As Went Arecibo - Now Goes America's International Space Station...,

spaceaustralia |  On November 2nd, 2000, humans set foot on the International Space Station (ISS). What we now know as two decades of continuous habitation in space.

During these 20 years, the US$150 billion orbital space lab has hosted 241 crew members from 19 different countries. And in doing so, has made up 43% of all people in space.

The 16 module station houses four Russian, nine US, two Japanese, and one European module with six regular crew members taking six-monthly shifts. To date, the rotating crew have conducted more than 3,000 scientific experiments.

But as the bi-decadal benchmark came and went, we were reminded that all good things come to an end.

And the ISS is no different.

 Although the ISS is cleared to circle Earth until 2028, wear and tear is an issue. And the White House has "asked" NASA to stop finding the ISS in 2025.

It's highly doubtful that NASA will clear the space station for another run past 2028, and will be decommissioned sometime shortly after.

A good run considering its expected shelf-life was only 15 years.

The station's mileage has seen a Russian toilet go kaput, an oxygen-supply system on the fritz, and a notorious air leak worsen over time. Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka said of the Russian side of the ISS, "All modules of the Russian segment are exhausted,'

And it's not like a Russian - let alone a Russian cosmonaut - to complain.

Once NASA decides to retire and decommission the space station, the complex will be de-orbited over the Pacific Ocean, most likely burning up during re-entry.

So, what does a post-ISS space look like?

 

Arecibo Collapse: When It Was Built, It Was Only Intended For A Decade Of Use..,

space |  After two cable failures in the span of four months, Puerto Rico's most venerable astronomy facility, the Arecibo radio telescope, has collapsed in an uncontrolled structural failure.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the site, decided in November to proceed with decommissioning the telescope in response to the damage, which engineers deemed too severe to stabilize without risking lives. But the NSF needed time to come up with a plan for how to safely demolish the telescope in a controlled manner.

Instead, gravity did the job this morning (Dec. 1) at about 8 a.m. local time, according to reports from the area.

"NSF is saddened by this development," the agency wrote in a tweet. "As we move forward, we will be looking for ways to assist the scientific community and maintain our strong relationship with the people of Puerto Rico."

The NSF added that no injuries had been reported, that the top priority was to maintain safety and that more details would be provided when confirmed.

"What a sad day for Astronomy and Planetary science worldwide and one of the most iconic telescopes of all time," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science, wrote in a tweet. "My thoughts are with the staff members and scientists who have continued to do great science during the past years and whose life is directly affected by this."

Images shared on Twitter by Deborah Martorell, a meteorologist for Puerto Rican television stations, compare views of the observatory taken yesterday — showing the 900-ton science platform suspended over the massive dish strung up on cables — and today, when the observatory's three supporting towers are bare.

Still Waiting For Those Steroids To Kick In....,

Still waiting for the steroids to kick in. #KrakenOnSteroids #KrakenCurrentSize🐙 pic.twitter.com/wlQw1MFJsY

— Bob Resists🌊 (@ResistsBob) November 23, 2020

CTH  |  Historically the GOP was dependent on big major donors and Wall Street for support, but the Trump small donor army shattered all republican records for contributions and showed a completely new grassroots donor base.  Tens of millions of middle-class Americans fueled the MAGA movement and stunned the republican establishment.

As an outcome of that massive data-file, and the contractual agreements to share with the Republican National Committee, the RNC became flush with money and transmitted the file to other GOP members in down ballot races.   Essentially Trump represented access to millions of previously hidden Americans, that’s why your emails and phones blew up in 2020 with pleas for contributions from every outlier GOP entity; the vultures in the business…

Within the business part of the GOP there are massive territorial fights amid those who live on the donations from within political campaigns.  The Trump MAGA file is being exploited like a bloody carcass dropped into a pool of piranha.  Once you know how the business end works, then a lot of other stuff makes sense.  Including this:

Trump Campaign Statement on Legal Team

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

- Rudy Giuliani, Attorney for President Trump, and Jenna Ellis, Trump Campaign Senior Legal Adviser and Attorney for President Trump

Politics Of The Left Behind: Submit Or Retaliate

thenation  |  Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.

Hell’s Angels concludes when the Angels ally with the John Birch Society and write to President Lyndon Johnson to offer their services to fight communism, much to the befuddlement of the anti-Vietnam elites who assumed the Angels were on the side of “counterculture.” The Angels and their retaliatory militarism were, Thompson warned, the harbingers of a darker time to come. That time has arrived.  

Fifty years after Thompson published his book, a lot of Americans have come to feel like motorcycle guys. At a time when so many of us are trying to understand what happened in the election, there are few better resources than Hell’s Angels. That’s not because Thompson was the only American writer to warn coastal, left-liberal elites about their disconnection from poor and working-class white voters. Plenty of people issued such warnings: journalists like Thomas Edsall, who for decades has been documenting the rise of “red America,” and scholars like Christopher Lasch, who saw as early as the 1980s that the elite embrace of technological advancement and individual liberation looked like a “revolt” to the mass of Americans, most of whom have been on the losing end of enough “innovations” to be skeptical about the dogmas of progress.

But though Thompson’s depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture—one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals—is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as “white trash” or “deplorables.”

BLM Is Elite Mimetic Diversion For What's Around That Signpost Up Ahead....,

unz  |  Let’s assume that Black Lives Matter is not a “social justice” movement, but a corporate-sponsored public relations vehicle that’s being used to advance the agenda of elites? Is that too much of a stretch?

And let’s say that the massive protests that erupted across the country were not random or spontaneous events as some people seem to think, but part of a broader strategy to control the headlines by shifting the dominant “narrative” to race. The death of George Floyd fits perfectly with this “broader strategy”, as the incident took place 6 months before the general election, which (conveniently) gave the Democrats enough time to mount an effective attack on Donald Trump using an issue on which they feel he is particularly vulnerable. (Race)

Was it all a coincidence?

