"Tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system, who hide in underground bases and plot the destruction of humanity" - you're quite right to say this is preposterous. Some of them happen to be short :D Thanks for your tremendous work
I came of age around the time of the Dutroux scandal, and if you go by the victim statements (a lot of witnesses died in that trial, particularly the ones who'd seen members of the Belgian royal court at "parties" of sorts) and go down the line down to Epstein, perhaps via Jimmy Savile (friend of the erstwhile Prince Charles), the picture is probably not that far off the truth..
I won’t dismiss that because much of it is true. Dutroux was real and the investigation was a catastrophe; the establishment protection around Saville was proven after his death; Epstein was real. Anyone calling these networks of abuse as fantasies isn’t paying attention. But here’s what these cases prove, devastatingly, is immunity — proximity to power buys protection from consequences. What they don’t prove is a coordinated intelligence. Savile was a predator institutions shielded because exposing him threatened them — the BBC, the hospitals, the palace — each acted in its own self-interest. That produces a wall of silence that shows the actions of a social class, not a coordinating cabal.
Thanks Richard. The world, our planetary world, is a complex self organizing system.
Whenever a few people want to accomplish any task, they seek the least encumbered way to do so if they are competent.
That usually involves minimizing bureaucratic hassles and hurdles.
I smoked pot in high school and college in the 1970s. A lot of us did. It was a big, open conspiracy. You had to be cool about it and not say anything incriminating on the phone. If anybody DID say something incriminating to you, you had to say "I don't know what you're talking about", and hang up. That was called "not talking on the phone". People I had never discussed it with knew not to talk on the phone...
You have laid out structures of shared interest and cooperation. There are many levels of cooperation in shared interest. We all naturally seek them.
Most bureaucracies have an official track and an inside track. If you are good at what you do, and somebody inside knows that for a fact, you can get a job via the inside track. The outside track formality is frustrating to no end for people seeking employment, as we all know.
Some people have the quality of being connection-nodes for other people. It is a human thing. They do not all have the same type of personality or anything, they just connect with a lot of people and enjoy, or are good at connecting those people with each other when they see a common interest that might be served by doing so. I am somewhat that way.
Jeffrey Epstein was/is that way (Schrodinger's existence). Escape Key has that story about Epstein as "Switchboard Operator" between gloabl elites, largely of the Davos class, but certainly Israeli and US imperial nationalists, too. https://escapekey.substack.com/p/switchboard-operator
When there is an interest in reducing the spread of a meme through electronic media, it is enough to reduce the conveyance of that meme through informan-nodes. It need not be constant or absolute, particularly if it is not intended to be openly known.
In early 2016 the Pentagon declared, openly, that the internet and social media were a battle-space, and started treating them as such. I did not have a blog yet, but I sent news-collection emails to a bcc group of friends numbering about 250. In spring of 2016 Gmail started blocking a lot of my sends. I tried reducing the number of recipients to just under 200, which seemed to work briefly, but the blocking function adapted. We went back and forth with Google, trying to comply and follow their rules, to no avail. The block just became constant by late spring, and I decided to start a blog to get around it. (I had always known that all electronic communications were monitored, and sometimes delayed for human eyes to review them, before algorithms got better. This was a thing tht could be tested by sending emails between 2 different addresses with and without a phrase of interest, like something about a bomb. My clever brother in law did this, sending 2 emails to himself at different addresses around 1998, with and without a bombphrase. The bomb-phrase email was delayed by 15 minutes.)
I also kept trying to send my bcc emails, which in spring 2016 had a lot of information about Clinton-disinfranchisement of Sanders voters, among other things. They remained blocked, just plain blocked, until 3 days after the November 2016 election, and then they all went through without a hitch until a few months before 2018 midterm elections. My Google blog was unaffected, but Google also sold Blogger after getting rid of the subscription widget, so people had to look for new posts. About 350 people generally did look at each post.
The pre-election censorship was back in force in 2020 with my bcc sends, but no COVID censorship yet. The election censorship stopped 5 days after that election, which you will recall as being contested as to propriety. My Google blog still went up for all to see, until February 22, 2022, just before Russia invaded Ukraine, when a bcc email and post resulted in both our joint email account (mine & Jenny's) and my blog being suddenly taken down by Google for 2.5 days without explanation, an unspecified "violation". In fact the post was later reinstated in the blog.
I figured that censorship of nodes had been set really tight before the Russian invasion as a precaution. WW-3 did not start. That overly harsh censorship was never officially explained, but I had learned that the algorithms were set for specific times and events by then. Our email and my blog were reinstated shortly after the actual invasion started on 2/24/22.
Substack seems to have limited me to no more than 2900 subscribers. No matter how many people have subscribed over the years since February 2022, when I added the Substack, it never goes above that. I have had friends be surprised that my blog still existed, because iit stopped coming to their inboxes long before we reconnected somehow.
I get lots of new subscribers. They all show up in my inbox and I review them. Sometimes I may recognize them from comments at some other blog.
So this is obviously business-as-usual for attenuating undesireable nodes. Other Substack bloggers I know, far more prominent than myself, and accepting paid subscribers, which I don't, have found themselves being attenuated by Substack over the past 2 years, after previously growing robustly.
