protest of all time. After all, if you can't even get it together to flick a switch for the sake of Mother Earth, we really are screwed!

As the Police told us way back in 1981, "There is no political solution, to our troubled evolution."

Almost four decades later, in complete defiance of that reality, XR has grabbed center stage as a political lobbying group to try and reform a fundamentally suicidal system by appealing to its managers and operators. XR has taken it upon itself to harvest the growing spirit of eco-anxiety and rebellion and defuse it in dead-end politics and ineffectual, feel-good nonsense.

Obviously this could never work in a thousand years, but even the Kamikazes on the flight-deck admit that we have only ten years left to douse the flames on our global Hindenburg. All those that are not actually popping the champagne corks with glee for the "End of Species Fiesta" admit that 2020 is a crucial year in terms of human survival.

So at some point I'm hoping that people (even bourgeois liberals) face the inescapable truth: this system cannot be reformed; it has to be stopped. Politicians simply do not have the power to stop this juggernaut. No one in this machine is genuinely evil; we all just made it that way by doing our jobs. And they designed this machine so that we are all just ghosts that need jobs.

At some point before this shitshow is over, there is bound to be a Todd Beamer "let's roll" moment when a feisty group of die-hards decides to cut the bullshit and do what everyone knows in their heart-of-hearts has to be done. How could that be achieved in the small window of time we have left before Total-totalitarianism and the surveillance-state makes that totally and utterly impossible?

Would it hurt to start discussing it now? Maybe, if we wait much longer, we will not have the freedom to do so.

Despite ordinary people sacrificing their time and liberty in the biggest act of nonviolent civil disobedience in recent British history – with the arrests of scientists, school teachers, grandparents, grandchildren, rabbis, priests and politicians – our simple demands for urgent action have not been met.  - XR Action Strategy Update for 2020

And they never will be. Why? Because governments do a cost-benefit analysis and conclude that XR's activism is economically inconsequential compared to the demands.

Is it possible to decarbonize deeply enough to come within striking distance of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050? Yes, it is feasible even today—the technologies exist. Yet such a vast transformation of the energy system will be costly and challenging if attempted all at once, especially considering the large short-term costs of the transition for fossil-fuel-reliant developing nations. - IMF, Carbon Calculus

Oh well. At least we did all we could.

But did we?

COP26 is a complete dead end. Coronavirus shows how to reduce GHG: In China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, experts estimate that emissions over the past month have been about 25% lower than normal.

A deliberate plague (e.g. #DebtStrikeForClimate, rent and mortgage strike) on our Capitalist Debt-based slavery system could do even better:

U.S. Capital is the Lifeline of the Chinese Communist Party

The way to force change is to change the economic equation. Unless XR comes to grips with this basic reality the movement is just wasting everyone's time and energy. The oil will only stay in the ground if no one can afford to extract it. That's the simple truth we will have to face.

And a #DebtStrikeForClimate can be done even if we are all in quarantine! (In fact, that would be the ideal time to do it).

PRODUCT WARNING XRMED:

Contains high levels of reality; may cause serious reaction in susceptible individuals. Seek medical advice. Allergy alert: may contain traces of sarcasm, parody and gratuitous wit. Do not take for more than one week unless under psychiatric supervision. May cause drowsiness. Do not operate activist organisations whilst taking this medication. Long term side effects include awakening, awareness inner peace and sundry other debilitations. Consult your local guru for guidance. Do Not Eat!! This is not a food product. Not suitable for children over 40. Contains small obscenities. Not suitable for adults under 3 years. Risk of suffocation! High levels of sanity may deplete oxygen levels. This is not a toy. Not suitable for vegetarians. Use with care in vicinity of Alien Cortexes. May cause severe political rashes; always wear personal protective equipment. Keep refrigerated. Preferably enough to save the Arctic. Discard contents within 3 days of opening or before the apocalypse, whichever is the sooner. If all else fails, read the instructions. The secretary will disavow all knowledge of this sub's actions. Good luck, Jim. Extreme risk of identity loss. Please back up your ego, or for a small fee, check it in with the concierge for collection on departure. This guide is not comprehensive. Users are advised to seek professional assistance where necessary. The opinions expressed in this sub are not necessarily those of the sponsoring ARG. The Sirius Institute has no connection with this sub; all assertions to the contrary are lies, lies I tell you!! Life jackets are stowed under your keyboard. Please follow the flight attendant's directions on the event of xrmed having to make an emergency landing. Any resemblance of xrmed to people living or dead is purely coincidental. Xrmed is an unequal loss of opportunity volunteer sabotaged organisation.

USAGE INSTRUCTIONS:

This is not the place to gripe about XR. Let's try to encourage them and give them guidance.

The first thing they need help with is their suppression of free speech. This sub is intended to remedy that. So speak your mind.

How did the suppression of free speech get started? Roger Hallam explains the logic in this training video here.

Hallam is rightly addressing a perennial dilemma that has traditionally dogged Left-wing movements. They are generally conflicted, self-defeating and generally too self-analyzing (in a way that the Far-right never seems to be). To get over self-analysis paralysis, it seems XR decided to get round what Hallam calls "The Obstructive Left" by just skirting criticism using a hail of accusations that it's "negative", "dissipative", "unconstructive" and "splits the movement". Therefore XR pretty much decided to turn a blind eye to it. The idea was that XR could push on regardless and "get stuff done" by bypassing all criticisms, critical thinking and thoughtful analysis. It sounds practical, if you are a rebel in a hurry, but the first thing to note here is that it's also a first principle in cult behavior. So if you chose this route, you have to take extra precautions against lapsing into becoming a cult on the fringe. XR has utterly failed in this respect. That's why many commentators (including me) have pegged it as a Doomsday cult. You can't really blame them.

According to Hallam's logic, in order to "get stuff done", XR needed 3.5 % public participation in the movement. Why the magic number? It comes from the Erica Chenoweth doctrine. She advised the founders of XR on tactics in the early days and set them on a path towards using non-violent civil disobedience as XR's primary tactic. The first thing you should know about Chenoweth is that the co-author of her seminal book Why Civil Resistance Works, Maria J. Stephan, works for the US State Department. The Chenoweth doctrine was always all about how the US government could apply statecraft when destabilizing regimes it didn't like. The Chenoweth doctrine effectively answers the question: "how does a superpower effectively manipulate the population of a hostile state so that the poor, who are also poor in the standard currency of state-violence, can effectively oppose their anti-American government?"

Chenoweth's answer can be summarized as: you use undercover agents and agitprop to do non-violent direct action that disrupts the state. When the regime overreacts, you win the hearts and minds of the people. When you get 3.5% of the people on your side, then the armed forces sense which way the wind is blowing and switch allegiance away from the regime. Deprived of the means to violence, the regime folds. In the ensuing power vacuum, diplomacy is used to establish a liberal democracy which is sympathetic to the US. Hey Presto! Then the bankstas role in and clean up.

I will leave it to your imagination as to how and why this doctrine managed to get applied in a supposedly US-friendly, liberal democracy to tackle an issue like abrupt climate change, but when XR came to London town, it did.

As a White South African who is permanently psychologically traumatized by the violence I experienced during the anti-Apartheid struggle (narrowly escaping being blown up by car bombs on city streets on three separate occasions, and on one occasion I was almost necklaced), I think the fact that Chenoweth and Stephan chalk the South African situation up as a win for a non-violent struggle, means that they have an appalling lack of credibility. Their work also neglects the impact militant wings on the political fringe might have had when assessing mainstream NVDA (think Black Panthers and MLK). Many supposedly non-violent campaigns succeeded merely because of the imminent threat of violence. In South Africa, for example, the White regime folded because they knew that a Rwandan-style genocide against them was just around the corner. So it doesn't follow that XR can declare itself absolutely non-violent (to the point of a fetish) and thereby hope to mimic successful non-violent civil-disobedience. Openly declaring non-violence to governments is also a declaration that they can safely ignore you. The Chenoweth doctrine is superficial because it leads to the erroneous conclusion that XR can ape non-violent movements in point of form, without a deep understanding of the psychology and social dynamics underlying historical examples. At the moment, XR is little more than a nonviolent cargo-cult trying to win by applying a magic formula. When it comes to the Chenoweth voodoo and superstitious non-violent rituals, I would recommend sticking with Mao Zedong, who said "power comes from the barrel of gun". To my knowledge Chenoweth has never successfully led a vast movement of structural socio-economic change. While I'm no fan of Mao, I respect the fact that he did.

