Category Archives: society

Is There Life After Death?

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

A review essay of James and Whitehead on Life after Death by David Ray Griffin

Life is entwined with death from the start, for death is the price we must pay for being born, even though we don’t choose it, which may be why some people who are very angry at the deal, decide to choose how and when they will die, as if they are getting revenge on someone who dealt them a rotten hand, even if they don’t believe in the someone.

The meaning of death, and whether humans do or do not survive it in some form, has always obsessed people, from the average person to the great artists and thinkers.  Death is the mother of philosophy and all the arts and sciences.  It is arguably also what motivates so much human behavior, from keeping busy to waging war to trying to hit a little white ball with a long stick down a lot of grass into a hole in the ground and doing it again and again.

Death is the mother of distractions.

It is also what we cannot ultimately control, although a lot of violent and crazy rich people try.  The thought of it drives many people mad.

No one is immune from wondering about it.  We are born dying, and from an early age we ask why.  Children often explicitly ask, but as they grow older the explicit usually retreats into implicity and avoidance because of adults’ need to deny death or their lack of answers about it that makes sense.

David Ray Griffin is not a child or an adult in denial.  He has spent his life in an intrepid search for truth in many realms – philosophy, theology, politics, etc.  He is an esteemed author of over forty books, an elderly man in his eighties who has spent his life writing about God, and also in the last twenty years a series of outstanding books on the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the demonic nature of U.S. history.  He fits T.S Eliot’s description in The Four Quartets:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Though the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning

In his latest book, which is another beginning, James and Whitehead on Life after Death, he explores the age-old question of whether there is life after death and concludes that there probably is.  It is a conclusion that is arguably shared in some way still by many people today but is clearly rejected by most intellectuals and highly schooled people, as Griffin writes:

The traditional basis for hope was belief in life after death. Modern culture, however, has so diminished this belief that today, in educated circles, it is largely assumed that life after death is an outmoded belief….The dominant view among science-based modern intellectuals is that the idea of life after death is not one to take seriously. That conclusion, however, is virtually implicit in the presuppositions of these intellectuals, such as Corliss Lamont. According to these modern intellectuals, there is no non-sensory perception; the world is basically mechanistic; and the world contains nothing but physical bodies and forces.

Griffin argues the opposite.  His book is devoted to refuting these presuppositions with the help of William James and Alfred North Whitehead.  It is not an easy read, and is not aimed at regular people who would find it rough going, except for the middle chapters on mediums, extrasensory perception, telepathy, apparitions, near-death out-of-body experiences, and reincarnation – the stuff of tabloid nonsense but which in Griffin’s scholarly hands is treated very intelligently. Moreover, these chapters are crucial to his overall argument.  However, the book will mainly appeal to the intellectuals whom Griffin wishes to convince of their errors, or to those who agree with him.  It is scholarly.

Without entering into all the nuances of his rather complicated thesis, I will try to summarize his key points.

Griffin is what is called a process theologian and his work of philosophical theology is intimately linked with scientific thinking and the idea of evolution, even as it rejects the modern mechanistic worldview for a “postmodern” cosmology based on recent science, in particular, the work of microbiology.  Although he is a Christian, the present book does not presuppose any Christian beliefs such as revelation, nor, for that matter, specific beliefs of any religion, although he does presuppose (and partially explains in chapter eleven) the existence of a “divine creator” or “divine reality” who is responsible for the evolutionary process that is the expression of a cosmic purpose with the “fine-tuning” of the universe.  This “Holy Reality” is important to his argument.

The thought of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead underlies everything Griffin writes here.  Whitehead is known as the creator of process philosophy, which, to simplify, is the idea that all reality is not made up of things or bits of inert matter, no matter how small (e.g. atoms, brain molecules) or large (people or trees) interacting in some blind way with other bits of matter, but consists of conscious processes of ongoing experiences.  In other words, reality is constant change, flowing experiences with types of awareness and intention and the free creativity to change.  Humans are, therefore, ongoing experiments, not static entities.

Following Whitehead, Griffin has coined the term “panexperientialism,” meaning that all reality is comprised of experiences.  It is worth noting that the etymology of the words experience and experiment are the same – Latin, experiri, to try.  Life is therefore a trying.  As some might say, it is trying to be born and to know you will die.

Griffin begins by noting the importance of life after death and why many argue against it.  He states how he will avoid many of their objections and how he will show how the valid ones dissolve under his analysis.  He promptly writes that “Microbiology has dissolved the mind-body problem.” He bases this on the work of acclaimed evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis,, among others, and her theory of symbiogenesis:

Her theory of symbiogenesis was based on the idea that all living organisms are sentient. Saying that her world view ‘recognizes the perceptive capacity of all live beings,’ she held that ‘consciousness is a property of all living cells,’ even the most elementary ones: ‘Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life.’

Margulis’s point is consonant with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, meaning that all physical reality possesses a degree of perceptive experience, although Griffin says “some of us may prefer to save the term ‘consciousness’ for higher types of experience.”  The fundamental point is that all of physical reality experiences, or, as he quotes William James, “is a piece of full experience.”  In layman’s language as applied to people, the mind and body are one.

Having laid down this scientific/philosophical foundation in the first four chapters (and in two more detailed appendices), Griffin turns to psychical research and how Whitehead and James believed in the need for such research and how James’s radical empiricism supported the reality of parapsychological events as did Whitehead, who accepted telepathy.  Griffin writes:

Like James, Whitehead affirmed the reality of non-sensory perception. Moreover, besides affirming its reality,Whitehead argued that non-sensory perception is fundamental, so that sensory perception is secondary. Far from being primary, sensory perception is derivative from non-sensory perception….Accordingly, there is nothing supernatural about telepathy; one becomes aware of the content of other minds through the same non-sensory mode of perception that tells us about causation, the real existence of physical objects, memory, and time.

(Let me interject the simple but important point that it follows that in order to have any perceptions one must exist in physical form.)

Turning to actual psychical research that was promoted by the establishment of The Society For Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882, Griffin, as previously mentioned, devotes four key chapters to mediums, telepathy, extrasensory perception, near-death out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation. This research and its findings, while rejected by the modern scientific worldview, is widespread and quite believable, in various degrees.  Griffin shows why this is so.  The truth of such psychic experiences is hard to refute since there are so many examples, which Griffin gives.  He would agree with James who said:

The concrete evidence for most of the ‘psychic’ phenomenon under discussion is good enough to hang a man twenty times over.

And James, of course, the longtime professor at Harvard University, is revered as one of the United States’ most brilliant thinkers, not a fringe nut-case.  This is also true for many of the others Griffin calls on to show how solid is the evidence for much psychic phenomena.  Most readers will find these chapters very engaging and the most accessible.

Finally, Griffin explains why the idea of a fine-tuned universe makes the most sense and how it dovetails with the belief in God, even as it runs counter to the mechanistic, materialistic, and atheistic view of many intellectuals. He writes:

The new worldview advocated in this book requires a new understanding of the divine reality. Whitehead and [Charles] Hartshorne [an American process philosopher and theologian who developed Whitehead’s work] advocated a view of the universe known as ‘panentheism.’ The term means ‘all-in-God.’  Panentheism [the world is in God] is thus distinguished from pantheism, on the one hand, and traditional theism, on the other.

Based on these factors – microbiology, Whitehead and James’s philosophy, psychic research, etc. – Griffin concludes that there is ample evidence for life after death, not in the physical sense but in that of psyche or soul or spirit.  He says that he has “long believed in life after death,” but that in offering this book with his argument for life after death as our “only empirical ground for hope” since we all die, he does so reluctantly.  “I suggest this answer with fear and trembling, knowing that most of my friends and other people whose opinions I respect will hate this answer.”

