Looking to the future, "truth and dissembling" and your carbon footprint in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

"If you think knowledge is dangerous, try ignorance!"

So said Steve Jones, the eminent biologist and geneticist, exasperated no doubt by the sinister denialism that stalks the truth, and so much abroad now, but long embedded in our history.

Steve Jones was speaking as a scientist . . .

Sigmund Freud's desk in his Hampstead home, now the Sigmund Freud Museum

In Steve Jones Reith Lecture series of 1991: The Language of the Genes, his Lecture 1: A Message from our Ancestors: 13 November 1991 - BBC Radio 4 - he begins by saying:

If you visit Sigmund Freud’s house in Hampstead, you see on his desk some unexpected objects - a stone axe, an Egyptian scarab and some ancient figurines. These, he suggested, were relics of the childhood of the human race; messages from our ancestors, whose experiences in the dawn of humanity still shape our lives. The guilt of those in the dim past, who killed their father for raping the women of their tribe, lingers on today; and, according to Freud, many of our anxieties and our neuroses are a memory of ancient times which can only be uncovered on the analyst’s couch.

Our genes, too, are messages from the past - and much more reliable than those received by Freud. Only in the past 20 years have we begun to read the language of the genes, to decipher our own instruction manual and understand the clues about ourselves left by our ancestors. In these lectures I will ask what genetics can - and, more important, what it cannot - tell us about the history, the present and the future of humankind.

The idea that the human condition can be explained by events that took place long ago is central to psychoanalysis, to religion and - for that matter - to much of politics. Recently, some psychologists and politicians, but not many geneticists, have claimed that we’re controlled by messages from our ancestors. They promote a kind of biological fatalism: humanity is driven by its genes and our biology is a sort of original sin. The poor are victims of their genes; their predicament is due to their own weakness and has nothing to do with the rest of us. Such nouvelle Calvinism suggests that as human life was programmed long ago there is no point in trying to change it, which is convenient for those who like things the way they are.

And knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially for those who like the way things are . . .

Take back control . . .

. . . and keep things the way they are!

Ben Jennings on Dominic Cummings' plans to axe BBC licence fee.

Dominic Cummings is a good example of someone who presents as radical and up for change, but he is highly selective in the methods and policy he challenges. Dominic Cummings Blog is full of a kind of pseudo avant-gardism, that backs up Steve Jones entirely valid position.

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is all about change, change as a personal and spiritual quality, but also about changing an entire system through education.

In the third chapter, that Dickens calls Stave three, both the reader and the apparently irredeemable character Scrooge, encounter the second of three spirits:

The second spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, takes Scrooge to a joyous market with people buying the makings of Christmas dinner and to celebrations of Christmas in a miner's cottage and in a lighthouse. Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present also visit Fred's Christmas party. A major part of this stave is taken up with Bob Cratchit's family feast and introduces his youngest son Tiny Tim, a happy boy who is seriously ill. The Ghost of Christmas Present informs Scrooge that Tiny Tim will die unless the course of events changes. 

Before disappearing, the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge two hideous, emaciated children named Ignorance and Want. He tells Scrooge to beware the former above all, for they will doom anyone who attempts to ignore them, and mocks Scrooge's concern for their welfare. 

Dickens was motivated by the condition of child poverty in the middle decades of the 19th century. In early 1843 he toured the Cornish tin mines, where he was angered by seeing children commercially exploited and working in appalling conditions. 

The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital's half-starved, illiterate street children.

In February 1843 the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission was published. It was a parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon working class children. 

On publication, public opinion was shocked and it inspired a variety of protest literature by such writers as Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (The Cry of the Children) and Charles Dickens.

Horrified by what he read, Dickens planned to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year. In March he wrote to Dr Southwood Smith, one of the four commissioners responsible for the Second Report, about his change in plans: "you will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force—I could exert by following out my first idea".

In a fundraising speech on 5 October 1843 at the Manchester Athenaeum, Dickens urged workers and employers to join together to combat ignorance with educational reform. In the days that followed he decided that the most effective way to reach the broadest segment of the population with his social concerns about poverty and injustice was to write a deeply felt Christmas narrative rather than polemical pamphlets and essays

Charles Dickens was writing as an artist . . .

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.” 

. . . and working for change! 

Ignorance . . .  

. . . and want!

Looking to the future in 2020, this year that climate scientists in 2019 declared as "the year of truth" when it comes to actually addressing the climate emergency, other couplets present themselves to Re:LODE Radio; 

knowledge and ignorance; 

ignorance and lies; 

arrogance and denial! 

Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson's endlessly inspiring collaborative work From Cliché to Archetype has all its chapters arranged in an all-for-a-bet-ical order, with the Table of Contents found on page 191, indicating that the chapter on Hendiadys: Cliché as Double Probe is to be found on page 107, where McLuhan and Watson consider the linguistic power of "doublets". As is the case in many of McLuhan's projects, at the top of this chapter there is a quote from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

The River Liffey at Harristown (Ceatharlach) 

LODE 1992 and Re:LODE 2017 Cargo of Questions - Ceatharlach 

The creation of the LODE cargo compass at Harristown, near to Carlow (Ceatharlach), and documented on Super8, that took place on the banks of the River Liffey on the edge of the Pale, prompted an article on the relevance of Joyce's work to LODE as a psycho-geographical exploration and expedition.

To every place there belongs a story . . . 

. . . riverrun . . . 

Here's the quotation: 

Lead kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine automotiveness right on normalcy: she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs . . .

Page 108, From Cliché to Archetype 

McLuhan and Watson begin to explain: 

L. P. Smith in Words and Idioms draws attention to a mysterious property of language, namely, the ineradicable power of doublets. The Greek word for these structure, hendiadys ("one through two"), draws attention to the Greek word for "word" - mythos. Doublets, by interface, create new forms of what James Hillman calls in Emotion "isomorphic unity." Phrases like "song and dance," "words and music" draw attention to the different senses and media that are encountered in doublets.

For this post Re:LODE Radio chooses; 

"truth and dissembling" in the realm of the socioscientific.

Blind faith in science is NOT appropriate, but belief and trust in a process, a result of a peer review consideration of "sound as a bell" evidence and probability, are qualities that are entirely relevant in the realm of the socioscientific.

On Sunday 6 December 2020 in the print version of the Observer, the editorial on the Covid vaccine was headlined as follows:

This amazing global effort shows science is borderless

The Observer editorial:

For some politicians, the temptation to indulge in bouts of national triumphalism is irresistible. A perfect example was provided last week by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, who claimed – in half-joking terms – that Britain’s speedy approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 showed that the UK had a much better grade of scientists and medical regulators than France, Belgium or the US. For good measure, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, joined in, insisting that because Britain was no longer part of the EU, it had been able to act more speedily in making vaccine jabs available to its citizens. How great it was to be British and independent.

It has taken little time to reveal the emptiness of these assertions. Hancock’s claim about the medical benefits of Brexit ignored the simple fact that the UK already possessed long-standing legislative instruments that allowed it, within the framework of European law, to authorise the emergency supply of the vaccine. As a result, both Downing Street and the UK’s medical regulatory authority were forced to dismiss the medical claims of our own health secretary – on the straightforward grounds that they were inaccurate.

Then there is the issue of Britain’s approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which, according to Williamson, shows the primacy of our medical researchers and doctors over all other nations. It was a flippant assertion and it was also wrong and unworthy. A great number of British scientists are certainly first rate but in this case they had only walk-on parts to play in making the vaccine available to the population of the UK. A closer look at the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reveals a far more intriguing truth. It was developed in Germany, by the children of Turkish immigrants, and then tested in the US, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa. Now it is being manufactured in Belgium, an intriguing international chain of involvement that has culminated in Britain weighing in – at the last minute – to gain plaudits for being the first to approve the vaccine for use.

The important point is that nothing in the development of the first Covid-19 vaccines demonstrates the unique attributes of scientists or researchers of any single nation. Quite the reverse. What has been revealed, very clearly, is the power of science to operate between different countries, over different continents and to put narrow national interests aside. This is the essence of modern science, an intensely co-operative exercise in which information is shared, ideas put forward and propositions tested. This is the process that has led not just too the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine but to the success of many other Covid-19 projects, including the Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines that have also recently reported highly encouraging trial results.

This process can, in turn, be traced back to the initial work of Prof Zhang Yongzhen at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center. As we report elsewhere, he received, on 3 January this year, swabs from patients suffering from a deadly respiratory illness, which we now call Covid-19, which was sweeping through Hubei province in central China. After two days of intense effort, he and his team were able to sequence the genetic code of the virus causing the epidemic and showed it was a previously unknown, very dangerous coronavirus closely related to one that had caused fatal outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China several years earlier.

Within days, Zhang’s results were posted on the website Virological.org, giving scientists across the globe a unique early opportunity to begin research on drugs and vaccines that could halt the spread of the disease. More than 200 vaccine projects have been launched on the back of this work, many involving scientists abruptly abandoning other research to launch projects that might help the world deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been pointed out, correctly, that quitting existing research may have set back progress in tackling other illnesses. However, lessons learned from tackling Covid-19 will very likely help researchers develop new ways to create vaccines for other diseases.

The crucial point is that, in a stunningly short space of time, an effective weapon to counter a deadly new virus has been created thanks primarily to global interactive efforts. Covid-19 has killed more than 1.5 million people in less than a year but scientists have responded with equal speed to find a solution. Their efforts have transcended borders and encompassed the planet. Ultimately, this should save our world from continued Covid misery and save millions of lives.

These points are worth stressing as Britain hovers at the edge of a no-deal exit from the EU, one that would greatly decrease our scientific standing, hamper our researchers’ abilities to join collaborative international research projects and curtail funds for new EU scientific initiatives. Isolated by a bad Brexit, British research would suffer disastrously. Covid has made it clear that science today is an international affair, yet Britain is poised to curtail its ability to join in this process. Science will be poorer for a bad Brexit, as will be the UK.

Riddell's view 

Re:LODE Radio considers this a moment of inanity "bordering on insanity".

Science is borderless . . . 

. . . as is Carbon Dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere . . . 

. . . and yet, Carbon Dioxide emissions emanate from within identifiable national boundaries!

A month ago, in the print edition Wednesday 11 November, Haroon Siddique reported for the Guardian on Anti-vaxxers seizing on the promising results of a new coronavirus vaccine, and attempting to discredit the Pfizer/BioNTech development on social media within hours of it being announced. This story was published under the headline:

Plague of conspiracy theories spreads online after vaccine is unveiled 

Haroon Siddique reports (Tue 10 November 2020). He writes: 

Anti-vaxxers have seized on the promising results of a new coronavirus vaccine, attempting to discredit the Pfizer/BioNTech development on social media within hours of it being announced.

After the news broke that interim analysis suggested the vaccine had 90% effectiveness, “Bill Gates” began trending on Twitter. The Microsoft founder has been one of the most popular targets for conspiracy theorists because of his work on vaccines.

Most promising vaccines in devlopment

While some were poking fun at the conspiracy theories, others subscribed to views expressed by the disgraced US researcher Dr Judy Mikovits in the viral Plandemic video, in which she blames the coronavirus outbreak on a conspiracy led by big pharma, Gates and the World Health Organization.

The conspiracy was repeated by a caller to BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show on Tuesday, who claimed “Bill Gates is behind this” and accused him of seeking material gain.

Just over an hour after Boris Johnson finished a press conference in which he sought to manage expectations following the interim results for the vaccine – which must gain regulatory approval before it is rolled out – Louise Creffield from Save Our Rights UK, which has campaigned against lockdown, made a Facebook live response.

In the video, she said: “There’s been no safety data yet, it hasn’t been peer-reviewed, there is a lot of indemnity to it and the MHRA [Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency], who are going to be the ones that approve it or not, we have found out, well, one, they’re a government body so they are paid for by the government, and two they’ve received nearly £1m in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So the likelihood that they are a robustly independent body like Boris Johnson said is slim to none.”

Johnson was explicit in saying there was no safety data for the vaccine and it has not been peer-reviewed.

Creffield also voiced scepticism about the speed at which the vaccine has been developed. She suggested the “presence of the army is coercive” – a reference to Johnson being flanked at the press conference by Brigadier Joe Fossey, who was there to talk about military support for mass testing in Liverpool.

Heidi Larson, director of the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project, said: “There’s a lot of language out there about speed but we haven’t really talked about why things are faster and it’s not because we’re shortcutting old processes.

“These new Covid vaccines are on brand new platforms. There’s never been an mRNA vaccine [which uses the genetic code rather than any part of the virus itself] before for humans. So, this Pfizer vaccine, for instance, would be absolutely brand new, made in a new way.”

While social media companies have removed some of the most extreme content – in relation to the Plandemic video for instance – Larson said it was difficult for them to police content that was more ambiguous or posted by organisations with innocuous-sounding names, or to prevent it being moved to another platform.

“I think the biggest problem with all these misinformation efforts is that we’re not there with alternatives and we’re not listening,” she said.

“Anti/sceptical vaccine individuals and groups are actively seeking out people who are questioning and hesitant, and they are right there, waiting to say: ‘You’re right, you have a good reason to be concerned, there is a problem.’ We’re just saying ‘Don’t worry’ and not really saying: ‘Tell me about your concern.’”

Prof Melinda Mills, from the University of Oxford and lead author of Covid-19 vaccine deployment, a report published on Tuesday by the British Academy and the Royal Society for the Set-C (Science in Emergencies Tasking: Covid-19) group, echoed Larson’s views.

“Vaccines are one of the most amazing discoveries … they’ve saved millions of lives and we often forget that because we’re not surrounded by measles and polio and smallpox. But I do think so much focus on the medical science and so much focus on the vaccines has left us with a real blind spot into how people see them.”

Creffield said the Pfizer vaccine being based on new technology increased the need for scrutiny. “I’m not about feeding conspiracy theories – I’m just about making sure that we have the full facts of the matter, including about where these things are coming from,” she told the Guardian.

“If there’s questions on any of those answers … that doesn’t mean necessarily it’s untrustworthy and that you shouldn’t take part in whatever it is. It just means you need to satisfy that … nothing untoward is going on.”

Back in May this year (May 12 2020), our "YEAR OF TRUTH", Casey Newton, writing for THE VERGE, covered the story of:

How the 'Plandemic' video hoax went viral

This article by Casey Newton is part of The Interface at THE VERGE, a daily column and newsletter about the intersection of social media and democracy, another doublet, and another interface. Casey Newton writes:

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the big social platforms have generally been quicker than usual to intervene in the spread of misinformation. We’ve seen Facebook, Google, and Twitter add various labels, warnings, and links to high-quality news sources and public health organizations. And for the most part, the dumbest theories about the novel coronavirus have not reached huge scale — unless the theory was suggested by the president of the United States, in which case, well.

But some cracks are beginning to show. In February, a set of bizarre and almost incomprehensible theories began to spread on YouTube and Facebook alleging that 5G cellular networks had played a role in spreading the virus. And last week, we saw the emergence of the first true hit conspiracy video of the COVID-19 era. It’s called “Plandemic,” and like many conspiracy videos it asserts that a shadowy cabal of elites is using a global crisis as a cover to profiteer and entrench their power. Here’s Davey Alba in the New York Times:

In the 26-minute video, the woman asserted how Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading voice on the coronavirus, had buried her research about how vaccines can damage people’s immune systems. It is those weakened immune systems, she declared, that have made people susceptible to illnesses like Covid-19.

The video, a scene from a longer dubious documentary called “Plandemic,” was quickly seized upon by anti-vaccinators, the conspiracy group QAnon and activists from the Reopen America movement, generating more than eight million views. And it has turned the woman — Dr. Judy Mikovits, 62, a discredited scientist — into a new star of virus disinformation.

Uploads of “Plandemic” have more than 8 million views across social platforms, with one YouTube version hitting 7.1 million views before it was removed. That would be more than enough to place it near the top of the YouTube trending page — about as many views as this video where influencers practice apologizing (8.6 million), but still way below the three-day-old official music video for 6ix9ine’s “Gooba” (103 million).

Still, the video seems well on its way to becoming something akin to this generation’s Loose Change. That video, which wrongly depicted 9/11 as an elaborate false flag operation, generated millions of views after being distributed for free on YouTube and local Fox TV affiliates — and went on to become one of the foundational texts of the 9/11 truther movement.

I accept that on a free and open internet, some people are going to post extremely dumb and harmful things. And “Plandemic” is undoubtedly harmful: among other things, it falsely tells people that wearing a mask will “activate” the virus. But we’ve seen in the past that extremely dumb and harmful things often benefit from algorithmic promotion. They appear high up in search results, on trending pages, and in recommendation widgets. Platforms are used to recruit followers for terrible causes without even being aware that they’re doing so.

After years of pressure, though, platforms have gotten better at detecting bad posts and videos as they begin bubbling up. They’re now able to catch more bad stuff before it hits the trending page. YouTube has a whole team that monitors this stuff in real time. And so “Plandemic” left me scratching my head. How did this thing go viral?

The ground was seeded by a book that Mikovits, the star of “Plandemic,” published last month. Plague of Corruption “frames Dr. Mikovits as a truth-teller fighting deception in science,” Alba writes, and it won approving coverage from far-right outlets including the Epoch Times, Gateway Pundit, and Next News Network.

