The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been set since its founding after the second world war. Chief among their reasons for doing so is the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.
A statement authored by the Bulletin’s editor John Mecklin is as biased against Russia as any mainstream western punditry today and makes no mention of the US empire’s role in provoking, prolonging and benefiting from this conflict, yet it still provides a fairly reasonable appraisal of the magnitude of the threat we’re staring down the barrel of at this point in history:
This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.
The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.
And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.
Mecklin encourages dialogue between Russia, Ukraine and NATO powers in order to de-escalate tensions in “this time of unprecedented global danger.” He quotes UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned last August that the world has entered “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”
The Doomsday Clock is now at 90 seconds to midnight, meaning the world is closer than ever to global catastrophe. Isn't this enough reason to call for negotiations in Ukraine??? #peaceinUkrainehttps://t.co/HvZPjmvRfI
We came a hair’s breadth from nuclear annihilation during the chaotic and unpredictable brinkmanship at the height of the last cold war, and in fact had numerous close calls that could have easily wound up going another way. As former Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, humanity survived the Cuban Missile Crisis by “plain dumb luck”.
There’s no logical basis for the belief that we’ll get lucky again. Believing nuclear war won’t happen because it didn’t happen last time is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias; it’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.
But that’s the kind of sloppy thinking you’ll run into when you try to discuss this subject in public; I’m always encountering arguments that there’s no risk of nuclear war because we’ve gone all this time without disaster. One of the reasons I engage so much on social media is that I find it’s a good way of keeping tabs on the dominant propaganda narratives in our civilization and understanding what people are thinking and believing about things, and nowhere have I been met with more fuzzbrained comments than the times I’ve written about the need to prevent an entirely preventable nuclear holocaust.
The most common response I get is something along the lines of “Well if there is a nuclear war it will be Putin’s fault,” as though whose “fault” it is will matter to us while we’re watching the world end, along with the related “Well Russia shouldn’t have invaded then” and “Well Russia should stop threatening to use nukes then.” People genuinely don’t seem to understand that in the event of a full-scale nuclear war, it will really be the end of everyone. They still kind of imagine everyone still being there and shaking their fists at Russia afterward, and themselves sitting there feeling self-righteous and vindicated for correctly saying what a bad, bad man Vladimir Putin is.
They don’t understand that there will be no pundits discussing the nuclear armageddon on Fox and MSNBC, arguing about whose fault it was and which political party is to blame. They don’t get that there won’t be any war crimes tribunals in the radioactive ashes as the biosphere starves to death in nuclear winter. They don’t understand that once the nukes start flying, nobody’s shoulds or shouldn’ts about it will matter at all, and neither will your political opinions about Putin. All that will matter is that it happened, and that it can’t be taken back.
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Another common response when I talk about the looming threat of nuclear war is, “Oh so you just don’t care about Ukrainians and you want them all to die.” The other day some lady responded to a Twitter thread I made about the need to avoid nuclear armageddon by saying that I must love rape and war crimes. People sincerely believe that’s a valid response to a discussion about the need to prevent the single worst thing that could possibly happen from happening. It really doesn’t seem to occur to them that they’re not actually engaging the subject at hand in any real way.
Slightly more perceptive interlocutors will argue that if we back down to tyrants just because they have nuclear weapons then everyone will try to get nukes and those who have them will become more belligerent, which will end up making nuclear war more likely in the long run. This response is a straw man fallacy because it misrepresents the argument as “just back down” rather than a call to engage in diplomacy and dialogue to de-escalate and begin sincerely negotiating toward detente, none of which is happening to any meaningful extent in this conflict. More importantly, it pretends that Russia is just invading its neighbor out of the blue instead of the well-documented reality that it is in fact responding to provocations by the US empire. The US has a moral obligation to de-escalate a conflict it knowingly provoked to advance its own interests, especially when that conflict could kill everyone in the world.
The whole “We can’t just back down to bullies like Putin” line of argumentation is further invalidated by the fact that it’s one thing to draw a line in the sand that must never be crossed — even if in the face of armageddon — but it’s quite another to say that line should be over something as small as who governs Crimea. This planet is populated with eight billion humans and countless other sentient creatures, very few of whom care one way or another who governs Crimea and almost none of whom would be willing to watch their loved ones die over it. Wanting to draw the line there is obnoxious, arrogant, and absurd.
And that’s just the shoddy brainwork of the rank-and-file public; the thinking of those who actually got us into this situation is surely just as dogshit. From what I can tell standing on this side of the thick veils of government secrecy which separate us from the truth, it appears to arise predominantly from a combination of immense hubris and zealous groupthink; hubris to think they can control all possible outcomes in a game of brinkmanship with so many small, unpredictable moving parts, and zealous groupthink in mindlessly adhering to the imperial doctrine that US unipolar planetary hegemony must be secured at all cost. They’re playing games with the life of every creature on this planet, and anyone who thinks that’s smart or wise should be as far from such decisions as possible.