That they would be surprised by his conclusion is a bit perplexing since he has long believed in life after death.  I surely do not hate his answer and believe that he has made a strong case for his long-held belief.  I share it, but differently.  And I think that many of his scientifically-oriented friends and others may indeed agree with him more than he thinks, for his argument is rooted, not just in philosophy and theology, but in science.  It is based on the idea of the non-duality between mind and matter, with the difference being that for him matter is conscious and for them it is not. They may come to accept the recent findings of microbiology and reject the “assumption of materialists and dualists alike” that “neurons are insentient.”  They may reject some of their own presuppositions.  For these debates take place at the highest level of abstraction where intellectuals dwell, and accepting one new scientific paradigm does not necessarily lead to belief in life after death.  Far from it.  That is when God enters the picture.

Griffin wisely uses hardcore commonsense beliefs to refute dualism and materialism.  But I propose that there is another hardcore, commonsense belief that he ignores: that people know and feel that they are flesh and bones.  Out of this feeling comes our conceptions about life, not the other way around.  The Spanish philosopher Miguel De Unamuno, in The Tragic Sense of Life,  put it this way:

Our philosophy – that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life – springs from our feeling toward life itself …. Man is said to be a reasoning animal.  I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal …. And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.

David Griffin, relying on John Cobb’s term, says the “resurrection of the soul” is a better term for life after death than the more traditional ones of “immortality of the soul” and the “resurrection of the body,” since it splits the difference, thereby taking a bit of truth from both terms.

But as I understand his argument in this book, he is doing what he cautions against via Whitehead: “… he [Whitehead] said that one must avoid ‘negations of what in practice is presupposed.’”  Griffin’s presupposition is that both dualism and materialism are both wrong and panexperientialism is correct.  He writes:

Panexperientialism is based upon the supposition that we can and should think about the units comprising the physical world by analogy with our own experience, which we know from within. The supposition, in other words, is that the apparent difference in kind between our experience, or our ‘mind,’ and the entities comprising our bodies is an illusion, resulting from the fact that we know them in two different ways. We know our minds from within, by identity and memory, whereas in sensory perception of our bodies, as in looking in a mirror, we know them from without. Once we realize this, there is no reason to assume them really to be different in kind. [my emphasis]

So if that is true, I ask this question: why, if body and soul/mind are inseparable and are what people are, why is it necessary to argue for their divorce in death?  If God created them as one at birth, could not God recreate them as one in death?  Why Griffin concludes that this is impossible or would require a miracle escapes me.  Maybe contemplating it is a bit too pedestrian and non-philosophical.

Despite my point above, James and Whitehead on Life after Death is another quintessentially brilliant volume from Griffin’s pen.  It forces you to think about difficult but essential matters.  It may not be easy reading, but it may force you to imaginatively ask yourself, what, if anything were possible and life continued after death, you would want such a life to be like.  Maybe the man David Ray Griffin wants it to be non-bodily.  Maybe many do and can’t imagine an alternative.  But I can, and I hope for bodily resurrection.  It’s just what I am.

Philosophy and theology can get very abstract and leave regular people in the dust.  Another poet comes to mind, a counterpoint to T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yates, who wrote in “An Acre of Green Grass”:

Grant me an old man’s frenzy,

Myself I must remake

Till I am Timon and Lear

Or that William Blake

Who beat upon the wall

Till Truth obeyed his call;

 

A mind Michael Angelo knew

That can pierce the clouds,

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds;

Forgotten else by mankind,

An old man’s eagle mind.

 

I would love to read what a frenzied David Ray Griffin has to say, now that I have read his philosophical logic. I can’t help agreeing with Unamuno:

And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man

The man of flesh, blood, and bones.

The Engineered Stagflationary Collapse Has Arrived – Here’s What Happens Next

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

In my 16 years as an alternative economist and political writer I have spent around half that time warning that the ultimate outcome of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus model would be a stagflationary collapse. Not a deflationary collapse, or an inflationary collapse, but a stagflationary collapse. The reasons for this were very specific – Mass debt creation was being countered with MORE debt creation while many central banks have been simultaneously devaluing their currencies through QE measures. On top of that, the US is in the unique position of relying on the world reserve status of the dollar and that status is diminishing.

It was only a matter of time before the to forces of deflation and inflation met in the middle to create stagflation. In my article ‘Infrastructure Bills Do Not Lead To Recovery, Only Increased Federal Control’, published in April of 2021, I stated that:

“Production of fiat money is not the same as real production within the economy… Trillions of dollars in public works programs might create more jobs, but it will also inflate prices as the dollar goes into decline. So, unless wages are adjusted constantly according to price increases, people will have jobs, but still won’t be able to afford a comfortable standard of living. This leads to stagflation, in which prices continue to rise while wages and consumption stagnate.

Another Catch-22 to consider is that if inflation becomes rampant, the Federal Reserve may be compelled (or claim they are compelled) to raise interest rates significantly in a short span of time. This means an immediate slowdown in the flow of overnight loans to major banks, an immediate slowdown in loans to large and small businesses, an immediate crash in credit options for consumers, and an overall crash in consumer spending. You might recognize this as the recipe that created the 1981-1982 recession, the third-worst in the 20th century.

In other words, the choice is stagflation, or deflationary depression.”

It’s clear today what the Fed has chosen. It’s important to remember that throughout 2020 and 2021 the mainstream media, the central bank and most government officials were telling the public that inflation was “transitory.” Suddenly in the past few months this has changed and now even Janet Yellen has admitted that she was “wrong” on inflation. This is a misdirection, however, because the Fed knows exactly what it is doing and always has. Yellen denied reality, but she knew she was denying reality. In other words, she was not mistaken about the economic crisis, she lied about it.

As I outlined last December in my article ‘The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error’:

‘First and foremost, no, the Fed is not motivated by profits, at least not primarily. The Fed is able to print wealth at will, they don’t care about profits – They care about power and centralization. Would they sacrifice “the golden goose” of US markets in order to gain more power and full bore globalism? Absolutely. Would central bankers sacrifice the dollar and blow up the Fed as an institution in order to force a global currency system on the masses? There is no doubt; they’ve put the US economy at risk in the past in order to get more centralization.’

The Fed has known for years that the current path would lead to inflation and then market destruction, and here’s the proof – Fed Chairman Jerome Powell actually warned about this exact outcome in October of 2012:

“I have concerns about more purchases. As others have pointed out, the dealer community is now assuming close to a $4 trillion balance sheet and purchases through the first quarter of 2014. I admit that is a much stronger reaction than I anticipated, and I am uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons.First, the question, why stop at $4 trillion? The market in most cases will cheer us for doing more. It will never be enough for the market. Our models will always tell us that we are helping the economy, and I will probably always feel that those benefits are overestimated. And we will be able to tell ourselves that market function is not impaired and that inflation expectations are under control. What is to stop us, other than much faster economic growth, which it is probably not in our power to produce?

When it is time for us to sell, or even to stop buying, the response could be quite strong; there is every reason to expect a strong response. So there are a couple of ways to look at it. It is about $1.2 trillion in sales; you take 60 months, you get about $20 billion a month. That is a very doable thing, it sounds like, in a market where the norm by the middle of next year is $80 billion a month. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much the sale, the duration; it’s also unloading our short volatility position.”

As we all now know, the Fed waited until their balance sheet was far larger and until the economy was MUCH weaker than it was in 2012 to unleash tightening measures. They KNEW the whole time exactly what was going to happen.

It is no coincidence that the culmination of the Fed’s stimulus bonanza has arrived right after the incredible damage done to the economy and the global supply chain by the covid lockdowns. It is no coincidence that these two events work together to create the perfect stagflationary scenario. And, it’s no coincidence that the only people who benefit from these conditions are proponents of the “Great Reset” ideology at the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions. This is an engineered collapse that has been in the works for many years.

