Zero Point: Our 4th Industrial Revolution Against Their Great Reset

By Joaquin Flores

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Genesis 1:26 – And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Humanity is on the precipice of a new dark age, a long dark winter. It is one in which the technologies once developed to liberate humanity from toil, have developed further into a seemingly insurmountable techno-industrial leviathan. This is one based upon misanthropy, slavery, and human eradication. Called the Great Reset, it is being put forth by the same as those speaking of this 4th Industrial Revolution.

But there is another 4th Industrial Revolution which is on the horizon, one which places mankind at the helm of liberatory technologies like the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing.

Hence, what is being termed the 4IR is in fact about subverting the actual 4IR towards the interests of the financialists whose old method of control (finance) is dwindling.

In this piece, we will attempt to shed light on two very altering visions of a 4th Industrial Revolution. One of prosperity and individual human freedom as well as social liberty, versus one of repression and a new technocratic police state.

 “The real 4th Industrial Revolution is about micro-production and each household, in its garage, owning its own means of production. That is the real promise of the internet of things and 3D printing. It is not about furthering globalization or the mass societies of scale towards an ever-larger pyramidically shaped control paradigm.”

Whose 4th Industrial Revolution – Ours or Theirs?

There are two competing visions of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), and in that sense, two competing visions of a Great Reset. This is why we have posed the question in our essay Whose Great Reset? The Fight for Our Future – Technocracy vs. the Republic . Consequently, a lot of confusion has arisen about the 4th Industrial Revolution; whether it is primarily an anthropic or misanthropic agenda.

This is chiefly because Klaus Schwab’s books ‘Covid-19 – The Great Reset’ and ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’ appropriates the language of the coming 4th Industrial Revolution, but puts forward another practically unrelated agenda entirely. The World Economic Forum, the ‘Davos People’, is a financialist network which looks upon the coming new epoch not with optimism, but with horror.

Just as the financialist system was about externalizing costs, now we find an entire social-psychological regime of externalizing horror. The horror and uncertainty of this time is in most ways a reflection of their own. The dominating ideas of any society are the ideas of its dominating class.

The moves of Schwab (and backed by the Rothschilds and their friends in big tech, and the Deep State writ large), are all moves to contain, control, and push-back the 4th industrial revolution into a different kind of system. This is because the technologies which the actual 4th Industrial Revolution really involve are to the detriment of the present ruling plutocracy.

To be clear, their Great Reset will not bring about the 4th Industrial Revolution they speak of, nor as it was originally understood. The 4th Industrial Revolution was originally thought to be new inventions that bring great freedom, and individual initiative that automation would allow for. These would break the fetters of the old economic model and unlock the potential of the new. It would not destroy society and imprison people, but magnify the plurality of a free society and liberate people from the planned obsolescence industrial model.

The real 4th Industrial Revolution is the economic component of the Great Awakening and the 4th Turning.

The old society was based in mass-scale industrial production, planned obsolescence, and the societies of mass-scale requiring bureaucracies. Those old bureaucracies and societies of scale mirror, in its social relations of production, the form lent to it by the means of production.

In other words, the society of mass industry and planned obsolescence at the economic level was the foundation for a society of mass bureaucracy and meaningless work at the social level. The bureaucratic revolution of the 1920’s and 30’s which was the New Deal and the Military Industrial Complex, was seen in other parts of the world as Marxism-Leninism and Fascism.

Consequently, as we have explained in ‘Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity’, that system relied upon planned obsolescence. The goal was not to produce access to the goods produced by industry, but to continue on the cycle of production and distribution as an over-arching control paradigm. This was to have people going to work every-day.

Therefore the focus of innovation has not been to increase the durability of goods, but to focus on adding features which, in terms of cost vs. benefit, were significantly higher in cost than realized benefit. And so marketing so heavily focused on the conspicuous consumption aspect of commodity ownership, for its conspiculous aspects, as explained by Thorstein Veblen in his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and operationalized in the revolution in advertising which is generally attributed to Edward Bernays’ 1923 classic Crystallizing Public Opinion. Moreover, the entire ‘philanthropic’ parade from Rockefeller down to Gates can only be fully understood through the lens of Bernays.

Origins of the 4th Industrial Revolution

The phrase ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ we are erroneously informed by Wikipedia, is said to have been introduced by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. Yet this is credited based on a 2015 article published in the Atlanticist magazine, Foreign Affairs “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution . This would go on to become theme of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.

So what exactly is the 4th Industrial Revolution if not yet another ploy by the elites to use new technologies to further enslave humanity?

Wikipedia’s revisionism entirely ignores its use in futurist circles among thinkers, techies, and independent investors going back nearly two decades. These were in turn inspired by the New Wave Science Fiction movement of thee 60’s and 70’s, and a related genre, Cyberpunk. Even in the Wiki article which begins by falsely attributing 4IR to Klaus Schwab, they later admit that the term dates back to at least the Hannover Faire in Germany in 2011. But the term (or similar) dates back another decade before it. The concept itself dates back to the 19th century, seeing what increased automation would mean. This is a function of the organic composition of capital, the ratio of constant to variable capital.

Dragon investor knows that investing in a new product which lasts forever is a non-starter. And yet technology has long existed which could tremendously extend the lifespan of any given product. The replacement of plastic parts with the actually cheaper to produce tin, for example, has been documented for nearly 70 years as a product-life extending material.

This would have eradicated global poverty within a generation. But instead the control-paradigm which required the constant upwards redistribution of wealth towards the aim of control, and the requirement that people keep themselves busy with work (idle hands do the devil’s work), was the more ‘logical’ model, provided that the aim is conserving power and not liberalizing human freedom and dignity.

And so why we are seeing this great coup against republican democracies right now, the Covid-19 ‘Great Reset’, is not because the time is opportune nor because the financial elites are in a position of strength. It is not because they have done the sufficient ground work to smoothly transition into a post financial control matrix. But rather because time is running out and their position of strength is weakening by the day.

This is all because of the declining rate of profit which the 4th Industrial Revolution is the solution for. Those technologies have been developing swiftly since the 1950’s. Now to repeat, there are various possible iterations of ‘a’ 4th Industrial Revolution – some are emancipatory and liberatory in nature. And yet others (the one being pursued by the financial elites and as spelled out by the World Economic Forum) are based in misanthropy, population reduction, thought-control and policing, and the ‘long dark winter’.

Why would we want those who so disastrously brought about the ‘Great Reset’ to then go on to manage for us the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’?

The roots of forecasting the 4th Industrial revolution were based in post-capitalist economic theory, and looked at sub-dividing capitalism into further historical mini-stages. This was so that the development of capitalism away from variable capital (human labor) and towards constant capital (machines) could be more accurately described and projected. It was a descriptive and predictive model. Secondarily, it has always been a fact of life that many of the same technologies that can liberate humanity can also enslave them.

A better 4th Industrial Revolution is about micro-production and each household, in a personal garage, having their own means of production. That is the real promise of the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing. It is not about furthering globalization or the mass societies of scale towards an ever-larger pyramidically shaped control paradigm.

With that comes ‘self-employment’, and a tremendously reduced (and self-created) work schedule of working in one’s own garage. Now, there are various transitional models which involve more local community efforts, and the requisite specializations and down-stream repair micro-economies at the local level that would flow from this.

AI and ‘cybernetics’ are also fields that are developing, but strictly speaking are irrelevant to the 4IR if the liberatory potential of post-scarcity economics is understood.

Cybernetics isn’t necessarily involved in the decentralized and localized outcomes of the IoT.

Applied cybernetics (as envisioned by the World Economic Form) and, with it, ID2020 and beyond, are the opposite of any 4th Industrial Revolution if we understand the liberatory potential of 4IR.

Their vision attempts to ‘Uberize’ the entire economy. The idea here is to eliminate all permanent work, but in its place have non-contracted temporary work, which changes on a nearly daily basis. This is similar to the disastrous ‘Labor Ready’ model already seen in the U.S.

The dystopic idea here is that everyone has a ‘chip’ implanted in them, and this has all their biometric data as well as serving as their bank card. People will earn credits when they receive work assignments at a random new location on a given day, and successfully complete that work.

Unfortunately, the liberatory potential of the 4IR is not understood by those who quite rightly reject the financialist institutional version of it. How these work towards a liberatory agenda of personal freedom, localism, and the foundation for intentional communities based on shared values, is being obscured by the official proponents of the false 4th Industrial Revolution from the World Economic Forum.

In the same way that the financial elites have somewhat erroneously called their corporate-statist monopoly system ‘capitalism’ (if capitalism is understood as competition between players with equal legal rights), they are calling the next system they have in mind the ‘4th industrial revolution’, when in fact it works against the actual 4IR that can be.

And while the phrases and incessant quacking about ‘decentralization’ and ‘internet of things’, along with ‘3D printing’ are also used in the false version of 4IR, likewise we have seen for the past hundred years the corporate monopoly system nevertheless use the language of ‘markets’, ‘private property’ and ‘freedom’ when in fact those components of the corporate system have not really been its most prominent features.

This, practically alone, informs us on the fraudulence which is the World Economic Forum’s 4IR. Just as ‘capitalism’ has not truly relied on free competition, the 4IR being proposed will not truly be based on a decentralized model of 3D printing.

