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Thursday, October 20, 2022
Building a Field Expedient Amateur Radio Kit Posted by Troy Blair, KE8DRR
Editor’s Note: Troy Blair, KE8DRR, DX Engineering customer/technical support specialist, enjoys sharing personal stories about his involvement in amateur radio so others can learn from his experiences in the true spirit of being an Elmer. Check out Troy’s other articles, “Serving the Needs of Others Through Ham Radio” and “Transitioning to HF Portable Ham Radio Operations.” Look for more posts from Troy in the days ahead.
I was really beginning to enjoy this hobby. I could combine my passion for public service with my interest in amateur radio. The specific area that truly intrigued me was Field Expedient Communications. I define “field expedient” like this: The ability to rapidly move to a remote area and set up reliable multi-band, multi-mode communications in very short order.
I realize there is more to it than that, but I am a simple man and subscribe to the KISS philosophy. I have friends who are engineers, and it is a running joke with us. I will often stop them amid an explanation and remind them, “I asked you what time it is, not how to build a watch!” I honestly believe the reason I have had such success with portable operations is because I keep it simple.
I am going to lay out the equipment I chose for my kit. Keep in mind, this is what I chose, not what everyone should choose. I’m merely sharing my experience, not looking to debate one piece of equipment over the other.
RADIOS: I wanted to have multi-band, multi-mode capabilities contained in a single unit for easy “grab and go.” I chose the iPortable enclosure to house everything. It is prewired and comes with speakers, headphone jacks, lighting, and charging ports. I use it as packaged with one additional shelf.
As I begin talking about my transceiver choices, please know that I am a Yaesu fan. I like the form, fit, and function of their radios. Also note that I receive no considerations or compensation for using their products.
For HF, I chose the Yaesu FT-991A. It has a nice compact footprint, conserving space in the enclosure while providing HF, 6m, 2m, and 70cm coverage. It also has the Yaesu C4FM digital platform built in with access to WiresX. The FT-991A uses a built-in audio interface for direct connect to a computer for digital mode communications. Although it has a built-in antenna tuner, I opted to install an MFJ-939Y Automatic Antenna Tuner to allow for a wider range of antenna scenarios. Portable operations do not always present the best antenna situations.
For 2m and 70cm, I opted for the Yaesu FTM-400XDR. This radio has a large screen with onboard GPS as well as C4FM with access to WiresX. I included a Tigertronics SignaLink USB audio interface in the chance I would need to connect the radio to a computer for messaging.
ANTENNAS: For HF operation, I use a 31-foot telescopic vertical model. It comes with a tripod mount and includes three ground rods that double as anchor rods for the tripod. I purchased an optional extended trailer hitch mount. My typical deployment of this antenna is to put the hitch mount in the trailer hitch of my Jeep, affix the antenna, and attach the ground clamp from the trailer hitch mount to the vehicle’s tailpipe. The antenna requires the use of a broad band tuner, but it is extremely effective.
For 2m and 70cm on both radios, I use rollup J poles. These are extremely compact and lightweight yet very effective. I elevate them using MFJ-1916 telescopic masts. I find these masts, with a few elastic cords, work well as makeshift antennas. I can strap them to a fence post, a support on a park pavilion, or most any place I can get a strap around.
POWER: This one took some time to figure out. I used a Nanuk 915 case as the housing for my power box and ordered the mating Lexan cover that is predrilled to mount over the bottom section of the case. Velcroed to the bottom of the case I have a Samlex 1235 power supply and a Bioenno 20aH LiFePo battery. Mounted on the Lexan are the following:
- West Mountain Radio Epic PWRgate Battery Backup System
- West Mountain Radio RIGrunner DC Outlet Panel
- Anderson Power Pole adapters for the power supply and battery
- Dual USB charging port
- Small fan for heat removal
The battery, power supply, and RIGrunner plug into the Epic PWRgate. Additionally, I use a Dokio 110W foldable solar panel. It should be noted that the included charge controller is not used with the Epic PWRgate, and the Epic PWRgate must have jumpers set for your battery chemistry. The solar panel also plugs into the Epic PWRgate.
Miscellaneous: There are a few other things that I consider to be mission critical. First, I use a Microsoft Surface Pro laptop for logging, CAT, and messaging. I originally used the Panasonic Tough Book, but it is very heavy and bulky with a small screen. However, the Panasonic does offer a few nice features. The screen can be viewed in direct sunlight, and it has a modular design to help meet different needs. I just found that the portability of the Surface was more useful for most applications. Don’t forget pen and paper in case of electronic failure.
I use a Heil BM-17 headset when portable. It is lightweight and stows nicely, and I continually get good sound quality reports with it.
I also carry a folding poly-molded table to hold all these items and keep them at my fingertips while I am working, along with a folding camp chair to help with my aging back. Both are lightweight and don’t take up much space in the Jeep.
I now have a system that allows me to be operational in 15 to 30 minutes from the time I pull up to an incident command post. I cannot stress enough the need to not only build the gear, but practice with it. Typically, in a month with no planned exercise, I will set it up and conduct an ARES net from the go gear.
