Quote:The Blob Begins to Quiver

“…the Permanent State lacks the courage to take hard decisions – to say to Moscow, ‘Let us put this unfortunate episode (Ukraine) behind us. Dig out those draft treaties you wrote in December 2021, and let’s see how we can work together, to restore some functionality again to Europe’.” — Alasdair Crooke

When you deny what is self-evident, you are at war with reality, and that never ends well. This is the ultimate disposition of our country’s years-long misadventure in maximum dishonesty. The American administrative Blob has not just lied about everything it does, but used the government machinery at hand to destroy everything it touches in a terminal-hysterical effort to cover up its misdeeds — including especially its crimes against its own people.

Get this: there is no way that Ukraine can avoid defeat in its US-provoked struggle with Russia. Russia has every advantage. It is next door to Ukraine. It has robust arms production capacity. The terrain of the war is its own historic “borderland,” which it has controlled since the 18th century, except for the past thirty years when Ukraine functioned as Grift Central for US military contractors and their political enablers. Despite massive arms assistance from the US and grudging contributions from the NATO contingent in Europe, there is almost nothing left of the Ukrainian military in troops, equipment, and munitions. Ukraine will return eventually to demilitarized “borderland” status.

What are NATO’s alternatives now? It can try to return to negotiation. Russia has no reason to trust that process, given how the Minsk 1 and 2 accords worked out (NATO and the US willfully and dishonestly voided them). The US and NATO could send their own troops into Ukraine, but that would be suicide, considering the alliance’s arms and munitions drawdown and America’s feminized army. The US could go a little further and provoke a nuclear exchange (suicide by other means) — and given the level of terminal-hysterical insanity in the US Blob, that’s not out of the question.

One likely, reality-based alternative is to stand by and let Russia complete its Special Military Operation to pacify and neutralize Ukraine. The prevailing theory is that this would be the end of America’s world dominance militarily, and effectively the end of NATO, but also the end financially for the US, as the non-West abandons the dollar. In that scenario, the BRICs dump their trillions in US bond holdings, sending all that putative “money” back to America, stoking a king-hell inflation, effectively bankrupting us. It would be the final fruit of the disastrous “Joe Biden” regime imposed on us via election fraud by the Blob: the US reduced in a few short years to a broke, socially disordered, marginalized power susceptible to its own political breakup — not a tantalizing outcome, but perhaps better than turning the planet Earth into a smoldering ashtray.

That outcome would force our country to turn inward and face its own stupendous failures of honor, decency, and integrity. It would be the end of the Blob’s hegemony inside the USA. The question is whether the Blob sets America’s house on fire in the attempt to save itself and escape a legal accounting for its crimes. One kindling stack already burning is the pile-up of jive prosecutions aimed at Mr. Trump. You know that the attempt to kick him off the game-board using Special Counsel Jack Smith may easily lead to severe civil disorder, and possibly a counter-coup, a US first!

The current Mar-a-Lago “Doc Box” case is as much a complete fabrication as were RussiaGate and Impeachment Number One — Mr. Trump’s telephone inquiry to Ukraine about the Biden family grifting operations there, now firmly documented to be true. An upright judge would summarily dismiss the Mar-a-Lago case and slam sanctions on the US attorneys involved, including disbarment and criminal investigation for mounting a maliciously fraudulent prosecution. AG Merrick Garland and his deputy, Lisa Monaco, obviously would have some ‘splainin’ to do, possibly before juries.

A long list of public figures populating the Blob await a reckoning: Hillary and Bill Clinton and their retainers, Barack Obama and retinue, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Christopher Wray (plus Rosenstein, Strzok, McCabe, Carlin, Ohr, Mueller, Weissmann, Horowitz, Atkinson, Ciaramella, Vindman), Rep. Adam Schiff, Senator Mark Warner, William Barr, Avril Haines, Marie Yovanovitch, William Burns, James Boasberg, Marc Elias, Michael Bromwich, David Laufman, Alejandro Mayorkas, Xavier Baccera, Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, Lloyd Austin. Mark Milley, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Ron Klain, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney… the list goes way on, but there’s a start.

     The weeks of summer 2023 are the fulcrum for a great public attitude adjustment. The Blob’s psy-ops are finally failing among just enough of the formerly mind-fucked to tip the national consensus against the gang behind all this treasonous political depravity. Even the so-called mainstream media is running scared. If they happened to turn in a desperate act of self-preservation, it will be all over for the Blob.

