The test that this kind of thing is actually going on is the media’s active participation. So if a new leader is due to be anointed (typically these days without any requirement for any democratic mandate whatsoever) the media is all over it like a rash. This provides a tacit approval of the leader’s status, regardless of the said leader’s lack of any mandate or any obvious ability to even act.

But, more to the point, is the extent of media involvement in freshly painted dramatic projects designed to give the impression that the government is ‘out of touch’ or, for example, that Andy Burnham is planning to ‘take us back into the EU’. In effect, the Leading Boy is given his status because he is defining the main debates featured in the Sunday rags and Monday morning breakfast TV news shows (note the media optimised timings of the staged audience wow moments).

Cue an extended troop of players dragooned-in after said (staged) wow moment. So our Principal Boy (Andy Burnham) agrees to do an interview with Pantomime Dame (Alastair Campbell) and Comic Sidekick (Rory Stewart). During the interview Burnham drops a major clanger, with oohs and aahs from the audience, that the Russians (boo) influenced the Brexit vote.

Note, that the chosen topic - Brexit - is a well known source of heated debate, division and party-political rivalry. So this gives Principal Baddie (Nigel Farage) lots of scope to deride the Principal Boy for ignoring the biggest ever mandate delivered by the British people…yada, yada.

And, this morning, the cast of characters, including their understudies (i.e. junior ministers we’ve never heard of) appear on the various news bulletins to be ‘quizzed’ (politicians are always quizzed) about Burnham’s faux pas. Twitter is today flooded with car-crash interview footage featuring junior ministers blathering nonsense - largely because they weren’t even provided with any scripts. Ad-libbing without scripts is the primary role of the understudies.

I’m currently watching 100 Years of Solitude - the mini-series - having failed to read the book by Gabriel García Márquez (perhaps the English translations from Spanish don’t do it justice). The book tells the story of the Buendia family, founders of the fictional town of Macando. The town of Macando is peaceful and self-governed after being established in the middle of nowhere by the Buendias and their fellow travellers. The town’s patriarch is José Arcadio Buendía.

Macando manages to get by without any government. It even manages to survive a ‘plague’ of insomnia as a result of José Arcadio invoking the ghost of a dead gypsy healer. But, of course, its success and self-reliance doesn’t escape the notice of the government. It sends a magistrate to instil order and justice in the town, who then starts about imposing arbitrary rules - insisting, for example, that all the houses be painted blue.

José Arcadio Buendía confronts him and says: “In this town we do not give orders with pieces of paper. And so that you know it once and for all, we don’t need any magistrate because there’s nothing here for him to judge.” He continues, “We have been through an insomnia plague and we don’t want a political plague.”

This is where we are now, here in the UK. Our politics is merely about the staging of a never ending charade designed to convince us that we’re part of something, that people are fighting our corner. But they aren’t. They are - and always have been - ugly actors in a shit play.

And how do I know this? Surely, I hear you cry, the active debates show that democracy functions?

Clearly that’s not the case. Typically the heated discussions focus on well-trodden turf that causes populist division. Brexit is almost hallowed ground as far as the pantomime producers are concerned because, clearly, Brexit has provided the bread and butter for the current uniparty discourse. The Reform Party emerged from Brexit and the Brexit Party. The Reform splinter groups (like Rupert Lowe’s other R party) argue about continued boat people ingress resulting in organised gang rape. The Labour Party is, apparently, divided on the rejoining issue. The Conservatives are, similarly, always trying to keep discipline between leavers and remainers. But all of this, of course, is contrived nonsense. No-one really cares any more. Just look at the actuality. Since leaving the EU the UK government is now mandating the ‘fortification’ of wheat flour with a known toxin (folic acid) while no such mandate exists in the EU. Rupert Lowe now argues against UK food standards imposed well after the Brexit vote by a newly independent United Kingdom.

Notably excluded from the carefully choreographed pantomime furores are any topics deemed unacceptable by the state and its poodle media. The Brexit vote was in 2016 - over ten years ago. The cost of the UK’s participation in the EU (i.e. the net contribution to the EU budget) amounted to around £10 billion a year. But in 2020 we had the ultimate political pantomime that gagged any media organisation even considering quizzing any political understudy actor about the efficacy of government policy relating to “COVID”. In 2020 alone the cost of dealing with the government’s own COVID pantomime was around £400 billion - or around 40 years worth of net EU contributions. And yet, no-one is allowed on mainstream television to express the view that COVID was a globally rehearsed farce - that resulted in a catastrophic loss of life from fake vaccines, end-of-life protocols and economic vandalism. The plague of politics.

And so it continues. None of the so-called mainstream political parties, or leading political actors, say anything about the Bard’s Play. There’s an unspoken rule, or Omerta, that cannot be broken. Instead, let’s rewrite a crap stage-play about Brexit, or anti-semitism, or climate change. These are the topics the political troop of actors do so well.

I may be naive. But I do suspect that the ticket sales aren’t going so well. And that is our potential salvation. I caught a few bits of BBC coverage of the party conference season - where various leader speech snippets were prepped for the schedules. But there was no real belief in the reports, no attempt to disguise the fact that politics is the stuff of desperation for relevance. That’s what tends to happen with perpetual lying - the stenographers of the lies tend to get bored with it.

Meanwhile we’re all bored rigid. BBC audiences are declining to such an extent that the organisation is in an existential crisis - claiming that its news content be carried on Netflix. But I presume even Netflix knows that would be a kiss of death.

The play is awful. Its actors are ugly. Its plot has no ending. Let’s be done with the farce.

Carlson made no effort to correct much of the heavily rehearsed nonsense - particularly near the start of the interview when Mogg made the spectacular claim that Russia’s economic performance was nowhere near the UK’s stellar achievements (just have a look at the UK’s sovereign debt and compare it to Russia’s).

Mogg’s blatant hypocrisy could have been called out. The only conclusion one could take from the fact that it wasn’t is that Rees-Mogg has been selected for star treatment and that Carlson’s ‘interrogation’ was more of a publicity stunt for a politician who failed to win a mandate in 2024 - seeing his vote collapse.

Carlson could have explored this angle…

Rees-Mogg co-founded Somerset Capital Management (SCM) in 2007 and was fully involved in the firm’s overarching strategy until 2019.
SCM targeted emerging market assets - including Russian equities - from its early years. When questioned (at the time) about the firm’s £217 million exposure to Russia, Rees-Mogg argued that it would be “quite improper” and risk legal action from clients if he allowed his personal political viewpoints to dictate the portfolio managers’ stock selections.

However, Somerset Capital Management built up its main Russian investments across a timeline primarily spanning from 2012 to 2018 i.e. when Rees-Mogg remained a part-time adviser to the firm (until 2019). For example, SCM first purchased shares in the Russian internet giant Yandex in early 2015 while Rees-Mogg was serving as a formal adviser to the company.

Indeed, because Rees-Mogg was an advisor to the firm (as a Partner) he was paid £14,000 to £15,000 per month for his advisory services.

SCM’s largest and most controversial Russian holding was in the state-owned lender Sberbank. The firm took advantage of massive institutional stake sales in Russia - such as Sberbank’s major 2012 share privatization - to aggressively build out its exposure. By early 2018, SCM held a peak investment of roughly £60 million to £85 million (representing a 4.1% stake) in the bank.

So isn’t it odd that Rees-Mogg was an active advisor to a firm so heavily invested in Russia (as a lucrative emerging market) when he advocates that we prepare for war against a nation in which his firm was actively investing?

For another discussion of Rees-Mogg’s contrived aristocratic persona, this is worth a read.

