The Ultimate Conspiracy Revealed

Posted on September 29, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

It’s a trip how much mental energy people pour into arguments about world affairs while devoting almost none to the way their understanding and perception of those affairs is happening.

People will happily argue day in and day out about what political ideology is most correct or what should be done about a given problem, but it’s rare for them to turn around and examine the sources of information that they’ve used to form those opinions. The fact that most of the information being circulated about what’s going on in the world is owned by plutocrats who undeniably have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo rarely enters into mainstream awareness. Which is of course by design.

Even less common than people questioning the nature of the information they’ve received is for them to examine what happens to that information once it gets into their heads. Nearly everyone lives a life that is dominated by nonstop compulsive mental chatter which determines everything from one’s emotional state to how their interest and attention moves, thereby creating cognitive biases and perceptual filters which shape how all future information will be interpreted. For most of us, thought serves not as the useful tool we evolved it to be, but as the writer, director and star of the entire show. As Ecknath Easwaran once said, “we don’t think our thoughts, our thoughts think us.”

Rarer even than examining the nature of thought is examining the nature of consciousness itself. From cradle to grave none of us ever experience a single thing that is outside our own field of consciousness, but almost everyone goes that whole time without ever seriously looking into the nature of that field for themselves. Which is a shame, because a bit of rigorous investigation reveals that our entire conscious experience is happening in a very different way than the consensus worldview assumes.

Most of us labor under the assumption that we are a finite, physical body moving around in world from which we are separate, and against which we must protect and secure ourselves. Some dedicated self inquiry reveals that it’s far more accurate to say that what you are is not a body or a mind or a separate “me” at all, but rather a kind of strange, imperceptible subject to which the field of consciousness appears. In your actual experience without referring to mental narrative, you can discover a clear distinction between this ineffable subject and your field of consciousness, and see lucidly that if you’re going to identify as anything, it only makes sense to identify as that ineffable subject.

If you think it’s mind-blowing to launch an investigation into the source of the world’s problems and discover a covert alliance of plutocrats, intelligence agencies and domestic propagandists, wait until you launch an investigation into the source of your own suffering and discover that “you” don’t even exist at all. You chase the white rabbit down twisting funhouse-mirror rabbit holes, finally discover the secret chamber of your tormenter, spin his desk chair around to face you, and find not the rabbit, nor the devil, nor even yourself, but an empty chair.

That’s the real red pill, right there. That’s the ultimate conspiracy revealed. Not that there’s a secret cabal controlling world affairs to ensure world domination, but that there’s ultimately no one in the driver’s seat at all. Some clever primates with robust egoic structures have figured out how to manipulate things, but they themselves are just like the rest of us: empty processes playing themselves out for no one, just like a fire or a waterfall. We all conspired to tell a story about a bunch of separate selves who simply do not exist outside of the story.

And in this sense our impulse to expose the ultimate conspiracy to solve our world’s problems once and for all is a perfectly healthy one. Those efforts don’t have the end result that most of us are anticipating, but if enough people pursue those efforts to their end it will indeed solve all our problems. The ego is an illusion held in place by the mistaken belief that there exists some hard, tangible object that can be accurately labeled “me” or “mine”, and ego also happens to be the thing that the propagandists use to hold the status quo in place. Without the illusion that there exists a non-conceptual self who must be protected and secured from a separate world, the propagandists cannot propagandize, because their only tools are narrative, fear, and greed. Awakening from the illusion of ego makes people immune to illusory narratives, fear and greed, which means awakening on a large scale will make them impossible to propagandize, at which time we can use the power of our numbers to expunge the status quo.

But we’ve got to wake up first. We’ve got to stop overlooking the most important and fundamental aspects of our experience here. Self-inquiry is a powerful tool that can be used to investigate the nature of self and consciousness in a way that can lead relatively quickly to self-realization. Just do a search for the term and find your own approach to it if this is something which interests you.

Once you’ve resolved this fundamental matter, the illusion of ego is no longer there to disturb your natural state of equanimity and prevent you from using thought as the useful tool it’s meant to be. You can pick up stories, concepts and identities and use them to the extent that they are useful, and then put them down once they’re not. But please remember that the ultimate goal in discovering the ultimate conspiracy is not to just know it, but to solve the world’s problems. Don’t be content with self-knowledge, carry it out into the world and use your newfound inner peace and lucid relationship with concepts to help make this planet a better place to live on.

Happy rabbit holing.

Believing Jeffrey Epstein Committed Suicide is the Real Conspiracy Theory

Posted on September 25, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Is a murder committed more heinous than a suicide allowed? In its act, sure. In this context? NO.

An “unlucky accident” like this is the ONE THING that a non-corrupt State must prevent. It’s the non-corrupt State’s ONE JOB to keep Epstein alive for trial, and everyone knows that everyone knows this is their ONE JOB.

It is impossible to violate this common knowledge without premeditation and malice, without conspiracy and criminality aforethought. It is impossible to have an “unlucky accident” like this in a non-corrupt State.

– Ben Hunt, I’m a Superstitious Man

It’s entirely fitting that the death of Jeffrey Epstein is as disturbing, shady, bizarre and seemingly inexplicable as the rest of his life. It seems as if one could research this wretched man’s time on earth for years and still come up with more questions than answers. An unfortunate reality complicated by the fact we don’t have a mass media particularly interested in asking any of the big questions, such as:

Where is Ghislaine Maxwell? Why isn’t she in custody and was she a Mossad spy like her late father Robert Maxwell?
Explain the details of the relationship between Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein? Why does it seem as if Wexner helped set Epstein up with the appearance of extraordinary wealth, yet no one seems to know how Epstein actually came into all his money?

It appears sexually abusing children and accumulating associated blackmail on the rich and powerful was a full-time job for Epstein, so who was actually bankrolling/overseeing this operation? Was it Wexner, somebody else, or was it an intelligence agency as Alex Acosta claims he was told? Seems kind of important to get to the bottom of this.

I could go on and on, but then this would become a book. Rather, the purpose of this post is to highlight the outlandishness surrounding many of the details (or lack thereof) surrounding Epstein’s death a week ago in a Department of Justice operated New York City prison.

Indeed, what you’d have to believe in order to think this was a simple suicide is the actual conspiracy theory.

Let’s begin with the initial attack, which happened three weeks before his death.

The Initial Attack
As everybody knows, on July 23, Jeffrey Epstein was found in a fetal position, semi-conscious, on the floor of his cell with neck injuries. His cellmate at the time was Nicholas Tartaglione, a former New York police officer who was arrested in December 2016 on charges of killing four men in a drug distribution conspiracy.

