Predictive Programming, Revelation Of The Method & COVID-23

Posted on August 3, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Derrick Broze

When major events impact millions, and even billions, of people, there will, inevitably, be a wide range of opinions put forth to explain the crisis. From political explanations to religious testimony, thinkers from all walks of life seek to deconstruct those events which alter the lives of the masses.

When it comes to what I will call the “conspiracy research community”, one theory often proposed as an explanation to the chaos of our world is known as predictive programming. When searching for specific definitions of this theory you find derogatory analyses, true believers, and the curious.

According to a researcher at Ohio University:

“Predictive Programming is theory that the government or other higher-ups are using fictional movies or books as a mass mind control tool to make the population more accepting of planned future events. This was described by researcher Alan Watt who defines Predictive programming as “Predictive programming is a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders. If and when these changes are put through, the public will already be familiarized with them and will accept them as natural progressions, thus lessening possible public resistance and commotion.”

Essentially, the idea is that operations being conducted by a hidden elite are shown to the public in advance via popular media such as books and films. These clues and references are meant to “soften” the public to the ideas presented. By introducing concepts that seem fantastic and then constantly reintroducing the concepts they appear more likely, or at the least, acceptable.

The belief is that the “predictive programming” in media can speak to the subconscious in a way that causes the public to passively accept the events when they unfold in real life, rather than offering resistance or opposition.

The Ohio University writer states, “I found that most commonly people believe the government creates a problem so the population will look to the government for a solution. However, because the government planned for the crisis the government will offer a solution that has been planned long before the crisis ever happened.” What they are describing is often known as “problem-reaction-solution”.

The TV show The Simpsons is often a source for such predictive programming claims. Various episodes show Donald Trump running for President, and references to September 11, 2001. For example, The Simpsons 1997 episode titled “The City of New York vs Homer Simpson” features the Simpson family visiting Manhattan where the World Trade Center factors heavily into the story. In one often touted scene, Lisa holds a brochure for a $9 bus fare with the World Trade Center shown in the background. Together the $9 and the twin towers make 9/11, a reference to the 9/11 attacks.

In 2010, Bill Oakley, an executive producer on the show at the time, told The New York Observer, “$9 was picked as a comically cheap fare,” he said. “And I will grant that it’s eerie, given that it’s on the only episode of any series ever that had an entire act of World Trade Center jokes.”

Another example of this alleged predictive programming comes from the pilot episode of “The Lone Gunmen,” a short-lived spinoff of the popular “The X-Files”. The pilot for The Lone Gunmen — which aired aired six months before the September 11th attacks — includes a plot where a hijacked plane is aimed at the World Trade Center. The terrorist attack is averted in the end and the towers are not hit.

Here is a sample of the dialogue from one scene of The Lone Gunmen pilot:

“Your saying our government plans to commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline – “
“There you go, indicting the entire government as usual. A faction, a small faction. “

“For what possible gain?”
“The Cold War is over, John, but with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market is flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you’ll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility and begging to be smart bombed.”

The lazy response to claims of predictive programming is to dismiss them as the workings of a paranoid, tinfoil hat wearing, “conspiracy theorist”. Numerous theories have been proposed to explain predictive programming.

Some researchers dismiss the claims as simple coincidences. The Simpsons has been on air for 30 plus years now and some of their thousands of episodes are bound to reflect reality at some point, they say. Others contend that there are some eerie examples of art “predicting” reality, but they believe theorists are suffering from Pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing patterns in random stimuli. Those who are looking for patterns are more likely to see them because of this, as well as confirmation bias.

Revelation of the Method

Another theory which has been proposed by believers of predictive programming is the idea that these so-called elites must show the public their plans for one reason or another. This theory has come to be known as “Revelation of the Method”. The first person who appears to have popularized the use of this term was researcher James Shelby Downard.

Downard’s claim to infamy came as a result of his writing the controversial essay King-Kill 33, which accuses a network of Freemasons of being involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In subsequent writings, Downard further explored his ideas around revelation of the method. In Sorcery, Sex, Assassination, and the Science of Symbolism, he writes, “acts concerning the
assassination are on ice and will be be revealed in the future in the so-called ‘Revelation of the Method.’”

He continues, “this method and process of Masonic machinations is summed up in the principle of the “Making Manifest of All That is Hidden.”

Michael A. Hoffman II, was a student and friend of Downard and continued to write about the concept. Writing in the book Apocalypse Culture, Hoffman says, “We come to the current unfoldment in “Must Be,” an alchemic term Mr. Downard translates as “the Revelation of the Method.” This alludes to the process wherein murderous deeds and hair-raising conspiracies involving wars, revolutions, decapitations and every manner of horror-show are first buried beneath a cloak of secrecy and Harpocrates’ hushed- finger, and then, when finally accomplished and secured, slowly revealed to the un- suspecting populace who watch in deep-frozen apathy as the hidden history is unveiled.”

In an interview with radio program Guns and Butter, Hoffman stated:

“The Revelation of the Method actually comes from my mentor, James Shelby Downard. I met him in Saint Petersburg, Florida in the mid-1970s and he was a very unusual man. He walked the razor edge between genius and eccentricity, but he had a mind where he was able to see and detect patterns. And also, he had an historian’s mind in terms of the research that he did, and he was the one that set me on this path of the Revelation of the Method. He also called it “Must Be” or “The Making Manifest of All that is Hidden.”

Some researchers of the so-called “Revelation of the Method” also believe there is a spiritual or religious element of the practice. They believe that by sharing clues or foreknowledge of their plans, the elitists somehow absolve themselves of wrong doing in the eyes of their Creator.

COVID-19

This bring us full circle to COVID-19 and claims of predictive programming in various media which foreshadowed the claims of a worldwide pandemic, and the subsequent authoritarian measures.

For example, the 1981 novel “The Eyes of Darkness” by Dean Koontz talks about a deadly virus used as a biological weapon named Wuhan-400. There’s also the 2011 film Contagion with a story of a deadly pandemic involving a virus originating from a bat and social distancing.

In an interview with The Washington Post, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns said, “It is sad, and it is frustrating… It is also surreal to me that people from all over the world write to me asking how I knew it would involve a bat or how I knew the term “social distancing.” I didn’t have a crystal ball — I had access to great expertise. So, if people find the movie to be accurate, it should give them confidence in the public health experts who are out there right now trying to guide us.”

Perhaps the most striking example of potential predictive programming, or a coincidence, if you prefer, is the film Songbird. The film’s IMDB description states:

“In 2024 a pandemic ravages the world and its cities. Centering on a handful of people as they navigate the obstacles currently hindering society: disease, martial law, quarantine, and vigilantes.”