Edward Cartwright absently tossed a handful of corn towards the expectant chickens and wondered if today he'd find
the effort to finish the coop he'd half-built before Lillian's disappearance. Tugging closed the embroidered seed bag his
wife had sewn for him when he first bought the birds in Weathercote, he still found it hard to believe that two seasons
had passed since she'd heard one of the hens squawking, stepped out of the kitchen door and vanished.

A small search party was mustered from the nearby hamlet of Weathercote and along with his son Mathew, the wary
party scoured the surrounding woods until darkness demanded they suspended their hunt for the love of Edward's life.
When harvest time came around, the craggy-faced man agreed with the eight villagers who'd combed four leagues in
every direction of his farm that it was time for them to return to their own homes and move on. Edward had watched
the men leave and wondered if he would ever be able to do the same.

They'd married twenty summers ago and it hadn't been long before Mathew and then Marjorie came along to help work
the acreage piece of land he'd bought when Edward realised he loved the young flaxen-haired colleen from Flixton Moor.
A handsome son and a beautiful daughter, both married off to good families and now their father's only companions
were the ten feathered fowl pecking in the dirt around his feet.

"So what happened to her?" Edward murmured vacantly as he turned to return to the cabin he'd built with his own two
hands But the wattle-shaking chickens failed to relate what they'd seen in the dusty yard on that life-changing day and
continued to focus on probing for their breakfast. In a small copse only a decent stroll from the village of Weathercote,
the remains of a woman's mutilated body lay beneath a large growth of Hosta.
Mrs Cartwright had been the first victim of The Cold Caller.
.................................................................

To the small woman in the big hat, the wet Timothy grass lining the wheelbarrow-wide track out of the fishing village
of Shellport was a symbolic representation of how she felt as it washed away the faint whiff of standing water from
her bare feet. It wasn't much, but the cool feeling around her toes was a welcomed tonic that went a long way to clear
the doldrums she'd been mired in since her encounter with the malodorous bogie who'd stolen Daisy Manning.

The rain had eased and the scudding grey clouds coming inland seemed to have unloaded the majority of their cargo
just before they came ashore. With her trusty canvas satchel tapping lightly on her thigh, she mentally agreed with
herself that this rarely-used trail up among the overgrown dunes and out towards Calder's Way would provide enough
time to repair her sullied spirit after the recent undertaking of removing of the distasteful Mistle-Hob from the swaying
bed of reeds below.

The picayune figure paused for a moment at the apex of the hill and tugging the rim of her headwear, sucked in the
chilly salty breeze and forced a smile on her little face that failed to reach her eyes. The troubling calvary was behind
her now and heading for a more contemporary type of highway, the travelling artisan of old-style majick known as
Peggy Powler silently rejoiced that she was exiting away the coastal community during the winter weather.

The little Witch's satisfaction of leaving was no reflection on the quiet harbour village or its affable residents, it was
simply that Peggy had always believed the shores of the Great Sea were for warmer times, not when storms lashed
the seaboard on a daily basis. Although -Peggy had to admit to her  bleak surroundings, bodily wrestling the girl from
the ditch-Goblin was a strong component to helping her departure.

The remnants of the altercation with the iniquitous bog spirit and the eventual recovery of Daisy Manning had taken
it out of her. Even now, peering down at the undulating stretch of green-blue reeds that seemed to be creeping ever
closer to the Manning residence, the subdued bare-footed half-Fae made a silent pledge that once a quiet place
appeared beside the well-trodden turnpike, Peggy would spend some time repairing her flagging spirits by means of
some much-needed shut-eye and tad of self-reflection.
.................................................................

As the driving rain continued to beat its tattoo on the scabrous bark of the hollow willow tree, Peggy leaned forward
in the darkness of the willow's cavity and gently abetted a bohemian draught to draw life into some foraged kindling.
Wisps of smoke from the weak campfire sought escape from the deciduous husk and found dilution in the night's
tempest outside. "Come on yer' bugger, give me a flame" the shivering sibyl murmured to the sputtering fuel as she
ruminated on the last couple of days.

It had been only after the pair of exhausted females had scrambled out of the foul-smelling reedbed that a memory
from Peggy's past had surfaced just like the stinking oily substance that materialised in the water around her ankles
as she throttled the last breath out of the young girl's captor. It was the question an old man had warned of when
she was still losing her yearning for the Carnival and her aunt's devil-may-care commentary.