There was a giant haze surrounding this incident up until the moment of Epstein’s death, with everyone unsure whether he was attacked or if it was a suicide attempt. According to a report by NBC News, Tartaglione was subsequently cleared the day before Epstein was found dead. I suppose that means the initial attack was belatedly ruled a suicide attempt, but why did it take so long to figure that out? It took far less time to rule Epstein’s suspicious death a suicide.

Circumstances at the Prison Surrounding the Death
Either the stars all aligned perfectly for the most important prisoner in America to kill himself on that day, or he was somehow murdered to shield an extensive list of some of the most wealthy and powerful people on earth. Decide for yourself.

– One of Epstein’s Guards Was Not a Corrections Officer

The AP reported:

A person familiar with operations at the federal jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself says one of the two people guarding him the night he died wasn’t a correctional officer.

The person wasn’t authorized to disclose information about the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The person said Epstein hanged himself with a bedsheet, days after being taken off a suicide watch.

Federal prisons facing shortages of fully trained guards have resorted to having other types of support staff fill in for correctional officers, including clerical workers and teachers.

– Both of the Guards Fell Asleep at the Exact Same Time Giving Epstein a Chance to Die

Guards were supposed to have checked on Epstein every 30 minutes, but rather both of them fell asleep for 3 hours during the window of Epstein’s death.

Via Business Insider:

The two prison guards assigned to monitor Jeffrey Epstein in a high-security jail fell asleep for three hours, the night he died of an apparent suicide, The New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed officials…

According to reports, there were multiple breaches in protocol regarding the supervision of Epstein: prison guards were required to check on Epstein every 30 minutes, which they failed to do, officials told The Times, and Epstein was being housed alone after his cellmate was transferred and was not replaced.

– Epstein Guards Suspected of Falsifying Logs

AP reports:

A person familiar with the probe of Jeffrey Epstein’s death at a federal jail says guards are suspected of falsifying log entries to show they were checking on inmates in his unit every half hour, when they actually weren’t.

– Key People at the Prison Are Not Cooperating with the FBI

CNN reports

Even top officials in the department have been frustrated by their inability to get some answers from the prison, in part because initial answers turned out to be inaccurate in some cases…

The FBI probe is complicated by the fact that key people involved aren’t cooperating, people briefed on the matter say.

– Epstein Was Taken off Suicide Watch Less Than a Week After His Initial Suicide Attempt

New York Magazine reports:

Epstein was taken off of suicide watch on July 29 and returned to the MCC’s special housing unit after a psychiatric evaluation determined he was no longer at risk of harming himself. The Wall Street Journal reported that Epstein’s lawyers had requested he be removed from suicide watch.

– Epstein’s Cellmate Was Removed the Day Before Epstein Died

This makes no sense, unless you’re trying to create the perfect conditions for Epstein to die.

Via CNN:

In one instance over the weekend, officials believed the former Epstein cellmate had been released on bail. But it turns out he had been moved to another facility, one person briefed on the matter said. One of the first tasks for FBI agents this week was interviewing that former cellmate, who could provide information on Epstein’s behavior in the days before his suicide.

Who was Epstein’s cellmate before he died? After the first incident, it was revealed almost immediately who his cellmate was, but there’s been little to no details about the second cellmate. Who was he and what does he have to say?

– At Least Eight Jail Officials Knew Jeffrey Epstein Was Not to Be Left Alone in Cell

Just total insanity. The official narrative gets increasingly ridiculous by the day.

Via The Washington Post:

At least eight Bureau of Prisons staffers knew that strict instructions had been given not to leave multimillionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alone in his cell, yet the order was apparently ignored in the 24 hours leading up to his death, according to people familiar with the matter.

The fact that so many prison officials were aware of the directive — not just low-level correctional officers, but supervisors and managers — has alarmed investigators assessing what so far appears to be a stunning failure to follow instructions, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations. They declined to identify the eight…

The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.

“It’s perplexing,” said Robert Hood, a former warden at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo. “If people were given instructions that Epstein should not be left alone, I don’t understand how they were not followed.”

It’s only perplexing if you go into it thinking it was a suicide.

Details Surrounding the Death Itself

– Epstein Hung Himself from a Bunkbed

Via The Washington Post:

Epstein, 66, was found in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on Saturday morning, and an official said he hanged himself with a bedsheet attached to the top of a bunk bed. Epstein was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The bunkbed was conveniently available due to the fact his cellmate was inexplicably moved a day before.

– Epstein Suffered Multiple Breaks in His Neck Bones, Which Is More Common in Homicides

Also via The Washington Post:

An autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein suffered multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings, deepening the mystery about the circumstances around his death.

Among the bones broken in Epstein’s neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam’s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.

– Little to No Details About Prison Camera Footage

I assume some narrative will emerge here, but it’s already been too long for my comfort. We had all sorts of details emerge in the days following Epstein’s death, but almost nothing regarding the crucial hallway camera footage in the prison. This is something investigators would likely check immediately so why didn’t they, or if they did, why is it taking so long to inform the public?

Even Epstein’s lawyers seem confused as to whether the video footage exists.

Here is part of a statement from Epstein’s attorneys via NBC News:

“It is indisputable that the authorities violated their own protocols. The defense team fully intends to conduct its own independent and complete investigation into the circumstances and cause of Mr. Epstein’s death including if necessary legal action to view the pivotal videos — if they exist as they should — of the area proximate to Mr. Epstein’s cell during the time period leading to his death.”

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the NYC Medical Examiners Office, which ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, has a pretty sordid history.

Check out the following from a 2014 New York Post article, Lost Bodies, Wasted Money: Inside NYC’s Medical Examiner’s Office

The city Medical Examiner’s Office is a mess — plagued with errors, including bodies being lost, mistakenly cremated or wrongly donated to science — while millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on plans and equipment useful only in a mass disaster…

Meanwhile, insiders say ME chiefs, caught up in the glamor of disaster, neglect the agency’s primary mission.

“They can’t take care of day-to-day business. They play war games,” one said.

The ME’s Office, with 625 employees and a $63.6 million budget, has a history of criminality, waste and incompetence.

The ME’s former chief of management information systems, Natarajan “Raju” Venkataram, and his co-worker girlfriend, Rosa Abreu, were busted in 2005 for embezzling more than $9 million from a $11.4 million FEMA grant meant to track and identify remains of 9/11 victims.

