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The most Orwellian tool of our rulers which does the most damage and affects the most lives is not surveillance, nor police militarization, nor government secrecy, but domestic mass media propaganda. It’s also the most overlooked. It’s good to protest the other mechanisms of authoritarian control, but propaganda is enemy number one.

You don’t need the ability to spy on dissident groups if you can control public thought enough to prevent those groups from forming in the first place. You don’t need the ability to quash public uprisings if you can propagandize people away from rising up at all. And they can. And they do.

The ability of the plutocratic class to manipulate public thought at mass scale is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. It warps the entirety of our political spectrum, all our thinking, all our discourse, and what we perceive as normal. And you just don’t see people fighting it. The ACLU isn’t protecting people’s mental sovereignty from the manipulations of sociopathic government-aligned oligarchs. People aren’t taking the media-owning class to the Supreme Court for brazen election interference. People aren’t taking to the streets protesting it. But they could.

In terms of the effect it has on society, no control tool comes remotely close to advancing as many interests of the powerful against the interests of the people as domestic plutocrat-sponsored propaganda. Nothing will change until people start noticing and resisting this.

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Theories about elite conspiracies to shore up more control over the population tend to greatly underestimate how much control they already have.

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Wanting the US government to have a “competent leader” is like wanting a serial killer to be skilled at evading detection.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are We Facing a Future Where Life Only Goes “Back to Normal” for Rich People?

December 21, 2020

Are We Facing a Future Where Life Only Goes “Back to Normal” for Rich People?

As jobs and businesses vanish, and prices go up, Americans could soon face another expense – the expense of proving that they’re “healthy.”

While the government tells us that the Covid vaccinations are going to be “free,” are they really? Let’s take a look.

How much will it actually cost to get vaccinated against Covid?

While the government is paying for the vaccine itself, it will still cost money for most people to get injected with it.

However, providers will be able to bill you an administrative fee for giving the shot to patients, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This would be similar to paying a charge when you visit the doctor’s office, or for specialized vaccine delivery, such as infusion, a process in which a substance — like medication, a chemotherapy drug or hydration — enters the bloodstream intravenously.

If you don’t have insurance, the medical provider you used should be reimbursed for any COVID-19 treatment you receive through the CARES Act Provider Relief Fund, at no cost to you.

…If you receive a bill for administration fees, it’s still unclear whether or not those will be covered in full. It’s a good idea to contact your local provider or health insurance company for more details on whether you’ll be charged additional fees before receiving a vaccine. It might be that you have more than one option for immunization, including finding a medical provider that would give you the vaccine free of charge, or offer a more straightforward approach to reimbursement if you’re charged. (source)

So it’s kind of free, sort of, unless somebody charges you but then you might be able to get your money back. Multiply by your number of family members.

And what about all the apps for proving you’ve gotten vaccinated? Will that be government-funded or will people pay a few bucks to the app store to download it onto their smartphones? What about people who don’t have phones? What about those who can no longer afford phone service?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cycles, Systems and Seats in the Coliseum

December 12, 2020

Cycles, Systems and Seats in the Coliseum

The idea that debt, leverage, speculation, greed, exploitation and parasitic elites can expand exponentially forever is magical thinking.

Contrary to first impressions, I am not a doom-and-gloomer; I’m a systems-cycles-er, meaning I’m interested in where systems and cycles are heading.

Cycles work because we’re still running Wetware 1.0 which entered beta testing around 200,000 years ago and was released, bugs and all, around 50,000 years ago. Since the processes and inputs haven’t changed, neither do the outputs.

Nature is a mix of dynamic, semi-chaotic systems (fractals, etc.) and cyclical patterns which tend to operate within predictable parameters. Why should human nature and human constructs (societies, economies and political realms) be any different?

So longterm success breeds complacency, hubris, economic and intellectual sclerosis, draining political infighting and the overproduction of parasitic elites, to use Peter Turchin’s apt description. Consumption of resources expands to soak up every last bit of what’s available and then the supply of goodies plummets for a multitude of completely natural and predictable reasons (sunspot/solar activity, El Nino, etc.) and a host of unpredictable but equally natural semi-chaotic extremes (100-year droughts, floods, etc.).

