Humanity’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children

Posted on June 25, 2018 by Reid Mukai

© UNICEF/UN0126672/Brown
A drawing by a Rohingya boy reveals the horrific experiences he endured while fleeing from Myanmar to Bangladesh, October 2017.

By Robert J. Burrowes

In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out four conflict configurations that are paid little attention by conflict theorists.

In this article, I would like to discuss a fifth conflict configuration that is effectively ignored by conflict theorists (and virtually everyone else). This conflict is undoubtedly the most fundamental conflict in human society, because it generates all of the violence humans perpetrate and experience, and yet it is utterly invisible to almost everyone.

I have previously described this conflict as ‘the adult war on children’. It is indeed humanity’s ‘dirty little secret’.

Let me illustrate and explain the nature and extent of this secret war. And what we can do about it.

Every day, according to some estimates, human adults kill 50,000 of our children. The true figure is probably significantly higher. We kill children in wars. See, for example, ‘Scourging Yemen’. We kill them with drones. We kill them in our homes and on the street. We shoot them at school.

We also kill children in vast numbers by starving them to death, depriving them of clean drinking water, denying them medicines – see, for example, ‘Malaria is alive and well and killing more than 3000 African children every day’ – or forcing them to live in a polluted environment, particularly in parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America. Why? Because we use military violence to maintain an ‘economic’ system that allocates resources for military weapons, as well as corporate profits for the wealthy, instead of resources for living.

We also execute children in sacrificial killings after kidnapping them. We even breed children to sell as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and the filming of ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming), torture and satanic sacrifice. And these are just some of the manifestations of the violence against children that have been happening for centuries or, in some cases, millennia. On these points, see the video evidence presented at the recent Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse organized by the International Tribunal for Natural Justice.

The opening statement by Chief Counsel Robert David Steele refers to an estimated eight million children trafficked annually – with 600,000-800,000 of these children (excluding both those bred within the USA without birth certificates and those imported without documentation) in the United States alone – and mentions such practices as ritual torture and ritual murder as well as training dogs to rape children and toddlers. He mentions the range of organizations involved from Oxfam and the Boy Scouts of America to ‘child-service’ agencies and police forces as well as various United Nations organizations, where pedophiles (those who prey on children) rise through the ranks to exercise enormous control. He also points out that many of the children bred or kidnapped into this system usually last about two years before dying (often after being raped several times each hour for some of that time) or being killed outright. He also mentions (with evidence provided in other video presentations) the forced removal of body organs from children of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Steele, who is a former CIA operations officer, also points out that the 1,000 US military bases around the world are ‘not there for national defense; they are there to serve as lilypads for the smuggling of guns, gold, cash, drugs and small children’. The obvious and clear inference to be drawn from his statement is that the US military is heavily involved in child trafficking (as well as its well-known involvement in drug and weapons trafficking, for example), which means that vast numbers of US military personnel know about it too. And do nothing.

The compelling testimony at the Commission of Inquiry of survivor/perpetrator Ronald Bernard will give you a clear sense of the deep elite engagement (that is, the 8,000-8,500 ‘elite’ individuals running central banks, governments, secret service agencies, multinational corporations, terrorist organizations and churches) in the extraordinary violence inflicted on children, with children illegally trafficked internationally along with women, weapons, drugs, currencies, gold and wildlife.

In a particularly poignant series of moments during the interview, after he has revealed some of the staggering violence he suffered as a child at the hands of his father and the Church, Bernard specifically refers to the fact that the people engaged in these practices are terrified (and ‘serving the monster of greed’) and that, during his time as a financial entrepreneur, he was working with people who understood him as he understood them: individuals who were suffering enormously from the violence they had suffered as children themselves and who are now so full of hatred that they want to destroy life, human and otherwise. In short: they enjoy and celebrate killing people and destroying the Earth as a direct response to the violence they each suffered as a child.

There are more video testimonies by survivors, expert witnesses, research scholars in the field and others on the International Tribunal for Natural Justice website and if you want to read scholarly books documenting aspects of this staggering violence against children then see, for example, ‘Childhunters: Requiem of a Child-killer’ and ‘Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape’.

For further accounts of the systematic exploitation, rape, torture and murder of children over a lengthy period, which focuses on Canada’s indigenous peoples, Rev. Kevin Annett’s evocative report ‘Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust – The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada’, and his books ‘Unrelenting’ and ‘Murder by Decree: The Crime of Genocide in Canada’ use eyewitness testimonies and archival documentation to provide ‘an uncensored record of the planned extermination of indigenous children in Canada’s murderous “Indian residential schools”’ from 1889 to 1996.

Apart from what happened in the Indian Residential Schools during this period, however, the books also offer extensive evidence documenting the ongoing perpetration of genocide, including child rape, torture and killing, against Canada’s indigenous peoples by its government, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Catholic, Anglican and United Churches since the 19^th century. Sadly, there is plenty more in Kevin’s various books and on the website of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State which also explain the long-standing involvement of the Vatican in these genocidal crimes against children.

Of course, Canada is not alone in its unrelenting violence against indigenous children (and indigenous peoples generally). The United States and Australia, among many others, also have long records of savagery in destroying the lives of indigenous children, fundamentally by taking their land and destroying their culture, traditional livelihoods and spirituality. And when indigenous people do not simply abandon their traditional way of being and adopt the dominant model, they are blamed and persecuted even more savagely, as the record clearly demonstrates.

Moreover, institutional violence against children is not limited to the contexts and settings mentioned above. In the recently conducted Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse undertaken in Australia, childcare services, schools, health and allied services, youth detention, residential care and contemporary out-of-home services, religious activities, family and youth support services, supported accommodation, sporting, recreational and club activities, youth employment, and the military forces were all identified as providing contexts for perpetrating violence against children.

Over half of the survivors suffered sexual violation in an institution managed by a religious organization such as places of worship and for religious instruction, missions, religious schools, orphanages, residential homes, recreational clubs, youth groups, and welfare services. Another one-third of survivors suffered the violence in an institution under government management such as a school, an out-of-home care service, a youth detention centre or at a health service centre. The remaining 10% suffered violence in a private organization such as a child care centre, a medical practice or clinic, a music or dance school, an independent school, a yoga ashram or a sports club, a non-government or not-for-profit organization.

Needless to say, the failure to respond to any of this violence for the past century by any of the institutions ‘responsible’ for monitoring, oversight and criminal justice, such as the police, law enforcement and agencies responsible for public prosecution, clearly demonstrates that mechanisms theoretically designed to protect children (and adults) do not function when those same institutions are complicit in the violence and are, in any case, designed to defend elite interests (not ‘ordinary’ people and children). Hence, of course, this issue was not even investigated by the Commission because it was excluded from the terms of reference!

Separately from those children we kill or violate every day in the ways briefly described above, we traffic many others into sexual slavery – such as those trafficked (sometimes by their parents) into prostitution to service the sex tourism industry in countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and India – we kidnap others to terrorize them into becoming child soldiers with 46 countries using them according to Child Soldiers International, we force others to work as slave laborers, in horrific conditions, in fields, factories and mines (and buy the cheap products of their exploited labor as our latest ‘bargain’) with Human Rights Watch reporting over 70,000,000 children, including many who aren’t even, technically-speaking, slaves, working in ‘hazardous conditions’ – see ‘Child Labor’ – and we condemn millions to live in poverty, homelessness and misery because national governments, despite rhetoric to the contrary, place either negligible or no value on children apart from, in some cases, as future wage slaves in the workforce.

We also condemn millions of children, such as those in Palestine, Tibet, Western Sahara and West Papua, to live under military occupation, where many are routinely imprisoned, shot or killed.