The goal is to “reset” the world, to erase what’s left of free market systems, and to establish what they call the “Shared Economy” system. This system is one in which the people who survive the crash will be made utterly dependent on government through Universal Basic Income and one that will restrict all resource usage in the name of “carbon reduction.” According to the WEF, you will own nothing and you will like it.

The collapse is engineered to create crisis conditions so frightening that they expect the majority of the public to submit to a collectivist hive mind lifestyle with greatly reduced standards. This would be accomplished through UBI, digital currency models, carbon taxation, population reduction, rationing of all commodities and a social credit system. The goal, in other words, is complete control through technocratic authoritarianism.

All of this is dependent on the exploitation of crisis events to create fear in the population. Now that economic destabilization has arrived, what happens next? Here are my predictions…

The Fed Will Hike Interest Rates More Than Expected, But Not Enough To Stop Inflation

Today, we are witnessing the poisonous fruits of a decade-plus of massive fiat money creation and we are now at the stage where the Fed will reveal its true plan. Hiking interest rates fast, or hiking them slow. Fast hikes will mean an almost immediate crash in markets (beyond what we have already seen), slow hikes will mean a drawn out process of price inflation and general uncertainty.

I believe the Fed will hike more than expected, but not enough to actually slow inflation in necessities. There will be an overall decline in luxury items, recreation commerce and non-essentials, but most other goods will continue to climb in cost. It is to the advantage of globalists to keep the inflation train running for another year or longer.

In the end, though, the central bank WILL declare that the pace of interest rates is not enough to stop inflation and they will revert to a Volcker-like strategy, pushing rates up so high that the economy simply stops functioning altogether.

Markets Will Crash And Unemployment Will Abruptly Spike

Stock markets are utterly dependent on Fed stimulus and easy money through low interest rate loans – This is a fact. Without low rates and QE, corporations cannot engage in stock buybacks. Meaning, the tools for artificially inflating equities are disappearing. We are already seeing the effects of this now with markets dropping 20% or more.

The Fed will not capitulate. They will continue to hike regardless of the market reaction.

As far as jobs are concerned, Biden and many mainstream economists constantly applaud the low unemployment rate as proof that the American economy is “strong,” but this is an illusion. Covid stimulus measures temporarily created a dynamic in which businesses needed increased staff to deal with excess retail spending. Now, the covid checks have stopped and Americans have maxed out their credit cards. There is nothing left to keep the system afloat.

Businesses will start making large job cuts throughout the last half of 2022.

Price Controls

I have no doubt that Joe Biden and Democrats will seek to enforce price controls on many goods as inflation continues, and there will be a handful of Republicans that will support the tactic. Price controls actually lead to a reduction in supply because they remove all profits and thus all incentive for manufacturers to keep producing goods. What usually happens at that point is government steps in to nationalize manufacturing, but this will be substandard production and at a much lower yield.

In the end, supplies are reduced even further and prices go even higher on the black market because no one can get their hands on most goods anyway.

Rationing

Yes, rationing at the manufacturing and distribution level is going to happen, so be sure to buy what you need now before it does. Rationing occurs in the wake of price controls or supply chain disruptions, and usually this coincides with a government propaganda campaign against “hoarders.”

They will hold up a few exaggerated examples of people who buy truckloads of merchandise to scalp prices on the black market. Then, not long after, they will accuse preppers and anyone who bought goods BEFORE the crisis of “hoarding” simply because they planned ahead.

Rationing is not only about controlling the supply of necessities and thus controlling the population by proxy; it is also about creating an atmosphere of blame and suspicion within the public and getting them to snitch on or attack anyone that is prepared. Prepared people represent a threat to the establishment, so expect to be demonized in the media and organize with other prepared people to protect yourself.

Be Ready, It Only Gets Worse From Here On

It might sound like I am predicting success of the Great Reset program, but I actually believe the globalists will fail in the end. That’s not going to stop them from making the attempt. Also, the above scenarios are only predictions for the near term (within the next couple of years). There will be many other problems that stem from these situations.

Naturally, food riots and other mob actions will become more commonplace, perhaps not this year, but by the end of 2023 they will definitely be a problem. This will coincide with the return of political unrest in the US as leftist factions, encouraged by globalist foundations, demand more government intervention in poverty. At the same time, conservatives will demand less government interference and less tyranny.

At bottom, the people who are prepared might be called a lot of mean names, but as long as we organize and work together, we will survive. Many unprepared people will NOT survive. Understand that the economic conditions ahead of us are historically destructive; there is no way that serious consequences can be avoided for a large part of the population, if only because they refuse to listen and to take proper steps to protect themselves.

The denial is over. The crash is here. Time to take action if you have not done so already.

A Warning About The Coming Shortages Of Diesel Fuel, Diesel Exhaust Fluid And Diesel Engine Oil

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Activist Post

What I am about to share with you is a developing situation, and I hope to share more once the facts become clearer.  It appears that a very serious diesel crisis is coming in the months ahead, and that will have a dramatic impact on our economy.  As you will see below, we are being warned that there will be shortages of diesel fuel, diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil.  Most diesel vehicles require all three in order to run, and so a serious shortage of any of them would be a major disaster.  Needless to say, simultaneous shortages of all three could potentially be catastrophic.  Most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about diesel, but without it our supply chains collapse and we don’t have a functioning economy.  In a recent Time Magazine article discussing the coming diesel fuel shortage, we are told that “the U.S. economy runs on diesel”…

Though most consumers shake their heads at the cost of gasoline and complain about the cost of filling up their car tanks, what they really should be worried about is the price of diesel. The U.S. economy runs on diesel. It’s what powers the container ships that bring goods from Asia and the trucks that collect goods from the ports and bring them to warehouses and then to your home. The farmers who grow the food you eat put diesel in their tractors to plow the fields, and the workers that bring construction equipment to build your home put diesel in their trucks.

Since January, supplies of diesel fuel have been steadily getting tighter.

As supplies have gotten tighter, prices have skyrocketed.  The average price of a gallon of diesel fuel hit $5.50 a gallon in early May, and it has remained above that level ever since.

One of the biggest reasons for the supply crunch is a serious lack of refining capacity.  Back in 1980, the U.S. had twice as many refineries…

There are also fewer refineries, which process crude oil into diesel and other products, in the U.S. than were just a few years ago. There are just 124 now operating, down from twice as many in 1980, and down from 139 in 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association. The northeast region is particularly spare, with just seven refineries today, down from 27 in 1982.

There have already been some temporary outages of diesel fuel at a few locations around the country, and we are being warned that disruptions are likely to intensify during the summer months.

But the good news is that we aren’t going to run out of diesel fuel.  It may become a lot more expensive, and there may be painful temporary shortages, but we won’t run out of it.

Unfortunately, the crisis that we are facing with diesel exhaust fluid is potentially much more serious.

If you have just been skimming this article, this is the part where you need to start really paying attention.

Newsweek is telling us that the United States “could soon experience a severe shortage of diesel exhaust fluid”…

The U.S. could soon experience a severe shortage of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), impacting U.S. drivers already hit with soaring fuel prices.

DEF is a solution made up of urea and de-ionized water that is needed for almost everything that runs on diesel. It reduces harmful gases being released into the atmosphere and works by converting nitrogen oxide produced by diesel engines into nitrogen and steam.