Many of the concerned maritime members of Shellport had been waiting on the nearest point of the harbour and
seeing Peggy and Daisy's appearance from the man-high sedges, apron-flapping women with warpaint of flour
on their faces and hand-calloused piscators of lobsters had raced down into the mud to retrieve one of their own.

Of course, afterwards during the many toasts in the village's only tavern, Peggy Powler's name was celebrated in
gratitude and the drained necromancer had accepted the pummels on her back and politely refused the requests
to refill her flagon. Round ruddy-faced women loomed into the tired Witch's view with promises that she'd never
go hungry during her travels and the pile of wax paper-wrapped foods next to the unwanted beer were testament
to those affirmations.

Stealthily creeping out of the cacophonous inn, Peggy breathed in deeply as she stared at the indifferent winter
moon above and just like the pedestrian click of the Deathwatch Beetle, she posed the question that Myrddin the
greatest of all Wizards had once told her she would have to ask herself during her journeys across the land.
She knew it was there to be confronted.

During the battle for Daisy Manning, the Mistle-Hob had inadvertently hit a nerve by suggesting Peggy's reason
for meeting the loathsome Imp holding the terrified girl by the hair was because she was an outsider like himself.
After several fruitless attempts with majick to weaken the laughing kobold's grip on the half-conscious lassie, the
immediate situation had required Peggy to physically attack the bugbear and get it to loosen its choking grasp.

It was a fight she knew she couldn't win and only when a large rock has suddenly swooped in over her shoulder
and pounded the creature into obliviousness, did the gasping and soaked augurer realise it was Daisy who had
saved them both. Yes, there'd been failures to oust the multitude of monsters Peggy had waged war with and
in many of those occasions, assistance from human and Fae-alike had been a major contributing factor.

But as she plunged the senseless Swamp-Goblin's head into the putrid brackish water and watched the last of
the bubbles break the surface, Peggy felt another type of vapour had been released, a breath carrying a question
born not of a need to know, but from doubt. Daisy had saved the day, the youngster who cavorts around drying
lobster pots and pleased old-timers by listening to their tales of the Great Sea, she was the one who's tankard
should be brimming. The cold moon looked back and its silence was condemning.

Coaxing the dank tinder to ignite, the little wandering Witch mused on the idea that maybe she had become an
albatross to those who she believed once needed her help and Myrddin's warning had truly surfaced just like the
dead Mistle-Hob's battered face had done from its final baptism. But resisting the need to return to her earlier
doldrums, Peggy's mind sought other reasons to explain a possible need for retirement.

The flourishing of the new religion was also a factor to be deliberated when surveying the possible abandonment
of her vocation. Churches to the voguish denomination were cropping up in many of villages Peggy had visited
lately and even though a cool taciturnity existed between the clergymen and herself, Peggy had often wondered
when the tides would shift and the old ways become obsolete.

Gazing around at the disintegrating version of a Witch's chancel and her aches from dealing with the dyke-roaming
brigand of Shellport, maybe that time had finally arrived to call it a day and hang up her satchel for good. With the
fragile fire slowly coming to life, the lonely woman in the rotted willow leaned back into the moving shadows and
allowed sleep to soothe her worries.

This is a documentary of our government's business in protecting us from our bad choices.

And any time you choose to go against what is profitable to big corporations then our government decides you are bad.

We make choices that we are allowed to make. Any choices we make that benefits big business almost never benefits us. It they are from the government, they will not be there to help "us".

The Illusion of Democracy: Who Really Controls our Lives?

Quote:    Life is about choice. What we eat, what we read, who we elect; every day we make choices that determine how we want to live. But what if these choices are just an illusion? In an era where regulations and red tape rule every industry, where lobby groups and big business wield more influence than ever before, our daily choices have become increasingly limited. Focusing on key areas such as food, medicine, finance, and media, Freedom From Choice provides viewers with a glimpse at the myriad of ways their lives are being dictated, and tells us who stands to gain. Director: Tim Delmastro Full Documentary Original Title: Freedom from Choice (2014)

Hi all 

This video has some very interesting items/discoveries that were found. One an ancient nuclear power plant.
They mention a book from the nineties , that I will be getting. 
It would be hard to fake 50k statues, but who knows. 

https://www.bitchute.com/video/pIGVzoID9xMF/

I have nothing to say other than listen to this and tell us what you think of the new words of the National Anthem.