In addition, while fighting wars we cause many children to be born with grotesque genetic deformities because we use horrific weapons, like those with depleted uranium, on their parents. See ‘“Falluja Babies” and Depleted Uranium: America’s Toxic Legacy in Iraq’ and ‘Depleted uranium used by US forces blamed for birth defects and cancer in Iraq’.

In other cases, we cause children shockingly debilitating injuries, if they are not killed outright, by using conventional, biological and chemical weapons on them directly. See ‘Summary of historical attacks using chemical or biological weapons’.

But war also destroys housing and other infrastructure forcing millions of children to become internally displaced or refugees in another country (often without a living parent), causing ongoing trauma. Worldwide, one child out of every 200 is a refugee, whether through war or poverty, environmental or climate disruption. See ‘50mn children displaced by war & poverty worldwide’.

We also inflict violence on children in many other forms, ranging from ‘ordinary’ domestic violence to genital mutilation, with UNICEF calculating that 200 million girls and young women in 30 countries on three continents have been mutilated. See ‘Female genital mutilation/cutting’.

And we deny children a free choice (even those who supposedly live in a ‘democracy’) and imprison vast numbers of them in school in the delusional belief that this is good for them. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ Whatever other damage that school does, it certainly helps to create the next generation of child-destroyers. And, in many countries, we just imprison children in our jails. After all, the legal system is no more than an elite tool to control ‘ordinary’ people while shielding the elite from accountability for their grotesque violence against us all. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

While almost trivial by comparison with the violence identified above, the perversity of many multinational corporations in destroying our children’s health is graphically illustrated in the film ‘Global Junk Food’. In Europe, food manufacturers have signed up to ‘responsibility pledges’, promising not to add sugar, preservatives, artificial colours or flavours to their products and to not target children.

However, the developing world is not in Europe so these ‘responsibility pledges’ obviously do not apply and corporations such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino’s Pizza sell their junk food in developing countries (with the video above showcasing Brazil and India) loaded with excess oil, salt and sugar and even using fake cheese.

The well-documented report reveals corporations like these to be nothing more than drug dealers, selling toxic food to ill-informed victims that deliver a lifetime of diabetes and obesity to huge numbers of children. So, just as weapons corporations derive their profits from killing children (and adults), junk food corporations derive their profits from destroying the health of children (and adults). Of course, the medical industry, rather than campaigning vigorously against this outrage, prefers to profit from it too by offering ‘treatments’, including the surgical removal of fat, which offer nothing more than temporary but very profitable ‘relief’.

But this is far from representing the only active involvement of the medical industry in the extraordinary violence we inflict on children. For example, western children and many others are rarely spared a plethora of vaccinations which systematically destroy a child’s immune system, thus making their health ongoingly vulnerable to later assaults on their well-being. For a taste of the vast literature on this subject, see ‘Clinical features in patients with long-lasting macrophagic myofasciitis’, ‘Vaccines: Who’s Allergic To Thimerosal (Mercury), Raise Your Hand’ and ‘Vaccine Free Health’.

And before we leave the subject of food too far behind, it should be noted that just because the junk food sold in Europe and some other western countries has less fat, salt, sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavours in it, this does not mean that it is healthy. It still has various combinations of added fat, salt, sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavours in it.

Separately from this: don’t forget that virtually all parents are systematically poisoning their children by feeding them food grown by the corporate agribusiness giants which is heavily depleted of nutrients and laced with poisons such as glyphosate. For a taste of the vast literature, see ‘The hidden truth about glyphosate EXPOSED, according to undeniable scientific evidence’. Of course, in many countries we are also forcing our children to drink fluoridated water to the detriment of their health too. See ‘Research Exposes How our Water is Making us Depressed, Sick: Fluoridated water is much to blame’.

Obviously, organically/biodynamically grown food, healthily prepared, and unfluoridated water are not health priorities for their children, according to most parents.

As our ultimate act of violence against all children, we are destroying their future. See ‘Killing the Biosphere to Fast-track Human Extinction’.

So how do we do all of this?

Very easily, actually. It works like this.

Perpetrators of violence learn their craft in childhood. If you inflict violence on a child, they learn to inflict violence on others. The child rapist and ritual child killer suffered violence as a child. The terrorist suffered violence as a child. The political leader who wages war suffered violence as a child. The man who inflicts violence on women suffered violence as a child. The corporate executive who exploits working class people and/or those who live in Africa, Asia or Central/South America suffered violence as a child. The racist and religious bigot suffered violence as a child. The soldier who kills in war suffered violence as a child. The individual who perpetrates violence in the home, in the schoolyard or on the street suffered violence as a child. The parent who inflicts violence on their own children suffered violence as a child.

So if we want to end violence, exploitation, ecological destruction and war, then we must finally admit our ‘dirty little secret’ and end our longest and greatest war: the adult war on children. And here is an incentive: if we do not tackle the fundamental cause of violence, then our combined and unrelenting efforts to tackle all of its other symptoms must ultimately fail. And extinction at our own hand is inevitable.

How can I claim that violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence? Consider this. There is universal acceptance that behavior is shaped by childhood experience. If it was not, we would not put such effort into education and other efforts to ‘socialize’ children to fit into society. And this is why many psychologists have argued that exposure to war toys and violent video games shapes attitudes and behaviors in relation to violence.

But it is far more complex than these trivialities suggest and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behavior in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioral change in the direction of functionality be possible. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? We do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen. In other words: a slave.

Of course, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorize a child into accepting certain information about themself, other people or the state of the world, the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of thinking critically or even learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’). If you imagine any of the bigots you know, you are imagining someone who is utterly terrified. But it’s not just the bigots; virtually all people are affected in this manner making them incapable of responding adequately to new (or even important) information. This is one explanation why many people are ‘climate deniers’ and most others do nothing in response to the climate catastrophe.

Of course, each person’s experience of violence during childhood is unique and this is why each perpetrator becomes violent in their own particular combination of ways.

But if you want to understand the core psychology of all perpetrators of violence, it is important to understand that, as a result of the extraordinary violence they each suffered during childhood, they are now (unconsciously) utterly terrified, full of self-hatred and personally powerless, among another 20 psychological characteristics. You can read a brief outline of these characteristics and how they are acquired on pages 12-16 of ‘Why Violence?’

As should now be clear, the central point in understanding violence is that it is psychological in origin and hence any effective response must enable both the perpetrator’s and the victim’s suppressed feelings (which will include enormous fear about, and rage at, the violence they have suffered) to be safely expressed. As mentioned above, for an explanation of what is required, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Unfortunately, this nisteling cannot be provided by a psychiatrist or psychologist whose training is based on a delusionary understanding of how the human mind functions. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ and ‘Psychiatry: Science or Fraud? The professor’s trick that exposed the ongoing Psychiatry racket…’ Nisteling will enable those who have suffered from psychological trauma to heal fully and completely, but it will take time.

So if we want to end violence (including the starvation, trafficking, rape, torture and killing of children), exploitation, ecological destruction and war, then we must tackle the fundamental cause. Primarily, this means giving everyone, child and adult alike, all of the space they need to feel, deeply, what they want to do, and to then let them do it (or to have the feelings they naturally have if they are prevented from doing so). See ‘Putting Feelings First’. In the short term, this will have some dysfunctional outcomes. But it will lead to an infinitely better overall outcome than the system of emotional suppression, control and punishment which has generated the incredibly violent world in which we now find ourselves.