If you have a diesel vehicle that was sold in the United States after 2010, your vehicle could technically run without DEF, but in most cases your vehicle will simply not let you start it if the DEF tank is dry…

Can we call it a DEF jam? Everything is in short supply as supply chains continue to unlink. The latest commodity reportedly hit is DEF, or the blue diesel exhaust fluid that every diesel sold in the U.S. after 2010 needs to cut emissions. This means that every diesel truck, diesel RV, SUV, and car owner will likely have to look harder, and pay more for, DEF. A diesel engine can technically run without DEF, but your diesel vehicle likely won’t let you start it if the DEF tank is empty.

A lack of urea is the biggest reason for the growing shortage of DEF.

The United States is one of the largest importers of urea in the world, and Russia and China are two of the largest exporters.  In previous years that wasn’t a problem, but now the war in Ukraine has dramatically changed things…

A major portion of our urea comes from Europe, and because of the war in Ukraine we’re seeing a shortage of it, according to Newsweek. Russia is one of the world’s major exporters of it. China, too, is a major exporter of it, and it has suspended exports. Weather, too, has caused supply chain disruptions. Since it’s also a major component in fertilizers, there’s intense competition for urea.

Without enough DEF, our economy is going to be in for a world of hurt.

Meanwhile, Mike Adams is reporting on the growing shortages of diesel engine oil that are starting to happen all over the nation…

Retailers, customers and distributors are all reporting shortages in diesel engine oil. This is not an imaginary problem, it is a real problem that is so far entirely ignored by the corporate media.

Apparently there are some diesel engine oil additives that are in extremely short supply, and one industry insider is telling us that this problem isn’t going to be resolved any time soon.

So what this means is that people are going to start running out of diesel engine oil.

In fact, it is already being reported that the trains in Sri Lanka will soon have to completely shut down because of a lack of diesel engine oil…

Sri Lanka Railways said that it will NOT be possible to operate trains in the future due to the lack of engine oil. A senior official at Sri Lanka Railways said that the current level of engine oil would only last for another two months.

That’s in line with the warning we’re hearing in the states: About 8 weeks of diesel engine oil remaining in the pipeline.

Just solving one of the shortages that I have described in this article will not be enough.

As I noted in the opening paragraph, a diesel vehicle requires diesel fuel, diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil in order to operate.

You need all three.

This is a story that I will be following very closely.  Needless to say, there are enormous implications for our supply chains and for our economy as a whole if solutions cannot be found.

Wokeness is a Product of Neoliberalism

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Why don’t more people make this connection?

By Chad C. Mulligan

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab Substack

One thing I haven’t seen people point out anywhere else is how much the current atmosphere of “wokeness” is an outcome of neoliberalism.

Let me explain.

There was a lot of analysis written about neoliberalism back in the 1990s when it was still a relatively new phenomenon, having only been enshrined as the dominant economic paradigm in the 1980s. Now that neoliberalism has become simply the water in which we swim and the horizon upon which we gaze, we don’t even notice it anymore. The idea that there could be other ways to organize the economy and society has completely vanished from the discourse even on the nominal “Left”—so utterly complete has been its intellectual victory.

I can’t recall all the books and articles I read during that time, but a couple of standouts were One Market Under God by Thomas Frank and No Logo by Naomi Klein. Frank’s The Baffler magazine published a lot of good articles about neoliberalism back in those days, and Klein’s subsequent The Shock Doctrine is indispensable for understanding how neoliberalism took over the world.

One of the things that those analyses pointed out was the fact that neoliberalism derided governments as universally incompetent and inefficient and argued that only market competition could distribute goods and services effectively.

Furthermore, those markets had to be global in scope and free from “interference,” which was broadly defined as anything that hindered profit maximization including worker and environmental protections. This, in theory, would lead to ideal outcomes—or at least as close to ideal as they could be in a world of inherent scarcity.

As a corollary of this, neoliberals argued that democratic politics—the idea that citizens could express their wishes and desires via their elected representatives—was a hopelessly naive and outdated notion in the age of globalism. Rather, they argued that people’s preferences and desires would be more accurately reflected by how people spent their money in “free and open” markets. People’s spending patterns—aggregated and allocated by markets—would therefore be a better agent of social change than ineffective political action according to neoliberal theory1.

The One Big Market under neoliberalism, therefore, was seen not just a method for coordinating economic activities and allocating goods and services, but as the highest expression of people’s fundamental values. We were now expected to change the world thru shopping. As a result of this, you were expected to be an “ethical consumer.” You were exhorted to “spend your values.” Markets, neoliberals argued—and not popularly elected governments—were the true expression of the democratic will. As our choices at the voting booth began to narrow and seem more and more alike, we were told to vote with your dollar!

Here’s a concrete, real-world example. If you were concerned about dolphins being ensnared and killed in fishing nets used to dredge the ocean for tuna, the solution was not to ban the practice. No, the solution was to spend ethically on products labeled “dolphin safe.” Since consumers would express their preferences via buying dolphin safe tuna instead of the ones not so labeled, eventually the Invisible Hand of the Market would cause this practice to die out without a single government regulation. Similarly, if you wanted to support sustainable farming practices, you would spend preferentially on products labeled “organic” rather than the alternatives.

So in the neoliberal world view, the best way to bring about positive social change was by individuals spending their money in markets. That’s why in a modern shopping center you see all kinds of labels festooned on every conceivable product proclaiming how it is “responsibly sourced,” or how environmentally-friendly it is, or how the package is biodegradable, or how the farmers were fairly compensated, or whatever. You never saw that in the 1960s or 1970s—this change was ushered in by neoliberalism.

Now when you went to the grocery store it was no longer just to buy groceries—you had the obligation to save the world! (As if your life wasn’t stressful enough with the ever-longer working hours that were also the result of neoliberalism). A recurring theme of those analyses I read back in the day was the replacement of citizens with consumers.

(Of course, what’s to stop corporations from slapping any old claim onto their products? How can shoppers evaluate these claims? How can they possibly know what’s accurate and what’s not? Into this void stepped literally hundreds of different (private) certification agencies to try and make sure that these labels accurately reflected what they claimed. Thus, in the effort to avoid regulating markets, neoliberalism actually caused a proliferation of far more regulations and regulatory agencies than ever before. And often these privatized agencies have nonexistent oversight, poor standards and lax enforcement).

Another fundamental aspect of neoliberalism was the notion that competition would bring about ideal social outcomes. Therefore competition, neoliberals argued, had to be introduced into absolutely every aspect of human affairs. In this regard, neoliberalism a was really not just about economics, but was rather a radical totalitarian vision for remaking human society.

This extended even to social issues. For example, the philosophy behind “school choice” came from the notion that the problem with public schools was the lack of free market competition because schools were a state-owned monopoly. State-owned monopolies are the greatest possible evil under neoliberalism because they are not subject to market competition. By unleashing “choice,” schools would be forced to compete for students just like businesses compete for customers. This would make public education better, the thinking went, by eliminating bad schools and teachers and creating “lean and mean” educational institutions.

Even environmentalism has been colonized by neoliberalism. Instead of limiting the emission of fossil fuels, for example, new and exotic markets would be established so that polluters could trade opaque “carbon credits” in order to theoretically allocate pollution the same way we allocate any other resource under neoliberalism. This also demonstrates how neoliberalism is not anti-regulation or “small government” as is often portrayed, since creating these kinds of artificial markets takes massive amounts of government regulation and bureaucracy.

As this all-encompassing philosophy gradually took over the world, social protections were dismantled, regulations were abolished, and untrammeled, cutthroat competition was unleashed in every arena of life.

But it was Karl Polanyi who pointed out that such a vision of turning over society to anarchic markets with no protections and no refuge from its capricious dictates would lead to the “demolition of society.” No one could long withstand the never-ending whipsaws and bullwhips of “pure”relentless market competition—not consumers, not workers, and not even the businesses themselves! That’s why its has never existed, he said, and cannot exist.