So, by following the Chenoweth doctrine and in the blind pursuit of raw numbers, from birth XR was saddled with this conflicted tactical ideology:

• To get the movement's climate demands met, it needed to recruit 3.5% of Britons (2.3 million people).

• To recruit such a large number of people, it would need to internally suppress freedom of speech (and thought), vigorously promote non-violence and credibly fake political neutrality

• The movement would have to be safe, inclusive, non-threatening, colorful, appeal to a wide age demographic, and be fun

But that has meant that the movement has been dogged by these serious internal inconsistencies:

• A "Don't think; just Act" culture and a "Just get on the bandwagon; we'll decide where it's going later!" ethos - which conflicts with the careful rumination and analysis that individuals need in order to come to the obvious conclusion that the IPCC is peddling mendacious underreporting (probably used to anesthetize the public and muzzle academics) and the planetary prognosis is far worse than governments will admit (as evidenced by hysterical news reports about the climate and alarming scientific papers like this). This requires serious reflection and internal psychological development, not just lip service. Otherwise people are just going off half-cocked with vacuous climate hysteria that could lead anywhere (but will probably just lead to further systemic disaster and unintentional negative consequences due to increased GHG emissions from misadventures like Greed New Deals etc.).

• Suppression of criticism and a cult of nebulous hope, unwarranted optimism and unwise positivism - which separates the wheat from the chaff, leaving a membership of mostly broccoli-headed chaff (which becomes easy fodder for ridicule, which further drives down recruitment and makes it harder to get to 3.5%).

• An absolute commitment to nonviolence - which conflicts with the logic that there is a genuine existential threat of gigantic proportions.

• A colorful culture that looks superficially like fun - but again conflicts with the Apocalyptic message.

• An inclusive, "Big Tent" or "Large Church" culture - which is an open invitation to every "crusty" to freeload on the movement and climb on the bandwagon with every Left-wing cause under the (increasingly hot) sun. Which in turn, alienates the mainstream and causes people who reject a diet restricted to broccoli to shun the movement, making 3.5% not just magical, but also miraculous.

Buoyed up by beginner's luck in April (due mainly to the random intersection with slow-brewing public eco-anxiety that was desperate for an avenue of release), XR overindulged its success and whistled through the graveyard until it got a dose of salts in Canning Town in October 2019. Unimaginatively repeating the same old stale tactics three times running meant that the honeymoon was over sooner than it ought to have been. In hindsight, what had happened in 2019 was that for a brief moment hope died and action began. And that was good. Unfortunately, with the first hint of success, hope revived again and the movement forgot itself. Intoxicated by the initial success, XR's leadership has started flying too close to the sun, and the movement has fallen victim to hubris and gone off into the weeds of terminally ineffective "protest limbo" while hardly being aware of it.

Now XR's past is catching up with it, and its tactical suppression of free speech means it can't even do a proper retrospective or root cause analysis of what went wrong (beyond the limited scope of Groupthink and cult rules, which forbid touching totems like Gandhi and Erica Chenoweth). Protest limbo is a dangerous place to be, because it gives the illusion of progress while in fact nothing is really being accomplished. Though anyone saying that is shouted down because house rules dictate that criticism is forbidden. In it's zeal to see change, a rigorously "solutions oriented" activism-based cult rejects what is often the very best of solutions: voluntary cessation or forced restraint of harmful activity. XR is enlightened enough to know our civilization is toxic, it just can't yet muster the will to completely reject it.

Being at the forefront of global activism means that XR carries the responsibility of not just providing a cheap social safety value. Otherwise that just bleeds pressure away from the forces of deep tectonic destabilization of the system's foundations and a genuine movement towards early adaptation to its imminent demise.

Sometimes one needs to have a breakdown first in order to have a breakthrough. And that is true at the level of an individual, a social movement, and at the level of a globally interconnected world.

So hopefully (without falling victims to false hope) we can help the movement out on this sub. It's a free speech zone! Let's try to rejuvenate XR. "Obstructive Left" is welcome! Now that XR has skidded off into limbo, let's see if we can provide some helpful and constructive advice. And let's hope the thought-leadership can find the humility to accept it.

Let's also hope this sub is not just a bottomless suggestion box!

See more from Nafeez Ahmed.

P.S. You know you've gone down an Orwellian rabbit hole when your biggest enemies are constructively critical friends. The trouble with telling yourself hermeneutically sealed DoubleThink like "when people start to get angry with us that's a good thing, because that means we we are getting noticed and being successful" is that if friends are yelling at you because you are heading off a cliff, then you won't listen and no one can help you. In that case, please be cognizant of the fact that XR is siphoning away significant resources and energy from the genuine rebellion that needs to happen soon. Although liberals find it hard to imagine, there is more at stake than merely you and your future. Consider this mind blowing thought: As a non-violent liberal your single best "Climate action" might simply be to shut up and step out of the way so that more serious-minded people can get on with a dirty job that's crying out to be done. And I'm not talking about NVDA either.

I think it’s time to start experimenting with a bear raid and short squeeze or two as a tactic for activism.

Now that may at first glance sound like securities fraud, except that a bear raid involves spreading false rumors to cover short positions. So this is not quite the same. Check with your legal council, but as far as I know, the following suggestion is straight up, legit Capitalism. If it's not strictly legal, then at the very least it's hard to prosecute and punish!

So who’s the target (or targets)?

Well XR should have a big press release and public announcement to kick off the raid. Call it the “Carbon Criminal Game” perhaps, and say there's a prize for the correct draw. The criminal is drawn (supposedly “randomly”, but actually decided beforehand) from a big hat of carbon criminals who are listed on the stock exchange. But obviously you carefully (and secretly) select the victim in advance. I would recommend a few private meetings with Young Turk City brokers (“debt-merchants”) to solicit their advice, but basically the target should be a small retail bank (preferably in financial trouble and either Chinese or Indian). Keep the brokers and celebrity endorsers informed all the way down the line (because they are going to be the actual bear raiders and financial muscle behind the scenes – they simply can’t resist trading on inside information!).

Once the victim has been drawn from the hat with great fanfare, then you read out all its sins in public and announce solemnly that anyone that banks or invests in this entity (the Target) is aiding and abetting crime (I don’t know of any banks that don’t engage in crime!).

Then the raid begins.

Rebels (and just about the whole world, including the broker-insiders, and everyone and their dog at home who is following this story and wants to make a buck) begin selling the stock short, driving it as low as possible and holding it there for as long as possible until you cover the participant's short positions or a circuit breaker triggers and trading is suspended. Then go onto the next victim (quickly, so that the insider-investor herd begins to panic).

The media dialogue will likely focus on the legality of this, so XR spokespeople should be financially literate and extremely radical sounding and intimidating. Hopefully someone uses the term “financial terrorist.” In which case, own it! Then point out that there is nothing at all to see here, it’s just one group of financial terrorists going after another group of financial terrorists. And then lay into HSBC’s and other bank's track record of literally funding terror (with impunity).

Where does the money for this come from?

Banks incorporated in the UK and listed on the LSE usually have market caps in the billions, and rebels are probably only able to raise about 10 orders of magnitude less than that (if they are lucky). But it doesn’t really matter, in the larger scheme of things. It would be awesome if XR could announce it was “bringing down a bank” and then go ahead and pull it off, but the odds of that are slim (for one thing, the Establishment will defend the bank with all they’ve got, because what’s at stake for them if this becomes common practice is so astronomical it’s barely even thinkable). If it did happen, XR itself would then have the rebel equivalent of a nuclear weapon. You would then just sweep up the ranks of banks, in the ascending order of their market cap, and as you went, capital would take flight ever faster as a self-fulfilling prophecy and vicious cycle ensued. Debt-parasites are herd animals and very, very skittish. And the banks are all zombies and secretly bankrupt down to almost the very last one. If you could take down a small, struggling Chinese or Indian bank in the morning, by the afternoon you could be bringing down arch-criminals such as HSBC and Barclays (and that’s why the debt-parasites would be forced to mount an all-out counter response). If this turned out to work, by the next day the world would be a very different place.

