XR Extinction Rebellion cognitive psychology Colin Davis PHD

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Picketing Jeremy Corbyn & the Docklands Light Railway
This is madness


Climate change activists glue themselves to fence outside Jeremy Corbyn's house
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-climate-change-activis ts-glue-14386397

Activists from Extinction Rebellion have targeted the Labour Leader's house as part of protests across London

Oliver Milne political Correspondent 16:06, 17 APR 2019

They have glued themselves to his fence in North London (Image: PA)
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Four climate change campaigners from the Extinction Rebellion group glued themselves to a fence outside Jeremy Corbyn's home in Islington.

The four activists, who glued themselves to the Labour leader's fence have been spoken to by police.

They reportedly said it was a bid to get the Labour leader to commit to tackling climate change.

They said they are "all Jeremy Corbyn supporters" but want the Labour Party to do more to tackle the countries climate crisis.

The Labour leader - who has warned about the risks of climate chaos - has agreed to meet with the protesters in Parliament next week according to a party source.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police told the Mirror: "Police are dealing with reports of a disturbance outside a residential property in Islington.

"Local officers remain at the scene and the incident remains ongoing."

It comes after more climate change activists have glued themselves to a DLR train at Canary Wharf in London.

Two protesters climbed on the Docklands Light Railway carriage as part of a third day of action to pressure politicians to take more radical measures to protect the environment.

A man dressed in a dark suit and a woman wearing a black coat stood on the roof of a train in the station holding a banner which read: "Climate Emergency. Act Now."

A third protester glued his hand to the window of the train.

Commuters were stunned by the protest, which caused huge delays to their journeys.

But one bystander claimed she was "happy to see the protests".

Diane John, visiting London with her teenage daughter for the day, told Mirror Online: “We are pleased to see it.

"We were just saying something about our carbon footprint needs to be done. It’s about the environment. The thing is, ‘what do we do?’

XR demonstrations have been taking place at Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus and Marble Arch this week.

The protests have led to road closures, traffic gridlock and serious disruption to public transport and local businesses, with 55 bus routes closed and 500,000 people affected.

[item8]

What we need is a protest about something that really matters. Do we open the egg at the pointy end or the round end? Lets get animated about something that is REAL!!!!

[TonyGosling]

Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam - ex Rising Up
Extinction Rebellion - The birth, the theory and the practice

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKSUNnAnIwg

[TonyGosling]

Extinction Aversion
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/04/extinction-aversion/
http://tlio.org.uk/craig-murray-xr-extinction-aversion/
23 Apr, 2019 in Uncategorized by craig | View Comments

Man made climate change has appeared to me for three decades to be sufficiently proven, and it has that cardinal virtue of a scientific hypothesis, you can see the things which it predicts will happen, come to pass before your eyes, like being uncomfortably hot in your Edinburgh flat on Easter Monday.

Direct action of the illegal kind is a very important weapon in the arsenal of protest. It represents a challenge to the state’s monopoly of force. While it may appear non-violent, in fact by imposing your body into a space and blocking it off, that is an assertion of physical force. What the Extinction Rebellion protests showed this week was the reticence of the Metropolitan Police in dealing with nice, middle class and largely white protestors. That reticence is to be welcomed; the fact that it is not extended to other groups is what is to be deplored. The alternative is to argue for everyone to get beaten up by Plod equally, which is not a sensible line to take.

I broadly support the Extinction Rebellion protest. In terms of gatecrashing climate change on to the political agenda, they have had a good and entirely necessary effect. Their use of what was in effect force, certainly did some harm in restricting the movement of people around London, and in some cases will have impacted the ability of struggling people to earn their living. It also disrupted public transport systems which are a good thing. But these are minor items if you accept that climate change is whirling its way to becoming an existential threat – and that is a premise which I do accept. The disruption is outweighed by the intent to do a much greater good, in terms of the justification of the people doing the protesting. Whether it succeeds in prompting real action by government and achieving a balance of good, is a different question. I fear we have to get rid of the Tories first.

I accept that climate change is a worldwide phenomenon and action in individual states of limited utility. But individual states can inspire by example, not least by showing that a switch to a greener economy can lead to a major stimulation of economic growth. I do not pretend to expertise in green economics. What follows are rather some homely policy nostrums which I believe should form a part of a coherent approach to green policy.

1) Home Insulation

The Tory Government has effectively abandoned and cancelled home insulation schemes; in effect nothing whatsoever is happening. Yet the government’s own plan to reach committed emissions targets by 2050 explicitly depends on one third of all savings being achieved by insulation in Britain’s existing stock of over 20 million very poorly insulated homes.

There is the clearest case here for government action. The aim should be to upgrade 4 million homes a year. Full funding should be provided to local authorities and housing associations for their stock. Householders should face a legal obligation to bring home insulation up to high defined standards – with generous means-tested grants available from central government funds, which should meet 100% of the cost for all those in straitened circumstances, and a decreasing percentage thereafter based on income and wealth. Private landlords should be forced to comply and self-fund up to the value of four months’ rent, with grants available for higher costs. Failure to comply should lead to the landlords’ property being confiscated by the local council, with tenancies protected.

Those are the broad outlines of a policy which would provide massive employment and contribute to a major Keynesian boost for an economy crippled by years of austerity, as well as make a major difference to emissions.

2) Ocean Energy

Wind energy has made massive strides, and to a lesser extent solar and hydro. But disappointingly little has been done to harness the restless energy of the seas. Government support for research programmes into utilising wave and current energy is pitifully small, given the potentially vast and reliable energy resource available, to the UK in particular.

On tidal energy, those objecting to the Severn or Wash barrage schemes on the grounds of effect on wildlife habitat are failing spectacularly to see the wood for the trees. Of course biodiversity is massively important, but we are fighting a battle in which some resources will need to be sacrificed. The Severn, Wash and Swansea Bay schemes do not require substantial technological innovation – they are basically just low head hydro – and should be pushed ahead as urgent projects. Simultaneously major research funding should be given to innovation. I suspect the harnessing of currents rather than waves would be the first to fruition.

3) Aviation Fuel Tax

Cheap flights are the opiate of the people. I cannot buy in to the argument that aviation fuel tax is only viable if everybody does it. Planes landing can very easily be taxed on any fuel they have in their fuel tanks brought in from third countries. If hub passengers transiting are reduced in favour of fuel tax free destinations, I cannot see that as a bad thing. An aviation hub is a particularly undesirable thing to become, from any sensible environmental view.