So what actually happened in the real world due to unleashing this radical philosophy was an unprecedented wave of mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations in every sector of the economy, enabled by high finance (which was also “unleashed” thanks to neoliberalism).

You see, competition is expensive. It is also highly inefficient. It’s much more effective for parties to cooperate than to compete. That’s just game theory 101. It’s true of human affairs just as it is in nature. That’s why you see cooperation everywhere throughout the animal kingdom as Peter Kropotkin pointed out long ago. Any species where every single member was perennially locked in existential competition with every other member of the species would quickly die out, he said. Even where competition does exist in nature, it is in very limited in scope and in circumscribed contexts like mate choice.

Competition is also inherently unstable. You can’t just have an endless tournament going on forever and ever as free market theory depicts. Eventually there has to be a winner. Again, this is simply game theory 101. You can observe this everywhere you look.

So the current wave of consolidations and mergers in every sector of the economy can be seen as the logical outcome of neoliberal philosophy when applied to the real world as opposed to the world depicted in economic textbooks and think-tank policy papers. Want to know why the entire economy is dominated by a handful of mega-monopolies these days? That’s the reason why.

But getting back to our initial topic, here’s the point that’s absolutely critical: as a result of this neoliberal transformation, corporations had to portray themselves as agents of positive social change.

Read that again. And again and again and again until it sinks in.

This is what has lead to the rise of the modern “socially conscious” corporation and to so-called “woke capitalism.”

Think about it. Back in the pre-neoliberal 1960s, did any company bend over backwards to convey what it believed about absolutely anything? About any social issue whatsoever? No, because corporations weren’t expected to do that. Corporations were widely seen as anonymous entities devoid of values designed to make money by producing the goods and services consumers wanted. Back in the 1960’s—an era of rapid social change—no one cared about what IBM, Boeing, McDonalds, DuPont, General Electric, Coca Cola, General Motors, Prudential, Chevron, or any other big corporation thought about anything, much less the prevailing social issues of the day. That’s what politics was for! Businesses were expected to make money, full stop. Besides, how could a corporation really “think” anything? A corporation is a faceless bureaucratic enterprise composed of hundreds, or even thousands of individuals, each with their own personal set of values and beliefs. The very idea that a corporation could “believe” anything would have been seen as preposterous and absurd back then.

Spending money in “free” markets has subsequently become the only acceptable form of social protest or fomenting change under globalized neoliberalism—and not, for example, people banding together in popular movements to advocate for a better world. Government and politics have become passé and irrelevant—or so we’re told by those in charge. The sole option you have as a lone individual in the face of this relentless onslaught is to become an ethical consumer—in other words, to “spend your values.” Therefore, in order to meet this solemn obligation, you have to be sure that when you hand your money over to a corporation, that corporation reflects your values! That is a fundamental tenet of neoliberalism and its emphasis on markets—and not governments—as the highest arbiter of social values and preferences.

Yet very few commentators on the (fake) Left and the (pseudo) populist Right seem to grasp this. Instead they just shake their fists and rage.

So in order to get their hands on those precious “ethical” dollars, faceless bureaucratic corporations have to fashion themselves as “socially responsible.” As “ethical.” As being “positive change agents.” To that end they have launched wave after wave of PR campaigns designed to proclaim just how ethical and virtuous they are, from Amazon to Dove to Gillette, and every other big business has to follow suit.

Consider, for instance, those Dove advertisements that promised to let plus-size women believe they were beautiful—and publicly paraded them in their bras and panties in a commercial for cellulite-reducing cream. Or the Heineken “Worlds Apart” ad that showed people of disparate backgrounds and races coming together (eventually) over the beer. Or—to bring things back to the strategic positioning of carbonated sugar water as a proto-revolutionary product—the (thankfully short-lived) Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot that portrayed the soda as the means to bring Occupy-style protesters back into a grateful posture of consumer-abundance connoisseurship…

Believe in Something (The Baffler)

This also ties in with the “doing well by doing good” ethos of philanthropic capitalism as described by Anand Giridharadas in his book, Winners Take All. Once again, elected governments and politicians are portrayed as hopelessly inept and incompetent (sense a pattern?). In place of governments installed by the will of the people, therefore, “social entrepreneurs” will step into the void and solve the most pressing social problems of the day—and make a killing $$$ by doing so. This is portrayed as a “win-win” scenario in the media, which is owned and controlled by those same rich people (the fact that every single social problem seems to be getting exponentially worse has not deterred this policy approach in the slightest).

So if you wonder where all that cloying, patronizing Silicon Valley bullshit about “changing the world” and “making the world a better place” comes from—that’s where it comes from. It’s basically a form of neofeudalism in practice.

So the end result of all this is that under neoliberalism corporations are now obligated to portray themselves as ethical and moral in order to attract precious consumer dollars. Hence the rise of the modern “woke” corporation expressing it’s opinion on absolutely every hot-button issue of the day—from Black Lives Matter, to gay marriage, to the abortion debate, to transgender rights, to sexual harassment, to gun control, to multiculturalism, to whatever contentious wedge issue the political Right will dream up next.

And whether you like it or not, the people who tend to earn the most under globalized, technocratic monopoly capitalism really do strongly support cosmopolitan values like diversity, tolerance and inclusiveness. And since we are obligated to “spend our values” under neoliberalism, corporations have to cater to them—and to make sure that everyone knows about it. Thus they have to “officially” support things like Black Lives Matter. They have to speak out against discrimination against gay and transgender people. They have to be “antiracist.” They have to extol “empowering women and girls.” All because they need to attract the kinds of people who “spend their values,” and those values are more likely to be socially liberal for the kinds of people that corporations want to attract both as employees and consumers. That’s just the reality, and it’s not likely to change anytime soon.

And even though conservatives may not like it, socially regressive people and reactionaries tend to be poorer and less educated overall—and hence are less desirable as workers and consumers. That’s also just how it is. Therefore, corporations are “woke” based on a cynical, self-interested calculation of what will net them the most consumer dollars under neoliberal capitalism, and no amount of conservative grousing is going to change that. As a result, reactionaries and authoritarians are increasingly turning to politics to force their values upon people which they can’t enforce via the kinds of free market choices that they believe should dictate every other aspect of life.

When it became clear that the NFL supporters—largely white, male, and older—were outnumbered by the corporation’s brand loyalists—more diverse and younger—Nike went ahead and now even claims that it inaugurated the campaign because it believes that Kaepernick “is one of the most inspirational athletes of his generation.”

Believe in Something (The Baffler)

Of course, if we had a healthy and functioning political system none of this would be necessary. And it follows that if neoliberalism had not become the dominant social and economic paradigm of the twenty-first century there would be no such thing as “woke” capitalism in the first place.

So it’s truly amusing to watch the political Right rage to the heavens at the result of their own economic philosophy being applied in practice.

It’s also funny that, to my knowledge, no one appears to have made this connection. After all, why did corporations only relatively recently (i.e. after the 1990s) begin virtue signalling at every opportunity? It’s not just because everyone suddenly became “based” at approximately the same time. It’s the economic system, stupid!

Of course, it’s a win-win situation for political conservatives since they now have something to permanently complain about to rally people to their side, even though they are still just as pro-wealth and anti-worker as ever, and even though they still fervently believe in the most toxic tenets of neoliberalism (such as its contempt for democratically elected governments and its antipathy toward regulations and constraining the rich in any way). That’s the natural result of gutting civil society in favor of apotheosizing an all-powerful Market.

Of course, the bad news is that the end result of neoliberalism will probably be the rise of a twenty-first century form of fascist authoritarianism based on what I’m seeing in the media and across the political spectrum these days.