Rather, they will sit on 3D printing and the internet of things until other, really unrelated technologies like pre-crime detectors and other surveillance state techniques, can be implemented. Then they will try to centralize 3D printing when by its very nature, it is best suited to decentralization – thus eliminating various downstream and distribution middle-men. Bear in mind, that the coercive techniques implemented first will be part of a global population reduction scheme with the aim of reducing the population by as much as 90% its present number.

But the aim for the plutocrats in transition to a new kind of oligarchy, they are trying to maintain what Karl Wittfogel described as a ‘Hydraulic Civilization’ in his seminal book Oriental Despotism (1957). Here we understand that the difference with the free-farmers and peasants typical of Northern Europe were made possible because of the relatively high level of annual rain-fail. In many ways, liberal ideas of personal freedom that developed out of the middle-ages and into modernity in Northern Europe are a vestige of this economic, agricultural, reality.

In contrast, the Chaldean and Egyptian hydraulic civilizations of which Rome took its model, were based upon a militarized control over relatively centralized waterways (the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile). Access required paying of taxes, fines, fees, military service, and a whole array of other control mechanisms. In a post-economic order that we see on the horizon, one component of this is the transformation of a whole and larger section of society into ‘contact tracers’, a new security apparatus of ‘block captains’, of snitches, of informants against the rest of society. A reference here is the 1977 science fiction work ‘A Scanner Darkly’, by Philip K. Dick

Today the oligarchs are trying to make a Hydraulic Society out of 3D printing, but first need to establish a new coercive model of control over these new productive modes. Even to the extent of manufacturing pandemics, forced lockdowns, and a ‘cyber-pandemic’ of intentional, rolling black-outs.

But the more obvious implementation of 3D printing is more akin to rainfall. That is the primary contradiction at present.

The cornerstone of any 4IR that is workable for humanity, in line with the rights of man and based upon the dignity of the human spirit, is by definition based on a new form of cottage industry which the internet of things and 3D printing make possible.

Humanity was made in the image of its creator, and is worthy of a society reflective of his magnificence. It’s time to blow up the dam and stand under the rain-fall.

No Escape from Our Techno-Feudal World

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Global Research

The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.

Durand places the Digital Age in the larger context of the historical evolution of capitalism to show how the Washington consensus ended up metastasized into the Silicon Valley consensus. In a delightful twist, he brands the new grove as the “Californian ideology”.

We’re far away from Jefferson Airplane and the Beach Boys; it’s more like Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” on steroids, complete with IMF-style “structural reforms” emphasizing “flexibilization” of work and  outright marketization/financialization of everyday life.

The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.

In 1994, PFF held a ground-breaking conference in Atlanta that eventually led to a seminal Magna Carta: literally, Cyberspace and the American Dream: a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Era, published in 1996, during the first Clinton term.

Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.

Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.

Those Randian heroes

Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.

When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.

That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.

Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.

On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.

The Rise of Data Capitala 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.

So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.

Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable,  online real estate empire is built.

The key point is that whatever the original business – Google, Amazon, Uber – strategies of conquering cyberspace all point to the same target: take control of “spaces of observation and capture” of data.

About the Chinese credit system…

Durand offers a finely balanced analysis of the Chinese credit system – a public/private hybrid system launched in 2013 during the 3rd plenum of the 18th Congress of the CCP, under the motto “to value sincerity and punish insincerity”.

For the State Council, the supreme government authority in China, what really mattered was to encourage behavior deemed responsible in the financial, economic and socio-political spheres, and sanction what is not. It’s all about trust. Beijing defines it as “a method of perfecting the socialist market economy system that improves social governance”.

The Chinese term – shehui xinyong – is totally lost in translation in the West. Way more complex than “social credit”, it’s more about  “trustworthiness”, in the sense of integrity. Instead of the pedestrian Western accusations of being an Orwellian system, priorities include the fight against fraud and corruption at the national, regional and local levels, violations of environmental rules, disrespect of food security norms.

Cybernetic management of social life is being seriously discussed in China since the 1980s. In fact, since the 1940s, as we see in Mao’s Little Red Book. It could be seen as inspired by the Maoist principle of “mass lines”, as in “start with the masses to come back to the masses: to amass the ideas of the masses (which are dispersed, non-systematic), concentrate them (in general ideas and systematic), then come back to the masses to diffuse and explain them, make sure the masses assimilate them and translate them into action, and verify in the action of the masses the pertinence of these ideas”.

Durand’s analysis goes one step beyond Soshana Zuboff’s

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when he finally reaches the core of his thesis, showing how digital platforms become “fiefdoms”: they live out of, and profit from, their vast “digital territory” peopled with data even as they lock in power over their services, which are deemed indispensable.

And just as in feudalism, fiefdoms dominate territory by attaching serfs. Masters made their living profiting from the social power derived from the exploitation of their domain, and that implied unlimited power over the serfs.

It all spells out total concentration. Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel has always stressed the target of the digital entrepreneur is exactly to bypass competition. As quoted in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Thiel declared, “Capitalism and competition are antagonistic. Competition is for losers.”

So now we are facing not a mere clash between Silicon Valley capitalism and finance capital, but actually a new mode of production:

a turbo-capitalist survival as rentier capitalism, where Silicon giants take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the “techno-feudal” option, as defined by Durand.

Blake meets Burroughs

Durand’s book is extremely relevant to show how the theoretical and political critique of the Digital Age is still rarified. There is no precise cartography of all those dodgy circuits of revenue extraction. No analysis of how do they profit from the financial casino – especially mega investment funds that facilitate hyper-concentration. Or how do they profit from the hardcore exploitation of workers in the gig economy.

The total concentration of the digital glebe is leading to a scenario, as Durand recalls, already dreamed up by Stuart Mill, where every land in a country belonged to a single master. Our generalized dependency on the digital masters seems to be “the cannibal future of liberalism in the age of algorithms”.

Is there a possible way out? The temptation is to go radical – a Blake/Burroughs crossover. We have to expand our scope of comprehension – and stop confusing the map (as shown in the Magna Carta) with the territory (our perception).

William Blake, in his proto-psychedelic visions, was all about liberation and subordination – depicting an authoritarian deity imposing conformity via a sort of source code of mass influence. Looks like a proto-analysis of the Digital Age.

William Burroughs conceptualized Control – an array of manipulations including mass media (he would be horrified by social media). To break down Control, we must be able to hack into and disrupt its core programs. Burroughs showed how all forms of Control must be rejected – and defeated: “Authority figures are seen for what they are:  dead empty masks manipulated by computers”.

Here’s our future: hackers or slaves.

 

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Edward Snowden On Big Tech Companies, Like Facebook, Censoring & Controlling Information

By Arjun Walia

Source: Collective Evolution

Glenn Greenwald is no stranger to censorship, he’s the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden (NSA mass surveillance whistleblower)  to put together his story and release it to the world while working for the Guardian. He eventually left the Guardian and co-founded his own media company, The Intercept, an organization that would be free from censorship and free to report on government corruption and wrong-doings of powerful people and corporations. He recently resigned from The Intercept as well due to the fact that they’ve now censored him, and is now completely independent. You can find his work here.Glenn Greenwald is no stranger to censorship, he’s the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden (NSA mass surveillance whistleblower)  to put together his story and release it to the world while working for the Guardian. He eventually left the Guardian and co-founded his own media company, The Intercept, an organization that would be free from censorship and free to report on government corruption and wrong-doings of powerful people and corporations. He recently resigned from The Intercept as well due to the fact that they’ve now censored him, and is now completely independent. You can find his work here.Glenn Greenwald is no stranger to censorship, he’s the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden (NSA mass surveillance whistleblower)  to put together his story and release it to the world while working for the Guardian. He eventually left the Guardian and co-founded his own media company, The Intercept, an organization that would be free from censorship and free to report on government corruption and wrong-doings of powerful people and corporations. He recently resigned from The Intercept as well due to the fact that they’ve now censored him, and is now completely independent. You can find his work here.

Anybody who reports on or sheds a bright light onto immoral and unethical actions taken by governments and the powerful corporations they work with has been subjected to extreme censorship. In the case of Edward Snowden, he’s been exiled, and Julian Assange of Wikileaks is currently clinging to his life for exposing war crimes and other unethical actions by multiple governments and corporations. There are many other examples. What does it say about our civilization when we prosecute those who expose harm, corruption, immoral/unethical actions by governments and war crimes?

Greenwald recently interviewed Snowden about internet censorship and the role big tech companies and governments are playing. Greenwald explains that in one of his earliest meetings with Snowden, he (Snowden) explained that he was driven in large part by the vital role the early internet played in his life, “one that was free of corporate and state control, that permitted anonymity and exploration free of monitoring, and, most of all, fostered unrestrained communication and dissemination of information by and among citizens of the world without corporate and state overlords regulating and controlling what they were saying.

This is what he and Snowden go into in the interview posted below. Prior to that I provide a brief summary of Snowden’s key thoughts.

Snowden starts off by mentioning government surveillance programs and the companies they contracted to do this work and compares them to modern day Big Tech giants censoring information on a wide range of topics. We see this today with elections/politics, to medical information dealing with coronavirus and vaccines, for example.

