Category Archives: Technocracy

Why You Should Stop Trusting ‘The Experts’

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We’re constantly told to “trust the experts”, but that is phenomenally bad advice.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: JeremyRHammond.com

“Trust the experts,” we are constantly being told, whatever the topic of discussion. The problem with this advice is that the so-called “experts” are frequently wrong, sometimes as a result of plain incompetence and other times because it is their function to propagandize rather than to educate.

For instance, I got my start doing citizen journalism speaking out against the US government’s planned war on Iraq. In 2002 and early 2003, the government claimed that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, active weapons manufacturing programs, and an active nuclear program aimed at producing a nuclear bomb. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times uncritically parroted the government’s claims. All the “expert” analysts and commentators towed the official line.

When I would point out to people that there was no credible evidence to support the government’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that the documentary record rather indicated that Iraq had been disarmed of the weapons it produced during the 1980s with the support of the US government, I was frequently confronted with the idea that we should trust the expert intelligence analysts because surely government policymakers must have classified information supporting their case that they just couldn’t share with the public.

Later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) issued its official report acknowledging that Iraq had indeed been disarmed by UN inspectors by 1991 and never restarted its weapons programs, a whole new propaganda narrative was developed to whitewash how the US government lied to the American people and the world. We were then fed the myth that there had been an “intelligence failure”, the truth being that the government had successfully waged a disinformation campaign against the public for the purpose of manufacturing consent for an illegal war of aggression that left Iraq devastated, with negative ripple effects throughout the Middle East, including the war’s precipitation of the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Another example is the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. The mainstream “experts” insisted that there was no bubble, that the economy was rolling along nicely. Right up to the bubble’s peak, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke refused to see it. In the New York Times, throughout the 2000s, Keynesian economist Paul Krugman lauded the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy that was the principal cause of the housing bubble only to ludicrously blame the bubble on the forces of the free market after it burst.

Meanwhile, free market economists schooled in the ideas of Austrian economics, so called because its founders and early luminaries hailed from Austria, were accurately warning how the Fed’s policy of maintaining artificially low interest rates—meaning rates below where they would otherwise be if determined by the market rather than by a roomful of policymakers—was fueling a housing bubble that would cause economic devastation when it inevitably burst. Congressman Ron Paul famously warned about this as early as 2001, yet we were consistently told by the mainstream “experts” that we shouldn’t listen to him or other advocates of liberty in the marketplace.

The preposterousness of the mainstream narrative was so overwhelming, it prompted me to write a book titled Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, which ended up getting a rave review by none other than Barron’s. Gene Epstein, the former Economics and Books editor for Barron’s said of it:

Any work of economics that can make you laugh is at least worth a look. If in less than 100 pages it also informs you about a subject of great importance, it might just qualify as a must-read. Jeremy Hammond, a political journalist self-taught in economics and a writer of rare skill, has produced such a book…. This short work conveys more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks, and more about the recent business cycle than most volumes of much greater length.

Once again, we could see that there is a whole class of “experts” whose primary function was not to truly educate us about how the economy functions but to manufacture consent for the existence of central banking—the Fed being a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply.

That episode also once again illustrates how any non-expert willing to commit the time to self-education can easily see through the lies and deceptions propagated by the “experts”.

Arguably, there is no more perfect example of how the “experts” get things completely wrong than the governmental responses to the COVID‑19 pandemic. While I and others fervently opposed the lockdown measures from the start on the grounds that they would do more harm than good, the thought-controlling media insisted that we must trust the government’s “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci. We should “follow the science” we were told, while Fauci claimed to be science incarnate, deeming himself beyond reproach by proclaiming that to criticize him was to attack science itself.

Predictably, the proclaimed benefits of lockdowns never manifested in the data while the harms have been devastating, with negative consequences being disproportionately borne by children, who are at the lowest risk from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection.

I was also warning people since March 2020 that the endgame of the lockdown measures was coerced mass vaccination, which was dubbed a “conspiracy theory” by the mainstream media but nevertheless came to pass.

While all the “experts” in the so-called “public health” establishment were proclaiming that widespread acceptance of the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines would end the pandemic by conferring herd immunity, dissident voices like my own were being censored for telling the truth that there was no scientific evidence that the vaccines would induce durable sterilizing immunity that would prevent infection and transmission of the virus.

