The Recognition

The Recognition by James Howard Kunstler

The climate change agitation is based on a central grandiose fallacy of our wobbling technocratic age: the idea that if you can measure enough stuff, you can control it. The master-wish in this case is what, exactly? To control the weather? (Which we might define as the day-to-day expression of the planet’s climate?) That ain’t gonna happen. In case you haven’t noticed, the business model of industrial civilization is already broken, and many of its dazzling tricks with it. And, anyway, the earth’s climate is forever and always changing, as is the adaptive response to it by human populations over the centuries, sometimes slowly and sometimes fast.

So, the net result of this year’s Glasgow Climate Summit is to pledge gobs of money from the “rich” nations to protect the poor nations, while mandating the reduction of oil, natgas, and coal in all nations, i.e., the global economy. Apropos of those “rich” nations, guess what: all of our modern money rests on promises to deliver future volumes of energy (and products of value made from it) and those promises are without basis in reality, so the money itself is increasingly worthless. Thus, the cost of getting that future energy exceeds the promises embedded in the money based on the energy. How’s that for a paradox? We’re the proverbial snake eating its own tail and now we’ve bitten off more than we can swallow.

We’re going to use less energy whether Klaus Schwab (and the Persian cat in his lap) likes it or not because our money is increasingly no good, which translates into a general loss of mojo for this round of civilization. The massive matrix of mutually self-reinforcing activities is seizing up — the mining, making, harvesting, and transport of stuff. That’s exactly what the “supply chain” melodrama is about. Of course, the Glasgow Summit did allow a bunch of people to feel self-important, to bethink themselves morally superior, which is the status currency of our time — the brownie-point having more actual value than the dollar these days. It certifies the “good” people and validates their persecution of the “bad” people, which is the central political drama of our time. The reward is power for its own sake, which is — let’s face it — the essence of evil.

The collapse of the global economy is underway and working itself out as it will, and the fear associated with that epic loss of resources, goods, comforts, and conveniences is driving Western Civ batshit crazy. Hence, the lunacies around the Covid-19 virus, another measure-and-control mania. Except that most of the official measurements about Covid-19 are untrue, gamed, fudged, juggled, misrepresented, and weaponized for political purposes. In fact, despite all the obsessive-compulsive statistical measuring, everything that the public health officialdom and the medical establishment did to control the disease after January 2020, only made the pandemic worse and prolonged it.

And so now all those authorities are bent on “vaccinating” every last human — which is absolutely the last thing you would rationally do in the midst of the pandemic event, since it only provokes new iterations of the virus that are immune to the “vaccines.” What’s more, the “vaccines” are so ineffective in the first place, and so toxic in the second place, that the damage they cause is arguably worse than the disease. But that quandary affords another opportunity for the self-designated “good” people (the vaxxed) to distinguish themselves from the “bad” people (the unvaxxed), and hence another way to persecute them. (Do you suppose it’s a mere coincidence that the people who refuse to get agitated by the climate change panic are often the very same people skeptical of the “vaccines.”)

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