Maybe or maybe not. But it’s certainly worth investigating, after all, we’ve just endured 3 and a half years of relentless fabrications connected to the Russiagate scam, so the idea that this latest headline-grabbing fiasco might be, well, fake, is certainly within the realm of possibility.

So, let’s see if we can figure out “why” wealthy elites and their giant charitable foundations would choose to dump millions of dollars into an organization that claims to be Marxist. Could be that….

1. They are genuinely committed to social justice for black people?
2. They think “racist” cops are the Number 1 problem facing black people today?
3. They think the massive protests are raising consciousness which will have a transformative effect on the country?
4. They need a flashy social justice organization (BLM) to divert attention from widening inequality, spiraling unemployment, ballooning poverty, shrinking growth, and the savage restructuring of the economy that is creating a permanent underclass forced to scrape by at food banks, homeless shelters and tent cities that are sprouting up across the country but which are religiously ignored by our prostitute media?

If you chose Number 4, you guessed right. The protests, demonstrations and riots are all part of a spectacular “Product Launch”, the most impressive Madison Avenue-type extravaganza of all-time. BLM has exploded onto the scene just months before the election eliminating all of the 10 Top issues listed by Gallup that voters really care about, and skillfully shifting the public’s attention to race, race relations, social justice and cops. What an astonishing turnaround! In the old days we would have called this the “old switcheroo”, an art-form that has been perfected by BLM (and their Democrat handlers) who have turned the election on its head by burning down half the country, then claiming they are the victims. How’s that for twisted logic?

So, what can we say definitively about BLM? What does the group really believe and what is it trying to achieve? Having spent a fair amount of time on their website, I’m still puzzled. The website contains a number of emotive videos with pulsing background music and lively narration. But–like everything else with this shadowy group– there doesn’t seem to be much substance. The emphasis seems to be on appearances rather than policy, slogans rather than remedies, and catchy monikers (Black Lives Matter) rather than thoughtful recommendations for real change. So, where’s the beef? 

Who is Black Lives Matter and what do they want?

1% Replacement Negroe Immigrants Made The Native 1% Elites EVEN MORE Medieval...,

voxeu |  It is a well-documented fact that top-income growth has been particularly stark in English-speaking countries, with incomes of the top 1% and 0.1% rising sharply over recent decades (Atkinson et al. 2011, Blanchet et al. 2019). Some scholars have argued that the shared economic and political institutions of these countries, such as lower top marginal tax rates and light touch regulation, have incentivised rent-seeking behaviour among their top earners (Piketty et al. 2011, Bivens and Mishel 2013). In addition, technical changes may have created ‘winner-takes-all’ markets where a few workers earn most of the returns. Recent technological innovations may thus have contributed to the rise of top incomes (Rosen 1981, Kaplan and Rauh 2013, Koenig 2020).

Another characteristic feature of Anglo-Saxon countries is their popularity as a destination for high-skilled migrants, particularly the cities that serve as global services hubs such as London and New York (Kerr et al. 2016, Kerr and Kerr 2018, Roarch et al. 2019). Anecdotal evidence suggests that the rich and famous are internationally mobile and favour these destinations, but this evidence is based on a few highly visible cases. So far, we know little about the magnitude of these effects and the extent to which migration-induced selection effects could drive different trends in income inequality across countries and periods.

In a new paper (Advani et al. 2020), we combine top-income records from UK tax records with new information about migrant status to analyse the link. Tax records have been instrumental in recent research on top incomes. These data provide improved coverage of the highest incomes (reviewed in Atkinson et al. 2011); however, the data include minimal information on demographic characteristics. As a result, it has been difficult for researchers to distinguish native workers from migrant workers at the top of the income distribution, or to assess the impact of migration between countries on income dynamics. We derive information on migrant status from the structure of Social Security numbers assigned to migrant workers on arrival.

Our findings suggest that migrants are highly represented at the top of the income distribution. The public debate primarily focuses on low-income migrants; however, migrants make up a higher proportion of earners at the very top of the income distribution. Among low-income groups, about one in six people are immigrants. In contrast, among the top percentile of the income distribution, one in four people are immigrants and at higher fractiles, every third person is an immigrant. A lack of data has created a perception that migration is mainly a low-income phenomenon, but these new data show that the economy relies most heavily on immigrants for extremely highly paid positions.

The inflow of high-income migrants can also help in understanding recent trends in top incomes. In the UK, an inflow of high-income finance workers can account for much of the observed rise in top-income shares over the past two decades. Immigrants make up more than a quarter of the top percentiles’ income share, up from 18% in 1997. Over these two decades, the importance of migrants thus increased by 50%, which accounts for about 85% of the rise in top income over this period (Figure 1a). 

The impact of migration is even starker at higher income levels. Among the top 0.1% and 0.01% top, migrants make up roughly a third of UK top incomes (Figure 1a). This pattern aligns closely with the observed expansion of the wage distribution at the top. Incomes in the very top fractiles of the income distribution have grown the fastest in recent decades, pulling away even from the rapidly growing incomes in the lower end of the top 1%. The data suggest that differential migration rates can rationalise this ‘fractal inequality’. The inflow of migrants into the top 0.01% was nearly twice as large as the comparable inflow into the top 1% over the past two decades. Hence, differential migration rates may have increased the gap between the incomes of the top 1% and the top 0.1% (Figure 1b).

Deplorables Equal Expendables In The 9% American Political Economic Calculus

NYTimes |  Here is the basic argument of mainstream political opinion, especially among Democrats, that dominated in the decades leading up to Mr. Trump and the populist revolt he came to represent: A global economy that outsources jobs to low-wage countries has somehow come upon us and is here to stay. The central political question is not to how to change it but how to adapt to it, to alleviate its devastating effect on the wages and job prospects of workers outside the charmed circle of elite professionals.

