"Almost a year has passed since I came down here at your Head Master's kind invitation in order to cheer myself and cheer the hearts of a few of my friends by singing some of our own songs. The ten months that have passed have seen very terrible catastrophic events in the world - ups and downs, misfortunes - but can anyone sitting here this afternoon, this October afternoon, not feel deeply thankful for what has happened in the time that has passed and for the very great improvement in the position of our country and of our home?
Why, when I was here last time we were quite alone, desperately alone, and we had been so for five or six months. We were poorly armed. We are not so poorly armed today; but then we were very poorly armed. We had the unmeasured menace of the enemy and their air attack still beating upon us, and you yourselves had had experience of this attack; and I expect you are beginning to feel impatient that there has been this long lull with nothing particular turning up!
But we must learn to be equally good at what is short and sharp and what is long and tough. It is generally said that the British are often better at the last. They do not expect to move from crisis to crisis; they do not always expect that each day will bring up some noble chance of war; but when they very slowly make up their minds that the thing has to be done and the job put through and finished, then, even if it takes months - if it takes years - they do it.
Another lesson I think we may take, just throwing our minds back to our meeting here ten months ago and now, is that appearances are often very deceptive, and as Kipling well says, we must "...meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same."
You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination.
But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period - I am addressing myself to the School - surely from this period of ten months, this is the lesson:
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.
Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.
You sang here a verse of a School Song: you sang that extra verse written in my honor, which I was very greatly complimented by and which you have repeated today. But there is one word in it I want to alter - I wanted to do so last year, but I did not venture to. It is the line: "Not less we praise in darker days." I have obtained the Head Master's permission to alter darker to sterner. "Not less we praise in sterner days."
Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race."
"This Is Why They Won’t Be Able To Block Matt Gaetz,
Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth And RFK Jr."
by Michael Snyder
"This week, Donald Trump shocked the Washington D.C. establishment to the core. For decades, the unelected bureaucrats that control our mammoth federal agencies have been running our country into the ground. No matter who we have sent to Washington, the culture in these federal agencies has remained the same. But now Trump has nominated firebrands such as Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. for some of the most important positions in his cabinet, and this shows that he is quite serious about “draining the swamp” during his second term. In essence, there will be a bunch of “mini-Trumps” running around firing hordes of useless bureaucrats and dismantling federal power structures that have existed for generations. Needless to say, many on the left are in a state of panic now that it appears that many of the institutions that they cherish so much could literally be turned completely upside down.
For a lot of Democrats, the possibility that Matt Gaetz could be the next attorney general is truly a nightmare scenario. When his nomination was announced, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy called him “dangerously unqualified”…"Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., warned Tuesday that President-elect Trump’s selection of former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to be U.S. attorney general signaled Trump’s intention to follow through on promises to persecute his opponents.
Murphy called the firebrand Floridian “dangerously unqualified” to lead the Justice Department, noting that Gaetz urged the need to abolish the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that do not get in line with conservative priorities."
Many in the corporate media are freaking out about the Gaetz nomination as well. For example, Geraldo Rivera says that he “threw up in my mouth” when he heard that Gaetz was the pick… “When I heard that Matt Gaetz was picked to be attorney general, I threw up in my mouth,” Rivera told host Leland Vittert. “I think it is a horrible, creepy choice. I have no idea why he did it.”
The nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence has also caused a tremendous amount of outrage…"Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., declared in a post on X that she was “appalled” by the selection of Gabbard for the role. “Not only is she ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin,” Spanberger claimed in a post on X."
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., called the choice of Gabbard as DNI “incredibly reckless,” declaring in a tweet, “Putting someone with known sympathies for foreign adversaries is not putting America’s interests first – it’s putting our security at risk.”
I find it quite comical that Democrats are now talking about “putting America’s interests first”, because they haven’t been doing that for years. At the Pentagon, the environment is “like a morgue” now that Pete Hegseth has been nominated to be the new boss of the Department of Defense…"But the surprising top cabinet-post appointment came as an absolute shock to Pentagon career employees – who weren’t anticipating such a non-establishment pick to lead the nation’s largest federal agency with a $800 billion budget.
One defense official told DailyMail.com that it was ‘like a morgue’ inside the Pentagon after Trump’s announcement. They said the career staff were ‘apoplectic’ after hearing Hegseth, who has no government or management experience, would be taking over administration of the largest joint fighting forces in the world. In the past, Hegseth has talked about the need to fire all of the “woke” generals, and I certainly think that would be a promising step in the right direction for our military."
After all of the other nominations that Trump has made this week, he topped things off by choosing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services…"I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health. The Safety and Health of all Americans is the most important role of any Administration, and HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country. Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!"