Flying is a major contributor to pollution and there is far too much of it. The tax free fuel status that makes flights cheaper than trains is ludicrous. Aviation fuel should be taxed at the same levels per calorific value as road fuels.

4) Expand Rail Networks

Nationalisation and re-integration is of course the sensible prelude to any development of rail transport. The UK is chronically behind most of the developed, and even much of the developing, world in terms of high speed rail lines. This needs to be rectified as does the chronic over-concentration of transport resource on South East England. HS2 should run on to Aberdeen and Inverness, not just be confined to the southern third of the UK.

On a wider note, with demand for rail transport buoyant, re-establishment of many Beeching axed lines should be undertaken with a view to a simple containerised nationwide freight distribution system as well as passenger transport. Rail is far more energy efficient than road. The preponderance of road transport is simply the result of perverse incentive from government policy.

Light rail and tram systems should be expanded in cities. Here in Edinburgh, the poor planning and execution of the start of a tram system should not put us off. Trams should be a local service, not fast and stopping frequently, but rather akin to buses, as in Manchester. They should not be confused as in Edinburgh with an express airport service, with very few and inaccessible stops.

5) Encourage Micro-Generation: Abolish Nuclear

The UK had an immensely successful programme of encouraging domestic solar generation through feed in tariffs, so the Tories cut it, as they cut the less successful insulation grants. Generous feed-in tariffs for domestic generation should be rebooted, while technologies such as heat pumps and exchangers should be zero rated for VAT (as should bicycles).

By contrast, the massively expensive nuclear power projects should be scrapped immediately. I lived almost all my adult life under the impression nuclear energy involved some fiendishly clever technology, until I realised it generates from bog standard steam turbines, and the nuclear part is simply a ludicrously complicated, incredibly expensive and devastatingly dangerous way to – boil water.

The real attraction to governments of nuclear power is the precise reason governments dislike micro-generation – nuclear power promotes a massively centralised security state, and links in well to weaponisation. It is the most expensive electricity of all, and should be immediately closed down.

The above represent my own thoughts on possible short term policy responses to climate change. I acknowledge quite freely that it is not my area of expertise and is perhaps insufficiently radical, and certainly insufficiently broad and detailed. It has however focused my mind on the great economic stimulus that can be gained from wholesale pursuit of the necessary technologies at the government level.

I have deliberately concentrated on unilateral measures rather than international negotiation, because I am sceptical there is sufficient will for progress on the latter or that governments around the world intend to stick to commitments. I have viewed it from a UK not a Scottish perspective because action is required immediately, and Scotland starts from a much better place anyway.

That I am thinking on this at all is in a way evidence that Extinction Rebellion achieved their aim from their immediate action, though it is those in power they seek to influence, not random bloggers. I am very sceptical of their declared desire to “negotiate with government”. If David Cameron were still in power, he would undoubtedly “hug a swampie” and make all kinds of green noises, then continue shutting down environmental programmes. Those around Theresa May are quite clever enough to recommend such an approach, as a potential Tory rescuing image as the party otherwise crashes to electoral disaster.

I would recommend Extinction Rebellion to keep blocking the roads and stay clear of the politicians. If they could refine their tactics to concentrate more on direct action against the big polluters and their financial backers, and move away from shocking the public through inconvenience, that might be tactically good for a while. But on the whole, I applaud. Vigorously.

[TonyGosling]

The Truth About Extinction Rebellion?
No - the energy industry fight back anonymously

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=536qN22jxak
Who runs Extinction Rebellion? What is the fourth industrial revolution? What are their goals? What is a climate emergency? What is sustainable development? How is 5G connected with all of the above?
Many of the sources from site below plus others which I have sourced which have URLs displayed in the video.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Well, well.
Globalist solutions.
One country can't do it alone? Yes they can. Like Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, even Germany have.

Interesting list of organisations signing up to this at the end. How do they get them all to agree? Is this such a brilliant new way to control energy use? Or part of a deeper manipulative social agenda as the Middle East prepares for war?

[TonyGosling]

The madness of Extinction Rebellion
This is an upper-middle-class death cult and we should ridicule it out of existence.

Brendan O'Neill
BRENDAN O'NEILL
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/10/07/the-madness-of-extinction-reb ellion/

7th October 2019
The madness of Extinction Rebellion
Share
TopicsPOLITICS SCIENCE & TECH UK WORLD
Yesterday, in London, I witnessed an eerie, chilling sight: I saw a death cult holding a ceremony in public.


The men and women gathered outside King’s Cross station and formed a circle. They swayed and chanted. They preached about End Times. ‘What will you do when the world gets hot, what, what?’, they intoned, conjuring up images of the hellfire they believe will shortly consume mankind. They sang hymns to their god – science. ‘We’ve got all the science / All that we need / To change the world / Hallelujah’, they sang, rocking side to side as they did so.

They demanded repentance. ‘Buy less, fly less, fry less’, said one placard. Catholics only demand the non-consumption of meat on Fridays, as an act of penance to mark the day of Christ’s death. This new religion demands an end to meat-consumption entirely, as penance for mankind’s sins of growth and progress.


And like all death cultists, they handed out leaflets that contained within them ‘THE TRUTH’. The leaflets foretell floods and fire: ‘We are in trouble. Sea levels are rising… Africa and the Amazon are on fire.’ The only word that was missing was locusts. They can’t be far behind these other ghastly visitations to sinful mankind.

And if you question their TRUTH? Then, like those heretics who were hauled before The Inquisition 500 years ago, you will be denounced as a denier. A denier of their revelations, a denier of their visions. ‘Denial is not a policy’, their placards decreed. Spotting me filming their spooky, apocalyptic ceremony, one of the attendees waved that placard in my face. A warning from the cult to a corrupted outsider.

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This was, of course, Extinction Rebellion. Let us no longer beat around the bush about these people. This is an upper-middle-class death cult.

This is a millenarian movement that might speak of science, but which is driven by sheer irrationalism. By fear, moral exhaustion and misanthropy. This is the deflated, self-loathing bourgeoisie coming together to project their own psycho-social hang-ups on to society at large. They must be criticised and ridiculed out of existence.


