"Lookout Don't Look Up"

"Lookout Don't Look Up"

Phone addiction is the most powerful drug on earth.

by Nicholas Creed

"Is the art of conversation dying or dead almost those born since 2000? Does that age cohort favour emojis and digital communication over face to face human interaction and verbal dialogue? I ask these questions both rhetorically and tongue-in-cheek, because we all know the answer. I feel like I am surrounded by zombies. I am surrounded by zombies. I’ve ranted about this kind of thing before, here, here, and here.

Today I re-examine ‘smart’ dumb phone addiction through the lens of a pedestrian in mortal peril, a driver who sees 99.9% of motorists playing on their phones or watching videos in Bangkok, and as a quietly despairing man from a bygone era that values meaningful human connection. I must be old-fashioned. I was born in 1984 and now I am living through Eric Blair aka George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty four. I have yet to turn forty years old, yet I may be called a ‘boomer’ simply by virtue of my principles and how I cling onto being human, acting human, rejecting the merging of man and machine, and quite literally detesting my own phone.

I leave my little blue screen at home most of the time. Mrs. Creed is never without hers; alas I do encourage her to spend less time on her Instagram story and more time on our story in the land of the living, within the magical, spontaneous, unpredictable realm of reality.

There are a handful of friends who I can rely on for punctuality to appear at a convened meeting point at the allotted time. It is liberating being without that little device that craves attention - even with zero anti-social media apps installed, no email account apps, *no Substack app*, no food delivery apps - only Telegram and Signal messaging - I can make do with those on my laptop desktop alone.

I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks back when I met a friend in the park for some outdoor exercise at the open-air gym, when he was despondent to my calls and messages. I reluctantly brought my phone in its little faraday cage pouch and fished it out upon arrival to check if he was nearby. He turned up and proudly announced that he’d left his phone at home, inspired by observing me having done the same so often. It was checkmate with me in the NPC crosshairs on that occasion. Nay bother. Going ‘phoneless’ is catching on. Long may it continue.

Last night I braved thunder and lightning in a torrential classic Bangkok monsoon season downpour to make a run to the local minimart. There are rarely any pavements (‘sidewalks’ in American English) around Bangkok’s little ‘Sois’ (roads). As I toddled home, I hugged the right side of the road on the final corner of the home stretch, only to be almost wiped out of the game.

A food delivery driver tore around the corner towards me, one hand on his motorcycle handlebar, the other hand holding his phone as he slouched forwards checking the map direction on his blue screen. I breathed in and darted further still into the walls atop the drains. He missed me by millimeters. I shouted in Thai “concentrate!” - to which I received an angry glare. Sorry for existing, and being in your way as you multi-tasked your journey one-handed in zero-visibility heavy rain at highspeed, Mr. Motorcyclist.

I see these near-misses daily around my neigbourhood - for the most part these motorcyclists seem to have developed an extra-sensory perception via peripheral vision that allows them to remain glued to their phones as they swerve around oncoming traffic and pedestrians. Although I know from the daily death tolls on the roads involving motorcycles and pick-up trucks, that many souls are not so ‘lucky’. It really is a concrete jungle out there.

As my car’s engine idles in the dreaded Bangkok gridlocked traffic from time to time, I look around from side to side, and what do I see? Everyone is on their phone, almost all motorists are wearing a facemask, often alone in their cars, and motorcyclists are often playing games or watching YouTube videos; if they are not otherwise mesmerised by the infinite scroll of drivel via Facebook.

When the traffic lights turn green, invariably it warrants a beep of my horn to pull the driver in front of me out of their phone-induced stupor, so that they may drive forwards, whilst they ambidextrously continue tapping away on their screens, putting their automatic drive vehicles into gear.

Frightening. Insane. Normalized. The brief reprieves from being - I like to think - sane, in an insane and abnormal society, come via the rare glances of acknowledgement from fellow humans who are socially self-aware of their surroundings, and fully conscious. What a rare, beautiful sight it is to behold, truly. Especially on the public transport links - Bangkok’s underground mass rapid transit (MRT) trains, or the over-ground ‘Skytrain’ system.