“In secret, these companies had all agreed to work with the U.S. Government far beyond what the law required of them, and that’s what we’re seeing with this new censorship push is really a new direction in the same dynamic. These companies are not obligated by the law to do almost any of what they’re actually doing but they’re going above and beyond, to, in many cases, to increase the depth of their relationship (with the government) and the government’s willingness to avoid trying to regulate them in the context of their desired activities, which is ultimately to dominate the conversation and information space of global society in different ways…They’re trying to make you change your behaviour… – Snowden

So basically, these Big Tech companies have become slaves, if you will, to the governments will, or at least powerful people situated in high places within the government. Snowden brings up the fact that many of these companies are hiring people from the CIA, who come from the Pentagon, who come from the NSA, who have top secret clearances…The government is a customer of all the major cloud service providers. They are also a major regulator of these companies, which gives these companies the incentive to do whatever they want.

This is quite clear if you look at Facebook, Google and Amazon employees. There are many who have come from very high positions within the Department of Defense.

In no case is this more clear than Amazon – Snowden

Amazon appointed Keith Alexander, director of the NSA under Barack Obama.

He was one of the senior architects of the mass surveillance program that courts have repeatedly now declared to be unlawful and unconstitutional….When you have this kind of incentive from a private industry to maintain the warmest possible relationship with the people in government, who not just buy from you but also have the possibility to end your business or change the way you do business…You now see this kind of soft corruption that happens in a constant way. – Snowden

Snowden goes on to explain how people get upset when government, especially the Trump government, tries to set the boundaries of what appropriate speech is by attempting to stop big tech censorship, he then says,

If you’re not comfortable letting the government determine the boundaries of appropriate political speech, why are you begging Mark Zuckerberg to do it?

I think the reality here is…it’s not really about freedom of speech, and it’s not really about protecting people from harm…I think what you see is the internet has become the de facto means of mass communication. That represents influence which represents power, and what we see is we see a whole number of different tribes basically squabbling to try to gain control over this instrument of power.

What we see is an increasing tendency to silence journalists who say things that are in the minority.

You can watch the full conversation between Greenwald and Snowden below, the conversation is about 40 minutes long.

Closing Comments: This kind of information almost begs the question, are we ready as a society to truly create and disseminate journalism that is honest, integral and bi-partisan? Why is it that these types of organizations fail or struggle? How do some media companies fail? Well, they no longer stay true to their mission. They fall to the pressure of politics and fall into ideology. How many other times did ideology change what media outlets reported? Yes, it’s almost impossible to have zero bias, but how close can we get to zero? How can we achieve this when media outlets who do not fit within the accepted framework and disseminate information that challenges the popular opinion are constantly being punished for simply putting out information?

As Snowden mentioned above, these Big Tech companies in collusion with governments are literally attempting to not only censor information, but change the behaviour of people as well, especially journalists. When you take away one’s business or livelihood as a result of non-compliance, you are in a way forcing them to comply and do/say things you they way you want them done/said. We’ve experienced massive amounts of censorship and demonetization here at Collective Evolution, but we haven’t changed as a results of it. We simply created CETV, a platform that helps support our work as a result of censorship.

Power Is An Illusion, Control Is A Facade

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

This past year in numerous countries the public is being bombarded with lessons in power and control that have been forgotten for generations. I think the majority of westerners in particular have long believed themselves “safe” from totalitarian government, from collectivist micro-management and from communistic cultism. They thought we had moved beyond the nightmares of the 20th century. They thought that the “new world” was going to be more Utopian, and that freedom would grace us naturally along with technological progress.

Sure, in the back of everyone’s subconscious there is the fear that the good times are an illusion and that dystopia is just behind a thin veneer of economic stability and false optimism, but most people do not really think such catastrophes will happen in their lifetime. We are now in the midst of a deliberately over-hyped pandemic, strict national lockdowns, civil unrest, riots, aggressive tech censorship, intrusive government censorship, unprecedented corporate and treasury debt, stagflationary central bank stimulus and the collapse of massive financial bubbles. Yet, I still don’t get the impression that many in the public really grasp the extent of the danger; they still believe that the situation is going to heal itself without any effort or much sacrifice on their part.

This is the first lesson of power: Entire societies can be easily influenced when they suffer from delusions that the bad times will be fleeting, and that governments will keep them safe no matter what.

It is a historically proven pattern that governments tend to CREATE problems instead of solving them, and this is because the power dynamic of government never changes. The politicians we “vote” for are not in control, rather, the elites who fund their campaigns and who permeate their cabinets are in control. Political representatives come and go, but the establishment elites never leave. Therefore, the problems our society faces will remain; they are a direct result of the subversive and perpetual power structure that serves the interest of a select minority rather than the public. The decline of our society into tyranny will not stop until this power structure and the people behind it are erased.

This would actually be a simple thing to achieve if enough people were to accept the truth and take action. The elites, the globalists, the establishment, the “new world order”, whatever you want to call this organization of power mongers, is but a collection of mostly weak and feeble psychopaths and parasites. They are completely out in the open; they proudly proclaim their affiliations and intentions on a regular basis through their host institutions, from the Council on Foreign Relations to Tavistock to Bilderberg to the World Economic Forum, the IMF, the Bank for International Settlements, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, etc. There is very little that is hidden about these people anymore.

But, it is also a sad reality that most people have to hit rock bottom before they embrace the idea that they cannot rely on the corrupt system to save them from harm. And as long as they continue to have blind faith that the system will self correct, they will never act. The elites operate in the open with impunity because they know that human beings are more likely to seek out help from the system than they are to fix a problem for themselves. If someone was to switch off that single mass fantasy, the elites would be gone tomorrow.

The second lesson of power is that perception of consent creates legitimate consent. To put it another way – When people believe that their peers and neighbors have accepted a certain level of tyranny, they too will often accept it so that they don’t stand out or draw attention to themselves as “aberrant”. People seeking power only need to create the illusion of mass consent. Even when the majority of people are against them, the perception of compliance can sometimes overwhelm logic.

Control is usually achieved passively without force. Sometimes you don’t even need the threat of force; sometimes you only need to inspire a fear of standing out among the crowd.

For example, the pandemic has been used the past six months as a tool for creating such a narrative. Mask wearing “rules” are particularly insidious as they conjure illusions of compliance and submission. “Everyone” is wearing a mask, therefore everyone must support medical tyranny. Mask wearing is a complete farce when it comes to the actual science of virology and viral spread. The CDC still does not recommend cloth masks to their own employees and only allows them to use N95 filtered masks. A recent and censored Danish study confirms the reality that masks are mostly useless.

Strictly enforced cloth mask rules have done nothing to stop renewed spikes in infections in multiple countries and US states. The fact that in many places masks are required OUTDOORS despite endless scientific evidence showing that UV light and open air kills microorganisms including viruses shows that the lockdown response has nothing to do with science or saving lives. It is about control.

We can take all logical factors into account, but, for a lot of people, if they see others wearing masks they too will wear a mask simply because they are afraid to be judged by what they perceive to be the majority. The reality is that a majority of people are wearing the masks grudgingly, and they would take them off tomorrow if they knew other people would do the same.

This is why the mainstream media pushes mask wearing propaganda everyday, 24/7. News journalists stand on street corners or in open air parks and wear masks on camera. Politicians wear masks even when on camera in their own homes. Celebrities and companies try to sell the idea that mask wearing is “cool”. Hey, if you don’t wear a mask you could be putting hundreds or thousands of other people at risk and killing their grandmas, right?

The masks do nothing. They achieve nothing in terms of stopping the virus spread or saving lives. This is a fact made obvious by the very infection numbers the establishment holds up as a rationale for the masks. But if the establishment elites through propaganda can convince you to wear a mask everyday, then this opens the door to them dictating many other aspects of your life. The masks are just a gateway into more destructive mandates.

The solution to this type of tyranny is to stop caring what other people think, especially when the facts are on your side. In the town where I live, the vast majority of people have said no to the mask restrictions. If someone wants to wear a mask because they believe it will protect them, that’s fine. But, no one is going to tell us we have to wear them “for our own good”. That said, even if I was the ONLY person not wearing a mask around town, I would not care if it bothered others. Your credo has to be “try and force me to wear a mask, and watch what happens…”

The third lesson of power is that force only leads to control if you respond with submission. A group of people can beat you or even kill you, but they can’t force you to comply if you do not fear for your own life.

I find that the use of force by tyrants is predicated on the assumption that the people they are seeking to control will not fight back effectively. As soon as people do fight back effectively, the tyrant is shocked. Most tyrants rise to power, not because they have won multiple battles and subdued their opponents, but because they never had to fight in the first place. Or, they win a handful of easy battles, often staged to look more victorious than they really were, and then use those mediocre wins as a means to terrify all future opposition into not fighting. The tyrants start to believe their own lies and presume their own invincibility.

Predators do not seek out hard targets, they seek out weak targets. The solution to tyrants is for the hard targets to seek them out and strike them in the midst of their confidence. When predators get hit back they have a habit of running away.

But, this requires people who do not live in fear of what might happen when they fight back. The concept of sacrificing comfort (or much worse) can’t be an issue. Fear fades away when a person fights for something more than himself. It’s not always about personal survival, sometimes it’s about the survival of future generations, or the survival of a set of principles. As that fear disappears, so does the illusion of control that tyrants rely on.

