What Lies Beneath - Chronicle Of Fools

​Part 1 - Survival, Self-Deceptions & Abandonment by the Cognizant Elite.

“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through”.

It speaks for itself.

Eric Ambler– Dirty Story, 1967.

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But first, some doctrine.

Cognoscenti: n - A person with extensive knowledge and capability in a particular field or fields. Then there is the cognizant elite. Now that is a whole different thing. The politics of personal madness?

Their surface political narrative is a transparently simplistic affair, even absurd. It serves a purpose though and that purpose is to keep the public’s gaze averted from what is a more nuanced, mostly perverse and frequently corrupt and devastating underlying reality. And so to the self-consoling illusions of a lazy elite.

What lies beneath.

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It's really very nerve racking, you know, emerging as I have from some deep underground bunker and nuclear fallout survival shelter where I was invited to spend a few weeks, to now pen a few words of guidance for the mass of the greatly entertained while exposing myself to some desperately sought sunshine on my face. Very nerve wracking indeed. It did seem like an eternity until you see what’s been going on, up here on the surface. Mind you, it’s been going on for some time, but being removed and underground for a while, then returning to the surface does so focus the mind. With all this war talk going down right now and from inside and outside of The Beltway aka the Washington inner circles of the power elites (note the plural - you never quite know who has the upper hand at any particular time), now a matter of some urgency and large dollar cost for US vassal states - er - I mean allies, things are set to become none too nice and very unsettling indeed. Even in the once distant shores of the southern hemisphere - read on.

Maybe you missed it. Or just didn’t give it the attention it deserved.

“New Zealand has become an apocalypse escape destination for Americans” - as reported.

But then living in an underground survival shelter isn’t all that nice either, I apprehend. Hardly normal. Think CoVid lockdown 24/7. Unless you’re a Peter Thiel type with the bespoke built uber-billionaire survival estate in the New Zealand south island, it’ll be cramped. Don’t bet on too much fresh water either. New Zealand has been filling up with imported prefabricated underground survival bunkers, along with wealthy new immigrant New Zealanders and foreign residents who think they can escape the twin and quite possibly terminal disasters of global warming and a northern hemisphere contained nuclear war. Note the qualifier. Contained. Dream on. Contained to the northern hemisphere? Keep dreaming.

And now there’s a third quite possibly terminal disaster that sent the private jets and yachts of the more money than sense class evacuating themselves down to New Zealand and that was the current viral pandemic, here to remind humans that microbes rule; SARS-CoVid is the new Kommissar. By no means the last. Microbes were the first life on earth. They go back a billion or so years. They have the best survival strategies. This accounts for why they’re still around. This accounts for why they’ll still be around when we’re not. I do not digress. Anyhow . . .

Check that temporary underground survival arrangement experience. Good thing I’m not tall or too antisocial.

The influx of survival shelters and rich folk from the northern hemisphere buying New Zealand residency and citizenship was enabled by the New Zealand government decades back. If you have the money. How much money? NZ$10 million, to be “invested” over a three year period. Oh yes - and a good character pass. An arguable point. Acquire a suitable plot of land, excavate, bury your bunker. New Zealand is now very attractive for the ruling class of the business and political worlds who truly believe that they can escape the consequences of their spectacularly unimpressive stewardship of - er - just about everything and so bail out to a remote, albeit civilized, English speaking part of the planet, hunker in y’bunker and wait out the worst of whatever climatic or conflict outcomes collapses down (add in pandemics), impliedly and deservedly so, upon the rest of us surface dwelling lowlifes. Good luck with that. Just another idea from that well known and thoroughly unforgiving realm of the entirely untested. But, courtesy of clever marketing and advertising, it’s caught on and some people are making a bundle of money off of the insecurities and technically limited, misguided delusions of a bunch of other people. OK - isn’t that how this form of Capitalism works these days? You know - peddling bullshit to people who don’t know any better? That class of people with more money than sense? More money than sense. Not a difficult thing - to have more money than sense. Notable of that class who studied the humanities and business - think accounting, finance, commerce, law, advertising, marketing, the arts. Political Science? Don’t make me laugh. The affairs of human social arrangements where for them anything from the realm of the real sciences looks almost magical, usually unfathomable and always intractable. Yet their want is to have the sciences in service for their personal benefits and comforts. What they didn’t master is Physics, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, the disciplines that have delivered modern living, as well as the means to obliterate it all in a flash since the people in charge in The West now have no idea about any of it. You just cannot bark orders at Nature. Their podiatrist has more commonsense than that lot of commerce class opportunists.