At this moment, the corporate media is begging for the Senate to block these nominations. But that isn’t going to happen. As U.S. Representative Thomas Massive has correctly pointed out, even if the Senate does not want to confirm these nominees Trump can just push them through as recess appointments…"In a video posted to X by Haley Talbot, a reporter with CNN, Massie was asked if he thought Gaetz would be confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as the Attorney General. “Do you think he’ll get confirmed by the Senate?” a reporter asked Massie, to which Massie could be heard responding, “recess appointments.” “He’s the Attorney General,” Massie added. “Suck it up!”
Many people don’t realize this, but the U.S. Constitution specifically gives whoever is president the power to make recess appointments… A recess appointment, however, allow presidents to install their nominee to the position while the Senate is in recess, without a confirmation hearing or vote, according to the Recess Appointments Clause in the U.S. Constitution. It says: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”
So this means if a president manages to make a recess appointment, that individual’s term would only last for about two years. At that point, the person could be appointed again through the same recess appointment or through the regular Senate confirmation process. The Supreme Court has ruled that recess appointments are only allowed if the U.S. Senate is not in session for at least 10 days. But of course our senators are so lazy that they like to take lots of long breaks. And since Republicans now control the Senate, there probably won’t be any dramatic moves to stop Trump from getting the recess appointments that he wants.
Some “experts” are making it sound like Trump intends to do something out of the ordinary, but the truth is that other presidents made large numbers of recess appointments…"According to the Congressional Research Service, former President Obama made 32 recess appointments while in office; Bill Clinton made 139 and George W. Bush made 171."
When Senate Majority Leader John Thune was asked about the possibility of recess appointments a few days ago, he specifically mentioned “recess appointments” as one of the ways that Trump could get his nominees in place “as soon as possible”… “We must act quickly and decisively to get the president’s cabinet and other nominees in place as soon as possible to start delivering on the mandate we’ve been sent to execute, and all options are on the table … including recess appointments,” he said in a statement."
Of course the radical left is not just going to sit back and let Trump do whatever he wants. In fact, they are already planning massive protests for Trump’s inauguration…"Flyers are now appearing on complete campuses in DC. These fliers have QR codes. When you scan the code, the links invite you to “fight fascism” by protesting Trump’s inauguration on 1/20."
So violent leftist groups have begun recruiting WokeQaeda. One of the groups is Students for Justice in Palestine. If that doesn’t sound familiar, that’s the group that one of the primary factors of the violent protests on college campuses.
It appears that there will be a great deal of turmoil in the streets of Washington D.C. on January 20th, and that will just be a preview of the widespread turmoil that is coming all over America. After everything that they have said and done during the past eight years, the radical left is not going to suddenly change course and decide that it is time for “healing” and “unity”. Our nation is more divided right now than it has ever been in my entire lifetime, and we should all be deeply concerned about what is coming next."
"Certainly, the re-election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency has been a remoralizing event. I know that many (me included) thought that the GloboLeftElite would do whatever was necessary to “fortify” the results so Trump couldn’t return to power. I think, in the end the real power that saved Trump was the power of his hair. I mean, like Hamlet said, let the best mane win.
I’m in hopes that he won’t let his worst impulses take this second term of his administration run into the problems of the first. Trump’s main flaw (not his mane flaw, which is flawless) is his desire to “make a deal”. Hell, his book was even titled, “The Art of the Deal”. That’s where he got his greatest successes, and that was the great flaw that was exploited and why we ended up sending billions to foreigners, yet still didn’t have adequate border coverage at the end of his administration.
So, now is not the time to give up – we must hold Trump accountable for the promises he made. He understands that he’s not our leader, that, rather, he jumped out in front of a parade that was already in motion and gave it a focus. When he gets off track, like when he praised himself for the Vaxx®, MAGA crowds booed him. And then he stopped talking about the Vaxx™, because he knew that wasn’t where the parade was headed.
We must remain vigilant. I do think that there is hope, since his near assassination, this has probably focused him like a laser on his own mortality. He knows he has four years to do what he has to do, and that’s it. Possibly only two: the mid-term elections may change the House, and turn his last two years into a gridlocked standstill.
Now, a gridlocked standstill is probably better than when congress is “doing” things and will probably lead to a dozen more impeachments for crimes like “breathing” and “sighing”, so the next two years is key.
The good news is that the GloboLeft is shell-shocked. They’ve created little echo chambers that made them get high on their own supply and think that a (possibly) drunken (allegedly) cocaine-using diversity hire anchor baby that achieved absolutely nothing, ever, that wasn’t given to her would be a good candidate. They were (and are) shocked. Good. The GloboLeft are shaken to the core, and we should make sure that it stays that way. If they think Trump is going to be bad, we should, at every instance, agree and amplify.