It reminds me of that scene in the film "I Am Legend" when Will Smith’s character discovers the mutated humans underground all huddled together in silence:

Yet within the silent, huddled, phone scrolling of the public transport trains in Bangkok, I yearn to find just one person who is phoneless, without earphones, without an Ipad or device in their palms. It is extremely rare. If our eyes meet but for a moment, we might exchange a knowing smile as we glance around at the other automaton passengers. It makes for good people watching at least.

What a waste of the inherently natural beauty that used to radiate from Thai women. They just do not look up anymore. They are also still often masked. Hidden away from the world, sinking into the digital, all consuming, attention sapping succubus demon of the blue screen. Unquestionably addicted. Hopelessly dependent on their bastion of truth propaganda, spewing out attention-span diminishing ten second clips of nonsense.

I am so glad to not be a single man in this landscape which is devoid of feeling, numbed by always being connected to the internet, yet entirely disconnected from the sense of self, surroundings, and from life itself.

I met an interesting bloke at the sports hall in the local park. He has a unique job where his role comes in between physiotherapy and doctor’s rehabilitative duties for people who have suffered devastating physical injuries, often from car accidents. I can’t recall the job title, but it is something ‘activated’. He helps people to ‘get activated’ through a type of Swedish massage and stretching exercises. He ranted about phone addiction.

He casually said: “Basically, babies are born now, they learn to walk, then that’s it really. They do not progress beyond the ability to walk in terms of their physical development. The walk turns into a shuffle with poor posture. Most infants are given an Ipad by the age of two years old here. Then they are cognitively and physically stunted in terms of development.”

We mused on how across the sports centre halls of the local park - Pickle Ball, Badminton, Table Tennis, Basketball, and Volleyball - the children are absent. Teenagers are nowhere to be seen. The age demographic for the most part is 30 years old and up. We agreed, nostalgically, how our childhoods in England were spent climbing trees, building rope-swings, playing football, and generally being outdoors as much as possible.

“Piss off Creed you cringeworthy Boomer!” - I hear some youngster shout from the backrow…

As a teenager at the turn of the millennium on new year’s eve 1999, I was at a house party with the entire high school year of pupils. It was wild. I drank myself stupid and ended up throwing up all over my friend’s parent’s pretty flowerbed in their neatly trimmed suburbia garden. I was somewhat mortified. I featured heavily in Monday morning’s gossip stories around the school. It faded away. Only to be replaced by some other drunken teenager falling down some stairs or into a bush at the next week’s house party.

Nowadays, teenagers cannot afford to make such mistakes - even though such errors can be a coming of age rite of passage. Not necessarily involving alcohol, but general moments of great embarrassment when you want the ground to swallow you up and memory hole the incident.

Nowadays, a teenager would be subject to intense ‘cyber bullying’ if they put one foot wrong at a party. It would be remixed into a funky video clip to a whacky soundtrack and might go viral, if they are very unfortunate. I wonder what teenaged house parties are like now. Do they sit around on their phones showing each other videos and messaging the person sat beside them? Do some people play up to the camera phones for attention, or choregraph a little dance for TikTok?

“Shut up Creed you stupid Boomer!”

As a child, I would call my friends by landline and ask “are you playing out today?” Then we would ‘knock-on’ our friend’s front door, and off we went to explore the great outdoors, tearing around on our BMX bikes, with the only danger we put ourselves in owing to our own non-stop laughter, and perhaps foolishly cycling together side by side in a row on a main road.

Although we weren’t chased by nefarious government officials from clandestine programs like in the show Stranger Things, we once experienced a bicycle chase from a group of much older boys after we replaced the huge log on their rope-swing with a twig, just for a laugh. I am sure they would have beaten us to a pulp if they had caught up with us - a lucky, narrow escape.