Of underground escape fantasies, factually, empirically, you can never be certain that any system of arrangements will work end to end until that system is built and demonstrated to function end to end. Repeatedly. No-one actually knows what it means to survive beneath the surface in, say, a world war with nuclear weapons blossoming up above the surface. Like, people hiding in basements during the WWII firestorm bombing of the German city of Dresden by allied air forces (itself a rolling war crime) were reduced to something akin to large, desiccated gingerbread biscuit cutouts in very loose fitting clothing, so the descriptions went. As well did the super heated air boil the waters in the Dresden rivers! Such is the nature of firestorms. They do not happen by happenstance. They do happen by deliberate planning, the right bombs and were developed only after a great deal of trial and error, with properly engineered munitions. Nuclear? The firestorm comes as part of the package. Check Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Food for thought.

So believe me. New Zealand will not be left unscathed in any northern hemisphere conflagration, being part of the Five Eyes signal intelligence network with the United States, plus Australia, Britain and Canada. Think the Waihopai communication base on the New Zealand south island. Like Pine Gap in central Australia, possibly the most key US military communications switch, they’ll be blown to bits at the start of any serious exchange between The West and Russia - China. Russia has China’s back. China is now the largest manufacturing state in the world and trading with Russia off the US dollar system (a whole other story and one not liked inside The Beltway). Russia has about half the world’s remaining resources, is energy independent and that is all under one government. The West self-assigned the role of a consumption shopping center and sabre-rattling for foreign threats. If you have any pretensions as a country to being and remaining a superpower, your first prerequisite - energy independence, . Which countries have energy independence? Anyhow, here’s a little picture of that New Zealand south island Waihopai facility radomes, to convey an idea of what a target in a populated area looks like. Hidden in plain view. From the outside only. One trusts that those Chinese and Russian missiles we see on show at their annual military parades in BeiJing and Moscow are really very accurate.

What the uber-rich have sought and been sold is a place as far removed as possible from the major continents and super powers and their conflict scenarios. New Zealand does not qualify, nor does any other planetary location. Addressing the root cause of the world’s problems that the folks in charge have visited upon us all - they call themselves the cognizant elite (not a joke) - is beyond this class. No cognoscenti here. The one discriminating factor that they all share, within the echo chamber of their personal associations, is stacks of cash, along with influence. And a preparedness to abandon the circumstances of their making that they find frightening enough to leave and leave the rest of us to deal with whatever. So they think. As long as they can think this way and act accordingly, there is no incentive to do things differently.

Examples of a real cognoscenti? Albert Einstein, Nico Tesla, Carl Steinmetz. Huge track records in Physics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering that delivered modern living. Few know of Steinmetz. His research, development and lectures are foundational to modern civilization. Worth thinking about next time one tunes into essential broadcast gibberish of media faves.

I once had a private lunch with a well known Canadian billionaire. I was consulting to his string of operations, you see. Believe me, he got more out of it than I did. What can one say? The one eternal characteristic in the character of these masters of the universe and their world changing agendas is their reflexive amazement when confronted by people who just simply disagree with them! Their paid staff would never dare. Just so often must they venture outside the echo chamber of their private associations. It can’t be a pleasant experience. I was never asked back. Some of us are not impressed by money.

“I look to a day when people will be judged not by the content of their wallet but by the quality of their character”. Yeah -right.

