Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Saturday Matinee: Pump Up the Volume

Posted on by
Reply

Looking back at Pump Up The Volume

By Simon Brew

Source: Den of Geek

“Do you ever the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?”

When writer/director Allan Moyle’s work is celebrated, it’s generally Empire Records that gets the acclaim (and with some justification). Furthermore, if the conversation then moves on to cult movies starring Christian Slater, then it’s almost sacrilege to not start with Heathers.

Me? In both cases, I go for Pump Up The Volume every time, a thoughtful film masquerading behind a name that doesn’t necessarily do it a lot of justice. It’s certainly not the first story about a shy-by-day high school kid who assumes an anonymous identity out of hours – although this is a film in pre-Internet days, remember – but it’s comfortably one of the best.

“I didn’t talk to one person today, not counting teachers”

The film centres on Christian Slater’s Mark, a meek, lonely teenager, moved into a strange area by his parents, and attending a high school where he knows nobody. Actually, scratch that, he knows the youngest school commissioner in the history of Arizona – that’d be his father – but other than that, he’s very much alone.

He’s also nervous and shy: early in the film, his writing is read out to the class by an impressed teacher, and his discomfort at his talent being aired in such a way is evident. Mark prefers flying under the radar.

That’s until 10pm every night, when he takes his one piece of company in life, his radio broadcasting equipment (given to him by his parents so he can keep in touch with his old friends), finds an available frequency, and broadcasts for as long as he wants as pirate DJ Happy Harry Hard-On. His collection of music is quite brilliant, and the film’s soundtrack is most definitely worth checking out (although it lacks the version of Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows that’s heard more prominently in the film), but it’s what Harry has to say that grabs the attention.

Because in Harry, Mark has an outlet to say what he actually thinks. And say it he does. His views aren’t, in the scheme of things, massively radical. His parents have sold out (his father used to fight the system, we’re told, and now he “is the system”), the school system is warped, and everyone conforms. There’s nobody to look up to, nothing to do. Oh, and he simulates masturbation. A lot.

As if to reinforce the two sides of his life, after one of his early broadcasts, Mark attempts to talk to a girl at school, and she blanks him.

That notwithstanding, though, he inadvertedly becomes the lone voice of protest in the midst of a messed up system. The film centres around the fictional school of Hubert Humphrey High, whose principal, Loretta Cresswell, firmly knows how to get the academic results that her own superiors judge her school on (her eventual demise in the film, arguably, doesn’t solve that much). Root out the problem students, with the below average scores, then find a reason to expel them, and just keep those who get decent grades on the register.

Interestingly, the story does have its roots in a real life situation. Appreciating Hubert Humphrey High doesn’t exist, what does exist is a school that it’s based on, and where Moyle’s sister, according to the Toronto Star, taught.

“This dancing is a privilege, and it’ll be taken away if it’s abused”

Back to Harry, then. His listeners are everywhere, and his audience unites the people who simply don’t talk to each other when they’re together at school. The nerdy overweight kid, the jocks, the prim and proper swot girl: Moyle draws together the usually clichéd characters of the high school movie, and pretty much gathers them around the radio. Some of them have very swish radios, too.

This wins him a gradually building word-of-mouth audience, which is where Mark’s problems begin. Kids start ringing each other up, to help pass the broadcast on. Tapes do the rounds. More people start to notice. Moyle demonstrates this by gradually congregating more and more people at the physical spot where the reception for Harry’s show is at its best.

Consequently, much to the growing consternation of his father and the principal, more and more people take seriously what Harry has to say. A calm school population starts to take on a rebellious flavour, and a small system that works on complicity starts to unravel.

It doesn’t help, of course, that Mark/Harry has access to documents and information that don’t show Hubert Humphrey High in the best of lights. And when he particularly highlights the case of one student who has been expelled for her problems, although really for her grades, then suddenly, Harry is on lots of people’s radar.

The turning point for the movie, though, comes surprisingly early: it’s the suicide of one of Harry’s listeners. As his army of followers know, if you include a number in your letter to Harry (he’s a pirate radio DJ with a  PO box), you get a call back. In this case, it’s all a little too late. One on-air conversation with Harry later, said caller commits suicide, and the system has its scapegoat. Moyle’s film makes no bones about the way the system looks for the obvious, public fix rather than examining what really drove a youngster to kill himself, and it’s in moments like these when it’s at its best.

There’s also a foil of sorts to Mark/Harry, and that’s with Samantha Mathis’ Nora. The film was made in 1990, and it shows just what my predictive powers are like that I was fairly convinced at the time she’d go on to be a bigger star than she became. Her choices of films didn’t massively help – the Super Mario Bros movie is a stain on most people’s CV – but there’s real potential in her performance here.

For Nora is a far more popular person than Mark by day, yet she too feels the need to express herself anonymously. In her case, it’s her letters to his show, signed from the Eat Me Beat Me lady. It’s Nora who fairly quickly works out Mark’s true identity, and the irony of their relationship is that by them both talking to nobody, they both find somebody.

“Like everything else, you have to read the fine print”

It’s around then, though, that the film starts to run out of steam. It lands lots of punches in its first hour, in pretty quick succession, yet its momentum falters a little, and it goes just a little more conventional (the romance, certainly, is well done, but less interesting). Thus, the final act of the film is more concerned with those in authority tracking down Harry, and shutting down his show. And it all comes together via Harry’s last broadcast, which ends up taking place from the back of a 4×4.

It’s worth acknowledging too, that some points jar just a little. Some of the reaction moments to people listening to Harry’s broadcasts feel a little out of place. Furthermore, while Moyle takes time to briefly explore why the parents, staff and authorities act the way they do, he doesn’t invest too much in it.