It is just not offical. It is done quite routinely, but with plausible deniability, and somebody like Edward Snowden would have to bust this from the inside. That angle seems to be covered at this point, and these attentuation algorithms are probably not a hill for anybody to die on.
What you observe, and it obviously irritates you, is that people seek to oversimplify the way the deck is stacked against them into some overarching agency.
Most people can only handle so much complexity, at any rate, so we all oversimplify concepts daily.
Additionally, most people do not really want to be required to do anything, based o their worldview. You and I are exceptions to that. We are choosing to do something.
Both Pollyannas and Nihilists are relieved of any responsibility to take action to improve the world, either because it is fine, or because it is hopeless.
The overarching-conspiracy-believers are often relieved of any responsibility to act constructively, because it is "hopeless".
I am able, myself, to hold a lot of concepts in abeyance, like that whole list of groups that control us, seeing the thesis which is propounded, and its attributes, but not accepting or rejecting it, if there is not enough evidence to do either.
I have a friend who is a member of the Club of Rome. He's OK. He thinks about our world and its well-being. He and I have both tracked The Limits To Growth for a long time, but he's too young to have been a member in 1972. I discovered it in 10th grade Sociology class, about February 1974, during the Arab Oil Embargo. It made perfect sense.
Deng Xiaopeng is reported to have been greatly influenced by that book, having read it shortly after it came out. He set China on a path to be at the front of the pack of nations by the time that industrial economy peaked, which might have been last November or so... He did good work.
So there are individuals who do take initiative, and some of them are rich, and smart, and in the right place at the right time, and so on. They seek to network and get things done. Donald Trump is like that in a big way, as are Putin and Xi, but their personalities and styles are very different. They get things done. People come and go with vague explanations or sudden arrests, except around Putin, who is quite the stickler for legality. I like his style, but it is rare, extremely rare.
Still, they are all historical actors in this current epoch of the transition from industrial economic groth to "de-growth", or whatever, "contraction", "collapse", "Seneca's cliff".
Various kinds of pollution built up, too. Wars are how elites deal with difficult problems and times, since they get special-powers to get rid of non-compliant people and repudiate debts they can't pay, and stuff.
They thin our herds, too. That is the job of the 0.001% class, to thin our grazing human herds to maintain the planetary ecosystem. They are our Apex-Predators. That is their class-consciousness. (Sshhh, It's a SECRET.)
John — this is an interesting comment, because you've accepted the structure and then pushed on the one place it's genuinely thin, which I'd much rather engage than dodge.
Your Gmail logs and the election-timed blocking are a better description of how this actually works than "central command," and they're testable in a way most of these claims never are. The one caveat I'd add is that some of it — the subscriber ceiling especially — might have simpler explanations. There are Substackers with subscribers in the hundreds of thousands whose opinions are definitely not friendly toward the state. Hopefully Substack doesn't cave in to outside pressure and start de-platforming writers.
The 2016 "battlespace" declaration was real and open, platforms do throttle under state pressure, and I don't wave any of that away. China has built a sophisticated Firewall and domestic digital surveillance grid. Ditto for Russia and India. All powerful nations seek to control their populations' dissidents and naysayers.
Deniable node-attenuation is how factional power operates *without* a cabal. No committee throttles your reach — a capacity sits in the seam between the platform and the state, the legal architecture that lets the state pressure the service provider while both retain deniability, and a faction reaches for it when an election or an invasion makes a particular node inconvenient. That isn't the absence of my model. It's the mechanism of it. You've described from the inside the layer I'm calling rheopolitical — power exercised through control of the flow itself rather than through any visible hand.
Where I'd put a flag is the last move — the 0.001% as apex-predators whose conscious role is thinning the herd.
And on the herd-thinning specifically — look at the scoreboard. Malthus sounded the alarm at one billion people; we're past eight billion, and life expectancy has soared since to almost double in many nations. Two centuries of explicit Malthusian angst yet the opposite has happened. If you were sarcastic you could say that the elites actual plan is overpopulation, not de-population.
If the 0.001% are running a depopulation project, it is the most comprehensive failure in the history of projects. The Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth crowd you and I both track were *worried* about population, openly, in print. Reading "they worried about it" as "they engineered it" is the same symptom-for-cause move the piece flags — worry/angst isn't a plan.
This is the kind of disagreement worth having, and you're plainly someone who acts rather than retreats — which is the distinction that actually matters to me. Thank you for bringing your experience instead of a doctrine. This is the conversation I hoped the piece would start. And thanks for linking my articles on your blog. Cheers Also I may have smoked a lot of pot in the 70's! (didn't inhale!) Didn't talk on the phone either! haha
That we are grazing herds with apex-predatory owner-managers is not conceptually different from grazing cattle, but the world became a feedlot, which can handle a lot more volume. I think the roles are the same, because they are a function of dominant mental paradigms.
One culls a herd when food runs short, or when they start to overgraze, which invites catastrophe if not checked.
My grandfather raised cattle on his ranch, where I lived with him from age 13 to age 15. He paid close attention to the condition of the pastures, and moving the herds between them in a timely fashion. He had to sell more cattle if there was a drought.