Hunt & Gather TV

The Fake Aristocrats Who Fucked Up Britain

There is a particular type in English public life who has done more quiet damage to this country than any number of obvious villains. He is not an aristocrat. He is something more useful to himself: a man who has worked out that looking …

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21 days ago · 21 likes · 14 comments · Hunt&GatherTV

But what’s really going on? I asked Miles Harris, the writer and Economist, for his view.

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So I thought it might be good to record the first chapter as a podcast. Hopefully - after hearing this - you’ll want to find out more. By buying the book (hint, hint).

Now, I should explain that each chapter is ‘narrated’ by the book’s main characters. This leaves me with something of a dilemma because some of the characters are female. And some would, logically, have regional accents.

Case in point is Rahul Vaidya - the character who narrates the first chapter. My acting and reading abilities aren’t up to attempting an Indian, never mind a Keralan,accent,so you’ll just have to put up with my Northern Irish male voice. This will apply also to the female characters. Sorry. But I just don’t have the budget for an entire retinue of Thespians. So, suspend disbelief.

So this is Chapter 1, audio version, of South of Market. Narrated by me as Rahul Vaidya.

If you’d like me to record more chapters please let me know in the comments below. If you’d like to buy me a coffee, use the link below.

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If you’d like to buy South of Market, here’s the link (UK link below but available from most Amazon international sites in Kindle and paperback editions).

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Martina and I have known each other for several years and share a common world view about many issues - but especially about the lurch to corporatism and authoritarianism over the last few years. Martina sent me this article a few weeks ago and asked if it resonated at all, and might be suitable for The New Era.

It’s essentially an extended essay about how “individuals become increasingly dependent on large systems for things they once possessed some capacity to provide, influence or negotiate themselves”. So it clearly resonated immediately. This is the dilemma we face: how do we wrest back control, or create a new economic system, when we have accepted, so readily, what centralised corporatism has provided?

Martina introduces the idea of the “spiral economy”. Her initial article was more algebraic, econonometric even. Went way over my head. But this prose version she prepared for me and this site. I hope you enjoy it. It’s presented here unedited and in full. And I know that Martina would welcome comments. So they’re open. JP

A Different Question

We have spent an extraordinary amount of time arguing about which economic system is right: capitalism or socialism, markets or government, growth or degrowth, centralisation or decentralisation, individual freedom or collective responsibility.

I have begun to wonder whether we are arguing one level too low.

Look at many of the systems around us and a remarkably similar pattern appears. Resources are extracted, transformed, consumed and discarded. Money moves through productive activity and tends to accumulate. Authority is delegated upwards and has a tendency to remain there. Institutions created to solve a problem can survive long after the original problem has changed. Individuals become increasingly dependent on large systems for things they once possessed some capacity to provide, influence or negotiate themselves.

The institutions may become more capable while the people underneath them become less so.

That observation became the starting point for what I call the Spiral Economy. It is not an argument against markets, governments, companies, wealth or technology. Nor is it another proposal for an ideal society. It begins with a much simpler question:

The Strange Thing About Scale

Human beings create higher-order systems because they are extraordinarily useful. One person cannot build a railway network. A household cannot manufacture semiconductors. A village cannot operate an international payments system. A small company cannot necessarily fund research costing billions.

We cooperate because relationships create capabilities that none of us possess alone. There is nothing inherently wrong with scale. The interesting question is what happens to the participants when scale emerges.

Consider education. A child enters an educational system because teachers, institutions, other students and accumulated knowledge can provide something the child cannot provide alone. But the ideal outcome of education is not a human being who becomes permanently dependent upon the teacher. It is precisely the opposite: the student should emerge more capable.

Healthcare has a similar logic. The purpose of a hospital is not to create lifelong dependence upon the hospital. Where possible, it should return the patient to life with greater functional capacity.

The same principle can be applied to companies, communities, governments and economies. A higher-order system justifies itself not simply because it has become powerful or efficient, but because the capability created through coordination ultimately returns capacity to the systems participating in it.

Autonomy Without Isolation

This leads to what may be the most important distinction in the whole idea. Autonomy is not the same as independence.

I am not proposing that every household grow all its food, generate all its energy, educate its children, manufacture its medicines and disconnect from society. That would simply replace dependency with isolation.

Instead, imagine a household that possesses enough resilience that participation in larger systems becomes increasingly voluntary rather than existentially compulsory.

If losing one salary immediately means losing shelter, food, energy and security, a person’s theoretical freedom may be considerable while their practical freedom is very small. A more resilient baseline creates optionality.

The person can still work. Trade. Build companies. Participate in markets. Specialise. Cooperate. But they do so from a stronger negotiating position.

And the principle scales. A household can retain meaningful autonomy while belonging to a community. A community can retain meaningful capacity while belonging to a region. A region can participate in a state. A state can participate internationally. The existence of the larger system does not inherently require the smaller one to become hollow.

Capital Is Not The Enemy

This also changes how I think about capital. It is easy to make accumulation itself the villain. But large concentrations of capital can create extraordinary things: factories, infrastructure, scientific research, new medicines, energy systems and technology. Some capabilities simply require scale.

So the more interesting question is not, ‘How much capital has accumulated?’ It is, ‘What is the capital doing?’

Does it continue circulating through productive transformation, creating knowledge, infrastructure, businesses and future capability? Or has it become primarily extractive, pulling capacity out of productive systems and terminating the flow?

The Spiral Economy therefore distinguishes accumulation from circulation. A billion euros continuously generating new productive capability may be considerably more regenerative than a much smaller amount of capital that simply extracts rents from an increasingly fragile underlying system.

Distribution still matters. But circulation tells us something distribution alone cannot.

Perhaps Growth Does Not Always Mean Getting Bigger

We normally measure growth quantitatively: more production, more transactions, more consumption, more GDP. But living systems often develop differently. They grow, reach a threshold, reorganise and become more capable.

A child does not simply become an ever-larger child. At various points development changes the organisation of the system itself. Perhaps economies can do something similar.

Growth could mean using less material to produce the same capability. It could mean greater resilience, better knowledge, more efficient infrastructure, lower dependency, greater adaptability and more sophisticated relationships between systems.

That potentially offers a way out of one of our most stubborn arguments: the apparent conflict between ecological limits and human development. Development does not have to stop simply because material throughput cannot increase forever. Development can change form.

Power Should Know How To Come Home

Government presents another interesting case. Societies sometimes need enormous concentrations of capability. Wars, crises, natural disasters, infrastructure projects and systemic risks can require coordination far beyond what individuals or municipalities can accomplish.

The Spiral Economy does not deny this. But it asks something we rarely design explicitly: how does concentrated authority return?

We are reasonably good at creating mechanisms through which power moves upward. We are considerably less systematic about designing the journey back. An emergency measure solves an emergency and becomes permanent. A central institution assumes a function because the local system cannot perform it, then retains the function even when local capability could have been rebuilt. Temporary dependency quietly becomes structural dependency.

A Spiral architecture would therefore attach greater importance to closure. What condition justified the intervention? How will we know when that condition no longer exists? What capability should be returned afterwards? Could the intervention leave the local system stronger than it found it?

When capability moves upward, something useful should come back down.

Coherence Does Not Mean Sameness

None of this requires everyone to live the same way. In fact, the opposite. A coherent society should be able to contain enormous diversity: different cultures, ambitions, lifestyles, companies, ownership structures, communities and levels of wealth.

The goal is not uniformity. The phrase I use for this is: The axis is stable. The form is free.

There can be shared constraints - rights, physical realities, ecological boundaries, rules preventing one person’s freedom from destroying another’s viable agency - without prescribing a single correct expression of human life.

So What Would an Economy Actually Look Like?

Probably not dramatically different at first. There would still be companies, money, markets, investment, private ownership, public institutions, entrepreneurs, governments, technology, competition and cooperation.

