Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Saturday Matinee: Holy Motors

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What do limos know that we don’t?

By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

We know he lives in movies because we literally find him in one. Leos Carax’s much-debated “Holy Motors” begins with a man (Carax himself) asleep in bed, then waking and approaching a wall of the room that looks like a forest. Knowing just where to look among the trees, he unlocks a door using a key growing from his finger. Well, isn’t that what artists do? Unlock doors with their fingers?

Now this man is inside a cinema, and we meet Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who lives in a house that seems designed by the same architect employed in Jacques Tati’s “Mon Oncle.” He gets into the waiting limo, driven by a taciturn woman, and we see that the back of the limo, seemingly much larger inside than the outside, is a dressing room filled with costumes and props. When he gets out the first time, he has transformed himself into a wretched beggar woman. This will be the first of his many roles, or assignments, or embodiments. He performs in bizarre and mysterious ways, linked only by the desire of a mime or comedian to entertain and amaze us. His “appointments” take him into personas so diverse, it would be futile to try to link them, or find a thread of narrative or symbolism. If there is a message here, Walt Whitman once put it into words: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

Here is M. Oscar as a madman wandering street markets and eating flowers or whatever else he can snatch up. M. Oscar in the most famous cemetery in Paris, Pere Lachaise, occupied by the dead and famous (Moliere, Chopin, Jim Morrison, Colette, Oscar Wilde). In “Holy Motors,” however, the cemetery’s tombstones carry no names, requesting us, to “visit my web site.”

Here is M. Oscar transforming a fashion model (Eva Mendes) into a Muslim woman concealed within her costume. And that’s not all that happens to her, although she adheres to the model’s code and never betrays emotions or opinions. Her job is to embody a beautiful object for the purposes of others. Their travels through the city lead to the roof of the Samaritaine department store, producing stunning vistas of Paris.Celine (Edith Scob), his reserved chauffeur, seems long accustomed to her role. Once she expresses concern that M. Oscar hasn’t eaten all day. Their day began at dawn and lasts far into the night, one “appointment” after another.This has been a year of leading roles for limousines. M. Oscar’s car upstages the limousine in David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis,” and the journeys of both cars seem to be odysseys through their cities, for purposes not very clear to the audience. “Holy Motors” is the more entertaining and funny of the two, although some parts are not funny at all, and many laughs are of disbelief or incredulity. Both end with their limousines going home for the night, answering a question asked in “Cosmopolis,” although when the limo in “Holy Motors” gets home, its day is far from over.Here is a film that is exasperating, frustrating, anarchic and in a constant state of renewal. It’s not tame. Some audience members are going to grow very restless. My notion is, few will be bored.

A State of Never-Ending Crisis: The Government Is Fomenting Mass Hysteria

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“This country has been having a nationwide nervous breakdown since 9/11. A nation of people suddenly broke, the market economy goes to shit, and they’re threatened on every side by an unknown, sinister enemy. But I don’t think fear is a very effective way of dealing with things—of responding to reality. Fear is just another word for ignorance.”—Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Take this latest shooting in Nashville, Tenn.

The 28-year-old shooter (a clearly troubled transgender individual in possession of several military-style weapons) opened fire in a Christian elementary school, killing three children and three adults.

Already, fingers are being pointed and battle lines are being drawn.

Those who want safety at all costs are clamoring for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on assault weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more CCTV cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

This is all part of the Deep State’s master plan.

Ask yourselves: why are we being bombarded with crises, distractions, fake news and reality TV politics? We’re being conditioned like lab mice to subsist on a steady diet of bread-and-circus politics and an endless spate of crises.

Caught up in this “crisis of the now,” the average person has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork in order to keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

As investigative journalist Mike Adams points out:

“This psychological bombardment is waged primarily via the mainstream media which assaults the viewer by the hour with images of violence, war, emotions and conflict. Because the human nervous system is hard wired to focus on immediate threats accompanied by depictions of violence, mainstream media viewers have their attention and mental resources funneled into the never-ending ‘crisis of the NOW’ from which they can never have the mental breathing room to apply logic, reason or historical context.”

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

All the while, the government continues to amass more power and authority over the citizenry.

When we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this.

Yet as John Lennon reminds us, “nothing is real,” especially not in the world of politics.

In other words, it’s all fake, i.e., manufactured, i.e., manipulated to distort reality.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.

Reality and fiction merge as everything around us becomes entertainment fodder.

We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).

“Living is easy with eyes closed,” says Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.