The human carrying capacity is based on oil these days, and is roughly 10X what it would otherwise be. We are getting a shock, like the 1973-1974 shock, but it will be worse. The buffers are just getting used as if nothing is the matter, so the shock will be very hard.
The Strait of Hormuz is a variable valve of sorts, with several entities able to close it, but it can only open on agreement.
It's like what you describe with the shared electronic infrastructure that way, no?
Do consider my "class consciousness" view of "owners" (Carlin) and herds as history progresses. It differs some in projections from purely capitalist models, because it presumes something like 50-year-plan type knowledge is more generalized amongst elites than what they openly verbalize.
They have control-narratives, Plato's "Noble Lies", instead.
"Chatham House Rules" apply. "Don't talk on the phone."
Graham Hancock gives his last testament in this almost 2 hour interview, about the lost human civilization before the last ice age and cataclysm, over 12,000 years ago. I almost never watch videos, but he's having heart surgery this month, and did this interview to be on the record. He's a sincere and decent man who thinks independently and puts up with a lot of derogation from "mainstream" arcaeologists, because he digs at the spots where the accepted story falls completely short of plausibility.
John — agreed, we understand each other, and I think the disagreement has narrowed to one real and interesting point, which is the best outcome a thread like this can have.
The Hormuz example is exactly right and you’ve put it better than I did: a valve several actors can close but that only opens by agreement. Deniability is the cornerstone; nobody owns the chokepoint, everybody can veto. Yes. Same structure as the digital infrastructure layer.
The 50-year-plan premise is a difficult proposition. I don’t think you’re wrong that elites run on unverbalized paradigms. They do. Shared schooling, shared assumptions, noble lies, Chatham House rules— all real, and it produces convergence that looks coordinated.
How could anyone have predicted 50-years ago the rise of China, the internet dotcom explosion, and the current AI explosion? Any 50-year plan would have been overturned by any of these things.
Your grandfather’s ranch actually cuts my way — he was the single owner of that herd, sole authority over one set of pastures, which is exactly why he could manage it well. The human ranch has no single owner. It has four ranchers fighting over the same cattle and the same land.
I’ll take the apex-predator paradigm seriously as a lens — Carlin’s “owners” bit is funnier and closer to true than most political science — I just read the owners as plural and at war, which changes what we can expect to come next. And ranchers don’t prey on their herds, they manage them.
And thank you for the Hancock link. I take your point about why he made it now — a man wanting to be on the record before surgery, putting up with the derision that comes with digging where the accepted story runs thin, is someone worth respecting whatever one concludes about the archaeology. I’ll watch it. This has been the conversation I hoped the piece would start — genuinely.
Thank You, Richard. I don't see much actual disagreement, since we have expressed our views clearly.
50 years ago was 1976. there were all kinds of predictions.
That we "eat oil" was common knowledge in my peer group as I entered college as a freshman.
Deng Xiaopeng became paramount leader of China in 1978, and he presented a clear 50 year plan to move China forward to its historical "middle kingdom" status before those 50 years elapsed, synchronized to the BAU projections of The Limits To Growth, as I have read, but can't find in any search these days.
When he met with Jimmy Carter in January 1979 he was all-systems-go, already, working on a plan that was clear to him and accepted broadly in China.
I am happy that Mary Ballon sent me an email with a link to one of your posts. I see us as having similar views and objectives to be of help to our fellow herd-members.
Then look at what the Club of Rome actually is, because the name is doing unearned work. It is a club. Founded in 1968, its members are former heads of state, retired officials, scientists, diplomats — a roster, a threshold, a letterhead. It convenes. It commissions. It publishes. And it has never possessed the power to compel a single government to do a single thing, though it does indeed have influence. Soft power is not hard power.
My answer:
What isn't on Wikipedia, but was on Russian blogs until they were purged two years ago. The Club was a Trojan horse designed to bring about the New World Order. It was founded in coordination with the Soviet Union, and until 1992, there were always at least two KGB generals who, under cover, were regular members of the club.
In a ‚Tichy‘s Einblick Talk‘ in Berlin in June 2023, the participants discussed the question:
Is a climate dictatorship looming?
The former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, (Domestic intelligence agency) Hans-Georg Maaßen, said:
“I would be a lawyer, my boss would be a dictator or a would-be dictator and would say: Mr. Maaßen, think about it, how can you turn a liberal democracy into a totalitarian state that works to my liking?
Then I would also think about what mechanisms to use to undermine the system and to transform it into a collectivism where everyone is streamlinedand everyone thinks alike, to scare them, and to put an overriding goalin front of them.
And I have to say, the idea of using the climate to undermine the Constitution
– that was a clever idea. I know that, in the 1960s, there were already people in the KGB who were thinking about how to move the West toward socialism. Back then,
the KGB was already discussing the topic of environmental protection.“ Page 88
Learn more: Berlin 1989 – The Launch of the Soviet Long Term Strategy.
Looking back at the events of the past 50 years, we can see that the climate hoax has changed the world—moving it toward a New World Order, which will be a socialist one.
