Category Archives: Dystopia

How Do You Know When Your Society Is In The Midst Of Collapse?

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Activist Post

As economic turmoil worldwide becomes increasingly apparent, I have been receiving messages from readers expressing some concerns on the public “perception” of collapse. That is to say, there are questions on the average person’s concept of collapse versus the reality of collapse. This is a vital issue that I have discussed briefly in the past, but it deserves a more in-depth analysis.

What is collapse? How do we define it? And, are some of the notions of collapse in the public consciousness completely wrong?

It’s funny, because skeptics opposed to the idea of a U.S. collapse in particular will most often retort with a question they think I cannot or will not answer – “So, Mr. Smith, when specifically is this supposed collapse going to take place? What day and time?”

My response has always been – “We’re in the middle of a collapse right now; you really can’t see it right in front of your sneering face?”

The reason these people are incapable of grasping this kind of answer is in large part due to the popular mainstream conceptions of systemic collapse. These are conceptions that are for the most part delusional and not in line with the facts. The public idea of collapse comes predominantly from Hollywood, and not from personal experience. For the masses (and some preppers, unfortunately), a collapse is an “event” that happens visibly and usually swiftly. You wake up one morning and behold; the television and phones don’t work anymore and zombies are at your doorstep! Yes, it’s childish and cartoonish, but anything less than a Walking Dead/Mad Max scenario and many people act as if all other threats are benign.

This is the driving reason why many Americans are absolutely oblivious to the economic instability that is rampant and blatant within our system the past few months. They might see the same signals that alternative analysts see, but these signals do not register in their brains as dangers.

Look at it this way; say you told a person their whole life that a tiger is a 10-foot tall behemoth with four heads that breathes fire while urinating flesh-rending acid. Say you make movies and TV shows about it and they never have any experience to the contrary. When they finally come across a real tiger, they might try to pet the damn thing instead of running in terror or searching for a means of defense.

To use another vicious animal analogy, when I encounter skeptics with false assumptions of what a collapse actually is, I am often reminded of that woman in Anchorage, Alaska who jumped an enclosure fence at the zoo to get a closer picture of Binky the polar bear. These people have been made so inept when it comes to identifying threats that they will continue arguing with you as the animal takes a football-sized bite out of their meaty thigh.

So what is the root of the problem beyond Hollywood fantasies? Well, the problem is that social and economic collapse is not a singular event, it is a PROCESS. Collapse is a series of events that sometimes span years. Each event increases in volatility over the last event, but as time goes on these events tend to condition the masses. The public develops a normalcy bias towards crisis (like the old “frog in a boiling pot” analogy). They lose all sense of what a healthy system looks like.

It is not uncommon for a society to wade through almost a decade or more of violent decline before finally acknowledging the system is imploding on a fundamental level. It is also not uncommon for societies to endure years of abuse by corrupt governments before either organizing effectively to rebel, or caving in and submitting to totalitarianism.

But how does one recognize a failing system? How does a person know if they are in the middle of a collapse rather than on the “verge” of collapse? Here are some signals I have derived from research of various breakdowns in modern nations and why they indicate we are experiencing collapse right now…

The Criminals Openly Admit To Their Crimes

The surest way to know if your society is in the midst of disintegration is to see if the criminals who created the instability in the first place are openly discussing a collapse scenario or warning that one is imminent.

A year ago, central bankers presented little more than a chorus of recovery propaganda. Today, not so much. The Royal Bank of Scotland is now warning investors to “sell everything” ahead of a “cataclysmic” year in markets.

The Federal Reserve’s Richard Fisher has admitted that the Fed “frontloaded” (manipulated) stock markets into a bubble and that payment is about to come due in the form of severe economic volatility (up to 20% crash in equities).

The Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of central banks, has a track record of warning the public about collapse conditions – right before they happen, leaving little or no time for people to prepare. They have followed their habit by warning in September and December that a Fed rate hike would “shatter” the uneasy calm in markets.

The former Chief Economist of the BIS now says the economy is in worse shape than it was in 2008 and is headed for a larger fall.

What happened between last year and this year and why are these internationalists suddenly so forthcoming about our economic reality? The fact that central bankers are the cause of our current collapse leads me to believe that such admissions are designed to deflect guilt. If they put out a few warnings now, they can then later claim they are prognosticators rather than culprits, and that they were trying to “help us.” Beyond that, the reality is that our situation was just as dire in 2014/2015 as it is today; the difference is that now we are about to enter a new phase in the ongoing collapse, a much more detrimental phase, but still a phase of a breakdown that has been progressing since at least 2008.

The Fundamentals Break Through The Manipulation Barrier

Governments and central banks do not have the capacity to artificially create demand for goods or a supply of well-paying jobs in a crashing economy. What they can do, though, is hide the visible problems in supply and demand with false numbers.

