Do People Change?

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.

This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses.  This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years.  People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is dismissed as irrelevant.

The United States is very much a psychological society.  Sociological and historical analyses are considered insignificant to people’s identities.  It’s as if economics, politics, culture, and propaganda are beside the point.

Yes, it is often admitted that circumstances, such as illness, death, divorce, unemployment, etc. affect people, but such circumstances are not considered central to who people are and whom they become.  These matters are rarely seen contextually, nor are connections made.  They are considered inessentials despite the fact that they are always connected to larger social issues – that biography and history are intertwined.

In writing about what he termed the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills put it clearly when he described it as “the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.  In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.”

Without learning it, one cannot know who one is or whom one might become if one chose to change and were not just blown by the winds of fate.

We now live in a digital world where the uncanny nature of information pick up sticks is the big game. Uncanny because most people cannot grasp its mysterious power over their minds.

What was true in 1953 when Ray Bradbury penned the following words in Fahrenheit 451, is exponentially truer today:

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. . . . Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

That it is all noise, all signal – no silence.  That it prevents deep reflection but creates the habit of mental befuddlement that is consonant with the mental derangement of the mainstream media’s 24/7 news reports.

When almost everything you hear is a lie of one sort or another, it becomes barely possible to keep your wits about you.

These bits of bait are scattered all over the mind’s floor, tossed by an unknown player, the unnameable one who comes in the night to play with us.  Their colors flood the mind, dazzle and razzle the eye.  It is screen time in fantasy-land.

This summer’s two hit movies – “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” – while seemingly opposites, are two sides of this same counterfeit coin.  Spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle as Guy Debord put it:

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

“Oppenheimer,” while concentrating on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer who is called “the father of the atomic bomb,” omits the diabolic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if there were no innocent victims, while “Barbie” plays the coy game of satirizing the doll that celebrates women as sex objects while advertising its same sex doll status.  It’s just great “fun.”  Colorful salt water taffy for a summer hoot.  “Little Boy” meets sexy sister in the land of dreams where existential crises lead to expanded consciousness.  Yes, Hollywood is the Dream Factory.

There is so much to attend to, multi-colored tidbits begging to be touched carefully, to grab our full consideration as we delicately lift them into the air of our minds.  So many flavors.  Call it mass attention disorder order or paranoia (beside the mind) or digital dementia.  The names don’t matter, for it is a real condition and it is widespread and spreading madly.  Everyone knows it but represses the truth that the country has become a comic book travesty sliding into quicksand while bringing the world down with it.

“Oppenheimer” plays while a mumbling and bumbling U.S. President Biden pushes the world toward nuclear annihilation with Russia over Ukraine.

“Barbie” struts on her stilettos while men receive guidance from the CDC on “chest feeding” and millions of young people are not sure what sex they are.

What’s up?

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

The instinct of self-defense has disappeared.  “Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close,” this, Nietzsche told us, is the instinct of self-defense.  But we have let all our defenses down because of the Internet, cell phones, and the digital revolution.  We have turned on, tuned in, and dropped into computerized cells whose flickering bars note signal strength but not mental bondage.  Not the long loneliness of distant signals barely heard, but “Cause” what Rodriquez sings for us:

Cause my heart’s become a crooked hotel full of rumours
But it’s I who pays the rent for these fingered-face out-of-tuners
and I make 16 solid half hour friendships every evening

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

I recently had the arduous task of reviewing nearly fifty years of a writer’s personal journals.  The thing that stood out to me was the repetitive nature of his comments and analyses of people he knew and the relationships he had.  His political, literary, and historical comments were insightful, and his keen observations into the decades long diminution of the belief in existential freedom captured well the growing domination of today’s deterministic ethos with its biological emphasis and its underlying hopeless nihilism. But it was also very clear that the people he wrote about were little different after forty to fifty years.  Their situations changed but they did not – fundamentally.  They were encased in long-standing carapaces that protected them from change and choices that would force them to metamorphosize or undergo profound metanoias. Most of them saw no connection between their personal lives and world events, nor did they seem to grasp what William James, in writing about habits, said, “if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are … but two names for the same psychic fact.”

The notebooks, of course, were one man’s observations.  But they seemed to me to capture something about people generally.  In the notes I took, I summarized this by the words “social addiction,” a habit of living and thinking that has resulted in vast numbers of people locked in their cells, confused, totally bamboozled, and in despair.  This condition is now widely recognized, even by the most unreflective people, for it is felt in the gut as a dazed death-in-life, a treading of water waiting for the next disaster, the next bad joke passing for serious attention.  It is impossible to fail to recognize, if not admit, that the United States has become a crazy country, mad and deluded in the worst ways and leading the world to perdition on a fool’s dream of dominance and delusions.

