Into The “New Normal”? (Part 1)

 


This article was first published in New View magazine Issue 96 Jul-Sept 2020

As we approach midsummer we can recall Rudolf Steiner’s stern characterisation of the Archangel of Summer, Uriel.1 The Archangel  of the historical conscience, Uriel gazes into the depths and sees through our errors but also summons us to resist summer’s languid dreaming and its physical temptations and indulgences and instead, to raise our minds to the heights and exercise our capacity to think with that historical conscience  – to weigh our own deeds and those of our culture. It is a summons powerfully evoked in Vivaldi’s “Summer” from his Four Seasons when the lightning powers down from above into the depths after the opening drowsy languor.

From the sonnet text of the piece:

The shepherd trembles,

fearing violent storms and his fate.

The fear of lightning and fierce thunder

Robs his tired limbs of rest

As gnats and flies buzz furiously around.

Alas, his fears were justified.

The heavens thunder and roar and with hail

Cut the head off the wheat and damage the grain.

At such a time it is worth watching and reflecting on the documentary “Midsommar: Initiation into the Ancient Religion of the Future” by Truthstream Media on Youtube2. It discusses the Swedish-American movie “Midsommar” which was released in summer 2019 at the height of the Greta Thunberg/Extinction Rebellion phenomena. The documentary-makers explore how this film, which is full of symbolism, was clearly intended by its Jewish American writer and director Ari Aster as an initiation ritual disguised as a young lovers’ break-up movie. Their relationship ends up as something of a summer day’s nightmare but also as a catharsis and breakthrough for the heroine, Dani. It points beyond what is presented as the sickness and breakdown of the modern industrial culture of America – including the theme of death by suffocation – to a new form of communitarian society and culture that is actually not new at all, but very ancient. The future, it suggests, is the past: the pre-Christian past, in this case, of ancient Sweden: the American Dani and her boyfriend, the unsubtly named and very inadequate Christian, find themselves  in an empathic, health-giving, but also utterly ruthless community that requires the suicide of the old and the sacrifice of young blood for its continuation. Watching this documentary and the movie itself that like so many movies nowadays is clearly aimed primarily at the 15-25 age group, though the issues it raises certainly go much further, one sees how many contemporary themes are enfolded within it; the viewer is taken through a vicarious initiation ritual, as though following Dani and Christian. Ari Aster seems both to affirm and reject this modern evocation of an ancient way of living. He affirms the community’s  ‘green’ health and harmony, and its seeming sanity but points to elements that he hints will lead eventually to something like Nazism, a collective hive-mind.

Since the film was released last year, to considerable acclaim, we too have been told that our world, our culture, our era has come to an end and is now being replaced by a new era, that of the “new normal.” We have heard this phrase a lot recently: “what will the post COVID-19 new normal be like?”; “better a new normal than go back to the old normal”; “we’ll have to get used to the new normal” and so on. Some have pointed out that a “new normal” is a contradiction in terms. So, for that matter, is the phrase “social distancing”. How can you be ‘social’ and at the same ‘distanced’? Orwellian language comes to mind: “war is peace” “ignorance is strength”, “freedom is slavery” – likewise, “social is distanced”, “the normal is new”.

Through the looking glass

Here we are “through the looking glass”, to borrow from Alice in Wonderland. Again and again the mainstream media have told us we will be in “a new world”, “a new order” after COVID-19 has passed, or that we are already in one. Who is it that tells us what time of history this is and decides when the new age begins? Those voices are invariably channelled to us by the mainstream media – a giant de facto conglomerate of just 7 media corporations: out in front are five American and one Japanese conglomerate3. Behind them trails the BBC. An example of how we are moulded and nudges to hold certain views – on 7 June presenter Mark Mardell, on the BBC Radio 4 programme The World This Weekend took the whole programme to address this question of reading the runes of the future after COVID-19. What key voices did he and his editors select to put before the listening millions? The programme was ‘topped and tailed’ by interviews with Larry Summers (below, right) and Tony Blair (below, left). Summers was a key Treasury official throughout the Clinton administration, eventually (1999-2001) rising to become become Treasury Secretary like his political mentor before him, Robert Rubin4. Summers played a large role in the US response to the major economic crises of the 90s (Mexico, the Asian economies, Russia); through his Harvard connections he gave advice to Boris Yeltsin (1992-97) and facilitated the pillaging of Russia by US financial interests during Yeltsin’s years in power in Russia. Furthermore, Summers played a significant part in pushing through repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a move which would later become a major causative factor in the Crash of 2007-20085. After leaving government, he became Harvard University’s first Jewish President. During that time there was a ‘special relationship’ between Summers and the late Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who donated $25 million to Harvard and for which he received a personal office at the university. Summers later went on to serve briefly in the Obama administration (2009-2020) as Director of the National Economic Council, and is currently a professor at Harvard. He is a member of three institutions of the global elite: the  Bilderberg Group (on which he was for a time a member of the Steering Committee), the very influential Group of Thirty (financiers and academics), and the Trilateral Commission6, as well as the 100 year-old US foreign policy think tank, the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR).


