Author: Doug Casey

International Man: The “15-minute city” is an urban planning concept rapidly spreading in North America and Europe. They aim to make everything—where people work, shop, get their education, healthcare, and leisure activities—just 15 minutes away.

The idea is for bureaucrats to restrict—and eventually prohibit—car use because everything is within walking or biking distance. Phasing out hydrocarbons, in general, and cars with internal combustion engines, in particular, is a primary goal of the carbon hysterics.

Critics also argue that 15-minute cities will eventually allow for total surveillance and control of people’s lives, as governments will inevitably pair them with an ESG social credit system and central bank digital currencies.

What is your take on the 15-minute city concept?

Doug Casey: It’s social engineering taken to a new level—trying to reform the way humans act and live. In fact, it’s social engineering that’s expressed in the form of civil engineering, putting people in the kind of houses, environments, and locales that the elites—strike that, I mean parasites—prefer.

It’s as if the whole human race is taking a role in the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show. But that’s way too benign. The way they’re trying to reform the cities and force people to stay in place in certain areas, it’s more like the panopticon, which was a type of prison where all people could be observed easily by the guards at all times.

Of course, keeping everybody within a 15-minute radius of their home sounds convenient, homey, and small town-like. But it just makes things much more convenient for artificial intelligence to monitor where everybody is. Not just in their vehicles, either, because the next step along this path will be to make it desirable for everybody to have a chip implanted so individual bodies can be monitored. The 15-minute city concept is just a step on the way to something much more dystopian.

International Man: 15-minute cities received a big boost from the Covid hysteria as many city councils and mayors sought to redesign city spaces amid the lockdowns.

The concept has spread to many areas in North America and Europe, with plans to transform parts of the biggest cities into numerous 15-minute city zones. We have already seen this happen in Ottawa, Oxford, and other large cities.

What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: It’s all about control, but it won’t be sold as a military “you must do this” type of control. It will be a soft, “do it for your own good” type of control. And, of course, it’s part of the general climate insanity for the supposed good of Mother Earth. The idea is to get people to stay out of their cars and, for that matter, stay off of planes and even public transportation.

It’ll be sold as a great way to get to know your neighbors, walk, and maybe bicycle. They’re trying to return the world to medieval times where nobody went more than 15 minutes from their house. Because not only weren’t they supposed to but there might be dragons over the next hill.

International Man: The global elite don’t want the plebs to be as mobile as they used to be.

In recent years, we’ve seen more and more travel restrictions. The Covid hysteria set a precedent for using lockdowns as official policy and introduced many confusing travel restrictions. The carbon hysteria also serves as a pretext for all sorts of proposals to limit and restrict travel. The trend now in motion is gaining momentum.

How do you see 15-minute cities within the context of this trend?

Doug Casey: People are far easier to control if you know where they are at all times. And the elite—again, they’re parasites that don’t produce anything or serve a useful purpose—want the plebs to stay in place, not just physically, but psychologically, economically, and politically.

They’d prefer to live in a world where places like St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Machu Picchu, and the Grand Canyon aren’t overwhelmed with the hoi polloi because they’re back observing their 15-minute travel zones and adhering to requirements that allow them to expend only so many pounds of carbon.

It’ll be much more convenient for the parasites from a personal living point of view, in addition to affording them vastly more control.

International Man: The World Economic Forum (WEF) has promoted 15-minute cities.

Why are they interested in this topic?

Doug Casey: In the past, the United Nations provided the premier forum for governments to get together and palaver about how to restructure the world. But the UN—fortunately—is fading into obscurity. It’s now really no more than an expensive club for mid-level government officials to vacation in New York while playing big shot and connecting with other ambitious bureaucrats.

The World Economic Forum is for the real power people.

The WEF, however, needs a reason for existing. These people are into power and money. They naturally like to socialize with each other, scratching each other’s backs and seeing themselves as masters of the universe. Now that they’ve gotten to know each other at the WEF and have clearly taken the reigns over at least the Western world, they’re no longer there just to socialize. They have lots of big plans for the plebs.

