Category Archives: Sociology

Digitizing Your Identity Is the Fast-Track to Slavery: How Can You Defend Your Freedom?

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Throughout your lifetime, you or someone you trusted has unwittingly given up many aspects of your biometric and other personal data so that your digital identity can be created. Over time, this digital identity is being progressively defined and is replacing your actual physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual identity. What you are allowed to do, and not do, will increasingly depend on your technological identity rather than your moral character, intellectual and/or physical abilities, your emotional suitability, religious beliefs and the many other attributes that define your unique personality.

Starting with your birth certificate, which identifies your name, birth date and birth location, as well as parenting, an endless series of details about your personal life has been accumulated and stored, sometimes with your knowledge and consent. Far more often it has been done without either.

Do you remember having your photo taken for a student and/or employee identity card, your vehicle license and/or a passport? Do you remember being finger and/or palm-printed, submitting to an iris scan, agreeing to a recording of your voice, offering data for ‘two-factor’ authentication, and requesting an ancestry search by submitting a sample of your DNA? Most often you had no choice: It was ‘legally required’. Other times, you were probably offered something in return, such as admission to an educational institution, ‘secure’ access to an account or information you wanted. But whatever other price you paid, you also paid an ‘identity cost’.

Moreover, none of that information has ceased to exist and there is a lot more interest in it now than there was when you, or someone, innocently agreed to tender it all those years ago. And it is being added to all of the time with information you have surrendered or that has been obtained about you, up until this morning. In addition, it will be added to by information gathered about you tomorrow.

Your bank account(s), academic and employment records, health records (including vaccination record), legal record (including traffic violations), internet search history, and any other information compiled by or submitted to a government authority, corporation or other entity has been recorded, compiled and systematically stored in data banks of which you have never even heard. And they are being used to generate your ‘social credit score’ which, depending on the country in which you live, is already or will be soon, used to determine what you can, and cannot, do.

In addition, facial recognition technology is vastly expanding the capacity of the surveillance state, and those corporations and entities that work with it, to identify and track you. And it is doing this already in the most obvious places such as on the street and in shopping centres. See, for example, ‘Microsoft partners with banks to introduce facial recognition: More invasive technology’.

Sometimes, an apparently desirable application is used as a trojan horse to have it introduced even more widely. See ‘Australian clubs call for facial recognition tech to watch drinkers and gamblers: More privacy invasion’.

Beyond that, of course, existing technologies already enable many aspects of your unique identity to be imitated precisely. Think you voice is unique? Not once they clone it so they can present some technological imitation as your voice. See ‘Voice Cloning for Content Creators’.

And you are no doubt well aware of simple ways that photos of you can be replicated. Or altered by ‘photoshopping’, to put you in an entirely different context or location.

Does this matter?

This has all been done, fundamentally, so that one day soon now you can be locked in the technological prison that is being created around you. This technological prison, being promoted under the guise of ‘smart cities’, is being built around you as cities are converted to ‘smart’ by installing 5G and the other technologies necessary for comprehensive surveillance and control. But the Saudis are building a ‘smart city’ in the desert too. You can watch their promotional video here: Neom.

Despite the positive spin endlessly put on these projects by governments and corporations – see ‘Smart cities: The cities of the future’ – the fundamental outcome is that you will require a digital ID to do those particular things that the elite has decided you will be allowed to do. And you won’t be able to do anything else. This is usually called ‘slavery’ except that, in this new technological world, virtually all of the slaves will be transhuman with no independent will of their own.

How has this happened?

In a report published by the World Economic Forum in 2016, the authors wrote ‘Consistent with the World Economic Forum’s mission of applying a multi‐stakeholder approach to address issues of global impact, the creation of this report involved extensive outreach and dialogue with the financial services community, innovation community, technology community, academia and the public sector…. The mandate of this project was to explore digital identity and understand the role that Financial Institutions should play in building a global standard for digital identity. Identity is a critical topic in Financial Services today. Current identity systems are limiting Fintech innovation (as) well as secure and efficient service delivery in Financial Services and society more broadly. Digital identity is widely recognized as the next step in identity systems. However, while many efforts are underway to solve parts of the identity challenge and create true digital identity, there is a need for a concerted and coordinated effort to build a truly transformational digital identity system.’

See ‘A Blueprint for Digital Identity: The Role of Financial Institutions in Building Digital Identity’.

By 2018, another report by the World Economic Forum was proclaiming ‘Our identity is, literally, who we are, and as the digital technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution advance, our identity is increasingly digital. This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.’

See ‘Identity in a Digital World: A new chapter in the social contract’.

But one primary motivation for their interest in digital identity was reported in a World Economic Forum article in August 2022. Citing research conducted by the consultancy Cebr – see ‘The digital trust index’ – the World Economic Forum noted that ‘our global digital economy can unleash trillions of dollars of opportunities. But if we don’t know for certain who we are interacting with online, we cannot have trust. Digital identity must therefore be the foundational element to our digital economy….’ Moreover, according to the WEF: ‘Consumers also told us they would trust banks and financial services firms the most to create and maintain an identity system.’

See ‘Digital trust: How to unleash the trillion-dollar opportunity for our global economy’.

Of course, the World Economic Forum is not the only institution planning our digital identity prison. In a 2019 report, the United Nations stated ‘We recommend that by 2030, every adult should have affordable access to digital networks, as well as digitally-enabled financial and health services, as a means to make a substantial contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.’

See ‘The Age of Digital Interdependence’.

In addition, that long-standing bastion of economic exploitation known as the World Bank has had a long-running involvement in digitizing identity, publishing a report on the subject in 2017 which was updated in 2021 and, unsurprisingly, linked to its notion of ‘sustainable development’: ‘Every person has the right to participate fully in their society and economy and to be recognized as a person before the law. Yet, as many as 1 billion people across the world do not have basic proof of identity, which is essential for protecting their rights and enabling access to services and opportunities.’

See ‘Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development: Toward the Digital Age’.

This report goes on to outline a set of ten principles – universal access, accuracy, security, privacy… – to guide the nature of digital identity, in various categories, that sound wonderful.

But fundamental issues are left unaddressed.

Why the rights to participation in society and the economy, and recognition before the law, suddenly requires ‘basic proof of identity’ and is ‘essential for protecting their rights and enabling access to services and opportunities’ is not explained. Nor is it explained why those same rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 – on which the world has so spectacularly failed to deliver since that time (and particularly for those billions of people marginalized by the global capitalist economy) – will now be magically delivered by a digitized identity.

As is often the case, the delusional rhetoric sounds good despite being a vast distance from the truth.

But the World Bank continues its rhetoric in a more recent report: ‘Vulnerable and marginalized groups are often the least likely to have proof of their identity, but also the most in need of the protection and services linked to identification.’

See ‘Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development: Toward the Digital Age’.

Moreover, according to the World Bank, experience has supposedly ‘shown that there are key actions countries can take to unlock their own paradigm shift towards building digital ID and G2P [government-to-person] payments ecosystems that empower people and support sustainable development outcomes’.

See ‘Identification for Development (ID4D) and Digitalizing G2P Payments (G2Px) Annual Report 2021’.

Really? How does this happen?

Of course, the documents go on to outline why identity is important to access certain rights and services – banking, voting, owning property, particular transactions… – but do not specify why a digital version of identity is necessary. A sleight of hand made necessary by the complete absence of any genuine reason for moving beyond long-accepted means of establishing identity, where they are appropriately useful.

Beyond international organizations such as these, major Non-Government Organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, as well as corporations, are predictably behind the moves to digitize identity for reasons explained in the ID2020 Manifesto. For example, as Peggy Johnson of Microsoft Corporation noted: ‘… it’s exciting to imagine a world where safe and secure digital identities are possible, providing everyone with an essential building block to every right and opportunity they deserve.’

See ‘ID2020’ and ‘ID2020 Manifesto’.

Again, why rights and opportunities, theoretically long-ago enshrined in a multitude of human rights laws, should now somehow be accessed through a digitized identity is, obviously, not explained.

With such a predatory list of sponsors – the World Economic Forum, World Bank, United Nations, major corporations, particular NGOs – clearly endorsing digital identity and the complete absence from any consultation process of those of us who might identify (not digitally, of course) as ‘ordinary’ people, it is obvious why those who understand the rapidly advancing technocratic agenda have issued a multitude of warnings about participating in the ongoing efforts to digitize your identity.

What, precisely, is at stake?

Your identity itself. Your freedom. Your privacy. Your human rights generally, including the right to choose what you eat and how you obtain it. And everything else that matters to you. Gone forever, if this global push is successful.

Let me explain this in a little more detail.

All over the world, countries have been implementing processes to digitize the identities of their citizens. Here, for example, are progress reports on what is happening in Nigeria and Greece: ‘Nigeria will be a testing ground for Microsoft’s digital ID tech’ and ‘Greece rolls out digital “wallet” for citizens; ID and driving license now on phone’.