What did Summers and Blair say about the future? Summers said that after COVID-19 there would be fewer people working, more inequality, a smaller economy. Inflation would have to be avoided, private savings absorbed, there would have to be an increase in demand Central banks would be less important, interest rates held near or at zero, fiscal policies and public investment/government spending would be much more important as well as more government borrowing. There would be a pro-growth agenda, ‘secular stagnation’ (cf. Japan) and manufacturing would be closer to home and less ‘just in time’. The centre-left could be positive about the future. Tony Blair, who is so unpopular in Britain outside of elite circles that he dare not show his face in public bryond those circles, said many sectors would shrink, e.g. the hospitality sector and construction, and retail. The Left, he said would argue that the State must take charge, while the Right would argue for economic nationalism and protectionism. The problems would be for technology to be ‘practical’, a need for “sensible government”. Globalisation would go on. There would be a new geopolitical world, a major feature of which would be the hostility between the US and China. Both men argued for much more State involvement. This is what Al Gore, XR and Greta Thunberg were calling for last year. Now they have got it. But through governments’ precipitate actions in reacting to COVID-19, they and we have also now got trillions in debt, millions unemployed and economies which will take many years, perhaps decades, to recover. The situation in the developing countries is likely to be even worse because they depend so much on investment from and sales to the developed countries.

Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865, the year the US Civil War ended. The author, Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) followed the book’s success with his second book about Alice in an ‘alternative reality’: Through the Looking Glass, in 1871. The 1860s were an important decade in human history. From an esoteric point of view, they were indeed the years when mankind began to move ‘through the looking glass’ into a new reality. 250 years of deepening materialism now began to shift. Why was this? Rudolf Steiner showed in his numerous lectures and writings how the Christ Event – the birth, life, death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ in the first 33 years of the Christian era -  was the fulcrum, the turning point in human history. Human evolution descended to it through the long physical and psychic ‘condensation’ of humanity out of the world of spirit onto the material plane and has been slowly ascending from it since 33 AD, from the material plane once more into a spiritual, dematerialised condition – a very long process. St. Paul therefore spoke of Christ as the ‘Second Adam’ who rescues mankind. He enables a turnaround for us all and saves humanity from becoming stuck in the miasma of matter. A new story, as it were, thus began for mankind 2000 years ago, a story that is structured in terms of centuries which are each formed by 3 periods of 33⅓ years, the periodicity of the life of Jesus Christ.7

