Category: fearmongering

  • The conduct of live-fire exercises by the People’s Liberation Army Navy Surface Force (the Chinese “communists”, as they are called by the analytically strained) has recently caused much murmur and consternation in Australia. It’s the season for federal elections, and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, thinks he’s in with more than a fighting chance. Whether that chance is deserved or not is another matter.

    The exercise, conducted in international waters by a cruiser, frigate and replenishment ship, involved what is said to have been poor notice given to Australian authorities on February 21. But the matter has rapidly burgeoned into something else: that what the Chinese task fleet did was mischievously remarkable, exceptional and snooty to convention and protocols. It is on that score that incontinent demagogy has taken hold.

    Media outlets have done little to soften the barbs. A report by ABC News, for instance, notes that Airservices Australia was “only aware of the exercises 40 minutes after China’s navy opened a ‘window’ for live-fire exercises from 9.30am.” The first pickup of the exercises came from a Virgin Australia pilot, who had flown within 250 nautical miles of the operation zone and warned of the drills. Airservices Australia was immediately contacted, with the deputy CEO of the agency, Peter Curran, bemused about whether “it was a potential hoax or real.”

    Defence Chief Admiral David Johnston told Senate estimates that he would have preferred more notice for the exercises – 24-48 hours was desirable – but it was clear that Coalition Senator and shadow home affairs minister James Paterson wanted more. Paterson had thought it “remarkable that Australia was relying on civilian aircraft for early warning about military exercises by a formidable foreign task group in our region.” To a certain extent, the needlessly irate minister got what he wanted, with the badgered Admiral conceding that the Chinese navy’s conduct had been “irresponsible” and “disruptive”.

    Wu Qian, spokesperson for the China National Ministry for Defence, offered a different reading: “During the period, China organised live-fire training of naval guns toward the sea on the basis of repeatedly issuing prior safety notices”. Its actions were “in full compliance with international law and international practice, with no impact on aviation flight safety”. That said, 49 flights were diverted on February 21.

    Much was also made about what were the constituent elements of the fleet. As if it mattered one jot, the Defence Force chief was pressed on whether a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine had made up the task force. “I don’t know whether there is a submarine with them, it is possible, task groups occasionally do deploy with submarines but not always,” came the reply. “I can’t be definitive whether that’s the case.”

    The carnival of fear was very much in town, with opposition politicians keen to blow air into the balloon of the China threat across the press circuit. The shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie warned listeners on Sydney radio station 2GB of “the biggest peacetime military buildup since 1945”, Beijing’s projection of power with its blue-water navy, the conduct of two live-fire exercises and the Chinese taskforce operating within Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone off Tasmania. Apparently, all of this showed the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to be “weak” for daring to accept that the conduct complained of was legal under international law. “Now that may be technically right, but that misses the deeper subtext, and that is China is now in our backyard, and they’ve demonstrated that we don’t have the will to insist on our national interest and mutual respect.”

    There are few voices of sensible restraint in Australia’s arid landscape of strategic thinking, but one could be found. Former principal warfare officer of the Royal Australian Navy, Jennifer Parker, commendably remarked that this hardly warranted the title of “a crisis”. To regard it as such “with over-the-top indignation diminishes our capacity to tackle real crises as the region deteriorates.” Australia might, at the very least, consider modernising a surface fleet that was “the smallest and oldest we’ve had since 1950.”

    Allegations that Beijing should not be operating in Australia’s exclusive economic zone, let alone conduct live-fire exercises in international waters, served to give it “a propaganda win to challenge our necessary deployments to North-East Asia and the South China Sea – routes that carry two-thirds of our maritime trade.”

    The cockeyed priorities of the Australian defence establishment lie elsewhere: fantasy, second hand US nuclear-powered submarines that may, or may never make their way to Australia; mushy hopes of a jointly designed nuclear powered submarine specific to the AUKUS pact that risks sinking off the design sheet; and the subordination of Australian land, naval and spatial assets to the United States imperium.

    Such is the standard of political debate that something as unremarkable as this latest sea incident has become a throbbing issue that supposedly shows the Albanese government as insufficiently belligerent. Yet there was no issue arising, other than a statement of presence by China’s growing navy, something it was perfectly entitled to do.

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  • Feelings, whoa, oh, oh, feelings

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  • Seg2 carolandtrumpcloseup

    Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump had their first and only scheduled debate Tuesday, providing a stark contrast between the two candidates with just eight weeks to go before the November 5 election. Harris repeatedly put Trump on the defensive as they debated abortion, immigration, Israel’s war on Gaza, race, January 6 and other issues. Trump repeated his false claim that he won the 2020 election and again questioned Harris’s race, painted diverse cities as inherently unsafe, repeated a debunked claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets and more. Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University, says Trump’s basic pitch is that “white Americans need to be fearful” of people of color. “What he is basically saying is, ’I’m your white savior.’”