No No No, they are not trying to starve anyone... Dairy cows just fart too much and need to be culled. Have you ever heard of anything so insane? Well, nevermind, we hear insane shit everyday now.


IRISH FARMERS OUTRAGED AS GOVERNMENT MOVES TO CULL 200,000 HEALTHY COWS TO MEET CLIMATE GOALS

https://slaynews.com/news/irish-farmers-...ate-goals/

Quote:Farmers in Ireland are expressing outrage over the globalist Irish government’s decision to cull 200,000 of the nation’s healthy cows to meet the green agenda’s climate goals.


The government is moving to reduce national cattle numbers over claims they contribute to “climate change” due to “carbon emissions.”

A report by the Irish Department of Agriculture outlined how 200,000 cows could be killed over the next three years to meet carbon targets.

The plan would reportedly come at a cost of around 600 million euros to taxpayers, with the document indicating that 5,000 euros per cow would be offered as compensation.

The country’s Environmental Protection Agency said that the agriculture industry was creating nearly 40 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions there, and much of it stems from the methane in livestock and the use of nitrogen fertilizer.

The country has committed to reducing its agricultural emissions by 25 percent by the year 2030.
They are calling the plan a “dairy reduction scheme,” but the result is the senseless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of animals in the name of somehow helping the environment.
The cull would entail killing 65,000 cows per year over the next three years, reducing the country’s overall dairy herd by 10 percent.

It is being positioned as a potential “retirement exit scheme” for aging farmers.

The president of the Irish Farmers’ Association, Tim Cullinan, said that the plan would only serve to increase farmers’ mistrust in the government and will not have the intended environmental aims.
He said: “Reducing dairy or beef production in Ireland will also lead to ‘carbon leakage’ with production moving to other countries with a higher carbon footprint.

“This is likely to increase global warming rather than reducing it.”

I had just mentioned this topic in another thread the other day, as well as others here in past threads and happened to stumble across another one from today...

Quote:The Internet Is Dead. Long Live the Internet by James Corbett, July 9, 2023.



Have you heard the latest?

Canadians are losing their access to online news thanks to a new bill that would make tech companies liable for so much as linking to news stories.

French President Macron is mulling a social media shutdown in the name of quelling France's social unrest.
Meta's new "Twitter killer" Threads app is (surprise, surprise!) censoring from day one.

And the UK government is mulling a proposal to give their NSA equivalent, the GCHQ, unprecedented, sweeping new powers to monitor internet logs in real-time.

Are you noticing a pattern?

Yes, the Internet—the "Information Superhighway" version of the "Internet" that was sold as a digital panacea to a credulous public in the 1990s, that is—is now officially dead.

So what does this mean? And where do we go from here? Today, I'll get to the bottom of the dead internet theory and what conspiracy realists should make of this news.

The Internet Theory



If you lived through the '90s, congratulations! You had a front row seat to a fundamental transformation of society the likes of which hasn't been seen by any generation since the days of Gutenberg.

Unless you were working at a university or a US government lab, you started the decade utterly ignorant of email and message boards and even the basic rudiments of computer networking. But by the time you were ringing in the millennium, you were (more likely than not) online, sending emails and surfing the web and getting into your first online flame wars.

You lived through the endless talk about the Information Superhighway. You survived the interminable propaganda designed to convince you that the Internet (capital "I" and all, as if cyberspace was some newly discovered foreign country that we were about to colonize) was going to democratize information, give everyone a voice in the conversation in the digital town square and unite us all in peace, harmony and understanding. And you endured ceaseless segments of befuddled TV hosts informing their audiences about URLs and email addresses as if they were reading an encyclopedia entry in a foreign language, carefully intoning every letter, colon and backslash and tittering over how to pronounce the "@" symbol.

It was all a lie, of course. Unbeknownst to the general public at the time, the internet did not spring fully formed from the heads of the Silicon Valley nerds in the 1990s. In fact, its origins go back much further. As we eventually came to learn, the internet actually began life as the ARPANET, a US Department of Defense project whose goal, according to the former director of DARPA, "was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making."

