Saturday, September 9, 2023

"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death. The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"

"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death.
The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"
By Dr. Gary G. Kohls

“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.”  - Roger Waters

“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund

“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.” – Dresden James

“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill

"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.

The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.

But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.

SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,

“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.

Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”

Postman ended his book by writing: “What afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
“Amused To Death”
by Roger Waters

"Doctor, Doctor what’s wrong with me?
This supermarket life is getting long.
What is the heart life of a color TV?
What is the shelf life of a teenage
queen?
Ooh western woman,
Ooh western girl,
News hound sniffs the air
When Jessica Hahn goes down
He latches on to that symbol of
detachment
Attracted by the peeling away of
feeling
The celebrity of the abused shell
of the belle
Ooh western woman
Ooh western girl
And the children of Melrose strut
their stuff
Is absolute zero cold enough?
And out in the valley warm and clean
The little ones sit by their TV screens
No thoughts to think
No tears to cry
All sucked dry down to the very
last breath.

Bartender what is wrong with me,
Why I am so out of breath?
The captain said excuse me ma’am,
This species has amused itself to death
We watched the tragedy unfold,
We did as we were told.
We bought and sold,
It was the greatest show on earth.
But then it was over,
We oohed and aahed,
We drove our racing cars,
We ate our last few jars of caviar,
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah.

And when they found our shadows,
Grouped ‘round the TV sets,
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test,
They checked out all the data in
their lists.
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed.
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise,
They logged the only explanation left.
This species has amused itself to death.
No tears to cry,
No feelings left,
This species has amused itself to
death…"
Freely download “Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, by Neil Postman, here:

"How It Really Is"

“We'll know our disinformation program is complete 
when everything the American public believes is false.”
- William Casey, former director of the CIA

"Aldi Buys Out Winn-Dixie! What They Don't Want You To Know!"

Adventures with Danno, AM 9/9/23
"Aldi Buys Out Winn-Dixie!
 What They Don't Want You To Know!"
Aldi buys out Winn-Dixie, and we are exposing the
 truth of what they don't want you to know about this.
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Wendover Productions, 9/7/23
"How Dollar Stores Quietly Consumed America"
Comments here:

"Banking Crisis Update 9/923"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 9/9/23
"A Small Bank With A Big Problem"
Everyone is focused on the big banks. But what happens when a small bank starts to have the problems with liquidity and with losing money? This problem is going to continue and it’s only going to spread to other banks.
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 9/9/23
"Is Wells Fargo About To Go Out Of Business?"
A debate inside Wells Fargo over what to do with the mortgage franchise has been heating up for months, with a consensus starting to take shape in recent weeks. Banks dominated the home-loan market heading into the 2008 financial crisis. After the bust, many large lenders faced tens of billions of dollars in losses from mortgage-related operations and retreated. Wells Fargo held itself out as the exception. The firm avoided an annual loss in the crisis and then rode a surge in refinancings, making mortgages a key part of its identity.
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
The Economic Ninja, 9/9/23
"JP Morgan Chase Bank Warning (Bank Branches Closing)"
Comments here:

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Romania Border Evacuation; UK Jets Face Off With Russia"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 9/8/23
"Alert! Romania Border Evacuation; 
UK Jets Face Off With Russia; Bunker Network Being Built"
Comments here:

Friday, September 8, 2023

"15 Signs That Social Insanity Is Eating Away At America Like A Cancer Is Visible All Around Us"


Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 9/8/23
"15 Signs That Social Insanity Is Eating Away 
At America Like A Cancer Is Visible All Around Us"

"The fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams, and you can see it with your own eyes. If you live in a major city, all you have to do is walk around, and you'll find many signs that our core urban centers are decaying, and just about every sort of evil that you can possibly imagine is exploding all around us. Our so-called leaders continue to make stupid decisions, and now we are all going to reap the consequences. Predators are roaming our streets. American families are collapsing. Traditional moral values have been completely discarded. Young people are running wild in the streets, lawlessness is growing, and our system of government is melting down in plain sight.

Analysts with ZeroHedge pointed out that there’s a sudden panic leading Americans to search for a way out of our society. Research has shown that the number of people in the U.S. searching for the term “live off-grid” on the Internet has hit the highest level in five years. The driving force behind finding a rural piece of land for dirt cheap, buying or building a tiny home, installing solar panels, and sourcing your own food and water might have to do with the worst inflation storm in a generation, the experts noted. The worst housing affordability crisis in history and the deterioration of people’s confidence in our institutions are driving many to try to become independent from our system because they can already feel that it is only a matter of time before everything starts crumbling down.

As economic conditions get worse, people are becoming more desperate. This is fueling a shoplifting wave all over the country, and some grocery stores are being forced to implement extreme measures right now. A new report by the Washington Post reveals that Giant Food stores are taking all Tide, Colgate, and Advil products off the shelves completely because theft has become an enormous problem. The grocer is also clearing its beauty and health aisles of all national labels. Shoppers also will have to present their receipts to an employee before exiting the store. Executives said the decision was made to prevent the stores from shutting down.

