Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Saturday Matinee: The Square

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By Freda Cooper

Source: Flickering Myth

SYNOPSIS:

A museum curator is preparing to launch a major art exhibition.  He sees himself as having a social conscience, but when his wallet and phone are stolen, the other side of his character emerges and he badly mis-handles the situation – and does the same thing when it comes to promoting his new show.

A film from Ruben Ostlund isn’t going to be cozy.  Compelling and fascinating, yes, but never easy and sometimes impenetrable.  His previous offering, Force Majeure, was well received and won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2014.  His latest, The Square, went one step further and scooped the Palme D’Or last year.

Force Majeure centred on a spontaneously cowardly act by a father.  This has another act from another father at its centre, but this time one that’s thought out.  Badly.  And it’s followed by a second one, which is equally ill-considered.   The Square of the title is an art installation, the centrepiece of an exhibition supervised by museum curator Christian (Claes Bang).  He’s a man under pressure, both professionally and domestically, but still believes he has a social conscience – until his wallet and phone are stolen.  His reaction is extreme, a more accurate reflection of the real man, and he’s responsible for something equally rash when it comes to launching his beloved exhibition.

That’s putting it simply.  Ostlund has a number of targets for what is, at times, a savage satire.  At the heart of it is how those with money treat others – the homeless, the poor or those who are just not as wealthy.  Society encourages tolerance and kindness, but it’s easier to ignore them.  “Would you take a moment to save a life?” asks a charity worker and everybody who walks past her says no.  Are they just saying no to her or to her actual question?  Or both?

The art establishment, in the form of The Square installation, comes in for attack as well.  It’s meant to represent a space where everybody is safe and responsible for each other – but that can apply to any space, from a circle to a pentagon. It’s nonsense.  As are some of the other exhibits, especially one made up of conical piles of gravel.  It’s no surprise that some are accidently vacuumed up by the cleaner.  The exhibition’s marketing team is equally ridiculous, but also irresponsible in its creation of a promotional video of a little, impoverished girl.  It goes viral and causes an outcry – all because Christian doesn’t take the time to think it through properly.

Much of this creates uncomfortable laughter, but lurking in the background in the museum is another installation featuring an ape like man, brought to life by a performance artist.  His actual appearance at the exhibition launch is breath-stoppingly unsettling, as he lumbers around the room, aggressively whooping and pawing at the guests.  The end of the scene is even more deeply disturbing.  Yet again, the idea is mis-judged, with the guests initially alarmed and scared and then turning on the man in the most vicious of ways.

That scene marks a change in tone, but it’s also where the film starts to unravel.  Christian delivers a speech, videoed on his phone, which essentially explains the plot.  Except that, by that stage, the point is already clear, so it’s hardly necessary.   His explanation of the marketing video to a packed press conference is equally superfluous and more than a little disingenuous.  But Claes Bang holds both halves of the film together with the arrogant, flawed but not wholly unlikeable Christian, although talents like Dominic West and Elizabeth  Moss are under-used and have only a handful of scenes apiece.  Terry Notary, in that exhibition launch sequence delivers the piece of acting that sticks in your mind and, disturbing as  it is, it’s powerfully excellent.

The Square doesn’t have the clarity of Force Majeure, but it does have the ability to grab the audience firmly by the shoulders for the duration.  Given the complexity and occasional obscurity of the story, the film needs it.  It isn’t always satisfying, but it is never less than compelling.

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Watch The Square on Tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/590338/the-square?start=true

The Two Causes of the Coming Great Depression

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

There are two approaches to analyzing a situation:

1. Choose the desired outcome–generally the one that doesn’t require any major changes, sacrifices or downward mobility
2. Identify the initial conditions and systemic dynamics and then follow these to a conclusion back-tested by comparisons with historical outcomes.

Our default setting as humans is 1: select the outcome we want and then find whatever bits and pieces supports that conclusion. Cherry-pick data, draw false analogies–the field is wide open.