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The logical faceplants I’m describing here seem to arise partly from the fact that our civilization is completely inundated with empire propaganda about this conflict, and partly from the fact that people just haven’t thought terribly hard about nuclear war and what it would mean. The latter is probably because the prospect of everyone dying horrifically is such a huge, heavy, uncomfortable subject to sit down and deeply grapple with to the extent that it demands. For most people it’s just this vague, blurry mass in the periphery of their awareness, because they’ve been doing all these weird mental gymnastics to squirm and compartmentalize away from this thing rather than facing it.
But if ever there was a time to start doing some rigorous independent thinking and stop trusting the authorities to sort things out, it would be now. They’re showing us every sign that they’re just going to keep ramping up these games of nuclear chicken until they either fill their bottomless need for more complete global control or get us all killed trying. People need to start waking up to what’s going on and start making things uncomfortable for the people who are driving our world toward total destruction.
It does not need to be this way. Peace talks are possible. Diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are possible. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. We need to start building some public pressure to end this madness, because if the mushroom clouds ever show up, there is not one person alive who in that moment will believe that it was worth it.
I remember reading about the case at the time. A high school kid killed his girlfriend and left her body lying on the ground. Over the next few days, he brought some of his friends out to look at her body, and gradually word of the crime spread through his circle of friends. But for a long time, nobody called the cops.
A lot of op-ed articles were written to analyze this event, which was seen as symptomatic of a wider moral breakdown in our society. “River’s Edge,” which is a horrifying fiction inspired by the case, offers no explanation and no message; it regards the crime in much the same way the kid’s friends stood around looking at the body. The difference is that the film feels a horror that the teenagers apparently did not.
This is the best analytical film about a crime since “The Onion Field” and “In Cold Blood.” Like those films, it poses these questions: Why do we need to be told this story? How is it useful to see limited and brutish people doing cruel and stupid things? I suppose there are two answers. One, because such things exist in the world and some of us are curious about them as we are curious in general about human nature. Two, because an artist is never merely a reporter and by seeing the tragedy through his eyes, he helps us to see it through ours.
“River’s Edge” was directed by Tim Hunter, who made “Tex,” about ordinary teenagers who found themselves faced with the choice of dealing drugs. In “River’s Edge,” that choice has long since been made. These teenagers are alcoholics and drug abusers, including one whose mother is afraid he is stealing her marijuana and a 12-year-old who blackmails the older kids for six-packs.
The central figure in the film is not the murderer, Sampson (Daniel Roebuck), a large, stolid youth who seems perpetually puzzled about why he does anything. It is Layne (Crispin Glover), a strung-out, mercurial rebel who always seems to be on speed and who takes it upon himself to help conceal the crime. When his girlfriend asks him, like, well, gee, she was our friend and all, so shouldn’t we feel bad, or something, his answer is that the murderer “had his reasons.” What were they? The victim was talking back.
Glover’s performance is electric. He’s like a young Eric Roberts, and he carries around a constant sense of danger. Eventually, we realize the danger is born of paranoia; he is reflecting it at us with his fear.
These kids form a clique that exists outside the mainstream in their high school. They hang around outside, smoking and sneering. In town, they have a friend named Feck (Dennis Hopper), a drug dealer who lives inside a locked house and once killed a woman himself, so he has something in common with the kid, you see? It is another of Hopper’s possessed performances, done with sweat and the whites of his eyes.
“River’s Edge” is not a film I will forget very soon. Its portrait of these adolescents is an exercise in despair. Not even old enough to legally order a beer, they already are destroyed by alcohol and drugs, abandoned by parents who also have lost hope. When the story of the dead girl first appeared in the papers, it seemed like a freak show, an aberration. “River’s Edge” sets it in an ordinary town and makes it seem like just what the op-ed philosophers said: an emblem of breakdown. The girl’s body eventually was discovered and buried. If you seek her monument, look around you.
I don’t have to tell you that your money doesn’t go as far as it once did. You see it every time that you go shopping. Our leaders flooded the system with money and pursued highly inflationary policies for years, and now we are all paying the price. The cost of living has been rising much faster than our incomes have, and this is systematically destroying the middle class. Survey after survey has shown that a solid majority of the population is living paycheck to paycheck, and at this point most U.S. consumers are tapped out. In fact, one brand new survey just discovered that 57 percent of Americans cannot even afford to pay a $1,000 emergency expense…
According to Bankrate’s Annual Emergency Fund Report, 68% of people are worried they wouldn’t be able to cover their living expenses for just one month if they lost their primary source of income. And when push comes to shove, the majority (57%) of U.S. adults are currently unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense.
