For those of you who have read all along and saw I was clearly moving somewhere in particular this is the magic moment when I get to holler “we’re here!” Unfortunately, all those mysterious defined terms like engrenage and dirigiste were created for a reason. I needed them to ultimately discuss the hows of the death of the individual. And the linked demise of economic freedom. And since as I keep saying that individual liberty and economic freedom for each person to pursue their dreams and buy and sell what seems to be needed have always been essential for widespread prosperity, we need to talk about this now. Right before the international UN sustainability conference called Rio+20 that is just cranking up as I write. I see our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leading the US delegation.

Not to be mean, well maybe just a little, but all the talk about charters and accreditation and gypsy principals and supers and Quality Learning and SEL and outcomes based education and UNESCO were all essential to lay a foundation. I needed you to stop thinking of education as necessarily being a good thing. It should be but now it has become the most valuable and potent weapon available for the scheming set. And their mediocre allies who are perfectly willing to push any idea that allows them to live at the expense of other people.

Now I happen to know for a fact that the Belmont Challenge goal that “global energy security be provided entirely by sources that are renewable and have neutral impacts on other aspects of global sustainability” is impossible. Even trying will send us all hurtling back towards the limited lives of Middle Age serfs without air conditioning or cars or widespread food production or distance travel. If not caves and fires.

So when you hear an education proposal from now on, ask if it is trying to strengthen individual independence, actual knowledge, genuine innovation, and people’s ability to interact and cooperate with each other as they see needs and wants. Without the need to get anyone’s consent. Otherwise I want you to think of locusts coming after a field of wheat ready to be made into life-sustaining grains. They are coming because they can and they are hungry. It is better to know they are coming if we are to have any chance of protecting the wheat. Maybe harvest it early and put it into padlocked silos. Otherwise we will be discussing what happened from a barren field with the threat of famine ahead. Mind arson may be a provocative term but it is also an accurate term for this official agenda we have been discussing.

I have not read or heard of any coverage of either the Belmont Forum or the Belmont Challenge. My knowledge of it comes from documents obtained as I tracked education initiatives from the March 2012 Planet under Pressure Conference. They were located on computer servers outside any of the participating countries. I guess that’s convenient. It will take me several posts to lay out what people almost everywhere should be aware of.

Right now we are in the 1-2 year “design and secure the necessary partners and support for a 10 year research mission” to transition to sustainable economies where official  “decision-makers” make all the necessary plans and decisions. In the 20th century we called this central economic planning and it had a terrible track record. But the lust for power and control is apparently eternal. And the computers are so much stronger now so here we go down that tragic path again. But this time we have education to be the “step-change in science-society bridging activities.”

The Belmont Forum is a high-level but deliberately informal body created in July 2009 when:

“the world’s major funders of environmental change research, and major international science councils, met at Belmont House, Maryland USA, to consider how best to align financial and human capital towards delivering the environmental science knowledge base that society will need in the 21st century.”

The US National Science Foundation and the UK Natural Environment Research Council manage the Belmont Challenge to lay out and mandate a Roadmap to ensure “equitable economic and social development”. The final version of the Challenge was issued March 2011.

The Challenge is founded on the basic belief that “the environment and human society” are “interconnected systems.” The problem is that is not a factual statement. It is a political aspiration. A global one. The kind that will take lots of taxpayer money and public policy directives and radical changes to the purpose and results of education. Public policies based on 10 year models or guesses about the world and what might happen in the future. Wishful thinking that if these desired changes we are seeing in those UN Millenium Development Goals and its Education for All initiatives are imposed all over the world through Quality Assurance and the US Common Core and Australia’s Core Skills Framework, these political theories may create human behavior that can be reliably predicted.

The exact words from the “integrated conceptual framework” adopted by the Belmont Challenge are these:

“the second requirement is to model interactions between humans and the weather-climate-biogeochemical system. This will introduce novel methodologies that account for societal drivers, impacts and feedbacks. This is a challenging endeavour requiring creative solutions and some compromises because human behavior cannot YET  be fully represented within the framework of present-day physical prediction systems.”

But with enough emphasis on basic skills and concepts accessible to all and emotion and limiting literacy, apparently the schemers hope that human behavior can become predictable. And desired priorities for future living will become automatic. A reflex.

We really are going to have to talk about this some more.  This is just cranking up and it’s time to really examine all this nonsense. Yes education and climate change are two related tools for the international scheming set. Also known as parasites poisoning the host and living at our expense. We are the hosts and financing all this modelling and scheming. And we will be the victims if nothing is done to talk about this “informal body.”