Category Archives: Sociology

Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever

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By August Cole and P.W. Singer

Source: Slate

It hits you every so often.

When you when you tug on a face mask to go pick up food for your family.

When you witness the powerless suffer casual violence by a man with a sneer.

When you see riot police surround the Lincoln Memorial and protesters snatched off the streets by masked soldiers in unmarked cars.

And when you realize that it is all being watched by an unblinking eye of A.I. surveillance.

At times, it feels like we are living in a real-world version of dystopia. The strange outcome, though, is that it means we need dystopian fiction now more than ever, to help us sort and even make it through it.

You’d think with everything going on, now would be the last time to escape to a world of darkness. And yet books, including those of awful imagined worlds, are in deep demand.
Some of it has been a return to old classics. In a period of disease and lockdowns lasting for weeks, booksellers report the seeming irony that Albert Camus’ The Plague and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude have seen renewed demand. And some of it has been escaping into new worlds, as with Divergent author Veronica Roth taking readers into another post-apocalypse with her new novel Chosen Ones. People have even been willing to enter imagined worlds that seem not too far away, such as Lawrence Wright’s best-selling pandemic thriller The End of October.

Yet the value of the genre is as much in education as entertainment. It can elucidate dangers, serving the role of warning and even preparation. Think of the recent resonance of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 Handmaid’s Tale and its 2020 sequel The Testaments or the revival of interest in It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis in 1935. These are finely written works, not as indulgences, but as a pure expression of the idea that to be forewarned is to be forearmed. Even Susan Collins’ Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, might be interpreted in that light, showing how authoritarian rule can originate through the manipulations of an ambitious striver.

Our personal corner of this dark market is the meld of imagination with research. For our book Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution, we chose the setting of not a far-off imagined world like Panem or Gilead, but Washington, D.C., just around the corner. What happens as Silicon Valley’s visions of utopia hits our real, and very divided, country? What plays out in politics, business, and even family life as our economy is rewired by AI and automation? Yet to make our scenario more haunting, we back up everything that happens in it with 27 pages of endnotes.

When the scarier elements from an imagined world come to life in the real one, however, there is no gleeful “I told you so.” When the novel coronavirus accelerated the more widespread roll out of the robots, remote work, job automation, and AI surveillance projected in our book, we certainly weren’t happy. All it meant was that all the tough dilemmas that our characters face would come quicker for all of us. What was perhaps most disturbing of the last few weeks, though, were when some of the most dystopian scenes we had painted of a future Washington, D.C., also came true, from our book’s scene of riot police deployed around the Lincoln Memorial to the militarized fence thrown up around the White House being put exactly where we had it in Burn-In.

Yet what makes dystopian fiction different is that its creators are oddly optimists at heart, as we are. These works are not about prediction, but prevention. The stories warn of just how far things can go if action isn’t taken, wrapped in a package that is far more impactful than a white paper or PowerPoint. Indeed, research shows that narrative, the oldest communication technology of all, holds more sway over both the public and policymakers than even the “most canonical academic sources.” Our minds can’t help but connect to the “synthetic environment” that our fictional heroes and villains experience, living part of our lives through theirs, even if imagined.

Most importantly, though, the dark worlds are only the setting. The stories are really about the agency of the people in them. And that is perhaps the true value of the dystopian fiction. These stories are not about what those characters experience so much as how they act. At the heart of every story of darkness is a story of perseverance.

As we face our own difficult journeys through the reality of 2020, it is perhaps that lesson which is most important of all.

Twitter QAnon Purge Gives Bigger Monopoly to Corporate Media

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By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

News outlets like CNN reported on Twitter’s move to purge the QAnon movement from its platform.

Articles like, “Twitter cracks down on QAnon accounts,” would claim Twitter fears QAnon’s rhetoric online could eventually lead to “offline harm.”

There is no doubt that QAnon has been behind absurd conspiracy theories and verified lies circulating online – suspiciously absurd. Banning it from Twitter because of alleged fears its activity will lead to “offline harm” is even more absurd .
Despite making absurd claims that demonstrably never materialize or providing evidence that is later revealed to be clearly fabricated, nothing QAnon has done differs from what the corporate media does on a daily basis. In many ways they are one in the same – dividing and distracting the public while US special interests advance their agenda unnoticed and unopposed.
QAnon allegedly made false claims that Hillary Clinton’s arrest was imminent – she was never arrested. Conversely, the corporate media regularly claims that various world leaders in nations targeted by Western regime change have “fled,” are “dead,” or otherwise “ousted from power” – with lies spread by the Western media over the alleged “fates” of still incumbent leaders like Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un coming to immediate mind.
The Western corporate media also helps sell various wars of aggression.

This includes the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, US interventions in Libya and Syria from 2011 onward and US-backed regime change in Ukraine in 2013-2014.