And bosses take lavish taxpayer-funded trips to conferences and symposiums.

Frank DePaolo, assistant commissioner for emergency management, has traveled to Las Vegas, the Hague, Hong Kong and Israel. Chief of Staff Barbara Butcher has gone to Croatia and Thailand…

The number of investigators, who examine bodies at death scenes, was slashed from about 40 to 20, among other cuts, they said.

“We’re told to do more with less, but the work is suffering,” one said.

Here’s some more while we’re at it:

If after everything I’ve highlighted, you still believe this was a simple suicide that’s fine. Anything is possible, but it really doesn’t matter. Even if it was mere incompetence that allowed a suicide to occur, this still demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt that the federal government is incapable or unwilling to protect the public.

The Epstein case was and remains a matter of extreme public interest since this was a man who systematically sexually abused and trafficked children while closely associating with, and collecting blackmail on, a large slew of the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet. If the government can’t protect you from that, and it most certainly went out of its way to deny justice for this criminal over decades including within prison itself, then you can’t trust the government for anything. As such, whenever the feds claim they’re doing something extreme to protect you, whether it’s mass surveillance or encryption backdoors, you can be 100% sure it is a giant heap of stinking bullshit.

The narrative now being formed is that it was all just a lot of incompetence. That the guards were tired and overworked. We’re also being told that it’s normal for an inmate on suicide watch to come off after a few days, but Jeffrey Epstein was not a normal inmate. Epstein and the people around him belong to a class I refer to as super predators, which are the most dangerous predators in society because their elite connections allow them to get away with anything and everything.

It’s become completely clear that rather than stopping such people and their criminal rings, the U.S. government protects them and ensures no justice is ever served upon them, even up to their last breath.

Our government isn’t there to protect us, save us or dispense any justice. Instead, it seemingly exists to protect, serve and encourage the elite criminal rings operating around us in plain sight, whether it’s bank CEOs or pedophile sex traffickers with apparent intelligence links.

We are truly ruled by gangsters.

Keep talking about Epstein. Don’t let it go. Keep digging. It’s a giant middle finger in the face of humanity. Never forget.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) August 19, 2019

RFK Jr. Slams Gov’t & Big Pharma In Eye Opening Speech About Forced Vaccinations

Posted on September 20, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Arjun Walla

Source: Collective Evolution

California has very strict compulsory vaccination laws for children in school, and as a result more parents are deciding to homeschool their children. The latest information regarding vaccines in California that’s making noise is Senate Bill 276 by Senator Richard Pan. The bill eliminated nearly all vaccine medical exemptions. Under this bill, politicians, not physicians, are in charge of deciding whether or not children may receive medical exemptions, which in turn would determine whether or not they can attend school.

This bill, which was recently signed into law, represents medical tyranny that is similar to a police state. Forcing vaccinations on any segment of the population and taking away their freedom of choice is ridiculous. All of this is done under the assumption that unvaccinated children pose a danger to vaccinated children, and this is simply not true for several reasons.

Herd immunity is a largely theoretical concept, yet for decades, it has furnished one of the key underpinnings for vaccine mandates in the United States. The public health establishment borrowed the herd immunity concept from pre-vaccine observations of natural disease outbreaks. Then, without any apparent supporting science, officials applied the concept to vaccination, using it not only to justify mass vaccination but to guilt-trip anyone objecting to the nation’s increasingly onerous vaccine mandates.

In a 2014 analysis in the Oregon Law Review by New York University (NYU) legal scholars Mary Holland and Chase E. Zachary (who also has a Princeton-conferred doctorate in chemistry), the authors show that 60 years of compulsory vaccine policies “have not attained herd immunity for any childhood disease.” It is time, they suggest, to cast aside coercion in favor of voluntary choice.

This is true, in fact, there has been a history of disease outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations. I wrote an article not long ago providing multiple studies showing this, and the studies are elaborated on and linked in that article, which you can go through here.

According to a MedAlerts search of the FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database as of 2/5/19, the cumulative raw count of adverse events from measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines alone was: 93,929 adverse events, 1,810 disabilities, 6,902 hospitalizations, and 463 deaths. What is even more disturbing about these numbers is that VAERS is a voluntary and passive reporting system that has been found to only capture 1% of adverse events.

How can vaccines produce herd immunity if they’re not safe for everybody? It’s impossible.

The various forms of vaccine failure not only make herd immunity impossible to achieve, but also feed the occurrence of “vaccine-preventable illnesses” in highly or even fully vaccinated populations. There are numerous examples of this in published literature, again, some of which I link and go into greater detail about measles here.

Vaccines Aren’t Safe For Everyone

It’s no secret that vaccines are not completely safe for everyone, it’s clearly not a ‘one size fits all’ product, and that’s evident by the fact that nearly $4 billion has been paid out to families of vaccine injured children via the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). As astronomical as the monetary awards are, they’re even more alarming when you consider that only an estimated 1% of vaccine injuries are even reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). If the numbers from VAERS are correct – only 1% of vaccine injuries are reported and only 1/3 of the petitions are compensated – then up to 99% of vaccine injuries go unreported and the families of the vast majority of people injured by vaccines are picking up the costs, once again, for vaccine makers’ flawed products.

This completely debunks the validity of herd immunity.

Speech From Kennedy

While California’s tragic fall into what might rightly be described as a Medical Police State has many up in arms, RFK Jr. spontaneously delivered a speech outside Gov. Newsom’s office, helping to transform the anger and grief experienced by thousands of shaken onlookers into inspiration and hope, no doubt catalyzing further what is clearly becoming this country’s next grassroots civil rights movement.

In the astoundingly powerful and uplifting speech by RFK Jr. below, one senses the historical importance of what just transpired. And that the fall of California into medical fascism also marks the beginning of a new, broad-based civil rights movement, including all sexes, races, walks of life, religions, and socioeconomic classes — as it concerns the primary, inviolable human right of bodily self-sovereignty and health freedom, and a parent’s right to make informed health choices for their children, which can have life and death consequences. [From the Youtube video description]

Another Informative Statement From Kennedy

Via Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Merck introduced its measles vaccine in 1963, claiming the vaccine would convey lifelong immunity equivalent to a natural infection, with health officials promising that 55% vaccine coverage would produce “herd immunity” sufficient to eradicate measles by 1967.