The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, an intriguing writer who questioned his own profession, put it well in his 1973 book How People Change:

Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway… Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

He correctly warned that insight does not necessarily lead to change.  It may help initiate it, but in the end the belief in freedom and the power of the will is necessary.  This has become harder in a society that has embraced biological determinism as a result of decades of propaganda.  Freedom has become a slogan only.  We have generally become determined to be determined.

To realize that one has choices is necessary and that not to decide is to decide.  Decisions (from Latin de = off and caedere = to cut) are hard, for they involve deaths, the elimination of alternatives, the facing of one own’s death(s) with courage and hope.  The loss of illusions.  This too has become more difficult in a country that has jettisoned so much of the deep human spirituality that still animates many people around the world whom the U.S. government considers enemies.

Such decisions also involve the intellectual honesty to seek out alternative voices to one’s fixed opinions on a host of public issues that affect everyone’s lives.

To recognize that who we are and who we become intersect with world events, war, politics, the foreign policies of one’s country, economics, culture, etc.; that they cannot be divorced from the people we say we are.  That none of us are islands but part of the main, but when that main becomes corporate dominated mainstream news pumped into our eyes and ears day and night from little machines, we are in big trouble.

To not turn away from what the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this propaganda machine – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATT) – is a choice by default and one of bad faith in which one hides the truth from oneself while knowing one is doing so.

To not seek truth outside this complex is to deny one’s freedom and to determine not to change even when it is apodictic that things are falling apart and all innocence is being drowned in a sea of lies.

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

Change begins with desire, at the personal and public level.  It takes courage to face the ways we have all been wrong, missed opportunities, shrunk back, lied, refused to consider alternatives.  Everyone senses that the U.S. is proceeding down a perilous road now.  Everything is out of joint, the country heading for hell.

I recently read an article by Timothy Denevi about the late writer Joan Didion who, together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles a few days previously, had died.  The thing that struck me in the article was what Didion described as the sickening indifference of so many vacationers to the news about RFK’s death and funeral.  Because television reception was sketchy in Hawaii, Didion and Dunne, not Kennedy supporters, were only able to watch a three-hour ABC taped special on June 8 that covered the assassination, funeral, and train ride of the body to Arlington Cemetery as millions of regular people kept vigil along the tracks.  A television had been set up on a large veranda where guests could watch this taped show.  But few vacationers were interested; the opposite, actually.  It angered them that this terrible national tragedy was intruding into their vacations.  They walked away.  It seemed to Didion and Dunne that something deep and dark was symbolized by their selfish indifference.  As a result, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea and was prescribed antidepressants after psychiatric evaluation.  She felt the 1960s “snapping” as she too snapped.

I think those feelings of vertigo and nausea are felt by many people today.  Rightly so.  The U.S.A. is snapping.  It is no longer possible to remain a normal person in dark times like these, no matter how powerfully that urge tempts us.  Things have gone too far on so many fronts from the Covid scam with all its attendant deaths and injuries to the U.S. war against Russia with its increasing nuclear risks, to name only two of scores of disasters.  One could say Didion was a bit late, that the snapping began in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA.  As Billie Joel sings, “J.F.K. blown away, what more do I have to say?”  And why was he assassinated?  Because he changed dramatically in the last year of his life to embrace the role of peacemaker despite knowing that by doing so he was accepting the real risk that he would be killed.  He was courage and will personified, an exceptional example of radical change for the sake of the world.

So I come back to my ostensible subject: Do people change?

The short answer is: Rarely.  Many play at it while playing dumb.

Yet is does happen, but only by some mixture of miracle and freedom, in an instant or with the passing of time where meaning and mystery can only exist.  Where we exist.  “If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic,” the English writer John Berger muses, “then prophecy and destiny can coexist with freedom of choice.”  Time always tells.

The last entry in the writer’s notebooks that I reviewed was this:

I read that Kris Kristofferson, whose music I love, has said that he would like the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone:

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

It seemed apposite.

Saturday Matinee: Everybody Wants Some!!

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“Everybody Wants Some!” — Richard Linklater’s Remembrance of Teams Past

By Gerald Peary

Source: The Arts Fuse

Richard Linklater has branded Everybody Wants Some! a “spiritual sequel” to his earlier Dazed and Confused (1993), with Dazed and Confused’s pack of 1970s high school boys, after a summer break and with new identities, off, in fall 1980, to freshman year at college. Critics have piped in that Boyhood (2014) ends with teenager, Mason, at the moment of entering university, so that Everybody Wants Some! is also some kind of Boyhood sequel. Not only is Everyone Wants Some! deeply personal in Linklater’s oeuvre, it’s also nakedly autobiographical. Floppy-haired Blake Jenner, cast as Jake Bradford, the film’s protagonist, is a look-alike for young Rick Linklater. Like his character, Jake, Rick is a native Texan who attended a small Texas college, Sam Houston State, on a baseball scholarship.