When broken down by generation, Gen Zers (85%) and Millennials (79%) are more likely to be worried about covering an emergency expense.
These numbers are quite ominous, because they clearly demonstrate that we are completely and utterly unprepared for any sort of a major economic downturn.
And thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living, we are losing even more ground with each passing month.
Nearly three-quarters, or 72%, of middle-income families say their earnings are falling behind the cost of living, up from 68% a year ago, according to a separate report by Primerica based on a survey of households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000. A similar share, 74%, said they are unable to save for their future, up from 66% a year ago.
We haven’t experienced anything like this in the United States in decades.
When I walked into a Walmart store the other day, I was shocked by how high the prices are now.
Isn’t Walmart supposed to be the place with “low prices every day”?
Well, the prices were certainly not “low” when I walked through the store.
And I was stunned to learn that McDonald’s is now selling one hash brown for three dollars.
I am sure that many of you can remember a time when they were 50 cents.
Sadly, those days are not coming back.
Food prices are going to continue to go up, and the CEO of Unilever recently admitted that his company has actually “been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market”…
“For the last 18 months we’ve seen extraordinary input cost pressure … it runs across petrochemical derived products, agricultural derived products, energy, transport, logistics,” he said.
“It’s been feeding through for quite some time now and we’ve been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market,” he added.
US retail sales continued their fall in December, dropping by 1.1% as inflation remained high, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.
That’s the largest monthly decline since December 2021, and practically every category (except for building materials, groceries and sporting goods) saw sales drop from the prior month.
U.S. existing home sales slowed for the 11th consecutive month in December as higher mortgage rates, surging inflation and steep home prices sapped consumer demand from the housing market.
-More Americans than ever before are being forced to pay at least 30 percent of their incomes on rent…
The average US household is now considered ‘rent-burdened’ as a record-high number of people are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
According to Moody’s Analytics’ latest affordability report, the national average rent-to-income (RTI) ratio reached 30 percent for the first time since the company began tracking the data more than 20 years ago.
U.S. consumers are being stretched financially like never before, and many are turning to debt to help them maintain their current lifestyles.
As a result, the savings rate has plunged to a historic low, credit card debt has surged to a record high, and the average rate of interest on credit card balances has also risen to a record high. As Zero Hedge has aptly noted, this is “nothing short of catastrophic”…
The combination of record high credit card debt and record high credit card interest is nothing short of catastrophic for both the US economy, and the strapped consumer who has no choice but to keep buying on credit while hoping next month’s bill will somehow not come. Unfortunately, it will and at some point in the very near future, this will also translate into massive loan losses for US consumer banks; that’s when Powell will finally panic.
For a long time, we have been warned that the very foolish economic policies that our leaders were implementing would have deeply tragic consequences.
And now it is starting to happen right in front of our eyes.
Sadly, the truth is that this is just the beginning.
The entire system is cracking and crumbling all around us, and there is much more pain ahead.
In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.
Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.
As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:
A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.
Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.
Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.
As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.
What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.
It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.
Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.
The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.
The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.
The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.
Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.
Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”
In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.
We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.
Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.
Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.
As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.
As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.
On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.
The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.
After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.
Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.
Economic sanctions and blackmail have long been the preferred methods of conducting foreign policy and advancing the United States’ own geopolitical interests.
In 2018, the US withdrew from the agreement on Iran’s nuclear program signed in May 2015, following which Washington began to implement the “maximum pressure” strategy on Iran.
In 2019, the US government imposed a slew of restrictions on the Chinese firm Huawei, which is widely regarded as a leader in digital technologies, particularly in the deployment of 5G networks. Following that, Washington began to intercept Huawei’s foreign market as a result of an open competitive struggle.
And Russia’s gas squeeze in Europe, orchestrated by the US, exacerbated an already obvious economic and financial crisis for Europeans, resulting in total population impoverishment against the backdrop of America reaping additional superprofits from the sale of expensive American LNG instead of cheap Russian gas to Europe.
Sanctions, including secondary ones, become a tool for seizing funds and assets and bankrupting competitors, and are used by the United States to strengthen its global dominance.
Although the definition of extortion as a common law crime in US criminal law varies across states, both in wording and substance, it is nevertheless recognized everywhere as a serious offense and prosecuted under domestic law. In recent years, in an effort to introduce “rules” unilaterally favorable to the United States in place of international law, Washington’s policy has begun to carry the principle of “extraterritorial” sanctions into the international arena when the United States imposes them and openly extorts not only US legal subjects but also foreign ones, including independent states.
The fact that under these conditions, the US uses the dominant role of the US dollar, blackmail, and economic sanctions as the main instruments of foreign policy (the use of sanctions almost tripled in 2009-2019 alone) makes many countries think about possible alternatives. One of them is already the increasing use of national currencies in bilateral trade.