The answer: Improve the educational credentials of workers so that they, too, can “compete and win in the global economy.” Thus, the way to contend with inequality is to encourage upward mobility through higher education.

The rhetoric of rising through educational achievement has echoed across the political spectrum — from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton. But the politicians espousing it have missed the insult implicit in the meritocratic society they are offering: If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault.

It is important to remember that most Americans — nearly two-thirds — do not have a four-year college degree. By telling workers that their inadequate education is the reason for their troubles, meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism — an insidious prejudice against those who do not have college degrees.

The credentialist prejudice is a symptom of meritocratic hubris. By 2016, many working people chafed at the sense that well-schooled elites looked down on them with condescension. This complaint was not without warrant. Survey research bears out what many working-class voters intuit: At a time when racism and sexism are out of favor (discredited though not eliminated), credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice.

In the United States and Europe, disdain for the less educated is more pronounced, or at least more readily acknowledged, than prejudice against other disfavored groups. In a series of surveys conducted in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium, a team of social psychologists led by Toon Kuppens found that college-educated respondents had more bias against less-educated people than they did against other disfavored groups. The researchers surveyed attitudes toward a range of people who are typically victims of discrimination. In Europe, this list included Muslims and people who are poor, obese, blind and less educated; in the United States, the list also included African-Americans and the working class. Of all these groups, the poorly educated were disliked most of all.

Beyond revealing the disparaging views that college-educated elites have of less-educated people, the study also found that elites are unembarrassed by this prejudice. They may denounce racism and sexism, but they are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.

By the 2000s, citizens without a college degree were not only looked down upon; in the United States and Western Europe, they were also virtually absent from elective office. In the U.S. Congress, 95 percent of House members and 100 percent of senators are college graduates. The credentialed few govern the uncredentialed many.

It has not always been this way. Although the well-educated have always been disproportionately represented in Congress, as recently as the early 1960s, about one-fourth of our elected representatives lacked a college degree. Over the past half-decade, Congress has become more diverse with regard to race, ethnicity and gender, but less diverse with regard to educational credentials and class.

One consequence of the diploma divide is that very few members of the working class ever make it to elective office. In the United States, about half of the labor force is employed in working-class jobs, defined as manual labor, service industry and clerical jobs. But fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress worked in such jobs before their election.

Masks A Dry Run For The Mark Of The Beast?

pulpitandpen |  The gist is this: Prior to the return of Christ, his followers are going to become increasingly unpopular and the world will grow increasingly wicked. It will be characterized by unruly children, self-centered vanity (food selfie, much?), homosexuality, and general ungodliness. Although all ages have had these sins to varying degrees, the generation before Christ returns will actually take pride in them.

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.² For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,³ Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,⁴ Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;⁵ Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.⁶ For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,⁷ Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
2 Timothy 3:1-7

This will be accomplished by incredible technology that allows the comings-and-goings of people to be micromanaged and they will be excluded from buying or selling things in the marketplace. This is to accomplish a “soft extermination,” basically starving out believers or forcing them to assimilate.

¹⁶ And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:¹⁷ And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Revelation 13:16-17

After it’s clear from muscling non-conformists into a corner by restricting their access to the market, a global, powerful government will then begin a “hard extermination,” rounding up believers and murdering them like dogs in a persecution worse than anything the world has ever seen (including the Holocaust). 

Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake…²¹ For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.Matthew 24:9,21

 

This will, in part, be possible by some kind of contraption – whether natural or supernatural – that will detect believing non-conformists who have refused to identify with the global grand poobah (known as the anti-christ) and it will sound an alarm, alerting people that an ‘unauthorized person’ is nearby.

¹⁵ And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.
Revelation 13:15

You can figure out how that will be done, because it doesn’t leave much to the imagination in a period in which we’re talking about “health passports” scanning temperatures of passing crowds of people, putting everyone into a facial recognition database (even liberals in America’s cities are scared over this one and have started to ban the tech), and are micro-chipping Lassie. I’m not a prophet or the son of one, but I surmise it will be one of these things, a combination thereof, or something eerily similar. In one way or another, those little images are going to scream out and snitch, something that John was seeing in his revelation and trying to convey to us with his 1st Century vocabulary.

And when all this fails to round up believers for the gas chamber, people will snitch on each other. Even family members will turn one another in for not conforming to the government regulations.

Collapse Is Silent But Its Signs Are All Around...,

theinsideview |  We can define civilizational collapse as a process wherein most recognizable large-scale institutions of a society vanish, coupled with a drop in material wealth, a drop in the complexity of material artifacts and social forms, a reduction in travel distance and physical safety of the inhabitants, and a mass reduction in knowledge.

Loss of knowledge is especially damaging, since it accelerates the other aspects of collapse and ensures that they will be long-lasting. Nearly all of the written evidence we have of societal decline comes from elites. Historically, literacy was restricted to the traditional elite class of a society, as they were the only ones with any use for reading and writing. This accounts for the total disappearance of writing after the Late Bronze Age collapse, since Bronze Age societies had a very small literate class. 

The result was a wholesale loss of civilizational knowledge. When writing reappeared in the eastern Mediterranean centuries later, it was based on the new Phoenician alphabet, rather than the old hieroglyphic system that gave birth to the cuneiform of the Assyrians or the Linear B of the Minoans. Such losses of knowledge are a constant throughout human history: as with FOGBANK, or as with the state of New Jersey recently scrambling to find a COBOL programmer with the ability to overhaul their legacy information systems.