This is why we get so upset when our “analysis” is challenged: we’re forced to ask what happens to us if our desired outcome doesn’t transpire, and since the answer might be something less than optimal, we violently reject any data or analogies that conflict with our carefully curated “analysis.”

A great deal of what passes for analysis today is cherry-picked bits and pieces that support a happy story of endlessly expanding prosperity–AI, fusion, etc.–with no mention of limits, constraints, costs or worst-case outcomes rather than best-case outcomes.

Let’s start with an historical analogy most reject: the Great Depression of 1929 to 1942. The conventional account claims that the Depression was the result of a “Federal Reserve policy error”: the Fed tightened credit when it should have loosened it.

This is nonsense. What actually happened was credit expanded rapidly in the Roaring 1920s, which is why they were Roaring. Farmers could borrow money to buy prairie land to put under the plow, speculators could borrow $9 on margin to play the stock market with $1 in cash, and so on.

In other words, what happened was a gigantic credit bubble inflated that pushed stocks and other assets to unsustainable heights of over-valuation, valuations based on the Roaring 20s expansion of credit and consumption continuing forever.

But all bubbles pop, and so the weather changed for the worse and newly plowed prairie turned into a Dust Bowl, wiping out heavily leveraged farmers. Since there was no federal bank deposit guarantee (no FDIC), the bankruptcies of overleveraged borrowers wiped out thousands of small banks, wiping out the savings of prudent depositors.

So even prudent savers got wiped out in the crash of the credit bubble.

Stock speculators gambling on margin (i.e. borrowed money) were quickly wiped out, and the selling became self-reinforcing, accelerating the cascading crash.

The real policy error was protecting the wealthy who owned the debt from a debt-clearing write-down. The wealthy own debt, the non-wealthy owe debt. When the debt is defaulted on, the lender / owner of the debt has to absorb the loss. The debtor is freed of the burden. In a debt-clearing event driven by defaults, insolvencies and bankruptcies, the wealthy are the losers and the debtors are freed of the burden of debt.

Various programs were implemented to stave off the consequences of default, as if pushing losses into the future would somehow enable the credit bubble to reinflate. That’s not how it works: the financial system is like a forest, and if the dead wood of bad debt piles up and isn’t allowed to burn, then the forest cannot foster new growth.

Economies that refuse to accept the wealth destruction that results from credit bubbles popping stagnate. This is the story of Japan from 1990 to the present: the status quo in Japan refused to accept the losses, hiding bad debt (i.e. non-performing loans) behind artifices such as new loans that covered the interest due, listing the non-performing loans in “zombie” categories, i.e. as assets that were still on the books at full value even though they were essentially worthless, and so on.

The net result was 33 years of stagnation and social decay as young people gave up on owning homes and having families.

Now the US has inflated another “debt super-cycle” credit bubble that has pushed assets into over-valuation. Once again the goal is to avoid handing the wealthy owners of all this debt the enormous losses that must be accepted to clear the dead wood of bad debt, money lent to borrowers and projects that were not creditworthy except in a bubble.

The lesson the status quo took from the Great Depression is to cover up private-sector over-valuations and bad debts with vast expansions of credit via the Federal Reserve and the federal government. Please look at these four charts below:
1. total credit (TCMDO)
2. the Federal Reserve balance sheet (2 charts)
3. federal debt

All are in visibly unsustainable parabolic ascents.

Predictably, the status quo will refuse to accept the necessity of clearing the dead wood and accepting the trillions of dollars in losses that will accrue to those who own the unpayable debts.

Consider CRE, commercial real estate. Office towers are now worth one-third of their pre-pandemic valuations, the valuations on which their mortgages were based. There is no way these properties can be magically restored to their previous over-valuation. Massive losses must be accepted by the owners of the debt. If those losses make them insolvent, so be it. That is unacceptable in a system geared to protect the wealthy at all costs.