Each of these centuries in the new ‘christened’ era of human history can be compared with a year in the life of a human individual. Indeed, when we look at the history of the last 2000 years from this viewpoint, it becomes remarkably illuminated. We see, for example, that the 14th century, the time of the plague known as the Black Death across much of the vast continent of Eurasia, corresponds with the human experience of puberty, and the shock of that physical experience of the Black Death is reflected in the shock of the physical experiences of puberty. Before and after the Black Death, European history is very different in many ways: in art, in fashion, in religion, in economy. The new humanity that had, as it were, been ‘born’ or ‘reborn’ 2000 years ago was aged 13 in the 14th century and passed into its ‘teenage’ period proper. Puberty is the time when the human astral body is ‘born’, when the individual begins to think for him/herself and struggles to find the balance between thinking and feeling, between self and other, or between self and community or peer group. In the 19th century, the new ‘christened’ humanity was thus, aged 18, in its 19th year and in the 1860s it had reached that point in its development that the human individual reaches at 18 years and 7 months, namely, the Moon Node. This is the remarkable time when the Moon returns to the place in the heavens where it was when each of us was born. The individual – if s/he is paying attention, which, unfortunately, most of us aren’t – can detect a subtle, though in some cases very powerful impulse that for a short period, usually no more than six months at most, can illuminate something of the purpose of the individual’s life in this incarnation. Something that can help to answer the all-important questions: why am I here? Where am I going? Where have I come from? Or even: who am I? Something happens at that point, within us or to us, which, if we are fortunate enough to notice it, is so decisive, so magical and mysterious that it can give us an impulse that lasts for decades or perhaps even for the rest of our life. We meet someone, we read something, we have an experience in Nature or in the arts, we travel somewhere. And we are changed immeasurably by this new impulse, or perhaps only subtly at first but then it grows over the subsequent months and years.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), shown above, entered Oxford University at this point in his life but within months soon lost his mother, who died in January 1851 of “inflammation of the brain” aged 47. Within three years he had graduated with a FirstClass Honours degree in mathematics from Christ Church College where he remained as a lecturer in mathematics for the rest of his life. In 1856 the four-year old Alice Liddell arrived in Oxford with her family; her father was to be a new Dean at Christ Church College. When she was 10 she prompted Lewis Carroll to tell her stories that he then wrote up and published as Alice in Wonderland (original title Alice’s Adventures Underground). His two Alice books are known for their mathematical and logical allusions. The 1850s and 60s was a time when mathematics was crossing a threshold into a new wonderland of its own, that of non-Euclidean geometry. Whereas  Euclid’s geometry was developed in the centuries before Christ to describe the mathematics relating to the material, physical world, the new non-Euclidean mathematics of projective geometry establishing itself in the mid-19th century proved able to describe non-three-dimensional spaces and helped to lay the geometric groundwork for quantum physics in the 20th century.8 At approximately the same time, in the 1860s those artists who by the mid-1870s would have introduced the style known as Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille) were beginning to work together. By the early 1870s the public had enthusiastically welcomed the new style, which seemed to traditionalists to be mere impressions, something fleeting, unfinished, indefinite. But this public welcome showed that the artists were in touch with the spirit of the times.

China, the USA, Russia

The 1860s saw great upheavals too in the sphere of politics. The 20 year-civil war in China (1850-64), the rebellion of the pseudo-Christian Taiping religious sect against the Manchu dynasty, which cost the lives of between 10-30 million Chinese, ended in 1864, due not least to aid given to the Empire by British and American generals and troops. This war and its consequences would determine the fate of the Chinese Empire in its dying decades as well as the destiny of China in the 20th century. Mao Zedong learned a lot from the Taiping, and even today, with the repression of religious groups like Falun Gong, the Chinese authorities have not forgotten the upheavals caused by the Taiping. What happened as a result of the defeat of the Taiping Rebellion was that China was unable to move forward out of its decrepit and corrupt imperial system. The West, whose Protestant missionaries had originally inspired the Taiping leaders, committed troops to help crush the Taipings and enable the Empire to survive, in order to profit from its weakness, corruption and inefficiency.

Meanwhile, in the USA, the two issues left over from the Revolution of 1776-81, namely slavery and States’ rights, exploded in the 1860s as the ‘New World’ showed how well it could copy the bad old ways of the ‘Old World’. The argument between the followers of Thomas Jefferson, who favoured a looser Confederation and stronger states’ rights against the federal centre, and those of Alexander Hamilton9, who favoured a stronger, centralised federal State and a tighter Union, erupted around the central issue of slavery: the more agrarian, slave-dependent and Bible-quoting South vs the rapidly industrialising and secularising North. After four years of fighting (1861-1865) and 1.6 million deaths on both sides, victory predictably went to the North, with its greater population and resources. The result was that although slavery was formally abolished throughout the country, which was a progressive step, the cruel way in which the war was fought and Reconstruction carried out meant that a very different USA had emerged by the end of the century. It was a much more tightly centralised and aggressive State that now embarked on a path to world domination, beginning with the seizure (1893) and annexation of Hawaii (1898) and the war against Spain (1898) that gave the Americans control of the Philippines, 33 years after the end of the Civil War.