Yesterday’s gathering, like so many other Extinction Rebellion gatherings, was middle-aged and middle-class. The commuters heading in and out of King’s Cross looked upon them with bemusement. ‘Oh, it’s those Extinction freaks’, I heard one young man say. It had the feel of Hampstead and the Home Counties descending on a busy London spot to proselytise the cult of eco-alarmism to the brainwashed, commuting plebs.

It was a gathering to mark Extinction Rebellion’s week of disruption. The group is asking people in London and other cities around the world to ‘take two weeks off work’ and join the revolt against the ‘climate and ecological crisis’. You can tell who they’re trying to appeal to. Working-class people and the poor of New Delhi, Mumbai and Cape Town – some of the cities in which Extinction Rebellion will be causing disruption – of course cannot afford to take two weeks off work. But then, these protests aren’t for those people. In fact, they’re against those people.

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Extinction Rebellion is a reactionary, regressive and elitist movement whose aim is to impose the most disturbing form of austerity imaginable on people across the world. One of the great ironies of ‘progressive’ politics today is that people of a leftist persuasion will say it is borderline fascism if the Tory government closes down a library in Wolverhampton, but then they will cheer this eco-death cult when it demands a virtual halt to economic growth with not a single thought for the devastating, immiserating and outright lethal impact such a course of action would have on the working and struggling peoples of the world.

Extinction Rebellion says mankind is doomed if we do not cut carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2025. That’s six years’ time. Think about it: they want us to halt a vast array of human activity that produces carbon. All that Australian digging for coal; all those Chinese factories employing millions of people and producing billions of things used by people around the world; all those jobs in the UK in the fossil-fuel industries; all those coal-fired power stations; all that flying; all that driving… cut it all back, rein it in, stop it. And the people who rely on these things for their work and their food and their warmth? Screw them. They’re only humans. Horrible, destructive, stupid humans.


Progressive movements, as the name suggests, used to be about pursuing progress, pushing mankind forwards, creating a better, wealthier world for all. Extinction Rebellion wants the precise opposite. It wants to propel us backwards, to the Stone Age. It wants to reverse the most important moment in human history – the Industrial Revolution. It wants to undo that revolution’s liberation of mankind from the brutishness and ignorance of life on the land and recreate that old, unforgiving world in which we all ‘ate locally’, never travelled, danced around maypoles for fun, and died of cholera when we were 38.

The sheer backwardness of Extinction Rebellion was captured when two of its members appeared on Sky News yesterday morning. They complained, hysterically, about modernity. One of them bemoaned all the electricity that is used in a city like London. So the very lighting up and warming of cities, the electricity that powers homes and workplaces and transport systems and life-support machines, is offensive to these hair-shirted, self-flagellating loathers of arrogant humankind. ‘Switch it all off’, is their alarmingly immoral cry.


What is most astonishing about the Extinction Rebellion phenomenon is what an easy ride these people get in the media and from political types. They are treated as wise and radical defenders of reason and the future. Please. These people are a menace to good sense, rationality, truth and progress. Their predictions of hellfire if we don’t cut carbon emissions by 2025 are pure bunkum. They lie and spread fear and disrupt hard-working people’s lives. If you see this cult promoting its deathly propaganda on the streets of your city this week, give them a piece of your mind.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Recommended recent critiques of XR:

- Athian Akec, ‘When I look at Extinction Rebellion, all I see is white faces. That has to change’ https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/opinion-perspectives/you-cant-hav e-true-climate-justice-without-migrant-justice/
- Minnie Rahman, 'You can’t have climate justice without migrant justice’ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/19/extinction-rebel lion-white-faces-diversity
- James Poulter ‘Extinction Rebellion's Tube Protest Isn't the Last of Its Problems’ (including interview with XR Scotland’s Mikaela Loach) https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/59nq3b/extinction-rebellion-tube-di sruption-criticism
- Suzanne Dhaliwal, 'Extinction Rebellion haven’t thought about BAME people and it shows' https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/17/extinction-rebellion-havent-thought-bam e-people-shows-10937741/
- Suzanne Dhaliwal and Erica McKoy, https://www.facebook.com/suzanne.dhaliwal.7/videos/10162859508105657/
- May Fraser, ‘The Police Line’, https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2019/10/16/the-police-line/
- Kevin Blowe, ‘It’s Not Just a Bunch of Flowers’ https://medium.com/@copwatcher_uk/it-is-not-just-a-bunch-of-flowers-bc 5078b899e4
- Hannah Dines, ‘The climate revolution must be accessible – this fight belongs to disabled people too’ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/15/climate-revoluti on-disabled-people-activism
- Kuba Shand-Baptiste, ‘Extinction Rebellion’s hapless stance on class and race is a depressing block to its climate goal’ https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/extinction-rebellion-climate-cris is-race-class-london-arrests-xr-a9156816.html
- Bae Sharam ‘What are you doing to dismantle your middle class white privilege when participating in XR protests? https://medium.com/@baesharamdrag/what-are-you-doing-to-dismantle-your -middle-class-white-privilege-when-participating-in-xr-2bfcfc1d66a9
- Karen Bell, ‘A working-class green movement is out there but not getting the credit it deserves’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/11/a-working-class-gr een-movement-is-out-there-but-not-getting-the-credit-it-deserves?CMP=s hare_btn_tw
- Sharlene Gandhi, ‘Extinction Rebellion need to focus on the fact that climate displacement will largely impact communities of colour’ http://gal-dem.com/extinction-rebellion-need-to-focus-on-the-fact-that -climate-displacement-will-largely-impact-communities-of-colour/
- Aranyo Aarjan, ‘It’s time to add global justice to XR’s demands’ https://www.redpepper.org.uk/xr-global-justice/
- Statement from Extinction Rebellion Liberation, https://rebellion.earth/2019/10/05/statement-from-extinction-rebellion -liberation/
- Damien Gayle, ‘Does Extinction Rebellion Have a Race Problem?’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/04/extinction-rebelli on-race-climate-crisis-inequality
- Jessica Garraway, 'A Real Extinction Rebellion Means the End of Colonialism, Imperialism, and Capitalism' https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/22/real-extinction-rebellio n-means-end-colonialism-imperialism-and-capitalism?
- Wretched of the Earth Collective, ‘Our House Has Been on Fire for Over 500 Years’ https://worldat1c.org/our-house-has-been-on-fire-for-over-500-years-97 fc668dc400

#SolidarityNotSilence #DecoloniseXR #EverybodyNow

[TonyGosling]

The Flawed Social Science Behind Extinction Rebellion’s Change Strategy
Written by Nafeez AHMED on 29/10/2019
https://orientalreview.org/2019/10/29/the-flawed-social-science-behind -extinction-rebellions-change-strategy/

We face a planetary emergency. It is, simultaneously, a national emergency — not just for the UK, where I write this from, but for every country in the world.