I was also warning since very early into the mass vaccination campaign that the policy goal of getting everyone vaccinated could prolong the pandemic and worsen outcomes in the long-term because of the immunologic phenomenon of “original antigenic sin” and the opportunity cost of superior natural immunity. These warnings, too, proved prescient as we now know from the available scientific evidence that the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines do result in an “immune imprinting” so that vaccinated individuals are stuck generating a suboptimal immune response to circulating SARS‑CoV‑2 variants.

After it became obvious from the data that the vaccines failed to prevent infection and transmission of the virus, the media went so far in their efforts to defend the criminal regime of lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination by gaslighting us and absurdly denying that the COVID‑19 vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of lies.

We’re also supposed to trust doctors, but my own household’s experience with the medical establishment led us to the opposite conclusion. The doctors were not just unhelpful; they were less than useless. Especially in my wife’s case, listening to them caused more harm than good. In fact, it wasn’t until we learned to stop listening to the doctors and started trusting our own judgment that my wife and I both found a path to healing from the respective health problems we used to have (leaky gut in my case and mercury toxicity from dental amalgams in my wife’s).

Throughout the time that I was seeking help from the so-called “health care” system, I was repeatedly confronted by doctors whose ignorance was matched only by their arrogance and condescension. I ultimately bypassed the doctors by researching our symptoms directly in the medical literature; we diagnosed ourselves and successfully treated the root cause of our respective symptoms (taking steps to heal my gut and getting the mercury fillings safely removed followed by a two-year mercury detox regimen, respectively).

The supposed “experts” with an “MD” after their name were far more interested in lazily pushing pharmaceutical products on us to treat symptoms than in doing their job to try to figure out what the root cause was, much less in figuring out treatments aimed at addressing the underlying cause.

So, the next time you hear someone telling you to place your trust in the “experts”, emphasize the foolishness of placing blind faith in supposed authorities in lieu of doing one’s own research and thinking for oneself, and remind the person how the “experts” are frequently nothing more than professional propagandists serving a given political or financial agenda.

From Survival To Moments of Stillness

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Are we consistently in survival mode? Does our societal design chronically invite us into this state?

By Tom Bunzel

Source: The Pulse

I thought I would contribute to the discussion by Joe Martino that “We’re Not Living in Ordinary Times.”

Many of the issues Joe mentioned dovetail with the work of trauma specialists like Dr. Gabor Mate, who recently wrote “The Myth of Normal” which describes how chronic illness and stress are actually “normal” responses to a traumatizing world.

So many of us are in survival mode.  I thought it was just me after COVID and having some other personal issues, but even now when I go to the market, it seems like many people are living with activated nervous systems.

A good friend also refers to a “fear machine” in the media.  Joe Martino calls it fear porn.  News has always been a beat down at times but with cable news it’s a 24/7 assault on the senses.

The format is deadly:  they don’t just tell you what HAS happened. They scare the crap out of you with what might happen, hasn’t happened, will never happen but might come knocking at your door. It is an onslaught of what ifs.

Why do we watch it?  We want to know “what’s going on”. 

What about what is happening all around us before we turn on the media?  What about trees growing, birds eating from a feeder or our cat coming up to snuggle?  We have all but forgotten our connection to the natural world into which we were born, and which apparently was here before we arrived.

How do we reconnect with what is beyond what we believe might be? I think there may be a “portal”.

We have been so conditioned by digital media that many of us never completely experience silence.

Quiet is hard to find these days.

The Noise of Consumerism

Besides just the news, there is the onslaught of commercials, now also on our phones and seemingly everywhere one goes.  I remember in 1980 when some people were appalled by the sudden commercialization of the Los Angeles Olympics, with corporate logos suddenly everywhere.

That was just the beginning.

Now every stadium is named after a corporate sponsor, and many of us wear branded attire proclaiming our attachment to a sports team or even a brand of sneakers or workout clothes.

The philosopher and mystic Gurdjieff wrote and spoke about how “Impressions” are taken in by our senses – essentially how the environment affects our bodily functions, mind and alas, spirit.

Getting bombarded with messages about our inadequacy on social media and advertising has already been noted as taking a psychological toll on teenagers in particular.

When I recognized that my brain had mostly healed from my concussion, but that I was still frequently uncomfortable in my body, I encountered the work of Dr. Mate and did some introspection on what sorts of “wounds” my body might be holding.