Mike — thanks for engaging, and you've actually handed me a clean illustration of the thing the piece is about, so I want to take it seriously rather than wave it off.
Notice the KGB-generals claim: the evidence for it "was on Russian blogs until they were purged." The proof existed is the one claim that can never be tested, because the absence of evidence becomes evidence of the cover-up. I'm not saying you're arguing in bad faith; I'm saying the argument is built so that nothing could ever count against it. That's the difference between an analysis and a conviction.
On Maaßen: read the quote again and note that it's a hypothetical. He's saying if he were advising a would-be dictator, here's how he'd misuse climate politics. That's him imagining a strategy, not documenting one — and a thought experiment about how something could be abused isn't evidence that it was. The Soviets did run environmental influence ops; that's real and documented. But "the KGB discussed environmentalism" is a long way from "the climate is a hoax engineered to install a socialist world order," and you're making plain my conclusion: the commentariat cannot accept that capitalism is the problem: you're arguing "it must be communism even if it is capitalists doing it."
Here's where I think we actually agree: something genuinely authoritarian is taking shape — surveillance, the erosion of consent, power drifting away from electorate and the transfer of wealth. You're not wrong to feel it. I just think it's capitalism in a specific factional form, not socialism wearing a mask — and that the people creating it can't agree among themselves, which is why it keeps backfiring. That's the argument of the next articles, and I'd genuinely rather have you reading them than not.
For about four years now, Amazon has been using AI to scan all books published on Kindle. It is unknown who receives these analyses, shares them, and then orders the removal of displeased sources. I have listed all active links (sources) on my website.
The book was published in March, and in June I noticed that Russian links had been deleted—specifically those dealing with the KGB and the Soviet long-term strategy adopted in 1966. You can view the list of links here:
I have partially saved the relevant texts and also included them as quotes in the book. Since the onset of the pandemic, a practice of website deletions has taken hold and is now firmly established. This means that everything can be called into question.
And when the former head of a secret service speaks in this manner, that is a strong indication for me that I cannot simply dismiss with a wave of the hand.
There are several books on Amazon.de about the Soviet long-term strategy. In the West, many do not take the topic seriously because it is officially denied—and there are no “reputable” sources available.
From 1986 to 1990, I served as the East German liaison for the state foreign trade agency to a U.S. corporation and worked in its East Berlin liaison office.
On January 9, 1990—two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall—company executives informed me that the GDR (East Germany) would cease to exist and that we would transfer all business operations (previously managed from Switzerland) to the West German subsidiary. Start date: immediately. However, the four foreign ministers of the Allied powers (the U.S., the USSR, France, and Great Britain) and the two German foreign ministers did not announce until a meeting in Ottawa on February 13, 1990—that is, five weeks later—that negotiations for German reunification would be BEGUN. Ever since then, I’ve been haunted by the question of how top executives knew that reunification was coming. I was then hired by the corporation at the end of 1990 and set up the liaison office in Moscow. This allowed me to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s transformation, but I also gathered a great deal of information on the infiltration of the West.
Perestroika was decided upon as early as 1966 in Moscow as a deception aimed at making the West believe that state socialism was coming to an end.
Gorbachev had originally urged Honecker to tear down the Wall as early as late May 1987—but Honecker (head of state of the GDR) refused. Coincidentally, two weeks later, Reagan spoke the famous words on the west side of the Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev—tear down the Wall.”
Incidentally, I am one of two German authors who tell the story of the fall of the Berlin Wall differently. The other author was with the East German military intelligence at the time and was indirectly involved in the covert Soviet operation behind the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has written a novel about it, while I write non-fiction books on the subject.
It is also interesting to note, in this context, that the story of the “peaceful revolution of the East Germans” is disseminated worldwide via Wikipedia, even though thousands of pieces of knowledge accumulated over the past 35 years paint a different picture. There must therefore be a central control of knowledge—this was first noticed in the case of COVID-19.
Mike — this is a remarkable vantage point, and I mean that sincerely; someone who ran a liaison office in East Berlin and then Moscow across exactly those years saw things most of us only read about. I’m not going to dismiss that.
Where we part is the inference, not the experience. That Soviet influence operations were real and sophisticated — documented, no argument from me. But “Amazon’s AI purged the Russian links,” “there’s no Russian Wayback Machine,” and “Wikipedia centrally controls the narrative” are each doing the same job: explaining why the proof can’t be examined. I understand why that feels like the system is closing ranks.
Here’s the real overlap, though: you lived the West being infiltrated and managed, and you’re not wrong that something is being managed. I just read the managers as competing factions of capital rather than a single 60-year plan running to schedule — partly because the plan keeps falling apart, which a plan that good shouldn’t. That’s the argument I’m making across the next pieces. I’d rather have you reading and disagreeing than not reading. Either way, thanks for bringing your actual life to the thread — it’s more than most commenters do.
"Tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system, who hide in underground bases and plot the destruction of humanity" - you're quite right to say this is preposterous. Some of them happen to be short :D Thanks for your tremendous work
Haha ... some of my best friends are short, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids ... 👽
I came of age around the time of the Dutroux scandal, and if you go by the victim statements (a lot of witnesses died in that trial, particularly the ones who'd seen members of the Belgian royal court at "parties" of sorts) and go down the line down to Epstein, perhaps via Jimmy Savile (friend of the erstwhile Prince Charles), the picture is probably not that far off the truth..