Beyond this, did you know that people in Australia started getting microchipped in 2016? See ‘Australia Has Started Microchipping People’ and ‘Australia Becomes World’s Most Microchipped Nation’.

But other countries, like Sweden, are not far behind. See ‘Thousands of Swedish people are swapping ID cards for microchips’.

And while digitizing your identity in this way might appear to be technologically savvy and even more convenient – after all, opening a door without a key is a pretty slick move hey? – the problem is that once your identity is linked to other more important functions, control of your life is soon easily taken from you.

As John Adams noted in a recent interview by Martin North, once you link a microchipped identity with the soon-to-be-introduced Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the Central Bank can simply reprogram your personal chip (or the chips of millions of people) to prevent you from engaging in a particular type of commerce if you do not comply with whatever mandatory requirements are in force at the time. Beyond this, of course, what else will the chip be used to control? Do you know? Watch ‘Australia’s banks want you MICROCHIPPED!’

And what if, as planned, your identity chip is linked to your driver’s licence and your car? How far do you think you will be able to travel from home? To go shopping for food? To travel to work? Will you be allowed to go on holiday?

Beyond these simple examples, what if your digital identity is linked to your health records (including vaccination status), your legal records, and anything else they decide to add – such as carbon credits – so that you can be given a ‘social credit score’? Perhaps you will be deemed unsuitable to be a parent and have your children taken away.

But the answers to these questions, as well as others, are already known and you can watch a fuller explanation of just how securely you are already locked in this digital ID prison in this video presentation by technology expert Aman Jabbi – see ‘Facial Recognition: Digital ID or Digital Dictatorship?’ – who spells it out in gruesome detail.

By the end of 2022, there will be more than twenty billion data collection (not just simple surveillance) cameras (of many types) in the world keeping track of the nearly eight billion people on Earth. As Jabbi observes: Under the guise of privacy, security and convenience, ‘We are being monitored everywhere and all the time’ by the ‘Internet of Eyes and Ears’ linked to artificial intelligence and a vast array of technological devices, such as smart street poles and lights which gather data via facial recognition cameras and environmental sensors, display digital signage, use speakers to instruct the immediate population how to behave, include ‘drone charging stations’ because drones ‘are going to be the new aerial police’ with everything wirelessly connected to each other and the Internet of Things (IoT). This comprehensive network will be used to collect your data and control your behaviour, including by use of LED (light-emitting diode) incapacitators (which Jabbi calls ‘puke guns’) which emit high-intensity beams of different frequencies that can make you vomit or inflict other forms of behavioural control. In short, behavioural compliance will be enforced not by human guards, but by artificial intelligence and electromagnetic weapons.

The digital identity they say is a new chapter in the social contract. It’s a social contract that nobody signed up for and nobody wants. But they are… going to force this on us.

Every entity, person, device and thing is going to have a digital identity and once you sign on to a digital identity, the only way you can access healthcare or your bank finances, ability to travel, ability to access the internet, to go to social platforms or do anything in your life, to buy food, you need a digital identity. And how will that digital identity be authenticated? Through your face. So your face is the key to unlocking access to life.

And this key is going to be linked to a new type of financial system which is going to be a combination of carbon credits, your social credits or social score… ‘reputation capital’, and then of course your status with respect to vaccines and boosters…. And if you don’t have enough carbon score and you don’t have enough social score or you haven’t taken your latest booster, your face will not be able to unlock your digital identity and therefore you cannot access stuff.

You’ll be locked out of the whole new matrix system. And this is what they call central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)….

This is essentially the key to understanding what sort of a new world that is going to be upon us once the final switches are turned on….

Your digital identity is really a digital prison and your face is used to unlock the digital prison if you behave well….

And how are they going to implement this? There is a new protocol called ‘Zero Trust in Cyber Security’… so by default we are going from a world of implicit ‘allow’ to default ‘deny’.

So as an example, when you log into your computer you type in a password… and you have access to your browser, your files, your applications but now this zero trust is about ‘default deny’ which means ‘we don’t trust you and for everything you need to do you’ll be denied initially until you can prove that you’re trustworthy’ and that trust will come from face recognition and from digital identity. (If you want to read more about ‘digital trust’, here is the Callsign report: ‘The digital trust index’.)

Beyond the above, by using ‘geofencing’ (both digitally and geographically), your access to everything, including who you can contact, how you can travel and how far, what media you can access or book you can read… can be controlled through your digital identity. ‘So the goal is to lockdown humanity in these smart cities and not allow them to move anywhere…. So the digital identity is inside the Trojan horse of security and privacy. I can’t stress this enough…. And this will result in total control of humans because people will comply in order to unlock access to life.’ In addition, ‘they can even be monitoring the emotional state of a child and the algorithms can decide whether child abuse is happening at home and then they can come for the children, which they will.’

Jabbi also points out that in late April 2022, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations took over the internet which means that, soon enough, ‘If you don’t accept a digital ID, you cannot get onto the internet and you cannot open your phone’. And he emphasizes that ‘Banning facial recognition means nothing because neither your government, nor your state or local officials are doing facial recognition so banning it is pointless because facial recognition is going to be done in the cloud on Amazon and Google servers with artificial intelligence algorithms, with cameras installed by private companies on public lands which are now owned by private corporations.’

Apart from Aman Jabbi, other scholars have also thoughtfully researched what is happening regarding digital identity and how it relates to other features of the overall elite plan.

After exhaustive research leading to their extensive report ‘Paving a Digital Road to Hell? A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID’, scholars at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law concluded as follows in relation to digital ID:

As outlined in this primer, and as many of our partners and colleagues have documented, the World Bank and a wider network of global actors are promoting a specific model of digital ID. This model privileges economic identity, is disconnected from legal status, and steers attention away from civil registration. Contrary to the human rights and inclusive development language used to promote this vision of digital ID, this model threatens a range of fundamental rights, from the right to social security to the right to privacy. The purported benefits remain mostly unsubstantiated in the absence of serious baseline studies, cost-benefit and value for money analyses, and impact assessments. Meanwhile, researching and revealing the impacts of these systems has mostly been outsourced to an already overburdened and under-resourced community of human rights organizations, advocates, scholars, journalists, and other civil society actors.

The report includes three recommendations for addressing concerns about digital ID, given the transformational nature of the change intended: 1. detailed investigation and research, consideration (particularly of possible harms and their mitigation), cost-benefit analysis and impact assessments; 2. thorough discussion in democratic fora based on detailed knowledge of plans, actors involved in the scheme and roles played by foreign governments and international organizations; and 3. engagement of all stakeholders, including us, not just ‘technical experts’ in the deliberations.

Researcher Lynn Corey has also written an insightful four-part series of reports which are published on her website and as a book. In the second report – see ‘The Global Landscape on Vaccine ID Passports Part 2: How Your Digital Identity is Moving to The Blockchain for Full Control Over Humans’ – Corey identifies key players driving the long-term plan that is currently being implemented, particularly noting the importance of central banks but also other key elite agencies such as the World Economic Forum and United Nations. Their aim is to institute ‘complete digital control… over the world and all human beings’ and Corey observes that different agents ‘have their areas of expertise when it comes to building the digital identities, which is the key to making this all happen.’

Investigative journalist Jesse Smith bluntly observes:

With the evidence being provided openly, there is little reason to doubt that humanity is being ushered into a new era of surveillance and control through digital ID systems. This effort is being pushed by governments, banks, multinational corporations, and global governance organizations like the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations.

But digital IDs only represent one aspect of the digital revolution….

A whole world is being created to enslave us in a perpetual digital panopticon including the metaverse, digital currency (CBDCs), mass surveillance, AI and biometrics, and body implants while blockchain technology records everything we do.

See ‘The Global Digital ID Surveillance Plan Accelerates – Urgent Resistance Needed’.

Beyond these scholars and organizations, there are other fine analysts who have explained why digital ID promises to inflict great harm on humanity. You can watch, for example, the excellent video report by James Corbett: ‘The Global Digital ID Prison’ and read the critique by Derrick Broze ‘Exposing The “Digital ID Is A Human Right” Scam’.

These and other scholars, such as Peter Koenig – see ‘Digital Identity – Absolute and Total Control via the QR Code: Open Letter to the Swiss Federal Council’ – have also explained why there is zero intention to meaningfully engage ‘ordinary people’ in consideration of the plan: The explicit intention is to impose it on us.

In addition, we also have the experience of India to consider, as documented in the report ‘Busting the Dangerous Myths of Big ID Programs: Cautionary Lessons From India’ which offers this summary before going on to expose how India’s digital ID system, introduced some years ago, has spectacularly failed to deliver gains for ‘ordinary’ people in twelve key areas, noting that ‘ID systems often promise a technological solution for a political problem’.