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  • We should be clear about one thing. Death is not preventable. In fact it is assured. Even David Rockefeller, third generation patriarch of the gangster family on the Hudson, bit the dust at 101 in 2017. There may be some of his kind with ambitions of greater longevity but Daoist immortality has so far escaped them. However we may find that the improvements rendered notorious by Christiaan Barnard’s surgical experiments may reach a level to satisfy the most Methuselahaic of our ruling oligarchy. Perhaps some of these ancients are still around us nostalgically forcing the world back to the century in which they were born. Meanwhile the rest of us expire after shelf lives between 60 and 90 years.

    In 1946, Simone de Beauvoir published a fine, little novel called All Men are Mortal (Tous les hommes sont mortels). The hero of her fable, Raimon Fosca, is a loyal patriot of his Italian city-state who desperate for a means to lift a deadly siege accepts a potion from a man who says it will give immortality. At first he is sceptical, suspecting the vial contains poison. When a mouse on whom he has tested it recovers from a mortal blow, Fosca is convinced. Yet he asks why the man has not taken it himself. He tells Fosca that he just could not dare. Fosca dismisses the man’s cowardice, and after drinking all the potion escapes the city. He is able to lift the siege and becomes a hero to his home city. The story continues to relate Fosca’s adventures.

    The book does not begin in the castle of the besieged Italian city. It opens with a group of holidaymakers in the countryside. One of whom is a successful actress of great ambition named Regine. She notices in the course of those proverbially long August vacation seasons in France that on the terrace of a nearby house lies a man in a chaise longe, day and night with no sign of moving. Tired of watching this scene from the house where she is staying, she goes to the house and manages to reach the man she has been watching for days. Her opening question is what does the man do and why does he lie in this position, on the terrace in a chaise longe apparently every day. She explains how much she has to do to promote her acting career and how surely a man of his age—he appears somewhere in his late thirties or early 40s—must have great plans and potential.

    He replies that he has no need to do anything else. In fact, doing anything else is pointless. Regine cannot understand how doing anything could be pointless. Fosca then tells his life story, one spanning roughly five hundred years. Fosca is a patrician and his newly won immortality not only permitted him to save his city but to perform incredible feats for a succession of princes, monarchs and emperors. In each context he offered his services to the potentate. Each time he fell in love. However, he never grew old. His patrons died. Their empires withered. His lovers died as did his children. He survived. After the recitation of all these accomplishments he explains to Regine that there is no point in anything he has done. His greatest accomplishments all collapsed. He survived everyone he ever loved. In the end, his message to Regine is that immortality is a curse. When all is said and done, no one will survive on the planet except him and the mouse he fed the same potion.

    Fosca abandons every form of activity because his immortality invests everything with indifference. On the other hand, he notices the passion and the importance attached to everything by those whose life is finite—whether or not they are aware of death all the time. He in turn cannot imagine anything surviving him. At the end of the story, Regine is overwhelmed and unable to contemplate the consequences of the immortality Fosca describes.

    The Western pursuit of immortality is also an obsession with the power exercised over life and its conditions. The immortal—whether literally or fictively imagined—do not understand present value since they imagine that in their world without death nothing else is eternal.

    On 26 July 2024, it was reported by UN News that the fascist parastatal, World Health Organization, announced that more than a million doses of a polio vaccine was being sent to Gaza “after the discovery of the highly infectious disease in sewage samples”. According to the press report, the corrupt former Ethiopian government minister, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, appointed as director general of the pharmaments consortium dba as a United Nations agency said although no cases of polio had been recorded, it was “just a matter of time before it reaches the thousands of children who have been left unprotected.” Dr Ayadil Saparbekov, named as “team lead for health emergencies at WHO in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, was to have warned that “the spread of polio and other communicable disease could lead to more people dying of preventable illness than from war-related injuries—currently 39,000, according to local health authorities.” Allegedly vaccine-derived poliovirus type two had been identified in sewage samples taken from cities bombarded by the IDF, the terrorist forces of the occupying regime in Tel Aviv.

    On 26 August 2024, UN News reported that 1.2 million doses of vital polio vaccines had arrived in besieged Gaza, Palestine. “More than 640,000 children are targeted to receive the polio type two (nOPV) vaccines”, according to UNICEF sources quoted in the press report. The occupying and besieging regime in Tel Aviv dba the State of Israel announced through its agency COGAT that vaccine shipments had arrived in Gaza and that the vaccination campaign would be conducted in coordination with its combined terror forces as part of their “routine” humanitarian activity.

    In a century of cynicism and public amnesia, even the language used by those engaged in this operation—which ought to induce moral outrage—scarcely elicits curiosity. Naturally there are the usual suspects censored, ignored and/or maligned, i.e., the people who have been opposed to the permanent occupation and siege of Palestine by the settler-colonial entity in Tel Aviv combined with those who have been monitoring the belligerence of the pharmaments industry, who have objected, not to meaningful healthcare measures but to the fact that this WHO operation is anything but meaningful healthcare, let alone humanitarian. The criticisms deserve to be summarized because together they indicate the type and scope of full-spectrum warfare against the majority of humanity that has been intensifying as we speak.