(Lucky for us, Linklater suffered a blowout injury, which stopped short a wished-for trip into the minor leagues for a talented second baseman. He dropped out of college, worked for a short time on an off-shore oil rig, and then, back on land, chose a different career path.)

There’s more than autobiography in Everybody Wants Some! We should not forget to factor into the movie what seems the film’s real “spiritual father,” that infamous anti-PC guilty pleasure, National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). In both films, a university’s Apollonian claim to be an epicenter of learning and intellectual development is a total sham. Dionysus reigns. Everyone is at college for the party-going. Period. In Animal House, the university administrators we meet are all hapless grotesques. In Everybody Wants Some!, the sole college teacher we see, in mismatched jacket and pants, appears only in long shot in the last scene of the movie. Far off and powerless. “Who the hell is that?” asks a student, unable to grasp what that old guy by the blackboard has to do with higher education.

Higher education? Getting high, on weed or beer. Getting laid. Perhaps the most arresting “student” in Everybody Wants Some! is Finnigan (Glen Powell), a charming rogue—pipe smoking, Kerouac-reading — who uses his verbal dexterity as his major tool in getting coeds into the sack. He’s the cocky heir of the smooth-talking frat rodents of Animal House who sounded, at their smug wittiest, like the amoral rakes from a Restoration stage comedy.

I am a lifetime baseball fan but I’m also a Northeastern intellectual, a friend to feminism, a left liberal. And I’m old. For a long time, I couldn’t get into the philistine, Southern swagger of those we hang out with in Everybody Wants Some!: the budding guys on the baseball team, who share a house and don’t need to belong to a fraternity to act like heathen brothers. It’s four days before the college semester begins, and those days are taken up with drinking, doping, playing, in lieu of baseball, lots of ridiculous competitive games and, above all, scoring with anonymous, ever-willing young ladies. Am I just being paranoid? I imagined these almost-all white boys later in life, living high off the hog in rural Texas, good ole’ men in their late 50s, voting one and all for Rick Perry and Ted Cruz.

It’s hard to separate the unapologetic sexism of the baseball players, for whom Linklater has an obvious affection, from chauvinism in Linklater’s point-of-view. Should he be tougher on his macho crew, or, as he does, forgive their cave boy attitudes as part of his utopian stance on college life 1980? I suggest a reading of an excellent review by new MTV critic Amy Nicholson, in which, disappointed by his new film, she scolds Linklater for having “a lame midlife crisis.”

Me? I was finally won over in the last act, when Everybody Wants Some! turns a little emotional, a little “girly.” After three days of male carousing, Thursday-Saturday, Jake settles down on Sunday with Beverly (Zoey Deutsch) a smart, sassy, ambitious, artsy dance and drama major. The other guys can’t believe it: he “likes” her. Jake wants to see Zoey as more than a midnight bounce on a bed. What can I say? Both young actors are winning and sweet, and I put behind me Jake’s earlier moments of piggy behavior. (Hey, I’ve been there! Oink, oink,) Jake has learned something meaningful in three days: women are more than sexual objects. And now it’s time, Monday, to actually start college.

If Jake is Richard Linklater’s alter ego in his movie, where do we see in Jake the seed of the person who would become a pioneer indie filmmaker? Pointedly, there’s not one movie reference anywhere in Everybody Wants Some! But around Jake there are some who are sensitive to the arts, starting with his new girlfriend and his Beat-reading baseball cohort, Finnigan. Most importantly, there’s the odd guy who is somehow on the baseball team: Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a bearded, weathered, Californian hippy. He quotes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, he owns a roomful of Twilight Zone VHS tapes. He blames the crowd’s love of the band Van Halen on the power of corporations to form mass taste. Best of all, he delivers long, winding soliloquys on whatever. And that’s a key to Linklater’s sensibility: his devotion to disquisition. It’s the road to the moviemaker’s first hit film, Slacker (1991), a roundelay of alternative people walking about and holding forth. In weird Austin, a Democratic oasis in Texas, where Linklater landed and stayed.

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Watch Everybody Wants Some!! on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/15776471

Fooled by What We Measure, Enlightened by What We Don’t Measure

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Economists and pundits are falling all over themselves to declare the US is chugging along splendidly, and to express their frustration with the public for their curmudgeonly lack of enthusiasm. For example: If this is a bad economy, please tell me what a good economy would look likeWe should acknowledge that things are going well, even as we continue to look for problems to solve and How the Recession Doomers Got the U.S. Economy So Wrong.

My intention is not to slam Noah Smith or Derek Thompson. I follow their work and gain value from their analysis.

