Do you trust what you see? How can you? Our eyes are no longer the primary way that we see; they have been swapped out for the filters of screens and technology. The suspicious mediation between cameras and our perception of ‘reality” has never been more ubiquitous — or more insidious. Perhaps what we don’t see, however, is at least as important as what we do see. But how can we become aware of what we don’t see?
These questions lie at the heart of the fascinating new documentary All Light, Everywhere, an entrancing blend of neuroscience, metaphysics, and technological history that has the smarts to apply some sly, subtle social commentary to its elusive subjects.
At first, the film seems to flitter among semi-connected topics: A marketing campaign that is testing its volunteers’ reactions to visual images; a tour of Axon Industries, the #1 maker of police body cameras, with its corporate spin doctor as our guide; an aerial composite-imaging system that was used secretly by Baltimore police to surveil the city. Interspersed into these “storylines” are narrated forays into the history of early photography along with B-roll of ordinary people preparing to view the 2017 solar eclipse with their own cameras (and eyes). This unrelenting focus on the production and consumption of visual imagery transforms the film into an almost fractal experience. It becomes a bit too much: the sheer ubiquity of people looking, eyes looking, images to be seen and consumed and interpreted, examinations of the various technologies serving up new pictures to be mediated. The unsettling point of this unconventional documentary seems to be to distort rather than clarify the subject at hand — and that may be just what director Theo Anthony wants.
The underlying political relevance of the film is transparent. We live in a surveillance society, consenting (though not always consciously) to being filmed, watched, and recorded by corporations hoping to sell us products based on the data they gather. The government snoops in the name of crime prevention and law enforcement. The value of the latter has been hotly debated in the last few years: George Floyd’s murder being a prime example. Here the police body cameras showed us what we believe to be an “objective” record of events, footage of police brutality and murder. But body camera images have been weaponized by both sides, each seeking to prove something that will help their case. What Axon Industries sells to police forces (and to the general public) is that they are confident their cameras will tell the “truth” about any police action. Accountability is promoted as their product’s best feature. But it is more than that — “behavior will change ” because of the presence of cameras, that they will inhibit bad behavior.
But what do body cameras actually show us? Are these videos an authentic record of reality? The documentary examines, abstractly at first and then far more concretely, how there is always bias. Where is the camera located on the body? Does its wide-angle lens distort our understanding of action? How is this data interpreted and by whom? There are so many levels of interpretation that “objectivity” has turned into a myth.
The film’s looks back into the past are also illuminating, unsettling illustrations of how camera technology has almost always been co-opted for violent and authoritarian uses, whether it be the American military tracking the enemy on the battlefield or in the early experiments in composite imaging used by police to profile criminals. The latter presages the now rampant use of facial recognition technology, its marketed value undercut by its practical limitations as well as ethical muddiness.
The irony is not lost that what we’re looking at is itself a film, another visual entity that requires us to watch and to mediate. The film’s meta-commentary confesses that its stochastic manipulation is by design. Highly kinetic editing leads our brains to make connections in ways that excited Eisenstein at the dawn of film a century ago: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The mind demands order, so the juxtaposition and collision of images generates meanings that did not exist in individual images.
Anthony draws on history to help us make sense of a visual world that is increasingly fleeting and fragmented. The film is reminiscent, in style and subject matter, of the works of Errol Morris. This goes for its sometimes desultory exposition, as well as its approach to epistemology. (Morris explores these issues in all of his films, as well as in his essays in his books Believing Is Seeing and The Ashtray.) In the third act of All Light, Everywhere, a well-placed quotation from Frederick Douglass summaries the central issue: “We all feel that there is something more. That the curtain has not yet been lifted. There is a prophet with us forever whispering that behind the seen lies the immeasurable unseen.” The “immeasurable unseen” may not be possible to capture on cameras, no matter how many we use or how hard we strive for an elusive objectivity. Perhaps it is more important for us to understand that urge for “something more” should lead to examining how, why, and for whom the image was made.
The Western sanctions against Russia, decided unilaterally by Washington, are presented as a just punishment for the aggression against Ukraine. But, without mentioning their illegality under international law, everyone can see that they do not reach their target. In practice, the United States is isolating the West in the hope of maintaining its hegemony over its allies.
The United States, which was a late participant in the World Wars and suffered no losses on its territory, emerged victorious from the world conflicts. Inheriting the European empires, it developed a system of domination that made it the “world’s policeman. However, their hegemony was fragile and could not resist the development of large nations. As early as 2012, political scientists began to describe the “Thucydides trap” by analogy with the Greek strategist’s explanation of the wars between Sparta and Athens. According to them, China’s rise to power also made a confrontation with the United States inevitable. Noting that, if China had become the first world economic power, Russia had become the first military power, Washington decided to fight them one after the other.
It is in this context that the war in Ukraine took place. Washington presents it as “Russian aggression”, adopts sanctions and forces its allies to take them too. The first thing that comes to mind is that the United States, knowing that it is militarily inferior but economically superior, decided to choose its battlefield. However, an analysis of the forces involved and the measures taken belies this reading of events.
THE WORLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM
The global economic system was created by the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. They aimed to establish a framework for capitalism beyond the crisis of 1929, for which Nazism had not been the solution. The United States imposed its currency as a gold-convertible benchmark. Neither the Soviet Union nor China participated in the conference.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon decided to unofficially end the dollar’s parity with gold. This allowed him to finance the war in Vietnam. In practical terms, there were no longer any fixed exchange rates. The measure was not formalized until after the war, in 1976. It was also at this time that China formed an alliance with the Anglo-Saxon multinationals. The European Community (the forerunner of the European Union) adapted by regulating the now-floating exchange rates in 1972 (the “currency snake”), and then by creating the euro.
From 1981 onwards, the United States began to let its debt slip away. It went from 40% of its GDP to 130% today. They tried to globalize the world economy, i.e. to impose their rules on the solvent countries and to destroy the state structures of the remaining countries (the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy). To pay their debt, they printed dollars, spied on the companies of their allies and stole all the reserves of two big oil states, Iraq and Libya. Nobody dared to say anything, but from 2003 onwards, the US economic system was no longer what it claimed to be. Officially they were still liberal, but everyone could see that they were no longer producing their own food and necessities, and that they were living on rapine.
The US economy, which was one third of the world economy when the USSR dissolved, is now only one tenth.
Many states anticipated the end of the Bretton Woods rules and thought about a new deal. In 2009, Brazil, Russia, India and China, soon joined by South Africa for Africa, created the BRICS. These countries have set up financial institutions which, unlike the IMF and the World Bank, do not make their loans conditional on structural reforms or political commitments to align with Washington. They prefer to invest on a leasing basis, with the host country becoming the owner of the investment when it is profitable.
In 2010, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, soon joined by Armenia, founded the Eurasian Economic Union. These border countries established a free trade zone with Egypt, China, Iran, Serbia, Singapore and Vietnam. They could be joined by South Korea, India, Turkey and Syria. In 2013, China began its vast “New Silk Roads” project. The following year, when its GDP surpassed that of the United States at purchasing power parity, Beijing created the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and in 2020, it regulated foreign capital.
In 2021, the European Union devised its Global Gateway to compete with China and impose its political model. But this demand was seen as colonial overreach by many countries and was rejected en masse.
Gradually, the Russian and Chinese blocs have come closer together thanks to the joint project of the Great Eurasian Global Partnership (2016) within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The aim is to develop the whole space by creating balanced communication channels on the ideological bases defined by Kazakh Sultan Nazerbayev: inclusiveness, sovereign equality, respect for cultural and socio-political identity, openness and readiness to integrate other ensembles.
Washington’s attempt to destroy this emerging entity has no chance of success. It is striking that : the economic attack began not with the invasion of Ukraine, but two days before. it is primarily directed against Russian banks, Russian billionaires and the Russian gas industry and not at all against the new Eurasian communication system. Finally, it aims at excluding Russia from international organizations, but does not concern the states that refuse to condemn Russia. Therefore it will push them into the arms of Beijing.