Around the world, the quickly expanding ‘Big ID’ industry has driven the adoption of centralized digital identity programs that severely undermine human rights. Governments, companies, and international agencies sell the idea of implementing a Big ID project as the silver bullet for solving a host of problems…. without ever presenting evidence that these tools will actually be effective at meeting people’s needs.… Aadhaar, India’s flagship Big ID project, is a clear example of this approach. Despite all the positive propaganda in its favor, Aadhaar has had a disastrous impact.

Despite the solidly documented negative experiences in relation to digitized identity and the many expert warnings against it, a range of powerful elite agents has a comprehensive program to impose this technocratic nightmare upon us. Consequently, it will require many people resisting strategically if it is to be defeated.

But if you remain sceptical of the risks and dangers of the technological world being constructed to imprison us, any time spent reading such books as the following should inspire you to consider ways to defend your true identity and, wherever possible, erase the existing elements of your digital identity, among many other responses: Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, John W. Whitehead’s Battlefield America: The War on the American People, Derrick Broze’s How to Opt-Out of the Technocratic State as well as the several books on technocracy written by Patrick Wood and his articles posted on his website ‘Technocracy News and Trends’.

The bottom line is simple: Every time you submit to participation in some technological convenience, you  give up some control over your own life. And there is no easy way to reclaim it, assuming that you even can.

What can we do about this?

First, remember that despite the rhetoric to which we are routinely subjected about digital identity and other aspects of the elite’s technological prison (benignly labeled measures to enhance our ‘privacy, security and convenience’), the vast range of inconsistencies, illogical arguments and ongoing efforts to kill or enslave us – see ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It Is “Now or Never” in the Long War against Homo Sapiens’ – are functions of elite insanity. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ with further detail in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

This does not mean that we do not face a profound threat. We do. But it means that we cannot rely on reason or thoughtfulness alone to get us out of this mess: You cannot reason with insanity. And because the Global Elite controls international and national political processes, the global economy and legal systems, efforts to seek redress through those channels must fail.

See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’

Moreover, if we are going to defeat this long-planned, complex and multifaceted threat, we must defeat its foundational components, not delude ourselves that we can defeat it one threat at a time or even by choosing those threats we think are the worst and addressing those first.

This is because the elite program, whatever its flaws and inconsistencies, as well as its potential for technological failure at times, is deeply integrated so we must direct our efforts at preventing or halting those foundational components of it that make everything else possible. This is why random acts of resistance will achieve nothing. Effective resistance requires the focused exercise of our power. In simple terms, we must be ‘strategic’.

If you are interested in being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.

In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 20 languages (Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish & Slovak) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here:

‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.

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

And if you want to organize a mass mobilization, such as a rally, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.

If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here:

‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.

Finally, while the timeframe for this to make any difference is now in doubt, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make

‘My Promise to Children’.

Conclusion

Resisting the digitization of your identity is an important element of effective resistance to the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ program.

While there are some elements of this that are very difficult to avoid, such as facial recognition cameras that are virtually everywhere, it certainly includes not signing up for a digital identity or participating unthinkingly in those programs, such as using a QR code, getting a ‘vaccine passport’ or willingly submitting to efforts to palm-print or microchip you, that are linked to it.

But, as I have already noted, just resisting digitization of your identity is not enough.

We must strategically resist the foundational components of the Elite program.

The alternatives are death or slavery.

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

RE-WIRING FOR THE FOUNDATIONS OF A NEW WORLD

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘You are the foundation in which a new world needs to be built upon – each and every one of you are a part of this foundation.’ – Abe

There have always been individuals among the population that exhibit a higher resonance, and this enables them, whether they are conscious of it or not, to act as ‘alarm clocks’ for others. What may be the real issue here is not so much the chaos unfolding in the physical world but rather that not enough people are enabling an appropriate resonance to take root and to become established within humanity. The real ‘apocalyptic’ scenario is the breaking down of old ways and the bringing in of new resonant alignments. It is difficult for humans to accept that great change and shifts come about through breakdown, and what appears as destruction. That is, beginnings need a new space from which to emerge, both physically and energetically.

The current reality of the modern world has much within it to overload the human senses. There are many factors that contribute to vibrational dissonance, and this seems to be increasing, not lessening. Part of this is related to our advancing technologies, especially our digital devices and communications infrastructure. Other aspects are related to the human psyche, and its individual and collective state of psychological (dis)equilibrium. Both elements – the technological and the psychological – are interrelated and affect one another. Moreover, there are also deliberate human strategies to maintain this dissonance and state of fragmentation as a means to manipulate, control, divide, and box up each individual inside their own conscious experience. If placed into specific labelled boxes, then human thinking patterns and fields of consciousness will become artificially restricted. Unfortunately, many people have become so used to experiencing consciousness within limited parameters. These are our restrictive thinking patterns, that then go on to form belief systems, intellectual structures, and programmed perspectives. We are literally living out of boxes – psychologically homeless – with our genuine freedoms curtailed. We are so used to projecting our psychological attachments upon so many unnecessary things, which we then get entangled with.

It is understandable that there is a confusion around the concept of resonance. There is a popular notion that resonance is something to be ‘raised’ through certain actions such as positive thinking. Yet ultimately, this may be little more than sugar-coating – a ‘band-aid treatment’ as it is called.[1] That is, people end up masking the issue without actually getting to the root of it. And this appears to be fast becoming a default setting in modern life. By seeking out positive thinking ‘feel good’ type of practices, this is like using medication to mask the pain without finding out the root cause. And in the end, it may serve as a distraction rather than a benefit for there is still an attachment to the old patterns and feel-good factors may function more as a delay rather than as a remedy. Positive thought is not a bad thing, but it should not detract from the understanding that a person is, relatively speaking, already imbued with their own potentials. The misunderstanding here is that people are pushing to ‘raise something.’ But in this, people often remain clinging to all the old baggage of seeking salvation away from the circumstances of everyday life. And this can make it harder still for people to let go, to disconnect, from their unhealthy entanglements. Natural resonance is more a question of being receptive rather than pushing to ‘raise’ something. That is, we are being reminded to refine what we already are – there is no need to feel compelled to go anywhere ‘higher.’

A person’s energetic state and resonance is relational to how they feel within. As such, it is strongly connected to our mental and emotional states. As it is now broadly recognized, the human being is highly socially conditioned. We are easily influenced and manipulated to give away our inner authority onto external structures and supports. The more things that we link our energy up to, the more we can be influenced. In this, we can be giving our energies away without a reciprocal exchange. This can be through linking up to other people, as well as with possessions, ideas, desires, etc.

The more we send out our vibrational tentacles, the more we are liable, often unknowingly, to give a little away of ourselves each time. We easily forget to ‘draw back the links,’ and to reevaluate our psychological, emotional, and physical attachments. It is often through our own unawareness that we block or distort our natural resonance – our flow. Just as we arrange our house to the way we like it, to give us the energetic feel that makes it right for us, so too should we arrange our life, our connections and relations, in a way that harmonizes with us. Humans have the advantage over other animals that we have a high degree of self-awareness. Yet because of this, we often over-complicate matters; whereby animals, on the other hand, are much more instinctive and responsive to fields of energy. It may be good to remind ourselves that we each have the capacity to literally re-wire our internal connections that then will manifest in our external relations. In the end, human survival is dependent upon the connections we make to the world around us. We cannot evolve as a species cut off from its environment, energetically isolated.

It seems that humanity is being nudged down its rabbit hole, but all alone. We have lost part of our essential connection in how we resonate to the planet, the animal kingdom, with the ecosystem, and within the larger cosmos. We are severing our resonance with the very environment that sustains and nourishes us – it is like we are peeing in our own bathwater. In the end, any imbalance will cause our species the greatest upset. The planet, and its environment, can always find rebalance, for this is their natural resonance. On the other hand, humanity has placed this disequilibrium and off-kilter resonance upon themselves – or else allowed others to place it. Yet now is the moment to step away from these pathways of dissonance and disequilibrium and to allow for the establishment of a new foundation.

Beginnings need a new space from which to emerge, both physically and energetically.

The path of self-development – ‘a process of human becoming’ – is something that generally goes against all that we have been taught. Or rather, against all the social programming and conditioning that we were brought up within. We may even be asking ourselves: ‘why be the foundation in which a new world needs to be built upon when I have a hard enough time dealing with my regular everyday life?’ It may also sound like pseudo-science when it is said that the creation of new neural pathways in the human brain can allow for a new resonance pattern. Yet this is how new thinking operates – it starts to establish new patterns of neuronal connection. And this is where the initial re-wiring should occur – in our own internal workings, not out there in the physical world. Besides, what happens within will also be reflected without: this is also part of the relational aspect of energy. It is about reprogramming ourselves first, before we rush off trying to reorder and reorganize the world around us. We need to take time to reassess and to question ourselves and the world we perceive. It is time for us to take a good, deep look at our own human programming.

