Trans-Digital vs Oil
(ISRAEL SHAMIR) Let’s begin with good news. Resplendent August, the last summer month, has blessed the North! The sun is shining, the lakes are still warm enough for swimming, the mushrooms are ready for picking, the wild raspberries are crimson and sweet, the ginger Bambi fawns frolic in the forest as it reaches up to our summer house; God’s in His heaven— all’s right with the world! Or is it? Despite unabated efforts to tip us into panic and despair, this sturdy world isn’t easily thrown into turmoil, and there are even signs of improvement (though thunder clouds still hover at the horizon).
People are moving out of the big cities into smaller towns, reversing a long trend. The overcrowded capital cities began to unload their surplus dwellers. Stockholm began to release its population; so does Moscow. Innovative Russians ponder plans to rebuild their capital in faraway Siberia, leaving Moscow high and dry. Salaries of agricultural workers and builders go up, for guest workers are not easy to find. As the flow of migrants and refugees dries up, workers’ salaries have begun to grow.
International travel has become so difficult that only the very rich or the very obstinate still venture abroad, and so there is more domestic tourism – something that was almost extinct. Why would a sane Swede, Briton or Russian holiday in his own country, when it is cheaper and more exotic to go to Spain, Turkey, Greece? Now with these endless encumbrances they would rather spend their time and money in their own country. A Swede will discover the mountain forests of Bergslagen or the medieval town of Gotland; a Russian may visit the Vologda monasteries forgotten centuries ago in the Northern wilderness, or tour the lovely Altai Mountains; a Briton, instead of the Canary Islands, now may go to rugged Cornwall or visit the lofty Salisbury Cathedral. We never thought much of globalisation, and our desire was granted: globalisation is out. This is definitely a positive outcome of a very negative development.
However, regime tightening-up continues all over the world. Some elementary freedoms nobody doubted, so basic we didn’t even knew they were freedoms – going to a pub, lighting a cig, driving a mile, chatting with pals, flirting with gals, spending pocket money, speaking your mind – have been discarded like chaff on the threshing ground. The right to gather, to demonstrate, to decide one’s own fate, even the right to control our own bodies is now dismissed as unsanitary and villainous. The authorities always pretend to do it in our interests, because they know what is best for us.
Years ago, they went after tobacco companies; the judges found them guilty for every case of cancer and fined them billions. People applauded; nobody likes big companies. Only later did they begin to make life hell for people with the innocent habit. Now they go after oil companies. They are big and dirty; nobody likes them. But very soon, our heating bills, our transportation and food costs will skyrocket. And then we’ll discover that to stay warm in winter is not a natural right, but a great luxury.
Today the price of oil went south again, continuing the downward trend. Yet the price at the pump never goes down, so we do not get to enjoy this result of the oil war. But somebody does: the digital giants. Mammoth oil has been defeated in the discourse by sleek digital giants. Twenty years ago, when the US went to the Middle East wars, it was tactful to call each a “war for oil”, unless you were prepared to face a charge of (God forbid!) anti-Semitism. In vain did we point out that Big Oil didn’t need Iraq’s oil and could not profit from it. We noted that Afghanistan had no oil, but the invasion was still called a War for Oil. The oil companies were powerless to counteract the charge without pointing at Israel, and so they sat and fumed in stony silence.
Now there is a serious offensive against oil companies. The Dems drafted a bill that would tax Exxon, Chevron and a handful of other major oil and gas companies, claiming that the biggest climate polluters should pay for the floods, wildfires and other disasters that scientists have linked to the burning of “fossil fuels”. The tax is estimated at $500 billion for the next decade. Before you cheer at the downfall of warmonger Big Oil, remember that they will transfer every penny of this tax onto you, their customers. And who is pushing for the tax? Our beloved philanthropists, says the New York Times:
“These oil companies and their executives are by far the most responsible parties for the climate crisis,” said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a philanthropic group that helped develop the proposed legislation. Oil companies have accused the Rockefeller Family Fund of bankrolling a climate conspiracy by funding research that has been used in litigation against the fossil fuel industry.
The story goes back to 2016, when the Rockefeller family was accused of encouraging and bankrolling the investigations and campaigns against oil companies. We continue in the un-paywalled version:
Both journalism organizations that investigated the Exxon Mobil were financed by Rockefeller philanthropies, though the organizations say that their donors have no control over what they write.
This is a very likely claim, for sure! The donors are as likely to support The Unz Review as the publications they do actually support, indeed!
Rockefellers have also supported groups like Greenpeace and 350.org that have investigated and criticized the company. A conference on oil and climate was held at the offices shared by two Rockefeller family funds with intent to “establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.” Alan Jeffers, an Exxon Mobil spokesman, said in an interview, “At every turn, as we saw the company coming under attack, there was a link back to either the Rockefeller Brothers Fund or the Rockefeller Family Fund.”
