Monthly Archives: October 2021

THE ART OF THE UNDECEIVED

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Strong confident woman.

By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then search.” ~Nietzsche

What does it mean to be undeceived?

To a certain extent, we are always deceived. For we are only human, all too human. But to the extent that we can become aware of deception—both self-deception and the deception of others—being undeceived means being ahead of the curve of the human condition.

First, it means embracing deception as an integral part of life. Then it means being strategically circumspect while creating your own meaning. It means taking everything that you’ve learned into consideration with humility and a good sense of humor. It means becoming so healthy that your very existence is a catalyst for healthy change. It means connecting courage to curiosity. It means taking a leap of courage. It means putting things into proper perspective by using health as a benchmark.

It is, paraphrasing Bruce Lee, “absorbing what is useful, discarding what is not, and adding what is uniquely your own.” Let’s break it down…

Absorb what is useful:

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.” ~Benjamin Franklin

What is useful? Well, if your goal is not only basic survival but also progressive evolution, then what is useful is what is healthy. Contrastingly, what is not useful is what is unhealthy.

So, how do you figure out what is healthy or not? Through logic, reason, and critical thinking. You cannot wish something into being healthy. You cannot simply believe something is healthy and, by your strong faith alone, expect it to be valid. You can only reason through if something is healthy or not. Once you have reasoned a thing to be healthy, you free yourself to absorb what is useful.

Absorbing what is useful is absorbing what is healthy. The path is then clear to question with a good conscience. You become undeceived. In a state of undeception, you are free to wield the question mark sword, the Sword of Truth, and to use it in a way that distinguishes what’s healthy from what’s not.

What is healthy is absorbed as something useful for progressive evolution. What is unhealthy can then be discarded as something useless, so as to avoid an unhealthy society.

Discard what is not useful:

“A fool thinks himself wise, a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” ~William Shakespeare

Discarding what is not useful (what is unhealthy) requires self-discipline. It requires vigilance. Most people don’t even know that they don’t know the difference between healthy and unhealthy. Especially people who have grown up, culturally conditioned and indoctrinated, in a profoundly sick society.

How do you know if you were born into a profoundly sick society?

1.) Any society that pollutes the air it needs to breathe is a profoundly sick society.

2.) Any society that pollutes the water it needs to drink is a profoundly sick society.

3.) Any society that pollutes the food it needs to eat is a profoundly sick society.

4.) Any society that pollutes the minds it needs to evolve with is a profoundly sick society.

You must have the self-discipline to daily question what is healthy and what is not. For health is not a matter of opinion. Health is a benchmark. Without this benchmark, you cannot discern what is useful from what is not useful.

As such, belief and certainty are the greatest obstacles blocking us from being able to discard what is not useful. This is especially dangerous when those beliefs and certainties are derived from the cultural conditioning of a profoundly sick society. Hence the importance of vigilance and strategic prudence.

In order to remain undeceived, we must remain circumspect. The Sword of Truth must be unleashed daily so that it may cut through the red tape of wishful thinking, irrational beliefs, and whimsical certitude.

It is only when our naïve beliefs have been shattered upon the hard concrete of reality that we are free to distinguish between what is healthy and what is not. As we begin to piece things together, we become undeceived. We are liberated to absorb what is useful and discard what is not.

Add what is uniquely your own:

“Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.” ~Henry Thomas Buckle

Once you have successfully threshed the chaff (unhealthy/useless) from the grain (healthy/useful), you are free to unleash your creativity. From swords to plowshares, your Sword of Truth becomes a Pen of Truth. With it, you are free to create high art; art that shatters molds, stretches comfort zones, and initiates wake up calls. You become free to prove why the pen will always be mightier than the sword.

Here, still, we must remain vigilant. For even art can become dogmatic. In order not to be deceived, we must always be in a state of questioning what we think we know and weighing it against the nonnegotiable scales of healthy/unhealthy. Should our art become dogmatic, we would be wise to absorb what is useful from it and discard what is not. This way we will always be openminded and openhearted enough to add what is uniquely our own.

Outdated truth must die so that it doesn’t taint the updated truth of the times. God must die so that God can be reborn. Creativity thrives off the ashes of old art. Evolution progresses or stagnates in proportion to how creative we can be after having absorbed what is useful (healthy) and discarding what is not (unhealthy).

The art of being undeceived is more like the juggler’s art than the interrogator’s. It should be flexible and adaptable to meet results which are sudden and unexpected. The undeceived understand that the self is masks all the way down perceiving delusions all the way up, and they have the acumen and the wherewithal to juggle both masks and delusions into a state of high humor and even higher art.

Saturday Matinee: Cold Case Hammarskjöld

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Review: COLD CASE HAMMARSKJÖLD, Pretzels of Truth and Performance Art

By Kurt Halfyard

Source: Film Anarchy

“This could either be the world’s biggest murder mystery, or the world’s most idiotic conspiracy theory.”

Two years before the JFK assassination, on the 18th of September 1961, the world was shocked by the suspicious death of the second serving Secretary-General of the United Nations. In a plane crash in Ndola, Rhodesia, Dag Hammarskjöld was the only person on board not horribly scorched in the ‘accident.’ Instead he was bloodied, and a playing card was tucked in his shirt collar.