That’ll do it for glimpsing into my misspent well-spent, character building youth. We were free once upon a time. Carefree, adventurous, explorative, and curious about the big wide world."

Lookout Phone Parody Video I don’t know who to give credit for this final parody clip. Fellow Substacker TriTorch sent me a link to it (I hope he recommences his writing again when the time is right). If I can persuade Mrs. Creed to add a Thai voiceover to the video, I bet my inbox will be inundated by Thais asking where they can order it…

Click to view Odysee "No More Need To Look Up"

As TriTorch said to me in a direct message which I am sure he won’t mind me quoting verbatim: "They're (phones) highly weaponized poison aimed directly at mankind. Worse than drugs because the vector of attack makes so much sense ("well my son has to have his cell phone in class, what if there's an emergency") <--- there's so much evil built into that mantra it's practically inconceivable (we went on just fine for 200 years without cell phones in classrooms, but whatever eases the parents' minds paves the path to our ruin).

- https://nicholascreed.substack.com/

"A Comforter in the Storm"

"A Comforter in the Storm"

by Edward Curtin

“What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Walker Percy, "The Moviegoer"

"To say we live in chaotic, disquieting, and sinister times is undeniable. Its truthfulness is revealed in the great sense of foreboding evident among the population of the United States. Everyone I know feels it. The forces of history and chance, always powerful although often ignored as people pursue private happiness, at times gather into a great and obvious storm that sets people back on their heels. It becomes impossible to discount. Now is such a time. Everything seems to be falling apart at once.

Sometimes the memory of a work of art resonates with reality; seems to conspire with nature to rattle the mind. In the opening pages of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak’s novel, "Doctor Zhivago" – a story set in Russia during the Russian Revolutionary period – the eponymous main character, Dr. Yurii Andreievich Zhivago (called Yura as a child,) is ten years-old and distraught. He has just attended his mother’s funeral where he stood on her grave weeping and is spending the night with his uncle in the local monastery. The night brings a ferocious snowstorm that awakens Yura and brings him to tears for the second time that day.

Outside there was no trace of the road, the graveyard, or the kitchen garden, nothing but the blizzard, the air smoking with snow. It was almost as if the snowstorm had caught sight of Yura and conscious of its power to terrify, roared and howled, doing everything possible to impress him. The boy fears his mother will sink deeper and deeper into the earth.

Pasternak, a symbolist poet of deep spirituality, uncannily wrote a large and ambitious novel near the end of his life. It is a book that is deeply rooted in the real world, beginning with the boy’s mother’s death and ending with that of the grown Yurii. Bookends of endings that leave the reader’s spirit uncaged and oddly rhapsodic. Sad it is, but not depressing, for it is a love story filled with radiance and resurrection, especially fitting now when to distinguish between the real and the apparent world is so problematic and hope is so hard to find in such a dark time.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all -,” wrote Emily Dickinson. Hope, like America, as the great peace warrior poet Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J. used to say, is hard to find. Not impossible, just hard. Perhaps it is better to say it must be created through action. Action rooted in faith. But from whence comes faith?

I was reminded of this scene the other night as I looked out my New England window at the blizzard burying everything in sight. It was bitter cold and the wind was howling. Lucky to have a warm abode and far from being a child, it wasn’t the blizzard that frightened me. It was its message. Chaos coming, madness in the saddle, people losing their minds, leaders drunk on power, war, hatred, murder in the streets. Lost souls. Lost, lost souls.

Such sentiments have been uttered before, so I don’t want to exaggerate. Yet I feel certain we have entered a new “reality,” one based on phantoms and methods, a digital world spun out of the nineteenth century’s so-called “death of God,” or God’s murder. The murder of God also meant the suicide of man, with both finally resulting in rule by algorithm and artificial intelligence and our time when everything has become unsettled, doubtful, and frighteningly farcical, all a deadly parody – in Nietzsche’s prescient words: “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.”