Why do they come up with daft schemes such as BIONIC (‘Believe It Or Not I Care’)? Why do Mark’s parents not see beyond the tick box obvious? There are moments with Mark’s dad in particular, to be fair, where you get a glimpse of what he was, and contrast that with what he’s become (check out the moment where he catches Mark and Nora in the basement). But Moyle is, understandably, a little harder on their side of the story.

Still, for its few foibles, and appreciating that the film tailors off a little, at no point in its 102 minute running time does it feel like it’s outstaying its welcome. There’s sometimes a rawness to it, and there’s also a bunch of strong performances from the predominantly young cast.

I should focus on Christian Slater in particular, though. He’s electric here, in the midst of Harry’s raging monologues, but it shouldn’t be overlooked how well he conveys Mark’s innate shyness. It’s one of the more trickier characters he’s tackled, and the issues he has to talk about – sexual abuse, suicide, sexuality, loneliness – mean he has to balance the tone just right. I’d suggest he very much does. Moyle’s writing, too, is at times exquisite. The monologue he pens for Slater to deliver on the simplicity of suicide is dark, gripping material for a supposed teen movie

“I am not perfect. I have just been going through the motions of being perfect”

I find it odd that Pump Up The Volume, a film with a misjudged title and a not wonderful promotional campaign behind it, seems to have been lost a little. Appreciating that at most we’ve had a basic DVD release of the film, and it’s never likely to be ripe for Blu-ray, it’s still comfortably one of the best teen movies of the 90s (and the 90s were hardly short of strong teen movies), and also, a qualityaddition to the unnaturally strong genre of radio DJ movies (seriously: how many bad ones can you name?)

Even if you take just the romance element in isolation (arguably the weakest ingredient) between Mark and Nora, the scene where Harry takes to the airwaves to tell her his feelings, unable to look her in the eye and voice them face to face, is really well done. It’s the kind of stuff that romcoms stumble over all the time. Here’s a teen movie that handles it with class.

When the film is quiet in particular, and when good actors are being trusted with long passages of dialogue, Pump Up The Volume is brilliant. And it still is. Moyle has fashioned here an intelligent, well made and strongly written film, with something to say, that – in an age of Internet anonymity – might even be more resonant over two decades later.

And if it isn’t? Well, to take the works of Harry himself, “so be it”…

Why the political West still doesn’t want Ukraine to join NATO

Posted on by
Reply

By Drago Bosnic

Source: InfoBrics.org

For approximately 20-25 years, the political West has been flirting with the idea of Ukraine joining NATO. And yet, Kiev is as far from joining the belligerent alliance as it was a few decades ago, as evidenced by Zelensky’s unconcealed, almost painful frustration at the latest NATO summit in Lithuania’s Vilnius. The very idea that Ukraine might join the aggressive alliance is hardly a new concept. The CIA had plans for such a scenario long before the Soviet Union’s dismantling during the late 1980s and early 1990s. And yet, the country never became part of NATO, not even after approximately two decades of close cooperation, including the Ukrainian military’s direct participation in illegal US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, why is the political West sending so many mixed messages about “Ukraine’s future in NATO”, but then demands Kiev to defeat a military superpower next door as a prerequisite for potential future membership? The only logical conclusion is that the belligerent alliance simply doesn’t want Ukraine to become a member yet. The primary reason for this is that Moscow is just too strong for that to become a reality, meaning that the political West wants Russia to be weakened to the point where it will not be able to resist NATO’s crawling aggression. For that purpose, the political West needs what experts have rightfully called “a crash test dummy“. Unfortunately for Ukrainians, they’ve been given that exceedingly unflattering role.

And indeed, during the Vilnius summit, NATO offered Ukraine “an alternative to full membership” that can only be called TTLU (To the last Ukrainian). The belligerent alliance simply cannot offer any sort of security guarantees to a country with so many territorial issues, to say nothing of its ongoing direct confrontation with Russia, a military superpower with a thermonuclear arsenal exceeding the combined power of NATO’s entire strategic might. The TTLU concept allows NATO to keep providing weapons, funds, logistics, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), etc. while not having to send its own troops. For the political West, this is seen as a win-win, as Ukrainians (seen as “former” Russians) are fighting (other) Russians for the sake of NATO.

This war by proxy is the belligerent alliance’s best bet to conduct its crawling “Barbarossa 2.0” against Russia while avoiding complete destruction by Moscow’s second-to-none ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). And it’s most definitely not even the first time the political West has been probing the Kremlin in this way. Back in 2008, Georgia was the first “crash test dummy” and a litmus test of Russia’s reaction. Tbilisi was promised full membership, but all it got was a loss of approximately 20% of its former territory, as well as the long-term loss of centuries-old virtually brotherly relations with its northern neighbor. The leading Georgian political “crash test dummy” Mikheil Saakashvili served his purpose and was then “recycled” in Ukraine only to later be cast away as a useless burden.

Saakashvili’s fate can serve as a stark reminder to the Kiev regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky, which perfectly explains his perpetually depressed bearing. He understands that the political West wants the war to last for as long as possible and that’s certainly not an appealing prospect for someone who will eventually have to take all the blame for Ukraine’s unrelenting collapse. NATO’s mixed messages are designed for this exact purpose. The belligerent alliance has openly stated that it will not accept Kiev regime’s membership until hostilities cease, meaning that Moscow will simply have no incentive to stop its counteroffensive against NATO aggression until most or all of Ukraine is under its control.

