Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Saturday Matinee: River’s Edge

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

I remember reading about the case at the time. A high school kid killed his girlfriend and left her body lying on the ground. Over the next few days, he brought some of his friends out to look at her body, and gradually word of the crime spread through his circle of friends. But for a long time, nobody called the cops.

A lot of op-ed articles were written to analyze this event, which was seen as symptomatic of a wider moral breakdown in our society. “River’s Edge,” which is a horrifying fiction inspired by the case, offers no explanation and no message; it regards the crime in much the same way the kid’s friends stood around looking at the body. The difference is that the film feels a horror that the teenagers apparently did not.

This is the best analytical film about a crime since “The Onion Field” and “In Cold Blood.” Like those films, it poses these questions: Why do we need to be told this story? How is it useful to see limited and brutish people doing cruel and stupid things? I suppose there are two answers. One, because such things exist in the world and some of us are curious about them as we are curious in general about human nature. Two, because an artist is never merely a reporter and by seeing the tragedy through his eyes, he helps us to see it through ours.

“River’s Edge” was directed by Tim Hunter, who made “Tex,” about ordinary teenagers who found themselves faced with the choice of dealing drugs. In “River’s Edge,” that choice has long since been made. These teenagers are alcoholics and drug abusers, including one whose mother is afraid he is stealing her marijuana and a 12-year-old who blackmails the older kids for six-packs.

The central figure in the film is not the murderer, Sampson (Daniel Roebuck), a large, stolid youth who seems perpetually puzzled about why he does anything. It is Layne (Crispin Glover), a strung-out, mercurial rebel who always seems to be on speed and who takes it upon himself to help conceal the crime. When his girlfriend asks him, like, well, gee, she was our friend and all, so shouldn’t we feel bad, or something, his answer is that the murderer “had his reasons.” What were they? The victim was talking back.

Glover’s performance is electric. He’s like a young Eric Roberts, and he carries around a constant sense of danger. Eventually, we realize the danger is born of paranoia; he is reflecting it at us with his fear.

These kids form a clique that exists outside the mainstream in their high school. They hang around outside, smoking and sneering. In town, they have a friend named Feck (Dennis Hopper), a drug dealer who lives inside a locked house and once killed a woman himself, so he has something in common with the kid, you see? It is another of Hopper’s possessed performances, done with sweat and the whites of his eyes.

“River’s Edge” is not a film I will forget very soon. Its portrait of these adolescents is an exercise in despair. Not even old enough to legally order a beer, they already are destroyed by alcohol and drugs, abandoned by parents who also have lost hope. When the story of the dead girl first appeared in the papers, it seemed like a freak show, an aberration. “River’s Edge” sets it in an ordinary town and makes it seem like just what the op-ed philosophers said: an emblem of breakdown. The girl’s body eventually was discovered and buried. If you seek her monument, look around you.

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Watch River’s Edge on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12027310

The Cost Of Living Has Become Extremely Oppressive And 57 Percent Of Americans Cannot Afford A $1,000 Emergency Expense

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Activist Post

I don’t have to tell you that your money doesn’t go as far as it once did.  You see it every time that you go shopping.  Our leaders flooded the system with money and pursued highly inflationary policies for years, and now we are all paying the price.  The cost of living has been rising much faster than our incomes have, and this is systematically destroying the middle class.  Survey after survey has shown that a solid majority of the population is living paycheck to paycheck, and at this point most U.S. consumers are tapped out.  In fact, one brand new survey just discovered that 57 percent of Americans cannot even afford to pay a $1,000 emergency expense…

According to Bankrate’s Annual Emergency Fund Report, 68% of people are worried they wouldn’t be able to cover their living expenses for just one month if they lost their primary source of income. And when push comes to shove, the majority (57%) of U.S. adults are currently unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense.

When broken down by generation, Gen Zers (85%) and Millennials (79%) are more likely to be worried about covering an emergency expense.

These numbers are quite ominous, because they clearly demonstrate that we are completely and utterly unprepared for any sort of a major economic downturn.

And thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living, we are losing even more ground with each passing month.