For us it is particularly relevant that the earliest known script of the Covid pandemic and the preferred response to it (Lockstep 2010 – here is a rather ridiculous “debunking of this accusation”) was created by this same Rockefeller family, that old enemy of mankind. Their unique hold on the US had been ostensibly broken in 1911 by a Supreme Court decision, but like the mythic Hydra, it grew new heads and is back at its old games of control. Covid and the Green Agenda seem to be inseparable as Siamese twins, both born and weaponized by these international “philanthropists”.
It wasn’t long ago that they urged us to discard our trusty refrigerators because they cause “ozone holes”! I really do not care much for the Green Deal and its mandatory austerity.
Underneath the noisy battle against oil companies, the real economy is quietly being strangled by the digital economy. You may choose to look even deeper into the rabbit hole and glimpse what lurks below. There you will discover the trans-humanist agenda, a peculiar idea of creating android-supermen and discarding ordinary humans. The denial of God is at the foundation of this idea. Nietzsche made it popular in the beginnings of the 20th century, after announcing his famous quip “God is dead”. Julian Huxley gave it the name of transhumanism.
The idea has gotten a boost in the peripheries of Soviet thought due to its thoroughly godless environment. The pop version can be found in the sci-fi books penned by the Strugatsky brothers. They posit that transhumanity is the next logical step of evolution, inevitably resulting in immortal, computer-connected, incredibly smart creatures. Transhumans will inherit the earth, while ordinary humans will be allowed to live out their natural lives and then go extinct. Here is where the idea of Universal Basic Income comes in, as the modern version of Roman bread and circuses – this is money provided by superior transhumans to allow ordinary humans to carry on their useless lives until their natural demise.
This strange post-Soviet (or rather anti-Soviet) idea was imported into Silicon Valley by the Russian-Jewish IT techies who formed the nucleus of Google. From there, it spread among the high tech personnel until it attracted the attention of the super-rich, who always wanted to be special and not just rich. Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli bestselling writer, became one of the prophets of transhumanism, denying the very existence of a human soul and free will.
Transhumanism is the ideological base of Wokery (or Wokeism or Wokeness), a special way of speaking and thinking that stresses one’s special and superior status. Scott Alexander quipped, wokeness is a made-up mystery religion that college-educated people invented so they could feel superior to you. Ordinary people do not like it but are given to understand that wokes have more money and power, and that’s reason enough to emulate them. It is a faith, but it is not a faith for everybody like Christianity was. It is a faith for the ruling class. The Arian version of Christianity was such a faith for rulers in Visigothic Spain until the Moors crashed the party. The Judaic faith is another example of a religion for the elite, turning life for the masses into a living hell. You can’t understand the times we go through unless you are aware of this hidden faith of our superiors.
Transgenders are being extolled and promoted by the elite-owned media to prepare humanity for the advent of the Transhuman. Ditto the covid vaccines that are being promoted and pushed with unprecedented vigour. It is not done in order to kill off mankind, as anti-vaxxers suspect, nor in order to save us all from the dreaded covid, as vaxxers believe. It is a step in the direction of transhumanity. The Digital Economy, Universal Basic Income, trans-sexuality and mandatory mRNA vaccinations is a rapid evolutionary strategy that today’s visionaries expect will prepare the masses to accept a trans-human super-race.
But these are far-off and deep-down things. There is a lot of fleecing to be done before their dream can materialise. Let’s get up to the observable level, to the current fight over energy. The Covid pandemic diminished the demand for oil in 2020 and 2021; and that allowed the Green agenda to grow. It is not enough; the Green future needs another attack on oil, and the Delta variant of Covid will deliver it. The present fall of oil prices has been interpreted as the anticipation of impending lockdowns, first of all in heavily vaccinated Israel. In the US, despite much urban vaccination, there are 250 thousand new cases per day, and there are shrill demands to limit business activity.
China is a powerful player against Big Oil; it has little oil of its own; they are forced to buy it abroad and so they have a strong interest to drop oil prices. That is why, though China has a laughable amount of covid sufferers (125 new cases! A thousand times less than in the US), they still limit travel heavily. The Chinese version of Google, Baidu, says traffic in Beijing is down 30% from last week. Sure, we might explain these draconian measures by citing China’s reverence for human life, but maybe their participation in the global oil war may explain it better. The Chinese quietly continue to run their economy with coal power, which shows how little their Green partners in the oil war fear Climate Change. Ditto the US: A planned deal to end coal burning failed to make the communique from June G7 meeting in Britain, reportedly because the Biden administration feared pushback at home.