But bubbles pop anyway, regardless of policy tweaks. Consider these stock market charts of the Roaring 20s and the Great Depression and the present (below). The similarity is remarkable–possibly even eerie.

The big difference between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Depression we’re entering is the world still had enormous reserves of resources to tap and a (by today’s standards) modest population in the resource-consuming developed nations.

Recall that a developed-world consumer uses up to 100 times more energy and resources than a poor person in a rural undeveloped nation. Recycling a few bottles doesn’t change this.

This means the planet’s “savings account” of abundant, cheap-to-access resources has been depleted. Yes, there is still oil and copper, etc., but it’s of far lower quality and much harder to get now. The rich ores have been mined and the shallow super-giant oil fields have all been tapped long ago. Now the Saudis must pump stupendous quantities of seawater into their oil wells to maintain production. All these technologies consume vast quantities of energy.

The inevitable result is the energy efficiency–how much energy is required to access, process and transport the energy–has plummeted even as consumption has soared.

The outcome many hope for is some new miraculously cheap and abundant sources of energy such as fusion. But fusion is far more complicated and tricky than pumping oil, and oil is a high-energy-density fuel that can be stored rather easily. All the electricity generated by various technologies can’t be stored easily or cheaply, and so the happy story is that a new miraculous battery technology is just around the corner.

But batteries are also complicated and resource-dense, so they’ll always be as expensive as the materials needed to fabricate them. There will never be “low-cost” batteries if the materials needed to make them are scarce and expensive to dig out of the ground, process and transport.

So the policy choices are simple: either protect the wealthy from write-downs of bad debt and the collapse of asset bubbles and usher in decades of stagnation, or force the wealthy to take the losses and clear away the dead wood.

But either choice will be constrained by the reality that humanity has already drained the easy-to-get “savings account” of global resources.

I get emails from readers who say things like “mining techniques are far more efficient now.” That’s fine, but most of these new mines are often thousands of kilometers away from railways or seaports, and thousands of kilometers away from the processing plants that turn the ore into useful metals.

Recall the enormity of the cost and effort required to build a single two-lane highway thousands of kilometers to a new mine, and the oceans of diesel fuel needed to power the mining equipment and trucks hauling the ore to railways or seaports. Recall the immense amounts of energy required to smelt / process these ores, and the near-zero percentage of lithium-ion batteries that are currently being recycled.

Batteries are difficult to recycle because they’re not manufactured to be recycled, and they’re not manufactured to be recycled because that would raise costs considerably, reducing profits.

So on the present course, the idea is to manufacture billions of batteries, throw them all in the landfill in 10 years, and then mine enough minerals to build another couple billion batteries and then repeat the cycle of throwing them away in 10 years forever.

That isn’t realistic, so the status quo will have to adjust to this unwelcome reality.

This is why I keep writing books about relocalizing, degrowth, using less rather than more to yield a higher level of well-being. The resource “savings account” won’t support fantasies of endlessly expanding consumption of hard-to-get resources.

But the status quo has much to unlearn, and it seems the only pathway to a new understanding is a Great Depression that won’t end with a new expansion of credit because the resources required for that new expansion simply won’t be available or affordable.

Reducing our exposure to avoidable risks is a key strategy of Self-Reliance.

Is Sleepy Joe Biden Trying to Outdo Hitler and History?

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

History is the most interesting subject for many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact it tends to repeat itself. And the fact that some are doomed by ignorance of this is an important lesson for today. Take German tanks, for instance. First, let’s rehash a little history about the steppes of Russia and Eastern Ukraine and unlearned lessons.

From the 5th of July 1943 until the 23rd of August 1943, the largest tank battle in history took place in what became known as the “Kursk Salient,” an area that stretched from the tiny town of Kirov on the Bolva River in the north, through Belgorod in Russia, Kharkiv, which Ukraine currently controls. The line reached deep into the Donbas region, the focal point of Ukraine’s Nazi hostilities since 2014.

