THE OMNIPRESENT SURVEILLANCE STATE: ORWELL’S FUTURE IS OUR PRESENT REALITY

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Mac Slavo

The Orwellian dystopia of thought control and an omnipresent surveillance state has become our reality. George Orwell’s book 1984, although meant as fiction, has turned out to be an incredible prediction of our future.

The “land of the free” hasn’t been free since shortly after the American Revolution and it’s getting more authoritarian by the day. It’s been 70 years since Orwell (dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm) depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism, and totalitarianism in 1984.

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.” – John W. Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute

This world is truly dystopian, and that doesn’t just go for the United States. The masters are brainwashing the slaves and the slaves aren’t doing anything about it. In fact, most want more masters and to be further enslaved. We are witnessing a wholly disturbing state of humanity right now.

Much like Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state (which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report) we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control. Violence and government dominance rule over the masses and they are completely accepting and willing participants in their own enslavement.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.

The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one-third of the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or not it has always had the authorization to do so. – John W. Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs.

We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me. –George Orwell, 1984

We have been reduced to a cowering citizenry which is rendered 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. We have nowhere left to go. We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of the government.

We are living in Orwell’s dystopian predicted future. John W. Whitehead poses the question: So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

The truth is that we’re running out of options. As Whitehead makes clear in his book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, that we will all soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

Orwell’s 1984 no longer reads like fiction. It’s the reality of our times

Posted on July 18, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Bridge

Source: RT.com

70 years ago, the British writer George Orwell captured the essence of technology in its ability to shape our destinies in his seminal work, 1984. The tragedy of our times is that we have failed to heed his warning.

No matter how many times I read 1984, the feeling of total helplessness and despair that weaves itself throughout Orwell’s masterpiece never fails to take me by surprise. Although usually referred to as a ‘dystopian futuristic novel’, it is actually a horror story on a scale far greater than anything that has emerged from the minds of prolific writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz. The reason is simple. The nightmare world that the protagonist Winston Smith inhabits, a place called Oceania, is all too easily imaginable. Man, as opposed to some imaginary clown or demon, is the evil monster.

In the very first pages of the book, Orwell demonstrates an uncanny ability to foresee future trends in technology. Describing the protagonist Winston Smith’s frugal London flat, he mentions an instrument called a ‘telescreen’, which sounds strikingly similar to the handheld ‘smartphone’ that is enthusiastically used by billions of people around the world today.

Orwell describes the ubiquitous device as an “oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror” affixed to the wall that “could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.” Sound familiar? It is through this gadget that the rulers of Oceania are able to monitor the actions of its citizens every minute of every day. At the same time, the denizens of 1984 were never allowed to forget they were living in a totalitarian surveillance state, under the control of the much-feared Thought Police. Massive posters with the slogan ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ were as prevalent as our modern-day advertising billboards. Today, however, such polite warnings about surveillance would seem redundant, as reports of unauthorized spying still gets the occasional lazy nod in the media now and then.

In fact, just in time for 1984’s anniversary, it has been reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has once again been illicitly collecting records on telephone calls and text messages placed by US citizens. This latest invasion of privacy has been casually dismissed as an “error” after an unnamed telecommunications firm handed over call records the NSA allegedly “hadn’t requested” and “weren’t approved” by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2013, former CIA employee Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA’s intrusive surveillance operations, yet somehow the government agency is able to continue – with the help of the corporate sector – vacuuming up the private information of regular citizens.

Another method of control alluded to in 1984 fell under a system of speech known as ‘Newspeak’, which attempted to reduce the language to ‘doublethink’, with the ulterior motive of controlling ideas and thoughts. For example, the term ‘joycamp’, a truncated term every bit as euphemistic as the ‘PATRIOT Act’, was used to describe a forced labor camp, whereas a ‘doubleplusgood duckspeaker’ was used to praise an orator who ‘quacked’ correctly with regards to the political situation.

Another Newspeak term, known as ‘facecrime’, provides yet another striking parallel to our modern situation. Defined as “to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense.” It would be difficult for the modern reader to hear the term ‘facecrime’ and not connect it with ‘Facebook’, the social media platform that regularly censors content creators for expressing thoughts it finds ‘hateful’ or inappropriate. What social media users need is an Orwellian lesson in ‘crimestop’, which Orwell defined as “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” Those so-called unacceptable ‘dangerous thoughts’ were determined not by the will of the people, of course, but by their rulers.

And yes, it gets worse. Just this week, Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘private company’ agreed to give French authorities the “identification data” of Facebook users suspected of spreading ‘hate speech’ on the platform, in what would be an unprecedented move on the part of Silicon Valley.

‘Hate speech’ is precisely one of those delightfully vague, subjective terms with no real meaning that one would expect to find in the Newspeak style guide. Short of threatening the life of a person or persons, individuals should be free to criticize others without fear of reprisal, least of all from the state, which should be in the business of protecting free speech at all cost.

Another modern phenomenon that would be right at home in Orwell’s Oceania is the obsession with political correctness, which is defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.” But since so many people today identify with some marginalized group, this has made the intelligent discussion of controversial ideas – not least of all on US college campuses, of all places – exceedingly difficult, if not downright dangerous. Orwell must be looking down on all of this madness with much surprise, since he provided the world with the best possible warning to prevent it.

For anyone who entertains expectations for a happy ending in 1984, be prepared for serious disappointment (spoiler alert, for the few who have somehow not read this book). Although Winston Smith manages to finally experience love, the brief romance – like a delicate flower that was able to take root amid a field of asphalt – is crushed by the authorities with shocking brutality. Not satisfied with merely destroying the relationship, however, Smith is forced to betray his ‘Julia’ after undergoing the worst imaginable torture at the ‘Ministry of Love’.

The book ends with the words, “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” Will we too declare, like Winston Smith, our love for ‘Big Brother’ above all else, or will we emerge victorious against the forces of a technological tyranny that appears to be just over the horizon? Or is Orwell’s 1984 just really good fiction and not the instruction manual for tyrants many have come to fear it is?

An awful lot is riding on our answers to those questions, and time is running out.

The Limited Mind: Why Fear is Driving Humanity to Extinction

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

I have previously written many articles describing one or more aspects of the dysfunctional nature of the typical human mind, together with an explanation of how this came about and what we can do about it. See, for example, many of the articles republished in ‘Key Articles’ and the source documents ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

I have also explained that it is this dysfunctional psychological foundation that generated the behaviors, as well as the political, economic, legal and social institutions (such as capitalism), that are driving the multifaceted and existential crisis in which humanity now finds itself.

Moreover, on that basis, my own focus has significantly evolved from the research and nonviolent activism that occupied me for several decades to now include an ongoing effort to have this psychological dysfunctionality addressed as a central feature of our efforts to understand and transform dysfunctional political, economic, legal and social institutions as well as to understand and end war (including the threat of nuclear war), the environmental crisis (including the climate catastrophe) and all other ongoing conflicts that bedevil humanity.

You may believe that psychology is unimportant to your understanding of conflict or that it is the realm of specialists but, in fact, it is crucial to any deeper and complete understanding of the origin and unfolding of our crisis and it is far from complicated simply because any psychological dysfunctionality can be explained in straightforward language which is readily understood by most people. For a sample, try ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’.

But because only the rarest psychologist and psychiatrist understands human psychology – as I have explained in ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ – most of the literature on psychology and psychiatry is virtually incomprehensible, not to mention inaccurate. This lack of understanding has four immediate and disastrous outcomes.

First, it leads to groups of psychological symptoms being linked together and then given an arbitrary label (so that the fields of psychology/psychiatry can sound as if they know what they are talking about while excluding those who do not comprehend their jargon).

Second, it provides cover for the pharmaceutical industry to profit massively from the manufacture and sale of drugs that theoretically suppress key symptoms of, rather than cure, the psychological dysfunction that has been ‘diagnosed’.

Third, it precludes accurate diagnosis and treatment of any dysfunction: obviously, if a problem is not understood it cannot be responded to powerfully so that the issue is resolved. (Of course, it is more profitable for practitioners and the pharmaceutical industry if any dysfunction is not resolved but simply requires ongoing – that is, endless – ‘therapy’/drugs.)

Fourth and most fundamentally of all, it limits the domain of what is considered psychological dysfunctionality to those with ‘identifiable’ mental illnesses. But psychological dysfunctionality goes well beyond those considered to have a mental illness and is simply an outcome of the fact that mental health, like physical health, has many dimensions that require appropriate attention for the human organism to function optimally.

So, beyond the many examples I have offered previously in the articles I cited above (and others not cited but also available on the ‘Feelings First’ website), I would now like to describe further common examples of psychological dysfunctionality that are impeding both activists and those they are trying to mobilize in the effort to save Earth’s biosphere and avert human extinction, particularly given the timeframe in which this must now happen. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

As a result of the ‘socialization’ (more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’) to which all children are subjected throughout their childhood and adolescence (which involves inflicting unending ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence on them during these periods) – see ‘Why Violence?’ – the typical young human being obediently (or, often enough, unconsciously) acquires the set of attitudes, beliefs and values (as well as the consequent behaviors) that are approved by the significant adults (and predominant institutions) in their life. These attitudes, beliefs and values, however, are often so deeply entrenched by the (unconscious) fear that holds them in place that they are never subjected to serious scrutiny by the individual: whether functional or otherwise, they are accepted without question and, over time, acquire the status of ‘incontrovertible fact’ (as the individual perceives them).

The most obvious (and highly negative) consequence of being terrorized into accepting the attitudes, beliefs and values of the significant adults (and predominant institutions) around them is that the capacities to analyze a problem or conflict (often including its roots in the nature of their society), to seek out relevant (and perhaps complex) evidence to understand the issues arising from it, to plan a strategy so that underlying drivers of the problem or conflict are addressed in depth and to then behave strategically (often in concert with others) to achieve this outcome are simply never developed beyond the most superficial levels (sufficient, say, for a socially approved career, whether trade or professional).

As a result, the typical human being is simply going through the routine of ‘growing up’ (which also critically involves being further terrorized into becoming a submissive citizen and worker/soldier at school for a decade or more: see ‘Do We Want School or Education?’), choosing post-secondary education and/or an approved job doing what someone else tells you, and then doing that job (or an equivalent) for decades (usually having a partner and children in the process and perhaps some hobby as well).

Fundamentally, humans are terrorized into taking on the ‘socially-constructed delusional identity’ that their society imposes on them and then calling it ‘me’. Their personal life journey is now so utterly obliterated from their awareness that the idea of seeking out their own unique destiny never even occurs to them. Of course, some people (in industrialized societies at least) are compensated for their sacrifice: wages, entertainment, travel and other trinkets. But, for most, these trinkets are given in sparing quantities and for many others around the world (in deliberately ‘underdeveloped’ countries), not at all.

Terrorized into believing that this is all that life has to offer, only the rarest individual aspires to more. Endless consumption of goods and services (no matter the quality, beauty or functionality) – see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ – at the expense of the Earth, becomes the reason for living. Because life itself no longer has meaning.

So here we are, a human population that is so devoid of self and planetary awareness that we are on the brink of precipitating our own extinction. Do you really believe that this is where we would be if we were all psychologically functional? Manipulated and controlled by an unaccountable global elite that is utterly insane – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – using its many agents, including governments, to easily deceive us into consuming ever more in pursuit of capitalism’s ‘God’ – endless economic growth (that is, corporate profit, power and privilege) – the bulk of the human population submissively unaware (except of the latest scandal or sports result) and most activists (who purport to be trying to do something about the perilous state of the world) incapable of thinking, planning and acting strategically to struggle for outcomes that are so desperately needed. See, for example, ‘Why Activists Fail’.