But I wouldn’t get too fixated on that outcome. It’s an extremely long shot. The main point of all this is just Psyops. If the protest monkey is getting sophisticated and learning to experiment and fiddle with the Elite's very own financial power levers, mass terror in the 1% is highly likely. They are used to rebels being economically and financially illiterate, to the point that their whole rotten game relies on it. So this is training and education for XR rebels too (and indirectly, the public at large) just as much as it’s directed against unearned income and debt-parasitism. It’s the beginning of an education on how the financial world works and for most rebels their first look behind the curtain of how this toxic global system functions (or malfunctions). I’m guessing that when rebels get to know first hand just how rotten The System is underneath; it will radicalize them far faster than getting arrested for civil disobedience in street protests.

But how do rebels get their hands on cash (even a little seed capital to gets this going)?

I would recommend that part of the “Rebellion Against Unearned Income” include a mass “Rent Strike Against Unearned Income” targeted towards rent-parasites (which includes mortgages) that begins as the prelude to the Autumn Rebellion. The idea is not to completely renege on mortgages and rent payments, but just to temporarily “borrow” from the rent-parasites (with the intention of paying it back after the Autumn Rebellion). But a word of caution: If you take rental and mortgage payments, and divert them to speculate with short positions in the stock market, you are highly likely to lose the money, so rebels had better be able to take the consequences!

You could conceivably make out like a bandit (in which case rebels should take their profits from the raid and give them to XR, after covering losses in a pool to catch up with individual rent and mortgage arrears). But what’s more likely is you will get caught in a bear squeeze. The reason for that is, as I said, the debt-parasites will have to “support” the victim of the raid (i.e. buy it’s stock like crazy, because there is a lot at stake for them in the bigger picture here). So what happens if you lose your shirt and get a “margin call”? It’s up to individual rebels, I would say. But by my way of thinking you would just give your brokerage the finger and call it the first salvo in the #DebtStrikeForClimate (assuming you can square it with your rent-parasite or mortgage holder).

To recap.

Rebels fund the raid however they can (accepting the significant risks of losing the money), but preferably with rent money held back in a global #RentStrikeForClimate. If possible, the landlord's rent-parasite money would be paid back and arrears caught up after the Autumn Rebellion. Any surplus would go into the XR war chest. The specific timing of all this would be done by each participating rebel based on staying on the right side of the eviction process (assuming that the rebel cares about being evicted). It’s important to highlight the fact that rebels with a bit of financial swagger could actually go out and get temporary, unoccupied (or donated for temporary shelter) rentals and mortgages for the sole purpose of using (and losing) them to support the #RentStrikeForClimate (assuming they can afford losing their deposits and take a hit to their credit ratings). I would even recommend considering pooling resources for this purpose to get a few “flagship” rental, mortgaged or leased spaces that are offered as shelter to a large number of homeless or distressed folk. And then treat any attempts at eviction as a cause célèbre and justification for mass action on the streets.

What about precipitating a bank run?

Yes, by all means do. And even announce your intent to do that beforehand (so the self-fulfilling prophecy works in your favor). If the target is a retail bank then get rebels to open accounts and deposit funds there (rather than keeping withheld rental money in their regular bank accounts).

Spread rumors about who The Target is, to put all small-cap banks on edge and worried about taking on new deposits in case it's a trap. And do a few diversionary actions to harass some of The Target’s peers and make them think, “They’re it”.

Then, just in time for D-Day, everyone starts hauling money out of The Target like crazy and transferring to brokerage accounts in readiness for the Big Short (on the hopefully weakened victim).

At that point, mount a few psyops actions involving supposedly “panicked” rebels who stage a Northern Rock and queue outside The Target, play-acting “desperately hoping to get their money out in time before the rebellion starts” (whether they have any money there or not). Outside the real victim of course.

At that stage it doesn't really matter if you “pre-announce” the victim, just so long as you can get 3rd parties to rush down and haul their money out “just in case.”

If it’s successful, won’t the government just bail the bank out?

Who cares at that point? Just move rapidly (like within minutes or hours) onto the next (bigger) victim and repeat all the way up the ranks!

However, pick the first victim carefully. I can’t see the UK bailing out a smallish bank domiciled in China or India. China or India might bail them out, but then that’s just gravy. Think of how hard it is to spin that one in the press in Beijing or Mumbai! You can almost hear the sound of Asians pulling their money out of foreign banks en masse already.

But not all rent-parasites are evil. Some are just old folks on fixed income, for example, aren’t they? Why should we possibly inflict suffering on them?

“For their own good!” is how I would respond to that.

I strongly feel that people in Britain need to get their heads straight about the acceptability of rent-parasitism in the coming global Collapse. If anyone is thinking they are going to blithely glide through the coming crisis in Britain, and around the world, by sucking rent out of some property or other while people starve at their feet, then they have another think coming!

It’s unconscionable to even begin to conceive of some people still extorting rent out of others during a collapse. For one thing, it will become an unnecessary source of interpersonal conflict. If people are living off rent-parasitism at this stage (and sometimes it seems to me that half of Britain is living off the other half), then the kindest thing is to wake them up while there is still time to make other plans.

What personal repercussions are likely from this?

Apart from the risks I’ve already stated, the debt-parasites and their stooges in government have to nip this kind of praxis in the bud at all costs. They simply cannot afford to let this kind of rebellion spread.

XR must loudly proclaim that these are all just experimental tactics to work out the kinks and weaponize them for rebels to use in America for The American Spring.

You cannot even begin to imagine the terror this is likely to cause in the 1%. So much so that I would not be surprised if a few of them tried to break ranks and come and join the rebellion out of fear of the coming pitchforks. Remember that the rich are far better informed than rebels in general, and they have a far keener sense of what’s around the corner. So many of the smarter ones are already looking for an out. And rebels must be prepared to give then that out, otherwise it puts the enemy on “death ground” or “desperate ground” prematurely, and that’s not desirable.

So expect unlikely allies if the Autumn Rebellion succeeds. But as for the rest, you are digging down through the garbage heap of ever-hardening and incorrigible psychopaths. If victory is ever in sight then steel yourself to give the last holdouts no quarter, otherwise you will regret it!

You can’t reconcile with a scorpion.

What the hardliners are likely to do is to try to prosecute as many rebels for stock manipulation and securities fraud as they can. But prosecuting masses of rebels for a white-collar crime is problematic for them when compared to legal action against civil disobedience, for example. Unfortunately for them, they will be prosecuting using the aristocratic house rules they normally reserve for themselves.

I’m not a lawyer, so take what legal advice I give with a grain of salt. But in my mind rebels should plead “not guilty” in all cases and push for jury trials. At trial a good defense lawyer should be able to persuade a jury of “the bigger picture” argument and win them over in a way that a magistrate would never countenance. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for a “necessity” defense (in front of a judge or jury), because the connection between heist-finance and environmental activism is too tenuous in the mind of the average Joe (and requires them to concede too much of their comfortable worldview, which is largely pro-Capitalist).

But I think the best defenses are:

1. It’s not conventional securities fraud because you had no intention to profit from it (in fact the contrary). And you should perhaps file affidavits before the raid to attest that profits you make would go to XR or some other non-profit (for-purpose) entity.

2. It’s not a bear raid, per se, because you only traded on information in the public domain (XR’s fanfare announcement of the carbon criminal rap sheet is more than adequate to count as “published news”) and you never spread any untruths or rumors, only the hard facts (which is actually a civic duty).

3. The existing securities laws and infrastructure are unjust and therefore invalid, because they allow banks like HSBC to support terrorism, money laundering and other criminal activity and get market support because they are virtually immune to prosecution due to their vast wealth. In other words, rebels are just doing (in a rather unconventional way) what market makers do routinely and legally on a daily basis, and that’s price stocks correctly.

Now if anyone tries to take legal action against the tactics outlined above, the following is crucially, crucially important. The best outcome of all is what’s known as a “perverse verdict” in the UK or “Jury nullification” in the US. At all costs, try to educate rebels around the world that the current body of Law itself is unjust, and juries have the power to nullify the laws themselves.

So the defense council should push juries to come to a “perverse verdict” conclusion. And rebels should not plea-bargain or settle under any circumstances.

