Endgame

Last week Alex Jones' new movie Endgame came out. I suggest you go watch it right now. It may be the most important movie you ever see.

What's it about? Look at the tags attached to this post. Need to know more? Well, here's some reviews: one at the the Daily Llama, one at Smoker's Corner (that's one snazzy background he's got, gotta get me one of those....), and a final pair of reviews by a pair of (formerly) 'good' Bush-voting Republicans. Read those first if you want. Then watch the goddamn movie.

If you don't walk away from this movie without at the very least a cold, paralyzing dread clenching in the pit of your stomach, well, there's probably no hope for you. Preferably, you should finish it filled with a deep and abiding anger, an outrage that burns like an emotional Chernobyl, and a righteous passion to do everything you can to stop the crime against all of humanity whose final stages are being laid right fucking now. You need to see this movie because you need to wake the fuck up, because this really is one of the last warning's you'll get.

Why the hell are you still reading this? Whatever you're doing, or whatever you think you should be doing, it is almost impossible that it is more important than seeing this movie. I don't care if you're getting ready for a job interview or sitting in your cubicle, if you're studying for an exam or about to leave for one, whatever it is, drop it, and go watch the movie.

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The Red Pill's Bitter Aftertaste

Back in June, I flew for the first time, back to Canada. Made a transfer in Atlanta, where I was greeted, as soon as I got off the plane, with a giant banner saying 'Welcome to America, Land of Freedom!' or some shit like that, all in gold letters with a photo-quality American flag fluttering in the background. Later, while I was waiting to take off my shoes and have my bag pawed through by a surly, ill-educated trailer-park spawn, I couldn't help but think of this website (while, admittedly, listening to the album it's associated with, but then again, Year Zero was appropriate. Regarding the website, you might have to wait a bit for it to load. Once it does, just click and move your mouse around. You'll see.) At one point I made eye contact with a random traveller from the Middle East, inevitably getting far more thorough treatment than the petty humiliations of security theatre I and every other traveller was forced to endure. Nevertheless I felt an instant empathy with the plight of this man; a part of my brain that hadn't really sparked in years sputtered for life, however pathetically and briefly.

I think that was the moment, for me, when the shell that had been built up around my brain finally began to crack. It didn't spread very quickly, not at first. This was back in June, after all, and I can't honestly claim to have woken up any earlier than, well, last week. But then that is the way of crumbling dams: at first a small crack, which spreads, slowly ... until all at once, the flood.

Watch this. Over a million other people have. It was the cold shower that woke my ass up, and maybe it'll do the same for you.

Waking up is a funny thing. I was walking through Shinjuku station on my way to work, and all at once I felt tears in my eyes, because for the first time in years it really hit me that this time it was my people - the Anglo culture of which I am deeply proud, the culture that has given so much of freedom and science and technology and wealth to the world, that has taken civilization to the greatest heights it has yet achieved - this time, it was my people who housed the evil. That we were the bad guys, and that the Muslims, bless their bewildered, confused, hateful little hearts, were right to fight against us with every ounce of their strength.

I remember when 9/11 first happened (well, yeah, we all do.) At the time I'd never really considered that the government could be behind it, but still, a few days later, after the networks had been full of nothing but collapsing towers and broken five-sided geometry, I had enough savvy to tell my girlfriend at the time "Whatever happens, don't let me fall for the propaganda. Don't let me do anything stupid." Well, I didn't join the army or become a weapons scientist, so I have my ex to thank for that much at least (hell, if I hadn't dated her I'd've still been in the militia when the towers went down), but I still bought the propaganda, drinking deep of the kool-aid, letting the fever take over my brain. Then again, we broke up a couple of years after that, and it wasn't until later that I really started to buy into it, to really believe the lies and the halftruths and the misdirections and the perverted logic that's been shoveled so liberally into our mouths over the past several years. Hell, I remember getting into an argument with David Brin on his blog, where the guy tried his best to convince me with logical argument that the current pack of criminals was far worse than the muslims or the crazier elements of the left ... I couldn't defeat the logic, so I just left. Still, the propaganda kept it's hold on my brain.