So what can we do?

Well, given that the enormous psychological dysfunctionality of most humans is the primary driver of our accelerating rush to extinction – again, see ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ – I encourage you to seriously consider incorporating strategies to address this dysfunctionality into any effort you make to improve our world.

For most people, this will include starting with yourself. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

For virtually all adults, it will include reviewing your relationship with children and, ideally, making ‘My Promise to Children’. Critically, this will include learning the skill of nisteling. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

For those who feel psychologically capable, consider campaigning strategically to achieve the outcomes we need. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. The global elite is deeply entrenched – fighting its wars, exploiting people, destroying the biosphere, invading/occupying resource-rich countries – and not about to give way without a concerted effort by many of us campaigning strategically on several key fronts.

If you recognize the pervasiveness of the fear-driven violence in our world, consider joining the global network of people resisting it by signing the online pledge of ‘The People ’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World ’.

But if you do nothing else while understanding the simple point that Earth’s biosphere cannot sustain a human population of this magnitude of whom more than half endlessly over-consume, then consider accelerated participation in the strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’.

Or, if this feels too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

There is a great deal wrong with our world, which continues to get worse every day. And, as should be obvious from my argument above, if we as a species do not start to remove the (largely unconscious) fear that limits our minds and governs our behavior, we will continue contributing to this predicament rather than resolving it.

I am well aware that this point is not where the typical individual wants to start and that is assuming the point is even understood. After all, because most fear is unconscious, it is easy for people to fail to identify their own dysfunctional behavior (or to rationalize it by believing in the ‘importance’ of what they do). So while you may like to believe that we do not have to ‘start’ with this point, collectively speaking, we cannot ignore it either, if human survival is our aim.

The key issue is that for our strategy to mobilize people in this great struggle for survival to be effective, we must also be mobilizing parents, teachers, religious leaders and other adults to reconsider and profoundly revise their relationship with children. This is because every child who is not dysfunctionalized becomes a powerful agent for change. If we do not do this, we will continue to undermine the overall struggle, even if we precipitate some interim victories along the way.

My own preoccupation is ending violence, averting human extinction and building anew and sustainably our relationships with the Earth and each other. What about you?

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Facebook Insider Confesses All

Quote

Posted on July 5, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Source: American Intelligence Media

The Zuckerberg Dossier

Mark Zuckerberg is a Fraud Used by the CIA

The following anonymous document claims to be written by a Facebook insider who was Mark Zuckerberg’s lover from their freshman year at Harvard. Mark’s continuing indiscretions with his ongoing government contract keep getting him in trouble to this day. Mark was supposed to simply be the fake “boy genius” of Larry Summers’ (Harvard’s president) social media project funded by DARPA/In-Q-Tel (CIA)/IBM and the secretive international “public-private” group called The Highlands Group organized with the DoD Office of Net Assessment.

It was Summers and a group of government officials who fabricated, produced and directed Mark throughout the entire fraudulent creation of the Facebook propaganda story at Harvard. These claims are explosive and allege that the entire fraudulent social media network called Facebook was always controlled by the government through the people who were at Harvard directing Mark. The anonymous author of the letter below, who we will call “John”, also points out why Facebook was created, how Mark was controlled by Eric Schmidt, James Beyer, Larry Summers, Sheryl Sandberg and the evil intellectual property thief Professor James Chandler.

Admittedly, this Zuckerberg “Dossier” has enough information in it to put Mark Zuckerberg behind bars, and therefore would not be touched by the Main Stream Media – according to the person who hand-delivered this letter to a member of the Anonymous Patriot’s Conclave a few days ago.

American Intelligence Media has been able to quickly verify that many of the claims insinuated in this “Zuckerberg Dossier” are true and this leads us to conclude that the document is authentic and exactly what it appears to be. The true authorship of this Zuckerberg Dossier is evident to members of the Conclave, but that supposition is speculation and the Conclave does not deal in speculation. Though, if one were to listen carefully to the admission of guilt by Sean Parker (a long-time executive of Facebook) which he made repeatedly before the press, you will hear that Sean knew all about the true creation of the social media giant and its evil intents and fingers the culprits.

Therefore, it is not hard at all to figure out who may have written this expose on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook evil. You can even see the true motivation for writing this “tell all” about Zuckerberg at this time in history, just as Facebook is facing all kinds of charges, including anti-trust violations.

Any person well-educated on the continuing scandals surrounding the creation of Facebook might have been able to piece together the many divergent claimants to the authorship of the source programming code used to make social media “scalable” – which was the universal problem of all of the major tech companies at the time, including the NSA’s “LifeLog” project. Somehow, genius Mark Zuckerberg “solved” the problem that no one else in the world could. Oh yes, and Mark did it “between a week and two weeks or so” while studying for finals and hosting a beer “kegger” for his friends. [1]

The author of this expose offers a quite different story and for the first time tells of the involvement of high-level government players who made a fortune off of the sky-rocketing overnight growth of Facebook stock on NASDAQ. The players mentioned by “John” (anonymous author) check out to be the people who made enormous amounts of money from Facebook stock. These insider traders then took their Facebook winnings and started other social media companies that, coincidentally, sky-rocketed beyond most companies in history.

Hmmm…do you own any Facebook stock? Might be cash-out time!

American Intelligence Media does not claim that the Zuckerberg Dossier is 100% correct, but we can state with absolute confidence that the source is real. We also believe that their may be other installments of what we are calling the Zuckerberg Dossier and will probably not be the last time we hear from this source as the trouble that Mark is having in the news keeps mounting.

The most convincing aspect of this “scorned lover tell-all” is found in what the author outlines as Mark’s true nature and what he believes is happening to Facebook right now in America. It was shocking to read these remarks and we found them to be, after much reflection, probably true and certainly not what we might have imagined to be the reality with the U. S. government’s threat to act against Facebook.

Also, interesting is the major British intervention in Facebook through the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Nick Clegg, taking over the “face” of Facebook which Baron Richard Allen (another UK agent) had failed to do properly.

At this point, Facebook seems to be “dead in the water” unless the British Crown Agents, Clegg and Allen, can save Mark from his horrible mis-management.

Again, we do not claim that this anonymous “confession” and “indictment” is true in all its parts. But certainly, any intelligent reader will acknowledge that this version of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to fame and fortune is much more likely that the nonsense stories we have been told by Mark since the early 2000’s when he first popped up Larry Summers’ Harvard.

Please circulate this wide and far. We need to turn the weapon that Zuckerberg is aiming at us – social media … back on him.

[1] Tr. 41:7, Mark Zuckerberg Deposition, April 25, 2006, ConnectU LLC v. Zuckerberg et al, 1:04-cv-11923-DPW (D. Mass. 2004).

Mark’s diary where he proclaims “let the hacking begin” was also provided to us and is available in the link below as a PDF. We did not convert it to a Word file for obvious reasons. Also note that we formatted the author’s letter below in a way that you can easily read it, instead of how it was sent with tiny font and packed paragraphs. We did not correct grammar or spelling.

Zuckerberg-Let-Hacking_Begin-28-Oct-2003

To Every Facebook User,

Mark Zuckerberg, and all of us who were there from the beginning, are lying to you and using your personal life as a government-controlled experiment in brain-washing and mind-control – basically a weaponized system of the military (CIA especially) that got out of control. At this point, Mark Zuckerberg has lost control of a company that he never really owned or operated. Truly, anyone who has ever worked with Mark knows that his mind is a blank and that he is nothing more than a parrot for the government handlers who created him. Mark is incapable of running a McDonald’s, let alone one of the most powerful companies in the world. Not even his name is real and his identity has always been covered up. Mark was chosen as child for a CIA training program because his relatives were some of the people creating the program.

I am not making excuses for Mark, but his choices have not been his own. Yes, he has become an evil sociopath who once believed in his heart-of-heart that if he decided he wanted to be president, all he had to do is say he wanted the job and “Facebook” would deliver the election to him. This is the level of brain-washing Mark is at – he is not in contact with reality.

You might think that a madman who could think he could become president – because he “said so” – would be discovered and accused as a fraud. Well, that has happened repeatedly with the other three teams that were working at Harvard, under Harvard president Larry Summers, to create what DARPA and In-Q-Tel wanted the most – a cyber-weapon that could control the minds of anyone that could be lured into it. Facebook was always a military weapon – just like Eric Schmidt’s Google which was incubated in the same fashion that Facebook was. Mark was a patsy, but a ruthless, heartless, cold-blooded non-human patsy. He became this way through the brain-washing he received in his High School years by a DARPA program called TIA that needed a “boy-genius” to be the front man. This scam would make Mark into a global model of the young, cool, irreverent computer geniuses that “rule the world” and lead everyone to a cyber-god of artificial intelligence. Mark was just an unwitting puppet at first – I felt sorry for him.

I remember when I first became room-mates with Mark in our sophomore year at Harvard. We were in Kirkland House, on JFK Street and had to endure Dustin and Andrew. Mark hated them because they prevented us from sleeping together, even though we were in the same room. It was frustrating and kept our relationship secret. Little did I know that the thing that drew me to Mark, a certain openness for listening to anyone, also made him extremely promiscuous with both sexes.

Mark had no morals, conscience, or shame. He also chased women on Craig’s List and would sometimes just disappear to rendezvous with them. He was like a blank slate that simply echoes whatever was happening in his environment. I loved and hated this aspect of his personality but later found out that he, and his brother and cousin, were all the same way due to the brain-washing programs they were subjected to during high school. If certain people spoke to Mark in person or on the phone, he would drop everything and do whatever they told him to do. Certain people had more power and effect over him. I eventually found out, from Mark breaking down and crying, that the brain-washing was permanent and was all part of the “position” these people had promised to create for Mark. He didn’t even know what this “position” was or entailed.

But one thing Mark was sure of, he was only “placed” at Harvard “for a while” until his “position” became available to him. Mark was certain that this promise of a position included a great deal of money and power—aphrodisiacs to an incurable narcissist

I must admit that I came under the power of Mark’s surety that he didn’t need Harvard, a degree, or good grades. Mark eventually dropped out of Harvard at the end of our sophomore year and did become filthy rich and more powerful than he could have imagined. I also admit that I road on Mark’s success to become quite wealthy myself. All four of the members of the club Mark eventually named – “The Fellowship” – became wealthy by no means of our own – we simply knew Mark’s secrets.

You see, Mark could never be faithful to anyone but he loved men more than women. He actually used to hate all women. So, Mark cheated and would want to bring the new “boy” home to me to join in. I was never into that like Mark was. He was abusive but would never admit it, especially to young boys. Eventually, there were three of us that remained lovers with Mark.

Mark always had panic attacks and would break down frequently due to the brain-washing – according to Mark. He would cry about his mother and the “torture” she let “them” do to him. At those times, Mark’s mouth ran on open and he would tell his bed-partners about all the pain and horrible plans these “evil people” did to him. Early on, his doubts and fears almost consumed him at night and he could hardly sleep due to nightmares. Once Mark became filthy rich, he simply used drugs to mask these fears. But if you get him upset by asking about the creation of Facebook, Mark will freak out and have a panic attack because he always messes up the story and looks like an idiot. He can’t stand questions about “how he made Facebook” – because he didn’t. I had to laugh as one of his stupid answers: “I saw that Harvard didn’t have a Facebook, so I made one”, or something close to that. The journalist let him get away with that lie, like they always have.

