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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56064.htm

Stalemate

In chess, stalemate describes the endgame situation in which one party has no possible legal moves. It is the point at which we are arrived in our Presidential fiasco. There has been great angst and gnashing of teeth over it, and ebullient, if tentative, rejoicing on the part of giddy enthusiasts for whom Trump’s electoral defeat represents the Jubilee, the Dawn of Glory, and re-establishment of righteousness on earth. This view, deluded and infantile as it is, is nevertheless sincere and widely held.

Stalemate, though, is not victory, in chess or otherwise. In a stalemate the game ends in a draw. That said, it seems likely Trump will depart—in spite of the hysteria peddled by so many in media and cyber-flackery—without anything faintly resembling the Reichstag Fire, or even a Proud Boys version of the shootout at the OK Corral. He’ll go with a whimper, not a bang.

So the crisis ends in victory? Or has it indeed been a sort of draw? We’ve been assured from authoritative quarters, in the most decisive terms, that, in his mulish, petulant refusal to take no for an answer to his grandiose ambitions, Trump has done irreparable damage to the Great Institution of our Electoral Democracy; that his dogged denial of his loss, and utter rejection of the protocols of cordial transition have sorely undermined, and perhaps even fatally shaken, our collective faith in the purity and justice of our Constitutional process and its benign functioning.

On top of that, there is now—I won’t call it news—official yammer that those pesky Russkies are at it again. Yes, by golly, they’ve diabolically infiltrated our Official Secrets Crypt, no doubt goaded into it by that fiend, Putin, who, according to what we’ve been schooled for four years to believe, ought to have been spending all his energies backing Trump, but somehow overlooked that. It appears that after doing so much to elect him in ‘16, they didn’t bother this time and let him lose. Just no fathoming their deviltry.

Anyhow, our noble protectors and defenders, those fab Security Services—FBI, NSA, CIA and the other sixteen or twenty-three sister spook units who’ve done so much to keep us from harm—all have their knickers in a twist, one hand clutching their pearls and the other making a bold fist at the Kremlin, over Vlad & Co. attacking the dead meat of our sanctified secrets catacombs.

What a dogpile! What a gang-bang! Trump and the Russians, allied again, bringing all their satanic powers to bear on the frail, vulnerable vessel of our fate, the very motor and mainspring of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean: our hallowed electoral system.

Come on, somebody has to call bullshit on this nonsense.

Voting, in our arcane, convoluted process, has been, from the beginning, a contrivance to mollify and divert hoi polloi with a specious sense of their power of governance while the owners and managers of the State accomplish their private agendas.

These include, but are not limited to, exploiting and pauperizing labor; openly burgling the public purse; plundering our natural resources while fouling The People’s lands and waters; fixing tax rates so The People pay for their own impoverishment while huge corporations skate free with big refunds; allocating government expenditure so enormous sums fatten all massive industries, banking, and the War Machine, so that next to nothing is left for public health, education, infrastructure, and the environment; and funding, with The People’s money, the imperial piracy, villainy, and murder that feed the tyranny for which we are widely hated.

Recently, due to the insecurity of those George Carlin called “our owners” about perceived slippage in the steel cogs of their propaganda machine, they’ve required their courts to eliminate limits on buying office for the swinish whores infesting Congress.

This, of course, is nothing new, historically. In ancient Athens, when a highly restrictive, bastard version of democracy—i.e., rule of the people—was tried, it was subverted by gold, and a series of assassinations and bloody revolutions led from aristocracy to mob rule, tyranny, and chaos, and tore that city state apart. The fact is, democracy is an abstract term for a system that has never been implemented by any polity, anywhere, at any time.

The notion that Trump and Russia, China, Iran, or Upper Volta, singly or in combination, could, by any conceivable measure, do any damage to our grossly, nakedly corrupt scam of a system even remotely comparable to what has already been effected by those who own and operate it, is preposterous on its face.

So, yes, the system remains as it was, rigid and stinking, with all its noisome dead tissue of party control, legal bribery, super delegates, local thuggery, mafia structure, and SchutzStaffeln tactics in place as Old Daffy prepares to helm the Ship of State.

Do you not shudder to imagine what lies ahead? With an exactly split Congress of oafs, hillbillies, loons, and trolls; mathematically and operationally incapable of anything at all; presided over by a vacuous, dysgnosic, life-long huckster; a sad, empty husk of a drone for Empire; an Obama doll, without stagecraft, glib bullshit, or even the sociopathic capacity to lie outrageously, gazing into the eyes of an adoring public while gently stroking its penis.