The wikipedia description further outlines the similarities to what would unfold in 2020 and 2021:

“By 2024, the COVID-19 Coronavirus has been mutated into COVID-23 and the world is in its fourth Quarantine year. In the United States, the nation’s government is converted into a fascist police state and the people are required to take temperature checks on their cell phones while those infected with COVID-23 are taken from their homes against their will and forced into quarantine camps, also known as “Q-Zones” or concentration camps, where some fight back against the brutal restrictions. In these camps, the infected are left to die or forcibly get better. “

While it’s odd enough that a film came out in 2020 “inspired” by the COVID-19 event, it’s even more unnerving knowing the film included scenes of “immunity passports” using cell phones, forced quarantines and lockdowns of the vast majority of the population, and even a black market for the digital passports.

The timing of the filming is also a bit difficult to understand considering the fact that most of the world was experiencing lockdowns. The film makers claim they had their first call about the project on March 14, 2020, around the time the world was learning about the COVID-19 situation. They claim by June, major actors like Demi Moore had been cast in their roles, with production beginning in Los Angeles on July 8, 2020.

By August 3, 2020, the film wrapped, making it the first film to be shot in L.A. during lockdown. While the public was forced to stay inside, and work from home, Hollywood actors and a crew of 40 people were allowed to continue working on their film. The film was eventually released on December 11, 2020 and has received very poor reviews.

If there is any predictive programming in Songbird, it might relate to events yet to come. For example, the movie takes place in 2024, with a virus known as COVID-23 rampaging the planet.

What does this mean for our future? Should we live in fear of what might come?

In the film’s version of events, things do not end well. While the young couple in love manages to acquire blackmarket passports and escape to somewhere more free, the rest of their family and friends remain prisoners of their governments. The rest of the people shown in the film continue to live in the bio-fascist tyrannical nightmare.

Whether predictive programming is true, or simply a matter of coincidence and confirmation bias, we should not allow ourselves to live in fear. However, we should do everything in our power to make sure these fantasy worlds do not become our reality.

Digital Authoritarianism: AI Surveillance Signals the Death of Privacy

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.” ― Philip K. Dick

Nothing is private.

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.

Nothing that was once private is protected.

We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.

AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.

Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.

As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.

It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.

Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen observed that “before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Who could have predicted that 50 years after George Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel 1984, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

Yet that is exactly what has come to pass.

After 9/11, Rosen found that “people were happy to give up privacy without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. More concerned about feeling safe than actually being safe, they demanded the construction of vast technological architectures of surveillance even though the most empirical studies suggested that the proliferation of surveillance cameras had ‘no effect on violent crime’ or terrorism.”

In the decades following 9/11, a massive security-industrial complex arose that was fixated on militarization, surveillance, and repression.

Surveillance is the key.

We’re being watched everywhere we go. Speed cameras. Red light cameras. Police body cameras. Cameras on public transportation. Cameras in stores. Cameras on public utility poles. Cameras in cars. Cameras in hospitals and schools. Cameras in airports.

We’re being recorded at least 50 times a day.

It’s estimated that there are upwards of 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. alone, second only to China.

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

Yet it’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, microbiomes, scent, gait, heartbeat, breathing, behaviors—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.

As one AI surveillance advocate proclaimed, “Surveillance is no longer only a watchful eye, but a predictive one as well.” For instance, Emotion AI, an emerging technology that is gaining in popularity, uses facial recognition technology “to analyze expressions based on a person’s faceprint to detect their internal emotions or feelings, motivations and attitudes.” China claims its AI surveillance can already read facial expressions and brain waves in order to determine the extent to which members of the public are grateful, obedient and willing to comply with the Communist Party.

This is the slippery slope that leads to the thought police.

The technology is already being used “by border guards to detect threats at border checkpoints, as an aid for detection and diagnosis of patients for mood disorders, to monitor classrooms for boredom or disruption, and to monitor human behavior during video calls.”

For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state.

This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.

The short answer: they have become one and the same entity. The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state, which has shifted into high gear with the help of artificial intelligence technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic helped to further centralize digital power in the hands of the government at the expense of the citizenry’s privacy rights.

“From cameras that identify the faces of passersby to algorithms that keep tabs on public sentiment online, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools are opening new frontiers in state surveillance around the world.” So begins the Carnegie Endowment’s report on AI surveillance note. “Law enforcement, national security, criminal justice, and border management organizations in every region are relying on these technologies—which use statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, and big data analytics—to monitor citizens.”

In the hands of tyrants and benevolent dictators alike, AI surveillance is the ultimate means of repression and control, especially through the use of smart city/safe city platforms, facial recognition systems, and predictive policing. These technologies are also being used by violent extremist groups, as well as sex, child, drug, and arms traffickers for their own nefarious purposes.

China, the role model for our dystopian future, has been a major force in deploying AI surveillance on its own citizens, especially by way of its social credit systems, which it employs to identify, track and segregate its “good” citizens from the “bad.”

Social media credit scores assigned to Chinese individuals and businesses categorize them on whether or not they are worthy of being part of society. A real-name system—which requires people to use government-issued ID cards to buy mobile sims, obtain social media accounts, take a train, board a plane, or even buy groceries—coupled with social media credit scores ensures that those blacklisted as “unworthy” are banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among the activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.

In much the same way that Chinese products have infiltrated almost every market worldwide and altered consumer dynamics, China is now exporting its “authoritarian tech” to governments worldwide ostensibly in an effort to spread its brand of totalitarianism worldwide. In fact, both China and the United States have led the way in supplying the rest of the world with AI surveillance, sometimes at a subsidized rate.

This is how totalitarianism conquers the world.

While countries with authoritarian regimes have been eager to adopt AI surveillance, as the Carnegie Endowment’s research makes clear, liberal democracies are also “aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.”

Moreover, it’s easy to see how the China model for internet control has been integrated into the American police state’s efforts to flush out so-called anti-government, domestic extremists.

According to journalist Adrian Shahbaz’s in-depth report, there are nine elements to the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism when it comes to censoring speech and targeting activists: 1) dissidents suffer from persistent cyber attacks and phishing; 2) social media, websites, and messaging apps are blocked; 3) posts that criticize government officials are removed; 4) mobile and internet access are revoked as punishment for activism; 5) paid commentators drown out government criticism; 6) new laws tighten regulations on online media; 7) citizens’ behavior monitored via AI and surveillance tools; 9) individuals regularly arrested for posts critical of the government; and 9) online activists are made to disappear.

You don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship and AI surveillance.

The danger posed by the surveillance state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law-abider alike.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

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

In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.

No one is spared.

As Elise Thomas writes for Wired: “New surveillance tech means you’ll never be anonymous again.”

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whomever we wanted, buy whatever we wanted, think whatever we wanted, go wherever we wanted, feel whatever we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants, sold to government agencies, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

Tread cautiously: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day AI surveillance state.

Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, AI technology and militaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before Philip K. Dick’s rules for survival become our governing reality: “If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”

Joe Biden’s Secret War in Ukraine

Posted on July 29, 2022 by Reid Mukai

American soldiers are already “boots on the ground”

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

The White House keeps insisting that it will not directly involve American soldiers in the war in Ukraine, but it keeps taking steps that will inevitably lead to a large-scale open combat role for the US against Russia. Among the most recent moves to increase the pressure on the Kremlin, Biden revealed at a NATO summit meeting in Madrid on June 29^th that the US will establish a permanent headquarters in Poland for the Fifth Army Corps, maintain an additional rotational brigade of thousands of troops in Romania and bolster other deployments in the Baltic states. Also, the number of US troops in Europe, currently approaching 100,000, will be increased. Biden also was pleased to learn that Turkey had been enticed to drop its objection to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

On the way to the NATO summit aboard Air Force One, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan advised that “By the end of the summit what you will see is a more robust, more effective, more combat credible, more capable and more determined force posture to take account of a more acute and aggravated Russian threat.” Presumably Sullivan was reading from a prepared script, but the objective surely seemed to be to heighten tension with Moscow rather than attempt to reduce it and come to some kind of diplomatic settlement.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also did his bit. In an astonishing display of derriere kissing, he responded that the new US force posture commitments were demonstrative of Biden’s strong leadership. What Stoltenberg did not mention was that Biden has been lying for some time about the presence of US military personnel in Ukraine. He let the cat out of the bag back in March, when he told troops belonging to the 82^nd Airborne division in Poland that they would soon be going to Ukraine, observing that “You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see —” It was an admission that US forces are already in place inside Ukraine even though the White House quickly did damage control, asserting that the president continues to be opposed to American soldiers being directly engaged in the fighting. Biden also claimed that the US was working to “keep the massacre [of Ukrainians] from continuing.” Again, the language was hardly designed to make some room for a possible accommodation with Russia to negotiate an end to the fighting.

And now there is a New York Times report entitled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say: A secretive operation involving US Special Operations forces hints at the scale of the effort to assist Ukraine’s still outgunned military.”

The article describes a more active US role in Ukraine than the Biden Administration has been willing to admit publicly. Back in February, before intervened in Ukraine, the US reportedly withdrew its own 150 military instructors, many of whom were training Ukrainian soldiers on newly acquired American produced weapons. However, some Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary operatives and special ops troops continued their service in the country secretly, directing most of the intelligence flow the US is sharing with Ukrainian forces. In addition to that, special ops soldiers from Washington’s NATO allies have been managing the movement of weapons and equipment into Ukraine and providing some specialized training. It has also been reported that British SAS commandos are actually guarding President Volodymyr Zelensky. The NYT specifies, citing American and other Western officials, that the soldiers and CIA officers are currently not on the front lines with Ukrainian troops. Also according to the Times, even though the US and NATO member states have not acknowledged the presence of their paramilitaries soldiers in operational roles in Ukraine, Russia and other intelligence services around the world are aware of this.

The New York Times report appears to be generally correct, though it does omit some details, some of which I have been hearing from former colleagues in the intelligence services. There has been considerable overt training at the Grafenwoehr German army base as well as at the Ramstein US Air Base to familiarize the Ukrainians with the new weapons arriving. Other NATO countries are also participating in the training. Meanwhile, the cadres of special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel operating primarily in western Ukraine are not in uniform and many of them are working under various contrived cover designations, including sometimes loose affiliations with foreign embassies and NGOs. There are also a conventional CIA Station, a group from the National Security Agency and a Military Attache’s office in the recently reopened US Embassy in Kiev.

All of the above means that Biden and other western leaders have been dissimulating regarding their active participation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Apart from his possible gaffe, Biden will not admit that there are American boots already on the ground, but they are there and are playing a major role in both logistics and intelligence sharing. The potential downside for the president could come when some of these soldiers in mufti get killed or, worse, captured and start to talk about their role.

Retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, observes that deploying plausibly deniable non-uniformed personnel “is completely typical of the initial stages of a US-backed long war, and for long-term political manipulation of the target country. This is the future that neoconservative ‘strategists’ in DC and their British and European allies imagine for Ukraine. Rather than a negotiated conclusion, with a new Ukrainian role as a neutral and productive country, independent of both Russian and US political influences, the US government and CIA see Ukraine as an expendable yet useful satrap in its competition with the Russian Federation.”

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson sees the activity in stark terms, while also commenting that the CIA has not won a semi-clandestine insurgent war in forty years. He observes that “Ukraine is a proxy; the West is trying to destroy Russia, it’s that simple. It would be one thing if Russia was the most evil, oppressive, authoritarian regime in the world. It’s nowhere even close. Even though the West keeps trying to portray Russia as such. The fact of the matter is, the West wants the resources that Russia has and it wants to control Russia. [But] Russia is not about to be controlled.”

In other words, Washington might be seeking an unending war entangling Russia and limiting its options globally. The Biden Administration has staked its reputation and possible political future on enabling Ukraine to survive without succumbing to Russian territorial demands. It is a risky and even dangerous policy, both in practical terms and politically. The persistence of the Ukrainians in their defense is largely a product of US and Western Europe guarantees that they will do all that is necessary to support Zelensky and his regime, which is already seeking $750 billion in aid for “reconstruction.” If western military casualties begin to surface, the political support for the Ukraine war will begin to fade in Washington and elsewhere and there will be consequences in the upcoming midterm US elections in November.

A final comment on the Times piece is in response to the question why it has appeared at all at the present time. The mainstream media has been a cheerleader for aggressive US support of Ukraine and Zelensky, but now it is beginning to step back from that position, as have also the Washington Post and other media outlets. Perhaps they are becoming convinced that the game plan being promoted by Washington and its European allies is unlikely to succeed at great cost to the respective economies. Larry Johnson puts it this way: “I think the purpose of this article coming out now is just to lay the groundwork for why we can’t put or shouldn’t put any more US military personnel or even CIA personnel inside Ukraine because continuing to put US personnel…inside Ukraine to train is becoming too risky because of Russia’s success on the battlefield.” One might also add that it is exceptionally dangerous. A misstep or even a deliberate false flag coming from either side could easily make the war go nuclear.

Saturday Matinee: Theaters of War

Posted on July 23, 2022 by Reid Mukai

A documentary about the U.S. military’s editorial control over thousands of Hollywood’s films and television programs.