But it was the “Plandemic” clip that turned Mikovits into a star (she’s gained more than 130,000 Twitter followers in a month.) And the two have benefited each other: searches for Mikovits drove views of “Plandemic,” and viewings of “Plandemic” drove searches for Mikovits.

Erin Gallagher, a social media researcher who specializes in data visualizations, offers some clues. Gallagher used CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool for analyzing public posts, to investigate when “Plandemic” began to surge on the network. She found that posts referencing it appeared most often in Facebook groups devoted to QAnon, anti-vaccine misinformation, and conspiracy theories in general.

“The video spread from YouTube to Facebook thanks to highly active QAnon and conspiracy-related Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members which caused a massive cascade,” Gallagher writes. “Both platforms were instrumental in spreading viral medical misinformation.”

YouTube and Facebook both ultimately removed the video, but their responses differed in notable ways. I spoke to representatives at both companies today, and here’s what I learned.

At Facebook, “Plandemic” was demoted before it was removed. Demotion is a step that Facebook often takes with posts that seem bad for one reason or another but are not considered actively harmful. Maybe you posted an image in which someone is almost but not quite naked; maybe you suggested that people commit violence without coming right out and saying it. Since 2018 Facebook has intervened in an effort to prevent these types of posts from spreading, as part of an initiative to make it less appealing to post so-called “borderline content.”

I don’t know exactly what qualified “Plandemic” as borderline content initially, but a spokesman noted that the video’s length — 26 minutes — along with the large number of claims made within it, created a lot of work for fact-checking teams. (A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes, etc.) Facebook eventually decided that “Plandemic” had to go over its false assertion that people can “reinfect themselves” by wearing masks, but given the truly unfortunate confusion over mask wearing — some of it generated by public health organizations — the company was cautious.

At YouTube, the company saw several videos related to “Plandemic” and flagged and removed them before the 26-minute clip that became famous. That clip was uploaded on May 4th and removed May 6th. In the meantime, it generated 7.1 million views. According to the company, the vast majority of those views came from external sites — people linking to it directly, rather than seeing it somewhere on YouTube. Gallagher’s analysis suggests a significant number of those clicks came directly from Facebook. (YouTube wouldn’t comment on that.)

For its part, YouTube said, it did not recommend “Plandemic” or surface it “prominently” in search results — so, not on the first page. Search for it now and you’ll see a pop-up from an independent fact checker and many videos of doctors debunking its claims.

Facebook continues to see people upload other clips from “Plandemic,” and told me that it is sharing fact-checking information from its partners with people who share them. It’s temporarily reducing the distribution of these other clips — the ones that don’t include the mask bit — as fact checkers continue to evaluate other parts of “Plandemic.” People also continue to post modified versions of the original — recording it on their phones or adding commentary to it — and Facebook is hunting those down too.

There’s a view of all this that is heartening. Both companies saw a bad thing, put teams of fact checkers on it, and removed it from their networks with relative haste. (That’s more than Amazon can say: Plague of Corruption is a top-10 best seller there today.) Facebook and YouTube could have acted faster, or more completely, but it isn’t as if “Plandemic” caught them unawares. YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly users, and Facebook has 1.73 billion users per day across its suite of apps; at that scale, 8 million people seeing something in 48 hours just doesn’t look like all that much. (And if you’re thinking well huh, maybe the problem with these companies is their size, you may have been interested in Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.)

But there’s a darker view to consider, too. When Facebook announced it would shift its attention to building services for smaller, more private groups, critics pointed out that this was likely going to make it harder to police misinformation. This is particularly true of WhatsApp chats, which are encrypted end-to-end. But it’s also true of private Facebook groups, where it seems likely that “Plandemic” was shared actively.

It likely won’t be the last piece of harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that becomes a blockbuster. And when the next one comes, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that the pathway to virality leads straight through Facebook groups.

But here's an "antidote" 

Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ 

This continually updated information resource is a website based joint project by Stuart Ritchie, Mike Bird, Neil O'Brien MP, Saloni Dattani, Sam Bowman, Michael Story, Lawrence Newport, Mustafa Latif-Aramesh, Jonathon Kitson, Ben Hoskin, and other volunteers, and nobody is paying them for their contribution to disseminating this peer reviewed data, trustworthy information, and critique of misinformation on this freely accessible web based resource courtesy of Notion.

The website offers users the opportunity to review the record of a number of high profile Covid Sceptics in the United Kingdom and the US, in comparison to scientifically accepted, peer reviewed and known facts, data and reasoning: 

"We invite you to compare what the Covid Sceptics have written with the reality of what has happened throughout the pandemic."

Academics

Sunetra Gupta (Oxford University)

John Ioannidis (Stanford School of Medicine)

Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson (Oxford CEBM)

Journalists

Ross Clark

Julia Hartley-Brewer

Peter Hitchens

Allison Pearson

Toby Young

Online Sceptics

Clare Craig

Ivor Cummins

Jeffrey Tucker (AIER)

Michael Yeadon

Q. Narcissists?

The media, in fighting for attention, sometimes over-simplifies, or exaggerates minor disputes, staging them as showdowns between the luminaries involved. In Germany, the debate about COVID-19 is presented by some media as an almost personal fight between Professor Drosten (Berlin) and Professor Streeck (Bonn), with ntv describing Streeck as the virologist of the second wave while Drosten was the one of the first wave7 – in interviews both strongly reject such staged presentations. 

Still, nonprofessional observers often pick whatever oversimplified and out-of- context argument they can distill out of such formats, as long as it suits their priors. It also seduces them into the false conclusion that their own beliefs and deliberations are at par with experts’ views. They fall prey to overestimating their own knowledge, as in reality their limited assessment does not come from their own knowledge but is borrowed from communities of knowledge they are tuned into. The ability to assess the quality of your own knowledge, called “meta- knowledge”, is crucial for information evaluation and decision-making. Experiments show that people overestimate their knowledge even with regard to rather simple subjects. Upon testing, there is hardly any correlation between people’s self-assessment and their actual knowledge of a subject. 

According to sociologists, COVID-19-related conspiracy theories are so appealing to narcissistic individuals, as they provide them with the (false) impression of owning superior knowledge ordinary people (or even experts) do not have.

But even experts rely heavily on their “communities of knowledge”. They have to trust their colleagues and institutions, such as peer reviews, as they cannot reproduce every important new science insight published elsewhere. Trust, however, is an emotion, so even the scientific process cannot escape being influenced by attitudes and beliefs.

A. Yes! Narcissists!

The quotation above is from an analysis and research conducted by Deutsche Bank

Speaking of narcissists, the observation made about the relative popularity of “Plandemic” which succeeded in gaining more than 8 million views across social digital media platforms, with one YouTube version hitting 7.1 million views before it was removed, certainly more than enough to place it near the top of the YouTube trending page — AND about as many views as this video where influencers practice apologising (8.6 million), BUT still way below the three-day-old official music video for 6ix9ine’s “Gooba” (103 million).

What is it about narcissists and their followers?

Referencing "Gooba", there's a question, a question primarily for 6ix9ine fans and QAnon and other conspiracy followers: 

"Are you dumb, stupid, or dumb?" 

This question is 6ix9ine's repeated and confrontational refrain in "Gooba", a rehashing of Brooklyn rapper Ronny Godz's song "Are You Dumb", and a line which 6ix9ine previously ripped off for his 2018 song "Stoopid". For Re:LODE Radio it begs another couple of questions:

What is it about narcissists, narcissism and control freaks? 

Is the use of conspiracy and distrust part of a narcissist's stock response, a "gaslighting" tactic?

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment. It may evoke changes in them such as cognitive dissonance or low self-esteem, rendering the victim additionally dependent on the gaslighter for emotional support and validation. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's beliefs.

Instances can range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents occurred, to belittling the victim's emotions and feelings, to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim. The goal of gaslighting is to gradually undermine the victim’s confidence in their own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from delusion, thereby rendering the individual or group pathologically dependent on the gaslighter for their thinking and feelings.

The term originated from the British play Gas Light (1938), performed as Angel Street in the United States, and its 1940 and 1944 film adaptations (both titled Gaslight). The term has now been used in clinical psychological literature, as well as in political commentary and philosophy.

This is Gaslight, a 1940 British film directed by Thorold Dickinson which stars Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and features Frank Pettingell. The film adheres more closely to the original play upon which it is based – Patrick Hamilton's Gas Light (1938) – than the better-known 1944 MGM adaptation. 

Re:LODE Radio considers that there is some similarity between the strategic techniques of psychological manipulation adopted by 6ix9ine and the outgoing President of the United States, Donald Trump, especially in the rendering of an individual and/or a group pathologically dependent on the gaslighter for their thinking and feelings.

Re:LODE Radio considers the "Gooba" phenomenon a fair example of narcissism present in popular culture. It was released on May 8, 2020, 6ix9ine's birthday, as the first single after his prison release on April 2, 2020. 

So, who is 6ix9ine?

His name is Daniel Hernandez (born May 8, 1996), but is known professionally as Tekashi69 or 6ix9ine (pronounced "six nine") as an American rapper and songwriter. But he is also a convicted felon. His music has been marked by an aggressive style of rapping, while his controversial public persona is characterized by his distinctive rainbow-colored hair, extensive tattoos, public feuds with fellow celebrities, and legal issues.

6ix9ine became widely known in late 2017 after the release of his debut single, "Gummo", which was a sleeper hit. He subsequently released the mixtape Day69 (2018), which was supported by the singles "Kooda", "Keke", and "Gotti", all of which charted on the Billboard Hot 100. "Fefe", featuring Nicki Minaj and Murda Beatz, a single from his debut album Dummy Boy (2018), peaked at number three on the Hot 100. Despite negative critical reception, Dummy Boy was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

In 2015, 6ix9ine pled guilty to a felony count of use of a child in a sexual performance and received a four-year probation period and a 1,000-hour community service order. He had been charged with three counts of the offence after a February 2015 incident in which he had physical contact with a 13-year-old girl and later distributed videos of the incident online as part of a music video. 

Three videos are described in the criminal complaint against Hernandez. In the first, "the child engages in oral sexual intercourse with the separately charged defendant Taquan Anderson, while the defendant, Daniel Hernandez, stands behind the child making a thrusting motion with his pelvis and smacking her on her buttocks. The child is nude in the video." The other videos show the child sitting on Hernandez's lap while Anderson gropes her breasts, and later sitting naked across the laps of Anderson and Hernandez.

In 2018, he was arrested on racketeering, weapons, and drugs charges. He pled guilty to nine charges including conspiracy to commit murder and armed robbery in February 2019, and was given a two-year prison sentence after testifying for the prosecution. In April 2020, he was granted early release during the COVID-19 pandemic following fears over his vulnerability to the disease due to his asthma condition. He was put on house arrest for the remainder of his term. On May 7, 2020, he announced that he would celebrate his 24th birthday the following day, by releasing a new single, "Gooba". The single peaked at number three in the US, and "Trollz", his third collaboration with Minaj, debuted at number one in the country. His second album, TattleTales (2020), debuted at number four on the US Billboard 200.

"Gooba" is the lead single from his second studio album, TattleTales, released on September 4, 2020. 6ix9ine recorded the song, in which he raps about his role in the Nine Trey Gangsters trial while targeting his detractors, and filmed its accompanying video while under house arrest.

The track contains a simplistic trap beat, and finds 6ix9ine employing his signature "aggressive" style. Lyrically, as noted by Rap-Up, he "unleashes his wrath on the haters and clout chasers". 

He mentions testifying in court against members of the Nine Trey Bloods Gang in return for a reduced sentence: "Tell me how I ratted, came home to a big bag". The track also includes a reference to the COVID-19 pandemic ("Basic, been hot, way before coronavirus"). Brendan Klinkenberg of Rolling Stone described the song as "punishingly blunt and seemingly designed to provoke".

"Gooba" received negative reviews from most critics. Complex's Shawn Setaro gave the song a negative review, and criticized 6ix9ine and the rapper's approach to his comeback, claiming he is "not the repentant, quiet young man we saw in the courtroom". Setaro further remarked: "Instead, we saw a 24-year-old man obsessed with money, popularity, haters, and getting even. 6ix9ine fell right back into his favorite role: the upstart who doesn't conform to street codes, and wins anyway". He lambasted 6ix9ine for his lack of apologies toward those he wronged, saying he "only lists [...] the wrongs done to him, and why those wrongs render him blameless". Vulture's Craig Jenkins had a similar notion, regarding the song as "a long diatribe about how everyone's jealous because he's doing better than them". Jenkins went on to criticize the rapper, stating: "It's jarring having a rapper tell you his entire persona was really just a money-making shtick and then step right back into the character, to hear and see a hip-hop artist make a joke out of the fact that he sang on the stand in court", but concluded, "we can't stop him because we must know what happens next; our curiosity is his source of power".

Hernandez, faced with the fact that the "Gooba" debut reached only number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, 6ix9ine uploaded a video accusing Billboard of rigging and chart manipulation. He stated, "I want the world to know, that Billboard is a lie", while adding: "You can buy No. 1s on Billboard". He also went on to accuse pop singers Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber's management of buying downloads for their song "Stuck with U", which debuted at number 1 ahead of "Gooba". He alleged that "they purchased 30K copies with six credit cards". 6ix9ine claimed "It's all manipulated, it's all fabricated", showing the streams "Gooba" had accumulated in its first week, accusing Billboard of "disqualifying" 20 million or so streams. 

A few days prior to this, 6ix9ine had posted a video to Instagram showing an unidentified Hot 100 chart forecast where "Stuck With U" was placed at number 5. 

Later he posted another video, where, in his words, the song "went from being fifth place to first place out of nowhere", suggesting that Billboard was manipulating the Hot 100 and "playing favorites". 

In a lengthy online post, Grande indirectly responded to 6ix9ine, writing: "I didn't have a number one for the first five years of my career and it didn't upset me at all because from the bottom of my heart, my music is everything to me [...]". She went on to deny 6ix9ine's accusation that her and Bieber's team bought digital song downloads for the track: "Our fans bought this song (never more than four copies each, AS THE RULES STATE). Sales count for more than streams. U can not discredit this as hard as u try". Bieber also responded, pointing out that 6ix9ine counted global streams instead of just US streams and addressed his claims further, saying "Nielsen company checks this and found all out sales were legit because our fans are amazing and bought them". Scooter Braun, Grande and Bieber's manager, also responded, denying 6ix9ine's claims.

Billboard responded later the same day, and "in the interest of transparency", denied any chart manipulation, explaining its chart methodology for the Hot 100. The magazine went on to address and detail every accusation made by 6ix9ine, including the 24-hour sales spike that "Stuck with U" received, noting that "singles were put up for sale in Grande and Bieber's webstores" on the final day of chart-tracking. Billboard also addressed 6ix9ine's claims that they would not "disclose" information about data when asked, stating that they, Billboard and Nielsen, cannot "provide granular detail on a title to anyone but its content owner" and further stressed that "data partners recognize excessive bulk purchases and remove those units from the final sales total. All titles this week, as in every week, were put under the same scrutiny". Regarding 6ix9ine's video of an unidentified chart forecast, Billboard said it "does not distribute any Hot 100 ranking forecast to labels, management or artists", and concluded that "Overall, Stuck With U drew 28.1 million U.S. streams, 26.3 million in radio airplay audience and 108,000 sold in the tracking week, which is why it got to number one whereas Gooba had 55.3 million U.S. streams, 172,000 in radio airplay audience and 24,000 sold".

Look and sound familiar?

Trump has longstanding history of calling elections 'rigged' if he doesn't like the results

This article by Terence Smith for ABC News (11 November 2020), was published just over a week after the US election for the presidency, looks at Trump's long term habit of gaslighting as a stock response to losing in a fair contest.   

Terence Smith writes:

It's been over a week since the polls closed on Election Day, and a few days since President-elect Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential race, and still, President Donald Trump has not accepted the results of the election.

What Trump has done is continue to double down on his claims that this year's election was "rigged" and there were massive amounts of voter fraud nationwide that cost him his victory.

There is no truth to the claims that there was widespread voter fraud in the election, yet the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are pursuing lawsuits in several states claiming that there was. Despite their complaints, they have not provided any evidence of fraud or corroborated any of the president's claims.

This is not the first time Trump has made claims about election fraud when the results do not please him. It has been a part of his playbook for years -- long before he entered politics.

2012 general election

On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a "total sham" and a "travesty," while also making the claim that the United States is "not a democracy" after Obama secured his victory.

Trump even wrote on Twitter, "We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!"

There was no truth to the claims that Obama's election victory against Sen. Mitt Romney was a "sham" and the democratic process played out in 2012 as it is doing now and has with every election, as the votes are tabulated and certified by states and local officials.

Trump also previously called for the American people, presumably those who didn't vote for Obama, to "fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice," because "the world is laughing at us."

Trump first challenged the election results in 2012, continued to do so in 2016 and has now done it again in 2020.

2016 primary and general election

When he ran to become the Republican Party nominee in 2016, he attempted to cast doubt on the election process. Trump said he did not lose the Iowa caucuses in 2016 to then candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, because he "stole it."

"Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!" Trump wrote on Twitter at the time.

He also wrote, "Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified."

Cruz was the clear victor for the Republican Iowa caucus in 2016, as he defeated Trump by three percentage points.

In October 2016, just weeks before the general election, Trump wanted to cast doubt on the results by tweeting, "The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD," without providing any evidence for the claim.