Layer all that over a citizenry so equally and bitterly divided on every single important question or concern to a world facing the perilous likelihood of economic implosion or annihilating war, and the certainty of climate disaster portending humanity’s probable immanent extinction, and the picture is complete.

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Merry Christmas.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec20/Fed-fails12-20.html

What Would Happen If the Fed Ceased to Exist?

What would happen if the Federal Reserve ceased to exist? We all know the answer: global markets would instantly collapse and the global financial system, now entirely dependent on Fed stimulus, intervention, manipulation, free money for financiers and endless printing of trillions of dollars out of thin air, would crash, leaving nothing but a steaming, fetid pile of corruption infested by the cockroaches scurrying around gobbling up the few crumbs left.

What would happen if the Federal Reserve ceased to exist? The Treasury would sell its bonds on the open market, where buyers and sellers would set the yield on the bonds. Private banks would take deposits and lend money at rates set by supply and demand.

We all know what would happen: yields and interest rates would explode higher in response to risk having to be priced in and every flimsy, worm-eaten enterprise that depended on zero-interest rates would collapse in a heap and every putrid, staggering zombie corporation would crumble to dust, and its phantom assets, illusions generated solely by the artificial spew of the Fed, would fall to their real value, i.e. near zero.

Let's modify the question slightly: what would happen if the Fed's policies stopped working? In other words, what if the Fed's spew no longer created the illusion of risk-free gambling in bubble-valuation assets? What if risk raised its Gorgon-like head despite every intervention, every manipulation, and every foul burp of propaganda from the Fed?

Please glance at this chart of the delusional faith in incremental change. The faith in the Fed's omnipotence that magically reduces the perception of risk to zero is ultimately a faith in incremental change: the Fed tweaks the dials of bond purchases and its spew of free money for financiers, and voila, risk is banished and risk assets get another rocket booster.

Alas, risk cannot be banished, it can only be transferred to others. The Fed's endless spew and its constant tinkering with incremental adjustments have created a delusional faith that these tweaks will work forever and ever.

All that's actually happened is the Fed's spew has transferred the skyrocketing risks generated by its policies to the entire economy. The economy has been capacious enough to absorb the astronomical risks generated by Fed policies, but the economy has been stuffed to the gills with Fed-generated risk, and now the bursting of the risk bubble is upon us.

Put another way, there's no closets left to hide the risk in. Now the risk will escape the Fed's rusting, hubris-soaked chains and decimate the financial sector, which is now the dominant force in the economy. Once the delusions of no-risk gambling and phantom valuations implode, the real economy will undergo a devastating cold turkey withdrawal from the Fed's malevolent spew of free money for financiers masquerading as "stimulus."

Extremes get more extreme until risk breaks out; then the reversal will be as extreme as the bubble expansion. Delusions, illusions, phantoms of value: these are not real. Want to know what's real? Risk.

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/12/21/why-its-good-to-push-politicians-to-do-the-right-thing-even-when-they-probably-wont/

Why It’s Good To Push Politicians To Do The Right Thing (Even When They Probably Won’t)

The debate rages on over whether or not House progressives should force a floor vote on Medicare for All by threatening not to re-elect Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker, with one side arguing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of “The Squad” were elected to advance progressive policies so that’s what they should do, and the other side arguing that AOC is cool so shut up and leave her alone.

As we discussed yesterday, Americans will not be given Medicare for All despite overwhelming public support because an immense amount of power depends on keeping them in a state of financial struggle so they don’t interfere in the affairs of a nation which serves as the hub of a global empire. The US political system does not exist to serve the interests of Americans, it exists to serve the interests of the empire. No part of that system is there to protect the people from the powerful; it’s there to protect the powerful from the people.

There’s a misconception which spans almost the entire US political spectrum, and that is the idea that some part of the system serves the people. Progressives believe they can use the electoral process to obtain economic justice for Americans. Trumpers believe the judicial system is going to overturn Biden’s win any minute now. Liberals believed Mueller was going to drag the entire Trump camp out of the White House in chains.

And that’s just not the case. There is no part of the US political system which is anything other than innately oppositional to economic justice. There is no part of the US judicial system which would ever act to reverse widespread establishment electoral fraud. There was no part of the Special Counsel which was separate from the same unifying power structure that Trump serves to remove him from office over corruption or anything else. Ever since 2016 people have been predicting massive upheavals which radically shift power from one mainstream faction to the other, but it never happens; the imperial machine keeps chugging along with all its parts working in well-oiled harmony.

And that’s all the US governmental system exists for: ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of the imperial machine. But that doesn’t mean there’s no value in pushing for officials to do the right thing.