The fact that the political West has prevented a peaceful settlement speaks volumes about how it sees Ukraine and its people. Zelensky and his clique are there just to execute commands, regardless of the cost for the Ukrainians or even the Neo-Nazi junta itself. In his op-ed for Politico, Wolfgang Ischinger, one of Germany’s most prominent diplomats, recently suggested that the Kiev regime might be given all aspects of membership, only without actual membership. According to Ischinger, “[NATO] could grant Ukraine all the practical and concrete options and opportunities that NATO membership includes, but without official treaty membership”. In other words, Kiev would effectively have all the commitments of a member, but no benefits. Hence – TTLU.

It should also be noted that the US-led political West is certainly not shying away from (ab)using Ukrainians for whatever purpose it finds profitable and/or useful for itself. Whether it’s the easier recruitment of spies, less stringent control of sex trafficking (including of underage children) or the immense profit for NATO’s Military Industrial Complex (MIC), it’s all up for sale and war drives down the prices. In such a scenario, why would the political West ever want to have any legal commitments that would require it to enter a direct confrontation with Russia, a country that’s still the world’s only true near-peer military rival to NATO? Thus, it’s up to the Ukrainian people to finally reject such suicidal servitude that has resulted in nothing but misery for their country and has effectively robbed them of their future.

Mental Health Round-Ups: The Next Phase of the Government’s War on Thought Crimes

Posted on by
Reply

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”—Hannah Arendt

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth Amendments at will.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.

In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.

Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile… sound familiar?

It should.

The age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) its critics is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these individuals are declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.

These developments are merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009, including one dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Coupled with the report on “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (curiously enough, a Soviet term), which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration has since become an operation manual for exiling those who challenge the government’s authority.

An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.

Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, these veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.

For instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.

One tactic being used to deal with so-called “mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare” is through the use of civil commitment laws, found in all states and employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear.

For example, NSA officials attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as “mentally unbalanced” based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.

NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered by way of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.

Marine Brandon Raub—a 9/11 truther—was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s civil commitment law based on posts he had made on his Facebook page that were critical of the government.

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.

As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”

With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

Let that sink in a moment.

Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

We stand at a crossroads.

As author Erich Fromm warned, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”

A Bonfire of the Vanities

Posted on by
Reply

By Alastair Crooke

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.

The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.

It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.

The obvious flaw to this hubris is that it requires you to be at war with reality. At first, the public are confused, but as the lies proliferate, and lie is layered upon lie, the narrative separates further and further from touched reality, even as mists of dishonesty continue to swathe themselves loosely around it. Public scepticism sets in. Narratives about the ‘why’ of inflation; whether the economy be healthy or not; or why we must go to war with Russia, begin to fray.

Western élites have ‘bet their shirts’ on maximum control of ‘media platforms’, absolute messaging conformity and ruthless repression of protest as their blueprint for a continued hold in power.

Yet, against the odds, the MSM is losing its hold over the U.S. audience. Polls show growing distrust of the U.S. MSM. When Tucker Carlson’s first ‘anti-message’ Twitter show appeared, the noise of tectonic plates grinding against each other was unmissable, as more than 100 million (one in three) Americans listened to iconoclasm.

The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.

Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.

“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met … [however] unless Ukraine wins this war, there’s no membership issue to be discussed at all” – Jens Stoltenberg’s statement at Vilnius. Thus, after urging Kiev to throw more (hundreds of thousands) of its men into the jaws of death to justify NATO membership, the latter turns its back on its protégé. It was, after all, an unwinnable war from the beginning.

The hubris, at one level, lay in NATO’s pitting of its alleged ‘superior’ military doctrine and weapons versus that of a deprecated, Soviet-style, hide-bound, Russian military rigidity – and ‘incompetence’.

But military facts on the ground have exposed the western doctrine as hubris – with Ukrainian forces decimated, and its NATO weaponry lying in smoking ruins. It was NATO that insisted on re-enacting the Battle of 73 Easting (from the Iraqi desert, but now translated into Ukraine).

In Iraq, the ‘armoured fist’ punched easily into Iraqi tank formations: It was indeed a thrusting ‘fist’ that knocked the Iraqi opposition ‘for six’. But, as the U.S. commander at that tank battle (Colonel Macgregor), frankly admits, its outcome against a de-motivated opposition largely was fortuitous.

Nonetheless ‘73 Easting’ is a NATO myth, turned into the general doctrine for the Ukrainian forces – a doctrine structured around Iraq’s unique circumstance.

The hubris – in line with the Daily Telegraph video – however, ascends vertically to impose the unitary narrative of a coming western ‘win’ onto the Russian political sphere too. It is an old, old story that Russia is military weak, politically fragile, and prone to fissure. Conor Gallagher has shown with ample quotes that it was exactly the same story in World War 2, reflecting a similar western underestimation of Russia – combined with a gross overestimation of their own capabilities.

The fundamental problem with ‘delusion’ is that the exit from it (if it occurs at all) moves at a much slower pace than events. The mismatch can define future outcomes.

It may be in the Team Biden interest now to oversee an orderly NATO withdrawal from Ukraine – such that it avoids becoming another Kabul debacle.

For that to happen, Team Biden needs Russia to accept a ceasefire. And here lies the (the largely overlooked) flaw to that strategy: It simply is not in the Russian interest to ‘freeze’ the situation. Again, the assumption that Putin would ‘jump’ at the western offer of a ceasefire is hubristic thinking: The two adversaries are not frozen in the basic meaning of the term – as in a conflict in which neither side has been able to prevail over the other, and are stuck.

Put simply, whereas Ukraine structurally hovers at the brink of implosion, Russia, by contrast, is fully plenipotent: It has large, fresh forces; it dominates the airspace; and has near domination of the electromagnetic airspace. But the more fundamental objection to a ceasefire is that Moscow wants the present Kiev collective gone, and NATO’s weapons off the battle field.