The difference lies underneath them. Every time we create a larger structure, we would ask three questions:

That changes how we evaluate success. A company that produces extraordinary shareholder returns while progressively destroying its suppliers, employees, natural resource base or productive capability may be profitable while remaining systemically degenerative.

A government programme that achieves its objective while permanently reducing the ability of citizens or local institutions to act independently may be successful according to its programme metrics while weakening the larger system.

Conversely, a higher-order organisation that becomes powerful and makes its participants more capable is doing something quite different. It is generating rather than merely concentrating capacity.

This is Not a Utopia

There is an obvious danger in writing something like this. It can quickly become another beautiful theory in which everybody wins, resources circulate perfectly and human beings suddenly stop being human.

That is not what I mean.

Humans will remain ambitious, generous, frightened, competitive, cooperative, irrational, inventive, selfish, loving and contradictory. Real systems contain trade-offs. Sometimes one part of a system must temporarily carry a cost so the larger system can survive. Sometimes centralisation is necessary. Sometimes decentralisation is inefficient. Sometimes accumulated capital is precisely what enables the next breakthrough.

The Spiral Economy is therefore not based on the assumption that every interaction produces a win for everyone. The test is more modest and more demanding: does the architecture systematically increase capability by destroying the viability of the systems underneath it?

If it does, I suspect that sooner or later the apparent strength at the top becomes fragility. Dependency concentrates. Adaptive diversity disappears. The system becomes increasingly unable to function without the structures upon which it has made itself dependent.

That is not a moral argument. It is a systems hypothesis - and importantly, one that should eventually be possible to test.

Start Small

I do not think ideas about civilisation should begin by redesigning civilisation. They should begin somewhere we can observe them.

That is why I have been developing SpiralHome as the smallest practical demonstrator. A home is simultaneously an economic system, physical system, ecological system and human system.

Energy enters and leaves. Water moves through it. Food enters, is transformed and creates outputs. Money flows through it. People work, rest, create, learn, relate and recover inside it. Some needs can be made more resilient locally. Others make far more sense shared with neighbours or provided through larger networks.

It therefore gives us a bounded environment in which to ask the same question repeatedly: what should remain local, what becomes better through relationship, and does the relationship leave the participants more capable afterwards?

If the principle works at the level of a home, perhaps several homes can cooperate. Then a community. Then enterprises. Then infrastructure. The architecture repeats, but the form changes.

A Different Question

Perhaps the choice facing us is not ultimately between individual freedom and collective capability. We may simply have become accustomed to architectures in which increasing collective capability requires surrendering increasing amounts of local agency.

At the other extreme, attempts to preserve absolute autonomy can leave us unable to create things that require scale. There may be a third possibility:

The higher layer exists because it can do something the lower layer cannot. But the lower layer does not exist merely to feed the higher one.

That leads me back to the proposition underneath the entire Spiral Economy: a coherent higher-order human system increases useful relational capacity while preserving the viable agency of the systems from which it emerges.

Perhaps that sounds abstract. In ordinary language, I mean something very simple:

And perhaps economics should ultimately be judged against something even simpler than that.

Note from Martina Willis: This essay was developed in collaboration with AI as part of my ongoing work on the Spiral Framework. The underlying framework, observations and architecture are my work; AI is used as an integrated research, analytical and writing partner to test relationships, perform calculations and help articulate the developing framework.

Modern societies rarely collapse in a single moment. They drift. They shift. They morph. The change is subtle at first, almost imperceptible, like a slow distortion in how institutions view the world. What begins as a small adjustment becomes the new normal, and that normal becomes a new logic. Eventually, the logic becomes so familiar that few remember how different things once were.

This morphing is not driven by ideology or conspiracy. It is driven by structure. Institutions evolve in ways that make sense to them, even as those changes make less and less sense to the people they are supposed to serve. The drift is gradual, but its consequences accumulate. Over time, institutions lose the ability to perceive the world outside their own categories.

The first sign of morphing is a shift in purpose. Institutions created to solve problems become preoccupied with preserving the frameworks that define their operations. The mission remains on paper, while daily work increasingly focuses on maintaining internal stability. Procedures multiply, metrics proliferate, and new layers of oversight appear. Each layer is justified as necessary, yet each also distances the institution from the reality it was meant to address.

This is not incompetence. It is not malice. It is the predictable outcome of institutional success. Once a structure is stable enough to survive its failures, it begins to protect itself. The rules that once created order become ends in themselves. The categories that once helped interpret reality become filters that exclude anything that does not fit. The institution becomes very good at seeing what it expects to see and increasingly unable to see what it does not expect.

As institutions morph, they also become more rigid. Rigidity is not merely resistance to change. It is a narrowing of perception. When an institution has used the same categories for long enough, those categories begin to feel natural. They become the horizon of what seems possible. People within the institution adopt these categories without realizing it. They learn to speak the institutional language, interpret events through institutional frameworks, and treat deviations as errors rather than as signals.

This is how blindness emerges. Not because people refuse to see, but because the institution has shaped what they can see. A bureaucrat may recognize a procedure as absurd yet still defend it. A manager may know a metric distorts reality yet still rely on it. A leader may sense the institution is drifting yet still reinforce the very assumptions that make the drift possible. The structure absorbs the individual.

Morphing also shapes how institutions respond to information. Modern organizations collect more data than at any point in human history. Yet more information does not yield greater clarity. It often creates more confusion. When institutions rely on predefined indicators, dashboards, and standardized categories, they begin to treat these tools as reality itself. Anything that does not fit the model is dismissed as noise. The world is flattened into what the institution can measure.

This flattening has consequences. When lived experience contradicts official interpretations, trust erodes. People begin to rely on their own observations, communities, and informal networks. They notice patterns that institutions overlook, detect problems earlier, and share insights that do not fit within institutional categories. These alternative interpretations persist because they make sense of what people actually see, not what institutions expect them to see.

Digital archives amplify this process. In the past, institutions could maintain control by limiting access to information. Today, independent analyses remain available indefinitely and can be revisited whenever official narratives fail. They form a parallel memory that institutions cannot erase. Even if institutions dominate the present with curated explanations, they cannot eliminate the record of competing interpretations. The transformation of institutional authority is therefore not only structural but also historical.

As institutions drift, they often respond with symbolic gestures. New committees are formed. New oversight mechanisms are established. New slogans are introduced. These gestures create the appearance of change without altering the underlying assumptions. The structure adapts superficially, not substantively. The institution survives by performing responsiveness rather than practicing it.

Real transformation is rare because it requires something institutions find difficult: self-reflection. Institutions must examine the categories they typically use to analyze other things. They must ask whether their own frameworks are part of the problem. They must consider that the rules they rely on may be preventing them from seeing the world clearly. This is an extraordinary demand because it challenges the very mechanisms that make institutional life possible.

Morphing is therefore not merely a drift away from effectiveness. It is a drift away from reality. Institutions grow increasingly adept at preserving their assumptions, even when those assumptions no longer align with the world. They become machines for maintaining coherence rather than tools for understanding. They lose the ability to learn from feedback. Once learning stops, decline becomes inevitable.

The challenge for modern societies is not to gather more information or build more complex systems. It is to remain open to signals that do not fit existing categories, to recognize when institutional models no longer work, and to preserve the capacity for self-correction. Societies that maintain this openness can adapt, while those that cling to rigid frameworks are eventually corrected by events they failed to anticipate.

Morphing is subtle, yet its consequences are profound. It explains why institutions that once solved problems now struggle to understand them. It explains why more information has not brought greater clarity. It explains why trust erodes even when systems insist they are functioning as intended. And it explains why the future will belong not to the institutions that gather the most data, but to those that remain capable of learning from the world rather than forcing it to conform to their expectations.

