Friday, February 23, 2024

"A Look to the Heavens"

"In silhouette against a crowded star field along the tail of the arachnalogical constellation Scorpius, this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower.
In fact, clumps of dust and molecular gas collapsing to form stars may well lurk within the dark nebula, a structure that spans almost 40 light-years across this gorgeous telescopic portrait. Known as a cometary globule, the swept-back cloud, is shaped by intense ultraviolet radiation from the OB association of very hot stars in NGC 6231, off the upper edge of the scene. That energetic ultraviolet light also powers the globule's bordering reddish glow of hydrogen gas. Hot stars embedded in the dust can be seen as bluish reflection nebulae. This dark tower, NGC 6231, and associated nebulae are about 5,000 light-years away."

"Hope In a Time of Hopelessness"

"Hope In a Time of Hopelessness" 
by Washingtons Blog

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage;
anger at the way things are, and courage 
to see that they do not remain the way they are."
- Augustine of Hippo

"Several long-time activists have told me recently they are overwhelmed, worried, and think that we may be losing the struggle. One very smart friend asked me if there is any basis for hope.

Hope is an act of will, not a passive mood. Admittedly, things are easier when circumstances bring hope to us, and we can just receive the hopeful and inspiring news. But if we care about winning, we have to be able to decide to have hope even when outer circumstances aren't so positive.

I have children who are counting on me to leave them with a reasonably safe and sane planet. As I've said elsewhere, I care too much about my kids and my freedom to be afraid. I care enough about them that it gets my heart beating, connects me to something bigger than myself, and that gives me courage, even when the chips are down. 

If I allowed myself to lose hope about exposing falsehoods, about protecting our freedom and building a hopeful future, I would be dropping the ball for my kids. I would be condemning them to a potentially very grey world where bigger and worse things may happen, where their liberties and joys are wholly stripped away, where every ounce of vitality is beholden to joyless and useless tasks.

Many of us may be motivated by other things besides kids, and only you can know what that is. But we each must dig down deep, and connect with our most powerful motivations to win the struggle for freedom and truth.

I don't know about you, but I don't have the luxury of giving up hope. When I get depressed, overwhelmed or exhausted by the stunning acts of savagery, treason, and disinformation carried out by the imperialists, or the willful ignorance of far too many Americans, I will myself into finding some reason to have hope. Because the struggle for life and liberty is too important for me to give up." 
Full screen recommended.
Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"

And don't you ever give up..

Jeremiah Babe, "We Are In Massive Trouble America"

Jeremiah Babe, 2/23/24
"We Are In Massive Trouble America
Homeowners Can't Afford Their House Payment, Foreclosures Rising"
Comments here:

"Bank Collapse Imminent: 90% Facing Risk Of Failure"

Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 2/23/24
"Bank Collapse Imminent: 90% Facing Risk Of Failure"
"In this video, you will see the impact bank failures have on the housing market and the broader economy. These Bank failures shocked the US Citizen's occurrence, often causing ripples throughout the economy. Besides the economy, the housing market, in particular, is vulnerable to the effects of bank failures. The collapse of banks like Citizens Bank in Sac City, Silicon Bank, JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association (N.A.), Columbus, Ohio, and more had a significant impact on the housing market."
Comments here:

The Daily "Near You?"

Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"I See No Reason..."

"Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told- and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."
- Michael Crichton, "The Lost World"

"Unfortunately..."

“They say if you don't know your history, you're 
doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, most Americans 
can't even figure out what's going on in the present.”
- Thor Benson

“All this had happened before, perhaps a million times, and because of this was doomed. There was no ordinary future any more, only this ecstatic tormented terrified present. The future had passed through the present like a sword. We were already, even eye to eye and lip to lip, deep in the horrors to come.”
- Iris Murdoch, "The Black Prince"

And they don't care or want to know...

Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern: Ukraine/Israel Intel Wrap"

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 2/23/24
"INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern: 
Ukraine/Israel Intel Wrap"
Comments here:

Dan, I Allegedly, "Your Mail's Not Safe Anymore"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly AM 2/23/24
"Your Mail's Not Safe Anymore"
"People need to prepare themselves for a run on mail theft. This is getting more extreme by the week. From male carriers getting robbed to people actually going into the post office and stealing crates of mail. It’s out of control."
Comments here:

"To Understand The Globalists We Must Understand Their Psychopathic Religion"

"To Understand The Globalists We Must 
Understand Their Psychopathic Religion"
by Brandon Smith

"In the late 1800s and early 1900s the western world experienced a sudden burst of open occultism among the ultra-rich elites. The rise of “Theosophy” was underway, becoming a kind of fashion trend that would ultimately set the stage for what would later be called “new age” spiritualism. The primary driver of the theosophical movement was a small group of obscure academics led in part by a woman named H.P. Blavatsky. The group was obsessed with esoteric belief, Gnosticism and even Satanism.

Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875, claiming that she had a psychic connection to beings called “the Mahatmas” or “the masters.” These creatures, she asserted, helped her write the foundational books of Theosophy, including ‘The Secret Doctrine.’

I bring up Theosophy and Blavatsky because the movement she helped launch was primarily an elitist one – The spread of occultism in the early 1900s specifically targeted the upper classes and this resulted in many political leaders and financial leaders being involved in obscure organizations with secretive mandates. Such groups have existed in the past, from the Rosicrucians and Freemasons to the alchemists of the Middle Ages who hid their occult beliefs in coded texts. However, never before had they been so public in their efforts.

To their credit, the early theosophists were mostly apolitical (at least outwardly) and they argued against political intrusion into people’s lives. I suspect, however, that this was because at the time western governments revolved around Christian and conservative values. As politicians became more separate from Christianity, the theosophist interest in controlling government grew and the movement became increasingly socialist in practice.

Invariably, these spiritual systems revolved around pagan deities of the past, many Babylonian or Ancient Egyptian in origin. That said, there are also numerous mentions in Theosophy of one figure in particular – Lucifer, also referred to as “the Light Bearer, the angel of light, Prometheus (symbolically), the dragon, the morning star and Satan.” Modern luciferians will consistently deny the the name “Lucifer” has anything to do with the biblical figure of Satan, but this is a lie. Blavatsky herself treats the two figures as synonymous in ‘The Secret Doctrine.’ As she admits in her book: “And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the ‘Lord of Phosphorus,’ and Lucifer, or ‘Light-Bearer,’ is in us: it is our Mind…” Blavatsky, quoting hermetic texts in the Secret Doctrine, also repeats the mantra: “It is Satan who is the god of our planet and the only god…”

Luciferians and occultists will also argue that the Christian Bible only mentions the name “Lucifer” once, and that the two figures are not associated. This is once again a lie by omission. The Bible does in fact mention “light bearer,” the “angel of light” and “the dragon” in reference to Satan on multiple occasions, and all of these names are used by elites to describe the figure they call Lucifer. As mentioned in Corinthians 11:14 – “And it is no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light…”

In other words, when any elitist group mentions terms such as “light bearer” or Lucifer, they are indeed referring to Satan. It’s not just a matter of archetypal discussion, this is in fact a part of their religion. But in our modern times some people might say “who cares?” It’s all mythical hoodoo and fantasy, right?

I would respond with a question: Do you think the deeply held religious beliefs of the people with financial and political power matter in how they make decisions? Wouldn’t their beliefs help explain why they do the things they do? If you want to know why the globalists are engaged in a very real war on the minds of the masses, you cannot overlook their religious motivations. What seems like fantasy to some is VERY real to the globalists.

For example, many know that the United Nations building in New York has an occult library. But few people know that it was built by a group called the Lucifer Publishing Company (later changed to Lucis Trust). Lucis Trust cites the writings of HP Blavatsky constantly as the inspiration for their organization. The UN continues to associate with Lucis Trust to this day. The very heart of globalism revolves around luciferian ideals.

It doesn’t matter what you or I think about these things. It doesn’t matter if you see such concepts as metaphorical, or symbolic or imaginary. THEY believe, and so we must explore what these beliefs mean.

Before the 1800s, occultists engaged in luciferianism would have been burned at the stake if discovered. I’m beginning to think that maybe this was the right way to handle such people all along. But to understand why, we have to look at the progression of the religion and why it inevitably leads to moral relativism and social self-destruction.

For the theosophists, Lucifer/Satan is a kind of heroic figure. When they argue that Lucifer is “not Satan,” what they mean is that their version of Satan is different from the version ascribed by Christianity. In other words, imagine a group of people took a famously malicious figure such as Joseph Stalin and then devised an entirely different history for him in which he is a misunderstood philanthropist instead of a genocidal maniac. That’s essentially what luciferianism is.