Yes it is true that AOC and other House progressives will probably lay low instead of doing the right thing that people are pushing them to do, and that even if they do show some spine and force a floor vote on Medicare for All it will be quashed by other politicians on Capitol Hill. Yes it is true that any and all measures which US progressives advance to bring Americans the same social safety nets afforded to everyone else in every major country on earth will be quashed by whatever means necessary to ensure the continuation of a ruling class to manage the global empire. But it is still very worthwhile to push for those things anyway.

You don’t push politicians to do the right thing because you think they will, you do it to show everyone else that they won’t. You get them essentially making your argument for you: Oh we can’t fight for that right now because the system is rigged to nullify our attempts to do so. And this helps spread awareness to the greater public about just how fucked things really are.

Human behavior only changes when there’s an expansion of consciousness, whether you’re talking about individuals or a collective of any size. This might sound like woo woo New Age drivel, but I promise you it isn’t. It just means that people don’t stop doing crazy and self-destructive things until they can fully perceive what’s driving it and why it’s undesirable.

Substance abuse doesn’t end until the user turns and faces the inner demons that have been driving them to use. A religion’s child molestation epidemic doesn’t end until its victims come forward and are actually listened to. Women don’t get the right to vote until awareness spreads that women are actually capable independent thinkers. A society doesn’t collectively reject racism until it collectively becomes aware of how destructive and insane it is. No matter the size or scale, the behavioral dynamics do not change until consciousness is brought into them.

This is where the real battle is being waged. Not ultimately in winning elections or obtaining committee positions, or even really in winning specific battles over policy, but in expanding consciousness. In showing more and more people more and more information about what’s actually going on above and below the surface. That’s what will lead to swift and lasting change.

This is why so much of the battle is happening on the front of propaganda, censorship, and press freedoms. The more unconscious aspects of our world want to keep things secret, distorted, and hidden in the shadows, while those who want change are fighting to turn the lights on. This is also why there’s so much value in getting a political system which doesn’t serve the people to expose itself. First and foremost the quest is to spread awareness of what’s really going on to as many people as possible; people need to become aware that they’ve been duped.

So keep spreading awareness using every tool you have available to you. Pressure the system to do what it’s supposed to be doing, and then when it doesn’t, shine a big bright light on the lock they’ve placed on the door and make a lot of noise about it so that people can see they’ve been trapped.

Things won’t change until a critical mass of people becomes aware that they are happening and how they are happening. Once this awareness has been sufficiently spread, there’s not actually anything our rulers can do to stop us from using the power of our numbers to force real change. They can’t arrest us all; they’ll run out of prison space. They can’t kill us all; they’ll have no one to rule. It’s an unwinnable fight for them, which is why they’re fighting instead to keep all the lights off using corruption, propaganda and secrecy to keep us from opening our eyes at mass scale to what they’re doing.

Our task is to turn the lights on. Their task is to keep them off. The side that wins this battle is the side that wins it all.

 

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https://scheerpost.com/2020/12/20/chris-hedges-the-great-delusion/

The Great Delusion

Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 that has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away. 

But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead.”     

The list of new administration officials includes retired General Lloyd J. Austin III who is being nominated to be secretary of defense. Austin is on the board of Raytheon Technologies and a partner at Pine Island Capital, a firm that invests in defense industries and also includes Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee to be secretary of state.  Blinken, who was deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state, is a strong supporter of the apartheid state of Israel.  He was one of the architects of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and a proponent of the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, resulting in yet another failed state in the Middle East.

Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve chair under Barack Obama, is slated to be Treasury Secretary. Yellen as the chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and later as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve, backed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which led to the banking crisis of 2008.  She supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She also lobbied for a new statistical metric intended to lower payments to senior citizens on Social Security.  Yellen backed “quantitative easing” that provided trillions in virtually no-interest loans to Wall Street, loans used to bail out banks and corporations and engage in massive stock buy-backs while the victims of financial fraud were abandoned.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry is to become a special envoy for climate. Kerry championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Obama’s memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to “offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling.”

Avril Haines, a former Obama deputy CIA chief, is to become Biden’s director of national intelligence. Haines oversaw Obama’s expanded and murderous drone program overseas and backed Gina Haspel’s nomination to be the head of the CIA, despite Haspels’ direct involvement in the CIA torture program carried out in black sites around the globe. Haines called Haspel “intelligent, compassionate, and fair.” Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the “climate portfolio” at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, has been chosen to run the White House’s economic policy.