Reality always has the final word. Institutions that forget this drift into blindness, whereas those that remember it remain capable of renewal.

Luc Lelievre is a Canadian sociologist and critical anthropologist with advanced doctoral training at Laval University. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in Anthropologieet Sociétés and Les Cahiers de géographie du Québec. His research focuses on institutional governance, academic freedom, and the systemic effects of bureaucratic drift. He writes from Poularies, Quebec.

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Read Part 1 here:

Part 2: Rigidity…

There is a strange paradox at the heart of institutional life.

Institutions are created to solve problems. They exist to coordinate action, impose order, preserve knowledge, and make collective life more predictable. Yet over time, they often begin to reproduce the very problems they were meant to solve.

Bureaucracies designed to ensure fairness become machines of delay. Schools created to transmit knowledge become increasingly preoccupied with credentials, conformity, and social reproduction. Public institutions established to serve citizens become preoccupied with procedures, internal legitimacy, and their own survival.

Why?

The usual answers are familiar: incompetence, corruption, poor leadership, political capture, or, at times, conspiracy. These explanations may occasionally be correct, but they miss something deeper.

Institutions can become dysfunctional without anyone deliberately choosing to be dysfunctional.

The problem is structural.

The first problem is rigidity. Once an institution has established rules, procedures, hierarchies, professional norms, and categories, these arrangements take on a life of their own. They may have been created for a specific purpose, but eventually preserving the arrangement becomes a purpose in itself.

The institution begins to protect not only its mission but also its structure.

This is the old danger Max Weber identified in his famous image of the “iron cage.” Bureaucracy is extraordinarily powerful because it replaces personal whim with predictable rules. But the same rules that create order can eventually become detached from the purpose they were meant to serve.

The procedure survives. The reason for it disappears.

At that point, following the rule becomes more important than achieving the original objective. A person who finds a better way to solve the problem may even be treated as the problem.This is how institutions begin to conflate obedience with virtue.

But rigidity alone does not explain institutional failure. The deeper problem is a blindness.

Institutions do not merely resist information. They also determine what counts as information.

Organizations operating in the same environment tend to become increasingly similar. Universities imitate universities. Hospitals imitate hospitals. Government agencies imitate government agencies. This does not necessarily happen because a particular model works. Often, it happens because the model appears legitimate.

The question gradually shifts.

Instead of asking, “Does this work?” institutions begin to ask, “Is this what institutions like us are supposed to do?”

That shift is crucial. Legitimacy begins to replace effectiveness.

Once that happens, inconvenient evidence becomes difficult to process. Information that fits the institutional categories is recognized as meaningful, while information that does not fit them is ignored, reclassified, delayed, or dismissed.

The institution does not necessarily consciously reject reality.

It may simply lack the categories required to see it.

This is where the problem becomes truly human.

People who spend years in an institution gradually adopt its way of seeing. Its rules begin to feel natural. Its hierarchies become common sense. Its assumptions become invisible precisely because everyone shares them.

A senior administrator may be unable to imagine a different organizational structure not because she lacks intelligence, but because the existing structure has become the horizon of what seems possible.

A bureaucrat may recognize that a procedure is absurd yet still defends it.

A professional may recognize that a system is failing yet continue to speak its language.

This is not necessarily hypocrisy. It is often socialization.

Institutions produce people who can operate effectively within the institutional world while becoming progressively less able to see the world outside it.

That is systemic blindness.

And even when the blindness is finally recognized, change remains extremely difficult.

Institutions are built layer upon layer. Past decisions create expectations, investments, careers, regulations, professional identities, and entire networks of dependence. The longer a structure endures, the more difficult it becomes to abandon - not necessarily because it is good, but because so much has been built around it.

This is why inefficient arrangements can persist for decades.

The cost of changing the system exceeds the perceived cost of tolerating its failures.

When pressure finally becomes impossible to ignore, institutions often respond symbolically by creating new committees, reports, offices, slogans, and accountability mechanisms.

The appearance of change can become a substitute for real change.

The structure survives by adapting cosmetically.

Genuine transformation is much rarer. It usually requires something more disruptive: a challenge to the assumptions that the institution uses to understand reality.

This is why replacing a leader often results in less change than expected. The new leader enters the same structure, inherits the same categories, relies on the same networks, and is quickly socialized into the same logic.

The institution absorbs the individual.

Real reform, therefore, requires more than new rules. It requires the institution to become capable of questioning the assumptions that structure its own perception.

That is an extraordinary demand.

Institutions must learn to examine the categories they normally use to analyze everything else.

They must ask not only whether we are following the rules.

They must also ask:

What if the rules themselves are keeping us from seeing the problem?

This is the central difficulty of institutional life. The mechanisms that create stability also produce rigidity. The structures that produce legitimacy can weaken responsiveness. The shared assumptions that make collective action possible can eventually render alternative possibilities invisible.

Therefore, institutional dysfunction is not always accidental.

Sometimes it is the predictable result of institutional success.

The institution becomes stable enough to survive its failures.

And when that happens, the real challenge is no longer to reform the institution.

It is to make the institution capable of self-reflection.

Luc Lelievre is a Canadian sociologist and critical anthropologist with advanced doctoral training at Laval University. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in Anthropologieet Sociétés and Les Cahiers de géographie du Québec. His research focuses on institutional governance, academic freedom, and the systemic effects of bureaucratic drift. He writes from Poularies, Quebec.

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In the conversation Jamie provides some background to his Virology Control Studies Project. He also describes how he became a prolific sceptic about climate change in his early 20s, having graduated from the University of Durham with a degree focused on geology.

He put his analysis of geology to good use by examining ice core data to help debunk CO2 climate change causality. But when the Covid event happened in 2020, Jamie started to question the efficacy of virology, germ theory and allopathic medicine.

In the video, Jamie outlines how the psychological operations around Covid 19 became more and more dependent on celebrity endorsement to push the idea that people should be tested and that viruses were both causal of disease and could be spread even by asymptomatic patients.

Covid also made use of fraudulent tests based on PCR. As Jamie notes, this ‘test and scare’ methodology (with PCR testing at the centre) is now being applied to other diseases such as cancer - with celebrities being drafted in to help promote the idea of early testing for cancers such as prostate.

Follow Jamie on Twitter here and on substack.

The Virology Controls Studies Project

Conducting Experimentation to prove Virology Fraudulent. All content will be free to access , but any donations/paid subscriptions very much appreciated to keep me writing.

By Jamie Andrews

In the meantime, I’m publishing this short clip where we discuss Jeremy Clarkson’s recent intervention into the field of allopathic healthcare. Enjoy.

Jamie is on substack here.

The Virology Controls Studies Project

Conducting Experimentation to prove Virology Fraudulent. All content will be free to access , but any donations/paid subscriptions very much appreciated to keep me writing.

By Jamie Andrews

The elevation of Andy Burnham (probably to the Labour Leadership and Prime Minister) is probably the most obvious spook-coordinated game-plays I have ever seen in British politics (possibly more obvious, even, than the suiciding of David Kelly).

There is not a scintilla of credibility left in British democracy.

If anyone even suggests that this choreographed bullshit bears any relationship to 'truth', call them out. Because they're part of the problem.

Let me explain exactly what I mean by going back to some basics. Let’s consider what media is and how it differs from social media. Then I’ll explain, again, why the proposed digital ID proposals are extraordinarily sinister (but doomed).

First of all, let’s consider the difference between media and social media. Let’s ask an AI bot to define the difference. This, courtesy of Gemini:

Media has historically served to inform, educate, and shape public opinion, acting as a bridge between events and the public. It establishes societal norms and holds institutions accountable. Social media differs fundamentally from traditional media by decentralizing this flow of information. It shifts the model from one-way broadcasts to interactive, two-way conversations.