    The most obvious criticism asks how is it possible that the Tel Aviv regime and its terrorist forces are willing to permit a campaign for polio vaccination of Palestinian children while multiple eyewitness reports testify to those forces targeting children deliberately with lethal lead vaccinations, i.e. shooting them dead? This apparent incoherence is obfuscated mainly by the method of segregated reporting characteristic of most journalistic practice. That is the WHO actions and the operations on the ground are described in texts, broadcasts, and other media separately from whatever reports are filed about the assassinations, bombing and other killing activities by Tel Aviv’s terrorists. This results partly from intentional deception but also from the organisation of work in the industry, where subject matter treated by strictly separate categories. Often those “beats” are divided to match the underlying product or ideological marketing segment to be served. To the extent the incoherence cannot be ignored, the siege operations are described as were they natural catastrophes. Famine and disease are labelled serious risks arising from the destruction of infrastructure and the inability to deliver food to the inhabitants. However the fact that siege is not a condition of nature and therefore its consequences are not “acts of god” is unmentioned. Quite the contrary, the assumption underlying most reporting is that whether or not Tel Aviv’s occupation and siege of Palestine is divinely inspired, god or gods have not been on the side of the besieged. The vast majority of the Gaza population comprises women, children and youth. Thus the siege is ultimately punishment of unarmed, non-combatants. These families are implicitly held responsible for the collateral dismemberment and death on the premise that they are constituents of armed units comprising adult males. To the extent they are recognised as victims, those adult male Palestinians are deemed the perpetrators. Tel Aviv’s terrorists are defending the unarmed women and children of Palestine from their wayward manhood. The paramount leader of the terrorist onslaught, his lieutenants and allies all proclaim the divine righteousness with which they annihilate. It has been the duty of journalism to dilute their demonic language. For the scribbling battalions, such a vaccination campaign is a welcome theatrical performance to report. The Righteous (terrorists) deign to “pause” in their execution of god’s will in order to prevent the targeted population from becoming lame or paralysed. Could it be they are afraid the paralysed survivors will be unable to walk across the borders into permanent exile?

    Another point of criticism, even less obvious but also more difficult to comprehend, is focused on the vaccine itself. If the pathogen allegedly detected itself derives from a previously introduced vaccine, then what assurance does anyone have that the vaccine brought to Gaza in August by the UN agencies are any safer or efficacious than the contaminating substances against which they are supposedly intended to work? On 27 August 2024, the UN News published official insistence that the polio vaccine is “safe and effective” (where have we heard that before?) and in the media briefing by UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric denied claims in “several news stories (that) have appeared online in Israel and the United States, quoting two Israeli scientists falsely asserting that the polio vaccine due to be used in Gaza is ‘experimental’”. Dujarric is cited as saying that “This vaccine is safe, it is effective, and it offers top quality protection. It is a vaccine globally recommended for variant type two polio virus outbreaks by the World Heath Organization.” Late journalist Claude Cockburn, father of the late Alexander and his sibling journalists, was to have observed that the time to believe the government is doing something is once they start denying it. In the decades since 2001, official denials are routine.

    According to Dujarric, the vaccine was rolled out in March 2021. What a coincidence? In the midst of unveiling the “mother of all vaccines”, a new polio vaccine was released for public consumption. Where did the pharmaments industry ever get the time to create a vaccine to prevent the spread of a vaccine-induced virus while they were working at warp speed to produce the mRNA miracle-maker to combat COVID-19? Is it possible that this was just another off the back shelf product waiting for the right sales opportunity. US patent agent David Martin demonstrated with painstaking research published in the midst of the PHEIC pandemic that all the active components of the mRNA bullet and its target pathogen had been patented long before 2019 when the first flare was fired in Wuhan. When one should ask was the testing of the 2021 polio vaccine? What Dujarric actually means is that the responsible entities authorized the vaccine to be deployed which, like in the case of the mRNA bullets, ended their experimental status de jure.

    Perhaps the 2021 vaccine procured in such enormous quantities are a product of another investment by misanthropic capitalist William Gates III, known as Bill Gates, dba the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) with its special polio focus. According to the foundation, their focus on polio is warranted because “despite this progress (in eliminating wild polio), several challenges remain in reaching all children with vaccines.” Interestingly enough they also report that “wild polio virus type 2 was declared eradicated in 2015, and wild poliovirus type 3 was declared eradicated in October 2019 (the month in which Event 201 was held). A reasonably literate person could be forgiven for asking, if wild polio type 2 (and type 3) have been eradicated what is the source of the polio threat now? The answer of course is polio vaccines!