I found it helpful to consider this issue in the context of the impressions I received from an early age – and actually even before birth in the womb of a mother who had just survived the holocaust.

I began to see how the feelings of inadequacy and “less than” were programmed into me by trying to please first my parents, then my fellow students and ultimately potential friends in an attempt to secure connection and self-worth.

But it also became obvious that I was far from alone with having accumulated these “impressions” and now projecting the results onto the world – often shaping my experiences in negative ways that I attributed to “circumstances.”  I tried to get in touch with the anger and shame reflecting on these experiences, often of rejection, would trigger after years of probably ignoring those feelings entirely.

Conditioned Resistance to Resting

One thing that helped me begin to heal was noticing my intense resistance to resting – which I needed to do after my concussion but which the mind would not tolerate without admonishing me to “do something.”

The work of several spiritual teachers helped me address this issue.

Jeff Foster talks about being ’de-pressed’ and getting deep rest.

Jac O’Keefe and Eckhart Tolle both mention the need to stop “the movie in your head” and Eckhart often speaks of finding and making space – using a few conscious breaths to stop the voice in the head even just temporarily.

Mooji is a proponent of rest and contemplation around one’s conditioned beliefs.

And Adyashanti also advises “deep rest” in Stillness, without trying to control anything.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer in mediation says it’s really just about letting things be the way they are.

And on and on.

Of course, it’s easy to tell people working multiple jobs or trying to balance work and family to just rest.  As mentioned earlier, the whole impetus of the culture is to push through, do more, and keep going.

The Compulsion to Move with Loud Music

It’s interesting and a bit troubling to me that almost every advertisement shows young people dancing, whether they have taken a miracle pill or used the right deodorant.  It shows they have overcome their inadequacy.

I happen to think dancing is wonderful, but this continuous emphasis has made it almost impossible to find quiet.

It’s no secret that now so many people are constantly connected, by phone or other device, to the Internet, constantly intruding on any moment of stillness.

Unfortunately, like many of our own nervous systems, the Internet never rests.  And now with AI the prospect of a continual activity of neural stimulation now done also by machine portends the sort of chronic illness and stress that Dr. Mate talks about — getting even worse?

In his writing, Joe Martino mentions a “full bodied sensemaking” where one goes beyond the constant chatter of the mind and connects with the wisdom of the body – wisdom that Eckhart Tolle describes also as an Intelligence far greater than the (relatively smaller human) mind.

For me, that is essentially what led me to seek interludes of stillness, which I am fortunate enough to be able to find living in a senior community.

Connecting to What Receives Impressions

The mind and the body need a break from impressions.  In stillness it is possible to both allow the chatter of the mind and still not get caught up in any particular story; instead taking a series of deep conscious abdominal breaths we can “clear the cache” in memory and relax.

In relaxation, we can then allow the sensations in the body to be felt rather than suppressed, and even welcomed.

We can become open to the world as it is before it gets analyzed and judged by the mind.

Can this sort of practice and understanding be proliferated on a planetary level?

In reality, this is truly an economic issue, because this experience of stillness cannot occur in survival mode.

Corporations Have Their Own Agenda

The problem, of course, is the stiff resistance from the corporations — which have in many ways become the dominant species on the planet, comprised of seemingly independent humans the way our guts are made up of billions of “independent” microorganisms. 

But perhaps like reality itself, the corporation is a digital “living” organism in the sense that it seeks to survive, grow and often devour both competitors and its human workers.

Once again, this issue has been exacerbated by artificial intelligence which threatens to further separate the technologically privileged from an ever-increasing mass of human serfs.

As that chasm grows both separating portions of humanity will inevitably become even more separated from Source — what is and was always here.

As Joe suggests, the transformation here must come on an individual level first, but ultimately lead to a recognition of inter-connectedness and “wholeness” where humanity recognizes how it has separated from the very Nature of which it is an expression.

Imagine if during any large musical concert, where the audience is dancing and in tune, the artists brought the volume and tempo down, and then had a few minutes of community silence.

Imagine if that concert was under the Milky Way, and the light could be suppressed for that brief time to allow a real look at ‘where’ we are.

This is reminiscent of some of the indigenous ceremonies, if only we could begin to go in that direction.

It’s now part of my own practice – to find stillness both externally and internally – and begin to embody a sense of alignment with how things are – rather than how the mind thinks they should be.

