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Some food for thought from George Orwell’s ‘1984’…

Does anything really ever change? (emphasis ours)

The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste.

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

Slouching Towards 1984

September 29, 2023

Slouching Towards 1984

Orwell could not have imagined the swiftness in which the Left has exerted control over our body politic

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” he portrays English society – renamed Oceania – as a futuristic version of the 1940s Soviet Union. In this invented society that Orwell calls IngSoc – English Socialism – the populace has even less freedom than the Soviets permitted its citizens and life consists only of drudgery, loneliness and hideousness. The novel grips the reader with fear and loathing of a totalitarian future enabled by technological advances and prompts one with the question: “Can it, will it happen here?”

It goes without saying that the United States in 2023 bears little resemblance to 1984 Oceania. In Oceania, the state had total control over the language, economy, science, history, personal possessions, personal thoughts, music, art and literature. In the U.S. today, however, it is not difficult to see how government intrusion and control reduces freedom, creates fear and confusion, reduces economic opportunity and prosperity, distorts history and science and creates unnecessary interpersonal conflict.

One of the ways Big Brother, Oceania’s leader, exerted total control was by subverting language. This reduced the capacity to think thoughts not approved by the state. “Newspeak,” as Orwell coined it, consisted only of words that expressed permitted thoughts.

“Thoughtcrime,” another Orwellism, punished illicit thoughts. Illicit action therefore became literally unthinkable. Truth is what Big Brother declared it to be at any given moment: 2+2=5 yesterday and 2+2=4 today. History was constantly and literally rewritten in order to satisfy the “truths” that Big Brother was currently promulgating.

The most nefarious aspect of Big Brother’s rule was of course his brutally enforced elimination of freedom, which he accomplished by suppressing the truth and promulgating lies.

In all eras, in all states, in all political parties, leaders tell lies. The danger arises when the state and state co-opted institutions suppress, eliminate and punish unapproved ideas…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Rise of Huxwell

September 23, 2023

The Rise of Huxwell

Two dystopias are better than one…

Noam Chomsky stopped just one rung shy of perfection with his illuminating book, Manufacturing Consent, about how commercial media work as extensions of government and corporate power to manufacture the consent of the masses. Likewise, Matt Taibbi’s title, Hate, Inc. is a near-perfect indictment of cable and digital news profit models that manufacture and prioritize enmity to the exclusion of the truth and the common good.

Both works fall just one rung shy of perfection, however, not because they aren’t impressive examples of applied critical thought and insight, but because neither consent nor hate are the primary products of commercial media. Rather, they are toxic byproducts of a commercial mass media whose primary product is addiction…

“The effect of mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.” — Christopher Lasch

In the early 21st century, we turned the corner from a society in which addiction was the exception to the rule to a society in which addiction became the rule. By 2004, still some years before social media, the smartphone, and streaming media secured their reputations as history’s most perfect narcotics, the average American — according to the Ball State University Middletown Media Studies report (the first large-scale observational study of American media consumption habits) — was already consuming more than eleven hours of media each and every day.

Concurrently, TV Everywhere, the commercial imperative behind the trillion-dollar campaigns for high-speed bandwidth and streaming HDTV, was ordained as the latest media industry mantra — part of an all-hands-on-deck digital blitzkrieg to normalize late-stage addiction.

Since then, hundreds of studies, articles, books, and documentaries have confirmed what anyone with a smartphone, social media account or a teenager already knows or suspects: we are a nation of media addicts — by design. We are, per Stanford addiction researcher Dr. Anna Lembke, a Dopamine Nation…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

January 30, 2023

The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.

I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.

Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.” It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.

The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

It’s Not a Lie If You Believe It

December 30, 2022

IT’S NOT A LIE IF YOU BELIEVE IT

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” – George Orwell, 1984

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I wish I could go through a day without having to reference Orwell and Huxley when observing how the ruling class is able to manipulate, subjugate, and propagandize the willfully ignorant masses through lies, deceptions, disinformation, and fear. But here we are, living through a dystopian nightmare blending the worst aspects of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.