Mark Greenberg (Zuckerberg) did not write one single line of programming source code for Facebook. Those are lies and propaganda generated by his government, military handlers. Everyone knows that the Winkelvoss twins (Aaron and Cameron) won a $65 million dollar lawsuit settlement against Mark because they knew that their little HarvardConnection (HC) piece was just adjunct code attached to the original stolen source code – which was given to Mark by Professor James Chandler and IBM. That $65 million bit of dirty knowledge was pretty profitable for a couple of cute Harvard Crew rower jocks with no interest in me.

Mark simply had others adjust the code into what was a government-sponsored military weaponization of a cyber-warfare project directed by the President of Harvard, Larry Summers. Even Summer’s himself had his own budding student and staff directory being developed by the Harvard computer staff called “Facebook.” Mark didn’t even create the name!

The Winkelvoss twins had developed their own version in the competition for the government contract, HC, that they changed to ConnectU. Aaron Greenspan was developing HOUSE System, and Paul Ceglia was working with Mark to modify his StreetFax software into a Facebook too. Mark developed nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even the famous “hacking” of the Harvard systems was not done by Mark himself. Mark was the middleman for those who were the overseers of the “big project”, as it was called.

From the president of Harvard, to the “PayPal Mafia”, National Venture Capital Association, In-Q-Tel, DARPA, NSA, CIA, DIA, to the worst patent thieves in America: James Chandler, Hillary Clinton, David Kappos, Robert Mueller and the rest of the Big-Tech group. Mark is just like the other fake front-men chosen to represent the numerous other social media companies.

Eric Schmidt was the poster child for the Silicon Valley geniuses who ran corporations that are basically exempt from prosecution as the facade for military-weaponized companies that are always funded by the same evil bankers—Fidelity Investment, Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, JPMorgan, HSBC, Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins and the rest of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who always make a killing from companies who get no-bid government contracts. These companies, like Facebook, are just an excuse for black-ops experiments to control the enemy – and Mark doesn’t know who the enemy is. Mark’s lack of a moral compass made him the perfect patsy for the new “military experiments on U. S. citizens.”

I believe now, since Mark was well-aware of the evil intentions of the government, that he has committed crimes of many types with the clear, pre-meditated intention of harming every user of Facebook. That is why Mark let Facebook be used to manipulate elections, he has no moral core. I personally saw the “template” that Hillary ordered that uses Facebook to manipulate voters to win elections for her. Given the amount of election interference by Big-Tech in 2016, I became a reluctant believer in miracles.

I have seen the truth concerning the supposed “Russian Interference” and can tell you that it was all made up and, in fact, was the exact opposite of what the media reported. I have seen so many illegal actions of Facebook that I am indeed complicit with the crimes. That is one of the reasons I must remain anonymous. But I assure you, if I testified, Mark and I would be locked up along with the other members of the Fellowship as well as many, many other Facebook employees.

It is due to the truth that is currently coming out in the media that I feel I can reveal what I witnessed so that Mark and the “U. S. and British military controlled” Facebook can be charged with criminal activity instead of simply being hit with anti-trust charges that will only split Facebook into many subsidiaries – which would simply make Mark even more rich.

Then, the poor suckers who believed in Facebook will be left holding the bag – an empty bag of a gutted Facebook worth little or nothing. Mark will simply rebrand and go on with multiple companies that will be just as big as Facebook. He will escape unscathed, protected again by his military handlers who, by the way, were insider traders from the beginning of Facebook and will be allowed to buy into the new companies from the beginning also.

Once again, the use of taxpayer dollars goes to private corporations run by stooges and controlled by non-Americans. Yes, I just called Mark a stooge because he actually has no clue what he is doing – at all. Just ask him to write a simple program in any code he would like – he can’t, he is a fraud and always was.

Though I will not tell you who the members of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Fellowship” group were, I can point out that all of the original members of Facebook knew from the beginning that it was a military project for cyber warfare mind-control. Everything done from the beginning was an experiment to see just how far a social media platform could go to “conquer the enemy” through behavioral manipulation with electronic warfare. The idea that Mark wanted to connect all college students in America was a novel idea that was far from the true intention of mind-control of every user in the world.

Free platforms like Google, Gmail, Facebook, and the rest were confidence tricks to get users to experiment on. My old buddy, Sean Parker, an early member of Facebook has “confessed all” to the media and specifically told the truth that Facebook was meant as a cyber-drug to create and control addicts – digital addicts. As Sean said, we knew from the beginning it was harming every user and that is why we never let our friends or our children use these systems – it harms them tremendously and was the original intent of the media. Mark and I were told by representatives of DARPA that that was the intent of Facebook from its inception.

The U. S. Patriot Act allows the military to consider every American a possible terrorist or enemy warfighter until proven otherwise. Every person on the Internet, which was also created by DARPA, is considered a cyber-terrorist and the military sees it as their job to create systems to surveil, target, disarm, and aggressively remote control the user. I hated the idea from the first time I heard of it. Personally, I have never used Facebook and don’t let anyone I love use it.

Mark would use patriot arguments, like the ones mentioned above, to justify his participation in this black-ops CIA operation to the Fellowship. We argued with him, but to no avail. Mark basically believed anything his “controllers” told him. We would sometimes convince him that the project was “dead wrong”, but all it took was one phone call from “above” and Mark went back to his scheming. It was truly pathetic to see that Mark had no freedom but was told what to do. He was also so poorly organized and such a muddled thinker that he couldn’t get anything done: homework, schoolwork, project work, nothing. So, there was always clean up to be done after Mark, especially when the company got big. Clean-up would include stupid stuff like paying others millions for “stealing” their code, making stupid statements every time he opened his mouth, or the lack of attention he gave to the running of the company.

Mark was always a mess and the Fellowship, as well as Larry Summers’ squeeze Sheryl Sandberg—those soul-less megalomaniacs deserve each other—helped the handlers control Mark, were always picking up the broken pieces and trying to glue them back together. But this time, Facebook and Mark cannot be fixed.

Many of the original Facebook players and the Fellowship have been paid off in huge bribes to keep us quiet. CIA secrecy agreements grow on every plant at Facebook, but the Facebook insiders are turning against Mark anyway for many good reasons. The board of directors wants him fired. Mark’s British controllers sent Baron Richard Allen to rein Mark in, but he failed miserably. Even Sir Nick Clegg, x-deputy prime minister of Britain was sent to shut Mark up, but to no avail. Even the second-in-charge of Britain couldn’t stop Mark and his non-stop stupidity. Mark opens his mouth, it cost the company billions. Mark testifies, and everyone finds out that he doesn’t know a single thing about “his” company.

Mark knows nothing because he doesn’t do anything and hasn’t really shown up for work since the beginning. Mark seems to be allergic to work and can’t stand meetings unless he is “announcing” something. He is the worse manager in history, and everyone will tell you the same if asked. We all “play” like Mark runs the company, but that is not true. Mark can’t run himself effectively, let alone Facebook. That is why he was failing at Harvard and was going to be kicked out for bad grades, even after I did much of his work for him.

I can honestly say that, at this point, there are no “insiders” who have any faith in Mark to run the company, or to even speak in public. We believe that even after Larry Summers, the father of Facebook, who planted Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook to shut Mark up and stop revealing that Facebook is the tool of the Democrat agenda for globalism, cannot fix the company. This is one of the points I am most angry about. Mark has become, over the years, no friend of America. In fact, he hates America and rants on about how proud he is to avoid U. S. taxes and to cheat the American people – whom he considers to be animals.

Mark believes he is a higher being – above human beings. He now believes it was all his work that made Facebook. He is completely deluded by his own propaganda, which is nothing but lies. It is because Mark is now a danger to himself and the world that I must tell the true story of how Facebook and social media have become the enemies of Americans and the world.

Mark was shocked when he received an acceptance letter from Harvard, before he had applied. No test scores, interviews, or pre-requisites were required. His government “programming” had made his acceptance a given. Harvard wanted Mark, and Mark did what he was told. So, when the president of Harvard, Larry Summers, called Mark into his office early in his freshman year, Mark was not so surprised. He knew he would have to pay the piper. Summers asked Mark to start a group to work on the social media project – a supposed competition among teachers and students to win a government contract.

The ostensible goal was to create a social directory and Harvard where people could share in small groups. The real intent was to create a social network to manipulate the world. Mark liked the idea but was too lazy to do anything about it. He stuck his nose into the others’ camps to see what they were doing, but he himself just talked about it with good programmers and made them promises—thus, numerous lawsuits ensued from those promises.

Larry Summers continued to call Mark into his office for updates, so Mark just lied. Occasionally, others would be in the office with Larry Summers, but one person stood out and showed up at many more meetings in the future. This man was obviously the person in charge of this project. His name was a former Harvard Law Professor James Chandler. He boasted that he was one of the top idea people for DARPA and that he had actually developed lower level programming languages for the Army. He pretended to be interested in me, but I could tell that was a political act. Guys like me can just sense these things.

Over time, it came out that Summers and Chandler had much bigger plans for the social media project and had some outside sources of help to complete the project. Mark found it odd that Summers, Chandler, and eventually Sheryl Sandberg did not put much pressure on Mark to produce but were interested in everything Mark was learning from spying on the other groups for almost two years.

One day, Mark was called to Summers office in Massachusetts Hall to meet a most unusual man. His name was Andrew Marshall and he was the head of the Naval Intelligence Net Assessment Office. Mark was terrified of Marshall from the beginning. Marshall had Mark sign a government secrecy agreement, and other security agreements before he told Mark the ultimate military nature of what the Harvard Facebook project entailed. Mark, and Harvard, were simply being used as incubation think tanks as a cover for a military project that needed a corporate face. Professor Chandler said he had discovered the source code that would accomplish the seemingly impossible task of making a social directory “scalable” to billions of people.

Chandler droned on as Harvard professors like to do about how Harvard academic elites were the best choices to do the early testing because of their superior intellects. He explained that this scalability dilemma was not being solved by the military’s usual Microsoft, IBM and Oracle go-to military intelligence suppliers for reasons that were over my head. He said they had found a company who had solved the problem but was not willing to be used by the military as a black-ops project against Americans and the rest of the world.

Chandler and Summers had selected Mark as their front-man to lie and claim that he had written the source code for scalability. Chandler explained that the government had seized the source code from an inventor and his company for use in the DARPA Harvard Facebook project. He explained in very flowery intellectual property theft language that Mark may get sued by the inventor, but that DARPA would shield him. Mark told them he was willing to take that chance.

Mark knew full-well that the people who had brain-washed him had a big plan and his part was simply to do as they told him to do. But now, Mark was getting scarred because James Chandler was a member of the president’s National Security Team, a top national security and patent lawyer, and a truly mean, ugly and frightening black man who could easily turn on you like a pit bull.

Larry Summers had those same elitist bully traits, and was the president of Harvard and an economic world leader. Mark felt he was being groomed and protected by some very powerful people. But it was Andrew Marshall, the one they called “Yoda”, who scared the pants off Mark. After Mark had been “read into” the plan by Summers and Chandler, their boss wanted to meet Mark to make sure that he could be trusted to be part of this overarching evil plan to manipulate all of cyber space as if it were a war arena.