Washington’s abuse of such criminal policies and blatantly illegal pressures are causing resentment even among the United States’ allies. It is no coincidence that in 2019 the chairman of the United Kingdom’s central bank, Mark Carney, called for the creation of an international digital currency that would weaken the dominant role of the US dollar in international trade.
Washington is increasingly using outright blackmail, not just in the political, economic, and trade spheres. It is also used in the military sphere, with the sale and subsequent use of American weapons directly threatening the national security of countries that purchase US weapons.
And one of the many egregious examples of this is the events of 2016, when the US attempted to stage a coup in Turkey by killing President Erdoğan with American weapons and preventing Turkish authorities from using US air defenses to prevent them from shooting down F-16 aircraft flying from the US military base at Incirlik. And it was only thanks to the intervention of Russian politician Alexander Dugin (against whom, by the way, Ukrainian accomplices of the United States committed an act of terrorism in 2022 and killed his daughter) and the Russian military at the behest of President Vladimir Putin that this sinister plan of Washington was foiled. The arrested Turkish coup plotters themselves have given detailed accounts of it. In particular, about how the Russian military, using seven Russian fighter jets and two S-400 missile systems in northern Syria, warned the coupist aircraft that if the radar showed any indication of their suspicious or improper actions, they would be hit directly. As a result, the Turkish F-16s could only track Erdoğan’s plane and not attack it. In addition to the testimony of the Turkish participants in this failed American coup attempt, those interested can learn more from a Turkish report published on Odatv.com on September 21, 2016.
This blackmail of Ankara with US weapons continues even now, as pointed out in particular by Bloomberg the other day, which reported that the US will not supply Turkey with F-16s until it agrees to admit Sweden to NATO.
Even if Turkey, under pressure from Washington, agrees to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO, which the United States is trying hard to push into the alliance, Turkey will never be able to use those aircraft or other American weapons unless such use would be advantageous to the White House.
And the US decision in April 2021 to withdraw US Patriot air defense batteries from the Persian Gulf region after the White House deteriorated relations with the Saudi monarchy is proof of that.
The threat from Washington to restrict the use of purchased US weapons has become increasingly serious for many countries recently. Especially considering that it is the US that sells twice as many weapons as Russia and six times as many as China, thus dominating the market for weapons of death, destruction and protection of many states from external threats, the vast majority of which are also initiated by Washington. Here one can also see the recent White House game of supplying Greece with more and more offensive weapons against Turkey, whose relations with both Athens and Washington have recently deteriorated significantly.
Washington has made similar attempts at blackmail in its arms supplies to the other two rival parties to the conflict in South Asia – Pakistan and India. Therefore, despite Washington’s blatant blackmail and intimidation of New Delhi, India continues to focus on buying arms from Russia rather than the United States. In the meantime, India has two important defense needs: the availability of weapons and their quality. In its preferential treatment of Russia on this issue, Indian leaders assume that if the country begins to buy weapons from the West, it will strengthen its autonomy but sacrifice these two needs, since Western systems are many times more expensive but inferior to Russian ones.
At the cutting edge of science and technology today is artificial intelligence and robotics, which are being driven by ever-increasing computational speeds made possible by quantum computing. When the capacity of technological computation rivals the speed of our capacity to think and process information as humans, then we will reach the singularity and a superintelligence will emerge in our society, triggering runaway technological growth.
While this is coming in the very near future, we are also now learning how this very type of quantum creative power is already at play in our world via the interplay of human consciousness and the material world. In the early 1900’s, the famous double-slit experiment demonstrated that material objects can actually change their composition based on what is being held in consciousness when said objects are observed.
In other words, the world around us is being created moment by moment, and our expectations of what the world should be is what gives it form. In order to alter its form or to change course, we can use the directed focus of the mind to envision and feel something different for ourselves, and in time and through repetition, this reality will eventually take form. The feeling is the key.
This is something we do all the time. The best example of this, perhaps, is the human body, which can by some measures be considered a projection of human consciousness. We see this everywhere. For example, just look at people’s bodies and consider their health, and you’ll be able to get a fair idea of what type of thought patterns and belief systems are at work in the everyday silence of their own minds.
The best example is someone with radiant health, high energy and intense vitality. This person didn’t get to be this way by happenstance. The patterns of thought in their mind support their belief that their body can be a radiant storehouse of health. This, in turn, supports the development of habits which create such well-being. This type of person engages in clean, clear thinking about their health and body, and the result is this very type of body. They intentionally feel how they want to feel.
On the other hand, a person with an out of shape, obese, or disease-ridden body undoubtedly engages in thought patterns and beliefs about health which support such poor health. They never believe that they can be disease free or of ideal weight, and so their thoughts reinforce habits which deteriorate their health. Inside this person’s mind is chaos, confusion, fear, self-loathing and other patterns which create dis-ease.