Leading scientists of the day, including the world’s preeminent bacteriologist, Sir Graham Wilsonand Harvard Virologist John Enders, who first isolated measles, warned against introducing a vaccine unless it provided lifelong immunity. Measles, they cautioned, would rebound with increased virulence and mortality as the vaccine forced the evolution of more virulent strains and shifted outbreaks away from children—biologically evolved to handle measles—to the elderly who could die from pneumonia, and young infants now unequipped with maternal immunity.

A 1984 Johns Hopkins University modeling study predicted that Merck’s population-wide experiment would increase measles outbreaks by 2050, (when the last generation subject to natural immunity died off,) compared to the pre-vaccine era. This is exactly what has happened. Merck’s vaccine, with a growing failure rate has been incapable of abolishing the disease. Vaccine failure has left millions of adult Californians effectively unvaccinated. And 79% of people affected by measles in this year’s California outbreak were adults.

When eradication predictably didn’t materialize and measles attacked fully-vaccinated populations, Merck simply moved the goalpost saying that herd immunity required 75% vaccination, then 85%, then 95%, then 98%. And now 99%. To distract the world’s citizens from its failed vaccine, Merck started blaming “anti-vaxxers.” (The Vaccine Safety Movement)

California’s bought or brain-dead lawmakers are proposing to “fix” Merck’s vaccine failure problem by punishing 4,000 vulnerable children with medical exemptions. In an act of legislative savagery, Democratic politicians propose to forcibly vaccinate children whose doctors have told them that a vaccine could kill or severely injure them. SB276 will not fix the measles outbreak or solve the problem of vaccine failure, it will only reward a corrupt company for a defective product.

The Takeaway

The idea that politicians can force children to be vaccinated, including those deemed to be in danger of severe adverse reactions, and strip them of their rights to attend public school is insane. Freedom of choice and medical freedom should always exist, especially with regards to vaccines. If parents want to vaccinate, fine, but parents who wish to not vaccinate their children for whatever reasons should always have the freedom to do so.

Mandatory vaccination is tyrannical.

“The fight for liberty and health freedom in California is far from over. There will be legal challenges,” said RFK. Jr., “all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary. In fact, this incident brings to the forefront a deep, dark problem in the United States that has been festering for decades: the rise of the Pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the government to mandate products that the free market would otherwise reject, due to the profound liability these products have now underwritten completely by the government via their indemnification through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act (NCVIA) of 1986. Now, over three decades since the inception of NVICA, that same industry is starting to use the police powers of the state to enforce these mandates.” [Taken from the Youtube description in the video posted above]

The Humans Are Waking Up

Posted on September 15, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

You run into a lot of despair in this line of work. The more you learn about the mechanisms of power, the more hopeless things seem at first glance.

The political system is totally locked down, with anyone who tries to upend the status quo being aggressively sabotaged by the mass media and their own political party.

Technology, which futurists have long heralded as the deus ex machina which will liberate humanity from its self-destructive ways, is owned by plutocrats with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and is pervasively infiltrated by murderous intelligence agencies from top to bottom.

Even attempts to circulate information about the dangers of war, ecocide and oligarchy are consistently sabotaged by internet censorship, blanket de-platforming and mass media propaganda, and even imprisonment if one’s truth-telling becomes too successful.

Still, I remain unwaveringly hopeful. Not because I foresee any of those massive obstacles vanishing at any time in the near future, but because I see an escape route that none of them are blocking.

I have had a great many bizarre and utterly unanticipated experiences, some of them ongoing, which assure me beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity is capable of far, far more than our consensus worldview about ourselves accounts for. Most of those experiences I will probably never share publicly, because, while I often venture well off the beaten path in my commentary, if I discussed those experiences people will think I’m way more insane than they already believe me to be. But I don’t mind sharing here that I know from my own experience that humans are capable of radically and permanently shifting into a much healthier and efficacious relationship with mental narrative, which happens to be the mechanism by which existing power structures keep us locked down.

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

This is the clearest I've been able to sum it all up so far.https://t.co/JqbZMKn7ov

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 22, 2018

But so what, right? Just because an individual is capable of exiting the fearful egoic state of consciousness which propagandists and social engineers exploit to manipulate us into consenting to the status quo doesn’t mean that everybody is. People have been writing about spiritual enlightenment for millennia, and still we remain collectively asleep. Believing that such a shift is possible on a mass scale is childish and absurd. Right?

Well, maybe. That objection certainly makes sense from the perspective of our consensus worldview about what humans are capable of. Except people who’ve been coaching others into this shift for a long time say in no uncertain terms that it’s becoming more and more common.

“For the first time there is a large scale awakening on our planet,” spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle said in an interview last year. “Why now? Because if there is no change in human consciousness now, we will destroy ourselves and perhaps the planet. The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our only choice now. Without considering the Eastern world, my estimate is that at this time about ten percent of people in North America are already awakening. That makes thirty million Americans alone, and in addition to those people in other North American countries, about ten percent of the population of Western European countries are also awakening. This is probably enough of a critical mass to bring about a new earth. So the transformation of consciousness is truly happening even though they won’t be reporting it on tonight’s news. Is it happening fast enough? I am hopeful about humanity’s future, much more so now than when I wrote The Power of Now. In fact that is why I wrote that book. I really wasn’t sure that humanity was going to survive. Now I feel differently. I see many reasons to be hopeful.”

Tolle is easily the best-known teacher on the subject of enlightenment in the western world, and he’s been doing it for decades. There’s not much research available on this topic, but if anyone in the west has interacted with enough people and gathered enough experience to make such a declaration, it would be him.

But what if he’s wrong? Well again, maybe. But he’s not alone in this perspective.

“There’s a phenomenon happening in the world today. More and more people are waking up—having real, authentic glimpses of reality,” writes Adyashanti, another longtime popular awakening coach. “In the beginning of my teaching work, most of the people who came to me were seeking these deeper realizations of spirituality. They were seeking to wake up from the limiting and isolated senses of self they had imagined themselves to be. It’s this yearning that underpins all spiritual seeking: to discover for ourselves what we already intuit to be true— that there is more to life than we are currently perceiving. But as time has passed, more and more people are coming to me who have already had glimpses of this greater reality.”

Adyashanti gets a bit more specific than Tolle, saying that it’s non-abiding “glimpse”-type awakenings in particular that are growing more common, which often happen spontaneously without having been sought out.

“This glimpse of awakening, which I call non-abiding awakening, is becoming more and more common,” he writes. “It happens for a moment, an afternoon, a day, a week—maybe as long as a month or two. Awareness opens up, the sense of the separate self falls away—and then, like the aperture on a camera lens, awareness closes back down.”