As it turns out, even this "nuclear resistant network" story is a limited hangout. As students of my Mass Media: A History online course will know by now, the ARPANET wasn't just about securing America's nuclear war-fighting capabilities but also about improving Uncle Sam's tools of surveillance and control for counterinsurgency operations. This thread of the story—involving characters like psychologist-turned-computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider and his quest to build a tool capable of collecting, storing and analyzing mind-boggling amounts of information on every entity and individual deemed an enemy of the US government—has been largely lost to time.

As Yasha Levine documents in his book on Surveillance Valley, however, anti-Vietnam War protesters on US campuses in the 1960s recognized the ARPANET and The Cambridge Project and associated computer networking research projects for what they were: attempts to find a way to quash dissent against the powers-that-shouldn't-be wherever and whenever that dissent arose.

One 1969 pamphlet on the growing peril of military-funded computer databases noted:

Quote:Clearly the ARPA network has practical military implications. While not a weapon of destruction per se, it will contribute a necessary link to a powerful automated military control system.

And another 1960s pamphlet on the looming threat of silicon surveillance observed:

Quote:The whole computer set-up and the ARPA computer network will enable the government, for the first time, to consult relevant survey data rapidly enough to be used in policy decisions. The net result of this will be to make Washington's international policeman more effective in suppressing popular movements around the world.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, public awareness of the perils of digital dictatorship and the mechanized menace of the "Octoputer" (with its technological tracking tendrils snaking their way into every nook and cranny of your life) got lost along the way. By the '90s, people were ready to believe that the digitization of social relations was a boon to humanity and that the world would be better off for it.

Meanwhile, here in the 2020s, the gloss of the (capital "I") Internet fairy tale has long since worn off. And, now that we have long since past the point of no return on this roller coaster ride into the digital abyss, we are finding that the dream sold to the public three decades ago—the hopium-induced phantasm of Information Superhighways and technological liberation—is now officially dead.

The Dead Internet Theory



Have you heard of the "dead internet theory"?

In a nutshell, it posits that the Internet of old—the wild and wacky, old-school, capital "I" Internet of human-generated fun and weirdness—died in 2016. Since then, according to adherents of this premise, the majority of everything we encounter online has been bot-generated.

If this theory is correct, then the computer-created content of the dead internet includes not just the obviously inhuman content on the web—the spam that overruns every unmoderated comment section, for instance, or the botnets that flood social media with identically worded propaganda posts—but everything: the content itself, the commentary on that content, the "people" we interact with online, even audio podcasts and video vlogs and other seemingly human-generated media.

Whatever one makes of this dead internet theory, it is certainly neither the first nor the last time that the internet has been declared dead.

In 1998, Paul Krugman infamously declared the internet to be a hype-driven fad, boldly predicting it would have no more impact on the economy than the fax machine.

In 2000, Bob O'Keefe, a professor of information management at Brunel University, opined that the "internet is dead" because "young people want mobility and social interaction, not computers."

In 2002, CNET announced the death of the free web (free as in free beer, that is, not free as in free speech).
In 2007, Mark Cuban told us that "the internet’s dead" and that "it's over" before contradictorily asserting that "the internet’s for old people" because it had become stagnant.

In 2010, Wired confirmed that the web was indeed dead (having been replaced by apps).

In 2015, Vox also pronounced the internet officially dead, a point contested by their MSM brethren over at The New York Times, who asserted in 2017 that the internet was merely in the process of dying.

Even the CBC has gotten in on the act (years after everyone else, of course), daring to ask in 2020 if "the dream of an 'open' internet" is in fact dead.

Some astute observer may have even written "April 10, 2021" on the internet's death certificate in commemoration of the main Corbett Report channel being scrubbed from ThemTube that day.  (I mean, I haven't seen anyone actually do that, but I'm sure someone could!)

Whichever death certificate you choose to believe, though, it's hardly worth quibbling over the exact date and time of the internet's death at this point.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the rise of the censorship-industrial complex over the past decade, anyone who has seen country after country after country after country after country implementing internet shutdowns and great firewalls and internet kill switches to keep their tax cattle from accessing online information detrimental to the powers-that-shouldn't-be, anyone who has seen the push for age verification and digital identification and "driver's licenses" for the internet knows the truth by now: to whatever extent the "Internet" of yore ever existed, it is now well and truly gone.

Heck, I just spent ten minutes searching various search engines with multiple queries to find an article whose exact headline I already knew. (And, irony of ironies, that article is about Canada's new online censorship bill).

My friends, it is now beyond doubt that we are no longer living in the utopian era of the Information Superhighway but in the dystopian nightmare of the digital gulag.