This emergency has been a core preoccupation of my work, increasingly so over the last decade — to the point that all my work now seeks to enhance our understanding of how the multiple crises we are experiencing intersect with one another as symptoms of a deeper, global civilisational crisis.

From this vantage, I am a supporter of Extinction Rebellion, the School Strikes for Climate, the Sunrise Movement, and other mass protest actions aimed at raising consciousness of the scale of the crisis, and galvanising major social and system-wide change to avert our current trajectory.

Yet I’ve long had concerns about XR’s strategy. Having touched on the issue once, I chose not to write again at length about this because, ultimately, I hoped the movement would continue to succeed, mature and listen to constructively critical friends; and I did not want my criticisms to be exploited by the regressive forces driving us toward planetary extinction.

But after the fiasco when XR activists decided to disrupt the London Underground — angering and alienating commuters from East London, where many are black and ethnic minorities in poor housing with low paid jobs and often zero hour contracts — I’ve decided that remaining silent is a mistake.

While it later emerged that the majority of XR activists did not support this action, the movement’s press department doubled down by amplifying the XR brand’s apparent endorsement of the action.

The press statement reiterated the logic of XR’s strategy — the idea that generating ‘disruption’ in the capital city, translates into disruption of the ‘business as usual’ that is driving carbon emissions, which in turn will eventually translate into the national government capitulating to the movement’s demands.

Those demands are as follows: 1. declare a climate emergency; 2. commit to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025; and 3. create a Citizens Assembly on climate and ecological justice which will in turn create legislation for action on the net zero target (to which parliament will be subordinate).

The movement has also encapsulated these three demands into a proposed Climate & Ecological Emergency Bill, which it is hoped, might eventually be passed in Parliament.

The basic problem with this logic underlying XR’s method is that it is based on flawed science — specifically, demonstrably flawed misreadings of the social science. It’s not that the entire method is wholly wrong; it’s that the failure to grasp its wider context and limitations means that without an upgrade, it will lead to XR’s failure.

This piece is not an attack on XR. It is a call to do better based on critical engagement with the scientific data that XR’s strategists describe as the foundation for the movement’s approach, along with some of their public statements. It closes with four key, constructive recommendations. We cover a lot of ground, and some arguments are repeated in different ways. So if you want to get to grips with the social science on why XR strategy needs a serious upgrade, maybe grab a drink, sit down, and take out some time to digest this.

XR has proven to be one of the most successful, effective and well-organised social protest movements in recent years, and is certainly proving to be one of the most effective on climate activism. It’s definitely doing something right. I believe it is one of the most important movements to have emerged in recent years.

So far, it has brought climate change and the risk of human extinction into mainstream consciousness; it has helped trigger declarations of climate emergencies by the UK Parliament and other political bodies; it contributed, along with other climate protest actions, to the UK government’s unprecedented decision to adopt legally-binding targets for net zero emissions by 2050 (notwithstanding the fact that actual policy remains well-behind the targets, which are also flawed).

Unfortunately, XR is at risk of alienating the mass support it has built up, and aspires to continue to build up, due to a defective theory of change based on limited and selective readings of the relevant social science literature. That theory of change has been derived by arbitrarily lifting particular methods from historically-specific socio-political contexts, the implications of which are largely ignored in the execution.

Extinction rebelionMy conclusion is that, based on a straightforward sociological analysis, this approach creates major faultlines which reduce the likelihood of success; and further, that XR has actually not really understood the research it is relying on. Despite ostensibly being derived from studies of nonviolent movements around the world (overwhelmingly though not exclusively by people of colour), the most important learnings from these movements have been overlooked by XR. And because the resulting active theory of change underpinning XR’s core strategy is so impaired, this strategy is likely to backfire.

Given that XR’s recent Autumn action did not produce the same level of success and change as the previous actions, we now have fairly clear empirical evidence that XR’s present strategy may be reaching its ‘peak’. If it is to continue to scale as a movement, this needs to be confronted head-on. XR now has the opportunity to review and enhance its strategy, and I offer this critical appraisal in that spirit as a humble contribution to augment such efforts.

Mass arrests as the core strategy
In his distillation of XR’s strategy, the movement’s co-founder and chief strategist, Roger Hallam, has specified mass arrests as the principal tactical approach of XR protest actions in his booklet, Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse.

This has been reiterated (though with caveats) by other influential XR activists, such as XR spokesperson and advisor to the group on political strategy, Dr Rupert Read of the University of East Anglia.

In a recent strategy brief and public discussion with Hallam, Read expressed disagreement with several key nuances in Hallam’s approach. Though he continued to put forward the idea of mass arrests as a core tactic, some of the most important themes raised by Read are elaborated on here.

Let me be clear that I am not opposing direct action or nonviolent civil disobedience, including mass arrests; but I am arguing that the specific way in which XR is executing these methods is based on fundamental misconceptions at multiple levels, which will be fatal for the movement unless rectified.

Others have argued that XR’s strategy means black and ethnic minorities facing mass brutalisation from law enforcement will be inevitably marginalised by a movement whose principal focus is ‘disruption’ actions premised on getting arrested; thus erasing minorities and indigenous people from the movement. That raises questions about the capacity of such a movement to reach and enfranchise wide grassroots support in a capital city that is very diverse.

But this valid criticism barely scratches the surface of the problem. We need to go deeper to probe where exactly the idea of mass arrests as a strategy came from, and whether it is really being applied by XR in a viable context.

Both Hallam and Read explain that the strategy of mass arrests was derived from previous highly-venerated social movements for large-scale change, which used nonviolent civil disobedience as their principal mechanism.

Among other movements, they point to the American civil rights movement led by figures such as Martin Luther King, and the Indian independence movement against British rule led by Mahatma Gandhi.

They both also point to recent social science research indicating that when 3.5 percent of a population is actively committed to a cause and participating in nonviolent protests, they are largely guaranteed to succeed in securing political change.