This isn’t spiking the ball. This is making them crazy. Oh, sure, they wouldn’t be the GloboLeft if they weren’t already crazy members of a death cult. But we want to amp it up. We want them to not be able to think straight. For the next two years. We want to hijack (whenever possible) their amygdalae (Anonymous Conservative talks about it at the LINK). If you work with one of these creatures, you can get them to go off at the slightest provocation.
As long as the GloboLeft sounds like the unhinged death cult members that they are, they move the Overton Window our direction. Make them crazy. If you see a GloboLeftist flaking out at the supermarket, you can walk by and say, “This is MAGA country, missy.” That’s guaranteed to end up with a shrieking fit and a crazed post. If confronted, you can just say, “I was wondering where the pasta aisle was. Don’t have any idea why she reacted so.”
So, keep them busy. To the non-crazy normies, keep dropping redpills. One story I heard from about a normie was that she was concerned that Trump wanted to “drain the swamp”. When it was gently explained that “drain the swamp” actually referred to the corruption of the Deep State at Foggy Bottom, the response was, “Oh, I can see that.”
Never expect normies to know what’s actually going on, so don’t get complicated. Explaining basic economics might help. Might. Be reminded that these are the same people that didn’t know who was running for president, so, be gentle, and don’t start with weapons-grade redpills about deportation. Ease them into it. Help them draw conclusions. Point out how the mainstream media is lying or not covering the real news. And remember that X® is our friend right now – the closest we have to a mainstream news platform that isn’t censoring (much).
Don’t cede the Second Amendment. Ever. Not a single inch. Point out that the real killers aren’t law-abiding gun owners, but gangbangers mainly shooting gangbangers, and they’d have guns anyway when everyone else was disarmed. Point out that there is a correlation with more guns leading to less crime. Disarmed people are victims waiting for second responders – armed people are citizens who are the true first responders.
Don’t cede morality. The latest hilarity is the 4B movement, essentially women promising not to engage in random sex and rather wait until they’re in a committed relationship. They expected us to get mad, when in reality we say, “Awesome, welcome aboard! Nobody likes a tramp.”
Don’t cede love of your country, and don’t cede love of your nation. They’re not the same thing, but don’t give up either. Enjoy the win. Keep the steel in Trump’s spine. And don’t spike the football yet. It’s not even halftime. But for now? We didn’t win by a hair, we won by a whole headful. And you are needed."
"Today, we dive into the jaw-dropping bear costume scam that rocked Big Bear, California. Unbelievably, a group tried to outsmart the insurance world by faking a bear attack on their luxury car - but it all unraveled in the most bizarre way imaginable. It is wild the great lengths some folks will go to commit fraud and how they got caught red-handed with a bear suit and barbecue claws - the truth is stranger than fiction!"
Their working days are over. They neither guard, nor hunt nor herd.
They have convinced humans that they should have pet dogs and
treat them like children. Meanwhile, real children are disappearing.
by Bill Bonner
"Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as
conclusive evidence that you are wonderful."
- Ann Landers
Baltimore, Maryland - "Sitting next to us in a Bedford Street coffee shop was a large middle-aged woman with a small dog on a leash. “Here darling... have some of this.” She was feeding the dog a ham and cheese croissant... the same thing we had just bought, for $12.78.
Down the street came an oriental woman with a terrier on a leash. She marched along briskly, the dog keeping up. From the other direction came a man in a jogging outfit. He too had a dog on a leash, this one a Great Dane, who pulled him along. “No pets allowed,” said the sign on the door of the pastry shop. “Except personal support animals.” Inside, was a yellow lab, wagging its tail. On the other end of its leash was a couple, neither of whom showed any sign of impairment.
“I wish I was a rich man’s pet dog,” an old boss used to say. He was in charge of the painting crew for a small builder. One summer, he hired us to do the high trim work he no longer wanted to do. That was fifty years ago. And now, the world - or at least that part of the world represented by Brooklyn, New York - is full of them. Rich men’s pet dogs, that is. We spent last weekend in the city, where the canine kingdom has pulled off a remarkable triumph. Their working days are over. They neither guard, nor hunt nor herd. Instead, they have convinced humans that they should have pet dogs and treat them like children.
Meanwhile, real children are disappearing. Grosso modo, sub-Saharan African and Arab nations have the highest fertility rates; the average Nigerian woman has five children. East Asia has the lowest. In South Korea, for example, the statistical average for births per woman is 0.8. At that rate, the South Korean population will be cut in half by the end of the century. In neighboring Japan, the population has been falling for the last fifteen years and the president warns that the country “may not be able to sustain a functioning society.”