As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.

Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.

This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.

“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state as things happening to other people.

The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.

This is what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.

Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.

Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

Labelling something as “fake news” is a masterful way of dismissing truth that may run counter to the ruling power’s own narrative.

As George Orwell recognized, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses. In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”

In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).

Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.

Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.

In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.

Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.

Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.

The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

Where the $1.3 Trillion Per Year U.S. Military Budget Goes

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Nobody can give a precise dollar-number to U.S. ‘Defense’ spending because the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department has never been able to pass an audit, and is by far the most corrupt of all federal Departments (and is the ONLY Department that has never passed an audit), and also because much of America’s military spending is being paid out from other federal Departments in order to keep down the published annual U.S. Government ‘Defense’ expenditure numbers (which come from ONLY the “U.S. ‘Defense’ Department). Those are expenditures for America’s privatized and overwhelmingly profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex. (By contrast: Russia and China require, by law, that their armaments-firms be majority-owned by the Government itself.)

According to the best available estimates, the U.S. Government has been spending, in total, for over a decade now, around $1.3T to $1.5T annually on ‘defense’, and this is around half of all military spending worldwide by all 200-or-so nations, and is more than half (around 53%) of all of the U.S. federal Government’s ‘discretionary’ (or congressionally voted for) annual expenditures.

Unlike regular manufacturers, which sell entirely or mainly to consumers and to businesses, not to their Government, armament-firms need to control their Government in order to control their markets (which are their Government and its ‘allied’ Governments — including NATO), and so they (in purely capitalist countries such as the U.S.) do control their Government. This is why the armaments-business (except in countries whose armaments-sector is socialized) is infamously corrupt. In order to hide the extent of that corruption (and to promote ever-higher military spending), the ‘news’-media need — in those countries — to be likewise effectively controlled by the investors in those firms.

Consequently, America, which has no national-security threat from any country (so, these astronomical ‘defense’-expenditures are blatantly inappropriate), spends annually around half of all of the money that the entire world spends on the military. And most of that money gets paid to its armaments-firms. Or, as Stephen Semler, an expert on these matters, put it regarding last year’s numbers, “How much of the $858 billion authorized by the FY2023 NDAA will be transferred to military contractors? I estimate $452 billion.” That is 52% of the 53% of the federal Government’s discretionary spending that is being allocated to ‘Defense’. Thus, 26% of the money that Congress authorizes the U.S. federal Government to pay each year, goes to military contractors. Thus: if $452B is going to armaments-firms, and if $1.356T is going to ‘defense’ (both of which are reasonable estimates), then one-third of ‘defense’ spending goes to armaments-firms, and that is around 17% of the money that the U.S. Government pays each year for everything (including non-discretionary).

If this had not been happening each year after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, then the current U.S. federal debt would be far less, if any at all — but, in any case, that expense (which went, and is going, to exceptionally rich individuals) will be paid by future generations of Americans, by means of both increased taxes and reduced services from the U.S. Government. What pays for bombs (and funds the purchase of yachts) today will be taken from everyone’s infants tomorrow. And it is taking millions of lives in the targeted lands, and has been doing so for decades now. A psychopathic U.S. Government is producing these results.

America’s ‘Defense’ Department is so corrupt that when I happened recently to be re-reading my 14 January 2020 article about its corruptness, “US Military Spending: TRILLIONS of Dollars Unaccounted For”, yet a new detail of this corruptness, which I had not previously noticed, struck me. It happened in this passage:

——

Mick West, who blogs as metabunk, is a propagandist for the “Establishment” or the billionaires’ preferences of what the public should believe; and, on 16 May 2018, he headlined “Debunked: Missing $21 Trillion / $6.5 Trillion / $2.3 Trillion – Journal Vouchers”.

He presented a representative of America’s Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) asserting, to US House members, that “this is not a new story, it dates back to 2001 and before,”.

And, West noted:

“All these things are accounting things that, as Norquist says ‘occur after the money is spent’. They are things that you want to get right in your accounting, but if you get the values wrong then it does not mean you’ve lost the money. It means you’ve got some estimate wrong, and you’ll put to little or to much [West meant “too much or too little”] in one fund or another.”

Referring, then, to the $21 trillion, he wrote:

“This is just more of the same though, still not missing money, still just unsupported accounting information transfers.”

However, only a sucker would take that casual attitude to the enormous amount of money in the ‘defense’ budget that is “unsupported” as to who received it, and whether or not those payments were in accord with what Congress had actually authorized.