The fourth lesson of power is that ideals either stem from human conscience, or they do not. And if they do not, then they are not ideals worth adopting or fighting over. The conscience of the average person is not as ambiguous and changeable as the establishment would like you to believe. A lion’s share of human beings operate on a certain set of inherent morals and principles that are universally shared; they do not need to be taught these principles, they are born knowing them. If these rules were not ingrained into our psyches our species would have self destructed thousands of years ago.

Establishment elites would like you to believe that all ideals are a product of environment, and that those who control the environment control the morals of the people by extension. This is a lie. Values such as freedom exist even in the most oppressive environments, and people seek it out even when the risk is overwhelming. Empathy is also inherent for most of us, but a certain percentage of people are born without the capacity for it. The REAL fight in the middle of any power struggle is the fight between those who are born with conscience, values and empathy, and those who are born without these grounding characteristics.

Psychopathic tyrants desperately want to prove that all other people are just as devoid of humanity and soul as they are. They want to prove that the voice of conscience that guides us is a mask we wear to pretend that we are not evil at our core. Control comes from the fallacy that we are dependent on our environments to tell us who we are as individuals. Control comes from the notion that morals are relative, and that principles are social constructs.

Conscience is inherent, but it is also a choice. You have the free will to listen to it, or ignore it. If a tyrant can convince you to ignore the voice of your own conscience then the only other guide in life is your environment. And, if that tyrant dominates every aspect of your environment, then he now has the power to rewrite your moral code, at least temporarily. You can be made to do terrible things you would not otherwise do, or support destructive causes and ideologies you would not otherwise support.

The ultimate totalitarian power is the power to make people forget their own inner voice. The ultimate tool against evil is to listen to that voice and to not be afraid of the supposed consequences.

The question of the facade of power is about to become the defining question of our epoch as the elitist establishment accelerates their agenda for greater centralized control of our lives. The truth they do not want you to understand is that they have no power. They have nothing. We could defy their mandates anytime we wish. We could do away with them tomorrow if we wanted. They are of no use to humanity, they serve no valuable purpose. They only seek to feed like vampires on the masses and fulfill their deranged fantasies of conquest. Sooner or later they will have to be dealt with – The sooner the better.

Generation Numb: How Losing My Phone Exposed Me to the Pain of My Peers

This terrible void of which everyone stays pleasantly unobservant is the unofficial sickness of Gen Z.

By Ben Scheer

Source: ScheerPost

I hadn’t planned to give up my smartphone. After all, I was starting my sophomore year of college and I had not met a single adult who lives without one and definitely no other 19-year-old. If you haven’t noticed, it is part of the culture. A few weeks into the semester, I forgot my phone (a Google Pixel 2, for all you phone nerds) in the backseat of an Uber on my way back from shopping off campus. This would lead to an opening to consider a break from the phone and everything that comes with it.

I remember feeling frustrated at myself for being so absentminded and immediately rushed to track it down, anxiously calling the driver from a friend’s phone. While I listened to the open ringing on the line I began to think about this one technology’s central role in my life.

That gateway to other worlds.

Over the next few days I continued to hope my phone would come back to me and also thought further into its role in my relationships. I felt how hindering it was in communicating with the people I love.

How it had required me to be always ready to pluck it from my pocket, pull my focus and as a result, never be truly present. I saw in that reflection the possibility for healthier relationships, less dependent on constant digital connection.

More free, less reliant.

Sure, there were a thousand things that would be made more challenging and tedious, but it would be worth it if I could be more present for my own life.

Days later, after I had given up hope of seeing it again, I used a friend’s phone to call my dad to tell him.

“I will get you another one, what kind do you want?” was the first thing he said.

“Actually I think I’m good,” I responded, to his surprise. “I can write you and my mom by email. If we want to talk, I can call you from my computer.”

Quickly, I started to feel the change. My mood and habits became clearer; I felt happier, more grounded, less looming anxiety, feeling more alone and with myself, more conscious of my space and those in it.

Being alone led to more opportunities for reflection and boredom. I felt calmer, and my walking and pace of day actually slowed down. It is hard to describe how it changed the patterns in my brain but I could feel it readjusting, as it does if you spend a week in the woods or on a beach. One thing I felt was that my days were longer and more connected from one moment to the next.

I also became more aware of the moods and feelings of others around me and was suddenly terrified to see how dependent my peers were on all their screens, and, looking back just a bit, how consumed I, too, had been.

Something else bubbled up from my unconscious: My expectations of college differed from what I was seeing. Between talking to older relatives and seeing college life on TV and in the movies, I was expecting a . . . BIT MORE JOY! Young souls, free minds, positive energy, community. I was seeking some bright spark in the people around me, yet all too often what I saw was dull, void, distractible, unthinking, unfeeling people enveloped in the world of their screens instead of being in community and conversing with the people around them.

Yes, that is harsh. It is also what I see.

So much lost human potential.

I want something or someone to blame, but maybe what I should really be blaming is myself for expecting something else. The truth is, though, I feel right in blaming the phones.

It has been over a year since I gave up my smartphone, but I remember vividly when looking at my phone for hours a day seemed normal to me. I was content to stare at the screen for hours, doing the same thing: Watching mildly entertaining videos or mashing game buttons, swiping on Tinder, scrolling on IG, surfing memes and YouTube videos. In many ways, it’s a drug too good to give up, seemingly a harmless drug, but no. We have opened Pandora’s box of marvels and there is no way to close it now.

We are continually wanting what we do not yet have, an innate motivation amplified and rerouted by capitalism’s hyperdrive marketing engines. A good fix for this constant yearning, or any discomfort is to drown it out with distractions. Feeling an uncontrollable emotion? Existential itch? Low-grade anxiety? No problem: Try scrolling on the social of your choice for a bit, trust me, it takes the edge off.

Trauma or poverty, pain or loneliness, all manner of worry, we have a cure! Or at least the emotional response can be staved off long enough for you to find the next thing to click.

This terrible void of which  everyone stays pleasantly unobservant is a part of me as well, the unofficial sickness of my generation. (COVID-19 will be the official one, memorialized in our virtual yearbooks.) This hole, this pit, that is created from not knowing one’s self, not trusting one’s self, or not allowing feelings. So distracted that these insecurities that we act on every day are a mystery. That you cannot see how fundamentally OK everything actually is because you have music constantly in your ear and a fear that, in silence, your own thoughts would be too scary. The sickening thought that your true feelings for someone were no more than an act of comfort-seeking desperation and that “love” is a lifesaver from yourself.

I can’t blame anyone though. The distractions surround us, they surround the people we are with. The collective unfeeling is so great, so vast, it cracked me open, actually made me cry often once I allowed myself to experience it. I felt like I was losing my footing in the world in which I had grown up. Disconnected from my past and unsure of where we were going.

(Side note: If you haven’t yet watched The Social Dilemma, go do that, it’s worth it.)

Walking into a small college class to see no one looking at each other or chatting, the blank vacant stares. The soft glow. It felt … confusing? Why were so many interesting young people ignoring one another? What was a classroom like before these tools were available and allowed everywhere? Why were the screens so celebrated?

Then my confusion grew, and from it rage and pain. These emotions danced together, fueled me and crushed me. I saw, for the first time, the real power that the phones held. Yes, a power we had given them, but a power nonetheless. The power to keep people who were 500 miles apart tethered to one another, or keep people sitting right next to each other brutally apart.

Who can I blame? It is just the world I have been born into, and the technology- and profit-driven changes are coming faster every year. We live in the future with brain equivalents in our pockets and a web that contains all of our collective knowledge but reveals the worst of what we are and so little of the love we contain and of which we are capable.

Is the internet a good idea? Are phones good for humans? These are not questions we have answered or even barely thought to ask in the mainstream of our culture. Of course they are, what else could they be? Progress! Faster communication! More knowledge! More speed! More fun! We will all be more efficient and entertained, and from that we will live better lives.

NO! Stop, slow down. Please. These gadgets, these everywhere-anytime screens, are ruining the minds of the people who have been mesmerized since they were only little children.

To clarify: not ruining, in that people are made stupid (although it definitely does not help develop our attention span), but rather ruining our emotional capacity and spiritual selves. And these limits fetter us as we are already so strained by the pain we are able to see through our little windows; we don’t have a moment to feel, to feel our own pain, or that of our friends.

Or, for that matter, the pain of the world, or the impact of our constant consumption, or where all this STUFF comes from and where it ends up, or the pain of our history and centuries of exploitation of other humans and nature from which all this wealth originally was derived.

Being human is objectively great. We can use language and words to describe how we feel. We can feel the sun on our face and take in the taste of a thousand foods, dance to every song. Feel great pain and great happiness. Yet, all the time I see this discomfort, unrest and fear in my most distracted friends. It is coming from the disconnection from what they are feeling, a disconnection from being.

This is the worst theft of modern-day, first-world life: the theft of being present.

The phones and distractions and speed create this disconnection from the simple fact that you are actually OK, better then OK — you are alive and can feel and that is a gift to cherish.

Worse than the days of sadness are the days of not feeling anything. Some people are depressed not because anything is wrong but because they are numb to their feelings, too distracted and avoidant to feel them; avoidant, and scared of what might happen if they let themselves feel.

Try this: Really study those you love, let their face become new to you, again, and become fascinated in the way they move. Feel the wonder of being with another human.