The USA was now a Pacific Ocean power, and within 20 years it had a navy to rival the British. Indeed, the Civil War signalled a major geopolitical shift, the consequences of which are still very much with us: the British government was officially neutral during the Civil War, but favoured the South nevertheless, hoping the war would split the USA, thus rendering it a less formidable potential rival to the British Empire. This did not happen, so from the 1870s onwards, the British elite gradually mended fences with the new, more powerful USA to gain American support against the rising Germany and by 1914, on the eve of the Great War, the elites of the two English-speaking powers had become intermeshed, even at the level of marriage. The American elite had responded to Rudyard Kipling’s imperialist call in his 1899 poem “Take up the White Man’s Burden”, and the foundations of today’s “Five Eyes”10 military and intelligence Anglosphere alliance were laid in the two decades before 1914.

After 2 x 33 years of imperialism and ever-increasing centralisation, in 1931 the USA was staring economic disaster in the face in the great Depression of that decade. It was only another world war that enabled the country to overcome that problem, as Al Gore acknowledged in a speech in 201311. A further 33 years of centralisation and imperial expansion from 1931 had brought the USA by 1964 to the assassination of another President (J.F.Kennedy) and the beginning of America’s national trauma in Vietnam – the direct consequence of its Pacific Ocean ‘adventurism’ in the 1890s. It also led – not least because of the assassination of Kennedy – to the terribly fraught struggle for, and eventual achievement of, civil rights for black citizens in the 1960s – this struggle was the consequence of the State having resorted to war a hundred years earlier. The resentment of Southern whites at the defeat of the Confederacy had resulted in 100 years of repression of black civil rights in the South.

By 1964 the USA was the world’s leading superpower, but the US elite had learned few lessons; despite President Eisenhower’s famous TV speech on leaving office warning (too late) about the growing power of the military–industrial complex, centralisation and imperialism had proceeded apace. The consequence was that 33 years later, in late 1997, the USA had to suffer a unique collapse in its global profile and the acute embarrassment of seeing its President accused before the whole world of sexual activity in the White House with a young Jewish intern, Monica Lewinsky. In that same year President Clinton issued a formal apology to the surviving victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1932-72), all black Americans with syphilis who had been studied under false pretences but not treated, not given penicillin. Also in 1997 in the USA, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov – the first time a computer chess programme had beaten a world champion – a consequence of America’s obsession with technological power. 33 years on from those events in 1997 will bring the USA to the year 2030, which is likely to be a momentous date for various reasons discussed in the second part of this article.


The 1860s was also a turning point for Russia. After the death of the ultra-conservative Czar Nicholas I in 1855, the new liberal Czar, Alexander II ushered in a period of much-needed reform in Russia when he emancipated all Russian serfs (over 23 million people) on 3 March 1861, a major development for Russia. In March 20 years later, he was blown up and killed by revolutionary socialists who felt his reforms had not gone far enough. Unfortunately, Alexander had been less liberal when it came to minority ethnic groups: he oppressed the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians and Belorussians and agreed to a policy of ethnic cleansing of the Circassian people in the Caucasus; numerous genocidal massacres of Circassians were carried out by Russian troops between 1860 and 1864. Strife between Russia and the peoples of the Caucasus region would break out repeatedly over the next 130 years.

Both Alexander II (above, left) and Abraham Lincoln (above, right) were bringers of freedom to many in their countries but were also bringers of war and death to many others. Alexander’s emancipation of the serfs came the day before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated US President on 4 March 1861. Both events occurred in the same week as the birth of Rudolf Steiner (27.2.1861), the man whose philosophy, first published 33 years after his birth, would make clear the relationship between freedom in thinking and moral action. Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom (1894) was the full exposition of the ideas laid out in his doctoral thesis, Truth and Science, published three years earlier, in 1892. 33 years after the publication of that book, he died in 1925. The Confederacy, Alexander II’s Czarist Russia (after 1861) and Nazi Germany all had two things in common: they did not recognise any legal inequality between the members of their main communities: white Southerners, Russians, Germans respectively. They also insisted on the subjugation and legal inferiority of certain ethnic groups within their borders: black slaves in the Confederacy, non-Russians in Czarist Russia and so-called ‘non-Aryans’ (incl. Jews) in Nazi Germany.