The point I want to make is we only manage what we measure, and the reliance on statistics that are overly broad and easily distorted/gamed leads to generalizations that ignore consequential cause and effect: we are fooled by overly broad and easily distorted/gamed statistics and enlightened by looking at what is not measured or measured inadequately.

The consensus holds that inflation is declining rapidly and unemployment remains low, so the economy is doing great. Please glance at Chart #1 below to see what enthuses the mainstream: the unemployment rate is near historic lows.

But this measure leaves out a great deal of consequential factors. It’s well-known that the unemployment rate is distorted / gamed by leaving out everyone who is in the workforce but not “actively seeking work.” So what does this official unemployment rate actually measure? Not the percentage of the workforce that has a job.

Nor does it measure underemployment–those working far below their potential–or job insecurity or the percentage of workers being pushed into burnout–all consequential reflections of the real economy. All of these are potentially causal factors in why US productivity has fallen so dramatically.

And speaking of productivity, that’s the ultimate source of prosperity–not speculative bubbles or debt-binging. If productivity is tanking, eventually there are negative economic consequences that will be distributed to some segments of the populace, very likely asymmetrically.

Such a broad-brush measure also ignores the consequences of demographics. Please glance at chart #2 below, of the 55 and over population and workforce. Note that virtually all the 20+ million jobs the US economy added in the past two decades are in this older workforce, which is of course steaming steadily into retirement, even as the percentage of this cohort who continues working has soared.

In other words, virtually all the job growth is the result of older workers working longer. Yes, 70 is the new 50, but try doing the same work at 70 that you did when you were 50. Sure, some people forego retirement because they love their work so much, but we don’t measure how many are still working because they have to for pressing financial reasons.

Have you observed the age of service workers and skilled workers recently? Do you reckon they really love working at Burger King so much that they’re doing it for enjoyment?

What if we measured financial pressures and job insecurity rather than risibly bogus “unemployment”? Would the economy still look so wonderful and resilient?

Chart #3 shows that virtually all the population growth ahead is in the cohort of older workers 65+ years old heading into retirement. So the workforce is rapidly aging and the unspoken / unexamined assumption is tens of millions of new workers will enter the workforce with the same skills, motivation, dedication and values as the tens of millions retiring.

But the demographics simply don’t support this breezy assumption.

Now glance at chart #4 which depicts the extraordinary rise in the number of workers who are now disabled. The causes of this are being debated (the pandemic obviously plays a role), but 2.5 million workers leaving the workforce in a few years is something that could be consequential if the trend continues. An assumption that this is a one-off is baseless until proven otherwise.

Once again, demographics, productivity and factors such as disability and burnout are not part of the unemployment, GDP and inflation measures currently being touted as proof of economic nirvana.

Item #1 of what’s not even measured is the crapification of goods and services. I addressed this in The “Crapification” of the U.S. Economy Is Now Complete (February 9, 2022) and Stainless Steal (February 26, 2023).

How do we measure the “inflation”–i.e. a loss of purchasing power–when appliances that lasted 20 years a generation ago now break down in 5 years? Where does that 75% decline in utility and durability show up in the official inflation data? How about the tools that once lasted a lifetime now breaking after a few years?

It’s been estimated that America’s food has lost 30% of its nutritive value in the past few decades. Protein per gram has dropped, trace nutrients have dropped, and so on. Rather than pursue sustainably nutrient-rich soil, Big Ag has maximized profits by dumping natural-gas-derived chemical fertilizers on depleted soil to boost production of nutrient-poor, tasteless “product.” A product deemed “organic” offers no guarantee that the soil isn’t depleted of nutrients.

Could this decline have anything to do with the American populace’s increasingly poor health? Nobody knows because these massive declines in quality and value aren’t measured and are certainly not part of the risibly bogus measures of unemployment, GDP and inflation.

The official inflation rate ignores the multi-decade decline in the purchasing power of wages. Rents have soared 25% in a few years, and economists are looking at 5% increases in wages and worrying about the potential inflationary impact of workers’ wages not keeping up with real-world inflation.

Cheerleading economists and pundits never mention the $50 trillion siphoned from labor by capital over the past 45 years. They also don’t mention the rising trend of loading more work on employees rather than hire more employees, or as a response to not being able to find qualified new hires.

Funny how rosy the picture can be tinted when all the consequential forces are ignored. But this studied ignorance characterizes the American elite, who delight in whining about airfares and travel delays, and finding someone to fix their pool pump. I address our Terminally Stratified Society here:

The Wealthy Are Not Like You and Me–Our Terminally Stratified Society (August 3, 2023)

This protected elite don’t have to put up with the crapified goods and services which generate their capital gains and income. Their wealth and income enable their detachment from the crapified economy the bottom 90% experience. Their experience of the bottom 90% is as service workers, delivery people, etc. who serve their entitled tastes.