In the Theosophical magazine titled ‘Lucifer’ published in the 1880s, Blavatsky and her group spend multiple pages trying to separate the term Lucifer from the Devil, while also defending the mythology of the devil and painting him as a character slandered by Christian culture.

In their version of the Genesis story, for example, the serpent was the “good guy” bringing the fruit of knowledge to Adam and Eve. Eve is venerated as a root figure in theosophy and in feminism (a movement the theosophists helped to create), because without Eve the serpent would have never been able to get Adam to consume the fruit.

The fruit as a representation of gnosis (knowledge) is the key to luciferianism and the globalist cult. As many atheists I’ve encountered in the past have argued, isn’t knowledge a good thing? And if God is punishing humanity for consuming knowledge, does that not make him a villain? This argument ignores the underlying theme – Knowledge by itself is not good or evil, but evil thrives when people start to worship knowledge to the detriment of everything else. The application of knowledge without wisdom and moral discipline is dangerous.

As Dr. Ian Malcolm brilliantly asserts in the film Jurassic Park: “Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Luciferians openly admit that the goal of their ideology is to pursue knowledge until human beings become gods. This infatuation with godhood is what leads to great evil; it is a delusion that poisons the mind and encourages morally relative behavior, not to mention a pervasive thirst for power. Ponder the technological aspect for a moment. Consider the numerous globalist programs to expand artificial intelligence and bring about what they call “transhumanism.” This is a kind of knowledge worship that has terrifying implications for the future.

The integration of technology into the surveillance state to rule over society is bad enough, but what happens when human beings begin integrating technology into their very biology. Will this eventually erase any semblance of what we call “the soul?” After all, machines do not feel, nor do they self reflect on their actions. What happens when humans distort themselves to become more like machines? Will transhumanism become a movement that suffocates all love and empathy, removing moral compass and turning us into a demonic hive-mind devoid of individual thought?

Globalists assert that there is no such thing as the soul, no such thing as individual identity and no such thing as moral compass. Form their perspective there is no danger of adopting technology as a path to godhood because nothing would be lost; and here we see the true nature of luciferianism at work. A perfect representation of this cancer is World Economic Forum spokesperson Yavul Harari – a man who says the quiet part out loud and promotes the darker tenets of luciferianism regularly.
To grasp what luciferianism is, think of it as the anti-god; a war on nature, or a war on the natural state of humanity disguised as “enlightenment.” This is why globalists try to institute the extreme opposite view of every natural disposition. The notion of human beings as a blank slate that Yuval Harari clings to is one such false narrative. It is a philosophy that has been debunked by endless psychological studies as well as anthropological studies.

From Carl Jung to Joseph Campbell to Steven Pinker and beyond, all scientific evidence suggests that human beings have inherent psychological qualities and characteristics from birth. Some of these are unique to the person, some are universal archetypes and ideas that the majority of people share (such as conscience and moral compass). If we didn’t have these built-in qualities, humanity would have become extinct thousands of years ago. We still don’t know where exactly they come from, we only know that without them we are no longer human.

There is, however, a certain percentage of people (1% or less) that actually do not have these inborn character traits. They are generally known as psychopaths and sociopaths, and their behavior is very similar to that of the globalists. I have long held the theory that the globalist cabal is in fact a cult of higher functioning psychopaths.

Their lack of empathy and conscience, their thirst for godhood and omnipotence, their drive to attain all encompassing surveillance of the population, to know everything about us at all time, to have total control over the environment and society, the narcissistic self image of a supreme ruler who is worshiped by the masses, and the delusion that they will be able to read minds and predict the future. These are psychopathic fantasies, and they are willing to chase these fantasies by any means necessary.

But even psychopaths sometimes need a fundamentalist framework in order to maintain organization and inspire devotion within a group. It makes perfect sense that they would choose luciferianism as their religion. Their “do what thou wilt” philosophy of hedonism takes the idea of freedom and removes all responsibility – It is a degenerate view of liberty, rather than a principled view. Freedom, they think, is only for people like them; the people willing to desecrate everything in their path and upend the natural order.