Furthermore, such a casual attitude toward US ‘defense’-expenditures — the expenditures which constitute actually over half of the US federal Government’s discretionary expenditures, and even around half of the total world’s military expenditures — is an invitation to corruption in over half of this Government’s annually authorized spending; and any intelligent person would expect that such an invitation would be taken advantage of by insiders who are in a position to benefit from it.

West quotes from only one alleged authority, the “Defense Department Comptroller, David L. Norquist,” a person who is largely responsible for the problem, who said “it’s an accounting problem that does need to be solved because it can help hide other underlying issues,” but (at 1:43 in the accompanying video) “it’s not the same thing as not being able to account for money that Congress has given you to spend, but it’s still a problem that needs to be fixed.”

Mick West simply trusted this statement, by Norquist — though Norquist is one of the officials responsible for the problem — but Norquist failed to prove (and wasn’t even asked to prove) it, by the Representatives whom he was there addressing, who didn’t seem to be alarmed about where that $21T actually went) his key assertion, that “it’s not the same thing as not being able to account for money that Congress has given you to spend.”

Even if that assertion is true (which should not be assumed, and which even seems ludicrous on its very face), the problem is unquestionably an invitation to corruption in ‘defense’-expenditures, and those are precisely the type of federal expenditures that overwhelmingly dominate the income to the federal Government’s contractors, the corporations that make all or most of their profits from sales to the federal Government and to its allied governments (such as to the Saud family).

Therefore, casually allowing — and not even investigating as being possibly treasonous — these expenditures, is, itself, enormously scandalous, but the Representatives there were treating it so casually.

In fact, at the very opening of the hearing, which was held on 10 January 2018 (at 02:12 in the video of the 1:41:33-long hearing, above) the Chairman of the Committee emphasized the “We must spend more” on the military, even though we already spend around half of the entire world’s military expenditures. Manifestly, this hearing was a charade.

In the full video, the passage that Mick West quoted from is at 18:00-22:00, and the Representatives were clearly on the side of the charade, not on the side of the American people. Clearly, all members of that Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, behave as if they are in the pockets of firms such as Lockheed Martin.

On 15 November 2018, Reuters headlined “Pentagon fails its first-ever audit, official says”, and reported that: “‘We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,’ Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters.”

On 27 November 2018, The Nation headlined “Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed” and David Lindorff opened:

“On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest discretionary cost center — the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations — after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.”

So, that was the result of the latest version of this charade, which is virtual treason by the Federal Government.

In short: Congress is satisfied for this situation to continue, and the members of Congress evidently have no fear that the voters back home will vote against them if a challenger makes this issue a major issue in that Senator’s or Representative’s next Party primary.

The presumption is that the voters don’t care, and that the ‘news’-media won’t enlighten the voters about this matter, and about how it impacts, for example, which nations the US will categorize as being an “ally,” to sell weapons to, and which nations it will categorize as being an “enemy,” to target for conquest.

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So, what now struck me now was the name there, “David Norquist.” Maybe you remember the famous libertarian phrase about spending by the U.S. federal Government, that the libertarian goal is to “shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Here is one of the many articles that were published about that:

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https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/grover-norquists-no-tax-call-a-wedge-for-republicans

10 December 2012

GROVER NORQUIST’S NO-TAX CALL A WEDGE FOR REPUBLICANS


  • By     Dr Nicole Hemmer, Honorary Associate, United States Studies Centre

“Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?”

The question came from former US president George HW Bush this northern summer, but in the past few weeks many Americans have been asking the same thing.

Norquist, an anti-tax activist, now dominates discussion of the fiscal cliff. His “no-new-taxes” pledge has been signed by nearly every Republican in congress. The problem? To avoid going off that fiscal cliff, congress must make a “grand bargain” by January 1. If it doesn’t include tax rate increases, President Barack Obama won’t sign it into law.

Republicans are in a bind. They could agree to tax-rate increases on Americans making more than $US250,000 a year in return for cuts to programs such as Medicare. That, however, would mean breaking Norquist’s pledge. And Norquist has made it clear that any Republican who does so will face a primary challenge in the next election.

So, to echo Bush: “Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?”

Norquist runs Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax organisation he founded in 1986.

His opposition to taxation is an expression of his deep disdain for government. “I don’t want to abolish government,” he famously quipped. “I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

This “starve the beast” mentality has long been a conservative strategy for reducing the size of government. A strict diet of diminishing revenues, anti-tax advocates argue, will naturally lead to a smaller federal state.