So, here is the rub: Biden has an election, and so it would suit the Democratic campaign needs to have an ‘orderly wind-down’. The Ukraine war has exposed too many wider American logistic deficiencies. But Russia has its’ interests, too.

Europe is the party most trapped by ‘delusion’ – starting from the point at which they threw themselves unreservedly into the Biden ‘camp’. The Ukraine narrative broke at Vilnius. But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.

The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid.

If the reaction of some of these leaders seems disproportionate and unrealistic (“There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin”) – it is because this ‘war’ touches on a deeper motivations. It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure with it.

The western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, is one of superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have since been refined, extended, and transmitted down the ages (through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and other supposedly uniquely western developments), so that we in the west today are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA”.

This is what the narrators of the Daily Telegraph video probably had at the back of their minds when they insist that ‘Our narrative wins wars’. Their hubris resides in the implicit presumption: that the West somehow always wins – is destined to prevail – because it is the recipient of this privileged genealogy.

Of course, outside of general understanding, it is accepted that notions of ‘a coherent West’ has been invented, repurposed and put to use in different times and places. In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”.

With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe”.

The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.

They quake, not just at a ‘Russia empowered’, but rather at the prospect the new multi-polar order led by Putin and Xi that is sweeping the globe will tear down the myth of Western Civilisation.

ARE CENTRAL BANK DIGITAL CURRENCIES (CBDC) DESTINED TO FAIL?

Posted on by
2

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Since Bitcoin (BTC) was introduced to the world as an alternative to the current central bank system with a dying US dollar that is backed by nothing as its reserve currency, but now there is a plan by several governments to move ahead with implementing their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which is a digital form of currency that is still backed by, you guessed it, nothing.  The Nigerian government had made the decision to be the financial guinea pig for the globalist CBDC scheme, and so far, it has failed and that’s the good news.  The bad news is that certain governments are still moving forward with the idea of using government-issued digital currencies.  In the case of Nigeria, its citizens rejected their government’s plan to issue CBDCs by restricting cash in efforts to create a cashless society and so far, it seems that it has failed in epic fashion according to an opinion piece by author Nicholas Anthony that was published by coindesk.com ‘Nigerians’ Rejection of Their CBDC Is a Cautionary Tale for Other Countries’ is a warning to governments who are willing to take the same step: 

In Nigeria, citizens have taken to the streets to protest the nation’s cash shortage, further objecting to their government’s implementation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The shortage came about due to cash restrictions aimed at pushing the country into a 100% cashless economy. Yet, instead of adopting the CBDC, Nigerian protesters are demanding paper money be restored.

The country’s experience strongly suggests the average citizen understands that CBDCs present a substantial risk to financial freedom while providing no unique benefit

Not only did the Nigerian people reject CBDCs, but they also demanded a return to paper currencies because they quickly found out that financial freedoms would be severely limited. 

The concerns ranged from risking financial privacy to the possibility of financial oppression by government institutions.  Anthony mentioned how “the Nigerian government has unleashed a flurry of tricks to spur adoption, but none has proven effective.”  He even gave credit to the Nigerian government in terms of using modest approaches to influence its citizens to use CBDCs and it still failed:

To its credit, the Nigerian government initially tried to encourage use through modest measures. In August 2022, it removed access restrictions so that bank accounts were no longer required to use the CBDC. Then, in October, it offered discounts if people used the CBDC to pay for cabs.  Yet, neither effort proved to be fruitful. Put simply, Nigerians prefer cash

However, the Nigerian government continued its assault on cash:

Unfortunately, the Nigerian government doubled down and moved to more drastic measures by restricting cash itself. In December the Central Bank of Nigeria began restricting cash withdrawals to 100,000 naira (US$225) per week for individuals and 500,000 naira ($1,123) for businesses.

To make matters worse, the Nigerian government also chose to redesign the currency during this time in a “move aimed at restoring the control of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) over currency in circulation” and to “further deepen the push to [a] cashless economy,” according to a CBN press release

The Nigerians had a hard time adapting to the government’s restrictions on their hard earned cash, so they posted their concerns on Twitter, Tik Tok and other social media platforms to let the world know what went wrong.  Soon after, major protests erupted on the streets because of the cash shortages imposed by the Central Bank of Nigeria: 

The government decided to redesign the currency to restore control over the Central Bank of Nigeria as its governor, Godwin Emefiele claimed that “the destination, as far as I am concerned, is to achieve a 100% cashless economy in Nigeria.”  To add insult to injury, “the company that designed the Nigerian CBDC called the cash restrictions a creative use of marketing and said other countries could be expected to take similar steps.”  A top manager from a financial institutional ratings firm called Agusto and Co., Ayokunle Olumbunmi said that the central bank “doesn’t want us to be spending cash. They want us to be doing transactions electronically, but you can’t legislate a change in behavior.”  Anthony concluded that the idea of CBDCs will not go very far, “CBDCs may be popular among central bankers, but money is ultimately a tool for the people. So long as the risks outweigh the benefits, it’s unlikely any CBDC will gain traction in Africa or elsewhere.”

Nicholas Anthony was correct to point out that CBDCs will not become mainstream as several countries have already demonstrated their unwillingness to move forward with the new form of digitized currencies. 

The average human being on earth understands that CBDCs is a bad idea, even in the United States where two-thirds of the population believes almost anything that their government tells them to believe are skeptical of CBDCs according to the Cato Institute, a think tank who also published an article by Nicholas Anthony on the findings of a survey that was conducted by the US federal Reserve Bank on how people view CBDCs.  Here is what they found, “Specifically, more than 66 percent of the 2,052 commenters were concerned or outright opposed to the idea of a CBDC in the United States (Figure 1).”