Moreover, when people can’t trust our major institutions, it’s just a matter of time before they start breaking down. And a new Gallup poll shows that Americans do not believe in those that are currently running our country. The study found that only 8% of Americans trust Congress, while just 14% trust Big Business, and the rate same said they believe in Television news. Worryingly, the poll uncovered that only 17% of Americans trust the justice system. About 26% trust in the federal government, and only 32% believe in the church. In other words, the majority of the population can tell that the foundations of our society are solid enough at this point in time.

If we stay on this path, our future will be doomed. As a society, we need to turn around and reverse course immediately. We are literally destroying ourselves, but things have been wrong for so long, that many people don't even notice it anymore. Deep changes must happen soon. Otherwise, we are going to see things happen in the years ahead that will completely shock all of us.

Today, we compiled several facts and stats that help to illustrate the social insanity that is going on all over America. Some of the things we're about to share with you can be disturbing, but we must look at our issues to understand what is happening to our country. Here are '15 Signs That Social Insanity Is Eating America Like A Cancer.'"
Comments here:

Addison Wiggin, "Garbage In, Garbage Out"

"Garbage In, Garbage Out"
by Addison Wiggin

"Garbage In, Garbage Out: “Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.”
– Michael Crichton

“There’s not much doubt about ‘climate change’,” responds reader D Shultz, “it has been going on for eons.” “Some 15,000 years ago,” agrees G Pisauro, “we had an ice age, and sea levels were much, much lower. The earth has been warming ever since. Mankind barely survived the last ice age, and now we are thriving precisely because the climate is warmer."

Senor Pisauro continues: "Tonga erupted in early 2022 and spewed into the environment an enormous amount of water vapor, affecting the weather and climate in the short term. If the glaciers in Iceland are melting, may the cause be all of the heat from the earth and all of the volcanoes on Iceland, heating and melting the glaciers from underneath?"

It’s clear to any kindergarten scholar… even at the freezing point–32 degrees Fahrenheit–water melts ice. Plop a cube in your glass, soon it’ll be gone and the water level will have risen. Glaciers and icebergs melt faster underwater than they do in air. Sea level rises.

“It would just be nice if politicians actually followed the science,” D Shultz continues. “What a concept, I know! They’d learn Co2 emissions contribute about 1/100th to the ‘greenhouse effect' than the amount water vapor does. “A little learning would go a long way to help prevent the financial destruction of world economies, and deal with the impacts of climate change by learning the real cause.”

We’re aware readers like Pisauro and Schultz have studied the climate science v. policy conundrum longer and with greater intent than ours. Mr. Shultz recommends a couple of books to help: 'Hot Talk/Cold Science' by Fred Singer and 'Global Warming: The Great Deception' by Guy Mitchell. To the list we’d add Michael Shellenberger’s 'Apocalypse Never'.

It never hurts to hear both sides of the “debate,” if we dare call it that. “In all the discussion about climate policies,” reader D Darley writes, “what is the impact of shutting down perfectly good and useful systems like coal and gas power plants has on GDP? Looking at entire cities, industries, agricultural infrastructure – these all rely on cheap energy.” Darley then asks: 'What will be the negative impact on GDP of willingly and with forethought, shutting down perfectly useful assets? The big GDP plus is the trillions spent on replacement, most financed by borrowing. When do we view the true cost of these ‘climate’ boondoggles?'

And further down the rabbit hole we go… We set out online with good intentions. At first blush, Darley’s question regarding the cost of implementing climate policies to reach ‘Net Zero by 2050’ seemed like a natural one to answer if you’re a policy wonk and your goal is to radically, rapidly, reinvent the global economy. You’d think. But not so fast.

What I discovered is far more pernicious. We thought digital censorship was bad. What about unwitting collective delusion? You can try this search experiment at home if you like. Type in this sentence: “What are the costs of implementing climate change policy?” It’s actually hard to find an answer.

We found one. But without fail, some versions of the answer include this qualifier “the costs of not doing anything far outweigh the costs of doing something ‘now!’.” It’s fait accompli. Without any way of actually calculating the impacts of climate change from now into the future, politicians, pundits, journalists begin with the assumption that “climate change is here and it’s going to get worse.” The drag on global GDP is expected to be somewhere around 1%-2% per year until Net-Zero 2050. But the cost of “doing nothing” could reach 20% of global GDP by 2100.

Those stats appear frequently. “Global GDP” in this case is, of course, a placeholder for those countries who are in a position to finance the policies by going further into debt. Ahem. Most articles also end with some version of the assumption “the only way to mitigate the effect of climate change is for policy makers to spend [a sh$t-ton of your money.]” [***] emphasis added.

Bloomberg NEF, Bloomberg’s green-energy research team, puts the price tag at $200 Trillion. Okay, we’re getting somewhere. But then continues “which would be a bargain!” Not only would it be cheaper for rich Western countries to invest the $200 Trillion to preserve life as we know it on the planet, but we have to shell it out by 2030 or the price tag will rise. That or we’ll all die. Oh boy.