——

As it turns out, David Norquist and Grover Norquist are brothers. So: while David Norquist makes money by fronting for the billionaires who control firms such as Lockheed Martin Corporation, Grover Norquist makes money by fronting for the billionaires who control firms such as Lockheed Martin Corporation. David does it by rationalizing away those peoples’ corruptness as being a concern for U.S. taxpayers; and Grover does it by leading the Republican argument against the Government’s non-‘defense’ spending. (While Republicans want to reduce non-‘defense’-spending, they want to increase ‘defense’-spending. Democrats want to increase all federal spending, but ESPECIALLY for ‘defense’.)

The standard libertarian claim that “shrinking the government” is at all an issue or what motivates their wealthiest donors whom they are actually fronting for, is a lie. The only real issue that is involved here is: Who is, and who isn’t, getting the Government’s money.

All of federal politicians’ talk about the need to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” is also lies, because they themselves — those federal office-holders — got there and stay there by participating in it. If they’re not corrupt, they’re not in office, because this system is built upon corruption.

Whereas Republican billionaires demand that all federal expenditures except for ‘defense’ get slashed, Democratic billionaires demand that all federal expenditures get slashed but that ‘defense’ spending must never be reduced. So: what’s the real difference (except for the hypocritical rhetoric on the Democratic or “liberal” side)? The billionaires who control those arms-contracting companies control also which contenders for federal offices will become elected.

And here is how one of the billionaires’ ‘news’-media (in this case, the “Fact Check” columnist at the New York Times), on 3 December 2018, cited uncritically David Norquist’s fraudulent argument that nothing more was involved here than an accounting-problem — as-if those congressional and ‘Defense’ Department officials were upholding their obligations to THEIR “stockholders,” who are all U.S. citizens — by continuing to tolerate unauditable financial books at the largest federal Department: “The Misleading Claim That $21 Trillion in Misspent Pentagon Funds Could Pay for ‘Medicare for All’: Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising liberal star, cited a figure that refers to nearly two decades of internal financial adjustments, not actual spending.” And even the grandstanding ‘progressives’ in Congress did not take to task that lying ‘news’-medium for attacking them on a mere sub-allegation to the real issue here, which was the enormous corruptness that inevitably stands behind all of this.

The only way for an authentic progressive political candidate to deal with this is to declare publicly (and to document it by means of linked-to-evidence news-reports online, like the present one) that ‘our’ Government and media are controlled by the organized mega-crooks, who are this nation’s wealthiest individuals — the only group of individuals who benefit from it — who are this nation’s actual enemies: its corrupters. But, of course, no billionaire will fund such a campaign, and any news-medium that reports on it (except by lying against it) will likewise get no investors.

That is how bad that the situation really is. People need to be discussing this, in public, here and elsewhere. Because that is the problem. It is the problem that needs to be fixed. But how can it be done? And THAT is the question.

PS: Preliminary reports suggest that on account of this Government’s dual World War III against both Russia and China, the ‘Defense’ budget for next year will probably soar perhaps more than by 10%. The Congress now is well over 95% neoconservatives, in both houses. They’ve virtually all been bought.

Austerity, War & Dictatorship… the Charade of Western Democracy Is Over. Can We Lose Those Chains?

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Western liberal democracy and its ubiquitous “austerity economics” is a euphemism for fascism. And the charade is finally coming to an end.

Western liberal democracy and its ubiquitous “austerity economics” is a euphemism for fascism. And the charade is finally coming to an end.

Austerity is not some recent policy under neoliberal capitalism. It was born out of the historic crisis in the Western system following the First World War and during the 1930s when fascism became a way to curtail any democratic challenge to the prevailing capitalist system.

That political instrument of repression is wielded today across all Western states. Quite amazingly, for a long time, few people recognized their captive, repressive state as fascism. We generally lived under the illusion that we were free citizens in “liberal democracies”.

In this interview, Clara E Mattei explains how the technocratic-sounding “austerity” is used to hide the brutal reality of dictatorship and repression against the vast majority of citizen workers in Western states.

Clara Mattei is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research, New York. She is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.

Her book investigates the origins of austerity as an economic policy after the crisis of World War One. Crucially, she argues that austerity is not merely about governments balancing financial budgets. Professor Mattei contends that austerity policy implemented by all Western governments is a political instrument of mass repression to prevent any challenge to the prevailing capitalist order.