Collectively these conflicts have killed over a million people and driven millions more from their homes. This “offline harm” – the direct result of lies told by the Western corporate media – has not only gone completely unaddressed by Twitter – it is enabled by Twitter.
Twitter – along with other US tech giants like Facebook and Google – aided the US government in sowing chaos across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, precipitating wars that are still raging today, claiming lives, and effecting “offline harm” impacting millions of people.
The banning of the more absurd QAnon movement will pave the way for other purges – eventually eliminating any alternative to the corporate media and its demonstrably dangerous and dishonest narratives. QAnon’s absurdity will make it easy for Twitter to justify its ban, but the momentum toward greater censorship across Western social media will eventually impact accounts and movements previously difficult to justify banning.
US-based “social media” platforms – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. – are no longer truly social media. They are clearly transforming into centralized programed media where corporate monopolies create content that is consumed, removing the public, independent organizations, and competitors’ role in creating content, contributing to discussions, offering alternative views, and interacting with one another.
It is important that this fact be fully recognized and exposed as well as the creation of alternative platforms – especially overseas where US-based “social media” has been fully weaponized and used to undermine sociopolitical and economic stability.

A Bigger Picture

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Baluchitherium. Gone but not forgotten.

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

The Covid-19 virus itself didn’t run the United States into a ditch but it exposed the weakness and rot in the nation’s drive-train, and now all of us passengers on that disabled bus must decide whether to stay helplessly inside the smoldering wreckage arguing over who’s to blame, or begin a long, uncertain march down the road on our own two feet to a place of new arrangements.

In 1918, the country was lashed by a far deadlier pandemic disease at the same time it was fighting a world war, and daily life barely missed a step. The economy then was emphatically one of production, not the mere consumption of things made elsewhere in the world (exchanged for US IOUs), nor of tanning parlors, nail salons, streaming services, and Pilates studios. The economy was a mix of large, medium, and small enterprises, not just floundering giants, especially in the retail commerce of goods. We lived distributed in towns, cities not-yet-overgrown, and a distinctly rural landscape devoted to rural activities — not the vast demolition derby of entropic suburbia that has no future as a human habitat. Banking was only five percent of the economy, not the bloated matrix of rackets now swollen to more than forty percent of so-called GDP. Government at the federal and state levels was miniscule compared to the suffocating, parasitic leviathan it is now.

What happened? Like Hemingway’s old quip about a man going broke slowly and then all-at-once, we allowed everything in American life to creep into hapless giantism too cumbersome to adapt to new conditions, and suddenly conditions have changed. And now it’s all coming apart: the dying chain stores, the giant zombie companies that can only exist by borrowing money to buy back their own stocks, the auto-makers who have run out of lending schemes for non-creditworthy customers, the shale oil fracking companies that could never make a red cent, the agri-biz farmers grown morbidly obese on a diet of credit and government subsidies (just like their end-customers grew obese on engineered snack-foods), the Wall Street lords of financialization hypothecating fortunes by leveraging the stripped assets of everything not nailed down from sea to shining sea, the swelling underclass conditioned to helplessness, addiction, and vice, the inescapable ambient tyranny of media hype, propaganda, and disinformation, and, of course, the catastrophe that government has become.

Get this: none of these things now wobbling and staggering will be resurrected. They’re all going extinct, like the Baluchitherium of the Oligocene. To keep propping them up — as the Federal Reserve sedulously props up financial markets — will only promote the illusion that we don’t have to move on and conduct daily human life differently. A worldwide contraction was already underway before Covid-19 stepped onstage. The contraction was sending a very loud and clear message: gigantism went as far as it could go and now it’s up to the smaller and nimbler to carry on. Beware the promises of the sclerotic authorities asking you to remain in thrall to them — and dependent on them.

Expect these authorities to screw up even the next big exercise in their own franchise: the 2020 election. It will be the climax to a season of political hysteria and will complete the chapter of our history that left us on that smoldering big bus in the ditch. The scramble away from that disaster scene will be frightful and desperate. No matter who ends up in control of the government — or pretends to be — the same forces of contraction and decomplexifying will actually rule and you will have to act accordingly.

Many people will seek to escape the places they live now to find new homes and livelihoods elsewhere. These demographic movements are already underway. New York City is hemorrhaging much of its tax base as the wealthy flee, Chicago too, and the whole state of California. These places will be overwhelmed by functional bankruptcy, even if legal legerdemain allows them to avoid declaring it. Other states, counties and municipalities — including many suburban blobs — will also founder, meaning all the usual support systems and safety nets vanish. Many supply chains will break. Money may either be scarce or worthless, which are two ways of going broke.

Right now, start planning where you might go and what you can do. The turmoil will be filled with opportunity to find ways to be useful to other people, to devise work-arounds for ruptured systems and relationships, in getting food to people, making things they need, distributing them, fixing things that are broken where possible, and moving people and stuff from point A to point B. There will be plenty of work for people who are willing to do it. Keep in mind that it’s entirely up to you to make good choices.

