Tag Archives: Dystopia

Technology and a Tyranny Worse than Prison 

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By Bert Olivier

Source: Brownstone Institute

In an outstanding piece of political-theoretical writing, titled ‘The Threat of Big Other’ (with its play on George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’) Shoshana Zuboff, succinctly addresses the main issues of her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, Hachette, 2019), explicitly linking it to Orwell’s 1984. 

Significantly, at the time she reminded readers that Orwell’s goal with 1984 was to alert British and American societies that democracy is not immune to totalitarianism, and that “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere” (Orwell, quoted by Zuboff, p. 16). In other words, people are utterly wrong in their belief that totalitarian control of their actions through mass surveillance (as depicted in 1984, captured in the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you”) could only issue from the state, and she does not hesitate to name the source of this threat today (p. 16):

For 19 years, private companies practicing an unprecedented economic logic that I call surveillance capitalism have hijacked the Internet and its digital technologies. Invented at Google in 2000, this new economics covertly claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Some data are used to improve services, but the rest are turned into computational products that predict your behaviour. These predictions are traded in a new futures market, where surveillance capitalists sell certainty to businesses determined to know what we will do next. 

By now we know that such mass surveillance does not merely have the purpose – if it ever did – of tracking and predicting consumer behaviour with the aim of maximising profits; far from it. It is generally known among those who prefer to remain informed about global developments, and who do not only rely on the legacy media for this, that in China such mass surveillance has reached the point where citizens are tracked through a myriad of cameras in public places, as well as through smartphones, to the point where their behaviour is virtually completely monitored and controlled. 

Small wonder that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) does not let an opportunity pass to praise China as the model to be emulated by other countries in this respect. It should therefore come as no surprise that investigative reporter, Whitney Webb, also alluding to Orwell’s prescience, draws attention to the striking similarities between mass surveillance that was developed in the United States (US) in 2020 and Orwell’s depiction of a dystopian society in 1984, first published in 1949. 

In an article titled “Techno-tyranny: How the US national security state is using coronavirus to fulfil an Orwellian vision,” she wrote:

Last year, a government commission called for the US to adopt an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other country in order to ensure American hegemony in artificial intelligence. Now, many of the ‘obstacles’ they had cited as preventing its implementation are rapidly being removed under the guise of combating the coronavirus crisis.

Webb proceeds to discuss an American government body that focused on researching ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could promote national security and defence needs, and which provided details concerning the “structural changes” which American society and economy would have to undertake to be able to maintain a technological advantage in relation to China. According to Webb the relevant governmental body recommended that the US follow China’s example in order to surpass the latter, specifically regarding some aspects of AI-driven technology as it pertains to mass surveillance. 

As she also points out, this stance on the desired development of surveillance technology conflicts with (incongruous) public statements by prominent American politicians and government officials, that Chinese AI-technological surveillance systems instantiate a significant threat for Americans’ way of life), which did not, however, prevent the implementation of several stages of such a surveillance operation in the US in 2020. As one knows in retrospect, such implementation was undertaken and justified as part of the American response to Covid-19. 

None of this is new, of course – by now it is well-known that Covid was the excuse to establish and implement Draconian measures of control, and that AI has been an integral part of it. The point I want to make, however, is that one should not be fooled into thinking that strategies of control will end there, nor that the Covid pseudo-vaccines were the last, or worst, of what the would-be rulers of the world can inflict upon us to exercise the total control they wish to achieve – a level of control that would be the envy of the fictional Big Brother society of Orwell’s 1984. 

For example, several critically thinking people have alerted one to the alarming fact that the widely touted Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are Trojan horses, with which the neo-fascists driving the current attempt at a ‘great reset’ of society and the world economy aim to gain complete control over people’s lives. 

At first blush the proposed switch from a fractional reserve monetary system to a digital currency system may seem reasonable, particularly in so far as it promises the (dehumanising) ‘convenience’ of a cashless society. As Naomi Wolf has pointed out, however, far more than this is at stake. In the course of a discussion of the threat of ‘vaccine passports’ to democracy, she writes (The Bodies of Others, All Seasons Press, 2022, p. 194):

There is now also a global push toward government-managed digital currencies. With a digital currency, if you’re not a ‘good citizen,’ if you pay to see a movie you shouldn’t see, if you go to a play you shouldn’t go to, which the vaccine passport will know because you have to scan it everywhere you go, then your revenue stream can be shut off or your taxes can be boosted or your bank account won’t function. There is no coming back from this.

I was asked by a reporter, ‘What if Americans don’t adopt this?’

And I said, ‘You’re already talking from a world that’s gone if this succeeds in being rolled out.’ Because if we don’t reject the vaccine passports, there won’t be any choice. There will be no such thing as refusing to adopt it. There won’t be capitalism. There won’t be free assembly. There won’t be privacy. There won’t be choice in anything that you want to do in your life.

And there will be no escape.

 In short, this was something from which there was no returning. If indeed there was a ‘hill to die on,’ this was it. 

This kind of digital currency is already in use in China, and it is being rapidly developed in countries like Britain and Australia, to mention only some.

Wolf is not the only one to warn against the decisive implications that accepting digital currencies would have for democracy. 

Financial gurus such as Catherine Austin Fitts and Melissa Cuimmei have both signalled that it is imperative not to yield to the lies, exhortations, threats and whatever other rhetorical strategies the neo-fascists might employ to force one into this digital financial prison. In an interview where she deftly summarises the current situation of being “at war” with the globalists, Cuimmei has warned that the drive towards digital passports explains the attempt to get young children ‘vaccinated’ en masse: unless they can do so on a large scale, they could not draw children into the digital control system, and the latter would therefore not work. She has also stressed that the refusal to comply is the only way to stop this digital prison from becoming a reality. We have to learn to say “No!”

Why a digital prison, and one far more effective that Orwell’s dystopian society of Oceania? The excerpt from Wolf’s book, above, already indicates that the digital ‘currencies’ that would be shown in your Central World Bank account, would not be money, which you could spend as you saw fit; in effect, they would have the status of programmable vouchers that would dictate what you can and cannot do with them. 

They constitute a prison worse than debt, paralysing as the latter may be; if you don’t play the game of spending them on what is permissible, you could literally be forced to live without food or shelter, that is, eventually to die. Simultaneously, the digital passports of which these currencies would be a part, represent a surveillance system that would record everything you do and wherever you go. Which means that a social credit system of the kind that functions in China, and has been explored in the dystopian television series, Black Mirror, would be built into it, which could make or break you.  

In her The Solari Report, Austin Fitts, for her part, elaborates on what one can do to “stop CBDCs,” which includes the use of cash, as far as possible, limiting one’s dependence on digital transaction options in favour of analog, and using good local banks instead of the banking behemoths, in the process decentralising financial power, which is further strengthened by supporting small local businesses instead of large corporations. 

One should be under no illusion that this will prove to be easy, however. As history has taught us, when dictatorial powers attempt to gain power over people’s lives, resistance on the part of the latter is usually met with force, or ways of neutralising resistance.

As Lena Petrova reports, this was recently demonstrated in Nigeria, which was one of the first countries in the world (Ukraine being another), to introduce CBDCs, and where there was initially a very tepid response from the population, where most people prefer using cash (partly because many cannot afford smartphones). 

Not to be outdone, the Nigerian government resorted to dubious shenanigans, such as printing less money and asking people to hand in their ‘old’ banknotes for ‘new’ ones, which have not materialised. The result? People are starving because they lack cash to buy food, and they do not have, or do not want, CBDCs, partly because they lack smartphones and partly because they resist these digital currencies. 

It is difficult to tell whether Nigerians’ doubts about CBDCs is rooted in their awareness that, once embraced, the digital passport of which these currencies will comprise a part, would allow the government complete surveillance and control of the populace. Time will tell whether Nigerians will accept this Orwellian nightmare lying down.

Which brings me to the significant philosophical point underpinning any argument about resisting the drive for dictatorial power through mass surveillance. As every enlightened person should know, there are different kinds of power. One such variety of power is encapsulated in Immanuel Kant’s famous motto for enlightenment, formulated in his famous 18th-century essay, “What is Enlightenment?” The motto reads: “Sapere aude!” and translates as “Have the courage to think for yourself,” or “Dare to think!” 

This motto may be said to correspond with what contributors to the activities of Brownstone Institute engage in. Hence, the emphasis on critical intellectual engagement is indispensable. But is it sufficient? I would argue that, while speech act theory has demonstrated, accurately – emphasising the pragmatic aspect of language – that speaking (and one could add writing) is already ‘doing something,’ there is another sense of ‘doing.’ 

This is its meaning of acting in the sense one encounters in discourse theory – which demonstrates the interwovenness of speaking (or writing) and acting through the imbrication of language with power relations. What this implies is that language use is intertwined with actions that find their correlate(s) in speaking and writing. This is compatible with Hannah Arendt’s conviction, that of labour, work and action (the components of the vita activa), action – the verbal engagement with others, broadly for political purposes, is the highest embodiment of human activity.

Philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have shed important light on the question of the connection between Kant’s “Sapere aude!” and action. In the third volume of their magisterial trilogy, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2009; the other two volumes being Empire and Multitude), they argue that although Kant’s “major voice” shows that he was indeed an Enlightenment philosopher of the transcendental method, who uncovered the conditions of possibility of certain knowledge of the law-governed phenomenal world, but by implication also of a practical life of dutiful social and political responsibility, there is also a seldom-noticed “minor voice” in Kant’s work. 

This points, according to them, towards an alternative to the modern power complex that Kant’s “major voice” affirms, and it is encountered precisely in his motto, articulated in the short essay on enlightenment referred to above. They claim further that the German thinker developed his motto in an ambiguous manner – on the one hand “Dare to think” does not undermine his encouragement, that citizens carry out their various tasks obediently and pay their taxes to the sovereign. Needless to stress, such an approach amounts to the strengthening of the social and political status quo. But on the other hand, they argue that Kant himself creates the aperture for reading this enlightenment exhortation (p. 17): 

[…] against the grain: ‘dare to know’ really means at the same time also ‘know how to dare’. This simple inversion indicates the audacity and courage required, along with the risks involved, in thinking, speaking, and acting autonomously. This is the minor Kant, the bold, daring Kant, which is often hidden, subterranean, buried in his texts, but from time to time breaks out with a ferocious, volcanic, disruptive power. Here reason is no longer the foundation of duty that supports established social authority but rather a disobedient, rebellious force that breaks through the fixity of the present and discovers the new. Why, after all, should we dare to think and speak for ourselves if these capacities are only to be silenced immediately by a muzzle of obedience? 

One cannot fault Hardt and Negri here; notice, above, that they include ‘acting’ among those things for which one requires the courage to ‘dare.’ As I have previously pointed out in a discussion of critical theory and their interpretation of Kant on the issue of acting, towards the conclusion of his essay, Kant uncovers the radical implications of his argument: if the ruler does not submit himself (or herself) to the very same rational rules that govern the citizens’ actions, there is no obligation on the part of the latter to obey such a monarch any longer. 

In other words, rebellion is justified when authorities themselves do not act reasonably (which includes the tenets of ethical rationality), but, by implication, unjustifiably, if not aggressively, towards citizens. 

There is a lesson in this as far as the ineluctable need for action is concerned when rational argument with would-be oppressors gets one nowhere. This is especially the case when it becomes obvious that these oppressors are not remotely interested in a reasonable exchange of ideas, but summarily resort to the current unreasonable incarnation of technical rationality, namely AI-controlled mass surveillance, with the purpose of subjugating entire populations. 

Such action might take the form of refusing ‘vaccinations’ and rejecting CBDCs, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that one will have to combine critical thinking with action in the face of merciless strategies of subjugation on the part of the unscrupulous globalists.

Don’t Believe Anything – But Recognize the Verge of a New Dark Age

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

A decade ago, discovering every significant media outlet in the western world as tabloid news would have been inconceivable. Well, the unbelievable is all around us pounding pure lies into our brains on behalf of people eviler than Emperor Caligula. Just Google Putin, Russia, or even China, and with some effort, you’ll see what I mean.

In the mainstream, your average American gets, President Joe Biden is some kind of Dwight Eisenhower or Harry Truman figure. A man who cannot find his way off a stage or navigate the White House lawn is somehow a fit chess competitor for Vladimir Putin. The latest snafu is about his visit with Ukraine’s Zelensky a day before Putin spoke about a new phase of Russian policy. The CNN headline read “Biden’s Ukraine visit upstages Putin and leaves Moscow’s military pundits raging.” As an American who served his country in the military and other capacities, it’s sickening. Get this.

These media outlets and the Neocons have Americans believing a Chinese weather balloon that blew off course was gathering vital US nuclear missile silo intel. And Joe Biden waited until it flew all the way across the country before launching a multi-million-dollar F-22 strike to kill the spy machine. Days later, US fighter pilots shot down UFOs over Alaska. The only positive note after that was the Internet memes poking fun at the senile President and our goofball policies. Oh, but there’s more, oh so much more.

The New York Times and the rest are providing pushback on the Biden-authorized Nord Stream sabotage reported by one of the world’s most respected investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh. The guy who uncovered the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, key facts on Watergate, CIA domestic spy, and a lot more busted the Biden administration for using Navy Seals to detonate undersea charges dooming a Russia to Germany gas pipeline. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s revelations should have caused a media frenzy, a UN summit, and a NATO emergency meeting. But the people in charge can’t have that. The story of the decade so far is being slid under the rug. The reason why is explained in something Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently:

“In many cases, ruling elites in unfriendly countries do not act of their free will, but only because they must show solidarity within their block. NATO and the EU enforce heavy-handed discipline on their members at the initiative of an aggressive minority.”

“How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” should be a reason for Biden’s impeachment hearings to be planned. The Germans should be banning US military personnel from their borders. And the Russians should probably go ahead and declare war when it all pans out true. We have this from Hersh’s sources and research:

“Last June, the Navy divers, operating under cover of the highly publicized NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with knowledge of the operational planning.”

The pipelines, which supplied Germany and much of Europe with cheap gas to run industry and fueled the lives of millions, were sabotaged without so much as a mention of the plan to America’s lawmakers. Hersh went on to describe how Biden, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, and Anthony Blinken were key conspirators in the illegal plan to undermine a NATO ally just to get to Putin and Russia. Biden had announced months before, after a meeting with Germany’s Scholz, that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “there would be no pipeline.”

Of course, Biden and his scandalous minions knew Russia had to act to prevent further NATO shenanigans in Ukraine, as we learned from the revelations of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel about the Minsk accords being a ruse. Talk about world-class liars and thugs. America’s leadership makes the worst Israeli mafioso seem harmless as Mickey Mouse. These people will get our world blown up.

Now Biden, Zelensky, all the EU criminals, and even exiled Putin enemy and Russian mafioso Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky have been seen at the Munich Security Council predicting Putin’s demise—some more. Once we’d have thought US presidents, New York Times publishers, and killer thugs kicked from Russia like bullying kids from the schoolyard would be strange bedfellows. But this Biden administration has to be the most corrupt bunch since the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.

Get this, one of the men involved in the Hunter Biden laptop affair, Prof. Gal Luft, is now in leg irons in a Cyprus jail awaiting extradition to the US for, you won’t believe it, being an arms dealer. Luft had helped the FBI and other agencies with highly incriminating facts about Hunter Biden, and now he’s on a path like Jeffrey Epstein or Julian Assange. Hanged by the neck, or something like that. Oh, and congressional investigators are asking who paid millions of dollars for Hunter Biden’s art? The lunacy goes on, and on, and on.

I’ll leave off with the European Parliament bosses blocking public scrutiny of Ursula von der Leyen over a Pfizer contract she clearly benefitted from. And Pfizer gate is not the EU President’s only worry. She’s now pledged another €1 billion for Ukraine’s fast recovery. That is, if there is a Ukraine to rebuild once western weapons and mercenaries force the Russians to obliterate the country just to keep NATO and bio-weapons labs out. For me, it now seems obvious why the liberal world order has gone all in with this proxy war against Russia. If the citizens of our countries ever find out what their leaders have really done, there will be public hangings Mussolini style across the NATO cabal.

So, forget the tabloids except to use reverse psychology for understanding the news. If the White House says we did not blow up Nord Stream, you can bet your last dollar we did. Think about our track record, America’s I mean. Our leaders operate like very drunken Roman senators, and our military operates as if Hannibal were commanding the armed forces of every third-world country. We even have officials swearing that Putin does not have any nuclear weapons. No really. This is where we are with detente in the 21st century, on the verge of a new Dark Ages.

Arguments Against Despair

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By David Edwards

Source: Media Lens

Eliot Jacobson is a retired professor of mathematics and computer science who regularly appears on our Twitter feed discussing the climate crisis. He sends tweets under the grim title, ‘Your “moment of doom” for the day’. These channel the latest news on rapidly rising carbon emissions and temperatures, catastrophic examples of extreme weather, and so on. It’s depressing fare, and Jacobson is candid about the level of anguish he feels:

‘I woke up feeling angry at about 2:30 AM this morning.

‘It’s easy to find something wrong with just about anything I look at. It’s all projection. I’ve been writing and deleting Tweets, but I still feel angry.

‘I’m angry that there’s very little I can do and there’s no way out.’

In a blog post, he wrote:

‘This sadness is so overwhelming, so all-consuming, that it takes my breath away. The things I do to cope with the weight of it all are mere distractions from this sadness. Volunteer for a few hours, then sadness. Go for a walk, then sadness. Listen to music, read, visit websites, then sadness. Visit with friends or family, then sadness. Sadness returns every time I have a moment to reflect on the predicament of the present moment.’

I’m no stranger to this emotional roller-coaster. 1988 was the big year for me, when NASA scientist James Hansen told the world we were heading for disaster. I had no difficulty believing him.

It seemed inconceivable to me that the profit motive driving global industry could be restrained, let alone reversed, in time. I was then working as a marketing manager for British Telecom in the West End of London where I set up a Green Initiatives Group. Small changes were made, but they were just window dressing – deeper changes impacting profit were completely unthinkable. It seemed obvious to me that this fundamentalist corporate resistance must, sooner or later, lead to disaster.