Wetware 1.0’s go-to solutions to all such difficulties are rather limited:

1. Ramp up magical thinking. If a couple of human sacrifices ensured good harvests in the good old days, let’s slaughter a couple hundred now–and if that doesn’t work, then…

2. Do more of what’s failed spectacularly and slaughter a couple thousand fellow humans, because darn it, maybe everything will turn around if we just kill another couple dozen.

This requires ignoring the novelty of the current challenges and clinging to what worked so well in the past even as whatever worked in the past can’t possibly work now because circumstances are fundamentally different.

3. Seek scapegoats. It’s those darn witches. Burn a bunch of them and our troubles will magically disappear.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Great Reset

November 28, 2020

The Real Great Reset

In the more conspiratorial corners of the Internet, the “Great Reset” is a sinister public face of an elite plan to enslave humanity by creating a global authoritarian surveillance super-state, compete with re-education camps for those who suffer from wrongthink, and Soylent Green-style euthanasia camps for addressing the twin problems of overpopulation and an aging society. Tracing its origins via Agenda 21, the Project for the New American Century back to the unpleasant recommendations from the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth project in the early 1970s, the Great Reset is about securing the power and privilege of the technocratic elite in the devastating aftermath of the global pandemic.

It doesn’t help that Klaus Schwab, the co-author of the book Covid-19: The Great Reset, needs only a white cat on his lap to look for all the world like the villain in the next Bond movie. In reality though, Schwab is a mediocre German social democrat (i.e. neoliberal) who has little understanding of the crisis unfolding around him, and who – along with the rest of the Davos crowd – is simply whistling in the dark to mask his own fears.

Far from being a masterplan for subjugating humanity, Covid-19: The Great Reset simply builds upon Schwab’s earlier and equally detached The Fourth Industrial Revolution. As I wrote in response to that book four years ago:

“The courtiers of the modern corporate elite also danced in their version of Versailles at Davos in Switzerland. Initially, they were emotionally deflated. None knew why stock markets were tumbling, oil and commodity prices were crashing, the Chinese engine of growth was seized, and zero percent interest rates and quantitative easing had failed. For a brief moment, they peered into the abyss of their own destruction. Within the week, however, the courtiers regained their energy and confidence… technology was going to save the day after all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Power Is An Illusion, Control Is A Facade

November 27, 2020

Power Is An Illusion, Control Is A Facade

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

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

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

It is a historically proven pattern that governments tend to CREATE problems instead of solving them, and this is because the power dynamic of government never changes. The politicians we “vote” for are not in control, rather, the elites who fund their campaigns and who permeate their cabinets are in control…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Evil Geniuses: How the Rich Took Control of America (and Canada)

August 29, 2020

Evil Geniuses: How the Rich Took Control of America (and Canada)

Kurt Andersen looks at the not-so-secret conspiracy by the rich, right and big business.

Donald Trump’s presidency is just one result of a 50-year conspiracy to ensure the rich and the right controlled America. Photo: US government.

They may have sentenced Leonard Cohen to 20 years of boredom for trying to change the system from within, but a whole generation of American conservatives were richly rewarded for doing just that.

As Kurt Andersen says in summarizing his own book, “Evil Geniuses chronicles the quite deliberate re-engineering of our economy and society since the 1960s by a highly rational confederacy of the rich, the right and big business.”

Canada, Britain and many other countries were pulled along in the Americans’ wake, though without quite the same awful results. Canada may be able to recover, but it will not be easy.

Andersen admits the re-engineering of America sounds like a great conspiracy theory. But he documents the efforts to transform the country meticulously and credibly.

That’s possible in part because the conspirators made no attempt to conceal themselves; on the contrary, the arch-conspirator was a famous corporate lawyer, Lewis Powell, who authored the memorandum that sparked the movement in 1971 and was soon after appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Taking the 1960s radicals more seriously than he should have, Powell argued for long-term changes that would further enrich the wealthy at the expense of workers and the middle class.

The memorandum was probably the single most influential American document since George F. Kennan’s “long telegram” of 1946, which set the terms of the Cold War that followed. Corporate leaders fell in behind Powell, and began to pour millions into think tanks, foundations and law schools — not to mention journalism scholarships to develop a new generation of right-wing pundits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Abnormalize The Status Quo

August 17, 2020

Abnormalize The Status Quo

If we’d been living in a healthy society and then suddenly had this society’s sick, insane status quo thrust upon us by powerful people, we’d have all been out in the streets making life very hard for those powerful people in an instant.