As psychopaths, they are devoid of natural inborn contents and are more robotic than human. So, it’s no surprise that people like Harai argue there is no soul, no freedom (for you) and that machines are capable of the same creativity as humans. An empty person with no soul or creativity is going to assume that all other people are empty. An immoral person will also be compelled to prove that everyone else is just as immoral as he is. Or, he will be compelled to prove that he is superior to everyone else because he has embraced his immorality.

Do the elites actually believe in a real “devil” with hooves and horns and a pitchfork? I don’t know. What matters, though, is the philosophical drive of their cultism. Their goal is to convince a majority of the populace that there is no good, and there is no evil. Everything is empty. Everything is relative to the demands of the moment, and the demands of society. Of course, they want to control society, so then everything would really be relative to THEIR demands.

If you want to see something truly demonic, imagine a world in which all inherent truth is abandoned for the sake of subjective perception. A world that caters to the preferences of psychopaths with no ethical imperative. A world where the ends always justify the means. This is the luciferian way, and the globalist way. And no matter how much they deny it, the reality of their beliefs is visible in the fruits of their labors. Wherever they go, destruction, chaos and death follow."

"How It Really Is"

 

Adventures With Danno, "Saving Money At Aldi And Finding Some New Items!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 2/23/24
"Saving Money At Aldi And Finding Some New Items!"
"In today's vlog, I take you shopping with me to Aldi to show everything I am saving money on and talk about some of the new items that are coming back in at Aldi. Aldi Saver Deals are everywhere right now, and we need to all take advantage of these savings while they last."
Comments here:

Jim Kunstler, "The Dark and the Light"

"The Dark and the Light"
by Jim Kunstler

“‘The rule of law is under threat!’ the Regime shrieks, 
as it throws its political foes into the gulag."
 - Benjamin Weingarten

"The florid carbuncle of Woke-Maoist lawfare weeps its vile effluvium across the social landscape, poisoning whatever it touches, and nothing in the armory of reason, principle, or good faith avails to heal it. Sickness rages through the body politic. You have lost faith in all the doctors, and they have lost faith in themselves. The fever intensifies. The crisis is upon us. Which way will fate turn us? Toward death or recovery?

The poison killing our country is pervasive untruth. Every institution we have relied on to run the public interest has become a factory churning out lies, evasions, and misdirection - not unlike the way mRNA “vaccines” turned the cells in your bodies into tiny generators of spike proteins destroying your organs. Likewise, half the population, apparently, thinks this is a good thing, that we need more lawfare - the perversion of law by attorney perverts - and that we need ever more lies, evasions, and misdirection (just as the degenerates who run Harvard declare their student body needs more mRNA boosters to remain in school).

Since the doctors have all failed - miserably and dishonorably - America needs an exorcism. The poisons in our system are actual persons carrying out their programmed assignments, just as the spike proteins in the bodies of millions act as individual agents of destruction in your body. What possible invocation can drive out the likes of Mayorkas, Christopher Wray, Avril Haynes, William Burns, Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Jack Smith, Jake Sullivan, Marc Zuckerberg, Mandy Cohen, Rachel Maddow, Daniel Sachs Goldman, Jamie Raskin, Mitch McConnell, Charles “Chuck” Schumer, “Joe Biden” (the remnant of a person, after all), and a thousand others in high places behaving in a way indistinguishable from demons?

What explains their devotion to untruth? What motivates them? Can it possibly be the mere perqs and comforts of their positions? Are they answering a call? And who is issuing that call? Or are they just trapped by their many years of lying continually, fearful of getting cast into prison? Are you asking yourselves: what will satisfy these maniacs? Anything short of the ruin of our country? What will their coveted power be worth in a ruined country?

Mr. Trump volunteered to play role of exorcist in this grand psychodrama. Whatever else you make of him, he has shown a lot of fortitude. Eight years ago, when he came on the scene, he appeared to not know that his opponents were actually demons seeking to wreck the country; rather just low persons sunk in the most common venial corruption, and others mere zealots steeped in futile utopian fantasies of perfecting the flawed human condition. He learned eventually the that the situation was more dire than he ever imagined. His opponents came after him hard from the get-go and keep coming at him. Russia is the knout they use in the attempt to flay him alive.