I examined such false economic statistics in great detail last year in a six-part series titled “One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes.” I will not cover them all again here. I would only point out that recently the fundamentals of supply and demand have begun to break through the deceit of manipulated numbers, and this is a sign that the collapse is about to move from one stage to the next.

With global shipping and trucking freight in steep decline, with retail inventories in stasis and current oil consumption falling to levels not seen since 1997 despite a larger population, the mainstream can no longer deny that consumer demand is crumbling. If demand is falling dramatically, then the financial system is in the middle of falling dramatically; there is simply no way around this truth.

Stocks And Commodities Become Violently Erratic

Let’s be clear, if stock markets represent anything at all, they are merely lagging indicators of economic instability.  Stock markets are NOT predictive indicators of anything useful.  Therefore, any person who does nothing but track equities each day is going to be completely oblivious to the bigger picture behind the economy until it is too late.  They will be so mesmerized by the green numbers and red numbers and lines on minute-to-minute graphs that they will lose all sense of reality.

Violent swings in stocks are a sign of a financial system that is at the middle or end of the collapse process, not the beginning.

It is also important to note that extreme shifts in stocks and commodity values to the upside are just as much a signal of instability as shifts to the downside.  For instance, if you witnessed the recent 9% explosion in oil markets and thought to yourself “Ah, the markets are being stabilized again and nothing is different this time…”, then you are an idiot.

Of course, the next day oil markets lost almost all of the gains they made the day before.  And this is how markets behave when they are about to die; they expand and implode chaotically each day on nothing more that meaningless news headlines rather than hard data.  This heart attack in equities inevitably trends downwards as the weeks and months pass.  Keep in mind, equities are down nearly 10% from their recent highs, and oil is down approximately 50% in the past six months.  Every time there is a dead cat bounce in stocks skeptics come out of the woodwork to call alternative analysts “doomers”, yet they are nowhere to be found when markets come crashing back down.  They are not looking at the overall trend because their short attention spans hinder them.  Again, extreme swings in markets, whether up or down, are a sign of progressing collapse.

Deterioration Of Cultural Values, Heritage And Identity

I have written extensively over the years about the Cloward-Piven strategy; a strategy used by collectivists to destabilize social systems by dumping overt numbers of foreign immigrants into the population without demand for integration. This process has been obvious in the U.S. and Europe for quite some time, but only now is it peaking to the point that collapse is seen as an inevitable result by the public. Europe is worse off than the U.S. in this regard as millions upon millions of Muslim immigrants are injected into the EU’s already dying body; immigrants that intend to transplant their culture from their own failed societies rather than adopting the values and principles of the societies that have invited them in.

Natural-born Americans and legal immigrants with aspiration of integration appear to be fighting back against the Cloward-Piven strategy with some success by holding onto traditional American values despite being labeled “barbarians” and “racists.” Illegal immigration, though, is still completely unchecked.

In the EU, the long campaign of cultural Marxism has made natural-born Europeans perhaps the most self-hating people on the planet as well as the most passive and weak. Organized opposition to massive immigration programs in the EU should have taken place years ago. Now it is far too late, and the European system is finishing a social implosion which should have already been obvious to average citizens.

Open Discussion Of Totalitarian Measures

When corrupt leadership moves from quiet totalitarianism to more open totalitarianism, your society is in the FINAL stages of collapse, not the beginning of a collapse. The U.S. in particular has been slowly strangled with subversive legal directives and political policies ever since the so called “War on Terror” began. However, there are now multiple signals of a much deeper and open tyranny in the works.

A few recent examples stand out, including Barack Obama’s insistence that the office of the president has the legal authority to issues executive orders that affect constitutional protections such as the 2nd Amendment. As many liberty movement activists are aware, there is absolutely no constitutional precedent for the use of executive orders and such powers are not mentioned anywhere in the document. They were simply created out of thin air to be used by the federal government and sometimes state governments to supersede normal checks and balances.

While numerous presidents have issued executive orders, including some that were outright tyrannical, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unconstitutional internment of Japanese Americans into concentration camps, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been the most subversive in their bypassing of the Constitution. Obama, in particular, has tried to hide the number of executive actions he has taken by issuing hundreds of “presidential memorandums,” which are basically the same dirty play by another name.

These actions have been progressively setting the stage for the removal of checks and balances entirely in the name of crisis management. They are so broad in their nature and vague in their definitions and applications that they could be interpreted by federal authorities to mean just about anything in any given situation.

If executive actions are not scary enough, corrupt politicians are now becoming blunt in their demands for dominance. Two Republican Senators, Mitch McConnel and Lindsay Graham, are calling for unlimited AUMF-style (authorization of use of military force) war powers to be given to the president. Such powers would allow the president to project U.S. military forces anywhere in the world for any reason without review or time limits. This includes the use of military forces on U.S. soil.