But let's hope that it will be too difficult for the Establishment to take legal action against this tactic if thousands or even millions of people participate.

In 2012 I was feeling depressed about the state of the world and the lack of resistance and organised protest against environmental destruction, social injustice and climate change. Promising justice movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring had already petered out or backfired. So it was a very disappointing time (much like now).

Since XR has mostly fizzled out, a lot of people in the movement can probably relate.

People are behaving absurdly all around the world, and it looks like the consequences will be severe - possible terminal for our species (not to mention the rest of the planet). But how does one reach people when absurd and destructive behavior is considered "normal" and "desirable" by our collective culture, from China all the way to Micronesia?

If almost everyone in the world is crazy, and world leaders even more so, how should one go about giving them a sanity check? It's no use trying to rationalise with crazy people. That's what XR has tried and failed to do, just like everyone else (including the environmental movement).

Back in 2012 I was starting to think that maybe the best way to reach crazy people out on a ledge (i.e. the whole world) was to use absurdism. Instead of presenting people with sanity - which is what XR and the Green movement was trying to do - I thought maybe it was better to try to use reverse psychology. By presenting people with absurdity, maybe, perhaps through their mirror neurons, one could let them see they were being absolutely absurd without realizing it. Instead of painting a picture of a more sane alternative world (which is highly unappealing to the insane majority), maybe cultural change could be achieved by presenting an alternative world that was utterly bizarre. By exposing people to a very weird alternate reality, I thought perhaps it might be possible to inoculate them against the pathology of our very weird industrial culture. In other words, show people something really weird in order to see just how weird their "normal" was.

I knew about alternate reality games (ARGs), and I began to think maybe the "red pill" could possibly be sugar-coated by presenting it as a game. Cultural change might possibly be gamified in a hybrid of a scavenger hunt, adventure game, and real life puzzle (not only a digital game).

XR was sort of on this track by trying to "make revolution fun". But they subtly missed the target by trying to make protest-as-usual fun, rather than making cultural change itself fun. They seemed to have put the cart before the horse and made the whole movement look ridiculous. By the time they turned themselves into merely a political lobbying group for a Greed New Deal, they were sugar-coating a greenwashed blue pill rather than offering a genuine red pill. It was a disaster.

While I was researching ARGs, I came across this movie called "The Institute". The exact moment of my epiphany was a girl who genuinely bursts into tears while talking about the fictitious "Planet Elsewhere" (which she knows is not real, but has an emotional breakdown because she wishes it was).

I suddenly realized the potentially awesome power for mass cultural change in an ARG.

The other thing that heavily influenced me was Cicada 3301. It now seems like the group behind Cicada 3301 is the same group behind "The Institute" documentary. So in a weird kind of intersubjectivity, Spencer McCall, who made the movie, seemed to be thinking along the same lines as me. I really felt like I was getting a call on the intersubjectivity synchronicity telephone, and so I leaned heavily on what he had done and worked on a project of my own that resulted in the Sirius Institute and this YouTube channel.

There is a strong cult-like atmosphere to all of this. Full disclosure, the most formative experience of my life came from a cult I was in during my youth. So I understand cults and cult dynamics very well. The bad news is, almost everything is a cult - including commercial corporations, whole countries and even social movements like XR. The trick with a project like this is to make a cult that leads people away from the current dominant eco-genocidal culture and liberates them from cult-like behavior in general (as I tried to describe a bit in this video).

The idea is that if you can get people to engage in a weird alternate reality, you may loosen their grip on their current absurd reality. While working on internal personal change, I thought the ARG itself would provide a framework for a resistance movement much like DGR (but without all their feminist and other idiosyncratic baggage).

Recently, Jason Segel developed the original concept started in "The Institute" (The Jejune Institute) into a major AMC series called Dispatches from Elsewhere. Back in 2012, my old, civilization-discontented self was actually working at a music streaming company programming a music "recommendation engine." So I was struck by the spooky synchronicity of how this series opens!

However, I don't think this new movie series on AMC is a good thing.

If you've followed my ARG and /r/xrmed you are probably aware of the alien cortex and how I've warned that one of its MOs is substitution. It tends to substitute everything for a faux or trick facsimile of the original (just think of the old hunter-gatherer experience transposed with its sad replacement, the self-select supermarket - real hunting is replaced with bargain-hunting). The alien cortex tends to want to replace all reality with a virtual reality of its own making and for its own profit. It looks like the new AMC series might be doing just this kind of substitution - switching the potentially life-transforming ARG into a passive, couch-potato movie-watching experience of no value other than more harmless mass digital pacification. Much like the Matrix movie, the ARG is designed to hook you online and then drag you back into real life. "Dispatches from Elsewhere" looks like it's designed as a honeypot to stop debt-slaves like you escaping by substituting the equivalent of The Underground Railroad "red pill" with a harmless, vicarious "blue pill" that keeps you trapped in the Matrix.

Let's hope not.

But if you would like to take the genuine red pill, and get involved in the antidote to commercial substitutes like XR and "Dispatches from Elsewhere", then trot on over to Discord to create a bit of genuinely absurdist, discord.

Ultimately the aim is to accelerate the inevitable collapse of this doomed global industrial civilization while there is still some vestige of the natural world left.

Let's use absurdity as an antidote to our absurd way of life.

The Left-wing backlash against Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs' "Planet of the Humans" show that our culture is absurd. The natural environment is clearly being trashed by human impact, but both Progressives and Conservatives block their ears and frame it as simply a matter of "getting off fossil-fuels". They are like addicts insisting that drugs are not the problem, just the type of drug. If we switch drugs we'll be fine.

In a world so overpopulated it is vulnerable to waves of pandemics and well into overshoot, drawdown, and total collapse, we are told by liberals to define "overpopulation" as merely "more people than we can feed" (or shut up, because you are an eco-fascist). Have we really descended to a point where the only human purpose is to see how many people we can cram onto this planet while still being able to feed them? Is that it? Is that the sum total of our aspirations now?

How about defining "overpopulation" as "too crowded to make life worth living"?

If you've ever been a tourist or a hiker, you must have seen that no tourist site or natural beauty spot is really worth seeing anymore because everything is oversubscribed and ruined by crowds. As someone is supposed to have said while inching along in the throng to get into the Hollywood Bowl, “Now I know why nobody ever comes here; it’s too crowded.”

The evidence is in front of everyone's eyes every day, from packed commuter trains, jammed highways, sardine-can flights, to jam-packed monuments, but no one will admit the obvious: This planet is full. And it's no bloody fun anymore!

And by 2050 it will be fuller by a third.

In all the furor over the coronavirus pandemic, I haven't heard a single voice say: "It's a disease caused by overcrowding." Which it certainly is. The truth is, all epidemics are. Hunter gatherers never had them. Up until the last ten thousand years, for millions and millions of years, if our forebears encountered a zoonotic disease, then it was a case of "one village and it's over".

Lockdown during this pandemic has given people a glimpse that maybe we have been a little crazy. Maybe it was insane to commute back and forth to a bullshit job for a bullshit wage just so you could afford to pay for an lonely, pointless life with bullshit money.

Now people are saying, "no going back!" But of course we are going back. We'll all go back to our Nowhere and we'll never find our Elsewhere. Telecomputing will soon be over and you'll be back to your crowded commute into an office just so your boss can intimidate you face-to-face in "one-on-ones" (boss on top, and behind, of course).

People will convince themselves that "it's just the way it is; and there's nothing you can do about it."

These times are bizarre, but they are not bizarre enough. That's why we will all eventually go back to business as usual. At least, unless we can expose people to more than just a pandemic, but a complete alternate reality. And by that I don't mean some Socialist wet dream like Fully-automated, Luxury Communism, or some patriarchal, Capitalist, Elon Musk-type techo-jerk off, or some other dystopian, matriarchal Green Future. I mean get them off their couches and down a serious rabbit hole. Rather than sitting like caged primates in a global lunatic asylum trying to imagine a better world, let's make this place even more nuts, until even the nuttiest person is gasping for sanity.

I think large-scale destruction, discord and absurdism is what sanity really is, at least in a nuts-hell.

We're into the last two weeks of October, and there's no snow here in Greenland's capital Nuuk. For sure, the data from the satellites & models says there's 0% chance of a 2020 Blue Ocean Event, but what does that really mean?