Despite how difficult it can be to gather historical data, it’s still a far better way to understand societal collapse than purely theoretical models. Rather than picking and choosing our preferred explanations of collapse beforehand, we should first recognize that there are simply too many causal variables to control for. The best we can hope for is rigorous cross-comparison with the historical record, using sets of natural experiments between past societies. A broad historical literature of collapse does exist, especially on the Late Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire. But the scholars that pose these questions often have particular—and popular—answers in mind as to what causes collapse: environmental fragility, moral decline, an overloading of systemic complexity, and so on. 

The morality play is written first, the facts are found second, and this often results in a shoddy final product of a theory. Thus, the relevance of history for investigating our own society’s potential collapse is also obvious: without comparing the present to other civilizations, we can’t say much of anything useful about it.

It is hard to come to a consensus on historical cause and effect. In geology, we didn’t build another planet to discover the Earth’s plate tectonics, but rather dug among the rocks on which we found ourselves. In our macro-study of history and civilizations, we too must rely on in-depth exploration of historical examples.

That exploration is still itself theory-driven. Good historians and theoreticians explicitly acknowledge the theses they work with, so I will do the same. My theory of history is great founder theory: I propose that social technologies do not evolve out of mass action, but rather are devised by a tiny subset of institutional designers. Looking at history, we see that new organizations and social forms often arise within a single generation, showing jumps in social complexity far too rapid to be explained away by collective action or evolution. This would be the equivalent of expecting a tornado tearing through a junkyard to assemble a Boeing 747 or a Tesla Cybertruck.

Designing complex objects through collective action, or perhaps through an intermittent individual strategy similar to the open software approach, is tempting. However, unowned commons tend to be raided, and individual visions tend to differ massively. It often takes an exceptional individual with exceptional vision to create a new social or material technology. It’s hard to remember nowadays that the smartphone once had to be devised as a combination of the cell phone, the tablet, and the camera, and did not merely emerge out of mass market sentiments. It took a single individual, Steve Jobs, to see that while a combination of the car, the airplane, and the submarine would produce an inferior version of all three, the opposite case would be true in the creation of the smartphone. And then that individual had to implement the vision.

Coronavirus Is A Poor Person's Virus

vanityfair |  “All these rich people can’t stop themselves,” one person who is close to a number of wealthy tech CEOs and venture capitalists told me. “They just can’t stop themselves from throwing parties and going on their jets and socializing as if everything was normal.”

In many respects, to them, things are better than normal. Those on the top billionaire lists have only grown richer over the past five months, as tech has soared on the S&P and NASDAQ, helping push the markets back to their pre-COVID numbers, and adding double-digit billions to some tech CEOs’ personal net worths in a single day. Look no further than Apple or Amazon as a prime example. While 16.3 million Americans are unemployed, Apple is now nearing a $2 trillion market cap and Amazon just posted record profits of $5.2 billion in the last quarter—double last year’s goal.

So what are these elite tech founders doing with their wealth? Mostly living life as they did before coronavirus. I’ve spoken to numerous people who’ve described countless billionaires hitting the road, flying around the country to wherever case numbers are lowest. One investor worth several billion who has several homes told a friend—who then parlayed the information to me in tones of shock and awe and more than a tinge of jealousy—that he was in Miami when the numbers were lowest at the start of the pandemic; hopped over to Los Angeles when Florida got a bit dicey; and now that California is a hotbed, is in New York enjoying the season’s outdoor dining. Another billionaire in Los Angeles has been hosting lavish dinner parties (no social media allowed) where an on-site nurse administers 15-minute coronavirus tests outside as guests drink cocktails, and allows them in to dine once their test comes back negative. And yet another investor told me about some of his colleagues who chipped in for a massive $50,000-a-month compound in Palm Springs that’s being used as a group party house. (I’ve heard about similar setups in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.)

For those who don’t want to be in America (and let’s be frank, who really wants to be in America right now?), there’s an easy solution. A report last week found that the superrich are paying as much as $2.6 million for international citizenships, then zipping out to said country on their private jets. Not everyone owns their own jet, or “P.J.,” as they’re called. As a result, jet rentals are skyrocketing. A spokeswoman for NetJets, a private-jet rental company, told me that inquiries for flights shot up from the previous year, and have only continued to grow as the pandemic has stretched on. In April, for example, calls to NetJets was up 60% for the year prior, as of June, it was 195%, the spokeswoman said.

Soft White Underbelly: Hidden Realms Of American Squalor

WaPo |  “I’m just one guy with a camera,” Laita said. He monetized his YouTube channels days ago.

Laita will give between $20 and $40 to people who are willing to tell their stories, he said. Those who are more at risk of being exposed, such as pimps, drug dealers or prostitutes, sometimes want more, costing him up to $100.

On any given day, up to eight people line up willing to share a personal history that Laita uses only his gut to check, he said.

“I am certain that not every dollar I’ve given to somebody on the street has been spent on a blanket or a tent or shoes. What I’m doing is not foolproof,” he said, considering his work to be a tool for awareness and education.

Compensating his subjects shows a sign of respect for their time and the intimate details they’re willing to share, said Amy Turk, chief executive for Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles, the main service provider for women who live on Skid Row.

The line of exploitation can be a thin one to balance if not done well, and it can be “emotionally dangerous to have someone reveal so much deep complexity about their life and walk away,” she said.

Turk, a licensed clinical social worker, said the best way for someone to get involved is to find an organization that’s aligned with their desire to help and that matches their skills with a need.

“It’s about understanding that something has happened to them,” she said, adding that some people on her staff have heard of Laita’s channel and saw a video of a woman the organization has assisted in the past. “Sounds like [that’s] what Mark is tapping into.”

Stephany Powell, executive director for the Van Nuys, Calif.-based nonprofit Journey Out, which helps women who have survived sexual exploitation, watched Kelly’s story after the video popped up on her Facebook feed. She was instantly concerned for Kelly’s safety because of her identity being known and the amount of money raised for her.