Even after the election ended and it was clear that Clinton had lost and conceded victory to Trump, the president didn't stop lamenting over the election he had won. He quickly made the claim that he also won the popular vote over Clinton, which is something that did not happen.

"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," said Trump.

The president lost the popular vote to Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, and there was no evidence of voter fraud then, just as there is no evidence of voter fraud now.

2020 general election

Fast forward to today, Trump took to his favorite platform, just moments before major media outlets had projected Biden the winner in this year's election, and falsely tweeted, "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!"

That tweet was flagged by Twitter because Trump was not declared the victor, and because for months since his rally on Aug. 17 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin -- when he famously said, "The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged" -- Trump has been attempting to cast doubt on the American electoral process.

Trump continued to attack mail-in ballots and absentee ballots well into the fall months so that when the ballots were to be tabulated, he could cast doubt and speculate that he was the victim of fraud due to the vote-by-mail system.

On Twitter, the day after Election Day, as Biden's lead was becoming more evident in several states, Trump tweeted, "They are finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!"

The next day, the president made the claim that he has always said mail-in ballots are not to be trusted.

"I've been talking about mail-in voting for a long time. It's -- it's really destroyed our system. It's a corrupt system. And it makes people corrupt even if they aren't by nature, but they become corrupt; it's too easy. They want to find out how many votes they need, and then they seem to be able to find them. They wait and wait and then they find them," Trump said two days after Election Day.

As mail-in ballots continued to be counted, states like Pennsylvania began to show a clear Biden lead.

In the days after Election Day, Trump continued to make falsehoods on Twitter, which the social media platform quickly flagged. "WATCH FOR MASSIVE BALLOT COUNTING ABUSE...REMEMBER I TOLD YOU SO!" he tweeted, claiming that ballot harvesting took place and he was right about the potential of it happening.

Trump has stuck to this playbook for years; however, his claims have never prompted a meaningful change in the election process.

This time, the president is taking his claims through the legal system with no evidence to back them up. Meanwhile, the campaign is continuing to raise money for the battles, as it's clear the president isn't willing to give up quickly. 

This must stop!

On 1 Dec 2020 Voting System Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling calls on President Donald Trump, and other elected officials, to condemn threats of violence against election officials, and associated workers. This was covered by FOX NewsNOW in this press conference.

NewsNOW from FOX

"THIS MUST STOP" Georgia Election Officials Say Trump Supporters Are MAKING THREATS 

The following day, Donald Trump makes a previously-unannounced, pre-recorded speech on the election, released on Facebook, on December 2, 2020. Uploaded to YouTube for archival purposes by Factba.se

The Guardian reported (Thu 3 dec 2020) that Facebook and Twitter have placed warnings on a 46-minute video statement released by Donald Trump on Wednesday, in which the president repeats baseless claims of voter fraud in November’s election, which he lost to Joe Biden. Lauren Aratani and agencies report for the Guardian (Thu 3 Dec 2020). Lauren Aratani writes under the headline: 

Donald Trump releases video statement repeating baseless vote fraud claims

President-elect Biden, a veteran Democrat, won the presidential election with 306 electoral college votes, compared with Trump’s 232. However, Trump has refused to concede, and has instead launched – and lost – flimsy legal battles in several states, which experts said appeared aimed at dragging out vote counting and creating a cloud of uncertainty over the electoral process.

“This may be the most important speech I’ve ever made,” Trump says in the video, before making lengthy, rambling and baseless claims that America’s electoral system is “under coordinated assault and siege”.

Trump, who spoke from the Diplomatic Room, kept up his futile pushback against the election even as state after state certifies its results and as Biden presses ahead with shaping his cabinet in advance of his inauguration on 20 January.

Biden received a record 81m votes compared to 74m for Trump. The Democrat also won 306 electoral votes compared to 232 for Trump. The electoral college split matches Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago, which he described then as a “landslide”.

Trump dug further into his contention of a “rigged election” even though members of his own administration, including the attorney general, William Barr, say that no proof of widespread voter fraud has been uncovered. Courts in multiple battleground states have thrown out a barrage of lawsuits filed on behalf of the president.

“This is not just about honoring the votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me,” Trump said. “It’s about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election. And in all future elections.”

The Trump video comes a day after Barr said the US Department of Justice had not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the presidential election.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr said US attorneys and FBI agents had been working to follow up complaints and information but had uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said.

Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a statement: “With the greatest respect to the attorney general, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.”

As the 8 December deadline for states to certify their results approaches, Trump is fast running out of options to contest the outcome of the election.

Many of Trump’s claims, including that the US election was subject to widespread “voter fraud”, have been debunked repeatedly in recent weeks.

In fact, Christopher Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, voiced confidence in the integrity of the election ahead of the November vote. And afterward, he knocked down allegations that the count was tainted by fraud. Krebs was fired by Trump weeks ago.

The video was released a day after one of Georgia’s top election officials made an impassioned plea to Trump to tone down his rhetoric disputing the election results, saying the president was “inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence”.

Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system, also issued the stark warning that if Trump and his supporters did not rein in election disinformation “someone is going to get hurt”.

Sterling, the voting systems manager for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said last week that he had police protection around his home because of threats he received after election results were announced. Trump lost Georgia to Biden by about 13,000 votes.

Trump responded to Sterling’s plea by tweeting baseless claims about the Georgia election and criticising the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Twitter flagged his tweet as “disputed”.

"The Storm" and the "Trump of Doom"

The "trump of doom" has been referenced, somewhat playfully by Re:LODE Radio, to overlap the mediocre capabilities of Donald Trump with the unmitigated disaster his incompetence has, and is producing, and the wider cultural problem of contemporary millenarian fantasies, including conspiracy theories like QAnon, Covid-denial and the right wing sponsored climate change denial machine.

"The rabbit hole behind the rabbit hole is possibly a weaponised game", says Izabella Kaminska, in her article for the Financial Times that sheds some light amid the gloom (OCTOBER 16 2020) headlined:

The 'game theory" in the QAnon conspiracy theory

Izabella Kaminska begins her article by introducing a short FT video on "the state of play".

A couple of months ago we asked if Qanon, the online conspiracy that claims Trump is saving the world from corrupt pedophiles, is actually a LARP (i.e. a live-action role-playing game). The whole structure of the conspiracy, especially its puzzle-solving elements, seemed to us to emulate the constructs of a purposefully planned alternative reality game.

It wasn’t long before we were put in touch with a number of voices who seemed to corroborate the theory.

It’s a strange story. One that features a multitude of actors, many with varying or not-always clearcut agendas.

Here’s a short video we made about our findings so far:

Is QAnon a game gone wrong?

 

Climate change science and theories concerning "conspiracy theory"

To really understand the functionality and pathology of conspiracy theory go to the George Mason University: 

CENTER for CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNICATION

This page has a link to a pdf of The Conspiracy Theory Handbook in a number of languages. One of the reasons that climate science is concerned to find practical ways of addressing the threat posed by conspiracy theories is because this socio-cultural and political phenomenon represents a significant impediment to implementing those policy changes necessary to tackle the climate emergency by sovereign states. Climate science discourse is way ahead of political and media discourses, and able, in this instance to make this handbook available in the earlier stages of the pandemic.

This Press Release by the University of Bristol to the updated 'Conspiracy Theory Handbook' was published 23 March 2020. It introduces the new handbook thus:  

Given the unhelpful surge of conspiracy theories circulating regarding Covid-19, a new ‘Conspiracy Theory Handbook’ is published this week. The book summarises the scientific research into conspiracy theories: why people believe them, the traits of conspiratorial thinking, and how to counter them.

The Handbook begins with an overview with the heading:

Distinguishing between real conspiracies and conspiracy theories

Real conspiracies do exist. Volkswagen conspired to cheat emissions tests for their diesel engines. The U.S. National Security Agency secretly spied on civilian internet users. The tobacco industry deceived the public about the harmful health effects of smoking. We know about these conspiracies through internal industry documents, government investigations, or whistleblowers.

Conspiracy theories, by contrast, tend to persist for a long time even when there is no decisive evidence for them. Those conspiracy theories are based on a variety of thinking patterns that are known to be unreliable tools for tracking reality. Typically, conspiracy theories are not supported by evidence that withstands scrutiny but this doesn’t stop them from blossoming. 

For example, the widespread belief that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job” has persisted for many years after the event. Decades after the fact, a vast majority of Americans believe that the government covered up the truth about the JFK assassination.

Conspiracy theories damage society in a number of ways. For example, exposure to conspiracy theories decreases people’s intentions to engage in politics or to reduce their carbon footprint. 

In order to minimise these harmful effects, The Conspiracy Theory Handbook helps you understand why conspiracy theories are so popular, explains how to identify the traits of conspiratorial thinking, and lists effective debunking strategies.

Urban myth, the folklore of industrial man and pavement radio

The term "urban legend", as used by folklorists, has appeared in print since at least 1968, when it was used by Richard Dorson. Jan Harold Brunvand, professor of English at the University of Utah, introduced the term to the general public in a series of popular books published beginning in 1981. Brunvand used his collection of legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings (1981) to make two points: first, that legends and folklore do not occur exclusively in so-called primitive or traditional societies, and second, that one could learn much about urban and modern culture by studying such tales.

Many urban legends are framed as complete stories with plot and characters. The compelling appeal of a typical urban legend is its elements of mystery, horror, fear or humor. Often they serve as cautionary tales. Some urban legends are morality tales that depict someone, usually a child, acting in a disagreeable manner, only to wind up in trouble, hurt, or dead.

Urban legends will often try to invoke a feeling of disgust in the reader which tends to make these stories more memorable and potent. Elements of shock value can be found in almost every form of urban legend and are partially what makes these tales so impactful.

Most urban legends will also include an element of something that is supernatural or paranormal. Many of the most well known tales will try to balance out the normal with the paranormal. Stories that stray too far into the paranormal aspect are usually not as regarded as ones that still attempt to keep some sort of basis in reality.

The earliest term by which these narratives were known, "urban belief tales", highlights what is a key and common property: their tellers regarded the stories as true accounts, and the device of the FOAF (acronym for "Friend of a Friend" invented by English writer and folklorist Rodney Dale in 1976) was a spurious but significant effort at authentication. The coinage leads in turn to the terms "FOAFlore" and "FOAFtale". While at least one classic legend, the "Death Car", has been shown to have some basis in fact, folklorists have an interest in debunking those narratives only to the degree that establishing non-factuality warrants the assumption that there must be some other reason why the tales are told, re-told and believed. 

Urban legends typically include common elements: the tale is retold on behalf of the original witness or participant; dire warnings are often given for those who might not heed the advice or lesson contained therein (a typical element of many e-mail phishing scams); and the tale is often touted as "something a friend told me", the friend being identified by first name only or not identified at all. Such legends seem to be believable and even provocative, as some readers are led in turn to pass them on, including on social media platforms that instantly reach millions worldwide. Many are essentially extended jokes, told as if they were true events.

Persistent urban legends do often maintain a degree of plausibility, such as found in this example. Since the 1970s there has been a recurring rumor that the Procter & Gamble Company was associated with Satan-worshippers because of details within its nineteenth-century trademark.

The legend interrupted the company's business to the point that it stopped using the trademark.

A list of urban legends can be found on Wikipedia. 

As in the case of myth, the narratives are believed because they construct and reinforce the worldview of the group within which they are told, or "because they provide us with coherent and convincing explanations of complex events".

Social scientists have started to draw on urban legends in order to help explain complex socio-psychological beliefs.

Is there an underlying explicit connection between urban legends and popular folklore, such as Grimm's Fairy Tales, where similar themes and motifs arise?

Richard Mercer Dorson has been called the "father of American folklore" and "the dominant force in the study of folklore". It was Dorson who contributed the two terms to the study of folklore that have gained common currency, "urban legend" and "fakelore" coined in a debate with author James Stevens. Dorson dismissed Stevens' book on Paul Bunyan, and the later work of Ben Botkin as fakelore, or "a synthetic product claiming to be authentic oral tradition but actually tailored for mass edification", which "misled and gulled the public".

The Internet has made it easier both to spread and to debunk urban legends. 

Gossip, and the transmission of stories, especially those stories that tap into that old tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, will seemingly always trump the transmission of ordinary facts, regardless of whether these facts are more or less disputable.

The pairing of "good and evil" is another notable doublet. The phrase in Hebrew: טוֹב וָרָע, tov wa-raʿ, literally translates as "good and evil". Is this an example of the type of figure of speech known as merism, a literary device that pairs opposite terms together in order to create a general meaning? In that case the phrase "good and evil" would simply imply "everything."

This is seen in the Egyptian expression evil-good, which is normally employed to mean "everything." In Greek literature, Homer also uses the device when he lets Telemachus say, "I [wish to] know everything, the good and the evil."; although the words used – ἐσθλός for "good" and χερείων for "evil" – are better termed "superior" and "inferior".

So, if "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" is to be understood to mean a tree whose fruit imparts knowledge of everything, this phrase does not necessarily denote a moral concept. 

When it comes to gossip, it's all about information, but it also, and at the same time, all about "the telling". So, in the telling, information is structured around the effect of the communication. It is the effect that counts, not the truth. It's story time. 

A fascinating contemporary form of this transmission of information, and central to an oral cultural context across urban Africa, has been termed "pavement radio", a literal English translation of the French phrase "radio trottoir". As an expression, pavement radio was first popularised by historian Stephen Ellis, in referring to the grassroots, informal communication networks that relay information, primarily in urban African settings. 

Particularly interesting to Ellis is the blurred distinction between broadcaster and listener, and the essentially democratic nature of the system (in that a how long-lasting a story is, and how widespread it becomes, and the form it eventually takes, are down to the predominant preferences of the recounters of the story). Pavement radio is mistrusted by a number of academics, journalists and politicians, citing its anonymous nature, and the propensity of the genre to include tales of witchcraft and other ludicrous notions. Ellis, however, argues that pavement radio is a modern continuation of the African oral tradition, and that such ostensibly inconceivable stories are metaphors or are indicative of historic or cultural beliefs, and as such not to be confused with factual news.

Why it might in this way be regarded as distinct from say, Western cultural beliefs, urban legend, rumours and metaphors such as propagated by gossip, Internet social networking services or informal actuality media, Ellis omitted to express definitively, either in the 1995 book or in later works. This question, raised in the Wikipedia article on pavement radio, is particularly relevant in this context. 

Orality and tribal forms . . .

In the Wikipedia article on "orality" there is a reference to the work of Walter J. Ong.

The term “orality” has been used in a variety of ways, often to describe, in a generalised fashion, the structures of consciousness found in cultures that do not employ, or employ minimally, the technologies of writing. Walter J. Ong’s work was foundational for the study of orality, and reminds us that despite the striking success and subsequent power of written language, the vast majority of languages are never written, and the basic orality of language is permanent. 

In Orality and Literacy (2nd ed. Ong 2002), Ong sums up his own work over the previous three decades as well as the work of numerous other scholars. With regard to oral tradition and primary orality he draws on pioneering work by Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, and Eric A. Havelock. 

Marshall McLuhan was among the first to fully appreciate the significance of Ong's earlier work about print culture and the written and printed word as a technology. In his work, The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan 1962, McLuhan quotes and discusses works by Ong in the 1950s regarding print culture.

Orality gave us the stepping stones that allowed us to get where we are today, it was a necessity for the growth of civilization. But using his own examples to amplify Ong's thought, McLuhan shows how each stage in the development of this technology throughout the history of communication – from the invention of speech (primary orality), to pictograms, to the phonetic alphabet, to typography, to the electronic communications of today – restructures human consciousness, profoundly changing not only the frontiers of human possibility, but even the frontiers it is possible for humans to imagine.

In developing a theory of the characteristics of oral culture Ong was to draw on; "hundreds of studies from anthropology, linguistics and the study of oral tradition, Ong summarizes ten key aspects of the 'psychodynamics of orality'. While these are subject to continuing debate, his list remains an important milestone. Ong draws his examples from both primary oral societies, and societies with a very high 'oral residue'."

One of the characteristics of oral culture Ong identifies is the "additive pattern" used in the title of this post, and found in the doublet. Introducing the word "and", and "like" just saying "and", "like", allows oral cultures to avoid complex 'subordinative' clauses. Ong cites an example from the Douay-Rheims version of Genesis (1609–10), noting that this basic additive pattern has been identified in many oral contexts around the world:

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said ...

Demonstrating how oral modes of communication tend to evolve into literate ones, Ong additionally cites the New American Bible (1970), which offers a translation that is grammatically far more complex:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said ...

And less poetic!

For Re:LODE Radio this prompts this post to turn to and reference The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), a study of popular culture by Marshall McLuhan, treating newspapers, comics, and advertisements as poetic texts.

The Mechanical Bride is composed of a number of short essays that can be read in any order – what he styled the "mosaic approach" to writing a book. The apposition of stories, as in the Front Page, is intrinsic to the Re:LODE Radio project.

Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis thereof. The analyses bear on aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text. McLuhan chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed. 

In Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's War and Peace in the Global Village we find three pages setting out the Ten Thunders from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (This work has multiple marginalia quoting from this possible/impossible work of genius).  

Each of the first nine thunders sequence has a name, a hundred lettered name, and the tenth, and last thunder, has a hundred and one lettered name. Embedded in these names are multiple echoes of words, coded to be decoded, to be deciphered, uttered out of a voicing, a rolling and sounding that is "thunderous".

The sound of thunder may be experienced by some as a "voice of nature", a power to be feared. James Joyce was always wary, disconcerted, troubled even, by the sound of thunder and the storm. 