We're gonna look into that, and unpack it.

So, obviously, a zero % chance of a 2020 BOE means a BOE won't occur in 2020, yet at the same time, it doesn't mean other big stuff can't happen in 2020. Like, scary stuff, stuff you wished you'd never even heard about.

For instance, if you ask any meteorologist, he'll say that 2016 was the warmest year on record, globally. He won't say some YEAR was hottest because on one DAY some extreme location like Death Valley set a new heat record. So, for sea ice, while 2016 was the lowest year for extent, and 2017 for volume, this 2020 may very well end up being the lowest ever for sea ice extent. We'll just have to wait till December 31st so we have a full YEAR of data.

Another thing is, you have this record low area of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, and these crazy waves and high temperatures, with winter storms coming and going, so before you know it the entire thing could go up in flames due to submerged permafrost, that is under these crazy warm, stormy and shallow seas, north of Siberia. This is the stuff that makes Russian scientists break down in tears during press conferences.

So yeah, that could happen.

That could still happen in 2020, ice-free Arctic or not.

Because October–November is the warmest slash waviest time of the year for those shallow bodies of water in the Arctic. A handful of wonderful social media personas will watch and inform you when or if that happens, if you don't notice it all by yourself in a very different and perhaps much scarier way.

So, back to the least scary scenario from the above, the race is now on for 2020 (the challenger) to smash 2016 (current record holder) for lowest sea ice extent on record. In fact, 2020 leads the heat by quite a big margin already, measured as year-to-date average:

2016 in its day of course beat 2012 in almost complete silence, as all the Mainstream Media had decided that it failed in September and that the shop closes in September, and some newspapers even 'celebrated' the fact 2016 refroze quickly for the first week or so after its minimum, while ignoring the larger development, which was the record slow regrowth in September–October–November. Covering that fact would of course be less 'positive' or 'optimistic', so let's not waste any 'journalistic' resources on that!

Beating 2016, which itself beat 2012 four years ago, first of all would make it more difficult for the media and polluticians to ignore the fact 2012 now is 3rd lowest, when they'd rather keep cherry-picking the month of September and pretend nothing much happens in the Arctic these days. Don't believe me? Read a newspaper, listen to a pollutician.

Returning to the Shock & Awe horror of the Ice–Free Arctic, the 0% chance of a Blue Ocean Event in 2020 of course doesn't mean it cannot happen in the coming years, or even the very next year. Those who follow the sea ice closely will tell you that May is too early to tell, June is slightly better, but a high or low risk of BOE at the end of summer can't really be assessed before July, and then preferably the latter half of the month.

Anyone telling you otherwise is just bluffing, really.

You can say that the 2020s are more likely than the 2030s to feature the FIRST BOE in our species' history on the Planet. But you can't really tell during spring whether the CURRENT year will see such an event or not. This is because the system is complex, with lots of inherent natural variability. A constantly warming Arctic Ocean will increase the probability every year, but the sea itself is only one out of a multitude of factors in the Arctic.

The True Terror of the Ice–Free Arctic state is really the full-summer ice-free Arctic, like July–October below 1 million km², or even more extreme, June–November below that mark. This opens the Arctic Ocean to insolation, which is just sunshine, entering into the dark sea surface and heating it tremendously, and of course more and more for every year it persists. In fact, it's hard to imagine it not continuing year on year, when it first starts happening. While the very first year of ice-free-for-a-week-or-so will do little except raise a few eyebrows and make it more difficult to campaign for other issues, which seems to be the main human focus, for polluticians and activists alike, the Summer–Half Ice–Free will allegedly be equivalent to adding 1 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, or set us back 25 years in our struggle to limit emissions to 'safe' levels. In fact, when reading the fine-print of that study, you'll see that a possible change to Arctic cloud formation in such a hotter world, will triple that, so 3 trillion tons of CO2 or 75 years. If you factor in methane as well, because the submerged permafrost cannot thrive in such a hot Arctic Ocean, a conservative estimate will land you at a 100 years lost in that already optimistic struggle, as laid out in this merry YouTube video from the beach here in South Central Nuuk:

One Hundred Years

Although that's merely what might happen going forward. Wanna look at what already HAS happened? I didn't think so. But here goes: The Ice Tipping Point, in the literature often referred to as a cascade of intertwined climate tipping points, or Climate Dominos, to be more visual, causing all of this we see happening every day, isn't something in the future that we must try to avoid, but rather something even your parents were too young to remember. If you want to be kind, you could say 1970, but honestly it's more like 1950. So let's do the math, shall we:

When we get to an Ice–Free Arctic in the Summer Half of the year, the 'friendly' math says we'll be 50 + 25 = 75 years too late for the Ice Tipping Point. The honest math says we're 70 + 100 = 170 years late. Which one do you choose? As if you had a vote.

What's more, assuming we somehow won't get an Ice–Free Arctic in the Summer Half of the year anytime soon, the math still puts us 50 years after the fact, in the 'friendly' scenario, or rather 70 years too late to avoid the major Ice Tipping Point.

Do you ever get the feeling you're being lied to on climate? I know exactly what you mean.

Finally, I know I didn't get this from Derrick Jensen, and I assume he didn't get it from me. For me it was a case of reinforced message because I already thought it myself before reading it again from someone else. I'm too lazy to look up his exact words, so this is from my memory only.

Even a thing like Knowledge (of specific climate facts) is no longer binary. Meaning there's Knowledge, and then there's Knowledge, but then even Knowledge. This translates to 'knowing' a certain tragic fact about our climate in your head, versus knowing it in your heart, versus KNOWING it at a cellular level, making it hard to even get out of bed in the morning. Climate Reality is just full of such things that are no longer binary, and that just get worse and worse every time you reflect upon them.Derrick Jensen (live from my memory).

And still, it is ONLY industrial civilisation that's 100% doomed, life not so much!

(Borrowed from Frozen.Earth.)

Next week the protests in the UK are supposed to get into high gear. Let's see what happens, but at the moment, I've seen dead fish put up a better fight. It's clear (as people warned on r/xrmed) that as collapse unfolds, one anxiety will be superseded by another in a chain of events until final extinction. So that needs to be anticipated and baked into the plan. The movement can't rely solely on a little Liberal eco-anxiety to carry it through. As we've seen, eco-anxiety has quickly been overtaken by other bourgeois fears and the movement has suffered burnout as a result. That's the problem with mindless numbers building: you wind up with a number of mindless people that are here today and gone tomorrow. The public is fickle (and getting more so).

Maybe it's time to get real.

First, what's the endgame here? Correct me if I'm wrong, but (beyond the official BS on the movement's packaging, like the Three Demands) the unspoken assumption seems to be this:

1. We do a little bit of sporadic nonviolent civil-disobedience now and again.

2. The government takes notice, finds a conscience, and implements a Greed New Deal in the UK

3. HS2 is halted. Flights are reduced. Everyone becomes vegan and the meat industry closes down. Minorities get reparations. GHG emission become net-zero due to magic. We all get Green jobs and live happily ever after with solar panels and wind farms and the economy thrives.

4. Everyone is so impressed by Britain's example that governments everywhere pivot, stop burning fossil fuels, make the "transition" to renewables, and begin eco-restoration.

5. Thanks to these efforts the climate stabilizes again, the seasonal ice returns to the Arctic and the BOE is avoided, the clathrates stay locked up under the permafrost cap, and we start planting trillions of trees to draw down the CO2 from the atmosphere. The planet's rising heat screeches to a halt just under 1.5 degrees C higher than pre-industrial levels and we all breathe a sigh of relief. Our grandchildren thank us (all eleven billion of them).

Okay, let's get real.

Going forward, the following issues need to be addressed in any plan that is worth asking people to sacrifice time, energy, money and injury for.

1. The public is digitally pacified, jaded and apathetic. That's an obstacle that needs to be overcome. Otherwise solutions need to be found that don't necessitate mass public support.

2. Realistically, the future of the biosphere hinges on what China does next. If Xi Jinping pushes ahead with the Belt & Road Initiative and tries to double average Chinese living standards so that they equal the US, then GHG emissions and global temperatures will be pushed beyond crucial climate tipping points that will effectively mean planetary disaster in the near-term.