After more than a year without a smartphone, I am more hopeful than I was in those first few months. Not to say that everything is all right, far from it. Here in the United States our technology has allowed for multiple realities to coexist alongside one another and I don’t see a clear path out of that problem. Distraction and narrow self-interest prevent us from seeing and grappling with the apocalyptic future climate change can bring in a much shorter time frame than even most globally aware people are willing to accept.

However, I do know that change is a constant and I am healed by looking past my own lifetime and by all the simple beauties of life and living. In the end, these technologies do NOT define us. We can work together to change how we coexist.

 


Postscript: For those who are interested in also letting go of your smartphone, I would recommend downgrading to a flip-phone or phone of a similar level. I now walk around the world with a thick, red brick through which I can communicate with my work and family in case of emergencies. 

Corrupt Science and Elite Power: Your Techno-Slavery is Now Imminent

By Robert J. Burrowes

Do you like to believe that scientists are studying the evidence – whether in relation to Covid-19 or anything else – and delivering high quality knowledge that can be used to guide public policymaking so that it might better serve the interests of ordinary people?

It is certainly a comforting idea, isn’t it?

After all, we have long been told that science is an ‘evidence-based approach’ to understanding particular phenomena and thus providing accurate guidance on how to proceed to achieve productive outcomes.

Unfortunately, this claim is just propaganda for the unwary.

In his 2005 study of the validity of published medical research, John P. A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine who also studies scientific research itself, explained why ‘It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.’ Most? False? Here is what Professor Ioannidis concluded but you can read his entire article, cited below.

For starters, there are a range of what might be labeled methodological problems: inadequate sample size, outcomes so small that reliably gauging impact was impossible (leading, for example, to excessive ‘false positives’), and variability in research designs, definitions, outcomes and analytical modes. In addition, research in ‘hotter’ scientific fields – such as whether the SARS-Cov-2 virus exists or for a Covid-19 vaccine – may cause research teams to prioritize pursuing and disseminating their most impressive ‘positive’ results at the expense of rigor. But, importantly, Ioannidis also identified conflicts of financial and other interests (‘very common in biomedical research’) as well as prejudices (commitment to a particular theory or their own ‘findings’, research conducted purely to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure, and suppression via the peer review process of findings that refute their own, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma) as explanations why scientific research findings are ‘less likely’ to be true.

In essence, the ‘scientific research’ that avoided/survived all of these hurdles is considerably less than we might expect and certainly less than half. See ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’.

So that was in 2005. Do you think that the situation might have improved?

In an article just published in relation to Covid-19 in the British Medical Journal, Kamran Abbasi explains that ‘When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die.’ But is this happening?

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency – a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.

For a discussion of four examples of how the UK’s pandemic response involves suppression of science or scientists, including by simply preventing scientists keen to expose the truth from having access to appropriate mass media outlets, see ‘Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science’. (And if you want to read more about how this initial corruption was exploited for political and financial gain, see ‘Cronyism and Clientelism: The Tories’ outsourcing of the pandemic response’.)

The most important point of suppression, of course, is the fact that there is no scientific proof that a virus, labeled SARS-Cov-2 exists, as Dr Andrew Kaufman, among others, has been patiently and endlessly explaining from the beginning. For one of his more recent explanations, watch ‘ZERO Evidence that COVID Fulfills Koch’s 4 Germ Theory Postulates – Dr. Andrew Kaufman & Sayer Ji’.

Moreover, according to Dr Kaufman, ‘there is no evidence of anyone dying from any novel illness’. See ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. So what has happened?

As Dr Kaufman explains: Early scientific papers on the subject suggested an association (not causation) between a novel coronavirus ‘with human to human transmission and severe human infection’ whereas a subsequent key ‘scientific’ paper that made a claim which helped drive the global response to COVID-19 ‘flat out lied’ about their results: ‘Following the first outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the causative agent in January 2020.’ See ‘Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19’. In fact, Dr Kaufman points out: ‘they cannot reference any science to back that up whatsoever’.

Moreover, subsequently to this paper, another article – see ‘I study viruses: How our team isolated the new coronavirus to fight the global pandemic’ – declared ‘The emergence of a new coronavirus in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 set in motion the pandemic we are now witnessing in 160 countries around the world’. But again, Dr Kaufman counters, ‘no evidence was provided at all’ to support this claim: ‘just flat out lies’. For the details and citation of all the scientific sources for this explanation of how the Covid-19 ‘rumour mill’ got started, see ‘The Rooster in the River of Rats’ or ‘Koch’s Postulates: Have They Been Proven for Viruses?’

Of course, Dr Kaufman is not the only doctor or researcher who has worked tirelessly to expose this lie.

After extensively documenting his case in ‘Flaws in Coronavirus Pandemic Theory’, long-time medical researcher David Crowe noted shortly before his death mid-year that ‘despite the epidemic of testing…. There is no proof that a virus is being detected’. In fact: ‘What is being published in medical journals is not science, every paper has the goal of enhancing the panic by interpreting the data only in ways that benefit the viral theory, even when the data is confusing or contradictory. In other words, the medical papers are propaganda.’

Jon Rappoport, another long-time medical researcher who has been documenting medical fraud for decades, comes to the same conclusion after explaining, again, the complete failure of anyone in the medical industry to purify a unique virus which then causes a unique disease. See ‘Death by killing old people, not COVID – The Basic Deception’.

Meanwhile, do you know what you have? An unproven virus. A fake. A story about a virus.

Therefore, all your diagnostic tests ‘for the new virus’ are a sham. They’re based on something you never demonstrated in the first place.

Therefore, all those people, those elderly people dying for obvious reasons in nursing homes, and in their lonely apartments, and in hospitals all over the world? You obviously have no proof they’re dying from a virus. How could you? You never properly discovered a new virus.

Most notably, perhaps, Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter, the authors of ‘COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless’, wrote to the authors of four of the principal, early 2020 papers claiming discovery of a new coronavirus and each of them in their response ‘concede[d] they had no proof that the origin of the virus genome was viral-like particles or cellular debris, pure or impure, or particles of any kind. In other words, the existence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA is based on faith, not fact.’

Moreover, Engelbrecht and Demeter also wrote to Dr Charles Calisher, a prominent and veteran virologist, asking if he knew of ‘one single paper in which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and finally really purified’. His answer? ‘I know of no such a publication. I have kept an eye out for one.’

But you can read the paper by Engelbrecht and Demeter if you want to consider the other efforts they made, unsuccessfully, including by contacting prominent institutions such as the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, to locate documented proof that a purified SARS-CoV-2 virus had been isolated.

If you would like to read more about the non-existence of the virus, including fraudulent attempts to represent it, see ‘Only Poisoned Monkey Kidney Cells “Grew” the “Virus”’ or ‘Dr. Tom Cowan explores the COVID virus invented out of sheer nonsense’.

More fundamentally, according to Dr Stefan Lanka: ‘Contrary to what most people believe, there are no pathogenic viruses.… All claims about viruses as pathogens are wrong and are based on easily recognisable, understandable and verifiable misinterpretations…. A real and complete virus does not exist anywhere in the entire “scientific” literature.’ See ‘The Misconception Called “Virus”: Measles as an example’.

To reiterate in the words of two other authors: ‘there is no original scientific evidence that definitively demonstrates that any virus is the cause of any disease’. See What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong. But you can read more in ‘Dismantling the Virus Theory – The “measles virus” as an example’ and watch the video interview The Real Science of Germs: Do Viruses Cause Disease?

Another option you have if you are seriously interested in the truth is to spend the time to seek out the documented scientific proof that the ‘virus’ labeled SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated, purified and proven to cause a consistent set of disease symptoms among those it ‘infects’, which is then labeled Covid-19. So far, the many of us who have searched for this document – including some of the world’s leading virologists – have not found it.

Suppression of this fact – that there is no SARS-CoV-2 virus and, hence, no Covid-19 disease – is vital, of course, because if everyone knew that there is no Covid-19 disease (and there are simple explanations for the ill-health and deaths: see ‘Halting Our Descent into Tyranny: Defeating the Global Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’), it would be impossible to run the terror campaign that is being conducted to take complete control of our lives in accordance with the longstanding elite plan now manifesting as The Great Reset’ of the World Economic Forum. See also: Covid-19 – The Great Reset.

So I invite you to read the above two WEF documents, both readily available, to see if you like the look of what has been planned for you without your knowledge, involvement or consent

The World Economic Forum and The Great Reset

What is the World Economic Forum and what does it mean by ‘The Great Reset’?

The British nonprofit social justice organization Winter Oak in their article ‘Klaus Schwab and His Great Fascist Reset’ answers the first question by referencing the WEF website:

The WEF describes itself as ‘the global platform for public-private cooperation’, with admirers describing how it creates ‘partnerships between businessmen, politicians, intellectuals and other leaders of society to “define, discuss and advance key issues on the global agenda”.’

The ‘partnerships’ which the WEF creates are aimed at replacing democracy with a global leadership of hand-picked and unelected individuals whose duty is not to serve the public, but to impose the rule of the 1% on that public with as little interference from the rest of us as possible.