There is more to this, though, if we consider the possibilities unfolding in the realms of quantum physics and superintelligent technology. We are beginning to get a clear idea of what the quantum field actually is and what it can do. It appears to be waiting for us to purposefully interact with it.
The quantum world is waiting for us to make a decision so that it knows how to behave. That is why quantum physicists have such difficulties in dealing with, explaining, and defining the quantum world. We are truly, in every sense of the word, masters of creation because we decide what manifests out of the field of all-possibility and into form.
The thing is, the quantum level of reality isn’t a local and insignificant aspect of creation. It is all around us, and it is the most fundamental level of creation aside from the unified field itself. The human energy field is interacting and influencing the quantum field all around us at all times and the energy of our beliefs and intentions are infused into our energy field because they are defined by the energy of our thoughts and emotions. ~Brandon West
Final Thoughts
This may sound to some like a woo woo way of looking at the world, but there is immense practicality in this world view for improving your life, your health, your relationships, and your overall happiness. The takeaway here is that you must take control over your own mind, and plant thoughts that support the projection of a healthy body and life. As Dr. Joe Dispenza notes, you’ll need to decide what you want, then put your attention on creating that reality.
“Whatever it is that is your vision, you’re just going to have to be passionate enough to invest your attention and your energy into that future over and over again, till all of a sudden you start seeing feedback in your life.” ~Dr. Joe Dispenza
Based on the acclaimed novel by Philip K. Dick, Richard Linklater’s 2006 film of A Scanner Darkly presents a cautionary tale on drugs, surveillance, and perception in a unique formal arrangement. Set “seven years from now,” the film considers a tyrannical post-9/11 world oppressed by an ever-watchful government, widespread paranoia, corporate subjection, and pervasive pharmaceutical addiction—all elements further fuelled by the obsessive fear that governments, corporations, and even your friends conspire against you. Linklater’s decision to produce his film with rotoscoped animation turns his adaptation into one of the most visually and thematically original motion pictures in decades, and the most faithful of all Dick adaptations. The film’s world contains several Dickian existential and metaphysical dilemmas and paradoxes, from the notion of spying on oneself to becoming willing participants in one’s drug addiction. This unsettling and tragic world becomes deliciously skewed from the excessive filtering of surveillance technology and a crazed dystopian culture, so much so that it remains impossible to see anyone for who or what they really are. A Scanner Darkly beautifully, and chillingly, considers Dick’s persistent theme that our culture has destroyed its own ability to perceive objective reality.
Philip K. Dick was born in 1928 and became interested in science fiction at an early age. He attended the Berkeley, California, high school and graduated in 1947, alongside another future science fiction author, Ursula K. Le Guin, and briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley. He published his first science fiction story in 1951. From there on out, he would become one of the most prolific authors in his genre, publishing some 44 novels and more than 100 short stories until his death in 1982, just before the release of his first book-to-film adaptation, Blade Runner, based on his 1966 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Though science fiction was typically considered unsophisticated and a lower form of fiction, Dick’s caustic wit and social satires elevated sci-fi to the level of art. His self-proclaimed title was not that of an author but rather a truth-teller. He wrote his truth, and it consisted of a vast fictionalized philosophy, which some might argue was—and is—not necessarily fiction. His most enthusiastic followers might say his work is visionary, if not prophetic. Dick claimed his work spoke, and still speaks, to disturbed, troubled, and “off” members of society. His writing is for those who cannot rationalize society or reality: for those who need a satire, base, or frame of reference to rely on as coping mechanisms. Science fiction creates the desired satirical reality for readers, just as his characters in A Scanner Darkly see drugs as the only sane choice to escape the insane world.
Written in 1977, A Scanner Darkly stands as an ode to the drug counter-culture of Dick’s own Berkeley underground. But it’s also a thoughtful exploration of the metaphysical existence of drug users, as well as a mournful commentary on the government’s involvement in drug culture. Standing against the blatantly autocratic Nixon administration, marked by a reputation for undue suspicion and conspicuous surveillance, his Berkeley group purveyed conspiracy theories and widespread mistrust. And yet, this counter-culture also included a vast set of respected thinkers, unafraid to speak out—not just mindless stoners. According to an interview with French TV, Dick claims the group’s paranoia was not unjustified. During the interview, Dick speaks of secret CIA and FBI files on him, covert operations to get at his personal documents, and rampant spying led by the heads of various government organizations. To Nixon and his administration, the Berkeley group was an unknown element—a misunderstood collection of hippies seen through a distorted set of the administration’s famously paranoid views and political mechanisms. Fuelling this conflict between the two factions of Nixon’s administration and the Berkeley group, the author had a lifetime’s worth of experience with drugs, psychosis, and a slight case of schizophrenia. But in no way should those characteristics hinder the author’s message. Instead, Dick’s distinctiveness within the Berkeley group should reinforce that A Scanner Darkly may be more autobiographical than his other novels.