Hitler’s Operation Zitadelle (“Citadel”) was carried out over a 700-mile-long front, where the best Germans tried to outgun and outmaneuver the advancing Soviet forces. It became the largest tank battle in history, pitting the most advanced weaponry Nazi Germany had against prepared and dug-in, superior Soviet resistance. The reader will find it interesting that the German high command chose Belgorod as one of the first key objectives.

Numerous parallels exist between the battle of Kursk and the current proxy war in Ukraine. First, I’d like to deal with tanks. In 1943, Germany manufactured what can be argued as the finest medium and heavy armor of World War II. Though not numerous at Kursk, the deadly Tiger played a big role. The all-new Panther and the giant Ferdinand tank destroyer were supposed to blast the Soviets off the battlefield.

Ironically, many of their burning hulks littered the countryside once the battle ended. The battle raged for months, with neither side gaining a clear advantage. The Soviets, not unlike their modern-day counterparts on the Russian lines, created massive defensive works to sap the German offensive until a counterattack would gain a decisive effect.

When I read the other day about almost all of the highly touted German Leopards sent to Zelensky having been destroyed, this seemed like Deja Vu as a student of history. An article in the Berliner Zeitung cited Alexander Sosnowski, who used data from pro-Ukraine media channels to determine that 41 Leopard-2s, 49 T72 tanks, 31 Bradlys, 7 German Marders, 23 howitzers, and 40 MRAP infantry fighting vehicles have already been turned to scrap by the Russians. In 1943, the great Nazi war machine faced similar despair.

But what other parallels can we draw? What is going to happen next? If you ask most experts, Europe is out of ammo, tanks, and guts. The Germans cannot even crank up and run half their remaining Leopard 2s for lack of repair, Paris is on fire, Germans are ready for any Chancellor but Scholz, Hungary seems about ready to leave the NATO alliance, the dollar may crumble toon, and even Americans grow weary of cheering a losing team.

We can understand how idiotic Joe Biden’s war on Russia will end if we recollect what happened after the Kursk failure. The Germans had been progressing in fighting through the defensive layers the Soviets had built. The northern front of the pincer bogged down, and the southern one was halted by bitter Soviet resistance. Hitler, who the legendary Heinz Guderian had warned against Operation Citadel, lost heart when decisive victory was not at hand and focused elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Soviets had gained momentum in the ground war and never relinquished it after Kursk.

As we know, once the Axis began its retreat from Kursk, the Soviets, and their allies from the West marched into the heart of Europe, taking Berlin and destroying the dream of Leibensraum, at least for the moment. Today, we find Germany’s best tanks strewn all over the battle lines in the regions reclaimed by Russia. Of course, they are not the Tigers or Panthers of legend. Four Tiger tanks held off tank brigades at Kursk. Now a lightweight drone seemed capable of knocking one out. The same seems true for NATO, a military alliance that has never shown it could beat its way out of a wet paper bag, let alone conquer Russia.

Whoever devised this genius plan to create Operation Barbarossa 2 is not even as clever as a drugged Hitler on his worst day. All that has happened is that the Russians are preparing again. Factories are shifting to creating T-14 Armata tanks instead of luxury Lada 4x4s. Far from the front, the Russians ramp up their military complex as before. For Westerners, we can only hope they do so for defensive rather than offensive operations. For certain, as the fires of discontent burning in Paris, there is nothing behind the Donetsk River to stop the Russians if they choose to widen their breathing space.

Funny, isn’t it, how history repeats itself and does so in the same places with the same idiotic mistakes being made?

House Passes $886 Billion National Defense Authorization Act

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The bill narrowly passed in a vote of 219-210 due to a partisan divide over amendments included by Republicans

By Dave DeCamp

Source: AntiWar.com

The House on Friday passed its version 2024 National Defense Authorization Act in a vote of 219-210, which largely fell along partisan lines due to amendments added by Republicans relating to social policies in the military.