So while the World Economic Forum ‘provides a platform for the world’s 1,000 leading companies to shape a better future’ – see Our Partners’ – and pays lip service to its network of ‘communities’, you will find little more than tokenism when it comes to human constituencies that you and I might consider important in any forum genuinely representative of humanity. Constituencies either not represented or under-represented include women; indigenous peoples; people living in poverty or extreme poverty; Muslims; people from Africa, Asia and Central/South America; working class people; small-scale farmers; disabled people and members of the LGBTQIA community. There are others.

So what does ‘The Great Reset’ mean for those of us who are ‘ordinary people’ and, therefore, not involved in its planning? Here is a sample from authors with a non-elite perspective.

Jeremy Loffredo interviewed scholar, environmentalist, food sovereignty advocate and author Dr. Vandana Shiva, which he recorded in the article ‘World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” Plan for Big Food Benefits Industry, Not People’.

Loffredo noted that in Schwab’s book Covid-19 – The Great Reset, he writes ‘global food security will only be achieved if regulations on genetically modified foods are adapted to reflect the reality that gene editing offers a precise, efficient and safe method of improving crops’. In response Shiva disagreed, arguing that the ‘WEF is parading fake science’, and ‘for Mr. Schwab to promote these technologies as solutions proves that The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life.’

‘The Great Reset is about multinational corporate stakeholders at the World Economic Forum controlling as many elements of planetary life as they possibly can. From the digital data humans produce to each morsel of food we eat.’

Referring to the WEF’s partner organization the EAT Forum, an aim of which is ‘to replace wholesome nutritious foods with genetically modified lab creations’ framed as ‘healthy and sustainable’, Shiva observes that ‘EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.’

Shiva argued that ‘all of the science’ shows that diets should be centered around regional and geographical biodiversity.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky in his article The Covid “Pandemic”: Destroying People’s Lives. Engineered Economic Depression. Global “Coup d’Etat”?’ outlines some essential elements of the nature of this global coup:

It’s the destruction of people’s lives. It is the destabilization of civil society. And for What?

The Lies are sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and repetitive ‘Covid alerts’ for the last ten months. … It is a process of social engineering…. The entire urban services economy is in crisis…. Free Speech is suppressed.

The lockdown narrative is supported by media disinformation, online censorship, social engineering and the fear campaign. Medical doctors who question the official narrative are threatened. They lose their jobs. Their careers are destroyed.

Those who oppose the government lockdown are categorized as ‘anti-social psychopaths’….

In colleges and universities, the teaching staff is pressured to conform and endorse the official covid narrative. Questioning the legitimacy of the lockdown in online ‘classrooms’ could lead to dismissal.

Google is marketing the Big Lie. The opinions of prominent scientists who question the lockdown, the face-mask or social distancing are ‘taken down’….

The March 11 2020 Lockdown project uses lies and deception to ultimately impose a Worldwide totalitarian regime, entitled ‘Global Governance’ (by unelected officials)…. All of which is spearheaded by the installation of a global totalitarian State which is intent upon breaking all forms of protest and resistance.

The Covid vaccination program (including the embedded digital passport) is an integral part of a global totalitarian regime….

The UN system is also complicit. It has endorsed ‘global governance’ and The Great Reset.

In his article ‘Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?’ Dr. Joseph Mercola explained that:

The Great Reset refers to a global agenda to monitor and control the world through digital surveillance. You’ll be tied to it through an electronic ID linked to your bank account and health records, and a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life.

Not one area of life will be left untouched by The Great Reset plan, which aims to reform everything from government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing – even how we interact with our fellow human beings.

The globalist technocracy is using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, override opposition, accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the public against our will.

Whitney Webb in her article US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media’ has also written extensively on aspects of The Great Reset coup and in this article highlights the hazards associated with vaccination and the efforts to silence those critical of it.

In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives….

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s [November’s] end.

Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.

Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.

In an earlier article, Coronavirus Gives a Dangerous Boost to DARPA’s Darkest Agenda’ Webb pointed out that:

Technology developed by the Pentagon’s controversial research branch [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] is getting a huge boost amid the current coronavirus crisis, with little attention going to the agency’s ulterior motives for developing said technologies, their potential for weaponization or their unintended consequences.…

Those who are fearful and desperate will not care that the vaccine may include nanotechnology or have the potential to genetically modify and re-program their very being, as they will only want the current crisis that has upended the world to stop.

In this context, the current coronavirus crisis appears to be the perfect storm that will allow DARPA’s dystopian vision to take hold and burst forth from the darkest recesses of the Pentagon into full public view. DARPA’s transhumanist vision for the military and for humanity presents an unprecedented threat, not just to human freedom, but an existential threat to human existence and the building blocks of biology itself.

Tessa Lena in her article ‘The Great Reset for Dummies: Where do we go from here?’ explains:

The practical aim of the Great Reset is to fundamentally restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations based on two assumptions: one, that every element of nature and every life form is a part of the global inventory (managed by the allegedly benevolent state, which, in turn, is owned by several suddenly benevolent wealthy people, via technology) – and two, that all inventory needs to be strictly accounted for: be registered in a central database, be readable by a scanner and easily ID’ed, and be managed by AI, using the latest ‘science.’ The goal is to count and then efficiently manage and control all resources, including people, on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented digital precision – all while the masters keep indulging, enjoying vast patches of conserved nature, free of unnecessary sovereign peasants and their unpredictability. The king’s world feels far more predictable and relaxed when the chaos of human subjectivity is contained for good.

Plus, as a potentially lucrative aside, a bunch of these tightly managed ‘assets’ can be also turned into new financial instruments and traded. Game on!

In other words, it’s an ‘efficient’ global feudalism that goes much farther than its medieval brother since the scanner is all-seeing: every person, every mineral, and every berry is digitally tagged and tracked. Under that framework, every peasant has a function that is derived not from the mystery of life, and not from their inner calling – but from AI, the master of efficiency and the servant of the king. Ideally, the peasants can be convinced that it’s good for them (or necessary to be safe, see ‘contact tracing’) and that this is what progress and happiness are like – but if not, there are other ways, from classic violence to virtual prisons to ‘morality pills.’

In his article ‘Analysis: Globalists’ reboot of the world and their plans for us’ Jacob Nordangård outlines his interpretation of what is happening:

The Corona crisis is the trigger for a global coup d’état of monumental dimensions. It is the beginning of a new era, with a new international economic order that risks completely destroying human freedoms. Tyrants have now taken over to forcibly steer us into a ‘climate smart’ and ‘healthy’ world through the World Economic Forum’s new techno-totalitarian roadmap – ‘The Great Reset’….

On June 13, 2019, Klaus Schwab, President of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and UN Secretary-General António Guterres signed a partnership between their two organisations….

The agreement includes six focus areas [and] also states that the WEF’s fourth industrial revolution is an important component in implementing the agenda. Digitisation is seen as the key….

This means that the world’s tech giants (which are part of the WEF working groups) will solve the world’s problems through the use of AI, satellites, robotics, drones and the Internet of Things, and with synthetic food on the menu….

We have paid and will have to pay a high price for something that has been exaggerated beyond all proportions and which has been used as a trigger to introduce a new techno-totalitarian order.

Sarah Westall’s video presentation of the research by Grace Van Berkum – see ‘We are Being Played’ – about the future of global governance in ‘Multi-Decade Globalist Plan’ offers a comprehensive and horrifying view, which is only touched upon here:

The New World Order where there are no borders and only one government…. It is an entire comprehensive, meticulous plan for changing our entire world. No detail has not been addressed…. Covid-19 starts the journey of world globalization.….It is impossible for this crisis to be made only in the last [eleven] months. The sections on global governance and the fourth industrial revolution have been planned for decades…. The plan is for one government to have complete control of all of us. Artificial intelligence controlling our business, our food, our money, our privacy. And our freedom is to be abolished forever…. Years and years and years of elite mastermind plotting and planning on how to take over the world come together on this one website.

Covid-19 is just the first step to get the ball rolling… A scared and divided world is easy to dominate, crushing the economy and installing fear-based reactions is how you get an entire world to behave and start from scratch. All of the data and all of the videos throughout the site are updated daily, supporting propaganda is published and released daily, written by those determined to take over the world and all 7.7 billion inhabitants. You have to be able to understand this feel-good language and read between the lines to know what is really being said. I have had to re-read some things ten times to truly understand what the bottom line was but also truly understand what they were not addressing….

Using Covid-19 to harness the power of revolution to change the economy… characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres…. In its most pessimistic, dehumanized form, the Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed have the potential to ‘robotize’ humanity and thus to deprive us of our heart and soul. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will change not only what we do but also who we are… and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation….

The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.

The bulk of humanity has become expendable. We were good for the elite to have around when they could exploit our labor and enjoy the fruits of humanity’s talents. But information technology research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that at least one-third of jobs now performed by humans will be replaced by software, robots, and smart machines by 2025.

Robots do not require food, health benefits nor do they require a minimum wage…. According to Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, by 2029 robots and other forms of technology will have reached human levels of intelligence and functionality….

Analysing the WEF’s Resetting the Future of Work Agenda: Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World former World Bank economist Peter Koenig in his article ‘The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” – After “The Great Reset”. A Horrifying Future’ outlines elements of the ‘horrifying future to some 80%-plus of the (surviving) population’ which ‘The Great Reset’ promises.

These elements include 84% digitization of work, 83% of people working remotely, automation of 50% of tasks, temporary and permanent reductions of the workforce resulting in massive, permanent unemployment for at least 30%, vaccination containing nanochips that combined with 5G and 6G technologies will enable control of your behaviour or kill you outright in accordance with the eugenicist plan to reduce the human population.