Now that the portable gear was assembled, there was a whole new world out there. I’d been hearing a lot about ILLW (International Lighthouse, Lightship Weekend) and all kinds of other portable acronym events. What could I get into now? To find out, read my next post on my experiences with POTA (Parks on the Air) activations.
American Inquisition The thinking classes in America want to emulate the theocratic lunacy of the Sixteenth Century. They have become everything they used to despise as cruel, unjust, and crazy. by James Howard Kunstler
The world turns and things change. Everybody knows that. But the turnings and changings throw off sparks, which light fires. The intellectual turnings of the European Renaissance lit fires in the lumbering bureaucracy of Roman Catholicism, burdened as it was with abstruse theology larded with lingering, age-old superstition. Witch hunts, inquisitions, and persecutions ensued, even as the authority of the old order wobbled and frayed. The gross cruelties of the people in charge didn’t bolster their prestige, and a few centuries later you see the result: belief is dead.
Likewise in Western Civ today. Our authorities have disgraced themselves behind a new theology of degenerate “science” that veers back into superstition and necromancy. Proof that they don’t believe their own story shows in their desperate efforts to hide the data, confabulate numbers, ignore true facts, and lash out viciously at anyone who discloses their zealous deceits.
Case in point: the persecution of Meryl Nass, MD, in the state of Maine by its Board of Licensure in Medicine. Dr. Nass is an internal medicine physician and a recognized expert in bioterrorism who famously uncovered the origin of the mysterious “Gulf War Syndrome” as a reaction to the US Army’s own anthrax vaccine. She has testified before Congress and in many state legislatures about vaccine safety. After the emergence of Covid-19, Dr. Nass spoke out and blogged about the dangers of the new vaccines, and in favor of early treatment protocols using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Her outspokenness attracted the ire of Maine Governor Janet Mills, and Mills’s sister, Dora Anne Mills, the “Chief Health Improvement Officer” at Maine Health, a huge network of twelve hospitals, 1,700 doctors, and 22,000 employees, deeply invested in the Covid vaccine program.
In January of this year, Dr. Nass’s license was suspended by the Licensure Board based on complaints by two “activists” that she was “spreading misinformation” and for her use of early treatment protocols with her own patients. The board compelled Dr. Nass to undergo a neuropsychological evaluation to determine if she was a drug abuser or suffered from mental illness. (Flag that, since it implies official defamation of her character.) The board accused her of “fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” in her practice, “conduct that evidences a lack of ability or fitness,” and being “an immediate jeopardy” to public health.
For most of this year, the board refused to entertain any defense by Dr. Nass against her suspension until a hearing held last week, October 11, when she appeared before the Licensure Board with her attorney, Gene Libby. The hearing in its entirety can be watched on video at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense website. (The first two-thirds the board prosecutes its case; the last hour Dr. Nass presents her defense.) Days before the hearing, the Licensure Board withdrew all the “misinformation” charges against Dr. Nass without explanation and now bases its case on Dr. Nass’s use of early treatment protocols.
The hearing was highly instructive on the tactics and strategies for defeating official persecutions against doctors in America (and broadly across all of Western Civ these days), since the Maine licensure Board acted with obvious ignorance and malice that is easily revealed. Dr. Nass’s attorney Gene Libby deftly got the Board on-record attesting to their own deliberate misconduct. For instance, he repeatedly invoked their charges against “spreading misinformation,” forcing the chair, an eye doctor named Maroulla S. Gleaton, to affirm that the charges had been precipitously dropped days before. There was also some lively discussion of the board’s imputations against Dr. Nass’s mental health and insinuations of drug abuse — Dr. Nass testified that she’d never been treated for mental health issues, had never taken pharmaceuticals for them, never took illicit drugs or been accused of it, and, where alcohol was concerned, enjoyed “about five drinks a year.”
Watch the video. I think you can see that the Licensure Board members begin to realize in the proceeding that Dr. Nass is fixing to sue the living shit out of them, and that just about everything they’ve said implicates them in a malice-driven campaign to defame her. In fact, it may be appropriate as events move forward for a court to recommend suspending the medical license of board chair Maroulla S. Gleaton, and the several other board members who are doctors (some are not) for official misconduct, as well as paying damages to Dr. Nass.
The archbishops, confessors, and tortureors in the Inquisitions of yore had, in retrospect, at least one excuse for their misdeeds (what we might call today “crimes against humanity”): empirical science was then in its infancy and their ideas about how the world worked were still largely driven by myth, fear, and occultism. Until fairly recently, when Western Civ went off-the-rails, the thinking classes of America would have easily labeled the activities of the old Inquisition as a form of group insanity.
Alas, the thinking classes across Western Civ have now gone insane. Today, they are the ones perpetrating real crimes against humanity. They have given themselves permission — as elites will — to behave cruelly, unjustly, and idiotically against the public interest and against the inherent rights of individuals to fair treatment. They’ve subjected millions to injury and death. They’ve maintained the fraudulent “Emergency Use Authorization” (EUA) for hugely profitable, ineffective, and dangerous drugs by prohibiting treatments with proven effective drugs — the use of which would nullify the EUA and the legal protections it affords the drug-makers. They’ve concealed the statistics that would show all that. And they appear to be acting with arrant malice driven by political actors offstage.