“Russia Russia Russia” has been one long, elaborate lie. They’re going at it again, pretending that Mr. Trump seeks Russian help interfering in the fall election, despite the plain fact that all previous invocations of “Russia Russia Russia” were revealed to be untrue, and maliciously so - and that all the actual election interference originated with the gang shouting “Russia Russia Russia.” It looks like more than half the country is refusing to fall for it this time. Thus, the resort to lawfare, the five cases (so far) designed to bankrupt Mr. Trump and gain a felony conviction for objecting to the election shenanigans of 2020.

The lawfare claque around “Joe Biden” - Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, Marc Elias, Norm Eisen - tutored the likes of Letitia James, Fani Willis, and Alvin Bragg to bring these cases in jurisdictions ruled by the votaries of Abraxas, the gnostic demon-God that drives the Party of Chaos. New York Attorney General Letitia James won the first round with an utterly truthless case, decided despotically by Judge Engoron without a trial, that, for now, has created awful tactical problems for Mr. Trump. He may adroitly overcome the $355-million judgment to bring his appeal, and at some point up the ladder of review, Ms. James will be subject to the disgrace and punishment she deserves. Ms. Willis already has been wrung through her tribulation and revealed herself to be an experienced and dedicated liar unfit to bring the case that was gifted to her by the lawfare orcs. Mr. Bragg’s idiotic case based on a tortured chimera of state and federal law, will be served up soon with a pre-determined outcome.

What all these cases have in common is that they were concocted as if no such thing as consequence exists. The first consequence for the stupid office-holders duped into bringing these cases is that they will be dishonored and broken by their bad choices. The second consequence is that they will deepen the suppressed racial animosity in our country - as designed heinously to do by the white leftist elitists manipulating these black state and county attorneys - and possibly drive us into tragic race war to complete the destruction of our country they’ve wished and worked for.

The special counsel Jack Smith federal cases, on the other hand, look like a complete bust. The one in the DC federal district court under Judge Chutkan is unraveling on its obvious lack of merit, its misapplication of the statutes cited, and Mr. Smith’s illegitimate appointment under the rules governing special counsels. The so-called Mar-a-Lago document case in Florida appears to have been a smokescreen for the FBI’s attempt to repossess documentary evidence of its own criminal role in the 2015-to-2019 RussiaGate caper. I predict Judge Aileen Cannon will end up dismissing the whole thing as, in effect, a DOJ-sponsored hoax on the court.

This battle has a long way to go. It is clearly a battle of good against manifest evil. The evil side has done its thing - waged war on the American people - by working overtime to systematically derange your minds. Next, they will seek to go after whatever money you still have, whatever things of value you possess, and whatever remaining liberties you enjoy. Pay attention as events unspool."

Gregory Mannarino, "Alert! Expanding War! Food Inflation Rising; Fake Data"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 2/23/24
"Alert! Expanding War! 
Food Inflation Rising; Fake Data"
Comments here:

"Alert! Nationwide Outage! Putin In Nuclear Bomber! Poland Shuts Border! Israel F-35 Iran Strike"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 2/23/24
"Alert! Nationwide Outage! Putin In Nuclear Bomber! 
Poland Shuts Border! Israel F-35 Iran Strike"
Comments here:
o
"Putin Co-Pilots Supersonic Nuclear-Capable Bomber"
By Tyler Durden

"Russian President Vladimir Putin just sent the Western military alliance a not-so-subtle message just days after his top national security official Dmitry Medvedev warned that Moscow stands ready to use its entire strategic arsenal on London, Washington, Berlin and Kiev if Russian territory comes under direct attack from NATO.

On Thursday Putin entered the co-pilot’s seat in a nuclear-capable strategic bomber for a 30 to 40 minute flight, parts of which were filmed and quickly released by Russian state sources. Putin's brief flight in the upgraded Tu-160M supersonic strategic bomber also comes ahead of next month's Russian election, though of course we all know pretty much what the outcome will be. Watch below as Putin goes 'nuclear-capable'...

The Kremlin has released footage from Vladimir Putin’s flight on a Tu-160M nuclear bomber this afternoon pic.twitter.com/NYGiTFUKtP— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) February 22, 2024. "The plant has received state orders to produce a modernized version of the Tu-160 bomber that first flew in the 1980s and was code-named Blackjack by NATO." Putin subsequently hailed that the new bomber he rode in was "excellent". More footage:

Thursday, February 22, 2024

"Major Cellphone Outage Hits US; Communications Shutdown - Was It A Cyberattack?"

