Yearly Archives: 2020

2021 is Already Optimized for Failure

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

One sure way to identify a system “optimized for failure” is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is “optimized for my success”.

I often discuss optimization here because it offers an insightful window into how systems become fragile and break down. When we optimize something, we’re aiming to get the most bang for our buck: maximize our efficiency, profit, productivity, etc., while minimizing our costs.

To maximize our goal, whatever it is–profits, power, whatever– we strip away redundancy and buffers because these add costs and don’t boost our desired output. They create resilience, i.e. the ability to survive disruptions, but the logic of optimization is relentless: get rid of all extraneous costs, because resilience doesn’t boost the bottom line.

This trade-off–trading resilience for optimization–looks brilliant when everything goes according to plan. But when events veer outside the narrow parameters of the optimized system, the system breaks down: supply chains break, safety procedures fail, and so on.

Even more consequentially, optimization strips away anti-fragility, Nassim Taleb’s term for the ability to not just survive disruptions but emerge stronger and more adaptable.

What happens when inflexible, sclerotic systems optimized to benefit self-serving insiders encounter chaotic turbulence or conditions outside the expected parameters? They collapse because the system is optimized for failure. Put another way: when a system is optimized to benefit insiders at the expense of resilience and anti-fragility, it is effectively optimized to fail because life is not programmable to a steady-state, predictable stability.

2021 is already optimized for failure in key ways:

1. The mRNA vaccines have not been properly tested to answer essential questions such as: can a vaccinated individual retain enough of the virus to infect an unvaccinated individual?

As I explained before, the only way to really test a viral vaccine is to put the vaccinated volunteers in a controlled setting saturated with the virus for many hours. If none of the volunteers have any virus in their post-exposure serological tests, then the vaccine works. If the volunteers still have the virus but didn’t become severely ill, this doesn’t mean they can’t infect others.

One of the problems is the goal of the Covid vaccine trials wasn’t to determine if the virus was eliminated by the volunteers’ immune system; the goal of the trials was to determine whether the vaccinated individuals became severely ill with Covid or not–with “severely ill” being conveniently left undefined.

Individuals who’d already had Covid and who took the vaccine were not tested separately for safety and after-effects, so this remains an unknown.

The unanswered questions about the vaccines’ real-world results will be answered in due time, but not in the lab; they’ll be answered in a public-health “experiment” without precedent.

If you wanted to design a testing process that was optimized for failure, you’d end up with this haphazard, hurried process careening toward approval. The trials and testing of the Covid vaccines are not equivalent to those applied to previous generations of vaccines.

The bigger the claims and the harder the sell, the greater the number of red flags raised. If a product works as wonderfully as advertised, it will sell itself. If “consumers” have to be coerced into buying the product, that speaks volumes–whether we’re free to discuss it or not.

2. The fiscal-monetary “solution” being readied for 2021–print/borrow as many trillions as needed to prop up zombie corporations and obsolete institutions–is optimized for failure. The unstated goal here is to save everything that’s been rigged to benefit self-serving insiders and never mind the consequences: we’ve “proven” we can print infinite trillions with no ill effects.

This appears to be true until diminishing returns hit the wall and linear dynamics suddenly spin into non-linear semi-chaos. At that point, all the levers that we reckoned were god-like in their stability and power–the Treasury selling bonds which the Federal Reserve then buys, and all the other financial tricks and manipulations–no longer work as expected.

3. The sacrosanct “solutions” that we worship as secular gods–central bank-dominated “markets” and the machinery of politics–are both optimized for failure. The “market” and politics have both incentivized extremes of indebtedness, leverage, corruption, fraud and waste, all under the happy belief that the banquet of consequences will never be served. Alas, the tables are groaning with consequences that have been piling up for 12 long years of excess speculation, manipulation and happy-talk PR.

The policies of the past 20 years boil down to this: if we keep blowing ever-larger private-sector asset bubbles, rewarding the few who own most of these assets, this “wealth” will magically restore our economic health. This is of course completely delusional: by concentrating wealth in the hands ofthe few, the policies have also concentrated political power in these same hands.