Is Sleepy Joe Biden Trying to Outdo Hitler and History?

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

History is the most interesting subject for many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact it tends to repeat itself. And the fact that some are doomed by ignorance of this is an important lesson for today. Take German tanks, for instance. First, let’s rehash a little history about the steppes of Russia and Eastern Ukraine and unlearned lessons.

From the 5th of July 1943 until the 23rd of August 1943, the largest tank battle in history took place in what became known as the “Kursk Salient,” an area that stretched from the tiny town of Kirov on the Bolva River in the north, through Belgorod in Russia, Kharkiv, which Ukraine currently controls. The line reached deep into the Donbas region, the focal point of Ukraine’s Nazi hostilities since 2014.

Hitler’s Operation Zitadelle (“Citadel”) was carried out over a 700-mile-long front, where the best Germans tried to outgun and outmaneuver the advancing Soviet forces. It became the largest tank battle in history, pitting the most advanced weaponry Nazi Germany had against prepared and dug-in, superior Soviet resistance. The reader will find it interesting that the German high command chose Belgorod as one of the first key objectives.

Numerous parallels exist between the battle of Kursk and the current proxy war in Ukraine. First, I’d like to deal with tanks. In 1943, Germany manufactured what can be argued as the finest medium and heavy armor of World War II. Though not numerous at Kursk, the deadly Tiger played a big role. The all-new Panther and the giant Ferdinand tank destroyer were supposed to blast the Soviets off the battlefield.

Ironically, many of their burning hulks littered the countryside once the battle ended. The battle raged for months, with neither side gaining a clear advantage. The Soviets, not unlike their modern-day counterparts on the Russian lines, created massive defensive works to sap the German offensive until a counterattack would gain a decisive effect.

When I read the other day about almost all of the highly touted German Leopards sent to Zelensky having been destroyed, this seemed like Deja Vu as a student of history. An article in the Berliner Zeitung cited Alexander Sosnowski, who used data from pro-Ukraine media channels to determine that 41 Leopard-2s, 49 T72 tanks, 31 Bradlys, 7 German Marders, 23 howitzers, and 40 MRAP infantry fighting vehicles have already been turned to scrap by the Russians. In 1943, the great Nazi war machine faced similar despair.

But what other parallels can we draw? What is going to happen next? If you ask most experts, Europe is out of ammo, tanks, and guts. The Germans cannot even crank up and run half their remaining Leopard 2s for lack of repair, Paris is on fire, Germans are ready for any Chancellor but Scholz, Hungary seems about ready to leave the NATO alliance, the dollar may crumble toon, and even Americans grow weary of cheering a losing team.

We can understand how idiotic Joe Biden’s war on Russia will end if we recollect what happened after the Kursk failure. The Germans had been progressing in fighting through the defensive layers the Soviets had built. The northern front of the pincer bogged down, and the southern one was halted by bitter Soviet resistance. Hitler, who the legendary Heinz Guderian had warned against Operation Citadel, lost heart when decisive victory was not at hand and focused elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Soviets had gained momentum in the ground war and never relinquished it after Kursk.

As we know, once the Axis began its retreat from Kursk, the Soviets, and their allies from the West marched into the heart of Europe, taking Berlin and destroying the dream of Leibensraum, at least for the moment. Today, we find Germany’s best tanks strewn all over the battle lines in the regions reclaimed by Russia. Of course, they are not the Tigers or Panthers of legend. Four Tiger tanks held off tank brigades at Kursk. Now a lightweight drone seemed capable of knocking one out. The same seems true for NATO, a military alliance that has never shown it could beat its way out of a wet paper bag, let alone conquer Russia.

Whoever devised this genius plan to create Operation Barbarossa 2 is not even as clever as a drugged Hitler on his worst day. All that has happened is that the Russians are preparing again. Factories are shifting to creating T-14 Armata tanks instead of luxury Lada 4x4s. Far from the front, the Russians ramp up their military complex as before. For Westerners, we can only hope they do so for defensive rather than offensive operations. For certain, as the fires of discontent burning in Paris, there is nothing behind the Donetsk River to stop the Russians if they choose to widen their breathing space.

Funny, isn’t it, how history repeats itself and does so in the same places with the same idiotic mistakes being made?