Humanity (broadly speaking) has seemingly got itself embedded into a ‘vicious cycle,’ or loop pattern. Our socializing processes literally hypnotize us, and we create a myriad of manifestos and ideologies to keep us entertained (or transfixed). We easily become trapped within our own rankings and system of hierarchies, and little realize how much we smother ourselves.  After putting on so many outer layers (like overcoats) – socially, psychologically, emotionally, etc. – it is now time to start stripping them back. We often refer to the life experience as the ‘game of life,’ yet we often miss the point in that games are meant to be played – and we need to learn how to play our ‘selves.’ In playing our Self, we also should be playing our own truths. Yet most of the time we end up playing someone else’s truths. We need to ground ourselves first. Otherwise, we are liable to be swung around by the events, influences, and manipulations of life.

We are not here to pre-define to ourselves where we may find our truths or not, for then we are already creating limitations and confinements. The barriers, blockages, and illusions that we may have built up around us need now to be dropped. After all, life often has a way of circumnavigating our expectations and presenting us with incredible, spontaneous opportunities. Let us just say that it is timely to be now taking time out to re-align with our ‘home resonance’ and to root this. It is important that we each find the space to refocus, to readjust, and realign. To find our balance – our resonance/equilibrium – is not rocket-science, as they say.

If a person wishes to use certain practices/tools to re-sync back up, then this is fine – so long as they realize that these are tools and not the thing itself. Of course, it can be said that humans have always used tools throughout their history; tools have helped us navigate through the material world and to mediate our experiences. The danger here, though, is when we start to over-identify with them; when we say, ‘my practice or meditation is more spiritual, more aligned than yours,’ then such an attitude as this helps no one. Readjustment is not a forced process; it is a natural re-alignment and, as such, should be as normal as possible and not strained. Our tools and practices should not end up getting in the way by becoming our crutches. Once the ‘work is done,’ so to speak, we can put them down again and stop carrying them with us. After all, we wouldn’t continue to use a hammer if it is not needed, for it would only damage the wood.

Ultimately, those structures and groupings that favour separation, division, and control will fall for they are not sustainable or relatable to natural law. If the energy upon this planet increasingly shifts to one of unity and togetherness, then this will attract others into this alignment. People, structures, and groupings that have previously favoured separation and discord may then be compelled to realign if the prominent energies upon the planet shift. Not only is this scenario possible, it may even be likely, due to cosmic factors which then influence planetary ones. This realignment upon the planet may be chaotic initially, yet such chaos generally has a function. And let us also be honest: this re-wiring for the foundations of a new world will not attract everyone. Not everyone is ready for it yet. There are a great many people not yet actively seeking this type of information or understanding. And that is fine. Nothing can be forced – that is the nature of natural resonance. Yet if enough people start to manifest a new harmonic resonance, the collective instrument that is humanity can be re-tuned. After all, it only takes a few musicians to hear the new pitch in order to guide the orchestra.

Ukraine and the Politics of Permanent War

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Permanent war requires permanent censorship.

War Inc. – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.

On August 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require Congressional approval.

Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia’s February 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts. 

The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.

The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions. 

In the face of this barrage, no dissent is permitted. CBS News caved to pressure and retracted its documentary which charged that only 30 percent of arms shipped to Ukraine were making it to the front lines, with the rest siphoned off to the black market, a finding that was separately reported upon by U.S. journalist Lindsey Snell. CNN has acknowledged there is no oversight of weapons once they arrive in Ukraine, long considered the most corrupt country in Europe. According to a poll of executives responsible for tackling fraud, completed by Ernst & Young in 2018, Ukraine was ranked the ninth-most corrupt nation from 53 surveyed. 

There is little ostensible reason for censoring critics of the war in Ukraine. The U.S. is not at war with Russia. No U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine. Criticism of the war in Ukraine does not jeopardize our national security. There are no long-standing cultural and historical ties to Ukraine, as there are to Great Britain. But if permanent war, with potentially tenuous public support, is the primary objective, censorship makes sense.

War is the primary business of the U.S. empire and the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The two ruling political parties slavishly perpetuate permanent war, as they do austerity programs, trade deals, the virtual tax boycott for corporations and the rich, wholesale government surveillance, the militarization of the police and the maintenance of the largest prison system in the world. They bow before the dictates of the militarists, who have created a state within a state. This militarism, as Seymour Melman writes in The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, “is fundamentally contradictory to the formation of a new political economy based upon democracy, instead of hierarchy, in the workplace and the rest of society.” 

“The idea that war economy brings prosperity has become more than an American illusion,” Melman writes. “When converted, as it has been, into ideology that justifies the militarization of society and moral debasement, as in Vietnam, then critical reassessment of that illusion is a matter of urgency. It is a primary responsibility of thoughtful people who are committed to humane values to confront and respond to the prospect that deterioration of American economy and society, owing to the ravages of war economy, can become irreversible.”

If permanent war is to be halted, as Melman writes, the ideological control of the war industry must be shattered. The war industry’s funding of  politicians, research centers and think tanks, as well as its domination of the media monopolies, must end. The public must be made aware, Melman writes, of how the federal government “sustains itself as the directorate of the largest industrial corporate empire in the world; how the war economy is organized and operated in parallel with centralized political power — often contradicting the laws of Congress and the Constitution itself; how the directorate of the war economy converts pro-peace sentiment in the population into pro-militarist majorities in the  Congress; how ideology and fears of job losses are manipulated to marshal support in Congress and the general public for war economy; how the directorate of the war economy uses its power to prevent planning for orderly conversion to an economy of peace.”

Rampant, unchecked militarism, as historian Arnold Toynbee notes, “has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations.” 

This breakdown is accelerated by the rigid standardization and uniformity of public discourse. The manipulation of public opinion, what Walter Lippman calls “the manufacture of consent,” is imperative as the militarists gut social programs; let the nation’s crumbling infrastructure decay; refuse to raise the minimum wage; sustain an inept, mercenary for-profit health care system that resulted in 25 percent of global Covid deaths — although we are less than 5 percent of the world’s population — to gouge the public; carries out deindustrialization; do nothing to curb the predatory behavior of banks and corporations or invest in substantial programs to combat the climate crisis. 

Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked, discredited and silenced for speaking a truth that threatens the public’s quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged by the war industry and the nation disemboweled. 

You can watch my discussion with Matt Taibbi about the rot that infects journalism here and here.

The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. No matter how many disasters — from Vietnam to Afghanistan — it orchestrates, it is showered with larger and larger amounts of federal funds, nearly half of all the government’s discretionary spending. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

An organization like NewsGuard, which has been rating what it says are trustworthy and untrustworthy sites based on their reporting on Ukraine, is one of the many indoctrination tools of the war industry. Sites that raise what are deemed “false” assertions about Ukraine, including that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and neo-Nazi forces are part of Ukraine’s military and power structure, are tagged as unreliable. Consortium News, Daily Kos, Mint Press and Grayzone have been given a red warning label. Sites that do not raise these issues, such as CNN, receive the “green” rating” for truth and credibility.  (NewsGuard, after being heavily criticized for giving Fox News a green rating of approval in July revised its rating for Fox News and MSNBC, giving them red labels.) 

The ratings are arbitrary. The Daily Caller, which published fake naked pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was given a green rating, along with a media outlet owned and operated by The Heritage Foundation. NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks a red label for “failing” to publish retractions despite admitting that all of the information WikiLeaks has published thus far is accurate. What WikiLeaks was supposed to retract remains a mystery. The New York Times and The Washington Post, which shared a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election, a conspiracy theory the Mueller investigation imploded, are awarded perfect scores. These ratings are not about vetting journalism. They are about enforcing conformity.

NewsGuard, established in 2018, “partners” with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as corporations such as Microsoft. Its advisory board includes the former Director of the CIA and NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden; the first U.S. Homeland Security director Tom Ridge and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO.

Readers who regularly go to targeted sites could probably care less if they are tagged with a red label. But that is not the point. The point is to rate these sites so that anyone who has a NewsGuard extension installed on their devices will be warned away from visiting them. NewsGuard is being installed in libraries and schools and on the computers of active-duty troops. A warning pops up on targeted sites that reads: “Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”

Negative ratings will drive away advertisers, which is the intent. It is also a very short step from blacklisting these sites to censoring them, as happened when YouTube erased six years of my show On Contact that was broadcast on RT America and RT International. Not one show was about Russia. And not one violated the guidelines for content imposed by YouTube. But many did examine the evils of U.S. militarism.

In an exhaustive rebuttal to NewsGuard, which is worth reading, Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, ends with this observation:

NewsGuard’s accusations against Consortium News that could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West’s war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. Three CN writers have  been kicked off Twitter. 