Ours is a system perfected for extremes of inequality and corruption.

If you set out to design a social-political-economic system that was supremely optimized for failure, you’d end up with America’s status quo. Today’s financiers are like French nobles being led off in chains discussing their next glorious party, oblivious to the end-game just ahead. The political class are like the elites haggling over games in Rome’s Forum in 475 AD, months before what was left of the empire collapsed in a heap.

4. America’s social cohesion has been lost, leaving only empty platitudes, suppression and coercion. “We’re all in this together” shouts the captain of the galley as those chained to the oars are flogged to keep a thoroughly corrupt and illusory “growth” alive. With civic virtue lost to the moral corruption of maximizing private gain by any means available, the foundations of society have crumbled, as I explained in Moral Decay Leads to Collapse.

One sure way to identify a system optimized for failure is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is optimized for my success regardless of how many policies serve the infinite greed of insiders and how many red warning flags are ignored.

The New Normal: One Step Closer to Dystopia. New Covid Outbreaks, People are “Living in Extreme Fear”

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

On September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks took place on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon allegedly orchestrated by Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden, and subsequently blamed it on Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party and then the war on Iraq began.  The Middle East became the prime target of increased Western and Israeli conflicts and interventions. Guantanamo bay, Cuba became a torture center. Surveillance of the Muslims became normalized, then so did surveillance of the entire world. That was phase 1 of Western-led global tyranny, now on to phase 2, with a new disease, the Corona Virus aka Covid-19, appeared on the world stage.  Medical bureaucrats from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) including the longtime medical bureaucrat-in-charge, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Big Tech billionaire nerd, Bill Gates along with the rest of the establishment view everyone as a potential carrier a danger, therefore, they must vaccinate everyone to fight this new disease with an emphasis on treating the situation as a national security threat so Operation Warp Speed was announced.  At the same time, the U.S. government and its allies are fighting continuous wars that they themselves start on the rest of the world and on top of everything else, the world’s global economy is on the brink of the Greatest Depression along with a collapsing global reserve currency, the U.S. dollar.

Just imagine this sometime in the near future, you wake up one morning, you brush your teeth and then you turn on the television and on the screen is the ’emergency broadcast system’ flashing in red, alerting people about new Covid infection rates spiking in your area and it’s declared a red zone. With a disarmed populace in place who has no rights to self-defense, military personnel in hazmat suits wearing masks will be making door to door visits with mandated vaccines in hand, and if you resist, well, you can paint a picture for yourself. The streets are empty and businesses you once visited are now permanently closed making it increasingly difficult to get your basic necessities. Public and private schools are open on the condition that each child is fully vaccinated under government mandates regardless of the health risks associated with the vaccines and in many cases if a child is not vaccinated, the school nurse will do it for you without your permission.  Those who have jobs will have no choice but to get vaccinated or they lose that weekly paycheck they depend for their food and other expenses.  Then you look outside your window and you see the same breadlines in government-approved centers with people wearing facemasks, patiently waiting for their next meal as long as they have their vaccination card in hand.  Crime is out of control with no police protection because a couple of years earlier, major cities and towns across the U.S. decided to defund the police.  They now have social workers and civilian patrols resembling the actions of the Nazi’s who had the useful idiots known as the brown shirts safeguarding the streets from a spread of a disease that cannot be controlled by whatever ridiculous mandates they impose, making sure that the people have facemasks and their government issued vaccination cards readily available for inspection. The internet is also heavily regulated. Depression and suicides increasing by the day, yet, no resistance by the population, just slaves under a medical dictatorship that makes Nazi Germany look like a walk in the park.  That is a dystopian future.

That same old ‘New World Order conspiracy theory that many people laughed about is now unfolding before our eyes. For decades the people were warned, yet they are still blinded by the mainstream media’s fear mongering nonsense and blatant lies that it becomes comical at times. Yet, people are living in extreme fear.  Across the globe, new Covid-19 outbreaks are rising due to false positives detected by the unreliable RT-PCR tests. Countries around the world are waking up to this fact including Portugal who according to the Off-Guardian.org reported that “an appeals court in Portugal has ruled that the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful.” Why? Well the article summed up what the study had found:

Most notably this study by Jaafar et al., which found that – when running PCR tests with 35 cycles or more – the accuracy dropped to 3%, meaning up to 97% of positive results could be false positives. 