Nearly six decades later, the UN is still (nominally) investigating the details of what was thought first thought to be an accident, then a targeted assassination, of a man who had designs on the political and financial independence of the African continent. In fact, U.S. President John F.  Kennedy himself described the Secretary General as “the greatest statesman of our century.” The assassination theory holds several motive possibilities – various industrial interests active in the region (both then and now) or various clandestine military or mercenary operations taking orders from the US, the UK and Europe who had designs at odd with the ‘activist’ Secretary General.

There are crimes, and then there are crimes. Outside of the small circles of Denmark Television or offbeat cinephiliia, Mads Brügger is criminally unknown. The journalist, comedian, satirist, filmmaker, but above all, provocateur, has been twisting the documentary form into pretzels of truth and performance art for more than a decade.

In 2006, he toured an autistic theatre troupe though North Korea, cascading through a collection of political handlers and bureaucrats, to make a point about propaganda and totalitarian fear imposed on the so-called Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. As if that stunt, The Red Chapel, was not fraught with enough risk, he then purchased illegal diplomatic credentials from the Central African Republic (CAR) to set up his own personal blood diamond operation (under the front of a match factory whose product would be manufactured by the local Pygmy population). By the time The Ambassador wowed Sundance attendees (and yours truly) in 2011, several of the ‘characters’ in the film, political figures in the CAR, had disappeared or been killed.

The Danish filmmaker takes large risks, some might say indefensible ones. Along with his countryman Lars Von Trier (whose outfit Zentropa produced The Ambassador), Brügger keeps plenty of his own skin in the game of his cinematic endeavours — for the sake of your education, and entertainment. He is a hell of a talented filmmaker.

With Cold Case Hammarskjöld, things go the full Errol Morris (Wormwood, A Wilderness of Error) investigation route. With the help of Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish activist/investigator who is in possession of the only part of Hammarskjöld’s plane that was not buried under the soil of the Ndola airport, Brügger uses every trick in the documentary playbook: re-creations, animations, historical footage, official and redacted document scavenging, and a lot of interviews with people who where sidelined, ignored, or simply unknown at the time.

Above all, Brügger recreates, in glossy cinematic terms, himself making the documentary itself. Form as function, as with any good conspiracy theory, things start to fold back on themselves in increasingly avant garde ways.  

But there is purpose in this narrative trickery. By filming himself, twice, it offers Brügger the storyteller the opportunity to rope a Zodiac-level ‘filing cabinet ‘of names, facts, dates, and political organizations, together into a ‘lean in’ yarn of far reaching proportions. Two hundred old Secret Marine Societies, megalomaniac villains dressed in white, biological guerrilla warfare, the fallout of Apartheid, World War II fighter aces, assassins leaving Playing Cards in their victims’ collar, and of course, the fate of both a continent, and a fledgling World Government Body are all tethered together.

To say that the film’s 128 minutes is dense, is an understatement. Via this experimental technique (which of course the filmmaker acknowledges, in somewhat of a mea culpa, at one point) along with some pretty detailed, rational, detective work, makes the whole thing as seductive and addicting as Serial or The Staircase.

At one point, Michael Moore-style, Brügger and Björkdahl arm themselves with a high powered metal detectors, shovels, and a cigar (in the off chance they are successful), and go scouring the back-fields of the Ndola airport looking for the 50+ year old burial site of the plane. The authorities arrive. They are polite, but firm, regarding this activity. You are simply not welcome to do this kind of digging.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld has caused a stir in ‘papers of record’ such as The New York Times and The Guardian, reacting to the film compelling presentation and investigation of SAIMR, the South African Institute for Maritime Research, and its quack doctor, Lord Nelson cosplaying Commodore, Keith Maxwell, the “man in white”, who is said here of not only co-ordinating the murder of Dag Hammarskjöld, but also weaponizing AIDS virus for genocidal purposes, and ostensibly participating in bad amateur theatre.

The former may have been at the behest of the CIA and MI6, the latter was on his own personal time. Maxwell was a surreal combination of L. Ron Hubbard, and Colonel Kurtz, and Brügger condemns, mythologizes, exposes, at several points even mimics, him in the way only larger than life cinema can.

If there is a signature image across several of the films of Mads Brügger, it is that of an impeccably dressed man, wildly out of place, sitting on a skinny boat drifting on the current of a wide, and fast moving body of water. Here it is Göran Björkdahl, no closer to the truth of the matter, but still floating on the river of possibilites. We have learned things, both true and untrue, along the way.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld is the most engaging (and entertaining) documentary of the year.

Watch Cold Case Hammarskjöld on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/product/cold-case-hammarskjold

We Won’t Be Free Until Our Minds Are Free

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

There’s a quote from an ancient Buddhist text called the Dhammapada that’s often translated as, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”

In other words our mental habits shape our personality and determine how that personality will behave, and that behavior contributes to the shaping of the world.