Neera Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, has been picked to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden, as the head of the Democratic Party’s thinktank, the Center for American Progress, raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.  Her donors include Bain Capital, Blackstone, Evercore, Walmart and the defense contractor Northrup Grumman. The United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, also gave the thinktank between $1.5 million and $3 million. She relentlessly ridicules Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media. She also proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for the bombing Iran. 

The perpetuation of the deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks.  A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia.  Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration.  The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. 

Biden, after his defeat in the Democratic Party Caucus in Nevada by Bernie Sanders, where Sanders got more than twice his vote, immediately played the Russian card, telling CBS News that the “Russians don’t want me to be the nominee, they like Bernie.”  Hillary Clinton started this dirty game when she attacked 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein as a “Russian asset” and in 2020 leveled the same charge against Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.  The Democrats need an enemy, real or fictious, and Silicon Valley and major manufacturers will not allow them to target China.

More of the same means more disaster. If we want to reclaim our open society and save the ecosystem, we must abolish the corporate stranglehold on global economic and political power. If we want to avert zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, swine flu, avian flu, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease), Ebola, and SARS we must stop consuming animals and their bodily secretions. We must abolish factory farming and adopt a vegan diet.  And we must keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Razing the rainforest for cattle grazing and vast tracts of farmland devoted to growing monocrops to feed animals destined for human consumption are responsible for up to 91 percent of Amazon rainforest destruction since 1970. The loss of forests is one of the single biggest contributors to climate change. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of ocean dead zones. Oceans could be devoid of fish by 2048. Each minute, 7 million pounds of feces are produced by the animals raised for human food in the US alone. The continued destruction of natural habitat, coupled with the vast factory farms which use 80 percent of the antibiotics in the U.S. and incubate drug-resistant pathogens that spread to human populations, presage new forms of the Black Death.

The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.         

Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped.  At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near a coast, including New York and London, will be submerged.

Oceans absorb much of the excess CO₂ and heat from the atmosphere. This absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters, resulting in the deoxygenation of the oceans. Each of the earth’s five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one part of what climate scientists call the “deadly trio” – warming, acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans. The next mass extinction of sea life is already under way, the first in some 55 million years.

This is not defeatism. It is realism. We appear to have bought four years with Biden’s election, but if we do not use it wisely – and there is nothing in the Biden nominations that offer any encouragement – we are merely reconstructing a shabby Potemkin village that will soon be flattened by the gale-force political and environmental hurricanes that are gathering around us.

One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations. This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion.  It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle. Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy. 

After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light. Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical Left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials. One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote. Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.

Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept.  This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country.

The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us.

The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who with a handful of other writers and artists desperately tried to warn of the suicidal folly of World War I, wrote of what he called “the mental superiority of the defeated.” His anti-war play Jeremiah, based on the Biblical prophet Jeremiah who issued warnings in vain, illustrated that those who face reality, however bitter, are able to endure and rise above it.

“Awaken, doomed city, that thou mayest save thyself,” the prophet cries out in Zweig’s play. “Awaken from your heavy slumbers, heedless ones, lest you be slain in sleep; awaken, for the walls are crumbling, and will crush you; awaken.”

But the warnings from Jeremiah, called “the weeping prophet,” were ignored and ridiculed. He was attacked for demoralizing the people. There were plots against his life.  When the Babylonian army captured Jerusalem, Jeremiah, like Julian Assange, was in prison.

“I was always attracted to showing how any form of power can harden a human being’s heart, how victory can bring mental rigidity to whole nations, and to contrasting that with the emotional force of defeat painfully and terribly ploughing through the soul,” Zweig wrote in his memoir, “The World of Yesterday”. “In the middle of war, while others, celebrating triumph too soon, were proving to one another that victory was inevitable, I was plumbing the depths of the catastrophe and looking for a way to emerge from them.”

We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.

 

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https://www.peakprosperity.com/2021-is-going-to-be-rough/

2021 is Going to be Rough!

I can’t wait to get away from Covid coverage.  I’ve learned a lot, helped many, and yet I’m really anxious to get back to my main work in the world, which has to do with cultivating resilience.

This has been a huge year for us here in the Martenson household.

First, we moved right as Covid was breaking across the world.  The closing date on our new 182-acre property here in beautiful Chester MA was January 28^th.

My first ALERT to the world about a mysterious virus was on January 23^rd.

From that date and for the next 6 months I was producing daily videos.  Oh, and writing weekly content for the Peak Prosperity website.  Oh, and moving.  Oh, and assembling my first ever real estate syndication deal.  Oh, and converting our new property to a working farm.