The ruling goes on to conclude that, based on the science they read, any PCR test using over 25 cycles is totally unreliable. Governments and private labs have been very tight-lipped about the exact number of cycles they run when PCR testing, but it is known to sometimes be as high as 45. Even fearmonger-in-chief Anthony Fauci has publicly stated anything over 35 is totally unusable

It is well-known that high-risk groups with already life-threatening ailments are the ones at risk, even if there was a severe flu season in effect, they will still be at risk regardless.  Covid-19 lockdowns and mandatory facemasks and the possibility of forced vaccinations in various U.S. states and a number of countries is becoming part of everyday life, the “new normal” it seems.  The Hill reported that government-issued vaccine cards will be distributed to everyone in the US population ‘Details emerging on vaccine cards that will accompany inoculations.”  The report said that the federal government will hand-out cards with your name on them which will list what vaccines you have received and which ones will be due, “Everyone will be issued a written card that they can put in their wallet that will tell them what they had and when their next dose is due,” Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, said Wednesday, according to CNN. “Let’s do the simple, easy thing first. Everyone’s going to get that.” Then clinics and hospitals will send your vaccine report to the federal agencies-in-charge which will basically track and trace individuals of all ages:

Moore added that clinics providing vaccinations will also report what vaccine is administered to state immunization registries. Numerous clinics will also give patients the option to provide their phone numbers so they can be sent a reminder to take their second dose of the vaccine 

The world we once new is dramatically changing, a coerced society that’s is constantly living on the edge of fear, facing lockdowns every few months when Covid-19 cases spike while the establishment continues its early stages of total global control over society. They already control the people through mandated facemasks and lockdowns while Big Pharma is pushing a handful of vaccines so that people can travel, buy food, or for their children to attend school under the “new normal” rules once they get their vaccines.  People are acquiescent to authority, accepting the establishment’s recommendations as law as they walk around confused with facemasks, avoiding people at length. One time I was walking down one of the main avenues while I was in New York City as a woman was trying to avoid a group of young girls without facemasks, she immediately hoped into traffic to avoid them and right behind her was a city bus narrowly missing her by an inch, this woman was obviously so fearful of contracting Covid-19, she almost got herself killed by an incoming city bus, and to be honest with you, I closed my eyes because I thought she was history.  This is the state of the world of paranoia and fear we are living in. There are even people who have not even been outside their homes since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 an international pandemic. Fights are breaking out everywhere between those who refuse facemasks versus the slaves who listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the medical establishment who claim that wearing facemasks is about protecting yourself and respecting others, so people are policing themselves and “snitching” on each other, a dream come true for those who rule.

Normalcy in society has completely changed for the worst. People are less human today because of what the establishment has pushed upon us with their absurd ideas to control the population to prevent an over-exaggerated disease from spreading.  Yet, suicides, depression and loneliness is killing more people by the day because of these unnecessary lockdowns.  The people are on the edge of insanity. The normal life already seems like a long time ago as new trends became normalized over the years before the corona virus ever existed like humans having relationships with sex robots and life-sized dolls.  Humans having sex with robots and dolls and in some cases, even marrying them seems pretty bizarre to me. I am pretty sure that both men and some women are purchasing sex robots and dolls at a higher-rate since the pandemic begun although a handful of people have been interested in this new phenomenon has been introduced to the public. In ‘The Age of Sex Robots: The pros and cons in this emerging sexual age’ by David W. Wahl, PhD in Psychology Today wrote:

Sex robots are here. It’s not just a gimmick of science fiction. Granted, the artificially intelligent sex robots of such films as “Ex Machina” and “AI” are not here yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Most sex robots now are little more than slightly animated sex dolls. Perhaps the most advanced sex robot that we know of is “Samantha.” A creation of Synthea Amatus, Samantha is designed to be capable of enjoying sex. 