Correspondent Tomasz G. provided a telling excerpt from Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island:

“… the rich certainly like the company of the rich, no doubt it calms them, it’s nice for them to meet beings subject to the same torments as they are, and who seem to form a relationship with them that is not totally about money; it’s nice for them to convince themselves that the human species is not uniquely made up of predators and parasites… “

As correspondent Ryan R. observed, America’s privileged elites“were born on third, stole home (via asset inflation) and still think they hit that home run.”

We know who the parasites are, but economists and pundits are safely blind to America’s neofeudal aristocracy. After all, who butters the bread of economists and pundits?

Is it unsurprising there are no measures of neofeudalism or elite privilege? As for the incredible concentration of wealth in the top tiers and the resulting decline in the bottom 90%’s share of the nation’s wealth–nothing to see here, just globalization and financialization doing their thing. What matters is booking my next flight to yet another conference of economists and pundits where we nod our heads and dare not admit all the conferences are nothing but echo chambers of the privileged elites.

Cheerleading economists and pundits completely ignore the consequences of the system being rigged to favor capital and the already-wealthy who were given the means to buy assets back when they were cheap and affordable to the middle-class. Now that the system generates speculative credit-asset bubbles to create “the wealth effect,” assets such as homes in desirable regions are out of reach of the bottom 90%.

Please study the six charts below of wealth inequality. Try not to laugh out loud when you see that the top 1% reckon that “coming from a wealthy family” has near-zero impact on “getting ahead in America.”

Also note the steady decline in the middle class percentage of national wealth, and how the middle class’s share only rises when the credit-asset bubbles that have enriched the top 10% deflate, a bubble-pop that never lasts longer than a few months thanks to the policies that favor the already-rich at the expense of those who don’t own stocks, rental properties, municipal bonds, etc.

Economists and pundits steer well clear of the eventual social and political consequences of America’s entrenched neofeudal wealth-income inequality. That this neofeudal configuration is inherently destabilizing–never mind, we don’t measure that, look at the wunnerful unemployment and inflation charts!

Lastly, consider the skyrocketing federal debt in terms of how many jobs are created in the era of soaring federal spending and debt. (Charts courtesy of CH / Economica) Debt doesn’t matter to economists and pundits, and neither does its diminishing effect on GDP and employment. The same can be said of total debt (public and private), which is skyrocketing (last chart): diminishing returns writ large as higher interest rates are embedded in the policy excesses and neofeudal structure of the past 45 years.

In essence, nothing that is consequential is properly quantified, so the pundit class keeps insisting everything is wunnerful and is mystified why people are so foolishly dissatisfied with our wunnerful economy. The reason why people are not buying the fantasyland story is they have to live and work in the crapified real economy, as serfs serving the economist-punditry-elite aristocracy.

If we want to avoid being led astray by misleading measures, we must seek enlightenment in what isn’t being measured or is cast aside as inconvenient to the “economy is wunnerful” party line.

When a CIA Asset Becomes a CIA Liability 

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By Craig Murray

Source: CraigMurray.org.ca

Fernando Villavicencio, who with the Guardian’s Luke Harding and Dan Collyns fabricated the notorious Guardian front page lie that Paul Manafort and Julian Assange held pro-Trump meetings in the Ecuadorean Embassy, has been shot dead in Ecuador.

The appalling lie, which the Guardian’s $700,000 a year editor has refused to retract or remove, despite criticism even from the Washington Post which named Villavicencio as the fabricator, was aimed to give support to Clinton’s flagging “Russiagate” invention, which was crumbling fast.

Here is a photo of CIA assets Collyns, Harding and Villavicencio together in Quito.

Villavicencio’s claim to be an anti-corruption campaigner was highly selective and aimed only at making accusations against left wing figures, including a long history of fabricating documents.

Having been elected to the National Assembly in 2021, he devoted all his energy to obstructing the impeachment for corruption of Ecuador’s current President, fellow CIA asset and banker Guillermo Lasso. That seems rather strange for an anti-corruption campaigner.

Astonishingly, Villavicencio’s Wikipedia page presents him as an anti-corruption hero. It does not refer to the Manafort fabrication at all.

The Wikipedia page states that in 2015 Villavicencio informed Wikileaks of surveillance against Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy, as well as providing other documents to Wikileaks.

What it does not say is that Wikileaks did not publish Villavicencio’s material because their checks revealed at least some of it to be forged.

I must state here, for legal reasons, that the episode of surveillance on Assange in the Embassy mentioned in Villavicencio’s Wikipedia page, occurred before and was entirely unconnected to the UC Global affair, in which court case I am a witness and victim.

