D Benton Smith
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Taking down James O’Keefe is an information war attack almost without precedent. Only the imprisonment of Julius Assange and the removal of a sitting President (Trump) from the world’s social media (Twitter, etc.) are any larger.
It takes real juice to do things like that. Only the largest national and international institutions have that level of power.
Using that power so publicly will expose the hands that wield it. By the time this latest atrocity plays out expect to see the hand of a lot of hedge funds, bankers, spy agencies, and a coincidentally disproportionate number of fellows with Semitic last names.
Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address may well go down in history as the most informative reports to the nation in living memory, because everyone who watched it now knows the state we’re in.
@JohnDay
Sorry to take so long getting back to you about those traffic lights. I spent the morning going to one of my favorite towns in the hemisphere, Hermann, Missouri. Not only is it charming and quaint, with the hands down finest beer, wine and whisky known, it is also home to the best bratwurst this side of Thüringen. The billboard on the way into town proclaims “Best Wurst in the Country!”, and they ain’t lying.
Thank God for traffic lights on the highway of life. They give you a chance to stop, look around, and figure out where you are and whether or not you are there yet. One of these days, when I’m stopped at one of those lights, I’m just gonna hop out and walk away.
Why Wealth, Fame and Power Are A Bait & Switch Con
No matter how much food you have, or how good it tastes, you can only eat one meal.
No matter how far you go or how fast you got there, wherever you are you are still just there.
No matter how many rooms you own, you can only be in one of them.
No matter how luxurious your surroundings you can only experience what you can perceive and evaluate.
No matter the amount of fame you desire the fame you receive can never exceed the amount of fame that you truly believe is deservedly yours. Other people have got nothing to do with it, because they can’t do your believing for you.
No matter how powerful others contribute to making you powerful personally, your personal power consists only of what you yourself have the power to do.
No matter how long you live you are only as alive as you’re actually living.
And doesn’t that make the irony so much sweeter the probability, in the event of a complete collapse of civilization, that it will be the aboriginals who survive and thrive quite nicely (as they did for many uncivilized millennia) while it will be techno-dependent TPTB who go extinct ?
It’s the same people who put up (and then blew up) the Georgia Guide Stones, that are running all of the really big AI systems.
What if they are using those AI’s to achieve the goals carved into the stones?
Sure hope not, because an AI programmed to facilitate a goal, adaptively reprogramming itself to remove all obstacles, sure isn’t going to tell them that a goal it was designed to reach is a rotten idea.
Kafka wasn’t far from the mark.
That balloon story was just too weird, right?
That’s what I think, too.
Too weird. From startling start to anticlimactic brushing into the memory hole. TOO weird.
No matter how you parse the possibilities the story comes up BULLSHIT every time. Even the “a distraction too boring to bother with” angle doesn’t wash as things now stand.
Somethin’s up, boys and girls. (pun unintentional. Don’t know how I missed it)
The same trick that I just quipped to @Red can be applied in many other industries. Defense, for example. I start the wars that require expensive armies and weapons to be purchased from me at an enormous profit, AND I set the tax rates extracted from the “protected” citizens to pay for all those armies/weapons. Wham, bam, thankyou ma’am.
Want some other examples where the same, identifiable, individual people & gangs control BOTH of the two moving parts in such a money machine?
Here’s a short list : every major institutionalized endeavor on the planet from soup to nuts. Food, energy, health, security, education, Communications, etc, etc. ad infinitum.
No great stretch of the imagination is required to see that this exactly what happened to almost the whole planet. When a single power controls the production of a necessity, the price of the necessity, as well as control the identity of who will receive the item and who will pay it . . . . then the game is over.
It was not until that nearly hegemonic Cabal tried to consolidate it’s power into ONE central hub that there was any meaningful push-back anywhere. Lucky for us that the push-back was enough to beat back the attempt THIS time.
How many of us as kids playing Monopoly realized at the time that the game could be so deadly.