Jac O’Keeffe, another awakening coach who’s been teaching for some time, has more to add on the subject. She said in a 2015 interview that the awakening process, which used to be a difficult and much more physiologically gruelling ordeal for humans, is coming to us more easily not just as a process, but in terms of how physically taxing it is as well.

“We live in an interesting time, and whether it’s a leap in the evolution of consciousness, or whether it’s because of the industrial age and the quickening that has come about in how we function as human beings; whether it’s unusual, or whether it’s a part of the pattern, I’m not sure,” O’Keeffe said. “However, what’s happening right now is that there’s a mutation happening because we’re not changing fast enough for the changing mechanisms that we have created in the world. And so the shift in consciousness that’s happening now, it’s phenomenally more rapid than how it used to be. Things are not as concrete and as solid, not as difficult to shift in folk’s perception as it used to be. That’s for sure, for sure.”

“The mechanism of which through this is seen also, there seems to be less of a trauma or a dramatic shift,” O’Keeffe added. “Spiritual shifts used to be really difficult on the body, really difficult on every level — they’re not now. And what is that? How come? It’s like our whole cellular structures are more susceptible to transformation, to the embodiment of a higher frequency, a higher vibration. And you know, while we have more toxicity, we also have more availability of hearing what’s beyond all of it, of information, of new influences, of education, you know? We’re learning how to use the mind at last. And so this is bringing about a quickening in the evolution of consciousness.”

Dr Jeffery A Martin, who has been gathering data on awakened individuals for the Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness, told me via email that “We see an uptick in our data that starts about 1996. By this I mean the number of people saying they transitioned after that time versus before.”

“However it is important to note that we have a snowball sample, not a full population sample, so that could be a bias in our data,” Martin added. “If it is not, the only correlate we’ve been able to think of is that the Internet was reaching a level of connectivity and information sharing maturity starting about this time. So practices that were formerly secret or soloed were starting to become more available, and one of our key findings is that the best way to make progress is to find your fit from a practice standpoint.”

“I’m reasonably confident that significantly more people are coming to see True Nature than any other time in human history,” said awakening coach Fred Davis when I asked him for comment on the subject via email, adding, “I do think there are more clear beings on the planet than there were even ten years ago.”

Now obviously awakenings becoming more common than they used to be wouldn’t by itself mean much; humanity overall remains deeply unconscious and we appear to be bound for either extinction or Orwellian dystopia if we continue on our current trajectory at its current rate. But the fact that this phenomenon seems to be getting more common and more easy in various ways indicates that something is up. Something entirely unanticipated, from way out of left field which neither the revolutionaries nor the propagandists have foreseen.

But why would we be experiencing a sudden shift in consciousness? Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain it, since if this phenomenon is real it’s moving far too quickly and without natural selection eliminating the unenlightened from the gene pool at any noticeable rate.

Well, maybe as O’Keeffe suggested it’s got something to do with the industrial age and how it’s changed the way we function as a species, or as Martin theorized is due to the increased availability of spiritual teachings online. We now after all have over 4.5 billion human brains connected to each other by the internet with well over half our world’s population now online, which by itself is per definition a shift in human consciousness without adding any fancy stuff about spiritual enlightenment. It’s hard to imagine such a drastic change not having a significant impact on the way our minds operate collectively. So that could be part of it.

It could also have something to do with the fact that, as Adyashanti once suggested in an interview, we’re all aware on some level that we’re at a point of crisis where we’ll either change or go extinct.

“Crises are often the catalyst for change,” he said. “And I think as humanity is in general we can all start to agree, I hope we’re starting to agree, that we’re coming to a place of crisis. That… we’re coming into contact, not just with our own personal mortality, but our mortality as a species. That we as a species may not survive. And that can provide, just like individual mortality, [that] can lead to a change of consciousness because we realize time’s run out. There is no more time. So in that ‘no more time’ sometimes consciousness can shift. And as humanity I think we’re rapidly approaching that same kind of imperative. Time is running out and so quite naturally there is tremendous pressure on humanity and on humanity’s consciousness right now. We all feel it, right? This tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everyone knows that if there’s not some rather dramatic shift in consciousness then this opportunity will be missed.”

Another potential explanation for our apparent “quickening” is the possibility that we’re all a lot more interconnected than we assume we are. Some strange and unexpected anomalies in scientific studies have poked a few uncomfortable holes in the consensus worldview about organisms existing as wholly independent individuals on this earth, which opens up the possibility that one person’s awakening could in some ways inform the level of consciousness of the whole of humanity.

Scientist Rupert Sheldrake has been documenting the curious way animals sometimes appear capable of picking up new skills in ways that learning and genetics don’t seem to account for, like the strange case of laboratory rats around the world suddenly getting better at navigating water mazes from generation to generation following a water maze study in the 1920s by psychologist William McDougall. Sheldrake’s theories are often rejected by mainstream scientists with an extreme emotionality which reveals an egoic fixation on dogma rather than scientific objectivity, but if you’re curious about his ideas he had an interesting appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience a few years ago which outlines his thinking more clearly than any other video I’ve found.

If this is true, if humans are interconnected in such a way that one person’s awakening could be informing the rest of the species, then this could indicate that we are on track for a exponential awakening event of the kind that could transform us as a species overnight.

When futurist Roy Amara said “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run,” he wasn’t really making a statement about technology, he was making a statement about human cognition. We’re pattern-seeking creatures whose minds tend to think in linear terms within the near future, a tendency which served us well in our evolutionary history when trying to predict when it’s safe to reproduce and where the mammoths will be, but which is absolutely useless in predicting large-scale movements which may be nonlinear. It’s possible that the only reason the predictions the hippies were making about the “great awakening” that started in the sixties was solely because of this cognitive bias Amara spoke of. Perhaps we overestimated the short-term effects of that shift and underestimated its ongoing effects in the long term.

I personally don’t know quite what to make of any of this, which could end up being a good thing. If our future depends on us finding a way out of this ecocidal, omnicidal status quo that the propagandists and manipulators can’t anticipate and slam the door on, it’s going to have to come from an unexpected and mysterious direction. Something does appear to be stirring deep within our species, and for me that’s enough reason to hold out hope and keep pushing for real change. Maybe this shift isn’t what it appears to be from my point of view, and even if it is that doesn’t mean it will necessarily start happening quickly enough, but it’s enough to take a stand on. I believe we’ll either transcend our old self-destructive patterns or perish, so we might as well say “Damn the torpedoes” and sprint toward that transcendence at full speed.