Andrew Marshall did not like Mark at all. I witnessed it myself when I was asked to attend one of Andrew Marshall’s Highland Group forums as a major executive for Facebook, along with Mark. Every time Mark opened his mouth, Marshall would stare at him until Mark would shut up. Marshall indicated in this meeting that Mark himself was the biggest problem with the Facebook operation. Mark was so happy when Andrew Marshall died not long ago. Mark now takes his orders from Marshall understudies Dick O’Neil and James Baker who run Highlands Group. Chandler also worked for Highlands Group and directed numerous operations working directly with Andrew Marshall and James Baker.

The Facebook operation also coordinated their activities with Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the group that gathered around Hillary Clinton’s patent thefts. Every Facebook insider, who was there from the beginning, know these things to be true but would never speak of it for fear of retaliation and possible death. We are speaking about a theft of literally many trillions of dollars in intellectual property, trade secrets, patents, designs and stolen programming source code.

Mark bragged for two years about being able to write the source code for the Facebook platform, but he did not produce a single line of code. For two years, all the Fellowship heard were promises of a break-through at any moment. We heard one excuse right after the other. We learned later it was because the inventor had run into some R&D roadblocks that needed sorted out first. Mark continued to spy on the other groups working on the Harvard Facebook student and staff directories, made many promises to everyone involved, but did not follow through. Mark kept promising he was going to just “sit down and write the code”, as if it was no big deal.

His meetings with Summers, Chandler, Marshall and others continued and Mark always came back encouraged. Then, one day Mark got terribly excited about hacking a fellow student at Harvard because he had some part of the Facebook program. The particular student was an upper classman named Max McKibben who lived next door in Winthrop House, literally 100 feet from our Kirkland House front door. Mark got the best hacker to come to our room and use a special “school” computer to hack into McKibben’s personal Harvard email account to steal several white papers on an invention just like the one Chandler had described. This white paper described EXACTLY what Mark had been talking about for two years and now a Harvard student had a full description of a program that could do the same thing.

It was on October 28, 2003 that Mark returned from Summers’ office and announced: “Let the hacking begin.” That hacking stole the white paper that had been sent to the son of Michael McKibben, the owner of Leader Technologies and the real inventor of scalable social media. Michael had sent his son Max the white papers written to describe the new invention. When Mark learned that Chandler was Michael’s patent attorney, the theft finally put a name to the target Chandler had talked about in vague terms.

Chandler had requested that Michael write up a detailed explanation of the system and how it worked. Once Mark showed the stolen white papers to Chandler, Chandler confessed that he already had a complete evaluation copy of the source code as Michael’s patent attorney, that he was using a spy tactic called “strategic deception” in pretending to help Michael and Leader Technologies file patents, while he was secretly providing Michael’s invention code to DARPA’s IBM Eclipse Foundation cyber-warfare partners.

Chandler told Mark that IBM Eclipse was preparing Michael’s program, as they spoke, to give to Mark for the Facebook launch at EclipseCON ’04 in San Fancisco right after the Harvard January Reading Period. He said the plan was to transfer all of the NSA’s LifeLog data as soon as possible to the Facebook platform as well. He also told Mark that he would be moving to Silicon Valley after the term was over, and that the next phase of the plan for him would happen in California. Dustin and I went with him that summer, but I decided to return to Boston and graduate. That was a sad separation, but I was happy he got rid of his Craig’s List girls. The few that I actually saw looked like sad street urchins.

Chandler had not seen Michael’s white papers yet and was eager to have them. Mark sent him the hacked copies. Chandler said with the inventor’s first-ever public write-up, and the source code, the Highlands Group and the IBM Eclipse Foundation now had what they needed to prepare the platform for Mark to launch thefacebook, later shortened to Facebook, at EclipseCON ‘04 in February.

I now realize that Chandler took the stolen source code from Michael McKibben and Leader Technologies and gave it to the IBM Eclipse Foundation who turned around gave it out as “open source”, the most lucrative intellectual property in history, to all of the social media giants as open source code without charging a penny.

What I am telling you now is a composite understanding of what I knew early on in the Fellowship group of Mark Zuckerberg and what I have learned up to this time as a core insider of Facebook to this very day. It is not only Mark who needs to pay for his crimes, but many others also. IBM Eclipse Foundation plays like they are moral, honest, and philanthropically gave away intellectual property to other companies who essentially became monopolies with the stolen programming source code. This is laughable and I told Mark when he was being told this information by his handlers that the plan would never work because anyone can see through such stupidity. But to this day, beside Facebook insiders and the Fellowship group, no one has ever told me that they suspected the IBM Eclipse Foundation or the Highlands Forum are corrupt.

The bigger the lie, the easier it is to get people to believe it.

Mark Greenberg (Zuckerberg) did not create Facebook. Facebook is a governmental monopoly doing the most advanced virtual behavioral modification on the planet with stolen and modified patents, intellectual property (IP), and trade secrets from inventors who were not remunerated for their inventions. I personally knew this, even when it was happening. I felt sick about the whole thing and this led to many, many arguments between Mark and me. The other members of the Fellowship felt the same way I did. Eventually, Mark had to buy all of us off with large sums of money over the years.

We have not spoken up before now, but I personally cannot hold my silence any longer. I must speak out openly about the criminal surveillance Mark does through Facebook because it gets worse every day. Mark’s handlers tell him to allow more surveillance even though security breaches, selling customer data, allowing for spying by CIA, NSA, DIA, GCHQ, MI6, Five Eyes, lying to Congress, meddling in elections, allowing everyone access to Facebook data, censoring conservatives, being a platform for the Democrat party, and many other charges have been brought against Facebook in other countries and America. Mark will not listen to me or anyone else about stopping the insanity. I believe he is unstable and not fit to run Facebook.

When I saw the $1.5 billion from George Soros and the Atlantic Council bring in the AI system (some built by the Cambridge Digital Forensic Research Laboratory) used in Europe to stop free speech, I had had enough. It was then that I knew Mark was truly being used by evil forces and that even he couldn’t stop it. He seemed to have a death wish to destroy Facebook and reveal some of its evil intent. This was ruining the company I was trying to help run. There were no other avenues that I could take the company down that would deter Mark from the total destruction of Facebook. Mark had been told to win the country for Hillary, or kill the company trying. He was making astounding mistakes that showed the truth of the evil foundations of Facebook.

Our secrets were gushing out like blood from a slaughtered pig. I kept talking to Mark, trying to change his mind, but he became more insane and impossible to talk to. Mark gave up control of the company to a crowd stumbling over themselves to take personal credit for Facebook’s “turnaround”, including Highlands Group, DHS, DoD, Naval Intelligence, SERCO, Crown Agents, IBM Eclipse Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Google, Alphabet, Schmidt, Sandberg, Thiel, Hoffman, Breyer, Louie, Ketterson, Goldman Sachs, Blankfein, Dimon, Microsoft, Gates, Allen, Thompson, Balmer, Ozzi, Nadella, Milner, Obama, Pritzker, Hillary, Kutcher, Bono, Soros, Lamont, the Queen’s men Richard Allan and Nick Clegg, and the rest of the gang who are eager to clean up Mark’s messes. I could see that Facebook was on its last leg but I couldn’t understand why Mark would kill the company.

Then, one day I realized what Mark was doing with the obvious crash-landing of Facebook. He was being told that he would get a “deal” with the government charges against the company and would not have to pay billions in fines. The deal would be like the government’s deal with Standard Oil when they were charged with anti-trust, monopoly issues. They were made to break up into seven different companies – all of which became as big or bigger than Standard Oil itself. Splitting up the monopoly made the owners seven times richer.

That is what Mark is doing. He wants Facebook to be broken up instead of answer to the crimes it has willingly committed. Corporations can simply go bankrupt, dissolve, crash and burn, or do what Google did when it created a new company called Alphabet who is now called the Mother of Google and is worth even more. How a child becomes the parent is a new one for me. Eric Schmidt showed Mark exactly what to do and please remember that Eric Schmidt was also Mark’s mentor and the first person to invest hundreds of millions in Facebook before it went public. Eric Schmidt made billions off of his insider trader knowledge from the Highlands Forum investment in Facebook. Britain’s offshore banks feed them all with endless money laundering and “deal flow” as long as the Queen gets her cut. All us insiders know this global money game is totally rigged to perpetuate this evil power. I don’t want to go to my grave knowing that I didn’t do something to atone for my sins in perpetuating these lies.

I believe that Mark is doing everything in his power to get President Donald Trump deposed, just as he did everything he could to try to help get Hillary elected. If Trump continues, the globalist lose. Mark is a true globalist; he is not an American anymore. Mark essentially does not have a plan for Facebook, he simply does what he is told and always has. Mark has made no decisions on his own – not one. This current decision to destroy Facebook from the inside out is nothing more than Mark’s handlers using Mark in their last hours of power. Trump will win 2020 and Facebook will die. The only question left is whether Trump will charge Mark Fakerberg with the crimes he committed.

I, for one, want Mark in jail along with his handlers. I have personally been threatened and intimidated by these Big-Tech monsters since I met Mark Zuckerberg (Greenberg) – a person who truly does not even know his own name or who he is and yet is one of the richest people on earth. Mark did not earn nor deserve a single penny he has been given. Mark is a card-board cut-out who has lost his way and is completely delusional at this point.

As a Facebook insider I demand Mark be fired and all assets taken from him due to his non-stop lying to stockholders and Facebook users. The Board of Directors, underwriters and institutional investors all know about the secret government contracts that have been propping up the company since the beginning, but most average shareholders do not. It is a government-owned and operated military psy-ops weapon that has gotten out of control and been used for treasonous purposes and for seditious actions against the American people.

After she got sick of the lies, Mark’s former speech writer Katherine Losse described in her 2004 book The Boy Kings that Facebook has stolen personal data and sold it, created a “dark” profile on every user and sold it to everyone who would pay the price, created secret files of compromising photos, allowed all government agencies to access all user data, breached every user agreement, lied continuously to all users, built in back-doors and zero-day programs for the military, and many other unethical, immoral and illegal activities. Did Mark Zuckerberg (Greenberg) willing and with intent allow these criminal activities to go on unchecked on Facebook? – You bet he did. And he is still doing it and getting worse every day. Like other Facebook insiders, I want no part of this squelching of free speech or illegal surveillance activities or the purposeful experimentation on users to develop new and better means to electronically control, manipulate, and imprison people.

I have stood against Mark’s immoral and evil actions since our freshman year at Harvard. Nothing has changed, except that Mark has gotten worse and his handlers have become so demanding that they are condemning Facebook to the trash heap and creating the circumstances for Mark to become even richer and more insane. His next projects include a system much like what Eric Schmidt has created for China, a social credit system that controls the freedom of every American.

When Facebook is broken up, the new companies will have the Eric Schmidt “Dragonfly” social credit system built in. Mark wants to be like Eric and control the world from a digital Ivory Tower and oversee the depopulation of the earth. These maniacs believe they are “above the human race” and are actually higher beings sent to the earth to control the masses. From my experience, these attitudes are extremely prevalent with Silicon Valley tech giants — and they make me sick.

The time has come to simply end the fake social media experiments and call them governmental black-ops projects. I personally know most of these cyber tech-lords and I can testify that they do not possess the tech skills they claim founded their companies. They are simply tech thieves, like Mark Zuckerberg, who need to pay back those they stole from and be put in jail for their crimes. I personally am willing to testify without immunity and suffer whatever consequences I deserve for knowing these things and never bringing them forth until now. I know that the corruption is so great in Washington D. C. that I would not stand a chance of bringing forth this information without being squelched, killed, or silenced like I have seen done to others.

I suggest that the new Attorney General simply read this letter, investigate and then ask Mark Greensberg to program a single line of coherent code. When he cannot, lock him up.