It's not that I'm stupid. I am, if not a genius, certainly well above the herd. But intelligence can be as great a curse as stupidity when it comes to well-crafted webs of lies, because once the lies start to settle in and make themselves at home as part of one's self-image, an intelligent mind is much more adept at the doublethink required to keep it all in place.

I'll give this to the evil shits responsible for this nightmare: they are masters of memetic engineering, on a par with Mohammed and Marx. They know just how to get past all the mental defenses, how to manipulate human psychology with inter-related (and contradictory) complexes of memes. Hell, they've been setting memeplexes up against each other. 'Left' and 'Right' are just arbitrary camps full of manufactured ideas designed to be mutually antagonistic (thus keeping the politically motivated parts of the population at daggers drawn) while being supportive of the overall engenda (tax, control, and eventually, enslave.)

Basically, it works like this. The Left believes Bush and his court of grand viziers and sycophants are a bunch of evil fucks, and their war a complete sham. They think the real threat is environmental degradation generally, and global warming specifically. The Right, on the other hand, thinks global warming is a crock of steaming bullshit, and that terrorism generally, and the rise of an Islamic caliphate specifically, is the most dire threat facing Western civilization. Thus the Left is led to believe that those on the Right are criminals against the environment and duped supporters of an evil war, while those on the Right see the Left as either blind or traitorous when it comes to the war, along with being brainwashed victims of the new Gaianist religion with it's apocalyptic fairy tales of climate change.

Let me set you straight, in case you hadn't already figured it out. Terrorism is bullshit. So is global warming. Both are there to keep you scared (The terrorists might nuke us! The ice caps might melt!). Not only does this make it easier to control you - hysterical people instinctively look to authority figures - it also makes it easier to bleed you dry of resources. Carbon taxes limiting how big your house can be, how much electricity you can use, how big and fast a car you can have and how far you can go in it, how much you're allowed to fly ... all of these come directly out of global warming. It keeps you immobile, keeps you poor, and lets the government soak you like never before (income tax might be a tax on your label, but carbon tax? That's a tax on your existence. Because your very existence is a threat to the entire biosphere, awful, filthy human creature that you are.)

Terrorism keeps you scared of other people around the world, and keeps those people scared of you, which if you're trying to build a global empire is a very useful trick as it acts as a firewall against the formation of a global resistance. It justifies wars, and - more to the point - serves as an excuse for a steady ratcheting increase in 'security' regulations at home (security, not to protect us from terrorists, but to protect our would-be masters from us.)

For the last several years I came down on the right: global warming bullshit, Islamic terrorism dangerous! That's embarrassing, a little. But no more shameful than falling for the global warming line. Left and Right are more psychological predispositions than well-thought-out political positions, and the twin lies that have been endlessly repeated by the media are designed to appeal to one or the other (environmental catastrophe for the caring nurturer type, shadowy foreign threat for the watchful protector type.) Damn near everyone fell for one or the other and sometimes even both; few have been those who fell for neither, but then wisdom is precious because it is rare.

The wannabe emperors that are settling into power now, in this the time when the culmination of their scheme approaches, forgot to take one thing into account. Fear can be used to control us, yes, but only for a while. At first we look to our leaders; that is our instinct, as social animals evolved for life in a complex hierarchy. But alone among the social mammals, we have the ability to think; we look for leadership not just to our governments but to our thinkers, not just to the powerful but to the wise. And as time goes on, it is the wise that have the greatest influence, for even the most foolish of men - so long as he retains a soul - knows the truth when it is properly explained to him, and the finding and teaching of truth are the great strengths of the wise.