That’s a lot of “ands” for a given year.  Thanks 2020!  But what 2020 had taketh away (visitors and travel) it also giveth – lots of time at the homestead.

And not a moment too soon!

Look, the world is an increasingly unstable place.  It is absolutely correct and right that people should become more resilient.

And that begins at home.  Maybe even right on your own garden.

If 2020 has done anything, it has normalized what was once ‘fringe” by making it completely obvious that the systems upon which we depend are rotten, unable to self-repair or reform, and therefore more fragile than we thought.

Our national health “managers” are not leaders, and are completely unable to escape whatever conflicts of interest bind their tongues as well as their hearts.  The political system is corrupt through and through and completely uninterested in any sort of introspection, let alone reform.

I’ve had people tell me this was “the fairest election in recent US history.”  I show them this map of Chicago’s 4^th congressional district and ask them to point to its fairness so I can possibly see it:

Squint though I might, I just can’t see it.

Meanwhile the US Federal Reserve is busy exploding the currency supply as seen in this chart of M1:

Unbelievable!

As a reminder:

M1 is the money supply that is composed of physical currency and coin, demand deposits (savings & checking), travelers’ checks, other checkable deposits, and negotiable order of withdrawal (NOW) accounts

Looking at M1 in terms of its change from year ago levels makes it even more ridiculous seeming.

The only possibly response here ought to be WTF?

What could possibly be going through the minds of the Federal Reserve to justify this sort of monetary madness?

One more way to look at this is in terms of a percent change from a year ago.  How does M1 look under this condition?

This is insane.  Simply insane.

On a percent change basis, the entire money stock of the US — which includes all of the money stock built up over its entire history — increased by 65.6%.

In a single year!!!

At the same time the US is doing the worst job out of any country in the world managing Covid.  Simply terrible.  Awful.

Of course, as you probably know, I respect the hell out of Covid, but I don’t fear it any more than I fear the flu.

Why?

Because of Ivermectin, which has been overwhelmingly demonstrated to all but entirely block the transmission of the SARS2 virus as well as prevent the development of serious cases of Covid the disease.

Nobody at the NIH is interested in this data for some reason.  Fauci doesn’t care or want to hear about it.   All the US medical establishment wants is a vaccine.

That’s fine to an extent, but what about all the lives lost and ruined while we wait?  Is there no accounting for them?  How awful of the national health managers that they should not care about the most vulnerable, the weak, and the elderly.  At all.

The US Government is out of control in its spending, too:

That gap between receipts and expenditures is as staggering as it is frightening.  There’s just no possible way to get any of that back under control, especially not since 50% or more of small and medium sized bushiness (a.k.a. “the tax base”) have been destroyed for completely ill-advised and (as it turns out) completely unnecessary reasons — if only we had been using Ivermectin therapy and prophylaxis all along.

Against this backdrop the US dollar is busy falling, as it should.  There’s simply nothing good happening in the US at the moment that should support the dollar:

Crickey that’s a terrible-looking chart!

But it’s well deserved.  There really isn’t much going for the dollar right now.  The terrible US economy is being destroyed by ill-advised policies and a horribly bad Covid response, out-of-control spending, and a print-happy Federal Reserve.

Add it all up and you’ve got a lot of US dollars floating around. And a lot less to spend them on. So the dollar sinks.

As the USD sinks, other assets priced in dollars rise.

Like Bitcoin.  Congratulations Bitcoin Hodl-ers! (that stands for Hold On for Dear Life)

You know what else the dollar has been falling against all year?

Good real estate property, stocks, bonds, gold, and many other hard assets.  The press says they are “rising in price” but really it’s not that.  It’s too many dollars seeking a place to hide out and be safe.

The conclusion to all of this?

The Logic Of Homesteading

We’re entering a period of volatility and uncertainty.

Like myself and my fiancée Evie, many have come to the (proper) conclusion that the best way to hedge their bets is to build up their homestead, and make it more resilient.

We’ve really thrown ourselves at this project this year and it’s been both challenging and rewarding.

Here on the day of our first and quite significant snowfall, it’s time to sit back, reflect on the mistakes and progress alike, and to share what we’ve done in case it helps to inspire or educate anyone.

Make no mistake.  You really should be thinking about growing your own food and building your soil, too.

If any of the events outlined in The Great Reset come to pass, being as close as possible to your food production seems like a solid plan.  The closer the better.....

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It's More Than the Fed, Of Course

We have to include the G3 banks in this mess.

When their combined (exploding) balance sheets are compared with Bitcoin's price, well, that's a mighty big coincidence!

But that more than doubling of the G3 balance sheets is quite the sight to behold.