“If she’s vulnerable enough to be trafficked, she might be vulnerable enough for a guy to befriend her,” she said.

People are growing more aware about human trafficking, and Kelly seemed like a likable person whom people perceived as undeserving of what had allegedly happened to her, Powell said, contemplating why Kelly’s story resonated with so many people compared with others on Laita’s channel.

The retired Los Angeles Police Department sergeant said she’s heard stories like Kelly’s too often in her years of service and now as leader of Journey Out.

“A lot of times it is not unusual for victims to not depict themselves as victims or how some people think victims should present themselves,” she said.

Money isn’t curative for the type of trauma someone like Kelly experienced, Powell said. She needs assistance with finding housing, securing employment and attending counseling to help her cope with pain. People like Kelly need a community that consists of professionals and former sex-trafficking survivors to pull her forward, she said.

“You can give her that $30,000. If she blows through it, then what?” Powell asked.

The Great Reset REALLY Starts Ripping And Tearing This Week

cnbc |  The coronavirus pandemic has pushed the jobless rate in New York, Los Angeles and other major urban areas to near or above 20%, nearly twice the national rate.

The unemployment rate is a barometer of financial hardship for American families, since losing a job typically leads to a significant drop in household income.

A rate of 20% means 1 in 5 Americans in the labor force can’t find work.

That’s double the national peak during the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and a level unseen since the 1930s, when the country was in the throes of its worst-ever economic downturn in the industrial era.

“It’s devastating, in terms of how high that unemployment rate is,” said Ioana Marinescu, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

The local business mix and policies around mandated business closures are likely partly responsible for elevated joblessness in some major urban areas, said Wayne Vroman, a labor economist at the Urban Institute. Cities are also generally areas of higher business concentration when compared with other regions, he said. 

New York’s unemployment rate rose to 20.4% last month, according to state-level data issued Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that detailed figures for some large metro areas. That’s up from 18.3% in May and 15% in April.

The ranks of unemployed New Yorkers have grown by 261,000 people since April, to more than 811,000, according to the Bureau.

The trend stands in contrast to the broader U.S. labor-market recovery in May and June.

The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 11.1% last month from 14.7% in April, largely driven by furloughed workers being recalled to their jobs as states began reopening their economies.

New York, the hardest-hit area of the country early in the health crisis, has been cautious in lifting the economic shutdowns officials imposed to contain the spread of Covid-19.

Every Man For Himself With The Devil Taking The Hindmost

thenation |  In early Anglo-Saxon England and until the end of European feudalism, there existed a class of people known as churls, from which we get the adjective “churlish.” They weren’t called that because they had bad manners; churls were the lowest class of free people. They were not bound to a manor like serfs, but neither did they have wealth and own property like nobles. They were people who possessed freedom to do as they pleased in theory. In practice, their poverty meant that their “free” lives were little different from those of unfree serfs.

Economic reality dictated then, as it dictates today, one’s freedom. People are only as free as they can afford to be. For Americans, lacking guaranteed access to basic necessities like housing, food, and health care (and with our bank accounts determining access to the good versions of those things), this is a constant dilemma. We place great value in perceiving ourselves as free. Yet the more we extol this freedom’s virtue, the more it sounds like we are just trying to convince ourselves. 

Real freedom would include being free to quit a terrible job without losing access to everything on the bottom level of Maslow’s pyramid. It would include freedom to live where we want, not where “the market” decides jobs will be available. It would include control over our own labor, like negotiating power over our earnings and our working conditions. In short, it would mean freedom to live the lives we desire, rather than the lives we choose based on a curated set of options over which we exercise no control.

In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama caused controversy by claiming of working-class voters in the postindustrial Midwest, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The “bitter clingers” remark stuck throughout the campaign, particularly as he applied it to conservative shibboleths like the Second Amendment and religion. 

To many liberals this represents a hard truth, while to the left it is an example of how a politics that abandons economic populism is an invitation for “culture wars” issues to dominate. In either case, it is a useful basis for understanding why so many Americans find comfort in a misguided notion of “freedom” that amounts only to small acts of refusenik-ism, like school kids who rebel against the dress code by untucking one corner of their shirt. When our economic system takes freedom in a meaningful sense away from the vast majority of the population, people place more value on its symbolic expression.

Don't Side With The Powerful Against The Disempowered. Just Don't!!!

caitlinjohnstone |  Learning to distinguish between empowered parties and disempowered parties can be a little tricky, even for relatively awake people, because nobody likes to think of themselves as siding with the powerful against the weak. It’s something we all know intuitively to be wrong, so we’ll often find clever ways of using an incomplete analysis of the power dynamics at play which allows us to feel as though we’re fighting the power when we’re really doing the exact opposite.

And propagandists are of course all too eager to help us do this.

Israel is a perfect example. You can squint at it in such a way that lets you feel as though you’re defending a disempowered religious minority with an extensive history of persecution that is surrounded by enemies, but really it has nuclear weapons and the full might of the US empire on its side. In reality the Palestinians are the down-power ones, but people who want to believe the Israeli government is a poor widdle victim will do mental gymnastics to contort the power dynamics.

These compartmentalizations ignore where the actual power is at on a global scale and just zoom in to a local analysis which ignores all else.

Whenever you see the western mass media and their propagandized followers talking about “The people of [insert targeted nation here]”, they’re cheerleading a US empire-backed movement against a weaker government which has resisted absorption into that empire. But they’re posing as supporters of the little guy.