The nearer their plan comes to fruition, the more obvious it will be, and the more the truth will start to take hold. Those on the Right will realize that terrorism is a sick practical joke of awesome proportions, perpetrated by their own government against them; those on the Left will come to see that global warming is nothing more than a willful misrepresentation of science. They'll get to talking together, and together, they'll tear down the edifice of lies like the Berlin Wall.

Make no mistake, we are not out of the woods yet. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better. I'm talking biowarfare (my guess: smallpox, say in Oregon.) Martial law. Maybe a nuclear exchange or two (not a planet-buster, just turning a country or two into wasteland.) Disappearances, concentration camps, secret police, conscription, the whole nine yards of the classic militarized fascist police state, updated for the 21st century, scarier than anything that's come before, like something out of the Book of Revelations. This particular generation of homo demonicus is playing for all the marbles this time, and as always they mean to win.

Hell, I'm not sure if I'm going to survive this. I'm not sure if you will. I'm deeply frightened for the future of my family, and my friends. I look at the faces of the children in my kids' classes, and I wonder.

One thing I am sure about. The people will wake up, and when they do there will be a revolution. Much blood will be spilled leading up to it, and rivers will flow by the end. But when the dust settles, it will be the heads of the would-be neo-aristocracy that are impaled on pikes and set on display as an eternal monument to the greatest depths of evil yet plumbed by the human soul, as an eternal reminder to any who might plot to follow their path into darkness, and seduce others into following them down it.

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More Pretty Pictures

You know, two things sort of pop out at me from this: first, the temperature seems to do a lot of quickly darting up and then easing it's way back down into a nice long ice age.

That, and if you lean in and sort of squint, it looks like the rise in temperature leads the rise in CO2 by, oh, eight hundred years or so.

(Image found at New Scientist.)

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The Sunlens

Greg Benford, physicist and science fiction writer, suggested a few years ago that global warming could be stopped by means of putting a giant fresnel lens in orbit at the L1 point between the Earth and the Sun. This would lower the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, thus cooling the entire planet a fractional but crucial amount; essentially, a parasol for the planet.

It's occurred to me that maybe a similar system could be used to increase the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, thus causing the entire planet to warm. But why, you ask, would you want to do such a thing?

Well, if a new ice age were to start, could be mighty handy....

Beyond that, a giant sunlens (albeit on an even vaster scale) could be useful for terraforming Mars

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Global Climate Control

Everyone's got it wrong on climate change. One side is convinced it's being caused primarily by people, and the other thinks its not. All the political thunder about anthropogenic climate change driven by CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere obscures what is, in fact, a greater threat still: the Sun. Ultimately, the vast majority of the Earth's energy comes from the Sun, and the Sun is not a constant source. Modulated by various cycles with periods ranging from decades to millenia, the amount of Solar energy rises and falls and with it goes the temperature of the Earth. If Sun's magnetic field intensifies, cosmic rays are blocked, cloud formation is inhibited, and the Earth warms. If the field weakens, the cosmic rays come through, clouds form to block the Sunlight, and the Earth begins to freeze.

Climate can change drastically, in short periods of time: from dense jungles in the Sahara to baking deserts, or from a tropical England to one under a mile of ice, in a hundred years. Changes too fast to have anything to do with CO2, at least before humans came along (though the initial die-off in plant-life, while the biosphere adjusts to the new climate regime, likely causes some fluctuations in global concentrations.) Human activities may well contribute to climate change, but historically it has been the Sun, and at the present moment we are unlikely to overpower it's influence. Especially not as an accidental byproduct of daily existence.

Now, I've been muttering about solar forcing of climate change to friends and family for months. Most of them have seen Gore's movie, of course, and get extremely indignant if CO2's dominance (and humanity's culpability) are questioned, for it has become for the vast majority a moral issue far more than a scientific one. Large multitudes, ashamed perhaps at their affluence, seem to almost want to believe that civilization is the villain on the global stage of climate change, ignoring that we are but the most recent character to step onto that stage, in the midst of a drama of billions of years, and - as if that were not enough - also mere ants, creeping about the toes of giants.