Thunderstorm along the LODE Zone Line . . .

. . . in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia - February 2020

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce made use of natural-water cycles. These water cycles include, by natural inference, rainbows as well as thunder. 

Rainbow along the LODE Zone Line . . .

. . . Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland

The water-cycles retain their natural base and are associated humanly and mythologically in Finnegans Wake with the oceanfather, the cloud-daughter, and the river-wife.

The water cycle is driven by the Sun's energy producing evaporation and precipitation resulting in the spring of water that turns into a stream or lake and river to flow to the sea. 

The Ten Thunders in War and Peace in the Global Village

McLuhan approaches Joyce's Wake as if it were a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders. 

Each "thunder" below is a 100-character portmanteau of other words to create a statement he likens to an effect that each technology has on the society into which it is introduced. 

In order to glean the most understanding out of each, the reader must break the portmanteau into separate words (and many of these are themselves portmanteaus of words taken from multiple languages other than English) and speak them aloud for the spoken effect of each word. There is much dispute over what each portmanteau truly denotes.

McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Finnegan's Wake represent different stages in the history of man:

Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.

baba bad babble black sheep ali baba

Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk 

Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.

kod husk

Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun

Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.

klik of wheel  clique in society  klas

Klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygraddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot

Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.

Blady  bloody  ughfoul  awful  moeklenburg  Mucktown

Bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanennykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach 

Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.

Thing crookly ex in every pasture

Thingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdixlikencehimaroundhersthemaggerbykinkinkankanwithdownmindlookingated 

Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism.

Lukkedoeren  locked doors  The Phoenix Playhouse in which exhibitionist masks are supreme

Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk

Thunder 7: Tribal man again. End of separate, private man. Return of choric.

Both all choractors chum mina round gan sumumina rum drums trum trumina humpta dump waulto poo foolooder a mauns turn up

Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup

Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.

Pappa apparras  big guy again projected on arras

Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled

Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.

hussten hassten caffin (caffeine) coffin

Husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract

Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgring hello turd toured toward ford mud-mood gathering

Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar

The three pages of War and Peace in the Global Village, where this sequence of Ten Thunders is placed in Quentin Fiore's design scheme, sit between pages 45 and 49, interposed in the middle of a lengthy quotation of another Irishman's work, a political pamphlet written and published at the time of the French Revolution. 

This pamphlet was one of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution, written by Edmund Burke and titled Reflections on the French Revolution. This text, thanks to its thoroughness, rhetorical skill and literary power, has become one of the most widely known of Burke's writings, and a classic text in political theory, a defining tract of modern conservatism as well as an important contribution to international theory. Above all else, it has been one of the defining efforts of Edmund Burke's transformation of "traditionalism into a self-conscious and fully conceived political philosophy of conservatism". Here is the long quote:

The moment you take anything from the full rights of men - the right of each to govern himself, and not allow any artificial, positive limitation on those rights - from that moment the whole organisation of government depends on convenience. That is what makes the constitution of a state and the proper distribution of its powers a matter involving the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human needs, and of the things that help or obstruct the various ends that are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. . . . What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medi (end of page 44) cine? The question concerns how to procure and administer them. In that deliberation I shall always advise calling in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.

The science of constructing or renovating or reforming a commonwealth is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. And a short experience cannot instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes [i.e. causes that operate through the feelings and attitudes of human beings] are not always immediate; and something that at first is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may even arise from the bad (end of page 45, and then pages 46-48 set out the Ten Thunders) effects it has at the start. The reverse also happens: plausible schemes with pleasing commencements often have shameful and lamentable conclusions. A great part of a state’s prosperity or adversity may essentially depend on obscure and almost latent causes that appear at first view to be quite unimportant. The science of government being so practical in itself and intended for such practical purposes, a man should be infinitely cautious about pulling down an edifice that has for ages satisfied the common purposes of society to some tolerable degree, or building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.

McLuhan continues his text with his observation on Burke's observation, and that's also a subtle warning to us all.

Elsewhere in this treatise Burke makes an observation that anticipates the computer age, saying that the first right of every man in civilised society is the right to be protected against the consequences of his own stupidity.  

How true this observation turns out to be in our era of "tribal involvement" in the age of "tribal mood-mud"!

Casey Newton's article on the 'Plandemic' references the conspiracy theory widely shared following the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, and the film Loose Change, that's still generating its dubious appeal along with some revenue on YouTube, and branding itself as "the first internet sensation". 

Loose Change or . . .

. . . No Change?

There are many useful pointers made in The Conspiracy Theory Handbook and Re:LODE Radio chooses to foreground a few of these for this post. 

This page from the handbook, and illustrated below, asks the question:

Q. Why are conspiracy theories popular?

And the handbook's short answer is:

A. People who feel powerless or vulnerable are more likely to endorse and spread conspiracy theories.

The handbook then points out how the current advertising based social media amplifies and monetises conspiracy theorizing:

Social media has created a world in which any individual can potentially reach as many people as mainstream media. The lack of traditional gate-keepers is one reason why misinformation spreads farther and faster online than true information, often propelled by fake accounts or “bots”. Likewise, consumers of conspiracy theories have been found to be more prone to “like” and share conspiracist posts on Facebook. A recent analysis of tweets about the Zika virus found that the number of propagators of conspiracy theories was more than double that of debunkers of those theories.

The handbook then deals with tactical conspiracy theories, pointing out that: 

Conspiracy theories may be deployed as a rhetorical tool to escape inconvenient conclusions.

Conspiracy theories aren’t always the result of genuinely held false beliefs. They can be intentionally constructed or amplified for strategic, political reasons. For example, there is evidence that the Russian government recently contributed to the spread of various political conspiracy theories in the West.

Conspiracy theories may be deployed as a rhetorical tool to escape inconvenient conclusions. The rhetoric of climate denial is filled with incoherence, such as the simultaneous claims that temperature cannot be measured accurately but global temperatures have declined. Incoherence is one attribute of conspiratorial thinking, but it does not follow that climate denial is irrational—on the contrary, denialist rhetoric is an effective political strategy to delay climate action by undermining people’s perception of the strength of scientific evidence.

In confirmation, people selectively appeal to a conspiracy among scientists to explain away a scientific consensus when their political ideology compels them to do so—but not when the scientific consensus is of no relevance to their politics.

This leads to climate denial and conspiratorial thinking.

It is just over a month since Facebook took its first significant step to counter the spread of the pernicious, and strangely familiar to historians and readers of European medieval millenarianism (See Q - a novel by Luther Blissett), the sinister QAnon conspiracy.  

Julia Carrie Wong, reporting for the Guardian (Wed 7 Oct 2020) writes below the headline and subheading para: 

Facebook to ban QAnon-themed groups, pages and accounts in crackdown

Policy update comes after the company’s initial attempt failed to stem misinformation and harm from the conspiracy theory

Facebook will ban any groups, pages or Instagram accounts that “represent” QAnon, the company announced Tuesday, in a sharp escalation of its attempt to crack down on the antisemitic conspiracy theory that has thrived on its platform.

The policy will apply to groups, pages or Instagram accounts whose names or descriptions suggest that they are dedicated to the QAnon movement, a Facebook spokesperson explained. It will not apply to individual content, nor to individual Instagram users who post frequently about QAnon but do not explicitly identify themselves as representing the QAnon movement.

The new, broader ban represents the second update to Facebook’s policy against QAnon in less than two months, and it signals that the company’s initial efforts were insufficient to curb the spread of a movement that has been identified as a potential domestic terror threat by the FBI.

Just two months ago, Facebook had no policy on QAnon, which is a baseless internet conspiracy theory whose followers believe, without evidence, that Donald Trump is waging a secret battle against an elite global cabal of child-traffickers.

The conspiracy theory began on the niche image boards 4chan and 8chan but exploded in popularity on Facebook and Instagram in recent months. Facebook’s recommendation algorithms encouraged cross-pollination between QAnon communities and groups dedicated to anti-vaccine or anti-mask activism, Donald Trump, New Age spirituality and wellness, among other topics.

The growing movement, which has its roots in antisemitic conspiracy theories such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is increasingly influential among Republican voters and politicians. Trump has praised QAnon followers and refused to debunk its false claims. The movement has co-opted the hashtags #SaveTheChildren and #SaveOurChildren in a highly successful rebranding effort that helped introduce QAnon ideas to new audiences.

Facebook’s first attempt at a crackdown came on 19 August, when the company announced a host of restrictions on QAnon-promoting accounts that stopped short of an outright ban. Under those rules, in addition to removing QAnon groups from recommendation algorithms, Facebook said it would ban QAnon-themed groups, pages or Instagram accounts if they discussed potential violence. This led to the removal of more than 1,500 Facebook groups and pages, the company said on Tuesday.

“We’ve been vigilant in enforcing our policy and studying its impact on the platform but we’ve seen several issues that led to today’s update,” the company said in a blogpost. “For example, while we’ve removed QAnon content that celebrates and supports violence, we’ve seen other QAnon content tied to different forms of real world harm, including recent claims that the west coast wildfires were started by certain groups, which diverted attention of local officials from fighting the fires and protecting the public.”

The new rules will be enforced by Facebook’s Dangerous Organizations Operations team, the group that enforces Facebook’s bans on terrorist and hate groups. The team will “proactively detect content for removal instead of relying on user reports”, study the movement, and adjust to changes in terminology or tactics, the company said.

“QAnon messaging changes very quickly and we see networks of supporters build an audience with one message and then quickly pivot to another,” the company said. “We expect renewed attempts to evade our detection, both in behavior and content shared on our platform, so we will continue to study the impact of our efforts and be ready to update our policy and enforcement as necessary.”

The new policy against QAnon is not as strict as Facebook’s rules against the terror and hate groups it designates as “dangerous organizations”. The company is not banning individual users from posting in support of QAnon, for example, and the requirement for Instagram accounts to “represent” themselves as QAnon in order to be banned also leaves a large loophole for influencers who promote QAnon under their own identities. Many popular wellness influencers on Instagram have become major promoters of QAnon conspiracy theories.

A Facebook spokesperson acknowledged the loophole and said the company was still addressing how to deal with such accounts.

The QAnon movement has for months been preparing for a crackdown from social media platforms. Many Facebook groups began using codes – for instance, using “17” as a substitute for “Q” – as early as April. On 17 September, the anonymous internet poster who goes by “Q” and whose messages QAnon followers believe include clues to the vast supposed conspiracy, warned followers: “Deploy camouflage. Drop all references re: ‘Q’ ‘Qanon’ etc. to avoid ban/termination.”

QAnon . . .

. . . the rise and roots of a baseless conspiracy theory

Re:LODE Radio notes that the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Протоколы сионских мудрецов) is a fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The hoax, which was shown to be plagiarized from several earlier sources, some not antisemitic in nature, was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. In the United States the industrialist Henry Ford funded the printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s. This uncomfortable episode in US history is flagged in the Re:LODE pages found in the article: 

Ford and his Lizzie, kept the laughters busy

This article forms part of the Re:LODE section: 

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round . . .

Ginger Rogers sings . . .

. . . They all Laughed at Christopher Columbus

Re:LODE Radio references an article from Mashable's Social Good Series. "Moving forward requires focus" says Mashable! 

Tactical conspiracy theories and the idea of the "carbon footprint"! 

Mashable’s Social Good Series is dedicated to exploring pathways to a greater good by spotlighting issues that are essential to making the world a better place.

Mashable has this article exposing how successful Public Relations campaigns have, over the years, used ideological tools to:  

turn the TRUTH on its HEAD! 

The carbon footprint sham

A 'successful, deceptive' PR campaign

by Mark Kaufman 

In a dark TV ad aired in 1971, a jerk tosses a bag of trash from a moving car. The garbage spills onto the moccasins of a buckskin-clad Native American, played by Italian American actor Espera Oscar de Corti. He sheds a tear on camera, because his world has been defiled, uglied, and corrupted by trash. The poignant ad, which won awards for excellence in advertising, promotes the catchline “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.” What’s lesser known is the nonprofit group Keep America Beautiful, funded by the very beverage and packaging juggernauts pumping out billions of plastic bottles each year (the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and Anheuser-Busch Companies), created the PSA.

Keep America Beautiful 

advertising contributed for the public good

The Crying Indian (1970)

 The real message, underlying the staged tear and feather headdress, is that pollution is your problem, not the fault of the industry mass-producing cheap bottles. 

Another heralded environmental advertising campaign, launched three decades later in 2000, also won a laudatory advertising award, a “Gold Effie.” The campaign impressed upon the American public that a different type of pollution, heat-trapping carbon pollution, is also your problem, not the problem of companies drilling deep into the Earth for, and then selling, carbonaceous fuels refined from ancient, decomposed creatures. British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals.

It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint" in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, “carbon footprint” is everywhere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a carbon calculator. The New York Times has a guide on “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.” Mashable published a story in 2019 entitled “How to shrink your carbon footprint when you travel.” Outdoorsy brands love the term.

“This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever,” said Benjamin Franta, who researches law and history of science as a J.D.-Ph.D. student at Stanford Law School.

 Of course, no one should be shamed for declaring an intention to “reduce their carbon footprint.” That’s because BP’s advertising campaign proved brilliant. The oil giant infused the term into our normal, everyday lexicon. (And the sentiment is not totally wrong — some personal efforts to strive for a cleaner world do matter.)

A large plume of smoke rises from BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig explosion in 2010. 

But there’s now powerful, plain evidence that the term “carbon footprint” was always a sham, and should be considered in a new light — not the way a giant oil conglomerate, who just a decade ago leaked hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, wants to frame your climate impact.

The evidence, unfortunately, comes in the form of the worst pandemic to hit humanity in a century. We were confined. We were quarantined, and in many places still are. Forced by an insidious parasite, many of us dramatically slashed our individual carbon footprints by not driving to work and flying on planes. Yet, critically, the true number global warming cares about — the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide saturating the atmosphere — won’t be impacted much by an unprecedented drop in carbon emissions in 2020 (a drop the International Energy Agency estimates at nearly eight percent compared to 2019). This means bounties of carbon from civilization’s cars, power plants, and industries will still be added (like a bank deposit) to a swelling atmospheric bank account of carbon dioxide. But 2020’s deposit will just be slightly less than last year’s. In fact, the levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere peaked at an all-time high in May — because we’re still making big carbon deposits. 

So when BP tweets an ad encouraging you to “Find out your #carbonfootprint” with their “new calculator,” it’s time to rethink the use of the term. While superficially innocuous, "carbon footprint" is intended to manipulate your thinking about one of the greatest environmental threats of our time. (The threat of nuclear warfare with the potential for both the harrowing spread of radioactive material and the development of a nuclear winter are in the running, too.) 

“This industry has a proven track record of communicating strategically to confuse the public and undermine action, so we should avoid falling into their rhetorical traps,” said Geoffrey Supran, a science historian at Harvard University who investigates the tactics of fossil fuel interests.  

“You have to admit it’s very compelling. It's sticky,” said Susan Joy Hassol, a climate change communicator who worked as a senior science writer on three congressionally mandated National Climate Assessments. “It’s effective propaganda.”

PROPAGANDA

“It’s time to go on a low-carbon diet,” BP wrote in bold letters on its website in 2006, with its “carbon footprint calculator” just a click away. (In 2004 alone, 278,000 people calculated their footprints.) The site was part of BP's ad campaign, “Beyond Petroleum.” 

Fast forward, and BP is still producing bounties of oil and gas every day (4 million barrels a day in 2005 versus 3.8 million barrels today). In 2019, BP purchased its “biggest acquisition in 20 years,” new oil and gas reserves in West Texas that gave the oil giant “a strong position in one of the world’s hottest oil patches,” according to the company. Today, BP touts its foray into lower-carbon fuels, but these are limited in scope. In 2018, BP invested 2.3 percent of its budget on renewable energies. Its bread and butter is still black oil and gas. What low-carbon diet? 

It’s evident that BP didn’t expect to slash its carbon footprint. But the company certainly wanted the public — who commuted to work in gas-powered cars and stored their groceries in refrigerators largely powered by coal and gas generated electricity — to attempt, futilely, to significantly shrink their carbon footprint. In 14-year-old web pages no longer accessible online but documented by Julie Doyle, a professor of media and communication at the University of Brighton, BP published ads asking “What on earth is a carbon footprint?”, “Reducing our footprint. Here’s where we stand,” and “What size is your carbon footprint?”    

Doyle concludes BP sought to explain what a carbon footprint is “in a way which assigns responsibility for climate impact to the individual, while BP registers its own concerns by appearing already to be doing something about it.” 

Yet in a society largely powered by fossil fuels, even someone without a car, home, or job will still carry a sizable carbon footprint. A few years after BP began promoting the “carbon footprint,” MIT researchers calculated the carbon emissions for “a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters" in the U.S. That destitute individual will still indirectly emit some 8.5 tons of carbon dioxide each year. 

“Even a homeless person living in a fossil fuel powered society has an unsustainably high carbon footprint,” said Stanford’s Franta. “As long as fossil fuels are the basis for the energy system, you could never have a sustainable carbon footprint. You simply can’t do it.” 

The genius of the “carbon footprint” is that it gives us something to ostensibly do about the climate problem. No ordinary person can slash 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. But we can toss a plastic bottle into a recycling bin, carpool to work, or eat fewer cheeseburgers. “Psychologically we’re not built for big global transformations,” said John Cook, a cognitive scientist at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. “It’s hard to wrap our head around it.” 

