“We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbor who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.”
"Here’s a fact that will stop you in your tracks: In the time it takes you to watch this video, two more retail stores will permanently close their doors in America. That's one store closing every 10 minutes during business hours across the country.
Rite Aid - the pharmacy you've probably bought aspirin from a hundred times - just filed for bankruptcy twice and is closing all 1,240 remaining stores. CVS deleted over 1,100 locations since 2022. Joann shut down every single craft store by May. GameStop eliminated 590 stores last year and is closing even more right now. These aren't small mom-and-pop shops. These are billion-dollar corporations with armies of analysts, decades of data, and access to unlimited capital. And they're all making the same calculation: physical retail is dying.
In 2025 alone, an estimated 15,000 stores will close across America - nearly double the 7,325 closures from 2024. When companies this big start abandoning real estate this fast, something fundamental has broken. What you're witnessing is the systematic dismantling of America's retail infrastructure. Let's go through this list now."
Change Your Passwords Now, Protect Yourself ASAP!"
"Your personal data might already be on the dark web, and hackers are selling everything - from emails to passwords and even detailed personal information. This is the most serious breach yet! Protect yourself NOW by changing your passwords for everything: Facebook, Apple, Google, Android, email accounts, and more. Don’t wait until it’s too late - bad actors are targeting your bank accounts, pensions, and so much more."
"Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe. The advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare. According to Conway W. Henderson, "One source claims that 14,500 wars have taken place between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, costing 3.5 billion lives, leaving only 300 years of peace (Beer 1981: 20).] An unfavorable review of this estimate mentions the following regarding one of the proponents of this estimate: "In addition, perhaps feeling that the war casualties figure was improbably high, he changed 'approximately 3,640,000,000 human beings have been killed by war or the diseases produced by war' to 'approximately 1,240,000,000 human beings...'" The lower figure is more plausible but could still be on the high side considering that the 100 deadliest acts of mass violence between 480 BC and 2002 AD (wars and other man-made disasters with at least 300,000 and up to 66 million victims) claimed about 455 million human lives in total."
“Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”
~ Frank Zappa (1940 – 1993)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "In the daily prize for “dumbest headlines,” the Wall Street Journal often finds itself standing, bewildered, upon the dais. Recently, and among tough competition, it climbed to the very top step. From the March 29 edition: "For Russia’s Economy, Peace Poses a Threat." "The country’s economic growth depends on the war in Ukraine, making a peace deal an economic risk for the Kremlin."
Yes, dear reader, the very same economy that was going to crumble “within weeks” under the weight of rearmament, the pressure of western sanctions, and the inimitable force of Ukrainian flags in BlueSky bios, faces a new and existential danger: the imminent outbreak of peace!
To be clear, this particular Note is not about the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, per se, the sophmoronic “Us vs. Them” paradigm of the perennially propagandized. After all, war does not determine who is right, as the old saying goes... only who is left.
Rather, we aim to make a broader point, about an ideology that begins with a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world really works... and ends up in precisely the reductio ad absurdum you would expect, advocating for that Orwellian motto:
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
Peace Beware! Indeed, the Journal makes the case for us perfectly, albeit inadvertently. Continued the braindead op-ed..."Against the odds, the Russian economy has weathered the war. The next economic storm on the horizon: peace."
Hmm...“A bloodbath”...“a quagmire”...“hell on earth”... we’ve heard war described a thousand different ways. But we’ve never heard peace portrayed as an “economic storm on the horizon.” Apparently, Benjamin Franklin got it face-about-arse when he observed, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”
And here we thought battle-weary soldiers on both sides, having been dragged through mud and trench by their spotless political leaders, yearned for “peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” That, granted something like a Christmas Day Truce, as was the case on the Western Front in 1914, sons and brothers might retire their bayonets and sing carols together, exchange gifts and even take up some impromptu football games in no-man’s land.