Austerity forces the vast majority to accept unacceptable conditions that are otherwise shockingly anti-democratic. The precariousness and insecurity of employment, the widespread denial of social services, deprivation and poverty, and the relentless abuse of taxes and resources that are fueling insane militarism and war.

If we really did live in free, democratic societies why are such deformities enforced without any alternative? Austerity is used to crush the political imagination for any reasonable, more humane, more peaceful alternative.

However, as Clara Mattei points out in this interview, the extreme anti-democratic conditions in Western societies are inevitably forcing greater numbers of people to question the injustices and hideous anomalies of the prevailing capitalist order.

People are realizing that Western governments are in reality regimes of repression in service for the enrichment of a minority. That fundamental deformity is why Western societies are collapsing and why the United States and its Western lackeys are driven to increasing conflict against Russia and China.

The charade of “Western democracy” is coming to an end. The rulers and their pantomime political parties are losing the moral authority to hold power over the masses.

As people necessarily seek ways to reinvent societies that are fit for meeting their democratic needs, socialist solutions are beckoning. We have to throw off the mental shackles imposed by our dictators, and realize, as Karl Marx once eloquently said, that we have got nothing to lose except our chains.

Substack: Dead Man Walking

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The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian eradication of free speech is the theatrical takedown of Jack Teixeira.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

Substack’s days are numbered. The email newsletter platform is increasingly under attack, most recently by the ADL. The organization wrote on April 3 that Substack “continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

The latest salvo by ADL against the First Amendment dovetails with a congressional push to further erode liberty with its draconian RESTRICT Act. There are a number of tweets that encapsulate the latest threat to liberty, but Substack no longer allows tweet embeds, thanks to an absurd ego-colliding tiff between Substack CEO Chris Best and Twitter boss, Elon Musk.

The RESTRICT Act is dressed up as a response to Tik Tok and China. Contrary to this propaganda, it will be used primarily to sanitize the internet and squash (and criminalize) all speech diverting from USG narratives.

“The Restrict Act Completes the Overthrow of the US Constitution,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “The purpose is to silence all dissent from official explanations. Truth is criminalized. Propaganda and lies will reign supreme and unchallenged. The Matrix will be complete.”

Connor O’Keeffe writes for the Mises Institute,

With its vague language, the bill gives the government much leeway in defining what qualifies as illegal information. We’ve already seen government officials and their friends in media conflate antiestablishment arguments with foreign disinformation. They’ve even falsely labelled accurate news stories as foreign disinformation. It’s not hard to see these same people using the powers granted to them by the RESTRICT Act to criminalize certain dissenting views under the guise of counterintelligence.

The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian control over free speech is the theatrical SWAT takedown of 21-year-old patsy Jack Teixeira, a low-level National Guard airman that, according to The Washington Post, somehow managed to get his hands on highly classified CIA and DOD documents. This is highly improbable, but then a blindsided American public is routinely fed improbable lies, exaggerations, and omissions by the USG and its corporate propaganda media.

CNN describes the event as a “carefully choreographed arrest,” and I’d agree with that assessment, although not as a result of the “Biden administration’s scramble” to contain sensitive leaks. The theatrical takedown of Mr. Teixeira is a propaganda event designed to bolster further eradication of dissent and grease the skids for the passage of RESTRICT.

The Washington Post has a documented history of working with the CIA to disseminate propaganda, so when we learn that the newspaper “wrote about the presence of problematic content on Substack, noting its use by spreaders of false information,” according to the ADL, we know for certain Substack will be brought to heel. (For more on the CIA’s takeover of the media, see The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network, by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn).

Add to this the Digital Services Act. It is “the EU’s latest incoming tech rulebook requiring them to stamp out illegal content on their platforms… including social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. These include quickly taking down flagged illegal content, including hate speech,” Politico reported last October. The corporate propaganda conduit conflated “hate speech” (that is, speech contrary to the narratives of the state) with “child pornography and terrorist videos.”

According to Slate, the Digital Services Act (DSA),

while written to protect EU residents, will almost certainly lead social media firms to change their moderation policies worldwide. Thus, with the DSA, the EU will effectively be doing what the First Amendment ostensibly prohibits our own government from doing: regulating the editorial judgments made by social media platforms on which Americans communicate with each other.

The jaws of the authoritarian vice are tightening. In the near future, the ability to express your opinion will be terminated if it runs counter to official government narratives. All avenues of expression are to be tightly monitored, moderated and censored at the behest of the state.