From Moon Node to Ego Event

The 1860s was the Moon Node of mankind and Rudolf Steiner was born at that precise point. It was still the high point of materialism, and imperialism and racism, communism and fascism were all yet to fully emerge and reach their peak, but the 1860s announced a new direction, as the Moon Node usually does, albeit often subtly -  a new direction, spoken from within the spirit of mankind, and from within the spirit of the individual: who am I really? What is my true direction and goal? If that voice has been heard, by the age of 21, when another seven years have gone by since puberty and the ego has been ‘born’, the individual can often sense or find his/her destiny and has embarked in the path towards it. The period between the Moon Node at 18 years and 7 months (in history, the 1860s) and the 21st birthday (in history, the beginning of the 22nd century) is a truly critical time for the young individual – a time of testing when the young person has to find him/her self. If the individual establishes a stable sense of self and solid goals by 21, s/he can advance through the next period of life with confidence and positivity, but if that does not happen, psychological illness, drug dependency, a fall into fanaticism or crime, or even suicide can result, and the individual’s incarnation can come to a premature end.

This time of great testing is what seems to be happening in the USA right now with the race issue and the states’ rights issue (the struggle between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, the libertarian Right and the ‘big government’ Left). What was not resolved healthily in the USA in the 1860s at the time of humanity’s Moon Node has still not been resolved in the 21st century. The same is true of China today: the failure of the Taiping Rebellion to develop into something healthy in the 1860s  – rather like the similar failure of the French Revolution to do the same 70 years earlier – has eventually resulted in a new authoritarian Empire and a new Emperor bound in a poisonous and mysterious dialectic with the USA, made worse by what  seemed to issue from Wuhan, the centre of China, last year – COVID-19 – and by the world’s reactions to it, notably those of the US and British governments.

On 4 June, the 31st  anniversary of the 1989 Tienanmen killings in Beijing, Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former Special Adviser who, since his dismissal by Trump at the time of the Charlottesville incident in the summer of 2017, has been looking for a new mission – civilisational warrior and would-be ‘crusading’ Catholic that he is12 – staged a PR event in New York harbour in front of the Statue of Liberty together with China’s 73rd richest man, billionaire Guo Wengui (aka Miles Kwok) and they proclaimed the establishment13 of the “New Federal State of China” with the specific aim of overthrowing the Communist Party regime in China.

The new Chinese State, declared Bannon, reading aloud the ‘foundational document’ of the “New federal State of China”, would be based on British and American legal and constitutional practice. Bannon is a man who looks for civilisational dragons to fight: “the West vs Islam, the West vs China” etc. This comes at a time when the British and American governments are both making increasingly hostile sabre-rattling statements about China. There will have to be “a reckoning with China” in the new post-COVID normal, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has declared, because of China’s alleged misdeeds in the way it handled COVID-19 in the early months, from November 2019 to January this year. But we can recall that in October last year Wuhan was the place where the Chinese government chose to hold the 7th International Military Games, while on the very same day in New York, a coronavirus pandemic simulation known as “Event 201” was held under the auspices of the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Johns Hopkins University. Among the recommendations of that ‘round table’ discussion was the implementation of a global media programme to “flood the zone” (the phrase was used many times) with the same message about the pandemic and how to handle it. We saw this in operation by the world’s media from January-May this year after the World Health Organisation first declared a  “public health emergency of international concern” (30 Jan.) and then on 11 March a “global pandemic”. We saw also how the Imperial College Report on the pandemic published on 16 March was written by Prof. Neil Ferguson not only for the UK but also for the USA and had a significant effect on the subsequent “lockdown” actions taken by the governments of those two countries. The term “lockdown” itself stems from the US prison system.  The hostility between China and the West over the past 10 years – but especially since the COVID-19 outbreak – goes back to the 1860s and beyond.