Europe and the US are somewhere between the extremes, but new births, to native-born women, are generally less than replacement level. Russia has a fertility rate of only 1.4 births per woman. This is so alarming that Russian lawmakers have proposed to ban night-time internet use. The fertility rate for New York State is 1.7 children per woman. That is already well below the 2.1 ‘replacement rate.’ But in the New York metro area, the rate is the lowest in the state.
And in the USA, guess how many net new jobs have been given to native-born Americans over the last five years. The answer is ‘zero.’ Not because there has been a shortage of jobs. In short supply instead were the ‘native-born Americans.’ The Wall Street Journal: "More women in the 35-to-44 age range across all races, income levels, employment statuses, regions and broad education groups aren’t having children, according to research by Luke Pardue at nonprofit policy forum the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.
Birthrates among 35- to 44-year-olds give demographers who study fertility an early look into millennials’ changing approach to parenthood. But these researchers also look closely at women over 40, reasoning that if a woman doesn’t have a child by then, she is more likely to remain childless." Walking around the streets of Brooklyn, we saw hundreds of young women of childbearing age. But few bearing children. We saw only one tiny baby... and he was carried by his father in a front-mounted holster.
“It’s a dogs’ world now,” says Elizabeth. The dogs are well fed. They’re given vaccines, supplements, and organic food. They are enrolled in training programs... and given emotional counseling when necessary. And they’ve even trained owners to trail behind them and pick up their poop. “Some people around here even arrange playdates for their dogs. ” explains our local source. “They take them to the parks where they meet up with their doggie friends. And they become so attached to their pooches that they can’t go anywhere without them. They put them in the shopping carts when they go to the food stores. They hold them in their laps at the theater. I even know one family that has a blind dog. They take him out for walks, guiding him so he doesn’t run into signs or trees. They are seeing-eye humans working for the dog.”
"The meltdown has gotten so heavy liberal bureaucrats are
ready to form antigovernment militias and fretting about black helicopters."
- Max Blumenthal
by Jim Kunstler
“Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them. They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda” - The New York Times
"In July 27, 1794, the non-insane members of the Convention, or national legislative body in Paris, suddenly turned on the rabid Jacobin leader Maximillian Robespierre and overthrew his ruling tyrannical bunch - who had killed 40,000 of their fellow countrymen in the paranoid orgy known as The Reign of Terror. The next day, Robespierre rode the tumbrel to his own appointment with “the national razor” and the Thermidorian Reaction was on!
By the way, in one of their many acts disordering French society, the Jacobins had changed the calendar, renamed all the months, and changed the weeks from seven to ten days (to eliminate Sundays as a holy day of rest in their anti-church crusade). Thus, Thermidor, the month of mid-summer. This was but a small part of their proto-communist agenda, but you see in it the flavor of their radical extremism.
The Woke Democrats of recent times were our Jacobins, and the election of November 5, 2024, marks the kick-off of America’s Thermidorian Reaction. The crazies have been overthrown and our country awaits a restoration of norms in culture and law. No more sexualizing of children, no more flood of criminal mutts across the US border, no more furtive censorship of public speech, no more creative lawfare, no more women on the battlefield, no more “anti-racist” racism in the workplace, no more intel takeover of everyone’s private life... you get the picture.
Many abiding mysteries about how this happened - even of what exactly did happen - remain to be sorted out by law and by history. That is probably because so much of the Woke Revolution was provoked by state-of-the-art mind-f*ckery out of the giant intel blob’s psy-ops lab. This blob, you understand, had grown to be a colossal racketeering operation with many branches and ever-spreading roots, and it cast its spells over the populace to protect these interests - which, of course, involved huge revenue streams.
Perhaps its most potent spell was the manipulation of women’s emotion, harnessing female psychodrama as the propellant for mass social discord. In a nation of absent fathers, damaged children, and broken male-female relations, Donald Trump was painted as the ultimate archetypal tyrant Daddy figure to deflect the public’s attention from the actual tyranny growing under the US intel blob and its Globalist sidekicks. Case in point: RussiaGate, a long-running hysteria of fabricated accusations, a fabulous medley of scurrilous gossip, engineered at the highest levels of our government for the express purpose of wrecking Mr. Trump’s first term in office. “Witch hunt” was exactly the right term.
Many more psychodramas followed, all of them artificially cooked up by various branches of the blob: impeachments #1 and #2; the FBI-induced J-6 riot and the fake House J-6 inquiry that followed; the roll-out of DOJ-inspired fake criminal and civil cases that tied-up Mr. Trump in courtrooms through the year, and most especially the hostile news media’s presentation of all these things as one great big everlasting frenzy of on-screen women shrieking at the Daddy-figure, Donald Trump, like thirteen-year-old girls in fugues of hormonal disruption.