“The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks,” NBC News reported on April 12. “The administration is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.”

Undoubtedly, this will include Substack, one of the last remaining platforms where free speech is permissible without the heavy-handed interference of the state, and the narrowly focused and highly politicized censorship agenda of the ADL and other anti-First Amendment organizations.

Fox News Decision to settle Dominion lawsuit for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars makes no sense

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

Something fishy here.  

First, corporate executives don’t give away $787 million of shareholders’ money without a test of the claim in court.  The uncontested amount is so large that one wonders if Fox News itself paid it or whether this almost $800 million was a gift funneled through an uncontested lawsuit to fund Dominion by our ruling elites. Once elections are determined by how voting machines are programmed, the people are disenfranchised.

Second, it is not defamation to report the news.  Tucker Carlson reported the claims of experts.  That is news reporting.  Dominion’s defamation lawsuit should have been filed against the experts.  It wasn’t, because the experts had the evidence.

Third, Experts supplied evidence that the Dominion voting machines could be programmed to count votes differently from how the votes were cast; experts supplied evidence that the machines could be hacked; experts supplied evidence that the voting machines were connected to the Internet.  Fox News could have called these experts as expert witnesses. By agreeing to settle, Fox News refused the evidence its day in court.  Why?

A possible explanation is that Fox News, voluntarily or involuntarily, participated in an orchestration that established the precedent that reporting news different from the narrative, or news that is unfavorable to a person, company, or government institution, is defamation.  Think about what this means.  A prosecutor who charges a person with a crime has defamed the person.  Truth becomes unreportable. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh could be charged for defamation, and for being a Russian agent, for reporting that the US government destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline. 

When we see the few truth-tellers who are the stars of their organizations jettisoned–Tucker Carlson from Fox News, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, James O’Keefe from Project Veritas, President Trump charged under a non-existent law, and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange imprisoned for a decade without due process, we must face the fact that there is an organized conspiracy to suppress truth.  We are experiencing the completion of The Matrix in which expressed doubt or even unspoken suspicion of official narratives are criminal offenses.  

Truth-tellers receive almost nonexistent support.  The inescapable conclusion is that in the Western world truth has no future.

Tyranny is upon us.

Steiner and the Blood Demons

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Blood Demons original title artwork by Michael Cox – see his art on Instagram here

By Jason Happenstall

Source: Beyond the Wasteland

Is the human race under spiritual attack? And did the esoteric philosopher and clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner warn about it over a century ago when he said a ‘vaccine’ would be the delivery system for the defeat of humanity?

For many, the overly-authoritarian response by governments worldwide to Covid-19 pointed to some deeper, more sinister, driving force. But it hasn’t just been the governments that seemed to be acting strange. Over the last two years we’ve witnessed people across a broad spectrum of society meekly submit to draconian attacks on their freedoms, many even fiercely defending the assault. In the same way, we’ve seen politicians and parties who once ran on platforms of personal freedom and economic autonomy almost overnight turn into overbearing control freaks, intent on micromanaging every aspect of our lives. How has this happened?

Recently, the term ‘mass formation psychosis’ has been on everybody’s lips. It’s defined as a psychological phenomenon whereby a mass of people voluntarily go through a process of deindividuation and a herd mentality forms. Due to their contagious nature, the thoughtforms affecting these deindividuated people, catalysed by the positive feedback loops of news programmes, social media and peer interaction, spread like wildfire throughout the population. In the past, this used to be called mob psychology, or more plainly, the madness of crowds.

Psychology: from Science to the Occult

Someone for whom the events of the past couple of years would not have been so surprising was the Austrian esoteric philosopher and mystic Rudolf Steiner, who died almost a century ago. Throughout the course of his life Steiner wrote numerous books and delivered thousands of lectures on his theories, contributing greatly to diverse spheres from architecture to education, and agriculture to beekeeping. His highly unique – and sometimes controversial – insights and methods led to the founding of the spiritual movement known as Anthroposophy, which emphasises the existence of a boundless potential for human beings.

Unlike some esoteric thinkers, Steiner saw the great importance of materialistic science, but argued that it was vital to see it as only a single aspect of reality which should ideally be combined with what he called ‘spiritual science’ – gained by mystical experience – in order to present the full picture. After all, breakthroughs often occur when scientists receive insights from beyond the material realm, as in the famous case of James Watson, credited with the discovery of the double helix shape of DNA which came to him in a dream featuring two intertwined serpents. Similarly, Dmitri Mendeleev, created the period table after a dream of “… a table where all the elements fell into place as required.” These cases go to show that not all scientific discoveries are the result of logical deduction and experimentation.