I first protested for action on climate change with Friends of the Earth on the streets of central London in October 1989. I was 27 when I started campaigning; I’m now 61. I’ve thought a lot, worried a lot, talked a lot, read a lot, and written a lot about these issues for three and a half decades, more than half my life.

It seems absolutely incredible to me – by which I mean it seems something that I honestly would not have believed was possible – that what seemed like an urgent crisis to me in the late 1980s can still seem like ‘hype’, a ‘liberal tax scam’, an ‘oligarch plot’ and ‘bourgeois hysteria’ to large numbers of people in 2023. In the 1980s, we said things would change when there were ‘bodies in the streets’ – but the bodies are all around us now, and there is still no sign of meaningful change.

I say all this to make clear that I am in no way complacent about, or indifferent to, the looming climate catastrophe (it seems absurd to even describe it as ‘looming’). My comments below are not intended to detract from the vital need to take immediate action; they are addressed to the despair that I know many people, like Jacobson, are feeling.

You, Me And The Mysterium Tremendum

After everything I have myself suffered, it seems to me that we have two main tasks at the present time: first, to do everything in our power to avert the terrifying crisis threatening us with extinction. Second, to do everything we can to transform the fear and suffering of our predicament into love and bliss.

The first of these is new. The second may sound preposterous, even annoying, but it has actually always been the great human task.

Many activists devoted to action, to change, despise the very idea that our own happiness should be any kind of concern. The suggestion is dismissed as self-indulgent ‘navel gazing’. We have to dispense with all such ‘sentimentality’ and focus on ‘hard politics’. We have to plunge into the darkness of realpolitik and fight for our lives. It’s going to be bruising, to hurt – forget all kitten-cuddling ideas about ‘love’ and feeling good. And how on earth can you feel ‘bliss’ when the world is falling apart? Such nonsense!

As so often, the anger is rooted in fear – the fear that such concerns will divert energy and attention away from what really matters. The counter-argument is that not giving a damn about personal feelings, about our needs as human beings in this short life, is actually one of the key factors that got us into this fine mess in the first place. (See my Cogitation: ‘Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Parts 1 and 2)

Just as I can’t understand how so many people can fail to see the truth of the existential crisis we’re facing, I can’t understand how people can feel so absolutely certain about the significance, the meaning, of this crisis that they fall into absolute despair.

First of all, we need to remember that despair is a function of mind; it is not something mandated by Existence. As Thoreau noted, we have a choice:

‘However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.’ (Thoreau, ‘Walden’, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.292)

This has been as true for everyone in human history facing death from illness, starvation, genocide, as it is for all of us now, facing extinction.

I find the universe so mysterious, so fundamentally Unknown, and even Unknowable, that I cannot establish a solid base of existential certainty that allows me to be confidently desperate about even this situation.

Of course, climate collapse is terrible for us – I don’t want to die, you don’t want to die; we don’t want so-called human ‘civilisation’ to disappear. But we all do have to die and the deeper significance of even a disaster on this scale is fundamentally unknown.

We are a miniscule part of billions of years of existence involving 200 billion galaxies each containing 200 billion stars, and who knows how many planets, swirling over distances that completely defy imagination – all of it emerging out of the mysterium tremendum, the how and why of Existence (we can’t say Creation; we don’t even know if it has a beginning or an end).

This immensity of space and time has led to this moment that stands before us. Here we are! Everything in this cosmos has led us here. We can’t just blame politicians, corporate executives and their journalistic enablers – the universe made them as they are and this is what the universe has given us to deal with.

Who are we to break down in despair as if we were certain about the final meaning of what is happening? What do we really know about anything? Do we really know enough to find a solid position from which we can cast judgement even on the extinction of human life, or even of all life, on this planet? 

In November, spiritual writer Steve Taylor posted a poem, ‘Being Watched by The Moon’, on Facebook. Taylor wrote of our cosmic near neighbour:

‘Then I noticed a look of concern on her face.

There was a glint of disapproval, a hint of dismay

in her gaze, as it followed me home

as if she was witnessing an accident, or a crime.

Had I done something wrong? I wondered.

Had I injured or offended someone?

Had I gone astray, and lost the meaning of my life?

But then I looked closer, and realised:

she wasn’t just watching me.

She was watching the whole world.’

A glint of ‘concern’, ‘disapproval’ and ‘dismay’, as if ‘witnessing an accident, or a crime’? Is this really the most likely reaction of the Moon? After all, she has seen a lot – she’s around 4.5 billion years old, about the same age as the Earth. Human beings have been around for just 2.8 million years, and in our problematic modern form for just 200,000 years. The Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago from an enormous molecular cloud that gave birth to numerous other stars. Our star has about 5 billion years of life left; she’s in her prime. The universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old – at least in this cycle, if it is a cycle. We don’t know where all this comes from, what it means, what lies at the base of it all. 

Worst case scenarios suggest that human-induced climate change might devastate most animal and plant species to such an extent that it could take five million years for life to recover. But 5 million years is a blink of the cosmic eye to old-timers like the Moon, Earth and Sun whose memories stretch back, not millions, but billions of years. And if things don’t work out here post-climate collapse, maybe they’ll go better among the billions and billions of stars out there – that’s a lot of stars, a lot of possibility. From this perspective, one might surmise that human despair at the prospect of human extinction is one more manifestation of an egotism that causes us to vastly overestimate our own importance.

Might it alter our despairing perspective to consider that the enlightened mystics might be right in declaring that, not just plants and animals, but the entire universe is alive? We think life arises miraculously, ‘accidentally’ (what on earth does that mean?), Lazarus-like, from dead matter. But atoms are pretty lively phenomena; they are whizzing flea circuses of jumping sub-atomic particles, quantum waves and other forms of energy. Might we one day conclude that what we call life arises from these subtler forms of life? Is energy in some sense life?

And might our despair be leavened by the possibility, as mystics also insist, that, not just human beings, but the entire cosmos is conscious? What would it mean, if it turns out that even rocks are consciousness in a kind of coma; that evolution is ultimately a process of consciousness awakening from the slumber (not the death) of matter?

If everything is alive and everything is conscious, then even human beings are unable to inflict any real damage – a manifestation of eternal life rises and falls, comes and goes, but the ocean of living consciousness continues completely unharmed.

The universe seems to consist of objects, of material ‘things’. But that is not all: these rocks, animals, planets and stars appear in the something that is no-thing that we call space. Likewise, our awareness also provides an internal space in which sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions can appear and be known. We assume the universe is material and yet awareness seems non-material, seems entirely other than that which is material. Is it possible that external space and the internal space of awareness are related? Could they actually be the same phenomenon? We tend to see our internal space as an epiphenomenon of the brain, but is external space an epiphenomenon of matter?

Could the mystics even be right when they insist that awareness evolves in the universe by moving from ageing bodies to new ones? Westerners find this a childishly obvious example of wishful thinking. But does that make it untrue? Do we imagine that Buddha, Bodhidharma, Nagarjuna, Lao tse and all other enlightened humans were inventing when they made this claim over and over again? Could they even be right in arguing that consciousness moves from old, exhausted planets to fresh, new planets better suited to the continued evolution of consciousness?

If that sounds ludicrous, is it any crazier than the idea that the universe suddenly emerged from nothingness – nothing, nothing, nothing, then, Bang! – or that it has somehow always existed? These appear to be the only two possibilities, and yet both seem totally nonsensical to us. If the only logical possibilities seem impossible, how can we so confidently root our despair in our clearly inadequate human capacity for logic?

‘Satchitananda‘

I controversially suggested our task was to find bliss in the face of looming extinction. Is that possible? Is it moral even to try in the face of so much suffering?

Seasoned meditators tell us that the mysterious awareness perceiving these words is inherently blissful. Not just pleasurable, mind you – ecstatic. We are told the bliss is already there, is always there; that it is the very nature of awareness. The idea is captured in the Sanskrit epithet ‘satchitananda’, or ‘reality, consciousness, bliss’ – existence is aware and awareness is blissful.

This sounds counter-intuitive standing at a bus stop on a rainy Monday morning commute to work. We are here, we are aware, thank you very much, and we are emphatically not beaming with delight.

There are two possible explanations for this contradiction: either all the enlightened mystics were talking nonsense, or we are not in fact here, not in fact aware, and are therefore not able to experience the bliss that is here.

But if we’re not here, where on earth are we?

We are physically here, of course, but our minds are not in the present; they are in the past and in the future. Because the past and future do not exist, because they are mere ideas in the mind, when we are thinking we are absent; we are not truly here.

There are times when I sit in meditation for an hour when thoughts finally drop away; thoughts by which I am otherwise unceasingly plagued by day and night (dreams are thinking in pictures). When thoughts drop away, even for a moment, something very subtle, but very powerful slips through. In my experience, it emerges like a wispy strand of pink candy floss spinning out from some completely unknown depth and melting into my heart (my ‘dantian’ and ‘lower dantian’, in the terminology of Qigong). The melting is experienced as a sweetness, a delight, that glows with unconditional love for everyone and everything.

It is clear, sitting alone in a room, that this loving bliss is uncaused. I may have been as miserable as sin about the state of the world before slumping down to watch my thoughts and feelings – nothing in my world has objectively changed in that hour. In fact, as all the mystics insist, this loving delight has not been caused; it has simply been unveiled, revealed.