Even “Bard” – Google’s slick AI competitor to ChatGPT – gets in on the action. When I asked the Bard: “Have any studies been done on the negative impact of climate policy on GDP?” The Bard replied: “I'm designed solely to process and generate text, so I'm unable to assist you with that.” Hmn.

When I asked the language model where and when Greta Thunberg screamed “I don’t want you to be positive. I want you to panic!”... then followed it with “where and when did Al Gore admonish the world that “We’re boiling the oceans!”... I learned they were both addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, in 2019 and 2023 respectively.

Thankfully, I also got some unsolicited clarification from the robot. With respect to Thunberg. Bard summed Greta’s tantrum thus: "Thunberg’s speech was met with mixed reactions. Some people praised her for her passion and urgency, while others criticized her for being too alarmist. However, there is no doubt that Thunberg’s speech has helped to raise awareness of the climate crisis and the need for urgent action….Thunberg's message is simple: the climate crisis is real, it is urgent, and we need to act now. She is a powerful voice for change, and she is helping to make the world a better place."

Bard praised the diminutive hobgoblin: “There is no doubt that Thunberg's speech has helped to raise awareness of the climate crisis and the need for urgent action. She has also inspired a global movement of young people to demand action on climate change.” We witnessed a bit of Thunberg’s army of mutant teens last night when some knucklehead glued his bare feet to the cement floor in the upper deck of Arthur Ashe stadium during a women’s semi-final match at the US Open. He and a couple other ‘useful idiots’ (Lenin’s term, not ours) were wearing t-shirts that read “End Fossil Fuels.” Yeah, smart. Their protest interrupted the match for 48 minutes while security guards figured out how to use their bottle of Goo Gone to free the schmuck.

Regarding Gore’s “boiling oceans” the minstrel was apologetic. Bard: "It is important to note that the term ‘boiling’ is not literally accurate. The oceans are not actually boiling, but they are getting warmer… and… It is clear that climate change is a serious threat to the planet and to human society. We need to take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change."

We’re surprised that Bard could have opinions, emotions and bias; it’s a soulless machine, after all. Computer programmers have an acronym we find useful daily when reviewing our own writing: GIGO. It stands for ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Bard and ChatGPT scrub the Internet for responses to your queries. They can only assemble what they find there.

When I was studying philosophy at St. John’s College, one of the biggest crimes you could commit in a seminar is known as ‘tautology.” Roughly speaking, you construct your argument to lead your opponent to a predetermined conclusion. In other words, you set up a straw man, just to see him burn. A tautology is a crime because it’s intellectually dishonest. What’s an even greater crime is when the tautology becomes accepted as truth.

You’ll find “the scientific community agrees” or “the scientific consensus is” that climate change is real and it’s only going to get worse as the starting and ending point of most articles on the subject. “The matter has already been settled,” the consensus says. Those who challenge the “consensus” are immediately, and quite vehemently, dismissed as “deniers.” (Another popular t-shirt online reads “Denial Is Not A Policy.” You can find it alongside your Ukrainian flag and ‘Love is Love’ lawn posters.)

In August of this year, the Nobel prize winning physicist John Clauser caused some consternation in the scientific community when he signed the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) ‘s World Climate Declaration. Mr. Clauser is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and won his Nobel Prize for contributions that have paved the way for the development of new technologies in quantum computers and quantum cryptography. By signing CLINTEL’s Declaration, he joined fellow Nobel anointed physicist Ivan Giaever.

The declaration makes some bold statements that sit like a boil on the arse of the scientific consensus. Among them, these top assertions:

• Natural as well as [human] factors cause warming.
• Warming is far slower than predicted.
• Climate policy relies on inadequate models.
• Co2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth, Co2 is not a pollutant.
• Global warming has not increased natural disasters.
• Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities.

Far from denying climate change is afoot, the signatories of CLINTEL’s declaration encourages scientists to follow the real data. What they take umbrage with is the interpretation of the data and policy response to what scientific data actually suggest.

There are over 1600 scientists on the list hailing from the far corners of the earth. As part of the declaration, they advocate adaptation over mitigation. To prove their point, the CLINTEL founders point to Oslo, Norway and the city state of Singapore.

Let us look at today’s difference in mean temperature between Oslo (one of the big cities near the North Pole) and Singapore (one of the big cities near the Equator), see Figure 2. Measurements show that the difference is as much as 22C, twenty times bigger than the global warming between 1850 and 2020 and almost 14 times bigger than the so-called ‘scary’ global warming between 1850 and 2050.