The story’s main character is Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), an addict of a drug called Substance D, also known as Slow Death. But Bob is also Fred, an undercover narc spying on Arctor’s group of Substance D-using friends. Arctor has lost sight of his identity because of Substance D, which chemically separates brain functions in the hemispheres; after prolonged use, the left and right sides of his brain are unaware of each other. Furthermore, the Fred portion of the main character must conceal his identity from his supervisors for his own safety. No one knows who Fred is; no one knows who Bob is—including himself. The sole man representing both the narc and the addict does not realize he is spying on himself, and in a way, informing on himself. This self-betrayal is tantamount to suicide, rendering him prey to both Substance D and the totalitarian police state that employs him. According to the novel, the drug is made from a flower called “mors ontological”—Latin for ontological death. To be sure, Dick saw first-hand the damage substance abuse caused his friends. He was not entirely unaffected himself; he relied on methamphetamines and psychedelics for much of his early career. But he weaned himself off drugs before writing this book. And at the very end of his novel, Dick dedicates his fiction to several friends who died or retained permanent physical and mental dysfunction due to excessive drug use (a dedication abbreviated at the end of Linklater’s film). He writes that users are punished excessively and even unknowingly for attempting to “play” with something dangerous.
So often, society deems drug users worthless or mindless junkies for their habits, but A Scanner Darkly—the story and the title itself—asks that we do not pass judgment until we can see, in its entirety, the role of users. However, because of the elaborate system of filters between our eyes and that which we wish to see, how can we ever trust that we see reality and not some malformed version of reality skewed through surveillance tools? These filters exist in the form of monitoring equipment such as cameras and scanners, but also the mind-altering Substance D. Drugs are the obscuring mechanism by which the narrative challenges audiences to accept and ultimately forgive the characters within. Throughout the film, viewers must accept drug use as a fact of the story rather than a downfall of the characters. The book’s title refers to a verse from the bible, namely 1 Corinthians 13: 11-12, a verse that is paradoxically read both at weddings and funerals:
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now, we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
A pattern of dualism exists in this passage, particularly after its application to popular culture. Both in the novel and the film of A Scanner Darkly (not to mention Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s film Through a Glass Darkly), the idea of childhood versus adulthood, known and knowing, and parts versus the whole, are circumscribed so that the reader or audience cannot reconcile metonym from metaphor.
Dick’s writing often tells of worlds that are not what they seem. With A Scanner Darkly, the world remains undefined, distorted through a complicated filtration process. Linklater magnificently captures that undercurrent through his use of rotoscoped animation. Throughout the narrative, we remain unsure about Reeves’ character’s identity—in part due to the setting’s massive use of surveillance technology. The protagonist is not altogether Bob, nor is he altogether Fred; he comprises several constructs that never assemble into a single, understandable symbol. Agent Fred watches Bob on numerous holo-scanners, located everywhere; scanners see every moment of every day in every location. Someone is always watching (or that is what they want you to think). Undoubtedly, there was a time when Fred realized he was Bob, but Substance D has destroyed his understanding of his dual roles. Now, Fred cannot fully understand or see Bob. Who is this mysterious figure? Fred wonders. Is he the mastermind behind the whole thing? When Fred looks, he watches through a filter: the scanner. He cannot see clearly because his mind has been altered. At the same time, Bob has an unsettling sensation that he’s being watched. Though Bob and Fred are the same person, they cannot fully understand themselves. Meanwhile, the overwhelming network of observational devices only puts the truth at a greater distance.
The main character questions his culture’s scoptophilia-driven ways of looking and its authenticity: “What does a scanner see?” he asks himself. “Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone’s sake the scanners do better, because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do, then I’m cursed and cursed again, too.” The protagonist’s hopes are in vain, as scanners prevent authorities from seeing their suspects clearly. Drugs debatably prevent the film’s main characters from seeing reality clearly, just as Linklater’s innovative use of animation in the film prevents audiences from seeing clearly. All these devices—scanners, drugs, animation—are filtering devices within the film. They distance the viewer or the subject from the truth, for which knowledge thereof is impossible, thus brilliantly placing us on the same disjointed plane of existence as the protagonist. We see through these filters as if a sfumato haze lingered between our eyes, and what we see is a distortion that impedes an accurate understanding.
With the film’s animation, the distortion does not take away from the audience’s understanding of the story’s message. It adds to it. The rotoscoping technique postponed the film’s scheduled release yet made the lengthy, nearly two-year production worth every moment to waiting audiences. A Scanner Darkly’s journey to the screen actually struggled for well over a decade with interested directors and forgotten scripts. In the 1990s, filmmakers ranging from Terry Gilliam to David Cronenberg attempted but failed to get their proposed adaptation before cameras. Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich and the very Philip K. Dick-esque Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, also wrote a screenplay for Dick’s much-praised drug novel, although the script was never produced. Eventually, writer and director Richard Linklater wrote an adaptation. He had previously wanted to adapt Dick’s fast-paced Ubik, but settled on A Scanner Darkly for its metaphysical pondering and sense of paranoia, both themes which Linklater had explored before. George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s production company Section Eight agreed to produce. And eventually, the film was sanctioned by the Philip K. Dick Trust.