We see a similar line in the Upanishads of Hinduism: “As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”

These are two different ways of expressing the same timeless observation we see pop up in various forms throughout philosophical traditions around the world: that our actions arise from our thoughts and our thoughts arise from our conditioned mental habits, so we need to be very careful about what those mental habits are since it will ultimately determine our destiny.

But the people who pour the most energy and attention into this timeless observation as a group are not the Buddhists, nor the Hindus, nor any religious or philosophical tradition at all. Those who are the most interested in studying and acting upon this insight are the powerful people who rule this world.

The powerful understand that because people’s actions follow from their thoughts and the destiny of the world follows from people’s actions, if you can control the thoughts people think at mass scale you can control the destiny of the world.

Control the way people collectively think about things and you can control the way they act, you can control the way they organize, and you can control the way they vote. This is important because people have become more literate and better at sharing information over the years, and therefore more aware of the value of freedom and equality, so it’s gotten harder and harder to deny them freedom and equality without sparking violent revolutions and winding up with your head in a basket.

Power structures of more “enlightened” societies have addressed this dilemma by giving people the illusion of freedom snd equality while still keeping them enslaved to the agendas of their rulers via mass-scale psychological manipulation. Media institutions, online platforms and think tanks are dominated by plutocrats in coordination with secretive government agencies to ensure that the information the majority of people consume serves the social, political, military and geostrategic interests of the ruling power structure.

This is why when you watch the news on TV it always kind of feels like they are deceiving you; that’s exactly what’s happening. Information that is inconvenient for the powerful is omitted, while information that serves the powerful is amplified and twisted in the most convenient light possible.

This happens not because the media-controlling class is personally leaning over the shoulder of every news reporter and instructing them to lie, but because if you control who runs a media outlet then you control who they will hire and who they will elevate, naturally giving rise to a system wherein reporters understand that the only way for them to advance their careers is to promote narratives which serve the ruling power establishment and marginalize narratives which don’t.

The best way to manipulate people without their knowing it is to appeal to their strongest and most unconscious impulses. In practice this means tugging at the psychological hooks of the ego, which at their base level are fear and identity. If you’ve made a strong identity out of something like belonging to a certain political party or a certain ideological or ethnic group, then it will carry a lot of egoic weight for you. If you’re in a fear state then there will be a lot of egoic contraction and you’ll consequentially take your thoughts very seriously.

If you can appeal to people’s base impulses of fear and identification it becomes very easy to insert ideas into their minds and give them new mental habits, and that’s exactly what propagandists do. You need to fear the terrorists, the Russians and the Chinese, because they’re going to harm you. You need to support the Democratic Party and everything its pundits tell you, because that’s your tribe. Those anti-vaxxers over there are your real enemy, not the nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure that is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways. And on and on and on.

They give us the illusion of freedom, but as long as they chain our minds with propaganda we are not free. It wouldn’t matter if they gave us every personal liberty imaginable if a critical mass of us were still thinking in ways which benefit the powerful, because those thoughts would cause us to act, organize and vote in a way that benefits our rulers and not us.

If we want to free our minds from the chains of power, it’s not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts about what’s really going on in our nation and our world. The most important step to freeing our minds from their shackles is to remove from ourselves the psychological hooks of fear and identity to which those shackles are attached. This means freeing ourselves from the delusions of egoic consciousness, which, funny enough, brings us right back around to the central tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism again.

As long as humanity is enslaved to the ego it will remain enslaved to abusive power structures, because manipulators will always be able to use our egoic hooks to propagandize us into supporting their interests at mass scale. Until then it won’t ultimately matter how many civil liberties we gain or lose, because we’ll still be unable to move beyond the bonds of our psychological chains.

Not until humanity collectively breaks free from the gravitational pull of egoic consciousness will we truly blast off into the real potentiality of our species.

The Fear Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism. Sleepwalking Towards A Global Economic Crisis?

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Global Research

In October 2019, in a speech at an International Monetary Fund conference, former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences for what he called the “democratic market system”.

According to King, the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression. He concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.

In the repurchase agreement (repo) market, interest rates soared on 16 September. The Federal Reserve stepped in by intervening to the tune of $75 billion per day over four days, a sum not seen since the 2008 crisis.

At that time, according to Fabio Vighi, professor of critical theory at Cardiff University, the Fed began an emergency monetary programme that saw hundreds of billions of dollars per week pumped into Wall Street.

Over the last 18 months or so, under the guise of a ‘pandemic’, we have seen economies closed down, small businesses being crushed, workers being made unemployed and people’s rights being destroyed. Lockdowns and restrictions have facilitated this process. The purpose of these so-called ‘public health measures’ has little to do with public health and much to do with managing a crisis of capitalism and ultimately the restructuring of the economy.

Neoliberalism has squeezed workers income and benefits, offshored key sectors of economies and has used every tool at its disposal to maintain demand and create financial Ponzi schemes in which the rich can still invest in and profit from. The bailouts to the banking sector following the 2008 crash provided only temporary respite. The crash returned with a much bigger bang pre-Covid along with multi-billion-dollar bailouts.

The dystopian ‘great reset’ that we are currently witnessing is a response to this crisis. This reset envisages a transformation of capitalism.