Another survey that was recently released found that “earnings are falling behind the cost of living” for 72 percent of middle income families…

Nearly three-quarters, or 72%, of middle-income families say their earnings are falling behind the cost of living, up from 68% a year ago, according to a separate report by Primerica based on a survey of households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000. A similar share, 74%, said they are unable to save for their future, up from 66% a year ago.

We haven’t experienced anything like this in the United States in decades.

When I walked into a Walmart store the other day, I was shocked by how high the prices are now.

Isn’t Walmart supposed to be the place with “low prices every day”?

Well, the prices were certainly not “low” when I walked through the store.

And I was stunned to learn that McDonald’s is now selling one hash brown for three dollars.

Are you kidding me?

I am sure that many of you can remember a time when they were 50 cents.

Sadly, those days are not coming back.

Food prices are going to continue to go up, and the CEO of Unilever recently admitted that his company has actually “been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market”…

“For the last 18 months we’ve seen extraordinary input cost pressure … it runs across petrochemical derived products, agricultural derived products, energy, transport, logistics,” he said.

“It’s been feeding through for quite some time now and we’ve been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market,” he added.

That doesn’t sound good at all.

And he also ominously warned that “there’s more inflationary pressure coming”…

Unilever’s view, he said, was that “we know for sure there’s more inflationary pressure coming through in our input costs.”

As food prices continue to rise, these big companies are going to look for ways to reduce input costs.

One way that they are going to do that is by starting to put crushed bugs in our food.

I know that this may sound really bizarre to you, but this is already happening in Europe…

As of yesterday, a food additive made out of powdered crickets began appearing in foods from pizza, to pasta to cereals across the European Union.

Yes, really.

Defatted house crickets are on the menu for Europeans across the continent, without the vast majority of them knowing it is now in their food.

So you might want to start reading labels a lot more carefully from now on.

Of course it isn’t just the cost of food that has become extremely oppressive.

Just about everything has gotten more expensive, and this has broken the remaining strength of the U.S. consumer.

If you doubt this, just consider some of the latest economic numbers that we have seen.

-U.S. retail sales fell once again last month…

US retail sales continued their fall in December, dropping by 1.1% as inflation remained high, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

That’s the largest monthly decline since December 2021, and practically every category (except for building materials, groceries and sporting goods) saw sales drop from the prior month.

-Sales of existing homes have now fallen for 11 months in a row…

U.S. existing home sales slowed for the 11th consecutive month in December as higher mortgage rates, surging inflation and steep home prices sapped consumer demand from the housing market.

-More Americans than ever before are being forced to pay at least 30 percent of their incomes on rent…

The average US household is now considered ‘rent-burdened’ as a record-high number of people are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

According to Moody’s Analytics’ latest affordability report, the national average rent-to-income (RTI) ratio reached 30 percent for the first time since the company began tracking the data more than 20 years ago.

U.S. consumers are being stretched financially like never before, and many are turning to debt to help them maintain their current lifestyles.

As a result, the savings rate has plunged to a historic low, credit card debt has surged to a record high, and the average rate of interest on credit card balances has also risen to a record high.  As Zero Hedge has aptly noted, this is “nothing short of catastrophic”…

The combination of record high credit card debt and record high credit card interest is nothing short of catastrophic for both the US economy, and the strapped consumer who has no choice but to keep buying on credit while hoping next month’s bill will somehow not come. Unfortunately, it will and at some point in the very near future, this will also translate into massive loan losses for US consumer banks; that’s when Powell will finally panic.

For a long time, we have been warned that the very foolish economic policies that our leaders were implementing would have deeply tragic consequences.

And now it is starting to happen right in front of our eyes.

Sadly, the truth is that this is just the beginning.

The entire system is cracking and crumbling all around us, and there is much more pain ahead.

A Dollar Collapse Is Now In Motion – Saudi Arabia Signals The End Of Petro Status

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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman and CEO, and Christine Lagarde, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director, attend the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia October 24, 2017. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

The decline of a currency’s world reserve status is often a long process rife with denials. There are numerous economic “experts” out there that have been dismissing any and all warnings of dollar collapse for years. They just don’t get it, or they don’t want to get it. The idea that the US currency could ever be dethroned as the defacto global trade mechanism is impossible in their minds.