Thought is the veil. This is why we can’t feel the bliss of existence: it is hidden from us by layer upon layer of thought, rather like the multiple layers of cloud that typically greet solemn holidaymakers returning to Britain.

Human beings are the only animal that can become lost in the unreal world of mentation. All the virtuous, politically correct and well-intentioned thought by which we have always hoped to make the world a better place – the whole, misguided 17th and 18th century dream of the European ‘Enlightenment’ – has combined with all other thoughts to form an almost impenetrable barrier between us and the real source of civilisation, of personal and global salvation, within us.

The truth is that we have destroyed our planet and become almost completely estranged from the inherent bliss of being because we have sought civilisation and happiness in our heads. In reality, true civilisation – not the ability to build machines to pyrrhically ‘conquer’ nature, other animals and humans – is found when we transcend thought and connect deeply and often with our hearts.

‘The Best People In The World’ – Actual Human Civilisation

The very idea of technological ‘progress’ implies some kind of ‘Manifest Destiny’. It is our ‘destiny’ – the natural path of any ‘advanced’ civilisation on any planet – to develop ever more powerful technology, that we might one day voyage across the cosmic ocean just as we once voyaged across the water and air of our home planet.

But this may be wrong. It may be that the right option is to journey inwards in an exploration of being, of consciousness, to an unimagined brave new world of love and bliss.

Perhaps we don’t hear anything from highly technological ‘civilisations’ out there in the cosmos because the whole effort is a suicidal wrong turn that leads to near-instant decline and extinction. The cosmos may nevertheless be teeming with genuinely civilised beings who have gone in a very different direction.

After all, even on our planet, there have been examples of authentically civilised humans – people who live in their hearts rather than in their heads, who are free of our obsessive thinking. They appear to have rooted their daily lives in the kind of love and bliss that we in the West can only find in meditation.

In his book, ‘The Conquest of Paradise’, writer and ecologist Kirkpatrick Sale described the low-tech, Taino society encountered by the Spanish conquistadors in 1492:

‘So little a part did violence play in their system that they seem, remarkably, to have been a society without war (at least we know of no war music or signals or artifacts, and no evidence of intertribal combats) and even without overt conflict (Las Casas reports that no Spaniard ever saw two Tainos fighting).’ (Kirkpatrick Sale, ‘The Conquest of Paradise’, Papermac, 1992, p.99)

But the lack of violence was only one aspect of the Tainos’ towering civilisation:

‘And here we come to what was obviously the Tainos’ outstanding cultural achievement, a proficiency in the social arts that led those who first met them to comment unfailingly on their friendliness, their warmth, their openness, and above all – so striking to those of an acquisitive culture – their generosity.’ (p.99)

Even Admiral Cristobal Colon (‘Christopher Columbus’ in old money), the man who brought death and disaster to the lives of the Taino, recorded in his journal:

‘They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest. They became so much our friends that it was a marvel… They traded and gave everything they had, with good will.’ (pp.99-100)

He continued:

‘I sent the ship’s boat ashore for water, and they very willingly showed my people where the water was, and they themselves carried the full barrels to the boat, and took great delight in pleasing us. They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal.’

Colon added:

‘They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.’ (p.100)

Sale wrote poignantly:

‘It is to be regretted that the Admiral, unable to see past their nakedness, as it were, knew not the real virtues of the people he confronted. For the Tainos’ lives were in many ways as idyllic as their surroundings, into which they fit with such skill and comfort. They were well fed and well housed, without poverty or serious disease. They enjoyed considerable leisure, given over to dancing, singing, ballgames, and sex, and expressed themselves artistically in basketry, woodworking, pottery, and jewellery. They lived in general harmony and peace, without greed or covetousness or theft.’ (pp.100-101)

American geographical scholar Carl Sauer concluded:

‘…the tropical idyll of the accounts of Columbus… was largely true’. (p.101)

The Tainos were human beings who lived in their hearts, not in their heads. They had no august universities packed with thinkers, philosophers and other half-crazed intellectuals; no 24/7 outpourings of media pollution – they lived in the bliss of awareness unclouded by obsessive thought.

As for us! By painful contrast, in his book, ‘Impact of Western Man’, historian William Woodruff commented on the society from which Colon had sailed:

‘No civilization prior to the European had occasion to believe in the systematic material progress of the whole human race; no civilization placed such stress upon the quantity rather than the quality of life; no civilization drove itself so relentlessly to an ever-receding goal; no civilization was so passion-charged to replace what is with what could be; no civilization had striven as the West has done to direct the world according to its will; no civilization has known so few moments of peace and tranquillity.’ (Sale, ibid, p.91, my emphasis)

To live in the head, to sacrifice the moment for the future, to prioritise the ‘serious’, ‘important’ work of the greedy, plotting mind over the bliss of the heart is to build a self-destructive, doomed version of fake ‘civilisation’.

Or consider the experience of the Mexican anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias on visiting the island of Bali in 1938. Covarrubias wrote:

‘No other race gives the impression of living in such close touch with nature, creates such a complete feeling of harmony between the people and the surroundings… The Balinese belong in their environment in the same way that a humming-bird or an orchid belongs in a Central American jungle.’ (Miguel Covarrubias, ‘Island of Bali’, KPI, 1986, p.11)

Covarrubias added:

‘A man is assisted by his neighbours in every task he cannot perform alone; they help him willingly and as a matter of duty, not expecting any reward other than the knowledge that, were they in his case, he would help in the same manner’. (p.14)

The result, Covarrubias wrote, was a village system which operated as ‘a closely unified organism in which the communal policy is harmony and cooperation – a system that works to everybody’s advantage’. (p.15)

In the late 1990s, I worked with the Swedish ecologist and activist Helena Norberg-Hodge who lived for many years among the people of Ladakh on the Tibetan plateau of Northern India. In her book ‘Ancient Futures’, Norberg-Hodge wrote of how she was bewildered by the strange fact that the Ladakhis were always smiling:

‘At first I couldn’t believe that the Ladakhis could be as happy as they appeared. It took me a long time to accept that the smiles I saw were real. Then, in my second year there, while at a wedding, I sat back and observed the guests enjoying themselves. Suddenly I heard myself saying, “Aha, they really are that happy”. Only then did I recognize that I had been walking around with cultural blinders on, convinced that the Ladakhis could not be as happy as they seemed. Hidden behind the jokes and laughter had to be the same frustration, jealousy, and inadequacy as in my own society. In fact, without knowing it, I had been assuming that there were no significant cultural differences in the human potential for happiness. It was a surprise for me to realize that I had been making such unconscious assumptions, and as a result I think I became more open to experiencing what was really there.’ (Helena Norberg-Hodge, ‘Ancient Futures – Learning From Ladakh,’ Sierra, 1992, p.84)

As amongst the Tainos, fighting in traditional Ladakhi society was unknown, disputes were settled quickly and peaceably, and when one person had a problem the entire community did its best to help:

‘In traditional Ladakh, aggression of any sort is exceptionally rare: rare enough to say that it is virtually non-existent… Even arguments are rare. I have hardly ever seen anything more than mild disagreement in the traditional villages—certainly nothing compared with what you find in the West.’ (p.46)

Norberg-Hodge concluded:

‘I have never met people who seem so healthy emotionally, so secure, as the Ladakhis.’ (p.85)

These societies that seem so ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilised’ to goal-oriented, power-obsessed, head-trapped Europeans, were actually exemplars of authentic human civilisation.

I am not suggesting that we can become like the Tainos, Balinese and Ladakhis. If we are too high-tech primitive to save ourselves from climate disaster, we can obviously not hope to create that kind of paradise on earth.

What I am suggesting, though, is that the existence of these societies powerfully supports the contention of the mystics: that awareness unclouded by obsessive thinking is indeed in the nature of bliss and love. I am suggesting that such low-tech civilisations may exist in abundance, undetected, on other planets that will of course continue to thrive no matter what happens on our planet. I am also suggesting that you and I can create a little patch of this paradise in our own hearts.

Perhaps in our world as it is, genuinely civilised, loving societies are doomed to be destroyed by brutal, head-trapped, Western-style societies. But you and I still have the freedom, even in the face of this wider brutality, even in the face of environmental catastrophe, to live a life overflowing with love and bliss. Maybe that is all that is possible for us, and maybe that is enough. 

Send in the Clowns

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Yellen and Garland perform back-to-back surprise visits to Ukraine

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

Sometimes I think that the script being used by the Biden Administration to manage its foreign and national security policies has been written by George Orwell, though I am not sure if it based on 1984 or Animal Farm. Maybe it is a combination of the two. Either way, it would help explain why there is something seriously wrong here. For example, at the end of February Congress, confronted by a debt ceiling, began discussing cutting Medicare and Social Security while more recently a banking sector crisis seems to be developing so Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen decided to go off doing photo-ops in Kiev embracing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky shortly after handing him the keys to the US economy. She explained to Zelensky how the White House had approved an additional $12 billion in aid to Ukraine during the previous week, including $2 billion for the military and $10 billion to support Zelensky’s government and other infrastructure needs. The US Treasury is now de facto the source of the Ukraine government’s entire annual budget. In addition, Yellen described glowingly how the Treasury and State Departments will implement a new round of sanctions against more than 200 entities and individuals with ties to Russia’s military, high-technology industries, and its metals and mining sectors. The US Department of Commerce is also enforcing export restrictions on materials and technology, including semiconductors, sold by American companies to customers in Russia and China.