But Samantha is not all about sex. She can also talk about science and philosophy. She can even tell jokes (although hopefully not while you are having sex with her). Consent is even an issue with Samantha. If you are too rough with her or she doesn’t like your behaviors, she is programmed to go into “dummy mode” and completely shut down. Currently, robotic partners can go for prices in excess of $10,000

That is incredible and frightening. What if they created another doll was created down the road where “dummy mode” can turn into violent mode, but that will probably take another generation or so. I hope most people won’t fall for these types of futuristic relationships, but the point I am trying to make here is that this is where humanity is headed and this is not normal but it falls into the hands of the establishment technically speaking since in a way can reduce population growth.

What has society morphed into?

Now a Great Reset is upon us and make no mistake, it is real despite what The New York Times has falsely claimed that it does not in an absurd article they published titled ‘The Baseless Great Reset’ Conspiracy Theory Rises Again’, it’s real and we need to ask ourselves, will we except this insane idea? The World Economic Forum (WEF) is pushing ‘The Great Reset’ agenda since last May with calls to rebuild the global economy, social engineer society and enforce environmental sustainability rules and regulations to improve capitalism for basically major corporations, bankers and the ruling establishment. The corporate-technological alliance will be controlled by a powerful consortium of the pharmaceutical, financial, communications, defense industries and other major corporations with the government enforcing their dirty deeds with help from the mainstream-media continuing their propaganda. The Great Reset is being promoted by the United Kingdom’s very own, Prince Charles and WEF’s founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab who reminds me of Dr. Evil from Austin Powers who is also a former member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group which is behind the many changes the ruling establishment has envisioned for society. Life for humanity seems like it will never be the same. The Great Reset is a plan to foment corporate control over the entire economic and social landscape. They want control of the world’s natural resources and to expand their world government’s surveillance grid to unprecedented levels that fascist dictators from the past including Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet could have only dreamed about.

What is happening to society has been predicted for a long time by many, including one of the most famous names in science fiction, George Orwell, the 1984 author who wrote and predicted a future dystopian police state. Orwell’s dire predictions of what we face in the near future was an early warning to all of humanity. However, I believe that many people are not simply going to accept this way of life as the new normal, some will, but many will refuse to obey such absurd demands from the establishment and this is the start of a revolution, a revolution of the mind and the establishment is afraid of that.  The masses will rise and will demand its freedoms it once had. People around the world already disobey lockdowns, face mask mandates, oppose continuous wars, oppose government tyranny and every other human rights abuses they face.  We are not, and I repeat, we are not at the point of no return, there is hope.

This lockdown madness will destroy people’s livelihoods and in some cases, will kill more people than the disease itself.  How far can the establishment push us?  We are at a time where we need to make a critical decision that will change our lives forever because a group of powerful and politically connected people who are government bureaucrats, or people who are closely associated with Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Tech, the Military-Industrial Complex, bankers, Wall street, the elite families and so on, you know, the ones we have been warning about called the establishment or the ruling elite for some time are trying to change the structure of society, to control human nature. The year 2020 has been turbulent to say the least, 2021 will be chaotic and that is guaranteed. What is happening now is what George Orwell’s 1984 warned us about more than 70 years ago.  At this point in time, it will be up to all of us to resist, because that’s what it will take, and when that happens, people like George Orwell will finally rest in peace without rolling in his grave knowing that the world’s human spirit is alive and well, after all, that’s what he ultimately hoped for.

 

Big Brother in Disguise: The Rise of a New, Technological World Order

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By John Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

It had the potential for disaster.

Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube.

The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the heat to accessing work files, sending emails and making phone calls.

A year earlier, a Google outage resulted in Nest users being unable to access their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras. As Fast Company reports, “This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.”

Welcome to the Matrix.

Twenty-some years after the Wachowskis’ iconic film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a blue pill or a red pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.

We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.

Science fiction has become fact.