But there are several fundamental problems with this analysis, one of which has been pointed out by Rupert Read — which is that the black civil rights and Indian independence movements were not about pushing for comprehensive system-change, but had more specific goals. This raises questions about how effective it would be to apply such methods today in the context of the climate crisis. I will now explore those questions in greater detail.

Two major movements by people of colour that inspired XR — and why XR has wrongly expropriated them
XR has, in short, failed to understand the movements it draws inspiration from. I will begin illustrating this by first discussing just two of the most iconic historical cases which XR draws inspiration from.

The American civil rights movement succeeded in its strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience precisely because the very black communities rising up were the victims of the racist segregation and institutionalised brutality which they were protesting.

The civil rights movement was therefore inherently grassroots and broad-based, emerging from the institutions of black communities.

Its momentum was built-up over decades through direct, painstaking street-to-street organising, training, educating, network-building, and so on, within affected communities themselves. That is how the movement developed the capacity to eventually mobilise millions of people in repeated protest actions; and that is also how the movement was able to solidify and cement tight-knit networks of support across black communities nationwide. That is also how the movement was able to forge bonds of solidarity with white communities, resulting in peaceful protests involving black and white people.

The goal of the movement was directly related to the suffering of black communities, aimed at ending the segregation, racism, discrimination and constant unmitigated violence committed against black people.

It worked precisely because the people who drove the movement were the very same people who were suffering at the hands of the racist violence they wanted to change. It worked because they themselves were victims of violence, and the movement offered networks for self-empowerment and action against that violence. It worked because the solution was premised on core political changes directly related to the needs of those who wanted change; and disruption actions were targeted precisely at disrupting the system of injustice that was breaching their rights.

Similarly, the Indian independence movement, which had also inspired King and the civil rights movement, was premised on the reality of massive, widespread discontent and opposition to British rule, which was also complicit in routine violence against indigenous Indians. Gandhi’s charismatic leadership channeled this unmistakeable grassroots discontent into mass peaceful protest action, beginning by organising the lower castes. The goal of this action was, again, very specific — to repel British rule.

And once again, Gandhi’s capacity to mobilise millions for successful protest actions was based on years of painstaking grassroots organising, bridge-building between disparate communities and networks with differing theories and practices, and different types of targeted disruption actions which eventually coalesced into mass mobilisations (what Gandhi called ‘satyagraha’, or the application of “truth force”).

These movements were designed to disrupt an existing, highly visible regime of repressive violence, which was actively engaged in violence against the subject communities at the heart of the movement, and which already therefore lacked legitimacy in the hearts and minds of those communities. Both were cases of resistance by people of colour against systems of white supremacism. In both cases, disruption actions aimed at directly increasing the costs of the repressive violence that those communities were resisting.

Hence, they were successful because the institutions they disrupted were precisely the institutions of violence that needed to be overwhelmed by mass disruption in order for them to change, so that the costs of continuing that repressive violence would be increasingly difficult to sustain or justify.

This model cannot be simplistically transplanted to the modern Western context, where structures of power are far more complex, repression more invisible, and the institutions being targeted have no intuitively obvious connection to the demand being made.

In this case, the idea that mass arrests of largely privileged white people will overwhelm the police system — paving the way for the government to capitulate to XR’s demands about climate change — does not follow from the logic of these historical cases.

White people are not being brutalised en masse by a repressive state apparatus whereby, therefore, overwhelming it through mass arrests will force the police and authorities to reconsider their violent tactics; and the police as an institution are not directly involved in determining the climate policies that XR demands, so overwhelming them with costs will have no bearing whatsoever on the fossil fuel system, except in the most indirect sense. Instead, it will invoke the escalation of police-state powers but in a way that could turn popular opinion against the movement, due to its lack of connection with the grievances and challenges experienced by the majority of citizens, white, black, brown and beyond.

In both the American civil rights and Indian independence movements, there was a direct, organic connection between the people protesting, grassroots communities affected by the issues being protested, and the repressive institutions being disrupted through direct action. That is why they were able to build momentum rapidly. This is simply not the case with current XR strategies.

to be continued

Source: the author’s page at Medium.com

[outsider]

Here is a very important petition, against a massive scam by the big Corporations to screw any governments that don't play ball, in this case in the 'energy' department:
Here's a copy of the email I received from 38*:
'Europe’s got a dirty secret.

It could kill the Paris Climate Agreement, and even block EU countries from implementing a Green New Deal.

A piece of paper signed 25 years ago gives big oil, gas, and coal companies the power to sue entire countries for billions over laws that damage their profits. And right now, they’re using that power to block a green energy transition and accelerate climate chaos.

The Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) can be used to challenge oil drilling bans, the rejection of gas pipelines and taxes on fossil fuels. And it works. Governments are forced either to relax their clean energy laws, or pay eye-watering sums of money in compensation to fossil fuel companies.

Tell the EU and the government of the United Kingdom to pull out of the Energy Charter Treaty!

This is an agreement that the UK signed up to outside of its relationship with the EU. So it will hold even after brexit.
Citizens all over the EU want a Green New Deal. But that’ll only happen if we rip up this unfair agreement and stop letting fossil fuel corporations boss us around. Italy already did it. Now, the rest of Europe has to follow suit.

The number of lawsuits under the ECT -- which take place not in normal courts, but in closed-door tribunals -- has exploded in recent years. There have been over 83 cases in the past six years alone, and the majority have been decided or settled in favour of dirty energy corporations. This so-called "Investor State Dispute Settlement" (ISDS) regime must end.

Take the multinational Vattenfall, which was able to relax environmental restrictions on one of its coal plants by suing Germany for €1.4 billion. Or Germany’s own Uniper, which is threatening the Netherlands with a massive lawsuit if it goes ahead with a coal ban.

But we’ve got a chance to strike back. All over the continent, people like you and me are pushing our governments to take action against the dirty fossil fuel industry. We’ve made climate change a major issue in recent elections and staged millions-strong climate strikes.

Now, we need to use that same people power to end the Energy Charter Treaty -- because if we don’t, we’ll soon be back at square one.

There’s no time to waste -- tell European governments to stop the fossil fuel industry’s bullying and pull out of the Energy Charter Treaty.


SIGN THE PETITION

Thanks for all that you do,
David and the team at SumOfUs'

https://actions.sumofus.org/a/the-energy-charter-treaty-gives-fossil-f uel-companies-power-over-governments-it-s-time-to-end-it/?