The concept of the 15-minute city is one of the many prongs of attack that they’ve launched to essentially take over the world, as outrageous as that sounds.

International Man: Given everything we have discussed, what can the average person do to safeguard his sovereignty in general and his freedom to travel in particular?

Doug Casey: First of all, try to relocate to a rural area where you’re much more in control of your own life, and you’re not surrounded by thousands of people who might rat you out as a non-conformist and could easily turn hysterical.

The second thing is to get as rich as you can because having assets helps insulate you from both the parasitic elites and the capite censi.

And third thing you can do is to resist any way you can. Speaking out and letting other people know that they aren’t alone in thinking what’s going on is actually evil. But recognize the risks of doing so.

We can’t change the trends of history. The atmosphere in today’s world is like that of the early days of the US Civil War or the early days of World War I or World War II. The boobs become stupidly hysterical, enthusiastic to ” join up” to fight some real or imagined foe, and marching together in lockstep. A giant mind virus is well on its way to capturing most people.

We live in really dangerous times.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post ’15-Minute Citie’ and Penning You In for the Next Lockdown appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: Webster’s Dictionary defines a useful idiot as a “naive or credulous person who can be manipulated or exploited to advance a cause or political agenda.”

Lenin is thought to have originated the phrase when referring to communist sympathizers in the West.

What is your take on this term? Is it still applicable today?

Doug Casey: Today’s make-believe democracies are overflowing with useful idiots. They latch on to one lame-brained notion after another, perhaps to give meaning to their confused and pointless lives. They’re a bit like cats chasing the red dot from their master’s laser pointer. The Ukraine, Covid, sex perversions, Trump, racism, climate change—it’s one thing after another.

Climate change is one of the central scams being promoted by the World Economic Forum as part of their Great Reset. It seems everything that comes out of the WEF—I can’t think of any exceptions — is antithetical to the traditional values of Western Civilization, prominently including free markets and personal liberty.

We’ve discussed the COVID hysteria and what looks like World War III starting in the Ukraine. But the biggest thing, with the longest legs, is climate change. Full disclosure: I believe in climate change. The climate has been changing constantly since the world came together about four and a half billion years ago. And it’ll continue to change.

The problem, however, isn’t climate change itself but the process of indoctrinating the public, especially young people, with the belief that humanity is destroying Mother Earth.

They’re given snippets of science, like the fact that the world has been generally warming since the mid-19th century. Well, sure, it has because the planet went through what’s known as the Little Ice Age from the 16th through the 19th centuries. It has cyclically been warming for the last 150 years. As a matter of fact, the world has been warming since the end of the last Great Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago.

The “global warming” people have found a great excuse for changing not just the economy but the way literally everything works. My view is that they’re basically anti-human—they actually hate and fear people. It’s why Yuval Noah Harari, the mincing court intellectual of the WEF, often refers to them as “useless eaters.” He may be right. But what’s insane is that someone like him could gain the power to make serious decisions. People like him applaud massive population reduction.

Especially, it would appear, of what Hillary called “deplorables” in the Western world. They see people as the enemy. Some idiots among them are useful, but they’re all expendable.

It’s easy for the “elite’—who are actually parasites—to influence those that they refer to as “the masses.” That’s partly because the average person has no grip on either science or history. Any episode of Jay Leno’s Jay Walking, or Mark Dice’s current equivalent on Youtube, offers plenty of anecdotal proof. They’ll ask what seem like average, reasonably intelligent people the simplest of questions. They can’t answer any of them. A typical response to the question “Who won the American Civil War” might be “The Germans?”. The only questions they can answer correctly are about pop and sports stars.

It’s absolutely true: The world is full of useful idiots. They’re useful to the ruling classes who want to change everything. In fact, just last week, the Aspen Institute, one of the world’s best-known think tanks, sponsored a climate change conference featuring Kamala Harris and Gloria Estefan as the twin keynote speakers.