    For example, according to an article in New Indian Express (23 October 2019) “in 2019 at least 400 children would have developed polio after receiving the oral polio vaccine over the past five years… India has been free from wild polio since 2011, but the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has never released data on vaccine-associated polio paralysis, a rare adverse effect of OPV (oral polio vaccine) that causes infantile paralysis.” If there has been no data disclosure how can anyone know whether the adverse effect is “rare”? In the OPV given to children worldwide, Type 2 vaccine viruses were withdrawn from use in 2016, it continues to contain Type 1 and 3 strains that can cause VAPP.” The study cited highlighted a fact documented elsewhere, namely that cases of polio caused by vaccine viruses have outnumbered those of polio caused by wild polio viruses. Which according to those so credible authorities like the WHO have been eradicated. Although the WHO has benefited not only from the largesse of its quasi-owners but also from the combined forces of global mass media cartels at those owners disposal, occasionally it is impossible to conceal either the corruption (SOP) or the outright mendacity of the organization’s operatives.

    In a WHO press release (6 June 2019), it was reported that the government where the WHO director-general made his reputation for integrity in public service, Ethiopia, a total of 57,193 vials of type 2 OPV (mOPV2) were destroyed under official supervision, presumably to prevent their contents entering the sewage system of Addis Ababa. “According to the Global Action Plan Version III (GAP III) guidelines, type 2 polio virus containing or potentially containing materials post switch should always be thoroughly handled and destroyed using methods that can automatically inactivate the virus for minimizing the risks of infection of vulnerable population.” The OPV is a product pushed by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) another consortium, like GAVI, funded by the BMGF. Another BMGF funded activity from which the foundation has done its best to distance itself was a notorious tetanus vaccination wave in 2013 where its WHO cut-out, together with the local government vaccinated women in rural areas of reproductive age ostensibly for tetanus. It was discovered that the “vaccine” was laced with ingredients that would inhibit fertility. The otherwise Business-oriented Latin Church had not yet abandoned what one writer has called “procreationism”. Local Roman Catholics were outraged that young women would be sterilized by the State. It is no secret that the misanthropic capitalists in Seattle have often articulated their preference for population reduction methods through healthcare delivery. Even the former spouse of Mr Gates, a member of the Latin Church, has been a vocal supporter of enabling women in developing countries to choose not to have children. Is it inconceivable that an oral polio vaccine might be enhanced with other biologics? Are these vaccines or blankets for the “Indians”?

    Thus we can see there is not only apparent incoherence between the supposed humanitarian objective of vaccinating somewhat more than half a million children in Gaza before they are shot by terrorist snipers or buried dead or alive by bombs. Yet there is a school of thought—or a state of mind—which forbids criticism of any act which in isolation is “good” no matter the context in which it is performed. To condemn the vaccination campaign is to be heartless and inhumane. One ought to appreciate every instant of goodness or generosity even in the midst of evil.

    The vaccine itself—and the obsession with vaccinating the world—can also be criticised. However, the vast majority still believe what they have been taught—that vaccines have been the miracle of modern public health. Any criticism of vaccination or the vaccine industry is dismissed or disparaged as an attack on sound public health policy. Probably most people have had some kind of vaccine in the course of their lives and see their continued survival as well as relative good health as prima facie evidence that vaccines are right, good and necessary for civilized life. Like infant baptism, it is impossible to prove or disprove its efficacy. The only authoritative testimony from the dead we have so far is a compilation of clerical forgeries and fantasies for which no further apologies are needed.

    Elsewhere in my discussion of the military and intelligence origins of public health, I described the history of the government agencies today treated as world authorities on disease, cures and prevention. These agencies were not captured by corporations. They were created within the military-industrial complex and endowed with the powers of the State. They formed the template for virtually all modern public health institutions worldwide. A template is not only a tool of simplification, like any model, it is also a frame or limit placed on subsequent institutions established using it. Selling or imposing a model may not guarantee full control over the institution but it definitely eases future manipulation by the modeller. That is why the British, French and US Americans have always spent considerable sums educating foreigners in the military academies and elite universities. It is also why foreign aid includes continuous training and indoctrination events and exercises. These create and maintain the interfaces and personal relationships needed for the modeller to manipulate the models wherever they may be.

    In 2020, I described the PHEIC (Public health emergency of international concern) aka as the COVID-19 pandemic as a massive worldwide counter-insurgency operation. It is an element of the global terrorism that constitutes the controlling instrument for the financial oligarchy that rules us. Many of the tactics and strategies best theorized by the French and applied by the US in the 20th century actually have precedents in the long history of Western colonization and imperialism. However, the emergence of systems theory in the 20th century and the full militarization of science and medicine through the Manhattan Project have significantly magnified the organization of terror. A cultural convergence can be identified throughout the political power elite of the West by which industrial laborers, peasants and indigenous populations were all classified as resources to be managed scientifically. The scientific-technological revolution of the 20th century was foremost the translation of enormous productive capacity—capable of satisfying most of humanities basic needs—into the capacity for annihilating the population rendered surplus by all that industrial plant (now digital).