American Apocalypse: The Government’s Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working

Posted on September 6, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” — H. L. Mencken

The U.S. government is working hard to destabilize the nation.

No, this is not another conspiracy theory.

Although it is certainly not far-fetched to suggest that the government might be engaged in nefarious activities that run counter to the best interests of the American people, doing so will likely brand me a domestic terrorist under the FBI’s new classification system.

Observe for yourself what is happening right before our eyes.

Domestic terrorism fueled by government entrapment schemes. Civil unrest stoked to dangerous levels by polarizing political rhetoric. A growing intolerance for dissent that challenges the government’s power grabs. Police brutality tacitly encouraged by the executive branch, conveniently overlooked by the legislatures, and granted qualified immunity by the courts. A weakening economy exacerbated by government schemes that favor none but a select few. An overt embrace of domestic surveillance tactics if Congress goes along with the Trump Administration’s request to permanently re-authorize the NSA’s de-activated call records program. Heightened foreign tensions and blowback due to the military industrial complex’s profit-driven quest to police and occupy the globe.

The seeds of chaos are being sown, and it’s the U.S. government that will reap the harvest.

Mark my words, there’s trouble brewing.

Better yet, take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030—that’s barely ten short years away—but the future is here ahead of schedule.

We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence is becoming almost inevitable.

The danger signs are screaming out a message

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

Far from draining the politically corrupt swamps of Washington DC of lobbyists and special interest groups, however, the Trump Administration has further mired us in a sweltering bog of corruption and self-serving tactics.

Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”

They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

Suddenly it all begins to make sense.

The events of recent years: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls.

Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

Before long, no one will even notice the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, the police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns.

It’s happening already.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback.

The Deep State’s tactics are working.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned about the government’s nefarious schemes to lock down the nation.

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

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

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

All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats.

Seriously, think about it.

The government claims to be protecting us from cyberterrorism, but who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from weapons of mass destruction, but what country has one the deadliest arsenals of weapons of mass destruction and has a history of using them on the rest of the world? The U.S. government. Indeed, which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from foreign armed threats, but who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government. For that matter, where did ISIS get many of their deadliest weapons, including assault rifles and tanks to anti-missile defenses? From the U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting the world from the menace of foreign strongmen, but how did Saddam Hussein build Iraq’s massive arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, and chemical weapons during the 1980s? With help from the U.S. government. And who gave Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida “access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry”? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from terrorist plots, but what country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

For that matter, the government claims to be protecting us from nuclear threats, but which is the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in wartime? The United States.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars.

Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

Did I say Machiavellian? This is downright evil.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by government propaganda.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.

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

What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re already enemies of the state.

You want to change things? Start by rejecting the political labels and the polarizing rhetoric and the “us vs. them” tactics that reduce the mass power of the populace to puny, powerless factions.

Find common ground with your fellow citizens and push back against the government’s brutality, inhumanity, greed, corruption and power grabs.

Be dangerous in the best way possible: by thinking for yourself, by refusing to be silenced, by choosing sensible solutions over political expediency and bureaucracy.

When all is said and done, the solution to what ails this country is really not that complicated: decency, compassion, common sense, generosity balanced by fiscal responsibility, fairness, a commitment to freedom principles, and a firm rejection of the craven, partisan politics of the Beltway elites who have laid the groundwork for the government’s authoritarian coup d’etat.

Let the revolution begin.

The Real Big Brother

Posted on September 2, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Consortium News

Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, which leads America’s news-media in their almost 100 percent support and promotion of neoconservatism, American imperialism and wars. This includes sanctions, coups, and military invasions against countries that America’s billionaires want to control but don’t yet control — such as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, Libya, and China.

These are aggressive wars against countries which have never aggressed against the United States. They are not, at all, defensive, but the exact opposite. It’s not necessarily endless war (even Hitler hadn’t planned that), but war until the entire planet has come under the control of the U.S. Government, a government that is itself controlled by America’s billionaires, the funders of neoconservatism and imperialism — in both major American political parties, think tanks, newspapers, TV networks, etcetera.

Bezos has been a crucial part of neoconservatism, ever since, at the June 6-9 2013 Bilderberg meeting, he arranged with Donald Graham, the Washington Post’s owner, to buy that newspaper, for $250 million. Bezos had already negotiated, in March of that same year, with the neoconservative CIA Director, John Brennan, for a $600 million ten-year cloud computing contract that transformed Amazon corporation, from being a reliable money-loser, into a reliably profitable firm.

That caused Bezos’s net worth to soar even more (and at a sharper rate of rising) than it had been doing while it had been losing money. He became the most influential salesman not only for books, but for the CIA, and for such mega-corporations as Lockheed Martin. Imperialism has supercharged his wealth, but it didn’t alone cause it. Bezos might be the most ferociously gifted business-person on the planet.

Some of America’s billionaires don’t care about international conquest as much as he does, but all of them at least accept neoconservatism; none of them, for example, establishes and donates large sums to, anti-imperialistic organizations; none of America’s billionaires is determined to end the reign of neoconservatism, nor even to help the fight to end it, or at least to end its grip over the U.S. government. None. Not even a single one of them does.

Plutocrat Bezos at the Pentagon with then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, May 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)

But many of them establish and donate large sums to neoconservative organizations, or run neocon organs such as The Washington Post. That’s the way billionaires are, at least in the United States. All of them are imperialists. They sponsor it; they promote it and hire people who do, and demote or get rid of people who don’t. Expanding an empire is extremely profitable for its aristocrats, and always has been, even before the Roman Empire.

Bezos wants to privatize everything around the world that can become privatized, such as education, highways, health care, and pensions. The more that billionaires control those things, the less that everyone else does; and preventing control by the public helps to protect billionaires against democracy that would increase their taxes and government regulations that would reduce their profits by increasing their corporations’ expenses. So, billionaires control the government in order to increase their takings from the public.

With the help of the war promotion of The Washington Post, Bezos is one of the world’s top personal sellers to the U.S. military-industrial complex. He controls and is the biggest investor in Amazon corporation, whose Web Services division supplies all cloud-computing services to the Pentagon, CIA and NSA. (He’s leading the charge in the most advanced facial recognition technology too.)

In April there was a headline, “CIA Considering Cloud Contract Worth ‘Tens of Billions’,” which contract could soar Bezos’s personal wealth even higher into the stratosphere, especially if he wins all of it (as he previously did).