Dr. Nass is demonstrating how they can be effectively opposed. There should be thousands of heroic figures like her among the doctors of Western Civ. Ask them why they are not standing up in places like California, with its new, idiotically-written law against doctors speaking freely with their patients for the sake of informed consent (“spreading misinformation”). These reprobate lawmakers — and the depraved Governor Gavin Newsom who signed the act — need a lesson in what it means to be civilized. The people running the CDC, the NIH, and the FDA deserve severe floggings in the civil and criminal courts. They all know it now, too, and they’re running scared.
Failure, Success, Passion, and Joy by Isaac Morehouse
Everybody likes doing things they’re passionate about.
Everyone likes succeeding.
When these seem in tension, how do you proceed?
Do you ‘follow your passion’ no matter what? Do you go for what you are most likely to succeed at and hope you become passionate about it, or that the success will be enough?
No one else can provide the answer. (Though I have found it very helpful to run away from stuff you hate, rather than towards what you think you’d love). But there are some interesting and unexpected outcomes I’ve observed in terms of the feelings produced by these choices.
I’m going to call it “joy” (not the same as happiness). It’s a feeling beyond surface level satisfaction. Both success and passion for what you do contribute to it.
Tell me if the following holds true for you:
When I thought about this in my own life, it surprised me to realize that failing at something I’m passionate about is a lot more painful than failing at something I’m not.
I have no conclusions or recommendations to draw from this, so take the observation for what you will.
Fed Watch: When They Call For the Bailiff You Know You’re Winning by Tom Luongo
You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”
You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”
And you may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”
And you may say to yourself, “My God, what have I done?”
— Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”
In the face of the Fed’s intransigent hawkishness we are now on the verge of exposing the worst lies of two generations of people in power. I’ve maintained for more than a year now that the global oligarchy known here as The Davos Crowd thought they’d run the table on the US and the UK with COVID-19.
The various bailout packages, Pelosi’s CARES Act and pending legislation — Build Back Better, etc. — were supposed to destroy the fiscal position of the US once and for all. These were political blackmail to force the Fed not to raise rates when it clearly needed to.
That Pelosi et.al. were only able to pass neutered versions of these bills is a sign that powerful forces behind the scenes are not down with this plan.
Now, in light of the near-complete coup attempt against UK Prime Minister Liz Truss (more on that later this week) we are looking at big power plays to decide whether Davos will retain control over Western policy. Truss’ difficulties point to Davos having a few markers to call in here.
But, I want to go back to a couple of weeks ago and also talk about Credit Suisse. At the same time there was a coordinated effort to stop Truss implementing a very non-Davos fiscal program. There was a coordinated whisper campaign to start a bank run on Credit Suisse.
Clearly this attack failed, but it’s equally clear Davos activated the next level of their assault on any institution not aligned with them.
Is is any wonder that the two big European financial centers outside of the EU came under coordinated attack, Economic Hitman style, in the days following Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral and the coronation of Globalist Charles III as King?
After that, and subsequent statements by FOMC Chair “Baller” Jerome Powell, Davos had to bring in the UN begmanding (begging masquerading as demanding [H/T Joachin Flores for that one]) all central banks stop raising rates to avoid a global recession.
This was promoted all across the Davos-controlled media space. Even Rupert Murdoch’s War Street Journal got in on the action to sway GOPer’s a month out from the mid-terms. And I asked the big question last week, “Can the Fed Afford to Pivot,” with the US $31 trillion in debt?
The answer from the Fed has been a consistent, no.
And that means Davos is in serious trouble. As I’ve tirelessly pointed out, the Fed controls global dollar liquidity in a way they haven’t in decades. And that is why the screams of pain from all the usual suspects are so loud.
That said, Davos continues to execute a script they have no way to augment if they want to achieve their stated goals. Taking out the UK was the right move. But, is it a move that puts them on the path to winning or just an attack of opportunity in a series of rearguard actions?
The Bailiff Moment
Bullies always know when they are caught. Bullies are also generally the worst form of liars, ones who shout down opposition rather than engage in conversation.
In interrogations the goal is always to get the liar to trap himself and leave him calling for relief. This is why you should never talk to cops without a lawyer, FYI.
They are easy to trap because the lies are so transparent. All it takes is the slightest application of the Socratic Method — using one’s own argument to find flaws in it through counter-example — and you can get them “calling for the bailiff” in a matter of minutes.
The title of this post is my best remembrance of the title I first saw this video posted under at Lewrockwell.com back in 2009. I know this is 7+ minutes of having to watch Nancy Pelosi, but trust me, it’s worth it.
This is the only video of Nasty Nancy I can stomach to watch, because Jan Helfeld crushes her on minimum wage in less than 3 minutes. The squirm is almost like music. It’s a masterclass in evasion, deception and bullying. It lays bare the malignancy of her narcissism.
It is a real, tangible benefit to humanity revealing this horrific human being. Notice how when Pelosi really understands what’s happened she resorts to multiple threats, “You made a mistake!” she repeats glaring at him.
She became his enemy in that moment.
If you despise Pelosi as much as I do this is a treat for new readers, a thank you for joining us I’ve dredged up from my memory and the bowls of the YouTube algorithm.