    That said, with the long-standing political and military objective of the regime in Tel Aviv the total evacuation/ elimination of the indigenous population of Palestine, there ought to be no doubt that evacuation/ elimination involves more than just “Indian removal”. For decades, the Palestinian diaspora has demanded the “right to return” to lands they were forced at gunpoint to vacate over the past century. In other settler-colonial states the major domestic task has always been population replacement and extermination of title (eliminating any heirs with claims). The US has a peculiarity that bewilders the settled “Old World” land owners. Namely the absence of binding land registers. Buying a parcel of land in the United States is not completed by registration of the purchase in a central land registry administered by the State. Instead the buyer purchases a title warranted free of encumbrances (claims against his ownership) and purchases an insurance policy that will reimburse him the purchase price should there be a successful challenge to his title in court. The tenuousness of ownership of stolen land survives in this archaic form of real estate transaction. During the so-called “pandemic” the official COVID measures were applied in Australia to evict indigenous from the lands the federal government had ostensibly recognized as theirs. The collapse of much of the SME sector worldwide during the state of COVID siege resulted in substantial redistribution of assets, including land.

    During the US war against Vietnam, the CIA ran numerous programs which were eventually consolidated in what became known as the Phoenix Program. Two of those programs were interlocking pacification tactics included under the Rural Development schemes, e.g. through the Agency cut-out USAID. These were the strategic hamlet and census-grievance. Strategic hamlets were artificial villages forcibly constructed by the inhabitants of a theatre of operations in order to concentrate the population (yes, concentration camp) and isolate them from the National Liberation Front, also called the Vietcong (Vietnamese Communists). Census-grievance was a civil affairs operation. Villages were inspected, the population counted and registered, then a mirror version of the NLF alternative administration was installed. The US version was to operate according to what it thought was the structure and method of the NLF. Gene Sharp derived his colour revolution theories from analysis of these counter-insurgency strategies.

    One of the most important measurements for the Phoenix system was the force strength of the NLF. The general theory was that VC were the total population minus the percentage of the population under official control. However this was not very precise. Hence the census in census grievance. The Phoenix coordinators at all levels had to aggregate numbers and estimate the military strength of the NLF throughout the country. Since all Vietnamese look alike, this meant counting everyone. Of course sometimes counting was not necessary to determine the damage done. B-52 drops wiped out all traces of villager and insurgent alike. Yet monitoring population numbers and fluctuations throughout the country was considered a fair indirect measure. First of all where populations remained stable it was safe to say the NLF was protected or protecting. Where the rural population had been decimated it was safe to say the NLF would have little means of support. Either way numbers were crucial as were the other data collected about the inhabitants through the battery of civil operations disguised as Rural Development. That data went into the Phoenix Program Information System to generate “kill lists” for target acquisition. Every detail about families was fed into this system on the assumption that somewhere in every family there was an NLF member who had to counted and neutralized.

    It has been no secret that artificial intelligence tools are deployed by the Tel Aviv terrorists to produce similar assassination target lists. With the near total destruction of urban infrastructure and habitation in besieged Gaza, the essential controlling data for the counter-insurgency campaign is becoming more difficult to obtain. Whereas once the occupation health authorities were registering fatalities, about two million minus 40,000, the counter has been stuck for months now. While it is in the interest of the Tel Aviv regime to conceal the actual number of deaths from the general public, it is essential for their military operations to know how many more have to go. There is no substitute for a physical inventory—supervised by the IDF. Clearly they can no longer ask the inhabitants to come out for food and drink. However, the past four years have created a psychological condition worldwide by which vast numbers of people obviously can still be manipulated—the fear of disease.

    As another author also observed, the WHO vaccination campaign targets children AND the rest of the world’s population suffering from the trauma of the COVID-19 siege and the largely forced vaccination of untold millions. I say forced because this mass vaccination was performed using either by irrationally-induced fear or repressive measures imposed by the Corporate State. The staged micro-PHEIC, following the COVID-19 handbook, enhances through redundancy the PHEIC fear strategy, also embodied in covert WHO negotiations to amend the International Health Regulations (IHR), and it provides the IDF cover for a census-type intelligence operation. Those are the minimum advantages accruing to the West’s ruling oligarchy and its franchise in Tel Aviv. However if the more sinister possibilities are considered in this suite, then the vaccination campaign is targeting children (like so many other aggressive policies today) to assure that there will in fact be few of them in the future. If the children of those who survive the annihilation of the Gaza concentration camp are rendered handicapped or even sterilized by the concoctions they have been fed, then the experimental vaccine will have proven its worth to the vaccinators of the world. The best way to prevent a death is still to prevent the inception of life in the first place.

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  • What you smell is the stench of a dying republic.

    Our dying republic.

    We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic.

    In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

    For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

    In other words, we’re allowed to bask in the illusion of freedom while we’re being stripped of the very rights intended to ensure that we can hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.