The voters, subject to years of trips laid on them, were eventually able to see through all this induced psychodrama as to how they were being manipulated, and on November 5, they finally revolted. Their quandary was probably epitomized by the absurdity of watching men in women’s sports - spiking volleyballs on the girls’ heads, bashing them on the lacrosse field, humiliating them in the swim lanes - and, more to the point, being helpless to do anything about it, because the officials in-charge under “Joe Biden” said it must be, no matter what you think and feel about what you are seeing.
The New York Times, your field-guide to blob-think, is warning its dwindling readership of psychodrama addicts that Donald Trump will now take out his “grievances” on the noble, self-sacrificing bureaucracy that manages things so well in this land. As usual, The Times misleads and misinforms. These are the grievances of the nation that has seen its law and its culture twisted into new orders of wickedness that leave daily life in the USA perverted, dishonored, and grotesquefied.
So now Mr. Trump has picked a cabinet that scares the blob to death - for good reason. They are aiming to systematically disarm and disassemble the blob. They are a team of serious and intelligent warriors and they mean business, in particular Gaetz, Gabbard, Kennedy, Ratcliffe, and Homan, with Elon and Vivek riding shotgun. (A new FBI Director has not yet been named.) You must wonder how the blob is planning to defend itself, for it surely will resist.
Many of us believe that the two recent assassination attempts against the now-President-elect were blob-sponsored operations. Everybody expects they’ll try again. But it’s possible that the American system still has enough mojo to self-correct. A whole lot of public officials have a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do. It looks like they will be compelled to now, including the public health officers who brought us Covid-19 and the mandated, ineffective-and-harmful mRNA vaccines.
There’s every reason to believe that the ‘splainin’ can take place in correct proceedings according to law: hearings, grand juries, courts. We do have actual laws against racketeering, abuse of power, election fraud, bribery, malicious prosecution, sedition, treason, and conspiracy to commit all those crimes. Pay attention: all that is distinct from lawfare, which is making-up crimes, faking crimes, and faking procedure. You are going to see a demonstration of how law differs from lawfare. It ought to have a salutary effect on our national esprit. And that should motivate us to get on with the job of repairing the damage done to our country."
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
"The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the orange emission nebula at the far right of the featured picture. The horse-head feature is dark because it is really an opaque dust cloud that lies in front of the bright emission nebula. Like clouds in Earth's atmosphere, this cosmic cloud has assumed a recognizable shape by chance. After many thousands of years, the internal motions of the cloud will surely alter its appearance.
The emission nebula's orange color is caused by electrons recombining with protons to form hydrogen atoms. Toward the lower left of the image is the Flame Nebula, an orange-tinged nebula that also contains intricate filaments of dark dust. Two prominent reflection nebulas are visible: round IC 432 on the far left, and blue NGC 2023 just to the lower left of the Horsehead nebula. Each glows primarily by reflecting the light of their central star."
"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."
"We have reached a very alarming turning point in American history. More than at any other moment in modern times, Americans are extremely angry about the state of the economy. The next Administration will inherit a country struggling with a deep consumer recession. We have come to learn that our government has piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world. Now, the foolish decisions of the past several years are catching up with us. The U.S. economy is experiencing structural failure, and the American people is dissatisfied with the direction our nation is going. They want answers. They want someone to fix things. They want life to go back to the way it used to be. But will that really happen? Or will people get even angrier? At this point, it’s anyones guess. Here follows '15 Reasons Are Incredibly Angry About The State Of The U.S. Economy.'"
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.
I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
– Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
"We are living in a world where the degree of disinformation and outright lying has reached such a state of affairs that, possibly for the first time ever, we see the majority of the western world starting to question their own and surrounding level of sanity. The increasing frenzied distrust in everything “authoritative” mixed with the desperate incredulity that “everybody couldn’t possibly be in on it!” is slowly rocking many back and forth into a tighter and tighter straight jacket. “Question everything” has become the new motto, but are we capable of answering those questions? Presently the answer is a resounding no.
The social behaviorist sick joke of having made everyone obsessed with toilet paper of all things during the start of what was believed to be a time of crisis, is an example of how much control they have over that red button labelled “commence initiation of level 4 mass panic”. And can the people be blamed? After all, if we are being lied to, how can we possibly rally together and point the finger at the root of this tyranny, aren’t we at the point where it is everywhere?
As Goebbels infamously stated, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State [under fascism].”
And here we find ourselves today, at the brink of fascism. However, we have to first agree to forfeit our civil rights as a collective before fascism can completely dominate. That is, the big lie can only succeed if the majority fails to call it out, for if the majority were to recognize it for what it is, it would truly hold no power.