Fabio Vighi sheds light on the role of the ‘pandemic’ in all of this:

“… some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s).”

Vighi describes how, in pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown and chronicles how the Swiss Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock (the world’s most powerful investment fund), G7 central bankers and others worked to avert a massive impending financial meltdown.

The world economy was suffocating under an unsustainable mountain of debt. Many companies could not generate enough profit to cover interest payments on their own debts and were staying afloat only by taking on new loans. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were rising everywhere.

Lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation.

Vighi says:

“… the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing. With lockdowns came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture through extraordinary monetary policy was contingent on the economy’s engine being turned off.”

It all amounted to a multi-trillion bailout for Wall Street under the guise of COVID ‘relief’ followed by an ongoing plan to fundamentally restructure capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for these predatory corporations, and the eradication of millions of jobs resulting from lockdowns and accelerated automation.

Author and journalist Matt Taibbi noted in 2020:

“It retains all the cruelties of the free market for those who live and work in the real world, but turns the paper economy into a state protectorate, surrounded by a kind of Trumpian Money Wall that is designed to keep the investor class safe from fear of loss. This financial economy is a fantasy casino, where the winnings are real but free chips cover the losses. For a rarefied segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain.”

The World Economic Forum says that by 2030 the public will ‘rent’ everything they require. This means undermining the right of ownership (or possibly seizing personal assets) and restricting consumer choice underpinned by the rhetoric of reducing public debt or ‘sustainable consumption’, which will be used to legitimise impending austerity as a result of the economic meltdown. Ordinary people will foot the bill for the ‘COVID relief’ packages.

If the financial bailouts do not go according to plan, we could see further lockdowns imposed, perhaps justified under the pretext of  ‘the virus’ but also ‘climate emergency’.

It is not only Big Finance that has been saved. A previously ailing pharmaceuticals industry has also received a massive bailout (public funds to develop and purchase the vaccines) and lifeline thanks to the money-making COVID jabs.

The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants as well and have cemented their dominance. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID government measures.

Capitalism and labour

Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms. A significant part of the working class has long been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. Since then, this section of the population has had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services or, if ‘lucky’, insecure low-paid service sector jobs.

What we saw following the 2008 crash was ordinary people being pushed further to the edge. After a decade of ‘austerity’ in the UK – a neoliberal assault on the living conditions of ordinary people carried out under the guise of reining in public debt following the bank bail outs – a leading UN poverty expert compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses and warned that, unless austerity is ended, the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused ministers of being in a state of denial about the impact of policies. He accused them of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.

In another 2019 report, the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank laid the blame for more than 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 at the door of government policies. It claimed that these deaths could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts.

Over the past 10 years in the UK, according to the Trussell Group, there has been rising food poverty and increasing reliance on food banks.

And in a damning report on poverty in the UK by Professor David Gordon of the University of Bristol, it was found that almost 18 million cannot afford adequate housing conditions, 12 million are too poor to engage in common social activities, one in three cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in winter and four million children and adults are not properly fed (Britain’s population is estimated at around 66 million).

Moreover, a 2015 report by the New Policy Institute noted that the total number of people in poverty in the UK had increased by 800,000, from 13.2 to 14.0 million in just two to three years.

Meanwhile, The Equality Trust in 2018 reported that the ‘austerity’ years were anything but austere for the richest 1,000 people in the UK. They had increased their wealth by £66 billion in one year alone (2017-2018), by £274 billion in five years (2013-2018) and had increased their total wealth to £724 billion – significantly more than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion).

Just some of the cruelties of the ‘free market’ for those who live and work in the real world. And all of this hardship prior to lockdowns that have subsequently devastated lives, livelihoods and health, with cancer diagnoses and treatments and other conditions having been neglected due to the shutdown of health services.

During the current economic crisis, what we are seeing is many millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision on the immediate horizon, a mass labour force will no longer be required.

It raises fundamental questions about the need for and the future of mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.

As the economic is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed. If work is a condition of the existence of the labouring classes, then, in the eyes of capitalists, why maintain a pool of (surplus) labour that is no longer needed?

A concentration of wealth power and ownership is taking place as a result of COVID-related policies: according to research by Oxfam, the world’s billionaires gained $3.9 trillion while working people lost $3.7 trillion in 2020. At the same time, as large sections of the population head into a state of permanent unemployment, the rulers are weary of mass dissent and resistance. We are witnessing an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.

The global implications are immense too. Barely a month into the COVID agenda, the IMF and World Bank were already facing a deluge of aid requests from developing countries that were asking for bailouts and loans. Ideal cover for rebooting the global economy via a massive debt crisis and the subsequent privatisation of national assets.

In 2020, World Bank Group President David Malpass stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns but such ‘help’ would be on condition that neoliberal reforms become further embedded. In other words, the de facto privatisation of states (affecting all nations, rich and poor alike), the (complete) erosion of national sovereignty and dollar-denominated debt leading to a further strengthening of US leverage and power.

In a system of top-down surveillance capitalism with an increasing section of the population deemed ‘unproductive’ and ‘useless eaters’, notions of individualism, liberal democracy and the ideology of free choice and consumerism are regarded by the elite as ‘unnecessary luxuries’ along with political and civil rights and freedoms.