I brought this out to show you how easy it is to expose the duplicity and fragility of the narratives surrounding our political and financial reality.
The Reflections of Vampires
It was this interview which helped crystallize my filter I use to view these false narratives. It’s why it was so easy for me to see the Fed’s raising the RRP rate by 0.05% above the Fed Funds Rate at last year’s June FOMC meeting as a watershed moment.
It was no different than Helfeld showing Pelosi that her intern argument was nonsense. That move exposed the weak US dollar which had been created during the Trump administration as a supremely false move in historical context.
Powell raises RRP by 0.05% and the whole world freaks out. The euro collapses, gold’s nascent rally is snuffed out and US bond yields begin rising, forcing euro-bond rates out of the negative-yielding basement.
“It puts the positive yield on its skin or else it gets the rate hike again!”
Since then it’s been nothing but a series of ever-escalating actions to force the Fed to pivot off Powell’s ‘Volcker-esque’ policies. I’ve chronicled all of the twists and turns of this story, beat for beat, since last June.
These last sixteen months have played out like this seven minute interview with Pelosi. Jerome Powell is Helfeld and Davos is Pelosi. They kept making the case their plan for the US to spend spend spend when inflation was here here here.
The most obvious corollary to this interview and Powell was when Obama et.al. launched that insider trading scandal of the Fed governors last fall and forced three hawks off the FOMC.
“You made a mistake!”
Note we have a sequel this week with Atlanta Fed Chair Raphael Bostic having to do a mea culpa over more insider trading at the Fed.
Don’t Look Up!
This week Truss finally caved. It will be the end of her and the any dreams Elizabeth II had of an independent Britain.
I told you Truss was a moron and clearly overmatched for the job. But it goes beyond that. After the BoE toys with markets for a couple of weeks, the message to the world was to avoid bad stuff (“RECESSION!”) is get the evil US Fed to pivot.
Will Powell pivot? I don’t think so. Why? He’s not a moron. Nor is he alone like Truss was. Truss was set up to fail.
For months, I’ve been alone in saying the Fed is going to be aggressive. For months I said the Fed is not raising rates to tame cost-push inflation which it doesn’t have the tools to fight.
Now, I’m not alone anymore. Neither John Hussman or Danielle Dimartino Booth thinks the Fed will pivot. Others are still trapped at denial in the Kubler-Ross model.
Hussman points out that the Fed has never pivoted on hiking rates with the PCE deflator, currently 4.9% (with modifiers, see the linked article), above the Fed Funds Rate, 3.25%. He makes a powerful argument.
This is what Powell et.al. mean when they say they can’t leave the job undone.
But in a recent interview with Hedgeye’s Keith McCullough, Ms. Booth kept saying what I’ve been saying, “The Fed isn’t trying to stop inflation.” She uses the Fed’s massive TIPS portfolio as part of the reason, but it’s also something, when pressed, she’s, “not able to say.”
Watch the whole interview, it’s fascinating.
So, against this dark background, we have one non-EU European financial center crushed. Let’s go back to the other, Switzerland. The Fed’s intransigence is why I think the whisper campaign against Credit Suisse was another of these operations.
I’m not saying that Credit Suisse isn’t vulnerable. Of course it’s vulnerable. The reason it almost worked is because they are vulnerable, just like the UK pension system was Truss’ Achilles’ heel.
All I’m saying is that I have a hard time believing that all of the EU’s continental competition coming under extreme pressure in quick succession doesn’t have a strategic component to it.
Everyone acted like the Fed pivoted when they did a couple of $3+ billion tranches of swap line liquidity to the Swiss National Bank this month. Notice how there was no money for the Bank of England and almost no money for the ECB.
What if this is just more battle lines being drawn?
Because the UN coming out and decrying the central banks raising rates is a massive tell that the wrong people’s oxen are being gored. It isn’t just these two events.
We had the public meltdown of Jeremy Seigel on CNBC which was amplified beyond all recognition. Jeffrey Sachs stopped CNN cold with the pronouncement that the US was behind the bombing of the Nordstreams.
These people are all close allies of George Soros and the Democratic party machine. The fear over the mid-terms is real now. Even Nate Silver at five-thirty-eight.com is worried the Democrats are about to get Rick-rolled.
UN Cries Uncle
So, Davos using deep assets at the UN through UNCTAD to issue warnings against the Fed and Volcker-like policy is no different than Pelosi calling for the guard to remove Helfeld from her office.
They demanded easy money and price controls in typical Davosian communist fashion. We need to coordinate monetary policy worldwide to stop the collapse of the old system.
It was a classic appeal to the common good and for internationalism over nationalism.
This is also a moment of the purest weakness.
And if you think Europe isn’t weak here and that the Fed is still not in Helfeld’s seat asking uncomfortable questions of narcissist bullies with questionable taste in clothes I give you the EU’s latest trade data. (H/T Robin Brooks on Twitter)
Trade surpluses are gone. Inflation raging. Producer prices rising faster than inflation. Bond volatility at levels not seen since COVID.
Europe’s Energy price spikes are demons of their own summoning. They had a cozy deal with Russia and chose fake free markets for natural gas to create a volatility playground to bankrupt their middle classes.