• Juan Guaido is the brave rebel fighting the powerful Maduro regime! No, he’s backed by the US-centralized empire which is trying to stage a coup in the nation with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet.
• Yay, the freedom fighters in Syria are fighting the tyranny of their oppressive ruler! No they’re not, they’re jihadist extremists who were backed by the US and its allies with the goal of toppling Damascus in order to seize control of a crucial geostrategic region.
• Yay, the brave people of Hong Kong are liberating themselves from the tyranny of Beijing! Well really China is far less powerful than the US-centralized power alliance and the US government is unquestionably intervening in the HK protests. But people make believe it’s just the people vs the big bad Chinese government.

This impulse to pretend you’re fighting the power instead of fighting for power is so pervasive I’ve seen people do ridiculous things like say Julian Assange is actually the power because WikiLeaks is influential. He’s one guy!

That’s also what you’re seeing when people try to spin these US protests as a Deep State color revolution backed by George Soros and “the Chicoms”. No it’s not, you just don’t want to admit that you support the government and its armed goon squad against people who are sick of the brutal US police state, so you’re doing ridiculous mental gymnastics to make it feel like you’re actually punching up.

Online forums are full of self-described “anarchists” who constantly wind up on the same side as the CIA and the US State Department on foreign policy because they act like every “revolution” in every nation is the people vs power while ignoring a global-scale analysis of real power. If your “anti-authoritarian” worldview frequently leads you to supporting agendas which make the biggest power structure on the planet more powerful, then you’re not anti-authoritarian, you just want to feel like you are. You’re no different than any other MSM-brainwashed tool.

Learn to see clearly where the power is, and refuse to side with it. Expunge the “What did you expect?” mind virus from your system and you’ll be doing all of humanity a big favor.

The Global Capitalist Rulng Class Is Attempting A Color Revolution In The U.S.

consentfactory |  No, credit where credit is due to GloboCap. At this point, not only the United States, but countries throughout the global capitalist empire, are in such a state of mass hysteria, and so hopelessly politically polarized, that hardly anyone can see the textbook color revolution that is being executed, openly, right in front of our faces.

Or … OK, actually, most Trump supporters see it, but most of them, like Trump himself, have mistaken Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Democratic Party and their voters for the enemy, when they are merely pawns in GloboCap’s game. Most liberals and leftists cannot see it at all … literally, as in they cannot perceive it. Like Dolores in the HBO Westworld series, “it doesn’t look like anything” to them. They actually believe they are fighting fascism, that Donald Trump, a narcissistic, word-salad-spewing, former game show host, is literally the Return of Adolf Hitler, and that somehow (presumably with the help of Putin) he has staged the current civil unrest, like the Nazis staged the Reichstag fire! (The New York Times will never tire of that one, nor will their liberal and leftist readers, who have been doing battle with an endless series of imaginary Hitlers since … well, since Hitler.)

I’ve been repeating it my columns for the last four years, and I’m going to repeat it once again. What we are experiencing is not the “return of fascism.” It is the global capitalist empire restoring order, putting down the populist insurgency that took them by surprise in 2016. The White Black Nationalist Color Revolution, the fake apocalyptic plague, all the insanity of 2020 … it has been in the pipeline all along. It has been since the moment Trump won the election. No, it is not about Trump, the man. It has never been about Trump, the man, no more than the Obama presidency was ever about Obama, the man. GloboCap needs to crush Donald Trump (and moreover, to make an example of him) not because he is a threat to the empire (he isn’t), but because he became a symbol of populist resistance to global capitalism and its increasingly aggressive “woke” ideology. It is this populist resistance to its ideology that GloboCap is determined to crush, no matter how much social chaos and destruction it unleashes in the process.

In one of my essays from last October, Trumpenstein Must Be Destroyed, I made this prediction about the year ahead:

“2020 is for all the marbles. The global capitalist ruling classes either crush this ongoing populist insurgency or God knows where we go from here. Try to see it through their eyes for a moment. Picture four more years of Trump … second-term Trump … Trump unleashed. Do you really believe they’re going to let that happen, that they are going to permit this populist insurgency to continue for another four years? They are not. What they are going to do is use all their power to destroy the monster, not Trump the man, but Trump the symbol. They are going to drown us in impeachment minutiae, drip, drip, drip, for the next twelve months. The liberal corporate media are going to go full-Goebbels. They are going to whip up so much mass hysteria that people won’t be able to think. They are going to pit us one against the other, and force us onto one or the other side of a simulated conflict (Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis) to keep us from perceiving the actual conflict (Global Capitalism versus Populism). They are going to bring us to the brink of civil war …”

OK, I didn’t see the fake plague coming, but, otherwise, how’s my prediction holding up?

Global Elites Are Actively Undermining Trust In Sovereign Nation States

tomdispatch |  Let’s say you live in a country where the government responded quickly and competently to Covid-19. Let’s say that your government established a reliable testing, contact tracing, and quarantine system. It either closed down the economy for a painful but short period or its system of testing was so good that it didn’t even need to shut everything down. Right now, your life is returning to some semblance of normal.

Lucky you.

The rest of us live in the United States. Or Brazil. Or Russia. Or India. In these countries, the governments have proven incapable of fulfilling the most important function of the state: protecting the lives of their citizens. While most of Europe and much of East Asia have suppressed the pandemic sufficiently to restart their economies, Covid-19 continues to rage out of control in those parts of the world that, not coincidentally, are also headed by democratically elected right-wing autocrats.

In these incompetently run countries, citizens have very good reason to mistrust their governments. In the United States, for instance, the Trump administration botched testing, failed to coordinate lockdowns, removed oversight from the bailouts, and pushed to reopen the economy over the objections of public-health experts. In the latest sign of early-onset dementia for the Trump administration, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany declared this month that “science should not stand in the way” of reopening schools in the fall.