Clearly it was inevitable that, with a pervasive, near-universal, free and open Internet that the balance of power would shift away from centralised, media-controlling, organisations (like the government) to individuals.

Note that in Gemini’s amalgam definition of ‘media’ it notes that it has a role to ‘shape public opinion’. And that is what it has done, and continues to do. But its influence is waning. In fact, it’s plummeting.

Even the BBC has been forced to admit the obvious.

Also, the role of the media, as per Gemini’s definition, of establishing societal norms and holding institutions accountable, is laughably absurd and elitist. But it’s a very accurate portrayal, for example, of the BBC’s positioning - as evidenced by this cringe-worthy video produced by the organisation, claiming that it is a single source of truth.

But alongside this collapsing trust (and collapsing licence fee revenue) is a growing reliance on social media for news content. But, remember, social media is not media. There is no centralised control (or shouldn’t be). Rather, people ‘get their news’ from social media by seeking out the opinions of their peers, their favourite ‘influencers’ or seeking network agreement for their own opinions (as I’m doing here, now). And, in the face of this, the traditional media (tell-sell, broadcast approach) just doesn’t cut it any more.

The BBC realised some time ago that it was never going to survive in the face of individual free thinking. That’s why few, if any, news articles on the BBC website are open for comment. But it’s also why the BBC was quickly scrambled during the fake pandemic to create an international censorship network that included all of the main social media platforms: the ironically titled “Trusted News Initiative”.

The organisation, or rather its spook handlers, realised that it was failing to control the narrative around the faked pandemic given the widespread availability of an opinion promulgation network (called social media). Therefore, it set about creating a censorship nexus.

The result, however, was widespread disaffection from the social media platforms that retained traditional media’s funding sources (advertising revenue). Customer disaffection isn’t a great business model so the social media companies rapidly rebranded after the Covid fiasco. In the case of Twitter it was ‘acquired’ by the same people and institutions that owned it before. But the rebranding included the idea of ‘freedom of speech, not freedom of reach’ to appease the automated digital advertising networks.

But after the COVID debacle the spooks are left with a dilemma. The ‘media’ island of Newspeak is getting smaller and less well funded. “News” and network anchors who were associated with the unrelenting propaganda around the “pandemic”, “climate change” and “culture wars” are slowly, but surely, being exited (often because of their arrogance, perversions or both). Just yesterday the BBC announced thousands of job cuts and vast cost savings - including the exit of Amol Rajan from the Today programme (it’s quite astonishing that the axing of just one presenter from one radio programme is highlighted in a story about huge cost-savings).

But, given this waning in the importance of media designed to ‘shape public opinion’ what’s a spook network to do?

By definition, social media companies do not publish. They provide a platform for people to publish, and advertisers to advertise and governments to shape public opinion. By attracting people (consumers, citizens, employees, PR types, commentators, journalists, politicians) to the platform they get to sound off about stuff. Or publish videos. Or photos. Or opinions. But there’s no central organisation or control of all this stuff. It just is. It’s a medium of exchange. And it attracts all sorts. Good and bad. And there are lots of competing platforms. Some platforms are effectively run by the state or technocratic super-state. Some are genuinely independent (although they tend not to last, or are bought-out).

So the only means available to governments and their spooks to re-establish control is to have total central intelligence of what’s happening on the networks. That requires each and every user to be identified. It also requires the building of vast data surveillance networks (and data centres) and also the promulgation of content from approved influencers with vast reach.

The lesson that central intelligence has learned from traditional media and is currently applying in social media is that big influencers must be seen to be mavericks who organically emerge. However, this is tricky to achieve when the ‘model’ they have been using is to migrate well known traditional media personalities (like Tucker Carlson or Russell Brand) over to the world of social media. Hence Carlson moves from Fox to Twitter. Or Piers Morgan is repositioned as a maverick ‘thinker’ and faux conspiracy theorist (look at his repositioning from vaccine peddler to sceptic). Russell Brand’s rapid adoption of Christianity is in no small part based on the observation that supposedly organically emergent social media influencers (like James Delingpole) are often Christian. This is the modus of central intelligence in the social media era…they use actors to ape crowd-created influencers.

The problem they face, however, is that people have an uncanny ability to detect wrong’uns, actors, and placed ‘talent’. Moreover, it’s often the case that anonymous accounts can achieve huge reach organically.

This explains why such efforts were made during the purging period from 2020 to around 2022. And it also explains why, starting with Australia, all members of the Five Eyes network will use the excuse of ‘child protection’ to implement control over social media platforms. Australia took the lead in 2025. Now the UK and Canada. Eventually the US states will do it too. And NZ no doubt. Slam dunk.

The only reason ‘parents’ apparently support it is because the governments make it appear so by commissioning rigged studies.

However, all of the efforts will fail, for the reasons I alluded to in my post yesterday. People will simply not agree to digital ID gate-keeping to maintain their social media accounts. Therefore, the social media platforms won’t try. As argued by MiriAF, yesterday, they’ll probably target anonymous accounts primarily, then give up. And age-policing of under-16s will come unstuck because of GDPR and, ironically, distrust of social media companies holding personal data. And the widespread use of VPNs.

In my view, it’s much more likely that the attempt to make society a digital-prison ship is about to hit a big iceberg. The circular economy that is the so-called ‘Magnificent 7’ Tech Bro companies, is teetering. So don’t let the latest spook strategy unsettle you too much. This particular good ship DigitalID is full of holes. But another one might be coming soon.

This is the primary reason why the government - and most of the mainstream political parties - want to curb access to the internet. Social media, within seconds, undermines every government policy or pronouncement - and every politician peddling them. The government is unable to control what people say on social media so they see reduction of participation as a major policy plank. Ditto the “opposition parties”.

Of course, the government is claiming that restricting social media access is all about child protection. This is utter nonsense. Social media has been around for around 30 years. My own kids, both of whom are in their late 20s, have been routinely using social media since they were in their early teens. Smart phones (and app stores promulgating social media apps) have been around since 2007.

On the plus side, the UK government’s plan to ban under-16s from mainstream social media platforms by Spring 2027 faces severe implementation hurdles.

Australia provides a handy case-study (having banned under-16s using social media platforms in December 2025) and indicates that the policy will likely fail to curb usage because of widespread technological workarounds, strong incentives for platforms to maintain user bases, and fierce opposition from privacy campaigners.

The Australian experience shows massive circumvention. Research data shows that nearly 70% of Australian children retained or created new social media accounts despite the ban. Because the desire to connect with peers is strong, teenagers easily bypass age-verification gates.

The data also shows a shift to darker alternatives. Banning mainstream sites has fueled a spike in downloads for lesser-known, unregulated, or decentralized apps. This pushes younger users out of curated environments and into deeper online corners.

And, of course, VPNs and technical workarounds are available. Teenagers quickly turn to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and peer-to-peer sharing to spoof their locations or bypass age restrictions altogether.

Of course the likely response from social media platforms to the proposed UK legislation is also entirely predictable. The platforms rely on self-declaration or friction-based age checks (like photo ID matching or facial estimation). Historically, they do not aggressively purge underage users as it directly hurts engagement metrics and ad revenue.

Also SM companies might argue that age-gating should be the responsibility of app stores (Apple App Store or Google Play Store) rather than implemented at the individual platform level.

There will also be regulatory challenges. Regulators like Ofcom are finding that accurately distinguishing a 15-year-old from a 16-year-old is highly difficult. This makes creating watertight enforcement metrics nearly impossible without locking out legitimate adult users.