In The Matrix, computer programmer Thomas Anderson a.k.a. hacker Neo is wakened from a virtual slumber by Morpheus, a freedom fighter seeking to liberate humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by hyper-advanced artificial intelligence machines that rely on humans as an organic power source. With their minds plugged into a perfectly crafted virtual reality, few humans ever realize they are living in an artificial dream world.

Neo is given a choice: to take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be.

Most people opt for the blue pill.

In our case, the blue pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.

Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.

This is not freedom.

This is not even progress.

This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.

So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.

Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.

If ever Americans find themselves in bondage to technological tyrants, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, we’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”

By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)

These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones—poised to take to the skies en masse this year—will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?

Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

Indeed, it is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

In other words, the IoS will rely on technology being able to access and act on your thoughts.

Fourtane outlines several trends related to the IoS that are expected to become a reality by 2030:

1: Thoughts become action: using the brain as the interface, for example, users will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination.

2: Sounds will become an extension of the devised virtual reality: users could mimic anyone’s voice realistically enough to fool even family members.

3: Real food will become secondary to imagined tastes. A sensory device for your mouth could digitally enhance anything you eat, so that any food can taste like your favorite treat.

4: Smells will become a projection of this virtual reality so that virtual visits, to forests or the countryside for instance, would include experiencing all the natural smells of those places.

5: Total touch: Smartphones with screens will convey the shape and texture of the digital icons and buttons they are pressing.

6: Merged reality: VR game worlds will become indistinguishable from physical reality by 2030.

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.

Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside, these smart pills can remind you to take your medication, search for cancer, and even send an alert to your doctor warning of an impending heart attack.

Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know?

Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?

For example, asks Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha:

What kind of warnings should users receive about the risks of implanting chip technology inside a body, for instance? How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could law enforcement obtain data that would reveal which individuals abuse drugs or sell them on the black market? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?

Let me put it another way.

If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications? Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home—locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.

While President Trump signed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act into law on Dec. 4, 2020, in order to establish a baseline for security protection for the billions of IoT devices flooding homes and businesses, the law does little to protect the American people against corporate and governmental surveillance.

In fact, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug.

After all, who cares if the government can track your whereabouts on your GPS-enabled device so long as it helps you find the fastest route from Point A to Point B? Who cares if the NSA is listening in on your phone calls and downloading your emails so long as you can get your phone calls and emails on the go and get lightning fast Internet on the fly? Who cares if the government can monitor your activities in your home by tapping into your internet-connected devices—thermostat, water, lights—so long as you can control those things with the flick of a finger, whether you’re across the house or across the country?

Control is the key here.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

George Orwell understood this.

Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things and its twin, the Internet of Senses, is just Big Brother in disguise.

When will the central bankers pay for all the wealth inequality and misery they’ve caused?

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By Mitchell Feierstein

Source: RT.com

Janet Yellen’s been nominated by Joe Biden as Treasury Secretary, despite a poor record as Federal Reserve chair. This is typical of the unwarranted confidence placed in the central bankers who’ve caused so much financial pain.

The US Federal Reserve was established on December 23, 1913, and, despite its name, it is not a bank or part of the federal government. The Federal Reserve (or ‘Fed’) is owned and acts on behalf of its members, such as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Berkshire Financial Services. Do you think the Fed cares about the wealth inequality its reckless policies have caused – policies that have benefited the .01 percenters that own it? Since 1913, the US dollar’s value has declined by 97 percent. Can the Fed really be considered to be doing a good job?

Consider, for example, these remarkable comments from central bankers. In March 2007, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said the subprime mortgage crisis was “likely to be contained,” and in May of that year, he added, “The vast majority of mortgages, including even subprime mortgages, continue to perform well. We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.” 

In October 2007, he said, “It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve – nor would it be appropriate – to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their financial decisions.”

In November 2010, during a Federal Reserve conference on Georgia’s Jekyll Island, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said a lesson he learnt from the 2008 crisis is how the taxpayers implicitly subsidized the “financial intermediary system in the US.” He went on to point out that “there was rampant fraud in a lot of what was going on in these markets. We need far higher levels of enforcement of fraud on statutes – not new ones, existing ones. Things were being done that were certainly illegal and clearly criminal.” The look on then Chairman Bernanke’s face when Greenspan dropped this truth bomb was priceless.