It’s as if O’Brien and Mustapha Mond are running the show, using behavioral conditioning, restricting freedom of speech, adhering to a strict caste system, surveilling everything we say or do, using our fears to control us, utilizing propaganda to produce false narratives, and ultimately threatening to stomp a boot on our faces forever if we do not obey and conform. Virtually everything we are told by politicians, government bureaucrats, military brass, “esteemed” journalists, medical “experts”, bankers, and corporate executives is lies. They do not believe their lies, but they know it benefits themselves financially to lie, and as long as they work together, they know the ignorant masses will believe them.

George tells Jerry “It’s not a lie if you believe it” as he is going to take a lie detector test. I wonder how Fauci, Biden, Hillary, Obama, Comey, Wray, Pelosi, and the slew of other Deep State coup conspirators would fare on a lie detector test about Russiagate, Covidgate, J6 Insurrectiongate, and Vaccinegate. Based on the titanic volume of lies they have spewed over the last several years, I’m sure the machine would overheat and explode if hooked up to any of this traitorous vile scum.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Quiet Part Out Loud

October 29, 2022

The Quiet Part Out Loud

Of all the challenges facing our culture, the fact that humans use social sorting mechanisms to solve physical world problems looms as perhaps the greatest. This Frankly is a reflection on the possibility of sharing a socially unpalatable message to a large percentage of citizens and leaders. Our vertical and horizontal social infrastructure isn’t built to process, share and address challenges of this magnitude – but instead to ignore, water down, and mitigate. Will the quiet part be spread out loud to large amounts of humans as The Great Simplification becomes more obvious? Or will the quiet part be socially squashed a la George Orwell? Of course I have particular interest in this question, and its resolution. Time is moving very fast…

Will There Be a 2024 Presidential Election?

March 3, 2022

WILL THERE BE A 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION?

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” ― George Orwell

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.” ― George Orwell

The smell of tyranny is in the air. The level of propaganda, disinformation, and mistruth has reached astounding heights, as the ruling oligarchy/Deep State/globalist cabal are thrashing about violently because their frauds are being exposed on a daily basis. This shift to the tyranny of force has massive implications for everyone on the planet. When every quote from Orwell’s 1984 applies every day to everything swirling around us, you begin to realize we are in the midst of a dystopian nightmare which gets more ghoulish by the day.

The last two years have been a fraud of epic proportions, conducted by a cadre of evil money titans, their financial, media, and medical apparatchiks, with the objective of tearing down our existing social and economic structure and “resetting” the world where they own everything and you own nothing, eat bugs, and provide the slave labor needed to keep society functioning. Of course, this will be after they dispose of tens of millions of useless eaters through their Covid/Vaxx scheme, global war, and mass starvation.

The past two weeks have denoted a remarkable transformation in the pushing of the fraudulent fearmongering narrative about a relatively non-lethal flu, vaccine mandates, masking and shaming those with the common sense to rely on their immune systems, to trying to provoke a world war over a border dispute with absolutely no relevance or strategic value to our country, other than to further enrich the military industrial complex and the parasites and leeches in government, finance, media and war making industry who live for and love war.

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

Orwell’s 1984 Prophecies

November 27, 2021

Orwell’s 1984 Prophecies

Living in a Potemkin World

October 18, 2021

LIVING IN A POTEMKIN WORLD

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” ― George Orwell, 1984

I never thought I would experience the dystopian “fictional” nightmare Orwell laid out in his 1949 novel. Seventy-two years later and his warning about a totalitarian society, where mass surveillance, repressive measures against dissenters, mind control through government indoctrination and propaganda designed to convince the masses lies are truth, fake is real and the narrative can be manipulated to achieve the desired outcome of those in power, have come to fruition.

Everything is fake. I don’t believe anything I’m told by the government, the media, medical “experts”, politicians, military leadership, bankers, corporate executives, religious leaders, financial professionals, and anyone selling themselves as an authority on any subject matter. We are truly living in times of mass deception, mass delusion, and mass willful ignorance.