The customer, that is you, will eventually end up paying more in any case; in fact, that is the idea. In Europe, natural gas prices surged 1000%, reported Bloomberg; it is not cheap anymore, but still necessary to warm Europeans in the forthcoming winter. The story is that the price is high because EU bureaucrats based their calculations on spot prices, which are usually cheaper than long-term contract prices, and they planned to screw Russian natural gas suppliers, but in recent days the trend reversed due to gas deficit and increased demand.
The Russians were supposed to be the first victims of the Green agenda, of Covid and of natural gas spot pricing, but apparently the great Judoka Putin-san has once again come out on top. Gas spot pricing was supposed to impoverish Russia, but instead brought it riches. The attack against US and British oil companies by the purveyors of the Green Deal unexpectedly played into the hands of Russian oil companies. Russia will have to pony up some climate tax, but this expense will be unloaded onto their international customers. The Green Deal has already turned Russia into the second largest oil exporter into the US, after Canada.
Russian natural gas will flow very soon, possibly before August is over, into Germany by the North Stream II, the new pipeline completed last week. This is exactly on time to counter rising prices as a gas deficit is being felt all over Europe. President Biden agreed, in a semi-secret agreement with Chancellor Merkel, to lift American objections to the European pipeline. One of the reasons cited is a global shortage of natural gas, as China and South East Asia buy more and more of it. This too is connected to the Green Deal, for its designers consider natural gas the least polluting and damaging of natural fuels.
This development allowed Putin to undermine the Ukrainian authorities that had tried to play first fiddle in the anti-Russian orchestra. Until now, Russian natural gas came to Europe via old Soviet-built pipelines going through Ukraine and bringing hefty transit fees to Kiev. Now, with the completion of North Stream II, the bulk of gas will go directly to Germany. European gas will become considerably cheaper; the Ukrainians used to steal much of the gas destined for Western Europe, besides gouging both sides for the transit fees. This means that the Ukraine will have fewer profits to play their anti-Russian games. It is not impossible that the people of Ukraine will understand that their future lies in friendship with Russia, for enmity has brought no benefits to them. A recent poll says almost half of Ukrainians dwelling in the East and South of this fragmented country feel a great affinity to Russians and agree with Mr Putin’s vision of Ukrainians and Russians as being one people. Oil prices and gas pipelines do wonders to people’s minds!
In my recent piece, Prof Roman Zubarev calls these changes “Peak Oil”, the concept of an inevitable decline of extracted natural fuels. Some ten years ago, Peak Oil was all the rage in media, but since then, it is hardly ever mentioned. However, a recent analysis of Yale Environment 360 analytic Fred Pierce comes to the same conclusion and goes even further: Peak Oil is already behind us. Apparently it happened in 2019. Last May, activists angry at ExxonMobil’s climate policies won three seats on its board of directors; Chevron shareholders voted to force the company to start cutting emissions; and a judge in the Netherlands ruled that Shell must slash its emissions by 45 percent by 2030. Oil is on its way out; so is the associated travel and many other pleasures we once had. Only the future will tell whether oil is ‘out’ because we ran out of it, or because it was declared unfashionable, but either way the digitally and transhumanically-inspired elites have decided to retire it.
We expect that the main victim of all this will be the US consumer. The bungling Donald Trump cared for this great country and its people, but couldn’t do much; the elites now sipping at the founts of power couldn’t care less about ordinary Americans. They have a higher vision of transforming mankind and reshaping its course. You will pay for it, and you may not like it, but they do not care.
Biden’s US has less appetite for military adventures; the woke ideology is strongly anti-testosterone. This is reason enough for the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. You can’t expect wokes to want to fight in Third World countries, far away from the urban delights of New York and California. And while their elitist ideology, or trans-faith, is abominable, the international consequences could be positive for the world.
Summing up
We are living through a titanic struggle of a digital future against our oil past. This explains much of the covid drama. In this struggle, oil-less China is pitted against Big Oil, even at the price of heavy restrictions and lockdowns for its populace. Russia abstains from the Green Deal attack on US oil producers and yet still profits from the sidelines as the demand for Russian gas rises. Russia has its own vaccine, so it is rather insulated from orchestrated pandemic pressures. Afghanistan and Iraq have become quite irrelevant for Biden’s elites; they have more pressing battles back home, first of all against US nationalists. That’s why the empire withdraws. In the end, godless transhumanists will be defeated, as all their predecessors were; that is, unless they reach their “Singularity” (their name for the advent of Antichrist) first. But let us not worry too much about the future, for it is said (Matt, 6:34): do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Written in cooperation with Paul Bennett.