In defense of her grand mission, Yellen penned an op-ed for the always compliant New York Times explaining the importance of Ukraine to the United States. She wrote how in Ukraine “…Russia’s barbaric attacks continue — but Kyiv stands strong and free. Ukraine’s heroic resistance is the direct product of the courage and resilience of Ukraine’s military, leadership and people. But President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians would be the first to admit that they can’t do this alone — and that international support is crucial to sustaining their resistance. I’m in Kyiv to reaffirm our unwavering support of the Ukrainian people. Mr. Putin is counting on our global coalition’s resolve to wane, which he thinks will give him the upper hand in the war. But he is wrong. As President Biden said here last week, America will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes… Ukrainians are fighting for their lives on the front lines of the free world. Today, and every day, they deserve America’s unyielding support.”

The Yellen op-ed drones on with a lie so large that it is astonishing that the New York Times would even print it: “When confronted with scenes of brutality and oppression, Americans have always been quick to stand up and do the right thing. Our strength as a nation comes from our commitment to our ideals — and our capacity to see in others the same desires that animated our own struggles for freedom and justice.” But then she tops that with assurances from “President Zelensky, [who] has pledged to use these funds in the ‘most responsible way.’ We welcome this commitment, as well as his longstanding agenda to strengthen good governance in Ukraine.” Huh?

And here is Yellen’s version of “Why We Fight!”: “Our support is motivated, first and foremost, by a moral duty to come to the aid of a people under attack. We also know that, as President Zelensky has said, our assistance is not charity. It’s an investment in ‘global security and democracy.’ Let’s look at the strategic impact of our support for Ukraine so far. Mr. Putin’s war poses a direct threat to European security, as well as to the laws and values that underpin the rules-based international system.”

So, Americans have a “moral duty” apparently up to and including sending their sons and daughters to die supporting Ukraine. And ah yes, it’s all about the “free” world, democracy and the notorious rules based international system! Has anyone yet cited Hegel’s observation that the President Joe Biden Administration’s foreign policy has already “repeated itself, first as a tragedy in Afghanistan, second as a farce”? Meanwhile one suspects Zelensky was laughing all the way to the bank as Yellen disappeared over the horizon to come up with the cash, as that old expression goes, and he probably already has one of his buddies shopping for a new villa on the French Riviera to supplement his other real estate! But wait! The story became even more exciting the following week, involving another visit to Mr. Z by America’s nearly invisible Attorney General Merrick Garland, a man who can literally look Z in the eye as they are both very short. Garland is generally engaged in chasing white supremacists and requiring all new FBI hires to learn all about how to identify and pursue antisemites, but he has made two trips to Kiev to meet mano-a-mano with the brave olive drab t-shirt clad warrior who is already being beatified as the twenty-first century’s Winston Churchill.

Garland was in town to do the other thing the engages his sense of law and order, which is to set up a tribunal to arrest, prosecute and punish Russian war criminals after Ukraine emerges triumphant from its conflict with the unimaginably evil President Vladimir Putin. It would be modeled on the Nuremberg Tribunals that tried leading Nazis after the Second World War, and Garland has cited his family’s escape from the so-called holocaust to explain why he is intent on personally being involved in delivering what he describes as “justice.” A Justice Department spokeswoman described Garland’s mission as being in Kiev to personally “reaffirm America’s commitment to help hold Russia responsible for war crimes committed in its unjust and unprovoked invasion against its sovereign neighbor.”

Garland had several meetings with President Volodymyr Zelensky and foreign law enforcement officials including Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin while attending what was billed as the “United for Justice Conference.” Zelensky elaborated that the purpose of the conference was to hold Russia’s leadership accountable for the alleged atrocities carried out by its army. “The main issue of all these meetings is accountability,” he said. The US Justice Department is reportedly actively engaged in the gathering of evidence to indict the Russians. During Garland’s first visit to Ukraine in June 2022 he announced the appointment of Eli Rosenbaum, an Office of Special Investigations prosecutor best known for going after former Nazis, to direct American efforts to identify and track Russian war criminals.

Garland laid it on thick, as was expected from someone responsible for prosecuting the rest of the world when it steps out of line. He told his hosts that “Just over twelve months ago, invading Russian forces began committing atrocities at the largest scale in any armed conflict since the Second World War. We are here today in Ukraine to speak clearly, and with one voice: the perpetrators of those crimes will not get away with them. In addition to our work in partnership with Ukraine and the international community, the United States has also opened criminal investigations into war crimes in Ukraine that may violate US law.” He concluded by throwing out the complete bullshit party line much beloved by Joe Biden and Tony Blinken, that “The United States recognizes that what happens here in Ukraine will have a direct impact on the strength of our own democracy.”

Of course, there is more than a little bit of irony in all this, not to mention top level hypocrisy, as the United States has killed more people directly or indirectly while committing more crimes against humanity dished out in various ways over the past twenty years than any other country, except, predictably, Israel, which currently is committing crimes against humanity on a nearly daily basis. Curiously, however, the normally tone-deaf White House and Pentagon seem to understand, on a certain level, that opening up Pandora’s box might not be a good idea when it comes to war crimes. Last week Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin refused to share US information on alleged Russian crimes with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. The Pentagon is blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence with the ICC collected by American intelligence agencies regarding Russian activities in Ukraine because helping the court investigate Russians might set a precedent that could help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. Washington does not recognize the ICC, fearing that it might well seek to examine the sorry record of US military crimes in Asia and Africa. Israel similarly does to recognize the court for roughly the same reason.

So here we are, two top level officials from the Biden regime sneak into Kiev to give an arch crook money and unlimited moral support, together with a pledge that more cash is on the way as are arms and war crimes tribunals await those nasty Russians. And guess what? It is all packaged as being good for America! This sounds like a song that was sung previously in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and it was a tissue of lies then just as it is now. Yellen ought to have stayed home to tend to the banking system and should be giving the billions of dollars earmarked for Zelensky back to the American people. If Garland wants to investigate anyone it should be the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and Congress. And yes, his own FBI! And don’t forget how the Bidens and Clintons became multi-millionaires! And then there is the destruction of Nord Stream. Funny how every time one turns over a rock in and around the US government something really smelly surfaces.

A Fed-Issued Digital Currency: The Mark of the Beast

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A Fed-issued digital currency would be no more in our interests than the current dollar system.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: Jeremy R. Hammond Blog

China’s ‘Social Credit’ System

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” — Revelation 13:16-17

In China, as you have likely heard, the government has been experimenting with a “social credit” system aimed at giving politicians even greater control over people’s behavior. China was, of course, also the country whose authoritarian “lockdown” response to the outbreak of SARS‑CoV‑2—the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19 and was likely engineered in a Chinese lab with US government funding—was pointed to as a model for the rest of the world to follow by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO has since been aiming to acquire even more centralized global authority to issue diktats in the event of another pandemic, such as implementation of “lockdown” measures that might include travel restrictions, prevention of employment, and vaccine mandates or passport systems.

As of December 2020, around the time of the initial outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, China, social credit laws and regulations had been implemented in an estimated 80 percent of the country.

Naturally, the system is characterized by its proponents as a benevolent means to reward socially responsible people while denying privileges to unsavory and untrustworthy characters and businesses. But you and I both recognize the grave threat posed by politicians wielding this type of power and control over the population. It is an obvious threat to privacy and liberty.

The people of China regrettably but unsurprisingly appear to have welcomed this system, although the perception of public approval might be largely an artifact of people being afraid to publicly criticize the system lest their names be placed on one of the government’s “blacklists”.

As with any law or government policy, we should view it through the lens of how such power could be used as opposed to how politicians say they intend to use it.

A glimpse of how it could be used is the city of Rongcheng’s prohibition on “spreading harmful information”, violations of which could result in subtraction of points off residents’ social credit scores.

Such prohibitions must be seen in light of how governments are in the habit of interpreting “harmful information” as any information that does not align with the adopted political agenda. In the US during the COVID‑19 pandemic, there has been no greater purveyor of misinformation than the US government itself.

According to MIT Technology Review, the central government actually pressed the city to scale back the threat to individual liberty posed by its social credit system, such as enabling residents to opt-out. “The Chinese government did emphasize that all social-credit-related punishment has to adhere to existing laws,” the Review states, “but laws themselves can be unjust in the first place.”

The takeaway from that article is that “the social credit system does not (yet) exemplify abuse of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence”. But that’s no reason for the citizenry to consent to the implementation of systems that are conducive to extreme governmental abuses of authority.

A July 2019 article in Wired magazine related the example of Liu Hu, a journalist who was arrested, fined, and blacklisted, reportedly for writing about censorship and government corruption. He found himself on a “List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People’s Court as ‘not qualified’ to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.”