In other words, the US is not isolating Russia, but it is isolating the West (10% of humanity) from the rest of the world (90% of humanity).
THE PROCESS OF SEPARATING THE WEST FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD
0. The very day after Moscow recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (February 21, 2022), the United States launched an economic attack on Russia (February 22). The European Union followed suit the day after (February 23). Vnesheconombank and Promsvyazbank were excluded from the global financial system.
Vnesheconombank (VEB.RF) is a regional development bank. It could have helped the Donbass. Promsvyazbank (PSB) invests mainly in the defense sector. It could have played a role under the Mutual Assistance Treaty.
1. As Russia started a special military operation in Ukraine (February 24), the United States extended the exclusion of the first two banks from the global financial system to all Russian banks (February 25). The European Union followed suit (February 25).
2. In order to prevent as many states as possible from joining Russia, Washington extended the trade bans to Belarus. The European Union began to deny Russian banks access to the SWIFT system as previously instructed by the United States, extended sanctions to Belarus and censored the Russian state media, Russia Today and Sputnik (March 2)
3. Washington began to target wealthy Russian citizens (erroneously called “oligarchs”) with bad relations with the Kremlin (March 3) and to ban imports of Russian energy sources (March 8). The European Union followed suit, but resisted a ban on the import of much-needed Russian gas (March 9).
4. Washington extended financial sanctions in the IMF and World Bank, expanded the list of oligarchs and bannned the export of luxury goods to Russia (March 11). The European Union followed suit (March 15).
5. Washington ensuref that members of the Duma and oligarchs no longer have any rights in the West; that Russia would no longer be able to use its assets in the USA to pay its debts to the USA; and that it would no longer be able to use its gold to pay its debts abroad (24 March). The European Union followed in these prohibitions. It pronounced a ban on the import of Russian coal and oil, but still no ban on gas.
The table below summarizes the communications from the White House and Brussels.
It is an extremely surprising phenomenon to observe: the U.S. has managed to sway a majority of states to its side, but these states are the least populous in the world. It is as if they have no means of putting pressure on countries capable of independence.
Due to the unilateral actions of the Anglo-Saxons and the European Union, the world is being divided into two heterogeneous spaces. The era of economic globalization is over. The economic and financial bridges are being broken one by one.
Reacting swiftly, Russia has convinced its BRICS partners to stop trading in dollars and to eventually create a common virtual currency for their exchanges. Until then, they will proceed in gold. This currency should be based on a basket of BRICS currencies, weighted according to the GDP of each member state, and on a basket of commodities listed on the stock exchange. This system should be much more stable than the current one.
Above all, Russia and China appear to be much more respectful of their partners than the West. They never demand structural reforms, neither economic nor political. The Ukrainian affair shows that Moscow does not seek to take power in Kiev and occupy Ukraine, but to push back NATO and fight the Banderites (the “neo-Nazis” according to Kremlin terminology). Nothing but very legitimate, even if the method is brutal.
In practice, we are witnessing the end of four centuries of domination by Westerners and their empires. It is a confrontation between different ways of thinking. Westerners now think only in terms of weeks. With this short-sightedness, they may have the impression that the United States is right and the Russians wrong. On the contrary, the rest of the world thinks in decades, even centuries. In this case, there is no doubt that the Russians are right and the West as a whole is wrong. Moreover, the West rejects international law. They attacked Yugoslavia and Libya without the authorization of the Security Council and lied to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. They only accept the rules they make. On the contrary, the other states aspire to a multipolar world in which each actor would think according to their own culture. They are aware that only international law would make it possible to preserve peace in the world as they dream of it.
Rather than confronting Russia and China, the United States has chosen to withdraw into its empire: to isolate the West in order to maintain its hegemony.
Since 2001, all world leaders have viewed the West, and particularly the United States, as wounded predators. They do not dare to confront them and look for ways to accompany them gently to the cemetery. No one ever imagined that they would isolate themselves to die.
My forebodings/predictions about the Kremlin’s limited go-slow war in Ukraine are proving correct. Putin and Russia are demonized. Unprecedented sanctions amounting to piracy and theft have been imposed on Russia. The US and Europe are joining the war as de facto combatants. More countries are joining NATO with the result being the prospect of more US missile bases on Russia’s borders. The Western media controls the narrative, which is Russia is losing and can be defeated with more many billions of dollars from the US and more weapons that enrich the US military/security complex. Why any Russian government would expose itself to this and so many chances for miscalculation that ends in WW III is a mystery. What did the Kremlin imagine it was achieving by creating a situation that exposed Rusaia to many months of war propaganda, punishment, and Western preparations for wider war?
What peace needed was a quick decisive Russian victory that demonstrated extraordinary military power that completely stopped any further Western provocations of Russia. But the Kremlin was too liberal-minded to do what was neccessary. Consequently the Kremlin made a strategic error, dropped the ball and has failed to protect Russia from provocations that are leading to WW III.
Instead, the Kremlin filled with liberal delusions long discarded in the West decided to show a good side by limiting itself to the rescue of the Donbass Russians. This gave the West all it needed to present Russia as a military incompetent upstart. Among the Kremlin’s errors, the Kremlin overlooked that Ukraine’s distress from the limited Russian intervention created an opportunity for Poland to claim former Polish territories in western Ukraine where there are no Russian troops engaged. It is possible that the Polish government, disinformed by Western media’s picture of Russian military failure in Ukraine, will occupy western Ukraine as preparation to reclaiming it as Russia did Crimea and now Donbass. As Russia will have eastern and southern Ukraine, the country could simply disappear as Poland resurrects greater Poland. In its history, Ukraine has either been part of Poland’s empire or part of Russia.
If Poland moves into western Ukraine as it is tempted to do, opportunities for Polish-Russian conflict arise. As Poland is a NATO member, Washington has given Poland, as the British government did with World War II’s “Polish Guarantee,” the power to start a world war.
The Polish government has a penchant for emotional decisons, not responsible decisions. Just as the Polish military dictatorship thought the “British Guarantee” protected them, causing them to spurn Hitler’s demand for the return of German territory stripped from Germany in the Versailles Treaty despite President Wilson’s “guarantee” of no territorial losses, the Polish government thinks today that NATO membership protects Poland from Russian retaliation.
The government in Warsaw does not comprehand that the “NATO Guarantee” is worth no more than the British Government’s guarantee that launched WW II.
The governments that comprise the Western World have given Poland, once again, the decision whether there is to be a World War.
This deplorable and unsettling fact stares us in the face, but no Western media, not even online media, acknowledges it.
The situation that exists today is that either Russia and China must accept US hegemony or the neoconservaties will push Russia and China into war with the West. The hegemonic ambition of the neoconservatives is inconsistent with a peaceful world.
For all the people outside the UK who don’t understand what the “Queens Speech” actually is, it’s a farcical state occasion in which the Queen (or, in this case, Prince Charles since her majesty is ill/secretly dead/having “mobility issues”) makes a speech about what “her government” intends to do for the next 12 months.
Of course, the Queen doesn’t actually write the speech, or have any input on its content, or have any control at all over what “her” government intends to do. She’s just a mouthpiece in a big gold hat.
It’s the UK equivalent of the State of the Union, only done in Halloween costumes made out of shiny stolen rocks.
The whole thing is nothing but a grand, gilt statement of intent from the British Deep State, wrapped in mink and draped in medals they never earned. It’s a joke, but it is worth listening to.
Or, if you have a sensitive stomach, you can just read the full text the next day on the UK government’s website (that’s what I do).
A lot of the content is entirely predictable.
More money to Ukraine, with a promise the UK will “lead the way in championing security around the world”. More online censorship via the “Online Safety Bill”. A compulsory register for homeschooled children via the “Schools Reform Bill”.
There’s also mention of “securing the constitution” by introducing the UK’s own “Bill of Rights”. We broke down that particular Trojan Horse back in February.
But the part I found most interesting is the stated plan to “encourage agricultural and scientific innovation at home” via the proposed Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill.