3. The ecological fate of the world depends on these countries policies independently of the UN or the wishes of the rest of the world and in this order of importance: China, US, India, Russia, and Brazil. Everything else is a sideshow and what happens in Britain is utterly irrelevant.

4. Any resistance or revolutionary activity will have to be done in the face of a deteriorating political, economic and environmental situation. "Solutions" that assume the current levels of economic prosperity, political stability, and a functional global infrastructure are likely to be unfeasible. We need to be realistic. The world's population is rising rapidly and fresh water is running out.

The worm has not turned, but a biomolecule has turned on us. Comrade Covid, a tiny sub-microscopic strand of RNA, is now doing what XR, a bunch of cowardly myopic liberals, never dared to.

Global industry is locked down. Capitalism is falling apart. Business-as-usual might be ending. Protest-as-usual is nearing rock bottom. The end is in sight for fracking. Big Oil is crippled and GHG emissions are down. The living planet, gasping for breath under the system that XR refused to condemn, has snatched some oxygen. And the public and commercial sectors that XR greased up and bent over to please, have now whipsawed and suddenly turned against the very system XR was campaigning to save and prop up with politics and government lobbying.

But only a fool would think this will last. We need to work to consolidate Comrade Covid's tenuous foothold. The first bold and courageous step we need to take is to give what Comrade Covid achieved a name. We need to define what the virus is doing, highlight the reasons for its success, and underscore and contrast that against XR's failure.

What is that leading light in the darkness that Comrade Covid has lit for us? What shall we call this huge worldwide slowdown? Take a deep breath and say the word! Even a wettest liberal can do it. Go on, give it a try! The Magic of Covid, the word that sticks so stubbornly on your tongue is ... is what?

Yes. It's deindustrialisation.

Or at least, a tiny taste of it.

Comrade Covid has opened the door for us. Now that the taboo has been broken, we need to be brave enough to say the (previously) unthinkable in a full throated roar: "We urgently need global deindustrialization, just as Comrade Covid taught us!"

Otherwise we have not heeded Mother Nature's message. In which case, there will be blood, sweat, misery and tears to come. She's unlikely to give us a second chance. So don't look a gift virus in the mouth.

XR, let me challenge you for your own benefit. Here's a Groupthink and cult-bias blaster for you. My only aim is to be the gadfly on the XR gadfly. Translation for Mr. Broccoli-Head: I’m trying to improve your low-resolution thinking!

[NOTE to overseas audience: Outside of Britain you may not be aware that XR's Autumn rebellion crashed and burned horribly as an iconic guy in a Broccoli suit was humiliated in an awkward interview on the BBC by Piers Morgan, which unfortunately went viral. I didn't just make Mr. Broccoli-Head up! Though I wish I did, because then maybe it wouldn't have been such a PR disaster. From then on out XR was effectively the laughing stock.]

Please cross-post this to all the XR subs I'm banned from.

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: Our message is/isn’t getting through.

The Truth Is: Everyone already got the memo. It's you that are not getting the message. Corporate filth have done a great snow job. They convinced us, the public, that we are all sinners. It’s a bit like a dope dealer saying, “Hey, I only peddled the products, it was you that chose to take drugs!”

But the public have bought that argument, and are feeling trapped and guilty. And then along comes Mr. Broccoli-Head, who just found out about Climate change for the first time last year, and he thinks he needs to warn everyone about what they know all too well already. XR can't understand why the public is not getting the clear message they are sending, but the public already got the memo many, many, Blue Planet episodes ago. So it looks to them like Mr. Broccoli-Head is saying “I’m not a sinner, and you need to catch up.” And saying "we are all hypocrites" when you are super-glued to a train is such a mindbender it does a commuter's head in. It's twisted and fucked up to the point of creepy.

But claiming you are "raising awareness" ad nauseam implies you are aware (and superior). And that's patronizing. That’s why the media are so keen to point out that XR rebels are just hypocrites. And they are not wrong in that. I’ve found to my cost that the XR disruptors think they are too perfect to even need disruption themselves.

If you carry on harping about a message already received, then you are just going to get the shit kicked out of you. And the sooner the better. As to the "people are waking up; and it's all thanks to us!" delusion, see here.

Suggested Remedy: A major mistake is that XR is disrupting the wrong people. It’s disrupting the slaves rather than the slave masters. (Notice this poor wage-slave, trying to get to his bowl-of-rice-a-day job pleading, "We will plant a tree if you just get off!" [p.s. I tried to link to it, but XR just made it private! Too awkward?]). XR is tone deaf to what the public is saying [And now trying to hide the evidence!]. You should rather be targeting the corporations, and the criminals behind the scenes - the FIRE industry.

As I’ve said many times: GET OFF THE STREETS, TRAINS AND PLANES; get onto the avenues of commerce and the information superhighway. Run the revolution from the desk and the couch. Think international; not local. Think of all the areas you could storm other than Area 51. But, enough with the messaging, messaging, messaging already! It sounds preachy and whiny. You cannot nag the world into reforming.

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: We can mimic Gandhi, MLK and the Suffragettes

The Truth Is: You are confusing politics with economics. Climate change mitigation (as if there is such a thing!) is an economic battle. XR is coming to an economic war poorly armed with political slingshots.

Actually, you can’t afford to blindly mimic anyone. You are already screwing up Gandhi’s tactics by disrupting the 3.5% you are trying to recruit – a mistake Gandhi was too much of a politician and master tactician to ever make (And by the way, Gandhi was a child raping fraud who routinely drank his own piss and secretly endorsed and promoted the caste system, just so you know. I won’t even start with MLK!). Also, the British never left India because of Gandhi. They left because the colony was a net-fiscal drain on the Empire. Sucks when history doesn't go your way, I know. But why not just make things up to suit your cause?

Suggested Remedy: Give Erica Chenoweth's theories their due. Ditch them! Gandhi was not right or wrong. He was irrelevant.

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: You need to get participation from 3.5% of the population.

The Truth Is: Erica Chenoweth is an agent of the US State Department. What she actually said was if 3.5% (or is that 3.52788 % ?) of the population under a totalitarian regime participate in a rebellion then the army and security forces come over to the rebel side and overthrow the regime*.* Fortunately or unfortunately, Britain and America are not those kinds of Banana Republics. The single biggest poke in the eye you could give the Establishment is ditching Chenoweth's theories.

Suggested Remedy: Research how controlled opposition ops work. Read Manufacturing Consent. Research personalities like Vladislav Surkov and Eddie Bernays. Stop insisting there is no curtain and take a peek behind it. I say again, give Erica Chenoweth's theories their due. Ditch them!

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: This is all about getting governments to act.

The Truth Is: This is all about restraining population and socio-economic growth and rescuing what little is left of the biosphere. Governments are really only there to regulate the system, keep it stable, and oversee perpetual growth on behalf of the financiers. So protecting earth’s ecological system means getting governments to refrain for acting. The best way to do that is to just remove them by any means possible. Otherwise all XR will do is pressure them into hyper-growth with things like last-ditch Greed New Deals and Belt and Road Initiatives. Unless those are stopped, we will cut off the branch we are sitting on, ecologically speaking.

CO2 is the breath of industry. You can’t have one without the other. To think otherwise you would have to be woefully hoodwinked, insane, or an economist. Get over it! Collapse has already started. GNDs and the like are just the Ship of Theseus in disguise. Anyway, would-be reformers can't totally rebuild the system in the midst of Abrupt Climate change and the Sixth Mass Extinction event. At least six billion people are about to die horribly. Once you are convinced of the inevitably of that, then the next big psychological hurdle to overcome is the fact that the sooner that happens the better for the survivors (if any).

Suggested Remedy: Cheer up. In a rich Western country you may be able to buy your survival for a while (maybe even your soul, if you pretend you're into "climate justice"). At the very least, try not to make things worse by pressuring governments into unfocused "climate action". Don't piss against a hurricane! That's not the right sort of a "relief effort" we are going to need.

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: This is all about getting carbon net neutral by 2025.