We need only look at the ongoing tyranny in Australia to see where other countries could be heading. How quickly Australia was transformed from a ‘liberal democracy’ to a brutal totalitarian police state of endless lockdowns where gathering and protests are not to be tolerated.

Being beaten and thrown to the ground and fired at with rubber bullets in the name of protecting health makes as much sense as devastating entire societies through socially and economically destructive lockdowns to ‘save lives’.

It makes as much sense as mask-wearing and social-distancing mandates unsupported by science, misused and flawed PCR tests, perfectly healthy people being labelled as ‘cases’, deliberately inflated COVID death figures, pushing dangerous experimental vaccines in the name of health, ramping up fear, relying on Neil Ferguson’s bogus modelling, censoring debate about any of this and the WHO declaring a worldwide ‘pandemic’ based on a very low number of global ‘cases’ back in early 2020 (44,279 ‘cases’ and 1,440 supposed COVID deaths outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion).

There is little if any logic to this. But of course, If we view what is happening in terms of a crisis of capitalism, it might begin to make a lot more sense.

The austerity measures that followed the 2008 crash were bad enough for ordinary people who were still reeling from the impacts when the first lockdown was imposed.

The authorities are aware that deeper, harsher impacts as well as much more wide-ranging changes will be experienced this time around and seem adamant that the masses must become more tightly controlled and conditioned to their coming servitude.

A PANDEMIC OF AUTHORITARIANISM

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By Alastair Crooke

Source: Waking Times

What we see is an attempt to impose an idealised technical managerialism onto a complex, rather than pursue real solutions to problems.

Change happens quickly and often unpredictably. Yet the unpredictable part seemingly is all about physics. Imagine, dropping one grain of sand after another onto a table. A pile soon develops. Eventually, just one grain starts an avalanche. Most of the time, it’s a small one. But sometimes the pile just slides and disintegrates entirely.

Well, in 1987, three physicists began to play the sand pile game in their lab, seeking an answer to what it is that triggers the typical avalanche? After a huge number of tests, they found there is no typical number of grains that does it.

To find out why such unpredictability should show up in their sand pile game, the physicists next coloured it according to its steepness. Where it was relatively flat and stable, they coloured it green; where steep and, in avalanche terms, ‘ready to go’, they coloured it red.

They found that at the outset, the pile looked mostly green, but that, as the pile grew, the green became infiltrated with ever more red. With more grains, the scattering of red danger fingers grew until a dense skeleton of red instability ran through the pile. Here then was a clue to its peculiar behaviour: a grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots.

Afghanistan was intended to be a showcase for western technical managerialism – an empirical petri-dish in which to prove the historical inevitability of technocracy. Its doctrine held that free markets somehow obviated the need for politics; that big data and ‘expert’ managerialism in markets (in markets extended to ‘everything’, that is), were the crux to re-setting the world in a better way (i.e. the Build Back Better meme). It was, in a word, postulated on data predictability.

Existential political and social questions in this doctrine however, were to be nuanced through ‘Third Wayism’ (i.e. left unsolved – or fudged with easy answers, and easy money).

Or … ‘regulated’ into compliance. The answer to social problematics was Cloud Computing of mass data. With enough input on past human choices, it is believed that experts can precisely predict human behaviour, which then can be ‘nudged’ in the direction that our élites wish it to go. Nudge behavioural psychology, of course, is about control – not active thinking.

Yet unpredictably, this ‘world class’ managerial team in Kabul, so consumed by the notion of technocracy and mass data management, produced a project so rotten and corrupt (gaming the system) that it collapsed in eleven days. Many Americans and Europeans have barely recovered from the shock, and remain in denial.

So, back to the sand pile: When the red spots come to riddle the sand pile, the consequences of the next grain become fiendishly unpredictable, the physicists discovered. It might trigger only a few tumblings, or it might instead set off a cataclysmic chain reaction involving millions. The sand pile seemed to have configured itself into a hypersensitive and peculiarly unstable condition, in which the next falling grain could trigger a response of any size whatsoever.

Physics is saying we have systemic instability at a certain point of accumulation. Our technocrats deny it, and therefore will be unable to foresee even such a possibility. Their creed is the model.

There are many subtleties and twists in the story, but the basic message is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to explain why our highly complex world, at large, seems so susceptible to unpredictable upheavals. So much for AI and big data’s predictions – In the end, it was the landing of the Taliban ‘red grain’ that triggered an unpredicted, lightning cascade.

The question must be: Will this trigger any chain reaction? Maybe not, yet there are several other ‘fingers of instability’ in the western sand pile which should be coloured ‘grain red’, and – judged in avalanche terms – may be poised to cascade.

One such is the ‘vaccination’ (or gene therapy): The mRNA ‘vaccine’ doesn’t stop infection, nor does it stop the spread of the virus. A fully vaccinated person can catch the virus and spread it to others. There’s new evidence that double-vaxxed individuals build up huge viral loads in their noses and sinuses, causing them to become super-spreaders, and infect others. The unvaccinated therefore, have as much to fear in terms of catching the disease from the vaccinated as the other way around.