Don’t despair, and if you find yourself veering toward it, get over yourself. It’s just part of becoming stronger than you thought you could be,  and the times will require it of you anyway. The offices that gave out brownie points for avouched victimhood will also be shutting down. Won’t that be a relief? Welcome to the joyful illumination that life is difficult for everybody. Who is ready for this epic journey?

THE ONLY OBSTACLE TO A HEALTHY WORLD IS GOVERNMENT SECRECY AND PROPAGANDA

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

If people in power were no longer able to hide secrets and spin lies about what’s going on in the world, all of our major problems would come to an end. Because secretive and manipulative power structures are the source of all of our major problems.

If the public could see what’s actually happening in their world, they would immediately begin using the power of their numbers to overhaul our current system. This is why our current system pours so much energy into preventing the public from seeing what’s actually happening in their world.

If it weren’t for the constant campaign of obfuscation and manipulation of public perception via veils of government secrecy and propaganda, humanity would naturally find its way out of the power-driven tribulations it now faces, as surely as you’ll avoid obstacles and hazards in your path when you are walking with your eyes open. The only problem in this case is that our eyes have not been permitted to open.

It isn’t actually necessary to hold a bunch of hard, rigid ideas about exactly what kind of society we should have, what kind of political system we should have, what kind of economic system we should have. There’s nothing wrong with promoting ideas and having preferences of course, but really if you just gave humanity the ability to navigate through its own troubles by removing the blindfolds of propaganda and power opacity, it would organically create a healthy society, and realistically such a society probably won’t look a whole lot like our mental models.

You do have the option, then, of simply promoting the end of government/political/corporate/financial opacity and the end of establishment perception management. Wanting humanity to see with clear eyes so that it can make its own informed decisions about where to take itself is a complete political position, in and of itself. You don’t have to hold any other political preferences of any kind if you don’t want to.

The desire for an end to the obfuscations and manipulations of the powerful so that humanity can find its own way is the most anti-authoritarian position you can possibly take, because it also protects the world from your own authoritarian impulses.

I personally am very leftwardly inclined and believe that if humanity had its perception management blindfolds removed it would naturally create a world where we’re all truly equal and everyone is taken care of by the collective each according to their need, but what the hell do I know? Maybe if the blindfold is removed I’d be proven wrong. I respect human sovereignty enough to want to find out, free from my own political preferences. I should not be the one making such societal decisions, society as a whole should. I just want human perception to be freed up enough to make that call.

If you choose to make the end of perception management your foremost priority, that means you push for government transparency at every opportunity and support any movement to take away secret hiding places from the powerful.

It means opposing the way the powerful bolt shut all the doors on public scrutiny of their behavior, smear anyone who speculates about what they might be up to as a crazy conspiracy theorist, and imprisons anyone who leaks information about what they’re really doing to the people.

It means you support whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden who help shine light on the things power tries to keep hidden in the dark.

It means you support WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and any journalist who helps expose the secrets of the powerful.

It means you fight the empire’s propaganda machine at every opportunity to break public trust in its manipulations.

It means you support breaking up the monolithic mass media and giving everyone the equal ability to influence the dominant narratives.

It means opposing internet censorship, since Silicon Valley plutocrats propping up the establishment their kingdoms are built upon by censoring anti-establishment voices is another way of keeping people from being shown the truth about their world.

I personally would add that it means supporting the decriminalization of psychedelics, because seeing within ourselves is just as important as seeing what’s happening in our world and entheogens can facilitate this seeing, but maybe that’s just me.

Again, there’s no harm in engaging in politics and pushing for the changes you’d like to see in your world, and there can be many benefits to doing so. But as long as people are successfully prevented from seeing and understanding what’s really happening in their world by the obfuscation of information and by the manipulation of people’s perception of that information, the status quo will always remain in place.

So in my opinion this is the most sensible point upon which to converge our energy. I personally have no interest in controlling what humanity does, and desire only that people come to see freely enough to make their own decisions.

It’s absolutely insane that information which affects us all is kept hidden away from our clear vision by secrecy and propaganda. It’s even crazier that they shame us when we wonder what’s really going on and throw us in prison when we try to find out. We must liberate ourselves from this madness so we can create a healthy world together.

This Is a Financial Extinction Event

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The lower reaches of the financial food chain are already dying, and every entity that depended on that layer is doomed.

Though under pressure from climate change, the dinosaurs were still dominant 65 million year ago–until the meteor struck, creating a global “nuclear winter” that darkened the atmosphere for months, killing off most of the food chain that the dinosaurs depended on. (See chart below.)

The ancestors of modern birds were one of the few dinosaur species to survive the extinction event, which took months to play out.

It wasn’t the impact and shock wave that killed off dinosaurs globally–it was the “nuclear winter” that doomed them to extinction. As plants withered, the plant-eating dinosaurs expired, depriving the predator dinosaurs of their food supply.

This is a precise analogy for the global economy, which is entering a financial “nuclear winter” extinction event. As I’ve been discussing for the past few months, costs are sticky but revenues and profits are on a slippery slope.