But then there was this as well in the night, brief as it was. Strangely, the storm cracked its shell at one point, the clouds parted serenely for a brief glimpse of what seemed like a few stars, and I could see the snow settling softly on the ground like a diaphanous large bird with its wings a massive white comforter. The menace turned to tranquility, a sense of peace entered my heart, and just as quickly the storm roared back with the air smoking with snow and the ephemeral vision of hope gone.

So I went back to bed, got under the comforter, and wondered myself back to sleep. And I dreamed. And as usual I dreamed of birds, numerous dreams and numerous birds, as has happened throughout my life. All my significant dreams – and for some reason I remember almost all my dreams in detail – have been about birds. Not only do I encounter rare birds of flamboyant plumage in these night visions, but I fly with them. Gravity with its grave and somber implications no longer holds me down. I don’t talk about these encounters, except to my wife, and I will not go into details here. Let me just say they are real for me – deep experiences – like for Emily Dickinson, a source of hope in my soul. Like Percy Shelley in his poem “To A Skylark,” I too confess to my birds, What thou art I know not, for knowing is overrated. When one magnificent huge multi-colored bird fluttered its wings so I could feel its edges, I was reluctant to do so for fear of hurting the bird, but it assured me I wouldn’t because they were my wings also. Winged words, doves of the spirit, birds released from these sentences to release a transcendent vision from the aviary of my mind.

Yurii Zhivago is not only a medical doctor but a poet. In both roles he has a special gift for diagnosis. The book is a glowing example of Pasternak’s reverence for the wholeness of life, how our ends are in our beginnings and our beginnings in our ends, how patterns circulate through all our lives in ways we often know nothing of until a visionary experience or a work of art reveals them to us. Patterns across history, society, and families. This is exemplified by the uncanny crisscrossing parallels that occur from the beginning to the end of Dr. Zhivago. Life (zhivago in Russian = life, living, alive), after all, not us, is in control.

My adult son has an uncanny affinity for birds, not because I taught him about them or recounted my dreams to him. He can spot the smallest or most camouflaged, identify them all by sound and sight, point them out on the wing no matter how fast their flight, and draw them into his orbit as mystical friends. His wild garden is an aviary and a temple for imaginative dreaming. His communion with birds is a source of wonder to me and his mother.

[You might find this hard to believe, but just as I had started to write about him, hope, and birds, he dropped by our house for a few minutes and I heard him in the kitchen mention to his mother his friend named Hope and bird wings. It seemed unreal but wasn’t.]

Recently, in the middle of winter but before the heavy snows covered the farmer’s fields, he had seen some small-eared owls soaring at twilight. He invited his mother, lady, sister with family, and me to come to see them one late afternoon, but none appeared. Along the country road we traversed, we passed a half-dozen men standing in wait in the crepuscular light, sentinels guarding some hoped-for vision that would lift their winter spirits. It seemed to me the old adage pertained: He who has eyes to see, let him see. Only certain people are gifted with the clairvoyance that can conjure up not just such an owl, but the bird of paradise. These men were searching for a comforter who appears on its own schedule; but at least they were searching and open to an epiphany.

I said to my son, why don’t you write about your relationship with birds? He immediately demurred, giving no reason. I took it to mean that for him his relationship with birds, like the mountain running that he does, filled his heart and lungs with the spirit of life (his zhivago), and that was enough. It was then that I connected my “dream” life to his “real” life, my writer’s life to his active life. Hope takes many forms. And “the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

“Sitting still,” said Nietzsche, “is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.” For not flying is a way of lying, but art is a letting go.

"Ah, no wings of the body could compare

To wings of the spirit!

It is in each of us inborn:

That feeling that arises and ascends

When in the blue heavens overhead

The lark calls out in thrilling song."