To quote the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), the legislation would “take certain precision breeding techniques out of the scope of restrictive GMO rules”.
Essentially, this would see new “gene-edited” foods as distinct from old-fashioned “genetically modified” foods, and therefore not subject to the same rules and oversight.
The claimed distinction is that gene editing, as opposed to genetic modification, doesn’t introduce DNA from other species. Therefore, in effect, is merely speeding up what could potentially naturally happen over time.
Now, you might think this is just semantics, and that such a law will just provide a loophole for ALL “genetically modified” foods to simply rebrand themselves as “genetically edited” foods, and thereby avoid regulation. But that is disgustingly cynical and shame on you for even thinking it.
All in all, this is pretty on-message stuff, and not especially surprising. What’s noteworthy is – by pure happenstance, I’m sure – it appears to coincide with a renewed push on the GM food front in other countries all over the world.
In December 2021, Switzerland added an amendment to its moratorium on GMO crops, permitting the use of certain “gene editing” techniques.
Last month, Egypt announced their new strain of GM wheat. Just two days ago, Ethiopia’s National Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center announced they had researched, and the country will now be growing, genetically modified cotton and maize.
Britain’s deregulation of GM food is always described as a “post-Brexit” move – with the EU chided around the world for its “precautionary principle” on GM crops – and yet as long ago as last April, the EU was calling for a “rethink” on GM crops.
In fact, just today, European Biotechnology Magazine reports:
The EU Commission has launched its final consultation on the deregulation of new breeding techniques in agriculture
WHY THIS? WHY NOW?
So, we’re seeing a sudden increase in the variety of GM crops available and a simultaneous push for deregulation of the industry in Western nations.
Why would they be doing this now?
Well, there is a food crisis.
Or, more accurately, they have just created a food crisis. And as the cliched Hegelian dialectic inevitably goes, their manufactured “problem” is now in need of their contrived “solution”.
We should expect to see genetic engineering pitched as a solution to our food crisis in the very near future…like yesterday. Or indeed, two months ago.
That’s how fast they work now, with barely a pretence at concealing the plan. Spitting out the answer so fast they make it obvious they knew the question beforehand.
On March 15th, when the “special operation” in Ukraine was less than 3 weeks old, the Time was already headlining:
War forces farmers to think again about GM crops
…and reporting:
Genetic modification could make Britain’s food system less susceptible to geopolitical turmoil
A week later Verdict published an article titled“Improving food self-sufficiency with GM crops during geopolitical crises”
Can gene editing help farmers satisfy the rising demand for food?
Four days ago, the Manila Times published an article titled “In times of food scarcity: Revisiting genetically modified crops”.
Two days ago (so before the Queen’s speech specifically mentioning the gene editing bill), Scotland’s Press & Journal ran an opinion piece headlined: “Scottish Government must lift GM crop ban to ease cost of living crisis”.
The Ukraine-Russia conflict has demonstrated the fragility and vulnerability of global and European food supply chains. Around the world, governments in leading agricultural-producing countries are now catching up with the United States, both to better legislate gene-edited (GE) products, as well as differentiate them from the older Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology, and its negative connotations to some consumers, commentators, farmers, retailers, politicians and lawmakers.
And just today, the Genetic Literacy Project published an article by Ukrainian-Canadian David Zaruk, railing against the EU’s “precautionary principle” on GMOs and calling for an embracing of “new technology” to prevent widespread hunger and increase food sovereignty.
It goes on and on and on.
…LET’S NOT FORGET CLIMATE CHANGE, GUYS
Of course, it’s not all about the food crisis – giving corporate giants free rein to genetically alter all the food we eat will also be good for the planet. They talk about that a lot recently.
On February 8th this year, the University of Bonn published a new study claiming “Genetic engineering can have a positive effect on the climate”
On February 24th this year, the Cornell-based NGO “Alliance for Science” published an article claiming “GMOs could shrink Europe’s climate footprint”, based on the study mentioned above.
In a response to the Queen’s Speech, the UK’s National Institute of Agriculture and Botany claimed that genetic modification will make farming “more sustainable”.
In a reminder we’re not just talking about crops but genetically engineering livestock as well, in February Deutsche Welle suggested that genetically altered “Climate sheep and eco pigs could combat global heating”.
The narrative is clearly set: Genetically engineered food will save us all from the food crisis, and global warming too. Plus anything else they can think of.
THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR ORGANICS
Not content with the semi-constant fluffing of the GM business, the MSM are also turning their guns on organic farming and giving it both barrels.
Ukraine Crisis Reveals the Folly of Organic Farming: As food prices skyrocket, the world needs to admit it can’t live without modern, efficient agriculture.
The “Allliance for Science” article mentioned above goes out of its way to criticise the EU’s pro-organic “farm to fork” plans, claiming “[organic farming] has lower yields and would be associated with increases in global [greenhouse gas] emissions by causing land-use changes elsewhere”.
Meanwhile, Erik Fyrwald, the CEO of the Swiss agrochemicals group Syngenta (so possessing somewhat of a conflict of interests), told Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag that the West must “stop organic farming to help future food crisis”, adding that organic farming is worse for the planet, because ploughing up fields releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
NOTE: In an interesting (again, probably totally accidental) parallel, the currently simmering “Bird Flu outbreak” has also hit organic and free-range farmers hard, with one (sponsored) Guardian article asking if “year-round” bird flu could spell “the end of free-range eggs”.
CONCLUSION
Having just seen how the Covid19 “vaccine” campaign unfolded, it’s not hard to see how the pro-GM push will go from here. Genome-edited crops and farm animals are going to become the new “settled science”.
They will be sold to the public as cheaper, more nutritious, better for the environment and good for “preventing future pandemics” (yes, they literally did say that already).
Naturally, anyone who resists the push for gene-edited food, and/or mourns the planned death of organic farming, will be accused of “questioning the science”.
Eating British GM foods will be “doing your part” and “helping Ukraine”, while people who want more expensive organic products will be deemed “unpatriotic” or “selfish”.
Just as we saw Covid sceptics denounced as spreading “Russian disinformation”, despite Russia’s willing complicity in the Covid lie, those who argue against genome-edited food will be said to be “sharing Russian talking points” or “doing Putin’s work for him” despite Russia being well onboard the gene-editing train.
It all gets very predictable from there. Organic farmers will probably be “anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist Russian spies” by the end of the summer.
You may have noticed that every popular movie these days is a remake, reboot, sequel, spinoff, or cinematic universe expansion. In 2021, only one of the ten top-grossing films––the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy––was an original. There were only two originals in 2020’s top 10, and none at all in 2019.
Some of these explanations are flat-out wrong; others may contain a nugget of truth. But all of them are incomplete, because this isn’t just happening in movies. In every corner of pop culture––movies, TV, music, books, and video games––a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market. What used to be winners-take-some has grown into winners-take-most and is now verging on winners-take-all. The (very silly) word for this oligopoly, like a monopoly but with a few players instead of just one.
I’m inherently skeptical of big claims about historical shifts. I recently published a paper showing that people overestimate how much public opinion has changed over the past 50 years, so naturally I’m on the lookout for similar biases here. But this shift is not an illusion. It’s big, it’s been going on for decades, and it’s happening everywhere you look. So let’s get to the bottom of it.
At the top of the box office charts, original films have gone extinct.
I looked at the 20 top-grossing movies going all the way back to 1977 (source), and I coded whether each was part of what film scholars call a “multiplicity”—sequels, prequels, franchises, spin-offs, cinematic universe expansions, etc. This required some judgment calls. Lots of movies are based on books and TV shows, but I only counted them as multiplicities if they were related to a previous movie. So 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn’t get coded as a multiplicity, but 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze does, and so does the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remake. I also probably missed a few multiplicities, especially in earlier decades, since sometimes it’s not obvious that a movie has some connection to an earlier movie.
Regardless, the shift is gigantic. Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.
Original movies just aren’t popular anymore, if they even get made in the first place.