The Internet is dead.

Long Live the Internet?



But what does it mean that the free and open Internet is dead? After all, the ARPANET was designed to be able to survive and to continue functioning even in the wake of nuclear Armageddon, wasn't it? So how can some meddling governments take the whole thing down?

The most obvious answer is that the clueless masses who began logging on to the internet over the past two decades had no clue about the benefits of decentralization and merely gravitated to the most convenient and popular online spaces. By eschewing the labour of creating their own websites (or even designing their own geocities blog or Myspace page), by forsaking the quest to find new, unexplored corners of the net, they unwittingly recreated the dinosaur media paradigm in the new digital domain.

The parallels are striking: just as there were a handful of TV networks and newspapers and media companies that were able to dictate what almost everyone saw, heard, talked about and thought about on a daily basis in the old dinosaur media paradigm, there are now a handful of social media platforms where people are allowed to create a standardized, cookie-cutter profile and talk about the (fact-checker approved) news of the day.

And, just like that, the wacky, weird, intensely personal web of blogs and fora and message boards became the handful of standardized, soulless, corporate social media sites that dominate the web today.

There's even more to the story, though. The truth is that the Internet of yesteryear became the internet of today through a series of actions designed to make a decentralized, distributed network of information exchange into a centralized network of information control.

In fact, from its earliest beginnings, the ARPANET relied on a single "HOSTS.TXT" file maintained by the Stanford Research Institute to map hostnames to IP addresses. That system eventually developed into the Domain Name System that exists today, turning the inscrutable 77.235.50.111 IP address into the human-readable corbettreport.com.

Of course, most people don't give a moment's thought to the domain name system—how it is managed, who controls it, or why such a centralized directory is needed at all to run a supposedly decentralized network—until their domain is seized by the feds, that is.

Nor do they consider the dangers of relying on one of the few big-name web hosts or content delivery networks to host their web site . . . until their hosting is pulled and no one can access their site anymore.

Nor do they ponder the implications for the free, open, decentralized web if everyone relies on a handful of social media platforms run by a handful of Big Tech companies to provide access to their online "friends" . . . until their profile is suspended or their account removed for wrongthink.

Of course, as viewers of #SolutionsWatch know, the concept of truly decentralized communication is still alive and well. From Bastyon to Qortal to nostr to Blockchain DNS and many other projects besides, there is no shortage of developers who are working on ways for people to use the internet as it was intended: as a decentralized, distributed network with no middleman capable of stepping into your peer-to-peer information exchange.

Of course, the majority of people don't care about decentralized communication. They're happy to watch videos on YouTube and to share news on Twitter and to post vacation photos to Instagram and to pretend to be Facebook friends with people they haven't seen since grade school and to call all of this "the internet." They don't care about censorship or government surveillance. After all, if something is banned from this or that social media platform, then it's probably Thoughtcrime and deserves to be censored anyway, right?

But beyond the censorship, there's an even sadder story underlying the tale of the death of the internet. It involves the death of the human element of the early world wide web, a tragedy that the Dead Internet Theory is gesturing toward in a ham-handedly literal fashion.

Although it's incomprehensible for people growing up in today's depressing, enraging, clickbaity internet environment, the truth is that 30 years ago the world wide web was a fun, zany, lively space for encountering truly unique and idiosyncratic sites of all sorts.

The excitement of finding that group of people who cared as much as you did about stamp collecting or Scandinavian doom metal or 19th century crockery or whatever ridiculously niche topic you happened to be interested in is perhaps indescribable to those habituated to mindlessly scrolling through algorithmically provided feeds of increasingly bot-generated content on the handful of boring corporate social media platforms we're confined to today.

Oh, and those twirling "under construction" graphics and flashing, seizure-inducing backgrounds of poorly designed 1990s websites? Humorous as they appear to us in retrospect, they spoke to the human nature of the world wide web back then.

Contrast the off-the-wall individuality of an early 1990s website with the impersonal, inhuman, barren landscape of Facebook or reddit, and you can't help but be left with the feeling that we are slowly being turned into machines ourselves, devoid of personality or individual creativity.

Perhaps, then, it isn't a bad thing that the decentralized networks and platforms that are coming online right now are not popular. They are not being brought down to the lowest common denominator by the Joe Sixpacks and Jane Soccermoms of the world. Perhaps it's through these new, exciting, experimental technologies that we can finally shed the carapace of the dead internet and rediscover that place of human connection that seemed to be at our fingertips lo those many decades ago.