But the greatest hurdle will be pushback from internet freedom campaigners and ordinary adult users who will baulk at having to provide personal information or facial recognition scans to tweet or post photos from Granny’s birthday party.

Aggressive age assurance policies such as facial scanning or submitting government IDs (via services like Yoti) creates massive privacy risks, normalises mass surveillance, and puts minors’ biometric data at risk of breaches.

And the proposed legislation is effectively internet censorship that will ultimately end anonymous account creation for all users in the UK, altering the foundational freedom of the internet.

If you enjoy The New Era you may wish to read my debut novel, South of Market. Many subscribers have read it and enjoyed it. I’m also thinking of writing a sequel. More information is here.

I was there at the birth of both the IBM PC in 1981 and the Apple Macintosh in early 1984. Both of these were very significant technological milestones for humanity. The latter created a particular emotional rush.

In those days, developing clients (when selling tech to them) was a personal process. You visited them, befriended them, worked with them. You knew their issues and how to ease the pain those issues caused. Spending time in their businesses was a privilege – I saw inside different industries, different cultures, and I witnessed the birth of so many great ideas.

By the time I was in my late thirties my knowledge of the tech industry and all its many quirks had served me well. Then, ‘supply chain management’ arrived. All of a sudden, everything shifted. It was no longer about how good you were developing relationships, but how good you were jockeying algorithms.

What followed for me was a shift away from front line selling and into ‘program management’ and ‘influencing’. It was ‘selling’ – but with a whole slew of obscure job titles that added to the general professional bafflement.

In tandem, as a photographer since my teens, I transitioned to digital photography. At last – no more fretting about carefully calculating exposures, or angst about running out of my 12 exposures on a roll of film. It was such a rush being free of such constraints. I was also editing video.

Then, the crash happened, and to cut a long story very short indeed – I decided to have a career switch. The industry I’d worked in for 25 years was suddenly ‘wall-to-wall’ apps on smart phones and 20-somethings beginning the slow (but relentless) quest to shut the real world out from behind earbuds. Whether it was instinct, or a rush of madness, I jumped. I was touching 50 and I felt like Grandad. With some nice compliments from similarly aged colleagues, I plunged into the post-apocalyptic world and had a fairly sizable shift into specialised landscaping (essentially putting plant walls onto the sides of buildings) and dabbling in overseas property. I went back to school part time to learn design in my late 50’s.

Switching careers at that age is not for the faint of heart. Let’s just add that a global recession, an ageing body and the largest global architected ‘disease’ psyop of all time are not the most fertile conditions for embryonic growth of new enterprises! Add in the ‘Poseidon Adventure’ effect of white middle-aged, heterosexual men suddenly finding themselves at the very bottom of the UK societal pecking order – and what followed was pretty much a ‘lost decade’.

Turning 60 became a watershed moment. I was in a bookshop in Norwich and suddenly realised that I was a deeply analogue person who had been ‘temporarily hijacked’ by a tsunami of digital development – technologically, societally and culturally. As I recently saw on a You Tube interview video by a young twenty-something addressing baby boomers: “you allowed technology to just let rip”. Yes, young Sir, we did. Please don’t judge us too harshly – it snowballed out of our control. In fact, we never had any control.

Analogue got swept out of fashion because those using it had control. My late father – a Chartered engineer – built his own radiogram and made his own furniture when we were little. He serviced the family car himself and I inherited my love of horticulture from both my parents, who were prolific in that department too.

Clothes in many households got made (or altered). I once popped into a London dry-cleaners on the way back to the office after a nice lunch with a client. They told us that they had a suit in for cleaning that had spanned three generations from the 1930’s. It was still in great shape.

So began a love affair with vintage clothing. As I’m typing this, I am also researching the demise of the Northampton shoe and boot making industry. I’ve visited and photographed the last ‘proper’ shoe and boot factory in Derbyshire – who have a very full order book stretching out over a year – with eager clients all over the world craving hand-made boots.

Working clothing is mostly made in Asia or the heavily subsidised countries in the European block. Much of it is not well made – and largely disposable. Fashion clothing even worse – with major retail chains a few years ago caught dumping excess runs of lines directly into vast tracts of South American desert (labels still attached), hoping the sun and the weather would eventually rot them to ribbons without detection.

Whilst we are daily lectured and preached all sorts of nonsense about ‘sustainability’ – real sustainability is under all our noses – and it’s mainly analogue. I’m a prolific collector of vintage boots, shoes and clothes. I’m in the throes of sifting, sorting, photographing and re-selling them many of them on to a new audience. I’m delighted to report that some of that audience is quite young. Their desire for micro-wardrobes driving less – but better made - clothing.

So, what is my conclusion? I’m drifting boldly where a few more are going with me. I do not hate the digital world. I love the fact that (in its purest, unmolested state) it provides the vast majority of eight billion people an ‘eighth wonder of the world’ level content and communication platform which allows everyone to find everyone else and ‘share’.

That’s an epic achievement in the span of a couple of generations. But, as will befall all great innovation, there have been a lot of abuses of this wonderful technology. Tim Berners-Lee did a wonderful Christmas Reith lecture on these actual and potential further abuses. You won’t (of course) find that lecture on iPlayer.

I hope we will see a ‘recalibration’ of digital usage as a backdrop to analogue creativity. Digital cannot match the numerology and beauty of natural flora and fauna. It cannot transmit the soul of a hand-finished image painted or taken on canvas or on film. It cannot write with soul.

We are at a crossroads now. What happens next is entirely up to the collective will of eight billion souls on this wonderful planet.

(Richard Francis)

Modern societies often assume that more information automatically leads to better decisions.

Governments collect vast amounts of data, organizations use advanced analytical tools, and citizens live in a constant stream of digital signals. Yet this explosion of information has not made institutions more perceptive or responsive. In many cases, it has had the opposite effect. Institutions seem less able to understand what is happening around them, as if the abundance of information had weakened rather than strengthened their ability to see clearly.

This problem is not due to a lack of intelligence or resources. It stems from a deeper shift in how institutions relate to knowledge. Rather than seeking to understand the world as it is, many institutions now focus on protecting the internal frameworks that enable their operations. They become more concerned with maintaining stability than with adapting to new realities. As systems grow more complex, this tendency intensifies. In some public agencies, for example, procedures become so rigid that staff spend more time ensuring compliance with internal protocols than addressing the situations those protocols were meant to address. The form survives, but the function erodes.

Within large organizations, the nature of expertise has changed. People are often promoted not because they understand real-world conditions, but because they can keep internal procedures running smoothly. The most valued skill is no longer the ability to read a situation accurately, but the ability to preserve the institution’s preferred way of interpreting events. Over time, this creates a kind of cognitive rigidity. Institutions become very good at defending their models, even when those models no longer match what is happening outside. This pattern can be seen across sectors, including education, healthcare, and finance, where individuals who raise inconvenient observations are often told that “the system doesn’t work that way,” even when the system’s assumptions are visible.

This rigidity shows up in how institutions use metrics and indicators. Tools such as dashboards, performance measures, and standardized categories are meant to help organizations. But they also narrow what institutions can see. When internal indicators define success, they begin to replace reality. Anything that does not fit predefined categories is treated as an exception or an error. Instead of adjusting their models to match the world, institutions try to make the world fit their models. In some school systems, for instance, standardized performance metrics have become so dominant that teachers report spending more time preparing students for the metrics than for teaching the underlying. The indicator becomes reality.

When the gap between official interpretations and lived experience grows too wide, institutions rarely revise their assumptions. Instead, they resort to protective language. The modern vocabulary of “misinformation” is a good example. These terms often function less as tools for identifying truth than as tools for defending institutional authority. By labeling certain perspectives as illegitimate, institutions avoid confronting the limits of their own frameworks. The debate shifts from evidence to credibility: the issue becomes who is allowed to speak, not whether what they say is accurate. This pattern appears whenever organizations dismiss field reports, practitioner insights, or community observations simply because they do not align with the official narrative.