In 2015, the Financial Times reported how the Bank of Japan’s Haruhiko Kuroda “reimagined” its monetary policy on the belief in Peter Pan’s ability to fly. No wonder Japan’s economy has had no growth for nearly 40 years. And the frightening part is the West began embracing this failed economic model years ago.

Then there was Fed chief Janet Yellen, who, in 2017, said she didn’t believe we would see another financial crisis in our lifetime. How many times were Yellen’s economic forecasts during and after the global financial crisis proven wrong? Too many to count.

She often repeated how the Fed’s temporary emergency measures would be removed and we would have ‘lift-off’ of interest rates. But, of course, none of this ever happened, and we are still waiting, over 12 years later. Yellen kept bailing out billionaires with near-zero interest rates while killing savers and increasing the wealth inequality gap. The oligarchs of Silicon Valley love Yellen. And Wall Street adores her, as well as the Fed’s magic printing presses, with their unlimited capability.

Yellen’s counterpart at the time, Mark Carney, who was the head of the Financial Stability Board and the Bank of England, as well as the ex-governor of the Bank of Canada, was singing from the same hymn sheet. Carney, mirroring the policies of Bernanke and Yellen, inflated grotesque property bubbles in Canada and the UK by pushing interest rates to 900-year lows, eviscerating savers and elderly retirees while landing taxpayers with the bailout bill for the billionaires and bankers who’d blown up the system.

Carney is another who got it wrong about normalized interest rates in both the economies his policies destroyed. He promised “escape velocity” in the UK, but, like Yellen’s ‘lift-off,’ both crashed on the launch pad. Their policies still protected and enhanced the oligarchy, though.

Central bankers such as Yellen and Carney were paid handsomely for this. One must surmise that their ilk always intended to enrich the powerful oligarchs in the cantons of Wall Street, London, and Silicon Valley to the detriment of everyone else. This is the model: propaganda, lies, and censorship are used to ensure globalism that fosters tyrannical rule, which, in turn, is beneficial to maintaining the status quo demanded by the oligarchy. Be an obedient apparatchik and earn a golden parachute when you exit.

The policies of these two central bankers have created the most significant wealth inequality ever seen and have allowed for the financial plunder that benefited the .01 percent and turbo-charged the oligarchy. But now, Yellen and Carney have transformed themselves into social justice warriors, championing equality, racial equity and climate change. In fact, Joe Biden has deified Yellen, saying, “We might have to ask Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical about the first Treasury Secretary, Hamilton, to write another musical for the first woman Treasury Secretary, Yellen.” 

It beggars belief how, after years of lies and economic destruction, lipstick is put on pigs to re-brand the oligarchs’ go-to patsies, Yellen and Carney. And now, Yellen may get a chance to do some serious damage should she become Treasury Secretary. When considering central bankers like these, we should remember the old maxim: beware of false prophets.

A TAOIST MASTER EXPLAINS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RELIGION AND INDIVIDUAL SPIRITUAL CULTIVATION

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

“The modern world needs true spiritual guidance and development.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

A spiritual war is upon us and the individual is challenged to maintain integrity in a sea of greed, egotism, terror and fear. With no clear path toward spiritual evolution, so many of us floundering and losing ourselves to addiction, despair and self-destruction.

When in the past ordinary religions might have served to offer a pathway toward spiritual awakening based upon the experiences of their ancient sages, today, the best they seem to offer is communal support. Far too often, though, modern religions are mired in greed, scandal, pedophilia and outright terrorism. Religions are failing to provide the help one needs to spiritually thrive in this insane world.

In a reading from the book 8,000 Years of Wisdom, Taoist Master Hua-Ching Ni talks about the state of religions today:

“Spirit can hardly be found in noisy, crowded churches and temples. Even where the teachings of the past sages have been established they have been spoiled by the insensitive trend of the times.

The spirit of the world’s religions died long ago and left most temples and churches merely empty shells.