    We’re in trouble, folks.

    This is no longer America, land of the free, where the government is of the people, by the people and for the people.

    Rather, this is Amerika, where fascism, totalitarianism and militarism go hand in hand.

    Freedom no longer means what it once did.

    This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ commitment to the American experiment in freedom.

    Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

    My friends, we’re being played for fools.

    On paper, we may be technically free.

    In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

    We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

    Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

    With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

    As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

    Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, but we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

    In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

    Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction.

    The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

    This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

    That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

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

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

    So, what’s the answer?

    For starters, stop tolerating corruption, graft, intolerance, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, militarism, lawlessness, ignorance, brutality, deceit, collusion, corpulence, bureaucracy, immorality, depravity, censorship, cruelty, violence, mediocrity, and tyranny. These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through.

    Stop holding your nose in order to block out the stench of a rotting institution.

    Stop letting the government and its agents treat you like a servant or a slave.

    You’ve got rights. We’ve all got rights. This is our country. This is our government. No one can take it away from us unless we make it easy for them.

    You’ve got a better chance of making your displeasure seen and felt and heard within your own community. But it will take perseverance and unity and a commitment to finding common ground with your fellow citizens.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re making it way too easy for the police state to take over.

    So, stop being an accessory to the murder of the American republic.

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  • The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state.

    This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

    This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

    In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

    Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

    For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

    For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

    Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the psyops video posits. “Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

    This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

    Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

    Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

    Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry in order to acclimate us to the Deep State’s totalitarian agenda.

    Weaponizing violence in order to institute martial law. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

    Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Digital currencies, combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism, will create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society.

    Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

    Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

    Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. 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 lockdowns, 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—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    Weaponizing politics. Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset.

    Weaponizing the dystopian future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use 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 paints an ominous picture of the future 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. “We the people” are the have-nots.

    The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in undermining our freedoms.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the facts speak for themselves.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

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  • No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire state of our nation.

    Indeed, the 2024 elections will not do much to alter our present course towards a police state.

    Nor will the popularity contest for the new occupant of the White House significantly alter the day-to-day life of the average American greatly at all. Those life-changing decisions are made elsewhere, by nameless, unelected government officials who have turned bureaucracy into a full-time and profitable business.

    In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state that we will not be hearing from either of the two leading presidential candidates.

    1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”

    2. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

    3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.

    4. Presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

    5. The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on foreign aid programs it can’t afford, all the while the national debt continues to grow, our domestic infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached. What is going on? It’s obvious that a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy is running the country.

    6. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

    7. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”

    8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it. Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another manufactured illusion conjured up in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.

    9. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    10. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance. This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding. This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    11. The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

    12. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.

    13. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.

    14. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

    15. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes.

    16. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.

    17. From the moment they are born to the time they legally come of age, young people are now wards of the state.

    18. All you need to do in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

    19. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

    20. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

    These are not problems that can be glibly dismissed with a few well-chosen words, as most politicians are inclined to do.

    No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to own up to the fact that there can be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.

    Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”

    There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

    We are the government.

    The post Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

    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 only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

    It’s happening already.

    Yet we’re not just being acclimated to the trappings of a police state. We’re also being bullied into silence and subservience in the face of outright injustice and heavy-handed political correctness, while simultaneously being groomed into accepting government tyranny, corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude as societal norms.

    What exactly is going on?

    Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.

    Certainly, it’s not leading to more freedom.

    This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.

    It must be said: the various protests from both the Right and the Left in recent years have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.

    We may be worse off now than we were before.

    Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?

    You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

    This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    It works the same way every time.

    Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government headed up by their particular brand of political savior can solve the problems that plague us.

    We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests.

    Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.

    The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.

    Nor does it seem to matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.

    Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.”)

    Indeed, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

    We are walking a dangerous path right now.

    No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.

    We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when, in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.

    Never forget, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that the lesser of two evils is still evil.

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  • Once a dictator, always a dictator.

    Power-hungry, lawless and steadfast in its pursuit of authoritarian powers, the government does not voluntarily relinquish those powers once it acquires, uses and inevitably abuses them.

    Likewise, any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one, if elected, will be a dictator-in-chief for life.

    Then again, the president is already a dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional thanks to a relatively obscure directive (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), part of the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, which gives unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president in the event of a “national emergency.”

    That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

    It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “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”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.

    The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

    For all intents and purposes, the Constitution has long been suspended, and we’ve been operating in a state of martial law for some time now.

    The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.

    Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.

    Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been planning and preparing for such crises for years now, quietly assembling a wish list of presidential lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

    We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

    Mind you, the police state with the president at its helm has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

    Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.

    The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.

    All of the imperial powers amassed by past presidents—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were passed from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and will be passed along to the next president.

    These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

    These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.

    The war on disinformation, the war on electoral corruption, the war on CO

    VID-19, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration: all of these countermeasures have become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

    This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

    If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

    After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise.

