Vladimir Milov served under Vladimir Putin as his Deputy Energy Minister. Since then they had a little fall out. US General H. R. McMaster interviewed him for his show ‘Battlegrounds’ (organized by the Hoover Institute). In the interview Mister Milov shares with us some insights into Putin’s rise, the inner workings of the administration in Russia and the attitude of the public. The full recording is long and you find it here.
This video summarises and adds illustrations to the audio. Unfortunately, the microphone and/or sound setting of the original document are not great and I do not know how to improve on that. If somebody can clean it up and make it available to me, I will re-upload it with the polished sound. But in any event it is easily comprehensible still. On some segments (notably at the beginning) the voice modulation sounds strange. This is because my cuts “corrected” grammar flaws or pre-empted an interruption of the interviewer that make listening to it rather more difficult. They do not misrepresent Vladimir Milov’s views (and everybody can check the original to prove me right).
While we still struggle with the very real consequences of the Covid-19 epidemic and our responses to it, our elites think ahead already. John Kerry (US special envoy for climate) and Ursula von der Leyen (President of the EU Commission) are on record portraying your struggles as a ‘chance’ or as an ‘opportunity.’ They gave their two cents at the World Economic Forum which pushes the Great Reset.
And while this sounds just as callous as they are, they have really only arrived at the logical end of their ideology. Your life must be reset unless you want to continue living with all your “wrong” decisions. In the eyes of the all-truth-hogging elites, people who wish to conserve their “backward” lifestyles do this for one or more of the following four reasons.
1. They are dumb.
2. They are crazy.
3. They are evil.
4. They are dependent on the false paths taken in the past.
At the first glance the only-good-no-bad choices like ‘green’, ‘renewable’ or ‘clean’ energy are only refused by monsters. After all there can be no discussion of negative effects of various technologies. They are perfect. And some left-wingers have spent decades finding the villains in soulless corporations, inanimate objects only frequented by people with jobs. The soul of the world is already bound in trees, nature and the planet.
But some left-wingers have found clemency in the concept of “path dependency.” It suggests that the change to the only-good-no-bad option were too big. Now, with costs running out of control anyway, their opportunity has come to convert the benevolent, yet previously stubborn, to pure perfection.
Meanwhile the underlying current is speeding up. The reassurance of the left that the time for only-good-no-bad options has come can be read in innumerable international treaties and, if you are German like the organiser of the World Economic Forum and the mastermind of the Great Reset, you hear it literally everywhere and all the time. And it concentrates itself in one word: sustainability.
What is in a word? A rose is a rose is a … For Elisabeth Wehling at the linguistics department of Cal in Berkeley, the answer is ‘framing.’ Framing is the emotional content a word has outside of its pure verbatim meaning. Sustainability (and far more broadly in use right now: the German equivalent ‘Nachhaltigkeit’) is a propaganda term designed to make you feel safe and well just when you are expected to consent. In German TV commercials, TV shows, news casts and other media products the word is increasingly replacing the words ‘good’, ‘permanent’, ‘lasting’, ‘safe’, ‘robust’ and ‘positive.’ Parallel to that, the new word is constantly dropped around left-wing and environmentalist policies and lifestyle choices. This is classical conditioning. The new word ‘sustainable’ is that sweet organic-flour applepie and immigration. The legions of people who don’t entertain weighing arguments for and against a choice is growing. And a solid portion still identify the first three possible reasons why you don’t agree: asininity, madness and evil.
Additionally the old ghosts of anti-Capitalism are rising from their tombs. The World Economic Forum seeks to revive the aged and almost forgotten discussion about ‘stakeholder value.’ This is the notion that businesses should not only care about money (pronounce ‘only’ with utter disdain), but also immaterial goods such as happiness of the workers, cleanliness of the ponds and the wishes of other interested parties, ominously called ‘stakeholders.’ While, at first glance, everybody agrees on the basic idea of kindness to women, blacks, customers, gays, borrowers and other potential stakeholders of a given enterprise, the notion is operated primarily as an excuse for external involvements. One face of this is the current diversity management swamp bogging Western corporations.
The Great Reset would be a lame duck if the only-good-no-bad option were merely about organic flour freeing us from our sin of baking with ordinary flour. The pepper is the professed urgency of the climate change. When Greta Thunberg started as a child, we had 12 years to go until the point of no return. The Swedish pro-panic activist is now at an age at which Britney Spears had already preserved her virginity with Justin Timberlake and I have no idea what clock the left is counting down right now. But the idea of utmost urgency is still at the heart of their mission.
The discussion of the urgency of the climate change is fundamental to understand what changes a society must accept, but such discussions have no place in a good-good-sustainable-good world.
Goldstein 