Ogilvy & Mather, the marketers hired by British Petroleum, wove the overwhelming challenges inherent in transforming the dominant global energy system with manipulative tactics that made something intangible (carbon dioxide and methane — both potent greenhouse gases — are invisible), tangible. A footprint. Your footprint. 

“It’s a perfect storm of industry, culture, and psychology,” said Cook. 

British Petroleum didn’t just deploy the “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign in the U.S. In the UK, the marketing firm filmed regular people on the streets of London for a TV ad. The marketers asked questions like “Do you worry about global climate change?” so people would naturally reply with “I” or “We” when responding to a weighty question about global warming. This allowed BP “linguistically to remove itself as a contributor to the problem of climate change,” explained Doyle. 

One of the creators of BP’s ad campaign who approached Londoners on the street, the PR professional John Kenney, later acknowledged it was all a marketing scheme, not a sincere effort to promote BP’s low-carbon or renewable energy transformation. “I guess, looking at it now, ‘beyond petroleum’ is just advertising,” Kenney wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed in 2006. “It’s become mere marketing — perhaps it always was — instead of a genuine attempt to engage the public in the debate or a corporate rallying cry to change the paradigm.” 

BP, powerful and wealthy, signaled it would wean itself from oil. “Only they didn’t go beyond petroleum,” wrote Kenney. “They are petroleum.”

A protester makes a visual statement in front a BP sign in New York

Rewriting the narrative

The term “carbon footprint” isn’t going anywhere. “I think it would be hard to undo that phrase or to change it,” said Jennifer Marlon, a researcher at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. 

Some people certainly might want to jettison the term. “I apply the general rule of thumb that climate advocates shouldn't amplify fossil fuel industry propaganda,” said Harvard University’s Supran. Rather than perpetuating “carbon footprint,” Supran suggested instead “fossil fuel emissions,” “fossil fuel pollution,” or “fossil fuel footprint.” 

But because the phrase is here to stay, climate communication researchers emphasize that the meaning behind “carbon footprint” can be expanded, far beyond what BP wants it to mean. Lowering your carbon footprint should include being an engaged citizen who recognizes how to actually curb the planet’s warming, explained Hassol. It’s critical to talk about climate change with people so it’s consistently a matter of concern. It’s not enough for the issue to pop up as a viral news story during a disaster exacerbated by climate change, before fading into a chaotic ether of vitriolic politics, celebrity gossip, and a grim pandemic. 

And then there’s an individual's most potent tool: “Voting is the number one action,” said Hassol. Voting for what? 

It’s (relatively) simple. Voting for leaders who, among other things, have plans or strategies to slash the rampant flow of fossil fuels through the economy, mandate buildings that use less energy, and accelerate the electrification of America’s cars and trucks (transportation is the leading U.S. contributor of greenhouse gas emissions). In the U.S., the choice is clear. Democrats have a new, comprehensive 547-page climate plan that includes bold legislation to create a national electric vehicle charging system. To boot, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has a climate task force that recommends transitioning to 100 percent renewable electricity (wind, solar, geothermal) in 15 years. 

On the other hand, Republicans have a plan that hinges on planting a trillion trees over the next 30 years. Yes, plants do soak up carbon from the atmosphere, but even 1 trillion trees will make only a dent in civilization's burgeoning carbon problem (not to mention that trees are more susceptible to wildfires in a warming world, and this burning pumps loads of carbon dioxide into the air). 

While the pandemic has laid bare that our personal actions alone won’t stabilize the planet’s disrupted climate, some voluntary decisions beyond voting can still be important, and influential. Here’s a poignant example: When someone installs solar panels on their roof, their neighbors are more likely to install the panels too, a trend that’s shown in multiple studies. “It’s the effect of social contagion,” said Hassol. 

Critically, our voluntary, independent choices will pack a bigger climate punch if we have options to make significantly better choices. Perhaps the greatest deterrent to Americans buying electric cars (electric vehicles only make up about 1.8 percent of cars purchased in the U.S. today) is people’s understandable concern about running out of power on long trips. The U.S has some 111,000 gas stations. What if there were 100,000 electric filling stations? Beyond cars, a survey of both city and suburban bikers said they would bike more if there were safe, accessible bike paths and easy parking (cars get their own lots and multi-story parking garages!). 

It’s true that each time we fill up at the pump and drive off we’re inevitably emitting heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere. That’s technically a “carbon footprint.” But we're given no other choice. “The strategy is to put as much blame on the consumer as possible, knowing the consumer is not in a good place to control the situation,” said Franta. “It basically ensures that nothing changes.” 

And as ambitious changes are stymied, Earth relentlessly warms. Globally, nineteen of the last 20 years are now the warmest on record. Forests in the Arctic Circle are aflame, the Southwestern U.S. is mired in a megadrought, storms are becoming more intense, glaciers are fast receding, and a colossal Antarctic ice shelf has destabilized and threatens to redraw maps all over the globe. The ocean is warming, rising, acidifying, and losing oxygen. Climate change is here, even if half of Americans don’t think climate change will harm them personally, but a majority acknowledge the globe is warming. 

“It reveals how we think this is something that is far away,” said Yale’s Marlon.  

BP wants you to accept responsibility for the globally disrupted climate. Just like beverage industrialists wanted people to feel bad about the amassing pollution created by their plastics and cans, or more sinisterly, tobacco companies blamed smokers for becoming addicted to addictive carcinogenic products. We’ve seen this manipulative playbook before, and BP played it well.

What’s your carbon footprint? 

“They were brilliant,” said Marlon. “They had good marketers.”

On page 15 of today's print edition of the Guardian newspaper, Wednesday 9 December 2020, there are two stories by Damian Carrington, Environment editor for the Guardian. One is headlined:

Switch to net zero 'realistic and affordable', advisers tell government

And the other is headlined:

The future's green (printed in red) How to cut your carbon footprint 

The headline for the story in the equivalent Guardian webpage runs: 

What would a climate-friendly UK mean for you?

Re:LODE Radio considers that it is probably the digital headline that more accurately reflects the approach of the Guardian's Environment editor, which is far from replicating this notion that it is private individuals alone that bear responsibility for carbon emissions. After all, the story relates to the government advisers on the Climate Change Committee, and the only way to achieve the urgent and necessary reductions in global carbon emissions is when governments intervene to transform the activity of industries across the board. As Damian Carrington's subheading makes clear, what is being set out is a realistic plan of action that will result in consumers being able to make their choices in relation to: 

Electric cars, the end of gas boilers, green jobs, more trees and less meat are all part of government advisers’ net zero plan 

What is the plan?

Damian Carrington reports (Wed 9 Dc 2020):  

The world’s first detailed route map to ending a nation’s use of fossil fuels is both “ambitious and affordable”, according to the UK government’s official advisers, and would see half of the cars on the road being electric by 2030 and 10,000 giant wind turbines in the North Sea. 

The Climate Change Committee’s analysis found that the future cost savings from no longer having to buy oil and gas almost offsets the £50bn-a-year investment needed in low-carbon power, transport and home heating across the next three decades. 

The eyes of the world are on the UK as it prepares to host a critical UN summit to tackle the climate crisis next November and UK leadership is considered vital for success. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, recently announced a green industrial revolution plan, but the CCC said further action was needed now from the government to set the UK on the path to ending emissions by 2050. 

The CCC route map forecast people’s energy bills remaining level, before falling after 2030 as cheap renewable energy expands. Electric cars will also save drivers money but a phase-out of gas boilers will mean some households will require government help to install more expensive low-carbon heating systems, the CCC said. 

The plan envisages air travel staying near current levels and meat eating, which is already falling, being reduced by just 20% by 2030. Changes in how people live “need not entail sacrifices”, the CCC said. It said mixed woodlands covering an area three times the size of Greater London should be planted by 2035, capturing CO2 and providing new green spaces. 

The cost of offshore wind power has plummeted in recent years and the CCC sees it as “the backbone of the whole UK energy system”, with all electricity being renewable or nuclear by 2035. The UK will become an electric nation, the CCC said, with double the current amount of power being generated by 2050, but with hydrogen expanding to fuel heavy industry and transport and warm some homes. 

The CCC also set out a new carbon budget for the UK for 2035, as required by law. CO2 emissions are to reduced by 78% compared with 1990 levels, equivalent to cutting two-thirds of today’s emissions. The CCC said this advanced carbon cuts by 15 years compared with plans in 2018, reflecting falling green costs. 

Getting to net zero emissions is “ambitious, realistic and affordable”, said Lord Deben, chair of the CCC. “The price is manifestly reasonable. It will be the private sector that will do much of the investment but it will be the government that sets the tone.” 

“It now has to set out in detail the steps required,” he said. “As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, this is a chance to jump-start the UK’s economic recovery.” But Deben added the costs of the transition must be distributed fairly across society. The government has accepted all previous carbon budgets proposed by the CCC and has until June 2021 to accept the new one.

The CCC analysis found it is cheaper to transition to electric cars and vans than to continue with petrol and diesel vehicles. “That’s an amazing new insight, because it has major implications for the overall cost of achieving net zero,” said Chris Stark, chief executive of the CCC. 

The annual net cost across the 30 years to 2050 is £10bn, or about 0.5% of GDP, the CCC said. This does not include the benefits of new jobs or better health as air pollution and damp, cold homes are reduced. Today, poor housing alone costs the NHS £1.5bn a year. “It’s now clear that – at worst – we’ve got a very small cost overall in order to unlock those very big benefits of tackling climate change,” said Stark. 

Alison Doig, at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “The report demonstrates that taking bold action makes sense for jobs and prosperity, but also keeps the UK at the forefront of an international zero carbon revolution. The government can show it is serious about delivering the goals of the Paris agreement by taking [the CCC] advice.” 

Prof Rob Gross, director of the UK Energy Research Centre, said the CCC reports were hugely significant. But he said the major expansion of both renewable energy and electric cars would be challenging: “The speed with which we would need to get charging stations sorted out is a real challenge, if we are to avoid alienating motorists.” 

Clara Goldsmith, at the Climate Coalition, said: “The government must accept this advice and unleash a decade of ambitious action. There is no downside to embracing this plan. It can transform our society and create hundreds of thousands of green jobs.” 

Doug Parr, at Greenpeace UK, said: “The CCC may have set out its paths to net zero but we’ll need much more legwork from the government over this parliament to reach it. While some progress has been made recently there remains a yawning gap between our targets over the next decade and action needed to meet them.” 

Stark said the climate crisis was worsening, with global CO2 emissions and temperature still on an upward trend: “We are in a bad place.” But he said 2021 would be a big year for action in the UK, with government strategies due for heat and buildings, food, aviation, hydrogen and trees and peat bogs. “It is the actions to deliver [net zero emissions] that are important now.”

So, what options will be available for consumers if this plan is implemented? 

Damian Carrington, Environment editor for the Guardian (Wed 9 Dec 2020), sets out the scope for consumers in a plan for a green future:  

A cleaner, greener future is set out in a detailed new route map towards ending the UK’s climate emissions by 2050 from the Climate Change Committee, the government’s official advisers. 

“These stretching targets will see climate policies increasingly overlap with everyday life, bringing changes in the cars we drive and how we heat our homes,” said Jonathan Marshall, at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. “The overwhelming backing among the British public for climate action means that these measures are likely to be popular and well supported, as long as well-thought policies are used to bring about change.” 

Prof Daniela Schmidt, at the University of Bristol, said: “These actions need to be taken to reduce the risk of climate change impacts in the UK such as drought, crop failures and floods. Such a transition will make the UK a better place to live, with cleaner air, healthier ways of living and greener cities.”

Travel 

By 2025, half of new cars sold will be electric, the CCC recommends, with almost half of all cars on the road being electric by 2030. Electric cars are already cheaper to own and run and purchase prices are falling. Electricity is a cheaper and more efficient fuel than petrol or diesel and the CCC estimates benefits of £8bn a year to consumers by 2035, and a £20bn saving in fuel costs by 2050. But drivers will travel almost as far as today, with annual mileage expected to fall just 4% by 2030. 

Flying produces a lot of carbon emissions and jet fuel is difficult to replace. But the CCC sees air miles falling by only 6% in 2030 compared with 2019, and then rising by 17% in 2050 as low-carbon planes take to the skies. The remaining aviation emissions are offset by tree planting and other measures, which the CCC has suggested be funded by airlines. 

However, this scenario still sees a curbing of the rapid growth of aviation in recent decades, limiting the building of new runways and seeing ticket prices potentially rise. “At the moment, there is no carbon price on flights, although they are one of the most carbon-intensive things that we can do and they are largely done by a very small, largely rich part of the population,” said Mike Thompson at the CCC. “So we ask in the report, should the carbon price be higher?” In an example, the CCC suggests the cost of a return ticket from London to New York would rise by £56 in 2050.

Home energy 

The cost of more efficient home lighting, appliances and boilers will be offset by the reduced energy they use and the CCC says energy bills would remain level until 2030, after which bills would fall as cheap renewable energy expands further. 

The last gas boiler should be sold in 2033, the CCC said, but new homes are likely to require low-carbon heating a decade earlier. The majority of homes – probably 80% – should be heated by electric-powered heat pumps, which draw warmth from the ground. Installations will rise fifteen-fold from today to 415,000 a year in 2025 and then a million a year in 2030, the CCC said. 

Heat pumps are cheaper to run, but more expensive to buy and homes need to be made highly energy efficient before installation. This will cost £10,000 per home on average, the CCC said, meaning poorer households will need government help. It estimates that adding £3bn a year to existing efficiency schemes would cover the total cost and suggests ministers end regressive green levies on energy bills and move the levies to general taxation.

“Calling time on gas boilers will represent a major step on the UK’s path to a carbon neutral nation, and is a way for families up and down the country to take action on their carbon footprints,” said Marshall. “It will also reduce air pollution.” 

The CCC has also recommended that no home should be sold after 2028 without an energy efficiency rating (EPC) of C or better. Julie Hirigoyen, at the UK Green Building called this “radical but welcome”. 

Some homes may be able to install hydrogen boilers but the CCC said only in areas where a low-carbon industrial cluster has been founded to produce clean hydrogen. The Humber region is a likely site for one cluster. 

Jobs 

Modern low-carbon industries will grow, building renewable energy, decarbonising the UK’s 28m homes, capturing carbon from power stations, producing hydrogen and creating new woodlands, the CCC said, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the UK. 

For example, the programme to retrofit buildings alone would require over 200,000 extra full-time workers from 2030 through to 2050, the CCC said. But it said it was important for the government to support those losing jobs, such as in the oil and gas industry, into the new roles. 

Ana Musat, at the Aldersgate Group of businesses, said: “As more countries [like China and Japan] take on net zero emissions targets, the export opportunities for the UK could be significant.” 

Food

Red meat and dairy has a large impact on the environment and a series of recent reports have found that people in rich nations need to slash their consumption to deal with the climate crisis and improve their health. The CCC plan is less radical, requiring a reduction in meat eating of 20% by 2030 and 35% by 2050, and instead increasing the ambition of action in other areas.

Public sector caterers serving billions of meals a year in UK schools, universities, hospitals and care homes pledged in April to cut the amount of meat they serve by 20%, equivalent to 45,000 cows or 16 million chickens a year. The CCC said action to cut food waste by 50% by 2030 is also needed, such as better product labelling. 

Nature and land use 

The CCC recommends the UK becomes a greener and more pleasant land, with about 2bn new trees leading to a 40% increase in woodland areas, a level not seen in Britain for 1,000 years. Trees would cover 15% of the country by 2035 and 18% by 2050, up from 13% today.

The woodlands would absorb carbon from the air, but also boost wildlife and provide more opportunity for people to visit green spaces, which is known to increase wellbeing. But Nick Phillips, at the Woodland Trust, said: “On current trends, we will get nowhere near this [tree cover] target. Policies like the upcoming England Tree Strategy and new farm payments system need to be visionary and bold.” 

Peatlands cover 10% of the UK and store huge amounts of carbon but are mostly degraded. The CCC recommends half are restored by 2030 and 80% by 2050. Lord Deben, chair of the CCC, said the sale of peat as garden compost should be banned immediately. 

“It is quite wrong that we should be restoring peatlands, but still allowing the sale of horticultural peat,” he said. “There is no reason for us to be using it now – it’s ridiculous.” 

The CCC said about one-third of farmland needs to be converted to forestry and growing crops that can be burned in power stations which capture CO2 emissions, thereby removing carbon from the atmosphere. Food production can be boosted with greater efficiency and farmers would be paid for helping to fight climate change. 

Martin Harper, at the RSPB, said: “The CCC report highlights the vital role nature plays in locking up carbon. Now the UK government needs to pick up the gauntlet, stop burning our precious peatland and invest in restoring nature for wildlife, for people and for a safer climate.”

Survival strategies

After ten years of "Tory austerity politics" choices are limited for many people in the UK during this pandemic crisis, choices that are often simply about how best to survive and make it though Christmas to a new year on meagre benefits and reduced or non existent incomes.

On page 13 of today's print edition of the Guardian Rhi Storer writes about the predicament of many facing destitution even when they are in work. The story ran with this headline in the print edition of the Guardian today.