He also globally dominates, and is constantly increasing his control over the promotion and sale of books and films, because his Amazon is the world’s largest retailer (and now also one of the largest publishers, producers and distributors.) That, too, can have a huge impact upon politics and government, indirectly, by promoting the most neocon works helping to shape intellectual discourse (and voters’ votes) in the country.

Bezos is crushing millions of retailers by his unmatched brilliance at controlling one market after another as Amazon or as an essential middleman for — and often even a controller of — Amazon’s retail competitors.

He is a strong believer in “the free market”, which he has mastered perhaps better than anyone. This means that Bezos supports the unencumbered ability of billionaires, by means of their money, to control and eventually absorb all who are less powerful than they.

Because he is so enormously gifted himself at amassing wealth, he has thus-far been able to rise to the global top, as being one of the world’s most powerful individuals. The wealthiest of all is King Salman— the owner of Saudi Arabia, whose Aramco (the world’s largest oil company) is, alone, worth over a trillion dollars. (Forbes and Bloomberg exclude monarchs from their wealth-rankings.)

In fact, Bloomberg is even so fraudulent about it as to have headlined on Aug. 10, “The 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet control $1.4 trillion” and violated their tradition by including on their list one monarch, King Salman, whom they ranked at #4 as owning only $100 million, a ludicrously low ‘estimate’, which brazenly excluded not just Aramco but any of the net worth of Saudi Arabia.

Bloomberg didn’t even try to justify their wacky methodology, but merely presumed the gullibility of their readers for its acceptance. That King, therefore, is at least seven times as rich as Bezos is. He might possibly be as powerful as Bezos is. The supreme heir is lots wealthier even than the supreme self-made billionaire or “entrepreneur” is.

Certainly, both men are among the giants who bestride the world in our era. And both men are libertarians — champions of the belief that property rights (of which, billionaires have so much) are the basis of all rights, and so they believe that the wealthiest people possess the most rights of all, and that the poorest people have the least, and that all persons whose net worths are negative (having more debts than assets) possess no rights except what richer people might donate to or otherwise grant to them, out of kindness or otherwise (such as familial connections).

This — privatization of everything — is what libertarianism is: a person’s worth is his or her “net worth” — nothing else. That belief is pure libertarianism. It’s a belief that many if not most billionaires hold. Billionaires are imperialistic because they seek to maximize the freedom of the super-rich, regardless of whether this means increasing their takings from, or ultimately impoverishing, everyone who isn’t super-rich. They have a coherent ideology. It’s based on wealth. The public instead believes in myths that billionaires enable to be promulgated.

Like any billionaire, Bezos hires and retains employees and other agents who do what he/she wants them to do. This is their direct power. But billionaires also possess enormous indirect power by means of their interdependencies upon one-another, as each large corporation is contractually involved with other corporations, especially with large ones such as they; and, so, whatever power any particular billionaire possesses is actually a shared power, along with the others. (An example was the deal Bezos made with Graham.)

Collectively, they network together, even with ones they might never even have met personally, but only through their representatives, and even with their own major economic competitors. This is collective power which billionaires possess in addition to their individual power as hirers of employees and other agents.

Whereas Winston Smith, in the prophetic allegorical novel 1984, asked his superior and torturer O’Brien, “Does Big Brother exist?”

“‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’

‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?’

‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.”

This collective power is embodied by Bezos as well as any billionaire does. A few of the others may embody it too, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Charles Koch, Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Jack Dorsey. They compete against each other, and therefore have different priorities for the U.S. government; but, all of them agree much more than they disagree in regards to what the Government “should” do (especially that the U.S. military should be expanded — at taxpayer’s expense, of course, not their own).

Basically, Big Brother, in the real world is remarkably coherent and unified — far more so than the public is — and this is one of the reasons why they control Government, bypassing the public.

Here is how all of this plays out, in terms of what Bezos’s agents have been doing:

His Amazon pays low to no federal taxes because the Federal Government has written the tax-laws to encourage companies to do the types of things that Bezos has always wanted Amazon to do.

The U.S. government consequently encourages mega-corporations through taxes and regulations to crush small firms by making it harder for them to grow. That somewhat locks-in the existing aristocracy to be less self-made (as Bezos himself was, but his children won’t be).

Elected politicians overwhelmingly support this because most of their campaign funds were donated by super-rich individuals and their employees and other agents. It’s a self-reinforcing system. Super-wealth controls the government, which (along with the super-wealthy and their corporations) controls the public, which reduces economic opportunity for them. The end-result is institutionally reinforced extreme wealth-inequality, becoming more extreme all the time.

The billionaires are the real Big Brothers. And Bezos is the biggest of them all.

There Is No Normal

Posted on August 30, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

The wheel of time rolls forward, never retracing its path, but because it is a wheel, and we are riding in it, a persistent illusion persuades us that the landscape is recognizably the same, and that our doings within the regular turning of the seasons seem comfortably normal. There is no normal.

There is for us, at this moment in history, an especially harsh turning (so Strauss and Howe would say) as our journey takes the exit ramp out of the high energy era into the next reality of a long emergency. The human hive-mind senses that something is different, but at the same moment we’re unable to imagine changing all our exquisitely tuned arrangements — especially the thinking class in charge of all that, self-enchanted with pixeled fantasies. The dissonance over this is driving America crazy.

The wheel hit a deep pothole in 2008 turning onto the off-ramp and has been wobbling badly ever since. 2008 was a warning that going through the motions isn’t enough to sustain a sense of purpose, either nationally or for individuals trying to keep their lives together ever more desperately. The cultural memory of the confident years, when we seemed to know what we were doing, and where we were going, dogs us and mocks us.

The young adults feel all that most acutely. The pain prompts them to want to deconstruct that memory. “No, it didn’t happen that way,” they are saying. All those stories about the founding of this society — of those Great Men with their powdered hair-doos writing the national charter, and the remarkable experience of the past 200-odd years — are wrong! There was nothing wonderful about it. The whole thing was a swindle!

They are feeling the wheel’s turning most painfully, since they know they will see many more turnings in the years ahead, and the direction of the wheel is vectoring downward for them. The bottom-line is less of everything, not more. That is a new ethos here in America and it’s hardly comforting: Less income, fewer comforts, more literal hardships, fewer consolations for the universal difficulty of being alive. No wonder they are angry.