Israel is providing a useful case study in the effectiveness – or lack thereof – of vaccines. Israel is one of the most heavily vaxxed countries in the world, with nearly 80% of the population fully vaccinated and almost 100% of the elderly. But now Israel is experiencing a massive increase in infections (and of serious cases), mainly among the fully vaxxed.

There are ample reasons not to receive countless millions of mRNA spike-proteins into one’s circulatory system – including being recovered from Covid, and having stronger antibody protection than the vaccinated. Yet, the latter are being treated as lepers. And governments, like that of PM Draghi in Italy, continue trying to impose ever stringent vaccine mandates and other forms of authoritarian control. ‘Pandemic authoritarianism’ will do nothing to slow the spread of the disease. It may even adversely repercuss – as it has in Israel – to create a graver problem. What it will do however, is to tear an already tense society apart – particularly when set against the background of deteriorating economies.

It is all reminiscent of the managerialist control efforts of an earlier ‘war’ (the equally failed) Great War On Terror, launched in the wake of 9/11, when a different, yet supposedly, ‘morally justified’ form of mass public control and surveillance was instituted – with the wider, awkward facts of counter-terrorism policy simply edited out from an already anxiety-ridden and de-sensitised audience.

Today, there is an ongoing debate about whether we are going to ‘beat’ Covid in the way the general public conceives of these things. Scientists – not the ones you hear most from – always made clear that vaccines would not stop Covid in its tracks if, like other similar such viruses, the latter mutated into something more dangerous, and transmissible.

The latter would constitute a variant which vaccination might actually accelerate, in a process known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) (on which the jury is still out). There is a popular misconception that – at some critical threshold of vaccination – Covid just ‘goes away’. The science however, (Draghi aside) suggests that a happy outcome arguably will only happen were new variants to become milder, like a ‘flu.

In Afghanistan, where a ‘managerialist’ Pentagon had for 20 years, until the very eleventh hour, one General after another, repeating the mantra lie that all was fine: Plenty of ‘progress’ evident in Afghanistan. ‘Progress’ always was there – until it wasn’t. Until the state’s collapse. It was in essence a defeat driven by data addiction, at the expense of the ‘real’.

So, in this other ‘field’ of Covid, we find the similar approach: Vaccine ‘progress’ will be achieved, if not with two, then three, and now four shots (in Israel) – until it isn’t. And with that, another ‘grain’ will settle on a red finger of instability.

This issue is doubly pertinent, because just as Covid is not ‘sorted’, neither is the economy.  Anyone with a smattering of economics, might have also seen in advance that QE would never achieve its key goals. It is the quintessence of high tech (financial) managerialism. Central banks may keep saying they have achieved their goals (like the Generals calling ‘progress’ in Afghanistan), but the slump in productivity and the rise in inflation, and the shift to a reductive gig economy, all make it abundantly clear this is wishful thinking. It seems, we are now told that only trillion-dollar fiscal spends can halt the rot … Or, like vaccines, potentially with more and more shots, though possible ADE makes infections increase. Again, real solutions are edited out.

The Telegraph’s International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, sees another red-grain finger of instability running through the sand pile:

“Germany’s long-simmering anger with the European Central Bank (ECB) is again coming to the boil. It is hard to justify perennial [QE] and negative rates when German inflation is near 4pc – and rising. Political realities are forcing the ECB … to prepare for bond tapering sooner than it wants … in order to head off a bust-up with Europe’s anchor power [Germany].

“[This means] it will have to start pulling away the shield that has protected the high-debt Club Med states from market forces for almost seven years, and that has conveniently covered their entire borrowing requirements under the cloak of “monetary policy”. It is this monetary tightening in conjunction with parallel moves by the U.S. Federal Reserve that poses the chief risk to overheated global asset markets, not the virus’ Delta variant.

What is different this time [from past German grumblings], is that inflation can be felt everywhere – gefühlte Inflation – and parts of the German economy are patently overheating … German irritation should not be underestimated: The German Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) this week published an extraordinary paper, more or less alleging that ECB governors from the high-debt states are exploiting QE in order to bail out their own insolvent governments – and doing so in violation of EU treaty law”.

Events are nearing the point where Germany must either challenge this process, or accept that it has lost control of the Euro, and together with other northern ‘frugal’ Euro-states, pull out.

The ramifications deriving from the paradigmatic blow given by the Taliban to the Western technocratic vision; to Europe at its sudden discovery that America does not have Europe’s back; to inflation felt everywhere; to the QE impasse (that interest rates above 2% would kill the western economy); to geopolitical rejection of the western liberal model – arguably all these run through what happens next with Covid, and the mass resort to the imposition of ‘virtuous’ authoritarianism.

There is, in the end, nothing more than one common single thread running through all these fingers of instability: It is the attempt to impose an idealised technical managerialism onto a complex, critical-state reality, rather than pursue real solutions to problems – and the resort to behavioural control psychology to conceal the rot beneath, and compel compliance.