Businesses still have all the high fixed costs of 2019 but their revenues are sliding as the “nuclear winter” weakens consumer spending, investment in new capacity, etc.

Despite all the hoopla about a potential vaccine, no vaccine can change four realities: one, consumer sentiment has shifted from confidence to caution and from spending freely to saving. This is the financial equivalent of “nuclear winter”: there is no way to return to the pre-impact environment.

Two, uncertainty cannot be dissipated, either. There are no guarantees a vaccine will be 99% effective, that it will last more than a few months, that it won’t have side-effects, etc. There are also no guarantees that consumers will resume their care-free spending ways as credit tightens, incomes decline, risks emerge and the need for savings becomes more compelling.

Three, consumer behavior and uncertainty have already changed, and so businesses that cannot survive on much lower revenues won’t last long enough to emerge from the “nuclear winter” of uncertainty and a shift in sentiment.

Four, assets based on 2019 revenues, profits and demand are now horrendously overvalued, and the repricing of all assets will bring down the predators, i.e. the banks.

As I’ve noted here before, the top 10% of households account for almost 50% of consumer spending. These households are older, and own the majority of assets –between 80% and 90% of stocks, bonds, business equity, rental real estate, etc. This is the demographic with the most to lose in returning to care-free air travel, jamming into crowded venues and cafes, etc.

This demographic has “been there, done that” and foregoing fine dining, sports events, concerts, cruises, etc. is not much a burden and may actually be a relief.

Meanwhile, the entire food chain of landlords, banks, local government, employees, etc. depends on enterprises returning to 100% of 2019 revenues. As tenants stop paying rent, landlords default on mortgages, sending banks into insolvency, leaving local government with less tax revenues and employees with fewer job prospects.

To a degree few appreciate, the “recovery” since 2009 has been dependent on over-spending, over-borrowing and over-speculating: as spending, borrowing and speculation all pull back to what would have been “normal” levels two generations ago, the economy collapses because it’s become completely dependent on over-spending, over-borrowing and over-speculating.

As consumers and businesses retrench, borrowing declines while defaults and bankruptcies eviscerate bank profits and balance sheets. As spending declines, businesses with high fixed costs and pre-pandemic business models (crowding people together in close quarters, etc.) cannot generate enough revenues to survive. As the collateral of commercial real estate and profit streams collapse, assets are repriced all down the food chain, reversing the wealth effect: as people feel poorer, they borrow and spend less, creating a feedback loop of lower valuations, lower spending, lower profits, lower borrowing all of which feed back into each other, pushing everything lower.

The lower reaches of the financial food chain are already dying, and every entity that depended on that layer is doomed: the small business die-off will bring down distributors, banks, landlords, and employment, and as the this layer collapses then the top predators will starve to death as well: Big Tech, healthcare, higher education, tourism, local tax revenues, etc.

The clouds are spreading and thickening, and the dawn sky is tinted an ominous red. This is a financial extinction event, and the Fed’s pathetic shamans can’t reverse history.

Masked, Homeless, and Desolate

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Off-Guardian

Personality is persona, a mask…The mask is magic…Larva means mask; or ghost…it also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession.”
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

Walk the streets in the United States and many countries these days and you will see streaming crowds of people possessed by demons, masked and anonymous, whose eyes look like vacuums, staring into space or out of empty sockets like the dead, afraid of their own ghosts. Fear and obedience oozes from them. Death walks the streets with people on leashes in lockstep.

That they have been the victims of a long-planned propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus to frighten them into submission and shut down the world’s economy for the global elites is beyond their ken. This is so even when the facts are there to prove otherwise.

It is a clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel Chossudovsky in this must-see interview, that is not a conspiracy theory but a blatant factual plan spelled out in the 2010 Rockefeller Report, the October 18, 2019 Event 201, and Agenda 21, among other places.

Who can wake the sleepwalkers up in this cowardly new world where culture and politics collude to create and exploit ignorance?

Fifty-five years ago on, July 20, 1965, Bob Dylan released his song “Like a Rolling Stone.” It arrived like a rocking jolt into the placid pop musical culture of the day. It was not about wanting to hold someone’s hand or cry in the chapel. It wasn’t mumbo-jumbo like “Wooly Bully,” the number one hit. It wasn’t like the pop pap that dominates today’s music scene. It wasn’t Woody Guthrie in slow time.

It beat you up. It attacked. It confronted you. Maybe, if you were alive then, you thought Dylan was kidding you. You thought wrong. Bitching about his going electric was a dodge. He was addressing all of us, including himself.

Still is. But who wants to hear his recent “Murder Most Foul” and read Dylan’s scathing lyrics about the assassination of JFK, the killing that started the slow decay that has resulted in such masked madness. “And please, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” he tells us in capital letters for emphasis. Exactly what all the mainstream media have done, of course, and not by accident.

There are no alibis.

“How does it feel/To be on your own/with no direction home/A complete unknown/Like a rolling stone?”