The early internet was pioneered by the misfits, the geeks, the pioneers, the weirdos of all stripes who were willing to go out of their way to create something novel and different. The new internet will be pioneered by them, too. Hope to see you there.

Quote:How So Many Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nukes (Jul 9, 2023) by Edward Curtin.

Social psychosis is widespread.  In the words of the British psychiatrist, RD Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”

He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many.  The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common.  First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.

I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen US Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs.

All are on first strike triggers.  And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes.

My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.

This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died  on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. provocations against China.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of U.S. actions in Ukraine and asked:

Quote:Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia? Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?

Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a U.S./Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.

So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.
When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:

• Like many other boomers, Edward J Curtin Jr is caught up in ‘nuclear terror’ … whereas on 4chan you see that a large portion of the young generation has come to accept the massive evidence that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were chemically firebombed like Tokyo, and ‘nuclear weapons’ most likely do not exist at all. The 10 alleged ‘nuclear powers’ have had reasons to hoax together, just like the global collusion on ‘covid’ & ‘vaccines’.
  
• So, the point is? Subs with nukes have been cruising around the world’s oceans for over 60 years, back to the time when they tried to scare us with the Cuban missile crisis. I was on a fast attack sub during the Vietnam war, friend of mine got boomer duty, which is what they call the ones that carry the missiles. They’re there for show, they aren’t going to use them. Yes, they should be banned internationally, just in case. But as with the Nuremberg trials and principles, that’s not nearly enough. We’re going to need to create our own New World Order
  
• This is the way the world ends
  This is the way the world ends
  This is the way the world ends
  Not with a bang but a whimper
  I vote for the bang!
  
• The nuke is exaggerated. Reality is that too many will survive a nuclear WWIII.
  There will still be too many useless eaters and psychos left in the underground bunkers no matter how many nukes we drop. Like Chernobyl it will only develop to paradises for animals, natives and homeless on food stamps, while we the exceptionals will suffer from an underground life for 50 years without seeing natural light . A global virus and for double insurance a coupled vaxx, will be a much more effective tool to clean the filth and double shareholders profit..
  
• Dear Ed the sea monsters about as real as nukes.
  
• Another one of the “elites” hoaxes.
  

To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both.  Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are.

It frightened me. It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth.  I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.

The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears.  Nuclear war was not one them.  It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness.

As if Mad Magazine’s  Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?”  No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine.  We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”

Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:

Quote:At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?

That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience (isbn.nu).  He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.”  Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.

If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later.  Sooner is probable.  Nuclear weapons are very real.  They are poised and ready to fly.  If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the U.S. government does, we are worse than fools.  We are suicidal.

As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.”  That will be too late.  There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.

Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:

End nuclear weapons now before they end us.
Stop escalating the war in Ukraine now.
Make peace with Russia and China now.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in a U.S. government plot.

“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

When you have body dysmorphia, be it anorexia or thinking you're a different gender, we can all agree that it is a mental illness.
 

The difference is how we approach the two.

With gender, we give in to the patients demands, we accept the false reality that they see when they look in the mirror.

We call the man in women's clothing, "Ma'am" and reaffirm the mental condition.

If we said to the person suffering from anorexia, "Hey fatty-fat, you need to shed a few pounds, lard-butt", we are being cruel.

Isn't it just as cruel to encourage a false body image for folks who "feel" that they are different genders?

Quote:Since the outbreak of the pandemic in mainland China, the economy has been in a standstill, with news of massive salary cuts for civil servants, teachers, and public-sector employees beginning to surface in 2020. In June 2022, Chinese financial news website Caixin.com reported that civil servants across many eastern coastal areas of China had been hit by a wave of salary cuts. Various self-established bonus subsidies were cancelled, with civil servant salaries being reduced by around 20 to 30 percent. The report indicated that civil servants in Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu were severely affected. A section-level cadre in Longhua District, Shenzhen, estimated that their income would be cut by more than 20 percent. Previously, with bonuses and subsidies, their annual income could reach about 370,000 yuan. In Southern Jiangsu, a deputy section-level cadre experienced a salary cut of approximately 25%, reducing their take-home pay by about 100,000 yuan. Meanwhile, a grassroots section staff member in a town in Ningbo, Zhejiang, had their bonus, which accounted for 40% of their income, completely cut off.