I really don't believe there's any master plan to it.  It's just a pure, panicky reaction by some deeply corrupt and/or incompetent central bankers.  All they know is "more printing" and they haven't a clue how to even slow it down, let alone stop it, let alone reverse it.

 

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/78796/a-return-to-normalcy-joe-bidens-vision-of-normal-raises.html

A Return to Normalcy? Joe Biden’s Vision of Normal Raises Concerns

It has already been observed that Joe Biden’s incoming cabinet looks a bit like old wine in new bottles, drawing as it does on veterans from the Barack Obama and even the Bill Clinton administrations. That’s the bad news as it very much looks like business as usual as the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Wall Street kleptocracy is reasserting itself and will be in place for the next four years. Which is not to say that the Donald Trump version thereof was a whole lot different, but Trump was erratic enough to make the power brokers in America nervous, which was presumably enough reason to possibly rig the election and get rid of him.

The four key appointees to the new administration in terms of how the United States confronts the world are the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the National Security Advisor. All of Biden’s picks are, if not completely hawkish, at least dedicated to the notion that the U.S. should be actively pre-emptively engaged in democracy promotion and liberal interventionism. If a little regime change is needed here and there, so be it. General Lloyd Austin, who may have trouble in getting confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Defense, Tony Blinken, Secretary of State presumptive, and DNI Avril Haines have all been involved in making money out of the defense/national security establishment since they have been out of office. There is an assumption among ex-officials in the United States government that lobbying one’s former colleagues to buy products or services that are not needed is a perfectly legitimate semi-retirement avocation. Some, however, do not see it that way and General Austin’s service on the board of major defense contractor Raytheon may have crossed the red line, even for those who are accustomed to looking the other way when corruption looms.

It is assumed that the former torture-prison chief and currently Director of CIA Gina Haspel will be fired either by Donald Trump or by Biden, meaning that that position will also be vacant, likely to be filled by another friend of Clinton/Obama. David Cohen, a former analyst has been spoken of as the likely candidate. He previously served as a widely acknowledged utterly incompetent and out of place Director of Operations, appointed by Barack Obama in 2015 even though he had no real experience in intelligence operations, much less in running the Agency’s Clandestine Service. Unfortunately, incompetence and irrelevancy have never stopped anyone from moving onward and upward in the U.S. government. Quite the contrary.

Some see a silver lining in the clouds, namely a “return to diplomacy” after the debacle of the belligerent dispensationalist Mike Pompeo. Alas Pompeo for all his bluster has not actually started any new wars, while Blinken was the main man behind the bid to overthrow the Syrian government even though it posed no threat to the United States. He has never apologized for the wars he was involved in under Obama and has only regretted that they were not more successful, so we can safely assume that he will continue to do what he can in support of the globalist agenda as well as for the country that he loves best, which is Israel.

And there are also the somewhat more elusive aspects of Democratic Party leadership thinking that will shape the course of the new Administration. Still simmering hatred for Russia over the phony narrative that the Kremlin was behind the 2016 defeat of the execrable Hillary Clinton means that relations with that country will if anything get worse, particularly if the Clintons continue to be a major driving force behind the Democratic National Committee. And then there is China. There is every indication that the Democrats have bought into the China-bashing initiated by Donald Trump and sustained by the conspiracy theory that Beijing both weaponized a virus to destroy Western democracy and threatens “freedom.” Pentagon plans to build up the U.S. Navy to confront China in its own coastal waters while also reshaping the Marine Corps to equip it with breakthrough guided battlefield weapons to confront the “Yellow Menace” will not be reversed by Biden and company.

It can be taken as a given that the Biden/Harris regime will continue America’s Israel-centric foreign policy but it will be interesting to see if they persevere in the Trump program of bribing fringe Arab states to “recognize” Israel. Up until now, Washington’s buying of desperate regimes has included F-35s for the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed, canceling of the inclusion on the economy-brutalizing “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list for the military junta of starving Sudan, and now, uniquely, endorsing Morocco’s 45-year-old sovereignty claim over the Western Sahara, a region that has its own government and has become a member state of the African Union. It has also been diplomatically recognized by 84 other governments represented at the U.N. The U.S. is in addition the only state to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights while also giving the green light to the Jewish state’s stated intention to declare formal sovereignty claim over most of the occupied State of Palestine. It is unlikely that Biden will seek to reverse those sell-outs and he will not move the U.S. Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv.