So, they want this inflation, even if they say they don’t. They want the inflation to force the Fed to subsidize it, like it did when Globalist Ben and his Auntie Janet ran the place.
What they never planned on was having to do this and fight the Fed simultaneously. In broad strokes, they could freeze capital in Europe’s banks, grab back City of London and add Zurich, while putting the US on a path to true insolvency to neuter the power of New York.
Now all they have left is playing power politics with its junior EU members who were only interested in ensuring their people didn’t starve, e.g. Hungary. Lashing out at cripples is not a good look.
All arguments that the US dollar doesn’t deserve its strength or that the Fed has a responsibility to Europe when all they’ve done is engage in fiscal and monetary hara-kiri via negative rates for nearly a decade are pathetic as they are stupid.
You can see that this call was an extension of the anti-US psy-op that ran wild after the Nordstream bombings. There is a concerted effort now to at once push for open war between the US and Russia while also blaming the Fed for the crash in the global markets.
“You made a mistake, here!”
The BoE pivot was done to isolate the Fed. The Reserve Bank of Australia only raised by 25 basis points to support the BoE.
The ECB is silent during all of this, because they are the Elephant in the room that’s been pushed off the mountain and is about to go splat.
The UN’s response? Don’t Look Up!
Fake Rally, Fake Markets
The reward to the world is a massive rally in stocks, bonds and safe-havens. While this is clearly just a bout of short-covering in most of these markets which were stretched to the downside, it’s also timed with the global call for central bank dovishness and price controls from the UN.
The narrative now is the Fed is being petulant and rapacious, just like the US foreign policy establishment. The victim narrative is reaching a crescendo right in time for the mid-terms.
That’s why the whisper campaign against Credit Suisse didn’t materialize into a bank run. They were a warning and used as a weapon to pressure the Fed. As pointed out to me on Twitter the Fed opened a new repo facility for commercial banks.
Do you notice who ISN’T on this list? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. No major European banks. Nataxis doesn’t count when Deutsche Bank, Unicredit, or ING are not on the list.
Just US, Canadian, Hong Kong and Japanese banks.
Guess who got money? The Swiss.
Who didn’t? Europe.
A lot was made of that meeting, and it served as good fodder for the attack on Credit Suisse. Will the Fed come in with an emergency rate cut? Will they pivot?
And for the Fed to call a meeting for the same day that Credit Suisse was attacked and the UN to begmand them to pivot only to comment on debit card payment systems, is a massive tell.
The Fed updated the new rules for debit card transactions to have at least one backup processor in place. If anything, this means Davos can’t lean on VISA to deny your grocery purchase unilaterally because of mean tweets or because you’re Alex Jones.
This clearly says to me that they are fighting this crap at the foundational level. It also says that the FOMC’s silence on UK Gilts, Credit Suisse, etc. is deafening.
Since then there’s been nothing but more acquiescence to the coming 75 basis point hike on the eve of the mid-term elections. The Bank of England got their pound of flesh, all puns intended, and for now things are stable. It won’t be for long.
As Ms. Booth said and I agree, every rally in the stock market, every wiggle by someone to increase offshore liquidity and calm things down, is another opportunity for the Fed to keep repeating their position.
“Why can’t we raise rates?”
“Why can’t we charge what we want for the money we provide?”
“Why do we have to define the value of US labor by your rules?”
“Why do we have to enforce a minimum wage for offshore dollar speculators?”
“Bailiff!!”
But, the big unanswered question no one is allowed to answer is the one that Ms. Booth kept avoiding in that interview, “If the Fed isn’t fighting inflation with rate hikes, then what are they fighting?”
You know my answer. Davos does too.
What’s hilarious is watching Europe call for the bailiff and everyone finally realizing that the Fed told him to take an early lunch break.
The Riddle of History, Solved by JAMES LINDSAY
“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” –Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
As you can see, according to Karl Marx, Communism, true and proper, is the self-conscious solution to “the riddle of history.” Of course, in reality, where things have to work, there is no riddle of history. The “riddle of history” Marx referred to is, in fact, dialectical anthroposophy (which is a really fancy word for man-centered heretical nonsense), thus any claim upon a solution to that riddle is pure pretense and dangerous hubris. The true solution to the riddle of history, if we should even allow such a phrase, must begin with the outright rejection of Communism and the dialectical framing in which the riddle is posed in the first place, including the underlying assumption that History has a purpose and is thus a riddle to be solved.
Karl Marx did not reject that assumption, however; he began with it. What, to Marx, was the riddle of history, solved, other than just to say “Communism,” as described above? It’s socialism that can produce, that can “deliver the goods,” one might say. Productive socialism that allows Man to escape toil, exploitation, suffering, and work, which arrives when Man is freed from the existence of private property and thus the division of labor, which was his Fall, is the pathway to the “transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement,” as Marx had it. The problem is that “productive socialism” is a functional oxymoron.