I won’t dismiss that because much of it is true. Dutroux was real and the investigation was a catastrophe; the establishment protection around Saville was proven after his death; Epstein was real. Anyone calling these networks of abuse as fantasies isn’t paying attention. But here’s what these cases prove, devastatingly, is immunity — proximity to power buys protection from consequences. What they don’t prove is a coordinated intelligence. Savile was a predator institutions shielded because exposing him threatened them — the BBC, the hospitals, the palace — each acted in its own self-interest. That produces a wall of silence that shows the actions of a social class, not a coordinating cabal.
Richard, are you familiar with James Corbett's work? I think you would find it enlightening.
Yes, I am and he’s a smart guy, I would never take that away from him and an amiable host.
Thanks Richard. The world, our planetary world, is a complex self organizing system.
Whenever a few people want to accomplish any task, they seek the least encumbered way to do so if they are competent.
That usually involves minimizing bureaucratic hassles and hurdles.
I smoked pot in high school and college in the 1970s. A lot of us did. It was a big, open conspiracy. You had to be cool about it and not say anything incriminating on the phone. If anybody DID say something incriminating to you, you had to say "I don't know what you're talking about", and hang up. That was called "not talking on the phone". People I had never discussed it with knew not to talk on the phone...
You have laid out structures of shared interest and cooperation. There are many levels of cooperation in shared interest. We all naturally seek them.
Most bureaucracies have an official track and an inside track. If you are good at what you do, and somebody inside knows that for a fact, you can get a job via the inside track. The outside track formality is frustrating to no end for people seeking employment, as we all know.
Some people have the quality of being connection-nodes for other people. It is a human thing. They do not all have the same type of personality or anything, they just connect with a lot of people and enjoy, or are good at connecting those people with each other when they see a common interest that might be served by doing so. I am somewhat that way.
Jeffrey Epstein was/is that way (Schrodinger's existence). Escape Key has that story about Epstein as "Switchboard Operator" between gloabl elites, largely of the Davos class, but certainly Israeli and US imperial nationalists, too. https://escapekey.substack.com/p/switchboard-operator
When there is an interest in reducing the spread of a meme through electronic media, it is enough to reduce the conveyance of that meme through informan-nodes. It need not be constant or absolute, particularly if it is not intended to be openly known.
In early 2016 the Pentagon declared, openly, that the internet and social media were a battle-space, and started treating them as such. I did not have a blog yet, but I sent news-collection emails to a bcc group of friends numbering about 250. In spring of 2016 Gmail started blocking a lot of my sends. I tried reducing the number of recipients to just under 200, which seemed to work briefly, but the blocking function adapted. We went back and forth with Google, trying to comply and follow their rules, to no avail. The block just became constant by late spring, and I decided to start a blog to get around it. (I had always known that all electronic communications were monitored, and sometimes delayed for human eyes to review them, before algorithms got better. This was a thing tht could be tested by sending emails between 2 different addresses with and without a phrase of interest, like something about a bomb. My clever brother in law did this, sending 2 emails to himself at different addresses around 1998, with and without a bombphrase. The bomb-phrase email was delayed by 15 minutes.)
So I started www.johndayblog.com
I also kept trying to send my bcc emails, which in spring 2016 had a lot of information about Clinton-disinfranchisement of Sanders voters, among other things. They remained blocked, just plain blocked, until 3 days after the November 2016 election, and then they all went through without a hitch until a few months before 2018 midterm elections. My Google blog was unaffected, but Google also sold Blogger after getting rid of the subscription widget, so people had to look for new posts. About 350 people generally did look at each post.
The pre-election censorship was back in force in 2020 with my bcc sends, but no COVID censorship yet. The election censorship stopped 5 days after that election, which you will recall as being contested as to propriety. My Google blog still went up for all to see, until February 22, 2022, just before Russia invaded Ukraine, when a bcc email and post resulted in both our joint email account (mine & Jenny's) and my blog being suddenly taken down by Google for 2.5 days without explanation, an unspecified "violation". In fact the post was later reinstated in the blog.
This is that unremarkable post "Two New Countries", as Russia had just recognised Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. https://www.johndayblog.com/2022/02/two-new-countries.html
I figured that censorship of nodes had been set really tight before the Russian invasion as a precaution. WW-3 did not start. That overly harsh censorship was never officially explained, but I had learned that the algorithms were set for specific times and events by then. Our email and my blog were reinstated shortly after the actual invasion started on 2/24/22.
Substack seems to have limited me to no more than 2900 subscribers. No matter how many people have subscribed over the years since February 2022, when I added the Substack, it never goes above that. I have had friends be surprised that my blog still existed, because iit stopped coming to their inboxes long before we reconnected somehow.
I get lots of new subscribers. They all show up in my inbox and I review them. Sometimes I may recognize them from comments at some other blog.
So this is obviously business-as-usual for attenuating undesireable nodes. Other Substack bloggers I know, far more prominent than myself, and accepting paid subscribers, which I don't, have found themselves being attenuated by Substack over the past 2 years, after previously growing robustly.