Jeremiah Babe, 2/22/24
"Major Cellphone Outage Hits US; 
Communications Shutdown - Was It A Cyberattack?"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Peder B. Helland, "Sunny Mornings"

Full screen recommended.
Peder B. Helland, Soothing Relaxation,
"Sunny Mornings"
"I am a composer from Norway and I started this channel with a simple vision: to create a place that you can visit whenever you want to sit down and relax. I compose music that can be labeled as for example: sleep music, calm music, yoga music, study music, peaceful music, beautiful music and relaxing music. I love to compose music and I put a lot of work into it.

Thank you very much for listening and for leaving feedback. Every single day I am completely astonished by all your warm support and it really inspires me to work even harder on my music. If you enjoy my work, I would be very happy if you decided to subscribe and join our community. Have a wonderful day or evening!"
- Peder B. Helland, composer for Soothing Relaxation

"A Look to the Heavens"

“These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula left of center, and colorful M20 on the right. The third, NGC 6559, is above M8, separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant.
The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20's popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. The colorful skyscape recorded with telescope and digital camera also includes one of Messier's open star clusters, M21, just above the Trifid.”
"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where
he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."
- Walt Whitman

"The Most Contagious..."

 

“The Myth of Human Progress”

“The Myth of Human Progress”
By Chris Hedges

“Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth – intellectually and emotionally – and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury – as well as unrivaled military and economic power – for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada.

“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today – about 2 billion – is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.

If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

Wright explained this further on our call. “The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. 

We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”

As Wright told me: “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable – the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun – would disappear.

We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we let oil and gas exploration rip when we knew that expanding the carbon economy was suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.

If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”

The Daily "Near You?"

Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Maya Angelou, “Alone”

“Alone”

“Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home,
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone.
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong,
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use,
Their wives run round like banshees,
Their children sing the blues.
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone,
But nobody,
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know…
Storm clouds are gathering,
The wind is gonna blow.
The race of man is suffering,
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody,
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone,
Nobody, but nobody,
Can make it out here alone.”

- Maya Angelou

"Living In A Potemkin World" (Excerpt)

"Living In A Potemkin World" (Excerpt)
by Jim Quinn

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

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

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

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

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

I guess this was an early version of fake news, though I am sure there were also plenty of falsities and propaganda in the newspapers of the time. But, in our current day, oppressors have taken lies, falsities, miss-truths, and propaganda to heights never conceived by Edward Bernays, George Orwell or Joseph Stalin."

Please view this outstanding, 
and most highly recommended complete article here:

"Halt And Catch Fire"

"There's a great phrase, 'Halt and Catch Fire', which means, basically, you know sh&t's going to hit the fan, so you stop, accept it and move the [another expletive we'd prefer not to write] on. 'Halt and Catch Fire'is an early machine command that sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all conditions to compete for superiority at once." 
- Addison Wiggin

"How It Really Is"

 

Bill Bonner, "Elites Get The Benz"

"Elites Get The Benz"
Dishing the dirt on Internet tools, insider scams,
 military hegemony and plenty more...
by Bill Bonner

"Government officials wanted Amazon to remove from its online catalog books containing “misinformation” regarding the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines, meaning anything questioning the government’s pro-vaccine propaganda."
~ Ron Paul

"We begin with this report from the American Conservative… “Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?” asks an Atlantic headline. The numbers are deadly. The grimmest news was from the Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper outside the East Coast. The paper announced it was cutting 115 people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom. In June of last year, the Times dropped 74 people. Some 2,900 newspapers have closed or merged since 2005.

Sports Illustrated is in trouble. The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, NPR, Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed, among others, have shed hundreds of journalists over the past year. (The author of the Atlantic article himself was a layoff from the Post.) Job losses among print, digital, and broadcast-news organizations grew by nearly 50 percent during 2023. Why so much downsizing in the mainstream media? It is possible that consumers don’t really want to pay for propaganda?

Hand in Glove: It is obvious that the media, the US firepower industry, and the government work closely together. All are arms of America’s Establishment – rich, well-educated, and powerful…with elites who have grown distant from ‘The People’ they were meant to serve. No conspiracy theory is necessary to explain it; their interests…and the interests of ‘the masses’… simply diverge. People with power tend to want more power. And as Eisenhower observed in 1961, pretty soon, they exert an ‘unwarranted influence’ over public policy to get it.