The rationale for this is, of course, the threat of ISIS. The same group of terrorists the U.S. government helped to create.

And finally, if you want perhaps the most nonchalant admission of future tyranny in recent days, check out former General Wesley Clark’s call for “disloyal” Americans to be placed in internment camps through the duration of the war on terror, a war that could ostensibly go on forever.

One could argue that all of these measures are meant only to deter “Islamic extremism.” I would point out that government officials could have stemmed that tide at any time by enforcing existing immigration laws, or, by stopping all immigration for a period of years until the problem is handled. Instead, they have allowed open borders to remain, and have even imported potential terrorists while focusing Department of Homeland Security efforts more on evil white guys with guns.

If we accept the violation of the constitutional rights of any group of citizens, if we allow the concept of “thought crime” to become commonplace, then we leave the door open to the violation of our own rights someday. And that is how tyrants trick populations through incremental collapse; by applying despotism to a claimed dangerous minority, then expanding it to everyone else.

America is sitting near the end of the spectrum in terms of economic collapse and in the middle of the spectrum in terms of social collapse.  While more violent events are certainly gestating and are likely to be triggered in the near term, we should not overlook the reality that collapse is happening in stages all around us.  This process gives us at least some time.  All is not lost yet, and the steps we take to organize and prepare today will affect how the collapse process unfolds tomorrow. People who continue to ignore the outright evidence of collapse based on false assumptions of what collapse should look like are only preventing themselves from taking proper action until it is too late. Make no mistake, our system is dying. We cannot allow our false perceptions of this death to cloud the reality of it, or our response to it.

 

You can read more from Brandon Smith at his site Alt-Market.com. If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here.  We greatly appreciate your patronage. You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

Brussels Bombing Psyop a Victory for the Ruling Elite and Global Police State

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By Bernie Suarez

Source: Waking Times

There are many signs pointing to a false flag attack in Brussels on 3-22-16. Independent and alternative media, as usual, has been right on top of the story catching many of the usual oddities, lies and coincidences which are characteristic of false flags and are now piling on top of each other as they always do. And here’s another thing everyone should take note of; something we also observed during the Paris attacks on 11-13-15. As we saw in the Paris attacks, once again we’re seeing a “global” component to the “reaction” phase of the usual problem-reaction-solution dialectic employed by the controllers. Look for it. Problem at point A, subsequent “reaction” to the problem at point B, all the way on the other side of the world. This then leads to a “solution” that applies to both point A and B. This also serves to endorse the illusion that the bogeymen, in this case ISIS of course, involved in the Brussels attack are somehow everywhere at once.

One of the key purposes of this event, among other purposes like maintaining an excuse for U.S. military intervention in Syria, is to reinforce the need for a global police which is being sold as a “global solution” to a “global problem.” This global police state is a very clear agenda of the U.S., NATO and the U.N. This entire event is also designed to push the Authorization for Unlimited Military Force (AUMF) the Pentagon wants so badly and it’s a perfect quick and easy event in NATO’s and the European Union’s home turf to push for all of these goals at once. What am I talking about?

Following the Brussels “attacks,” which were immediately and deliberately linked to “ISIS,” we saw how in the city of Atlanta, Georgia halfway across the world, police were “on edge” and completely evacuated the Atlanta airport because of an unattended “package” they thought could be related or connected to the “ISIS” Brussels attacks. Though the whole thing turned out to be nothing at all, make no mistake this is part of the mass conditioning that comes with the entire quest for global police and perpetuation of the ISIS psyop. Even the officers involved in the airport evacuations I’m sure got caught up in the hysteria simply following protocol. Can you imagine how easy it would be for someone to purposely leave an unattended package just to extract the reaction, fear and hysteria from the masses while at the same time endorsing the idea of “global terrorism” and conditioning the masses to accept the idea of a need for a “global police.” One tiny fake package in Atlanta accomplishes all of this and more. And it wasn’t just Atlanta caught in the psyop, in Denver we saw “evacuations” as well:

Atlanta’s airport was briefly evacuated on Wednesday over a suspicious package while U.S. law enforcement agencies and travelers were on edge a day after deadly suicide bombings by Islamist militants rocked Brussels.

Passengers were ordered out of public areas of the domestic terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the United States’ busiest by passenger volume, but the site was quickly cleared and operations resumed, airport officials said.

Parts of Denver airport were also evacuated on Tuesday, hours after at least 31 people were killed and 271 wounded in attacks on Brussels airport and a rush-hour metro train, as airports across the United States tightened security.

As you can see, the hysteria wasn’t just in Atlanta. Notice the article doesn’t even bother to discuss what exactly happened in Denver. Was it also a “suspicious package” there? Was it a phone call from ISIS? Who cares, right? Because apparently the only thing that matters is that it’s part of the “reaction” phase; and the true answer is, this is part of the mass conditioning for the new world order’s global police state which is now being born with every ISIS “attack.”