The history of the twentieth century is basically the story of productive socialism not existing, either in reality or in actuality (these are different to Marxists). So far, all bids to create it have fallen flat on their faces, universally after starving and people by the millions in the pretense of having finally got it right—or, at least good enough for government work. The reason is straightforward: history is not a riddle, and the dialectic in which it is framed as such is bogus and ultimately a power grab for people who do not know how to wield power. We therefore have every reason to expect the newest “solution” to the “riddle of history,” which believes that it knows itself to be that solution, is going to fail and do a ton of avoidable damage so long as we keep giving it any countenance. Utter failure has never slowed a Communist down, however, so they’re doing what they always do when confronted with failure: keeping their bogus product the same while giving its branding a face-lift.
The fancy, new-fangled “solution” to the non-existent “riddle of history” therefore now tends to go by the name “sustainability,” or more specifically, “sustainable capitalism.” In sustainable capitalism, the economy will be “circular,” and “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.” We’ve heard this kind of talk before, always from the mouths of the emissaries of Mordor. It’ll be great, a “better future” that is both “sustainable and inclusive.” Our systems will be more “resilient,” and we won’t waste so much because we’ll be reusing most of our waste. Didn’t you see the video of Bill Gates smiling as he drank a glass of water pressed out of human sewage? We’ll eat far less meat and, one presumes, far more soy and bugs. Western values like individual liberty and the ownership of private property will hit their breaking points and be abolished, and the United States will no longer be the world’s superpower because room has to be made for China and a new mirror-image supranational West governed by the United Nations. Most importantly, this whole scam will be “sustainable” for the planet we live on, the people we live among, and, even more most importantly, for the Regime that administers it for us. That’s the rub, too. We’ll need someone to administer this unnatural, nonsensical, expensive crap for as long as it lasts because in that Marx was wrong about us being a “species-being” who has forgotten his true nature, nobody is going to sign up for or maintain this disaster for themselves willingly.
Lenin understood this. That was the point of his vanguard strategy, which he located in the Bolshevik Party. Thanks to the need to administer the proposed solution to the riddle of history, you may have heard of sustainable capitalism referred to by another name, “stakeholder capitalism.” That’s adorable. Lenin would smile. Administration of the sustainable capitalism has to be done by a council of expert stakeholders who, in their greater wisdom and perspicacity, make sure all the real stakeholders’ stakes are accounted for, after being passed through the supremely informed and equitable filter of their claim to expertise. That’s why it was called the Soviet Union, don’t you know? The Russian word for the deciding “council” is совет—Soviet, as it gets rendered in English. The совет акционеров, the stakeholders’ council, will administer the sustainable capitalism that us rubes are too dumb and selfish to produce and maintain for ourselves.
Where sustainable capitalism is the solution to the so-called riddle of history, stakeholder capitalism is little more than its mechanism of implementation. Phrased more historically, where sustainable capitalism “is the riddle of history solved” and “the positive transcendence of private property,” to riff from Karl Marx, stakeholder capitalism is the supranationalist Leninist-style vanguard program that will implement it for us—rather, on us. That is, because we won’t be sustainable in the right sense by ourselves, our elite betters are going to have to implement it upon us for us—for the greater good of all. Though we can only speculate, this might be why Klaus Schwab, alleged father of the stakeholder capitalism model, has a bust of none other than Vladimir Lenin on the bookshelf in his office. In other words, stakeholder capitalism being offered as the vehicle to sustainable capitalism is just further proof that this whole giant socioeconomic Ponzi scheme is going to fail catastrophically. It actually gives away the game that they’ve tucked away and hidden inside of a fancy new Western technofuturist box.
What we’ve already realized, however, is that there’s another term that could pass equally well for what is meant by “sustainable capitalism,” understood as “the riddle of history solved.” That term would be productive socialism, which, if administered long and hard enough, will result in the People undergoing the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement as they remember that they are and always were Communists in their essential being. That’s what Marx characterized it as. Communism, as he had it, is “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.” The problem is that through the “inversion of praxis,” which is how the existing society allegedly brainwashes people into accepting its terms and thus reproducing it, people can’t solve the riddle of history. They have had the wrong values “introjected” into them through the inversion of praxis, as it was phrased in 1969 by the Critical Marxist Herbert Marcuse in his infamous Essay on Liberation. They need to be freed from those and have new values—a New Sensibility—introjected into them instead so that they can establish a true (biological) foundation for socialism.
This, “productive socialism,” is what they pretend to have in China under the CCP now. Communist China can be looked at as the test-run for this brilliant new global scam. They introject the correct values into the population not only through the usual old-fashioned methods like 鬥爭 (dòuzhēng, struggle) and 洗腦 (xǐnǎo, brainwashing) but also through forced compliance with a pervasive social credit system that makes you behave, shall we say, productively and sustainably. The Marxist doctrine of the inversion of praxis instructs that if you force people to live and practice the new values system, eventually it will determine their character. They will become socialists by being forced to live as socialists.
This is easily enough said, but how did it get here? The case for my claim—that “sustainable capitalism” and “productive socialism” are synonyms—derives from my reading of the leading Critical Marxist Theorist of the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse. Particularly, in my view, the second and ninth chapters of his magnum opus, titled One-dimensional Man and published in 1964, constitute the conceptual bedrock for the development of “sustainable capitalism,” and that this concept represents nothing more than a West-palatable brand name for what would be more honestly called productive socialism. I think this book rephrases the so-called riddle of history while never admitting the slightest doubt that “socialism” might not be its solution. Of course, in the religion of Marxism, questioning the completion of History as truly transcendent capitalism (which resolves the Fall of Man as the division of labor) is roughly the same as asking a Christian to doubt the Resurrection (which resolves the Fall of Man as the Sin of Adam). It’s not going to happen.