PayPal’s cancellation of Consortium News’ account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company’s view that CN violated its restrictions on “providing false or misleading information.” It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, but CN trades in information and nothing else.  

CN supports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media.

Those causes are: NATO’s expansion eastward despite its promise not to do so; the coup and eight-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia’s security concerns into account.  

Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.

The frantic effort to corral viewers and readers into the embrace of the establishment media — only 16 percent of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and only 11 percent have some degree of confidence in television news — is a sign of desperation. 

As the persecution of Julian Assange illustrates, the throttling of press freedom is bipartisan. This assault on truth leaves a population unmoored. It feeds wild conspiracy theories. It shreds the credibility of the ruling class. It empowers demagogues. It creates an information desert, one where truth and lies are indistinguishable. It frog-marches us towards tyranny. This censorship only serves the interests of the militarists who, as Karl Liebknecht reminded his fellow Germans in World War I, are the enemy within.

U.S.-BACKED UKRAINIAN OFFICIALS ARE TRYING TO PROSECUTE JOURNALISTS FOR SPREADING TRUE INFO

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By Lee Camp

Source: Mint Press News

This past May, Rand Paul, the Senator from Kentucky, did something that made a lot of sense. Before a vote to send another $40 Billion to Ukraine, Paul demanded language that would create oversight for that money.

Most of Congress was furious with him for daring to put restrictions on U.S. funding for the proxy forces in Ukraine. One of his peers who was most upset with him was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

As former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter writes for Consortium News, three weeks after Schumer forced that bill through and got the money for the proxy war in Ukraine, something funny happened,

…[O]n July 14, Andriy Shapovalov, a Ukrainian civil servant whose salary was paid for by U.S. taxpayer monies, convened a “round table” in Kiev on ‘countering disinformation.’ Shapovalov …published a list of the names of 72 people whom he accused of deliberately spreading disinformation about Ukraine. Shapovalov labeled them ‘information terrorists,’ adding that Ukraine was preparing legislation so that such people can be prosecuted as ‘war criminals.’”

They want the power to call people war criminals for printing something Ukraine doesn’t like, and you can bet that the U.S. supports this outrageous policy.

Ritter continued,

The “round table’ was organized by the U.S. Civil Research and Development Fund (CRDF Global Ukraine), an ostensible nonprofit organization authorized by U.S. Congress to promote ‘international scientific and technical collaboration.’ It is supported by the U.S. State Department, some of whose officials sat in attendance.”

This committee was organized by a U.S.-backed nonprofit, and State Department officials were in the room.

Who exactly do they want to call information terrorists who should be prosecuted as war criminals? “One of the people singled out by Shapovalov as an ‘information terrorist’ targeted for criminal prosecution as a ‘war criminal’ was none other than Rand Paul,” reported Ritter. So Sen. Paul is being called a war criminal for trying to get some oversight on the billions of dollars sent to Ukrainian Nazis.

The senator from Kentucky isn’t the only U.S. politician on the list. An obscure New York Senate candidate named Diane Sare also appears on the list of information terrorists.

But how did she get on there?

Ritter wrote, “On May 31, Diane Sare, a LaRouche candidate challenging Schumer for his Senate seat in November, filed 66,000 signatures — well over the 45,000 required by law — with the New York State Board of Elections, thereby getting her name on the ballot.” Do you think, perhaps, that Sen. Schumer might have some say on that list?

Everyone in the U.S. should be repulsed at the idea of people being labeled “terrorists” or “war criminals” for standing up to U.S. propaganda about the proxy war in Ukraine. But beyond that, we should be more disgusted by the Senate Majority leader using taxpayer money to seemingly go after his political opponents.

Who is the U.S. and its proxy government in Ukraine to tell people what is and is not the truth? That’s like Fred Durst telling you what is and is not good music.

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of Behind The Headlines’ new series: The Most Censored News With Lee Camp. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.

Censorship and Global Information Control: Who Is Behind the “Trusted News Initiative”(TNI)?

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By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Source: Global Research

Story at-a-glance

  • The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was founded by the BBC in July 2019. While TNI claims to promote democracy and freedom, its purpose for being is global information control
  • Partners in the initiative include global media outlets such as The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, AFP, the Financial Times and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Big Tech partners such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft
  • TNI was formed mere weeks after a Reuters Institute report revealed trust in U.S. media had slipped to an all-time low of just 29% — the lowest of the 46 countries included. Clearly, people were going elsewhere for the facts, and that probably had everything to do with the creation of TNI. They have no control over alternative media, so they needed a comprehensive way to shut them all down
  • By suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the COVID shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the converse of “trusted news.” It is the very “fake news” it claims to combat
  • In addition to TNI, Google also has a similar program going on, called the Google News Initiative, which includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry. The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA), to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising”

https://odysee.com/$/download/Vaccine-Safety-Research-Foundation-TNI/e12aa5cff1d4330b882766cf4f00ed41c42a532c

What is the Trusted News Initiative (TNI)? As you may have discovered, Orwellian doublespeak is rampant these days, and many organizations are named in complete opposition to their intended purposes. Such is the case with the TNI as well.

As explained in the video above, created by Steve Kirsch’s Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF), TNI is an organization created for the purpose of global information control. It was founded by the BBC in July 2019,1,2,3 mere months before the COVID pandemic shattered all semblance of free speech rights.

Partners in the initiative include global media outlets such as The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, AFP, the Financial Times and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Big Tech partners such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft, just to name a few.4,5

TNI Formed as Trust in Mainstream Media Hit Rock Bottom

As astutely noted by Elizabeth Woodsworth in The Liberty Beacon,6 TNI was formed mere weeks after a Reuters Institute report revealed trust in U.S. media had slipped to an all-time low of just 29% — the lowest of the 46 countries included. Canadians trust in mainstream media was only slightly better at 45%.

Also supporting the distrust in the media is an even more appalling recent Gallup Poll.7 Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Jimmy Dore goes into more details below.

This massive slip “can only mean that people are going elsewhere for their news,” Woodsworth said. And that probably had everything to do with the creation of TNI. They realized people didn’t trust mainstream media anymore and were looking elsewhere for the facts.

This presented a serious problem, as they had no control over alternative media. How then would they shut down undesirable facts and theories that might jeopardize the smooth transition into the New World Order? Enter TNI and a new cadre of “fact checking” organizations to wrangle the unruly masses back into the brainwashing line.

Promoting ‘Freedom and Democracy’ Through Censorship

According to TNI, its first order of business was to “promote freedom and democracy” by preventing foreign interference in the 2020 election. However, TNI’s mission didn’t end there. Its Big Pharma backers had a vaccination agenda right from the start, and TNI has been instrumental in promoting that agenda and upholding their financial interests.

In 2019 — before we knew anything about the COVID shots to come — TNI warned that “anti-vaxxers are gaining traction” and that online platforms would need to intervene using algorithms to suppress the growing anti-vaccine movement.

In addition to suppressing undesirable vaccine content, TNI also floods online users with pro-vaccine messages to drown out what little opposition is left. As noted by VSRF, from the start, TNI sought to normalize the use of this experimental gene transfer technology, despite a mountain of unanswered questions about the safety and efficacy of mRNA technology.

Suppressing early treatment successes was also part of the vaccine agenda, as early treatment options posed a direct threat to the Emergency Use Authorization of these experimental shots.

To that same end, TNI also fueled hatred against the unvaccinated, and hired so-called “fact checkers” to publish false fact checks and hit pieces on those who questioned the sanity and safety of pandemic countermeasures, such as masks and lockdowns, or raised concerns about the experimental shots.

We’re Made to Pay for Our Own Destruction

Hundreds of outspoken doctors and scientists — including experts from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford — have been banned and deplatformed over the past two and a half years.

No matter how prestigious their careers, they’ve been labeled “dangerous” and targeted for neutralization. Many have lost their careers. They’ve been ousted from professional associations and stripped of their medical licenses.By suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the very ‘fake news’ it claims to combat.

Thousands of vaccine-injured people have also been accused of spreading “misinformation” and have been targeted for elimination from social media, while mainstream media (MSM) have roundly ignored their plight and pleas for recognition and help.

As noted by VSRF, by suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the converse of “trusted news.” It actually creates and promotes mis- and disinformation. It is the very “fake news” it claims to combat.

And “Who’s paying for this harmful suppression of science?” VSRF asks. The answer: YOU are. We all are, through our taxes. Government has spent billions of tax dollars to promote the experimental COVID jabs, which benefits no one but Big Pharma, various patent holders and investors.