Historic Mass Conditioning

So for the first time in human history an event at point A in one side of the world forces a Pavlov-style reaction at point B, on the opposite side of the world; even though the 2 events (in the organic reality) have no association with each other other than the conditioned response. The conditioning of the masses can be compared to Pavlov’s dog experiment. In the Pavlov dog salivation experiment, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was able to demonstrate that dogs can be conditioned to organically react a certain way by simply associating one artificial stimulus enough times with a natural stimulus. Eventually Pavlov demonstrated that you wouldn’t need the natural stimulus (food) to elicit the conditioned response (salivation) if you provide the artificial stimulus (a bell).

If you understand Pavlov’s classical conditioning then you should understand the mass conditioning of the masses going on right now via the mainstream media and politicians. The Brussels attacks is no different from the Paris “attacks” of November of 2015. Isn’t it a coincidence that less than a week ago the mainstream media brought back the Paris attack “story” as if to prepare the masses subconsciously for the upcoming Brussels attacks in Belgium? How about the fact the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan basically subliminally announced the upcoming attacks 4 days prior? Are we surprised given that Erdogan’s Turkey is right now the primary lifeline for ISIS purchasing their oil and supporting fighters with resources in the Turkey-Syrian border while blowing up Russian planes that interfere with that mission? This has all the markings of a mass psychological operation.

First of all, we don’t know who planted those explosives in the Brussels airport or subway system and we don’t know why or who told them to do it. With ISIS being credited, that alone is proof as far as I’m concerned that this is a state crime funded by NATO countries. We must all shed the myth that ISIS fighters are freely doing what they want, independent of the will of the states that created, funded, trained and armed them. Think about this. No one trains fighters only to let them go away and fight for someone else. Whoever trained these guys is still giving the orders or they wouldn’t have wasted their resources training these guys. Just like in the U.S. military, you wouldn’t train a Marine in boot camp, show them how to survive and offer weapons training only to watch them leave the Marines after boot camp and fight elsewhere. Yet this is precisely what Americans are asked to believe every day by the mainstream media. We’re told to believe these fighters just so happened to switch sides AFTER being trained to fight for the “Free Syrian Army.”

If it wasn’t that ISIS is a mercenary group employed by NATO countries, they’d be long gone by now. The only reason ISIS is still “alive” in our consciousness is because nations like Turkey, US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are keeping them alive both literally and figurative using their controlled media. ISIS is therefore alive because they (U.S., NATO and company) want and need them to be alive for political reasons. No ISIS means no Syria, no PNAC Middle East plan completion, no fear, no war on terror, no global police and no stripping away of individual rights, it’s that simple.

Incidentally the location of the explosions in Brussels Belgium is immensely convenient. There’s no question that the headquarters of NATO and the European Union would be a perfect place to execute and control a false flag like this. This is also the perfect false flag to quickly put together during this election year campaign hysteria pause. It likely took very little coordination and effort requiring a couple of explosives and a patsy or 2. Here’s the sequence as I see it: Boom! ISIS did it, lockdown airports in the U.S. due to an unattended package, goals and conditioning reinforced by media, back to election campaign with the candidates calling for “solution” to ISIS.

This is the part where ALL politicians running for president get to offer their “solution” to the same artificially created “problem.” In other words, this is a win-win for the ruling elite. And in this sense the Brussels attack is already part of the election campaign itself. Be on the look out for candidates endorsing ideas “global solutions” to ISIS.

Finally, I call on readers to observe how these false flags are getting easier and easier for them to do. I’m sure there was a time when a false flag attack like this took years to prepare (think 9/11). Now we are seeing quick attacks being strung together with minimal preparation, attacks which nonetheless have long-lasting implications for freedom, the rise of the global police, obtaining their AUMF license to kill, and obtaining all the excuses they need to justify U.S. aggression in Syria in hopes of forcibly removing their democratically elected president.

Remember practice makes perfect. So as they get better and more efficient at pulling these false flag attacks, let us get better and more efficient at diagnosing them and spreading the word. I believe both phenomenons are happening simultaneously. Hopefully, the ability of alternative and independent media to quickly diagnose these attacks by simply observing the process of problem-reaction-solution will help us turn a corner in changing minds at the highest level and thus effect much needed change sooner rather than later.

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome Was a Technology Prophecy

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Editor’s note: Since today marks director David Cronenberg’s 73rd birthday, it’s a good time to appreciate one of his greatest and most notorious works. Though my favorite of his remains the distinctly PKD-like eXistenZ, a close runner up is the cult classic Videodrome, which the following analysis reappraises in the context of contemporary social media-fixated culture.