But institutions cannot fully control how people understand the world. Much of what individuals know comes from their own experience — from their work, communities, and daily interactions. This knowledge is local, practical, and often difficult to formalize. Centralized systems cannot capture it, no matter how sophisticated they are. When people repeatedly encounter contradictions to official explanations, they begin to lose trust in them.

Outside institutional centers, alternative forms of understanding emerge. Independent researchers, practitioners, and observers often notice patterns that large organizations miss. Their ideas spread slowly but endure because they make sense of what people actually see. These alternative frameworks do not require institutional power to survive. They persist because they explain reality more effectively than official narratives. History is full of cases in which small groups of observers detected emerging problems long before large institutions acknowledged them — from early warnings in public health to analysts who identified financial vulnerabilities years before major crises.

Digital archives strengthen this process. In the past, institutions could maintain control by limiting access to information. Today, independent analyses remain available indefinitely. They can be revisited, compared, and shared whenever institutional explanations fail. This creates a parallel memory that institutions cannot erase. Even if they dominate the present with curated narratives, they cannot eliminate the record of competing interpretations.

This shift is part of a broader historical transition. Institutions built during the industrial era were designed for a world where information moved slowly and coordination. They relied on standardization and centralized control. Today’s environment, by contrast, is fast, fluid, and decentralized. Knowledge is produced everywhere, not just at the center. Institutions struggle not because they are poorly managed, but because they are structurally mismatched to the world they inhabit.

As a result, their authority weakens. Institutions do not collapse under external attack. They erode because they can no longer provide convincing explanations. Their crisis is not primarily political; it is cognitive. A system that cannot integrate feedback eventually loses its capacity to self-correct. It becomes a machine for preserving its own assumptions rather than a tool for understanding reality. When organizations treat every contradiction as a threat rather than a signal, they lose the ability to learn. Once learning stops, decline becomes inevitable.

In this context, the key question is not how to gather more information but how to stay open. Freedom does not depend on the size of our databases or the sophistication of our algorithms. It depends on our willingness to recognize when our models no longer work. Societies that maintain this openness can adapt and recover. Those that cling to rigid frameworks are ultimately corrected by events they failed to anticipate.

More information does not guarantee clarity. What matters is the ability to learn from the world rather than forcing it to conform to our expectations. When institutions lose that ability, they lose their connection to reality — and reality always has the final word.

is a Canadian sociologist and critical anthropologist with advanced doctoral training at Laval University. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in Anthropologieet Sociétés and Les Cahiers de géographie du Québec. His research focuses on institutional governance, academic freedom, and the systemic effects of bureaucratic drift. He writes from Poularies, Quebec.

I have never made much money from this site. However, I’ve had a (very small) core group of paid subscribers since the site started accepting paid subscriptions a few years ago. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all.

However, I’ve now taken the decision to switch off monetisation on the The New Era.

There are a few reasons.

Firstly, while it is very gratifying to have people pay me - it’s the ultimate vote of thanks for a writer - I don’t need the money and it’s never exactly been lucrative anyway. And I don’t want people to get the impression that I write in order to be paid or to gain ‘influence’ for sponsors or subscribers. Or that money in any way influences what I write or how I think. Or that I write what I think my paying subscribers will want to read.

But the more important reason is this. For several weeks now, I have been receiving emails from Stripe, Substack’s exclusive payment processor, insisting that I have to provide lots of personal information (including a copy of my passport and facial scans) in order to put my ‘account in order’ and to maintain payments. Stripe is not a bank. It’s a payment processor. So I’m not prepared to send this digital data to an organisation that has no right to hold it.

In a recent interview I made clear that I was able to express opinions and exercise free speech because I was fortunate enough not to need money to do what I do. That puts me in an extraordinarily fortunate position. It means that whatever I write I’m not being incentivised to do so by clicks, payments or eyeballs.

I’d like to thank the thousands of you who have subscribed to this site because you get some value from my writing, interviews or perspectives. All posts, from now on, will be open for comments from the entire subscriber base. But, please, keep it clean and keep it courteous.

Remember, the best way to support free thinking and freedom of speech is to read and to engage. And feel free to disagree with me.

Also if you have a burning desire to write for the site - even just a guest opinion piece - do get in touch.

We had already scheduled the chat, but then the news broke. So we discussed it. However, perhaps we focused too much on whether the attack had been staged. Aisling’s of the view that many ‘attacks’ that are labelled ‘fake’ or ‘manipulated’ by so-called conspiracy theorists like MiriAF, James Delingpole and Francis O’Neill, have, in fact, happened. And perhaps she’s right. As the furore over the ‘Belfast Beheading’ has unfolded more information has emerged about the victim and it’s Aisling’s view that it was a real attack.

In my view attacks such as this have the same impact on the audience, staged or not. A genuine attempted beheading and a faked one look pretty much the same when recorded by a distant smartphone.

Therefore, the reality of the attack is undisputed in that the video footage was promulgated and the reaction was predictable. Regardless of whether it really happened, was provoked to happen, was staged or fake, the media visibility (of the handily recorded video) has resulted in violence, protest, global media coverage and calls for social media censorship.

As the Northern Ireland MLA, Clare Hanna, has noted, other stabbings happen routinely, in Northern Ireland and across the British Isles, often resulting in death, but Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, Katie Hopkins and the rest aren’t engaged to muster a response designed to provoke riots.

As you know, I’m of the view that politics and actors like Robinson are manifestations of the establishment. The establishment seems intent on creating mayhem (in the interim contained within benefits-class areas of Belfast) in order to augur a Reform government that will install a de facto surveillance state and strict border controls.

The systematic open border policy of the Conservative and Labour governments (and the provision of benefits/housing to ‘illegal’ immigrants) will be reversed. But the price will be MAGA-style ICE policing, digital ID, and a surveillance panopticon.

Others have noted the BBC’s almost total focus on the Belfast riots, as far as its recent news coverage is concerned. I didn’t hear it, but apparently the BBC Radio 4 Today programme was entirely dedicated to a discussion about immigration policy given the situation in Belfast.

This implies that the media is intent on putting immigration right at the heart of the agenda. But this, clearly, required planning and orchestration. It didn’t happen because of what a black man did in Belfast. It happened because it has been planned to happen.

However, the Overton window, as far as immigration is concerned, is all about the current situation versus the Reform/Restore/Robinson antidote.

The view from the window implies that very large numbers of people are being permitted into the UK and are immediately permitted housing and benefits. The policy of ‘fighting age men’ being housed in hotels, raping and pillaging all around them, and beheading people, is now the definitive policy issue of our time according to Farage, Lowe, Habib and Robinson.The counter to this policy, according to Farage, Lowe, Habib and Robinson, is to create a strict border policy. Lowe wants most foreigners deported too.

So that, therefore, is the choice: beheadings or a police state, it’s your call. Except that’s Hobson’s choice.

Clearly most of us would choose neither. On immigration I’d suggest that few people would object to an open border policy if immigrants were able to be self-reliant from arrival. Without the promise of free housing and accommodation and benefits, few less desirable immigrants would arrive. Others, wealth creators, would be very welcome - just as elite footballers are welcomed by the biggest ‘English’ football clubs.

When around 10,000 Huguenots arrived in Ireland in the 1680s, they brought with them skills in banking, crafts and textile weaving. As far as I know, they didn’t get housed in hotels for illegals.