So, we are now poised at a critical state of what Paul McCulley calls ‘stable disequilibrium’ – where all actors work to maximize their personal outcome, and reduce their exposure to fingers of instability. But the longer the game runs, says McCulley, the more likely it is to end in a violent avalanche, as the fingers of instability have more time to build, and, eventually, the state of stable disequilibrium goes critical.

Which finger goes first? Unpredictability again – any grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots.

The Illusion of Getting Rich While Producing Nothing

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Of all the mass delusions running rampant in the culture, none is more spectacularly delusional than the conviction that we can all get fabulously rich from speculation while producing nothing. The key characteristic of speculation is that it produces nothing: it doesn’t generate any new goods or services, boost productivity or increase the functionality of real-world essentials.

Like all mass delusions, the greater the disconnect from reality, the greater the appeal. Mass delusions gain their escape velocity by leaving any ties to real-world limitations behind, and by igniting the most powerful booster to human euphoric confidence known, greed.

Lost in the mania of easy wealth from speculative trading is the absence of any value creation in the rotation-churn of moving bets from one table to the latest hot game: in flipping houses sight unseen, no functionality was added to the house. In transferring bets on one cryptocurrency to another or from one meme stock to another, no value to the economy or society was created.

In the mass delusion that near-infinite wealth can be generated without producing anything, creating value has no value: the delusion is that I can get rich producing nothing but speculative gains, and then I can buy all the stuff somebody else is making.

The fantasy powering the speculative frenzy is once I get rich, I’ll stop working and live off my wealth. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how everyone can get rich via unproductive speculation, quit their jobs and then live off the productive work of somebody else who failed to get rich off speculation.

Maybe that’s why all the container ships are lined up at Long Beach, waiting to unload the goodies made in China for American speculators to buy. This is what happens when the incentive structure of the economy decays so that being productive has little upside (i.e., working is for chumps) while speculating is all upside (get rich quickly and easily).

Everyone knows great empires became great by transferring their critical supply chains to competing nations, living it up on borrowed/printed money, exploiting the highest bidder wins regulatory/governance system and incentivizing speculation while pushing wage earners into debt-and-tax servitude. Bone up on your history, Bucko; all great nations got there by quitting boring, tiresome productive work to speculate on illusions of value with borrowed money.

This is the result of monopolies and cartels becoming the financial and political power centers of the nation. Maximizing private gains is all that matters in this incentive structure, and so treating employees as chattel to lower costs, offshoring critical supply chains to squeeze out a few more dollars of profits, engineering products to break down (planned obsolescence), buying regulatory barriers and “free passes” and tax breaks galore with all the billions showered on financiers and other fraudsters by the Federal Reserve: in a word, a system that optimizes corruption.

This is how you hollow out a nation and guarantee collapse. The most rewarding “skillsets” are a sociopathological obsession with maximizing profits by any means available and speculating with Fed free money for financiers. The millions of “retail” speculators are simply picking up the cues being given by the billionaires who gained their wealth by issuing debt to fund stock buy-backs and other financial manipulations.

Working for monopolies and cartels is for chumps because monopolies and cartels have zero incentive to share profits with mere employees. Their profits are made not by taking care of their workforce but by regulatory capture, artificial scarcities and financialized destruction of competition: first, borrow billions thanks to the Fed and Wall Street, destroy the competition (for example, the taxi industry), then once the competition has been wiped out, jack up prices because now consumers have no choice other than another member of the cartel.

Speculative “wealth” is phantom wealth, a flickering illusion of prosperity. All speculative bubbles pop, and all speculative bubbles inflated by borrowed money and central bank manipulation pop even more ferociously than bubbles funded by actual savings.

By incentivizing speculation and corruption, reducing the rewards for productive work and sucking wages dry with inflation, America has greased the skids to collapse. As with all mass delusions, the incentives to continue believing are immense and the incentives to reconnect with reality few.

So in conclusion: the speculative gains to be made in the collapse of the mass delusion will be spectacular. There’s nothing like the collapse of a hollowed out, completely corrupt economy to generate outsized profits for nimble speculators. Just keep your speculative winnings on number 22 on the roulette wheel. (A Casablanca movie reference….)

In a Dark Wood

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By James Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Behold the photo (above) showing President “Joe Biden” getting his booster shot of the Covid-19 “vaccine,” with the news media clustered to the left of what is apparently a stage-set built in a larger chamber. Do you possibly ask yourself: why bother to build a set for this event in or under the White House somewhere — including even fake daylit windows — when there are any number of actual rooms in the White House perfectly suited to holding this grand event in real daylight? What is going on here?

And, by the way, how do we know that “JB” is getting an actual mRNA booster?  Or is it just 10 CCs of saline solution? Is not the syringe, after all, just another prop in the show? The video of this event was broadcast on cable TV channels and corporate media websites everywhere. None of them commented on the strange artificiality of the staging. And so, the mystery abides….

It only reinforces the creeping suspicion that absolutely everything about the “Joe Biden” regime is fake. And malevolently so. How else could it be that so many bad things are happening at the same time in this country if there was not some faction seeking to destroy it?