These places continue as superficial social conventions and can only supply their devotees with shallow activities, psychological games of shadow playing, and hypnosis, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with spiritual reality.

This is the faith of today’s world, and most of their achievements are not the true answer.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

What then, is spiritual reality? And what does it look like in a world governed by fear, distracted by materialism, and kept in conflict by egotism? It’s really quite straightforward, says Master Ni, who refers to it as the “plain, simple truth of your life,’ which is best understood as the profoundly important concept of inner peace.

“The first spiritual goal of Taoism is the restoration and realization of one’s own well-balanced being, and then one’s spiritual evolution.

The highest goal of life is to combine oneself with the spiritual energy of the universe. There is one way to eliminate all wonder, bewilderment and confusion and that is to have inner peace.

The primary method or principle for personal cultivation is to keep peace within oneself and maintain normalcy in one’s environment; thus you can dwell with the spiritual energy and the spiritual energy dwells within you.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

Comparing the teachings of ordinary religions to true personal spiritual cultivation, Master Ni notes that undeveloped human beings follow and devote themselves to belief systems, deities and spiritual figureheads. In contrast, individuals seeking genuine spiritual evolution understand these systems for what they are: illusions and traps.

“People mistake religious emotionalism and hypnosis for spiritual reality.

Often in history religious emotion has been exalted as truth itself. This gave birth to all kinds of religious prejudice and persecution. Religious mobs have carried out the mischief caused by the hot-blooded in the forceful image of a spiritual sovereign. This has not the slightest connection with spiritual reality. It is the manifestation of the impure, heavy, bloody energy of undeveloped human beings before having completed their spiritual evolution.

Many people are fooled by their own ignorance or that of others. And in their ignorance they fool others too. People like this have no hope of reaching the spiritual realm. They will have no chance to touch the real spiritual life. So, before you commit yourself to any religion, you should develop the mental ability to discern what is religious emotion and what is the spiritual truth. One is the right way to follow, and the other is only a psychological pitfall and trap. This is very important for a seeker of truth on the spiritual path.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

Generating this type of spiritual emotionalism has become a profitable art form. Take note of the costumes worn by Catholic Cardinals and deference to the Pope in his symbolic Mitre hat. Islamic fundamentalists and ISIS do the same when they emote fear and terror by parading captives in front of religious soldiers clad in all black robes with faces covered, armed with rifles and sabres. Using symbolic imagery as tools of dominance and control, as Master Ni points out, has absolutely nothing to do with true spiritual reality.

What would the world look like if individuals first placed their own spiritual development ahead of their desire to change the world in accordance with their beliefs about spirituality and feelings of religious emotionalism? What if individuals were instead offered a plan of genuine spiritual cultivation, a path that led to actual inner peace?

“The spiritual process itself is a process of the evolution of the human spirit.” ~ Taoist Master Hua Ching Ni

Saturday Matinee: Kate (the Kate Bush Christmas Special)

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I Think About This a Lot: Kate Bush’s 1979 Christmas Special

By Alexis Garcia

Source: The Cut

Am I alone in thirsting for normalcy when Christmas rounds the corner? No matter how contrarian I fancy myself to be, once local radio stations incessantly drone “Jingle Bells” I become a walking cliché hellbent on conjuring the magic of a Winter Wonderland fantasy. Whether it’s stealing a kiss under the mistletoe, a family dinner that doesn’t end in a full-blown argument, or finally sticking to that Christmas gift budget — invariably, my idea of the perfect Hallmark holiday all goes to hell. And when I can’t go to sleep because of the jolly nightmare of my own making, I’m comforted by the thought of Kate Bush’s blood-splashed Christmas special.

The first thing you should know about her 1979 BBC holiday broadcast is that it’s almost entirely devoid of Christmas. Recorded after the English singer-songwriter’s first (and only) tour, the special is composed of 12 songs gathered from her first three studio albums and features an appearance from former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel. There’s no coherent theme or message to the show — the only constant is Kate’s stunning ability to shock viewers at every turn. This is most effectively accomplished with her mind-boggling performance of “The Wedding List,” a song based on a French New Wave film about a grieving bride avenging her husband-to-be after he’s slain at the altar.