Situational Awareness

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

“All across the board, illness, disability, cancer, heart, autism, fertility…WeFkdUp !!!” —The Ethical Skeptic on Twitter

What if Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is correct? The Dutch virologist said at the outset of the Covid-19 episode in 2020 that vaccinating the world in the midst of an epidemic was insane because it would train the virus to evolve more dangerously while disabling human immune systems.

     Last week he issued a warning that the world was within weeks of just such a new and deadly immune escape variant outbreak that would bring on a shocking wave of sickness and death among people who received multiple Covid-19 vaccinations. This would happen on top of an already accelerating rise in latent vaccine adverse reactions manifesting as aggressive cancers, blood disorders, cardiac injury, neurological disease, and much, much more.

     To this point in the Covid-19 story, Western Civ in general, and the USA in particular, have descended into an epic group psychosis as a result of the managed mind-fuckery induced by their own governments in collusion with a pharmaceutical industry metastasizing on money the way an aggressive cancer feeds on sugar in a human body. Fearful citizens swallowed all manner of unreality foisted on them by means of propaganda and censorship.

     We still don’t know for sure how, who, and why, exactly, Covid-19 was set loose on the world, and the public health agencies don’t want you to know. Perhaps the worst and most baldly dishonest act was the official suppression of effective treatments with common, safe, anti-virals that could have saved millions of lives. And all just to preserve the vaccine companies’ liability shield from the Emergency Use Authorization. In fact, governments are still militating against the sale and use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which could be taken prophylactically in anticipation of a new outbreak.

     So, if these populations were driven crazy by authorities ginning up their fear and preying on it, what will happen if that fear turns to anger instead? Because that’s exactly what will happen when Americans, and perhaps even Europeans, realize they’ve been subject to history’s biggest homicidal fraud. That anger is going to seek targets, and they are going to find them very easily in their own government officials and also — get this — in the medical establishment that has betrayed its patients so unconscionably.

     It’s just impossible to say exactly how that will play out on-the-ground. Governments are already falling — Spain, the Netherlands — but these were parliamentary downfalls according to regular political procedure. Our country has no such procedures for changing authority in a time of crisis. Instead, we have a president up to his neck in bribery scandal and executive agency thuggery, and political parties sunk in corruption, and no way to get rid of them except elections many months away — elections which at least half the people don’t believe are honest.

    This crisis of bad faith and sickness is happening at the same time that Western Civ enters an equally vicious crisis of economy and finance. America and Europe are broke. All are playing games with their conjoined banking systems and their currencies. All are de-industrializing economies strictly based on industrial production of goods no longer being produced, and pretending to replace them with economies of computer vapor-ware. That can’t work and can only end badly in collapsing standards of living.

     The past few years, an apparent coalition of global elites, functioning in orgs such as the WEF, the WHO, the EU, the IMF, the central banks, and countless NGOs, along with shadowy intel units and what remains of the old news media, have promoted ever more desperate top-down control programs to prevent a breakdown into wholesale economic and political disorder. Their efforts increasingly tilt into pretense.

     Try to impose digital currencies and health passports? Fuggeddabowdit. You will only get a chaos of work-arounds, non-compliance, and probably violent opposition. Keep that stupid, dishonorable, perfidious, and unnecessary war going in Ukraine and you run the risk of turning Western Civ into a matched set of ashtrays.

     As you can see, there has already been enough official mischief, crime, and malfeasance to severely piss-off the population. If Dr. Vanden Bossche is correct, we are perhaps heading into the conclusive shock of an evil era. Some kind of monumental correction will be in order. The people will need some way to regain credible self-governance, either through personnel change in every locus of power, or some revision in structure and procedure. For now, there is little faith that our institutions can manage either of those options. Better maintain situational awareness as we creep into the unknown.

When Dissent Ends, Transhumanism Reigns And Digitization Rules, Humanity Will Cease To Be Human

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By Gary Barnett

Source: GaryDBarnett.com

“The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

~  Arundhati Roy

Self-defense comes in many forms, but all defense of self begins and ends with dissent, non-compliance, disobedience, saying no to any and all rule, and never allowing aggression against mind and body; mental or physical. Without dissent, defense is not possible, because when voluntary compliance is the prevailing behavior, whether sought, desired, or not, all defense mechanisms are effectively disarmed. In other words, silence in the face of injustice, immorality, terror, or tyranny, creates a condition of weakness, submission, and irresponsibility, which are all the fodder of indifference. When you say nothing, when you do not say no, when you take no action against evil, you commit evil. By not speaking out, and by not responding, you have spoken loudly, and openly committed an act of cowardice. The ultimate blame lies not just with the aggressor in this circumstance, but also equally with he who hides and remains silent.