This all sounds pretty unpalatable doesn’t it? So each of us has a choice. We can suppress our awareness of what is unpalatable, as we have been terrorized into doing as a child, or we can feel the various feelings that we have in response to this information and then ponder (personal and collective) ways forward.

If feelings are felt and expressed then our responses can be shaped by the conscious and integrated functioning of thoughts and feelings, as evolution intended, and we can plan intelligently. The alternative is to have our unconscious fear controlling our thinking and deluding us that we are acting rationally.

It is time to end the most fundamental conflict that is destroying human society from within – the adult war on children – so that we can more effectively tackle all of the other violence that emerges from this cause too.

So what do we do?

Let me briefly reiterate.

If you are willing, you can make the commitment outlined in ‘My Promise to Children’. If you need to do some healing of your own to be able to nurture children in this way, then consider the information provided in the article ‘Putting Feelings First’.

In addition, you are also welcome to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which maps out a fifteen-year strategy for creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world community so that all children (and everyone else) has an ecologically viable planet on which to live.

You might also consider supporting or even working with organizations like Destiny Rescue, which works to rescue children trafficked into prostitution, or any of the many advocacy organizations associated with the network of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking.

But for the plethora of other manifestations of violence against children identified above, you might consider using Gandhian nonviolent strategy in any context of particular concern to you. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. And, if you like, you can join the worldwide movement to end all violence by signing online ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In summary: Each one of us has an important choice. We can acknowledge the painful truth that we inflict enormous violence on our children (which then manifests in a myriad complex ways) and respond powerfully to that truth. Or we can keep deluding ourselves and continue to observe, powerlessly, as the violence in our world proliferates until human beings are extinct.

If you want a child who is nonviolent, truthful, compassionate, considerate, patient, thoughtful, respectful, generous, loving of themself and others, trustworthy, honest, dignified, determined, courageous, powerful and who lives out their own unique destiny, then the child must be treated with – and experience – nonviolence, truth, compassion, consideration, patience, thoughtfulness, respect, generosity, love, trust, honesty, dignity, determination, courage, power and, ideally, live in a world that prioritizes nurturing the unique destiny of each child.

Alternatively, if you want a child to turn out like the perpetrators of violence described above, to be powerless to respond effectively to the crises in our world, or to even just turn out to be an appalling parent, then inflict violence – visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – on them during their childhood.

Tragically, with only the rarest of exceptions, human adults are too terrified to truly love, nurture and defend our children from the avalanche of violence that is unleashed on them at the moment of birth.

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.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better

Posted on June 13, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Gerald Coles

Source: CounterPunch

Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.

Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.

Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”

Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.

In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.

By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20^thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.

After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.

In the forefront of this pedagogy was the No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB), with its lock-step instruction, created under George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama. Supposedly “scientifically-based,” federal funds supported research on “brain-based” teaching that would be in tune with the mental make-up of poor children, thereby serving to substitute for policy that would address poverty’s influence on educational outcomes. My review of the initial evidence supposedly justifying the launching of this diversionary pedagogy revealed it had no empirical support. However, for the students this instruction targeted, a decade had to pass before national test results confirmed its failure.

The history of “scientific brain-based” pedagogy for poor children has invariably been a dodge from addressing obvious social-class influences. In its newest iteration– improve poor children’s executive functioning–billionaires Gates and Zuckerberg will gladly put some cash into promoting a new neurological fix for poor children, thereby helping (and hoping) to divert the thinking of education policy-makers, teachers and parents. Never mind that over three years ago, a review of research on executive functioning and academic achievement failed to find “compelling evidence that a causal association between the two exists.” What’s critical for these billionaires and the class they represent is that the nation continues to concoct policy that does not deplete the wealth of the rich and helps explain away continued poverty. Just because research on improving executive functioning in poor children has not been found to be a solution for their educational underachievement, doesn’t mean it can’t be!

Now that’s slick executive functioning!

Gerald Coles is an educational psychologist who has written extensively on the psychology, policy and politics of education. He is the author of Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures (Monthly Review Press).

8 Signs of a Mind Infected by Political Malware

Posted on March 18, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Jordan Bates

Source: High Existence

Your mind is similar to a computer.

Your brain is the hardware, your worldview the software.

The operating system you’re running is heavily influenced by your culture, upbringing, education, and many other factors.

Arguably, a well-functioning mind is a mind that can update its operating system.

As new information comes in, a healthy mind will revise its previous conclusions about the world to account for the new data.

The smartest people in the world do this: They’re constantly reading, tinkering, experimenting, and in the process updating their understanding of the world.

After all, the more accurate your models are, the better decisions you’ll make, and the more success you’ll have.

This holds true in virtually every area of life. As the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes put it:

“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”

Dogma as Malware

Armed with this understanding, we can see that an unhealthy mind is a mind that does not or cannot update itself.

Instead of expanding and revising its models to reflect new information, it will warp and misshape the data to force-fit its existing models.

This problem is captured nicely by a favorite folk saying of the brilliant billionaire investor, Charlie Munger:

“To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

What causes a mind to misfire in this way?

In a word: dogma: Absolute belief of any kind.

When the mind is convinced that something is incontrovertibly true, it ceases to update its views on that area of reality.

Any dogmatic ideology, then, can be seen as a kind of malware, or virus, attempting to infiltrate our mental computers.

Dogmatic ideologies—religious, political, or otherwise—are essentially trying to convince your mind to freeze into a certain shape and remain that way for the rest of your life.

As previously discussed, to allow one’s mind to freeze is generally disastrous, as a mind incapable of updating itself will tend to adapt very poorly to a complex world.

Unfortunately, certainty feels comfortable to us. It makes us feel like we’re in control, like we’ve got it all figured out. As a result, many minds are frozen by dogmatic malware.

This is an unfortunate state of affairs, as we humans can’t really afford to be non-adaptive at this point in history. We’re facing dire challenges, and we need our collective intelligence and decision-making to be sharp as possible.

8 Symptoms of Political Malware

One way to avoid getting mind-pwnd by dogmatic malware is to learn to recognize the warning signs.

If you can notice other people’s malfunctioning operating systems, you’re much more likely to be able to debug your own.

To hopefully help you do this, I’m going to outline eight telltale symptoms of a brain that’s been compromised by dogmatic political malware.

Political malware is far from the only form of dogma-malware lurking in the world today, but it’s sufficiently common that it should be a useful case to focus on and learn to recognize. And, naturally, many of these points can be extended to other domains.

Here are eight common symptoms of a brain-computer infected by political malware:

1. Inability to explain the arguments or evidence that led to current conclusions.

High-functioning minds don’t just believe things because they feel good or because someone told them to. They require evidence and well-reasoned arguments to support their positions.

If a person is unable to explain the evidence and/or arguments that convinced them of a particular political conclusion, it’s highly likely that they hold that belief simply because their political tribe does.

2. Never says, “I don’t have an opinion on this because I haven’t done enough research and thinking on it.”

Dogmatic, non-adaptive minds tend to have an opinion on everything. Even if they haven’t thought about a given issue for themselves, they just default to whatever opinion is popular with their tribe.

Healthy minds, by contrast, are extremely humble. They realize the world is ridiculously complex and that it’s actually impossible to have an informed opinion on everything. They are honest about what they don’t know, and they realize they should be cautious about forming opinions because humans are so good at deluding themselves and jumping to premature conclusions.

As the genius physicist Richard Feynman put it:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

3. Treats affiliation like a badge of honor.

Whatever they happen to be—Republican or Democrat, radical or centrist, libertarian or fascist, conservative or liberal—you know it. Because they advertise it.