In his article Dystopian “Great Reset”: “Own Nothing and Be Happy”, Being Human in 2030’, Colin Todhunter focuses on the fact that:

The Great Reset entails a transformation of society resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceuticals corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.

Using COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions to push through this transformation, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which older enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or absorbed into monopolies, effectively shutting down huge sections of the pre-COVID economy. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs will be carried out by AI-driven machines.

In a short video, the WEF predicts that by 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’.

More fundamentally, as I explain in the article ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’ and as mentioned above, if the transhumanist agenda is successfully implemented as part of ‘The Great Reset’, individual human identity will vanish along with human volition.

Of course, it should not be forgotten that while this coup is taking place, there has already been a great number of disastrous outcomes. These include the staggering cost, in terms of everything from mental health, violence in the family home, loss of livelihood and hugely increased deaths from starvation – see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ – to an acceleration in the path to human extinction on four separate counts. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

What can we do to halt ‘The Great Reset’ and defend ourselves from the elite coup?

Fortunately, we can do a great deal, particularly if we recognize that many issues must be tackled simultaneously and while we cannot all participate in everything, we will maximize our impact if we support the vital role that others play and we act strategically.

Moreover, we only have to build on what is happening already. Despite being largely ignored or denigrated by the corporate media, resistance to one or other features of the coup is already substantial. For just one example, see this summary: ‘Anti-Lockdown Protests All Across Europe’. For an example of the legal challenges to the coup, which are set to proceed in many countries, watch this video interview of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich: ‘Lockdowns, masks & vaccines’.

So, first, if you still find it difficult to believe that people would do this, rest assured that those organizing this, and their agents, are not sane. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’. Complicating this, unfortunately, is the fact that many people are victims and easily conned by propaganda. See ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks?’

Nevertheless, as noted above, there is widespread resistance to what is happening already – awareness of which is suppressed by the corporate media, of course – so our task is to build on that resistance and increase its strategic impact.

So, if you would like to be part of the campaign to defeat the elite coup, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve this outcome here: Coup Strategic Aims.

If you wish to campaign to avert one or more of the four most immediate paths to human extinction, you can see a list of strategic goals for doing so here: Campaign Strategic Aims.

If you wish to nurture children to be better equipped to understand what is happening and far more able to critique it, see ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you wish to reduce your vulnerability to elite control, consider joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of The Peoples Charter to Create a Nonviolent World.

Finally, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice.

More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

  1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
  2. I will not travel by plane
  3. I will not travel by car
  4. I will not eat meat and fish
  5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
  7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
  8. I will not buy rainforest timber
  9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
  12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

 

Conclusion

The coup currently being conducted by the global elite has been carefully planned and prepared over several decades. This is evident from documents published by the World Economic Forum and other elite organizations, many elite gatherings which have discussed the subject, interim measures adopted along the way and the extraordinary measures being taken to prevent any meaningful discussion or debate, in violation of our ‘right to free speech’, about the threat supposedly posed by Covid-19 and the merits or otherwise of ‘The Great Reset’. See ‘“Collective Narcissism” and the “Dark Triad”: Those Who Protest against the “Official” Covid-19 Narrative are Categorized as “Psychopaths”. Is It A Witch Hunt? and ‘There’s no vaccine for the infodemic – so how can we combat the virus of misinformation?’

Given that the fundamental aim of the coup is to substantially reduce the human population and keep those still alive, subject to permanent surveillance as well as mind and behavioural control, as ‘techno-slaves’ to the global elite, the time to resist is now.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of Why Violence? His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

“Watch this!”

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

There are times in my career as a collapse observer and systematizer when my running commentary can quite reasonably be pared down to just two words: “Watch this!” The current severe stage of the financial and economic collapse sequence that was initiated in 2008, which is being artificially masked (no pun intended) by the fake Covid “pandemic,” and now a hung and fraudulent US election on top of it is just such an occasion: why not just sit back and watch the world burn? But I happen to be in a particularly good and sprightly mood today, and when I get that way few things can hold me back from holding forth and bloviating prophetically.

Let’s start with a quick jaunt down memory lane. I first realized that the USA was going to follow the general trajectory of the USSR back in 1995. I also immediately realized that the USSR was rather well prepared for collapse whereas the USA was about to be blindsided by it, and so, as a public service, I thought I should warn people. “And a fat lot of good that did!” some of you might immediately exclaim. But you would be wrong: lots of people have written to me to say how much better adjusted they are psychologically now that they have heard and accepted my message, for now they are ready to accept collapse with equanimity and poise. This is sure to make their company less tedious moving forward.

And so I had my “Eureka!” moment in 1995, and a decade later, in 2005, I went public with my observations. I got a surprisingly sympathetic response from some particularly enlightened people (even if they said so themselves). And now, a quarter of a century after my initial insight, as the US enters national bankruptcy and institutional collapse, the whole world is being treated to an end-of-empire spectacular election extravaganza starring none other than the consummate showman and impresario extraordinaire Donald Trump. He used to run beauty pageants, while this one is more of an ugliness pageant, but then beauty is rare and always fades while ugliness is commonplace and usually just gets uglier, making it a much safer bet. And so let’s accept it as a parting present to the world from a vanishing nation that gave us horror flicks, reality television and three-ring circuses with sideshow freaks.

Within the sweeping panoramic tableau of the 2020 election, Trump (our hero) appears bathed in a golden sunset glow of nostalgia for lost American greatness which he forever promises to rekindle. Rest assured, Trump or no Trump, America will never be great again. But Trump’s magic halo extends out from his resplendent orange cranial plumage and enfolds all those who pine for the lost Pax Americana and fear and loathe what America is fast becoming—which is, to put it bluntly, a holding tank for degenerates of every stripe presided over by a freak show. They pine for a time when men were manly and women womanly, when secretaries were flattered when their bosses took time away from their busy schedules to rub up against them, and when everyone was either a WASP, or worked hard on trying to look and act like one, or kept to their assigned station in life and knew better than to get too uppity. They want to believe that the ethnic melting pot can still produce noble alloys, preferably Corinthian bronze, and certainly not clinker or slag.

Arrayed against our fearless orange-hued leader, who at 74 is no spring chicken himself, is a ghoulish gaggle of geriatric gerontocrats. There is Joe Biden, 77, whose brain ran away and joined a circus some years ago but who imagines himself to be president-elect, or senator, or vice-president, or something. Having spent eight years lurking in the shadows as Obama’s VP, Biden is as fit to lead as a pig is kosher after rubbing its side against a corner of a synagogue. To assist Biden in his dodderings there is his party-appointed nanny, Kamala Harris, a mere slip of a girl at 56.

Also haunting the balcony of the American mausoleum is Nancy Pelosi, 80, who still runs the House of Representatives even though proper employment for her at this point would be up on a pole keeping the birds off the corn. There is also Bernie Sanders, 79, a sad pagliaccio whose permanent role in the political Commedia dell’Arte that the Democratic Party stages every four years is to simulate democracy by cheerleading crowds of young imbeciles in Act I, to feign death after falling off his pogo stick in Act II, and to stagger to his feet, wave and smile for the curtain call.

Last but not least, there is the horrid harpy Hillary Clinton, who is relatively young at 73 but whose putrid smell and cadaverous, ghastly visage are not longer fit for public display except in most delicately contrived circumstances. Hidden even further backstage is the suppurating cadaver of George Soros who, at 90, is still pulling the strings and wreaking havoc in the US and around the world. (His minions had recently spread color revolution to Armenia, in turn causing it to “elect” Pashinyan, a choice imbecile and a traitor, who then lost a big chunk of Armenian territory to Azerbaijan.) I could mention quite a few other financial corpses and oligarchic cadavers, but will refrain, to avoid giving you nightmares. Nobody lives forever, not even Henry Kissinger, 97, and so all we have to do is wait.

In healthy societies, older leaders age out and make room for younger leaders who take over for them after a lengthy period of study and apprenticeship. In sick societies, older leaders cling to power with no one competent there to replace them and once they die are replaced by traitors and criminals. The USSR and the USA are two such examples. The late Soviet serial gerontocracy of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, who for a time haunted the balcony of the Lenin mausoleum and, once dispatched to the netherworld, were swiftly replaced by the traitorous duo of blabbermouth Mikhail Gorbachëv and Drunk President Boris Yeltsin, was a tragedy for Russia. The resulting die-off was of the same order of magnitude as the losses incurred during World War II. In accordance with the worn-out cliché about history repeating, the current American gerontocracy is more of a farce than a tragedy, but its results are likely to be no less lethal for the population.

To complete this ghastly tableau, in the ongoing US presidential election, an almost-dead candidate and his charming assistant have been voted for by an army of the undead: voters that have mailed in their ballots in spite of being deceased. I have spot-checked a bit of the incriminating evidence myself, and I am pretty sure that there were over 11,000 such voters in a single Michigan county alone. But this is by no means a local scam: among many other vote-counting shenanigans, it appears that there was a nationwide effort to order mail-in ballots for dead people, fill them out for Biden, and mail them in. You might say that this is a human rights issue: why deprive dead people of their right to vote? Isn’t it about time to stop discriminating against the dead? Perhaps LGBTQ should be amended to LGBTQD for “Dead.” But why stop there? Why not also add a “U” for the unborn and stop this unpardonable discrimination against abortions?