Top movies have also recently started taking a larger chunk of the market. I extracted the revenue of the top 20 movies and divided it by the total revenue of the top 200 movies, going all the way back to 1986 (source). The top 20 movies captured about 40% of all revenue until 2015, when they started gobbling up even more.
Television
Thanks to cable and streaming, there’s way more stuff on TV today than there was 50 years ago. So it would make sense if a few shows ruled the early decades of TV, and now new shows constantly displace each other at the top of the viewership charts.
Instead, the opposite has happened. I pulled the top 30 most-viewed TV shows from 1950 to 2019 (source) and found that fewer and fewer franchises rule a larger and larger share of the airwaves. In fact, since 2000, about a third of the top 30 most-viewed shows are either spinoffs of other shows in the top 30 (e.g., CSI and CSI: Miami) or multiple broadcasts of the same show (e.g., American Idol on Monday and American Idol on Wednesday).
Two caveats to this data. First, I’m probably slightly undercounting multiplicities from earlier decades, where the connections between shows might be harder for a modern viewer like me to understand––maybe one guy hosted multiple different shows, for example. And second, the Nielsen ratings I’m using only recently started accurately measuring viewership on streaming platforms. But even in 2019, only 14% of viewing time was spent on streaming, so this data isn’t missing much.
Music
It used to be that a few hitmakers ruled the charts––The Beatles, The Eagles, Michael Jackson––while today it’s a free-for-all, right?
Nope. A data scientist named Azhad Syed has done the analysis, and he finds that the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades.
And since 2000, the number of hits per artist on the Hot 100 has been increasing.
(Azhad says he’s looking for a job––you should hire him!)
A smaller group of artists tops the charts, and they produce more of the chart-toppers. Music, too, has become an oligopoly.
Books
Literature feels like a different world than movies, TV, and music, and yet the trend is the same.
Using LiteraryHub’s list of the top 10 bestselling books for every year from 1919 to 2017, I found that the oligopoly has come to book publishing as well. There are a couple ways we can look at this. First, we can look at the percentage of repeat authors in the top 10––that is, the number of books in the top 10 that were written by an author with another book in the top 10.
It used to be pretty rare for one author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year. Since 1990, it’s happened almost every year. No author ever had three top 10 books in one year until Danielle Steel did it 1998. In 2011, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, and Stieg Larsson all had two chart-topping books each.
We can also look at the percentage of authors in the top 10 were already famous––say, they had a top 10 book within the past 10 years. That has increased over time, too.
In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.
Video games
I tracked down the top 20 bestselling video games for each year from 1995 to 2021 (sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) and coded whether each belongs to a preexisting video game franchise. (Some games, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, belong to franchises outside of video games. For these, I coded the first installment as originals and any subsequent installments as franchise games.)
The oligopoly rules video games too:
In the late 1990s, 75% or less of bestselling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it’s been above 75% every year, and sometimes it’s 100%. At the top of the charts, it’s all Mario, Zelda, Call of Duty,and Grand Theft Auto.
Why is this happening?
Any explanation for the rise of the pop oligopoly has to answer two questions: why have producers started producing more of the same thing, and why are consumers consuming it? I think the answers to the first question are invasion, consolidation, and innovation. I think the answer to the second question is proliferation.
Invasion
Software and the internet have made it easier than ever to create and publish content. Most of the stuff that random amateurs make is crap and nobody looks at it, but a tiny proportion gets really successful. This might make media giants choose to produce and promote stuff that independent weirdos never could, like an Avengers movie. This can’t explain why oligopolization started decades ago––YouTube only launched in 2005, for example, and most Americans didn’t have broadband until 2007––but it might explain why it’s accelerated and stuck around.
Consolidation
Big things like to eat, defeat, and outcompete smaller things. So over time, big things should get bigger and small things should die off. Indeed, movie studios, music labels, TV stations, and publishers of books and video games have all consolidated. Maybe it’s inevitable that major producers of culture will suck up or destroy everybody else, leaving nothing but superstars and blockbusters. Indeed, maybe cultural oligopoly is merely a transition state before we reach cultural monopoly.
Innovation
You may think there’s nothing left to discover in art forms as old as literature and music, and that they simply iterate as fashions change. But it took humans thousands of years to figure out how to create the illusion of depth in paintings. Novelists used to think that sentences had to be long and complicated until Hemingway came along, wrote some snappy prose, and changed everything. Even very old art forms, then, may have secrets left to discover. Maybe the biggest players in culture discovered some innovations that won them a permanent, first-mover chunk of market share. I can think of a few:
In books: lightning-quick plots and chapter-ending cliffhangers. Nobody thinks The Da Vinci Code is high literature, but it’s a book that really really wants you to read it. And a lot of people did!
In movies, TV, and video games: cinematic universes. Studios have finally figured out that once audiences fall in love with fictional worlds, they want to spend lots of time in them. Marvel, DC, and Star Wars are the most famous, but there are also smaller universe expansions like Better Call Saul and El Camino from Breaking Bad and The Many Saints of Newark from The Sopranos. Video game developers have understood this for even longer, which is why Mario does everything from playing tennis to driving go-karts to, you know, being a piece of paper.
Proliferation
Invasion, consolidation, and innovation can, I think, explain the pop oligopoly from the supply side. But all three require a willing audience. So why might people be more open to experiencing the same thing over and over again?
As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar.
Another way to think about it: more opportunities means higher opportunity costs, which could lead to lower risk tolerance. When the only way to watch a movie is to go pick one of the seven playing at your local AMC, you might take a chance on something new. But when you’ve got a million movies to pick from, picking a safe, familiar option seems more sensible than gambling on an original.
This could be happening across all of culture at once. Movies don’t just compete with other movies. They compete with every other way of spending your time, and those ways are both infinite and increasing. There are now 60,000 free books on Project Gutenberg, Spotify says it has 78 million songs and 4 million podcast episodes, and humanity uploads 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute. So uh, yeah, the Tom Hanks movie sounds good.
What do we do about it?
Some may think that the rise of the pop oligopoly means the decline of quality. But the oligopoly can still make art: Red Dead Redemption II is a terrific game, “Blinding Lights” is a great song, and Toy Story 4 is a pretty good movie. And when you look back at popular stuff from a generation ago, there was plenty of dreck. We’ve forgotten the pulpy Westerns and insipid romances that made the bestseller lists while books like The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, and Animal Farm did not. American Idol is not so different from the televised talent shows of the 1950s. Popular culture has always been a mix of the brilliant and the banal, and nothing I’ve shown you suggests that the ratio has changed.
The problem isn’t that the mean has decreased. It’s that the variance has shrunk. Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings. They should alienate us sometimes, or make us mad, or make us think. But they can’t do any of that if they only feed us sequels and spinoffs. It’s like eating macaroni and cheese every single night forever: it may be comfortable, but eventually you’re going to get scurvy.
We haven’t fully reckoned with what the cultural oligopoly might be doing to us. How much does it stunt our imaginations to play the same video games we were playing 30 years ago? What message does it send that one of the most popular songs in the 2010s was about how a 1970s rock star was really cool? How much does it dull our ambitions to watch 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, where the most interesting scene is just Neo watching the original Matrix from 1999? How inspiring is it to watch tiny variations on the same police procedurals and reality shows year after year? My parents grew up with the first Star Wars movie, which had the audacity to create an entire universe. My niece and nephews are growing up with the ninth Star Wars movie, which aspires to move merchandise. Subsisting entirely on cultural comfort food cannot make us thoughtful, creative, or courageous.
Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention. Finding them takes some foraging and digging, and then you’ll have to stomach some very odd, unfamiliar flavors. That’s good. Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people. And it kindles that delicate, precious fire inside us––without it, we might as well be algorithms. Humankind does not live on bread alone, nor can our spirits long survive on a diet of reruns.
There has been so much bad news about the vaccines in the last few months, it even leaked into the mainstream media. I think the cabal’s plan, at least in the US but probably everywhere, is to stop propping the ludicrous vaccine claims up and allow them to die a natural death. I explain why below.
There was just too much bad news, too few getting boosted, too much resistance from parents. Getting 8 or 10 doses into everyone was not going to happen. The terrified obedient masses were becoming fewer and fewer.