It all starts innocently. A heavenly pitch fills the room as green cartoon hands and red text animate the screen. Is this the voice of an angel? As the titles fade out and the stage lights come on, we see Kate dangling from the ceiling — not as the Christmas cherub we first envisioned, but as a gothic bat rising from the abyss, clad in black sequins and plush feathers. As the opening salvo of “Violin” comes to a close I begin to wonder if this was actually meant to be a Halloween show. (After all, parts of the taped performance were filmed in a South London cemetery).

The next 40 minutes of Kate’s festive fever dream veer from the chaotic to the surreal to the just downright horny. In one scene, Kate, only 21 at the time, looks everything like the Victorian ideal of the virtuous woman as she plays an emotional andante called “Symphony in Blue” at the piano. Her figure shimmers in a sparkling silver cardigan and emerald-green skirt. But just as we settle into the moment, Kate peers at the camera, a twinkle in her charcoal-lined eyes, and seductively chirps, “The more I think about sex, the better it gets.” Not exactly the family-friendly content you’d expect from a holiday show!

I’ve watched this special dozens of times since I discovered it on YouTube years ago. I had always been a Kate Bush fan. Many of the artists I grew up listening to — like Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Big Boi — had cited her as a musical influence. But I didn’t fully start to appreciate her dazzling panache until I entered my 30s. Like many women, I found myself exhausted from trying to “have it all” and stretching myself to meet everyone else’s expectations. And here was Kate, a total unapologetic weirdo, being celebrated and revered for letting her freak flag fly. She’s written songs about menstruation and embarking on a steamy love affair with a snowman (so hot, in fact, that he melts). Her maniacal style of pouring tea, as captured in a 1989 BBC interview, has been made into a meme, as has footage of her rather unappetizing vegetarian cooking. And every year fans across the globe gather in parks dressed in flowing red gowns to recreate dance moves from her iconic “Wuthering Heights” music video. Her authenticity is the reason she’s cultivated such a devoted fan base and why her music still resonates after all these years.

The 1979 Christmas special is also significant because in many ways, it’s Kate’s departing gift to fans — a bow atop a year that would mark the end of her concert career for the next three decades. Like anything with the notoriously private singer, the more information I try to find on this special, the more questions I ultimately end up having. Why, for instance, did Kate think it was appropriate to perform a murder-suicide ballad for a holiday show? Who at the BBC approved this to go on air? How does she pop out of a garbage can so effortlessly in skin-tight leather pants? And does she even know what a Christmas special is? Do we?

But this is why I keep coming back to the Kate Bush Christmas special, year after year. The desire to conform to the cookie-cutter — and completely unattainable — Christmas ideal unleashes my inner control freak, but I never stop to ask myself why I want this version of the holidays in the first place.

Even her one Christmas song is a wink to this idea. In “December Will Be Magic Again,” she sings with childlike yearning for the idyllic Christmas. “The white city, she is so beautiful, upon the black-soot-icicled roofs,” Kate coos. It’s a beautiful image, the dusting of pure white snow, falling like the haze of nostalgia to cover the tarnished memories we’d rather forget. But Kate knows it’s a pipe dream. And she gives us permission to let it all go.

Her Christmas special feels especially relevant this year, as normal has never felt more out of reach. It would be easy to give into a collective sense of despair as we enter an uncertain winter. But when I watch Kate roll around on the floor, fake blood dripping from her lips as she gleefully shoots a hole into the chest of her lover’s murderer, I am embraced by the warm comfort that things will be okay. Even if this holiday isn’t what we envisioned, it doesn’t make it any less special — all we need is to give ourselves the space to get a little weird.

What If the Christ Child Had Been Born in the American Police State?

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.” ― Howard Thurman

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?

A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.

Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.

The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?

What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our  modern age?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.

Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”

Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.

After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Indeed, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebrations and gift-giving, we would do well to remember that what happened on that starry night in Bethlehem is only part of the story. That baby in the manger grew up to be a man who did not turn away from evil but instead spoke out against it, and we must do no less.