The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent

Posted on June 18, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Sally Lehrman discusses the Trust Project at 2018 WordCamp For Publishers

Given the Trust Project’s rich-get-richer impact on the online news landscape, it is not surprising to find that it is funded by a confluence of tech oligarchs and powerful forces with a clear stake in controlling the flow of news.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Mintpress News

After the failure of Newsguard — the news rating system backed by a cadre of prominent neoconservative personalities — to gain traction among American tech and social media companies, another organization has quietly stepped in to direct the news algorithms of tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Though different from Newsguard, this group, known as “The Trust Project,” has a similar goal of restoring “trust” in corporate, mainstream media outlets, relative to independent alternatives, by applying “trust indicators” to social-media news algorithms in a decidedly untransparent way. The funding of “The Trust Project” — coming largely from big tech companies like Google; government-connected tech oligarchs like Pierre Omidyar; and the Knight Foundation, a key Newsguard investor — suggests that an ulterior motive in its tireless promotion of “traditional” mainstream media outlets is to limit the success of dissenting alternatives.

Of particular importance is the fact that the Trust Project’s “trust indicators” are already being used to control what news is promoted and suppressed by top search engines like Google and Bing and massive social-media networks like Facebook. Though the descriptions of these “trust indicators” — eight of which are currently in use — are publicly available, the way they are being used by major tech and social media companies is not.

The Trust Project’s goal is to increase public trust in the very same traditional media outlets that Newsguard favored and to use HTML-embedded codes in favored news articles to promote their content at the expense of independent alternatives. Even if its effort to promote “trust” in establishment media fail, its embedded-code hidden within participating news sites allow those establishment outlets to skirt the same algorithms currently targeting their independent competition, making such issues of “trust” largely irrelevant as it moves to homogenize the online media landscape in favor of mainstream media.

The Trust Project’s director, Sally Lehrman, made it clear that, in her view, the lack of public trust in mainstream media and its declining readership is the result of unwanted “competition by principle-free enterprises [that] further undermines its [journalism’s] very role and purpose as an engine for democracy.”

Getting to know the Trust Project

The Trust Project describes itself as “a consortium of top news companies” involved in developing “transparency standards that help you easily assess the quality and credibility of journalism.” It has done this by creating what it calls “Trust Indicators,” which the project’s website describes as “a digital standard that meets people’s needs.” However, far from meeting “people’s needs,” the Trust Indicators seem aimed at manipulating search engine and social-media news algorithms to the benefit of the project’s media partners, rather than to the benefit of the general public.

The origins of the Trust Project date back to a 2012 “roundtable” hosted by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, a center funded by former Apple CEO Mike Markkula. That roundtable became known as the Roundtable on Digital Journalism Ethics and was created by journalist Sally Lehrman, then working at the Markkula Center, in connection with the New Media Executive Roundtable and Online Credibility Watch of the Society of Professional Journalists. Lehrman has explicitly stated that the Trust Project is open only to “news organizations that adhere to traditional standards.”

The specific idea that spurred the creation of the Trust Project itself was born at a 2014 meeting of that roundtable, when Lehrman “asked a specialist in machine learning at Twitter, and Richard Gingras, head of Google News, if algorithms could be used to support ethics instead of hurting them, and they said yes. Gingras agreed to collaborate.” In other words, the idea behind the Trust Project, from the start, was aimed at gaming search-engine and social-media algorithms in collusion with major tech companies like Google and Twitter.

As the Trust Project itself notes, the means of altering algorithms were developed in tandem with tech-giant executives like Gingras and “top editors in the industry from 80 news outlets and institutions,” all of which are corporate, mainstream media outlets. Notably, the Trust Project’s media partners, involved in creating these new “standards” for news algorithms, include major publications owned by wealthy oligarchs: the Washington Post, owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos; the Economist, directed by the wealthy Rothschild family; and the Globe and Mail, owned by Canada’s richest family, the Thomsons, who also own Thomson Reuters. Other Trust Project partners include The New York Times, Mic, Hearst Television, the BBC and the USA Today network.

Other major outlets are represented on the News Leadership Council of the Markkula Center, including the Financial Times, Gizmodo Media, and The Wall Street Journal. That council — which also includes Gingras and Andrew Anker, Facebook’s Director of Product Management — “guides the Trust Project on our Trust Indicators.”

These “Trust Indicators” are the core of the Trust Project’s activities and reveal one of the key mechanisms through which Google, Twitter and Facebook have been altering their algorithms to favor outlets with good “Trust Indicator” scores. Trust Indicators, on their face, are aimed at making news publications “more transparent” as a means of generating increased trust with the public. Though a total of 37 have been developed, it appears only eight of them are currently being used.

These eight indicators are listed and described by the Trust Project as follows:

Best Practices: What are the news outlet’s standards? Who funds it? What is the outlet’s mission? Plus commitments to ethics, diverse voices, accuracy, making corrections and other standards.
Author/Reporter Expertise: Who made this? Details about the journalist, including their expertise and other stories they have worked on.
Type of Work: What is this? Labels to distinguish opinion, analysis and advertiser (or sponsored) content from news reports.
Citations and References: What’s the source? For investigative or in-depth stories, access to the sources behind the facts and assertions.
Methods: How was it built? Also for in-depth stories, information about why reporters chose to pursue a story and how they went about the process.
Locally Sourced? Was the reporting done on the scene, with deep knowledge about the local situation or community? Lets you know when the story has local origin or expertise.
Diverse Voices: What are the newsroom’s efforts and commitments to bringing in diverse perspectives? Readers noticed when certain voices, ethnicities, or political persuasions were missing.
Actionable Feedback: Can we participate? A newsroom’s efforts to engage the public’s help in setting coverage priorities, contributing to the reporting process, ensuring accuracy and other areas. Readers want to participate and provide feedback that might alter or expand a story.

How the Trust Project makes these indicators available to the public can be seen in its new project, the Newsroom Transparency Tracker, where it provides a table of “transparency” for participating media outlets. Notably, that table conflates actual transparency practices with simply providing the Trust Project with outlet policies and guidelines related to the above indicators.

For example, The Economist gets a perfect transparency “score” for having provided the Trust Project links to its ethics policy, mission statement and other information requested by the project. However, the fact that those policies exist and are provided to the Trust Project does not mean that the publication’s policies are, in fact, transparent or ethical in terms of their content or in practice. The fact that The Economist provided links to its policies does not make the publication more transparent, but — in the context of the Newsroom Transparency Tracker’s table — it provides the appearance of transparency, though such policy disclosures by The Economist are unlikely to translate into any changes to its well-known biases and slanted reporting towards certain issues.

Trust Indicators manipulate big tech algorithms

The true power of the Trust Indicators comes in a form that is not visible to the general public. These Trust Indicators, while occasionally displayed on partner websites, are also coupled with “machine-readable signals” embedded in the HTML code of participating websites and articles used by Facebook, Google, Bing and Twitter. As Lehrman noted in a 2017 article, the Trust Project was then “already working with these four companies, all of which have said they want to use our indicators to prioritize honest, well-reported news over fakery and falsehood.” Gingras of Google News also noted that the Trust Indicators are used by Google as “cues to help search engines better understand and rank results … [and] to help the myriad algorithmic systems that mold our media lives.”

A press release from the Trust Project last year further underscores the importance of the embedded “indicators” to alter social-media and search-engine algorithms:

While each Indicator is visible to users on the pages of the Project’s news partners, it is also embedded in the article and site code for machines to read — providing the first, standardized technical language that offers contextual information about news sites’ commitments to transparency.”

Despite claiming to increase public knowledge of “news sites’ commitments to transparency,” the way that major tech companies like Google and Facebook are using these indicators is anything but transparent. Indeed, it is largely unknown how these indicators are used, though there are a few clues.

For instance, CBS News cited Craig Newmark — the billionaire founder of Craigslist, who provided the Trust Project’s seed funding — as suggesting that “Google’s search algorithm could rank trusted sources above others in search results” by using the project’s Trust Indicators.

Last year, the Trust Project stated that Bing used “the ‘Type of Work’ Trust Indicator to display whether an article is news, opinion or analysis.” It also stated that “when Facebook launched its process to index news Pages, they worked with the Trust Project to make it easy for any publisher to add optional information about their Page.” In Google’s case, Gingras was quoted as saying that Google News uses the indicators “to assess the relative authoritativeness of news organizations and authors. We’re looking forward to developing new ways to use the indicators.”

Notably, the machine-readable version of these Trust Indicators is available only to participating institutions, which are currently corporate, mainstream publications. Though WordPress and Drupal plug-ins are being developed to make those embedded signals to search engines and social media available to smaller publishers, it will be made available only to “qualified publishers,” a determination that will presumably be made by the Trust Project and its associates.

Richard Gingras, in a statement made in 2017, noted that “the indicators can help our algorithms better understand authoritative journalism — and help us to better surface it to consumers.” Thus, it is abundantly clear that these indicators, which are embedded only into “qualified” and “authoritative” news websites, will be used to slant search-engine and social-media news algorithms in favor of establishment news websites.

The bottom line is that these embedded and exclusive indicators allow certain news outlets to avoid the crushing effects of recent algorithm changes that have seen traffic to many news websites, including MintPress, plummet in recent years. This is leading towards a homogenization of the online news landscape by starving independent competitors of web traffic while Trust Project-approved outlets are given an escape valve through algorithm manipulation.

The tech billionaires behind the Trust Project

Given the Trust Project’s rich-get-richer impact on the online news landscape, it is not surprising to find that it is funded by rich and powerfl figures and forces with a clear stake in controlling the flow of news and information online.

According to its website, the Trust Project currently receives funding from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Google, Facebook, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (often abbreviated as the Knight Foundation), and the Markkula Foundation. Its website also states that Google was “an early financial supporter” and that it had originally been funded by Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. As previously mentioned, the Trust Project’s co-founder is Richard Gingras, current Google vice president of News. The Trust Project’s website described Gingras’s current role with the organization as “a powerful evangelist” who “can always be counted upon for expert advice and encouragement.” Newmark’s current role at the Trust Project is described as that of a “funder and valued connector.”

Newmark, through Craig Newmark Philanthropies, who provided the initial funding for the Trust Project, and has also funded other related initiatives like the News Integrity Initiative at the City University of New York, which shares many of the same financiers as the Trust Project, including Facebook, Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and the Knight Foundation. The Trust Project is listed as a collaborator of the News Integrity Initiative. Newmark is also very active in several news-related NGOs with similar overlap. For instance, he sits on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a longtime recipient of massive grants from the Omidyar Network, and Politifact.com, which is funded in part by Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.

Newmark is currently working with Vivian Schiller as his “strategic adviser” in his media investments. Schiller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former head of news at Twitter, and a veteran of well-known mainstream outlets like NPR, CNN, The New York Times and NBC News. She is also a director of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian.

The Markkula Foundation, one of the key funders of the Trust Project, exercises considerable influence over the organization through the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, which originally incubated the organization and whose News Leadership Council plays an important role at the Trust Project. That council’s membership includes representatives of Facebook, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times and Google, and “guides the Trust Project on our Trust Indicators and advises on core issues related to information literacy and rebuilding trust in journalism within a fractious, so-called post-fact environment.”

Both the Markkula Foundation and the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics were founded by A. M. “Mike” Markkula, former CEO of Apple. The Markkula Center’s Journalism Ethics program is currently headed by Subramaniam Vincent, a former software engineer and consultant for Intel and Cisco Systems who has worked to bring together big data with local journalism and is an advocate for the use of “ethical-AI [artificial intelligence] to ingest, sort, and classify news.”