For example, here is one story that got lots of traction: ABC News covered the fact that “At least 72 COVID cases in the fully vaccinated resulted from the Gridiron dinner.” Not only did Nancy Pelosi test positive, but several members of Biden’s Cabinet and many other Beltway glitterati did too. All of whom had to have been vaccinated in order to attend.
There was plenty of happy talk that the afflicted politicians in DC had only mild COVID cases. Good for them. But, if vaccinations caused them to become asymptomatic spreaders instead of spreaders with symptoms, who would know to stay home while sick, the vaccines could actually be doing more harm than good in terms of transmission. They could be causing more COVID cases, not less.
By now, it has to be apparent to everyone who walks by a newsstand or turns on the TV that the media are begging much too hard for more shots.
It must be obvious to all that the shots do not prevent spread and therefore there is no logical way you can mandate them. Because if my shot does not protect you (and only with lots of fairy dust will it protect me) why would you have any interest in whether or not I am vaccinated?
Once you stop caring about my vaccination status, the cabal’s nexus of control starts to fall apart. That was their ace in the hole. Time for them to move on to something else.
The kicker for childhood vaccines: the New York state Department of Health study of vaccine efficacy in children. After 2 months, efficacy in the 5-11 year olds had fallen to 12%. In other words, 7 out of 8 vaccinated kids derived no benefit after 2 months, only risk. The data were derived from 365,000 children, and apparently there was no way CDC could spin them, or 12% was the best spin they could put on the data. This report is a huge obstacle to universal child vaccinations. They cabal cannot surmount it.
It is important to mention again–because we keep forgetting–that while the vaccines are nominally licensed for adults, in fact you can only find the EUA (unlicensed) product in the US, and legally an EUA is experimental–and therefore forcing someone to be vaccinated is a Nuremberg violation and a violation of federal law.
The imposition of mandates for these experimental gene therapy products is therefore a crime, being committed by states, federal government and certain companies and other institutions. It seems that because US law was not designed for situations in which the government is the criminal, it has been very difficult to use the judicial system to change what is happening. But surely if this persisted much longer an honest judge somewhere would finally rule that the vaccines are experimental and the COVID mandate house of cards would then collapse. Like Humpty Dumpty (it is Easter today after all):
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put COVID mandates together again
In Australia, Queensland’s health minister just admitted that ambulances are being summoned for a lot more calls for cardiac events and sudden deaths: 40% more to be exact. Thanks to Igor Chudov for following this story, and including a video of the clueless minister admitting it, but having no idea why…
Then there were the 3 insurance companies, one each from the US, India and Germany, that admitted there were about 40% more deaths than expected in working-age people in the second half of 2021. The German official who blew the whistle, a CEO or VP, was immediately fired, which is a strong indication he was telling the truth.
Three doctor whistleblowers released a large cache of data from the military’s DMED database showing huge increases in service-member deaths. There has been a lot of confusion about these data. In part, that is because the military then reissued its data for the preceding several years, making the 2021 comparison look less dire. Mathew Crawford has some ideas about what really happened to the data. The only thing that is absolutely clear so far is that there has been a coverup, and the health of vaccinated members of the military appears to have taken a dive. But we don’t know how deep.
Everyone in the world must have heard the term ‘myocarditis’ by now, and knows that it is a vaccine injury. A lot of people also know that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said post-vaccination myocarditis was extremely “rare but mild,” except it isn’t and she lied. The rate of myocarditis she cited is at least 10 times too low. About 1 in 2000 young men aged 18-24 sought care for this diagnosis after getting their second mRNA shot.
In fact, CDC was so intensely worried about blowback regarding its recommendation to vaccinate teens (despite the risk of myocarditis) it got the heads of about 20 professional medical organizations to sign on to a declaration supporting CDC’s recommendation. Wonder how much CDC paid for that. Getting such back-up was an unusual move, but perhaps unsurprising for risk-averse bureaucrats who worry about their own butt but not anyone else’s. Rochelle even mentions these “cosigners” from many medical organizations in her ABC-TV interview. Collecting a bunch of “co-signers” is actually the proof that CDC knew its vaccine recommendation was going to considerably harm children.
While no one in a federal health agency has admitted it, many people must be aware that myocarditis is only the tip of the COVID vaccine injury iceberg. Myocarditis got attention because it’s life-threatening and almost always happens within 4 days of the second shot–it can’t be written off as coincidence, the way heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli, sudden deaths and perhaps many other diagnoses have been.
As if there wasn’t enough bad vaccine news, there was information from the Medicare database that FDA posted last July, but it only recently got attention. FDA revealed that heart attacks, pulmonary emboli, disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC, a life-threatening, bleeding plus clotting disorder) and ITP (another bleeding disorder) were related to the Pfizer vaccination in Medicare beneficiaries. FDA promised to study this rigorously, but instead remained silent, and subsequently has never denied the relationship.
And then there is ivermectin. So many ivermectin stories have been leaking into the popular press. Tennessee’s legislature made ivermectin essentially an over-the-counter drug last week. New Hampshire’s house voted in favor of this as well, while the NH Senate is now taking it up. Several states gave healthcare providers an immunity guarantee for the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID. Kansas’ Senate voted to strengthen religious exemptions and give safe harbor to those prescribing ivermectin, effectively undermining school vaccine mandates if it is enacted. Kansas also refused to enforce any adult vaccine mandates.
Coupled with stories about lawsuits against hospitals for refusing to supply ivermectin to dying relatives, like this one, people are finally realizing there is probably something to this drug, and they have been cheated. They were given a shot that barely works, is unsafe, and they were stopped from getting the good drug. And what if they lost their business to the lockdowns? There must be a lot of anger simmering by now. I imagine the Great Reset cabal must be worried about this, and has decided to loosen its grip for the moment and hopefully let off some citizen steam.
There is more surprising vaccine news. While many institutions are still imposing mandates (and we need to find out what $ carrots were given to universities and other entities to impose illegal mandates of experimental vaccines) in other, surprising places the mandates are disappearing. Out west in Woke Land, the Washington state Department of Health said it would not require COVID vaccines to attend school after all. Despite Gavin Newsom’s 2021 executive order mandating vaccines for school kids as soon as they are licensed, California’s Department of Health has just done the same thing that Washington’s did: killed the COVID vaccine mandate for the 2022-23 school year.
Finally, Fauci himself and various media now openly admit the vaccines will not take us to herd immunity (no matter how many shots we get).
This is why I am convinced the ship is turning and the current vaccine programs will be scuttled. Those states’ health departments take their orders from CDC and DC. I do not think FDA is going to be issuing any more fake licenses for COVID vaccines. [I say fake because a) the vaccines do not meet licensure criteria, and b) after issuing the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines licenses for adults, neither licensed product has been distributed in the US for actual use]. The Advisory Committee meeting to deliberate on vaccines for kids aged 6 months up to 5 years was delayed from February to April, and now from April till June. It seems like our unvaxxed kids will be spared. Hallelujah!
During the April 6, 2022 Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting, which I live-blogged and summarized, both briefers and committee members acknowledged that the neutralizing antibody titers that have been used as a surrogate for immunity in order to issue EUAs, were in fact not valid surrogates.
This had been obvious for awhile, but a recent Israeli study in healthcare workers made it crystal clear. While neutralizing antibody titers rose tenfold after a fourth vaccination, by 2 months out the Pfizer vaccine had only 30% efficacy against infection, and the Moderna vaccine had only 11%. So the high antibody titers were, in fact, meaningless.
This is really important, because Pfizer and Moderna have been relying on titers to get their vaccines okayed for the younger age groups, those below 16 and 18 respectively. They don’t have data showing the vaccines are actually reducing cases by 50% or more, which is the standard FDA said was necessary. They don’t have data showing that the vaccines prevent serious cases or deaths, another standard.