Legacy Media Is on the Wrong Side of History

In a June 25, 2021, article, unidentified staff at TrialSite News commented on the shocking censorship that was already becoming apparent:8

“Since time immemorial, those with power have used it to control those without. In the modern world, big government and big tech represent the seats of power when it comes to who is allowed to say what. Of course, many think that ‘private companies’ can regulate speech in any way they see fit. But from either an ethical or legal point of view, this is false …

COVID-19 and the Shadowy “Trusted News Initiative”

Legally, the Supreme Court has long held that when a private company creates something that functions as a public square (think of a company town), the First Amendment comes into play.

Way back in April 2020, it was already clear that the then-existing online socio-political censorship was going to expand into the world of science, medicine, and academia in the new COVID-19 era. On April 1 of that year, early in the pandemic, Foreign Policy took a look at these questions in a piece titled, ‘Coronavirus Has Started a Censorship Pandemic’9 …

[D]isallowing good-faith medical information because the public can’t be presumed to properly weigh claims is infantilizing said public, along with dismantling the free speech culture …

The efforts now underway to completely suppress positive data associated with early-onset treatment prospects such as ivermectin or the squelching of any discussion of vaccine safety issues is completely unacceptable in a civilized, democratic market-based society. Those perpetuating such offenses are in fact on the wrong side of history.”

And who are the ones perpetuating these offenses? The TNI, for sure. TNI partners have censored and tried to ruin the reputations and careers of fully qualified and licensed public health experts, doctors and scientists — all in the name of protecting you, the audience, from the life-saving information these experts are trying to share. In her closing remarks, Woodsworth says:10

“Regarding COVID-19, Dr. Piers Robinson, co-director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, has judged, ‘It wouldn’t be an underestimation to say that this is probably one of the biggest propaganda operations that we have seen in history,’ concluding ‘what happens is down to how people resist and how much force and coercion the authorities use.’

Indeed, the very foundation of democracy is that public wisdom should be consulted and given its head in self-rule. The public has the constitutional right to full information to form and express its own conclusions and does not need a coordinated TNI to corral and contain it.

It is utterly outrageous that the voices the public needs from the top public health figures at its best universities are being denied to its hearing. A far superior job of investigative reporting is being done by the hard-working alternative media researchers without Big Pharma’s blood-stained advertising dollars.”

Organized Control

The reason the TNI has been so effective in shutting out opposing views is because all of the partners work together in a highly-organized manner. When one identifies a piece of “misinformation,” the order to quash it is shared across platforms. The same goes for the official narrative. Everyone supports and promotes it, no matter how illogical.

A debunking piece by one legacy media partner is used as “proof” by another, and Big Tech platforms, of course, have unprecedented ability to suppress unwanted content and push “official” or approved content to the front using algorithms alone.

As for who actually decides what the official narrative is supposed to be, your guess is as good as mine. What we do know is that wealthy and powerful interests control media worldwide.

Two major media controllers are BlackRock and the Vanguard Group, which combined own a vast majority of the world’s assets, including media companies. Another is Bill Gates, whose self-serving “donations” ensure media treat him like a medical expert (or climate expert, or nutritional expert, or agricultural expert) when, in reality, he’s just promoting ideas that will make him a ton of money.

TNI’s Not-so-Trustworthy Sources

And what about TNI’s “trusted sources”? Aside from other TNI partners and their fact checkers, trusted sources are the public health agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Every one of these agencies has a long “rap sheet” when it comes to corruption and errors in judgment, and their unreliability have been highlighted time and again over the course of the COVID pandemic. They’ve broken a long list of rules and regulations intended to ensure public safety, and rewritten others on the fly — again without following proper protocols.

Time and again, people have scratched their heads, saying, “How can they do that? That’s not lawful. They CAN’T do that!” Well, the reality is, they used to be merely corrupt, but now they’re completely lawless. And no one is stopping them.

Decisions made by the FDA, CDC, NIH and the WHO over the course of the pandemic have been downright shocking in their absolute absence of any moral compass. They’ve repeatedly deferred to Big Pharma and blatantly ignored even the most basic of safety protocols, putting even babies lives at risk.

In the past, we’d expect the Fourth Estate — journalists with integrity — to expose the kind of fraud and lawlessness these agencies are engaging in. But sadly, legacy media, just like nearly every federal regulatory agency, has been captured by the military industrial complex.

Legacy media is no longer the “free press.” It certainly is in no way shape or form your trusted source of news. Those days are long gone. They are completely captured; hardly a sentence is uttered that isn’t directed to them by the government and repeated parroting by all of legacy media in all their varied forms.

Google News Initiative

In addition to TNI, Google also has a similar program going on, called the Google News Initiative, which includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry.

The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA),11 to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising.”

This is wrong on so many levels. Advertising and news/editorial departments are not supposed to be mixed, period. They are intended to operate independently, not as complements or supporting helpmates. The very fact that newspapers are failing and ad revenue is dropping makes the entire press corps susceptible to doing whatever the advertisers want.

And, online, advertisers include the CDC and NIH, as evidenced by their many ads on social media. So, the TNTA program is really all about building revenue. It has nothing to do with providing trustworthy news.

Several other copycats also exist that have nearly the same name as TNI. There’s the Trusting News Initiative, the Trust Project, the News Integrity Initiative, the Journalism Trust Initiative, you get the idea.12 Some share partners with the TNI, further widening the media network of controlled news.

Add to that NewsGuard and scores of fact-checking organizations, all of whom work in tandem to promote the official narrative while suppressing opposing views. As I’ve stated before, NewsGuard received startup funds13 from the Publicis Groupe, one of the largest PR companies in the world, which serves the needs of several of the largest drug companies in the world.

Last but not least, there’s a tightly woven web of interlocking “fact-checking” agencies that work for advertisers in an effort to manipulate the news in favor of the advertisers or other entities with vested interests, such as governments and health organizations.

This web of fact-checkers is funded by hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars. I believe this was planned long before the pandemic, and their goal is to steer the news into a second horn for advertisers. Not surprisingly, the drug industry has one of the largest advertising budgets, which is part of why you can’t get the truth about drugs and health from the legacy media or any of these fact-checkers.

TNI and Hitler’s Principles

In his Substack article, “Propaganda, Corporatism and the Hidden Global Coup,” Dr. Robert Malone describes the TNI thus:14

“The TNI uses advocacy journalism and journals to promote their causes. The Trusted News Initiative is more than this though; if you go back to Hitler’s basic principles, the members of the TNI are using these core principles to control the public.”

Hitler’s basic principles are described in the book, “Propaganda and Persuasion,” and are listed as:15

  • Avoid abstract ideas — appeal to the emotions
  • Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases
  • Give only one side of the argument
  • Continuously criticize your opponents
  • Pick out one special “enemy” for special vilification

I believe Dr. Malone is onto something. These principles have certainly become media norms over the past couple of years. Who knows — perhaps I was picked to be a “special enemy for special vilification” because the TNI and those who pull their puppet strings are all Nazis. I didn’t expect it to be that simplistic, but who knows?

We’re all getting an education in psychopathy these days, and there’s nothing normal about psychopathic logic. Their brains are wired differently and you won’t be able to understand their motivations no matter how hard you try. Is this perhaps why so many decisions handed down to us make no rational sense, either from a scientific, medical or humanitarian perspective?

If it’s true that many of those who are trying to take over the world in a global coup are in fact on the psychopathic spectrum, then our response needs to be suitably appropriate.

Appropriate responses when faced with a psychopath include keeping your emotions in check (as they seek to manipulate your emotions); standing your ground in an assertive manner; not buying into their stories (especially not victim stories); and paying attention only to their actions, not their words.16,17

To be more precise, most experts have one primary suggestion for dealing with a psychopath, and that is, “Don’t.”18 Since we’re talking about media here, that’s a fairly simple action item. Just turn them off, and find alternative news sources that aren’t tainted by blood money and an overt attempt for global slavery.

You owe it to yourself and your family to take control of your health and avoid these propaganda tools and restrict your information to truly trusted and vetted sources.

Notes

1 Parispeaceforum TNI

2 BBC TNI

3, 6, 10 The Liberty Beacon August 13, 2021

4 Media Space TNI

5 EBU July 13, 2020

7 Gallup July 18, 2022

8 TrialSite News June 25, 2021

9 Foreign Policy April 1, 2020

11 Google News Initiative TNTA

12 Nieman Lab A Guide to the New Efforts Fighting for Journalism

13 CrunchBase NewsGuard

14, 15 RW Malone Substack February 28, 2022

16 INC How to Deal With a Psychopath

17, 18 Bakadesyo How to Deal With Psychopaths

What Will You Say When Millions Of People Starve To Death?

