Welcome to Killing Medusa

This publication is a cross-posting of dialogues from the the “HyperScreen of the Present” component of our website, Killingmedusa.com. In this live monitoring part of our experiment into decoding the alphabetic illusion we test our toolbox with observations and predictions about events in the Great Game of Petroleum. These tools present a different interpretation writing — one that looks beyond syntax and grammar to the dynamic structure of public information and how it connects to broader energy flows (both abstract and physical.)

Before diving in we suggest touring the website’s other component, the Ground Truth Dialectical Engine (GT Engine), which explains our tools and concepts. You can also find brief descriptions of them in the Legend. If you are reading this on Killingmedusa.com during the soft launch (February to June 2022), please note that we are writing for an external audience on the Medium platform.

The Dialectical Dialogue

Like most of our site, this text is formatted in dialogues and structured dialectically. The framing dialectics include:

1. Inside Mind vs. Outside Mind. The dialogue between the insider Red and outsider Percy. But as Red points out all the time, he considers himself little more than the insider foil to Percy’s outsider hypotheses.
2. Concept vs. Object. This is the core dynamic of the Ground Truth Dialectic. The Concept is a relevant propaganda campaign. The Object is the place where the campaign connects to the infrastructure of commodity trade, specifically petroleum.
3. Oil vs Natural Gas. Oil is the world’s most valuable commodity, one that (indirectly via the US Dollar) prices all other commodities. But with the rise of e-vehicles, the transition to its conjoined sibling natural gas is well on. We believe this is the most important dynamic in the world today, and will be watching the systemic upheavals closely.
4. Present vs. Past. We will be comparing observation from our live monitoring to similar events from the recorded history of Western Civilization (which we are mapping in the GT Engine component of the website.) Our current focus is on the First Crusade, Reformation and World War I. The objective is to find the wave-like patterns of energy that connect the past through the present to the future.
5. Screen vs. Snow. Here Percy compares his “live” perception of abstract and physical energy. We are proposing that, with training and practice, Outside Minds can turn writing into a 4D map of energy flows, much like the mind does with retinal images of a physical environment. So during our “soft” launch of this experiment in the first half of 2022, Percy will compare his perception/cognition of the propaganda Screen with the snow in Colorado’s backcountry.

Of course the dialectics don’t stop with this group. We compare and contrast everything — a constant feedback loop of deconstruction and synthesis that’s the hallmark of the GT Engine.

The Predictive Framework

This is an experiment, and experiments require predictions. Please note that these aren’t precise— like betting on a sporting event or financial market. Rather we’ve identified a series of probable future events that we will monitor within an “Event Cone” structure for both causes and effects. Accurate decoding requires radical honesty and minimal self-consciousness. We will point out where our projections fall on the spectrum between right and wrong, and adjust our approaches and tools accordingly.

The prediction that frames everything is the looming bifurcation of the singular world trading system called “Globalization” into two zones. One contains the countries of the Anglo-American Empire and the legacy global reserve currency of the U.S. Dollar: the “Five Eyes” of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The zone that appears to be separating from this system is the Eurasian world island, led by Germany, Russia and China. Hanging in the balance is the Persian Gulf’s flows of petroleum, and their financialization by international banks.

We believe the pivotal event in this bifurcation will be the establishment of a new reserve currency, which will allow the new trading zone to operate outside the financial hegemony of the U.S. Dollar. That event could have far-reaching impacts, particularly for the domestic stability of America and Great Britain — who have been gorging on the rents of oil financialization for nearly two generations. The causal factors that could lead to this shift are based on an assumption that the new trading zone will stay within the framework of the post-Bretton Woods/Gold Standard trading system. Based on that, the possible short and near-term events we are monitoring and predicting include:

1. Establishment of international LNG benchmark.
2. Demise of the Brent oil benchmark.
3. Establishment of U.S. Gulf Coast oil and LNG benchmarks
4. E-Vehicle tipping point, pegged to China’s production.
5. The opening of Nordstream 2, and its impact on European trade and politics.
6. Development of Iran natgas fields and access to export markets.
7. Saudi tensions internally, and with Qatar — holder of the world’s largest natgas reserves
8. Re-opening of the Persian Gulf petroleum pipelines to the eastern Mediterranean
9. The boom/bust of U.S. fracking (oil and natgas)

Meanwhile the propaganda overlaying these events is pegged to the metronomic cycle of American elections. For the soft launch of this experiment will be monitoring the domestic dynamics of the 2022 midterm vote as well as the outside-in manipulations of various actors — notably the masterful information warfare techniques of Putin’s Kremlin.