How... quaint! For years we labored under the naive delusion that, as Randolph Bourne had it, “war is the health of the state,” not – as seemed far from the case – the health of the citizenry, who were, after all, busy dying en masse. Turns out, the real danger lurked in peacetime all along, where a brotherhood of man serves one and other’s needs, works together toward common goals and produces value through the free and voluntary exchange of goods and services.
Mars above! Spare those young soldiers the “economic storm” of peace, brewing ominously on the horizon. If only they would stick to building tanks instead of Teslas...churning out artillery shells instead of Taco Bells...manufacturing F-16s instead of iPhone 16s...the world would be all the richer for it. If only the young cannon fodder knew the true horror of peacetime, they might remain on the frontlines, coughing and hacking in the blood and the muck.
Thus does the myth persist that it was WWII that finally dragged the US out of depression...by stealing resources – including precious human capital – from the private realm of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and mandating that its flow be redirecting toward death, tyranny and the pursuit of misery.
And yet, it’s not merely hundreds of thousands of room temperature corpses at stake here...there’s a whole warped philosophy that undergirds such empty-headed, anti-human thinking. Continued the establishment mouthpiece: "Throughout the conflict in Ukraine, massive government spending on the military has propped up Russia’s output and blunted the impact of Western sanctions. Weapons factories geared up, while outfits from clothing brands to bakeries retooled to make balaclavas and drones. The transformation has made Russia’s economy reliant on the war for jobs, wages and growth. Weaning it off that military sustenance, in a peace deal being pushed by President Trump, is an economic risk for the Kremlin."
Bombs and Baby Rattles: And here we get to the cold, dark heart of the matter, the mistaken belief that true economic vitality is somehow tied to raw production itself, regardless of the underlying human value of what is actually being produced. As if the state knows best what its citizens need, rather than those self same individuals.
Who needs winter clothes and baked goods when you can have balaclavas and drones instead? Forget summer holidays with the kids and clear skies overhead. Try bomb craters full of child soldiers and skies darkened with predator drones. Death and destruction is what the people really want, right?
Of course, if you view the world through the slanted lens of Keynesian economics, this all makes perfect sense. It was John Maynard Keynes who advocated countercyclical government stimulus, designed to boost aggregate demand and thereby raise gross domestic product. Never mind whether the end product was a bomb or a baby rattle. Here he is, waxing nonsensical in his General Theory...
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."
~ John Maynard Keynes,
"The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936)
This is precisely the kind of cart-before-horse “reasoning” that inspires the misfiring neurons of neo-Keynesian eggheads like Paul Krugman, who once proposed an alien invasion as a magic elixir for the ailing economy. Spake the ex-Enron adviser in an interview on CNN, back in 2011: “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.”
Professor Paul then went on to suggest that, even if we discovered we’d been misled and the alien threat had been manufactured by the government to stimulate faux spending, a la Orson Wells’s classic, The Outer Limits, we’d all be better off for having spent the money…budget deficits, inflation and opportunity cost be damned!
Stimulating Keynes: To Keynes, Krugman et al. the worst government spending program of all... is no government spending program at all. Whether it’s imaginary extraterrestrial invasions or the very real tragedy of war, as long as GDP is bolstered and the relevant indicators are stimulated, it’s all to the good.
On the manufacturing front, there’s nothing like goosing production figures by making things that are literally designed to blow up. Talk about planned obsolescence! As for those employment numbers, what better than to keep the figures bolstered than by imposing nationwide conscription...than routinely decimating the entire workforce? The living work whether they want to or not...while the dead are too proud to show up on the unemployment rolls. Easy peasy!
In the end, war is Keynesianism gone wild, a voracious governmental ouroboros, feeding insatiably on its own tail, filling spreadsheets and trenches in roughly equal measure. When all you have is guns, everything starts looking like a duck…and when all you have is Keynesian economic quackery, everything begins to look like a government boondoggle-in-waiting.