They’re proud to be a member of their particular team. But when a person is really proud to be part of something that requires them to hold certain beliefs, what are the chances that they’re going to be able to update those beliefs as they encounter new information? Slim to none. Sharp minds value truth over team and tend not to have strong political affiliations.

4. Views don’t change over time.

Ask a dogmatic person their thoughts on a certain political issue, then ask them again in five years. You’ll almost surely get the same answer. No added nuance, no “Well, I thought about this more and my take is a little bit different now.” Just the same old scripts, repeated ad nauseam.

5. Quickly becomes hostile in political conversations.

The thing about joining a political tribe and thus making your politics a really deep, important part of your identity is that it becomes extremely difficult to have a calm conversation about ideas.

When you challenge a dogmatic political mind, you’re not just challenging their ideas. You’re challenging their tribe, their identity: the cornerstone of their sense of security in this universe. Naturally, this often doesn’t go over so well.

Healthy minds, by contrast, are interested in the truth, or the best solution, rather than preserving their sense of tribal pride. Therefore they can entertain multiple positions on a single issue without having their feathers ruffled. For them ideas are just ideas, and they want to find as many good ideas as possible, let them do battle, and determine which are the best.

6. Absolute faith in the correctness of their own views.

There’s a reason Jordan Greenhall uses the terms “Blue Church” and “Red Religion” to describe the two major political monoliths vying for power in the West.

He’s not the first person to notice that for many people, politics has become a form of religion. With the secularization of the West in recent history, it’s not a surprise that people’s religious drives have been diverted into another dogmatic domain.

Adaptive minds, by contrast, expect to be wrong. The idea that they’ve somehow reached the Final Truth of reality seems ludicrous.

“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”

― Elon Musk

7. Displays an “If you disagree with me, you must be my enemy” mentality.

For highly dogmatic minds, any disagreement is interpreted as an act of war. If you disagree with them, or even offer an alternate possibility, you must not be on their team, and if you’re not on their team, you must be on an opposing team—an enemy.

This black-and-white thinking is made all the worse when a country has just two major political parties, as in the case of the United States. In a well-functioning bipartisan system, the two parties should at least be able to cooperate, compromise, and realize everyone is ultimately seeking to improve the country, despite disagreeing about how best to do that. Unfortunately, in the profoundly divisive and polarized US political climate of 2018, bipartisan cooperation and understanding has become impossible for many people. This is a grim omen of things to come.

Adaptive minds realize that disagreement is healthy, and that talking through disagreements presents an opportunity to learn and refine one’s views. They furthermore understand that black-and-white thinking fails to account for the complexity of the world. They see that it is unwise to rigidly categorize someone as an enemy or as a member of a certain tribe based on a couple of their positions, considering there are potentially infinite positions one could take on any given issue.

8. All viewpoints are identical to those of a single political camp.

If you can guess a person’s positions on climate change, social welfare, immigration, and gun control, based on their position on some unrelated issue like abortion, you can be fairly certain that they’ve inherited tribal dogmas, rather than forming their own conclusions.

The appeal of subscribing to a dogmatic ideology is that there is an answer for everything. You just repeat the views that are popular with your tribe, and you never have to go to the trouble of analyzing individual issues for yourself.

Active minds, by contrast, hold complex, nuanced, unpredictable views, because they analyze each issue independently. They seek out the best arguments and evidence supporting different positions on the issue, and they form their own conclusions. Or often they’re agnostic on certain issues, because they’ve confronted the true complexity and don’t feel confident enough to favor one compelling view over another.

Conclusion: Activate Your Mind

A healthy mind is a mind that updates itself based on new arguments and evidence.

Cultivating this form of mental health will serve you well in all areas of life. It’s also arguably something that we need more people to do, if we hope to continue to flourish as a species and help other earthly species to flourish.

Humanity currently finds itself in the midst of unprecedented global changes. In such complex and unpredictable times, we surely need to be adaptable and open to good ideas, wherever they may come from. We are gaining the technological power of gods, but without the wisdom and care of gods to accompany this power, we are likely to wield it in disastrous ways.

Gaining the wisdom and care of gods begins with each of us: with our individual decisions to activate our minds—to actively pursue greater knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.

Hopefully this post has offered you some mind-activating inspiration and direction. The need for individuals to take their education and cognitive empowerment into their own hands extends far beyond politics. The degree to which we are collectively successful in this endeavor may well determine whether we create a utopia or an apocalypse in the coming decades and centuries.

All of this is to say that, your mind matters. Take good care of it. Best of luck.

Alex Schlegel on Imagination, the Brain and ‘the Mental Workspace’

Posted on February 18, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Rob Hopkins

Source: Resilience

What happens in the brain when we’re being imaginative? Neuroscientists are moving away from the idea of what’s called ‘localisationism’ (the idea that each capacity of the brain is linked to a particular ‘area’ of the brain) towards the idea that what’s more important is to identify the networks that fire in order to enable particular activities or insights. Alex Schlegel is a cognitive neuroscientist, which he describes as being about “trying to understand how the structure and function of the brain creates the mind and the consciousness we experience and everything that makes us human, like imagination”.

He recently co-published fascinating research entitled “Network structure and dynamics of the mental workspace” which appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which identified what the authors called “the mental workspace”, the network that fires in the brain when we are being imaginative. I spoke to Alex via Skype, and started by asking him to explain what the mental workspace is [here is the podcast of our full conversation, an edited transcript appears below].

This is maybe just a product of the historical moment we’re in with cognitive neuroscience researching, that most of neuroscience research, I think I would say even now, is still focused on finding where is the neuro correlate of some function? Where does language happen? Where does vision happen? Where does memory happen? Those kinds of things.

It was very easy to ask those questions when fRMI came around, because we could stick someone in the scanner and have them do one task, and do a control test, and then do the real test, and see what part of the brain lights up, in one case rather than the other. Those very well controlled reductionist kinds of paradigms behind these very clean blobs where something happens in one case versus the other. I think that led a lot to the story of one place in the brain for every function and we just have to map out those places.

But in reality, the brain is a complex system. It works in a real world which is a complex environment, and in any kind of real behaviour that we engage in, the entire brain is going to be involved in one way or the other. Especially when you start to get into these more complex abilities that are very hard to reduce to this highly controlled A versus B kind of thing.

To really understand the behaviour itself, like imagination, it’s not that surprising that it’s going to be a complex, multi-network kind of phenomenon. I think why we were able to show that is maybe primarily because the techniques are advancing in the field and we’re starting to figure out how to look at these behaviours in a more realistic way. One of the big limitations of cognitive neuroscience research right now, because of fMRI, because of the techniques we’ve had, is that we tend of think of behaviour as activating, or not activating the brain.

When we’re doing analyses of brain activity, we’re looking for areas that become more active than another. This is changing a lot in the last few years, but at least for the first fifteen, twenty years, that was one of the only ways we would look at brain activity. So it simplistically thinks of the brain as of some other organ where it’s either buzzing, or it’s not buzzing, or it’s buzzing, or it’s not buzzing, or if it buzzes, the language happens. But really the brain is a complex computational system.

It’s doing complex computations and information processing and that’s not something you’re really going to see if you’re just looking for, in a large area, increased versus decreased activity. When we start to be able to look at the brain more in terms of the information that is processing, and where we can see information, how we can see communication between different areas, then you can start to look at things like imagination, or mental workspace, in a more complex light.

So how does that idea sit alongside the ideas firstly of the ‘Default Network’, which is often linked to creativity and imagination as well, and also to the idea that the hippocampus is the area that is essential to a healthy, functioning imagination? Do those three ideas just fit seamlessly together, or are they heading off in different directions?