It was in the mid-1960s when confidence in knowing where home was and how to get there disappeared into thin air. If you left mommy and daddy, could you ever get back from where you were going? Who had the directions?

Absolutes were melting and relativity was widespread. Life was wild and the CIA was planning to make it wilder and more confusing with the introduction of LSD on a vast scale. MKUltra was expanding its scope. Operation Mockingbird was singing so many tunes that heads were spinning, as planned.

The national security state killers were in the saddle, having already murdered President Kennedy and Malcolm X as they sharpened their knives for many more to come. The peace candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had been elected nine months earlier with 61.1% of the popular vote and went immediately to work secretly expanding the war against Vietnam. War as an invisible virus. Who knew?

Who, but a small anti-war contingent, wanted to know?

War takes different forms, and the will to ignorance and historical amnesia endure. War is a disease. Disease is weaponized for war. In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected on a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War and then ramped it up to monstrous proportions, only to be reelected in 1972 by carrying 49 out of 50 states.

Who wants to know now? The historian Howard Zinn once said correctly that this country’s greatest problem wasn’t disobedience but obedience.

What’s behind the masks? The lockstep?

On the same day that Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, just back from a “fact-finding” trip to Vietnam, recommended to LBJ that U.S. troop levels in Vietnam be increased to 175,000 and that the U.S. should increase its bombing of North Vietnam dramatically.

This was the same McNamara who, in October 1963, had agreed with JFK when he signed NSAM 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the remainder by the end of 1965. One of the moves that got Kennedy’s head blown open.

Poor McNamara, the fog of war must have clouded his conscience, confused the poor boy, just like Secretary of State Colin Powell holding up that vile vial of “anthrax” at the United Nations on February 5, 2003 and lying to the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Powell recently said, “I knew I didn’t have any choice. He’s the President.” How “painful,” to use his word, it must have been for the poor guy, lying so that so many Iraqis could be slaughtered. Of course, he had no choice. These war criminals all wear masks. And have no choice.

Masks, or demonic possession, or both. You?

Also in that fateful year 1965, far out of sight and out of mind for most Americans, the CIA planned and assisted in the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians, led by their man, General Suharto. This led to the coup against President Sukarno, who two years earlier had been on good terms with JFK as they worked to solve the interrelated issues of Indonesia and Vietnam. Their meeting planned for early 1964 was cancelled in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

And the politicians and media luminaries came out in their masks and told the public that communists everywhere were out to get them.

It’s tough being on your own. It hurts to think too much. Or think for yourself, at least. To obey an authority higher than your bosses. “I was tricked” is some sort of mantra, is it not?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all did tricks for you

Dylan was lost and disgusted when he wrote the song. His own music sickened him, which, for an artist, means he sickened himself. He had just returned from a tour of England and was sick of people telling him how much they loved his music when he didn’t. He needed to change.

What else is the point of art but change? If you’re dead, or afraid of getting dead, you aren’t going to change. You’re stuck. Stuck is dead. Why wear a mask if you know who you are?

Knowledge, or more accurately, pseudo-knowledge or mainstream media lies, is a tomb “the mystery tramp” sold to us, a place to hide to avoid pain and guilt.

I have read more books than anyone I know. It sickens me.
I know too much. That sickens me.
I sicken myself. All the news sickens me.
I know so much no one believes me.
As Francesco Serpico once told me: “It’s all lies.”
Of course. Dylan and Serpico are blood brothers.
Only art tells the truth. Real art.

Not bullshit pop art. Some say “Like a Rolling Stone” is about Edie Sedgwick, “the girl of the year” in 1965 and one of Andy Warhol’s superstars. Perhaps to a degree it is, but it’s far more than that. It’s about us.

Poor Edie was poisoned by her wealthy family at a young age and barely had a chance. She was an extreme example of a rather common American story. People poisoned in the cradle. Thinking of her got me thinking of Andy Warhol, the death obsessed hoarder, the guy who called his studio “The Factory” in a conscious or unconscious revelation of his art and persona, his wigs and masks and the hold he has had on American culture all these years. Isn’t he the ultimate celebrity?

Warhol once took my photo on a deserted street. His and my secret but this is the truth. West 47th Street on an early Sunday morning, 1980. I guess he thought he was doing art or collecting images for his museum of dead heads. When I asked him why, he said I had an interesting face.

I told him he did too, rather transparent and creepy, but I didn’t want to capture him. He was a ghost with a camera, a face like a death mask, trying to capture a bit of life. I told him I didn’t give him permission to shoot me, but he turned and walked away into the morning mist. The shooters always just walk away in pseudo-innocence.

I then went down the street to the Gotham Book Mart that was my destination and asked James Joyce why he had written “The Dead,” and Joyce, secretive as ever, quoted himself, “Ed,” he said, “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” Now that was direction.

Only those who know how to play and be guided by intuition are able to escape the living tomb of so-called knowledge; what Dylan called, lifelessness. But that was from “Desolation Row,” released as the closing track of Highway 61 Revisited on August 30, 1965. The only acoustic song on the album. Slow it down to make the point another way. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the opening track.