If I was a big hospital network that sets prices for treatments, and was also an insurance company that decided what price it will pay to the hospital and what premiums to charge my insurance customers for that protection, then I think I could make a whole lot of money for awhile.
“Hopefully the King will make someone pay the price for this.”
Elsewhere on the net is a rumor that a hiring call for assassins has gone out to the darker layers of the martial arts community in Thailand and is being taken seriously by serious people.
We all speculate about how the current leadership could be so stupid in the face of the facts. Here’s a piece of the answer. Leadership operates on the basis of hierarchies of bosses commanding layers of minions. That’s a very simple and efficient arrangement, really, with many merits but at least one intrinsic mortal flaw.
Sooner or later in every powerful hierarchy those who answer to superiors discover that it is not always wise or safe to tell straight truthful facts to the boss. They learn that it’s safer to tell the boss what the boss want to hear. In other words, don’t speak truth to power if you care about your job, your paycheck or your neck.
From that boot licking minion’s moment of clarity onward , the upper echelons of that pyramid of power will become more and more stupid and ill informed. Eventually the leadership becomes nothing but a hubris filled balloon full of the flattering and reassuring flasified bullshit that is now fed to them as their exclusive diet.
Only the info that makes them sure they’re still on top is allowed to filter upward. They think they know everything when in fact they know practically nothing.
Don’t even think about getting the truth through to top leadership, because in addition to their own greed and pride driven ego centrism they are also insulated from reality (i.e. isolated from straight truthful facts) by layer upon layer of sycophantic gate-keepers whose lives and livelihoods depend upon keeping the boss happy.
It’s been a full day since the Chinese balloon showed up over America and despite all that time and thousands of professional liars on the payroll, so far nobody has come up with a plausible lie to explain why it’s there or why we haven’t done much about it. I find that more interesting (and scary) than the balloon itself.
That was a lot of work, but the destination was worth it, and like you said, not all that complicated either.
The Western Empire and its vassal (mostly European) states are living in a “shrinking bubble” (of their own making within which they can still exercise some degree of enforceable influence , and from which they belligerently refuse to be rescued.
So be it.
It will be interesting to see what sort of new nations discover themselves and coalesce into true nationhood within those geographical regions. The general populations of those places will stay put and continue to be very much as they are now (genetically, linguistically and culturally, albeit with some migrational smudginess) but I expect a flurry of names and labels to ensue while they sort things out and give themselves new borders.
@Oroboros Fashion Statements
The thing about fashion statements is that you can never be quite sure about who the fashion designers are making the statement TO. Are they talkin to us? Or are they sniggering to each other ABOUT us?
So, what happens to the Nord Americanos now that the ax of reality is falling and our severely deindustrialized (practically de-everything-ized) future continues to collapse around us?
My hopeful opinion is that from the uncouth were we fashioned, and to the uncouth we shall return.
Being couth makes a fine target to think you aspire to, but heaven help those who achieve it.
The West (read as “The Cabal”) has called for the dissolution and divvying up of all of Russia, and they have done so through so many channels and by so many top rank officials that it would be cumbersome and pointless to list them all.
Alright. They’ve made it quite clear what they want. But every time I hear what they want I’m instantly confounded by the same basic question: By what means and at whose hand is this Herculean task meant to be accomplished?
A bunch of pipsqueak proxies, using pop-guns?
Russia be big, bro, and they are packing major hardware. I see America talking the talk but when I tally up who they’ve got on their side, and how many physically/mentally fit boots and bombs they can put on the ground what I keep coming up with is a slaughter of idiots.
When all is said and duly AI computer modeled the “numbers” (of Great Western Empire vs everyone who hates them) work out to roughly 10:1 AGAINST the vaccinated overweight cognitively challenged broke pasty white woke Eur-Anglo sissies.
They talk the talk alright. In fact they hog the podium with an iron fist. But when it comes to walking the walk they’re friggin quadriplegic.
@DrD
“It’s relative.”