It is just not offical. It is done quite routinely, but with plausible deniability, and somebody like Edward Snowden would have to bust this from the inside. That angle seems to be covered at this point, and these attentuation algorithms are probably not a hill for anybody to die on.
What you observe, and it obviously irritates you, is that people seek to oversimplify the way the deck is stacked against them into some overarching agency.
Most people can only handle so much complexity, at any rate, so we all oversimplify concepts daily.
Additionally, most people do not really want to be required to do anything, based o their worldview. You and I are exceptions to that. We are choosing to do something.
Both Pollyannas and Nihilists are relieved of any responsibility to take action to improve the world, either because it is fine, or because it is hopeless.
The overarching-conspiracy-believers are often relieved of any responsibility to act constructively, because it is "hopeless".
I am able, myself, to hold a lot of concepts in abeyance, like that whole list of groups that control us, seeing the thesis which is propounded, and its attributes, but not accepting or rejecting it, if there is not enough evidence to do either.
I have a friend who is a member of the Club of Rome. He's OK. He thinks about our world and its well-being. He and I have both tracked The Limits To Growth for a long time, but he's too young to have been a member in 1972. I discovered it in 10th grade Sociology class, about February 1974, during the Arab Oil Embargo. It made perfect sense.
Deng Xiaopeng is reported to have been greatly influenced by that book, having read it shortly after it came out. He set China on a path to be at the front of the pack of nations by the time that industrial economy peaked, which might have been last November or so... He did good work.
So there are individuals who do take initiative, and some of them are rich, and smart, and in the right place at the right time, and so on. They seek to network and get things done. Donald Trump is like that in a big way, as are Putin and Xi, but their personalities and styles are very different. They get things done. People come and go with vague explanations or sudden arrests, except around Putin, who is quite the stickler for legality. I like his style, but it is rare, extremely rare.
Still, they are all historical actors in this current epoch of the transition from industrial economic groth to "de-growth", or whatever, "contraction", "collapse", "Seneca's cliff".
Various kinds of pollution built up, too. Wars are how elites deal with difficult problems and times, since they get special-powers to get rid of non-compliant people and repudiate debts they can't pay, and stuff.
They thin our herds, too. That is the job of the 0.001% class, to thin our grazing human herds to maintain the planetary ecosystem. They are our Apex-Predators. That is their class-consciousness. (Sshhh, It's a SECRET.)
John — this is an interesting comment, because you've accepted the structure and then pushed on the one place it's genuinely thin, which I'd much rather engage than dodge.
Your Gmail logs and the election-timed blocking are a better description of how this actually works than "central command," and they're testable in a way most of these claims never are. The one caveat I'd add is that some of it — the subscriber ceiling especially — might have simpler explanations. There are Substackers with subscribers in the hundreds of thousands whose opinions are definitely not friendly toward the state. Hopefully Substack doesn't cave in to outside pressure and start de-platforming writers.
The 2016 "battlespace" declaration was real and open, platforms do throttle under state pressure, and I don't wave any of that away. China has built a sophisticated Firewall and domestic digital surveillance grid. Ditto for Russia and India. All powerful nations seek to control their populations' dissidents and naysayers.
Deniable node-attenuation is how factional power operates *without* a cabal. No committee throttles your reach — a capacity sits in the seam between the platform and the state, the legal architecture that lets the state pressure the service provider while both retain deniability, and a faction reaches for it when an election or an invasion makes a particular node inconvenient. That isn't the absence of my model. It's the mechanism of it. You've described from the inside the layer I'm calling rheopolitical — power exercised through control of the flow itself rather than through any visible hand.
Where I'd put a flag is the last move — the 0.001% as apex-predators whose conscious role is thinning the herd.
And on the herd-thinning specifically — look at the scoreboard. Malthus sounded the alarm at one billion people; we're past eight billion, and life expectancy has soared since to almost double in many nations. Two centuries of explicit Malthusian angst yet the opposite has happened. If you were sarcastic you could say that the elites actual plan is overpopulation, not de-population.
If the 0.001% are running a depopulation project, it is the most comprehensive failure in the history of projects. The Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth crowd you and I both track were *worried* about population, openly, in print. Reading "they worried about it" as "they engineered it" is the same symptom-for-cause move the piece flags — worry/angst isn't a plan.
This is the kind of disagreement worth having, and you're plainly someone who acts rather than retreats — which is the distinction that actually matters to me. Thank you for bringing your experience instead of a doctrine. This is the conversation I hoped the piece would start. And thanks for linking my articles on your blog. Cheers Also I may have smoked a lot of pot in the 70's! (didn't inhale!) Didn't talk on the phone either! haha
We now basically understand each other.
That we are grazing herds with apex-predatory owner-managers is not conceptually different from grazing cattle, but the world became a feedlot, which can handle a lot more volume. I think the roles are the same, because they are a function of dominant mental paradigms.
One culls a herd when food runs short, or when they start to overgraze, which invites catastrophe if not checked.
My grandfather raised cattle on his ranch, where I lived with him from age 13 to age 15. He paid close attention to the condition of the pastures, and moving the herds between them in a timely fashion. He had to sell more cattle if there was a drought.