Bitcoin.com published an article on the GOP’s 2024 presidential candidate, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis who is opposed to CBDCs, ‘Ron DeSantis Vows to Prohibit CBDC, ‘Woke Politics,’ and ‘Financial Surveillance’ in Florida,’ he said “I think what the danger of the digital currency is that, one, they want to make that the sole currency, they want to get rid of crypto,” DeSantis continued, “They don’t like crypto because they can’t control crypto. So, they want to put everything in a central bank digital currency.”  There were other politicians who also have similar views on CBDCs:

DeSantis shares the view of several Republican officials who have criticized the idea of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer introduced the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Anti-Surveillance State Act, while Texas senator Ted Cruz has created legislation against the government developing a CBDC. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has also spoken out against CBDCs, and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. has warned that a central bank digital currency could lead to financial slavery

Cash is King! How the CBDC Failed in Japan and Ecuador

Cointelegraph.com, an independent digital news platform that focuses on crypto assets, blockchain technology and emerging fintech trends published an article last year written by Helen Partz based on which countries have rejected CBDCs for one reason or another titled ‘Some central banks have dropped out of the digital currency race’ mentions Japan, who is a major player in the global economy, ultimately rejected developing a CBDC scheme.  The Bank of Japan (BOJ) started testing their digital currency proof-of-concept in 2021 and had planned to finish the first phase by 2022 but in January “former BOJ official Hiromi Yamaoka advised against using the digital yen as part of the country’s monetary policy, citing risks to financial stability.” 

The BOJ issued a report in July 2022 and stated that it had no plan to establish a CBDC system since there is a “strong preference for cash and high ratio of bank account holding in Japan” and that the regulator suggested for a CBDC to be used as a “public good” and it “must complement and coexist” with “private payment services in order for Japan to achieve secure and efficient payment and settlement systems.”  However, it also said that “the fact that CBDC is being seriously considered as a realistic future option in many countries must be taken seriously,” in other words, the CBDC scheme in Japan will not move forward although several countries are still in the early stages of developing a plan for the use of CBDCs, but for Japan, cash is still and will be king well into the foreseeable future.

Ecuador is another example as its central bank, Banco Central del Ecuador (BCE) who launched its own electronic currency known as dinero electrónico (DE) in 2014 to increase some sort of financial inclusion for the public as well as to control the flow of fiat currencies.  According to Partz “As of February 2015, Ecuador managed to adopt DE as a functional means of payment, allowing qualified users to transfer money via a mobile app. The application specifically allowed citizens to open an account using a national identity number and then deposit or withdraw money via designated transaction centers.”  But industry observers were not so sure that the DE can take the form of a CBDC since Ecuador’s currency is the US dollar, and since Ecuador does not currently have its own sovereign currency, many were not so sure that they can call the DE, a form of CBDC.  “The Ecuadorian government cited the support of its dollar-based monetary system as one of the goals behind its DE platform after it started to accept U.S. dollars as legal tender in September 2000.”  It seems that Ecuador remains skeptical on any possibility that issuing CBDCs will be a success:

According to online reports, Ecuador’s DE operated from 2014 to 2018, amassing a total of 500,000 users at its peak out of a population of roughly 17 million people. The project ​​was eventually deactivated in March 2018, with the BCE reportedly citing legislation abolishing the central bank’s electronic money system. Passed in December 2021, the law stated that e-payment systems should be outsourced to private banks.

Years after dropping its central bank digital money initiative, Ecuador has apparently remained skeptical about the whole CBDC phenomenon. In August 2022, Andrés Arauz, the former general director at Ecuador’s central bank, warned eurozone policymakers that a digital euro could potentially disrupt not only privacy but also democracy

Bottom line, the CBDC will not be a standard for financial transactions for the few countries who already tried launching their versions of digital currencies. 

However, in the US, the Federal Reserve’s ‘FedNow’ was supposed to be launched sometime in July 2023.  Here is the Federal Reserve’s Press Release:

The Federal Reserve announced that the FedNow Service will start operating in July and provided details on preparations for launch.  The first week of April, the Federal Reserve will begin the formal certification of participants for launch of the service. Early adopters will complete a customer testing and certification program, informed by feedback from the FedNow Pilot Program, to prepare for sending live transactions through the system.

Certification encompasses a comprehensive testing curriculum with defined expectations for operational readiness and network experience. In June, the Federal Reserve and certified participants will conduct production validation activities to confirm readiness for the July launch.

“We couldn’t be more excited about the forthcoming FedNow launch, which will enable every participating financial institution, the smallest to the largest and from all corners of the country, to offer a modern instant payment solution,” said Ken Montgomery, first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and FedNow program executive. “With the launch drawing near, we urge financial institutions and their industry partners to move full steam ahead with preparations to join the FedNow Service”

For the US population, FedNow is a test that will eventually fail.  People will be skeptical about a central bank digital currency once it proves that it is used to surveil people’s spending habits and control what they spend their money on, and God forbid they are anti-war, anti-vaccine activists, homeschoolers, pro-gun supporters or conspiracy theorists, the bankers can cut them off from using CBDCs and then what happens?  Will there be riots in the streets? 

Since Bitcoin was introduced as an alternative to central bank control, the creation of the CBDC is their answer in hopes of retaining their power, but that idea is not likely to happen, it will in some way, backfire. 