The Republican amendments covered abortion, transgender surgery, and diversity initiatives. Only four Democrats voted in favor of the bill, and four Republicans voted against it. The four Republicans who opposed the NDAA are Reps. Thomas Massie (KY), Eli Crane (AZ), Andy Biggs (AZ), and Ken Buck (CO).

The Senate still needs to pass its version of the NDAA, then the two chambers will negotiate the final version that will go to President Biden’s desk. The Republican amendments packed into the House version will set up a fight between the two chambers as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other Democrats will reject them.

The 2024 NDAA is for a record $886 billion, the same amount President Biden requested. The debt ceiling deal reached between House Republicans in the White House did not limit military spending and put no caps on emergency supplemental funds, which is how the US has been spending on the war in Ukraine.

As the House was debating the NDAA, several amendments introduced by Republicans looking to rein in US support for Ukraine were voted down. One amendment sponsored by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) would have required the Biden administration to develop a strategy for the war in Ukraine. It was rejected in a vote of 129-301, with only Republicans supporting it.

One amendment introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would have cut $300 million in military aid for Ukraine that’s packed into the NDAA, but it failed in a vote of 89-341. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) put forward an amendment to cut off all military assistance for Ukraine, which failed in a vote of 70-358. Only Republicans supported the two amendments.

Greene sponsored another amendment that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine, although US cluster bombs have already arrived in the country. The effort failed in a vote of 147-276. It received support from 98 Republicans and 49 Democrats.

Situational Awareness

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

“All across the board, illness, disability, cancer, heart, autism, fertility…WeFkdUp !!!” —The Ethical Skeptic on Twitter

What if Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is correct? The Dutch virologist said at the outset of the Covid-19 episode in 2020 that vaccinating the world in the midst of an epidemic was insane because it would train the virus to evolve more dangerously while disabling human immune systems.

     Last week he issued a warning that the world was within weeks of just such a new and deadly immune escape variant outbreak that would bring on a shocking wave of sickness and death among people who received multiple Covid-19 vaccinations. This would happen on top of an already accelerating rise in latent vaccine adverse reactions manifesting as aggressive cancers, blood disorders, cardiac injury, neurological disease, and much, much more.

     To this point in the Covid-19 story, Western Civ in general, and the USA in particular, have descended into an epic group psychosis as a result of the managed mind-fuckery induced by their own governments in collusion with a pharmaceutical industry metastasizing on money the way an aggressive cancer feeds on sugar in a human body. Fearful citizens swallowed all manner of unreality foisted on them by means of propaganda and censorship.

     We still don’t know for sure how, who, and why, exactly, Covid-19 was set loose on the world, and the public health agencies don’t want you to know. Perhaps the worst and most baldly dishonest act was the official suppression of effective treatments with common, safe, anti-virals that could have saved millions of lives. And all just to preserve the vaccine companies’ liability shield from the Emergency Use Authorization. In fact, governments are still militating against the sale and use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which could be taken prophylactically in anticipation of a new outbreak.

     So, if these populations were driven crazy by authorities ginning up their fear and preying on it, what will happen if that fear turns to anger instead? Because that’s exactly what will happen when Americans, and perhaps even Europeans, realize they’ve been subject to history’s biggest homicidal fraud. That anger is going to seek targets, and they are going to find them very easily in their own government officials and also — get this — in the medical establishment that has betrayed its patients so unconscionably.

     It’s just impossible to say exactly how that will play out on-the-ground. Governments are already falling — Spain, the Netherlands — but these were parliamentary downfalls according to regular political procedure. Our country has no such procedures for changing authority in a time of crisis. Instead, we have a president up to his neck in bribery scandal and executive agency thuggery, and political parties sunk in corruption, and no way to get rid of them except elections many months away — elections which at least half the people don’t believe are honest.