We are in the same situation now. We are having a wildly insane status quo thrust upon us by the powerful and for the benefit of the powerful. Only difference is we’re not all out in the streets, and instead of thrusting this horrible situation upon us suddenly, they’ve been doing it this entire time.

Which is precisely why we’re not out in the streets. We were born into this mess, so we assume it’s normal and that things are supposed to be this way. But it isn’t, and they aren’t.

What is normal is health. Health is the normal default condition. If you wake up with a fever and stabbing pain in your abdomen you don’t say “Ah well I guess that’s normal now, you can’t expect to just not have a fever and stabbing abdominal pain,” you recognize that there’s an urgent problem and you take action to fix it.

Even if you’d been sick your entire life, you would understand that your situation is not normal. You would understand that the basic default condition is health, but some dysfunction in your specific system has deprived you of that normal state of being.

In order for us to begin pushing back on the dysfunction of our current system, we need to begin looking at it in the same way. We need to clearly come to see how spectacularly divergent it is from the basic default condition of health. How sick it is. How abnormal it is.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh

August 1, 2020

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh

As I approach my 7th decade on this planet, I have reached the conclusion that we all interpret the world through mythical narratives; some of our own creation, many (most?) others ‘imposed’ upon us. The ruling class of society conditions us in numerous ways to accept stories that, for the most part, support and prolong their position of power and control.

From hereditary chieftains/monarchs to ‘democratic’ leadership, the ‘elite’ of society maintain a hold over the ‘tribe’ so as to ensure their revenue streams and wealth (some would argue this is a parasitic arrangement since this class returns little in the way of productive value to the system). They use the various tools at their disposal (e.g., education system, media, etc.) to inculcate/predispose us to accepting this arrangement and continuing to control and expand the wealth-generating/extraction systems that arise from everyday human economic interactions.

Power and wealth is concentrated significantly at the top of the pyramid; yet we are constantly exposed to narratives that we not only have agency, but that the ‘elite’ put our needs at the forefront of their policies and decision-making. I strongly believe these are false and propagated to influence/manipulate our thinking and beliefs.

Just like our financial institutions (especially the big banks) who knowingly engage in criminal activity and then receive raps on the wrist with minimal fines when caught (making their brazen thievery well worth it), the ruling class is more than willing to break ‘rules/laws’ (in fact, I would argue they are constantly doing so) because the ‘price’ for doing so is negligible (with the occasional sacrifice made to appease the masses).

I don’t believe there is a ‘solution’ to any of this (unlike most who do because, you know, hope–and reduction of cognitive dissonance) aside from complete sociopolitical collapse–which I would argue will eventually happen as it has for every complex society that has preceded ours. My response to this has been to accept it, and try and remove myself from the Matrix as much as is possible and prepare accordingly.

The world is not as we have been conditioned to believe by the narrative managers who weave the various storylines (read Edward Bernays book Propaganda for interesting insight on this). Awareness of this is a first step towards a better understanding of how messed up this world truly is and, possibly, doing something for your family/community to make it more resilient as the system inevitably declines/collapses.

Real Revolution Means Expanding Consciousness, Both Outwardly And Inwardly

June 30, 2020

Real Revolution Means Expanding Consciousness, Both Outwardly And Inwardly

The fight to liberate humanity from oppression, exploitation, butchery and madness is really a fight to expand consciousness.

The existential threats our species now faces are ultimately due to the fact that powerful people advance omnicidal, ecocidal, oppressive, violent and exploitative agendas behind veils of secrecy and propaganda distortion. They do evil things while deliberately keeping people unconscious of those evil things, so that the people will not use the power of their numbers to stop them.

The people do not use the power of their numbers to force a change into a healthy paradigm which puts human interests first because their perception of the world is aggressively manipulated by power structures who have a vested interest in keeping that from happening. Wealth and power are kept in the hands of elites and their underlings by propagandizing people into believing the current status quo is the only way things can be. War agendas are consented to because people are propagandized into believing this or that boogie man poses some imminent threat and needs to be eliminated. Surveillance, censorship, government secrecy and police militarization are tolerated because people are manipulated into believing they need these things.