For instance, the vaccine mandates for medical personnel. In upstate New York, WNYT-TV reported yesterday that 200 employees of Albany Med, a large, regional teaching hospital, are placed on seven day’s unpaid leave prior to getting fired for refusing the vaccine. Andrew Cuomo’s replacement, new Governor Kathy Hochul, has blocked unemployment benefits for fired nurses and technicians if they persist in evading the vax. Doctors are included in the mix, too.

Of course, large numbers of health care workers getting kicked out of their jobs will only make it more difficult to care for patients — with Covid or any other health problem — so how does this policy help anyone? (Unless you consider that, with fewer staff on-duty, fewer Covid in-patients will be subjected to the medical malpractice of being placed on ventilators and treated with the killer drug Remdesivir.) Not only has effective early treatment with other drugs been banned from the official medical standards-of-practice across the USA, but mere talk about it has been banned, notably by Google’s YouTube app.

This coercion of health care workers is going on all over the country, of course, not just in New York state. These nurses and techs have been working around Covid patients for going on two years, and many of them have gotten the disease, with symptoms or without, conferring natural immunity. So, what is the point of forcing the vaxes on them? It is also a fact that vaccinated people are susceptible to catching the disease, and that, in any case, the vaccinated carry heavier viral loads than the un-vaxed, making them more efficient spreaders. It is also a fact that mass vaccination in the midst of a pandemic promotes the mutation of new variant viruses that increasingly are not affected by the vaccines.

Thursday night, CNN ran a segment with its house doctor, Sanjay Gupta, hectoring one Andrea Babinski, a La Crosse, Wisconsin, nurse who is quitting her job at Gundersen Hospital there rather than take the vax shot. Dr. Gupta, acting all perplexed, asked her why. Ms. Babinski said she was concerned about blood-clotting. Dr. Gupta dismissed her concern, saying, “If you’ve got a clotting disorder, you should get the vaccine.” Really…?

After the segment, Dr. Gupta and Anderson Cooper shook their heads in amused puzzlement over the nurse’s obdurate foolishness. They are apparently uninformed that the spike protein produced by the vaccine is known to bind onto the endothelial lining of blood vessels and promote blood clots, leading to a range of lethal events such as myocardial infarction and cerebral hemorrhage — heart attack and stroke — plus a broad array of organ damage and neurological disorders.

The Medicare Tracking System states that 48,465 people have died within 14 days of receiving a vax shot. Many had co-morbidities, of course, so not all the deaths can be directly attributed to the vaccines, but the public health authorities are averse to autopsies that might establish the truth of the matter. Anyway, the CDC has ruled recently that they will only count people more than 14 days out from a shot as being considered officially vaccinated — so none of those aforementioned deaths would have counted as vaccinated persons under the rule. Do you see how they are gaming the statistics to keep Americans as misinformed as possible?

Despite all the efforts to bamboozle the public, the “Joe Biden” regime has about run out the string on Covid paranoia, and wrung all of the political usefulness out of it. Going forward, it will only backfire on them. Do they think that wrecking hospital services while depriving thousands of health care workers of their incomes is a winning strategy? These are existential threats to US citizens.

Everything else under “Joe Biden’s” watch looks like a pyromaniac seeking to burn down the country. Over 10,000 Haitian interlopers have been surreptitiously dispersed from Del Rio, Texas, to nether regions of the USA. The government made no effort to vaccinate them — what does that tell you? Over 100,000 more invading opportunists from all over the world are reportedly heading to the southern border. A month after the fall of Afghanistan, and after this week’s hearings in both the House and the Senate, still nobody knows who gave the insane order to surrender Bagram Air Force Base outside Kabul. The Democrats’ dishonest “infrastructure” bill is wilting in Congress. Food and energy prices are rising fast, with shortages on the horizon. The capital markets are wobbling. And Special Counsel John Durham is back on the scene with more actions against Hillary Clinton’s favorite law firm, Perkins Coie, facilitators of the seditious RussiaGate campaign. Put it all together and you have a mechanism that looks like a “Joe Biden” toaster.

Off in a far corner of the News-O-Sphere, someone affecting to be John McAfee dwells on a Telegram channel labeled “OfficialMcAfee.” John McAfee, for those who don’t know, was the wealthy inventor of antivirus computer software who found himself at odds with the US government, went rogue, and supposedly committed suicide in Spain last June. Now, he has apparently turned up on this social media app in a series of videos and cryptic info drops. Whether he is actually still alive, or perhaps recorded these videos before taking his life, is not known. But he had threatened to release terabytes of digital evidence against his antagonists, including video of sexual misconduct among well-known political figures connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein, as well as incriminating documents from the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign files from 2016. Those info dumps have commenced and the figure who appears to be John McAfee in the Telegram videos says that the dumps will contain incrementally more shocking material for weeks to come.

All of this activity is obviously weird to an extreme never before seen in national affairs prior to the deep fake era — to the degree that reality is almost impossible to establish for now. We are a people lost in a dark wood. When you are lost, the first thing you must do is stop your useless, self-defeating locomotion, hunker down in place, and carefully assess what’s around you. Even if everything else is murky and perplexing, one thing is known: there is a way out of these dark woods. Remain calm and alert and it will reveal itself.