    This crisis of bad faith and sickness is happening at the same time that Western Civ enters an equally vicious crisis of economy and finance. America and Europe are broke. All are playing games with their conjoined banking systems and their currencies. All are de-industrializing economies strictly based on industrial production of goods no longer being produced, and pretending to replace them with economies of computer vapor-ware. That can’t work and can only end badly in collapsing standards of living.

     The past few years, an apparent coalition of global elites, functioning in orgs such as the WEF, the WHO, the EU, the IMF, the central banks, and countless NGOs, along with shadowy intel units and what remains of the old news media, have promoted ever more desperate top-down control programs to prevent a breakdown into wholesale economic and political disorder. Their efforts increasingly tilt into pretense.

     Try to impose digital currencies and health passports? Fuggeddabowdit. You will only get a chaos of work-arounds, non-compliance, and probably violent opposition. Keep that stupid, dishonorable, perfidious, and unnecessary war going in Ukraine and you run the risk of turning Western Civ into a matched set of ashtrays.

     As you can see, there has already been enough official mischief, crime, and malfeasance to severely piss-off the population. If Dr. Vanden Bossche is correct, we are perhaps heading into the conclusive shock of an evil era. Some kind of monumental correction will be in order. The people will need some way to regain credible self-governance, either through personnel change in every locus of power, or some revision in structure and procedure. For now, there is little faith that our institutions can manage either of those options. Better maintain situational awareness as we creep into the unknown.

When Dissent Ends, Transhumanism Reigns And Digitization Rules, Humanity Will Cease To Be Human

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By Gary Barnett

Source: GaryDBarnett.com

“The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

~  Arundhati Roy

Self-defense comes in many forms, but all defense of self begins and ends with dissent, non-compliance, disobedience, saying no to any and all rule, and never allowing aggression against mind and body; mental or physical. Without dissent, defense is not possible, because when voluntary compliance is the prevailing behavior, whether sought, desired, or not, all defense mechanisms are effectively disarmed. In other words, silence in the face of injustice, immorality, terror, or tyranny, creates a condition of weakness, submission, and irresponsibility, which are all the fodder of indifference. When you say nothing, when you do not say no, when you take no action against evil, you commit evil. By not speaking out, and by not responding, you have spoken loudly, and openly committed an act of cowardice. The ultimate blame lies not just with the aggressor in this circumstance, but also equally with he who hides and remains silent.

In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” This is an accurate description of the phenomenon of becoming what one lives, so if you live in a state of indifference, ignoring the evil around you, accepting it in order to avoid conflict and responsibility, you become the evil you have chosen to ignore. The dark abyss in this circumstance, is created by your own inaction against it.

What we face as a society, is the most tremendous threat ever perceived or active in the history of mankind. Do you scoff at this seemingly ‘bold’ pronouncement? If so, you are already fooled, and a major contributor to the vast problems rampant in our world today. Instead of the State just singularly seeking war, the continuance of the bogus Federal Reserve System, isolated government corruption, communism, fascism, or any broad-based totalitarian assault on certain segments of society, we are all being bombarded from a thousand different directions at once with all these atrocities and many more, including attacks on our freedom and sovereignty, on our minds and bodies, and on every aspect of our being. Due to the colossal advances in technology, which in many more ways than not are being used against us in order to build a literal transhuman world run by technocratic means, we are facing what could be considered a technological Armageddon, where all control over humanity will be isolated in the hands of the most powerful few. To accept this, to treat it as normal or eminent, is a most fatal error, and one that could determine our fate in perpetuity.

When humanity ceases to exist in any natural form, when male and female become one, when transhumanism and mind control are inescapable realities, when perversion is commonly accepted, the presence of life that we have all known to be magical and a wonder, will have disappeared. The world being designed is not a world of love, hope, and dreams, it is a nightmare of horror, and those pursuing this downfall of man have already lost all human characteristics. They are monsters, so we must fight and defeat them without becoming monsters ourselves.