Do you feel all alone or part of a masked gang roaming the streets incognito? Miss and Mr. Lonely, does that mask help? How do you feel?

Desolation means very lonely. From Latin, de, completely, solare, lonely.

Does that mask help? Do you feel alone together now, one of the crowd?

Do you really want to know about desolation row? It’s here. It was here in 1965, too. Only the true lonely know how it feels to really be all alone.

The Umbrella People, those who some call the deep state or secret government under whose protection all the politicians work, say they want to protect us all from death and disease. They are lying bastards who’ve gotten so many to imitate their masked ways. They can only sing a mockingbird’s song.

Listen to real singers. Dylan has arched the years, as true artists do. Who has paid close attention to what he said this year about the assassination of President Kennedy in his song, “Murder Most Foul”? Or were many caught up in the propaganda surrounding corona virus, and rather than contemplating his indictment of the U.S. government and its media accomplices, were they contemplating their navels to see if a virus had secreted itself in there. Viruses lurk everywhere, they say, and the corporate media made certain to circulate a vaccine about the truth in Dylan’s song. This is normal operating procedure.

We are still on Desolation Row.

“Take Off the Masks.” That was the title of a book by Rev. Malcolm Boyd that I reviewed long ago. He was a gay priest who decided that his mask was a lie. He came out into the light of truth. He had guts.

It is time for everyone to take off the masks. Escape from Desolation Row by seeing what’s going on behind our backs.
Listen to Dylan, long ago – today:

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
And they bring them to the factory
Where their heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on?”

 

QUESTIONS OF OUR TIME – A TIME FOR PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

A Time for Personal Responsibility?

‘The individual has to live in humanity as well as humanity in the individual’

Sri Aurobindo

In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, it is written that Jesus pronounced: ‘There is light within a man of light, and it lights up the whole world. If he does not shine, there is darkness.’ Furthermore – ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’

The inner resources each person has within them can bring insight, conscious awareness, and experiential knowing onto contemporary issues and their distress. It is essential to bring the inner world to bear onto the physical, material world. Both realms must participate and be in congruence. In order to achieve genuine solutions, each of us must be prepared to change and transform from within, and not just by changing our ideas. Each person has a responsibility not only to the outer world but also to their individual inner life.

A person cannot live by the conventions of society alone, or from the impacts and influences of everyday life. We need sustenance from a source that is beyond all social institutions, and from beyond the distractions and attractions of physical life. It is necessary to create a distance from the tirades that life brings us. Ironically, the newly imposed rules of social distancing may help us indirectly by triggering an awareness of a form of distancing in terms of energetic attachment and attention. In this, perhaps, a more acute state of self-awareness can develop as an antidote to the general state of social unconsciousness. One of the questions of our time should be about how to resist the conditioned conventions of the mass mind by cultivating new muscles of perception.

It is a question of personal freedom of thought and perspective. Our choice is thus twofold: between recognizing the unconscious forces of the mass mind; and aiming for the personal development of our awareness to act as individuals. Freedom is a question of our responsibility. And our responsibility is likewise a question of freedom.

Dag Hammerskjold[i], the Swedish diplomat, wrote in his diary: ‘I don’t know Who – or What – put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.’ 1 The responsibility of freedom, for Hammerskjold, was about saying ‘Yes’ to the unknown and ineffable source of trust in oneself.

Such meaning cannot be taught or given but must be lived and experienced. The living of such meaning is a mysterious process that is revealed through the poetic and lucid spontaneous connections in life. This is also the power of myth, dreams, and the imagination. The inner intuition can break down our cages of conditioning and allow us to see more clearly the situation we are in. This understanding has the power to directly change lives. Human freedom, with genuine conscious awareness, recognizes also the need for the social community, but not as an unconscious community. The human community needs to come together with at least a minimum of psychological insight. As the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo said – ‘The individual has to live in humanity as well as humanity in the individual.’

When communities and individuals lack psychological insight, they are open and vulnerable to the impulses of the unconscious from within as without. That is, manifestations of the unconscious do not just occur within an individual’s mind but also within the mass psyche of the collective. Unawareness of such forces can bring about emotional, mental, and physical instability. It is a psychological trait that when our minds recognize a repressed force within ourselves, a corresponding expression manifests in our outer, physical world. The source for so many ills resides within us. This is because the psychic or soul reality is real. We are conditioned into thinking that ‘psychic’ elements or things of the spirit are inferior to the physical things of life because they are non-material. The images we have within us, however, can be just as powerful as those without. Modern society has neglected, or considered unimportant, the power of psychic phenomenon. As a result, we are oppressed by forces that can dominate our own psychic lives.

What humanity is largely experiencing today is the moral uncertainty that precedes a new understanding as the old morality enters its death phase. As we each gain awareness and trust our intuition – our personal gnosis – we gain a new orientation to the world. We uncage ourselves and find a new freedom. The ultimate human question is in finding this freedom and to make steps towards it.