And yet, this is the narrative that must be constantly pushed to “We, the People,” by “They, the Bureaucrats.” War “props up” the economy... rearmament is good for our industrial base... the real threat to us all – Russians and Ukrainians, Allies and Axis alike – is the sudden outbreak of peace. Far from posing “an economic risk for the Kremlin,” peace would be an economic boon for all nations currently wasting precious resources on the scourge of war. And that’s exactly why the establishment is eager to prevent it at all costs... up to and including the gravest cost of all. Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."
"Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “peacetime president” authorized strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, so we are told. This global hyperreality show is relentlessly beamed into our minds via X accounts and Truth Social accounts.
It’s a joke. It’s all a joke. Kit Knightly, writing for Off-Guardian, says out loud what many of us have been thinking, yet has seemed too audacious to suggest, up until now…"For Iran’s part, they are claiming the Fordow nuclear facility was barely damaged and “evacuated months ago”. Who can say what’s true? Any footage that emerges could be AI generated. Or cut scenes from a video game. Or videos of some other explosion in some other war.
Maybe the US really did drop bombs on real places and real people died. Maybe they dropped real bombs on empty places (after phoning ahead, we know they do that) and no one died. Maybe neither the bombs nor the places are real.
We know that governments of supposedly “enemy” countries work together to sell a grand lie. Iran not only went along with “Covid”, but was instrumental in early stages of the narrative. The Iranian government forced their people to get vaccinated, had lock downs and social distancing and vaccine passports.
We know none of the governments of the USA, Israel or Iran care about the lives of each other’s civilians. More importantly, we know none of them care about the lives of their own civilians either. If the US, Israel and Iran can work together to pretend to have a pandemic, then they can work together and pretend to have a war. If they are willing to poison and euthanize and deprive their own citizens in the name of a fake “pandemic”, then of course they are willing to burn, shoot and bomb foreign citizens in the name of an equally fake “war”.
A commenter from the above cited article aptly quoted Orwell’s fictional novel instruction manual Nineteen Eighty-four: “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”
Is this how we are to have Agenda 2030 forced rather than foisted upon us? As a stage managed WW3 constrains shipping routes, energy production and supply, fertiliser, food production, and animal feed for livestock. Do we face imminent global economic degradation on a scale of hyperinflation induced supply shocks, and the subsequent forced wartime rationing of everything? Cyber-polygon war-gamed cyber attacks taking out critical infrastructure then blamed on [insert scapegoat state here]?
Will the people cry out for salvation? Will that salvation come in the form of a central bank digital currency and universal basic income? Digital ID and face scanning just to connect to the internet? Make sure to have water, food, and a way to prepare it. Things will only escalate quickly from here on out."
A banner bearing a painting that represents various categories of the Iranian society is deployed against the facade of a building in Tehran, with a message that reads in Farsi: " we are all soldiers of Iran", on June 22, 2025.
"War With Iran"
We are opening Pandora's box.
by Chris Hedges
"War opens a Pandora’s box of evils that once unleashed are beyond anyone’s control. The warmongers who ordered the strikes by U.S. bombers on Iranian nuclear sites have no more of a plan for what comes next in Iran than they had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. European allies, whom Israel and Trump have alienated with these air assaults, are in no mood to cooperate with Washington. The Pentagon, even if it wanted to, does not have the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran - the only way Iran might be subdued. And the idea that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is viewed by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counter force to the Iranian government is ludicrous.
In all these equations the 90 million people in Iran are ignored just as the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were ignored. They will not welcome the United States and certainly not Israel as liberators. Some may hate the regime, but they will resist. They don’t want to be dominated by foreign powers. A war with Iran will be interpreted throughout the region as a war against Shiism. Soon there will be retaliation. Lots of it. It will come at first with desultory missile strikes and then attacks carried out by elusive enemies on ships, military bases and installations. Steadily it will grow in volume and lethality. The death toll, including among the some 40,000 soldiers and Marines stationed in the Middle East, will mount. Ships, including aircraft carriers, will be targeted. We will, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, begin to lash out with a blind fury, fueling the conflagration we began.