In conclusion, I find all of these “culture war” topics utterly inane and ridiculous (despite all the money you can make by endlessly bellyaching about them on Sub$tack). In a country where many citizens can’t even access basic health care, homelessness is endemic and rising, higher education is unaffordable, crime and suicide are rampant, people are mired in debt, wages have stagnated and mass shootings occur on a weekly basis2, I find it hard to get worked up over “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” And, as many besides me have pointed out, the idea that this cynical virtue signalling by mega-corporations means that they are in any way “left-of-center” by any reasonable definition of that term is absurd. After all, we’re talking about some of the most vile, sociopathic billionaires since the Gilded Age and some of the most brutal working conditions since the era of George Pullman. And the saddest thing is, we’ll never be able to unite to stop them since—thanks to neoliberalism—we will be kept perennially at each other’s throats while they continue to Tweet from their luxury yachts, penthouses, villas, and private jets about diversity and inclusiveness for ever and ever.

1 A good book about this is Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown. Here’s an interview with the author.

2 It’s worth noting that I wrote this post before the latest massacre in Texas.

Explain It to Me, Please

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If you want a war with Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela tell me why and how it would benefit Americans

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

So Honest Joe Biden is now going to give another $1.2 billion to the Ukrainians on top of the sixty or so billion that is already in the pipeline, but who’s counting, particularly as Congress refused to approve having an inspector general to monitor whose pockets will be lined. The money will be printed up without any collateral or “borrowed” and the American taxpayer will somehow have to bear the burden of this latest folly that is ipso facto driving much of the world into recession. And it will no doubt be blamed on Vladimir Putin, a process that is already well under way from president mumbles. But you have to wonder why no one has told Joe that the whole exercise in pushing much of the world towards a catastrophic war is a fool’s errand. But then again, the clowns that the president has surrounded himself with might not be very big on speaking the truth even if they know what that means.

Having followed the Ukraine problem since the United States and its poodles refused to negotiate seriously with Vladimir Putin in the real world, I have had to wonder what is wrong with Washington. We have had the ignorant and impulsive Donald Trump supported by a cast of characters that included the mentally unstable Mike Pompeo and John Bolton followed by Biden with the usual bunch of Democratic Party rejects. By that I mean deep thinkers about social issues who would not be able to run a hot dog stand if that were what they were forced to do to make a living. But they are real good at shouting “freedom” and “democracy” whenever questioned concerning their motives.

Indeed, opinion polls suggest that there is a great deal of unrest among middle and working class Americans who see a reversion to Jimmy Carter era financial instability, at that time caused by the oil embargo. Well, there is a new energy embargo in place brought about by the Biden Administration’s desire to wage proxy war to “weaken” Russia. Analysts predict that the costs for all forms of energy will double in the next several months and surging energy costs will impact the prices of other essentials, including food. Given all that, the fundamental issue plaguing both Democrats and Republicans is their inability to actually explain to the American people why the country’s foreign and national security policy always seems to be on the boil, searching for enemies and also creating them when they do not exist, even when the results are damaging to the interests of actual Americans.

That a serious discussion of why the United States needs to have a military that costs as much as the next nine nations in that ranking combined is long overdue and rarely addressed outside the alternative media. The 2023 military budget has been increased from this year’s, totaling $858 billion, and, if one includes the constantly growing largesse to Ukraine, approaching a hitherto unimaginable trillion dollars. The military budget has become a major driver of the country’s unsustainable deficits. The deaths of millions of people directly and indirectly in the wars started in 9/11 aside, the wars of choice have cost an estimated $8 trillion.

The Constitution of the United States makes it clear that a national army was only acceptable to the Founders when it was dedicated to defending the country from foreign threats. Do Americans really believe that bearing the burden of having something like 1,000 military bases scattered around the world really makes them safer? The recent rapid collapse of the security situation in Afghanistan suggests that having such bases turns soldiers and bureaucrats into potential hostages and is therefore a liability. One might also suggest that the insecurity currently prevailing in the country can in large part be attributed to the government’s depiction of numerous “threats” in order to justify both the commitment and the expense.

So where does all the money go? And what are the threats? Starting with a war that the United States is de facto though not de jure involved in, Ukraine, what was the Russian threat that demanded Washington’s intervention? Well, if one discards the nonsense of a “rules based international order” or a plucky little democracy Ukraine fighting valiantly against the Russian bear, Moscow did not threaten the United States in any way before the missiles starting flying. Putin sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on a number of perceived existential Russian national security interests, all of which were negotiable, but the US and its friends were uninterested in compromise while also plying the corrupt Zelensky regime with weapons, money and political support. The final result is a conflict that will likely only end when the last Ukrainian is dead and it includes the possibility that a misstep by the United States and Russia could lead to a nuclear holocaust. To put it succinctly, what is going on does not enhance US national security, nor does it benefit Americans economically.

And then there is China. Biden let the cat out of the bag on his recent trip to the Far East. He stated that the United States would defend Taiwan if China were to attempt to annex it. In saying that, Biden demonstrated that he does not understand the strategic ambiguity that the US and the Chinese have preferred over the past fifty years as an alternative to war. The White House for its part quickly issued a correction to the Biden statement, explaining that it was not true that Washington is obligated to defend Taiwan. Some uber hawkish congressmen have apparently found the Biden gaffe appealing and are promoting a firm US commitment to defend Taiwan, coupled with a $4.5 billion military assistance package, of course.

At the same time, some officials in the Pentagon and the usual gaggle of congressmen also keep warning about the over the horizon threat from China as an excuse to boost defense spending. Most recently, there was alarm over Chinese participation in a meeting in May in Fiji to consider a China-Pacific Islands free trade pact! In reality, the only serious current threat from China is as an economic competitor. A trade war with China would be a disaster for the US economy, which is heavily dependent on Chinese manufactured goods, but Beijing, with its relatively small military budget, does not pose a physical threat to the United States.

And let’s not ignore Iran which has been hammered by economic sanctions and also through the covert killing of its officials and scientists. The US/Israeli war on Iran has also spilled over into neighboring Syria, where Washington actually has troops on the ground occupying the country’s oil producing region and stealing the oil. Iran’s possible expansion of its nuclear program to produce a weapon was effectively impeded through monitoring connected to a multilateral 2015 agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) but Donald Trump, unwisely and acting against actual American interests, withdrew from it. Joe Biden has been warned by Israel not to re-enter the agreement, so he will no doubt comply with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s determination to have Washington continue to apply “extreme pressure” on the Islamic Republic. Does either Iran or its ally Syria threaten the United States in any way? No. Their crime is that they are in the same neighborhood as the Jewish state, which finds the US government easy to manipulate into acting against its own interests.

Finally, in America’s own hemisphere there is Venezuela, which has been elevated to the status of Washington’s most hated nation in the region. Venezuelans have been subjected to increasingly punitive US sanctions, including some new ones just last week, which hurt the poorer citizens disproportionately but have not brought about regime change. Why the animosity? Because the country’s leader Nicolas Maduro is still in power in spite of a US assertion that the country’s opposition leader Juan Guaido should rightfully and legitimately be in charge after a possibly fraudulent election in 2018. The latest therapy applied by the United States on Caracas consisted of blocking the country as well as Nicaragua and Cuba from participating in the recent meeting of the Ninth Summit of the Americas which was held in Los Angeles. A State Department spokesman explained that the move was due to the three countries “lacking democratic governances.” Mexican President Lopez Obrador protested against the move and removed himself from his country’s delegation, saying “There can’t be a Summit of the Americas if not all countries of the American continent are taking part.” The despicable US Senator Robert Menendez of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee then felt compelled to add his two cents, criticizing the Mexican president and warning that his “decision to stand with dictators and despots” would hurt US-Mexico relations. So where was the threat from Venezuela (and Cuba and Nicaragua) and why is the US involved at all? Beats me.