- Goethe, "Faust"

- https://off-guardian.org/

"All Is Well, Or Is It?" (Excerpt)

"All Is Well, Or Is It?"

by Jim Quinn

“People don’t realize how hard it is to speak the truth 

to a world full of people who don’t realize they’re living a lie” 

– Edward Snowden

Excerpt: "My government overlords and their legacy media propaganda outlets tell me the economy is booming because GDP is between 4% and 5%, the stock market is near all-time highs, inflation is declining, unemployment is low, and AI is going to transform our world for the better. According to their narrative, All is Well. Meanwhile, all hell is breaking loose in every facet of our everyday lives. We are seeing 6 sigma (once in 500 million) events in multiple markets (gold, silver, JPY bonds) within one week. Well functioning non-manipulated markets based on price discovery do not crash by 40% in one day, like silver did last week.

Government shutdowns, ICE shootings, massive welfare program fraud, passing more bloated spending bills, fake staged shutdowns, violent upheaval in Democrat run urban shitholes, uncovering and ignoring the 2020 election fraud, Democrats (with RINO support) desperately trying to stop the SAVE Act voter ID bill to continue their election fraud scheme, and Trump tariffing and threatening every country on earth if they don’t do what he says, makes every day seem like an exhausting slog towards perdition.

And now we know for a fact the world is run by Satan worshiping, vile, child molesting pedophiles, powerful sadistic billionaires, who use politicians, bankers, and their propaganda media whores to coverup their crimes against humanity. The information which has seen the light of day is revolting, disgusting, criminal, and makes any normal person physically ill. Imagine the material they haven’t released or have already destroyed. The evilness, degeneracy, and immorality of their acts is incomprehensible to the average person trying to live a moral life, earn a living and raise a family.

What is really stupefying to me is no one other than Epstein and Maxwell have been arrested. And it is pretty clear the Trump DOJ has absolutely no plans to arrest anyone for the most heinous crimes ever documented. Meanwhile, Trump rages against Thomas Massie, who was solely responsible for forcing the release of these incriminating documents, while being completely silent regarding the evil men who committed these despicable depraved acts upon children.

More revealing is the complete blackout on all the legacy media outlets of the Epstein file release. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. It’s almost as if they have been instructed to circle the wagons and pretend the Epstein files don’t exist. Remember the videos of dozens of news anchors mouthing the exact same propaganda slogans during the covid scamdemic? Our government and media are completely controlled by evil men wielding undue influence and power over every aspect of our lives. Without Twitter and some dedicated alt-media websites, the truth about the true nature of how our world actually runs would be completely silenced.

Our overlords use the CIA, Mossad, NSA, FBI and other means to control the narrative and lead the ignorant masses to their demise. It is absolutely true the MSM being silent about the Epstein files means at least 80% of the population has absolutely no idea they were even released. And even if they know, after decades of government school indoctrination, they are incurious and incapable of critical thought, just as the pedophile psychopaths planned. Aldous Huxley was right about so many things, especially how our masters deal with the truth.

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical

 point of view, is silence about truth” – Aldous Huxley

Silence about the truth is their plan and they continue to implement it with deceptive gusto, while manipulating the propaganda levers of mind control through the media, Wall Street, the DC swamp, billionaire funded NGOs creating chaos across the land, and bought off social media influencers pushing whatever narrative they are instructed to spew by Israel and their child sacrificing co-conspirators throughout the government, finance, media, and entertainment industries. The narrative is ALL IS WELL, when anyone capable of examining the facts knows all is not well. In fact, our current situation is awful and deteriorating by the minute. I will briefly examine whether things are well in the markets, the economy, personal finances, politics, and global relations.

The standard response by those promoting the ALL IS WELL narrative is the stock market being within 2% of an all-time high. Scott Bessent and his band of hedge fund acolytes know they can manipulate the market upward whenever Trump does or says something astoundingly stupid. It can work in the short term because daily moves are based on emotion and momentum trading, but over the long term, earnings, valuations and reality will always win the day. The stock market valuation is currently 3 standard deviations above the long-term average and 45% above the Dotcom bubble valuation. We appear to be in a bubble seeking a pin."

Full, most highly recommended article is here:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Amazing Grocery Deals At Meijer"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 2/8/26

"Amazing Grocery Deals At Meijer"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/