In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” This is an accurate description of the phenomenon of becoming what one lives, so if you live in a state of indifference, ignoring the evil around you, accepting it in order to avoid conflict and responsibility, you become the evil you have chosen to ignore. The dark abyss in this circumstance, is created by your own inaction against it.

What we face as a society, is the most tremendous threat ever perceived or active in the history of mankind. Do you scoff at this seemingly ‘bold’ pronouncement? If so, you are already fooled, and a major contributor to the vast problems rampant in our world today. Instead of the State just singularly seeking war, the continuance of the bogus Federal Reserve System, isolated government corruption, communism, fascism, or any broad-based totalitarian assault on certain segments of society, we are all being bombarded from a thousand different directions at once with all these atrocities and many more, including attacks on our freedom and sovereignty, on our minds and bodies, and on every aspect of our being. Due to the colossal advances in technology, which in many more ways than not are being used against us in order to build a literal transhuman world run by technocratic means, we are facing what could be considered a technological Armageddon, where all control over humanity will be isolated in the hands of the most powerful few. To accept this, to treat it as normal or eminent, is a most fatal error, and one that could determine our fate in perpetuity.

When humanity ceases to exist in any natural form, when male and female become one, when transhumanism and mind control are inescapable realities, when perversion is commonly accepted, the presence of life that we have all known to be magical and a wonder, will have disappeared. The world being designed is not a world of love, hope, and dreams, it is a nightmare of horror, and those pursuing this downfall of man have already lost all human characteristics. They are monsters, so we must fight and defeat them without becoming monsters ourselves.

There is a reason that the children, beginning in infancy, are targeted by State indoctrination, drugs, chemicals, bioweapon injections masquerading as ‘vaccines,’  insane propaganda, distraction, gross perversion, and are pulled away from family mentally and physically throughout their lives. This, in and of itself, if allowed to continue, will guarantee mind destruction of multiple future generations, and that will secure a fully dumbed-down, compliant, and obedient proletariat mass in the future. At that point, total control by the technocrats over humanity will have been achieved.

While technology has the capability to accomplish many great things, in the hands of these monsters who seek universal control, it can also be used to destroy us. Many refer to this technological phenomenon as ‘artificial intelligence,’ (AI) but there is no such thing. This false terminology is being used against us, as machines are not intelligent, they are programmed by intelligence, or so it is believed. When man becomes a machine, real intelligence ends, and a programmed society of slaves is the result. AI is ‘defined’ as “perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information–demonstrated by computers, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or other animals.” Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, reason, and understand, so honest intelligence cannot be artificial, and machines are still machines. The transhuman digitization of man will mean the end of all traditional life as we know it.

The bulk of this society, has already succumbed to a digital world, and relies on what is falsely labeled ‘social media’ as parent, family, and friend, disregarding the natural state of personal communication, love, companionship, debate, and the grandeur of nature. At this point, the future is not owned by you, but is owned by your masters. All privacy has disappeared, and most all private and financial transactions are captured and data-based. Every aspect of life is now tracked, traced, used, surveilled, restricted, censored, taxed, and every activity imaginable requires licensure (paid permission slip) by the State. You are already a slave, whether you realize it or not.

The plot continues to thicken, as centrally-controlled digital currencies (CBDCs) are being rolled out around the world, which will allow for most every individual to be fully contained and regulated. This will lead to mass restrictions as to what you are allowed to do, where you may travel – if at all, what food you must eat, what medical care you may or may not receive, what State stipend you will be allotted, how much energy you will be permitted to use, and on, and on. Everything in your existence will depend on behavior modification; in other words, do as you are instructed by the State technocratic rulers, or lose everything, as your entire life will be technologically sanctioned.

It is imperative to understand that everything you think you know about technology, and technological advances, is likely at a minimum, 20 years behind. Every so-called new discovery and new technology recognized as such, are not new at all. What the military has now, and is working on today, is unknown to most all except the very few at the top of the pyramid of power. To understand and grasp this concept, should strike fear in the hearts of man. The internet, and therefore, the internet of things, was not discovered and implemented by some computer geek, but was designed and created by the military through the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” (DARPA) Getting to this terroristic time in our history was no accident, and was intentionally planned long ago. We have little time left to stop this totalitarian hell that has been created in order to destroy what we know as the human race.