The Battle for Your Mind: “Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief. The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”
– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”
It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognize that one was “oppressed” meant they must first have an idea of what was “freedom”, and if one were allowed the “privilege” to learn how to read, this discovery was inevitable.
If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of “dangerous ideas” that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in “The Brave New World”, would quickly organize the masses and revolution against their “controllers” would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to “think”. However, it hasn’t exactly played out that way has it?
The greater majority of us are free to read whatever we wish to, in terms of the once “forbidden books”, such as those listed by The Index Librorum Prohibitorum. We can read any of the writings that were banned in “The Brave New World”, notably the works of Shakespeare which were named as absolutely dangerous forms of “knowledge”. We are now very much free to “educate” ourselves on the very “ideas” that were recognized by tyrants of the past as the “antidote” to a life of slavery. And yet, today, the majority choose not to…
It is recognized, albeit superficially, that who controls the past, controls the present and thereby the future. George Orwell’s book “1984”, hammers this as the essential feature that allows the Big Brother apparatus to maintain absolute control over fear, perception and loyalty to the Party cause, and yet despite its popularity, there still remains a lack of interest in actually informing oneself about the past.
What does it matter anyway, if the past is controlled and rewritten to suit the present? As the Big Brother interrogator O’Brien states to Winston, “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not? And thus, are free to rewrite it as we choose…”
Of course, we are not in the same situation as Winston…we are much better off. We can study and learn about the “past” if we so desire, unfortunately, it is a choice that many take for granted. In fact, many are probably not fully aware that presently there is a battle waging for who will “control the past” in a manner that is closely resembling a form of “memory wipe”.
William Sargant was a British psychiatrist and, one could say, effectively the Father of “mind control” in the West, with connections to British Intelligence and the Tavistock Institute, which would influence the CIA and American military via the program MK Ultra. Sargant was also an advisor for Ewen Cameron’s LSD “blank slate” work at McGill University, funded by the CIA.
Sargant accounts for his reason in studying and using forms of “mind control” on his patients, which were primarily British soldiers that were sent back from the battlefield during WWII with various forms of “psychosis”, as the only way to rehabilitate extreme forms of PTSD.
The other reason, was because the Soviets had apparently become “experts” in the field, and out of a need for national security, the British would thus in turn have to become experts as well…as a matter of self-defense of course.
The work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, had succeeded in producing some disturbingly interesting insights into four primary forms of nervous systems in dogs, that were combinations of inhibitory and excitatory temperaments; “strong excitatory”, “balanced”, “passive” and “calm imperturbable”. Pavlov found that depending on the category of nervous system temperament the dog had, this in turn would dictate the form of “conditioning” that would work best to “reprogram behavior”. The relevance to “human conditioning” was not lost on anyone.
It was feared in the West, that such techniques would not only be used against their soldiers to invoke free-flowing uninhibited confessions to the enemy but that these soldiers could be sent back to their home countries, as zombified assassins and spies that could be set off with a simple code word. At least, these were the thriller stories and movies that were pumped into the population. How horrific indeed! That the enemy could apparently enter what was thought the only sacred ground to be our own…our very “minds”!
However, for those who were actually leading the field in mind control research, such as William Sargant, it was understood that this was not exactly how mind control worked. For one thing, the issue of “free will” was getting in the way.
No matter the length or degree of electro-shock, insulin “therapy”, tranquilizer cocktails, induced comas, sleep deprivation, starvation etc induced, it was discovered that if the subject had a “strong conviction” and “strong belief” in something, this could not be simply erased, it could not be written over with any arbitrary thing. Rather, the subject would have to have the illusion that their “conditioning” was in fact a “choice”. This was an extremely challenging task, and long term conversions (months to years) were rare.
However, Sargant saw an opening. It was understood that one could not create a new individual from scratch, however, with the right conditioning that was meant to lead to a physical breakdown using abnormal stress (effectively a reboot of the nervous system), one could increase the “suggestibility” markedly in their subjects. Sargant wrote in his “Battle of the Mind”: “Pavlov’s clinical descriptions of the ‘experimental neuroses’ which he could induce in dogs proved, in fact, to have a close correspondence with those war-neuroses which we were investigating at the time.”
In addition, Sargant found that a falsely implanted memory could help induce abnormal stress leading to emotional exhaustion and physical breakdown to invoke “suggestibility”. That is, one didn’t even need to have a “real stress” but an “imagined stress” would work just as effectively.
Sargant goes on to state in his book: “It is not surprising that the ordinary person, in general, is much more easily indoctrinated than the abnormal. A person is considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ by the community simply because he accepts most of its social standards and behavioural patterns; which means, in fact, that he is susceptible to suggestion and has been persuaded to go with the majority on most ordinary or extraordinary occasions.”