The term Potemkin Village comes from stories of a phony movable village built by Grigory Potemkin in the late 1700’s to impress his former lover, Catherine II, during her journey to Crimea in 1787. He supposedly erected fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper River, as her vessel sailed by, to impress her with the progress he was making on her behalf. After she passed, he would have the village disassembled and then reassembled further along downstream.

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

It’s a Fourth Turning: What Did You Expect?

September 20, 2021

IT’S A FOURTH TURNING: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction…

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

End of the US Empire–Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak & Dirt Cheap Gold

September 12, 2021

END OF THE US EMPIRE – ORWELL’S 1984 NEWSPEAK & DIRT CHEAP GOLD

The final phase of Empires normally ends with the same signals whether it was 2000 years ago in Rome or today in the US.

One of the first signs is losing wars together with excessive debts, deficits, devaluations and decadence The US being defeated and hurriedly fleeing from Afghanistan in a few days clearly signifies the end of the US empire.

The mighty US military has in the last few decades conducted disastrous wars against very small countries with no big armies or weaponry. Vietnam, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan come to mind but there are many more as we show below.

Brown’s University has just made a study of the US cost of wars since 9/11. They arrive at a staggering $8 trillion and the loss of 900,000 lives .

So in the last 20 years, the US has spent $8 trillion or 40% of annual GDP on conducting totally unsuccessful wars. The report also states that even after the exodus from Afghanistan the US is still involved in wars in over 80 countries.

US CURRENT WAR ACTIVITY

The cost of being involved in some kind of war activity in 85 countries will continue to cost the dying US empire dearly for decades to come.

1984 IS HERE AGAIN

Are the 2020s going to be a return to Orwell’s 1984 with Big Brother watching us everywhere?

Well, it certainly looks like many governments and the elite is leading us in that direction.

Covid has been a superb excuse for controlling the people in a number of countries. Free speech has been banned in the media and unacceptable censorship is now the rule on social media whether it relates to vaccines, climate or race.

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

Cascade of Consequences

July 26, 2021

CASCADE OF CONSEQUENCES

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” – George Orwell 1984

“People will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.” – Frank Zappa

Orwell and Zappa’s words of wisdom have never been truer than they are today. The level of untruth proliferated by the government, mainstream media, central bankers, military leaders, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Corp., and billionaire oligarchs has reached prolific heights. We are lost in a whirlwind of lies, destined to grow into a tornado of tragedy and ultimately result in a cascade of consequences.

Since the installation of the illegitimate dementia patient as president of this dying empire of debt by the Deep State (billionaire oligarchs, surveillance state agencies, military industrial complex, Silicon Valley censorship tyrants, corrupt bought off state politicians, Soros installed bureaucrats, and their propaganda arm – fake news media outlets), the country has further fractured into warring factions.

It has been driven by political party, moral vs. immoral, black vs. white, criminals vs. police, normal vs. abnormal, capitalists vs. communists, Federal Reserve vs. the people, vaxxer sheep vs. natural immunity realists, authoritarians vs. freedom fighters, critical thinkers vs. non-thinking believers, privileged elite vs. common men and women, citizens vs. traitors, powerful vs. powerless, and evil versus good.

As Zappa realized, people believe the narrative they have been conditioned to believe, and no quantity of facts, data or rational arguments will change their minds. Arguing on twitter or facebook is not going to change the mind of those you are arguing against..

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

1984 vs. Brave New World: Which Dystopian Nightmare Is Likelier to Come True?

May 5, 2021

1984 vs. Brave New World: Which Dystopian Nightmare Is Likelier to Come True?

That the global human population is hurdling towards dystopia at breakneck speed is a foregone conclusion by this point. The tea leaves read “red” with human pain and suffering.

The deeper question remains: will the coming authoritarian hellscape be more Mad-Max–kill-rape-pillage-scorched-Earth style or more lobotomized-institutionalized-submissive-heavily-medicated style?