Those who lured us into this war know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate. Blinded by hubris, believing their own hallucinations, they have learned none of the lessons of the last two decades of warfare in the Middle East. A war with Iran will be a self-defeating and costly quagmire, one more nail in the rotting edifice of the empire."
"This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome. And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure - taking place entirely in his head - he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book - what it is, what it means - is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom - “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote - while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic. So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend - revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the United Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.
This could sound, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object - this old, unusual book - skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.
Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration - a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.
Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung - who regarded himself as a scientist - is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets - the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes - have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology."
The rest of this (very long) article can be found here:
“What's happening behind those houses? Pictured here are not auroras but nearby light pillars, a nearby phenomenon that can appear as a distant one.
In most places on Earth, a lucky viewer can see a Sun-pillar, a column of light appearing to extend up from the Sun caused by flat fluttering ice-crystals reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere. Usually these ice crystals evaporate before reaching the ground. During freezing temperatures, however, flat fluttering ice crystals may form near the ground in a form of light snow, sometimes known as a crystal fog. These ice crystals may then reflect ground lights in columns not unlike a Sun-pillar. The featured image was taken in Fort Wainwright near Fairbanks in central Alaska.”
"Enough already. Enough with the distractions. Enough with the partisan jousting. Enough with the sniping and name-calling and mud-slinging that do nothing to make this country safer or freer or more just. We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long. We are approaching a reckoning.
This is the point, as the poet W. B. Yeats warned, when things fall apart and anarchy is loosed upon the world. We have seen this convergence before in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mussolini’s Italy, and in Mao’s China: the rise of strongmen and demagogues, the ascendency of profit-driven politics over deep-seated principles, the warring nationalism that seeks to divide and conquer, the callous disregard for basic human rights and dignity, and the silence of people who should know better. Yet no matter how many times the world has been down this road before, we can’t seem to avoid repeating the deadly mistakes of the past.
This is not just playing out on a national and international scale. It is wreaking havoc at the most immediate level, as well, creating rifts and polarities within families and friends, neighborhoods and communities that keep the populace warring among themselves and incapable of presenting a united front in the face of the government’s goose-stepping despotism.
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, disguised as “the better good,” marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and carried out by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
For too long now, the American people have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing - asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on - because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.
Yet the unavoidable truth is that the government - through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny - has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
At its core, this is not a debate about politics, or constitutionalism, or even tyranny disguised as law-and-order. This is a condemnation of the monsters with human faces who walk among us. Many of them work for the U.S. government.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film "They Live", which was released thirty-five years ago and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age. Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government. Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In "Escape from New York," Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America. In "The Thing" a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In "Christine" the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage. In In the "Mouth of Madness," Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s "They Live," in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace - blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives - has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses - Hoffman lenses - that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage. When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in "They Live" is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture. A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of "They Live" provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: what we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality. Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in "They Live" warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.” We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth. From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, pandemics, mass shootings, etc.). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats. We are little more than expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism - a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar? Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests - not elected by the citizenry - rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime? The answer is the same in every age: fear. Fear makes people stupid.
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on. The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is transforming the populace into fearful, compliant, pacified zombies content to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
This brings me back to "They Live," in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled. When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Injustice is growing. Inequality is growing. A concern for human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others. Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us? The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight. Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hypno-transmitter in "They Live" he delivers a wake-up call for freedom. As Nada memorably declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” In other words: we need to get active and take a stand for what’s really important. Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
As I make clear in my book "Battlefield America: The War on the American People" and in its fictional counterpart "The Erik Blair Diaries," the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight. Wake up, America. If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep."
In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the
collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.
by Chris Hedges
"The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.
In “Hitler and the Germans,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler - gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar - mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact.