By Nathan Jurgenson

Source: Omni Reboot

David Cronenberg’s vision of technology as the “new flesh” in Videodrome isn’t so shocking anymore.

Videodrome is the best movie ever made about Facebook.

What felt “vaguely futuristic” about it in 1983 is prescient today: technology and media are ever more intimate, personal, embodied, an interpenetration that David Cronenberg’s film graphically explores.
Videodrome offers a long-needed correction to how we collectively view and talk about technology. As the anti-Matrix, Videodrome understood that media is not some separate space, but something which burrows into mind and flesh. The present has a funny habit of catching up with David Cronenberg.
Still, Videodrome is deeply of its time and place. It’s set in Toronto, where Cronenberg was born and studied at the same time as University of Toronto superstar media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” Beyond McLuhan’s reputation, Toronto was also known as a wired city; among other things, it was an early adopter of cable television.
In suit, Videodrome follows a Toronto cable television president, Max Renn (James Woods). He becomes involved with a radio psychiatrist named Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry, of Blondie fame), who reminds us of popular criticisms of television culture: we want to be stimulated until we’re desensitized, becoming (at best) apolitical zombies and (at worst) amoral monsters. Television signal saturates this film. The satellite dishes, screens, playback devices, and general aesthetics of analogue video are on glorious, geeked-out display. Although Videodrome’s operating metaphor is television, this film can be understood as being a fable about media in general. And what seemed possible with television in 1983 seems obvious today with social media.
Over the course of the film, Max comes to know a “media prophet” named Professor Brian O’Blivion—an obvious homage to Marshall McLuhan. O’Blivion builds a “Cathode Ray Mission,” named after the television set component which shoots electrons and creates images. The Cathode Ray Mission gives the destitute a chance to watch television in order to “patch them back into the world’s mixing board,” akin to McLuhan’s notion of media creating a “global village,” premised on the idea that media and technology, together, form the social fabric. O’Blivion goes on to monologue, “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen appears as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality; and reality is less than television.”
This is Videodrome’s philosophy. It’s the opposite of The Matrix’s reading of Baudrillard’s theories of simulation, and it goes completely against the common understanding of the Web as “virtual,” of the so-called “offline” as “real.” O’blivion would agree when I claim that “it is wrong to say ‘IRL’ to mean offline: Facebook is real life.”
This logic—that the Web is some other place we visit, a “cyber” space, something “virtual” and hence unreal—is what I call “digital dualism” and I think it’s dead wrong. Instead, we need a far more synthetic understanding of technology and society, media and bodies, physicality and information as perpetually enmeshed and co-determining. If The Matrix is the film of digital dualism, Videodrome is its synthetic and augmented opponent.
As P.J. Rey illustrates, fictional Web-spatiality is the favorite digital dualist plot device. Yet more than fiction books and films, what has come to dominate much of our cultural mythology around the Web is the idea that we are trading “real” communication for something simply mechanical: that real friendship, sex, thinking, and whatever else lazy op-ed writers can imagine are being replaced by merely simulated experiences. The non-coincidental byproduct of inventing the notion of a “cyber” space is the simultaneous invention of “the real,” the “IRL,” the offline space that is more human, deep, and true. Where The Matrix’s green lines of code or Neal Stephenson’s 3D Metaverse may have been the sci-fi milieu of the 1990s, the idea of a natural “offline” world is today’s preferred fiction.
Alternatively, what makes Videodrome, and Cronenberg’s oeuvre in general, so useful for understanding social media is their fundamental assumption that there is nothing “natural” about the body. Cronenberg’s trademark flavor of body-horror is highly posthuman: boundaries are pushed and queered, first through medical technologies in Shivers , Rabid , The Brood , and Scanners , then through media technology in Videodrome  and eXistenZ , then, most notoriously, in The Fly, where the human and animal merge. If The Matrix is René Descartes, Videodrome is Donna Haraway.
Cronenberg’s characters are consistent with Haraway’s theory of the cyborg: not the half-robot with the shifty laser eye, but you and me. In the film, the goal is never to remove the videodrome signal that is augmenting the body, but to reprogram it. To direct it. As Haraway famously wrote, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” “Natural” was never a real option anyways.
Max Renn is especially good at finding the real in the so-called “virtual” because he is equally good at seeing virtuality in the “real.” From the beginning, he understands that much of everyday life is a massive media event devoid of meaning. The old flesh is tired, used up, and toxic. The world is filled with a suffering assuaged only by glowing television screens. As the film progresses, the real and unreal blur, making each seem hyperbolic: hallucinations become tangible, while the tangible drips with a surrealism that’s gritty, jumpy, dirty, erotic, and violent—closer to Spring Breakers than The Wizard of Oz. As such, Cronenberg’s universe is always a little sticky: an unease which begs the nightmares to come true, so that we at least know what’s real.
Videodrome’s depiction of techno-body synthesis is, to be sure, intense; Cronenberg has the unusual talent of making violent, disgusting, and erotic things seem even more so. The technology is veiny and lubed. It breaths and moans; after watching the film, I want to cut my phone open just to see if it will bleed. Fittingly, the film was originally titled “Network of Blood,” which is precisely how we should understand social media, as a technology not just of wires and circuits, but of bodies and politics. There’s nothing anti-human about technology: the smartphone that you rub and take to bed is a technology of flesh. Information penetrates the body in increasingly more intimate ways.
This synthesis of the physical and the digital is mirrored in the film’s soundtrack, too. In his book on Videodrome’s production, Tim Lucas calls Howard Shore’s score “bio-electronic” because it was written, programmed into a synthesizer, and played back on a computer in a recording studio while live strings played along. Early in the film, the score is mostly those strings, but as time passes the electronic synthesizers creep up in the mix, forming the bio-electronic synthesis.
The most fitting example of techno-human union in Videodrome is the famous scene of Max inserting his head into a breathing, moaning, begging video screen; somewhere between erotic and hilarious, media and humanity coalesce. There isn’t a person and then an avatar, a real world and then an Internet. They’re merged. As theorists like Katherine Hayles have long taught, technology, society, and the self have always been intertwined. Videodrome knows this, and it shows us with that headfirst dive into the screen—to say nothing of media being inserted directly into a vaginal opening in Max’s stomach, or the gun growing into his hand.