The rich are different. They have more money. More power. More influence. Can you blame them for wanting to control the government…and use it to their own advantage? Elites, already on top, typically aim to protect themselves by blocking innovation and competition. They control both political parties, for example; they don’t want any others butting in. But the rest of the population is better off in an open, dynamic society where they can go about their business without the costs and constraints imposed by the feds. This divergence explains much of America’s excess spending, its cancerous debt, and its lust for foreign wars. They are all obvious ways in which the insiders transfer more wealth and power to themselves. Less obvious is our subject for today: the extent to which the country has already become, in effect, a military dictatorship.

That, at any rate, is the charge leveled by Mr. Mike Benz. He is not saying anything we haven’t said. But he has taken it a step further. The US is not just in danger of being taken over by some form of insider rule; the federal government already has been captured. It is an explosive assertion; if true, it upsets hundreds of years’ worth of progress, in which fighting men were meant to serve civilized authorities, not the other way around.

Internet Tools: And he may be right. The deciders are selected, more or less, not by the voters, but by the political parties, the media and the firepower industry. They decide when we go to war and with whom, how much the feds spend…and, indirectly, where they get it.

One way they control the idea-flow, says Benz, Director of the Foundation for On-Line Freedom, is by using the latest internet tools. Benz: "Google is a great example of this. Google began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford PhDs, and they got their funding as part of a joint CIA NSA program to chart how “birds of a feather flock together online” through search engine aggregation. And then one year later they launched Google and then became a military contractor. From there it was one hop and one skip until Google was fully part of the Deep State program. At first, this was widely seen as helping independence movements – such as the famous Arab Spring – liberate their countries from dictatorial or backward leaders.

Overseas, the CIA and other US intel agencies had been rigging elections and pulling strings for a long time. Benz recalls George Keenan, then head of the CIA, explaining: “…listen, it's a mean old world out there. We at the CIA just rigged the Italian election [of 1948]. We had to do it because if the Communist won, maybe there'd never be another election in Italy again, but it's really effective, guys. We need a department of dirty tricks to be able to do this around the world. And this is essentially a new social contract we're constructing with the American people because this is not the way we've conducted diplomacy before…”

The Biggest Danger: But after the surprise election of Donald Trump, the insiders began to see that it wasn’t only Italian voters who couldn’t be trusted. Benz…"Russiagate died in July, 2019 when Robert Mueller basically choked on the stand for three hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing. After two and a half years of investigation…they took all of this censorship architecture, spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it's actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself."

Get it? The threat is not just that foreign elections may not go the way the elites want. Domestic elections might go awry too. The biggest danger to ordinary Americans is a debt crisis – followed by defaults, depression and inflation. But the biggest danger to the powers-that-be is a sudden cut-off in the flow of deficit-financed spending…easy money…stock market gains…cushy jobs…contracts…directorships…and other government boondoggles.

Suppose, for example, that a ‘peace candidate’ were elected president? Suppose he used his office to make a logical and compelling case for America First, proposing to stay out of other peoples’ wars? And suppose he cut spending in the one and only area where substantial savings are readily available – the ‘discretionary’ budget for maintaining the US empire? It would be easy to save $500 billion with no loss in security for the homeland; the US would still be spending 6 times as much on ‘defense’ as Russia. A few other cuts to the empire budget and the federal deficit would be eliminated completely!

But what would the toady press say? How would the elites defend themselves? How much longer would this reformer live? More to come…"

Dan, I Allegedly, "Are You Sick Of Junk Fees?"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 2/22/24
"Are You Sick Of Junk Fees?"
"We finally hear that a bank is getting sued for their junk fees. JP Morgan Chase has just been sued for charging people a bounced check fee. We are seeing junk fees in every aspect of our lives from airlines to insurance companies to restaurants."
Comments here:

Scott Ritter, "The US Finally Sanctions Israel After The IDF Continues To Attack Rafah"

Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 2/22/24
"The US Finally Sanctions Israel 
After The IDF Continues To Attack Rafah"
Comments here:

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! They're Going To War, Secret Mass Mobilization; NATO Flies F-16s In Ukraine"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper 2/22/24
"Alert! They're Going To War, Secret Mass Mobilization; 
NATO Flies F-16s In Ukraine"
Comments here:

Wednesday, February 21, 2024