These idiots, who promise to recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They accelerate the collapse. Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs. They make war on universities, banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vaccines as a pretext to expand mass surveillance and data sharing, strip legal residents of their rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity. Reality, whether the climate crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become.
Hannah Arendt blames a society that willingly embraces radical evil on this collective “thoughtlessness.” Desperate to escape from the stagnation, where they and their children are trapped, hopeless and in despair, a betrayed population is conditioned to exploit everyone around them in a desperate scramble to advance. People are objects to be used, mirroring the cruelty inflicted by the ruling class.
A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic society, these attributes are despised and criminalized. Those who exhibit them are condemned as stupid; “a man [or woman] who behaves in this way,” Voegelin notes, “will be socially boycotted.” But the social, cultural and moral norms in a diseased society are inverted. The attributes that sustain an open society - a concern for the common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrifice - are ridiculed. They are detrimental to existence in a diseased society.
When a society, as Plato notes, abandons the common good, it always unleashes amoral lusts - violence, greed and sexual exploitation - and fosters magical thinking, the focus of my book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.” The only thing these dying regimes do well is spectacle. These bread and circus acts - like Trump’s $40 million Army parade to be held on his birthday on June 14 - keep a distressed population entertained.
The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality. The population is conditioned by mass culture, dominated by sexual commodification, banal and mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, to blame itself for failure.
Søren Kierkegaard in “The Present Age” warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is, as Kierkegaard writes, a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.” In short, we became part of a herd, “unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization — and yet are held together as a whole.” Those who question the public, those who denounce the corruption of the ruling class, are dismissed as dreamers, freaks or traitors. But only they, according to the Greek definition of thepolis, can be considered citizens.
Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us.
It is tempting to personalize the decay, as if ridding ourselves of Trump will return us to sanity and sobriety. But the rot and corruption has ruined all of our democratic institutions, which function in form, not in content. The consent of the governed is a cruel joke. Congress is a club on the take from billionaires and corporations. The courts are appendages of corporations and the rich. The press is an echo chamber of the elites, some of whom do not like Trump, but none of whom advocate the social and political reforms that could save us from despotism. It is about how we dress up despotism, not despotism itself.
The historian Ramsay MacMullen, in “Corruption and the Decline of Rome,” writes that what destroyed the Roman Empire was “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.” Power became about enriching private interests. This misdirection renders government powerless, at least as an institution that can address the needs and protect the rights of the citizenry. Our government, in this sense, is powerless. It is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards.
“The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,” Edward Gibbon writes. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”
The Roman emperor Commodus, like Trump, was entranced with his own vanity. He commissioned statues of himself as Herculesand had little interest in governance. He fancied himself a star of the arena, staging gladiatorial contests where he was crowned the victor and killing lions with a bow and arrow. The empire - he renamed Rome the Colonia Commodiana (Colony of Commodus) - was a vehicle to satiate his bottomless narcissism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices the way Trump sells pardons and favors to those who invest in his cryptocurrencies or donate to his inauguration committee or presidential library.
Finally, the emperor’s advisors arranged to have him strangled to death in his bath by a professional wrestler after he announced that he would assume the consulship dressed as a gladiator. But his assassination did nothing to halt the decline. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax who was assassinated three months later. The Praetorian Guards auctioned off the office of emperor. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted 66 days. There would be five emperors in A.D. 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus.
Like the late Roman Empire, our republic is dead. Our constitutional rights - due process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and dissent - have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These rights exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are absurd.
Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war: "A Klee painting namedAngelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
Our decay, our illiteracy and collective retreat from reality, was long in the making. The steady erosion of our rights, especially our rights as voters, the transformation of the organs of state into tools of exploitation, the immiseration of the working poor and middle class, the lies that saturate our airwaves, the degrading of public education, the endless and futile wars, the staggering public debt, the collapse of our physical infrastructure, mirror the last days of all empires. Trump the pyromaniac entertains us as we go down."
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