Not enough to have second thoughts about that remote underground bunker? A further risk threatens the equanimity of the escape class. Geological instability. As an escape destination, it’s difficult to do worse than New Zealand. Earthquakes and volcanoes. How so? New Zealand lies adjacent to (North Island) and across (South Island) a tectonic plate margin. The Hikurangi Subduction Zone is one large fault in the earth’s crust - a plate boundary fault where the Pacific Plate collides with the Australian Plate and dives beneath it. Tremendous pressures build up. The most dangerous of the plate intersections. They build up far more strain before they release, as the most devastating of earthquakes. Expect a magnitude 8 or greater. Megathrust earthquake in geological trade talk. Check . . .

Recent geologic instabilities have killed a few at a tourist spot as well as destroying parts of the southern island city of Christchurch. It is entirely probable that the New Zealand landmass will sink under meters of seawater, like that mythical city of Atlantis, when the subduction plates significantly slip. This time it’s for real. Paleoseismologists agree that the very best place to be during an earthquake is underground. Wink, wink. The feature of subduction zones that puts them at the top of the most dangerous of earthquakes is that they do not release often enough and so when they do, they release far more energy. Results are terminally destructive. The west coast of the United States is parallel to a subduction zone and will drop beneath the waves. As New Zealand - at any time!

Fukushima serves as a recent example. Fukushima lies near an underwater plate subduction zone. The 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku-Oki under sea earthquake resulted in the electricity plant sustaining nuclear leaks after a tsunami was sent hurtling into the coast. Regular Fukushima tsunamis have been documented going back well over a thousand years! A thousand years? No kidding. The one prior to the most recent, back in the eighteen hundreds - the most recent is continuing to cause unending management problems, it can't be managed - also left a large number of people dead. The waves wash in, the bodies wash out and wash back in several days later. Black and bloated. A few nibbled away by fish. Just what the planners were thinking when they chose Fukushima as a site for four nuclear reactors - that’s a hard one. The geological instability record is well documented.

All ignored while selling this New Zealand end of the world (world ending?) destination using picturesque outdoor scenes - of mountains, valleys and coastlines. Avoiding the coastline in an earthquake is advisable.

Apparently the enlightened of the cognitive elite have not factored these things in.

Volcanoes present a further existential risk. Several actually and active too. Not bad for a small land area. Check White Island, off the North island coast.

No classic conically shaped volcano here. Somewhere in the ancient times, it erupted and blew half itself to bits. Like a nuclear explosion. They sometimes do.

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Just where does the motivation stem from for this sort of escapist fantasy? Survivalist escapism is just another -ism ideology and like all ideologies, they have their great gods in the sky. In the case of Brenton Tarrant, also advocating a survivalist ideology - his by eliminating those he didn’t like and so shot up two New Zealand mosques. For him, as others like him, there is Anders Breivik. For the cashed up survival escapists, it could be one British upper class peer, the late Lord William Rees-Mogg. Another aristocrat know-it-all. He wrote books - The Sovereign Individual and The Great Reckoning. Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, stated in 2014 that The Sovereign Individual was the most influential book he’d read. I’m breaking down. I guess he hasn't read this. Perception creates its own reality. The difference in method between our class of wealthy fantasy escapists and one gun-totting Brenton Tarrant is that the former can build walls and hire armed security to separate themselves from the rest of humanity, from those that deep down they don’t like. Check out Lord Reece-Mogg’s various predictions. For that matter, check out Oprah’s. Check out all of them. The underlying ethic? Material success is the sole basis of authority and legitimacy.

The New Zealand government does not publish a foreign property register. How many foreigners have interests in New Zealand properties and survival arrangements remains speculative.