The human carrying capacity is based on oil these days, and is roughly 10X what it would otherwise be. We are getting a shock, like the 1973-1974 shock, but it will be worse. The buffers are just getting used as if nothing is the matter, so the shock will be very hard.
The Strait of Hormuz is a variable valve of sorts, with several entities able to close it, but it can only open on agreement.
It's like what you describe with the shared electronic infrastructure that way, no?
Do consider my "class consciousness" view of "owners" (Carlin) and herds as history progresses. It differs some in projections from purely capitalist models, because it presumes something like 50-year-plan type knowledge is more generalized amongst elites than what they openly verbalize.
They have control-narratives, Plato's "Noble Lies", instead.
"Chatham House Rules" apply. "Don't talk on the phone."
Graham Hancock gives his last testament in this almost 2 hour interview, about the lost human civilization before the last ice age and cataclysm, over 12,000 years ago. I almost never watch videos, but he's having heart surgery this month, and did this interview to be on the record. He's a sincere and decent man who thinks independently and puts up with a lot of derogation from "mainstream" arcaeologists, because he digs at the spots where the accepted story falls completely short of plausibility.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs94KBeIiAo
John — agreed, we understand each other, and I think the disagreement has narrowed to one real and interesting point, which is the best outcome a thread like this can have.
The Hormuz example is exactly right and you’ve put it better than I did: a valve several actors can close but that only opens by agreement. Deniability is the cornerstone; nobody owns the chokepoint, everybody can veto. Yes. Same structure as the digital infrastructure layer.
The 50-year-plan premise is a difficult proposition. I don’t think you’re wrong that elites run on unverbalized paradigms. They do. Shared schooling, shared assumptions, noble lies, Chatham House rules— all real, and it produces convergence that looks coordinated.
How could anyone have predicted 50-years ago the rise of China, the internet dotcom explosion, and the current AI explosion? Any 50-year plan would have been overturned by any of these things.
Your grandfather’s ranch actually cuts my way — he was the single owner of that herd, sole authority over one set of pastures, which is exactly why he could manage it well. The human ranch has no single owner. It has four ranchers fighting over the same cattle and the same land.
I’ll take the apex-predator paradigm seriously as a lens — Carlin’s “owners” bit is funnier and closer to true than most political science — I just read the owners as plural and at war, which changes what we can expect to come next. And ranchers don’t prey on their herds, they manage them.
And thank you for the Hancock link. I take your point about why he made it now — a man wanting to be on the record before surgery, putting up with the derision that comes with digging where the accepted story runs thin, is someone worth respecting whatever one concludes about the archaeology. I’ll watch it. This has been the conversation I hoped the piece would start — genuinely.
Thank You, Richard. I don't see much actual disagreement, since we have expressed our views clearly.
50 years ago was 1976. there were all kinds of predictions.
That we "eat oil" was common knowledge in my peer group as I entered college as a freshman.
Deng Xiaopeng became paramount leader of China in 1978, and he presented a clear 50 year plan to move China forward to its historical "middle kingdom" status before those 50 years elapsed, synchronized to the BAU projections of The Limits To Growth, as I have read, but can't find in any search these days.
When he met with Jimmy Carter in January 1979 he was all-systems-go, already, working on a plan that was clear to him and accepted broadly in China.
I am happy that Mary Ballon sent me an email with a link to one of your posts. I see us as having similar views and objectives to be of help to our fellow herd-members.
Moo moo moo 🐮
I'm pretty good at mooing, too.
You wrote:
Then look at what the Club of Rome actually is, because the name is doing unearned work. It is a club. Founded in 1968, its members are former heads of state, retired officials, scientists, diplomats — a roster, a threshold, a letterhead. It convenes. It commissions. It publishes. And it has never possessed the power to compel a single government to do a single thing, though it does indeed have influence. Soft power is not hard power.
My answer:
What isn't on Wikipedia, but was on Russian blogs until they were purged two years ago. The Club was a Trojan horse designed to bring about the New World Order. It was founded in coordination with the Soviet Union, and until 1992, there were always at least two KGB generals who, under cover, were regular members of the club.
In a ‚Tichy‘s Einblick Talk‘ in Berlin in June 2023, the participants discussed the question:
Is a climate dictatorship looming?
The former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, (Domestic intelligence agency) Hans-Georg Maaßen, said:
“I would be a lawyer, my boss would be a dictator or a would-be dictator and would say: Mr. Maaßen, think about it, how can you turn a liberal democracy into a totalitarian state that works to my liking?
Then I would also think about what mechanisms to use to undermine the system and to transform it into a collectivism where everyone is streamlinedand everyone thinks alike, to scare them, and to put an overriding goalin front of them.
And I have to say, the idea of using the climate to undermine the Constitution
– that was a clever idea. I know that, in the 1960s, there were already people in the KGB who were thinking about how to move the West toward socialism. Back then,
the KGB was already discussing the topic of environmental protection.“ Page 88
Learn more: Berlin 1989 – The Launch of the Soviet Long Term Strategy.