One of the key pillars keeping the dollar in place as the world reserve is its petro-status, and this factor is often held up as the reason why the Greenback cannot fail. The other argument is that the dollar is backed by the full force of the US military, and the US military is backed by the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve – In other words, the dollar is backed by…the dollar; it’s a very circular and naive position.

These sentiments are not only pervasive among mainstream economists, they are also all over the place within the alternative media. I suspect the main hang-up for liberty movement analysts is the notion that the globalist establishment would ever allow the dollar or the US economy to fail. Isn’t the dollar system their “golden goose”?

The answer is no, it is NOT their golden goose. The dollar is just another stepping stone towards their goal of a one-world economy and a one-world currency. They have killed the world reserve status of other currencies in the past, why wouldn’t they do the same to the dollar?

Globalist white papers and essays specifically outline the need for a diminished role for the US currency as well as a decline in the American economy in order to make way for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and a new global currency system controlled by the IMF. I warned about this years go, and my position has always been that the derailment of the dollar would likely start with the end of its petro status.

In 2017 I published an article titled ‘Saudi Coup Signals War And The New World Order Reset’. I noted at the time that the sudden power shift over to crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman indicated a change in Saudi Arabia’s relationship to the US. I stated that:

“To understand how drastic this coup has been, consider this — for decades Saudi Kings maintained political balance by doling out vital power positions to separate, carefully chosen successors. Positions such as Defense Minister, the Interior Ministry and the head of the National Guard. Today, Mohammed Bin Salman controls all three positions. Foreign policy, defense matters, oil and economic decisions and social changes are now all in the hands of one man.”

The rise of MBS was backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), a fund comprised of trillions of dollars supplied by globalists within Carlyle Group (Bush family, etc.), Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Blackrock. MBS garnered the favor of the globalists for one specific reason – He openly supported their “Vision For 2030”, a plan for the dismantling of “fossil fuel” based energy and the implementation of carbon controls. Yes, that’s right, the head of Saudi Arabia is backing the eventual end of oil based energy, and part of that includes the end of the dollar as the petro currency.  

In exchange for their cooperation, the Saudis are being given access to ESG-like funding as well as access to AI advancements and the so-called “digital economy.”  It sounds crazy, but there is much talk of AI developments to cure numerous health problems and extend lifespan.  With those kinds of promises, it’s not surprising that Saudi elites would be willing to dump the dollar and even oil.

In 2017 I noted that:

“I believe the next phase of the global economic reset will begin in part with the breaking of petrodollar dominance. An important element of my analysis on the strategic shift away from the petrodollar has been the symbiosis between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been the single most important key to the dollar remaining as the petrocurrency from the very beginning.”

I believed that the threat to petro status would ultimately be spurred on by a proxy war between East and West:

“World economic war is the real name of the game here, as the globalists play puppeteers to East and West. It is a geopolitical crisis they will have created to engineer public support for a solution they predetermined.”

Back then I thought that such a proxy war would be initiated in the Middle East, possibly in Iran. However, it’s clear that Ukraine is the powderkeg the globalists have chosen, at least for now, with Taiwan being the next shoe to drop.

In the years since I made these predictions the relationship between Saudi Arabia, Russia and China has grown very close. Arms deals and energy deals are becoming a mainstay of trade and this has led to a quiet but steady distancing of the Saudis from the dollar. This past week, the dominoes were set in motion for dollar collapse when Saudi Arabia announced at Davos that they are now willing to trade oil in alternative currencies.

In response, Xi Jinping pledged to ramp up efforts to promote the use of the Chinese yuan in energy deals. This falls in line with another article I wrote in 2017 titled ‘The Economic End Game Continues,’ in which I described how conflict with Eastern nations (China and Russia) would be exploited to create a catalyst for the end of the dollar’s petro status.

The importance of the Saudi announcement cannot be overstated; this is the beginning of the end of the dollar. The dollar’s world reserve status is largely dependent on its petro-status. Without one, you cannot have the other. This is almost the exact same dynamic that led to the implosion of the British Sterling decades ago as the global petro currency which resulted in the rise of the dollar to take its place.