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Receiving no serious attention are the thoughts of those on the earth’s surface who survive a nuclear conflagration or a viral pandemic and their conduct towards those who do thereafter emerge from said underground bunkers - they inevitably must, likely sooner than later. This latter group will face down a goodly number of really pissed off people, not given over to readings on the Universal Declarations of Human Rights nor singing Three Dog Night’s Joy To The World gibberish. You have guns? Be prepared to use them. As others will use on you. Or anything else with a sharp edge or blunt object with mass. With their savage dogs. Hungry savage dogs. Factually, if all hell broke lose on the surface, no surface dweller will be politely respecting the property rights of those owning underground survival arrangements nor their escapist fantasies. They are more suffered than respected. Property rights and law will have ceased to function. Surviving surface dwellers will [1] do very straightforward calculus and then [2] shoot and blast their way into any underground bunker in sight to set their dogs on the occupants, take their food, their water and their lives. Why would they expect anything better? After all, to carry off this sort of escapist future planning, for themselves alone, required an outright deception towards all others in the society around them where they hitherto worked. Superficial politeness with no real commitment nor investment to society, including the misconceptions of philanthropy. A modern day class of parasites. The cities of the world breeds them. And they think they can escape. They do think that.

Margaret Thatcher, a former Tory British prime minister did tell the truth. She helpfully informed us that there is no such thing as society. She told the truth. A frank admission from the caverns of her subterranean thoughts. If you missed that, you missed a lot. As long as you’re in service to this class, well and good. But if things get difficult, everyone else is dispensable, disposable. They do think that.

This circumstance, where some may seek to intrude into the survival arrangements of others, uninvited, has been contemplated by those who plan out the larger group survival arrangements. The more expensive ones that sell memberships come with security personnel and technical staff to maintain survival systems. Machine gun posts, legal in some states of the United States, along with surveillance cameras on the exterior are an option to take care of anyone who may want to take care of them inside. No kidding. They do not expect any of the milk of human kindness from those on the surface. They will not be accorded any.

What lies beneath the near universal surface of human civility is situational. “A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue”. I add largely false. That sentiment is worth rereading. It comes from Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent (so-called) democratic Republic of The Congo, formerly the Belgium Congo. He advocated a policy of Congo resources for Congo people. For that he was killed, aged thirty-five, by Belgium and US intelligence - now admitted, as the resource extraction just rolled on and not for the benefit of the domestic population. The true nature of the elite class on display. People will turn as savage as they can possibly manage to ensure their survival. Possibly manage? Now with half the Western population overweight, diabetic, heart diseased, all three and the rest - whatever they can manage. But I digress.

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So, when old nuclear war planning luminaries tell us that we are “now in a more dangerous era” than during the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 and something I remember, where those closest to it inside The White House and The Kremlin thought they may not see out the remainder of the week, how much more unsettling can it be?

More unsettling than that because right now some senior US military brass think that small tactical nuclear weapons are, as they put it, "more usable". Much talk of a limited nuclear war, with America’s adversaries. This is quite a step backwards. Thoroughly debunked and dismissed decades ago. No-one remembers.

Maybe you missed it. Maybe you were too busy with your social networking experience or just catching up on another essential major television event.

Western armed forces commanders, supported by academic luminaries, publicizing that they are planning for a limited, containable nuclear war, meets my minimum standard for functional insanity. That takes a massive self-deception indeed.

Maybe you did notice. Russia has been moved off the front burner of incipient geopolitical threats to The West, just a bit and China has been brought to the front burner of a developing major geopolitical crisis and threat to the established rules-based international order of the Western estates. As it is pitched by the inner circles. A cover story for something else?

Cover Story: noun phrase - that none too nuanced explanation offered up that, in this case, people in far off lands mean us nothing but ill will and which rests upon the bedrock belief that the essential goodness and innocence of The West is beyond reproach, beyond critical examination and is to be reflexively accepted.

You may have noticed that as things deteriorate in The West, foreign threats become more immediate, more imperative, more dangerous. Do respectable people in high places and fave media presenters use cover stories? For cover story, could we use a different term, like mass hypnosis? If a proportion of the public believe or think something demonstrably not able to be demonstrated, have they been hypnotized? As a Chinese mainland academic remarked to me, on the nature of mainstream government and media messaging, “if you are told something over and over again, surely you must come to believe it”. As I replied, in China you know you are being lied to. In The West, people believe they are told the truth. That was 2003.