Based in Austin, Texas, Linklater helped launch a movement in American independent cinema with his 1991 debut, Slacker, an ultra-low-budget film that follows a group of college-age thinkers and vagabonds in loosely connected conversational vignettes. Before that, Linklater demonstrated his love of cinema when he founded The Austin Film Society in 1985, a non-profit group devoted to rare and important filmic works, which today has an Advisory Board consisting of filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Tobe Hooper, and Les Blank. After Slacker, Linklater released Dazed and Confused (1993), a box-office flop that has since become a cult favorite, along with launching the careers of Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, and Parker Posey. He continued with films rooted in thoughtful conversations, such as Before Sunrise (1995), the first chapter in the transcendent Before trilogy, and subUrbia (1997), adapted from Eric Bogosian’s acidic play. Eventually, Linklater experimented with commercial work, such as The Newton Boys (1998), an underwhelming Prohibition-era bank robber story, and the underrated Jack Black comedy School of Rock (2003). But the writer-director’s real talents flourish in artistic films with a sly commercial appeal—such as the highly praised sequels to Before Sunrise, 2004’s Before Sunset and 2013’s Before Midnight; his part-documentary, part-dramatized real-life murder story Bernie(2011); or his ambitious 12-year project Boyhood (2014).
Outwardly, A Scanner Darkly remains most closely tied to Linklater’s 2001 release, Waking Life, a most meandering and philosophizing work that uses rotoscoped animation to follow an ongoing series of thought-provoking conversations. The process was originally used in 1914 by cartoonist Max Fleischer, and then next by Walt Disney, to help cartoonists simulate natural movement. By painting or inking on live-action footage, the characters in a film such as Sleeping Beauty (1959) were given more realistic bodily actions and facial expressions. But A Scanner Darkly would use the method for much more than merely painting over photography; the film uses animation to establish both reality and create hallucinatory images. As a result, the original plan scheduled nine months’ worth of post-production animation, but the process took eighteen months to allow for the detail and imagination Linklater wanted in his animation. The outcome, even in seemingly insignificant scenes, is breathtaking. The flawless animation appears to be a comic book with a pulse. Combine that with the bravado performances of the film’s actors, and the animation becomes just another piece of the apparatus that disappears in the glory of a great story. Some may hold reservations towards the technique, believing that the animation takes away from the actors’ performances or the narrative. Still, the approach helps rather than hinders the actors’ places in A Scanner Darkly’s bizarre, paranoid reality, aligning perfectly with Dick’s themes of reality distortion.
The most impressive piece of animation in the picture is Fred’s ever-shifting “scramble suit,” which prevents Fred’s supervisors from identifying him, maximizing the security of his cover. Fred’s boss wears a similar suit, and neither Fred nor his boss knows who is behind the other’s suit. The “scramble suit” projects false identities via constantly shifting characteristics so that no surveillance mechanism can pinpoint the wearer’s identity, therein eliminating any possibility of exposure. Animating the suit consists of creating hundreds, if not thousands, of facial and bodily fragments that dizzily rotate at random. But each momentary identity has to maintain an overall silhouette and still project the actor underneath. When Keanu Reeves’ Fred moves, even from under the continually changing scramble suit, the audience can still recognize Reeves’ movements and body language. The performances themselves were given by actors chosen not only for their sheer talent but, seemingly, for their off-screen reputation with drugs. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, and Rory Cochrane have all had or even lived similar roles to theirs in A Scanner Darkly. Somehow rotoscoping wipes away that stigma, compiling a new face literally painted over the actor’s old one. The performers are made whole again, permitting the audience to forget about Downey Jr.’s reoccurring drug problems or Harrelson’s history with pot. They are no longer actors but rather characters given free-range because of the innovative medium. Their off-screen reputations linger in our subconscious, to be remembered later upon reflecting on the film’s artistry.