Up until now, FDA accepted titers in lieu of actual efficacy results from clinical trials to issue its EUAs for children–but with the recent VRBPAC admissions, which must have been planned in advance (otherwise why did multiple people at the meeting discuss it as settled fact when they had never mentioned it before?) FDA can no longer do so.
Another thing that happened at the VRBPAC meeting was that Peter Marks, the head of FDA’s Center for Biologics and highest FDA official there, said that if a new type of COVID vaccine is developed for the next booster, then the current vaccines would no longer be used, because it would be too confusing (according to STAT). Too confusing?! I believe this was another effort to prepare us for the demise of the current mRNA vaccines.
The fall of the vaccines means the fall of the vaccine passports. This ought to slow down the imposition of CBDCs and all-digital money for a bit. If we don’t have to show our vaccine certificate to go shop, eat, etc., (and people stop being fearful of catching something from each Other) people will be a lot less inclined to “show their papers” to go about their lives. It’s our job to explain over and over that this was how the Nazis maintained control.
Here I read the tea leaves
If there is a new vaccine waiting in the wings, FDA and its briefers were not telling us about it at the VRBPAC meeting, which was the time to do so. For right now, I think the current crop of vaccines and the vaccine passports are going away. I don’t think the authorities anticipate another severe COVID wave in the foreseeable future…as most people now have Omicron immunity. The COVID fear will dissipate.
The original Wuhan strain appeared out of nowhere. No natural progenitor could be found. And the original Omicron strain appears to have also originated in a lab. If I was a member of the Great Reset cabal, I would be quite hesitant about releasing yet a third lab-engineered virus on the population. Because millions of people will be looking for one, and it won’t take long before its laboratory provenance is discovered. Then the pitchforks might really come out.
On the other hand, I do believe the cabal has bet the farm on their Reset, they can’t go back, and they are simply moving on to another means of accomplishing it besides COVID. The over-the-top WHO Treaty/Constitution and its amendments designed to assume sovereignty over the world in the event of a pandemic is an ambitious Plan B.
But I don’t think it will fly. Too many people know the WHO was wrong about virtually everything regarding management of this pandemic, not to mention the 2009 swine flu. And then there was that little matter of WHO undertaking the SOLIDARITY Trial, in which WHO officials deliberately poisoned over 1,000 COVID patients with excessive doses of hydroxychloroquine and in many cases failed to obtain signed informed consents. The WHO could be liable for manslaughter.
Will Russia and China really agree to give up their sovereignty to Tedros? China, maybe. Brazil? India? Indonesia? Japan? Nigeria? Can all of their leaders, and their local power centers, have been sufficiently corrupted to turn over their nations to the cabal? I think that could be a stretch.
I suspect the cabal will try their best to get a legal OK to take over the world with the upcoming WHO pandemic treaty, but it won’t fly. Too many people already know about these plans.
After the WHO, the cabal will move on to something else, Plan C. Climate catastrophe? Yet more wars? Aliens? I’m guessing it will be a few years before we get hit with another nasty bug. By then maybe the fiat currencies will have finally crashed, and the cabal won’t have as tight control of the reins. By then, Fauci, Walensky, Biden, Macron, Johnson, Trudeau, Draghi will hopefully be unpleasant memories.
I am not thinking we will all sing kumbaya. I expect a good deal of misery as the cabal pushes all the levers at its disposal.
The Shanghai city and port closure (China’s largest city and the world’s largest port) seems to me a deliberate attempt to interfere with worldwide transit of goods and to reduce food availability. The Chinese know how to treat COVID. They make the drugs and herbs. There is no need for them to lock down.
Don’t miss all the food warehouses that caught fire recently, or the refusal of the Union Pacific railroad to carry 20% of the fertilizer the US’s biggest fertilizer producer expected to ship.
We are finally understanding that the awful government policies were deliberate — intended to cement control over and impoverish us. But maybe we can start to build something a whole lot better.
We are shaking loose of the educational indoctrination system, the ruination of our foods, the user-unfriendly and health-damaging healthcare system. We are starting to grasp that our governments acted with malice aforethought to stupefy and eventually enslave us.
People are breaking free and taking responsibility for their future. Where I live, people are learning self-sufficiency skills, creating home-schooling coops, building greenhouses and growing food. The migration to the countryside was deliberate.
A better life? It just takes everybody waking up. Despite all the acrimony we have faced, the time is ripe to help our fellows see things clearly. We have to love them, help them, meet them where they are. Maybe it is just to talk about the Gridiron dinner. Or ivermectin. They won’t get it in a day. But keep trying. It is our only solution.
Post script: On April 26, CDC reported that 60% of Americans (and over 3/4 of children) have now had COVID in the US. Yesterday, I saw that the UK reported that 70% of people in England and Northern Ireland have been infected.
Data from Moderna’s original trial reveal that only about 40% of those who were vaccinated, and then got COVID, developed “N” antibodies (to nucleocapsid), the current marker of infection and a marker of immunity. About 93% of the unvaccinated who developed COVID developed “N” antibodies. This is fairly strong evidence that vaccination does impair the ability to develop a normal, full immune response to COVID when infected. Lots of people have been hinting at this. Moderna’s data seem to confirm it. Does Pfizer have similar data? What has the FDA seen?
This is more reason for the PTB to let this ship slowly sink. Thankfully, most of us are already (at least partially) immune.
While elite control over human societies started to gather pace with the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, it was rapidly accelerated with the dawn of human civilization 7,000 years later. Since that time, ‘ordinary’ human beings like you and me have fought an unending sequence of battles to defend ourselves against these ongoing efforts by elites to kill or control us and capture the bulk of Earth’s resources for their own use.
We have had to fight off elites in a vast range of contexts: Pharaohs and Emperors politically, the Popes and other Vatican officials religiously, the City of London Corporation and other financial elites economically, monarchs and political elites nationally, and now a Global Elite that exercises enormous control technologically, economically, politically, militarily and otherwise over the entire world. For a fuller explanation of this point, see ‘Why Activists Fail’.
But there is a profound difference between all of the battles in earlier eras and the one we are in now.
If we lose this battle, there will be no subsequent battle. The Long War against humanity will have been lost, once and for all.
Why? Because this battle is for everything that it means to be human – human identity, human freedom, human rights, privacy, dignity, free will and anything else that makes life worth living – and for control of the Earth and all its resources.
And while it is true that no human has any of these elements in anything like its entirety – who would claim to be fully ‘free’ in this world? – and many humans still lack all of these elements in any meaningful form, it is nevertheless true that the totalitarian nature of the program being imposed on us will transform the very concept of ‘human’ in a way that has only been conceived in the past 100 years or so and not previously attempted. Moreover, if successful, any ‘free will’ that humans might still possess will be utterly eliminated.
How is this Happening? The Deep Level
Despite the unending efforts of those people aware enough to perceive the true depth of this conflict, elites have been able to use a long series of techniques to ensure that the vast bulk of ‘ordinary’ people either do not perceive the conflict or waste their dissent by expressing it within frameworks designed and controlled by elites for that precise purpose. By doing this, it appears that dissent is ‘allowed’ and valued when, in fact, it is simply dissipated.
A second way in which elites have been able to distract us from where the real power in society lies is by convincing us that we have ‘legal recourse’ against injustice, including against elites who kill and exploit us. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.
A third way in which elites retain control over societies is by designing compulsory education systems that ensure that whatever unique emotional, intellectual, sensory and physical potential a child has at birth is either utterly eliminated within a few years of that birth or channeled to serve elite will. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
And, of course, elites control populations by using extensive propaganda – marketed variously as ‘education’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘news’ – to ensure the passive submission of the bulk of the population to elite directives.
In short, an unending sequence of violence – ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – is used to terrorize the individual throughout childhood and adolescence into submissive obedience. This violence ensures that only a rare individual survives with any sense of ‘Self’, with the capacity to critique society and resist violence and exploitation strategically. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
So here we are in 2022, deeply engaged in the final battle to defend humanity, with most of the population unaware of what is happening and the bulk of those who are aware dissipating their dissent through elite-controlled channels.
Hence, as the World Economic Forum puts it so clearly in one of its promotional videos: By 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.’ See ‘8 predictions for the world in 2030’.