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By Michael Snyder

Source: End of the American Dream

For a long time, those of us that were claiming that a global famine was coming were widely mocked.  The skeptics could see the exact same trends that everyone else could see, but they just assumed that we would find a way to muddle through somehow.  So they didn’t want to listen to common sense, and they weren’t interested in warnings from “gloom and doomers” such as myself.  But I don’t consider myself to be a “doom and gloomer” because I am actually a very optimistic person.  I am so excited to be living during this time in human history, but I also know that very difficult times are ahead of us.  One of the major trends that I keep writing about over and over is famine, because the truth is that there simply is not going to be enough food for everyone on the planet in 2023 and beyond.  Of course the mainstream media is also starting to issue similar warnings.  For example, the following comes from a Yahoo News article entitled “Millions in East Africa face starvation due to drought”…

The World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that millions of people in East Africa face the threat of starvation. Speaking at a media briefing in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that drought, climate change, rising prices and an ongoing civil war in northern Ethiopia are all contributing to worsening food insecurity.

Over 50 million people in East Africa will face acute food insecurity this year, a study from late July by the World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organization found. Roughly 7 million children are suffering from malnourishment and, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, hundreds of thousands are leaving their homes in search of food or livelihoods. Affected countries include Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.

In Somalia, authorities are projecting that vegetable and grain production will “drop by about 80% this year” due to the endless drought that they are currently experiencing.

Millions of precious people in Africa are facing imminent starvation.  But most of us in the western world don’t care, because our grocery stores are still full of food.

If you are one of those people that are choosing to ignore what is happening on the other side of the planet, you can afford to be cocky for now.

But conditions are starting to change here too.

Earlier today, I came across an excellent article about how the multi-year megadrought in the western half of the country is absolutely devastating the ranching industry…

The megadrought in the Western U.S., the region’s worst in 1,200 years, is threatening America’s cattle heartland: withering pastures, wrecking feed harvests and endangering a quintessential way of life.

The drought is forcing ranchers here in Texas and across the Southern plains to make an agonizing decision: Sell early now for less money than they planned on — or hold on, pray for rain and risk losing everything.

Sadly, more ranchers are deciding to sell off cattle with each passing day.

If you can believe it, the rate at which cattle are being sold is now 120 percent above last year’s level…

Over the last two weeks of July, the national cattle sale rate also jumped to 120 percent above 2021 levels — an average that reporting by The Hill and KAMR suggested conceals even higher frenzies of sales in some markets.

What this means is that lots of beef is coming on to the market.

Beef prices had been soaring, but in the short-term all of the cattle that are being slaughtered will help to moderate prices.

However, the outlook for 2023 is grim.  The national cattle herd just keeps getting smaller and smaller, and some beef producers in Oklahoma are now predicting that ground beef “could eventually top $50 per pound”…

Thanks to the unending economic symptoms of the pandemic and 2022’s inflation double-punch, average beef prices are currently about twice what they were in 2019. Add in the deepening widespread drought, a shortage of hay and feed, skyrocketing prices, transport costs, and various other metrics, some Southwest Oklahoma beef producers suggest cheap ground beef could eventually top $50 per pound.

If the price of ground beef does reach 50 dollars a pound, what do you think our country will look like?

Needless to say, at that point there will be absolutely no debate about whether we are in a global food crisis or not.

And we are also being told that we could soon be facing shortages of potatoes and tomatoes.  The following comes from Zero Hedge…

Days ago, we said the next food insecurity problem that may impact Americans’ eating habits could be an emerging potato shortage. Now there appears to be another issue: Tomatoes are getting squeezed, and risks of a ketchup shortage rise as a severe drought batter California’s farmland.

California accounts for a quarter of the world’s tomato output. The worst drought in 1,200 years has forced farmers to abandon fields as crops turn to dust amid a water crisis.

I recently wrote an entire article about the coming tomato shortage that you can find right here.  Unless some rain comes along, the tomato crop in California this year is going to be absolutely disastrous.

So are you ready to eat less pizza because there isn’t enough pizza sauce to go around?

And are you ready to pay twice as much for spaghetti sauce at the grocery store?

On top of everything else, we are also potentially facing an extremely painful shortage of cotton…

Intense drought has forced cotton farmers to abandon millions of acres that have produced so little cotton that they are no longer worth harvesting, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Farmers will harvest an estimated 7.13 million acres, abandoning approximately 5.35 million acres due to an ongoing drought hammering southern U.S. states, representing an estimated abandonment rate of 42.87%, according to the National Cotton Council of America, who based their analysis on U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data. This represents the smallest harvest by area since 1868, The Wall Street Journal reported.

What I have touched on in this article is just the tip of the iceberg.

Agricultural production is going to be way down all over the planet this year.

But we will surely find a way to “muddle through” somehow, right?

If you have been a skeptic of reports of shortages and famine, it is time to wake up.

We really are staring an unprecedented global crisis right in the face, and the months ahead are going to be filled with pain.

Trump Derangement Syndrome Returns

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

Why would Black people laud the FBI or criticize protection against self-incrimination? The FBI search of Donald Trump’s home has reawakened Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Progressives love the FBI? Leftists embrace the Espionage Act? Of course, one man is responsible for this madness, and he is none other than Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. The fallout from the FBI search conducted at Trump’s home shows the rank confusion spread by people who call themselves liberal but who are as dangerous as anyone on the right. From the moment that Trump announced the raid they were in full fascist mode, even as they claimed to be fighting fascism.

Trump did what he usually does, play fast and loose with the truth. Of all former presidents only he would ignore subpoenas and claim to have declassified documents when he hadn’t done so. He can’t get out of his own way and thus makes himself a target. But Democrats should know that the search is seen as nothing more than a personal attack against him. Millions of people who love Trump will love him all the more and conclude that the raid was meant to keep him from running for president again. Liberal dead-enders will be happy, but everyone else will say that something rotten was conducted at Mar a Lago.

Attorney General Merrick Garland says that the documents were subpoenaed but the former president didn’t respond. The FBI search warrant states that the search encompassed three different issues: gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, which is part of the Espionage Act; concealment, removal, or mutilation concerning the handling of records and reports; and the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy, which is part of a section dealing with obstruction of justice. The warrant also states a search for information on Roger Stone and on the President of France.

Aside from the item descriptions, no one knows what Trump had or what the FBI found. Leaks from the Justice Department indicate something about nuclear weapons, but no one knows what that means. The lack of information hasn’t stopped the speculation which Trump always causes. There is conjecture that he was selling information to Russia or to Saudi Arabia or was plotting some other treason. There are even claims that documents were buried with his recently deceased ex-wife. It is fascinating that there can be so much guesswork about issues no one can know.

The years long Russiagate investigation is responsible for ordinarily sensible people losing their minds. Hardly anyone recalls that the charge of collusion was actually disproven, that Robert Mueller only indicted for process crimes, such as those which occur when people let down their guard and talk to the FBI. Most Americans who know the name Paul Manafort think he was a Russian spy but don’t know that he went to jail for tax and bank fraud. Propaganda works very well when it is repeated over and over again.

Worse than the silly Trump inspired derangement is the way that those who call themselves left or progressive have chosen to defend federal law enforcement and bad legislation like the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is a relic from the earliest days of the cold war, and Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Palmer Raids which targeted the left for persecution and prosecution. Barack Obama used it more than all previous presidents combined in order to prosecute journalists who published what the state didn’t want us to know. As for the FBI, its Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, created dissension in the liberation movement, targeted individuals for prosecution, spied on Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide, and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark among others. The FBI continues to use informants to entrap Black people in phony terror cases.

It is truly shameful to see Black people exalt the FBI and act as if punishing Trump is the organizing principle of all political activity. The Trump organization is also under investigation by the New York Attorney and the former president refused to answer questions put to him in a deposition. The right to remain silent is one of the most important in American law and should be used a lot more often. But copaganda television shows and Trump hatred have caused their own form of insanity, and his exercise of a fundamental right was widely lampooned. No one should ever be condemned for utilizing their fifth amendment right, not even Donald Trump.

Of course, this spectacle is also used to deflect from Biden administration failures. His approval rating is still low, for the simple reason that he didn’t do what he claimed he would for American voters. He continues to pour public money into the losing effort in Ukraine and needlessly provokes Russia and China. But who is paying attention if there is speculation that Trump put files in Ivana’s casket?

It is time to nip this foolishness in the bud before it goes any further. Trump should not live rent free in our collective consciousness any longer. He cannot be allowed to distract from the current president’s actions or become a rallying point for politics which will inevitably be useless. No one has to follow Trump’s shenanigans any longer or allow the corporate media or the democratic party to make him their focus. Doing so only makes it harder to do the already hard work of recreating Black politics.

At the Lost and Found

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

Those who are never lost are forever lost.  Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore.

The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth.  This is also common sense.

Everyone is a pilgrim on the way, and because there are no maps, we all get lost.  And it is only by getting lost in a deep sense that we can find ourselves and discover the truth about the world.

It is well known that Ernest Hemingway made famous the phrase “the lost generation” when he opened his novel The Sun Also Rises with the epigram “You are all a lost generation,” attributed to Gertrude Stein, who said she heard it from a garage owner who said it about a young auto mechanic in his employ.