It’s this simple. We landed in the New World five hundred years ago. It was full of good things that human beings had barely begun to exploit, laid out like a banquet. There was plenty of good virgin soil for growing food, the best timber in the world, clean rivers and great lakes, ores full of iron, gold, and silver, and down deep a bonanza of coal and oil to drive the wheel through very flush times. The past century was particularly supercharged, the oil years.

Imagine living through the very start of all that, the blinding, fantastic newness of modernity! Look back at the stories and images around Teddy Roosevelt and his times, and the confidence of that era just astonishes you, An emergent cavalcade of wonders: electricity, telephones, railroads, subways, skyscrapers! And in a few more years movies, cars, airplanes, radio. Even the backstage wonders of the day were astonishments: household plumbing for all, running hot water, municipal water and sewer systems, refrigeration, tractors! It’s hard to conceive how much these developments changed the human experience of daily life.

Even the traumas of the 20^th century’s world wars did not crush that sense of amazing progress, at least not in North America, spared the wars’ mighty wreckage. The post-war confidence of American society achieved a level of in-your-face laughable hubris — see the USA in your Chevrolet! — until John Kennedy was shot down, and after that the delirious moonshot euphoria steadily gave way to corrosive skepticism, anxiety, acrimony, and enmity. My generation, booming into adulthood, naively thought they could fix all that with Earth Day, tofu, and computers, and keep the great wheel rolling down into an even more glorious cybernetic nirvana.

Fakeout. That’s not where the wheel is going. We borrowed all we possibly could from the future to pretend that the system was still working, and now the future is at the door like a re-po man come to take away both the car and the house. The financial scene is an excellent analog to our collective psychology. Its workings depend on the simple faith that its workings work. So, it is easy to imagine what happens when that faith wavers.

We’re on the verge of a lot of things coming apart: supply lines, revenue streams, international agreements, political assumptions, promises to do this and that. We have no idea how to keep it together on the downside. We don’t even want to think about it. The best we can do for the moment is pretend that the downside doesn’t exist. And meanwhile, fight both for social justice and to make America great again, two seemingly noble ideas, both exercises in futility. The wheel is still turning and the change of season soon upon us. What will you do?

Why is the New York Times still trying to sweep the Epstein case under the rug?

Posted on August 23, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

A prominent article published in the Washington Post Thursday exposes the systematic violation of prison rules governing the detention of multimillionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein during the period immediately preceding his death on August 10.

Reporter Devlin Barrett writes: “At least eight Bureau of Prisons staffers knew that strict instructions had been given not to leave multimillionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alone in his cell, yet the order was apparently ignored in the 24 hours leading up to his death, according to people familiar with the matter.”

His report continues: “The fact that so many prison officials were aware of the directive—not just low-level correctional officers, but supervisors and managers—has alarmed investigators assessing what so far appears to be a stunning failure to follow instructions, these people said.”

This language is quite extraordinary, suggesting that Post reporters have reason to believe that the security failure has no legitimate explanation, and may have been the result of concerted action to leave Epstein exposed and vulnerable.

The report continues, “Investigators suspect that at least some of these individuals also knew Epstein had been left alone in a cell before he died, and they are working to determine the extent of such knowledge …”

In other words, numerous prison officials, including some in authority, were aware that Epstein—on suicide watch from July 23 to July 29—was alone in a cell, in violation of rules governing at-risk prisoners. (Other press accounts claim that his cellmate was granted bail on Friday, August 9, and released from custody, leaving Epstein by himself.)

Epstein was found dead in his cell the following morning, at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 10. During that night, the two guards assigned to check in on him every 30 minutes did not do so. Both were said to have been asleep for some or all of that night, rather than standing watch.

The two guards reportedly falsified the logs to show that they had checked on Epstein as required, but these logs were contradicted by video evidence from a surveillance camera monitoring the hallway outside his cell.

Investigators from the FBI and the inspector-general of the Department of Justice have taken possession of the videotapes, but have released no information about what they show, including whether there were any unauthorized visitors to Epstein’s cell the night he died.

The Post report suggests misconduct on a scale so staggering that it leaves little doubt that Epstein was either murdered or allowed to commit suicide, with the former far more likely. It defies belief that so many Bureau of Prisons employees, including managers and supervisors, could have each independently decided to ignore the rules for handling the most notorious prisoner then in federal custody.

Epstein had been arrested July 6 at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and was being held on sex-trafficking charges that carried a possible sentence of 45 years in prison. The nature of the charges, combined with his vast wealth and his connections in high places—including to Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew of England, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—ensured maximum television and tabloid publicity for the case.

Many powerful people feared exposure if Epstein were brought to trial, and there is ample evidence that he was preparing an aggressive and highly publicized defense rather than attempting a plea bargain that would have swept the case under the rug. Epstein was meeting with his lawyers for as many as 12 hours a day, and they have described his demeanor as anything but downcast or suicidal. (Epstein denied that he had attempted suicide July 23, claiming he was the victim of an assault by a cellmate).

Under these circumstances, the real question is why the bulk of the American media, spearheaded by the New York Times, has chosen to swallow the claim of “suicide” and denounced any questioning of the official verdict as a “conspiracy theory.” Epstein was killed in downtown Manhattan, only a few miles from Times Square. But most of the reports exposing new evidence in the case have come in the pages of the Washington Post, while the Times has published lengthy reports—such as a front-page account in its edition of Sunday, August 19—which could be summed up as “nothing to see here, move along please.”

It is worth recalling that when Epstein was first arrested, the Times editorialized against making a political issue out of his kid-glove treatment during his first sex-crimes prosecution in 2008. The editorial urged congressional Democrats to stay away from Epstein, although the US Attorney who had recommended a token 13-month sentence in 2008—with six days out of seven on work-release to run his financial empire—was Alex Acosta, chosen by Trump as his secretary of labor.

While the Times warned Democrats that they would be making a martyr of Acosta by examining his conduct in the Epstein case, Acosta was actually forced to resign only a week after the publication of the editorial. Far from fearing that targeting Acosta was too ambitious, the Times editorial board seems rather to have feared that Epstein, followed by Acosta, would become the first two dominoes in a chain that would implicate others perhaps too close for comfort.

Related Articles:

Why is the media dismissing questions about Jeffrey Epstein’s death as “conspiracy theories”?
[13 August 2019]

The case of Jeffrey Epstein and the depravity of America’s financial elite
[13 July 2019]

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Believing Jeffrey Epstein Committed Suicide is the Real Conspiracy Theory

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