The result of Villavicencio’s information on surveillance of Assange in the Embassy led in fact directly to an attempt to blackmail over intimate moment images. Villavicencio’s role in that is, to say the least, murky. He was not present at the attempted shakedown.

None of which justifies Villavicencio’s awful death. But it does explain why you should not believe anything you are reading about it in the mainstream media.

CIA assets who forge documents, or distribute CIA forged documents, and spread corruption allegations against left wing figures, are most useful working in the shadows. If they become over-ambitious, draw attention to themselves, and run for President as Villavicencio did, when the CIA already has its approved puppet in the race, it is very easy to move from CIA asset to CIA liability.

Which is very bad for your health.

My sincere condolences to Mr Villavicencio’s family and those who loved him.

From Press Room Raids to Indictments, Anything Goes When the Government Piles On

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.”—Mike Thomas, sports editor

What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.

In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a mountain of bread-and-circus distractions, economic worries, environmental disasters, power plays, power grabs, police raids, indictments and circus politics.

The Maui wildfires. The Trump indictments. Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. The looming 2024 presidential election. The Ukraine-Russia conflict.

In the midst of this pile on of woes, worries and semi-manufactured crises falling with sledgehammer-like frequency, monopolizing the media narrative and eclipsing all other news, it’s difficult to stay focused on what’s really going on, and yet something is brewing.

Pay attention.

Caught up in the partisan boxing match that is politics today, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s real.

The indictments against Trump, the investigation of Hunter Biden, and the chatter of the political classes aren’t real; they are more sound and fury, signifying nothing in the end.

As Aldous Huxley observed in Brave New World Revisited:

“Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation… Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.”

So what is real?

What’s real is the $5,000 fine and five-year jail sentence that could be levied against anyone found driving an illegal immigrant in their car in the state of Florida.

What’s real are the hi-tech policing tools such as robotic dogs equipped with all manner of weaponry and surveillance technology that are rewriting the ground rules when it comes to privacy and security.

What’s real is the North Carolina pastor who was fined $60,000 for ministering to the homeless on church property without a permit.

What’s real is the revelation that Boston officials created and sent police a watch list of the mayor’s most vocal critics, not unlike the government’s own growing databases for anti-government dissidents.

What’s real is what happened in Marion, Kansas, on Fri., Aug. 11, 2023, when police raided the office of the Marion County Record, blowing past the constitutional safeguards intended to safeguard the freedom of the press.

Are you starting to get the picture yet?

The manufactured media spectacles, piled on one after another, have a very real purpose, which is to distract us from the government’s constant encroachments on our freedoms.

In the larger scheme of things, these individual incidents—the police raid of a small-town newspaper, a state ban on who gets to be inside your car, an outrageous fine for feeding the destitute, a politician’s use of an enemies list to silence critics—might easily go unremarked, yet they are all part of the police state’s tendency to pile on: pile on the distractions, pile on the retribution, pile on the show of force in order to completely eviscerate anything that even remotely resembles opposition.

The police state has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on anyone who even questions its authority, let alone challenges its chokehold on power.

“We the people”—the proverbial nails to the police state’s heavy-handed tactics—will be hammered into compliance, intimidated into subservience, and terrorized into silence.

It doesn’t matter which party dominates in Congress or the White House: all of us are in danger from these fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics.

In this way, anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.

Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the prison walls holding the American people captive become ever more inescapable.

The upcoming election and its aftermath will undoubtedly keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats, so busy fighting each other that they never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

Yet the winner has already been decided.

As American satirist H.L. Mencken predicted almost a century ago:

“All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, nothing will change.

You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—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.

Fauci and the Hagiographical Style of American Journalism

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By Justin Hart

Source: Brownstone Institute

Norah O’Donnell has known Dr. Fauci and his wife for ages: “How are you guys?” she starts her interview with Dr. Fauci for InStyle Magazine where Fauci posed for the most hubris-exuding photo of the pandemic.

“With all due modesty, I think I’m pretty effective!” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, July 2020, InStyle Magazine

This was 3 years ago this past week:

Norah’s husband, Chef Geoff, owns the Georgetown restaurant, “Deluxe Hospitality” She admits in her opening that Dr. Fauci and his wife, the bioethicist, Dr. Christine Grady, are frequent patrons there.

“… these days mostly for takeout.” O’Donnell chuckles.

Revisiting this horrible puff piece you can’t help but see the obtuseness of the leader of the pandemic policy in stark relief.

First, as always, the man is incapable of actual reflection:

NO: What have we done wrong?

A F: You know, that’s almost an unanswerable question. There are so many possibilities. I don’t like to phrase it in the context of what we’ve done wrong, as opposed to let’s take a look at what happened and maybe we can have lessons learned.