Despite of this huge mean temperature difference of 22C, both cities are very prosperous and the citizens in both cities are enjoying life. So, why do the media tell us that a global warming of 1.6oC or more will lead to a disaster (“the end is near”), while 22C difference between Oslo and Singapore turns out to be no problem whatsoever?
Click image for larger size.
Global mean temperature from 1850-2050, together with the average temperature of the prospering cities Oslo and Singapore in 2020. Note that the global warming of 1.6 °C is marginal with respect to the difference of 22 °C between the two cities (almost factor 14) (Source: CLINTEL)

The answer is adaptation! Mankind shows an impressive history, having survived many big changes in its living environment, including big changes in the Earth’s climate. Thanks to our ingenuity, human beings have always found clever solutions to cope with all past challenges, again and again. If you visit Oslo and Singapore, you see an impressive demonstration of human’s capability to adapt to climate differences of 22oC.

To believe the outcome of a climate model, is to believe what the model makers have put in. This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. Should not we free ourselves from the naive belief in immature climate models?

What was the phrase? Oh, yeah. Garbage in, garbage out. “In the past decades the public has been flooded with fear-mongering stories,” Berkhout says, “telling them that global temperatures will rise to catastrophically high levels.” Guus continues: “Climate activists claim that the cause of all this impending doom is the increasing amount of CO2 produced by human activities. The proposed solution is the so-called net-zero emission policy, aimed at lowering human net CO2-emissions to the levels of the pre-industrial era of the late 1700s.”

Granted, reading history is a hobby, but even a cursory knowledge of it suggests that life, when the Colonies were still an appendage of the British Empire, was a tad more brutish and short then than it is today. No matter.

Policy makers prefer the immature climate models because in mitigation lies the honey pot at the end of the rainbow. Recall the $130 trillion raised for net-ero policy at COP26 in 2021. That money is going somewhere. Let’s not forget the craven political class get their rocks off, too, from the clout and influence when a growing global mob of useful idiots vote.

Journalists will go along with just about anything. That is, as long as it doesn’t rock their own boats. Identifying and repeating the consensus is what they’re paid to do. And they have deadlines to meet! God bless ‘em. There’s more to climate science, of course. For our part, we don’t like being told what to think… or do. We encourage you to visit CLINTEL’s site and make up your own mind. Happy Friday"
o
"Rapid Intensification"
"A $130 trillion plan to enforce regulations for a Net-Zero 2050 agenda. What could go wrong? Financial and economic forecasts for the “climate change” impaired."

Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Balance (Galaxies)"

Full screen recommended.
Liquid Mind, "Balance (Galaxies)"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.
Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."

The Poet: David Whyte, “The Sea”

“The Sea”

“The pull is so strong we will not believe
the drawing tide is meant for us,
I mean the gift, the sea,
the place where all the rivers meet.

Easy to forget,
how the great receiving depth
untamed by what we need
needs only what will flow its way.
Easy to feel so far away
and the body so old
it might not even stand the touch.

But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside
toward the place to which we go
washing over our worries of money,
the illusion of being ahead,
the grief of being behind,
our limbs young
rising from such a depth?

What would that be like
even in this century
driving toward work with the others,
moving down the roads
among the thousands swimming upstream,
as if growing toward arrival,
feeling the currents of the great desire,
carrying time toward tomorrow?

Tomorrow seen today, for itself,
the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,
unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface
of a great silence, the movement of a moment
left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,
safe in our unknowing, our very own,
our great tide, our great receiving, our
wordless, fiery, unspoken,
hardly remembered, gift of true longing.”

~ David Whyte,
“Where Many Rivers Meet”

Viktor Frankl, "Life Changing Quotes"

Full screen recommended.
Viktor Frankl, "Life Changing Quotes"
 ("Man's Search For Meaning")
"Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of the logotherapy method and is most notable for his best-selling book Man's Search for Meaning."
Freely download "Mans Search For Meaning", by Viktor Frankl, here:
Highest recommendation:

"A Refining Process..."

“Life is a refining process. Our response to it determines whether we’ll be ground down or polished up. On a piano, one person sits down and plays sonatas, while another merely bangs away at “Chopsticks.” The piano is not responsible. It’s how you touch the keys that makes the difference. It’s how you play what life gives you that determines your joy and shine.”
- Barbara Johnson

Gregory Mannarino, "Situation Critical! Warning! Warning! Warning! Expect Multiple Bank Failures"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/8/23
"Situation Critical! Warning! Warning! Warning! 
Expect Multiple Bank Failures"
Comments here:

Dan, I Allegedly, "Evictions Are Back In A Big Way"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly PM 9/8/23
"Evictions Are Back In A Big Way"
"You would think it would just be in the big cities, but you would be wrong. Evictions are back with a vengeance. It makes no difference which part of the country, the numbers are getting bigger than ever."
Comments here:

The Daily "Near You?"

Durand, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The War Against Will"

"The War Against Will"
by Paul Rosenberg

"The modern world will allow you to join any of a thousand collectives, but it will punish you for standing on your own, as a self-willed entity. People who commit this crime understand that they are outlaws in the present world. And if at first they don’t understand that, the world makes sure they know.