Make no mistake. The Sun is the villain of this piece. Thus it has always been. And our panic, as we sense the Earth growing briefly warmer, loudly hold ourselves to blame, and then imagine that we'll fry our dear planet like an egg and rush about to try and stop it? A mere comedic interlude, while the actor changes clothes offstage, prior to coming back and decimating us with the precise opposite of what we'd expected.

In 2020, the Sun's cycles are set to descend to lowest level of magnetic activity of the past 200 years. Back, in other words, to those of the little ice age. A global cold snap, which could be far more damaging than global warming, decimating crops and rendering large parts of the inhabited world at the very least rather uncomfortable.

Over the long run, the Sun is far more dangerous to civilization than carbon dioxide. Were the climate to descend back into a real ice age - an event that can happen with little warning - civilization, if it survived at all, would do so in a severely truncated form. If civilization is to survive into the Long Now, it must find a way of mitigating the Sun's influence, smoothing out the variations in temperature to ensure the Earth never becomes too cold (or, for that matter, too warm.)

It's funny. People talk to me about global warming, find out I think the anthropogenic hypothesis is a bad joke on the scientific endeavor, and assume I'm a dupe of the oil industry or the American government (sadly, no one ever takes me for a paid shill....) They think that when I object to the strain on the economy that lowering CO2 emissions would take, it's because I'm more concerned for industry than for nature. Rarely does the conversation last long enough beyond this point for me to explain that doing anything to hurt the economy, in the name of fighting climate change, is nutes, because ... the economy has to be as strong as it can get, precisely so it can fight climate change.

It's not quite as crazy as it sounds. Already, there are numerous proposals aimed at geoengineering. They range from the simple and cheap (plant lots of trees, seed plankton blooms), to the more ambitious (giant sulfate clouds above Antarctica) to the epic (a vast sunshade orbiting between the Earth and the Sun). Most, admittedly, are motivated out of a belief in anthropogenic forcing, but they are none the less useful for that. While the primary cause of climate change may well be the variations in solar magnetism and cosmic rays, the proximate cause is rate of cloud formation, and this is something our civilization can get a handle on, albeit at enormous cost.

The goal, however, should not be merely stopping climate change. It should be controlling it. Bringing water and shade to regions that currently have only sand and heat; bringing warmth to regions that are currently frozen. Humanity might be the instrument that finally greens the planet over its whole surface, from pole to equator.

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Type 1 Environmentalism

I just finished watching Gore's movie. Yes yes, I know ... you waited til now to see it? Listen, I only stay current on comic book movies. At any rate, there was one comment that he made, right at the end of the movie, in an offhand way (one which he repeated recently in Congress, I believe), to the effect that he believed we would get rich fighting climate change.

.... the fuck!? I thought. More in surprise than in actual disagreement.

Don't get me wrong. I'm coming here from the position of a man who is very skeptical of the climate change shibboleth. The science seems iffy to me (not obviously ridiculuous, but also not rock solid), and the motives of those pushing it seem downright suspicious sometimes, a suspicion I base largely on their media tactics. I was only watching the movie because a friend argued - quite correctly - that I couldn't be dismissive of everything Al Gore said without at least seeing the damn thing. Besides, he'd gone to the trouble of reading some pretty extensive pages I sent him on the solar forcing theory, so ... fair's fair.

You can just picture me there, one o'clock in the morning, pen and pad in hand as I watched the movie and jotted down every unsupported comment, every suspicious tactic, every dubious claim, and everything that just plain annoyed me about the style of the movie. And I filled a few pages. Al Gore's an annoying guy.

But that damn throw-away referrence to getting rich off global warming ... that ate at me.
And y'know? I think the Gore may just be on to something.