The frontline 'It's all kinds of people losing their jobs' 

Rhi Storer reports (Wed 9 Dec 2020): 

Craig Wilson, 45, from Wigan, found himself homeless in 2017 after losing his job in a factory. Initially unable to get a council flat due to debt, he found a privately rented flat but was receiving threatening letters and calls about his debts. “I was getting debt collectors knocking on my door everyday. I made a payment plan with the help of Christians Against Poverty and spent two years paying it back.

“I cut down on my electricity. I cut down on my heating. I was in a bad place with my mental health too.”

He is one of a growing number of people to have experienced extreme poverty in recent years, according to research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The charity found that even before the pandemic, destitution – defined as an inability to afford two or more of shelter, food, heating, lighting, weather-appropriate clothing, or basic toiletries over the past month – had rapidly grown in scale and intensity.

Wilson, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression, said he has found it a “very strange time” getting back on his feet during the pandemic. “All these people are losing their jobs and benefits; it makes this lockdown a living hell,” he explains. “Staying inside is tough on the brain cells.”

Joanne Abiola, 46, ran into difficulty in 2017. “I used to work in the IT industry, it was a contract job and it was supposed to be a five-year contract. I lost that and got a new part-time one in a school but the bills kept piling up.” 

Abiola turned to a debt management company to help her but soon had bailiffs on her doorstep. “I didn’t talk to anyone about my debts. At one point we had to downsize to a one-bedroom home so that I could minimise my expenses that way.” 

Finally she found help with the charity Christians Against Poverty. “I’ve managed to get my debts under control now. I thought my financial problems were something shameful, and I felt so isolated.”

Michelle Welch, 59, the project manager of Compassion Foodbank in Mosside, Manchester, has noticed an increase in families turning to her services as a result of the five-week wait for universal credit payments. “It’s hard to see people like this. Last Friday we had a mother come in who’d been told about our food bank. She [had] never used one before and felt quite embarrassed.

“It’s hard to ask for that help but she’s glad that she came and got some help. You do get people coming in crying. Quite heartbreaking at times,” she added.

Miranda Kaunang, the head of development at FareShare Greater Manchester, has seen a steady flow of people using its services. During lockdown one, between March and August, the food charity supplied over 971 tonnes of food to 250 local charities, reaching 50,000 people. In November alone, they gave out 350 tonnes of food, reaching approximately 60,000 people in need.

Kaunang believes that, while the charity has not experienced a drop in demand, the reasons for the increase in food aid has changed as the pandemic rolls on. “It’s not about people shielding any more and being isolated, it’s about hardship,” she said. “It’s the gap between universal credit, the hole in the ground, and all different kinds of people losing their jobs.”

Austerity - An Analysis 

On the same page as Rhi Storer's report todays Guardian publishes this Analysis by Patrick Butler. 

Patrick Butler, Social policy editor for the Guardian, writes (Wed 9 Dec 2020) under a headline in the print edition that runs: 

Decade of austerity cuts wipes away safety net to bring Victorian concept into 21st century Britain

For many years the word “destitution” felt like a throwback to some dimly lit Victorian past. No one was destitute in modern Britain, at least those who were eligible for social security. You might be poor, but it was rare to be regularly hungry, cold, ill clothed, and entirely dependent on the kindness of charity.

All that started to change less than a decade ago. While headline relative poverty rates seemed to change very little, researchers noticed that the proportion of those below the breadline experiencing extreme poverty was growing. Food bank volunteers saw people going for days without eating. Debt charities helped people mired in mountains of debt over unpaid rent and utility bills.

Three years ago the veteran anti-poverty campaigner and former MP Frank Field suggested what was being witnessed day in day out in the food banks and church halls of the UK’s poorest neighbourhoods went far beyond the quotidian shock of poverty numbers. Destitution was real and growing alarmingly, he said. “Clearly something unique and horrendous is happening to the bottom end of our society.”

By then Prof Suzanne Fitzpatrick was already analysing the phenomenon. Alongside the “old destitute” – asylum seekers and migrants without eligibility for benefits – she identified the new destitute: “People who once might have expected the welfare safety net to help them avoid extreme deprivation but who now have no such guarantee.”

Fitzpatrick and colleagues at the Institute for Social Policy, Housing, Equalities Research at Heriot-Watt University developed a definition of destitution based on publicly agreed minimum levels of income needed for “basic physiological functioning”. For a single person living alone that is £70 a week after rent for food, heat, light, clothing and footwear, and toiletries like soap and toothpaste.

As a decade of austerity cuts shrank the benefits bill by £37bn, leaving it at bare subsistence levels – so grew the vulnerability of low-income families to unexpected “income shocks” – job loss, a broken fridge, a higher-than-expected gas bill. Worse, the social security system itself – in the form of the five-week wait for a universal credit payment – seemed in itself to create indebtedness, hunger and destitution.

Fitzpatrick’s latest study of destitution, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), concludes that not only has the scale of destitution grown and intensified – especially in some of the poorest areas of northern England, Scotland and Wales, but that it is likely to double to 2 million households – including 1 million children – as the Covid economic crisis deepens.

“Our findings clearly show that levels of destitution in the UK were already rising sharply prior to the pandemic and the impact of Covid-19 has intensified the difficulties many people face accessing the help they need to meet their most fundamental needs,” said Fitzpatrick.

She added: “The sheer scale of the issue is unacceptable in one of the world’s richest countries and starkly reveals the devastating impact of the gaps, flaws and deductions in universal credit and other aspects of the social security system that lead to destitution by design.”

What shocked researchers was not just the meagreness of the social security system and its growing reliance on food banks, but the intrinsic unreliability of the charity response, for all its valiant efforts. Many destitute people they interviewed couldn’t get referrals to food banks. The centrality of housing affordability to destitution is underlined, as well as the impact of extreme poverty on physical and mental health,

The report’s key messages are essentially about the effectiveness of the UK’s social security system since the pandemic began. Not just the retention of the £20-a-week top-up for universal credit – 700,000 people face poverty overnight if it goes – but deeper issues concerning its generosity, reliability and effectiveness. As Helen Barnard, director of JRF, concludes, it’s time to redesign a system “to keep people afloat, rather than drag people down”.

Driven to tears . . .

Children . . .

. . . ripping bags open for food 

Representatives of a broad range of church denominations in Britain plead for government help as BBC film highlights the struggle of two Burnley community leaders to feed most needy. 

Harriet Sherwood, reporting for the Observer (Sat 5 Dec 2020), on how people are getting into massive debt to pay for the basics of living. She writes under the headline that runs: 

Exploitation of the poor borders on evil, say clerics driven to tears by debt crisis

Pastor Mick Fleming is on the frontline of the pandemic – not in hospital wards and care homes but battling with loan sharks and landlords who are propelling debt-encumbered, low-income families towards an ever more precarious future.

Fleming, of Burnley’s Church on the Street charity, has spent months dealing with the fallout from the pandemic on the most vulnerable people in the Lancashire town. He and Father Alex Frost of St Matthew’s church have distributed food parcels and hot meals, and have helped families stretch their meagre incomes to meet life’s other basic necessities.

“I’m with people every day for whom gas and electricity are luxuries. People are getting into debt to pay for basics, and small loans quickly turn into colossal sums. It borders on evil the way some people prey on the most vulnerable,” Fleming told the Observer.

“We take food parcels to people, but what’s the point if they can’t cook the food because there’s no gas or electric? So now we provide hot, cooked meals as well.”

Fleming and Frost came to national attention last week when a powerful BBC film of the priests and their work was shared widely on social media. Both men wept on camera as they talked about the challenges caused by Covid – but, said Fleming, “an average day is far in excess of what was shown in the video”.

Following the broadcast, they set up a fundraising page with a target of £10,000. It reached almost £55,000 within two days, and the pair have been inundated with offers of help and messages of support. “It’s all a bit overwhelming at the moment,” said Frost.

This weekend, a coalition of almost 500 church leaders has written to the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to highlight the growing crisis of household debt that millions of families are facing this Christmas. Their letter says: “We have heard countless stories from people who have faced awful choices, such as between affording food or falling behind on rent. Many of our churches have been on the frontline of providing food and essentials. Hundreds of churches provide debt advice for those at risk.

“We know from experience that this situation is exceptional and therefore requires an exceptional response.” Signatories to the letter include representatives of the Methodist church, the United Reformed Church, the Church of England, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Salvation Army and the Catholic church.

In August, Citizens Advice estimated that six million people in the UK had fallen behind on household bills because of Covid – a figure that is likely to have risen significantly in the past few months.

Six months ago, Step Change, the debt charity, estimated that 4.2 million people had borrowed money to make ends meet, using credit cards, overdrafts or high-cost loans. Again, the numbers are likely to have dramatically increased.

The faith leaders’ letter points out that 350,000 households face the possibility of eviction because of rent arrears. “For many, this will be a frightening Christmas period,” they say, with worry and stress potentially leading to long-term mental health problems.

The Covid crisis has exacerbated inequality, with higher earners who have saved money during the pandemic paying off over £15bn of debt while low-income groups have taken on £10bn in debt.

Chris Carroll, who runs a debt advice centre in Newcastle, said one low-income family she worked with had seen their progress to free themselves from debt go into reverse during the pandemic.

“The dad was a chef, he lost his job back in May. The mum worked part-time on minimum wage but had her hours cut. They have two children at primary school. In February, they were just about debt-free and had turned their lives around by careful budgeting. Now they’re using credit cards to put food on the table and loans to pay the bills,” she said.

“People are borrowing money on big rates for very ordinary things. It will take years for these families to get back on track.”

Not all creditors were sharks, she said; some had been wonderful. “Some have offered payment holidays or removed the interest, or even written off debts.”

Paul Morrison, a policy adviser to the Methodist church and a trustee of the Trussell Trust, which supports a network of more than 1,200 food banks, said the debt crisis was expected to worsen.

“This is the calm before the storm. We thought the storm was going to hit in the autumn but now the real crunch is likely to be January or February when the reality of debt hits families.

“Debt is treated as an individual problem but this debt crisis is caused by policy decisions relating to the pandemic. This is something for which we all have a responsibility.”

He would like to see a debt write-off, “but I’d be happy if the government recognises that action needs to be taken on this issue”. The letter asks the chancellor to “work with communities, churches, charities and creditors to create a comprehensive and just solution to the unique problem of lockdown debt”.

In Burnley, Frost said the number of people accessing the food bank at St Matthew’s had “just gone higher and higher. And we’re just one food bank in town – probably the smallest of four or five. People keep asking me, what’s the endgame? I’m not sure I know. I’m not a politician. I’m just doing what I’m called to do as a priest – helping the poor.”

God Save The Hungry . . .

Choices for consumers with disposable income, in a future that is green, will really depend on the scale of state intervention coordinated at an international level to reduce carbon emissions.

This is why the promises and commitments made by nation states across the world at the Paris agreement need to be translated into accountable actions in the upcoming November 2021 COP26 in Glasgow. 

The Daily Briefing for Thursday 3 December 2020 on the CarbonBrief website runs with the headline:

2020 likely world's second hottest year, UN says

Below this alarming headline the CarbonBrief DAILY BRIEFING for 3 December 2020 includes these eight stories.

Today's climate and energy headlines:

• 2020 likely world's second hottest year, UN says
• Climate change: PM aims for world-leading UK emissions cuts
• World is ‘doubling down’ on fossil fuels despite climate crisis – UN report
• Heatwave deaths on the rise as climate increasingly hits health – report
• Aston Martin in row over 'sock puppet PR firm' pushing anti-electric vehicle study
• Carney calls for ‘$100bn a year’ global carbon offset market
• Heatwave a stark reminder of potential dangers for Australia
• New climate science Satellite-based estimates of decline and rebound in China’s CO2 emissions during Covid-19 pandemic

Firstly, Re:LODE Radio chooses to reference this alarming prediction:

2020 likely world's second hottest year, UN says

A provisional assessment from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) suggests that 2020 is on track to be the second hottest on record, reports Reuters. In its annual “state of the climate” report, the WMO uses five global temperature datasets to estimate that 2020 is set to average around 1.2C above pre-industrial levels, the outlet explains, “placing it second behind 2016 and marginally ahead of 2019”. It adds: “Hot years have typically been associated with El Niño, a natural event that releases heat from the Pacific Ocean. However, this year coincides with La Niña which has the opposite effect and cools temperatures.” Despite this, the WMO is certain that 2020 will remain one of the warmest three, reports BBC News. Commenting on the assessment, WMO secretary general Prof Petteri Taalas said: “Record warm years have usually coincided with a strong El Niño event, as was the case in 2016…We are now experiencing a La Niña, which has a cooling effect on global temperatures, but has not been sufficient to put a brake on this year’s heat.” The report declares that 2011-20 will be the hottest decade on record, says the Financial Times. The report also notes that, while the widespread lockdowns in response to Covid-19 had slightly slowed the growth of greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, this slowing “will be practically indistinguishable” from normal year-to-year fluctuations, Climate Home News reports, driving the “relentless march” of climate change. According to the WMO report, the most notable warming in 2020 occurred in the Siberian Arctic, says Bloomberg: “Temperatures for the first 10 months of the year there were more than 5C above average, fuelling the most active wildfire season in 18 years on record.” (Carbon Brief has previously reported on quick-fire analysis that shows the Siberian heatwave would have been “almost impossible” without human-caused climate change.) The Independent notes that the difference between the provisional figure for 2020 and the warmest years on record is marginal, and “the rankings could shift once the full picture of 2020 is available”. The paper adds that the WMO will confirm the data in March 2021. (Carbon Brief’s most recent quarterly state of the climate article – published in October – suggested it was more likely than not that 2020 becomes the warmest year on record.)

In a speech at Columbia University in the US, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warned that the report shows “the state of the planet is broken”, says the Washington Post. The speech – which was trailed yesterday – was made to “mark the report’s release and to build momentum toward new climate action under the Paris Accord”, the paper explains. Guterres put the report’s findings in “unusually stark terms”, notes the paper. The Press Association quotes Guterres saying: “The fallout of the assault on our planet is impeding our efforts to eliminate poverty and imperilling food security. And it is making our work for peace even more difficult, as the disruptions drive instability, displacement and conflict”. However, Guterres also said he “firmly” believes that 2021 “can be a new kind of leap year – the year of a quantum leap towards carbon neutrality”, reports the Associated Press. The outlet adds: “Guterres saw hope in promises by more than 100 countries that by mid-century they will not be adding more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere than trees and technology can remove, along with shorter term pollution cuts.” Climate Home News describes this as a “global net-zero emissions club”. The Guardian reports that Guterres said that humanity’s survival will be “impossible” without the US rejoining the Paris agreement and achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, as the incoming Biden administration has pledged. The paper adds: “The secretary general said that ‘of course’ he had been in touch with President-elect Biden and looked forward to welcoming the US into a ‘global coalition for net-zero by 2050’ that the UN has organised. The US is the world’s largest cumulative source of heat-trapping emissions and its biggest military and economic power, Guterres noted, so ‘there is no way we can solve the [climate] problem…without strong American leadership’.” Biden and Guterres had spoken on Monday, notes Reuters.

Reuters Read Article

Secondly Re:LODE Radio selects this story on Mark Carney's stance on practical economic and financial strategies to address the challenge of the climate change emergency. 

Carney calls for ‘$100bn a year’ global carbon offset market

Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has thrown his weight behind efforts to create a global carbon offset market, reports the Financial Times, calling it an “imperative” to help reduce emissions. The paper adds: “A new pilot market for voluntary carbon offsets would be up and running within a year, Mr Carney said, and London was a likely location to host the new contract. Mr Carney, along with Standard Chartered chief executive Bill Winters, recently co-founded the Task Force on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, a private sector initiative backed by more than 40 companies and organisations, which is working on a blueprint for the new market.” Speaking at the FT’s Energy Transition Strategies Summit, Carney said: “This is a necessary market in the transition to net-zero…This is an imperative, which is why we are putting so many resources into it…This needs to be a $50-100bn per annum market.” Carney – who is the UN special envoy for climate finance – is also giving the Reith Lectures, an annual series of lectures commissioned by the BBC and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Carney’s lectures “chart how we have come to esteem financial value over human value and how we have gone from market economies to market societies”, says the programme notes: “He argues that this has contributed to a trio of crises: of credit, Covid and climate. And the former Bank of England governor will outline how we can turn this around.”

Financial Times Read Article

This post begins with a quote from the scientist and communicator Steve Jones, who is also someone, as mentioned at the top of this post, among eminent company invited to contribute to the BBC Reith Lectures. It turns out that today Re:LODE Radio ends this post with a look at the two most recent lectures, given by Mark Carney, under the theme title:

How We Get What We Value

The second of these lectures was broadcast today.  

Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, seems comfortable in his new role, following his 2020 launching of the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets — an initiative to increase trading of voluntary carbon offsets — with Bill Winters as Group Chief Executive. The TSVCM is sponsored by the Institute of International Finance.

The usual suspects?

Taskforce members include more than "40 leaders from six continents with backgrounds across the carbon market value chain", including representatives from the Bank of America, BlackRock, Bloomberg's New Energy Finance, BNP Paribas, BP, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Tata Steel, Total, IHS Markit, and LSE. In the December 3, 2020 Financial Times article, Carney said that the voluntary global carbon offset market was an "imperative" to help reduce emissions.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist . . .

. . . and like that . . . he's gone!

The Times article cited Carney saying London would likely be the host of the new "new pilot market for voluntary carbon offsets" which could be "set up" by December 2021.