In fact, Steiner, who had been on the receiving end of mystical insights since childhood, honed his clairvoyant skills to such an extent that the information he received from non-conventional sources became more than the occasional flash of insight, His quest became the establishment of methods for obtaining objective extrasensory perception – a task he considered of paramount importance for he believed an epic battle was being fought in the spiritual realm that would have disastrous consequences for humankind unless it was addressed head-on.

Spirits of Darkness

His clearest warnings about the future fate of humanity came in a series of lectures delivered towards the end of his life in Dornach, Switzerland; these lectures are reproduced in the book The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness. Although Steiner’s detractors say his prose can be leaden, his lectures meandering, and his concepts difficult to grasp, he is remarkably clear and straightforward when it comes to the fate that awaits humanity if our obsession with scientific materialism is allowed to reign free without being pulled back into balance by the counterbalancing forces of spirituality.

This is most clearly illustrated in the final two lectures in the series – 13 and 14 – which are respectively titled The Fallen Spirits’ Influence in the World and Into the Future. Steiner posits that an unseen battle took place in the early 19th century which certain ‘spirits of darkness’ lost. These spirits were duly ejected from their heavenly realms and cast down into a more material plane of existence i.e. here. He is remarkably precise about when this occurred: autumn 1879.

These newly arrived spirits joined those who were already here – the ones that have been existing alongside and influencing humanity since the mythological times associated with the Fall. Given that it takes time for these malign spirits to work their way through human societies, it wasn’t until 1914 when their malign influence manifested in human society in the form of the First World War – a disastrous event the cause of which still puzzles secular historians.

Lucifer and Ahriman – the Leaders of the Pack

The spirits Ahriman and Lucifer have been hacking humanity for thousands of years, says Steiner, with Lucifer being the ‘light bringer’ intent on making us more spiritual and granting us more free will, and Ahriman doing the opposite and making us more materialistic and easier to control. In simplistic terms, Lucifer is an ascending influence, which Ahriman is a descending one.

Why should they want to do this? Well, we just don’t know – it’s difficult for our human minds to figure out what makes angels and demons tick. But whenever there’s one of those periodic battles in the spirit world, Steiner said, it tends to result in a new batch of reinforcements being thrown down into the material realm to join forces with those already here.

Steiner told us that Ahriman – a demon first identified by the Zoroastrians in ancient Persia – has the upper hand right now. He had a personal beef with Ahriman and had seen his face in vision – in fact he was still carving a likeness of it out of wood at the time of his death. Ahriman’s main aim seems to be to drag humankind into a purely materialistic state devoid of any form of spirituality, removing even the impulse to connect with our souls. The method of attack would be through science and technology, and by taking possession of the minds of powerful and influential people in order to push through this agenda. These controlled people could be scientists, politicians, religious leaders, or anyone with any influence. Thus, demonic forces would work through these people, and the people themselves, blinded by all-too-human failings such as greed or a lust for power, would lack the basic awareness to recognise what was occurring.

A New Religion for a New Age

The background to this power grab was the rise of atheism and the worship of science and progress. Now, we have a situation in which a purely materialist perspective is presented as the only explanation for all creation. Atheism has, for some, become a de facto religion, while the rich traditions of native spirituality have been side-lined and crushed under its heel. People, animals and in fact all life is regarded in the same cold manner; merely receptacles of proteins and genetic code that can be exploited. The endgame of this play is presented as a bleak, monochrome world expunged of spirit and light, where humans – their minds and spirits broken – are herded together and monitored like lab animals.

We can see how this scenario is being expedited. The CEOs of tech corporations are viewed almost as saints or Bodhisattvas, dangling the carrot of eternal life in the form of uploading the ‘data’ contained within our brains onto microchips. At the same time, politicians, corporate scientists, civil servants and economists are regarded as technocratic engineers tasked with ensuring the smooth functioning of the juggernaut of the material economy. Free will? The implicit assumption is that this will be unnecessary once the AI powered algorithms – which know us better than we do – reach escape velocity. At this stage, human life would have no intrinsic value, and the shells of our former selves would be occupied by the demonic army that Steiner warned us was waiting for its moment.

