France v. England; Greens v. Bitcoin; & Europe v. Europeans
Here’s another excerpt from our new book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order.
Excerpt from "The Anti-Industrial Revolution" by Martin Hutchinson
The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset is a major revision of the economic policies that have pulled humanity to its present state of modest prosperity. Its central premise is captured by the epigraph: “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” But ownership is what divides modern free men and women from medieval serfs—without it, we are subject to the whims of our masters and unable to fashion our destiny. The Great Reset not only resets our social status, but also, over time, it will reset our living standards to those of our serf ancestors.
The WEF, based in Switzerland, aims to create a Fourth Industrial Revolution; apparently, electrification and computers were numbers two and three. (As an old-fashioned sort, I prefer to think there has been only one Industrial Revolution, which is still ongoing, and that subsequent technological advances are developments of the original leap forward, which unlike its supposed successors, was not a mere technological add-on to previous progress, but a paradigm change in humanity’s destiny.) The Covid-19 pandemic was the pretext for the group to call for a “Great Reset,” in which governments can change the conditions of economic life so that the WEF’s own policy preferences are favored. As President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in 2009, “Never let a plague go to waste.”
According to Schwab and Malleret: “to achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.”
Schwab’s Great Reset agenda has three main components. First, it “steers the market towards fairer outcomes”—Schwab and his cronies deciding what is fair. Second, the Great Reset agenda ensures that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability. (There appears to be no provision for those of us who do not share these goals.) The third priority is to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.”
Clearly, the Great Reset agenda has little in common with conventional market capitalism. To highlight the differences, I will compare its approach point by point with the policies that gave Britain the original Industrial Revolution—the most comprehensive advance in human civilization since the invention of agriculture, and with more unequivocally positive effects on living standards. I shall demonstrate that in almost all areas, the Great Reset advocates the opposite of those policies. It then seems inescapable that it is likely to produce the opposite results, in other words, an Anti-Industrial Revolution, in which human economic progress in living standards goes into reverse.
Michael Walsh wrote about the European Union’s continued insistence on knee-capping its own citizens.
E.U. Steals a Lump of Coal for Christmas
The headline says it all: EU reaches deal on major carbon market reform. Readers above the age of reason will know immediately that when an overweening body such as the European Union reaches a deal on carbon reform, there's trouble up ahead. And sure enough, there is:
EU member states and parliamentarians on Sunday announced an agreement for a major reform to the bloc's carbon market, the central plank of its ambitions to reduce emissions and invest in climate-friendly technologies. The deal aims to accelerate emissions cuts, phase out free allowances to industries and targets fuel emissions from the building and road transport sectors, according to a European Parliament statement.
Naturally, there's a catch:
The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) allows electricity producers and industries with high energy demands such as steel and cement to purchase "free allowances" to cover their carbon emissions under a "polluter pays" principle. The quotas are designed to decrease over time to encourage them to emit less and invest in greener technologies as part of the European Union's ultimate aim of achieving carbon neutrality.
In other words, it's just another scheme (in both the European and the American sense of the word) to mandate a solution to an imaginary problem and thus reducing the comfort—not to mention the freedom—of the people.
Richard Fernandez looked into the environmentalist movement’s recently declared war on Bitcoin.
In Defense of Bitcoin
When Bitcoin was first designed by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, it had two key features. First, unlike paper money which can be debased by overprinting, the total supply of Bitcoin cryptocurrency units was capped at 21 million. To ensure this number is never exceeded, the mathematical task necessary to make it intentionally grows progressively harder, like an asymptotically rising cliff, until no more than the limiting quantity can be produced. Second, validating the newly mined Bitcoin was itself computationally expensive to the network so that once it was registered, it was ruinously costly to counterfeit it.
Together the two computational exercises comprised "proof of work," which supported the integrity of the concept. You couldn't make Bitcoin without expending a lot of real physical electricity; nor could you demonetize a coin and replace it with one fashioned by a politician. Chiseling out and altering a single Bitcoin or consummated transaction would change the mathematical signature of the whole blockchain of which it was part, invalidating the whole, a fantastically difficult task. That resistance to alteration made it real.
These were deliberate design choices picked to mimic the physical properties of gold. Like gold, an element which is present in only small quantities in the earth's crust, Bitcoin rarity was thus guaranteed. Like gold, which could be assayed against dilution and forgery, Bitcoin could be exactly verified and its bits engraved in the public, distributed blockchain so there could be no doubt about its authenticity.