The world as it is, then, is the enemy of will. This is nothing new, of course, governments have been at war against will since they began: How else can you get people to blindly obey you, to hand over half their income, and to thank you for it? People who possess a full and active will must be convinced to do things, and governments couldn’t function if they had to do that.

The present world is built around the restraint of will, and not just on the government level. Advertising, for example, is more or less devoted to implanting subconscious desires and subverting the will with them. In dysfunctional families, manipulating one another – whether by guilt, ridicule, being left out of Papa’s will or whatever – is the currency of the realm.

And so obedience, consumption and acquiescence have become cardinal virtues, and the avoidance of immediate pain the prime directive. As we might paraphrase an old apostle, this world’s God is the belly.

The Willful, For Whom Heaven And Earth Were Created: All human creativity functions on individual will. Everyone interested in creativity knows this, and here are just a couple of passages to make the point:

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is 
created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
- Albert Einstein

"This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the
 individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."
- John Steinbeck

It is the active will of individuals that has created everything good in this world. Really, life comes down to a choice between creativity and entropy:

• The world (the realm of officialdom, acquiescence and so on) is an incarnation of entropy, winding down and collapsing once the fuel left to it by creative men and women of the past is burned out.

• The creatives, who are willing to take blows in defense of their willfulness, and who bless the world in myriad ways

The willful, then, are creativity incarnate; the universe is and ought to be dedicated to beings of their type. It should also be populated by beings of their type, and I think someday shall be.

This is not to say that entropic people can’t make their way out of entropy and join the creatives; in fact they can, and do, on a daily basis. Still, it is a gulf that must be crossed, and the only way across is to act on one’s own will, alone, and for purely self-generated reasons. That is the price.

The Automated War On Will: The great threat of the modern world is a system I call Descartes’ Demon, the Big Data/AI personalized manipulation system that is already in daily use. I held back talking about this for years, seeing that it was too much for people to bear, but the beast has progressed so far that I can’t see holding back any further.

The Matrix, as it turns out, was all too true, and its world is now the world of Facebook, Twitter and especially Google. The real-life version of The Matrix is functional, right now. (See here for explanation, or here for illustration.) What personalized manipulation is really all about is the subversion of individual will. And if you don’t think it’s happening, pull up YouTube on your smart phone, then ask your friend to pull it up on his or hers: You’re already receiving personalized pages. The world is deeply committed to passing this off as trivial and ridiculing those that don’t. But it isn’t trivial; it’s a present and actual war against free will.

We Are Inherently Creative: Humans are inherently creative beings. We cannot create matter out of nothing, but we can mold it to an infinite number and variety of uses. We are the fountains of new and beneficial action in the universe. And we ought to function that way.

I’ll leave you with a few words from Albert Schweitzer: "Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it… It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals." This is what we need… and we need it now."
"They Live"

"There Are Simply No Answers..."

“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
- Barry Lopez

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 9/8/23"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up 9/8/23"
More Ukraine War, Trump Trashes CV19 Vax, Economic Mad Max
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

Secretary of State Tony Blinken made a surprise visit to Ukraine to announce another US aid package, so the deadly Ukraine war can continue. Blinken promised another fresh $1 billion on the heals of the announcement that the Ukraine Army lost 66,000 soldiers in the past three months alone. Add that to the at least 300,000 Ukraine casualties, and it’s hard to understand why Blinken and others in the D.C. swamp constantly say this is the “most profitable investment.” My question: Is Blinken nuts or simply corrupt, cruel and demonic. Why are there no peace talks with this kind of defeat and carnage for Ukraine and NATO? Do they want nuclear war?

Donald Trump is finally waking up to the disaster of the CV19 bioweapon/vax and is now trashing it. Trump is asking Big Pharma to address all the adverse events and calls on the vax makers release the safety data. The CV19 bioweapon/vax deaths and disabilities are increasing and there is no end in sight. Expect Donald Trump to talk about the contract he signed with Pfizer that required the vax maker to produce a safe and effective vaccine and it did neither. (Pfizer had 63% of the CV19 vax market globally.) Now, even the CDC is admitting that the vaxed are more likely to get an infection from the new CV19 variant than the unvaxed. (You cannot make this up.) With 676 million CV19 injections in America alone, this will get far worse before it gets better.

For those of you that think the economy is getting better, or, is at least in good shape—wake up!!!! Two big BRICS nations just dumped $114 billion in U.S. debt. Interest rates are not going to be cut anytime soon because you don’t cut interest rates when your bonds are being dumped by your biggest creditors. Michael Snyder predicts “Mad Max Conditions are coming” and points to record credit card debt, record retail theft and a record amount of people living paycheck to paycheck.