    What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”

    We must recalibrate the balance of power.

    Congress must also put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely—no matter which party holds office.

    The process of unseating a dictator and limiting the powers of the presidency is far from simple but at a minimum, it must start with “we the people.”

    Make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

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  • But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.

    ― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

    Enough already.

    Enough with the distractions. Enough with the partisan jousting.

    Enough with the sniping and name-calling and mud-slinging that do nothing to make this country safer or freer or more just.

    We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long.

    We are approaching a reckoning.

    This is the point, as the poet W. B. Yeats warned, when things fall apart and anarchy is loosed upon the world.

    We have seen this convergence before in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mussolini’s Italy, and in Mao’s China: the rise of strongmen and demagogues, the ascendency of profit-driven politics over deep-seated principles, the warring nationalism that seeks to divide and conquer, the callous disregard for basic human rights and dignity, and the silence of people who should know better.

    Yet no matter how many times the world has been down this road before, we can’t seem to avoid repeating the deadly mistakes of the past.

    This is not just playing out on a national and international scale. It is wreaking havoc at the most immediate level, as well, creating rifts and polarities within families and friends, neighborhoods and communities that keep the populace warring among themselves and incapable of presenting a united front in the face of the government’s goose-stepping despotism.

    We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, disguised as “the better good,” marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and carried out by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

    For too long now, the American people have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.

    Yet the unavoidable truth is that the government—through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny—has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

    At its core, this is not a debate about politics, or constitutionalism, or even tyranny disguised as law-and-order. This is a condemnation of the monsters with human faces who walk among us.

    Many of them work for the U.S. government.

    This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released thirty-five years ago and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.

    Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

    Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.

    In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.

    In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.

    In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.

    In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

    And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

    It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

    When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.

    Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

    When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

    This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.

    A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

    In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”

    Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: what we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.

    We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

    Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.

    As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”

    We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth.

    From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.

    The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, pandemics, mass shootings, etc.).

    They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.

    They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.

    We are little more than expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.

    In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

    In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

    Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

    Sound familiar?

    Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.

    We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.

    Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.

    For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.

    But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?

    The answer is the same in every age: fear.

    Fear makes people stupid.

    Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.

    The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is transforming the populace into fearful, compliant, pacified zombies content to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

    This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.

    When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”

    We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Injustice is growing. Inequality is growing. A concern for human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.

    Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

    So where does that leave us?

    The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.

    Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.

    When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hypno-transmitter in They Live, he delivers a wake-up call for freedom. As Nada memorably declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”

    In other words: we need to get active and take a stand for what’s really important.

    Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.

    All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.

    Wake up, America.

    If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • RNZ News

    New Zealand police are investigating after the home of Te Pāti Māori election candidate Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke was invaded, vandalised, and a threatening letter left behind.

    They said the burglary of a Huntly home was reported to police on Monday.

    On Friday, Te Pāti Māori issued a statement saying it was the third incident to take place at Maipi-Clarke’s home this week.

    The candidate for Hauraki-Waikato said the attack was premeditated and targeted, and politically motivated.

    Danger on the campaign trail had increased because of race baiting and fearmongering from right-wing parties, Maipi-Clarke said.

    Despite the attack, she was not scared, she told The Hui’s Hauraki-Waikato debate.

    However, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has dismissed claims his party was race baiting, and increasing danger for candidates on the campaign trail.

    ‘Not responsible’
    Peters told Newshub Nation that notion was wrong, adding that he was not responsible for the actions of other people.

    He said he would never work with Te Pāti Māori.

    Te Pāti Māori said it was working with police to find a person who broke into their youngest candidate’s home.

    Co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said the party was outraged and it was seeing more abusive behaviour in this election than ever before.

    “You go at one of our mokopuna, you go at all of us. And it doesn’t matter how different we think, when we see our mokopuna being abused, we will unite and it will have the absolute contrary affect of what I think perpetrators are trying to do when they’re individually picking off on our youngest, on one of our babies … it’s disgusting,” she said.

    The party was looking into improving security for candidates to prevent future attacks, she said.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

    — H.L. Mencken, In Defence of Women, 1918

    First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.

    Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.

    In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.

    It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.

    Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

    Cue the Emergency State.

    Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, “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”: the government has been anticipating and preparing for such crises for years now.

    As David C. Unger writes for the New York Times:

    Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

    Here’s what we know: given the rate at which the government keeps devising new ways to establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems at taxpayer expense, each subsequent crisis ushers in ever larger expansions of government power and less individual liberty.

    This is the slippery slope to outright tyranny.

    You see, once the government acquires (and uses) authoritarian powers—to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the military, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process—it does not voluntarily relinquish them.

    The lesson for the ages is this: once any government is allowed to overreach and expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe recognizes, “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable.

    Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

    In this way, every crisis since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government.

    Each crisis has also been a test to see how far “we the people” would allow the government to sidestep the Constitution in the so-called name of national security; a test to see how well we have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we’ll march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

    Most critically of all, it has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

    Unfortunately, we’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.