Which would then mean that everyone who looks at it that way is a “relativist”, and we all know that we don’t get to pick our relativists.
The stunningly profound irony of Baldwin’s statement is not that it is a criticism of either the included or the excluded. It is that the statement is equally true of both cohorts. Just as the presence of the excluded among the included wrecks what the included wish their world to be, so does the presence of the included wreck things for the excluded . . . and for the same reason.
What we’re seeing in that relationship is a true dichotomy, and one that we all live in. It cannot reconcile because that would necessarily entail either inclusion of all, or exclusion of all . . . . both of which conditions are impossible in a Universe that literally runs on polarity.
You would think that the Woke West would be a thousand percent behind Vladimir Putin’s efforts in Ukraine. All that he’s trying to do, and which he has publicly stated many times, is to turn Ukraine into a Gun Free Zone
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels ?
Little Rascals ?
Dead Pool ?Say, this is sorta fun, I hope others jump in with some funnier guesses.
The guys who are bringing us the war are the guys who brought us the deathvax are the guys who brought us the bioweapon spike protein who are the guys who brought us the military industrial complex who are the guys who brought us the Hegemonic Empire of Lies who are the guys who own means and profit from war. I mean , it’s all the SAME guys, and they’re all “rich” by means of the same counterfeit money, which they print at will in whatever quantities they need to buy the people and things that they need to go on being the owners.
Anybody see a clear way off of this merry-go-down-to-hell?
I mean, I’m willing to swear off counterfeit money if you are.
@jb-hb
@aspnaz
and several of you other guys, have asked and/or wondered in general, “What happened that caused awfulness? Agriculture? That moment of becoming not and animal. Loss of innocence.”From what I’ve been able to figure out (and as mentioned in the Christian Bible and elsewhere) , yes. That’s pretty much it. You have free will. You have the ability to think. You reckoned to taste of true knowledge. Alright then, you wanted it and that’s what you received.
Now you’ve got to work and climb your arduous way up (or down) that perilous scale of spiritual awareness and responsibility until you get to a level that’s more acceptable (not mention more pleasant and comfortable). From what I’ve experienced so far (and I really am just getting started) God is right there accessible to you at all times to help you along the way. He’s is always listening. He will always answer every question you ask, truthfully, and in terms you are readily able to understand.
He will also never, EVER hurt you or lie to you. . . . but has granted you true free will, and that includes the free will to hurt yourself and others if that’s what you insist upon using it for.
You all know that there is nothing new to anything that I just said. This is just one guys confirmation that in my personal experience those time tested truths are, indeed, quite dependably true. I hope you will find them the same and better.
Thankyou for the beautiful, earnest and real communication. It helps all of us, perhaps more than you know.
@JohnDay
Science jokes aren’t easy, especially with audiences as tough as TAE. I was especially proud of the double pun at the end , and that the whole thing was so topical, with nukes and extinction and CO2 and everything.
No laugh? No snort of derision? Ah, well. Telling puns will just have to be it’s own reward, I guess.
Atheism is one of the most stubbornly held and intransigent religious beliefs on the planet. It is seldom relinquished until the bitter end, when its devotee are completely cornered by every other possible evasion of truth being exhausted. Even then, acceptance of God is usually preceded by truly pyrotechnic tantrums of denial.
Ya just gotta be patient while they get it out of their system.
@JohnDay
What did the first oxygen producing eukaryotic cyanobacteria say to the anaerobic noneukaryotic microbes who preceded them as Earth’s hegemonically dominant species?
“Back off, scum, or we’ll launch preemptive nucleus war on your carbonic little acids.”
The only thing that makes humans feel worse than thinking they know what’s going to happen next is the realization that they don’t really know, so it’s pretty pointless to think it. Historians and other reporters tell us that it was even worse back in the days that they tell us to think those days actually were, but thankfully now we have computers and AI and networks to help us think about what it might have been back then. Great. Computer assisted second-hand guess work. That should help.