Source: Media Education Foundation

If you’ve seen Top Gun or Transformers, you may have wondered: Does all of that military machinery on screen come with strings attached? Does the military actually get a crack at the script? Theaters of War digs deep into a vast new trove of recently released internal government documents to bring the answers to these questions into sharp focus. Traveling across America, filmmaker and media scholar Roger Stahl engages an array of other researchers, bewildered veterans, PR insiders, and industry producers willing to talk. In unsettling and riveting detail, he discovers how the military and CIA have pushed official narratives while systematically scrubbing scripts of war crimes, corruption, racism, sexual assault, coups, assassinations, and torture. From The Longest Day to Lone Survivor, Iron Man to Iron Chef, and James Bond to Jack Ryan, Theaters of War uncovers an alternative “cinematic universe” that stands as one of the great Pentagon PR coups of our time. As these activities gain new public scrutiny, new questions arise: How have they managed to fly under the radar for so long? And where do we go from here?

Watch Theaters of War on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/12327337

The Empire Is Showing More And More Of Its True Face

Posted on July 15, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Genocide walrus John Bolton outright admitted to planning foreign coups with the US government in conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday. That’s coups, plural.

While arguing that the Capitol riot on January 6th of last year was not an attempted coup but rather just Trump stumbling around trying to look after his own interests, Bolton hastened to pull authority on the matter when Tapper suggested that he might not be correct about how coups work.

“I disagree with that,” Bolton said. “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here, but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [Trump] did.”

Places. Plural.

Tapper just let Bolton’s remark slide like he didn’t just admit to something extraordinarily fiendish, but did eventually follow up with a request that the former National Security Advisor elaborate.

“I do want to ask a follow up,” Tapper said. “When we were talking about what is capable, or what you need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited your expertise having planned coups.”

“I’m not going to get into the specifics,” replied Bolton with a chuckle.

“Successful coups?” Tapper asked.

“Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book,” Bolton answered. “And it turned out not to be successful – not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable.”

“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me, though,” Tapper responded.

“I’m sure there is,” Bolton said, grinning like he just finished boiling a puppy.

Tapper pursued the matter no further, because he is a propagandist first and a journalist second, and he would be acutely aware that Bolton was saying things that you are not supposed to admit to on television.

Bolton’s sole admission to coup plotting runs counter to his comments about the US government’s failed attempt to oust President Nicolas Maduro while he was facilitating that bizarre operation under the Trump administration, telling reporters in 2019 that the empire’s Venezuela shenanigans were “clearly not a coup.”

Thread🧵

Facebook has hired DOZENS of ex-CIA + other govt agents to run its content moderation, security + trust & safety operations, meaning they affect what the world sees in their FB feeds.

Read my new @MintPressNews investigation into what this means https://t.co/7g43tywNgR
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) July 12, 2022

In other examples of the US empire just rearing its ugly head right out in broad daylight, an excellent new report by Alan MacLeod with Mintpress News shows that Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta has been hiring dozens of people who previously worked in the US intelligence cartel to help regulate what content gets seen on the social media giant’s platforms. Some were hired from straight out of the CIA or had (officially) left the agency very recently.

The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media. This trend of openly hiring US intelligence veterans to help teach the public what thoughts to think about the world began a few years ago in the legacy media, and now we’re seeing it in the new media as well.

This is part of a broader trend in which many of the ugly things the US empire used to do in secret it now does openly with the aid of propaganda spin. In addition to attempting coups right out in the open as we saw in Venezuela and just giving intelligence insiders positions of influence within both new and old media institutions, you’ve got things like the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly.

We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Ukraine to Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang, to the imperial propaganda firm known as Bellingcat. Rather than manipulate world narratives and foment discontent from behind the veil of hidden identities and cutouts as in CIA tactics of old, NED just manipulates them openly by pouring funds into narrative management operations which benefit the empire while framing it as promoting democracy and human rights.

To further #humanrights & human dignity for all people in China, the National Endowment for Democracy has funded Uyghur groups since 2004. #NEDemocracy #HumanRightsDay https://t.co/C0LJEyWxq1 pic.twitter.com/OqZdehdxXN
— NEDemocracy (@NEDemocracy) December 10, 2020

Then you’ve got things like American officials telling the press that the US government has been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine, Biden administration officials saying the proxy war in Ukraine is being used to “weaken” Russia and that they are fine with US brinkmanship with Russia causing global recession and hunger, and western officials telling the press that Ukraine is crawling with CIA personnel.

What the empire has found is that you don’t need to hide as much from public visibility as long as you can manipulate what people think they’re seeing. If the public is sufficiently propagandized and consent has been adequately manufactured, you can get away with just proclaiming some random guy the president of a foreign country and seeing if you can manipulate the rest of the world into playing along with you.

If your narrative control is strong enough, you can even keep the empire running smoothly when information gets out into the open that you’d rather stay hidden. Very often these days major stories about imperial malfeasance will come out that simply have no impact, either because the mainstream news media unite to ignore them or because they spin those revelations as coming from someone bad or not containing important information.

People tend to overrate the power of the US war machine and underrate the power of the US propaganda machine. While the US military finds itself losing a war to the Taliban, the awesome power of its propaganda engine has people marching in perfect alignment with the will of the oligarchic empire.

When I was in an abusive relationship, the more ground down and submitted I became the more my abuser would flaunt his abusiveness in the plain light of day. Toward the end he was just outright admitting he was a sociopath and a manipulator and openly telling me he was going to do monstrous things to me before he did them, because he was that confident that he had me wrapped around his finger.

Luckily, he was wrong. And hopefully the empire is wrong as it makes this same calculation with all of us.

UNCONSCIOUS BECOMING CONSCIOUS: UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF NEGATIVE FORCES

Posted on July 10, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘What people of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must learn to recognise is the fully conscious struggle against the evil rising up in the evolution of humanity.’ ~Rudolf Steiner, 18 November 1917

According to Austrian metaphysician Rudolf Steiner, the task of humanity in this epoch is to comprehend the relation of good and evil; especially, the human choice between good and evil, and the challenge of evil to make humanity more aware of spirit-consciousness. In our present age, we are to experience the negative counterforces in order to move through to greater development. Steiner stated that the ‘forces of evil’ exist in the world so that humanity might, at the appropriate time, break through into a ‘life of the spirit.’[1]

The presence of the counterforces gives humanity an opportunity to gain insight into the human condition, as well as the life conditions in this earthly domain. By having some understanding of the intention of opposing forces, a person is better prepared for continuing their own journey. That is, we each can learn from our encounters with negating forces; we can take these encounters as an opportunity to connect more strongly with our own force of will. In the words of philosopher Sergei O. Prokofieff:

In addition to working intensely on oneself, especially with regard to eradicating falsehood of any kind and all aspects of fear, together with all overt and secret inclinations towards materialism – something different is required, namely, a working together of human beings in the social realm that is based on spiritual principles.[2]

In advocating the coming together of spiritually minded people, it is not our responsibility to be concerned with those who Steiner called the ‘soulless’ ones. Rather than being pulled into the influence of such people (with their lower vibrational energies), it is more beneficial for a person to transform their immediate environment into a more harmonious energy. Another way of saying this is that the presence of negativity is to be transmuted into that which is not negative or counterproductive. This is akin to an alchemical procedure.