The most notable performance of the group is Robert Downey Jr. as Barris—a suspicious character so burnt out from the drugs and constant onslaught of paranoia that he’s become sadistically mistrusting, if only internally, of his friends. Downey Jr. plays Barris as a fast-talking, often brilliant individual that can turn at any moment. Downey’s maniacal rapid-flow speech and brazen waving of the arms bring Barris—the most conniving, intelligent, humorous, sadistic, and strangely most likable character from the novel—to life. Reeves and Cochrane’s performances deserve acknowledgment as well, as each actor completely embodies their respective role. Reeves takes Bob (or is it Fred, or later Bruce?) to the ambiguous level demanded. While Reeves has taken his share of guff for his inexpressive acting, he seems at ease and perfectly cast here. Looking back, no other actor could have given Bob-Fred-Bruce the same ambivalence to the world and himself without making it appear too unintentional (or too intentional, for that matter). Cochrane plays Freck, an overdosing Substance D fiend and one of Arctor’s group of stoner friends. The first scenes in the film involve Freck attempting to wash and kill hallucinatory aphids from his body and out of his hair. Cochrane gives Freck the perfect helpless-yet-fearful twitch of a user who knows he has gone too far. Freck is pitiable in how prey is pitiable: although aware of his deteriorating state, he is too far gone to change the situation and helpless to prevent his eventual collapse.
This could be said for any of the characters in the film. Each floats like a moth on a calm pond—having landed on the water, they are now helpless to escape. They wait for some hideous predator from the murky bottom to float up and gulp them down. Both the film and Dick’s novel share a potent message—particularly in the story’s climax, which reveals that the foundation set up to cure people of Substance D addiction is the very organization creating it, a corporation called New Path. This turn speaks against the type of suspicious world where people have no choice but to escape. Neither the film nor the book condones drug use, but they understand it. They do not blame users for attempting to distract themselves from the ever-encroaching watchful eye of society and the government looming in. Or as Dick writes in his Author’s Note at the end of his novel:
Like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyway. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief; even when we could see it, we could not believe it.
Indeed, through A Scanner Darkly, Dick seems to indirectly remark on the allegations that the CIA participated in the Secret War in Laos, which in turn moved commercial opiates, including heroin, into the United States. Those who wished to “play” could do so thanks to their government, and in turn, they were destroyed for it. Surely Dick’s story would anticipate accusations of CIA cocaine trafficking, specifically during the Reagan and Clinton administrations: there are questions about how closely the government has worked alongside the Mexican Cartels; how the CIA has allowed drop points at the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport; if the CIA collaborated to import cocaine and marijuana as part of the Contra war in Nicaragua; or how the CIA targeted certain Black neighborhoods during the 1980s crack epidemic. But, as with Freck and eventually Bob, we do not judge the users in A Scanner Darkly; instead, we see them as the product of ignorance, corruption, and an irresponsible government. Dick and his Berkeley group, which one can imagine were not dissimilar from Arctor’s group, were neither victims nor criminals for their usage.
Even today, several decades after his death, Dick’s work remains futurist and visionary, yet also reflective of our society. Since Blade Runner‘s release in 1982, Dick has become one of the most adapted-to-film authors, from Paul Verhoeven’s ruthless actioner Total Recall (1990, based on Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”) to Steven Spielberg’s breathless thriller Minority Report (2002, based on the short story of the same name). More recently, Amazon has turned Dick’s Hugo Award-winning book The Man in the High Castle into a triumphant series. But where other adaptations often abandon the author’s insights on the nature and illusion of existence in favor of sci-fi genre fun, Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly fully embraces Dick’s penchant for damaged souls and their metaphysical line of questioning. Linklater’s film has been praised, even by Philip K. Dick’s daughter Isa, as an accurate, generous, and artistic adaptation. Unfortunately, Dick’s work has a notorious reputation for being slaughtered by screenwriters, as viewers of Paycheck (2003) and Next (2007) can attest. The few good adaptations out there still stray from the writer’s original text, though in spirit, they remain faithful. But Linklater captured the plot, spirit, and most importantly, the questions of Dick’s original work. Instead of losing himself in science-fiction, he used the book to emphasize further the story’s focus on a particular subculture and what races through their minds.
Wondrous and curious sights are shown in this film—so wondrous that, quite intentionally, we begin to mistrust our eyes. When we cannot trust what we see and how we feel, when we suspect our senses, and when a world like the one depicted in A Scanner Darkly succeeds so well in drawing us in and making us as paranoid as its characters, we find ourselves involved in the story more so than we realized. Therein lies the subtle genius of A Scanner Darkly. Like the characters in the film, we’re involved in the long, drug-fueled conversations and skewed perceptions of reality, forgetting about the inherent dangers until all at once, we realize that Freck, Arctor, and eventually the rest, will succumb to a slow death. The film’s last shots are at once melancholy and hopeful. They find Arctor inside one of New Path’s many farms that produce the flower behind Substance D, though his brain has been fried beyond help. Perhaps, somehow, his presence and police work will lead to New Path’s end. Or perhaps not. Linklater superbly captures the sobering theme of Dick’s novel—how people are forced to rely on escape, either from their own psychosis or the world around them. Ultimately, they become willing casualties of their own addiction and complicit in their own demise; through their attempt to escape, they turn themselves into slaves of the very system they hoped to avoid.