The purpose of these design elements was to insulate it from attempts at manipulation. By emulating the properties of gold, Bitcoin became attractive to the financial industry. According to Susan Arbetter of State of Politics, "The allure of cryptocurrency is that by using blockchain technology, financial transactions are instantaneous, secure and very difficult to trace."
But its success has attracted the very attention it had hoped to avoid. Environmentalists, who are always looking for some new activity to denounce, noticed that Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than Finland, and began to condemn the process. Before long, their political lapdogs took the hint and got to work. And here's their biggest success thus far -- New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently signed a law "banning Bitcoin mining operations that run on carbon-based power sources."
Peter Smith wrote about the environmentalist religion.
Bishop Klaus and the Reset Religion
Under the mastery of a global elite, the World Economic Forum is out to remake the world. To this end, as I have previously noted, its 1973 Manifesto is a tad less ambitious than is its 2020 Manifesto. No doubt any future manifesto will be bolder still. Unnerving? Indeed. For context, though not for peace of mind, turn to a quite different manifesto: A Christian Manifesto by Francis Schaeffer. I doubt Schaeffer had Klaus Schwab in mind when writing his manifesto, first published in 1981. The Great Reset had not come of age. On the other hand, as a matter of pure speculation, I wonder whether perhaps Schwab has read Schaeffer.
As humanism supplants Christianity, Shaeffer writes, the freedoms and prosperity which Western civilization owes to Christianity are taken for granted. True enough. Among many in the increasingly secular West you’ll find a hangover of lots of Christian moral precepts, with little accompanying insight into whence they came. Needless to say, anchorless precepts are disposable as circumstances dictate. Then it’s a lottery as to what comes next.
Humanism can create any number of moral orders. It’s a bootstraps creed, susceptible to the politics of the day. Things can go badly wrong. We don’t have to go to the brutal excesses of history; say, to the French revolutionary Reign of Terror or the Holocaust or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Not comparing, but how about the wanton killing of millions of healthy unborn babies or the (demonic) chemical and physical maiming of mentally-disturbed teenagers, confused about their sexual identity. Evidently, today’s humanist moral order finds this not just acceptable but righteous. Humanism is truly a flexible creed. Who knows where it will land tomorrow.
Shaeffer “guesses” that whatever flavor it takes, it will likely end in some form of “elite authoritarianism.” He is eerily prescient about the form such authoritarianism will take. He points particularly to the emergence of what he calls a “technocratic elite.” And approvingly quotes American physicist and science historian Gerard Holton.
More and more frequently, major decisions that profoundly affect our daily lives have a large scientific or technological content…if the laymen cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite, Margaret Mead wrote about scientists elevated to the status of priests… now there’s a name for this elevation… From the point of view of John Locke, the name is slavery.
And haven’t we effectively become vassals, if not already slaves? When it’s claimed that ninety-seven percent of climate scientists say that the science is settled— a science we can’t begin to understand—then what choice do we have but to fall into line? Sure, it’s not nearly ninety-seven percent, but it is the received wisdom. And it has the unqualified support of almost all politicians; all media hacks; the majority of corporate big-wigs; and, to boot, activists of pedigree aplenty: Hollywood stars; King Charles; David Attenborough; Al Gore; Bill Gates; Klaus Schwab; Greta Thunberg; and many others. Ask your next-door neighbors about the cumulative greenhouse effect of CO2 and of its radiative forcing. Blank look. Ask them whether climate change is a serious even existential problem. Chances are they’ll be onboard.
Among laymen, it’s only an incorrigible few (of us) "deniers" who have the temerity to question "the science." The rest simply follow the script. And so be it; if that means replacing reliable and affordable sources of energy with intermittent and costly forms of energy; and, soon -- wait for it -- having smart meters compulsorily installed in our homes, giving the authorities the ability to monitor our power usage and cut us off at will. I’d say that degree of servility is close enough to slavery. However, it needed another group of scientists, in this case medical scientists, to close out the game.
Tom Finnerty blogged about the different approaches to climate protestors on either side of the Chanel.
England v. France
And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy, does a photoshoot.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Gloving
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Richard Fernandez, Jenny Kennedy, and Tom Finnerty. And, once again, don’t forget to order our book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. Christmas is just a few weeks away!
All this and more this week at The Pipeline!