Anthroposophers can recognise in this mutual hostility the contours of the eternal struggle between the two spiritual counterforces known as Lucifer and Ahriman (above, painting by Arild Rosenkrantz) working through China and through the West respectively (notably the Anglosphere). It is not of course the case that these two spiritual powers are only active in these two regions but due to the fact that, according to Rudolf Steiner,14 Lucifer in the distant past and Ahriman in the near future have their incarnations in those two regions, they are, as it were, cultural and geographic strongholds of those powers. It is no accident that in just this crucial period between the 1860s and 2100, when humanity is seeking, albeit mostly unconsciously, to incarnate its own Ego, these two powers China and the Anglosphere, should, through their mutual hostility, ‘combine’ to try to prevent humanity from doing so.

But the Ego Incarnation which humanity is embarking on now is only one aspect – although a very important one – of the new period of history opening up in the 2020s. In previous articles in New View, I have written about the new, approximately 200 year-phase, commencing in 2020, of the arc of history that began in 1603. This arc is determined by the regular conjunctions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. In 2020 we move from the Earth sign phase of these planetary meetings to the Air sign phase. As the arc that began in 1603 is that of materialistic natural science, we have passed through a blazing up of that impulse when Jupiter and Saturn met in Fire signs (1600s-1840s), a consolidation of it when they met in Earth signs (1840s-2020s) and now a loosening or relaxation of it with their meeting in Air signs (2020s-2220s; this year they meet in Aquarius). Before that relaxation of materialism can really take effect, “before even a part of the third millennium has elapsed” (Rudolf Steiner), the spiritual being who is the inspirer of materialism, Ahriman, is seeking in the early part of this Ego event, this 21st century, to incarnate on the physical plane “in the West”, just as Lucifer did in China c.3000 BC and Christ did in Israel 2000 years ago. All global elite attention from the UN on down is focusing via the mainstream media on the year 2030. That year will of course be 2000 years after the Incarnation of Christ in Jesus at the Baptism in the River Jordan. Three years later, in 2033, will follow the 2000th anniversary of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the first Whitsun, as well as the 100th anniversary of Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany and in 2032 the 100th anniversary of the publication of Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World. Readers of New View are recommended to study the “Strategic Intelligence” section of the website of the World Economic Forum (WEF)15 to observe something of the incredible extent of elite planning for global governance which the WEF calls the “Global Reset” following the events of 2019 (climate change movement/XR/Greta Thunberg) and 2020 (COVID-19). Virtually everything has been thought of on the WEF’s inverted seven and five pointed star charts except for….spirituality and religion; they are omitted.

The second part of this article will address in greater depth these aspects of the coming “new normal” intended by the global oligarchy so that we may prepare ourselves for what may be approaching as the “rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”.16 It will also consider how this alleged “new normal” can be met by impulses informed by Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science.

Notes

1 R. Steiner, lecture of 12.Oct.1923 in The Four Seasons and the Archangels (RSP, 1984)

2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gt-DsWO4ks

3 National Amusements, Disney, Time-Warner, Comcast, NewsCorp, Sony.

4 26 years at Goldman Sachs then 70th Secretary of the Treasury, under President Bill Clinton.

5 The Act, passed in 1933, enforced the separation of commercial and investment banking, thus preventing regular commercial banks from getting involved in risky investment banking. After the repeal of the Act, commercial banks began to engage in unsound investments; their impending or actual failure threatened to impact heavily on ordinary citizens.

6 The Bilderberg Group was founded in Holland in 1954 to hold together the N. American and European elites and ‘oversee’ the evolution of the ‘European Project’ (later, the EU) from behind the scenes. The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski to bring Japanese and Chinese elites into regular consultation with American and European elites, after the Bilderbergers had decided they did not want Japanese and Chinese to join Bilderberg.

7 Steiner first described this new rhythm in human history in a lecture on 23 Dec. 1917.

8 See https://www.nature.com/articles/437323a   ‘Dirac’s hidden geometry’, by Graham Farmelo
9 N.b. the musical Hamilton (2015-), about Alexander Hamilton has been much-hyped and talked up; there is no such musical about Thomas Jefferson!
10 The Five Eyes: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

11 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7dWG5ICxAA

12 See Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAmUo0Np9nw

13 See Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2d–gvN7E

14 R. Steiner lecture of 1.11.1919, Collected Works GA 191.

15 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/archive/the-great-reset

16 From the poem by W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1919), written during the global influenza pandemic of 1918-1919.