What all of this means is that there is absolutely no standard of genuine national security that motivates the US’s completely illegal aggression in many parts of the world. What occurs may be linked to a desire to dominate or a madness sometimes described as “exceptionalism” and/or “leadership of the free world,” neither of which has anything to do with actual security. And the American people are paying the price both in terms of decline in standards of living due to the upheaval created in Ukraine and elsewhere as well as a completely understandable loss of faith in the US system of government. By all means, let us shrink the US military until it is responsive to actual identifiable threats. Let’s elect a president who will follow the sage advice of President John Quincy Adams, who declared that “Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy.” At this point, one can only imagine an America that is at peace with itself and with what it represents while also being considered a friend to the rest of the world.

Everything Is a Weapon: The U.S. Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare on the Nation

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? … Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”— U.S. Army Psychological Operations recruitment video

The U.S. government is waging psychological warfare on the American people.

No, this is not a conspiracy theory.

Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. Just recently, for example, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens… PSYOP soldiers’ key missions are to influence ‘emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,’ ‘deliberately deceive’ enemy forces, advise governments, and provide communications for disaster relief and rescue efforts.”

Yet don’t be fooled into thinking these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns are only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.

Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry.

Weaponizing violence. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. 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. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing fear and paranoia. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Weaponizing the future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The facts speak for themselves.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

What we have is a government of wolves.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State.

Brace yourselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have become enemies of the Deep State.

THE SOUL OF TODAY: THE SPIRIT AS THE SIGN OF THE TIMES

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

“If we do not develop within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve to something higher.” ~Rudolf Steiner

Humanity is passing through a difficult phase in its development, and of concern is the potential risk of being plunged into deeper states of materialism and automatism. These two states are often in cooperation together, for the deeper we become embedded in material forces then the greater are the influences that can make us act without conscious thought or intention. It can also be said that there are certain forces, or agents, in this current time that are pushing for greater immersion into materialism in order to paralyze or prevent humanity’s spiritual development. In this regard, even the notion of anything ‘spiritual’ has come to be either ridiculed, diluted into commercialism, or hijacked into pseudo-spiritual forms (such as corporate retreats and online guruism).

It is important that we now cast a critical eye upon the state of human society and the nature of our times. This is not to criticize but to draw attention – to be aware of its aspects – as if to shine a light upon it. It is necessary to look beyond the ‘scenery of external affairs.’

For those people caught up within the external civilization of the moment, with its impacts, distractions, and stimulations, it is difficult to acknowledge the existence of knowledge and perceptual understanding that lies beyond the conditioned senses. Yet it must also be said that now is the time for people to live, and be guided, more in accordance with inner, or esoteric, principles than ever before. It is this connection with one’s inner life that brings greater awareness onto external events. And without this awareness, this degree of perceptive insight, then we allow greater concentrations of power to be wielded in the hands of the few, who will exercise this control over the masses in a negative way. What is necessary is awareness and intention emerging through each individualized person. It is this state of individualization, as opposed to group/mass behaviour, that marks the correct stage of human development for these times.

Taking the work of Austrian thinker/mystic Rudolf Steiner, the state of human perception and awareness can be recognized as relating to three soul stages: sentient, intellect-mind, and consciousness. Within the stage of sentient soul (i), the human being lives primarily within the world of the senses. They are drawn into their passions, desires, and are easily manoeuvred or manipulated into following trends, politics, and mass movements. These people form the majority, are swayed by the media, and are the general masses that move with the machinations of the mob.

They are influenced by the ‘influencers,’ convinced by the consensus narrative, and swim in the mainstream. The second stage, that of the intellect-mind soul (ii), represents the person of the intellect who strives to free themselves from the rash impulses of the senses. They are aware of these tendencies yet steer themselves by rational thinking. They also attempt to keep their feelings under check and express their heart’s desire through critical engagement. At the same time, this rational ordering often allies such people with conservatism, dogma, ideologies and a sense of righteousness. As they can manipulate others, so too can they be manipulated by their own allegiance to fixed systems. They can be blinded by ideals and uncritical of their own weaknesses.

Such people can appear exceedingly clever whilst lacking humanity. Broadly speaking, such people fill the ranks of the political and leadership organizations. And the third stage, that of the consciousness soul (iii) has yet to fully emerge within the current epoch. It is this stage that deals with the formation of the aware individual who is not easily influenced or swayed by the emotional-psychological masses, and the strategies employed for these persuasions.

The phase of individualization within humankind was, and continues to be, a necessary step to release the human being from the previous mode of group consciousness. The egoistic self was required in this transference into individualization. Yet the danger now is that this operational ego grows beyond its function and becomes a dominant aspect of the human being. Acting and striving from the egoistic self is what leads to the imbalance and inequality of the world. The stage of individualization is bound up with increased egoism, yet this is a necessary relationship to reach the depths of self-realization. It becomes troublesome when the ego, instead of leading to inner growth, gets projected externally and becomes the major aspect of the outward personality.

This can lead to stunted inner growth and continued external ego projection. The extremity of this is when a person sinks back into group consciousness and seeks security within a group environment. This can lead to cultic tendencies, as well as nationalism and other ideological and religious groupings. Part of the polarity tension in world affairs has been the pull between the dominant egoists and the group mentality masses. However, it can also be recognized that this stage of growth has to be lived and experienced in order to be moved through. The strains and stresses increase when people seem incapable, or are disallowed, from moving beyond this stage of human development. In this case, the person remains at the level of the lower ‘I’, which is a mass phenomenon and below that of full individualization.

The lower self becomes the dominant expression of the personality, and this can literally run amok, getting entangled in passions, persuasions, disagreements, and disputes. The worst case of affairs is when societies establish structures, systems, and forms of management that cater to this lower stage of human development. People are then caught in a loop, where the base behaviours of this lower individualization are sustained and supported, deliberately creating a civilization of stagnation and stunted growth. The task here is for people to take the direction of their life into their own hands.

The human being must establish an intention to develop their aligned individualization for it seems that there are forces opposed to this human evolvement. For this reason, it is now essential that a perceptive state of consciousness (referred to in Steiner terminology as the consciousness soul) is allowed to emerge among those people receptive and prepared for this. The consciousness soul can be said to elicit higher morals and values within the individual. This requires also that the person has an inner freedom and the ability to perceive and act beyond the confines of social conditioning. This is a form of perceptual thinking as opposed to programmed thinking. The human being has it in their power to transform themselves whilst participating in active life. In fact, life provides friction for the transformational process. And this transformation takes place in the innermost self, which later can be projected outwards into life. It is not enough to affect correct behaviour if the inner life is stunted (as is the case with so many people, especially those most visible upon the world stage). As Rudolf Steiner put it:

‘For every human being bears a higher man within himself besides what we may call the work-a-day man. This higher man remains hidden until he is awakened. And each human being can himself alone awaken this higher being within himself. As long as this higher being is not awakened, the higher faculties slumbering in every human being, and leading to supersensible knowledge, will remain concealed.’[1]

Steiner also considered entropic forces (what some would call ‘evil’ or de-evolutionary forces) as a necessary part of human development. Such forces create the friction that fuels potential development, such as the friction between the road and the tyre helps create the movement of the car. To a degree, such forces are unavoidable in physical existence. All development is a matter of stages, and each stage must be reached before attempting the move to another. Where is humanity at this current scale of development, we may wonder?