It’s a pathetic comedy. A couple of useful idiots are talking to an audience of useful idiots about something that none of them know absolutely anything about.

International Man: Today, we see a lot of useful idiots among average people—especially children and young adults—whipped up into a hysteria over so-called “climate change.”

Popular culture, the media, Hollywood, academia, Wall Street, politicians, and other authority figures reinforce the climate alarmist narrative.

Are these people being duped into supporting an agenda they don’t fully understand? What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: The fact is that Congress critters live in an echo chamber. They’re there to pass laws and regulations governing what other people can and can’t do. And for that reason, they all believe that they have a right to push their agendas. They’re narcissists who love power. That’s why they’re in Washington.

Congress is largely populated by people like AOC, the race-baiting socialist bartender, the mentally disabled John Fetterman, and George Santos, the pathological liar. Almost every Congress critter is an embarrassment. They didn’t run for Congress because they’re good people but because they’re power-hungry narcissists.

Useful idiots are annoying enough when you see them in sports, the media, and Hollywood. But they tend to concentrate in Congress, where they’re actively dangerous.

International Man: Recently, climate brats—young Westerners with psychological problems—glued themselves to priceless paintings in various museums.

Another group threw cake on the Mona Lisa.

Yet another threw tomato soup on a Vincent van Gogh painting.

The perpetrators of these destructive acts did so to draw attention to a fictitious climate emergency.

What is your take?

Doug Casey: They’re trying to draw attention to lunatic beliefs by destroying great works of art. That alone is proof that they are, in fact, deranged. These people have real psychological problems. That they aren’t severely punished but are taken seriously proves how degraded the West has become. But it’s just getting what it deserves. Very sad…

It’s one thing to try to get the attention of other people, so they listen to what you have to say. But destroying the great art of Western Civilization is really where their heads are at. Destroying Western Civilization is an active part of their insane agenda. They’re deeply unhappy with themselves, but they blame it on Civilization.

Their severe psychological problems are illustrated by the kind of people populating the Biden administration. Everyone from the tranny who dresses up in an admiral’s costume to Pete Buttigieg, who plays the female part of a couple with his boyfriend, to the former assistant secretary in Biden’s Office of Nuclear Energy who was that was caught stealing women’s clothing again and again. Biden himself, his Attorney General Merrick Garland, almost all of the top military people…

This is all part of a syndrome.

International Man: While these climate brats seem to be engaging in isolated acts, the reality is that climate alarmism is dictating government policy and corporate decisions and pumping unimaginable distortions into the global economy.

Where is this trend headed?

Doug Casey: Trends in motion tend to stay in motion and even accelerate until they reach a crisis. And that’s where we’re heading right now. Even if we don’t reach a crack-up crisis, which I suspect we will, even if saner heads prevail and start to reverse the trend, it’s going to take many, many years to first slow the trend and then reverse it. So there’s not much cause for optimism.

International Man: Given everything we discussed today, what are the investment implications?

Doug Casey: Put money in things that everybody has been taught to hate but are necessary for Civilization to continue. This means energy—uranium, oil, natural gas, and coal—and metals like gold and copper—resources in general.

Fortunately, the stocks of companies that produce these things are very cheap, with many selling for single-digit P/Es, and double-digit dividends. The mining and energy industries are very un-PC. ESG dictates that you shouldn’t put money into any kind of extractive industry. It’s generally very expensive or impossible to get permits for development, so the stocks are very cheap. I’d like to believe that reality will reassert itself, and these things will go up a lot.

The general stock market is still way overpriced. Plus, a crypto bubble still exists, evidenced by things like Dogecoin, which was created as a joke and serves no useful purpose. It still has a market cap of about $11 billion dollars. I think that can almost be used as an indicator of how much of a bubble the economy is still in.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Rise of ‘Climate Brats’ and Other Useful Idiots appeared first on LewRockwell.