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is another interesting funder of the Trust Project, given that this same foundation is also a key investor in Newsguard, the controversial, biased news rating system with deep connections to government insiders and self-described government propagandists. There is considerable overlap between Newsguard and the Trust Project, with the latter citing Newsguard as a partner and also stating that Newsguard’s demonstrably biased ratings use the project’s “trust indicators” in its full-length reviews of news websites, which Newsguard calls “nutrition labels.” In addition, becoming a Trust Project participant is a factor that “supports a positive evaluation” from Newsguard, according to a press release from last year.

Notably, Sally Lehrman, who leads the Trust Project, described the project’s trust indicators for news as ”along the lines of a nutrition label on a package of food” when the Trust Project was created nearly a year before Newsguard launched, suggesting some intellectual overlap.

A previous MintPress exposé revealed Newsguard’s numerous conflicts of interest and a ratings system strongly biased in favor of well-known, traditional media outlets — even when those outlets have a dubious track record of promoting so-called “fake news.” It should come as no surprise that the Trust Project’s goal is to increase public trust in the very same traditional media outlets that Newsguard favored and to use HTML-embedded codes in news articles to promote their content at the expense of independent alternatives.

A familiar face in the war against independent media

The Democracy Fund, another top funder of the Trust Project and a bipartisan foundation that was established by eBay founder and PayPal owner Omidyar in 2011 “out of deep respect for the U.S. Constitution and our nation’s core democratic values.” It is a spin-off of the Omidyar Network and, after splitting off as an independent company in 2014, became a member of the Omidyar Group. The fund’s National Advisory Committee includes former Bush and Obama administration officials and representatives of Facebook, Microsoft, NBC News, ABC News and Gizmodo Media group.

The Democracy Fund’s involvement in the Trust Project is notable because of the other media projects it funds, such as the new media empire of arch-neoconservative Bill Kristol, who has a long history of creating and disseminating falsehoods that have been used to justify the U.S. war in Iraq and other hawkish foreign policy stances. As a recent MintPress series revealed, Omidyar’s Democracy Fund provides financial support to Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together initiative and also supports Kristol’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund think tank that is best known for its cryptic Hamilton68 “Russian bot” dashboard. Omidyar’s Democracy Fund has also donated to the German Marshall Fund’s Defending Digital Democracy project and directly to the German Marshall Fund itself. In addition, Charles Sykes, a co-founder and editor-at-large of Kristol’s new publication The Bulwark, is on the Democracy Fund’s National Advisory Committee.

An acolyte of Kristol’s who works at the German Marshall Fund, Jamie Fly, stated last Octoberthat the coordinated social-media purges of independent media pages known for their criticisms of U.S. empire and U.S. police violence was “just the beginning” and hinted that the German Marshall Fund had a hand in past social media purges and, presumably, a role in future purges. Thus, the Democracy Fund’s links to neoconservatives who promote the censoring of independent media sites that are critical of militaristic U.S. foreign policy jibe with the fund’s underlying interest in the Trust Project.

Omidyar’s involvement with the Trust Project is interesting for another reason, namely that Omidyar is the main backer behind the efforts of the controversial Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to become a key driver of which outlets are censored by Silicon Valley tech giants. The ADL was initially founded to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all” but critics say that over the years it has begun labeling critics of Israel’s government as “anti-Semites.”

For example, content that characterizes Israeli policies towards Palestinians as “racist” or “apartheid-like” is considered “hate speech” by the ADL, as is accusing Israel of war crimes or attempted ethnic cleansing. The ADL has even described explicitly Jewish organizations that are critical of Israel’s government as being “anti-Semitic.”

In March 2017, the Omidyar Network provided the “critical seed capital” need to launch the ADL’s “new Silicon Valley center aimed at tackling this rising wave of intolerance and to collaborate more closely with technology companies to promote democracy and social justice.” That Omidyar-funded ADL center allowed the ADL to team up with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft — all of whom also collaborate with the Trust Project — to create a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab. Since then, these companies and their subsidiaries, including Google’s YouTube, have relied on the ADL to flag “controversial” content.

Given the fact that the Trust Project shares with the ADL a key funder (Pierre Omidyar) and several external tech partners, it remains to be seen whether there is overlap between how major tech companies like Google and Facebook use the Trust Indicators in its algorithms and the influence of the ADL on those very same algorithms.

What is clear however is that there exists an undeniable overlap given the fact that Craig Newmark, who provided the seed funding for the Trust Project and continues to fund it, is also a key donor and advisor to the ADL. In 2017, Newmark gave $100,000 to the ADL’s Incident Response Center and is a member of the group’s tech advisory board.

Outsourcing censorship

Of course, the most interesting and troubling donors of the Trust Project are Google and Facebook, both of which are using the very project they fund as a “third party” to justify their manipulation of newsfeed and search-engine algorithms. Google’s intimate involvement from the very inception of the Trust Project tags it as an extension of Google that has since been marketed as an “independent” organization tasked with justifying algorithm changes that favor certain news outlets over others.

Facebook, similarly, funds the Trust Project and also employs the “trust indicators” it funds to alter its newsfeed algorithm. Facebook’s other partners in altering this algorithm include the Atlantic Council — funded by the U.S. government, NATO, and weapons manufacturers, among others — and Facebook has also directly teamed up with foreign governments, such as the government of Israel, to suppress accurate yet dissenting information that the government in question wanted removed from the social-media platform.

The murkiness between “private” censorship, censorship by tech oligarchs, and censorship by government is particularly marked in the Trust Project. The private financiers of the Trust Project that also use its product to promote certain news content over others — namely Google and Facebook — have ties to the U.S. government, with Google being a government contractorand Facebook sporting a growing body of former-government officials in top company positions, including a co-author of the controversial Patriot Act as the company’s general counsel.

A similar tangle surrounds Pierre Omidyar, funder of the Trust Project through the Democracy Fund, who is extremely well-connected to the U.S. government, especially the military-industrial complex and intelligence communities. And partnering with media outlets like the Washington Post, whose owner is Jeff Bezos, spawns more conflicts of interests, given that Bezos’ company, Amazon, is also a major U.S. government contractor.

This growing nexus binding Silicon Valley companies and oligarchs, mainstream media outlets and the government suggests that these entities have increasingly similar and complementary interests, among which is the censorship of independent watchdog journalists and news outlets that seek to challenge their power and narratives.

The Trust Project was created as a way of outsourcing censorship of independent news sites while attempting to salvage the tattered reputation of mainstream media outlets and return the U.S. and international media landscape to years past when such outlets were able to dominate the narrative.

While it seems unlikely that’s its initiatives will succeed in restoring trust to mainstream media given the many recent and continuing examples of those same “traditional” media outlets circulating fake news and failing to cover crucial aspects of events, the Trust Project’s development of hidden algorithm-altering codes in participating websites shows that its real goal is not about improving public trust but about providing a facade of independence to Silicon Valley censorship of independent media outlets that speak truth to power.

Editor’s note | This article was updated to include Craig Newmark’s connections to the Anti-Defamation League.

Democracy vs. The Putin-Nazis

Posted on June 11, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory

Back in January 2018, I wrote this piece about The War on Dissent, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is going gangbusters. As predicted, the global capitalist ruling classes have been using every weapon in their arsenal to marginalize, stigmatize, delegitimize, and otherwise eliminate any and all forms of dissent from neoliberal ideology, and in particular from their new official narrative … “Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis.”

For over two years, the corporate media have been pounding out an endless series of variations on this major theme, namely, that “democracy is under attack” by a conspiracy of Russians and neo-Nazis that magically materialized out of the ether during the Summer of 2016. The intelligence agencies, political elites, academia, celebrities, social media personalities, and other organs of the culture industry have been systematically reifying this official narrative through constant repetition. The Western masses have been inundated with innumerable articles, editorials, television news and talk show segments, books, social media posts, and various other forms of messaging whipping up hysteria over “Russians” and “fascists.” At this point, it is no longer just propaganda. It has become the new “truth.” It has become “reality.”

Becoming “reality” is, of course, the ultimate goal of every ideology. An ideology is just a system of ideas, and is thus fair game for critique and dissent. “Reality” is not fair game for dissent. It is not up for debate or challenge, not by “serious,” “legitimate” people. “Reality” is simply “the way it is.” It is axiomatic. It is apothegmatic. It’s not a belief or an interpretation. It is not subject to change or revision. It is the immortal, immutable Word of God … or whatever deity or deity-like concept the ruling classes and the masses they rule accept as the Final Arbiter of Truth. In our case, this would be Science, or Reason, rather than some supernatural being, but in terms of ideology there isn’t much difference. Every system of belief, regardless of its nature, ultimately depends on political power and power relations to enforce its beliefs, which is to say, to make them “real.”

OK, whenever I write about “reality” and “truth,” I get a few rather angry responses from folks who appear to think I’m denying the existence of objective reality. I’m not … for example, this chair I’m sitting on is absolutely part of objective reality, a physical object that actually exists. The screen you’re probably reading these words on is also part of objective reality. I am not saying there is no reality. What I’m saying is, “reality” is a concept, a concept invented and developed by people … a concept that serves a variety of purposes, some philosophical, some political. It’s the political purposes I’m interested in.

Think of “reality” as an ideological tool … a tool in the hands of those with the power to designate what is “real” and what isn’t. Doctors, teachers, politicians, police, scientists, priests, pundits, experts, parents — these are the enforcers of “reality.” The powerless do not get to decide what is “real.” Ask someone suffering from schizophrenia. Or … I’m sorry, is it bipolar disorder? Or oppositional defiant disorder? I can’t keep all these new disorders psychiatrists keep “discovering” straight.

Or ask a Palestinian living in Gaza. Or the mother of a Black kid the cops shot for no reason. Ask Julian Assange. Ask the families of all those “enemy combatants” Obama droned. Ask the “conspiracy theorists” on Twitter digitally screaming at anyone who will listen about what is and isn’t “the truth.” Each of them will give you their version of “reality,” and you and I may agree with some of them, and some of their beliefs may be supported with facts, but that will not make what they believe “reality.”

Power is what makes “reality” “reality.” Not facts. Not evidence. Not knowledge. Power.

Those in power, or aligned with those in power, or parroting the narratives of those in power, understand this (whether consciously or not). Those without power mostly do not, and thus we continue to “speak truth to power,” as if those in power gave a shit. They don’t. The powerful are not arguing with us. They are not attempting to win a debate about what is and isn’t “true,” or what did or didn’t “really” happen. They are declaring what did or didn’t happen. They are telling us what is and is not “reality,” and demonstrating what happens to those who disagree.

The “Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis” narrative is our new “reality,” whether we like it or not. It does not matter one iota that there is zero evidence to support this narrative, other than the claims of intelligence agencies, politicians, the corporate media, and other servants of the ruling classes. The Russians are “attacking democracy” because the ruling classes tell us they are. “Fascism is on the march again” because the ruling classes say it is. Anyone who disagrees is a “Putin-sympathizer,” a “Putin-apologist,” or “linked to Russia,” or “favored by Russia,” or an “anti-Semite,” or a “fascist apologist.”