The Israelis have already warned Biden not to re-enter any U.N. human rights organizations or fund the agency that provides relief to Palestinian refugees. They have also advised him against trying to cut any kind of deal with the Iranians, sending the signal that when it comes to Iran, including assassinations, Israel is in charge. And also, the Biden “plan,” if one can dignify it by using that word, to reengage with Iran is a non-starter. American and Israeli belligerency over the past four years has soured the Iranian people on any kind of rapprochement, with conservatives now politically dominant. They will likely sweep the elections scheduled to be held next year. Biden’s intention to get the Iranians to abandon their sophisticated missile weapons program and their support for Syria in addition to reopening their nuclear sites to U.S. inspectors will also go nowhere. Iran will continue to be enemy number one for the Democrats just as it has been for Trump and his principal financial backer Israel-firster casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Joe Biden will certainly have to work hard to equal the interventionist policies entertained by his predecessors in office, but he, of course, has had experience both in Congress and as Vice President in shaping those policies and promoting American “exceptionalism” as we have come to know it. And he will be helped along the way by Tony Blinken, Avril Haines, Jake Sullivan and General Lloyd Austin lest he stray from the established path. The fact is that elections change nothing in Washington but the name plates on the doors.

....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56054.htm

Deep State media issue Biden with marching orders

A flurry of articles has burnished Russia’s image as America’s “evil enemy.” Then quickly followed a piece in the New York Times, which read like an instruction to President-elect Biden for a more hostile line on Russia.

It’s a one-two sequence: set up a problem, then put forward a solution. This week’s US media choreography has the hallmarks of orchestration by the deep-state apparatus, which the New York Times and others willingly oblige.

First came the “blockbuster” reports claiming that Russian hackers had “penetrated” the heart of US government departments and agencies. As usual, no evidence is presented to back up the sensational claims. A software provider is alleged to have been hacked, various anonymous sources blame it on Russia, news outlets like the NY Times editorialize that it was Kremlin hackers and, before you know it, it snowballs into a “fact” that Russia launched a “sweeping attack” on America.

The purportedly hacked US software, SolarWinds, is used widely across government departments and agencies (how’s that for a security no-no!), and from the above assertion of “fact” that Russia was behind the cyber intrusion, then it follows – but only by implication – that all of the said US departments and agencies have been breached.

On Monday, the NY Times headlined: “Scope of Russia Hack Becomes Clear: Multiple US Agencies Were Hit.”

Well, it’s not at all “clear” because no evidence is provided. And the multiple agencies, which the newspaper implies might be affected, actually declined to give any comment, including the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency and State Department.

“Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack,” reported the newspaper.

In other words, the Times is “struggling to determine” evidence to back up its story.

All we have, therefore, is lurid claim, assertion and innuendo, which is pretty-much par for the course of US journalism when it comes to demonizing Russia. In any case, serious journalism abiding by basic reporting standards is not the point. The point is to achieve perception. Perception of Russia as a very, very, bad, bad country that is out to ruin virtuous America.

Members of Congress were suitably outraged by the alleged Russian cyber assault. Top-ranking Democrat Senator Dick Durbin told CNN: “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States, and we should take that seriously.” (The last clause suggests the senator is not really convinced by the alleged declaration of war. If it were war, then why would you need to lamely recommend taking it seriously?)

The New York Times was not the only paper to drool over the latest alleged Russia cyber attack at the heart of US government. Joining the media gang-bang was the Washington Post, Reuters, Associated Press, CNN and others. Whenever such a collective reflexive response is elicited one can be excused for thinking there might be orchestration going on.

But it was left to the NY Times, the unofficial media organ of the CIA and other deep-state operatives, to follow up with the gaslighting.

The day after “reporting” the “scope of Russia hack,” the Times ran its instruction for President-elect Joe Biden under the guise of a “news analysis” piece. The headline was: “Biden to Face a Confrontational Russia in a World Changed From His Time in Office”.

It went on to say: “The president-elect will have to assure American national security in ways that will require pushing back on the Kremlin at times and, at others, seeking Russian cooperation.”

Forget the appended sop about “Russian cooperation.” The thrust of the article was telling the incoming Biden administration to adopt a more “unified” policy towards Russia, which ends “the era of bifurcation between the West Wing and the American national security establishment.”

That’s just a verbose way of saying the national security apparatus and President Biden will from now on be working in unison towards confronting Russia, unlike during the Trump administration, when the White House was rather ambivalent about antagonizing Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is described as being “nakedly hostile to Western interests” and Biden is reminded of his own strident rhetoric during the election campaign when he vowed to “hold the Putin regime accountable for its crimes.”