In any case, dead voters for Biden turn out to be just the tip of an entire iceberg of election fraud. There are also the over 1.8 million nonexistent yet registered voters discovered by Judicial Watch back in September. Add to that the faulty voting system, creepily named “Dominion,” which miscounted votes to favor Biden. Add to that the undeservedly kid-gloved and fawning press coverage afforded to Biden and the US mass media’s overwhelmingly hostile attitude toward Trump. Add to that the fraudulent poll data which, just as prior to the 2016 election, was contrived to make a fraudulent Biden victory seem plausible. Add to that the amply funded organizations such as BLM and Antifa (in which the “Anti-” prefix is gratuitous, this organization in fact being very much “Fa…”) which have been ordered to protest, loot and riot in many major US cities, moving their mercenaries from location to location, where they then recruit useful idiots among the locals. What this adds up to is a vast, brazen, carelessly self-incriminating conspiracy to overthrow a sitting president through election fraud.

If you believe even for a moment that I am scandalized, disgusted and outraged by this trampling of the sacred principles of democracy, then pardon me while I shake my head sardonically while quietly chuckling to myself. No, I am not the least bit upset. In fact, this development fills me with optimism for the future. I believe that this ghastly institutional failure is a wonderful development that offers great hope to the rest of the world, and perhaps even to the US itself, although the political environment in the US appears to be rather hopeless irrespective of how horribly or wonderfully its ridiculous electoral system can be made to function.

In any case, it would be futile to try to give the US some semblance of a democratic election system. It would be like trying to clean up a beach by picking up empty beer cans around a beached whale. The presidency, after four years of ham-handed efforts to unseat a president using false evidence, is a failed institution. Congress, which now nonchalantly overspends federal revenue by a factor of three, is a fiscal zombie. The Federal Reserve, which is now a pure pyramid scheme, is a financial zombie. And then there is the rest of the ridiculously bloated US economy, which is waiting for a stiff gust of wind to cause ephemeral wealth to flood out of stocks and bonds and into cash, much of it evaporating in the process and the rest causing a tsunami of consumer price inflation.

In the course of this spectacle, the false image of the US as a shining city on a hill, a beacon for huddled masses yearning to breathe free and a beneficent global policeman safeguarding “universal human rights,” enforcing “universal human values” and spreading “freedom and democracy” around the world is being stomped into the dirt, having excrement poured all over it, and being stomped into the dirt some more. As the curtain descends on this final act of Pax Americana, the image of the orange enfant terrible and the senile puppet with his child-nurse in tow playing on the teeter-totter of electoral dysfunction on the playground of second childhood will forever remain etched into the retinas of the whole world. The whole world will then be able to move on and look for worthier role models and for less corrupt policemen. And that’s progress!

The collapse of the USA will make the collapse of the USSR look like a stroll through a leafy park and a boat ride on a placid pond. I’ve been saying this for 15 years now. My message is still there, for all those who wish to understand what’s been happening and to keep their sanity.

Everybody Knows the Fight was Fixed

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Yeah, like [in] a church. Church of the Good Hustler.”

– Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Hustler

At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, Nora, the aggrieved wife, leaves her husband’s house and all the illusions that sustained its marriage of lies. She chooses freedom over fantasy.  She will no longer be played with like a doll but will try to become a free woman – a singular one.  “There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself,” she tells her husband Torvald, a man completely incapable of understanding the social programming that has made him society’s slave.

When Nora closes the doll’s house door behind her, the sound is like a hammer blow of freedom. For anyone who has seen the play, even when knowing the outcome in advance, that sound is profound. It keeps echoing. It interrogates one’s conscience.

The echo asks: Do you live inside America’s doll house where a vast tapestry of lies, bad faith, and cheap grace keep you caged in comfort, as you repeat the habits that have been drilled into you?

In this doll’s house of propaganda into which America has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

Americans who voted for either Trump or Biden in the 2020 election are like Torvald clones.  They refuse to open that door so they might close it behind them.  They live in the doll’s house – all 146+ million of them. Like Torvald, they are comforted. They are programmed and propagandized, embracing the illusion that the electoral system is not structured and controlled to make sure no significant change can occur, no matter who is president. It is a sad reality promoted as democracy.

They will prattle on and give all sorts of reasons why they voted, and for whom, and how if you don’t vote you have no right to bitch, and how it’s this sacred right to vote that makes democracy great, blah blah blah. It’s all sheer nonsense. For the U.S.A. is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy.

This is not a big secret.  Everybody knows this is true; knows the electoral system is sheer show business with the presidential extravaganza drawing the big money from corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, credit card companies, lawyers, business and hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley honchos, think tanks, Wall Street gamblers, millionaires, billionaires, et. al.  Biden and Trump spent over 3 billion dollars on the election. They are owned by the money people.

Both are old men with long, shameful  histories. A quick inquiry will show how the rich have profited immensely from their tenures in office.  There is not one hint that they could change and have a miraculous conversion while in future office, like JFK.  Neither has the guts or the intelligence.  They are nowhere men who fear the fate that John Kennedy faced squarely when he turned against the CIA and the war machine.  They join the craven company of Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama.  They all got the message that was sent from the streets of Dallas in 1963: You don’t want to die, do you?

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.

It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why.

All the while, the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful. It is now essentially an electronic prison that is being “Built Back Better.” The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population through their corporate mass-media stenographers. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other.

Only those backed by the wealthy power brokers get elected in the U.S.A. Then when elected, it’s payback time.  Palms are greased.  Everybody knows this is true. It’s called corruption.  So why would anyone, who opposes a corrupt political oligarchy, vote, unless they were casting a vote of conscience for a doomed third-party candidate?

Leonard Cohen told it true with “Everybody Knows”:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

And yet everybody who voted for the two men backed by the super-rich owners of the country knew what they were doing, unless they live under a rock and come out every four years to vote.  Perhaps they were out buying stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey, so they can give thanks for the farce (stuffing: Latin: farcire ).

They have their reasons.  Now the Biden people celebrate, just as Trump’s supporters did in 2016.  I can hear fireworks going off as I write here in a town where 90% + voted for Biden and hate Trump with a passion more intense than what they ever could work up for a spurned lover or spouse.  This is mass psychosis. It’s almost funny.

At least we have gotten rid of Trump, they say.  No one can be worse. They think this is logic.  Like Torvald, they cannot begin to understand why anyone would want to leave the doll’s house, how anyone could refuse to play a game in which the dice are loaded.  They will deny they are in the doll’s house while knowing the dice are loaded and still roll the die, not caring that their choice – whether it’s Tweedledee or Tweedledum – will result in the death and impoverishment of so many, that being the end result of oligarchic rule at home and imperialism abroad.

Orwell called this Doublethink:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

And while in Nineteen Eighty-Four Doublethink is learned by all the Party members “and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox,” today in the U.S.A., it has been mastered even by the so-called unintelligent.

To live in the U.S.A. is to live in the Church of the Good Hustler.

People often ask: What can we do to make the country better?  What is your alternative?

A child could answer that one: Don’t vote if you know that both contenders are backed by the super-rich elites, what some call the Deep State.  Which of course they are.  Everybody knows.

The so-called left and right argue constantly about whom to support.  It’s a pseudo-debate constructed to allow people to think their vote counts; that the game isn’t rigged. It’s hammered into kids’ heads from an early age. Be grateful, give thanks that you live in a democracy where voting is allowed and your choice is as important as a billionaire’s such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Charles Koch. In the voting booth we are all equal.

Myths die hard.  This one never does:

Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.” [i]

With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.” [ii]

Above all else, the time has come for us to renew our faith in ourselves and in America.  In recent years, that faith has been challenged.” [iii]

Your voice – our faith – it’s time to unite and heal.

Ask the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Afghanis, the Libyans, the Palestinians, et al.  They sing a different tune, one not heard In the Church of the Good Hustler.

After campaigning hard for the losing presidential candidate in 1972, I nearly  choked when I heard Richard Nixon’s inaugural address in January 1973. Clinging to the American myth the previous year, I had campaigned for a genuine anti-war Democrat, Senator George McGovern. The war against Vietnam was still raging and Nixon, who had been first elected in 1968 as a “peace candidate,” succeeding the previous “peace candidate” Lyndon Baines Johnson, was nevertheless overwhelmingly elected, despite Watergate allegations appearing in the months preceding the election.  Nixon won forty-nine states to McGovern’s one – Massachusetts, where I lived.  It was a landslide. I felt sick, woke up, got up, and left the doll’s house.

“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” wrote the French sociologist Jacques Ellul in 1965 in Propaganda:

It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness…. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.

In a country where loneliness is widespread, the will to believe and the power of positive thinking are far more powerful than the will to truth.  Unlike Nora, who knew that when she left the doll’s house she was choosing the loneliness of the solitary soul, Americans prefer myths that induce them to act out of habit so they can lose themselves in the group.

This is so despite the fact that In the Church of the Good Hustler, when you play the game, you lose.  We are all Americans and your vote counts and George Washington never told a lie.

[i] Donald Trump

[ii] Joseph Biden

[iii] Richard Nixon