This time, though, it will not be a single foreign currency that takes on the role of world reserve, it will be a basket currency system controlled by the IMF called Special Drawing Rights, along with a single global digital currency that is yet to be named but is now under development.

The consequences of the loss of reserve status will be devastating to the US economy. It is the only glue holding our system together – The ability to defer inflation by exporting it overseas is a superpower only the US enjoys. The Fed can print money perpetually if it wants to in order to fund the government or prop up US markets, as long as foreign central banks and corporate banks are willing to absorb dollars as a tool for global trade. If the dollar is no longer the primary international trade mechanism, the trillions upon trillions of dollars the Fed has created from thin air over the years will all come flooding back to the US through various avenues, and hyperinflation (or hyperstagflation) will be the result.

This dynamic is already in play, as foreign holders of US debt and dollars have been dumping them at record pace since 2017. The process continues at a time when the Federal Reserve is cutting it’s balance sheet and raising interest rates, which means there is no longer a buyer of last resort.

This may be why multiple foreign central banks have renewed their purchases of gold reserves and are once again stockpiling precious metals. They seem to be well aware of what is about to happen to the dollar, while the American public is kept in the dark.

The effects of the decline of the dollar may not be immediately felt, or become obvious for another year or two. What will happen is consistent inflation on top of the high prices we are already dealing with. Meaning, the Federal Reserve will continue to hold interest rates higher and prices will barely budge or they may climb in spite of monetary tightening. Even in the face of a major recessionary contraction, which I predict will be triggered starting in April, prices will STILL remain higher.

All the while the mainstream media and government economists will say they have “no idea” why inflation is so persistent, and that “nobody could have seen this coming.” Some of us saw it coming, but only because we accept the reality that the dollar’s days are numbered.

NATO Panics, Escalates Big Arms to Ukraine; U.S. ‘Will Increase Artillery Production Sixfold’; Brian Berletic: Only MICs gain from all this.

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

On January 20th, the great American military and geostrategic analyst Brian Berletic, who has had a stunningly high percentage of his predictions turning out to have been 100% accurate, did a youtube at his “The New Atlas” Website, headlining “US, Allies Send More Weapons to Ukraine in Absence of Real Solution”, and it had been sparked by Berletic’s advance knowledge that America and its allies would probably decide to send to Ukraine some of the German-manufactured Leopard tanks and some of the U.S.-manufactured Abrams tanks. Near the end of his video, at 25:24 in it, he summarized what the prior portion had already documented to be the case: that these tanks will be useless to turning the tide of this war away from a Russian victory, and into a U.S.-and-allied victory.

Then, on January 25th, came the announcements that America, Germany, and Poland, had, in fact, decided to do this (send those tanks to Ukraine), and the BBC reported that, “Germans endured months of political debate about concerns that sending tanks would escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia.” The reason why Germany’s leaders ultimately decided to go along with these supplies to Ukraine isn’t that they had concluded that doing so wouldn’t “escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia” (and that’s oblique terminology for “globalize the war in Ukraine and turn it into a very hot WW III between NATO (the U.S.) and Russia”) but was instead that “The US and Germany had resisted internal and external pressure to send their tanks to Ukraine for some time.” The BBC, being an extension of Britain’s own military contractors — such as the world’s 7th-largest weapons-manufacturer, BAE Systems — many of which had been lobbying heavily for this decision, refused to define, or to say anything about, what stood behind that amorphous phrase “external pressure”; and, so, as usual, what was causing what was happening here was being ignored; only the result was being reported. Its cause (source) was banned from being even discussed in the ‘news’-media. However, on Tuesday, January 24th, Politico bannered “U.S. closer to approving ‘significant number’ of Abrams tanks to Ukraine”, and reported that, “On Tuesday, shortly after news broke of the possible U.S. move, POLITICO reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also plans to announce that German Leopards are heading to Ukraine. Last week, Scholz told U.S. lawmakers [in Switzerland, at the pro-imperialist WEF in Davos, where many billionaires and U.S.-and-allied Governments meet privately each year and which has increasingly come to replace the United Nations that the anti-imperialist FDR had initiated to serve as the basis for international laws, and for these imperialists to come to replace those international laws, by imposing America’s “rules-based international order”] that Berlin would approve the transfer only if the U.S. donated its own tanks first.” But, still, the key individuals who stood behind this supposedly crucial international agreement, to possibly start what could quickly become a nuclear World War Three, wasn’t, at all, being indicated; it was, instead, hidden, and that question wasn’t mentioned, at all — as-if it didn’t ‘really’ matter who, or how, and why, this decision to “escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia” had been made — what had caused it to be made.