    Indeed, the powers-that-be have been pushing our buttons and herding us along like so much cattle since World War II, at least, starting with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, which not only propelled the U.S. into World War II but also unified the American people in their opposition to a common enemy.

    That fear of attack by foreign threats, conveniently torqued by the growing military industrial complex, in turn gave rise to the Cold War era’s “Red Scare.” Promulgated through government propaganda, paranoia and manipulation, anti-Communist sentiments boiled over into a mass hysteria that viewed anyone and everyone as suspect: your friends, the next-door neighbor, even your family members could be a Communist subversive.

    This hysteria, which culminated in hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where hundreds of Americans were called before Congress to testify about their so-called Communist affiliations and intimidated into making false confessions, also paved the way for the rise of an all-knowing, all-seeing governmental surveillance state.

    By the time 9/11 rolled around, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government used the USA Patriot Act to claim greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.

    By way of the National Defense Authorization Act, Barack Obama continued Bush’s trend of undermining the Constitution, going so far as to give the military the power to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, label them extremists, and detain them indefinitely without trial, all in the name of keeping America safe.

    Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the NDAA.

    Then Donald Trump took office, claiming the country was being invaded by dangerous immigrants and insisting that the only way to keep America safe was to expand the reach of the border police, empower the military to “assist” with border control, and essentially turn the country into a Constitution-free zone.

    That so-called immigration crisis then morphed into multiple crises (domestic extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic, race wars, civil unrest, etc.) that the government has been eager to use in order to expand its powers.

    Joe Biden, in turn, has made every effort to expand the reach of the militarized police state, pledging to hire 87,000 more IRS agents and 100,000 police officers, and allowing the FBI to operate as standing army.

    What the next crisis will be is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure that there will be a next crisis.

    So, what should you expect if the government decides to declare another state of emergency and institutes a nationwide lockdown?

    You should expect more of the same, only worse.

    More compliance, less resistance.

    More fear-mongering, mind-control tactics and less tolerance for those who question the government’s propaganda-driven narratives.

    Most of all, you should expect more tyranny and less freedom.

    Given the government’s past track record and its long-anticipated plans for using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems in response to a future crisis, there’s every reason to worry about what comes next.

    Mark my words: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if and when another crisis arises—if and when a nationwide lockdown finally hits—if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public— then we will truly understand the extent to which the powers-that-be have fully succeeded in acclimating us to a state of affairs in which the government has all the power and “we the people” have none.

    In the meantime, if all we do to reclaim our freedoms and regain control over our runaway government is vote for yet another puppet of the Deep State, by the time the next crisis arises, it may well be too late.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

    — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

    What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

    Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

    Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

    On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

    In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

    Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

    By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

    This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

    The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

    Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’

    This is the very definition of technofascism.

    Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

    The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

    Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

    As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

    Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

    The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

    Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

    This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

    In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

    Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

    This is how it starts.

    Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combating fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

    Watch and learn.

    We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

    Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

    Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

    As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

    The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

    Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

    Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

    If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s happening already.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No words for emotions — alexithymia

    New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.

    Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

    The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

    Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

    It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.

    While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.

    Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.

    Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.

    Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.

    My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.

    Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.

    In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)

    All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).

    Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.

    Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)

    I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.

    It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.

    Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?

    The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.

    Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.

    “Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”

    “I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”

    Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.

    So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.

    This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”

    Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.

    And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”

    Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?

    Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.

    But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:

    The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)

    The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.

    So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.

    China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.

    The preface to the Chinese edition warns:

    Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].

    At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.

    There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:

    He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.

    Hmm: why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

    “Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”

    Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?

    This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:

    An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.

    “Little children working,” the visitor replied.

    Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

    But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

    Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

    Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)

    Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?

    Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:

    Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders.  An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

    By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

    American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

    When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)

    Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.

    May be an image of artillery and text

    May be an image of artillery, military uniform and text

    [Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}

    Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.

    May be an image of 7 people

    Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.

    A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.

    The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.

    May be an image of raft and ocean

    The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

    Poverty and Crisis: Sucking Humanity Dry

    The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”

    “Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)

    May be an image of 2 people, crowd and text that says 'No ES, SEQUIA SAQUEO! Es'

    It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:

    While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.

    Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.

    The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”

    May be an image of 1 person, suit, microphone, dinner jacket and text

    So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.

    The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.

    Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

    The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.

    CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)

    If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

    Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in Papers of Jefferson, ed.

    The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

    Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

    Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

    Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

    Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

    As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16.  You need something else than just an AR-15.”

    The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

    For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

    By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

    This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

    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.

    A 2008 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 goes 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.”

    Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

    Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is 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.

    The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

    The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.

    This is how it begins.

    As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

    Already, discontent is growing.

    According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”

    Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.

    What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”

    This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

    Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

    When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Brace yourselves.

    There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

    Any time you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

    Any time you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

    And any time you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

    The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

    The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.

    We are at our most vulnerable right now.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.