The main proposed solution to global warming that is likely to be have any effect is technological change in the direction of greater energy independance at the household level, utilizing sources such as solar, wind, tidal, or whatever happens to be locally available. That technological change is also likely to lead in short order to a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale (you know, types I, II, and III, respectively corresponding to total control over planetary, solar, and galactic energy resources.) Solar in particular will likely lead the way, due to advances in design such as the sunflower, and in materials science, developing increasingly cheap and efficient photovoltaic cells. Throw in the Sun's globally available nature, and the universal market that thus presents itself, and the history of solar power over the next twenty years or so has almost already been written. Cheap solar alone could revolutionize the world; with power becoming easily available in remote regions, it may well prove to be the technology that helps to bootstrap much of the Gap out of poverty.

Disturbing as it might be, Al Gore might actually be right that we - as a species - will get rich off of fighting global warming. I imagine he intends to, and he's not the only one. Indeed, the whole global warming story may well be, in part, a scare tactic in order to juice up demand for the coming production lines of household solar power panel installations. Gore's deliberate identification with the environmental movement is just good positioning; he's becoming the public face for a technology that may well revolutionize the world (and selling it with a scientifically credible scare story that can't help but generate massive attention for him.) But giving the entire planet access to Core standards-of-living, in a vastly more efficient way, can not possibly be a bad thing.

Indeed, the coming paradigm is likely to be one of far greater local independance than is currently the case. Most households will likely produce their own power (or buy it off neighbors who have more solar panels), and their own goods (with late-generation reprap style fabbers), eventually out of nothing more than dirt. The old infrastructures for power and the movement of goods will be largely abandoned: so long as you have access to the internet, you can go anywhere you please, start with a fab and a few solar panels, and grow your physical possessions as much as you want.

Food technology, also, is likely to become more of a local operation. Green techniques such as indoor aquaculture (a massive number of large aquariums filled with fish, stacked and linked so that they form a sort of contained ecosystem) are likely to make it possible for urban areas to grow much of their own food. Oddly, 'farmer' may come to describe an increasingly common occupation in much of the world, Core regions included. With much of the traditonal economy rapidly failing from lack of use following the near-simultaneous spread of repraps and solar, a lot of people in retail and manufacturing will be out of work ... and they'll still need money, because time, land, and food are three things that havene't gotten any cheaper. Gap regions that integrate through this route - adopting repraps and solar power and simply bootstrapping themselves - won't be demeaned with the prospect of lost jobs, as massive numbers of them don't have jobs, and working in a fish factory or some other green industrial food production method is a step up from nothing (especially when you've now got information, electricity and material abundance, thrown in for free.)

All of these technologies point in one direction, which is that of a world vastly richer than it currently is. Indeed, within short order, the diffusion of industrial power will likely lead to something very close to a Type I civilization, essentially controlling all the energy available in the vicinity of the earth. One might imagine whole forests of solar panels growing to cover the deserts, generating vast amounts of power from land previously useless to man or to living things, making those that own them very rich indeed. Make no mistake, the mid-East's current centrality to the energy economy is unlikely to go away when the oil does. Europe doesn't get much sunshine.

Then there are the possibilities for geothermally tapping volcanoes, harnessing tidal power from the oceans deepest currents, or wind power from the jet stream ... more challenging from an engineering perspective, but no less plausible for all that.

One can't help but wonder if there won't be some unforseen side effect of harnessing so much energy, likely dwarfing what the biosphere is capable of harnessing on its own. One way or another, civilization is set to become the dominant influence on the Earth's climate. Green technologies will get us there even faster in the long run, and I'm betting it's not long before the Greens realize that themselves and end up despising that which it once enthused over. It doesn't stretch the imagination that civilization might well end up deciding for itself what the climate will be; that, with some of the vast energies it harnesses, climate itself might come to be understood and directed as desired. In the meantime, it'll be more like an ape blundering about in a computer lab.

Some chaos is to be expected as the planet's phase space lurches towards the Singularity. It's oscillating towards a very different attractor from the one it's been on the past three billion years or so, in a lot more ways than just the climate. The entire solar system is about to become a much more interesting place.

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