In One-dimensional Man, which reached and influenced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Leftists in the 1960s and 1970s—Leftists who went on to become your college professors and your kids’ teachers’ college professors, among other world-building professionals—Marcuse wrestles with a number of mid-century challenges to the sputtering Marxist sophistry, which was barely chugging along on fumes everywhere outside of East Asia and, to a degree, Latin America. Prominent among them, and essentially the thesis of his second chapter, is the dialectical relationship between capitalism in the West and socialism in the East (and South). What that means is that capitalism and socialism are in some obscure sense the same thing viewed in different, incorrectly opposing lights. Both are partial answers to the riddle of history, which finds its solution on a higher plane of understanding that synthesizes them both into a single program. Putting capitalism and socialism in a dialectical relationship, in fact, might have been Marcuse’s most significant contribution to Leftist thought because it, in a sense, poses the two great warring systems as two key insights to the so-called riddle of history.
For Marcuse, part of the solution exists in what he sees as the chief problem of capitalism. The problem is that capitalism “delivers the goods.” It enables the middle class to rise and the worker to have a good life that he enjoys. He has stuff. He isn’t hungry or cold. He isn’t miserable. Though he is allegedly still exploited, he’s conditioned by the goodness of his life (the inversion of praxis) to accept and even enjoy it—and, he admits, it’s absolutely true that his life is a good life. That makes him “one-dimensional” and completely ruins his revolutionary potential. To be a revolutionary, the worker has to be radicalized by making him miserable through the abuses of monopoly-capital and exploiting that misery. “Advanced capitalism,” as Marcuse called it, had fairly effectively put a stop to these abuses, thus flattening Man and conditioning him to accept and even love his largely meaningless and static one-dimensional workaday-consumerist life.
For Marcuse, the working class was removed from his historical position as a revolutionary base by this evil success of advanced capitalism, so much so that he insisted that a new working class would need to be found through identity politics, racial, sexual, feminist, and more, led by the more easily programmed college students (Mao preferentially xǐnǎo-ed the youth too, and Marcuse knew it). In Marcuse’s telling, besides flattening Man and thus locking his essential nature (as a socialist) away from his consciousness, this successful dimension of capitalism creates an impending disaster of excess. Capitalism delivers the goods, but it turns people into relentless consumers whose needs multiply as fast as they can be satisfied. Meanwhile, in his telling, it profiteers off deliberately wasteful practices like planned obsolescence and the destruction of the limited natural environment. Capitalism works, in Marcuse’s dialectical view of it, but it works too well and simply isn’t sustainable.
On the other hand of the grand riddle of history, socialism has the right view of things, the right sensibility, argues Marcuse, but it’s a dump. Socialist nations were undeniable shitholes—in fact, far worse than that because they were brutally totalitarian and abusive. Marcuse pinned these failures on the abuses of bureaucracy and their tyrants, but those in turn were, to him, the result of a specific problem that Marxists of his era didn’t know how to solve. That problem is sometimes called the problem of production. Stated simply, socialist societies can’t produce. They cannot even manage to meet the basic needs of their people, and in their mounting failure to be able to produce, they become brutal. Socialism, for Marcuse, has it right, but it doesn’t work. If it did work, it would be both productive and sustainable, and the people would be happy.
That “riddle of history,” which I will insist defined Marxist Leftism (a redundancy, frankly) in the tumultuous 1960s and stagnating 1970s, was the framing in which stakeholder capitalism and the notion of a “sustainable and inclusive” future emerged, I believe. The Soviet Union, for all its might, was toast, so the model was tested first in China. It developed not under Mao Zedong—though important meetings between leaders like him, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger proceeded, perhaps to that theme—but under his successor Deng Xiaoping, who rose to Chairman of the CCP within a couple of politically tumultuous years following Mao’s death in September 1976.
The “productive socialism” experiment, as it might now be called, was to open up restricted markets within China and Chinese industry to Western markets. “I don’t care if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice,” Deng famously remarked, so why not experiment with a markets-driven solution to the problem of production? In some sense, it worked. China was rapidly enriched and went from being a broken, backwards, and extremely populous nation with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s to a global financial superpower in just a few decades. They had, it seemed, cracked the code on productive socialism.
The trick, it seemed, was to open up quasi-capitalist markets like little controlled terrariums inside the socialist architecture of the command-driven Communist state. The trick, in reality, was probably little more than turning that humongous, impoverished, and easily exploitable population base into a gigantic manufacturing base for Western consumer goods, which is only good so long as it lasts. (The check might be coming due on this now, for what it’s worth.)
If the model could work in China, why not in the West—and thus, in some sense, everywhere? The West, obviously, would naturally fall behind the rising command-economy behemoth in the East if it didn’t transform as well, right? That makes for one hell of a sales pitch, one that many of our Western elites seem to have bought hook, line, and sinker. To get productive socialism in the West, especially in the United States, where socialism is largely anathema, what changes would be needed there?