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he talks about 
these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 9/8/23:

"Parsing the Telescreen, Slouching into the Gulag"

"Parsing the Telescreen, Slouching into the Gulag"
by Fred Reed

"Sez I, we are barreling into a world of mixed unreality and invited surveillance, not quite noticed but at warp speed. The unreality? We can now do politicians in video software and make them convincingly say things more reprehensible then they would themselves. The surveillance creeps in like a barely noticed smell. It creeps and will creep. Consider:

Several years ago Vi and I bought a sixty-five inch LG screen that we use for watching YouTube and Netflix. It has search-by-voice. Thus by pressing a button on the remote to wake it up, we can say, “Tianjian automated Chinese seaport,” and it will find the relevant sites on the web. Of course we have no way of knowing whether it is listening the rest of the time. Since it is convenient, we are not important, and we don’t say anything criminal or probably even very interesting, we use it.

The screen also has control-by-gesture. It doesn’t work very well, and I would feel like an idiot waving my arms and gesturing at a television, so I have never learned it. However, we have no way of knowing whether and when it is watching us. Just in case, we confine human sacrifice and orgiastic sex with farm animals to the garage so, if it is watching, we will be boring.

We also have two Alexa boxes, one in the kitchen and one in my office. These are marvels. The speakers aren’t bad for the price and Alexa is good at providing on voice command any music ever written. This is very nice indeed, though I suspect that most of us are so used to such things as not to notice how nice they are. Violeta uses this greatly while cooking.

Alexa’s hearing is eerie. If Vi says, “Alexa, play Lohengrin” while in the kitchen, often Alexa’s sister in my office will respond as well. The the kitchen and the office are in rooms separated by two plate-glass walls and a long hall with a right angle. This is astonishing acuity. Since Alexa in my office will sometimes get the music wrong, the two aren’t communicating electronically. Again, we find the convenience more appealing that the surveillance threatening. Besides, no one would bother listening to us, unless of course we were writing unflattering columns about that unevolved truculence in the White House.

I am writing this in my-office using text-to-speech software. Every time Alexa hears her name, she asks what I want.

I have just read that there is a video game called 'Call of Duty', which apparently millions of the young use to lower their IQs and avoid doing anything useful as they struggle with each other electronically. The parent company, Activision, is now incorporating AI software that listens to the martial shouts of remote and disembodied warriors to check for inappropriate language. This of course includes anything racial, uninclusive, offensive, triggering, sexist, and so on. This is said in today’s awkward English to have as purpose the improving of the gaming experience and the protection of women, though it probably means girls.

Saith the article, one in ten of distaff gamers has been driven to “suicidal thoughts” by insults during her hours as an online Boadicea. This is interesting. In the age of the 'Pride and Prejudice' sort of novel, women were always fainting on any provocation and dashing for the swooning couch, and they had to carry umbrellas in sunny weather so as not to damage their delicate skins. This strikes me as fraud as in my appalling number of years on the planet I have never seen a woman faint or even look as if she were considering it. They were too busy running marathons and scuba diving and wearing bikinis at high noon, to the great betterment of mankind.

But now it seems that they will take poison if insulted by tiresome twerps while killing enemy soldiers online – instead of saying, for example, “Grow up.” It appears that we are going to have moral uplift as pretext for surveillance of conversation. This electro-linguistic mommyism can easily be extended to high school bathrooms, locker rooms, or indeed any place thought proper to be monitored for acceptable values by government, which is to anywhere at all. There is no technical reason why it can’t be extended to Alexa boxes.

We should be grateful that we don’t live in a surveillance state like China.

OK, AI and language. Computers today can understand spoken language, or at least come close enough to be dangerous. For example, if I say to my iPhone, “Hey Siri, in Spanish how do you say “If I had more money, I would buy myself a bright red Corvette,” she gets it exactly right, subjunctive, reflexive, conditional. That’s not mechanical replacement. A lot of syntax lives in that short sentence. People with time on their hands can argue about whether machines are conscious and whether they “really understand,” but if what they do is indistinguishable from understanding, that’s close enough for jazz.

That’s not quite understanding because the translation software probably couldn’t answer the question, “What would Fred do if he had the money?” But you can have a real conversation with Chat GPT. Which is real understanding.

If I mistake not, this means that Alexa boxes can, or shortly will be able to, monitor what people are talking about wherever it is practical to put a microphone, which is pretty much everywhere. We are now used to ubiquitous cameras. We pay no attention to them. We would – will? – quickly get used to microphones in public places, and are already comfortable with cameras and microphones in our homes (the Alexa boxes) and in our pockets, iPhones. Any device activated by voice command must be listening for that command, and thus potentially everything we say. Where, if anywhere, other conversation goes is an open question..

If I may throw in a somewhat-related thought, of course all of our credit-card transactions, bank dealings, and their times and places, and phone records, are recorded, this thought harmless because only commercial entities, not the government, have access to them. Read Ed Snowden’s book, 'Permanent Record.' The social media know more about us than we know about ourselves. To all of which, government has access. If you believe otherwise, you should have a second lobotomy.

Onward and upward."
- https://fredoneverything.org/
o

"How It Really Is"

Bill Bonner, "What Kind of Morons are We? Part Duh"

"What Kind of Morons are We? Part Duh"
Prices, productivity, preferences... 
and getting where you really want to go.
by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "A dear reader wrote to tell us, in effect, how dumb we are. He writes: 'The most ridiculous, crazy, imbecilic thing I’ve ever read of yours is the so-called ‘comparison’ between the cost of an early 1970s pickup and a 2020 pick-up.' He must be a new reader. Surely, over the years, we must have written things much stupider than that.