Actions today will be less costly than those required tomorrow. 

The First of Mark Carney's Reith Lectures was broadcast on Wednesday 2 December 2020, and titled: 

From Moral to Market Sentiments

In this first lecture, recorded with a virtual audience, Mark Carney reflects that whenever he could step back from what felt like daily crisis management, the same deeper issues loomed. 

What is value? 

How does the way we assess value both shape our values and constrain our choices? 

How do the valuations of markets affect the values of our society? 

Carney argues that society has come to embody Oscar Wilde’s old aphorism: “knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing".

Lecture 2: From Credit Crisis to Resilience

(9am, Wednesday 9 December 2020, BBC Radio 4)

Dr Carney takes us back to the high drama of the financial crisis of 2008, which ended a period when bankers saw themselves as unassailable Masters of the Universe. More than a decade on, how much have the bankers changed their ways? How far has the financial sector changed? Carney says that we must remain vigilant and resist the “three lies of finance". If we don’t, he warns, we will live with a system which is ill-prepared for the next crisis.

The three lies of finance 

Eight hundred years of economic history teaches that financial crises occur, roughly, once a decade. In finance, institutional memories are short. Lessons that are painfully learned during busts are gradually forgotten as new eras dawn and the cycle begins anew, and this is a depressing cycle of prudence, confidence, complacency, euphoria and despair, and it’s a cycle which reflects the power of the three lies of finance. 

The first lie 

The first lie is the four most expensive words in the English language, “This time is different.” This misconception is usually the product of an initial success, with early progress gradually building into blind faith in a new era of effortless prosperity. Several factors drove the debt super cycle in the run-up to the financial crisis, including demographics and the stagnation of middleclass real wages, that itself a product of technology and globalisation. Households had to borrow to increase consumption. “Let them eat cake,” became, “Let them eat credit.”

Financial innovation made that easier and the ready supply of foreign capital made it cheaper. Most importantly, and this is the lie, complacency amongst individuals and institutions, complacency fed by a long period of macroeconomic stability and rising asset prices, made this remorseless borrowing seem sensible. A deep- seated faith in markets lay behind the new era thinking of the Great Moderation. Captured by the myth that finance can regulate and correct itself spontaneously, authorities retreated from their regulatory and supervisory responsibilities.  

The second lie

This leads to the second lie, the belief that the market is always right. This has two dangerous consequences. First, if markets are efficient we can identify bubbles or address their potential causes. Second, if markets always clear they should possess a natural stability, and evidence to the contrary must be the product either of market distortions or incomplete markets, and such thinking dominated the practical indifference of policy makers to the housing and credit booms before the crisis. Much of financial innovation springs from the logic that the solution to market failures is to build new markets on old ones, an attempt at progress through infinite regress.

During the Great Moderation this view became an organising principle for financiers and policy makers, and the latter pursued a light-touch regulatory agenda in the quest for a perfect real world of complete markets, first described as “abstract theory” by two economists, Arrow and Debreu. This is a world of rational agents coolly calculating odds over all future possible states of the world, trading contracts with each other that are frictionlessly enforced in achieving mutually beneficial, indeed socially optimal, outcomes.

Of course, markets only clear in text books. In reality, as Newton learned at his cost, people are irrational and economies are imperfect, and when such imperfections exist, adding markets can make things worse. A truth of finance is that the riskiness of an asset depends on who owns it. When markets don’t clear, financial institutions may be surprised to find what – find out what they own and for how long, and when those surprises are or are thought to be widespread, panic ensues. The impossibility of completing markets was not the only practical problem with the pre-crisis approach. Even if markets could be perfected, nature itself is unknowable.

Newtonian mechanics breakdown at the subatomic level and the search for the grand unifying theory of everything that matters persists in physics to this day. Market fundamentalism relies on people being able to calculate the odds of each and every possible scenario. They can trade contracts and insure with each other against risks that they’re unwilling to bear. But a moment of introspection reveals the absurdity of these assumptions compared to the real world. More often than not, even describing the universe of possible outcomes is beyond the means of mere mortals, let alone ascribing subjective probabilities to each outcome. The swings and sentiment that result, pessimism one moment, exuberance the next, reflect not only nature’s odds but also our assessments of those odds, assessments that are inevitably distorted by human behaviour. A successful speculator himself, John Maynard Keynes, argued that people price assets based not on their estimates of fundamental value but, rather, on what they think those values are or, rather, what everybody else would predict the average of those assessments would be. It is the derivative of the derivative of subjective utility, the CDO-squared of utility.

These dynamics can afflict not just sophisticated investors but mortgage lenders and homebuyers, especially during a new era. If house prices can only go up, it’s possible to borrow at large multiples and pay off future obligations with the capital gains that follow. 

The third lie

The third lie, that markets are moral, takes for granted the social capital that markets need to fulfil their promise. In financial markets, means and ends can be conflated all too easily. Value can become abstract and relative, and the pull of the crowd can overwhelm the integrity of the individual. Repeated episodes of misconduct in the run-up to the global financial crisis called into question the social licence that markets need to innovate and grow. Financial market participants were found to have knowingly mis-sold to clients products that were inappropriate or even fraudulent. Traders manipulated key interest rates and foreign exchange benchmarks to support their trading positions, while costing retail and corporate clients who relied on those benchmarks billions of pounds. If you read the transcripts of the chat-room discussions that orchestrated these outrages, what’s striking is how completely detached the traders were from the businesses and households whom they were cheating.

So, rather than being professional and open, some critical markets, such as those for bonds, currencies and derivatives, became informal and clubby. Rather than competing on merit, participants colluded online. Rather than everyone taking responsibility for their actions, few were held to account. The global financial crisis reminded us that real markets don’t just happen, they depend on the quality of market infrastructure, that means both hard infrastructure, in other words the structure of the markets themselves, such as the design of financial market benchmarks, and it means soft infrastructure, like regulations, codes, and culture that govern behaviour in those markets. It's critical to get this infrastructure right because financial markets serve us all. By financing firms to hire, invest and expand, markets help drive growth and create jobs. By opening up international trade and investment, markets create new opportunities for our businesses and savers, and by transferring risk to those most willing and able to bear the markets help households and businesses ensure against the unexpected, and markets have become evermore important to people as they bear increasingly responsibility – they bear increasing responsibility for financing their retirements and ensuring against risks.

So, it’s obviously vital that markets work well and that they are seen to do so. So, this time is no different. Markets don’t always clear and we can suffer from their amorality, and the question is what to do with such knowledge and how can we retain it so that financial history stops rhyming? I think the answer starts with the radical programme of G20 reforms that are working to create a safer, simpler and fairer financial system, a financial system that can better serve households and businesses in bad times as well as good, a system that can help support greater inclusion and the transition to a net-zero carbon economy. These pro-market reforms are vital but they are not sufficient in and of themselves. Regulation alone won’t break an eight-century cycle of financial boom and bust. To resist the siren calls of the three lies, policy makers and market participants must bind themselves to the mast, and that ultimately means recognising the limits of markets and rediscovering our responsibilities for the system. If the experience of the financial and COVID crises teaches us anything, it’s humility. We cannot anticipate every risk or plan for every contingency but we can and must plan for failure. That means creating an anti-fragile system, a system that can withstand both the risks we see and those we don’t.

Trying to make capitalism work?

I refuse to notice the wind or the rain / To teach me of nature would be done in vain / I ignore all / I just contain / Predicated on a great disconnect / I don't react and I do not reflect / I ignore all / I just retain / The invisble hand no longer guides, it chokes / The invisble hand no longer guides / They blew up the bank of England / The paper burnt for days / They blew up the bank of England / The paper burnt for days / In the end we all employ sabotage / No room for ethics now, greed is in charge / I ignore all / I just constrain / How many barrels are left in the field / I only care for the coins that you yield / I ignore all / I just obtain / The invisble hand no longer guides, it chokes / The invisble hand no longer guides / They blew up the bank of England / The paper burnt for days / They blew up the bank of England oh / The paper burnt for days / They blew up the bank of England / The paper burnt for days / They blew up the bank of England oh / The paper burnt for days / The paper burnt for days / The paper burnt for days! / The paper burnt for days / The paper burnt for days / The paper burnt for days

Songwriters: Robert Rolfe / Liam Rory Clewlow / Roughton Reynolds / Christopher John Batten

Or let it rip? 

The Invisible Hand is an economic concept that was first introduced by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, written in 1759. The Invisible Hand is a metaphor describing the unintended greater social benefits and public good brought about by individuals acting in their own self-interests. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, says: "the reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there." Noam Chomsky suggests that Smith (and more specifically David Ricardo) sometimes used the phrase to refer to a "home bias" for investing domestically in opposition to offshore outsourcing production and neoliberalism. However, the "invisible hand" has become something of a "holy grail" for hardcore "free market" ideologues to justify the very same neoliberalism and a right wing political agenda, an agenda far removed from Adam Smith's considerations. And anyway, there has never ever been a "free" market! 

There have always been rules that govern markets, exchange processes and behaviours. Perhaps for "free market" ideologues, it's more about a blind faith, a belief in the assumptions underpinning their mythological basis for a laissez-faire economic philosophy that ends up rendering actually existing rules invisible?

The "visible hand"?

Along the LODE Zone Line in India the government's right wing neoliberal policies, with "new rules" for the market are playing out . . .

. . . and provoking mass protests!

The Indian agriculture acts of 2020, often referred to as the Farm Bills, are three acts initiated by the Parliament of India in September 2020. The Lok Sabha (or House of the People) approved the bills on 17 September 2020 and the Rajya Sabha (or Council of States) on 20 September 2020. On this same day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to the bills as a watershed moment in the history of Indian agriculture and stated the bills will "ensure a complete transformation of the agriculture sector" and empower tens of millions of farmers. The President of India, Ram Nath Kovind gave his assent on 27 September 2020. 

The farmers of India saw this legislation in very different terms and their concerns inspired the protests against the new acts, which gained momentum in September 2020. The acts have been described as "anti-farmer laws" by many farmer unions, and politicians from the opposition also say it would leave farmers at the "mercy of corporates". The farmers have also demanded the creation of an Minimum Support Price (MSP) bill, to ensure that corporates cannot control the prices. The government, however, maintains that the laws will make it effortless for farmers to sell their produce directly to big buyers, and stated that the protests are based on misinformation.

Soon after the acts were introduced, unions began holding local protests, mostly in Punjab. After two months of protests, farmer unions — notably from Punjab and Haryana — began a movement named Dilhi Chalo (transl. Let's go to Delhi), in which tens of thousands of farming union members marched towards the nation's capital. 

The Indian government ordered the police and law enforcement of various states to attack the protesters using water cannons, batons, and tear gas to prevent the farmer unions from entering into Haryana first and then Delhi. 

On 26 November 2020, a nationwide general strike of 250 million people, according to the trade unions assessment, took place in support of the farmer unions. On 30 November, an estimated gathering of protesters of between 200,000 and 300,000 farmers was converging at various border points on the way to Delhi.

Hannah Ellis-Petersen, South Asia correspondent for the Guardian reported on these protests (Mon 30 Nov 2020) under a headline that runs:

Indian farmers march on delhi in protest against agriculture laws

Hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have marched upon Delhi and set up vast camps blocking entry to the city in protest at agriculture laws they say will destroy livelihoods.

More than 300,000 farmers marched from the states of Punjab and Haryana – on foot and in convoys of tractors – at the weekend to reach the Indian capital for what they described as a “decisive battle” with the central government.

As the farmers reached Delhi, some managed to enter but the majority were stopped by barricades and barbed wire erected by police on major roads into the city. The farmers set up camps along five major roads, building makeshift tents and setting up fires with a view to staying for months if their demands are not met.

Police had used tear gas and water cannons against the marching farmers and ripped up highways to stop tractors and protesters moving forward. However, the Delhi government denied police permission to convert nine stadiums into temporary jails for farmers. “Farmers are not criminals,” the city government said.

The farmers are protesting against a series of agricultural laws that see the deregulation of crop pricing which farmers say will leave them at the mercy of big corporations. The government has argued that the laws are necessary reforms that give farmers more autonomy over the selling of their crops and will break big unfair monopolies.

Though farmers’ unions have been protesting in Punjab for the past two months, holding marches and blocking roads and train lines, they said they were organising the march to Delhi to force the government’s hand. Unions want to repeal the laws, which they say are anti-farmer and pro-corporate interests.

Farming is one of the biggest employers in India, with more than 40% of the population working in agriculture.

Among the farmers who marched to the border was Ratam Mann Singh, 61, from Haryana, who is president of the Indian Farmers Association for the state. He said: “I took part in this protest to the Delhi border because the central government has sold out the farmers with these new laws, which did not have any consultation or input from farmers. If they are passed then the farmers’ rights will be finished.”

Singh said many of the farmers had brought enough food, supplies and blankets to last for up to three months. “We are prepared to stay here for as long as it takes, even in the cold winter, we are ready for that. The farmers of India have been betrayed,” he said.

On Saturday, the union minister, Amit Shah, said the government was willing to deliberate on “every problem and demand” of the farmers. Talks have been scheduled for 3 December.

The farmers’ demands have proved contentious. Among them is the demand to remove a fine for stubble burning, the practice of setting fields alight to remove the old crop. While farmers say it is unavoidable, stubble burning is a major contributor to the toxic air pollution that engulfs Delhi and northern India in the winter months and has been made illegal as a result.

The farmers’ cause has garnered support from across the world, including from the cricketer Monty Panesar and Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, the UK MP for Slough, who tweeted: “I stand with farmers of the Punjab and other parts of India, including our family and friends, who are peacefully protesting against the encroaching privatisation of Farmers Bill 2020.”

In todays print edition of the Guardian, Wednesday 9 December 2020, this story and report by Hannah Ellis-Petersen ran with the headline:

Delhi blockaded over new agricultural laws that 'only benefit big corporations'

Farmers in India have shut down swaths of the country’s transport, shops and markets as they escalated their protests against new agriculture laws with the launch of a national strike.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers blocked all roads into the capital Delhi for most of the day, and across the country demonstrated on railway lines and highways and called for a shutdown of shops, in a effort to pressurise the government into repealing new agriculture laws they say will leave them poverty stricken and at the mercy of corporations.

For over a week, thousands of farmers, mainly from Punjab and Haryana, have been camped out around the periphery of Delhi, sitting along police barricades on the three main roads going into the capital, saying they will not move until the three agriculture laws are repealed and they are given assurances of a minimum price for their crops. A meeting last Friday between farmers and the government went on for seven hours but failed to end the deadlock.

The prime minister, Narendra Modi, passed the laws in September, saying they would reform an archaic and outdated system and give farmers more control over their crop prices. However farmers began protesting, saying they had not been consulted and that their livelihoods face ruin.

Agriculture employs more than 40% of India’s workforce but it is also an industry plagued by poverty, underdevelopment and suffering. India has one of the highest rates of farmer suicides in the world.

Over 450 farmer’s unions and organisations supported the nationwide strike on Tuesday, which saw police deployed across the country to keep the agitation under control.

Stationed at the Delhi border was Kuldip Malana, 41, a farmer from Bant district in Haryana, who has been travelling back every evening to pick up food supplies and bring back home anyone who has fallen sick at the protests.

“Over the last 25 years, farmers have suffered and the government has not bothered about us, even when so many are committing suicide,” said Malana. “They have not provided cold storage for our crops to keep them fresh, so sometimes we have to sell our vegetables for 1 rupee. They have not give us enough water for our crops.”

He added: “They have not thought about us for years, and suddenly they come up with reforms have nothing to do with helping the farmers and only benefit the big corporations. These laws are suicide for us all.”

Malana and other farmers proclaimed the strike a success, after the home minister, Amit Shah, agreed to meet with the farmers’ leaders at his residence at 7pm on Tuesday. “There is no midway. We will demand just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from the home minister at today’s meeting,” Rudru Singh Mansa, a farmers’ leader, told reporters. Farmers are also due to have a meeting with the government on Wednesday to continue discussions.

Political tensions also escalated around the protests. The Delhi government’s ruling Aam Aadmi party (AAP) claimed that the Delhi chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, had been placed under de facto “house arrest” by Delhi police, who are under the federal jurisdiction of the home ministry, to prevent him joining the protests in support of the farmers. “They didn’t let me go, but I was praying for the movement to be successful,” said Kejriwal.

Punjab’s chief minister, Amarinder Singh, reiterated his support for the farmers and called on the central government to listen to their demands. “Had I been in their place I would not have taken a minute to accept my mistake and revoke the laws,” said Singh.

Umendra Dutt, the founder of the Kheti Virasat Mission, a people’s movement for sustainable farming and food safety in the state of Punjab, said the government had “severely underestimated” the farmers and that the protests were the culmination of “40 years of anger and disenchantment at a broken system that has bankrupted farmers, destroyed food security and led to an ecological crisis in India.”

Dutt said that “a paradigm shift” was needed to overhaul the agriculture system in India to make it sustainable, but that these new laws were simply “tinkering with a broken system that is responsible for the farmer suicides in India, has plundered the natural resources and poisoned the food and the ecosystem in India.” 

Re:LODE Radio recognises the interests and the logic of those like Mark Carney working towards a type of "reformed capitalism", and an economic system that serves society, as opposed to the way it works now, that is society serving the economy. Mark Carney's record does address the requirement that the governments of nation states and international financial organisations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, intervene to shape the market environment, and to support a radical transformation of the way business is undertaken, and save the planet from climate change catastrophe. 