I can give you my opinion, that’s not very well founded in any kind of data, but this is something that we’ve talked about a lot in the lab. I have a suspicion that actually we had been thinking about how to test for a while. So the Default Mode Network was first seen as this network that would become more active in between tasks. So when we’re doing an fRMI experiment what we’ll usually do is you’ll have some period where you’re doing the task, and then there’s a period where you’re just resting, so you can get the baseline brain activity when you’re not doing anything. And this was a surprising result, is that actually during rest periods, some areas of the brain become more active. And, you know, “Oh wow, it’s a surprise, the person’s not just sitting there blankly doing nothing.” The brain doesn’t just totally deactivate. They’re doing other stuff during those blank periods where there’s no stimulus on the screen.

From my personal experience, what you do in those rest periods is you daydream. Your mind wanders. You think about what you’re going to do afterwards, or stuff that’s happened during the day. There’s a lot of research since then to back that up. It seems to be this kind of network that’s highly involved in daydreaming like behaviour, or social imagination, those kinds of things.

My opinion, or my suspicion, is that this is illustrating how our term ‘imagination’ really encompasses a lot of different things. When you try to lump it under this one term, this one mega term, you’re going to be missing out on a lot of the complexity, or subtlety. So what I suspect is going on is that there’s this more like daydreaming mode of control over your inner space, where you’re not really consciously, volitionally, directing yourself to have certain experiences. There’s a default control network that’s more taking over the daydreaming.

When I daydream I’m not trying to think about anything, it’s just letting the thoughts come. That’s maybe part of what imagination is, but a very important part of imagination is you trying to imagine things, trying to direct yourself, thinking, “Well, what is the relationship between these two things? Or “how can I build community?”” Or something like that. In that case you’re taking active volitional control over these systems. So that would be my suspicion of what’s going on.

How the results we found would differ from default mode network is that in our study we would show people some stimulus (see below) and we would say, “Rotate this 90 degrees clockwise”, so they had this fairly difficult task that they had to do and it was effortful. This more frontal parietal network probably took over then. And you see that a lot in other studies. Our frontal parietal, I think they sometimes call it like an Executive Attention Network, that directs when you’re consciously trying to engage in some tests, that takes over, and if you’re not doing anything, the default mode network takes over.

So they’re both different manifestations of the imagination? Like an active and a more passive, less conscious version? They’re two versions of the same thing, in a sense?

Yeah, I would think that. It fits well with what I’ve seen. There have been studies that show that they’re in some ways antagonistic or mutually inhibiting, the default mode network and this executive attention network…

It’s like oil or water, it’s one or the other? Or Ying and Yang, as I’ve read in some papers?

Right, but a simple way of describing these that people often resort to is that the Executive Attention Network is designed for attention to the outside world, and the Default Mode Network is attention to the inner space. Where I would disagree with that, or suggest that that’s not the case, is that I think a better way to classify it would be that executive attention is more of this volitionally driven attention, which is usually associated with attention to the outside world. And default mode network is more – I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but it’s more of this daydreaming network. But the point is that your executive volitional attention can be driven to the inner space just as much as it can be driven to the outside world.

Is the mental space network the same kind of network that would be firing in people as when they’re thinking about the future and trying to be imaginative about how the future could be?

Yeah, I would think so. I think an important difference, or an important additional part that you might start to see if you’re thinking about imagining the future, is that practically most of the time when you’re imagining the future, you’re thinking about people, and social groups, and how to navigate those kinds of dynamics.

So I would guess that then you would get added into the mix all the social processing networks that we have. That’s actually another thing that we’re thinking about how to look at, is that practically a big chunk of human cognition is spent thinking about your relationship with other people, and how to navigate that. There’s a good argument to be made that that kind of complex processing space was one of the main drivers of us becoming who we are. Because social cognition is some of the most complex cognition we do, trying to imagine what somebody’s thinking by looking at their facial expression, or imagine how do I resolve a conflict between these two people who are fighting. Things like that.

We do have very specialised regions and networks in the brain that have evolved to do that kind of processing. So yeah, it’s a very interesting question. That how would these other mental workspace areas, at least that we looked at, that had nothing to do with it, you know, it’s like, “Here’s this abstract shape. What does it look like if you flip it horizontally here”, things like that. How would they interact with these socially evolved areas? It’s a very interesting question.

A lot of the research that I’ve been looking at is about how when people are in states of trauma, or when people grow up in states of fear, that the hippocampus visibly shrinks and that cells are burnt out in the hippocampus, and that people become less able to imagine the future. People get stuck in the present, and it’s one of the indicators, particularly with post-traumatic stress, is that inability to look forward, and inability to imagine a future. Do you have any knowledge of, or any speculation about, what happens to the mental workspace when people are in states of trauma or when people are in states of fear?

Definitely no data, only speculation. As with anything real and interesting involving humans, it’s going to be incredibly complex. So it would be very difficult, and may be impossible to distil it down to simple understandable things that are happening in the brain, but what I would guess is that, in people that are in stressful situations, and experiencing trauma, you tend to focus – like you were hinting at – you tend to focus on present. What’s there immediately? How do I survive this day?

You don’t tend to think much about planning for the future. Synthesising everything that’s happened to you in the past, you just react in the moment because you don’t know what the next moments are going to be like. It’s no more cognitive load that you can deal with because of all the stress you have. So I would guess that for one you’re not really synthesising or processing your experiences into something brought to bear on decisions in the future as much.

And you’re not exercising those muscles of planning far into the future. So just like any other muscle in the body, if you don’t practice the skills, and you don’t use various parts of your brain, they’re going to atrophy. They’re not going to develop in the way that they would if you did use them. In that sense it seems perfectly understandable and not that surprising that these areas and these networks that we found associated with these kinds of activities of projecting oneself in the future, or imaging that things don’t exist, in people for whatever reason aren’t doing that kind of thing regularly in their lives, they’re not going to be developed as much as they would from people that were happy and healthy and imaginative.

The paper that Kyung Hee Kim published in 2010, ‘The Creativity Crisis’ suggested that we might be seeing a decline in our collective imagination. Do you have any thoughts on why that might be, or what might be some of the processes at work here?

I could speculate a couple of things. The first thing that pops to mind obviously is education. How we think about the educational system, how we train children. And I don’t know about 1990 in particular but definitely starting in 1999 when we became test-crazed, that would be a very obvious culprit.

One thing to think about with the Torrance test and pretty much all tests, these standardised tests of creativity that we use, is that one of the major components that determines the outcome on the test is this divergent thinking idea. How many ideas can you come up with? So this has, I think, fairly detrimentally become one of the working definitions we have in psychology research of creativity, is “how much?” And not really focusing on quality so much, and just using how many ideas you can think of as a stand in for how creative someone is.

The Torrance Test is better because it does get into other dimensions as well, but still some of the major dimensions determining the score are fluency, when you’re doing these drawings, how many components are there in the drawing? That kind of thing. So for instance if there were educational trends starting in the 1990s and continuing to now that were leading people to try to converge rather than diverge – you know, “What’s the one right answer?” versus, “What are lots of possible answers?” – then that could definitely lead to these changes we’ve been seeing in the tests.

Even if that were the case though, is that really a problem? Obviously we want people to be able to think of lots of possibilities but if it’s just, for instance, people who have been brought up in an educational system where they’ve been taking standardised tests all the time, and they’re trying to figure out which of the four bubbles is the right one to fill in, then that could just be a habit they’ve developed that carries over to these tests. I don’t know exactly.