Voters, of course, could boot Trump out in November and, assuming he actually leaves the White House, restore some measure of sanity to public affairs. But the pandemic is contributing to an already overwhelming erosion of confidence in national institutions. Even before the virus struck, in its 2018 Trust Barometer the public relations firm Edelman registered an unprecedented drop in public trust connected to... what else?... the election of Trump. “The collapse of trust in the U.S. is driven by a staggering lack of faith in government, which fell 14 points to 33% among the general population,” the report noted. “The remaining institutions of business, media, and NGOs also experienced declines of 10 to 20 points.”

And you won’t be surprised to learn that the situation hadn’t shown signs of improvement by 2020, with American citizens even more mistrustful of their country’s institutions than their counterparts in Brazil, Italy, and India.

That institutional loss of faith reflects a longer-term trend. According to Gallup’s latest survey, only 11% of Americans now trust Congress, 23% big business and newspapers, 24% the criminal justice system, 29% the public school system, 36% the medical system, and 38% the presidency. The only institution a significant majority of Americans trust -- and consider this an irony, given America’s endless twenty-first-century wars -- is the military (73%). The truly scary part is that those numbers have held steady, with minor variations, for the last decade across two very different administrations.

How low does a country’s trust index have to go before it ceases being a country? Commentators have already spent a decade discussing the polarization of the American electorate. Much ink has been spilled over the impact of social media in creating political echo chambers. It’s been 25 years since political scientist Robert Putnam observed that Americans were “bowling alone” (that is, no longer participating in group activities or community affairs in the way previous generations did).

The coronavirus has generally proven a major force multiplier of such trends by making spontaneous meetings of unlike-minded people ever less likely. I suspect I’m typical. I’m giving a wide berth to pedestrians, bicyclists, and other joggers when I go out for my runs. I’m not visiting cafes. I’m not talking to people in line at the supermarket. Sure, I’m on Zoom a lot, but it’s almost always with people I already know and agree with.

Under these circumstances, how will we overcome the enormous gaps of perception now evident in this country to achieve anything like the deeper basic understandings that a nation-state requires? Or will Americans lose faith entirely in elections, newspaper stories, hospitals, and public transportation, and so cease being a citizenry altogether?

Trust is the fuel that makes such institutions run. And it looks as though we passed Peak Trust long ago and may be on a Covid-19 sled heading downhill fast.

The Lockstep Scenario And The Clairvoyant Ruling Class

wrongkindofgreen |  (wrong kind of green dollar-dollar-bill-y'all is just entirely too clever)

“The ruling class exists, it’s not a conspiracy theory. They operate as a class, too. They share the same values, the same sensibility and in Europe and North America they are white. They act in accordance with their interests, which are very largely identical. The failure to understand this is the single greatest problem and defect in left discourse today.”

— John Steppling, Author, Playwright


“This report is crucial reading for anyone interested in creatively considering the multiple, divergent ways in which our world could evolve.”

— Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation

torytelling. Dystopian scenarios. Not Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury or Brunner.

Scenario planning for corporate strategy was pioneered by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s. [Further reading on scenario planning: The Art of the Long View]The following excerpts are highlights from the May 2010 “Scenarios for the Future of Technology & International Development” report produced by The Rockefeller Foundation & Global Business Network. Not just the more known “Lock Step” scenario, but all four scenarios.

Following “Event 201” (Oct 18, 2019), we must concede that the ruling class has been gifted with phenomenal and prophetic intuitions and insights. (They truly are the chosen ones.) Thus it is worthwhile, even mandatory, to study their scenario exercises and simulations.

“We believe that scenario planning has great potential for use in philanthropy to identify unique interventions… scenario planning allows us to achieve impact more effectively.” [p 4]

“The results of our first scenario planning exercise demonstrate a provocative and engaging exploration of the role of technology and the future of globalization.” [p 4]

“This report is crucial reading for anyone interested in creatively considering the multiple, divergent ways in which our world could evolve.” [p 4]

“*I offer a special thanks to Peter Schwartz, Andrew Blau, and the entire team at Global Business Network, who have helped guide us through this stimulating and energizing process.” [*Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation] [p 4]

“*I hope this publication makes clear exactly why my colleagues and I are so excited about the promise of using scenario planning to develop robust strategies.” [*Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation][p 5]

Peter Schwartz is an American futurist, innovator and co-founder of the Global Business Network (GBN), a corporate strategy firm, specializing in future-think & scenario planning. Founded in 1987, GBN was “a membership organization comprising executives from many of the world’s leading companies alongside individual members from business, science, the arts, and academia.” The proprietary list of GBN’s corporate members included “more than 100 of the world’s leading companies, drawn from virtually every industry and continent.” Members paid an annual subscription fee of $35,000. [Source] Following an acquisition by Monitor in 2000, GBN then specialized in scenario-based consulting and training. GBN ceased to be active following the acquisition of the Monitor Group by Deloitte in 2013.

“Perhaps most importantly, scenarios give us a new, shared language that deepens our conversations about the future and how we can help to shape it.” [p 7]

“How can we best position ourselves not just to identify technologies that improve the lives of poor communities but also to help scale and spread those that emerge?” [p 8]

The Four Scenarios

“Once crossed, these axes create a matrix of four very different futures:

LOCK STEP – A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian eadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback

CLEVER TOGETHER – A world in which highly coordinated and successful strategies emerge for addressing both urgent and entrenched worldwide issues

HACK ATTACK – An economically unstable and shock-prone world in which governments weaken, criminals thrive, and dangerous  innovations emerge

SMART SCRAMBLE – An economically depressed world in which individuals and communities develop localized, makeshift solutions to a growing set of problems”

“Each scenario tells a story of how the world, and in particular the developing world, might progress over the next 15 to 20 years,… Accompanying each scenario is a range of elements that aspire to further illuminate life, technology, and philanthropy in that world.” [p 17]

Scenario #1: LOCK STEP

“In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain — originating from wild geese — was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months, the majority of them healthy young adults. The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.” [p 18]

“The pandemic blanketed the planet — though disproportionate numbers died in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, where the virus spread like wildfire in the absence of official containment protocols. But even in developed countries, containment was a challenge. The United States’s initial policy of “strongly discouraging” citizens from flying proved deadly in its leniency, accelerating the spread of the virus not just within the U.S. but across borders. However, a few countries did fare better — China in particular. The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter postpandemic
recovery. [p 18]

So Far, The Great Reset Is Nicely Tracking The Rockefeller Foundation's Lockstep Scenario

The Great Reset was laid out a decade ago by the Rockefeller Foundation (showed you the rabbit hole last saturday, but nobody went in head first)

“In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain — originating from wild geese — was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months…”

Then the scenario gets very interesting:

“The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.” This sounds eerily familiar.