[TonyGosling]

London Blackmailed By New Age Death Cult

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX-ALc2xFgM

swilliamism
58.8K subscribers
The protest spontaneously appeared as if by magick.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Please share this video and if you fancy supporting me you can do so by sending a gift via Paypal using the email: swilliamism@gmail.com

http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/105132

http://www.radio4all.net/files/tony@cultureshop.org.uk/2149-1-George_M onbiot_and_XR_on_Magic_Mornings_with_Peter_Williams_Fri06Mar2020.mp3

[TonyGosling]

Chris Hedges: The Cost of Resistance
September 23, 2020
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/23/chris-hedges-the-cost-of-resista nce/
You can measure the effectiveness of resistance by the fury of the response by ruling elites.

Roger is being held in Pentonville Prison in London which was built in 1842 and is in disrepair. He is charged with breaking bail conditions over an action that saw activists throw paint on the walls of the four major political parties, as well as conspiracy to cause criminal damage. A Green Party member leaked to the British police a recorded Zoom discussion Roger was having with three other members of Burning Pink, an anti-political party organized to create citizen assemblies to replace ruling governing bodies, as they discussed upcoming actions.

The homes of the four activists on the Zoom meeting – Roger Hallam, Blyth Brentnall, Diana Warner, Ferhat Ulusu and Anglican priest Steven Nunn – were raided on Aug. 25. Their electronic devises were confiscated by police and they were arrested.

[TonyGosling]

Who Runs Extinction Rebellion? Heiko Reveals His Findings & Questions Some Members

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWISiJJUHpU

Content Over Everything
52.5K subscribers
Marble Arch & Oxford Circus 17th April 2019.

Heiko' Videos On This Channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

Content Over Everything
For The Study Of Human Psychology and Behaviour.

COE T's https://teespring.com/stores/coe-merch

Support the stream: https://streamlabs.com/contentovereve...

To Become A C.O.E. Patron: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?c=11...

To Donate To The C.O.E Bentley Fund!
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr...

[TonyGosling]

Prince Charles – Paradise Papers  Prince Charles campaigned to alter climate-change agreements without disclosing his private estate had an offshore financial interest in what he was promoting, BBC Panorama has found. The Paradise Papers show the Duchy of Cornwall in 2007 secretly bought shares worth $113,500 in a Bermuda company that would benefit from a rule change. The prince was a friend of a director of Sustainable Forestry Management Ltd. The Duchy of Cornwall says he has no direct involvement in its investments. A Clarence House spokesman said the Prince of Wales had "certainly never chosen to speak out on a topic simply because of a company that it [the Duchy of Cornwall] may have invested in". He added: "In the case of climate change his views are well-known, indeed he has been warning of the threat of global warming to our environment for over 30 years. "Carbon markets are just one example that the prince has championed since the 1990s and which he continues to promote today." 'Conflict of interest' He added Prince Charles was "free to offer thoughts and suggestions on a wide range of topics" and "cares deeply" about the issue of climate change but "it is for others to decide whether to take the advice". Sir Alistair Graham, former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said Prince Charles's actions amounted to a serious conflict of interest. He said: "There's a conflict of interest between his own investments of the Duchy of Cornwall and what he's trying to achieve publicly. "And I think it's unfortunate that somebody of his importance, of his influence, becomes involved in such a serious conflict." The leaked documents held by law firm Appleby show the Duchy of Cornwall also made offshore investments totalling $3.9m in four funds in the Cayman Islands in 2007. This is legal and there is no suggestion of tax avoidance. A Duchy of Cornwall spokesman said Prince Charles voluntarily pays income tax on any revenue from his estate. He added the estate's investments "do not derive any tax advantage whatsoever based on their location or any other aspect of their structure and there is no loss of revenue to HMRC as a result". Kept confidential The prince began campaigning for changes to two important environmental agreements weeks after Sustainable Forestry Management (SFM) sent his office lobbying documents. Prince Charles's estate almost tripled its money in just over a year although it is not clear what caused the rise in the share value. Despite his high profile campaign, the environmental agreements were not changed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901175

[TonyGosling]

Astroturfing the way for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
By UN Extinction 2 years ago
https://nowhere.news/index.php/2019/04/01/astroturfing-the-way-for-the -fourth-industrial-revolution/

This is an introduction to a series of articles entitled ‘Astroturfing the way for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’.
Here are the links to the other parts:

1) Dr Gail Marie Bradbrook: Compassionate Revolutionary… for hire?
2) Political Charities and the Brave New World of Professional Activism
3) Green Gail and the Technocratic Industrialists: Citizens Online’s Digitopian Nightmare
4) Extinction Rebellion and the Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
5) #XRSpaceJunk 5G & Citizens Online: Industry Agents, Digital Acolytes and State Agitators

For a current update on our research, read our latest article here:
6) UN-Extinction: A Guide for the Perplexed

­Some Inconvenient Truths about Extinction Rebellion and the Climate Mobilisation movement

A message in a bottle…
Dear Reader,

We’d guess that you were drawn to open this link for one of two reasons:

You’re sympathetic to the goals of Extinction Rebellion and the broader ‘climate mobilisation’ movement, and want to know why we’re criticising it.
You’re suspicious of or opposed to the same, and are looking for evidence to bolster your sentiments.
Before going any further, know that our motivation for producing this piece of research is as follows:

We’ve been involved in environmental activism for some years, are personally acquainted with people in the networks we’re discussing, and fully support their goal of protecting our planet’s ability to sustain complex life. With that said, we’ve felt for some time that the groups that make up the ‘climate activism movement’ are majorly amiss in how they’ve been going about achieving said goal, which led us into doing in-depth research into their activities. We’ve been consistently amazed by what we’ve been finding, and as a result feel obliged to share this with others.

We have put hundreds of hours into creating this presentation, without the prospect or expectation of financial reward; our only hope is that it serves as a wake-up call to the many well-meaning people who’ve accepted what they’ve been told at face value about what stands behind these groups. We appreciate that those of you who’ve found a sense of shared purpose and camaraderie through participating in them will likely find it difficult to engage with what we’re presenting. We can only assure you that our intent in doing this is not malevolent, and suggest that you suspend any initial judgment, examine the material thoroughly, and try not to allow your discernment to be clouded by a sense of group allegiance.