Another idea that maybe would be related to this is we’re definitely much less idle than we were in the past. I guess we lament all the time how overscheduled kids are. They go from soccer practice to band practice to art class, to blah, blah, blah, blah, trying to fill up their resume for college or whatever. So if somebody is just constantly buzzing, busy, not really just stopping and daydreaming, and throwing rocks in creeks or whatever, then that’s again, it’s a habit they’re not going to have developed and they’re not going to be able to use as well.

This idleness, or giving up control to the Default Mode Network maybe, if you will, letting those ideas come in, exploring possibilities, those are things that I think often come out of boredom. And if you’re never bored, you’re never really letting those processes happen. So that would be another thing to think about.

So if somebody is less imaginative, is that because that when the mental workspace fires, it’s including less places, or that it’s joining them up less vigorously? I don’t have all the terminology. It all fires, but it fires to less places? Or it fires less strongly to all those different places?

I think it would be basically everything, to give you a terrible answer. For instance, this is where we’re really getting at how imagination is a very, very complex process that we’re distilling to a single word, and it’s really thousands of parts to come together.

For instance, if you can imagine visual experiences more or less vividly, then that’s going to play a role. Somebody who can have very vivid mental images of things is going to probably have an easier time recombining things than somebody who really struggles to form a visual image. Or on the flip side, there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that people tend to go to one end or another of being very visual people, and I consider myself on those… When I think, I tend to think a lot in terms of visual representations. So it’s very easy for me to do the kinds of tasks that I ask subjects to do, where you know, “Here’s this weird random shape, what would it look like if it was rotated 90 degrees?”

Some people have a really hard time doing that kind of stuff though. They’ve very smart people, but they’re just terrible at mentally manipulating images. But if you have them think about other things, like more verbal kinds of verbal logical representations, they’re really good at that. So even trying to talk about the mental workspace network as one static network of areas in the brain is probably not true, or probably not accurate because different people will have different connections, or different parts of it will be more active than others.

When I’m trying to mentally imagine things, for some people like me, that might involve mental or visual images, and that’s the way I think about it, but for other people it might involve much more the language areas of the brain, exercising that language network in a more mental way. And that might lead to strengths for some people versus others, and vice versa, depending on what kinds of tests you’re trying to do, or whether you’re a verbal person that’s being forced to try to do something visual, or vice versa.

So given that these networks are involved are these complex information processing systems, there’s any number of ways where they can differ or fail, or become strengthened or become atrophied.

One of the questions I’ve asked everybody that I’ve interviewed has been if you had been elected last year as the President on a platform of ‘Make America Imaginative Again’, if you had thought actually one of the most important things we need is to have young people have a society that really cherishes the imagination, an education system where people come out really fired up and passionate, what might be some of the things you would do in your first 100 days in office?

First 100 days? Well I think the real solutions are things that are more like 20 year solutions. So you can start at a 100 days I guess but you definitely won’t solve it in 100 days. For me it all comes down to how we choose to educate people. I come at this all from a perspective of the US education system, so one thing is that we don’t view a teacher as a profession really, in the same way that we do as a medical doctor, or a lawyer.

I would say we need the equivalent training and residencies and professional degrees for teachers that we would have with anything else that’s as important a profession as teaching is. Obviously we shouldn’t be focused on tests in the way that we are. If you teach tests, and you teach to the kind of competencies a child should achieve by fifth grade, you’re going to be ignoring all the things that are hard to measure, for one thing, like imagination, creativity, curiosity. How do you evaluate whether a kid’s curious? I don’t know.

One of the changes I would want to see is that we trust more that the outcomes that we want will come rather than need to see them happen, because if you need to see a result, then you’ll only focus the things that you can see. And for a lot of what education really does, it’s very hard to measure it in any reliable way. If your goal is create a society of people that are civically engaged, that are curious, that are creative, compassionate, that’s all stuff that you just have to set up a system to do that, and hope that the outcome you measure will be the society you create, basically. So that it frees you to focus on those things, and not focus on maths skills, reading skills, that kind of thing.

So in the first 100 days, what do you do? I don’t know. One concrete thing you could do is try to reorganise the teacher training system to make it more professionally aligned.

Like they have in Finland, where teachers are basically trained to Masters level, and then there’s no testing in schools of teachers. They are then just empowered to teach, and they have the most amount of play and the shortest school hours of any country in Europe, and they constantly gain the best results and the brightest students.

Maybe that would be the first thing we could do, just copy Scandinavia.

Wasted lives: The worldwide tragedy of youth suicide

Posted on January 17, 2018 by Reid Mukai

Principles of goodness together with the golden seed of social justice – sharing – need to be the guiding ideals of a radically redesigned socio-economic paradigm.

By Graham Peebles

Source: Nation of Change

The pressures of modern life are colossal; for young people – those under 25 years of age – they are perhaps greater than at any other time. Competition in virtually every aspect of contemporary life, a culture obsessed with image and material success, and the ever-increasing cost of living are creating a cocktail of anxiety and self-doubt that drives some people to take their own lives and many more to self-abuse of one kind or another.

Amongst this age group today, suicide constitutes the second highest cause of death after road/traffic accidents, and is the most common cause of death in female adolescents aged 15–19 years. This fact is an appalling reflection on our society and the materialistic values driven into the minds of children throughout the world.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in total “close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. Many more attempt suicide,” and those who have attempted suicide are the ones at greatest risk of trying again. Whilst these figures are startling, WHO acknowledges that suicide is widely under-reported. In some countries (throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, for example) where stigma still attaches to suicide, it is not always recorded as the cause of death when in fact it should be, meaning the overall suicide figures are without doubt a great deal higher.

Unless there is fundamental change in the underlying factors that cause suicide, the WHO forecasts that by 2020 – a mere three years away, someone, somewhere will take their own life every 20 seconds. This worldwide issue, WHO states, is increasing year on year; it is a symptom of a certain approach to living – a divisive approach that believes humanity is inherently greedy and selfish and has both created, and is perpetuated by, an unjust socio-economic system which is at the root of many of our problems.

Sliding into despair

Suicide is a global matter and is something that can no longer be dismissed, nor its societal causes ignored. It is the final act in a painful journey of anguish; it signifies a desperate attempt by the victim to be free of the pain they feel, and which, to them, is no longer bearable. It is an attempt to escape inner conflict and emotional agony, persecution or intimidation. It may follow a pattern of self-harm, alcohol or drug abuse, and, is in many cases, but not all, related to depression, which blights the lives of more than 300 million people worldwide, is debilitating and deeply painful. As William Styron states in Darkness Invisible, “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.”

Any suicide is a tragedy and a source of great sadness, particularly if the victim is a teenager, or someone in there twenties, who had their whole life ahead of them, but for some reason or another could not face it. As with all age groups, mental illness amongst young people is cited as the principle reason for, or an impelling cause of suicide, as well as for people suffering from an untreated illness such as anxiety anorexia or bulimia; alcohol and drug abuse are also regularly mentioned, as well as isolation.

All of these factors are effects, the result of the environment in which people – young and not so young – are living: family life, the immediate society, the broader national and world society. The values and codes of behavior that these encourage, and, flowing from this environment, the manner in which people treat one another together with their prevailing attitudes. It must be here that, setting aside any individual pre-disposition, the underlying causes leading to mental illness or alcohol/drug dependency in the first place are rooted.

Unsurprisingly young people who are unemployed for a long time; who have been subjected to physical or sexual abuse; who come from broken families in which there is continuous anxiety due to job insecurity and low wages are at heightened risk of suicide, as are homeless people, young gay and bi-sexual men and those locked up in prison or young offenders institutions. In addition, WHO states that, “Experiencing conflict, […] loss and a sense of isolation are strongly associated with suicidal behavior.”