A more recent Newsweek article appropriately describes the system this way:

On an individual level, the government seeks to instill in the public an increased sense of morality to discourage everything from fraud and plagiarism to counterfeit goods and petty crime. But a system to make individual actions more transparent would necessitate the creation of tools to monitor all aspects of life. Social control, if not the original aim, could be an inevitable consequence, researchers say.

. . . While China’s vision of the system has yet to emerge as a dystopian tool for control driven by big data, there are real concerns about the way personal information is to be collected and processed to create social credit profiles, which could have lasting implications for individuals.

An untrustworthy government has no place dictating to its citizens what types of behaviors should be regarded as creating or breaking trust.

Human Rights Watch provides the example of lawyer Li Xioaolin, who was denied a plane ticket home while away on a work trip inside China because his name was on a blacklist of “untrustworthy” people in relation to a years-old court-related issue that he thought he had resolved.

According to Human Rights Watch, journalist Liu Hu was punished not for criticizing the government and exposing corruption but for having offered an apology that the government deemed “insincere” after losing a defamation case for publishing an article alleging that someone was an extortionist. Still, the organization notes, in both cases, “penalties were exacted in wildly arbitrary and unaccountable manners.” Additionally, “the courts failed to notify them, leaving them no chance to contest their treatment.”

According to the human rights organization, between 2013 and 2017, the Chinese government imposed more than seven million punishments to people for failing to carry out local court orders, which punishments have included publicly naming and shaming individuals and barring them from flights and trains.

After experiencing the totalitarianism of the disastrously harmful lockdown regimes and the accompanying efforts to coerce the population into accepting COVID‑19 vaccines and to censor truths countering the government’s incessant lies (I was permanently banned from LinkedIn, for example, for accurately reporting that the CDC’s claim that COVID‑19 vaccines provide greater protection against SARS‑CoV‑2 infection than natural immunity was a bald-faced lie), it should not be too difficult to imagine such a system being dangerously used to silence critics and punish dissenters so that whatever ruling regime can continue its crimes against humanity unobstructed.

The idea of a “social credit” score, of course, is inherently tied to the idea of central banking. In the US, the central bank is the Federal Reserve, a government-legislated private monopoly over the supply of currency. Increasingly, there is talk of a central bank digital currency, heightening concerns about the government having the means to exercise power over us and control our behavior.

“Project Hamilton”

As an example of how the Fed is exploring the idea of adopting a digital currency, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has teamed up with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston under the appropriately named “Project Hamilton”.

Alexander Hamilton, of course, was instrumental in the adoption of central banking by the US government, famously at odds with Thomas Jefferson, who rightly opposed the idea and warned about the dangers inherent in such an institution. Jefferson appeared to hold the view that the means of exchange and interest rates ought to be determined by the market as opposed to being determined by fiat by a roomful of central planners.

Jefferson accurately foresaw how the government would use the central bank to pay for its spending as an alternative to raising taxes directly, and how the debt that would consequently be incurred by this uncontrolled spending would ultimately be borne by future generations.

In a letter to John Wayles Eppes in 1813, for example, Jefferson wrote:

I have said that the taxes should be continued by annual or biennial re-enactments; because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse, is a salutary restraint, from which an honest government ought not to wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free. No tax should ever be yielded for longer than that of the Congress granting it, except when pledged for the reimbursement of a loan.

. . . Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs. . . . Treasury bills, bottomed on taxes, bearing, or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation, will take the place of so much gold & silver, which last, when crouded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level.

In a letter to John Taylor in 1816, Jefferson described central banking as rightly “reprobated” and as “a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction”. He wrote, “And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale”.

Jefferson viewed the federal government as having no authority to institute a central banking system. As he wrote in 1791, “The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution.”

The stated aim of Project Hamilton “is to investigate the technical feasibility of a general purpose central bank digital currency (CBDC) that could be used by an economy the size of the United States and to gain a hands-on understanding of a CBDC’s technical challenges, opportunities, risks, and tradeoffs.”

The project is part of MIT’s “Digital Currency Initiative”, which is aimed at bringing minds together “to conduct the research necessary to support the development of digital currency and blockchain technology.”

The aim of the collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has been “to develop a hypothetical CBDC.” MIT describes the possibility of a “central-bank-issued digital currency” as “a unique opportunity to address challenges in our existing payments system and design an economy that is more resilient, participatory, and open.”

We can reasonably assume that Thomas Jefferson, were he alive today, would disagree and view the idea as anathema to both a sound economy and a free society.

Noting that it was Alexander Hamilton “who laid the foundation for a U.S. central bank”, a project white paper published in February 2022 concluded that it is “critical” for research to continue for “achieving goals for a CBDC.” That is, it is not a question of whether the Fed should adopt a digital currency but how and when.

Biden’s Executive Order and Project Lithium

In January 2022, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors similarly published a paper titled “Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation”, the aim of which was “to foster a broad and transparent public dialogue about CBDCs in general, and about the potential benefits and risks of a U.S. CBDC.”

Then in March 2022 President Joe Biden signed an “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets”, which declares the supposed need for the US government to “regulate” digital assets, including for the purpose of preventing circumvention of its sanctions regimes—in which context we might remember the US government’s criminal sanctions regime against Iraq in the 1990s and how Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted that the “price” of half-a-million dead Iraqi children was “worth it”.

The executive order, number 14067, describes how the government has an interest in maintaining the US dollar’s “central role” in “the global financial system”, which refers to the use of the dollar as a reserve currency. To that end, the order states, the Biden administration “places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.”

The White House is intent on determining what actions would be required to launch such a currency “if doing so is deemed to be in the national interest”. Of course, as the example of half a million excess childhood deaths in Iraq due to sanctions once again illustrates, determining just what is in the “national interest” is not a task that government policymakers seem particularly good at.

The lockdown measures, which utterly failed to project those at highest risk from COVID-19 while causing devastating harms globally, are another useful example of the ineptitude of policymakers when it comes to making decision that are in our best interests.

Following Biden’s executive order, in April 2022, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced “the development of the first prototype to explore how a CBDC might operate”. This endeavor was given the name “Project Lithium”, on which the DTCC is collaborating with The Digital Dollar Project (DDP), an organization that advocates US leadership “in advancing a CBDC” and encourages the executive branch of government “to support appropriate legislation” to authorize further research and development of such a currency.

The DDP published a white paper in May 2020 concluding that the US government “should, and must, take a leadership role in this new wave of digital innovation” and preserve the dollar’s role as “the world’s primary reserve currency” by working toward “the launch of a tokenized digital dollar”.

End the Fed!

Naturally, advocates of a central bank digital currency describe the aims of such a development as benign, just as the Federal Reserve system was originally established on the pretext that having a more centrally controlled economy would benefit all.

In truth, the Federal Reserve system serves the interests of the financially and political elite at the expense of the rest of us. Central banking itself, whatever the form of currency issued, is harmful to the economy because central banks essentially exist to effect a transfer of wealth upward. Schools of economic thought like Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which I like to refer to as “Keynesianism 2.0”, exist to justify the existence of central banks.

The Fed, a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply, enables the government to spend on whatever, including endless wars (euphemistically called “defense” spending), but the means of paying for it all, the creation of “money” out of thin air, results in upward wealth transfer. The elite classes who receive the newly created dollars first are able to spend it for purchasing assets prior to the resulting devaluation that manifests in the form of higher prices for goods and services.

Monetary inflation robs us of our purchasing power and so serves as a hidden tax. It also causes widespread malinvestment and major economic distortions like the housing bubble that burst in 2007 and precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, not to mention the current housing bubble and general asset inflation. (For more on that, see my book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis.)

We are meant to believe we need centralized control over the currency supply for economic growth, but central banks instead serve to impede real economic growth in favor of enabling the government’s endlessly wasteful and harmful spending.

The chief appeal of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is that it is a decentralized medium of exchange that serves to compete with central-bank-issued currency and potentially enables people to opt-out of the exploitative dollar system. The idea of a “legal tender” digital currency in the hands of the bankers and politicians is anathema to the whole concept of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

One might argue that the replacement of print dollars with a centrally controlled cryptocurrency is just a natural evolution from the current system, in which exchange of actual cash is becoming less frequent and most transactions occur digitally anyway. We should keep up with the times and adapt to advancements in technology, the argument goes.

However, this overlooks the more fundamental issue that we should not have central banks in the first place. The way I see it, the movement towards replacing the US dollar with a Fed-issued cryptocurrency is far from benign. We have seen in the past few years just how far government policymakers are willing to go to exercise authoritarian control over us.

To illustrate, remember how businesses deemed “non-essential” were shut down by clueless bureaucrats under threat of punishment, and how coercive measures including mandates and travel restrictions were used to get people to accept COVID‑19 vaccinations?

With the World Economic Forum (WEF) having announced its “Great Reset” agenda, which ties directly into the global mass vaccination agenda, the advocates of greater centralized control over society do not deserve the benefit of our doubt about their intentions. It would be naïve to think that if the authoritarians in government had even greater means to penalize citizens for disobedience to the regime that they would not attempt to use it. It is safer to assume that if they can utilize a digital currency to control our behavior, they will.

It seems therefore imperative to oppose a centralized digital currency, but we also need to go further than that and oppose the existence of the Federal Reserve altogether. Whatever the form of currency, centralized economic planning is an abomination and anathema to the principle of a free market.