There is a reason that the children, beginning in infancy, are targeted by State indoctrination, drugs, chemicals, bioweapon injections masquerading as ‘vaccines,’  insane propaganda, distraction, gross perversion, and are pulled away from family mentally and physically throughout their lives. This, in and of itself, if allowed to continue, will guarantee mind destruction of multiple future generations, and that will secure a fully dumbed-down, compliant, and obedient proletariat mass in the future. At that point, total control by the technocrats over humanity will have been achieved.

While technology has the capability to accomplish many great things, in the hands of these monsters who seek universal control, it can also be used to destroy us. Many refer to this technological phenomenon as ‘artificial intelligence,’ (AI) but there is no such thing. This false terminology is being used against us, as machines are not intelligent, they are programmed by intelligence, or so it is believed. When man becomes a machine, real intelligence ends, and a programmed society of slaves is the result. AI is ‘defined’ as “perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information–demonstrated by computers, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or other animals.” Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, reason, and understand, so honest intelligence cannot be artificial, and machines are still machines. The transhuman digitization of man will mean the end of all traditional life as we know it.

The bulk of this society, has already succumbed to a digital world, and relies on what is falsely labeled ‘social media’ as parent, family, and friend, disregarding the natural state of personal communication, love, companionship, debate, and the grandeur of nature. At this point, the future is not owned by you, but is owned by your masters. All privacy has disappeared, and most all private and financial transactions are captured and data-based. Every aspect of life is now tracked, traced, used, surveilled, restricted, censored, taxed, and every activity imaginable requires licensure (paid permission slip) by the State. You are already a slave, whether you realize it or not.

The plot continues to thicken, as centrally-controlled digital currencies (CBDCs) are being rolled out around the world, which will allow for most every individual to be fully contained and regulated. This will lead to mass restrictions as to what you are allowed to do, where you may travel – if at all, what food you must eat, what medical care you may or may not receive, what State stipend you will be allotted, how much energy you will be permitted to use, and on, and on. Everything in your existence will depend on behavior modification; in other words, do as you are instructed by the State technocratic rulers, or lose everything, as your entire life will be technologically sanctioned.

It is imperative to understand that everything you think you know about technology, and technological advances, is likely at a minimum, 20 years behind. Every so-called new discovery and new technology recognized as such, are not new at all. What the military has now, and is working on today, is unknown to most all except the very few at the top of the pyramid of power. To understand and grasp this concept, should strike fear in the hearts of man. The internet, and therefore, the internet of things, was not discovered and implemented by some computer geek, but was designed and created by the military through the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” (DARPA) Getting to this terroristic time in our history was no accident, and was intentionally planned long ago. We have little time left to stop this totalitarian hell that has been created in order to destroy what we know as the human race.

Will you continue to sit on the sideline, keeping your eyes closed, your ears covered, and your mouth shut, or will you stand up and defend your freedom and life, and that of your family? The only solution, as I have often said, is through active dissent. Say no to the State, disobey, do not comply with any tyrannical order, and do so as individuals en masse. No one can do this for you, but it can and should be done by many independent freedom-minded individuals. Asking someone else for a solution for the masses as a collective, is worthless, and exposes apathy at a level that if practiced by the herd as it has been for so long, the end of humanity will surely be our destiny.

“Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.”

Why Propaganda Works

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The primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives has a simple, well-documented explanation.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Consortium News

It’s not really deniable that Western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes.

Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the U.S. empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought.

Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every U.S. war, rally behind the U.S. foreign policy objective of the day and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.

To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect.

It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.

By continually hammering our minds with simple, repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.

Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview and because powerful plutocrats such as John D. Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.

Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.

This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda.

I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that Westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests.

I’m sure both of these factor into the equation exist to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.

Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system.

 Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when most humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true.

So now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.

This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.

So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries protecting those implanted worldviews.

Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.

I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why.  A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs.

Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the U.S. military to do something evil and stupid.

The Oatmeal has a great comic about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible for someone to change beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm biases.

It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.

Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you.

And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it.

The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.