The 21^st century is a transformatory epoch, where we shall have to face our shadows and deal with them. Without this acknowledgement, and cleansing, we will be dominated by the forces of stagnation. Later, when this catharsis or ‘cleansing’ has been achieved, we may collectively move into a stage of transmutation where the negative is transmuted into constructive forces. The spirit of our times, therefore, is one of transmutation and transformation. And until counterforces are transmuted, there is no real or lasting transformation. This ‘transmutation of the negative/shadow’ is the leitmotif of our epoch, and it cannot be done without passing through ‘the valley of the shadow of death;’[3] experiencing and, above all, understanding both the forces of negation and those of development. As author Terry Broadman writes:

In saying that, we immediately meet a paradox, because we need to recognise that without the resistance posed to our development by these counterforces, there would be no human freedom possible and therefore, ultimately no possibility for love either. No great drama, especially the great drama of the story of mankind, is possible without the challenge from forces of darkness within us.[4]

By casting light upon those forces that oppose human freedom, we may also see that, somewhat paradoxically, it is these same forces that make freedom possible. And yet, we need to gain this realization so we can know what we are up against.

Entropic counterforces attempt to control and manage human thinking and cultural narratives through arid materialism – the forces of limitation, indifference, rational logic, and consumption, for example. Such arid forces seek to constrain and contain human thinking by limiting it to the physical domain. That is, by negation and denial of the metaphysical background to life; a worldview that recognises no spirit-consciousness or genuine inspiration from beyond the material realm. It can be said that such counter-evolutionary forces wish to ensure that humanity remains at the level of the ‘lower ego;’ that is, our base level ‘everyday’ selves, ruled by passions, possessions, promises, and pseudo-truths. We have already seen how modern life is rife with the self-centred materialist concerned only for their physical pleasures and gains.

This is the false-polished underbelly of a capitalist-fed globalist agenda. This is the sphere where the tightly controlled culture industry provides ultimate dissonance through glamour-distraction. Cacophonous music, jarring rhythms, and discordant lyrics appeal to the basest impulses within the tranced modern listener. It is little wonder then that there is resistance to those people who wish to develop their inner senses and modes of perception. The everyday environment is not conducive to the development of spirit-consciousness. And yet, it is the role of awakened individuals to assist the unconscious in becoming conscious.

Entropic forces can be regarded as forces of hindrance. For various reasons, they have not fulfilled their developmental potentials; they have faltered in their path, and thus ‘fallen by the wayside.’ And as wayside creatures, they hinder and disrupt all other wanderers and walkers upon the path. It can be said that they belong to our realm but are no longer upon our developmental path. Such counterforces are not creative; that is, they are not a creative principle in the universe, and so they need to make use of – or usurp – existing impulses to be able to act in the physical world. Such forces operate by distorting, and demonising, other processes and/or vessels in order to function.

We need to be aware of those beliefs, idealisms, organizations, groupings, etc, that show a deliberate antipathy and hostility towards aspects of spirit-consciousness and the metaphysical. These may be collective, and/or concealed, forces aiming to divert humanity’s path of growth. The materialistic route is a caricature of what now needs to be the human being’s present state. Total materialization, including the digital-virtual domains (such as the Metaverse) represent a paralysis of growth in spirit-consciousness. A total materialization of human consciousness is taking place across the world and is especially dominant within the technologically advanced nations.

Modern life has been turned upon itself to become a parody. Nothing can be taken at face value for the outer expressions have become corrupted. Pseudo-truths are the caricature of relative truths; deep fakes are the travesty of genuine selves; and the lines between knowing and unknowing have been deliberately smeared. The outer life, on its own, exists as a tarnished kingdom. The only thing to do is to extract oneself from this polluting sphere and to re-wire one’s alignments, attachments, and allegiances. In previous epochs, the human being’s inner authority was undermined by subjugating it to exterior bodies of authority – such as institutionalized religions.

When the masses moved out of illiteracy and became educated enough to read, research, and learn for themselves, the exterior forms of authority shifted from the sacred to the secular. Secular institutions came to regulate social norms, thinking patterns, and modes of accepted behaviour. In present times, as conscious awareness and perceptive understanding expands rapidly, the exterior bodies of authority are attempting to gain leverage by gaining interior access to our bodies and minds – what I have referred to as the new forms of biopower. These interventions into the physical integrity of the human being have serious consequences for the natural expression of spirit-consciousness. If the human vessel is unbalanced, or bio-chemically – or even genetically – interfered with, then the incarnated spirit-consciousness will have trouble in manifesting within the physical.

This intervention can be taken to the extreme through advancements in the biological-genetic sciences. The process of human cloning is a further step in this domain. If a physical body is cloned, then it is basically manufactured – it has not been brought into life through an organic birthing process (regardless of how the fertilized egg was delivered into the female body). In a metaphysical sense, it can be said that the physical body is not capable of receiving spirit-consciousness for it is not vibrationally aligned. It is an empty vessel, in a spiritual sense. From this, it may be inferred that other entities or forces could inhabit such a physical vessel. Why is human science increasingly moving towards the automation, the techno-hybrid, the slicing and dicing with DNA and human genetics? In this, there is a shift toward splintering the human being from its metaphysical origins and from the domain of spirit. If anything, this is the definition of evil – the isolation of the physical from its metaphysical source.

The counter-developmental forces are acting against the human mind (psyche), the heart (emotions), and the body (will). These three aspects can be related to imagination, inspiration, and intuition. And these three aspects have been targets for manipulation for quite some time. In our current age, the imagination is targeted through the media, video games, propaganda, digital life, and augmented reality, for example. The faculties of inspiration are being distorted through a controlled culture-industry (music, literature, art). And the intuition is deadened through a weakening of the human will as well as interventions and violations against the physical body. All these forces aim to press down upon the human being in a way that increases its immersion in materiality whilst bringing forth more animalistic, or primitive drives. How much more difficult it is for spirit-consciousness to come into a life experience, only to find that everything is subordinated to a material perspective – a world that is almost oblivious to the reality of the spirit.

The more a person comes under the powers of this world, under the laws set within this materiality, the less a person can act from an inner place of personal and spiritual will. A human being can no longer truly become their essential self if they are wholly invested in a consensus reality that is averse to metaphysical truths. As Christ famously stated: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world.’ (John 18:36) Although not of this world, it must work in this world. Our point of interaction – participation and action – are within this world, yet our foundation does not originate from within this world. And this combination, this merger, is what creates a strength to be in this world and not to be worn down by it.