Sending these additional armaments to Ukraine runs exactly opposite to public opinion in at least the imperial country itself.

The news-report on January 18th by the American polling organization Quinnipiac was headlined “Americans On Biden’s Handling Of Classified Documents: Inappropriate & Serious, But Shouldn’t Face Charges, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Biden Handling Of The Mexican Border Hits Record Low While Majority Back His New Immigration Plan”. Buried deep in it was “U.S. AID TO UKRAINE”, reporting that

As Russia’s war against Ukraine approaches its one-year mark, 33 percent of Americans think the United States is doing too much to help Ukraine, 21 percent think the U.S. is doing too little, and 38 percent think the U.S. is doing about the right amount to help Ukraine. This compares to a Quinnipiac University poll on February 28, 2022 after the war started, when 7 percent of Americans thought the U.S. was doing too much to help Ukraine, 45 percent thought the U.S. was doing too little, and 37 percent thought the U.S. was doing about the right amount to help Ukraine.

Buried yet deeper in it was “16. In your opinion, what is the most urgent issue facing the country today: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, COVID-19, inflation, climate change, health care, racial inequality, immigration, election laws, abortion, gun violence, or crime?”

Here were the findings on that:

#1. Inflation 35%; #2. Immigration 10%; #3. Gun violence 8%; #4. Climate change 7%; #5. Something else than these named items 7%; #6. Health care 6%; #7. Crime 6%; #8. Election laws 5%; #9. Racial inequality 4%; #10. Abortion 4%; #11. DK/NA or Don’t know or not applicable 3%; #12. Russia/Ukraine 3%; #13. Covid-19 1%.

So: not only did more Americans want “U.S. AID TO UKRAINE” to be decreased than wanted it to be increased, and not only did Americans rank the issue itself as being # 12 out of 13 options for the U.S. Government to be focusing on, but the U.S. Government is and has been focusing on it more than on any other, and that focus and those expenditures are now soaring — despite what the public wants. This is normal, not unusual in America, because its Government is perhaps the most corrupt on the planet.. And there is lots of other evidence that it is profoundly corrupt and does not represent the American public. Furthermore, new evidence supporting this is coming in all the time. In fact: a higher percentage of Americans are living in prisons than is the case in any other nation on the planet. Is that consistent with America’s being a democracy?

So: Why is America’s NATO driving its members to shovel yet more weaponry into Ukraine? Is it because these countries are “democracies”? Brian Berletic has a different answer — and, unlike the propagandized one, it recognizes that that is a pure scam excuse (like the invasion and occupation of Iraq used in 2003). The “MIC” Military-Industrial Complex (and that’s controlled by the leading stockholders in the top-100 ‘Defense’ firms) is behind it. NATO is the trade-organization for those international corporations, and it (especially in the U.S. and UK) runs their Governments. That’s why this is being done.

Now that Ukraine’s government will be receiving those tanks, Ukraine is expecting ultimately to receive American jet fighters and missiles that will enable Ukraine to invade Russia at least as far as Moscow — which is only 300 miles away from Ukraine. On the afternoon of January 25th, Reuters headlined “Ukraine sets sights on fighter jets after securing tank supplies”, and reported that Yuriy Sak, who advises Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters, “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get.” If they get nuclear weapons, those will certainly be operated by Americans. And, of course, that has been the U.S. goal ever since Obama started by no later than June of 2011 to plan his coup to take Ukraine.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

360 Degree Surveillance: How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We live in a surveillance state founded on a partnership between government and the technology industry.”— Law Professor Avidan Y. Cover

In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.  

There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.

With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.

Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:

A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.

Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.

Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.

As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.

What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.