It is less well known that Hemingway later wrote “that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be …But to hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty easy labels.”

He was thinking of how the madness of war with the calls to patriotism and God and country and the never-ending official lies about everything maimed people at very deep levels.  His words in A Farewell to Arms have lasted because they are so true in their dismissal of abstract obscenities and their embrace of the concrete:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain …. And I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it …. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

No doubt he was also thinking of the existential anxiety of being alive and the fear of death and nothingness that is conveyed in his powerful short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” that appeared in the 1930 volume Winner Take Nothing.  He was well acquainted with nothing (the not, nada) and knew that social circumstances only add to it, particularly wars and the nihilistic death wishes of lying political leaders.

Some say nothing has changed for millennia and that every age is similar and people are the same, always complaining about the present and recalling the good old days.  There is some truth in this, but the issue of assessing today in all its uniqueness remains paramount.  For every age and every generation is different; therein lies its potential and dangers.  Each can only be understood within its place and time.  We live in the era of high technology that has never before existed.  It is unique.  And it is uniquely dangerous.

Today is a time of unprecedented official lies about everything, endless wars hot and cold, class wars of the rich against the poor, medical wars of international elites against everyone, etc. –  it is a daily electronic digital  barrage meant to pound people into the deepest despair.  Call it “The Lost World of the Information Superhighway.”  These lies have sown a vast sense of bewilderment, as intended.  Lostness for so many, including those who don’t know it and take those lies for truth. People who don’t know that there are still places, although they are shrinking, where truth can be found.  The problem is, of course, that even when they are told about media sites and writers that operate honestly and outside the propaganda mill, they usually refuse to go there.  They prefer to live inside what Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans District Attorney who brought the only trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, correctly termed “the Doll’s House.”

Picking through the bins at the lost and found on the Internet, which is dominated by intelligence services and their Silicon Valley big tech partners, many who feel lost find “things” they think they have lost but which are counterfeit.  They cling to them as to false gods, not realizing that they have been placed there by the elite mountebanks and their accomplices, a process similar to a document dump that contains fabricated records.  It is an old trick.  Often what is really lost is the sense that life makes sense and is meaningful, but this awareness is often replaced with shards of false reassurance meant to distract and far too much information for anyone to comprehend.

What’s up?  Check your cell phone and head down the primrose path to unreality.

Just as there are two senses to being lost, one based on the awareness that if we refuse to grasp at straws and proceed through life by faith, the unknown road will bear us up (Thoreau said, “How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it…”), and the other being the more socially induced one of incessant propaganda, so too there are two ways of thinking about nothing.  The existential sense as described by Hemingway in his famous story mentioned above, and the sense of trivia or superficial preoccupations that distract.  C.S. Lewis described the latter sense very well:

The Christians describe the enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

This is a perfect description of the passivity of scrolling the internet or social media.  Much ado about absolutely nothing but distractions.  Tranquilized by trivia.

Our current situation has been long in coming.  Back in the early 1960s, there was a  highly touted intellectual named Marshall McLuhan whose 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was gobbled up by the baby boomers raised on television, whose rebellious members protested the inhumanity of IBM computer technology of that time.  Ironically, it was members of this generation who later created the computer revolution and have promoted the digital revolution.  They carry cell phones as sidearms to defend themselves from reality.

Newsweek called McLuhan “the oracle of the New Communications.”  He was an obscurantic celebrator of the electronic media and retribalized man long before the Internet, cell phones, personal computers, and digital mania.  McLuhan’s paeans to technology sounded very profound and liberating  with their vaguely Gnostic and Jungian rhetoric, which also fit with the 1960s “vibes.”  He called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve, for they in turn would liberate us.  He gave life to things while taking it from persons.  He wrote:

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. [my emphases]

Clearly this was a message of a prescient religious crank: mystical, mythological, technological nonsense perfectly in tune with the dawning new age. Not any coming of the Age of Aquarius, however, but that of the Age of Digital Control and endless wars.

By turning the person inside out and giving life to things, McLuhan was certainly anticipating and promoting the developments of the past forty years.  His ideas gave legitimacy to the passivity of the person in the face of the burgeoning mass media consumer culture.  They supported the growing commodification of all aspects of life, especially people.  By externalizing the person, McLuhan was eliminating the idea of the autonomous self and opening the way for today’s era of consumers, blank screens for the reception of advertising, public relations, and propaganda on a vast scale.  In fact, what he wrote of television runs deeper for cell phones and computer screens.  “ … with TV,” he wrote, “the viewer is the screen.  He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that imbues his ‘soulskin with subconscious inklings.’ “

Inklings of abstract obscenities at war with the lost world of reality.

While many people sense this, they still embrace their killers, feeling that they would be lost without them. They have become appendages of their electronic appendages.  The current push to transform all person-to-person life into a digital one run by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with its mass surveillance powers is recognized by many but dismissed as a weird conspiracy.  This is so far from the truth.  A good indicator of this nonchalant attitude toward such developing trends is the vastly increased popularity of on-line shopping.  Its innocence conceals the future that is coming.

I recently won a very high-tech looking electric toothbrush at the dentist.  When I opened it, I discovered it contained a gadget with a suction cup that could hold a “smart phone” that you could attach to the mirror.  The phone could electronically be linked to the toothbrush and it would monitor your brushing as you watched yourself brush.  Poor me, I felt so stupid: a man without a smart phone!

While everybody knows that the boat is leaking and the captain lied, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, such knowledge is abstract.  It is a sort-of knowledge, sensed but also denied.  Real but unreal.  Known but unknown.  And that’s how it goes.  It is very difficult for many conventional people to admit that the life they have known is disappearing while they dawdle in fantasy land, believing the propaganda of their rulers.  To live in the U.S.A. is to live in Neverland where no one ever has to be alone, never grow up, and always be “in touch” through the ether.  It is a country of lost children.

You can choose any issue of importance and its official explanation is certain to be untrue, obvious or subtle propaganda.  The lies about Ukraine and Russia; Covid-19, lockdowns, and vaccines; China and Taiwan; U.S. forces in Syria and U.S. support for Israeli aggression against Syria and the Palestinians; its support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless policies and war against Yemen; the economy, central banking, and inflation; the increasing censorship of dissident voices; digital IDs, digital programmable currencies, and social credit systems; the persecution of Julian Assange; the Great Reset; a series of binaries meant to suggest false alternatives, etc.  The list is endless.  All official lies to support a sinking ship captained by psychopathic liars seemingly intent on a world war that will destroy the world.  Melville’s Captain Ahab writ large. Like those traveling on the Titanic, today’s passengers on the flailing American empire’s Good Ship Lollipop are in for a surprise, and it won’t be a sweet trip to a candy shop.

Hemingway was surely right that “Winner Take Nothing.”  Yet losers also exit empty-handed.  Everybody knows this but goes on surrounding themselves with stuff, lots of things.  Hoarders are a popular TV subject because they represent the extreme form of this madcap method of trying to secure oneself from loss.  It is a form of mental and spiritual despair that could only exist in advanced capitalist consumer society.  Too many possessions and too much information.  Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes.  There is a reason why the world’s poor are called the dispossessed.  One could say hoarders are the possessed, and it is a form of demonic possession.

Recently I was called upon to help a hospitalized elderly relative by checking on her house.  The house is filled from attic to basement, in every nook and cranny, with collected things that serve no life purpose but were kept to provide a security blanket that was really a strangulation cord.  I will spare you the details, except to say that this relative is an intelligent woman, as was her deceased husband, and yet they surrounded themselves with so much “stuff,” never threw things out, kept papers from 70 years ago, old keys and coins, empty jewelry boxes by the score, etc.  An overwhelming scene to behold.  And why did they do this?  Because they thought they were protecting themselves against loss, against nothing, nada.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”  But there is nothing that will protect against the loss Eliot was referring to – the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe as a result of World War I.  A wasteland created by politicians. Like today.

We too are now living in a wasteland, and the only way to find our way forward is to acknowledge that we are lost and to jettison the false security of believing the vast tapestry of lies promulgated by the captains of the American-led Titanic.

I often think of the words of the poet Rilke as good advice, a step in the right direction where there is a lost and found worth visiting and insights await us. While primarily writing about the artist who time and again is that someone who emerges from the crowd and whose “winged heart everywhere beats against the walls of their time,” I think his words apply to every person, including journalists.  To plumb the depths of our sordid current world demands aesthetic, political, and spiritual resistance rooted in the open sociological imagination, a willingness to go wherever the facts and intuition leads us.  Rilke said:

Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence, namely the period of childhood …. [the child] has no anxiety about losing things …. And whatever he has once been lit up in love remains as an image, never more to be lost, and the image is possession; that is why children are so rich.

For a country of lost children, this is a good place to start.