The expression of spirit-consciousness is a fusion – and the human being is the vessel (the receptor as well as the carrier). Being the carrier for that which is also beyond the physical means also that the person needs to strengthen their interior world – their inner environment. A fully exteriorized person is too much attached with events and influences of the material world, and this can become a hindrance. There needs to be enough capacity within each person to exercise internal creative imaginations so that received inspirations have a vessel, a protected space, in which to gestate before outward expression. A ‘new world’ can come into being, yet it must come through the human being and not to be forced upon it. This is why it is said that a new world is birthed rather than built. The outer actions may be that of building, yet the initial impulses are birthed from within. It is in this way that metaphysical influences can enter into the domain of the physical – through receptive individuals.

The act of transmuting counteractive forces into constructive ones requires that humanity shifts from a place of outward dominance, under the sway of external influences, and into spaces of inward receptivity to inspirational impulses. In this, it can be said that the transformative process is one of the unconscious becoming conscious.

Virtual Beauty, Virtual Freedom, Virtual Love: Is the Metaverse Our Future?

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

When is the last time you were outside in the morning to experience a glorious dawn? Or sat watching the sun set across the ocean horizon?

How do you feel when you touch the skin of someone you love? A grandparent, parent, lover or child?

Have you ever seen a spider’s web full of morning dew, or after the rain, when the sun is shining through the droplets in the web to reveal the flashing diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds hidden within?

Have you ever stood in a natural environment – a beach, desert, rainforest… – far from a city and noticed that strange and subtle feeling of freedom tremor through your body?

Have you ever marveled at the breath of wind that cools your face on a hot Summer’s day? Or been intoxicated by the smell of blossom in Spring?

Have you gaped in wonder at the birth of new life: a chick pecking out of its shell, a seed germinating or a baby being born?

Or paused to ponder the sheer magic of being alive yourself?

Or do you find life in the real physical world too constricting, painful, frightening and demanding: something from which you seek to escape, with some distraction or another (work, television, sport, a novel, a drug…), as often as you can?

Well, very soon now, we are promised, you will be able to escape reality far more effectively than those primitive means of distraction made possible previously. And far more effectively than even the outcomes promised in those dystopian novels.

So the fundamental questions we must ask ourselves are simple: Do you want real life, with all of the pains, sorrows, fear and fury that go along with beauty, freedom and love? Or do you believe what they tell us and want everything unpleasant to go away? Permanently. And to live in delusion thereafter, given synthetic versions of all of the pleasant feelings and experiences described above?

Remember the dialogue between the Savage and Mustapha Mond during the closing stages of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World?

‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’

‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’

‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’

‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may
happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’

There was a long silence.

‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.

Well, after nearly one hundred years, the dystopian future described by Huxley is almost upon us and, if we are to defeat it, we need a lot more ‘savages’ willing to forego the promised ‘comforts’.

Because if those who see themselves as our global masters get their way, we are about to enter a virtual world that will become more complete by the day and from which there will be no escape.

The Metaverse

Based on many years of effort, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has recently launched its plan to create our new all-digital world, called the ‘metaverse’. See ‘Defining and Building the Metaverse’.

So if you find natural phenomena – ranging from rainforests, beaches and weather variations to ill-health, danger and unhappiness – annoying, you will soon be able to escape them, compliments of the metaverse. Or so we are promised. And you won’t be troubled by anything resembling what might be called ‘free will’ either. You will be content to do as you are told, even more than you are content to do already. See ‘Terrified of Freedom: Why Most Human Beings are Embracing the Global Elite’s Technotyranny’.

After all, your mind will no longer be your own. And while the usual descriptions, written by elite agents, fail to mention it, a quick flash of metaverse-induced fear will make sure that you comply, whatever you are required to do. The point is this: You won’t be escaping all of those unpleasant feelings after all. They can just be used to control you more directly, to fulfill an elite-determined purpose. But that is a fact they are not advertising.

In their iconic hit song ‘In the Year 2525’, written in 1964 by Rick Evans and later recorded by he and Denny Zager to become a No.1. hit around the world in 1969, Evans captured key elements of what is already upon us somewhat ahead of the schedule mapped out in the song.

[Chorus 2]
In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pills you took today

[Chorus 3]
In the year 4545
Ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes
You won’t find a thing to chew
Nobody’s gonna look at you

[Chorus 4]
In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machine’s doing that for you

[Chorus 5]
In the year 6565
Ain’t gonna need no husband, won’t need no wife
You’ll pick your sons, pick your daughters too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
Whoa-oh-oh

So what is the Metaverse?

According to the WEF: ‘The metaverse is a future persistent and interconnected virtual environment where social and economic elements mirror reality. Users can interact with it and each other simultaneously across devices and immersive technologies while engaging with digital assets and property.’ See ‘Defining and Building the Metaverse’.

Moreover, ‘if technologists are right that 2022 will separate thinkers from builders, then last years’ technical advances will produce this year’s first steps towards making the metaverse a reality….

‘But from the perspective of the human experience, one development stands out above all others: extended reality (XR) technologies. These include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and brain-computer interfaces (BCI), which together position themselves as the next computing platforms in their own right.’

Nevertheless, it is clear that a precise definition of the term ‘metaverse’ (for a start: is it a product, service, place or moment in time?), upon which there is broad agreement even among those who routinely use the term, is yet to emerge. See ‘3 technologies that will shape the future of the metaverse – and the human experience’.

Having written that, here is one definition elaborated in the article above that reveals just how far some of those heavily involved in this work have become disconnected from any sense of themselves and, hence, reality: ‘Specifically, the metaverse is the moment at which our digital lives – our online identities, experiences, relationships, and assets – become more meaningful to us than our physical lives.’ The original quotation can be read here: ‘Spheres of Self: Performativity and Parasociality in the Metaverse’.

And, as Cathy Li describes it, the metaverse is ‘most useful as a lens through which to view ongoing digital transformation. The belief is that virtual worlds, incorporating connected devices, blockchain and other tech, will be so commonplace that the metaverse will become an extension of reality itself.’ See ‘Who will govern the metaverse?’

Let me reiterate two points from the paragraphs immediately above: ‘our digital lives… become more meaningful to us than our physical lives.’ And ‘the metaverse will become an extension of reality itself.’

Really?

While statements such as these reveal the breathtaking level of insanity that underpins this entire enterprise – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – it does not mean that we are not under enormous threat. Just as vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, by some insane ‘logic’, are supposed to provide us with ‘security’ while actually threatening the existence of all life on Earth, the metaverse is part of a substantial package of measures that will reduce human life to one not worth living.

Why? Well, as noted by authors such as Tom Valovic: The metaverse is one element in the path to implementing technocratic governance over all of humanity.