The first step, and responsibility, is to recognize and identify the shadows of our unconscious that then manifest as external dominant forces. It will ultimately help us to know and accept the presence of the oppressive forces close to us. Mental and emotional balance comes not only from an acceptance of the reality of malevolent forces but also from the recognition of false optimism. The presence of false optimism is like the presence of false gold. It exists because the real gold exists. The commercialization and consumerism of false optimism has been part of what became known as the ‘New Age’ phenomenon. Whilst it is important to have a clear focus, concentration, and a grounded mindset, there is danger in the gilded roses distracting us from the alertness of the inner vision. Rose-colored spectacles are no compensation for our own intuitive penetrating gaze. Finally, we may ask ourselves – in the face of all these challenges and the danger of a fool’s paradise: what can I do about this?

To this question the remarkable Carl Gustav Jung answered: ‘To the constantly reiterated question “What can I do?” I know no other answer except “Become what you have always been,” namely, the wholeness which we have lost in the midst of our civilized, conscious existence, a wholeness which we always were without knowing it.’2 As long as the majority of people expect all problems to be solved outside of themselves our societies will continue to be dominated by unruly forces. The question of human freedom from these forces depends upon people willing to assume the responsibility of conscious awareness. We each have a power for creating change that we carry around with us, literally, each moment of our lives – why do so many people fail to make use of it? The great perennial task of humanity has always been the same: to become what we have always been, and to show others the way by our own individual presence and behavior. Through our deliberate and conscious presence, we can assist others to become what they have always been also. As it was written in the gnostic Gospel of Truth almost two thousand years ago –

‘That it is in you that this light, which does not fail, dwells…Speak of the truth with those who seek it…You who are the children of the understanding heart…Joy to the man who has discovered himself, and awakened and blessed is he who openeth the minds of the blind.’3

We are asked to be ‘children of the understanding heart’ – a call that has rung out over millennia. It is a perennial call and it will always continue to ring out, for those with ears to hear. We are called to transform from ‘I am what I have,’ to ‘I am what I do,’ to ‘I am what I am.’

This is the answer to one of the questions of our times – and it is the human question. Jung was right when he said that we should become what we have always been – I am what I am. When we are finally able to heal ourselves from within then, and only then, can we heal others and the world without.

Everything begins from the source: I am. The power for change begins and ends with us, the individual – not from the hand of a minority elite. The individual has to live within the heart of humanity, as will humanity ever exist within the heart of each person. The question of responsibility is to resist the forces of dehumanization. To defy the forces that place us as anonymous numbers within algorithms. The responsibility is to grow into our humanhood – and to become the humanity that has always awaited us. A humanity within each individual – an individual within our humanity. I am because We are.

America, You’ve Been Blacklisted: McCarthyism Refashioned for a New Age

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“If we confuse dissent with disloyalty—if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox—if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.”—Edward R. Murrow

For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.

Back then, it was the government—spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee—working in tandem with private corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.

By the time the witch hunts carried out by federal and state investigative agencies drew to a close, thousands of individuals (the vast majority of them innocent any crime whatsoever) had been accused of communist ties, investigated, subpoenaed and blacklisted. Regarded as bad risks, the accused were blacklisted, and struggled to secure employment. The witch hunt ruined careers, resulting in suicides, and tightened immigration to exclude alleged subversives.

Seventy years later, the vitriol, fear-mongering and knee-jerk intolerance associated with McCarthy’s tactics are once again being deployed in a free-for-all attack by those on both the political Left and Right against anyone who, in daring to think for themselves, subscribes to ideas or beliefs that run counter to the government’s or mainstream thought.

It doesn’t even seem to matter what the issue is anymore (racism, Confederate monuments, Donald Trump, COVID-19, etc.): modern-day activists are busily tearing down monuments, demonizing historic figures, boycotting corporations for perceived political transgressions, and using their bully pulpit to terrorize the rest of the country into kowtowing to their demands.

All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.

This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.

The silence is becoming deafening.

After years of fighting in and out of the courts to keep their 87-year-old name, the NFL’s Washington Redskins have bowed to public pressure and will change their name and team logo to avoid causing offense. The new name, not yet announced, aims to honor both the military and Native Americans.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, a delegate to the House of Representatives who supports the name change, believes the team’s move “reflects the present climate of intolerance to names, statues, figments of our past that are racist in nature or otherwise imply racism [and] are no longer tolerated.”

Present climate of intolerance, indeed.

Yet it wasn’t a heightened racial conscience that caused the Redskins to change their brand. It was the money. The team caved after its corporate sponsors including FedEx, PepsiCo, Nike and Bank of America threatened to pull their funding.

So much for that U.S. Supreme Court victory preventing the government from censoring trademarked names it considers distasteful or scandalous.

Who needs a government censor when the American people are already doing such a great job at censoring themselves and each other, right?