Some half a million people came to England from the Caribbean - the so-called Windrush generation - and have contributed much to British culture, cuisine and business. But, notably, the Windrush immigrants rapidly filled jobs in sectors with severe skill shortages, created their own financial institutions (like credit unions), and businesses serving their own communities. Often they were excluded from social housing because of racial prejudice - they weren’t housed in hotels.

People who migrate tend to do so because they seek a better or safer life. Typically they are proud and self-reliant unless they are essentially trafficked by the state to create mayhem. That’s the playbook happening right now in Belfast. And the entire establishment is planning it, stoking it and covering it.

Needless to say, I’m not so sure about bitcoin anymore. Nor are several of my characters in the book.

However, I must say that my presentation was well received and there was a good humoured debate about whether bitcoin can possibly claim any ‘freedom currency’ laurels now that it’s essentially absorbed into the financial industrial complex. Although the debate got a little bit more heated over some cherry vodka at the after-party.

But it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience visiting Warsaw again. Wonderful people and a dynamic, fabulous city.

Here’s a link to my post back in February that explains more.

My recent post outlined the degree of obfuscation around the “war” in Iran in order to hide the corporatising of Israel, the Levant and, inevitably, Iran itself. All of the foundations are in place. Therefore, it’s now time for the Damascene conversion of the “Christian” right away from Zion.

The radical change was marked, of course, by Charlie Kirk’s “assassination”. Following this, many of the leading MAGA cheerleaders, like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and MTG, have been parroting the line that Israel and Netanyahu are essentially controlling MAGA and Trump. All claim to be devout Christians. A bit like JD Vance (although he’s apparently a Catholic version, so devout, that he lectures the Pope on geopolitical protocol) - who converted from Atheism a matter of months before he was ‘chosen’ to be Trump’s running mate.

But, returning to Marjorie Taylor Greene, this tweet neatly articulates the New Alt-Right Anti-Zionist Chapter ‘line’. As the Tweet-author puts it:

Massive bombshell. Former US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene explicitly confirms Donald Trump was forced to make a secret deal with the Zionist lobby to become president. She exposes how the Trump administration is completely held captive by Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel.

This is quite convenient, as far as media narratives are concerned. After all, Team Trump has ensured that the syndicates are installed, the corporations are aligned. So perhaps America should retreat back to its expanding home empire of New Oceania and let others run the show now that the cabals are in place.

The obvious question is, what’s the timeline? Is the (orchestrated) schism in MAGA going to result in Trump’s exit? Will this happen this year? And will JD Vance slowly become aligned with this subtle anti-war positioning?

Who knows? But The “Israel controls America” narrative is clearly agency-led using their favourite commentators and lobbyists. What’s the end-game here? That America disengages from the Middle East and Israel aligns with the BRICS? Because this is not organic. It’s a controlled narrative…

I’m leaving this post open. What’s your view?

But we need to keep asking ourselves, if we truly are thinking straight (and free), what is the other side fighting for? And how does the fighting manifest itself?

That might seem a somewhat daft question when there are wars all over the place. But often the purpose of wars is not just about killing people (typically people just buying some bread or going to school). Wars are, increasingly, key components of obfuscation - hiding what’s actually going on. Wars are useful vehicles for division. They encourage people to take sides and argue for or against the various combatants. And why should such arguments be encouraged by the war-mongers? Because when we end up arguing about the wrong things we don’t get to see the big things, even when they should be really big and obvious. When we’re distracted we don’t see, we don’t understand.

Yesterday I reposted this piece by Morgan which highlighted the big thing that we’ve been forced to ignore in the unfolding ‘conflict’ in the Middle East. Her analysis has one central idea: that wars are typically about theft. And it’s the thieving that we’re not allowed to see.

Morgan

The Usual Architects

There is a particular kind of man who looks at a smoldering ruin and sees, before the smoke has cleared, a development opportunity. History tends to reward him handsomely for this and then name a building after him…

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6 months ago · 62 likes · 24 comments

Of course, the theft arising from modern warfare is complex in nature. These days theft - and I mean really big theft - is less about just snatching things, and more about deal-flow. The central premise that she presents is that one category of theft is to create property redevelopment opportunities by bombing places to smithereens that have already been earmarked for redevelopment anyway. In her analysis the game-play was developed around 9/11. Organise the demolition of the twin towers, then rebuild them with other people’s money. But pocket most of the assets in the process.

In the unfolding mess in the Middle East we have ‘Iranians” apparently bombing sweet shops in Tel Aviv while American fighter jets circle overhead. Meanwhile in Southern Lebanon RAF jets from Cyprus keep an eye on developments on the ground as ancient trade routes get reopened without those pesky villages harbouring “Hezbollah” militants. And Zones are created. Development Zones. And funds, it turns out, have already been raised for their redevelopment, just in time. Funny that.

Of course this isn’t the only game in town. But it neatly makes the point that modern warfare is not just about Palantir. It’s about people stealing stuff and using governments to grease the wheels of the process of thieving.

The other ‘big thing’ in the Middle East conflict is market rigging. With the ‘closing’ of the Straits of Hormuz, and the associated ‘panic’ in energy markets, the consequence has been a gift - and a grift - for the petrochemical companies. This was a leading news story today (about BP) on Twitter/X:

BP Profits Double to $3.2 Billion Amid US-Iran Oil War Surge. The British energy giant credited its windfall to strong oil trading and refining amid the war that began in early April 2026, with Brent crude spiking due to restricted flows.

Meanwhile we hear about deals being negotiated, even when the Iranian ‘regime’ is in tatters. But still, they negotiate. First Iran closes the Strait. Then America. We hear about tolls being levied. But perhaps the USA should be charging the Chinese tolls? Should the Chinese be paying tolls to the Americans? Should they be paying in bitcoin or in Tether? Are the Iranians accepting Tether? Isn’t the US Trade Secretary something to do with Tether? Wasn’t Epstein involved in Tether and that guy with the strange Thai name who used to fund Boris but now funds the Reform Party?

And so the war, it seems, is in some way related to oil company profits, and digital money, and who gets to pocket the tolls and who gets to control the critical bottlenecks. And why aren’t Russia and China complaining? Is this multipolarism in play?

Whatever the truth is we can be sure that it’s about asset theft. They have the guns after all.

There’s an anecdote that used to do the rounds during the ‘peace’ negotiations in Northern Ireland over which Tony Blair once presided. Rumour has it that a leader of a political party felt somewhat left out. The negotiations seemed to be focused on the hardliners. Blair is reputed to have said that the ones with the guns were the main players in the peace talks.

And so it is that the main players in the resolution of the Russia Ukraine War are the Americans and NATO negotiating with the ‘defence’ companies. After all, the only people who can deliver peace are those that provide the instruments of war. But there’s little incentive for any hurry. More dollars can be borrowed after all. More money can be printed. More villages need to be bombed to clear the way for this or that. And, remember, LNG is best transported by tanker. That’ll require new routes. New roads, new logistical partnerships. More exploration. Specialist skills. And everyone has to play their part. Iran has big LNG fields. Western companies can help them get those resources to market once the sanctions are lifted. That’s the prize. Funds can be created that will help. Infrastructure can be built.

That’s the deal flow, you see. There are deals to be done arising out of war. Stability can be achieved. But the people need to know that in building back better than before new structures need to be created that mean that we don’t lurch back to old ways. The old ways, you see, got us into the predicaments, the situations that create war.

As Craig Wright put it (on the other platform)...

We are in a war.

Not a metaphor, not a flourish, not an exaggeration uttered for effect — a war in the truest, starkest sense. A war for freedom. A war for humanity itself. A war in which the battlefield is invisible, the weapons are abstractions, and yet the consequences are more tangible than steel. This is a war over the future of ownership — the future of whether a man shall own himself or merely lease the illusion from those who presume to rule him.

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