“During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems — from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty — leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.”

At first, the notion of a more controlled world gained wide acceptance and approval. Citizens willingly gave up some of their sovereignty-and their privacy- to more paternalistic states in for greater safety and stability. Citizens were more tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight, and national leaders had more latitude to impose order in the ways they saw fit. In developed countries, this heightened oversight took many forms: biometric IDs for all citizens, for example, and tighter regulation of key industries whose stability was deemed vital to national interests. In many developed countries, enforced cooperation with a suite of new regulations and agreements slowly but steadily restored both order and, importantly, economic growth.

Collective Automatic Physical Distrust Of All Other People

Because I've cultivated a baseline of vague digust until disproven or aesthetically overcome - the social distancing for health program doesn't work on me at all. But I'm curious to know if any of you feel any differently about these humans after several months of the social distancing programme?  Part of this I really do understand, because for me personally, disgust is the immediate and acute precursor to violence. If you can make these humans all a priori disgusted with one another....,

off-guardian |  Western civilization, led by the US government and media, has embarked upon a campaign of mass psychological terrorism designed to cover for the collapsing economy, set up a new pretext for Wall Street’s ongoing plunder expedition, radically escalate the police state, deeply traumatize people into submission to total social conformity, and radically aggravate the anti-social, anti-human atomization of the people.

The pretext for this abomination is an epidemic which objectively is comparable to the seasonal flu and is caused by the same kind of Coronavirus we’ve endured so long without totalitarian rampages and mass insanity.

The global evidence is converging on the facts: This flu is somewhat more contagious than the norm and is especially dangerous for those who are aged and already in poor health from pre-existing maladies. It is not especially dangerous for the rest of the population. 

The whole concept of “lockdowns” is exactly upside down, exactly the wrong way any sane society would respond to this circumstance. 

It’s the vulnerable who should be shielded while nature takes its course among the general population, who should go about life as usual. Dominionist-technocratic rigidity can’t prevent an epidemic from cycling through the population in spite of the delusions of that religion, especially since Western societies began their measures far too late anyway.

So it’s best to let herd immunity develop as fast as it naturally will, at which time the virus recedes from lack of hosts (and is likely to mutate in a milder direction along the way). This is the only way to bring a safer environment for all including the most vulnerable. 

The fact that most societies have rejected the sane, scientific route in favor of doomed-to-fail attempts at a forcible violent segregation and sterilization is proof that governments aren’t concerned with the public health (as if we didn’t know that already from a thousand policies of poisoning the environment while gutting the health care system), but are very ardent to use this crisis they artificially generated in order radically to escalate their police state power toward totalitarian goals.

The whole concept of self-isolation and anti-social “distancing” is radically anti-human. We evolved over millions of years to be social creatures living in tight-knit groups. Although modern societies ideologically and socioeconomically work to massify and atomize people, nevertheless almost all of us still seek close human companionship in our lives.

(I suspect most of the internet police-state-mongers are not only fascists at heart but are confirmed misanthropic loners who couldn’t care less about human closeness.)

This terror campaign seeks to blast to pieces any remaining human closeness, which means any remaining humanity as such, the better to isolate individual atoms for subjection to total domination. Arendt wrote profoundly on this goal of totalitarian governments, though even she didn’t envision a state-driven cult of the literal physical repulsion of every atom from every other atom.

So far the people are submitting completely to a terror campaign dedicated to the total eradication of whatever community was left in the world, and especially whatever community was starting to be rebuilt.

Such As You Are - Economic Growth Cannot Be Decoupled From Increased Resource Consumption

vice |  As societies get richer, they consume more resources. That also means they generate more pollution, driving climate change and destroying natural ecosystems.

We need to somehow break this link between material wealth and environmental catastrophe. That’s why financial institutions and governments have been focused on the idea of ‘decoupling’ GDP growth from resource use.

The idea of ‘decoupling’ is driven by the recognition that to stay within the ‘safe limit’ of 1.5 degrees Celsius, we have to dramatically reduce our material consumption of Earth's resources.

The assumption is that it is possible to continue growing the global economy while reducing our actual resource use and material footprint, perhaps by shifting to renewable energy.

This notion has been most recently articulated in the book More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next, by Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Financial and other data, McAfee argued, shows we can actually easily reduce our material footprint while continuing to grow our economies in a win-win scenario.

But new scientific analysis by a group of systems scientists and economists who have advised the United Nations seems to pull the rug out from under this entire enterprise. The new research indicates that the conventional approach is based on selective readings of statistical data.

McAfee argues, for instance, that as we are increasing wealth, the productivity motor of capitalism is driving us to greater heights of efficiency due to better technologies. This means we are able to make stuff faster and smaller using less materials and in some cases less energy. And that in turn implies we are causing less pollution. The problem is that this story, according to the new research, ignores how greater efficiency in certain regions or sectors is not slowing down the overall consumption machine. Within the wider system these efficiencies are enabling us to consume even greater quantities of resources overall.