Herbert Marcuse told us. You’ll definitely need a radicalized youth that believes it can’t even live without socialism, and getting one of those is as simple a matter, more or less, as getting hold of the education system and disrupting family, faith, and national identity. More would be needed, too, though. A right understanding of capitalism, the basis of the West, that synthetically moves it toward “productive socialism” would also be needed.
Again, to believe Herbert Marcuse on the issue, the problem with Western capitalism wasn’t that it couldn’t produce; it’s that it isn’t sustainable. The problem of advanced capitalism isn’t production and the satisfaction of needs, argues Marcuse; it’s overproduction and thus the insatiable production of newer and newer false needs. “In the contemporary era, the conquest of scarcity is still confined to small areas of advanced industrial society. Their prosperity covers up the Inferno inside and outside their borders; it also spreads a repressive productivity and ‘false needs,’” he tells us.
What’s to be done about these “false needs” generated by the excessive successes of advanced capitalism? Says, Herr Marcuse, “The process always replaces one system of preconditioning by another; the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction.” Of course, consciousness (the Marxists’ Gnostic counterfeit of Christian discernment and Greek wisdom) is needed to distinguish the two. True needs are the actual basic needs of life, not more, which a government of productive socialism should provide thus liberating Man from needing to provide them for himself. False needs, on the other hand, can be identified through critical consciousness as well, however.
We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.
So much for relaxing and having fun in the socialist utopia, comrades! That’s not all, though! “Liberation of energy from the performances required to sustain destructive prosperity,” advises Marcuse in the ninth chapter of One-dimensional Man, “means decreasing the high standard of servitude in order to enable the individuals to develop that rationality which may render possible a pacified existence.” It “also presupposes reduction in the future population,” he points out in the next sentence (written in 1964 when the population was roughly half what it is today), but let’s not digress into the uncomfortably obvious. To achieve the parallel of productive socialism in the West, capitalism would have to be modified to free up the “energy…required to sustain destructive prosperity,” and the denizens of Western capitalistic nations would have to accept generally a lower standard of living (and smaller population). In other words, capitalism would have to be made sustainable (and inclusive). So we’re back to the socialist shitholes, but in the new sustainable ones, you’ll be happy, not merely comfortable, relaxed, and euphoric.
I believe “sustainable (and inclusive) capitalism” is little more than the capitalist-side solution to this false riddle of history posed in 1964 by Herbert Marcuse, and that it knows—rather, believes—itself to be this solution. The “productive socialism” of China under the hybrid system currently run by the CCP is the socialist-side solution to the same, and, in fact, these two are not significantly different in any noteworthy way. These two, sustainable capitalism and productive socialism, are the two great systems dialectically reframed as part of a greater whole: the impending shithole world of the New World Order. Thus, in China the Communism is on the outside and the fascistic market structure is contained within to produce “productive socialism,” and in the West, perhaps mostly due to some combination of marketing constrains and dialectical wizardry, the fascistic “public-private partnership” is on the outside with the “equitable and inclusive” redistribution scheme hidden within. This, though is a distinction without much difference. Both are in a position for ultimate synthesis into the great tyranny of the twenty-first century. In a bizarre twist of ironic inversion, the Chinese model will be the nationalistic one. The West will not be allowed to be so lucky.
Karl Marx said of the true sort of Communism that it is “the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be the solution,” and this is characterized by “the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.” Sustainable capitalism phrases this more plainly: “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.” Marx said about it that it, “as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man.” The sustainable capitalists explain that it’s environmentally and socially responsible, or sustainable and inclusive. Inclusion as a Communist ideal is obvious, of course, but what about (environmental) sustainability? Karl Marx explained this too, though a bit more abstrusely,
Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art—his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible—so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.
In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form. (EPM)
We—as a collective—are nature, apparently. We, as individuals, sunder ourselves from nature, both as nature itself and as the necessary window into our true human natures—as Communists. Sustainable capitalism managed by Klaus Schwab’s совет акционеров, a.k.a. “stakeholder capitalism,” allows the properly conscious to remedy this primordial Marxist evil, and it knows itself to be the solution.
So, I think I’ve made my case. Karl Marx instructed in 1844 that the true Communism is the self-conscious solution to the riddle of history, and Herbert Marcuse 120 years later framed the riddle of history for the stage of “advanced capitalism” and faltering socialism to be how to synthesize them into a single functional system. While “productive socialism” is not a term in the common use, its Western brand name, “sustainable capitalism” is. These are not different, however. They’re both approximately the same new iteration of Communism, a Neo-Communism based on Marcusian Neo-Marxism instead of Marxian Marxism.
The whole thing is a scam, and it will do incalculable damage if we allow it. We don’t have to allow it, though. We have a choice. We can understand what we’re dealing with beneath the jargon and slick branding, and we can say no. Marcuse said that overcoming the tyranny of the system he hated required what he called a Great Refusal—“the protest against that which is”—and to that much, I say yes. We can refuse this scam, whether we call it “sustainable capitalism” or “productive socialism” (which is an oxymoron) and get back to living history as it unfolds instead of falling on our faces by thinking its a riddle we can or should solve.