In regard to perpetual motion:
Not intending to be facetious or “wise guy” in any way, I actually do have an example of such a perpetual motion device: The cosmological physical Universe itself was set in motion and will apparently run forever (Some theoretical physicists have alternative theories to suggest eventual motionlessness, but they are in a minority, and do not include the historically acknowledged greatest of physicists)
@jb-hb queried, “Life oppressive?”
Well I’m fairly certain that all of those teeth and claws didn’t evolve for mere decorative purposes.
Just when you thought that the Cabal’s plans were falling apart I’ve gotta go and tell ya that their plan is right on schedule.
The plan is to collapse Civilization, and this ain’t their first rodeo. They plan to do it just like they did it last time. And pretty much exactly the same way, but with a few new flourishes.
Last time it was done by halting large scale international commerce, and then waiting for the consequences of that to starve and rob and brutalize people into submission. Way too slow. This time they are pre-starving, pre-robbing and pre-brutalizing folks in advance. That way, when the large scale commerce crashes to near zero overnight, the other support systems will have already been degraded and thus unable to forestall death. Should go much much faster this time.
Incidentally, the last time these jokers pulled off the collapse caper would be the Bronze Age Collapse three thousand years ago.
Dimwit compromised paid off prostituted academic historians will try to convince you that the Bronze Age Collapse of 1277 BCE was the most mysteriously inexplicable historical puzzles since the “Missing Link”.
Horse shit. It ain’t no mystery at all.
Back then, just like now, Civilization (with a capital C) existed on the foundational bedrock of large scale international transshipment of raw materials and manufactured goods. That worked great for thousands of years, but then started to wobble as the golden goose was gradually (and then rapidly) killed off by corruption and fraud milking the system for more than it was actually producing.
Back then, just like now, such large scale shipment of high value cargoes was totally dependent upon THREE other factors (aside from having the goods to ship and having things to trade for those goods upon delivery) and those three other factors were :#1) an agreed medium of exchange that both buyer and seller trusted, and #2) Assurances (“Insurance”?) that before the goods left port that the shipper would, dependably, NOT lose everything if the deal went sour for some reason. And finally #3) A dependable trustworthy means of ENFORCING the “laws” regarding both factor #1 AND factor #2 (that is to say, money/currency/banking AND contracts/laws/insurance.)
The Bronze Age Collapse was caused by the catastrophic, virtually instantaneous and simultaneous failure of the trusted currency, the trusted enforcement of law regarding contracts and insurances which shippers absolutely had to have before they could allow ships laden with existentially important valuable goods to leave port.
Without the currency, insurance and law enforcement necessary to the movement of shipments, no big shipments moved. The large scale international shipment of raw materials and manufactured goods simply STOPPED. Since Civilization depended upon that commerce Civilization itself simply stopped along with it.
Who dunnit?
Why the guys who owned and ran the currency, insurance and financial law enforcement, that’s who. The murkily hidden Cabal I so often refer to. The “Owners”, “Bankers” and “Lawyers” (AND THEIR BOSSES) in grossly oversimplified other words.
Just like now.
And why would they want to do that?
Because most poor blokes with children to feed, caught between the rock of slavery to overlords and the hard place of violence & starvation-driven lawless chaos will accept ANY degree of slavery and despotic control in exchange for rescue from the expectation of certain death.
The guys who currently own and run the currency, insurance and financial law enforcement ( The “Owners” Cabal in other words) now have it in mind to replay what worked so well in 1277 BCE. Back then they emerged from the chaos in control of ALL commerce that involved money and currencies (not just large scale international shipping and super-sized single transactions). This time around they intend to emerge in control of EVERYTHING (not just mega whumping finance and commerce). They want the entire enchilada, lock, stock, barrel and chromosome.
That’s the plan, and in THEIR view, at least, it’s proceeding right on schedule. Bronze Age Collapse, version 2.0, here we come. (Ain’t it just awe inspiring what super-computers, AI and electronic networking can accomplish and fuck up?)