“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” — Revelation 18:4

The Devil’s Milkshake

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The water’s just fine!

By Tarence Ray

Source: The Baffler

YOU’VE SEEN IT BEFORE. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try to dispel that anger through a public act of self-sacrifice, of reassurance. They convene a press conference, whereupon some hapless courtier brings forth a chalice of the supposedly poisoned material. And then, in front of God and the television cameras, the public official imbibes.

Examples from recent history abound. In 2019, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe ate possibly irradiated rice balls from Fukushima to demonstrate the progress made toward rebuilding the prefecture since its 2011 nuclear meltdown. In 2013, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper claimed he drank fracking fluid to assuage his constituents’ concerns around natural gas drilling. (Not “tasty,” he said.) And, most famous of all, in 2016 Barack Obama took a sip of (filtered) water from the lead-poisoned water supply of Flint, Michigan, to prove it was safe. (“This is not a stunt,” he noted of the stunt.)

Officials are already lining up to drink the forbidden poison issuing from East Palestine, Ohio. When a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed there earlier this month, producing an airborne toxic event of hazardous chemicals, concerns about the water inevitably arose. Enter one Troy Nehls, a Republican congressman from Texas, who became the first intrepid soul through the breach. On February 16, Nehls—who was inexplicably in Ohio, some fourteen hundred miles away from his district—posted a video to Twitter to get word out that the water was safe. To prove it, Nehls slurped it up. This was promptly followed by a video from Ohio lieutenant governor Jon Husted, wherein a group of public officials huddled together and threw back shots of supposed tap water like they were freshman college students out on the town.

But Nehls and Husted were just the undercard features. On February 21, following reports that Norfolk Southern had funded preliminary tests declaring the water totally safe, Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine and a merry caravan, including an EPA official and a congressman, stalked around East Palestine with news cameras, gamely drinking from residents’ taps. (“That’s good,” the EPA official gushed. “That’s really cold coming from the tap.”) The photos and videos from this danse macabre mirrored Husted’s, but on a grander scale—half a dozen people standing around, toasting and clashing cups together like they were at a medieval banquet. If these dizzying trends hold, it’s probably a matter of time before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, or even President Biden, follows suit.

Years ago, I surveyed the literature looking for a name or term to describe this phenomenon of consuming potentially tainted materials. After all, it seemed to be increasing in frequency, and I’d even started witnessing it at the level of local politics. But if there was a name, I couldn’t find it. So I gave it one: the Devil’s Milkshake.

The Devil’s Milkshake is bipartisan. Neither Democrats nor Republicans hold monopoly on it. Which means it can be multiple things, depending on who wields it. To some, it’s cynical political theater, meant to make the politician look invincible and brave. To others, it can be a genuine—yet transparently phony—attempt at showing solidarity. And to others still, it abets a kind of mass hysteria, in which public officials feel increasingly pressured to outdo each other for attention and admiration.

The Devil’s Milkshake can also be an effective way for a public official to shirk any commitment to doing something about the conditions that gave rise to the disaster in the first place. One time I was at a town hall in Martin County, Kentucky, where the water system has been degraded by years of coal mining, corruption, and neglect. Residents were getting sick, and they’d convened the town hall to demand action from the local government. But instead of committing to any substantive action, one local official ran to the front of the hall and demanded a glass of that sweet local tap, so he could drink it right there on the spot, and thus prove that nothing needed changing. A few awkward minutes passed, wherein the crowd grew uncomfortable with the prospect of witnessing a man poison himself in public. So they talked the official down. To this day, Martin County’s water is still unsafe to drink.

It’s likely the Devil’s Milkshake is a modern phenomenon. After all, medieval rulers used to employ taste testers precisely in order to avoid being poisoned. But historical examples are nonetheless difficult to track down because the phenomenon has been heretofore unnamed. So I’ve had to crowdsource its history. It’s clear, reviewing this data, that public officials have had to tweak, refine, and workshop the spectacle; it developed over time through a process of trial and error.

A PhD student at Indiana University, Justin Hawkins, sent me what is perhaps the earliest historical example. In the 1850s, New York City was in the middle of an adulterated milk scandal. Across the country, thousands of infants were dying every year from milk cut with “swill”—excess mash from nearby distilleries, whitened with plaster and drained of nutrients. Tammany Hall sent an Alderman named Michael Tuomey to investigate. But Tuomey vigorously defended the dairy owners and their milk supply. While visiting one dairy, Tuomey threw back some whiskey with the farmers, concluded the milk was perfectly safe, and slandered anyone who thought otherwise as “prejudice[d].” But, as Hawkins points out, it’s unclear whether or not Tuomey’s stunt was performed before a crowd. This highlights a crucial ingredient in the Devil’s Milkshake formula: for it to be a proper Devil’s Milkshake, it must be performed in public, or at least in front of cameras.

The second criteria of the Devil’s Milkshake is that one must actually go through with it. This example came to me by way of a researcher friend, Jack Norton. It’s the story of New York governor Hugh Carey who, in 1981, volunteered to drink a big glass of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, from a contaminated state office building in order “to satisfy the unions” that the building was safe. Carey, however, was warned that doing so might actually make him sick, and so he reportedly did not follow through. He nonetheless displayed a curious willingness to put his body on the line for the sake of scoring political points.

Occasionally, the Devil’s Milkshake can be fobbed off on the inferiors or family members of the elected official trying to harness its powers. To illustrate this, we turn to our cousins across the pond. In 1990, four years after the fatal mad cow disease was discovered in Britain’s beef supply, the nation’s agriculture minister, John Selwymn Gummer, carted his four-year-old daughter before news cameras and tried to feed her an “absolutely delicious” hamburger. Six years later, researchers confirmed humans could be infected with the degenerative neurological disease—and in 2007, the daughter of a Gummer family friend died of it. Perhaps Gummer’s logic was that of a hostage taker: if his audience saw his craven recklessness, they, too, might be willing to put their lives on the line to make beef sales go up.

But perhaps the grimmest example of the Devil’s Milkshake is that of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and his fisheries minister, Felix Alberto Canal Torres. This story was sent to me by Twitter user @JimmyFalunGong. In 1991, cholera was spreading throughout Peru by way of raw fish, resulting in massive profit losses to the Peruvian fishing industry. In order to get the industry back on its feet, President Fujimori and Minister Torres chowed down on some raw fish live on television, hoping to encourage the public to do the same. Unfortunately, the epidemic wore on for months, eventually killing over three thousand people, and Minister Torres reportedly wound up hospitalized with cholera, no doubt acquired from the raw fish.  

The Gummer and Fujimori-Torres debacles show that, from the very beginning, the Devil’s Milkshake was always just that: a deal with the devil. A gamble. One that, if successful, could pay enormous dividends. But, if unsuccessful, could be very embarrassing. Perhaps that’s why nowadays, the Devil’s Milkshake is most likely just a stage trick. When that aide brings out the chalice, whatever’s inside almost certainly isn’t poison. It’s something harmless that is meant to look poisonous. (Someone on Twitter even pointed out that the officials taking shots of East Palestine’s water in lieutenant Governor Husted’s video had neglected to hide their bottle of Smart Water.) Besides, even if President Obama really did drink lead-poisoned water in Flint, his stunt missed the point: prolonged, chronic exposure is what leads to severe impairment, not a single sip. Race, class, and geography are the major determinants of environmental harm. Most people know this, which is why many Flint residents viewed Obama’s theatrics with skepticism.

Yet I would argue that leaders like President Obama are, like the constituents they seek to deceive, fully aware of this structural truth. It’s what makes the Devil’s Milkshake so strange. The stunt seems to be a tacit acknowledgement by the ruling class that they know the general public doesn’t trust them. (Only 19 percent of Americans believe they can trust the government “most of the time.”) Its recent proliferation must be seen as proof of a ruling class desperate to uphold the illusion of democracy. It is the last gasp of a dying order, drinking and eating its way to the grave, restrained or unwilling to fix anything, and thus doomed to play act a fantasy before klieg lights and newscasters. The dizzying amount of Devil’s Milkshake footage issuing from East Palestine only proves their desperation: these people could not be more unlike you. In fact, the only thing you have left in common with them is the fact that they, too, still have to eat food and drink water to stay alive. That’s it. The Devil’s Milkshake is a measure of the gaping chasm between you and them.

The sad thing is that, sometimes, the water or food in question is actually safe to consume. Watersheds can be hard to wrap your head around. A lot of hysterical and paranoid information leeched into the ether following the East Palestine toxic event. People upstream from the Ohio River worried that they, too, were at risk of exposure. Were boil water advisories fifty miles southeast in Pittsburgh related to the derailment—even though local officials said otherwise? Were birds dying in Kentucky because of the crash? All these places probably are under threat, but from other things entirely: chemical plants, microplastics, algae blooms, air pollution, you name it.

The public has by now seen so many of these large-scale pollution events that they well understand no one will be held accountable; that the clean-up will be, at best, half-assed; and that we’re just going to bide our time until the next one occurs. (Indeed, in the weeks since the East Palestine incident, a commercial tanker truck full of chemicals crashed outside Tucson, killing the driver and releasing a plume of nitric acid into the air; a train derailed in Texas, killing one; another train carrying coal derailed in Nebraska; and on and on.) People, naturally, have lost trust in their leaders to keep them safe. No amount of poisonous water consumed by governors, congressmen, or EPA officials will restore that trust.