Lack of hope is another key factor. Absence of hope leads to despair, and from despair flows all manner of negative thoughts and destructive actions, including suicide. In Japan, where suicide is the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 39 (death by suicide in Japan is around twice that of America, France and Canada, and three times that of Germany and the U.K.), the BBC reports that, “young people are killing themselves because they have lost hope and are incapable of seeking help.” Suicides began to increase dramatically in Japan in 1988 after the Asian financial crisis and climbed again after the 2008 worldwide economic crash. Economic insecurity is thought to be the cause, driven by “the practice of employing young people on short-term contracts.”

Hope is extremely important, hope that life will improve, that circumstances will change, that people will be kinder and that life will be gentler. That one’s life has meaning. Interestingly, in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, suicides in Britain increased by almost 20 per cent, and cases of self-harm rose by 44 per cent. To many people she was a symbol of compassion and warmth in a brittle, hostile world, and somehow engendered hope.

The list of those most vulnerable to suicide is general and no doubt incomplete; suicide is an individual act and flows from specific circumstances and a particular state of mind. Generalizations miss the subtleties of each desperate cry. Some suicides are spontaneous acts, spur of the moment decisions (as is often the case in Asian countries, where poison is the most common method of suicide), others may be drawn out over years, in the case of the alcoholic for example, punctuated perhaps by times of relief and optimism, only to collapse under the weight of life’s intense demands once more.

It is these constant pressures that are often the principle causes of the slide into despair and the desire to escape the agony of daily life. They are all pervasive, hard to resist, impossible, apparently, to escape. Firstly, we are all faced with the practical demands of earning a living, paying the rent or mortgage, buying food, and covering the energy bills etc. Secondly, there are the more subtle pressures, closely related to our ability to meet the practical demands of the day: the pressure to succeed, to make something of one’s life, to be strong – particularly of you’re a young man, to be sexually active, to be popular, to know what you want and have the strength to get it; to have the confidence to dream and the determination to fulfill your dreams. And if you don’t know what you want, if you don’t have ‘dreams’ in a world of dreamers, this is seen as weakness, which will inevitably result in ‘failure’. And by failure, is meant material inadequacy as well as unfulfilled potential and perhaps loneliness, because who would want to be with a ‘failure’?

These and other expectations and pressures constitute the relentless demands faced by us all, practical and psychological, and our ability to meet them colours the way we see ourselves and determines, to a degree, how others see us. The images of what we should be, how we should behave, what we should think and aspire too, the values we should adopt and the belief system we should accept are thrust into the minds of everyone from birth. They are narrow, inhibiting, prescribed and deeply unhealthy.

The principle tool of this process of psychological and sociological conditioning is the media, as well as parents and peers, all of whom have themselves fallen foul of the same methodology, and education.

Beyond reward and punishment

Step outside the so-called norm, stand out as someone different, and risk being persecuted, bullied and socially excluded. The notion of individuality has been outwardly championed but systematically and institutionally denied. Our education systems are commonly built on two interconnected foundations – conformity and competition – and reinforced through methods, subtle and crude, of reward and punishment. All of which stifles true individuality, which needs a quiet, loving space, free from judgment in which to flower. For the most sensitive, vulnerable and uncertain, the pressure to conform, to compete and succeed, is often too much to bear. Depression, self-doubt, anxiety, self-harm, addiction and, for some, suicide, are the dire consequences.

There are many initiatives aimed at preventing suicide amongst young people – alcohol/drug services, mental health treatment, reducing access to the means of suicide – and these are of tremendous value. However if the trend of increased suicides among young people is to be reversed it is necessary to dramatically reduce the pressures on them and inculcate altogether more inclusive values. This means changing the environments in which life is lived, most notably the socio-economic environment that infects all areas of society. Worldwide, life is dominated by the neoliberal economic system, an extreme form of capitalism that has infiltrated every area of life. Under this decrepit unjust model everything is classed as a commodity, everyone as a consumer, inequality guaranteed with wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population – 1% of 1%, or less in fact. All facets of life have become commercialized, from health care to the supply of water and electricity, and the schooling of our children. The educational environment has become poisoned by the divisive values of the market place, with competition at the forefront, and competition has no place in schools and universities, except perhaps on the sports field: streaming and selection should be vetoed totally and testing, until final exams (that should be coursework based), scrapped.

All that divides within our societies should be called out and rejected, cooperation inculcated instead of competition in every area of human endeavor, including crucially the political-economic sphere; tolerance encouraged, unity built in all areas of society, local, national and global. These principles of goodness together with the golden seed of social justice – sharing – need to be the guiding ideals of a radically redesigned socio-economic paradigm, one that meets the needs of all to live dignified, fulfilled lives, promotes compassion, and, dare I say, cultivates love. Only then, will the fundamental causes of suicide, amongst young people in particular, but men and women of all ages, be eradicated.

Jesus Was Born in a Police State

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Jesus is too much for us. The church’s later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from ‘extremism.’”—author Gary Wills, What Jesus Meant

The Christmas narrative of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable, where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus.

Unfortunately, Jesus was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say—things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Yet what if Jesus, the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet, had been born 2,000 years later? What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets were in their home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they would have been turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later. Daniel Shaver, 26 years old, was crawling on the floor, sobbing and begging for his life, and had just reached down to pull up his shorts when a police officer opened fire on him with an AR-15 rifle. “If you move, we’re going to consider that a threat and we are going to deal with it and you may not survive it,” the cop shouted at Shaver before his partner started shooting.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Either way, whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Indeed, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what Jesus and other activists suffered in their day is happening to those who choose to speak truth to power today.

For those who celebrate Christmas as a season of miracles, it is indeed a time for joy and thanksgiving. Yet it should also be a time of reckoning, re-awakening and re-commitment to making this world a better place for all humanity.

Remember, what happened on that starry night in Bethlehem is only part of the story. That baby in the manger grew up to be a man who did not turn away from evil but instead spoke out against it, and we must do no less.

Thus, we are faced with a choice: remain silent in the face of evil or speak out against it. As Nobel Prize-winning author Albert Camus proclaimed:

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally.

As Babies are Prescribed Pharmaceuticals, Have We Reached Dystopia?

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Tablets Pills Baby

By Joe Jarvis

Source: The Daily Bell

Would you let a five-year-old smoke a joint? I certainly hope not. Yet that would probably be less harmful than loading kids up on pharmaceuticals.

Currently, over a million American children UNDER SIX YEARS OLD are taking psychiatric drugs. Babies are literally being doped up by the pharmaceutical industry. Over 274,000 babies UNDER ONE-YEAR-OLD are given drugs, mostly for anxiety.

Anxiety drugs for babies. Have they tried motherly love? Or is that just an old fashioned, outdated concept?

You know, I like to mention society’s similarity to Orwell’s 1984. And surely the growing police state, war on drugs, and endless military campaigns–where the enemy seems to change daily–are reminiscent of the fictional dictatorship of Big Brother.

But it seems the powers that be are working tirelessly to blend together the dystopia of 1984, with that of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

In that dystopia, there is no police state or war. Society has been perfectly designed by scientists, inspired by Ford’s assembly line. Babies are grown in the lab, cloned to all look alike, depending on their class. Parents are an embarrassing relic of the past. How silly to think a child needs family when they have the state!

The lower castes are deprived of oxygen as embryos to stunt their mental development. In America, they use fluoride in the drinking water instead.

In Brave New World, children listen to 24-hour propaganda in their cribs. Betas hear:

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse.