Thirty years after its release, Videodrome remains the most powerful fictional representation of technology-self synthesis. This merger wasn’t invented with the Internet, or even television. Humans and technology have always been co-implicated. We often forget this when talking about the Web, selling ourselves instead a naive picture of defined “virtual” spaces which somehow lack the components of “real” reality. This is why The Matrix and “cyberspace” have long outworn their welcome as a frame for understanding the Internet. It should be of no surprise that body horror is as useful for understanding social media as cyberpunk.

Fukushima@5

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(Source: Fairewinds.org)

Modern ghost towns, abandoned houses, and far stretching roads lined with plastic bags of radioactive garbage have replaced the once bustling neighborhoods and cities of the Fukushima Prefecture. Formerly home to thousands, the massive release of radiation has forced residents to evacuate their beautiful homeland, leaving the land they love behind without knowing whether or not they may ever return without putting their lives at risk. Join the Fairewinds Crew and ask yourself this: With 99 operating atomic power reactors generating electricity in the U.S., what’s so different about your home, your town, your state that what happened to Fukushima couldn’t happen to you and your family?

Many Japanese and millions of Americans are currently living in the shadow of atomic reactors, plutonium reprocessing plants, and atomic waste dumps. It will be five years in March since the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi began and the Japanese public and people around the world continue to search for the truth about nuclear risk and honest answers to their energy future. Fukushima@5 exposes the truth of the ongoing atomic devastation caused by the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi.

Related Podcast: Project Censored 03.08.16

Mother Earth May Have Good Reason to Slaughter Us

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By Jack Balkwill

Source: Dissident Voice

Decades ago James Lovelock constructed a principle called the Gaia hypothesis, contending that a biosphere teeming with life works together with inorganic matter to self-regulate conditions for maintaining a livable planet.

The oxygen levels in our air are maintained, and the salinity of the seas – everything that’s needed to keep conditions within the zones which nurture life on the planet.  This is a theory embraced by many deep environmentalists because it offers hope for the future of life forms on the planet.

When one creature (such as man) gets to be so out of control that it threatens the other life forms, Gaia, or Mother Earth, pushes back toward a healthy balance, according to some theorists (the Gaia principle has many variations).

In the ancient Greek religion, before Zeus was king of the gods in the classical period, or Zeus’ father Cronus was king of the gods, or Cronus’ father Uranus was king of the gods, there was Gaia, the earth mother, who created the heavens, the various gods, and man.  Gaia regulated the growing of crops, healed the sick, and was the earth itself to her followers.

Many of the most ancient religions around the world had as their chief deity a female, and my guess is because they reasoned that since it is the female who gives birth, a creator must be female.

The universe within us

Each of us humans is a microcosm of the Gaia principle.  Within us, we have about a hundred trillion unique creatures which do not share our DNA.  Cells containing our DNA only number about ten trillion, so they are vastly outnumbered.  The microbes within us are in many forms — bacteria, fungi, archaea and viruses.

When our microbes are out of balance, it can be life-threatening, so a major function of our immune system is to regulate them, to keep one species from over reproducing, just as, in the Gaia theory, life forms are regulated within the massive biosphere.

If, for example, Candida reproduces to a high level, our immune system will try to destroy enough of it to get back to a balance.  Candida at normal levels may actually be beneficial, and is thought to attack some harmful invaders. At extreme levels of overgrowth Candida may become deadly to us.