And that could well become true for the simple reason that key measures of the transformation taking place are shifting wealth from those with less to those who will shortly own everything, including you, as Dr Joseph Mercola points out – see ‘Who Will Eventually Own Everything, Including You?’ – and the technologies that will destroy your volition will also remove any concept of happiness.
In short, a transhuman slave needs nothing and experiences only those emotions that are programmed. A transhuman slave, whether as worker, soldier or consumer, will simply perform its programmed tasks until it is no longer functional and is ‘decommissioned’.
A human being without free will cannot resist because they do not know that they are enslaved.
Every day, while most people content themselves with trying to get on with living some version of the life that they experienced prior to 2020, another detail is mapped out and another measure is taken by compliant politicians in one or more countries around the world to destroy everything we have ever known. And the noose is ever-tightening.
Let me offer you just a taste of what else is happening, beyond what is ordinarily discussed as part of the ‘Great Reset’, as elements of the Global Elite’s agenda, about which you are not being consulted or even given thoughtful critiques to consider in government and corporate media.
The World Health Organization: International Health Regulations & the Pandemic Treaty
The World Health Organization continues to promote its initiative to create a ‘Pandemic Treaty’. Using wonderful-sounding words such as ‘to build a more robust global health architecture that will protect future generations’, the Treaty sounds like something we have all been dreaming about. See ‘Global leaders unite in urgent call for international pandemic treaty’.
But like all elite initiatives of this nature, the devil is in the detail and, often enough, hidden in plain sight. Rather than offer a detailed critique here, you can consider several fine critiques by thoughtful scholars in the following articles or videos:
Kit Knightly: The ‘Pandemic Treaty’ would ‘hand supranational powers to an unelected bureaucrat or “expert”, who could exercise them entirely at his own discretion and on completely subjective criteria. This is the very definition of technocratic globalism.’ See ‘“Pandemic Treaty” will hand WHO keys to global government’.
But it would be unwise to ascribe too much significance to these latest, ongoing encroachments on national sovereignty. As explained above, the Global Elite has long exercised control over national governments (as well as international organizations) and the ongoing formalization of this process through the various measures outlined immediately above are simply the latest (health) details in this long-standing process.
Consequently, rather than focusing our resistance on these latest details by, yet again, falling for the trap of lobbying elite agents, as suggested by organizations such as the World Council for Health – see ‘#StopTheWHO: How You Can Take a Stand Against International Health Regulation Amendments’ – it is superior strategy to focus our resistance on the entire elite agenda by undermining elite power at its source.
World Government Summit
The World Government Summit was held in Dubai on 29-30 March 2022. See ‘World Government Summit 2022’. The event was sponsored and hosted by the United Arab Emirates, that bastion of ruthless dictatorship and human rights abuses – see ‘United Arab Emirates 2021’ – and brought together ‘thought leaders, global experts and decision makers from around the globe to share and contribute to the development of tools, policies, and models that are essential in shaping future governments.’ See ‘World Government Summit 2022’.
‘The World Government Summit community is an opportunity for thought-leaders from the public and private sectors to join forces with world-renowned experts to design a better life for citizens across the world. Through Memberships and Partnerships, the Summit brings together change makers to shape a better future for humanity.’ See ‘World Government Summit: Community’.
It is reassuring to know that the WGS felt that the views of constituencies of ‘ordinary’ people – women, indigenous peoples, working people, the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, farmers, non-white peoples, religious people… – were not required and that the ‘world renowned experts’ were quite capable of designing ‘a better life for citizens across the world’ without even consulting us. Surely, after all, these high profile people fully understand the daily struggles of those who battle to survive, have a different worldview or are just simply not white, wealthy and ‘well-connected’.
In any case, as the host country’s long record reminds us, human rights are to be eviscerated in the world that is now being introduced, which is why those attending the Summit were obviously very supportive of the UAE’s ruthless approach to human rights.
As Derrick Broze noted in his thoughtful critique of this gathering: ‘Anyone with a functioning brain should… pay attention to this little known gathering of globalist Technocrats… [who] imagine a world where the tyrannical technological systems are invisible and the average person has zero recourse for preventing exclusion or punishment based on their social credit score.’ See ‘While You Were Distracted by Will Smith, the International Elitists Met at The World Government Summit’.
The Great Narrative
The Great Narrative was a forum sponsored by the World Economic Forum from 10-13 November 2021. According to the WEF: It was ‘a collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.’ The gathering involved ‘Top thinkers from a variety of geographies and disciplines – including futurists, scientists and philosophers – [to] contribute fresh ideas for the future.’ See ‘The Great Narrative’.
Again, perhaps like me, you find it difficult to identify with the people at this gathering. I wonder if they could see things from your perspective? Or mine?
The good news is that Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, authors of the original book on Covid-19: The Great Reset, also wrote a book about The Great Narrative: For a Better Future. So at least you can read what they are doing to you and plan to do to you. As long as you can read between the lines.
But, again, Derrick Broze has been kind enough to offer a thoughtful critique:
Authoritarians use great narratives to legitimize their own power, and they do this by claiming to have knowledge and understanding that speaks to a universal truth…. With this understanding, the WEF’s call for a ‘Great Narrative’ should be seen for what it truly is – an attempt to displace all other visions of the future of humankind by placing the WEF and their partners at the heart of a narrative which paints them as the heroes of our time. This fits perfectly with the Technocratic philosophy employed by WEF founder Klaus Schwab. He envisions a future where ‘public-private partnerships’ of government and private business and so-called philanthropies use their wealth, influence, and power to design the future they believe is best for humanity. In actuality, the Technocrat philosophy merges with a Transhumanist mindset that sees humanity as limited, flawed, and in need of augmentation by technology in order to accelerate what Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution…. Of course, for Schwab and other globalists, the 4IR also lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores. See ‘The Great Narrative and The Metaverse, Part 1: A Dystopian Vision of the Future’.
Sound like the sort of world that will be good for you?
Defeating the Global Elite’s Agenda
As you ponder the enormity of this elite project, I hope it will encourage you to deeply consider what meaningful resistance in this context will entail. We cannot succeed if we beg elite agents, including politicians, to fix it for us. In the last 18 months, five presidents who resisted the elite-driven narrative have been assassinated to remind us of that.
So resisting it effectively and, ultimately, defeating its agenda, will require focused, strategic action that undermines the power of the Elite to implement its plan.
If you are interested in being part of this strategy, you can read how to do so on the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’website which offers further analysis, resources and a list of 29 strategic goals for doing so.
This includes campaigning to cause all sectors of society to refuse to develop and make available, or to purchase/use, technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and transhumanism (including 5G and 6G, military weapons, artificial intelligence [AI], big data, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things [IoT], and quantum computing) because these technologies will subvert human identity, human freedom, human dignity, human volition and/or human privacy. See ‘Strategic Goals related to resisting the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism’.
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 15 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.
Notably, these latter actions avoid certain problems. Because they involve actions by people dispersed throughout the population, rather than people concentrated in one location (as with rallies), they are extremely difficult to interrupt. Hence, they virtually eliminate the risk of violent repression.
If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link available from the website).
Conclusion
The insane Global Elite has launched the final stage of a long-planned program to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslave those left alive. They have agents (including international organizations such as the UN and WHO, politicians, medical personnel, government and corporate media) throughout society playing a part in implementing this program on their behalf.
If we are to defeat this program we must mobilize sufficient thoughtful and courageous people to act strategically to undermine the power of the Global Elite to inflict this program upon us. This can be done as described above.
As you ponder your involvement, remember this. If we do not fight successfully now to defend our humanity, no human being will have the opportunity to fight in future. It is ‘now or never’ for us all.