And to those who are reading this because they aren’t aligned with these groups: we believe that much-needed criticism of the environmental movement in no way negates the basic premise of environmentalism: that humans cannot go on destroying and polluting the soil, water and air of our home indefinitely. Human beings, like all life forms, are inextricably linked to our environment, and what we do to it, we do to ourselves. If for some reason you’ve been led to believe otherwise, we’d suggest looking into the subject more deeply.


The Investigation

What we’re presenting here is a complex ecosystem, so before we can arrive at a big picture, we’ll need to look at various aspects in turn. Let’s not beat around the bush: there’s a fair bit of material here. If you want to appraise it properly and understand how we’re being misdirected, then you’ll need to set aside some time to do so. After all, the ‘educational’ system and mass media have been drip-feeding us with pernicious lies for all of our lives; hence it takes a certain amount of commitment to deconstruct and then re-examine those truths we hold as self-evident. (Please note, we have used hyperlinks to provide further background for our claims.)

The greedy b****** who are, ultimately, the subject of our investigation, have in many cases been in this game for multiple generations; and their forebears took care [1] to capture the press, schools and academia a long time ago. In recent years, things have decentralised somewhat with the advent of the internet, but the simultaneous erosion of people’s attention spans has compensated for this, and serves these parties very well. You are of course welcome to close this window and go back to checking your Facebook feed, watching Netflix, or whatever else it was you were doing before you came here; but for those prepared to take a walk with us through this perplexing landscape, there’s work to be done.

At this point it’d be worth giving a brief insight into what led us to embark on this journey ourselves. Having been actively involved in environmental and land rights campaign groups whose membership directly overlapped with that of the Climate Camp, Occupy and related movements – which in many ways prepared the ground for the current groups – we already had a bad taste in our mouths from what we’d witnessed in those circles. Which is to say, that what was passing itself off as ‘horizontal non-hierarchical consensus-based decisionmaking’ was in our experience anything but; leading us to ask ourselves further questions, and pay attention to what the rare dissenting voices that dared to speak up had to say. Hence, when the buzz around Extinction Rebellion began to circulate through our networks, we were already on the lookout for signs of it being (yet another) controlled opposition group. And find them we did.

The first major clue came in the form of a presentation [2] given by Gail Bradbrook, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion (XR for short – the main British group advocating for Climate Mobilisation) at Off-Grid Festival a number of years ago, promoting her Compassionate Revolution/ Rising Up! concepts/brands. In it, she referred to Otpor!, the ostensibly ‘grass-roots’ instigators of the Serbian ‘Bulldozer Revolution’ of 2000, as ‘just a bunch of kids’. She also spoke glowingly of Gene Sharp, whose strategies were applied in that and each of the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ that subsequently swept through various parts of the globe, culminating in the Arab Spring, which in turn inspired many to participate in the Occupy movement.


Notice a pattern?
What she failed to disclose to her audience is the fact that Otpor!, the groups it subsequently spawned in other countries, and Gene Sharp, were all funded by the National Endowment for Democracy: an American NGO whose activities run parallel to the regime-change objectives of the US government, widely considered [3] to be a ‘plausibly deniable’ above-ground arm for CIA meddling. Another notable oversight from her talk was any mention of what replaced the corrupt governments that these activist movements toppled: slick neoliberals, passing ‘reforms’ that enabled the rapid re-organisation of their economies to suit western multinationals; and in the case of Egypt, the coming of the Muslim Brotherhood to power – later to be replaced by the military dictatorship of al-Sisi, which persists to this day.

Furthermore, it is now known (by way of Wikileaks’ ‘Global Intelligence Files’) that one of the leaders of Otpor!, Srdja Popovic (who after his success in Serbia went on to found CANVAS, a ‘revolution consultancy’ and receive substantial funding from NED for organising groups in other countries) is well-connected to STRATFOR [4], a private intelligence firm “that gathers intelligence on geopolitical events and activists for clients ranging from the American Petroleum Institute and Archer Daniels Midland to Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Northrop Grumman, Intel and Coca-Cola.”


STRATFOR is widely considered to be the private security division of the American intelligence services. Founded in 1996, STRATFOR came to prominence during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 when its ‘cutting-edge analysis’ provided everything that the mainstream news networks needed to know. The company’s geopolitical analysis on the ‘war on terror’ is head-lined by the likes of the Associated Press, Reuters and the BBC. Without going into great detail (that we’ll do later), an influential figure within STRATFOR named Ronald Duchin promulgated a formula for incapacitating anti-corporate activist movements, which Max Wilbert, in his book ‘We Choose to Speak & other essays’, describes as follows:

“STRATFOR advocates are dividing movements into four character types: radicals, idealists, realists, and opportunists. These camps can then be dealt with summarily: First, isolate the radicals. Second, “cultivate” the idealists and “educate” them into becoming realists. And finally, co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry. This is how movements are neutralized: those who should be allies are divided, infighting becomes rampant, and paranoia rules the roost. To combat these strategies, we must understand the danger they represent and how to counter them.”

As unlikely as this may sound to some of you, we would contend that isolating the radicals, educating the idealists into becoming realists, and co-opting the realists into agreeing with industry is precisely what the Climate Mobilisation movement is engaged in doing. Fear not – we’ll be providing ample evidence for our accusation below, and in the articles to follow.

And lest you feel that we’re placing undue emphasis on Gail Bradbrook’s reference to the events in Serbia, we’d like to point out that Gene Sharps’s long-time employee Jamila Raqib (who has now become the Executive Director of Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute, following his death) just so happens to sit on the Advisory Board of ‘The Climate Mobilization’ – a group set up by Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Director of Fundraising’, Margaret Klein Salamon.

https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/advisory-board


Jamila Raqib.
In addition, if we look at the references/further reading list in XR co-founder ‘Roger’ Hallam’s ‘How to Win’ [5] (on which much of XR’s strategy appears to be based) he names Popovic’s ‘Blueprint for Revolution’ as “the KEY TEXT!”:

“A must read on how good organisation and a determination to have fun are the key to mass participatory action to bring down autocratic regimes – from the people who have done it, so you can’t argue with that! Again note that the context is taking on dictators – but as the subtitle implies – these mechanisms and techniques enable you to “change the world” – and increasingly they apply to the political realities of the western “democracies”.”