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0F896K98G
Looking back at the events of the past 50 years, we can see that the climate hoax has changed the world—moving it toward a New World Order, which will be a socialist one.
Mike Wolski
Mike — thanks for engaging, and you've actually handed me a clean illustration of the thing the piece is about, so I want to take it seriously rather than wave it off.
Notice the KGB-generals claim: the evidence for it "was on Russian blogs until they were purged." The proof existed is the one claim that can never be tested, because the absence of evidence becomes evidence of the cover-up. I'm not saying you're arguing in bad faith; I'm saying the argument is built so that nothing could ever count against it. That's the difference between an analysis and a conviction.
On Maaßen: read the quote again and note that it's a hypothetical. He's saying if he were advising a would-be dictator, here's how he'd misuse climate politics. That's him imagining a strategy, not documenting one — and a thought experiment about how something could be abused isn't evidence that it was. The Soviets did run environmental influence ops; that's real and documented. But "the KGB discussed environmentalism" is a long way from "the climate is a hoax engineered to install a socialist world order," and you're making plain my conclusion: the commentariat cannot accept that capitalism is the problem: you're arguing "it must be communism even if it is capitalists doing it."
Here's where I think we actually agree: something genuinely authoritarian is taking shape — surveillance, the erosion of consent, power drifting away from electorate and the transfer of wealth. You're not wrong to feel it. I just think it's capitalism in a specific factional form, not socialism wearing a mask — and that the people creating it can't agree among themselves, which is why it keeps backfiring. That's the argument of the next articles, and I'd genuinely rather have you reading them than not.
Richard, thanks for your reply:
For about four years now, Amazon has been using AI to scan all books published on Kindle. It is unknown who receives these analyses, shares them, and then orders the removal of displeased sources. I have listed all active links (sources) on my website.
The book was published in March, and in June I noticed that Russian links had been deleted—specifically those dealing with the KGB and the Soviet long-term strategy adopted in 1966. You can view the list of links here:
https://www.1989mauerfall.berlin/buch-3/linkliste-zum-buch-3/
There is no Russian Wayback Machine.
I have partially saved the relevant texts and also included them as quotes in the book. Since the onset of the pandemic, a practice of website deletions has taken hold and is now firmly established. This means that everything can be called into question.
And when the former head of a secret service speaks in this manner, that is a strong indication for me that I cannot simply dismiss with a wave of the hand.
There are several books on Amazon.de about the Soviet long-term strategy. In the West, many do not take the topic seriously because it is officially denied—and there are no “reputable” sources available.
From 1986 to 1990, I served as the East German liaison for the state foreign trade agency to a U.S. corporation and worked in its East Berlin liaison office.
On January 9, 1990—two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall—company executives informed me that the GDR (East Germany) would cease to exist and that we would transfer all business operations (previously managed from Switzerland) to the West German subsidiary. Start date: immediately. However, the four foreign ministers of the Allied powers (the U.S., the USSR, France, and Great Britain) and the two German foreign ministers did not announce until a meeting in Ottawa on February 13, 1990—that is, five weeks later—that negotiations for German reunification would be BEGUN. Ever since then, I’ve been haunted by the question of how top executives knew that reunification was coming. I was then hired by the corporation at the end of 1990 and set up the liaison office in Moscow. This allowed me to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s transformation, but I also gathered a great deal of information on the infiltration of the West.
Perestroika was decided upon as early as 1966 in Moscow as a deception aimed at making the West believe that state socialism was coming to an end.
Gorbachev had originally urged Honecker to tear down the Wall as early as late May 1987—but Honecker (head of state of the GDR) refused. Coincidentally, two weeks later, Reagan spoke the famous words on the west side of the Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev—tear down the Wall.”
Incidentally, I am one of two German authors who tell the story of the fall of the Berlin Wall differently. The other author was with the East German military intelligence at the time and was indirectly involved in the covert Soviet operation behind the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has written a novel about it, while I write non-fiction books on the subject.
It is also interesting to note, in this context, that the story of the “peaceful revolution of the East Germans” is disseminated worldwide via Wikipedia, even though thousands of pieces of knowledge accumulated over the past 35 years paint a different picture. There must therefore be a central control of knowledge—this was first noticed in the case of COVID-19.
Mike
Mike — this is a remarkable vantage point, and I mean that sincerely; someone who ran a liaison office in East Berlin and then Moscow across exactly those years saw things most of us only read about. I’m not going to dismiss that.
Where we part is the inference, not the experience. That Soviet influence operations were real and sophisticated — documented, no argument from me. But “Amazon’s AI purged the Russian links,” “there’s no Russian Wayback Machine,” and “Wikipedia centrally controls the narrative” are each doing the same job: explaining why the proof can’t be examined. I understand why that feels like the system is closing ranks.
Here’s the real overlap, though: you lived the West being infiltrated and managed, and you’re not wrong that something is being managed. I just read the managers as competing factions of capital rather than a single 60-year plan running to schedule — partly because the plan keeps falling apart, which a plan that good shouldn’t. That’s the argument I’m making across the next pieces. I’d rather have you reading and disagreeing than not reading. Either way, thanks for bringing your actual life to the thread — it’s more than most commenters do.