Q. NOT business as usual? 

A. NO, business as usual!

By Chloé Farand (10/11/20)

As demand for carbon offsetting grows to help companies meet their climate goals, Mark Carney is driving efforts to scale up the voluntary carbon market, while improving its environmental integrity.

With a recent surge of carbon neutrality pledges, many businesses around the world are looking to offset the emissions they cannot cut.

This means financing projects, usually in developing countries, that deliver verified emissions reductions. These might come from in renewable energy, energy efficiency, waste management, tree-planting or carbon removal technologies.

Demand for carbon credits has risen rapidly in the past two years, with the volume of emissions reduction claimed doubling between 2017 and 2020. It is expected to continue to soar in the near future as companies look for ways to meet their newly set goals.  

“It’s incredibly important that the ‘net’ in net zero, the offset is credible, verifiable, transparent and is preserving that precious and very limited carbon budget,” Carney, the UN special envoy for climate action and finance, told the Green Horizon finance summit on Tuesday.

Today, the voluntary carbon market is “opaque, cumbersome and fragmentated” and “struggle[s] with low liquidity and scarce financing”, Carney said.

In 2019, just over $300m worth of trading took place on the voluntary market “when these projects should be measured in the tens of billions dollars per year,” he added.

Carney convened as taskforce in September to design a blueprint for scaling up the market into a transparent, verifiable and resilient emissions trading mechanism, which is expected in January 2021.

On Tuesday, the initiative chaired by Bill Winters, group chief executive of Standard Chartered, and sponsored by the Institute of International Finance (IIF), published its first set of 17 recommendations, which it opened to consultation until 10 December.

The taskforce found efforts to upscale the market will need to be “significant”, estimating voluntary offsetting would need to grow at least 15-fold between 2019 and 2030 to support levels of investments consistent with limiting global heating to 1.5C – the upper goal of the Paris Agreement.

Demand for voluntary carbon credits is expected to exceed 88 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2020. That “is still notably short of what is needed to support net zero [emissions targets], estimated to be at least 2 gigatonnes of CO2 per year by 2030,” the taskforce found.

On the supply side, “there is no shortage,” said Annette Nazareth, Partner at Davis Polk and the taskforce’s operating lead. And while demand has fluctuated, there is a groundswell of interest among companies, including small and medium-size businesses, added Tim Adams, president and CEO of the Institute of International Finance.

At scale, the voluntary carbon market could “create an enormous green investment opportunity much of which, if not most of which, will flow to emerging and developing economies bringing vital capital flows and investments at the time when the transition is imperative,” Carney said. “In order for any of that to happen, we need a functioning and professional market.”

Many climate campaigners are sceptical of carbon offsetting, warning it could give polluters a free pass without driving genuinely additional emissions cuts.

For example, oil majors have made big investments in forestry offsets in recent years, to burnish their green credentials.

Of forestry and land use credits issued on the voluntary carbon market in 2019, nearly 90% were projects aiming to protect existing forests at risk of land-use change or deforestation, known as Redd+, according to data from Ecosystem Marketplace.

Margaret Kim, CEO of Gold Standard, one of the main certifiers of voluntary carbon market projects, told Climate Home News these forestry credits – which account for around a third of the market — lacked integrity. It is too easy to game the baseline and ignore deforestation that is displaced outside the project boundary, she explained.

“Companies should reduce within and finance beyond — particularly those major polluters like the oil and gas industry who seem to be very keen to enter into this forestry offset market,” she said. “Many [oil and gas companies] are setting targets that are not in line with what science says is needed and are seeking to profit from markets that are aiming to solve a problem that they created.”

The Carney taskforce emphasised buying credits was no substitute for a company cutting its own emissions and called for stronger quality control. It stopped short of adjudicating which types of project were valid.

While she supported scaling up the market, Kim cautioned against “force-fitting all the private sector finance into the voluntary carbon market”.

“The voluntary carbon market should be used as a catalytic tool, not as a means to deliver private finance. It is important to set that expectation. We can’t… just hope the market is going to solve the problem.”

Sympathy for the Devil? 

This is page 4 of a hand-coloured facsimile, made in 1868, of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell original and undated work, probably created in 1790. To quote the British Library webpage on this valued item from its collection:

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an innovative and highly personal publication, the design of which is similar to that of Blake’s poems Songs of Innocence and of Experience and his Prophetic Books. The content develops Blake’s view of the spiritual cosmos. Through the voice of the Devil, he comments on the ideas of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), who wrote a book with a Latin title meaning Heaven and Hell. Blake takes issue with Swedenborg for conversing more with angels than with devils.

Blake was deeply critical of traditional religion but greatly admired John Milton. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake refers to Paradise Lost (1667), but inverts the power relations between God and Satan. Jesus, the Messiah, becomes the voice of restraint, while Satan is the revolutionary voice of liberty and desire (see p. 5 below). 

Blake develops the idea that the sensual world can lead to the spiritual, and that the repression of desire destroys the spirit. He says, ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul … Energy is the only life, and is from the Body’ (see page 4 above). 

Blake also includes a series of Proverbs of Hell with unsettling pearls of wisdom, including ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’ (see page 9 below).

The book ends with 'A Song of Liberty', which calls for revolt against the tyrannies of church and state.

On page 6, Blake adds a provocative note suggesting that:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

This is often quoted to express the magnetic appeal of John Milton’s Satan. Blake inspired other Romantic and Gothic writers to view Satan as a hero. 

Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, William Blake (1808) 

This "reversal" technique employed by Blake, that is in this reversal of the roles and power relations between God and Satan is a simple way to to expose the absurdities of ideological constructions. Swedenborg is categorised as a mystic in the British Library account, but he was significantly for Blake, descended from a wealthy mining family, and was appointed by the King of Sweden  to be assessor-extraordinary on the Swedish Board of Mines (Bergskollegium). Blake regarded Swedenborg's theology as a limited and poor justification of inequality in human society. If you are rich and powerful it is because you are good. If you are poor, powerless, work down the mines, or in the sulphuric atmosphere of the printing workshop in Hell, it is because this condition reflects your moral standing as far as God is concerned. A self-serving and narcissistic philosophy, resulting in a blindness to the beauty in work, life and energy evident in the actuality of everyday life. 

Re:LODE Radio considers that many of the rightwing "free market" ideologues adopt a similar psychological posture to Blake's version of Swedenborg, resulting in a convenient blindness to the consequences of their belief and justification of a system that produces structural and systemic inequalities. The systemic inequalities in society have been amplified and exposed during the pandemic and climate change crises. 

Is Mark Carney, like John Milton, of the Devil's party, without knowing it?    

Capitalism as GOOD? Or capitalism as GOD? 

ONE + ONE

In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard moved to London intending to make a film about abortion. When he discovered that, due to the 1967 Abortion Act, it was no longer a hot topic, he told his producers he would still make a film in London, but on the condition that he would work with either the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. The Beatles turned him down, but the Rolling Stones were happy to collaborate. As a result, he was able to capture their work in progress as they rehearsed and recorded material for their seventh album, Beggars Banquet.

The film was shot at the Olympic Recording Studios in London and at Camber Sands. In the original version running 104 minutes, Godard left the creation of the song unfinished. 

The film was originally titled 1 + 1 (also One Plus One) by Godard, and distributed under this title in Europe. 

This self-consciously avant-garde film is shot mostly in colour and was his first British made, English language film. 

It ended up being a composite film, juxtaposing documentary, fictional scenes and dramatised political readings. 

It is most notable for its scenes documenting the creative evolution of the song "Sympathy for the Devil" as the Rolling Stones developed it during recording sessions at Olympic Studios in London. 1 + 1 was shown at the 1968 London Film Festival. 

Godard punched producer Iain Quarrier in the face, for the changes made to the film's ending, including featuring the complete version of the song, and it is this song, "Sympathy for the Devil", that has replaced the original title of the film. Godard showed his original version under a London bridge for free after the first screening at the London Film Festival. 

1 + 1 is beyond being a period piece, replete though it is with uncomfortable dramatic elements that point to uncomfortable truths, relevant to the present as well as over fifty years ago. As for example in the scenes of the abduction and execution of "white women" by "black revolutionaries", lurid magazines and readings of Hitler's Mein Kampf, lend themselves to a juxtaposition with the contemporary "taste" and "market" for the consumption of interracial and ethnic pornography. 

Clickbait? 

Whilst in Godard's film the scenes undercut a post-colonial critique, in the porn business, stereotypes of race and stereotypes of gender are made the focal point of intrigue for the audience. Fifty years from 1 + 1 on we see the continued perpetuation of these exotically contrasting encounters, and the frisson of racial difference in a pretend reversal of power relations. In the time of Black Lives Matter, a renewed understanding of the significance of activism, of the Black Panthers and Malcom X, it must be owned that the eroticised sexual tension in interracial pornography dates back in a double edged way, to the mindsets that relate to white supremacy and slavery. 

This is a political advertisement for the Alternative for Germany (German: Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) from the 2019 European Parliament election, using an example of European "orientalist" fine art. This German nationalist and right-wing populist political party, is known for its opposition to the European Union and immigration. It is often characterised as being on the far-right of the political spectrum. The AfD is often described as a German nationalist, national-conservative, and Eurosceptic party, but since 2017, the AfD has been increasingly open to working with far-right extremist groups such as Pegida. Factions of the AfD have racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic tendencies with links to neo-Nazism and the Identitarian movement. Party leaders have denied accusations of racism, but this political poster, using a detail of a reproduction of a painting by by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme exposes the AfD appeal to an audience that is racist, Islamophobic, and fears deeply the anathema of miscegenation in a multicultural society, as something abhorrent, and potentially undermining both "racial purity" and "national identity". The reprint was accompanied with the slogan "Europeans vote AfD!" and "So Europe doesn't become Eurabia!" Deutsche Welle reported how the painting was used with racist intent, in that it suggestively depicted dark-skinned men with beards and turbans "inspecting the teeth of a nude white woman".

This painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme is titled Le Marché d'esclaves (The Slave Market), completed in 1866 by this 19th-century French artist. This is around the same time miscegenation as a term was invented by anonymous authors in the United States in an 1863 fraudulent political pamphlet. The idea being promulgated that miscegenation meant interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations, particularly between ". . . the American White Man and Negro". The term came to be associated with laws which banned interracial marriage and sex, these laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws.

Opposition to miscegenation, framed as preserving so-called racial purity, is a typical theme of racial supremacist movements. Although the notion that racial mixing is undesirable has arisen at different points in history, it gained particular prominence in Europe during the era of colonialism.

Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting depicts an unspecific Middle Eastern or North African setting where a man inspects the teeth of a nude, female slave, and has become an iconic example of 19th-century orientalist art. Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, much academic discourse has begun to use the term "Orientalism" to refer to a general pattern of the "projection" of a Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies. In Said's analysis, the West essentialises these societies as static and undeveloped — thereby fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, depicted, and reproduced in the service of imperial power. Implicit in this fabrication, writes Said, is the idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and superior.

Back to Godard's One + One - A Résumé

Looking as though it were finger-painted, the opening intertitle of Godard’s One + One/Sympathy for the Devil reads, “The Stones Rolling;” already Godard has begun to play with language.  The letters E-O-N-E-O-N, or O-N-E-O-N-E in the correct ordering of the band’s name, are highlighted in red.  One + One.  For Godard here One + One is never unified into the end result, the final product.  Instead, One + One is just that, one and one; two individual, separate pieces, together.  In many ways, this will come to define the film, as Godard presents us with two worlds, two separate realities.  The first is a world beyond Godard’s control, the world of the Rolling Stones, as he documents their process of writing and recording their song “Sympathy for the Devil.”   The second is a world the filmmaker does control, the world of film, a sphere of fragmented narratives whose figures act as his ideological mouthpieces.  He doesn’t present us with a single message, a unified ideological, social, or political critique.  Instead, these sections are meant to conflict and clash, to raise more questions than they answer, and, ultimately, to alter and shape how we view the Stones at work. 

In the opening shot, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones sit on the studio floor, guitars in hand, the camera hovering around them slowly (as it does throughout the film).  The song has yet to take shape; it is the creative process in its beginning stage, in its rawest form. Following the rhythm of the guitar, Jagger sing-speaks variations of the same few words of jumbled, even baby-like, rambling. 

There are no words, just gibberish.  

Language is secondary here (at least at first); we are introduced, first, to sound; pure sound, before there is any meaning assigned to it.  Whereas Godard has too much to say throughout the film, overwhelming us with multiple and conflicting voices and sounds that overlap one another into an incomprehensible noise, Jagger here speaks only gibberish.

Godard cuts from the studio to a London hotel room, where Wiazemsky (who plays Eve Democracy later on in the film) spray paints the words “Hilton” and “Stalin” onto the hotel window, crossing the two at the “t.”  It is a mixing of terms and ideologies that we will see throughout the film.   

“Sovietcong.”  “Cinemarxism.”  “Freudemocracy.”   

All of them are One + One; conceptual and ideological combinations he never explores specifically, only mentioning them on the walls and streets in spray paint, inviting questions and provoking questions, but ultimately offering no answers.  Over the image, the narrator begins telling us that he’s a Bolivian hiding in a London toilet to escape from the police.   

He reads from a pornographic novel (which he calls a “political novel”), replacing the names of the characters with political figures and cultural icons, mixing politics, pornography and pop culture into one philosophical mess.   

We are never fully sure what their connection is.  “Raising the toilet lid I could see Elizabeth’s fat white behind on which Lyndon Johnson was projecting an Andy Warhol movie,” the narrator tells us.  Like Jagger’s singing in the beginning, it is gibberish to us.  The narration will continue throughout the film, running over the image of the Stones in the studio.   

What is their role in this political, cultural, and pornographic mess?  Could we just as easily substitute Jagger’s name or Richard’s for Johnson’s and Warhol’s?

“Outside Black Novel” reads the second intertitle in red, the acronym “love” spelled out this time in black.   

A Black militant sits in a wheel barrel in a junkyard, reading to us about the history of the blues, its roots, its development, and ultimately its appropriation by young Whites and popular culture for White consumption. 

“Any group of middle class White boys who need a haircut and male hormones can be a pop group.  That’s what pop means,” he tells us.   

We cannot help but think of the Stones in the studio from the scene before, and this is Godard’s intention. Originally starting as a skiffle band (a popular but now-neglected subgenre of music popular in Britain in the 1950s, combining blues, roots, and country), drawing on the styles of Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf, the Stones exemplify this appropriation of “Black music” by the White youth culture.

The camera is the unifying force in the film.  It is what connects these fragmented sections together: the Stones, the Black militant group, Eve Democracy, and even the seedy fascist bookstore later on.   

It remains consistent in its style throughout, always slow and controlled in its movement, always moving laterally, always circulating back to where it started.  We watch as it hovers throughout the studio, never intruding on the band as they work, drifting around them as an observer (embodying the perspective of the filmmaker himself), capturing the artist and the creative process at work.  We watch as the song evolves from the simple strumming of Jones and primitive mumbling of Jagger into a complex and layered work.  The lyrics begin to take shape, and the guitars from the beginning disappear and are replaced by maracas, congas, and a chorus group.  We watch in real time as the band starts and stops repeatedly, tweaking different sections each time. The song is never the same twice; the instrumentation, rhythm, beat, speed, and Jagger’s lyrics and inflection change each time.  What is significant here, though, is that unlike the other figures and scenes in the film, the Stones, their process and their output, are outside Godard’s control.   

The filmmaker here has no real power over them; they are not a mouthpiece for him to convey his ideological questions and theories, at least not directly.  Nor is this necessarily his intention. Instead, he works to control everything around them, to place them within a context that he creates.

In filming the artist at work, the artist and his or her creative process come to serve different functions for this filmmaker.  For Clouzot and Parreno and Gordon, the artist is a mystery to be unraveled, a hieroglyphic to be deciphered, and yet in filming them we inevitably realize we can’t ever fully know what drives them creatively.   

What, though, is Godard’s interest in capturing the Stones at work here?  What does he hope to learn from filming them?   

The song itself would seemingly fit with Godard’s own political position; it is an anti-establishment statement that would come to define 60s youth, highlighting atrocities of the past and present (the Holocaust, the Kennedy assassinations, and the 100 years war) as a way to signify their own break with the generations before them.  And yet Godard here is not interested in (or at least he’s not focused on) that.  His interest instead lies in what the Stones represent and to what their creative process tends. This is a study in control: in its creation and its limits.  The limit of creative control, Godard seems to suggest, is at base in its commerciality.   

Although “Sympathy for the Devil” became an anthem of the 1960s counterculture, it is also simultaneously a cultural product that is to be commodified and commercialized, bought and sold by record companies and corporations to the masses.  By placing them in the context of the Black Panthers and Eve Democracy, juxtaposing scenes of the Stones in the studio with these other fragmented narratives, we are forced to understand The Stones in a different way.  We must re-examine and re-contextualize them within a larger social, economic, and cultural frame; and in doing so, Godard is questioning not the art itself, not its content, but instead what the art and the artist are used for, how they are to be packaged and consumed.   

We come to view them less as artists and more as appropriators and as tools and products.   

And by placing them within this context, Godard ultimately exerts his authority as the filmmaker over the band, seizing control from them and placing it back into his hands.

The video montage begins with the song and the song lyrics and ends with:

1 plus 1

One + One