Will you continue to sit on the sideline, keeping your eyes closed, your ears covered, and your mouth shut, or will you stand up and defend your freedom and life, and that of your family? The only solution, as I have often said, is through active dissent. Say no to the State, disobey, do not comply with any tyrannical order, and do so as individuals en masse. No one can do this for you, but it can and should be done by many independent freedom-minded individuals. Asking someone else for a solution for the masses as a collective, is worthless, and exposes apathy at a level that if practiced by the herd as it has been for so long, the end of humanity will surely be our destiny.

“Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.”

Why Propaganda Works

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The primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives has a simple, well-documented explanation.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Consortium News

It’s not really deniable that Western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes.

Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the U.S. empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought.

Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every U.S. war, rally behind the U.S. foreign policy objective of the day and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.

To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect.

It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.

By continually hammering our minds with simple, repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.

Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview and because powerful plutocrats such as John D. Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.

Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.

This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda.

I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that Westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests.

I’m sure both of these factor into the equation exist to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.

Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system.

 Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when most humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true.

So now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.

This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.

So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries protecting those implanted worldviews.

Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.

I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why.  A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs.

Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the U.S. military to do something evil and stupid.

The Oatmeal has a great comic about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible for someone to change beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm biases.

It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.

Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you.

And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it.

The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”—Thomas Jefferson

The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16.  You need something else than just an AR-15.”

The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.

This is how it begins.

As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

Already, discontent is growing.

According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”

Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.

What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”

This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

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

Brace yourselves.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

TWITTER FILES: Brown University’s Claire Wardle Aids Censorship

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Researchers on “disinformation” have little in common with academic scholars teaching Proust or studying astrophysics.

By Paul D. Thacker

Source: The Disinformation Chronicle

The Washington Post defended campus researchers collaborating with federal agencies to censor Americans in an awkward, bumbling article last week, alleging that congressional staff demanding university documents were “harassing academics” who studied falsehoods spread by Trump. In reality, Congress is investigating campus employees who have little in common with traditional university scholars teaching Proust or studying the atmospheric chemistry of distant planets.

Just last year, one Stanford University researcher disclosed that he and other academics at Stanford and the University of Washington worked with an agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves,” admitting that academics served as a cutout for federal censoring of Americans. The DHS agency campus researchers collaborated with is called the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA.

In a recent investigation, Tablet magazine noted that in 2021 CISA began determining which ideas Americans were allowed to discuss and debate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Documents I discovered at Twitter’s headquarters further tie these censorship efforts to another researcher—Brown University’s Claire Wardle.

Who is Claire Wardle?

Largely unknown to most Americans, Wardle is a central figure in the disinformation industry and helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups in 2015 with funding from Google. But searching through Twitter’s files, I uncovered a government document marked “for official use only” that finds Wardle had also been chosen to brief CISA’s advisory committee.

A spokesperson for CISA emailed yesterday that he would get back to me and explain how often Wardle had briefed the agency.

Wardle has no training or background in science, yet she has long sought to define herself as an expert on vaccines. In a 2019 Twitter email that I discovered, Wardle tried to involve the company’s executives in a Ted Talk event that would define “credible sources” and “quality information around vaccines.”

That next year, Wardle emailed Twitter executives a report she had written looking into what she deemed to be antivaccine conspiracies and narratives found on social media. Wardle sent the email days after Pfizer announced initial positive findings for their COVID vaccine—results which Wardle said forced her to hurry up the report’s release.

“The dominant vaccine narrative is designed to undermine confidence in institutions and scientific sources,” Wardle alleged, in her email to Twitter. Wardle claimed in her report that vaccine mandates are “one of the prominent anti-vaccination narratives”—a narrative which, oddly enough, proved to be accurate when US companies as well as state and federal agencies began mandating COVID vaccines.

Since Wardle published her vaccine findings, one of the report’s authors joined a secretive UK government agency that investigative journalists exposed in recent weeks for censoring British citizens. Meanwhile, one of the report’s contributing researchers now works for a global PR firm that an Australian investigation found was helping that country’s government to censor its own people.