Question the official narrative about the Gratuitously Baby Gassing Monster of Syria and you’re an Assad apologist, a Russian bot network, or a plagiarizing Red-Brown infiltrator. Criticize the corporate media for disseminating cheap McCarthyite smears, and you’re a Tulsi-stanning Hindu Nazi-apologist. God help you if you should appear on FOX, in which case you are a Nazi-legitimizer! A cursory check of the Internet today revealed that “far-right Facebook groups are spreading hate to millions in Europe” by means of some sort of hypnogenic content that just looking at it turns you into a Nazi. Our democracy-loving friends at The Atlantic Council are disappointed by Trump’s refusal to sign the “Christchurch Call,” a multilateral statement encouraging corporations to censor the Internet … and fascism is fashionable in Italy again!”

This post-Orwellian, neo-McCarthyite mass hysteria is not going to stop … not until the global capitalist ruling classes have suppressed the current “populist” insurgency and restored “normality” throughout the Western world. Until then, it’s going to be pretty much non-stop “Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis.”

So, unless you’re enjoying our new “reality,” or are willing to conform to it for some other reason, prepare to be smeared as “a Russia-loving, Putin-apologizing conspiracy theorist,” or a “fascism-enabling, Trump-loving Nazi,” or some other type of insidiously Slavic, white supremacist, mass-murder enthusiast. Things are only going to get uglier as the American election season ramps up. I mean, come on … you don’t really believe that the global capitalist ruling classes are going to let Trump serve a second term, do you?

HOW THE AMERICAN CULTURE OF CONVENIENCE IS KILLING US

Posted on June 2, 2019 by Reid Mukai

TROY, OH – MAY 11: An employee restocks a shelf in the grocery section of a Wal-Mart Supercenter May 11, 2005 in Troy, Ohio. Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer and the largest company in the world based on revenue, has evolved into a giant economic force for the U.S. economy. With growth, the company continues to weather criticism of low wages, anti-union policies as well as accusations that it has homogenized America’s retail economy and driven traditional stores and shops out of business. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

By Daisy Luther

Source: Waking Times

In the United States, we are lucky to have massive convenience at our fingertips. I was talking to one of the instructors for the urban survival course, who is from Sweden, on a car ride. He was blown away by some of the things I told him about the levels of convenience and comfort in the United States. Things I completely took for granted don’t even exist there. I thought some of you might be interested in hearing about some of the insights we discussed.

Before I left for the course, I was walking my dogs a mile or two every day with my dogs, but that was about it. I thought it was enough but I learned during the field exercises that it wasn’t even close to the physicality required during an SHTF situation. But I digress. Let’s get back to convenience.

A caveat before people respond indignantly and tell me about all the inconvenience with which they deal every day: this is an opinion piece. Obviously many people in America still work out hard and have manual jobs. But when two-thirds of American adults and 30% of American children are overweight or obese, you have to see that you are not in the majority.

And it’s the majority here that I’m discussing. Between a combination of low-quality food and extremely sedentary lifestyles, the majority are killing themselves with convenience.

The American Culture of Convenience

The first thing that struck me when I landed in the Balkans was how different their lifestyle is from ours in the United States. But the longer I’ve been here, the more obvious it has become.

In the United States, depending on where you live, everything is dropped in your lap.

Food can be quickly acquired by shouting your order into a microphone and driving around a building, all without you having to leave your car. And if you live in a larger town or city, with the advent of services like GrubHub and DoorDash, the food delivered to your home is no longer the domain of pizza chains. You can have your choice of practically any restaurant in town brought right to your door within 45 minutes.

But it isn’t just about food. Instacart offers pick-up services from a wide variety of stores, including places like chain grocers, Wal-Mart, and Target. All you have to do is drive up, let them know by phone that you’ve arrived, and pop your trunk. Poof. Your shopping is done. In some cities, you can even use services like Instacart to have these things brought to your door.

Amazon has brought us practically anything else we could want with two-day shipping, regardless of where you live in the country. Gone are the days of scouring half a dozen stores to locate the whatchamacallit you needed. A quick search on Amazon and One-Click ordering and it’s yours within 48 hours and you never moved off your comfy chair.

If you need to go somewhere you don’t even have to drive yourself or take public transit. Uber or Lyft will happily send somebody to pick you up and drive you anywhere you need to go for a reasonable price, and you can watch the approach of your driver from the convenience of your phone.

Entire billion dollar industries are evolving to make our lives more convenient and easy every single day. Imagine how stunned our hunter-gatherer ancestors would be to discover we don’t even have to leave the house to be clothed and fed in epic abundance.

We don’t walk much, either.

And speaking of drive-thrus and driving to the store to get your Instacart packages, we drive everywhere. Part of this is because of the way suburbia is developed. It’s rare to live in a neighborhood where you can walk to the market, the bakery, and the wine store. So instead of walking to get our goods, we drive there, dash in, and get back in our cars. Those in big cities probably walk far more than those in suburbia, and for those in the country, it depends if they actually have a place to walk and whether they’re taking care of a large property.

And if we’re not walking to run our errands, we’re not carrying stuff. We get as close as possible with our cars if heavy groceries need to be lugged in and we carry as little as we can if we’re heading somewhere. When you walk the dogs, you might take your phone and some poop bags but you’re generally not taking it as a training opportunity and strapping on a pack.

Then there are the stairs.

Even two-story buildings in the United States have elevators much of the time because everything, by law, has to be easily accessible to every person. (And no, I’m not saying that people in wheelchairs need to try to haul themselves up the stairs. I’m discussing a trend.) But it goes even further than that. Adding elevators to your home is a growing trend in both the United States and Canada. New home builders are including elevators in the original design of some homes.

On the other hand, in Europe, they don’t have elevators in many buildings with fewer than five floors. I walked up and down more stairs in the past month than I have in the past year at home combined, and I live in a three-story house.

And the list of conveniences that would blow the minds of people I met in the Balkans goes on.

It’s an agoraphobic’s paradise in the United States.

You can get all sorts of mobile services that come to your door – everything from hairstyling to dog grooming. Other people mow our lawns, clean our homes, service our vehicles, and take care of us in general. There are even people who hire others to walk their dogs. Some people definitely need help with physical tasks but able-bodied people should be able to do a little yard work, shouldn’t we? Especially if we’re preparing for some kind of apocalypse.

In many areas, things are perfectly level, the sidewalks are carefully maintained (because who wants to ask for trouble in our litigious society), and a slight incline is considered a “hill” that people avoid to make their dog walk a little easier.

You can get meal kits brought to your door with every single ingredient you need to make a gourmet meal, right down to the seasonings accurately doled out in little packages. You can have fresh fruits and vegetables dropped off at your door by your local CSA. You can get subscription services of all types with the delivery of things like cosmetics, fitness gear, food from exotic locales, wine, candy, home decor items, socks, and dog paraphernalia.

Looking at it from the perspective of the area where I’ve been spending time, it’s simply mind-boggling that all of these riches are brought to you at the click of a button.

And it’s killing us.

As I mentioned earlier in this article, the obesity rate in the United States is staggering. A lot of it is our food. Thanks to subsidization by the USDA, many of the foods that are cheap are highly processed with low-quality ingredients. The NY Times reports:

At a time when almost three-quarters of the country is overweight or obese, it comes as no surprise that junk foods are the largest source of calories in the American diet. Topping the list are grain-based desserts like cookies, doughnuts and granola bars. (Yes, granola bars are dessert.)

That’s according to data from the federal government, which says that breads, sugary drinks, pizza, pasta dishes and “dairy desserts” like ice cream are also among Americans’ top 10 sources of calories.

What do these foods have in common? They are largely the products of seven crops and farm foods — corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, milk and meat — that are heavily subsidized by the federal government, ensuring that junk foods are cheap and plentiful, experts say.

Between 1995 and 2010, the government doled out $170 billion in agricultural subsidies to finance the production of these foods, the latter two in part through subsidies on feed grains. While many of these foods are not inherently unhealthy, only a small percentage of them are eaten as is. Most are used as feed for livestock, turned into biofuels or converted to cheap products and additives like corn sweeteners, industrial oils, processed meats and refined carbohydrates. (source)

And even when we try to clean up our diets, foods are genetically modified, produce is doused in pesticides, and it’s packaged in all sorts of hormone-disrupting material that leaches in when you heat it up.

But it’s not just the crappy food. A lot of folks in the United States just do not get off their butts. And – I hate to say it – but I’m talking to a lot of people in the survival and preparedness world. Sitting at a keyboard or phone typing all day while Netflix plays in the background is sedentary to a deadly degree. On average Americans sit for 8.2 hours per day and this does not include the average 7-ish hours a day we’re sleeping. And when we’re not sitting, it doesn’t mean we’re doing things that are good for us. We spend a great deal of time standing in line and driving in our cars. And the trend toward inactivity is only increasing.

Meanwhile, obesity contributes to many diseases such as:

High blood glucose (sugar) or diabetes.

High blood pressure (hypertension).

High blood cholesterol and triglycerides (dyslipidemia, or high blood fats).

Heart attacks due to coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke.

Bone and joint problems, more weight puts pressure on the bones and joints. This can lead to osteoarthritis, a disease that causes joint pain and stiffness.

Stopping breathing during sleep (sleep apnea). This can cause daytime fatigue or sleepiness, poor attention, and problems at work.

Gallstones and liver problems.

Some cancers.

The National Institute of Health is incredibly concerned about the future of overweight, sedentary Americans.

More recent evidence points to differential roles for body fat distribution patterns, in addition to excess overall adiposity, in elevating risk of many major chronic diseases. The large numbers of children entering adulthood overweight, together with increased weight gain in adulthood, portend an enormous burden in terms of human suffering, lost productivity, and health care expenditure in the coming decades. (source)

And – since it’s the purview of this website – imagine if the SHTF and you were too overweight and sedentary to go out and acquire the supplies you need to survive. Imagine what will happen when your medication runs out and you have a preventable disease brought on by your sedentary lifestyle. Imagine how your family will feel watching you suffer.

You need to add more movement to your life.

Unless you are among the 23% of Americans who meet the national exercise guidelines, you need to add more movement to your life. I suspect that there are a lot of people who believe they are disabled because getting started on a movement program is hard. It really does hurt, I know. But there’s a very good chance as you begin to move more it will become far easier. Don’t give in to it if your doctor says, “Oh, you’re disabled” and hands you a sticker for your car unless you really, truly are. If there’s even a glimmer of doubt in your mind, try to move just a few more steps each day. Instead of using the scooter to shop, push a cart to give yourself something to lean on. You aren’t training for a marathon – 10 extra steps a day will add up if you keep on pushing. But, MOVE.

The best way to increase movement is to decrease convenience. I don’t mean that you need to suddenly become a hunter-gatherer but you need to get off your duff. (To get started, check out this article or Bug Out Boot Camp and of course, always contact your doctor before beginning an exercise program. Blah, blah, blah.)

You need to carry heavy things instead of getting them delivered. You need to climb the stairs instead of taking the elevator or escalator. You need to actually go inside the store to do your shopping instead of sitting in your car, waiting for stuff to get loaded into your trunk. Park at the back of the parking lot, or better yet, at a store further away. Quit ordering from Amazon and buy things locally so you can walk around the store. Look for the hills and walk up and down them instead of avoiding them. If you want to eat restaurant food, go to the dad-gum restaurant. Find a place to walk to every day – maybe the post office, a coffee shop, or the dog park – and make it part of your routine.

It’s not unusual in other parts of the world to walk 8, 10, or even more miles, every single day. You don’t need to start there but maybe you should strive to get there. Once you’re in your groove, it should only take an hour or so to walk 4 miles. Using your feet as transportation is one of the healthiest things you can do.