‘As Planet Earth and our physical world continue to experience massive biospheric degradation and disruption, the elites that are now in many cases pulling the strings of governance at the country level are heading for the exit doors. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are exploring the realm of space and Musk has a Mars mission planned. Globally oriented elites… looked out for themselves which is what they do best….

‘Paralleling the notion of space flight as a form of existential escapism is the metaverse. So what if our cities are crumbling, infrastructures falling apart, and the biosphere is seriously degrading? So what if our wasteful consumer-driven lifestyle has created unprecedented levels of pollution so extensive that it’s now the number one cause of health problems globally? No problem… we’ll just kick back and don our Meta headsets (or worse get a brain implant) and escape into an artificially fabricated world that lets us turn our back on the massive ecological and environmental problems we now face.’ See ‘Why We Should Reject Mark Zuckerberg’s Dehumanizing Vision of a “Metaverse”’.

‘Education’ in the Metaverse

Of course, the metaverse is deeply interwoven with other components of their plan, such as those in relation to what they call ‘education’, which is more accurately described as the process by which young transhuman slaves are programmed to perform their function in the technocratic economy that is being imposed upon us. Of course, ‘education’ sounds better than ‘virtual programming of young transhuman slaves’ so, in the interests of not raising obvious concerns, the word ‘education’ has been used.

As noted by Dr. Michael Nevradakis, discussions on this subject at the recent gathering of the World Economic Forum emphasized the importance of virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with participants touting the purported educational and economic benefits that would derive from use of these technologies in the classroom by helping, according to Dr. Ali Saeed Bin Harmal Al Dhaheri & Dr. Mohamad Ali Hamade, to ‘increase accessibility, enhance quality and improve the affordability of education globally’. See ‘Experiential learning and VR will reshape the future of education’.

However, as Nevradakis also noted, these discussions had ‘little to say about the need to protect children’s data or digital identities – or, for that matter, providing the types of early-life experiences children require as part of their socialization.’ See ‘Future of Education? WEF’s Vision – Heavy on Virtual Reality and AI Technologies, Light on Privacy Concerns’.

Of course, there is no need for concern about the ‘early-life experiences’ of those young transhumans who are being programmed for decades of servitude prior to being terminated when they are no longer functional.

Beyond claimed educational and economic benefits, however, some authors argue that digitalizing education can play a role in easing pressures on the environment and climate. How so? Nevradakis again: ‘Indeed, the WEF said the use of “textbooks, notebooks and pencils as critical learning tools” is on the way out, due to “environmental pressures and COP26 goals (from the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference),” which “will drive the digitalizing of education streams.”’ See ‘Future of Education? WEF’s Vision – Heavy on Virtual Reality and AI Technologies, Light on Privacy Concerns’

But it is clearly delusional to suggest that the use of textbooks, notebooks and pencils has greater adverse impact on the environment and climate than the environmental cost and climate impact of producing sophisticated technology for each student. And despite claims of ‘improved affordability’ it is equally delusional to ignore the economic and social cost, for example, to the child ‘laborers’ in the Congo working in appalling conditions to extract strategic minerals to produce this technology. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

Besides, as touched on below, education is already a monstrous experience, destroying the Selfhood of the child so that they become submissively obedient. Removing the bulk of education’s remaining social component by technologizing it can only make it even worse.

Babies in the Metaverse

Then again, maybe ‘children’ will no longer be put through school. It simply won’t be necessary because children, for transhuman slaves at least, will no longer exist.

By 2070, the metaverse will offer you virtual babies, ‘environmentally-friendly digital children’, according to UK artificial intelligence (AI) expert Catriona Campbell. ‘Parents will see and interact with their offspring through next-generation AR [augmented reality] glasses and haptic gloves.’ The latter devices enable users to experience ‘a realistic sense of touch when handling virtual or holographic objects’. As a bonus, these children take up no space, cost nothing to feed and remain healthy, if that is what you want, for as long as they are programmed to ‘live’. A subscription might cost as little as $25 each month.

And if this seems like a monumental leap out of reality to you, Campbell also believes that ‘within 50 years technology will have advanced to such an extent that babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world…. As the metaverse evolves, I can see virtual children becoming an accepted and fully embraced part of society in much of the developed world.’ See ‘“Virtual babies” who grow up in real time will be commonplace by 2070, expert predicts’.

That’s right, Campbell is claiming that ‘within 50 years… babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world’! Pause a moment. How does that sound to you?

Just in case you cannot wait, you are welcome to start using early versions now. See, for example, Virtual Baby, Adopt a Virtual Baby and My Virtual Child.

Oh, and by the way, you won’t be having sex either, whether for reproductive purposes or otherwise. You will prefer virtual sex. See ‘Sex And Pornography Aim To Strike Gold In The Metaverse’.

Critiquing the Metaverse

Beyond the criticisms already noted above, there are a great many other criticisms of the metaverse and the role it will play in the overall elite program being implemented under what the WEF calls its ‘Great Reset’. This comprehensive program will transform human society and human life for those people left alive after the eugenics component has been fully implemented. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.

If you like, you can read a little more about what the masters of this metaverse intend for us, as well as critiques of it, by authors such as these.

Derrick Broze: While some people ‘may not intend for The Metaverse to become an all encompassing reality that supersedes physical reality, for the Zuckerbergs, Microsofts, and WEFs of the world, that is exactly what they intend for The Metaverse…. For the billionaire class and their puppet organizations, such as the WEF and the United Nations, the Metaverse offers up the potential to commandeer all life into digital prisons where the people can be charged for services and products in the digital realm…. With the people of the world safely tucked into their digital beds, the Technocrats could complete their total takeover of natural resources, the economy, and humanity itself.’ See ‘The Great Narrative And The Metaverse, Part 2: Will The Metaverse End Human Freedom?’

Dr. Michael Nevradakis: ‘Who will govern the “metaverse”?… According to the WEF, “real-world governance models” represent one possible option for metaverse governance. However, far from referring to constitutionally defined institutions of governance, with checks and balances, the WEF cites Facebook’s “Oversight Board” as an example of such a “real-world governance model.”’ See ‘WEF Launches “Metaverse” Initiative, Predicts Digital Lives Will Become “More Meaningful to Us Than Our Physical Lives”’.

But an earlier World Economic Forum report from its Global Redesign Initiative was more blunt: ‘The report postulates that a globalized world is best managed by a coalition of multinational corporations, governments (including through the UN system) and select civil society organizations (CSOs).’ See Sustainable Development Goals and Human Rights p. 209, citing ‘Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World’.

So if you believe that you and I are destined to have a say in the metaverse that is unfolding, you would be wise to keep investigating. Elite proposals are invariably very distant from the type of governance models usually considered by ‘ordinary’ people in a multiplicity of contexts, where the emphasis is on facilitating widespread grassroots participation, not rule by technocrats.