When it comes to Bitcoin, it’s a different story.  In an interesting article written by Jay Speakman of beincrypto.com ‘When You Buy Bitcoin You Gain Freedom’ says that “in a world where economic and political uncertainties abound, owning Bitcoin (BTC) could provide the path toward financial freedom and autonomy. It’s no longer just about investing in a digital asset. It’s about making a revolutionary move to gain control over your finances and future.”  Speakman makes several main points on why people should own Bitcoins and one of those points is that owning sovereign cryptos such as Bitcoins, Ethereum’s and others is a step towards financial freedom:

It provides the opportunity to participate in the global economy without the limitations of traditional banking systems. Bitcoin is not subject to government regulations. At least not yet, and it is free from the inflationary policies which can erode fiat currency values. This means Bitcoin provides an alternative and potentially more secure, store of value

Another reason for owning Bitcoins is for future investment purposes:

Investing in Bitcoin is no longer simply making money. It is about investing in your future and securing your financial freedom. Bitcoin’s decentralized financial system operates independently of central authorities or governments. This means it is resistant to censorship and regulation. Bitcoin holders can make transactions without the need for banks, which are subject to government intervention

“Investment Diversification” is another reason to own Bitcoins since putting all your eggs in one basket, especially in a globalist banking system, is a bit risky:

Investing in Bitcoin can provide portfolio diversification as it is not correlated to traditional assets such as stocks and bonds. This means it may provide a hedge against inflation and market volatility, mitigating the risks associated with traditional investment portfolios

However, owning Bitcoins does have risks like everything else since the “market is notoriously volatile. Prices often fluctuate wildly based on a range of factors, from government regulations to media coverage.”  Speakman also mentions that “BTC transactions can result in a permanent loss of funds. There is also the risk of hacking and theft, as these transactions are irreversible and untraceable.” 

In conclusion, the article lays out what owning Bitcoins could mean for individuals and investors alike especially for those who do not trust the traditional banking system:

The decision to buy BTC is more than just a financial investment. It’s a move towards financial freedom, control, and security. Bitcoin’s feature of allowing individuals to act as their own banks. Providing a secure alternative to traditional banking systems which have exhibited instability and vulnerability to failures.  Furthermore, the appeal goes beyond just financial security and autonomy. The digital currency resonates with libertarians who value individual freedom and limited government intervention. Despite a torrent of dissenting voices Bitcoin continues to gain mainstream adoption. As the technology continues to mature, it may address some of the concerns raised by the dissenting voices.

Investing in digital assets may involve risks such as volatility and the potential for hacking and theft. Yet, the benefits of financial freedom outweigh the downsides. As the world becomes increasingly uncertain, owning Bitcoin could be the first step toward financial security and autonomy

When you look at the difference between CBDCs along with the system imposed by international banking cartels who still maintain some form of financial dominance versus the Bitcoin revolution, there is a difference.  CBDCs means no financial freedoms and owning Bitcoins means the exact opposite.  Even though Bitcoins are still in the early stages, there is hope in the new crypto technology.  But like everything else, you should be cautious, do not invest 100% of your net worth in just one asset, in other words, invest maybe 5% in bitcoins, and the rest? 15% in emergency preparedness (food, water filters, guns, flashlights, etc.)  20% in real estate or invest in a second passport, 20% in hard assets like gold, silver and copper, 20% in high-end watches, antiques, aged wines and liquor, collectibles etc. and the last 20% in foreign stocks especially those that are in politically stabilized environments or in gold and silver mining companies, but that’s just my opinion. 

Government-backed CBDCs will be a failure because the people already do not trust international banking cartels to totally control their finances. So, for these banks to have total control over your financial wellbeing under their CBDC scheme would be an extremely difficult task for them to manage. 

The banking cartel or the financial bureaucrats are about to discover that they will be in over their heads with an angry population.  Just imagine if the banking cartels, certain governments and their corporate conglomerates are in  control over the people’s finances, they will get to determine who eats and who will starve.  This is the ultimate power grab the globalist bankers have been dreaming about for a very long time, but will the people stop this from happening?  I’m an optimist, so I believe that they will demand their financial freedoms and that is something of value that they can hold and control in their own hands.  The case for CBDCs will be a hard sell, so central banks who are proposing this idea should think twice about what they are trying to impose on the public, if not, they will face some form of resistance just like they did in Nigeria.    

Why You Should Stop Trusting ‘The Experts’

Posted on by
1

We’re constantly told to “trust the experts”, but that is phenomenally bad advice.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: JeremyRHammond.com

“Trust the experts,” we are constantly being told, whatever the topic of discussion. The problem with this advice is that the so-called “experts” are frequently wrong, sometimes as a result of plain incompetence and other times because it is their function to propagandize rather than to educate.

For instance, I got my start doing citizen journalism speaking out against the US government’s planned war on Iraq. In 2002 and early 2003, the government claimed that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, active weapons manufacturing programs, and an active nuclear program aimed at producing a nuclear bomb. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times uncritically parroted the government’s claims. All the “expert” analysts and commentators towed the official line.

When I would point out to people that there was no credible evidence to support the government’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that the documentary record rather indicated that Iraq had been disarmed of the weapons it produced during the 1980s with the support of the US government, I was frequently confronted with the idea that we should trust the expert intelligence analysts because surely government policymakers must have classified information supporting their case that they just couldn’t share with the public.

Later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) issued its official report acknowledging that Iraq had indeed been disarmed by UN inspectors by 1991 and never restarted its weapons programs, a whole new propaganda narrative was developed to whitewash how the US government lied to the American people and the world. We were then fed the myth that there had been an “intelligence failure”, the truth being that the government had successfully waged a disinformation campaign against the public for the purpose of manufacturing consent for an illegal war of aggression that left Iraq devastated, with negative ripple effects throughout the Middle East, including the war’s precipitation of the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Another example is the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. The mainstream “experts” insisted that there was no bubble, that the economy was rolling along nicely. Right up to the bubble’s peak, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke refused to see it. In the New York Times, throughout the 2000s, Keynesian economist Paul Krugman lauded the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy that was the principal cause of the housing bubble only to ludicrously blame the bubble on the forces of the free market after it burst.