Showing once again that Dr. Fauci (in July 2020) believed that we did NOT lock down hard enough:

If you look at the European countries, they shut down about 90 to 95 percent of the country. Whereas when we shut down, the calculation is that we shut down about 50 percent. So, put all of those factors together, I can’t say we did anything wrong, you know, but certainly we’ve got to do better.

Lambasting any move to “re-open” he continues: “What we need to do now is to learn the lesson of what happened with the recent surges. We’ve got to pause in the opening and maybe even take a step back in our phases…”

Pushing masks was a high priority for the man who months earlier admitted in an email that they don’t really do anything:

As we try to proceed, we need to really take seriously the issue of wearing masks all the time and not congregating in bars. I think we can stop that by just closing them, because they are certainly an important mechanism of this spread. Keep distances, wash hands, avoid crowds, wear a mask … I think if we diligently do those things, we can turn this around.

Norah asks him about the “noble lie” he told around masks (which is just ridiculous parsing):

NO: It’s been recently reminded to us by the White House that you advised against people wearing masks in public, and, of course, that was due to the surge because the concern was about saving PPEs for medical professionals. Do you regret that comment?

A F: No. I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct.

I’m always struck as to the casual and flippant manner in which Dr. Fauci proscribed the policies. Here he is continuing to defend his noble lie and pushing masks with assertions that STILL have no science behind them – in fact, quite the opposite.

And also, it soon became clear that we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores.

The plan to vaccinate millions was already in place as this comments affirms:

By the beginning of the year we should have the first tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of doses. That being the case, I would think we could vaccinate a substantial portion of the population as we get into 2021 — if the vaccine is safe and effective.

The the hubris really kicks in:

NO: And how long do you see yourself at the NIAID?

A F: I don’t see any termination within the near future because I judge [my career] by my energy and my effectiveness. And right now, with all due modesty, I think I’m pretty effective.

Norah turns to Mrs. Fauci (Dr. Grady):

NO: Let me ask you, Chris, as a bioethicist, what do you make of this moment we’re in, when even a mask has become more of a divisive issue?

CG: Well, I would say that masks shouldn’t be divisive. It’s a relatively easy way to protect one’s self and others. And so for public health reasons, I think everybody should do it. From an ethical perspective there is always this tension between what you ask people to do that feels like a restriction of their liberty and what is required for public health. And in this case, it seems like a slam dunk. It’s not restricting liberty much, and it’s very helpful for public health.

She goes on to lament how “unfair” it all seems to her:

when he gets criticized, it feels unfair to me because he is working so hard for the right reasons.

NO: What feels unfair?

CG: That people are looking for things to criticize — I mean, for anything. They are making things up. They are not putting into perspective the contribution that he is making.

A curious aside, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Grady’s first encounter began with a lie – seems kind of appropriate if you’ll forgive my commentary on that.

CG: [laughs] I had just come back from spending two years with Project Hope in Brazil and came to work at the NIH. There was a patient, Pedro, on the unit at the time who was Brazilian and didn’t speak English. One day he asked me if I could speak to his doctors about sending him home because he really wanted to go home. So I set up a meeting with the fellows who were taking care of him and Tony, who was the attending physician. I had not met Tony before that. I was the interpreter. And Tony told him, “He may go home and be very careful about taking care of his health and doing his dressings and sitting with his leg up and things like that.” And when I told him that, Pedro said, “There’s no way I’m doing that. I’ve been in the hospital for months. I’m going to the beach, and I’m going dancing at night.” And I sort of in a split second decided to tell Tony, “He said he’d do exactly what you said.”

AF: She lied! [laughs]

CG: I lied! So the next day I was walking down the hall, and Dr. Fauci came by and said, “Can I see you in my office at the end of the day?” I thought I was going to get fired. But he asked me out to dinner. [laughs]

The entire hagiographical interview in hindsight is a classic look at the elitist bubble around the people in Washington, D.C. during the pandemic. Dr. Fauci’s contribution to history will not be seen in a kind light.

The Only ‘National Defense’ Needed in this Country, Is Defense Against the Real Enemy: The Ruling Class and the U.S. Government

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By Gary D. Barnett

Source: GaryDBarnett.com

“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”

H.L. Mencken

Throughout our history, and today, little, if any defense of this country or its people, has been necessary or warranted. The true enemy of the people of America is, and has always been, its own government. The real enemies are most all the politicians, regardless of party, the courts, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the IRS, the entire military industrial complex, and in general, the federal and state police forces. In other words, all the ruling class and it pawns in government, its enforcers, and all their institutions and bureaucracies, are the real threat to this populace and its natural freedoms. The ludicrous notion of national defense, and that government forces actually “defend the country,” is an outright lie; propagandized by the State and its mouthpieces in media, simply as a way to gain great power in order to own and control society.