Well, they certainly ‘did it’, we’ll give you that much. Given that XR are promoting the ‘colour revolution’ model, it stands to reason that an essential component of this model would be (as it was with the ‘colour revolutions’) the financial backing of those who stand to benefit from the changes brought about by such ‘activism’; as well as the collusion of the bought-and-paid-for media that serve those interests. And yes, that very much includes The Guardian – those charming cheerleaders [6] for ‘liberal’ imperialism. As it happens, it appears that this very same model is about to be rolled out in Venezuela [7], as America tries to install its puppet, Juan Guaidó, to enable more efficient extraction of Venezuela’s oil resources

In 2011, Journeyman Pictures released a 27-minute documentary called ‘The Revolution Business’, which provides a rare view behind the facade of the manufactured ‘colour revolutions’. Considering how closely XR appears to be following their lead, we reckon that you might do well to take a look at it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXbA6yZY-8
As far as we’re concerned, there’s nothing whatsoever spontaneous or grass-roots about the ‘climate mobilisation’ that’s currently being promoted all over the mass media. Mirroring what happened with the ‘colour revolutions’, idealistic youth are simply being herded into pre-approved movements, to create the illusion of a popular mandate for what the ruling classes have already determined to be the best course of action for preserving their dominance and control: carbon taxation, ‘smart’ cities, the 5G/ internet of things surveillance grid, AI, depopulation, and new investment opportunities in what’s being called the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (‘renewable technologies’, dependent on very limited rare earth minerals and heavily polluting mining operations, combined with health-damaging microwave technologies), as well as ‘carbon capture’/trading scams.


If any of this is either new or doubtful to you, then an essential piece of preliminary reading is Cory Morningstar’s The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent [8] series. Her website contains a wealth of research into the collusion between NGOs and the agents of empire. While one may not share all of the author’s political convictions, this is irrelevant, since we can find no fault in her detailed indictment of contemporary environmentalists’ collusion with the ruling classes. Speed-read if you must, but if you want to be in with a chance of understanding this mess, then don’t neglect to look at her work.

Here it would serve to underline the following point, as expressed by a certain Gavin Nascimento: “The problem is not that there is a lack of money, food, water, or land. The problem is we’ve given control of these resources to psychopaths.” Colluding in the schemes of those who have dispossessed you, which they’ve specifically designed to bestow upon themselves an aura of benevolence, is unlikely to yield much in the way of meaningful results. While climate groups make some token gestures towards serious economic reform, it’s clear that these points are low in their list of priorities, and will be the first to be jettisoned for the sake of ‘the greater good’. The dichotomy between ‘nationalist chauvinist imperialism’ and ‘benevolent globalist imperialism’ is an entirely false one; what neither of them challenges is the dominance of the rigged financial system that continues to concentrate the world’s wealth into the hands of an extremely small number of people.


Captain Monobot and the Planeteers
Our own research has as its focus groups based in Britain, since that’s where we’re from, and in particular the group known as ‘Extinction Rebellion’. Riding on the back of extensive publicity in The Guardian, courtesy of everyone’s favourite attack-dog [9] ‘ethical’ imperialist journo George Monbiot, as well as on BBC News, social media platforms and within activist networks, the movement launched itself very publicly on November 12th 2018 with activists glueing themselves to the doors of the Department of Energy offices in London, and spray-painting slogans on the windows.

They have since convened numerous nonviolent ‘swarming protests’ all over Britain, employing tactics designed to maximise visibility and media exposure such as the blockading of roads and bridges, and the resultant arrests of participants. They are demanding that “the UK government immediately declares a climate and ecological emergency; reduces to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, and creates a citizens’ assembly to oversee these changes”. They have also encouraged people in other countries to take up their cause; the hope appears to be that the movement will ‘catch on’ in a similar manner to how the Arab Spring or ‘colour revolutions’ did, bringing nations to a standstill and thus forcing politicians’ hands.

Their website [10] states that from April 15th, they intend to take their activities to the next level: “thousands of rebels will peacefully block streets in Central London – where the UK’s politicians, media, people and money are concentrated – until the government agrees to meet and seriously discuss the crisis with us.”

“At 11am on Monday 15 April we are inviting you to gather in Parliament Square. We will take our message to the British Parliament and the Government asking for a meeting to seriously discuss our demands for emergency action. If there is no response we will set up camp in Parliament Square and several other key locations in Central London. Please bring a tent and food. (…) If there is still no agreement to meet we will split into groups and sit down in numerous roads going into central London, effectively blocking road access into the centre of the city.”

There are a number of players involved in XR. To try and understand where this group has come from, and where it might be going, we’ve looked into their biographies and who they associate with, then branched out into related areas. The research will be released in a number of strands, beginning with our investigation into XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook.

Given that you’ll very likely be hearing a lot more about XR in the weeks to come, we cordially invite you to our next article, where you’ll be able to learn many things about them you’ll quite likely not be hearing anywhere else.

[Click here for part 1]: Dr Gail Marie Bradbrook: Compassionate Revolutionary… for hire?

Please note that we also have a page on Facespook, which you can ‘like’ or ‘follow’ to be kept up to date on new articles (assuming that the Al-Gore-rithims permit it): https://www.facebook.com/unextincti0n/

[TonyGosling]

"An indulgence we cannot afford."@GeorgeMonbiot tells @MiriamOCal that we must end our dependence on farming if we are to overcome the realities of climate change.#rtept pic.twitter.com/JFMeRqUSdj

— RTÉ Prime Time (@RTE_PrimeTime) July 19, 2022

[TonyGosling]

Guru- George Monbiot
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1278919055362097152.html

George Monbiot - Jul 3rd 2020
'For a few months at university, I was in the same social circle as Ghislaine Maxwell. I knew her fairly well. At first, it was fun. Then, almost overnight, I saw it for what it was: a networking nightmare of bright laughter and false friendship, with a howling void beneath.
No one gave a damn about anyone else. It was all about climbing the social ladder. I felt I had seen an X-ray of power and wealth in this country: the grinning skull and empty sockets beneath the peachy skin. It was terrifying. It set me on the path I've been on ever since.
I spiralled into a pretty dark place after that. I withdrew completely, and started the process of working out what a good life looked like, and how it could be lived. The experience inoculated me against ever again wanting to live the high life, or rub shoulders with that crowd.
It was the most important thing I learnt at university. From then on, I went my own way, did what I thought was right, rather than what was expected of me. I've made plenty of mistakes along the way, and I still have much to learn. But I'm glad I saw it when I did. '