Around that time, the major piece of mass hypnosis was Iraqi WMD’s plus Afghanistan fairy stories. Most everyone seemed to believe it, unless you were a weapons inspector or major political leader. They, after all, receive their national security reports and they don’t lie, do they?

For the rest of us, the deceptions can be very subtle. Think politics of distraction, a matter for a subsequent post.

The gist here is ultimately geopolitical and how major matters are misrepresented in the mainstream media and political narratives, now indistinguishable from propaganda. I prefer the old Soviet term agip prop.

“I have a theory that the truth is not told during the nine-to-five hours”.

Hunter S. Thompson, circa 1970’s.

At this point, one could launch into a a taxonomy of self-deceptions, of lying. To be examined within the all pervading realm of media, of politics - two of the indispensable parts of the modern Western experience. The other parts include consumption economics, more generally neo-liberal economics and the frauds embodied within international relations and that lead into two of the realms of persistent and some say necessary lying - Foreign Policy and Foreign Military Adventurism, dressed up as protecting the homeland.

However events in these two realms are pitched is the cover story. Not always that coherent or internally consistent, geopolitical cover stories targeted to a population rely on short memories and short attention spans. Think John Ralston Saul’s “The Unconscious Civilization”. There are consequences for not paying attention.

We have entered The Age Of Consequences simultaneously with The Age of Distractions. The previous forty years then? The Age of Shallow and Frivolous Pursuits? Celebrity Culture and the Triumph of Spectacle? Has it all been a series of pseudo-events?

Pseudo-Event: n - an entirely artificial, that is, a not spontaneous event created to attract media coverage and so convey authenticity.

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OK - one last time. Let’s reexamine that line . . .

“New Zealand has become an apocalypse escape destination for Americans” - as reported plus the justifier "And it's a long way from everywhere". Hahaha. Don’t make me laugh. And no. Not anymore! Recent changes in the geo-political landscape have buried this one. Sentiments that always were thought-terminating clichés.

The city of Perth, on the west coast of Western Australia, is now elevated in the geo-political stakes. They get their own slot in The Pentagon War Roulette Wheel of Fortune (misfortune? Check the recent experiences of any number of countries in the Middle East and West Asia) with a submarine base for US nuclear submarines, meaning nuclear powered and nuclear weaponized. Do not even imagine that these submarines will only be armed with conventional warhead missiles, the present cover story. A submarine is a weapons platform. That platform is only as good as the weapons it delivers. Declassified US documents going back to the 1950’s helpfully reveal that nuclear warheads targeting Chinese population centers has always been a part of US war execution doctrine, even when China had no nuclear weapons and outside of any contemplated war between the US and the then Soviet Union. Back to Perth and that proposed submarine base. Comes with a target too and Chinese and Russian missiles will be aimed at it. This policy manoeuvre was preceded a few years back by The Pentagon renaming Pacific Command the Indo-Pacific Command, May 2018 They had plans. Long range plans. Here’s their logo.

Australia front and center and lil’ New Zealand has not been overlooked. China’s there too. Check this photo, check the date, check the location - at the time of writing.

Now hear this. The War Machine is officially back in the Southern Hemisphere.

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“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” — Aristotle.

Escapist conduct is not a solution.

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Dr. Henry Kissinger recently railed against one element of this. Only one. A China - Russia military alliance. Everything he and President Richard Nixon worked for - the US not to face down a unified China - Russia Communist block, circa 1970’s. They and every US ally now face down a China - Russia military alliance.

Next up: Neo-liberal Geopolitics and why is The West facing an existential crisis of survival, why is China and President XiJinPing in the Anglo-American bad boy of the month club, alongside Vlad Putin (it’s had plenty of members)? Plus the functional insanity of the Australian defense minister and his helpful clarification that if a hot war broke out between the United States and China, Australia is in too. Remember. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria - these were turkey shoots, to use a US military officer’s explanation. Check - no WMD’s. Russia has the means to blast the US mainland and its military allies (Australia, New Zealand to randomly pick two) back to that era when the only life on earth were microbes.