OR…

In dystopian literary terms, will the horrific anti-human engineered society of tomorrow more resemble the vision of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

I read the first quarter of 1984, for the first time, at 15 years of age in the shed behind my father’s house in Topeka, Kansas on top of the family lawnmower. His wife at the time had banished me from the house, so there I sat at dusk under dim light from a single light bulb in the corner. Things were dark.

The human misery of Winston’s world leapt from the pages in crystal-clear notes.

“1984” in everyday parlance is synonymous with the ethos of that novel’s brutal ruling class. The prevailing ideology of the state depicted by Orwell was summarized in its arguably most haunting quote, delivered by agent of state O’Brien as he tortures the protagonist Winston:

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

Police state rule-by-cop is the standard concern when most civil libertarians discuss authoritarian overreach because it is the most visible, most obvious form of government power grab.

The Party of 1984 (the state) pursues power not as a means to an end but as an end entirely of itself: the “pressing forever” on the nerve of power:

“That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power.”

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

The Dystopian Bubble: George Orwell Meets Charles Mackay

February 11, 2021

The Dystopian Bubble: George Orwell Meets Charles Mackay

herd mentality

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

~ George Orwell

In early December I asked Jim Grant how to reconcile exuberant financial markets with economic reality that reads like dystopian fiction. He responded,

I’m not sure there’s much distinction. To me, the current form of dystopia is the bubble form. So I think this is the year of the dystopian bubble.

The opening pages of the new decade feel like we’re living through a combination of George Orwell’s 1984 and Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. On the day the 2020 election results were to be certified in the Senate, a mob from the losing side surrounded and actually breached the Capitol. The outgoing president was accused of inciting a riot, threatened with impeachment, and banned for life on Twitter. Despite the chaos, stocks shrugged it all off and rallied to new highs.

The following weekend cover of Barron’s, “The Case for Optimism,” captured the manic side of the dystopian bubble perfectly. Its editorial staff sees a silver lining in practically every cloud:

[T]his is a market determined to march higher, and it’s not about to be derailed—even by historic mayhem in the nation’s capital. Stocks are rallying on the trillions of dollars in stimulus that may only be accelerated under the new administration. A chaotic political season is winding down, while the economy is gearing up for a postpandemic reopening.

Investors need to keep their eyes forward and look ahead to a Joe Biden presidency: to more-predictable domestic policies, smoother trade relations, and additional efforts to revive the economy. Now might not be a good time to own anything defensive.

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

NY Times Calls For Biden to Appoint “Reality Czar” to Fight “Misinformation”

February 2, 2021

NY Times Calls For Biden to Appoint “Reality Czar” to Fight “Misinformation”

Here comes the Ministry of Truth.

Drew Angerer via Getty Images/Composite

The New York Times has amplified claims by “experts” who are calling for Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar,” prompting critics to compare the idea to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984.

In an article entitled ‘How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis’, the NYT’s Kevin Roose cites “experts” who are calling on “the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a “reality czar.”

The job of this “reality czar” would be to head up “a centralized task force could coordinate a single, strategic response” to things like COVID-related and election fraud “conspiracy theories.”

NYTimes suggests the Biden administration needs to appoint a “reality czar” to deal with misinformation and extremism. https://t.co/jVNWNJ3e1C

— Seth Fiegerman (@sfiegerman) February 2, 2021

“This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems. (For example, it could formulate “safe harbor” exemptions that would allow platforms to share data about QAnon and other conspiracy theory communities with researchers and government agencies without running afoul of privacy laws.) And it could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis,” states the article.

“Ah, the Ministry of Truth. I’ve been waiting for this one,” responded Raheem Kassam.

Ah, the Ministry of Truth.

I’ve been waiting for this one. https://t.co/JZ7sN7BgGk

— Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) February 2, 2021

While the Orwell comparison has become something of a cliché, in this instance its the best available.

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

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