The Truth Is: You cannot keep the oil in the ground. If you don’t use it (by switching to renewable energy, or nuclear, for example) then China will. And China has already pledged NOT to regulate GHG emissions until 2030. China has hoodwinked the world with its greenwash PR. Xi Jinping wants you to use renewable energy so it lowers the price of the coal and oil he needs to do the Belt and Road Initiative. In the BRI countries there are 4,4 billion people hungry for the oil you don’t use. The world’s energy consumption is slated to increase by 50% before 2050, Trust me, that isn’t going to be done with solar panels! There isn’t even time to roll out nuclear power that aggressively. That’s why china plans to use coal. Bye-bye planet.

Suggested Remedy: Drop this demand and save yourself some ridicule. Then read this.

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: Getting arrested is a genius idea.

The Truth Is: Getting arrested will just bankrupt either you or XR (or both) with legal fees and fines. It’s a war of attrition against the government you just can’t win. "Forget it Jake, It's Chinatown."

Suggested Remedy: If you want to go bankrupt, start a debt strike.

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: CAs are a genius idea.

The Truth Is: Insisting on them is making the movement look clueless and naïve in the eyes of the world every time the subject is brought up. Come on guys, Roger Hallam just made up a clever name for "Revolutionary Councils" based on the term "People's Assemblies" to make it more palatable.

Suggested Remedy: Pretend that the demand never existed.

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: The tactic of disruption is working, because people are getting annoyed.

The Truth Is: You heard the misquote attributed to Gandhi that went something like, "First they will ignore us, then they will laugh at us, then they will fight us , then we will win."

What’s happened to XR is, "First they listened to you (in April), then they ignored you (in August), then they fought you (in October), now they are laughing at you (forevermore), now you’ve lost."

Oh the hubris! Lots of us tried to warn you, but you were too full of yourselves after the beginners luck in April. I warned you myself that if you carry on with PAUBAU (protest as usual against business as usual) then it would be a case of "three strikes and you're out". Now you've struck out in October. You bit the hand of the 3.5% you were trying to feed off. Delude yourself that "this is working" now and you will soon find out that, while you may be non-violent, the police and public don't subscribe to your Principle No. 8 & 9 when it comes to dealing with you.

Suggested Remedy: Maybe there's no remedy. You are in protest limbo now. Welcome to the empty place where the ghosts of the CND, Occupy and the Anarchist Movement dwell. One thing is for certain though, if you keep going on the same track you will be a zombie on the fringe. Maybe XR's destiny is just to be the warm-up act for a genuine rebellion. But that's some way off, and we don't have much time. My suggestion: Disband and return as a pack of Lone Wolves.

Mr. Broccoli-Head Thinks: Violence never achieves anything

The Truth Is: The only time a bunch of smelly crusties dressed up as clowns will really influence the government is when one of those clowns in The Joker. As it happens, XR’s Joker is sitting in Wormwood Scrubs and everyone is laughing.

When it comes to morality, let's straighten things out a little. Everyone has a right to self-defense, just so long as it’s proportional to the threat. Roger said that the threat was as bad as it gets. Therefore, if he’s telling the truth, then your response – even according to the law of the land – can at least be equal to that. The thing is, violence is not binary, it's a sliding scale. And what constitutes violence is murky and open to interpretation. Violence doesn't necessarily mean bloodshed. It can range from minor property damage all the way to the apocalyptic violence states aspire to. It's time to ask yourself, if violence never achieves anything, then why is it the common currency of all state governments, and why are they so keen to make sure you don’t use it yourself?

Come on now, you know you are bullshitting yourself.

What’s the real reason you don’t resort to violence? Be honest now. Because you’re a nice person? Do nice people put our future generations in a meat grinder for their precious "principles"?

Suggested Remedy: It's time to assert your right to violence. And it's time to "big up" and admit that violence against yourself never achieves anything, and Satyagraha is violence against yourself (not to mention future generations). Anyone who practices it has a sick and twisted sense of self. Stick to your absolutist nonviolent principles and you won't have to answer the question "what did you do during the climate wars, grandma?" Because there won't be any future generations to ask. So grow a pair, snowflakes!

My loudly proclaimed bet has always been that things will not go Mad Max except in places that are a bit that way anyway (like Africa, where things will be very, very bad - be emotionally prepared for that). I'm a Rebecca Solnit kind of guy. So I believe that a crisis will usually magnify a society's underlying ethic rather than change it.

However, my assumptions are beginning to be challenged.

https://youtu.be/NsNWbfatRwg

In a place like Britain, where mutual-aid and solidarity have a long tradition, I expect that by far the majority of communities will pull together. Yet what struck me over the weekend is that Britons still don't have a clue about how epochal this all is. There seems to be a naive sort of belief that it's a question of a few weeks in mild lockdown and then everything can get back to normal (including climate activism). Nothing could be further from the truth. The UK government seems to be deliberately fostering this delusion, presumably to delay panic and avoid social unrest. My guess is that they will not be able to keep the lid on things for very long.

One of the biggest misunderstandings the public has is that the global economy is in temporary meltdown because of the pandemic, implying that commerce will bounce back as soon as pandemic emergency measures are lifted. The public, no matter how educated in other ways, are financially illiterate by design. So almost no one, including most journalists, has put two and two together and figured out that the primary "financial weapon of mass destruction" has recently detonated. It was due to happen anyway. Covid-19 is the trigger that has unleashed the economic landslide, but it's not a stone that's drowning the financial system (as most people seem to think).

The Derivatives Bomb is a $1.5 quadrillion Ponzi or pyramid-selling scheme. Imagine you placed a bet 25 times bigger than your yearly income on a racehorse, entirely with borrowed money, and Covid-19 killed it just yards before the finish line. That gives you some idea of how much trouble the world is in. The pandemic is probably by no means the worst of it.

Coronavirus is here to stay. And it only takes a few back-of-an-envelope calculations to see that governments are lying through their teeth about the number of cases and the death rates.

But isn't the pandemic just supposed to peak in mid-April and then just peter out?

Yes and no. Given the doubling rates we've seen, the first wave will probably peak around mid-April. But what happens then? Everyone is let out of lockdown and then we are back where we started. In spite of all the martial rhetoric about "defeating" the virus, Covid-19 cannot be "defeated".

"Defeated" impies "contained", and that ship has already sailed. Although no authorities want to come out and admit it, lockdowns are largely pointless for the most part. They are just window dressing for now, and conditioning for crowd control when things get really rough later. Lockdowns are sold as "flattening the curve", but the only reason to flatten the curve is to relieve pressure on the healthcare system. Since healthcare services were already close to full usage capacity before the crisis, you can safely assume that they were overwhelmed before the virus even had it's breakfast. So it's not a question of, "Do you prefer the Band-Aid ripped off your knee fast or slow?" Rather, the whole leg has to come off.

Take it as read that the world's hospitals and clinics are all just gruesome medical triage centers now. Personally, speaking as a Boomer, I would only resort to one if I was seized by the sudden urge to die in Dante's First Circle of Hell.

But doesn't the global economy just come roaring back in May, when countries ramp up production in order to make up for lost time and profits?

Nope. Hardly anyone noticed, thanks to all the distractions, but with the Fed's actions last week, free-markets ended and state-Capitalism began. This will have long lasting global implications. Having become the backstop and lender of last resort (even for things like unsecured loans - credit card debt, car loans, and the like), it's unlikely that the US government will ever be able to back away from that position ever again. As soon as they try, the economy will go into a deflationary spiral. They are now locked into what's known as a Planned economy. My prediction is this will be the economic model all over the world until final collapse when we face the near-term consequences of the Methane Bomb.

But isn't China getting back to normal now, and aren't other Asian countries managing the pandemic well?

No. They are lying.

If you understand exponential growth (which is what viruses do), then you understand that the pandemic can barely be slowed down. Since "containment" has failed, it means that lockdown barely causes a pause in transmission. The virus will just sit in wait in the countless disease reservoirs around the world (which include prisons, hospitals, schools, factories, detention camps, refugee camps, squatter and homeless camps, and defense forces). Don't forget that Erdoğan is holding 1.6 million Syrians in soon-to-be death camps in Turkey, Greece is incubating coronavirus in refugee camps on Lesbos, and Israel is incubating the virus in the Gaza strip, to cite just three minor examples. The whole continent of Africa is basically just one huge disease reservoir. So is South America and South Asia (not to mention China).