Will they succeed?
Well, the only way to be CERTAIN about the answer to that question would be to stop them and have done with it, otherwise it’s just gonna be a matter of letting things roll as they are and finding out the hard way.
The best summary of the Ukraine War situation that I have ever heard. Gonzalo Lira lays it down concisely in eloquent conversationally toned explanation back to it’s beginnings. In 59 minutes and 21 seconds you will understand the Ukraine conflict, and what it means for the rest of us. Here’s the link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loVtI_7xRHw
Jim Kunstler is, as usual, a day late and a dollar short. It’s not that any particular point of his fine grained analysis of American power politics is wrong in itself. It’s that he refuses to look, or see, or evaluate the precedents and consequences of what’s happening BEYOND and BEFORE the itsy bitsy West-Centric (almost Yankee Centric) view of the world, which in fact and in truth is much much larger and far far wider world that he’s got the balls to confront. As it has been since long before James was born.
Kunstler’s stuff is more than good. What he says has real value and I read him twice a week without fail and learn something new from it every time. So, by all means, keep on truckin’, Jim. I guess I’ve just gotta learn to accept the disappointment along with the pleasure.
@JohnDay
“Really distracting”, definitely yes it is that, and also perilous, and entertaining, and probably a classroom experience essential to our spiritual growth as well.
Talk about a tough class with a steep grading curve!
An immortal soul who “identifies” (meaning, literally believes it is who & what they are “identifying” with)) as a short warranty squishy organic robot operated by a gooey biological brain that’s running an AI program called “Abstract Reasonable Thinking” is very VERY comparable to that fat middle-aged man on European television the other day who “identified” as a woman who could figure skate. Pathetically wrong on both counts. Neither one of those grotesque misidentifications was even remotely true, as is hilariously obvious in the video. (click here if you want to see the full awful cringeworthy display: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/inexperienced-trans-figure-skater-performs-european-championship-hilarious-results )
An aware soul running a high quality soft robot properly can be a marvelous performance to behold, but that same robot running on it’s own . . . with no consciously aware soul at the controls, is just PURE psychopath. If for some reason it concludes that killing something is desirable then it can do so with absolutely no remorse whatsoever because “systems” do not feel remorse . . . . or any other feeling for that matter. The cerebral AI that the squishy robot is running on is not capable of knowing good from bad . . . . because IT IS A FUCKING AI, duh ! A mechanism can’t actual KNOW anything.!!
But brother, that human-body brain-based AI is just astounding in what it can do, almost beyond belief. So wondrously complex and intentionally designed that only a true God could have made it. It’s a device so sublimely capable that it almost runs itself, but it does NOT know good from bad or virtue from depravity.
Those elements, and the conscious judgment to know which one should be used (and when), are intended to be provided by YOU.
Your vaunted IQ and ability to process immeasurable troves of abstract information are vastly more hindrance than help at such times, because although brainiac level IQ can provide entrancingly enticing games and “answers” IT ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT provide judgment or evaluation of what are good games and answers rather than BAD games and answers.
In the final analysis all of that thinking is just another form of “rules based” (policy based, facts based, science based, etc etc whatever) ARTIFICIAL intelligence, and the aware choice of good over bad remains untouched right there where it always was: in YOUR consciously aware ability to know and consciously choose of your own free will which one is which for reals.
I know there are a whole bunch of you “severely gifted” (in the words of Christopher Langan) extraordinarily high IQ persons lurking and commenting here on TAE. Takes one to know one.
Well, what I’m telling you smart asses is to throttle back the love affair with abstract intellect, and up the game of simple uncomplicated AWARENESS of what is divine and good, as compared to what is diabolical and bad.
Of course all of you shall inevitably get around to doing that. Eventually. After exhausting all of the other (wrong) possibilities.
But the really smart ones will start doing it now.
The solution to our dilemma is not a brain thing. It’s a soul thing. The advice to, “Get right with God” ain’t far off the mark.