This is why the Devil’s Milkshake is ultimately an insult to your intelligence. The point isn’t to give you actionable information about what’s going on. If it was, public officials would just do that, instead of histrionically parading around in front of the cameras to show off the sacrifice they’re making. Nor is the point to rebuild trust in institutions. After all, these figures could just fix the problems, and make our natural and infrastructural environments responsive to crises and safe to navigate.

No, the point of the Devil’s Milkshake is to arrest further complaint. To recycle anger back into “acceptable” forms of discourse and mechanisms of accountability. To move on, forget it ever happened. It’s almost as if, through this act of symbolic consumption, a public official telegraphs their willingness to die for corporate America’s sins. That, because they’re willing to literally metabolize the issue, it’s been addressed, processed, and fixed.

The problem with this is that no one ever forgets. People remember it all. Not just the fear and terror of seeing a black pillar of smoke towering over their community. Not just the health scares and medical bills, the family members and friends and pets dying before their time. Not just the agonizing mystery of it all, of wondering which recent toxic event is responsible for their debilitating sickness, or if they’re crazy for even having that thought.

They’ll also remember the most terrifying, mind-bending thing of all: that their leaders sacrificed them at the almighty altar of profit, and then mocked them for daring to question it. They’ll wake up in the middle of the night, their minds retracing the choreographed ritual of power known as the Devil’s Milkshake, their gleeful leaders sending up veritable toasts to the fact they were getting away with it all. And this remembering brings on a final realization: that the next time may be even worse.

A Nanny State Idiocracy: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy. 

For instance, an animal welfare bill introduced in the Florida state legislature would ban the sale of rabbits in March and April, prohibit cat owners from declawing their pets, make it illegal for dogs to stick their heads out of car windows, force owners to place dogs in a harness or in a pet seatbelt when traveling in a car, and require police to create a public list of convicted animal abusers.

A Massachusetts law prohibits drivers from letting their cars idle for more than five minutes on penalty of a $100 fine ($500 for repeat offenders), even in the winter. You can also be fined $20 or a month in jail for scaring pigeons.

This overbearing Nanny State despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

Consider, for example, that businesses in California were ordered to designate an area of the children’s toy aisle “gender-neutral” or face a fine, whether or not the toys sold are traditionally marketed to girls or boys such as Barbies and Hot Wheels. California schools are prohibited from allowing students to access websites, novels or religious works that reflect negatively on gays. And while Californians are free to have sex with whomever they choose (because that’s none of the government’s business), removing a condom during sex without consent could make you liable for general, special and punitive damages.

It’s getting worse.

Almost every aspect of American life today—especially if it is work-related—is subject to this kind of heightened scrutiny and ham-fisted control, whether you’re talking about aspiring “bakers, braiders, casket makers, florists, veterinary masseuses, tour guides, taxi drivers, eyebrow threaders, teeth whiteners, and more.”

For instance, whereas 70 years ago, one out of every 20 U.S. jobs required a state license, today, almost 1 in 3 American occupations requires a license.

The problem of overregulation has become so bad that, as one analyst notes, “getting a license to style hair in Washington takes more instructional time than becoming an emergency medical technician or a firefighter.”

This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.

As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.

“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”

This is the police state’s superpower: it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.

That explains how a fisherman can be saddled with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water. Or why police arrested a 90-year-old man for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public unless portable toilets are also made available.

The laws can get downright silly. For instance, you could also find yourself passing time in a Florida slammer for such inane activities as singing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit, breaking more than three dishes per day, farting in a public place after 6 pm on a Thursday, and skateboarding without a license.

However, the consequences are all too serious for those whose lives become grist for the police state’s mill. A few years back, police raided barber shops in minority communities, resulting in barbers being handcuffed in front of customers, and their shops searched without warrants. All of this was purportedly done in an effort to make sure that the barbers’ licensing paperwork was up to snuff.

In this way, America has gone from being a beacon of freedom to a locked down nation. And “we the people,” sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, have allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

We increasingly find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes. 

The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.

In exchange for the promise of an end to global pandemics, lower taxes, lower crime rates, safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to lockdowns, militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization, overregulation and government corruption.

In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

We relied on the government to help us safely navigate national emergencies (terrorism, natural disasters, global pandemics, etc.) only to find ourselves forced to relinquish our freedoms on the altar of national security, yet we’re no safer (or healthier) than before.

We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.

We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.

A special report by CNBC breaks down the national numbers:

One out of 100 American adults is behind bars — while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison. This reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. The states and the federal government spend about $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people work in the industry.

We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

According to the Washington Post, these funds have been used to buy guns, armored cars, electronic surveillance gear, “luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.” Police seminars advise officers to use their “department wish list when deciding which assets to seize” and, in particular, go after flat screen TVs, cash and nice cars.

In Florida, where police are no strangers to asset forfeiture, Florida police have been carrying out “reverse” sting operations, where they pose as drug dealers to lure buyers with promises of cheap cocaine, then bust them, and seize their cash and cars. Over the course of a year, police in one small Florida town seized close to $6 million using these entrapment schemes.

We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras—used in 24 states and Washington, DC—are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash.

One small Florida town, population 8,000, generates a million dollars a year in fines from these cameras. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in heft fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is what happens when the American people get duped, deceived, double-crossed, cheated, lied to, swindled and conned into believing that the government and its army of bureaucrats—the people we appointed to safeguard our freedoms—actually have our best interests at heart.

The problem with these devil’s bargains is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.”

Saturday Matinee: The Girl With All the Gifts

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By Brian Tallerico

Source: RogerEbert.com

In many ways, Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is just another ordinary girl. She goes to school every day, where she’s grown affection for her teacher Ms. Justineau (Gemma Arterton). And she’s at that age where she’s figuring out what’s important to her, and how to navigate through the world of adults around her. But Melanie is not an ordinary girl. She will soon be a mindless, soulless zombie, a braindead creature who responds only to a desire to kill and eat people around her. In fact, with the right triggers—like if the adults around her forget to wear their scent-disguising lotion—she could become that right now. Just when you thought the zombie genre was out of ideas, along comes Colm McCarthy’s smart and engaging “The Girl with All the Gifts,” a film with echoes of George A. Romero, Danny Boyle, and Robert Kirkman but one that also feels confidently its own creation, a unique take on responsibility, adulthood, and a new chapter in evolution.

Melanie isn’t alone. She lives with a number of other zombie-children like her in a bunker beneath a military facility, where she’s being studied and experimented on by Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close), in the hope that they could provide the antidote for what has essentially ended normal human existence. Melanie is one of several second-generation flesh-eaters called “hungries,” babies who literally ate their way out of their parents but are not behaving in precisely the same way as the brain-dead speedsters that have destroyed humanity. Whenever a child is found in the wild, they’re taken to this facility, where Dr. Caldwell can experiment on them and Sgt. Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine) can work to control them. Said control involves leg, arm and head restraints whenever the children are anywhere near that oh-so-enticing human flesh.

But Melanie seems so normal and is clearly learning empathy. The good doctor sees that as well, and even starts to loosen some of the restraints keeping Melanie more of an object than a person. Then one day Dr. Caldwell comes for Melanie, ready to dissect her and see exactly what she can learn from this unique child the hard way. Before Dr. Justineau can save her, all hell breaks loose and the facility is overrun. A small group of survivors is forced to travel to another sanctuary city in the hope that it’s still being run by people who don’t eat flesh. Melanie goes with them, and proves to be pretty useful.

One of the major strengths of “The Girl with All the Gifts” is evident early in McCarthy’s tactile, believable world-building. Much as Romero paid close attention to such details, the set design, costumes, and the world of “Gifts” feels lived-in and genuine. And it’s a nature-based aesthetic (dirt on walls, costumes that look worn, etc.) that continues and even strengthens once this ragtag crew is forced from safety and into the dangerous world. There’s a visceral, emotional impact to the horror and action of “The Girl with All the Gifts” that resonates because the characters and the world they live in feels real to us. It’s hard to overstate how important this to a horror movie, especially one set in a post-apocalyptic world. If we don’t believe the world is genuine, we won’t care what happens in it.

Of course, performance goes a long way to amplify this believability as well, and it’s not often you see a horror film with a cast this strong. Close could have gone showy with her doctor with a heart of ice but she plays it straight, again conveying the believability of the moment more than the B-movie archetype this character could have become. Considine and Arterton perfectly convey authority and warmth, respectively, although they’re good enough to make these people into more than mere plot devices. And Nanua is a find, again never giving her performance with a knowing wink. So she’s a zombie child who could be the evolutionary key to the future—this just happens to be her reality.

The traveling band aspect of “The Walking Dead,” the cities and landscapes empty of human existence of “28 Days Later,” the military aspect of “Day of the Dead”—it’s easy to pick apart the influences of “The Girl with All the Gifts.” But just as Melanie marks something altogether new in this world—a zombie with a conscience—the film about her feels inspired by what came before but also good enough to inspire those that come after.