You can read considerably more about what our technocratic overlords have in mind – including the existing trade in such things as virtual real estate, virtual clothing and virtual art – and what is wrong with it, in the articles on the metaverse published by Patrick Wood on ‘Technocracy News & Trends’: ‘Metaverse’. And there is more in articles such as these: ‘The Top 10 Creepiest and Most Dystopian Things Pushed by the World Economic Forum (WEF)’ and ‘How Our Lives Could Soon Look”: The World Economic Forum Posts An Insane Dystopian Video’.

And here’s another simple issue to ponder. Remember how I mentioned above that a quick flash of metaverse-induced fear would ensure that you complied with an elite-determined directive, how does the idea of eating bugs, processed sewage and human flesh appeal? Well, given that your mind will no longer be your own, what appeals now, or doesn’t, will be irrelevant once the metaverse is determining how you perceive things. See ‘Canadian Company Pledges To Produce TWO BILLION BUGS Per Year For Human Consumption’ and ‘Will You Eat Cultured Meat Grown From Human Cells?’

You will eat ‘Soylent Green’ because that is what the program tells you.

So why are people embracing the Metaverse?

In a recent article in which he described taking his son to watch a film through 3D glasses, Charles Eisenstein noted ‘The on-screen reality was so vivid, stimulating and intense that it made the real world seem boring by comparison.’ See ‘Transhumanism and the Metaverse’.

How can this happen?

Because we terrorize our children into submissive obedience, devoid of the unique and powerful individual Self they were gifted by evolution at birth. See ‘Why Violence?’,‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ Why? Essentially to keep them performing tasks that bore them senseless throughout their school and working life.

Fundamentally, this terrorization works because it compels our children into suppressing awareness of how they feel. As a result, only the most intense experiences register emotionally: The capacity to experience a subtle feeling has been lost. And without this capacity, they cannot develop into the powerful, courageous Self-willed individuals that evolution intended. They are human relics. Ready and willing to be turned into a transhuman slave in the unconscious hope they will be finally able to experience, in the metaverse, what was taken from them in the real world as a child.

But they won’t get that experience, even in the metaverse. It is not what the elite has in mind for us.

Resisting the Metaverse

Of course, the metaverse is just one feature of the Global Elite agenda that is being imposed upon us. And it is not enough to resist individual features of the ‘Great Reset’ program. We must strategically resist its most fundamental elements so that the entire agenda is defeated.

If you are inclined to join those strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.

In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 17 languages (Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.

If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).

And if you want a child who is powerfully able to perceive the dysfunctional lure of the metaverse, and is able to join you in resisting it, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

CONCLUSION

So, for just a little longer, the choice is yours.

You can live your life with all its challenges and problems, joys and achievements. Or you can live the virtual life that someone else programmed for you, including whatever comes with it that they didn’t tell you about.

In short, like Neo in the film ‘The Matrix’, you have a choice. You can choose the Blue Pill and proceed to live in a synthesized, fictional, computer-generated world. Or you take the Red Pill and, in this case, join the fight with those of us determined to defend the real world and avert descent into the metaverse.

But you must make that choice while you still have free will.

So you must make that choice soon.

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

The Age of Discord

Posted on July 6, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

It’s very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.

Today’s topic echoes Peter Turchin’s 2016 book, Ages of Discord, which I have often referenced in blog posts.

I’ll also discuss two other books I’ve often referenced, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker and The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hackett Fischer.

Turchin proposes repeating cycles of history of social integration (people finding reasons to cooperate) and disintegration (people finding reasons to not cooperate).

Clearly, we’re in a disintegrative stage.

Fischer proposed a repeating cycle of history in which humans expand their numbers and economy to consume all available resources.

Once all the low-hanging fruit has been consumed, scarcities arise, pushing prices above what commoners can afford, and the result is economic stagnation and social/political revolution.

Either humans exploit a new energy source at scale to provide for the larger population and higher consumption per person, or the population and consumption decline to fit available resources.

Parker covers the mutually reinforcing climate, political, social and economic crises of the 17th century. A long cycle of cold, wet summers reduced crop yields, leading to hunger and strife.

Parker also identifies another cause of the tumultuous, war-plagued 1600s: political leaders had consolidated too much power, enabling them to pursue disastrous wars without any restraint from competing domestic social-political interests.

Clearly, we’re in Fischer’s stage of overshoot and resource scarcity and Parker’s extremes of centralized power free to pursue catastrophic wars of choice.

In the 1600s, those launching wars reckoned a clean, decisive victory was within easy reach. In every case, the wars dragged on inconclusively or generated even wider conflicts.

In the end, all the wars were settled diplomatically, not by military victory. The military gains were nil while the destruction was widespread and devastating.

Fischer details how poorly humans respond to scarcity and higher prices, also known as inflation or more. accurately, as the decline in purchasing power of money and labor. As scarcities and higher prices take their toll, society unravels: crime and social disorder accelerate.

What we’re seeing in real time is a “circle the wagons” mentality of weeding out everyone but the True Believers in every movement. Litmus tests are handy for this test: answer wrong on any question and you’re cast out: heretic!

It’s not enough to tick one “progressive” or “conservative” box; you have to tick them all or you’re a heretic who cannot be trusted. If you leave one box unticked, you might untick a few more in the days ahead.

This puts pressure on everyone to declare their loyalty to the “party” even if the loyalty is just for show. This dishonesty pleases those demanding every box be ticked but this forced loyalty creates an illusion of solidarity that unravels under pressure.

Officials vie to offer pledges of loyalty to Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of 20th Party Congress

Exacerbating this is social media, which rewards those promoting the most extreme and divisive positions and deranges the populace by substituting recognition online, which encourages disintegration, for real-world engagement, which encourages moderation and cooperation.

Online, it’s easy to be all-or-nothing: there should be no restrictions on social media, or we should just pull the plug and shut the whole mess down.

In the real world, these are knotty, nuanced problems. The Founding Fathers would not have tolerated sedition under the guise of free speech. The social order can only be maintained if every participant adheres to standards of civility and the common good.

When put under stress, humans harden their positions as a defensive measure. They become more argumentative and less tolerant, more strident in insisting that the One True Thing is the answer to our problems.

This leads to magical thinking, for example, that we can replace hydrocarbons with fusion or wind and solar. When the physical and cost limits of minerals are presented as impassable obstacles, people respond with denial: there must be a way to keep everything the same.

Humans have an easy time expanding their population and consumption per person and a hard time consuming less.

It’s very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.

This requires accepting that we can cooperate with people on one issue even though all the other boxes of our group/party/movement are left unticked.

History suggests the disintegrative stage will run its course and consumption will realign with available resources one way or another, and the best we can do is preserve our own sanity, community and willingness to nurture small patches of common ground that support productive cooperation.

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