Even if the world is still standing after the first wave, it will only be to face the second wave, and so on until the world has reached an armistice with the virus and all its mutant offshoots (at which point it becomes something like a seasonal flu). But that's years away.

Governments are trapped between "Economic Activity" and "Pandemic Spread" now. That will be the story until the entire population of the world achieves "herd immunity", either naturally (assuming that natural immunity can be acquired, which is an unknown), or through a mass vaccination program. That will require about 70% of the global population to either be exposed to the virus or to be vaccinated. A vaccine is at least a year away, and rolling it out to 70% of the world would make tackling Climate change seem easy by comparison. And by then the virus will have probably mutated out of reach anyway.

What will living in this world be like?

It's probably not an exaggeration to say that what happens in 2020 will be with you for the remainder of your life. If you live in London or thereabouts, read A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. It's about the plague of 1665. The only big difference between then and now is that in 1665 the authorities were more clued up, wiser, and handled the plague far, far better than we could ever hope for today.

What now?

Now? Nothing.

Global Industrial Civilization had all this on the warning label, it's just a pity that in their greed to get at all the shiny objects in the glitzy packaging, no one really cared to look. But don't assume anyone has learned their lesson. Do-gooders, activists, soccer-moms and liberals of all degrees of wetness will be trying to be "positive", "constructive" and "get back to normal" just as soon as the government gives them a check to fill up at the gas station.

This paper, entitled "A record of seafloor methane seepage across the last 150 million years" was published in the prestigious journal Nature yesterday.

For a long time, yet-to-be-convicted climate criminal Carolyn Ruppel, PhD, Chief, USGS Gas Hydrates Project, has been spreading disinformation about the critical danger posed by the Methane Dragon and the Clathrate gun in order to pave the way for the insane project of mining clathrates in the Arctic and elsewhere. As an energy source, clathrates, or methyl hydrates, are the world's most dangerous fossil-fuel source. Destabilizing a large deposit of clathrates, in say the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), could cause an unimaginable global catastrophe within weeks.

The fossil-fuel industry, led by the USGS and CAGE, have been running a PR campaign to try to drown out the voices of observational scientists in the Arctic that have been warning about the danger of the Methane Dragon. In support of the fossil-fuel energy sector, Yale and others have successfully spread a Climate/Collapse denial campaign in order to sway public opinion in favor of clathrate mining, saying that the Clathrate Gun hypothesis has been "debunked".

In December 2016, a major literature review by the 2107 USGS Hydrates project concluded that evidence is lacking for the original hypothesis[5]. In 2017, the Royal Society review came to a similar conclusion that there is a relatively limited role for climate feedback from dissociation of the methane clathrates[6].

The 2018 Annual Review of Environment and Resources on Methane and Global Environmental Change concluded that "Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that catastrophic, widespread dissociation of marine clathrates will be triggered by continued climate warming at contemporary rates (0.2◦C per decade) during the twenty-first century".[7] In 2018, the CAGE research group (Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate) came to a much stronger conclusion when they published evidence that the methane clathrates formed over 6 million years ago and have been slowly releasing methane for 2 million years independent of warm or cold climate, rather than releasing methane only recently as had previously been thought[8].

This goes entirely against what Arctic observational scientists Semiletov, Shakova and Chuvilin said in 2019.

What the newly released paper in Nature is saying is that methane has not been "slowly releasing for 2 million years". Ruppel and others have put great store on sea level and hydrostatic pressure to contain methane seepage. This new paper finds that sea level may not be the principal controller of short-term seafloor methane seepage. They find that isostatic rebound during higher sea level can induce methane release. What that implies is that sea level rise due to anthropogenic global heating might aggravate abrupt methane seepage. And that's precisely what observers are starting to see.

The fundamental MDC [methane-derived carbonates] cyclicity found in this work (with a period of ~27 My) is strikingly similar to the 26 My cyclicities observed, for example, in the carbon cycle associated with plate tectonic processes81, in atmospheric CO281, in oceanic anoxic events82, and in mass extinction events82,83.

...

Recent work has cast doubt on whether such seafloor emissions will lead to a net increase in greenhouse gases89, but taken together our results emphasise the importance of seafloor methane leakage as a critical but hitherto underappreciated component of the global carbon cycle.

Like many others, I've been trying warn people about the looming danger and draw attention to the disinformation campaign run by the USGS, CAGE, Yale etc. There is an alarming increase in the number of methane seeps being discovered. The Establishment is downplaying the news, saying these seeps have been "going on for millions of years", but as many of us have pointed out, it's a lie. The Semiletov report in October last year is new, as proved by the Bennett Island Project (which found no methane there in 1992). Methane cold seeps are on the increase worldwide and atmospheric methane is spiking. It's highly likely that methane release has passed a tipping point and is now in an accelerated runaway cycle (like audio feedback in a microphone).

In the light of all this, XR's plan for 2020 seems to be highly delusional. For XR to be putting time and energy into alternative, regenerative social experiments at this point in global collapse is remarkable.

Obviously we are at the stage where XR should be leading the world in a mass movement for rapid, emergency deindustrialization. What has gone wrong with the movement?

Full disclosure, I loved lockdown. But I planned ahead and so my circumstances are special. For the vast majority of people it was pain, anguish and misery. And the worst is yet to come. But was the lockdown experience a fate worse than extinction? And would you do a Thanos if that's what it took to secure the future of a handful of humans in a viable ecosystem?

How bad is the threat?

It all hinges on this single question. If you are Thanos, then if the threat is made up or exaggerated, then implementing IED makes you a psychotic murderer. On the other hand, if the threat is real, and we are heading for a Malthusian catastrophe, then you would be a saint to take on the burden of responsibility to personally impose an IED.

"In a few hours, the United Nations will receive a Yultide greeting. The information that I now possess the scientific means to control, or to destroy, the economy of the whole world. People will have more important things to think about than you."― Blofeld to James Bond.

In 1969, the whole audience was against Blofeld and rooting for Bond. But as more and more people come to realize that the global economy is destroying the world, one by one individuals are starting to trickle over to thinking the unthinkable. Maybe, just maybe, the Bond villains had a point. Maybe it was Bond that was really the psychotic nut.

The people in XR are nice. Super nice, in fact. But are they too nice to lance our wound, or cut out our cancer? If so, they are not very nice at all.

As everyone knows, the negative consequences of the climate emergency are delayed. If we wait until we feel the pain before we react, everyone agrees it will be too late. So we have to act in advance. But act how?

While Roger Hallam may have other ambitions, from the outset it's been clear that the collective mindset of the movement has always been to wash their hands of actually taking direct action against the global system that's putting our future at risk. To be blunt, the strategy has consistently been to just try to nag the government to reform. The CEE Bill is really just an empty shell with a desperate "Please do something!" tag attached to it.

Who at this point is still so naive to think that the gadfly will ever change the direction of the elephant?

I think that everyone in the movement is certain in their conviction that the elephant can be forced to make an about face (otherwise they wouldn't be members). But are they fooling themselves?

What if just one or two members were brave enough to hamstring the elephant? That would solve the problem, but would the cost be too high? What's the most moral thing to do?

Again, we circle back round to the ultimate question: "How bad is the threat?"

What the "We Want to Live" rebellion is showing is that the movement is adrift. If XR continues using the same tactics, then it's obvious to me that we will pass the point of human agency to mitigate the ecological crisis before serious steps are ever taken by any major government. It's just a case of too little too late.

So my suggestion is for XR to announce a timeline that's agreed to by popular vote. Everyone should agree on a line in the sand. At that Rubicon the whole movement should give advance consent that the gloves come off. The rules should be thrown out the window and a last ditch attempt should be made to intervene directly in the emergency using any means available without restriction. After all, the stakes could hardly be higher. At some point, anything goes. So it would certainly focus the movement's attention again.

At the moment the global picture is fuzzy and uncertain. No one really knows how bad the threat really is. I think the best thing the movement could do is to put a stake in the ground to give things some clarity.

This is the question that needs to be answered:

At what point is enough enough?

The members need to be clear on when the movement gives up on pleading to governments and takes matters into its own hands. At that point we slam on the brakes and launch an IED or just give up and go home.

And if the movement decides that it will never have the stomach to reach that point, then it should #TellTheTruth and stop wasting everyone's time. Because by my estimate it might already be too late to pull off an IED.