Most of the life forms within us are friendly, and we would die without them.  They have a great many functions, working together to keep us alive.  In the end, if we die, they no longer have a home.

And most of the life forms outside of us are also beneficial, aiding Mother Nature in maintaining a delicate balance.

Symbioses

Oak trees have dropped their heavy acorns for millions of years, right beside their trunks.  In such a place, the acorn has little chance of growing with no sunlight under the canopy of mother tree.  But squirrels are happy to carry the acorns away from the tree to bury them in case they are needed for food during an extreme winter.  The squirrels don’t eat all of what they bury most years, giving the oak an opportunity to spread its genetic material.

In return the oak provides a home for the squirrel, which builds nests in oak trees and eats the acorns.  There are interactions between species all over the planet with which we are not yet familiar, but it is clear that species depend on one another for survival, just as the microbes within us are maintained in a balance that sustains life.

A flower may provide pollen to the bee, and in return the bee pollinates other flowers, benefiting both species.

But sometimes man gets in the way

Who would think a massive animal like a moose would rely on the lowly beaver for its well being?  When beaver hats were a popular fad, beaver were killed off in such large numbers that moose began to starve.  One of the favorite foods of moose is the shoots growing in wetlands, and without beavers to dam streams creating wetlands, moose began to go hungry and started feeding on tree bark, killing trees.

Of course, it was inadvertent that a fad of humans started killing off moose.  But we’ve done such things throughout our history and have more control over nature than we realize.

When sperm whales were slaughtered to near extinction, giant squid began to rise up to the surface in the oceans, no longer having to fear their primary enemy, the sperm whales that fed upon them.  Giant squid previously stayed in deep parts of the ocean to avoid sperm whales.  We have no idea what happens in the long term when a creature like the giant squid, with a ravenous appetite, begins feeding in a part of the biosphere from which it was banned for millions of years, but certainly it must upset the food chain.

It is thought that some animals, such as mammoths, became extinct at the hand of man.  Such creatures disappeared in North America about the time it was populated by humans.

Whether directly or indirectly, we are responsible for the extinction of a great many species.

Intelligence, whatever that is

Many people seem to think that humans are somehow superior creatures.  We have a formula for determining intelligence which predicts that a species is intelligent when its brain is large enough to take care of all of the functions of its body, with something left over.  That something left over is intelligence.  So it’s largely brain size in proportion to body size that suggests degrees of intelligence.

There is an old belief that elephants have a pea brain, but it is not true.  An elephant has a large brain, but needs most of it for maintaining its massive bodily functions, so what’s left over may not be great intelligence, but the elephant is certainly an intelligent animal.

The cetaceans, the large toothed whales, all have brains larger than human brains.  Some scientists have speculated that they may be more intelligent than humans.

When people say, “But cetaceans haven’t invented nuclear weapons,” they are showing, perhaps, a flaw in the human being, not a comparative virtue.

Those who support the theory that cetaceans are more intelligent theorize that they may understand that being more in harmony with nature is the intelligent thing to do for long term survival, rather than making automobiles which pollute the planet and the many other destructive things humans do.

At any rate the other creatures appear to help maintain the balance of life within the biosphere, interrelating in complex ways, while humans have reproduced out of control, crowding out other life forms, taking more than our share of resources, and polluting the planet.

So another way to look at the Gaia theory is to describe it as a kind of immune system for the biosphere.  When it has an organism that is overpopulating and causing other organisms to die, that organism must be regulated, just as for a Candida overgrowth or cancer within a human.

The traditional way that Mother Nature has regulated the human population is with disease.  It worked well up to the twentieth century, when humans began to poison their drinking water with chlorine or other agents to kill off water-borne diseases, which had previously wiped out the populations of entire cities.

Will humans be brought under control by Mother Nature?

In the 1970’s there was a movement to reduce the human population, quite popular with many.  I donated to that cause, and was surprised to see it vanish.  I suspected that it was killed by the capitalists, who have a vision that the population must continue to grow for there to be more consumers, hence, more profit.  Capitalists insist that “growth” continue without considering finite limits consistent with the size of the planet.

So how will Gaia maintain the delicate balance with the human organism out of control?  She might introduce a new disease for which we have no antidote.  It was the first thing I thought of when the AIDS epidemic began decades ago.  A perfect killer, to destroy the immune function, allowing almost anything to then kill the host.  But mankind seems to now have that disease under control.

Or Mother Nature might allow us to commit suicide by climate change from our nasty habit of spewing carbon emissions, and other anti-environmental things we are doing in destroying our little blue planet. We are releasing massive toxins into the environment in the form of dioxins from paper and plastic making, radiation from nuclear power plants and bomb making, insecticides, herbicides, and other dangerous chemicals.