And so on. In all cases, the key carrying agent for all of these toxic agendas is unconsciousness. If people were conscious of the real nature of these agendas and how badly they’re being robbed in order to advance them, they would refuse to consent to them and force them to stop. So they are kept unconscious of their reality by perceptual manipulation like propaganda, government opacity, internet censorship, and the war on adversarial journalism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Into Darkness: Where The Fed Is Leading Us

June 27, 2020

Into Darkness: Where The Fed Is Leading Us

The system is hurtling towards breakdown. Protect yourself now.

As you may know, I was one of the very first voices publicly reporting on covid-19, issuing an alert that the virus was a significant pandemic event on Jan 23^rd, 2020.

This was long before most media outlets even managed to write their first “It’s just the flu, bro!” article.

Using the same logic and scientific methodology I was trained in as a PhD, I was able to “predict” things well in advance of nearly every official or mainstream news source.

I’m using quotation marks around the word “predict” because it’s not really a prediction when you’re just extrapolating trends that are already underway.

Just as it’s not really a “prediction” to estimate where a thrown pitch will travel, it wasn’t much of a prediction to state that a novel virus with an R-Naught (R0) of well over 3 would be extremely difficult to contain once it arrived in a country. Note that I didn’t say impossible — South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam all get high marks for containment — but certainly difficult.

The US and the UK proved this in spades, as they’re both led by below-average ‘managers’ rather than leaders.

Leaders make tough decisions based on imperfect information. Managers dither and hedge and only make up their minds after the facts are already in and events well underway. Naturally, the US/UK managers were simply no match for the exponential rate that the Honey Badger Virus (aka Covid-19) spreads at.

I call it the Honey Badger virus because of its incredible ability to evade quarantine, as eagerly and easily as Stoeffle, as seen in this short enjoyable video:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Illusion of Control: What If Nobody’s in Charge?

June 22, 2020

The Illusion of Control: What If Nobody’s in Charge?

The last shred of power the elites hold is the belief of the masses that the elites are still in control.

I understand the natural desire to believe somebody’s in charge: whether it’s the Deep State, the Chinese Communist Party, the Kremlin or Agenda 21 globalists, we’re primed to believe somebody somewhere is controlling events or pursuing agendas that drive global responses to events.

I submit whatever control we discern is illusory, as the dynamics unleashed by the pandemic have already escaped the control of elites. The fundamental reason the elites have lost control is that all the systems they depend on have been broken for 12 years, but were successfully papered over by doing more of what broke them in the first place. This papering over of broken systems generated an illusion of functionality: everything appeared to function as before even as dysfunction spread into every corner of every system.

As doing more of what broke the systems in the first place is failing, the illusion of functionality has been shredded. Now that the illusion of functionality has been lost, control of the narrative via institutional authority has also been lost.

I’ve often written about the difference between force and power; elites often mistakenly believe the two are equivalent, but they are worlds apart. Those who wield power persuade the masses to obey without being coerced, and to accept the self-serving narratives of the elite without question. Power leverages institutional authority and cultural myths and beliefs.

Force is costly, as coercion is costly. Force is a poor substitute for power, not only because the costs are so burdensome, but because the masses are not acting on their own volition; they are obeying only because the costs of not obeying are so high.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Street Battles in France with Weapons

June 20, 2020

Street Battles in France with Weapons

In the French city of Dijon, Chechens and North Africans are fighting with assault rifles and weapons of war. The question of how the Chechen refugees get their arms at all is interesting. But this is the global rise in civil unrest we have warned about. These elitist fools think they can shut down sports, close all gatherings for plays, movies and prohibit even flying in Europe and that they will be able to suppress the people is lunacy.

On a global basis, there are over 300 million people who have lost their jobs. This frustration will continue to explode on the streets. You cannot simply give people guaranteed basic income and expect them to be satisfied sitting home watching TV. Some people need to stay mentally or physically active and are NOT satisfied with basic income.

These elitists do not understand human nature because they have never walked among the people. This is not going to end nicely. This is what I mean it is not racist – it is pent up frustration that these elitists do not understand that their quest to shut down the world economy so they can rebuild it green is going to very violent. Using the virus as the excuse to deny gatherings and to lock people up for not wearing a mask is pure tyranny.