The gist of it was that working people get their income from selling their time. So, what really matters is how much they get per hour. In 1948, when the Ford F series began, each hour of his time, at an average wage of 40 cents/hour, bought him 1/3000th of the truck.

Yesterday, when we looked up the median hourly wage in 2023, we got $11. Today, we get – from the ListFoundation – $16 and change. The average wage is another thing, it includes the salaries of Wall Street executives and sports stars. It’s over $28 per hour. But it is irrelevant. The median actually measures what most people get…so let’s stick with that.

Goin’ Nowhere: At $16 an hour, a guy can buy – guess what – 1/2,937th of a new Ford F-150. Almost exactly the same as 75 years ago. And while new tech improved the truck, it should have improved the making of it at the same pace. Automated assembly lines, plastics, robots – all should have made the truck cheaper to produce. And it should have made him more productive…and raised his wages, too. But other studies show the same thing. Wages, adjusted for inflation, have not gone up in more than half a century.

Inflation-Adjusted Weekly Earnings of Full Time Male Workers, 1979 to 2023
We also got a response from George Gilder and Gayle Pooley – two of the leading proponents of the “time price” concept (the idea that prices are actually “tokenized time”). They agree with our Dear Reader, maintaining that our numbers are all wrong…and that today’s F-150 is far superior to the truck from 1948.

Losing: How come all this ‘tech’ and credit didn’t lift him up? More scientists. More capital. More Ph.Ds. Eight trillion in ‘stimulus’ from the Fed. More economists. More technology. More accumulated ‘knowledge’…available on our laptops. We don’t even have to think for ourselves anymore; we have AI. And who hasn’t read Jack Welch’s classic “Winning?” Jack laid it out for us. All we had to do was to borrow a lot of money, buy businesses, and hire some hotshots to run them.

It sounded so simple. And yet…it didn’t even work for Welch. His empire expanded…and then, overburdened by debt and dysfunction…it contracted. Today, the stock sells for about the same as it did in the mid-90s, nearly 30 years ago. Jack’s idea seemed new…but there was nothing new about it. Stripped of its trendy jargon, it proved only what we already knew, that credit only works when it is used to increase efficiency and output. Just buying things – whether consumer items or businesses – doesn’t help.

That is obvious in the national accounts too. The Fed, with its spiffy gold-free dollar, could provide credit. Welch, ahead of his time, used it to build a tottery business empire. Consumers used it to buy big screen TVs and granite countertops. The Feds used it to pay for, among other things, a 20-year war against nobody-in-particular, for no particular reason.

And now, credit is becoming more expensive…the screw turns…and the credit cycle (getting rid of bad debt) becomes painful, especially for the proletariat that depends on it. You can pump up an economy – temporarily – with credit. People think it is real ‘money’. They think their wages are rising…their stocks are going up…sales are increasing. Later, they discover that the boom was a fraud. It was a roundtrip to nowhere.

What if the same were true for “technology?” What if it were mostly a distraction…a diversion…an idle entertainment? Dot.coms…cryptos…the internet…TikTok…AI – the Fed’s EZ credit has juiced them up, one after another. But like Welch’s GE, the Feds’ wars, or Wall Street’s buybacks…what if they don’t really add to our wealth…but subtract from it, by absorbing time and resources that might be better used elsewhere?

The new Ford F-150 is said to have 1,000 silicon chips in it. What if none of them takes you where you really want to go? Stay tuned..."

Jim Kunstler, "A Theory of the Game"

"A Theory of the Game"
by Jim Kunstler

“…a system that has been hollowed out by a string of cascading failures runs into one more crisis than it can tolerate, and implodes under the weight of its own absurdities. We are much closer to such scenes in North America and Western Europe right now than I think most people realize.” - John Michael Greer

"Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss was a bigger shock to the Washington DC deep state Blob than Donald Trump’s victory. But the dynamics of this trauma operated at many levels. At the most superficial level was the hysterical response of Democratic Party rank-and-file women who regarded Donald Trump as the most extreme and horrifying embodiment of an archetypal “bad daddy.” This was all sheer psychodrama of course, but women are engrossed with psychodrama - generating it and relishing it - which men often fail to appreciate.

In cases of madness, there is often a dark, sordid secret behind the weird behavior that presents outwardly. In the group madness provoked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, the dirty secret was that she had actually bought the Democratic National Committee in 2016, meaning the machinery that runs the party. She used lavish contributions to the Clinton Foundation to accomplish that. And Hillary along with her foundation - and husband Bill, who had been reduced by late career misadventure to a kind of political fashion accessory - had committed any number of grave crimes against our country over the years, especially during her service as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Think: Skolkovo… Uranium One…. In 2016 Hillary used her ownership of the DNC to underhandly de-rail the likely Democratic primary winner, Bernie Sanders, from being nominated.