It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.

Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.

The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.

The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.

The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.

Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.

Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”

In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.

We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.

Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.

Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.

As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.

As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.

On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.

The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.

After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.

Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”

No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.

It’s George Orwell’s 1984 on a global scale.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, Orwell’s dystopian nightmare has become our looming reality.

How the US is blackmailing countries that buy American weapons

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By Vladimir Platov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Economic sanctions and blackmail have long been the preferred methods of conducting foreign policy and advancing the United States’ own geopolitical interests.

In 2018, the US withdrew from the agreement on Iran’s nuclear program signed in May 2015, following which Washington began to implement the “maximum pressure” strategy on Iran.

In 2019, the US government imposed a slew of restrictions on the Chinese firm Huawei, which is widely regarded as a leader in digital technologies, particularly in the deployment of 5G networks. Following that, Washington began to intercept Huawei’s foreign market as a result of an open competitive struggle.

And Russia’s gas squeeze in Europe, orchestrated by the US, exacerbated an already obvious economic and financial crisis for Europeans, resulting in total population impoverishment against the backdrop of America reaping additional superprofits from the sale of expensive American LNG instead of cheap Russian gas to Europe.

Sanctions, including secondary ones, become a tool for seizing funds and assets and bankrupting competitors, and are used by the United States to strengthen its global dominance.

Although the definition of extortion as a common law crime in US criminal law varies across states, both in wording and substance, it is nevertheless recognized everywhere as a serious offense and prosecuted under domestic law. In recent years, in an effort to introduce “rules” unilaterally favorable to the United States in place of international law, Washington’s policy has begun to carry the principle of “extraterritorial” sanctions into the international arena when the United States imposes them and openly extorts not only US legal subjects but also foreign ones, including independent states.

The fact that under these conditions, the US uses the dominant role of the US dollar, blackmail, and economic sanctions as the main instruments of foreign policy (the use of sanctions almost tripled in 2009-2019 alone) makes many countries think about possible alternatives. One of them is already the increasing use of national currencies in bilateral trade.

Washington’s abuse of such criminal policies and blatantly illegal pressures are causing resentment even among the United States’ allies. It is no coincidence that in 2019 the chairman of the United Kingdom’s central bank, Mark Carney, called for the creation of an international digital currency that would weaken the dominant role of the US dollar in international trade.

Washington is increasingly using outright blackmail, not just in the political, economic, and trade spheres. It is also used in the military sphere, with the sale and subsequent use of American weapons directly threatening the national security of countries that purchase US weapons.

And one of the many egregious examples of this is the events of 2016, when the US attempted to stage a coup in Turkey by killing President Erdoğan with American weapons and preventing Turkish authorities from using US air defenses to prevent them from shooting down F-16 aircraft flying from the US military base at Incirlik. And it was only thanks to the intervention of Russian politician Alexander Dugin (against whom, by the way, Ukrainian accomplices of the United States committed an act of terrorism in 2022 and killed his daughter) and the Russian military at the behest of President Vladimir Putin that this sinister plan of Washington was foiled. The arrested Turkish coup plotters themselves have given detailed accounts of it. In particular, about how the Russian military, using seven Russian fighter jets and two S-400 missile systems in northern Syria, warned the coupist aircraft that if the radar showed any indication of their suspicious or improper actions, they would be hit directly. As a result, the Turkish F-16s could only track Erdoğan’s plane and not attack it. In addition to the testimony of the Turkish participants in this failed American coup attempt, those interested can learn more from a Turkish report published on Odatv.com on September 21, 2016.

This blackmail of Ankara with US weapons continues even now, as pointed out in particular by Bloomberg the other day, which reported that the US will not supply Turkey with F-16s until it agrees to admit Sweden to NATO.

Even if Turkey, under pressure from Washington, agrees to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO, which the United States is trying hard to push into the alliance, Turkey will never be able to use those aircraft or other American weapons unless such use would be advantageous to the White House.

And the US decision in April 2021 to withdraw US Patriot air defense batteries from the Persian Gulf region after the White House deteriorated relations with the Saudi monarchy is proof of that.