In that sense, this is the final battle.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ . His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
The non-material, or non-visible, realm does not lie dormant. It is active, constantly. It is what infuses and makes possible the world we know and see. The intangible realm of vital forces is what we often call the ‘spiritual’ dimension for within it lies the conscious intelligences that establish material life. Spiritual matters have long been an abstract thing for many people. Yet they are no longer to remain abstract – they are now to flow into culture not only through ‘spiritual channels,’ but through all manner of ways, including people. The flow and merger between the suprasensory world and the sensory world (the realm of the phenomenal), has always been in operation. Only now, it looks set to increase.
Materialism is all good and well – yet up to a certain point. This is recognized by some as the ‘Fall’ – the deep immersion into physical reality. To a certain degree, this immersion into physicality was necessary for developing individualism and to perceive existence in relation to Source. Once this recognition is gained, then begins the ‘return journey’ back to Source/Origin consciousness. However, if a species remains too long within the grip of materialistic forces, then a hardening – or deadening – can occur that crystallizes certain faculties and organs of perception, which leads to an evolutionary stagnation. As such, the stagnation of evolvement can be due to the over-influence of entropic forces. The impulse of spiritual knowledge (developmental forces) descending into the physical world has been opposed by other forces that do not wish for people to discover their inner freedom. Yet this time, this moment in human development, has been foreseen and, on some levels, even planned for. What is to come about has been viewed as inevitable by those who know what is at stake.
The entropic forces that exist in opposition aim to ‘over-materialize’ materialism. They intend to deepen the entanglement within physical matter, and to create artificial material forms that would not have arisen in the natural course of human evolvement. This is a matter of exercising certain powers upon the physical plane. This is being applied in such a way as to block a renewal of human culture beyond materialism and to direct it into a new form of materialism, a more etheric form that seems un-material. This is what I refer to as the ‘fallacy of materialism’ – the digital-virtual realms, whilst seeming contrary to physical-materialism, are in fact working to deepen human entanglement in material forces. These digitized spaces, because of their sense of non-physicality, are really an etheric manifestation of materialism. Or rather, a realm of theoretical materialism. Theoretical materialism signifies a reality construct that does not need to be physical to the touch, yet it is based on, or is a projection from, a material foundation. Within both the theoretical and regular mode of materialism, the human being is encapsulated within an amalgamation of material processes. It is also a world of facts and external evidence that a person becomes lost within. All life experience proceeds from this material realm, and this conditions the human being to gain a view of life that is factually based, and to accept that there is no other reality except this world of materialism and factual experience. Any notion of the soul or spirit – the transcendental impulse – is either regarded as being a by-product from material reality or is rejected altogether as a false notion. This is the power of the immersion into matter-reality.
Deep materialism finally becomes a cosmology of entropy and decline. It leads to mechanical, artificial modes of thinking that eventually brings about a stagnation in those forces driving human development. If continued, these materialistic forces carve out a path of technological advancement and evolution that further blocks vital, spiritualized forces. In this route, the human being strives for greater material benefits yet neglects the vital human forces of spiritualized connection. Our current epoch is concerned with the development of the material world; and if the human being is not to degenerate totally into a mere accomplice of machines, then a path must be found which leads from the mechanical impulse towards a life of the spirit. However, entropic forces are in play that are opposed to forms of spiritualization (spiritual freedom), and which work to reduce and, eventually, dispose of spiritual seeking and to replace it with an ethereal and otherworldly ‘virtual paradise’ where all needs can be fulfilled-by-illusion. A part of this ‘supra-materialism’ is the notion of immortality that is arising through transhumanist tropes. This can be referred to as the immortality falsehood as it works not through the spirit-soul but through a prolongation of the physical life experience by merger with machinic forms. This is a mode of potential immortality within the physical sphere but not within the spiritual. In the end, it is an entrapment for it disavows the inner spirit release from the physical domain. This can lead to a state of soullessness within the human being as the contact with Source becomes, over time, diminished. Or, perhaps this materialistic, transhumanist agenda will attract those people already without full spirit-soul incarnation.
It may be that there are people walking around in physical incarnation, in physical bodies, yet who are lacking, for want of a better word, a soul. Rudolf Steiner made note of this a hundred years ago when he stated
‘…a kind of surplus of individuals is appearing in our times who are without Egos [‘I’], who are not truly human beings. This is a terrible truth…They make the impression of a human being if we do not look closely, but they are not human in the fullest sense of the word.’ 1
Steiner warned us to be aware that what we encounter as human beings in human form may not always have to be what it appears to be. He stated that the outer appearance can be just that: appearance. He went on to state: ‘We encounter people in human form who only in their outer appearance are individuals…in truth, these are humans with a physical, etheric, and astral body, but beings are embodied in them, beings that make use of these individuals in order to operate through them.’2 What this refers to is that human bodies can be vessels for other beings to operate through.
This makes us realize that the world of ‘spirit’ may not always be what we have thought it to be. In other words, it may not be all divine light and ascension. It also involves the aspect of discernment. For there are players and forces that wield a great deal of influence within the physical world. And some of these influences act through the presence of certain individuals that may appear outwardly ‘normal.’ In this light, a completely different kind of spirituality is at work in present-day humanity. It may be inferred, without sounding dramatic, that certain power groups, and their important individual members, are influenced (and perhaps dominated) by a non-human species of being that are intent on implementing non-human objectives. Such groups and individuals would, in this case, exhibit a distinct lack of ‘soul’ – i.e., empathy and compassion – and would appear to others as displaying almost sociopathic tendencies.[i] Yet at the same time, such people can appear unusually charismatic and are able to exert great influence over other people, especially with their words and speeches, whilst being themselves emotionally stunted.
To consider this further, such beings might be motivated in their actions to attempt to block other human being’s connection to their own individual inner/spiritual impulse. By a range of actions, they could focus on distracting people away from the notion of a metaphysical reality and of their inherent connection to Source (or a realm of vital conscious intelligence beyond matter-reality). In extreme cases, such players might even target the bio-psycho human body in an attempt to sabotage the vessel so as to make it a less viable vehicle for soul-spirit incarnation. What else might they hope to achieve? Again, referring to Rudolf Steiner, he stated that: ‘Their objective is to maintain the whole of life as a mere economic life, to gradually eradicate everything else that is part of the intellectual and spiritual life, to eradicate the spiritual life precisely where it is most active…and swallow up everything through the economic life.’3
By hijacking cultural, social, and economic systems, the focus turns away from the inner life, which tends to be more active once people have satisfied their primary needs (see Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). Also, if there are uncertainties, disruptions, and fluctuations in these systems, then people can become psychologically influenced in a negative way. That is, for those people who come under the domination of such economic forces – i.e., are subservient through debt – they are more likely to experience a loss of personal empowerment and will. If we take only a cursory glance at the actions of many incumbent leaders, politicians, corporate businesses, financial institutions, and more, we can see a clear lack of any soulful behaviour or intent. Quite the contrary, many of these individuals and groups seem determined to curtail human freedoms, sovereignty, and inner empowerment. If Steiner were alive today, he would no doubt say that what we are currently witnessing upon the physical plane is an act of soulless terraforming of the planet and a controlling manipulation of the human life experience by nefarious forces that have anti-human aims and intentions. Perhaps this is why so many people today are experiencing depression, frustration, and apathy – a paralysis of will – from which they feel unable to resolve. This gets manifested as a sense of weariness and dissatisfaction that is projected out into their everyday lives.
Because of this, and other factors, the consciously aware person of today is being asked to step into their role as a physical representative of sacred life. It is important that metaphysical realities are never diminished or disowned, and that the life of the spirit remains healthy and strong in expression within physical life. If there is ever a struggle against the human soul, then we may be witnessing this in these current times. We would do well to remember that each person possesses that special treasure that can never be taken from them. And this is the true eternal and genuine immortality. These are the times to be soulful, and to bring forth the human spirit.
References
1 Cited in Grosse, Erdmuth Johannes (2021) Are There People Without A Self? Forest Row: Temple Lodge, p31-2
2 Cited in Grosse, Erdmuth Johannes (2021) Are There People Without A Self? Forest Row: Temple Lodge, p60
3 Cited in Grosse, Erdmuth Johannes (2021) Are There People Without A Self? Forest Row: Temple Lodge, p63
After the Crash 