A recent report by The World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation stated that at the current rate, the weight of plastic in the oceans will exceed the weight of the fish.  When I heard this a few weeks ago I posted on Facebook, “The epitaph for human beings will read ‘they thought they were an intelligent species.’”

As an old man I take heart that young people seem to be far more aware of the degradation of the planet’s environment, giving me hope that they will find a solution and assist Mother Gaia in her quest for purification and renewal.

The alternative is to leave her no choice but to see us as a cancer that must be eliminated for the good of the whole.

 

Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com Read other articles by Jack.

Saturday Matinee: Snowpiercer

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Snowpiercer (2013) is a film adaptation of French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette directed by Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Mother, Haemoo). The majority of the movie takes place on a perpetually globe-spanning train containing the last surviving members of the human race after a geoengineering scheme creates an apocalyptic ice-age. Though the film has its share of plot holes (which become more apparent with repeat viewings), it remains the best cinematic metaphor for today’s dominant political/economic system. Snowpiercer also features outstanding performances from Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt, and Ed Harris among others.

Watch the full film here.

(Note: annoying pop-up ad windows may need to be closed after clicking the “play” button.)

The Age of Authoritarianism: Government of the Politicians, by the Military, for the Corporations

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy… But I knew it wasn’t a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head… The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.” ― Historian Howard Zinn

America is at a crossroads.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age—the age of authoritarianism. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

Don’t believe me?

Let me take you on a brief guided tour, but prepare yourself. The landscape is particularly disheartening to anyone who remembers what America used to be.

The Executive Branch: Whether it’s the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, the systematic surveillance of journalists and regular citizens, the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, or the occupation of Afghanistan, Barack Obama has surpassed his predecessors in terms of his abuse of the Constitution and the rule of law. President Obama, like many of his predecessors, has routinely disregarded the Constitution when it has suited his purposes, operating largely above the law and behind a veil of secrecy, executive orders and specious legal justifications. Rest assured that no matter who wins this next presidential election, very little will change. The policies of the American police state will continue.

The Legislative Branch:  It is not overstating matters to say that Congress may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America. Abuses of office run the gamut from elected representatives neglecting their constituencies to engaging in self-serving practices, including the misuse of eminent domain, earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracting in return for personal gain and campaign contributions, having inappropriate ties to lobbyist groups and incorrectly or incompletely disclosing financial information. Pork barrel spending, hastily passed legislation, partisan bickering, a skewed work ethic, graft and moral turpitude have all contributed to the public’s increasing dissatisfaction with congressional leadership. No wonder 86 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

The Judicial Branch: The Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the United States Supreme Court have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.

Shadow Government: America’s next president will inherit more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he or she assumes office. He or she will also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. Referred to as the Deep State, this shadow government is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.

Law Enforcement: By and large the term “law enforcement” encompasses all agents within a militarized police state, including the military, local police, and the various agencies such as the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace but now extensions of the military, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. In the latest move to insulate police from charges of misconduct, Virginia lawmakers are considering legislation to keep police officers’ names secret, ostensibly creating secret police forces.

A Suspect Surveillance Society: Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say. By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write. By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go. By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do. By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember. And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. Consequently, in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals, we are no longer “innocent until proven guilty.”

Military Empire: America’s endless global wars and burgeoning military empire—funded by taxpayer dollars—have depleted our resources, over-extended our military and increased our similarities to the Roman Empire and its eventual demise. The U.S. now operates approximately 800 military bases in foreign countries around the globe at an annual cost of at least $156 billion. The consequences of financing a global military presence are dire. In fact, David Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., believes there are “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that contributed to the fall of Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

That brings me to the final and most important factor in bringing about America’s shift into authoritarianism: “we the people.” We are the government. Thus, if the government has become a tyrannical agency, it is because we have allowed it to happen, either through our inaction or our blind trust.

Essentially, there are four camps of thought among the citizenry when it comes to holding the government accountable. Which camp you fall into says a lot about your view of government—or, at least, your view of whichever administration happens to be in power at the time.

In the first camp are those who trust the government to do the right thing, despite the government’s repeated failures in this department. In the second camp are those who not only don’t trust the government but think the government is out to get them. In the third camp are those who see government neither as an angel nor a devil, but merely as an entity that needs to be controlled, or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, bound “down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.”

Then there’s the fourth camp, comprised of individuals who pay little to no attention to the workings of government, so much so that they barely vote, let alone know who’s in office. Easily entertained, easily distracted, easily led, these are the ones who make the government’s job far easier than it should be.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by the antics of the presidential candidates, the pomp and circumstance of awards shows, athletic events, and entertainment news, and the feel-good evangelism that passes for religion today. What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and violence by government agents are increasingly norms.

The powers-that-be want us to remain divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems. Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

The only distinction that matters anymore is where you stand in the American police state. In other words, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.