Each person must decide for themselves how they wish to live life. It can be said that a person who is ignorant of this decision, or who negates making such a decision, is more likely to fall under the sway of entropic forces, for it is these forces that target/attract the unaware or lazy souls. This recognition should encourage us to make perceptive choices in life. In every sphere of human life – whether social, cultural, or political – there are forces in operation that represent spheres of activity of greater magnitude than most people are able to realize. There are ‘universal forces’ that have been in contention – in motion – for a very long time. As for human beings, all motion, all movement, requires effort. That the many are unaware of this, only places more emphasis upon the responsibility of the few who are aware. This has always been the case and is likely to remain so for the time ahead.

The inner impulse towards working for the greater good of humanity – the ‘macrocosmic good’ – comes out of genuine understanding and not general emotions or mass psychology. It is also the responsibility for such aware individuals to gain an understanding, a level of perspective, for perceiving the events of our time. It is this understanding of forces behind events at face value that helps in the growth of the consciousness soul. Just as we can recognize there are occult forces in play in the physical realm, so too does this suggest that there are forces operable beyond the physical domain. To not acknowledge this is the same as seeing the branches of a tree swaying in the wind and to consider that the branches are moving of their own accord and under their own volition. It is a fundamental error to mistake secondary phenomena for primary causes. And when a person acts out of limited understanding, there is the potential to serve not the good but ultimately the contrary. In terms of entropic forces (my term for ‘evil’), they cannot be banished for they form a part of existence; rather, they are to be transmuted into good for them to be overcome. And this is the task of our times, the task for the spiritual soul of today.

What is needed is a re-cognition and refocusing upon metaphysical realities. Rudolf Steiner stated that if all human beings were to decide that they did not want higher development, then this potential for development would come to an end. It is therefore the responsibility of those with awareness, and inner cognition, to maintain within humankind the urge for inner evolvement. The present task for responsibly aware people today is to seek out that knowledge which comprehends not only world forces but the primary causes of events in this phenomenal, physical realm. In doing so, the person is able to raise themselves beyond petty inclinations and selfish, egoistic behaviour. This is not a denial of physical reality but rather a strengthened recognition of the primary realm of spirit.

To conclude, it can be said that there are forces coming through into this realm that humanity has limited knowledge or experience of. This is not something to be afraid of, for these forces are a part of humanity itself. We-You-I are part of the same consciousness, only that material existence – the physical life – has split, divided, and splintered these aspects. Humanity, for the most part in recent times, has been living as if a partial existence – a semi-existence – for it has been cut-off from recognition of its Source and the greater field of consciousness. The planet Earth, as well as other planets in the solar system, are entering a new alignment where it shall be easier for these correspondences to be made. That this age was coming has been known for a long time by other groupings that have power and influence within human civilization.

For this reason, these groupings have come together to create conditions across the planet – physical, mental, psychical – that would attempt to halt the emergence of greater perceptive consciousness. The attempts being made across the planet are for the realization of anesthetizing certain aspects of the human being so that it is less receptive to ‘spiritual’ or metaphysical truths and their correspondences. In other words, humanity is being further cut-off from its inherent connection to developmental impulses. Yet this approach has only a limited range of success. Humanity’s faculties can only be ‘blinded’ for so long. Evolutionary, developmental forces are far more powerful than supposed by these planetary power groups. At the same time, we need to recognize that events of world history are symptoms of the occurrences on the metaphysical level of reality, where primary, non-material aspects have their existence. These essential, primary phenomena have their impulses that come into being within the physical world of secondary phenomena. For most of humankind, these primary aspects are the unknowables.

It is time to become receptive to the forces available to us so that as a human being we can be of assistance rather than ignorant or, worse still, a hindrance. For those people capable of developing their understanding and receptivity to such impulses, it is time to begin the journey to know of the unknowables.

Assange Is Doing His Most Important Work Yet

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

British Home Secretary Priti Patel has authorized the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to be tried under the Espionage Act in a case which seeks to set a legal precedent for the prosecution of any publisher or journalist, anywhere in the world, who reports inconvenient truths about the US empire.

Assange’s legal team will appeal the decision, reportedly with arguments that will include the fact that the CIA spied on him and plotted his assassination.

“It will likely be a few days before the (14-day appeal) deadline and the appeal will include new information that we weren’t able to bring before the courts previously. Information on how Julian lawyers were spied on, and how there were plots to kidnap and kill Julian from within the CIA,” Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters on Friday.

And thank goodness. Assange’s willingness to resist Washington’s extradition attempts benefit us all, from his taking political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 until British police forcibly dragged him out in 2019, to his fighting US prosecutors in the courtroom tooth and claw during his incarceration in Belmarsh Prison.

Assange’s fight against US extradition benefits us not just because the empire’s war against truth harms our entire species and not just because he cannot receive a fair trial under the Espionage Act, but because his refusal to bow down and submit forces the empire to overextend itself into the light and show us all what it’s really made of.

Washington, London and Canberra are colluding to imprison a journalist for telling the truth: the first with its active extradition attempts, the second with its loyal facilitation of those attempts, and the third with its silent complicity in allowing an Australian journalist to be locked up and persecuted for engaging in the practice of journalism. By refusing to lie down and forcing them to come after him, Assange has exposed some harsh realities of which the public has largely been kept unaware.

The fact that London and Canberra are complying so obsequiously with Washington’s agendas, even while their own mainstream media outlets decry the extradition and even while all major human rights and press freedom watchdog groups in the western world say Assange must go free, shows that these are not separate sovereign nations but member states of a single globe-spanning empire centralized around the US government. Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more attention is being brought to this reality.

By standing his ground and fighting them, Assange has also exposed the lie that the so-called free democracies of the western world support the free press and defend human rights. The US, UK and Australia are colluding to extradite a journalist for exposing the truth even as they claim to oppose tyranny and autocracy, even as they claim to support world press freedoms, and even as they loudly decry the dangers of government-sponsored disinformation.

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, it will always reek of hypocrisy when US presidents like Joe Biden say things like, “The free press is not the enemy of the people — far from it. At your best, you’re guardians of the truth.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, people will always know British prime ministers like Boris Johnson are lying when they say things like, “Media organisations should feel free to bring important facts into the public domain.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more of us will understand that they are being deceived and manipulated when Australian prime ministers like Anthony Albanese say things like “We need to protect press freedom in law and ensure every Australian can have their voice heard,” and “Don’t prosecute journalists for just doing their jobs.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, US secretaries of state like Antony Blinken will have a much harder time selling their schtick when they say things like “On World Press Freedom Day, the United States continues to advocate for press freedom, the safety of journalists worldwide, and access to information on and offline. A free and independent press ensures the public has access to information. Knowledge is power.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, UK home secretaries like Priti Patel will be seen for the frauds they are when they say things like “The safety of journalists is fundamental to our democracy.”

Extraditing a foreign journalist for exposing your war crimes is as tyrannical an agenda as you could possibly come up with. The US, UK and Australia colluding toward this end shows us that these are member states of a single empire whose only values are domination and control, and that all its posturing about human rights is pure facade. Assange keeps exposing the true face of power.

There is in fact a strong argument to be made that even all these years after the 2010 leaks for which he is currently being prosecuted, Assange is doing his most important work yet. As important as his WikiLeaks publications were and are, none of them exposed the depravity of the empire as much as forcing them to look us in the eye and tell us they’ll extradite a journalist for telling the truth.

Assange accomplished this by planting his feet and saying “No,” even when every other possible option would have been easier and more pleasant. Even when it was hard. Even when it was terrifying. Even when it meant being locked away, silenced, smeared, hated, unable to fight back against his detractors, unable to live a normal life, unable to hold his children, unable even to feel sunlight on his face.

His very life casts light on all the areas where it is most sorely needed. We all owe this man a tremendous debt. The least we can do is try our best to get him free.