China’s Covid Cover-Up, Economic War And The Elites Who Benefit

May 6, 2020

China’s Covid Cover-Up, Economic War And The Elites Who Benefit

“Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge, which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible…” – George Orwell, 1984

The problem with wars, beyond all the death and destruction they cause, is that they are almost never fought for the reasons that governments claim. In most cases there is an underlying agenda which the public may or may not discover many decades later, and such agendas are NOT for our benefit. Wars rarely erupt over mere unplanned circumstance. Wars are rarely random.

War is a tool for social engineering because it creates widespread crisis for the unprepared masses, and as the unprepared scramble for safety, the state can institute authoritarian powers they never could have asserted in peacetime. Not only this, but in our modern era over the past century there has been a distinct pattern following the aftermath of each war in which power and governance is centralized. Every time disaster strikes, the proposed solution is centralization and global government. You would think the political elites would offer some new ideas after 100 years, but no, they only have one idea that they try to sell to us relentlessly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Pandemic Is Deepening America’s Many Divides

April 30, 2020

The Pandemic Is Deepening America’s Many Divides

And so we’ve reached the precarious state of disunion in which the only thing the warring elites can agree upon is that the Federal Reserve should rescue their private wealth, regardless of cost or consequences.

America’s divides are proliferating and deepening by the day. The key political and economic divides predate the pandemic, but the pandemic is acting as a catalyst, creating new divides and exacerbating existing ones.

Let’s start with the politicization and subsequent polarization of re-opening the economy. In a reasonably sane, coherent society, this issue would be subject to common sense debates about risks, trade-offs, policies, responses to new data, etc.

But American society is neither sane nor coherent, so what should be a non-partisan debate was immediately politicized, to the absurd extreme that “progressives” must favor continuing strict lockdowns lest they be accused of being “conservative.”

The erosion of middle ground and the disappearance of de-politicized policy debates is a clear sign that a society is doomed to disintegration not just of the social order but the political and economic orders.

Author Peter Turchin has described the disintegrative stage in his book Ages of Discord, in which he modeled a Political Stress Index comprised in part of these three dynamics:

1. Stagnating real wages due to oversupply of labor.

2. Overproduction of parasitic elites.

3.Deterioration of central state finances.

The pandemic has catalyzed the oversupply of labor and the deterioration of central state finances, and illuminated America’s vast overproduction of parasitic elites, most of whom feed off various cartels and monopolies or the financial system, which has been saved yet again from gravity by the super-wealthy’s most important protector, the Federal Reserve.

The pandemic has created new divides that highlight existing extremes of inequality. Those Americans in poor health and in jobs that cannot be performed at home are at greater risk than healthy Americans who can work at home.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Who Rules the World?

November 26, 2019

Who Rules the World?

Elites. They’re all over the news these days. But who are they and what do we know about them? An excellent new study, Who Rules the World? A Portrait of the Global Leadership Class, takes a systematic approach to answer these questions. At its heart lies a new database, the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which covers 145 nation-states and 38,085 ‘leaders’, each of whom is given biographical information. In total, the database has approximately 1.1 million data points. Academics at several leading institutions, John Gerring, Erzen Oncel, the late Kevin Morrison, and Daniel Pemstein, then sliced and diced this data to arrive at a compelling picture of today’s leadership elite.

Who Are Counted As The Global Elite?

They look at the country’s top political leader, the political executives, cabinet ministers, executive staff, party leaders, assembly leaders, supreme court justices, and members of parliaments. They also include unelected leaders such as monarchs, religious leaders, military leaders, junta leaders, CEOs of important companies, and NGO leaders.

So What Does the Typical Member of the Elite Look Like?

Male (81% of the total), married (91%), and on average 55 years old. They speak roughly two languages, with over one third speaking English. They are normally university educated with almost half educated in the West. Their most common degrees were in Economics/Business/Management or Law. The majority had white collar jobs or political backgrounds before entering the leadership elite. Typically, they earn thirteen times more than national average.

Chart 1: Education of Political Elites

What About the Leader at the Top?

The top political leaders tended to be older (on average 61), and more of them were male (92%) and could speak English (59%). They tend to be educated abroad, rather than domestically. Also, they are likely to have studied Economics/Business/Management (35%) more than any other subject (next is law at 17%). They are as likely to have political backgrounds as white collar backgrounds.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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