White pride, black pride, gay pride, national pride. Pride is not meant for accidents of birth. You should be proud of accomplishments and achievements, not genetics and geography. Perhaps someone has been whispering in these radicalized children’s ears.

And how jealous the Department of Education must be of the incubators of Brave New World! They have to sometimes wait years to indoctrinate children. But at least the government gets to drug them up at a young age! And if the TV is left on, most of the programming is done for them.

Of course, the adults are drugged up in Brave New World as well, just like in America. If anyone feels the least bit anxious, nervous, sad–or any other troublesome emotion–they get “soma.” It’s the perfect mix of drugs with only pleasant feelings and no ill side effects.

The 1 in 6 Americans on antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anti-anxiety medication still have to put up with side effects.

The 50 million plus Americans on psychiatric medication sometimes kill themselves, or go mad and kill others. I guess the government is still working out the kinks. Or it’s just another creative blending of 1984 and Brave New World. In the former, the proles must be properly terrified.

And there is one more thing I can remember from Brave New World that strikes eerily similar to modern America.

At what age does the public education system start teaching sex ed? Kindergarteners in some states receive “age appropriate”–according to the government–sexual education. Some studies suggest teen pregnancies rise in areas where sex ed is taught at younger ages.

How young is too young for a sex change? Kids can now choose between 43 genders, or make up a new one! It’s like Mr. Potato head, but with their own bodies. And they will be given corresponding drugs to enhance the “natural” changes.

In the classrooms of Brave New World:

“We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,” she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.”

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing…

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

Drugging the population, programming citizens with propaganda, sexualizing children, creating class divisions.

These dystopian novels were meant to be warnings, not instruction manuals.

Decoding a Fake Reality

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Rosanne Lindsay

Source: Waking Times

Reality is a program of beliefs we decode:

Disease equals Health
Fake news equals Truth
Wars equal Peace
Uniformity equals Unity
State-granted rights equal human rights
Slavery equals Freedom.

All is illusion.

As our world unfolds in multiple dimensions, we are focused in a time-space continuum (linear construct) with limited perception. Our “perception deception” in this reality timeline means that no matter what happened in the past, or what might happen in the future, we are always pondering it and creating it in the Now.

The power to restructure reality is only possible with the clarity of the cosmic mind. Unfortunately, as humans, we are easily programmed to believe that what we see, feel, taste, hear, and smell is all there is.

“The outer world is a reflection of the inner world. Other people’s perception of you is a reflection of them; your response to them is an awareness of you.” ~Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Our beliefs guide our perception about who we are and what we can create. Believe we are sick and tired and we are. The body responds to core beliefs. The cells hear what we say, they hear limitations and feel fear. If we love our cells, the body will support our beliefs. What we do in our bodies is pivotal to our multidimensional selves, as well as to other timelines.

The Structure of Reality

Reality is constructed in time and space in this Third Dimension. Time and space are frequencies which cycle in a looped timeline, which our brains decode so that we can experience life as humans. Everything cycles, from the seasons to the economy, just as history tends to repeat itself.

We live in a Matrix system that can be described as a grid, a hologram, or a game composed of electromagnetic (EM) frequencies. The hologram is information as light that is distributed non-locally. Our brains decode this information based on perception; how things appear to us. And as we know, appearances can be deceiving.

Indeed, all is not as it seems. We create a collective reality with electromagnetic frequencies where everyone and everything is connected, in similar fashion to how the internet works. However, in the space we occupy we see only a small visible light spectrum, a narrow band of information that represents only 0.0001% of the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

Spirit First

We perceive that the brain is the central processing unit of the body, the body is a computer, and our DNA is nature’s hard drive. Yet we must also accept that we are receivers and transmitters of information – we are also the energy that runs the body. We are Spirit first. We are consciousness having a physical experience in a holographic constructed reality for our soul’s growth and evolution. Consciousness creates reality.

“You are a creator. You of humanity… Science has a fixation on knowledge, particularly that which is compatible with sense perception. Despite instruments which far exceed man’s sensory capacity, all knowledge gained in translated back to a sense perception before it can be coded as information. If it cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted, it is not received by physical man. The five senses of man. The four walls and the lid of your prison. Discard them. Touch will not determine subtle shapes. Eye will not perceive reality. Ears do not hear the song of the universe. You cannot taste the food of angels or smell the fragrance of a higher truth. We rejoice as you begin to unshackle the self-imposed chains of limitation. Use your physical senses, enjoy them, but never for one moment believe in them as complete reality. Your heart knows – experience. Believe. Believe. Whatever you believe is so.” ― Jade Plant, Talking with Nature by Michael J. Roads

If we understand the construction of an atom, then we appreciate that we are not solid at all. We are pure awareness in a cosmos we cannot measure. We are not our bodies or our names. We are not our emotions. We are limitless. Through our limited perception and core beliefs this may sound impossible.

However, we are not impossible but everything that is possible. All possibility means we are everything and no-thing. We are matter and energy, sound and silence. Life is a continuum, between physical and non-physical. Without beginning and without end.

In this game of illusion, we are a projection of our True Selves. In this reality, we are a hologram in a holographic universe. A hologram: a three-dimensional projection written on a two dimensional surface (i.e., piece of paper).

We are here to remember that we are more than words on paper just as we are more than base pairs of our DNA. Our DNA is a projection of a greater force. We are wave and particle at the same time. We are not complex. We are multiplex.

In this game of illusion, humans are caught in a time loop distortion where we have lost our power to those who control the program in the hologram. Not only are minds controlled (via social engineering and frequencies), but human genetics have been manipulated to perceive through five physical senses, resulting in the suppression of our true selves and our true potential.

The Freedom To Choose

In navigating All That We Are, we have a choice. We can choose to become bees in a Hive Mind on a colony of control and draconian laws, or we can choose freedom.

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law and no court, can save it.” ― Judge Learned Hand

When we talk about freedom, we perceive only a fraction of what is possible based on what we have been programmed and conditioned to believe through the limits of the five senses. The moment we perceive differently to use all of our senses, and to embody freedom, we reclaim our freedom. We no longer have to conform to colony control.

Decoding a Fake Reality

The mind controls beliefs in a reality that conforms to core beliefs. When we do not see beyond the page and open to all that is possible, we decode a fake reality and perpetuate it. We become distracted by the limitations set up to suppress our inherent power instead of creating the reality that best serves all of humanity and the planet.

“Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.” ~The Matrix

The Matrix is a system into which humans incarnate and reincarnate for the purpose of soul evolution, and to wake up. While this construct may not be able to be “fixed” it can be conditioned by the way we respond to it.

A Reality of Now in Three Steps

Step 1: Free the mind from the program of beliefs.

Unlearn Core Beliefs:
Schools are there to enlighten us to the truth of the world.
Governments grant rights to protect us.
Big Pharma cures us.
The mainstream media tells the truth about what is happening in the world.
Politicians stand for hope and change.
Terrorists (false flag events) necessitate less freedom though more controls and surveillance.
GMO foods feed the world.
RFID microchips make life more convenient and efficient.
Chemtrails and geoengineering control “global warming” to protect the planet.

Step 2: Expand what we think is possible. Choose to become conscious of the Matrix system or to choose to remain unconscious. If we are in denial we cannot change anything. Accept what is so that we can change what is.

Step 3: Move from thinking and talking about it to doing something about it. Start with the body. Change emotions to lighten the body burden. Love the Self. See the body respond and heal and watch it ripple out to change reality.

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Education

Alex Schlegel on Imagination, the Brain and ‘the Mental Workspace’