In the Blood

Some people say that Rudolf Steiner predicted a vaccine would appear which would be the delivery system for the final defeat of humankind. In light of the clandestine efforts made over the last two years to inject almost everybody on the planet with a gene editing treatment, his prescience seems remarkable – but how true is it? Amazingly, Steiner was remarkably clear (by his own standards) about the physical process by which this takeover would occur. He states in his final lecture in The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness that the spiritual world where entities such as angels, demons and archangels dwell is within the human blood. He meant this quite literally, saying:

“Both the Archangels and the Angels had their dwelling place in the blood, as it were. Truly, the blood is not something merely for chemists to analyse; it is also the dwelling place of entities from higher worlds.”

To that end, he speculated that the delivery mechanism will be in the form of a vaccine, injected directly into our bodies.

“Today [in 1917] bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another; in future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life – ‘foolish’ here, of course, in the eyes of the materialists.”

This ‘vaccine’, he goes on to say, would block off any communication from the spirit world, meaning no messages or impulses would be able to get through from the ‘spirits of light’ whose aim is always to help humanity progress and fulfil our destiny. Positive impulses which were once transmitted to us would be permanently locked out by the vaccine, and instead the hapless victims would only be able to receive the impulses coming to them from disruptive sources, which we can imagine today might include the media, the education system and even established religion. There would be great confusion, he says, and Ahrimanic forces will turn people’s thoughts upside down and inside out. Everything that once was good and sensible will appear evil and crazy, while everything that was once considered insane and evil will be presented as sensible and good.

Squid Games: From Wetiko to The Matrix

Does this all sound implausible, the ramblings of a long-dead mystic? Many will no doubt say that it does, and that there are more earthly and plausible explanations for the psychic epidemic which has gripped the world. Perhaps Steiner was speaking metaphorically after all, some may reason. Nevertheless, the phenomenon to which Steiner alluded bears striking similarities to the Native American concept of the demonic force they call wetiko. The author Paul Levy has written extensively about this, defining it as “a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions.”

Listening to a recent Legalise Freedom podcast entitled Covid-19: War on Humanity, Emma Farrell, a plant healer who uses shamanic techniques to access inner realms, made the observation that she and others in the same field had seen a veritable horde of spiritual parasitic entities attached to people over the last two years – as if a floodgate had been opened and they had poured through it. These entities, she says, come in all shapes and sizes but there are two very common and recognisable ones, one of which is squid-like. These squid-like beings, she says, attach themselves to unprotected people and harvest their spiritual energy by causing division and discord among us.

This struck me as interesting as we’ve seen this squid archetype move into human consciousness over the past few years, not least becoming apparent through popular culture. Many people have reported having dreams of octopus or squid-like creatures, and artists such as Peter Yankowski have painted pictures of these visions. Indeed, the villainous machines that control humans and harvest their energies in the Matrix movies look like robotic squids, while one of the top Netflix series of 2021 was Squid Game, a grim and violent survival thriller that posits human nature as intrinsically barbaric. What’s more, the resurgence in popularity of H.P. Lovecraft’s supernatural tales of horrors from the deep adds another tentacled layer to this rugose cake.

And let’s not forget when Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest investment banks, was memorable described by Rolling Stone journalist Matta Taibbi as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The description is apt, after all, what is the purpose of an investment bank other than to turn every aspect of the sacred world into a monetised asset that can be traded, exploited and leveraged?

The Path Back to Sanity

Could this manifestation of a squid/octopus archetype into human consciousness be what Steiner was warning us about? Are there really spiritual entities within our blood that could account for billionaire technocrats’ obsession with injecting substances into us that are said to contain nanoparticles we know very little about? And how does this sit with the psychospiritual disease of wetiko outlined by Paul Levy, and the concept of ‘mass formation psychosis’ being talked about in the alternative media?

Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the nexus of these concepts, with the implicit suggestion that we should not rest in our deep enquiry into the manner of the affliction that is currently so prevalent across the world. Only by doing so can we hope to find the necessary tools and weapons to fight back against it.

Or maybe the Ahrimanic demons that Steiner warned us about, the wetiko mind parasites Paul Levy writes of, and the tentacled entities that have squirmed into our collective consciousness via popular culture are all playing on the same team. If so, what does our team look like? And how do we win this game? Perhaps the fight is a necessary one at this juncture in human development, and that by defeating these ‘spirits of darkness’ we can progress to a higher level.

Whatever the case, referring back to the old adage alluded to earlier, people it’s said, might go mad in crowds, but the path back to sanity happens one person at a time.