Sargant then goes over the phenomenon of the London Blitz, which was an eight month period of heavy bombing of London during WWII. During this period, in order to cope and stay “sane”, people rapidly became accustomed to the idea that their neighbors could be and were buried alive in bombed houses around them. The thought was “If I can’t do anything about it what use is it that I trouble myself over it?” The best “coping” was thus found to be those who accepted the new “environment” and just focused on “surviving”, and did not try to resist it.
Sargant remarks that it is this “adaptability” to a changing environment which is part of the “survival” instinct and is very strong in the “healthy” and “normal” individual who can learn to cope and thus continues to be “functional” despite an ever changing environment. It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best “survivors” made for the best “brain-washing” in a sense.
Sargant quotes Hecker’s work, who was studying the dancing mania phenomenon that occurred during the Black Death, where Hecker observed that heightened suggestibility had the capability to cause a person to “embrace with equal force, reason and folly, good and evil, diminish the praise of virtue as well as the criminality of vice.”
And that such a state of mind was likened to the first efforts of the infant mind “this instinct of imitation when it exists in its highest degree, is also united a loss of all power over the will, which occurs as soon as the impression on the senses has become firmly established, producing a condition like that of small animals when they are fascinated by the look of a serpent.” I wonder if Sargant imagined himself the serpent…
Sargant does finally admit: “This does not mean that all persons can be genuinely indoctrinated by such means. Some will give only temporary submission to the demands made on them, and fight again when strength of body and mind returns. Others are saved by the supervention of madness. Or the will to resist may give way, but not the intellect itself.” But he comforts himself as a response to this stubborn resistance that “As mentioned in a previous context, the stake, the gallows, the firing squad, the prison, or the madhouse, are usually available for the failures.”
How to Resist the Deconstruction of Your Mind: “He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first of all drive mad.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Masque of Pandora”
For those who have not seen the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight” directed by George Cukor, I would highly recommend you do so since there is an invaluable lesson contained within, that is especially applicable to what I suspect many of us are experiencing nowadays.
The story starts with a 14 year old Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) who is being taken to Italy after her Aunt Alice Alquist, a famous opera singer and caretaker of Paula, is found murdered in her home in London. Paula is the one who found the body, and horror stricken is never her old self again. Her Aunt was the only family Paula had left in her life. The decision is made to send her away from London to Italy to continue her studies to become a world-renowned opera singer like her Aunt Alice.
Years go by, Paula lives a very sheltered life and a heavy somberness is always present within her, she can never seem to feel any kind of happiness. During her singing studies she meets a mysterious man (her piano accompanist during her lessons) and falls deeply in love with him. However, she knows hardly anything about the man named Gregory.
Paula agrees to marry Gregory after a two week romance and is quickly convinced to move back into her Aunt’s house in London that was left abandoned all these years. As soon as she enters the house, the haunting of the night of the murder revisits her and she is consumed with panic and fear. Gregory tries to calm her and talks about the house needing just a little bit of air and sun, and then Paula comes across a letter written to her Aunt from a Sergis Bauer which confirms that he was in contact with Alice just a few days before her murder. At this finding, Gregory becomes bizarrely agitated and grabs the letter from Paula. He quickly tries to justify his anger blaming the letter for upsetting her. Gregory then decides to lock all of her Aunt’s belongings in the attic, to apparently spare Paula any further anguish.
It is at this point that Gregory starts to change his behavior dramatically. Always under the pretext for “Paula’s sake”, everything that is considered “upsetting” to Paula must be removed from her presence. And thus quickly the house is turned into a form of prison. Paula is told it is for her best not to leave the house unaccompanied, not to have visitors and that self-isolation is the best remedy for her “anxieties” which are getting worst. Paula is never strictly forbidden at the beginning but rather is told that she should obey these restrictions for her own good.
Before a walk, he gives as a gift a beautiful heirloom brooch that belonged to his mother. Because the pin needs replacing, he instructs Paula to keep it in her handbag, and then says rather out of context, “Don’t forget where you put it now Paula, I don’t want you losing it.” Paula remarks thinking the warning absurd, “Of course I won’t forget!” When they return from their walk, Gregory asks for the brooch, Paula searches in her handbag but it is not there.
It continues on like this, with Gregory giving warnings and reminders, seemingly to help Paula with her “forgetfulness” and “anxieties”. Paula starts to question her own judgement and sanity as these events become more and more frequent. She has no one else to talk to but Gregory, who is the only witness to these apparent mishaps. It gets to a point where completely nonsensical behavior is being attributed to Paula by Gregory. A painting is found missing on the wall one night. Gregory talks to Paula like she is a 5 year child and asks her to put it back. Paula insists she does not know who took it down. After her persistent passionate insistence that it was not her, she walks up the stairs almost like she were in a dream state and pulls the painting from behind a statue. Gregory asks why she lied, but Paula insists that she only thought to look there because that is where it was found the last two times this occurred.