Many will take offence to these statements, mostly due to the fact that since birth, they have been inundated and indoctrinated by false ‘authority’ figures, to believe that they cannot survive and prosper without restrictive laws and rule, and worthless government schooling, all kept in check by severe coercive State prosecution. They are taught (schooled) to abandon their individuality in favor of the so-called ‘greater good’ of a collective society, to depend on and trust others in power to protect and sustain them and their families throughout their lives. This breeds only ignorance and passivity in the face of State terror. Independence, a supposed hallmark of this nation-state and its residents, is literally vilified, and even prohibited in many instances, causing personal sovereignty to be discarded in the name of unified slavery.

We live in a country that has warred aggressively against fictitious enemies, meaning without cause or necessity, more than any other country on earth. It is stated, and supported, that the United States has been at war for at least 93% of its entire existence. I firmly believe this number to be much higher, and with proper consideration, it is likely closer to 100%. If one is to determine the actual damage done, the actual harm due to direct war, proxy war, what is insanely considered ‘collateral damage,’ what is the horrid long term cost to human life in the aftermath of this terror, the total number of causalities, including the dead, would be tens if not hundreds of millions of innocent people. But what is sold to the wrongly named ‘public, is that this country is and has been the savior of ‘democracy,’ a completely evil and failed ideology, which is a gross lie beyond the imagination of any sane and thinking human being.

Yes, the truth hurts, but without acceptance of truth, what is left is a deceitful lie; a manufactured myth so atrocious as to have caused an entire nation’s abhorrent and hostile policies to be supported by the masses to such an extent, as to have caused the most broad-based, aggressive, and egregious destruction of humanity in history. This should be the epitaph upon the death of this empire.

At this time in our lives, aggressive war by this government and all who support its heinous deeds, has graduated from its main objective of slaughtering innocent men, women, and children, in addition to the other devastation, in other countries most everywhere on earth, to include the entirety of this country’s population as well. The major war currently is against all of us who live and work in the U.S. by those who continue to claim to be our protectors. This contradiction is absurd, but is still little understood by the average American, as can be evidenced by the terroristic treatment inflicted, and with little if any resistance, on this society these past few years.

At a time when this country and the world are steeped in madness and hate, more and more atrocities continue to take place, with almost zero empathy evident by the political class. The last evil ‘ruler,’ just one among all, ‘chosen’ by the ‘people,’ was Biden, and this was his response to the State’s complicit murder of those in Lahaina just recently, after a very suspicious and devastating fire had destroyed an entire town and its residents. He had the audacity to offer these poor people who lost everything, including many family members, a one-time $700 payment per household. This was in the midst of giving over $200 million more to Ukraine’s political criminals recently, with plans to give many more billions; this after more than $113 billion has already been paid to enrich the newly rich politicians in Ukraine. (Apparently, blackmail garners payment more than actual need of Americans) This alone should be enough for everyone in this country to grasp how little this government cares about its own, and how worthless all in the governing system have become. To depend on, or trust this scum to defend you from harm, is asinine beyond explanation.

Who will defend you from harm? Who will defend you from foreign invasion, although that has never once happened in this country’s history, not even including the pre-planned setup called the Pearl Harbor attack? Who will defend you from hyper-inflation and the resulting extreme prices for goods? Who will defend you from mass censorship and constant surveillance? Who will defend you from food shortages, energy shutdowns, and extensive restrictions on all transactions and travel? Who will defend your children from the consuming perversion being forced on them at every opportunity with this government’s blessing? Who will defend you from aggression and tyranny? Who will defend you from yourself?

It will never be the evil State that defends you, nor will it be its ‘national defense systems,’ its enforcers in the military and police, the politicians, the banking cartels, the large corporate monsters, or any government at any level. There is only one legitimate defense, and that is self-defense. Only you, each of you, has the ability and desire to defend himself. No other and no State entity can or will ever be your savior.  Until that is accepted, expect total serfdom to become your voluntarily accepted way of life.

Much more tyranny is coming. Lockdowns, fake ‘viruses,’ bioweapons, threats and totalitarian measures based on bogus ‘climate change, central bank digital currency, social credit restrictions, more inflation, destruction of money, health mandates, curfews, travel shutdowns, food shortages, transhuman promotion, among many other atrocities, including perpetual war.

National defense is an outright lie, and can never protect you, it can only harm you. There is but one enemy, and that enemy is the State! There is but one defense against this demon called government, and that is when individuals, or individuals working together en masse, abolish all rule. The responsibility for you is you, and any dependence on government whatsoever can only lead to despair, hopelessness, disaster, and enslavement. Defend yourself from this evil State, and break the chains that bind you.

“Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.”

~ I.F. Stone

Reference links:

America’s perpetual wars of aggression

What the media won’t tell you about the Maui fires