The threat from Washington to restrict the use of purchased US weapons has become increasingly serious for many countries recently. Especially considering that it is the US that sells twice as many weapons as Russia and six times as many as China, thus dominating the market for weapons of death, destruction and protection of many states from external threats, the vast majority of which are also initiated by Washington. Here one can also see the recent White House game of supplying Greece with more and more offensive weapons against Turkey, whose relations with both Athens and Washington have recently deteriorated significantly.

Washington has made similar attempts at blackmail in its arms supplies to the other two rival parties to the conflict in South Asia – Pakistan and India. Therefore, despite Washington’s blatant blackmail and intimidation of New Delhi, India continues to focus on buying arms from Russia rather than the United States. In the meantime, India has two important defense needs: the availability of weapons and their quality. In its preferential treatment of Russia on this issue, Indian leaders assume that if the country begins to buy weapons from the West, it will strengthen its autonomy but sacrifice these two needs, since Western systems are many times more expensive but inferior to Russian ones.

YOUR BODY IS A PROJECTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THOUGHT

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

At the cutting edge of science and technology today is artificial intelligence and robotics, which are being driven by ever-increasing computational speeds made possible by quantum computing. When the capacity of technological computation rivals the speed of our capacity to think and process information as humans, then we will reach the singularity and a superintelligence will emerge in our society, triggering runaway technological growth.

While this is coming in the very near future, we are also now learning how this very type of quantum creative power is already at play in our world via the interplay of human consciousness and the material world. In the early 1900’s, the famous double-slit experiment demonstrated that material objects can actually change their composition based on what is being held in consciousness when said objects are observed.

In other words, the world around us is being created moment by moment, and our expectations of what the world should be is what gives it form. In order to alter its form or to change course, we can use the directed focus of the mind to envision and feel something different for ourselves, and in time and through repetition, this reality will eventually take form. The feeling is the key.

This is something we do all the time. The best example of this, perhaps, is the human body, which can by some measures be considered a projection of human consciousness. We see this everywhere. For example, just look at people’s bodies and consider their health, and you’ll be able to get a fair idea of what type of thought patterns and belief systems are at work in the everyday silence of their own minds.

The best example is someone with radiant health, high energy and intense vitality. This person didn’t get to be this way by happenstance. The patterns of thought in their mind support their belief that their body can be a radiant storehouse of health. This, in turn, supports the development of habits which create such well-being. This type of person engages in clean, clear thinking about their health and body, and the result is this very type of body. They intentionally feel how they want to feel.

On the other hand, a person with an out of shape, obese, or disease-ridden body undoubtedly engages in thought patterns and beliefs about health which support such poor health. They never believe that they can be disease free or of ideal weight, and so their thoughts reinforce habits which deteriorate their health. Inside this person’s mind is chaos, confusion, fear, self-loathing and other patterns which create dis-ease.

There is more to this, though, if we consider the possibilities unfolding in the realms of quantum physics and superintelligent technology. We are beginning to get a clear idea of what the quantum field actually is and what it can do. It appears to be waiting for us to purposefully interact with it.

The quantum world is waiting for us to make a decision so that it knows how to behave. That is why quantum physicists have such difficulties in dealing with, explaining, and defining the quantum world. We are truly, in every sense of the word, masters of creation because we decide what manifests out of the field of all-possibility and into form.

The thing is, the quantum level of reality isn’t a local and insignificant aspect of creation. It is all around us, and it is the most fundamental level of creation aside from the unified field itself. The human energy field is interacting and influencing the quantum field all around us at all times and the energy of our beliefs and intentions are infused into our energy field because they are defined by the energy of our thoughts and emotions. ~Brandon West

Final Thoughts

This may sound to some like a woo woo way of looking at the world, but there is immense practicality in this world view for improving your life, your health, your relationships, and your overall happiness. The takeaway here is that you must take control over your own mind, and plant thoughts that support the projection of a healthy body and life. As Dr. Joe Dispenza notes, you’ll need to decide what you want, then put your attention on creating that reality.

“Whatever it is that is your vision, you’re just going to have to be passionate enough to invest your attention and your energy into that future over and over again, till all of a sudden you start seeing feedback in your life.” ~Dr. Joe Dispenza