For weeks now, Paula thinks she has been seeing things, the gas lights of the house dimming for no reason, she also hears footsteps above her bedroom. No one else seems to take notice. Paula is also told by Gregory that he found out that her mother, who passed away when she was very young, had actually gone insane and died in an asylum.
Despite Paula being reduced to a condition of an ongoing stupor, she decides one night to make a stand and regain control over her life. Paula is invited, by one of her Aunt Alice’s close friends Lady Dalroy, to attend a high society evening with musical performances. Recall that Paula’s life gravitated around music before her encounter with Gregory. Music was her life. Paula gets magnificently dressed up for the evening and on her way out tells Gregory that she is going to this event. Gregory tries to convince her that she is not well enough to attend such a social gathering, when Paula calmly insists that she is going and that this woman was a dear friend of her Aunt, Gregory answers that he refuses to accompany her (in those days that was a big deal). Paula accepts this and walks with a solid dignity, undeterred towards the horse carriage. In a very telling scene, Gregory is left momentarily by himself and panic stricken, his eyes bulging he snaps his cigar case shut and runs after Paula. He laughingly calls to her, “Paula, you did not think I was serious? I had no idea that this party meant so much to you. Wait, I will get ready.” As he is getting ready in front of the mirror, a devilish smirk appears.
Paula and Gregory show up to Lady Dalroy’s house late, the pianist is in the middle of the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #8 in C minor. They quickly are escorted to two empty seats. Paula is immediately immersed in the piece, and Gregory can see his control is slipping. After only a few minutes, he goes to look at his pocket watch but it is not in his pocket. He whispers into Paula’s ear, “My watch is missing”. Immediately, Paula looks like she is going to be sick. Gregory takes her handbag and Paula looks in horror as he pulls out his pocket watch, insinuating that Paula had put it there. She immediately starts losing control and has a very public emotional breakdown. Gregory takes her away, as he remarks to Lady Dalroy that this is why he didn’t want Paula coming in the first place.
When they arrive home, Paula has by now completely succumbed to the thought that she is indeed completely insane. Gregory says that it would be best if they go away somewhere for an indefinite period of time. We later find out that Gregory is intending on committing her to an asylum. Paula agrees to leave London with Gregory and leaves her fate entirely in his hands.
In the case of Paula it is clear. She has been suspecting that Gregory has something to do with her “situation” but he has very artfully created an environment where Paula herself doubts whether this is a matter of unfathomable villainy or whether she is indeed going mad. It is rather because she is not mad that she doubts herself, because there is seemingly no reason for why Gregory would put so much time and energy into making it look like she were mad, or at least so it first appears. But what if the purpose to her believing in her madness was simply a matter of who is in control?
Paula almost succeeds in gaining the upper-hand in this power-struggle, the evening she decided to go out on her own no matter what Gregory insisted was in her best interest. If she would have held her ground at Lady Dalroy’s house and simply replied, “I have no idea why your stupid watch ended up in my handbag and I could care less. Now stop interrupting this performance, you are making a scene!” Gregory’s spell would have been broken as simple as that. If he were to complain to others about the situation, they would also respond, “Who cares man, why are you so obsessed about your damn watch?”
We find ourselves today in a very similar situation to Paula. And the voice of Gregory is represented by the narrative of false news and the apocalyptic social behaviorist programming in our forms of entertainment. The things most people voluntarily subject themselves to on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Socially conditioning them, like a pack of salivating Pavlovian dogs, to think it is just a matter of time before the world ends and with a ring of their master’s bell…be at each other’s throats.
Paula ends up being saved in the end by a man named Joseph Cotten (a detective), who took notice and quickly discerned that something was amiss. In the end Gregory is arrested. It is revealed that Gregory is in fact Sergis Bauer. That he killed Alice Alquist and that he has returned to the scene of the crime after all these years in search for the famous jewels of the opera singer. The jewels were in fact rather worthless from the standpoint that they were too famous to be sold, however, Gregory never intended on selling these jewels but rather had become obsessed with the desire to merely possess them. That is, it is Gregory who has been entirely mad all this time.
A Gregory is absolutely dangerous. He would have been the end of Paula if nothing had intervened. However, the power that Gregory held was conditional to the degree that Paula allowed it to control her. Paula’s extreme deconstruction was thus entirely dependent on her choice to let the voice of Gregory in. That is, a Gregory is only dangerous if we allow ourselves to sleep walk into the nightmare he has constructed for us."
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