The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth

Posted on May 16, 2019 by Reid Mukai

“Triple Portrait” by Sophie Kahn

By Robert J. Burrowes

Like many people who have struggled to understand why human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, which now threatens imminent human extinction as well, over many decades I have explored the research and efforts of a great many activists and scholars to secure this understanding. However, with many competing ideas from the fields of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, among others, this understanding has proved elusive. Nevertheless, I have reached an understanding that I find compelling: Human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history because of the disintegrated nature of the human mind.

While the expression ‘mental disintegration’ has been used in a number of contexts previously, for the purpose of my discussion in this article I am going to redefine it, explain how it originates, describe several ways in which it manifests behaviorally and the profoundly dysfunctional outcomes this generates, and suggest what we can do about it.

Given that the expression, as I am using it, describes a shocking psychological state but also one that is so widespread it afflicts virtually everyone, it can be described as posing the greatest threat to human survival on Earth. Why? Simply because it caused – and now prevents virtually everyone from thinking, feeling, planning and behaving functionally in response to – the multifaceted threats to humanity and the biosphere.

So, for the purpose of this article: Mental disintegration describes a state in which the various parts of the human mind are no longer capable of working as an integrated unit. That is, each part of the mind – such as memory, thoughts, feelings, sensing capacities (sight, hearing…), ‘truth register’, conscience – function largely independently of each other, rather than as an integrated whole. The immediate outcome of this dysfunction is that human behaviour lacks consideration, conviction, courage and strategy, and is simply driven compulsively by the predominant fear in each context.

The reason this issue first attracted my attention was because, on many occasions, I observed individuals (ranging from people I knew, to politicians) behaving in ways that seemed outrageous but it was also immediately apparent that the individual was completely unaware of the outrageous nature of their behaviour. On the contrary, it seemed perfectly appropriate to them. With the passage of time, however, I have observed this dysfunctionality in an enormously wide variety of more subtle and common forms, making me realise just how widespread it is even if it goes largely unrecognized. After all, if virtually everyone does it in particular contexts, then why should it be considered ‘abnormal’?

One version of this mental disintegration is the version usually known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. The widely accepted definition of this state, based on Leon Festinger’s research in the 1950s, goes something like this: Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all of our attitudes, beliefs, values and behavior in harmony and to avoid disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency. When there is an inconsistency between attitudes, beliefs and/or values on the one hand and behaviors on the other (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance.

The problem with this approach to the issue is that it assumes awareness of the inconsistency on the part of the individual impacted and also assumes (based on Festinger’s research) that there is some inclination to seek consistency. But my own observations of a vast number of people in a substantial variety of contexts over several decades have clearly revealed that, in very many contexts, individuals have no awareness of any discrepancy and, hence, have no inclination to seek consistency between their attitude, belief and/or value and their behavior. Moreover, even if they do have some awareness of the inconsistency, most people simply act on the basis of their predominant emotion – usually fear – in the context and pass it off with a rationalization. For example, that their particular work/role is so important that it justifies their excessive consumption on a planet of limited and unequally shared resources.

Consequently, to choose an obvious example, most climate, environmental, anti-nuclear and anti-war activists fail to grapple meaningfully with the obvious contradiction between their own over-consumption of fossil fuels and resources generally and the role that consumption of these resources plays in driving the climate and environmental catastrophes as well as war. The idea of reducing their own personal consumption is beyond serious contemplation (let alone action). And, of course, it goes without saying that the global elite suffers this disintegration of the mind by failing to connect their endless acquisition of power, profit and privilege at the expense of all others and the Earth, with the accelerating and multifaceted threats to human survival including the future of their own children. But the examples are endless.

In any case, leaving aside ‘cognitive dissonance’, there are several types of mental disintegration as I define it in this article. Let me briefly give you five examples of mental disintegration before explaining why it occurs.

Denial is an unconscious mental state in which an individual, having been given certain information about themselves, others they know or the state of the world, deny the information because it frightens them. This is what happens for a ‘climate denier’, for example. For a fuller explanation, see ‘The Psychology of Denial’.
The ‘Magic Rat’ is an unconscious mental state in which a person’s fear makes them incapable of grappling with certain information, even to deny it, so they completely suppress their awareness of the information immediately they receive it. For four examples of this psychological phenomenon, which President Trump exemplifies superbly, see ‘You Cannot Trap the “Magic Rat”: Trump, Congress and Geopolitics’.
Delusion is an unconscious mental state in which a person is very frightened by certain information but the nature of the circumstances make it impossible to either deny or suppress awareness of the information so they are compelled to construct a delusion in relation to that particular reality in order to feel safe. For a fuller explanation, see ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”’.
Projection is an unconscious mental state in which a person is very frightened of knowing a terrifying truth so they ‘defend’ themselves against becoming aware of this truth by (unconsciously) identifying a more palatable cause for their fear and then ‘defending’ themselves against this imagined ‘threat’. Political leaders in Israel do this chronically in relation to the Palestinians, for example. But the US elite also does this chronically in relation to any competing ideas in relation to political and economic organization in other countries. See ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’.
Lies arise from a conscious or unconscious mental state in which a person fears blame and/or punishment for telling an unpalatable truth (such as one that will self-incriminate) so they unconsciously employ tactics, including lying, to avoid this blame and punishment (and thus project the blame onto others). When people lie unconsciously, it means they are lying to themself as well; that is, constructing a lie without awareness that they are doing so. For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Do People Lie? And Why Do Other People Believe Them?’

So why does this mental disintegration – this disintegration of the mind so that its many components are essentially unaware of the others – happen? In brief, it happens because, throughout childhood, each individual is endlessly bombarded with ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence in the name of socialization, which is more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’. This is done to ensure that the child is obedient despite the fact that obedience has no evolutionary functionality whatsoever. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

A primary outcome of this terrorization in materialist cultures is that the child learns to suppress their awareness of how they feel by using food and material items to distract themselves. By doing this, the child rapidly loses self-awareness and learns to consume as the substitute for this awareness. Clearly, this has catastrophic consequences for the child, their society and for nature (although it is immensely profitable for elites and their agents). For a fuller explanation, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

Beyond this, however, this terrorization ensures that the human mind is so disintegrated that virtually all humans have no problem living in denial, delusion and projection and using ‘magic rats’ and lies on a vast range of issues because they simply have no awareness of reality in that context. Different parts of their disintegrated mind simply hold one element of their mind separately from all others (thus obscuring any denial, delusion and projection and the use of ‘magic rats’ and lies), consequently precluding any tendency to restore integrity from arising.

This is why, for example, most people can lie ‘outrageously’, including under oath, without the slightest awareness that they are doing so and which, as an aside, is why oaths to tell the truth in court, and even lie detector tests, are utterly meaningless. If the person themself is unaware they are lying, it is virtually impossible for anyone else – unless extraordinarily self-aware – to detect it. And, of course, judges and juries cannot be self-aware or they would not agree to perform their respective roles in the extraordinarily dysfunctional and violent legal system. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

In essence then, the process of ‘socializing’ (terrorizing) a child into obedience so that they will ‘fit into’ their particular society has the outcome of scaring them into suppressing their awareness of reality, including their awareness of themself. In this circumstance, the individual that now ‘survives’ does so as the ‘socially-constructed delusional identity’ (that is, obedient and, preferably, submissive individual) that the significant adults in their childhood terrorized them into becoming.

To reiterate: Because social terrorization destroys the emergence of an integrated mind that would enable memory, sensing capacities, thoughts, feelings, conscience, attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviours to act in concert, the typical individual will now invariably act in accord with the unconscious fear that drives every aspect of their behavior (and ‘requires’ them to endlessly seek approval to avoid the punishment threatened for disobedience when they were a child).

Moreover, this disintegrated mind has little or no capacity to ‘observe reality’ in any case, such as seek out genuine news sources – like the one you are reading now – that accurately report the biodiversity, climate, environmental, military and nuclear catastrophes and, having done so, to be truly aware of this news in the sense of deeply comprehending its meaning and implications for their own behaviour.

So, to elaborate one of the examples cited above, even most individuals who self-identify as climate, environmental, anti-nuclear and/or anti-war ‘activists’ go on over-consuming (which is highly socially approved in industrialized societies) without any genuine re-evaluation of their own behaviour in light of what should be the observed reality about these crises (or, if their mind allows a ‘re-evaluation’ to commence, to dismiss it quickly with a rationalization that their over-consumption is somehow justified).

One obvious outcome of this is that elite-controlled corporations and their governments can largely ignore ‘activist’ entreaties for change because activist (and widespread) over-consumption constitutes financial endorsement of the elite’s violent and exploitative economy. In other words: If people are buying the products (such as fossil fuels for their car and air travel, and hi-tech devices), made possible by fighting the wars and exploiting the people in countries where the raw materials for this production are secured, then why pay attention to calls for change? Dollars speak louder than words.

So what can we do?

Well, given that the above describes just a small proportion of the psychological dysfunctionality of most humans, which is why we remain on the fast track to extinction despite overwhelming evidence of the profound changes that need to occur – see ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ – I encourage you to seriously consider incorporating strategies to address this dysfunctionality into any effort you make to improve our world.

For most people, this will include starting with yourself. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

For virtually everyone, it will include reviewing your relationship with children and, ideally, making ‘My Promise to Children’.

For those who feel readily able to deal with reality, consider campaigning strategically to achieve the outcomes we need. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. The global elite is deeply entrenched – fighting its wars, exploiting people, destroying the biosphere – and not about to give way without a concerted effort by many of us campaigning strategically on several key fronts.

But, most fundamentally of all, if you understand the simple point that Earth’s biosphere cannot sustain a human population of this magnitude of which more than half endlessly over-consume, then consider accelerated participation in the strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’.

Or, if this feels too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and the destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Facebook…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

There is a vast array of ‘professional help’, literature, video material, lecturers and other ‘resources’ from a wide range of perspectives that advocate and ‘teach’ one or a variety of ways that people can use to change their behaviour to get improved outcomes in their lives (whether from a personal, economic, business, political or other perspective). Virtually all of these constitute nothing more than psychological ‘tricks’ to achieve a short-term outcome by ‘working around’ the fundamental truth: As a result of terrorization during childhood, virtually all humans are unconsciously terrified and this makes their behaviour utterly dysfunctional.

The point is this: there is no trick that can get us out of the catastrophic mess in which we now find ourselves. Only the truth can do that. Psychological and behavioural dysfunctionalities notwithstanding, if we do not address this fear as part of our overall strategy, then this fear will destroy us in the end. And the evidence of that lies simply in the fact that the daily updates on the already decades-long but ongoing horrific biodiversity, climate, environmental, nuclear, war and humanitarian crises are testament to our ongoing failure to respond appropriately and powerfully. Because our (usually unconscious) fear prevents us from doing so.

So if you believe that human beings are going to get out of our interrelated social, political, economic, military, nuclear and ecological crises with a largely psychologically dysfunctional population, I encourage you to re-evaluate that belief (paying attention, if you can, to how your disintegrated mind intervenes to prevent you doing so). And I encourage you to ask yourself if the value we get out of improving the psychological functionality of our species might not be worth considerable effort as part of our overall strategy to avert human extinction.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: conditioning

HOW THE AMERICAN CULTURE OF CONVENIENCE IS KILLING US

The American Culture of Convenience

We don’t walk much, either.

And the list of conveniences that would blow the minds of people I met in the Balkans goes on.

And it’s killing us.

You need to add more movement to your life.