The initial act of madness by the “Resistance” on Mr. Trump’s inauguration day was the women’s march of pink pussy-hats, so called, a symbolic exhibition of fleering female genitalia in Mr. Trump’s face, so to speak, as an act of defiance against the new national daddy figure (and his millions of deplorable supporters watching the ceremonies on TV). This proved to be a mere overture to the more extreme sexual acting-out that evolved in the years to follow, overall a campaign to horrify people of normal appetites, beliefs, and moral codes, culminating in the drag queen story hours aimed at maximally inducing outrage among people organized as families.

All of that psychodrama was hijacked, of course, by the serious neo-Marxists lurking among the Left, who used it in the usual neo-Marxian way: to overthrow everything in the established social order. And who were these? The circle around Barack Obama. And who was Barack Obama exactly? Good question. This mysterious figure who rose so swiftly from being, briefly, a mere state senator in Illinois, then to the US Senate - for only a few years, accomplishing next to nothing there - then to being nominated for president, and actually winning the 2008 election!

Since we’re speaking in terms of psychodrama, Mr. Obama was liberalism’s wish-fulfillment: a half-century after the Civil Rights movement, America elects the first black president (half-black, anyway)! Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection, and especially to set an example for how to live for all those gun-loving, bible-thumping, meth-smoking, opiate-scarfing, racist, rapist flyover rubes who would dare to vote for such misogynistic vermin as the TV-clown Donald J. Trump.

It was known, at the time, that Mr. Obama was a close associate (probably an apostle of) Chicagoan Bill Ayers, a former leader of the 1960s domestic terrorism group called The Weathermen. But by 2008, Mr. Ayers had managed to rehabilitate himself into professor of education at the U of Illinois Chicago campus, and hitched himself to Chicago school czar Arne Duncan, who would be appointed Secretary of Education by Mr. Obama, opening the doors for a neo-Marxist coup in the public schools - now on display in the battles raging over race-and-gender-Marxism installed in the Common Core State Standard Initiative.

To what degree was Mr. Obama a tool of other forces lurking in the deep background of world politics, and what are these forces? Many of the non-Left will say they are a loose consortium of corporate and financial actors desperate to keep in motion a set of rackets that magically stabilize business-as-usual, which asset-strips the remaining wealth of the middle classes and transfers it to the already super-wealthy.

I’m not so sure about that, though the role of Davos remains persistently murky. Why, after all, would the super-rich invite as front-man a crypto-Marxist, as Mr. Obama is alleged to be, dedicated to destroying the existing social order that is the very ecosystem of the super-rich? Is it possible that Mr. Obama is fronting for nothing more than Mr. Obama now, desperately, as they say, weaponizing the “Joe Biden” government against its own people just to save Barack Obama from discovery, infamy, and loss of power?

Mr. Trump proved to be easily controllable in office with the Blob and all its primary agencies marshalled against him, systematically disabled and humiliated by serial Blob hoaxes during his tenure, culminating in the bizarrely successful criminal plot to launch Covid-19 as an election-rigging device. Mr. Trump was thereby neatly disposed of in 2020. Of course, RussiaGate, The Mueller business, Impeachment No. 1, and Covid-19 were all essentially acts of treason and perfidy - that is, high crimes committed by the Democratic Party.

“Joe Biden” was Mr. Obama’s device for wresting control of the DNC from Hillary Clinton’s gang. But now “Joe Biden” has criminal problems of his own that threaten to take down not only his own presidency, but of everything connected to it, namely his controller, Mr. Obama & Company, and the Democratic Liberal order itself driven insane by its own criminality. Meanwhile, his nemesis, Donald Trump has proven to be extraordinarily resilient in the remorseless war against him. And now that has culminated in the (so far) four cockamamie criminal cases cooked up by Obama/“Biden” as the final line of defense against the Golden Golem of Greatness - who obviously has no intention of surrendering.

It looks like Mr. Obama is now in the process of being “outed” as something other than the suave performer he was for two terms in the White House. The Tucker Carlson interview with one Larry Sinclair, a gay cruiser and druggie who claims to have frolicked with Mr. Obama before he was a celebrity, was met with ominous silence in the mainstream media. They didn’t even dare denounce it to avoid drawing more attention to it. And the mysterious “drowning” of the Obama family’s chef, Tafari Campbell, paddleboarding at night in the shallow bay off the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, remains woefully under-investigated. Will Barack Obama and “Joe Biden” end up sinking each other and the Democratic Party with them? And then, will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be called in to rescue the darn thing while driving all the demons out of it?"

Dan, I Allegedly, "The Numbers Don’t Lie"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly AM 9/8/23
"The Numbers Don’t Lie"
"You can’t argue with the numbers that we are getting about the economy. Bankruptcies are at a 12 year high. Houses are dropping in value. Mortgage demand is at its lowest level since 2012. There is not one economic indicator that is up right now."
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