Meanwhile, free market economists schooled in the ideas of Austrian economics, so called because its founders and early luminaries hailed from Austria, were accurately warning how the Fed’s policy of maintaining artificially low interest rates—meaning rates below where they would otherwise be if determined by the market rather than by a roomful of policymakers—was fueling a housing bubble that would cause economic devastation when it inevitably burst. Congressman Ron Paul famously warned about this as early as 2001, yet we were consistently told by the mainstream “experts” that we shouldn’t listen to him or other advocates of liberty in the marketplace.

The preposterousness of the mainstream narrative was so overwhelming, it prompted me to write a book titled Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, which ended up getting a rave review by none other than Barron’s. Gene Epstein, the former Economics and Books editor for Barron’s said of it:

Any work of economics that can make you laugh is at least worth a look. If in less than 100 pages it also informs you about a subject of great importance, it might just qualify as a must-read. Jeremy Hammond, a political journalist self-taught in economics and a writer of rare skill, has produced such a book…. This short work conveys more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks, and more about the recent business cycle than most volumes of much greater length.

Once again, we could see that there is a whole class of “experts” whose primary function was not to truly educate us about how the economy functions but to manufacture consent for the existence of central banking—the Fed being a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply.

That episode also once again illustrates how any non-expert willing to commit the time to self-education can easily see through the lies and deceptions propagated by the “experts”.

Arguably, there is no more perfect example of how the “experts” get things completely wrong than the governmental responses to the COVID‑19 pandemic. While I and others fervently opposed the lockdown measures from the start on the grounds that they would do more harm than good, the thought-controlling media insisted that we must trust the government’s “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci. We should “follow the science” we were told, while Fauci claimed to be science incarnate, deeming himself beyond reproach by proclaiming that to criticize him was to attack science itself.

Predictably, the proclaimed benefits of lockdowns never manifested in the data while the harms have been devastating, with negative consequences being disproportionately borne by children, who are at the lowest risk from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection.

I was also warning people since March 2020 that the endgame of the lockdown measures was coerced mass vaccination, which was dubbed a “conspiracy theory” by the mainstream media but nevertheless came to pass.

While all the “experts” in the so-called “public health” establishment were proclaiming that widespread acceptance of the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines would end the pandemic by conferring herd immunity, dissident voices like my own were being censored for telling the truth that there was no scientific evidence that the vaccines would induce durable sterilizing immunity that would prevent infection and transmission of the virus.

I was also warning since very early into the mass vaccination campaign that the policy goal of getting everyone vaccinated could prolong the pandemic and worsen outcomes in the long-term because of the immunologic phenomenon of “original antigenic sin” and the opportunity cost of superior natural immunity. These warnings, too, proved prescient as we now know from the available scientific evidence that the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines do result in an “immune imprinting” so that vaccinated individuals are stuck generating a suboptimal immune response to circulating SARS‑CoV‑2 variants.

After it became obvious from the data that the vaccines failed to prevent infection and transmission of the virus, the media went so far in their efforts to defend the criminal regime of lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination by gaslighting us and absurdly denying that the COVID‑19 vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of lies.

We’re also supposed to trust doctors, but my own household’s experience with the medical establishment led us to the opposite conclusion. The doctors were not just unhelpful; they were less than useless. Especially in my wife’s case, listening to them caused more harm than good. In fact, it wasn’t until we learned to stop listening to the doctors and started trusting our own judgment that my wife and I both found a path to healing from the respective health problems we used to have (leaky gut in my case and mercury toxicity from dental amalgams in my wife’s).

Throughout the time that I was seeking help from the so-called “health care” system, I was repeatedly confronted by doctors whose ignorance was matched only by their arrogance and condescension. I ultimately bypassed the doctors by researching our symptoms directly in the medical literature; we diagnosed ourselves and successfully treated the root cause of our respective symptoms (taking steps to heal my gut and getting the mercury fillings safely removed followed by a two-year mercury detox regimen, respectively).

The supposed “experts” with an “MD” after their name were far more interested in lazily pushing pharmaceutical products on us to treat symptoms than in doing their job to try to figure out what the root cause was, much less in figuring out treatments aimed at addressing the underlying cause.

So, the next time you hear someone telling you to place your trust in the “experts”, emphasize the foolishness of placing blind faith in supposed authorities in lieu of doing one’s own research and thinking for oneself, and remind the person how the “experts” are frequently nothing more than professional propagandists serving a given political or financial agenda.

From Survival To Moments of Stillness

Posted on by
Reply

Are we consistently in survival mode? Does our societal design chronically invite us into this state?

By Tom Bunzel

Source: The Pulse

I thought I would contribute to the discussion by Joe Martino that “We’re Not Living in Ordinary Times.”

Many of the issues Joe mentioned dovetail with the work of trauma specialists like Dr. Gabor Mate, who recently wrote “The Myth of Normal” which describes how chronic illness and stress are actually “normal” responses to a traumatizing world.

So many of us are in survival mode.  I thought it was just me after COVID and having some other personal issues, but even now when I go to the market, it seems like many people are living with activated nervous systems.

A good friend also refers to a “fear machine” in the media.  Joe Martino calls it fear porn.  News has always been a beat down at times but with cable news it’s a 24/7 assault on the senses.

The format is deadly:  they don’t just tell you what HAS happened. They scare the crap out of you with what might happen, hasn’t happened, will never happen but might come knocking at your door. It is an onslaught of what ifs.