Now there’s a push underway to boycott Goya Foods after its CEO, Robert Unanue, praised President Trump during a press conference to announce Goya’s donation of a million cans of Goya chickpeas and a million other food products to American food banks as part of the president’s Hispanic Prosperity Initiative.

Mind you, Unanue—whose grandfather emigrated to the U.S. from Spain—also praised the Obamas when they were in office, but that kind of equanimity doesn’t carry much weight in this climate of intolerance.

Not to be outdone, the censors are also taking aim at To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Atticus Finch, a white lawyer in the Jim Crow South who defends a black man falsely accused of rape. Sixty years after its debut, the book remains a powerful testament to moral courage in the face of racial bigotry and systemic injustice, told from the point of view of a child growing up in the South, but that’s not enough for the censors. They want to axe the book—along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—from school reading curriculums because of the presence of racial slurs that could make students feel “humiliated or marginalized.”

Never mind that the N-word makes a regular appearance in hip-hop songs. The prevailing attitude seems to be that it’s okay to use the N-word as long as the person saying the word is not white. Rapper Kendrick Lamar “would like white America to let black people exclusively have the word.”

Talk about a double standard.

This is also the overlooked part of how oppression becomes systemic: it comes about as a result of a combined effort between the populace, the corporations and the government.

McCarthyism worked the same way.

What started with Joseph McCarthy’s headline-grabbing scare tactics in the 1950s about Communist infiltrators of American society snowballed into a devastating witch hunt once corporations and the American people caught the fever.

McCarthyism was a contagion, like the plague, spreading like wildfire among people too fearful or weak or gullible or paranoid or greedy or ambitious to denounce it for what it was: an opportunistic scare tactic engineered to make the government more powerful.

McCarthy, a young Republican senator, grasped the opportunity to make a name for himself by capitalizing on the Cold War paranoia of the time. In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of over 200 members of the Communist Party “working and shaping the policy of the U.S. State Department.” The speech was picked up by the Associated Press, without substantiating the facts, and within a few days the hysteria began.

McCarthy specialized in sensational and unsubstantiated accusations about Communist infiltration of the American government, particularly the State Department. He also targeted well-known Hollywood actors and directors, trade unionists and teachers. Many others were brought before the inquisitional House Committee on Un-American Activities for questioning.

“McCarthyism” eventually smeared all the accused with the same broad brush, whether the evidence was good, bad or nonexistent.

The parallels to the present movement cannot be understated.

Even now, with modern-day McCarthyism sweeping the nation and America’s own history being blacklisted, I have to wonder what this sudden outrage and crisis of conscience is really all about.

Certainly, anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to the Trump Administration has not been paying attention.

No matter what the team colors might be at any given moment, the playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots.

Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state that is continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the people under the Trump Administration is the same police state that wreaked havoc on the rights of the people under every previous administration.

So please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.

While the populace wages war over past injustices, injustice in the here and now continues to trample innocent lives underfoot. Certainly, little of significance is being done to stem the tide of institutional racism that has resulted in disproportionate numbers of black Americans who continue to be stopped, frisked, shot at, arrested and jailed.

I’ve had enough of the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

When you drill right down to the core of things, the policies of a Trump Administration have been no different from an Obama Administration or a Bush Administration, at least not where it really counts.

In other words, Democrats by any other name have been Republicans, and vice versa.

War has continued. Surveillance has continued. Drone killings have continued. Police shootings have continued. Highway robbery meted out by government officials has continued. Corrupt government has continued. Profit-driven prisons have continued. Censorship and persecution of anyone who criticizes the government have continued. The militarization of the police has continued. The devastating SWAT team raids have continued. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists has continued.

The more things change, the more they have stayed the same.

We’ve been stuck in this political Groundhog’s Day for so long that minor deviations appear to be major developments while obscuring the fact that we’re stuck on repeat, unable to see the forest for the trees.

This is what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. Those who warned against the dangers posed by too many laws, invasive surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids and the like have been silenced and ignored. They stopped teaching about freedom in the schools. Few Americans know their history. And even fewer seem to care that their fellow Americans are being jailed, muzzled, shot, tasered, and treated as if they have no rights at all.

The erosion of our freedoms happened so incrementally, no one seemed to notice. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognized the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry became fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

We are on that downward slope now.

The contagion of fear that McCarthy helped spread with the help of government agencies, corporations and the power elite is still poisoning the well, whitewashing our history, turning citizen against citizen, and stripping us of our rights.

What we desperately need is the kind of resolve embodied by Edward R. Murrow, the most-respected newsman of his day.

On March 9, 1954, Murrow dared to speak truth to power about the damage McCarthy was inflicting on the American people. His message remains a timely warning for our age.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ”The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

America is approaching another reckoning right now, one that will pit our commitment to freedom principles against a level of fear-mongering that is being used to wreak havoc on everything in its path.

The outcome rests, as always, with “we the people.” As Murrow said to his staff before the historic March 9 broadcast: “No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”

Take heed, America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this may be your last warning.