Why do we watch it?  We want to know “what’s going on”. 

What about what is happening all around us before we turn on the media?  What about trees growing, birds eating from a feeder or our cat coming up to snuggle?  We have all but forgotten our connection to the natural world into which we were born, and which apparently was here before we arrived.

How do we reconnect with what is beyond what we believe might be? I think there may be a “portal”.

We have been so conditioned by digital media that many of us never completely experience silence.

Quiet is hard to find these days.

The Noise of Consumerism

Besides just the news, there is the onslaught of commercials, now also on our phones and seemingly everywhere one goes.  I remember in 1980 when some people were appalled by the sudden commercialization of the Los Angeles Olympics, with corporate logos suddenly everywhere.

That was just the beginning.

Now every stadium is named after a corporate sponsor, and many of us wear branded attire proclaiming our attachment to a sports team or even a brand of sneakers or workout clothes.

The philosopher and mystic Gurdjieff wrote and spoke about how “Impressions” are taken in by our senses – essentially how the environment affects our bodily functions, mind and alas, spirit.

Getting bombarded with messages about our inadequacy on social media and advertising has already been noted as taking a psychological toll on teenagers in particular.

When I recognized that my brain had mostly healed from my concussion, but that I was still frequently uncomfortable in my body, I encountered the work of Dr. Mate and did some introspection on what sorts of “wounds” my body might be holding.

I found it helpful to consider this issue in the context of the impressions I received from an early age – and actually even before birth in the womb of a mother who had just survived the holocaust.

I began to see how the feelings of inadequacy and “less than” were programmed into me by trying to please first my parents, then my fellow students and ultimately potential friends in an attempt to secure connection and self-worth.

But it also became obvious that I was far from alone with having accumulated these “impressions” and now projecting the results onto the world – often shaping my experiences in negative ways that I attributed to “circumstances.”  I tried to get in touch with the anger and shame reflecting on these experiences, often of rejection, would trigger after years of probably ignoring those feelings entirely.

Conditioned Resistance to Resting

One thing that helped me begin to heal was noticing my intense resistance to resting – which I needed to do after my concussion but which the mind would not tolerate without admonishing me to “do something.”

The work of several spiritual teachers helped me address this issue.

Jeff Foster talks about being ’de-pressed’ and getting deep rest.

Jac O’Keefe and Eckhart Tolle both mention the need to stop “the movie in your head” and Eckhart often speaks of finding and making space – using a few conscious breaths to stop the voice in the head even just temporarily.

Mooji is a proponent of rest and contemplation around one’s conditioned beliefs.

And Adyashanti also advises “deep rest” in Stillness, without trying to control anything.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer in mediation says it’s really just about letting things be the way they are.

And on and on.

Of course, it’s easy to tell people working multiple jobs or trying to balance work and family to just rest.  As mentioned earlier, the whole impetus of the culture is to push through, do more, and keep going.

The Compulsion to Move with Loud Music

It’s interesting and a bit troubling to me that almost every advertisement shows young people dancing, whether they have taken a miracle pill or used the right deodorant.  It shows they have overcome their inadequacy.

I happen to think dancing is wonderful, but this continuous emphasis has made it almost impossible to find quiet.

It’s no secret that now so many people are constantly connected, by phone or other device, to the Internet, constantly intruding on any moment of stillness.

Unfortunately, like many of our own nervous systems, the Internet never rests.  And now with AI the prospect of a continual activity of neural stimulation now done also by machine portends the sort of chronic illness and stress that Dr. Mate talks about — getting even worse?

In his writing, Joe Martino mentions a “full bodied sensemaking” where one goes beyond the constant chatter of the mind and connects with the wisdom of the body – wisdom that Eckhart Tolle describes also as an Intelligence far greater than the (relatively smaller human) mind.

For me, that is essentially what led me to seek interludes of stillness, which I am fortunate enough to be able to find living in a senior community.

Connecting to What Receives Impressions

The mind and the body need a break from impressions.  In stillness it is possible to both allow the chatter of the mind and still not get caught up in any particular story; instead taking a series of deep conscious abdominal breaths we can “clear the cache” in memory and relax.

In relaxation, we can then allow the sensations in the body to be felt rather than suppressed, and even welcomed.

We can become open to the world as it is before it gets analyzed and judged by the mind.

Can this sort of practice and understanding be proliferated on a planetary level?

In reality, this is truly an economic issue, because this experience of stillness cannot occur in survival mode.

Corporations Have Their Own Agenda

The problem, of course, is the stiff resistance from the corporations — which have in many ways become the dominant species on the planet, comprised of seemingly independent humans the way our guts are made up of billions of “independent” microorganisms. 

But perhaps like reality itself, the corporation is a digital “living” organism in the sense that it seeks to survive, grow and often devour both competitors and its human workers.

Once again, this issue has been exacerbated by artificial intelligence which threatens to further separate the technologically privileged from an ever-increasing mass of human serfs.

As that chasm grows both separating portions of humanity will inevitably become even more separated from Source — what is and was always here.

As Joe suggests, the transformation here must come on an individual level first, but ultimately lead to a recognition of inter-connectedness and “wholeness” where humanity recognizes how it has separated from the very Nature of which it is an expression.

Imagine if during any large musical concert, where the audience is dancing and in tune, the artists brought the volume and tempo down, and then had a few minutes of community silence.

Imagine if that concert was under the Milky Way, and the light could be suppressed for that brief time to allow a real look at ‘where’ we are.

This is reminiscent of some of the indigenous ceremonies, if only we could begin to go in that direction.

It’s now part of my own practice – to find stillness both externally and internally – and begin to embody a sense of alignment with how things are – rather than how the mind thinks they should be.