Never mind that Putin telegrammed his congratulations to Biden this week and called for great cooperation between the US and Russia. That’s hardly the words and sentiments of someone “nakedly hostile,” as the Times would have us believe. Instead they focused on the fact Putin didn't rush the congratulation – like many others did– before Biden was confirmed as president-elect by the Electoral College.

There seems to be ample room for many to speculate over whether this latest US media frenzy in Russia-bashing was triggered by the intelligence agencies, and just in time for Biden’s formal election to the White House by the Electoral College this week.

Not that Sleepy Joe needs any wake-up call on how to be aggressive towards Russia. He has spent his entire career in Congress and previously in the White House as Obama’s vice president being a warmonger, a deep-state asset and Cold War cheerleader.

What is foreboding, however, is the emerging synergy between the anti-Russia agenda that is endemic to the US deep state and the absolute pliability of the new president.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56047.htm

When Deplorables Become Ungovernables

China, Russia and Iran are the top three existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the National Security Strategy. Three features distinguish the top three. They are all sovereign powers. They are under varying degrees of sanctions. And they are the top three nodes of the 21st century’s most important, evolving geopolitical process: Eurasia integration.

What do the three sovereigns see when they examine the dystopia that took over Exceptionalistan?

They see, once again, three – discombobulated – nodes in conflict: the post-historic Pacific and Atlantic coasts; the South – a sort of expanded Dixieland; and the Midwest – what would be the American heartland.

The hyper-modern Pacific-Atlantic nodes congregate high-tech and finance, profit from Pentagon techno-breakthroughs and benefit from the “America rules the waves” ethos that guarantees the global primacy of the U.S. dollar.

The rest of America is largely considered by the Pacific-Atlantic as just a collection of flyover states: the South – which regards itself as the real, authentic America; and the Midwest, largely disciplined and quite practical-minded, squeezed ideologically between the littoral powerhouses and the South.

Superstructure, tough, is key: no matter what happens, whatever the fractures, this remains an Empire, where only a tiny elite, a de facto plutocratic oligarchy, rules.

It would be too schematic, even though essentially correct, to assert that in the presidential election, invisible campaigner Joe Biden represented the Pacific-Atlantic nodes, and Trump represented the whole South. Assuming the election was not fraudulent – and that remains a big “if” – the Midwest eventually swung based on three issues.

    Trump, as much as he relied on a sanctions juggernaut, could not bring back manufacturing jobs home.
    He could not reduce the military footprint across the Greater Middle East.
    And, before Covid-19, he could not bring down immigration.

Everything that lies ahead points to the irreconcilable – pitting the absolute majority that voted Dem in the Atlantic-Pacific nodes versus the South and a deeply divided Midwest. As much as Biden-Harris is bound to isolate the South even more, their prospects of “pacifying” the Midwest are less than zero.

Whose ground control?

Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points.

    A series of rules in mostly swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures, without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud schemes.
    Biden was de facto coronated by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks before the electoral college vote this past Monday.
    Every serious, professional audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de facto squashed.

In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.

On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”

Dangers abound. On the propaganda front, for instance, far right nationalists are absolutely convinced that U.S. media can be brought to heel only by occupying the six main offices of the top conglomerates, plus Facebook, Google and Twitter: then you’d have full control of the U.S. propaganda mill.

Another Deep State source, now retired, adds that, “the U.S. Army does not want to intervene as their soldiers may not obey orders.

Many of these far right nationalists were officers in the armed forces. They know where the nuclear missiles and bombers are. There are many in sympathy with them as the U.S. falls apart in lockdowns.”

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings simply will not be made to vanish from public scrutiny. He’s under four different federal investigations. The recent subpoena amounts to a very serious case pointing to a putative crime family. It’s been conveniently forgotten that Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations that he forced Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be fired exactly when he was investigating corruption by Burisma’s founder.

Of course, a massive army of shills will always invoke another army of omniscient and oh so impartial “fact checkers” to hammer the same message: “This is Trump’s version. Courts have said clearly all the evidence is baseless.”

District Attorney William Barr is now out of the picture (see his letter of resignation). Barr is a notorious Daddy Bush asset since the old days – and that means classic Deep State. Barr knew about all federal investigations on Hunter Biden dating back to 2018, covering potential money laundering and bribery.

And still, as the Wall Street Journal delightfully put it, he “worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign”.

A devastating report (Dems: a Republican attack report) has shown how the Biden family was connected to a vast financial network with multiple foreign ramifications.

Then there’s Barr not even daring to say there was enough reason for the Department of Justice to engage in a far-reaching investigation into voting fraud, finally putting to rest all “baseless” conspiracy theories.

Move on. Nothing to see here. Even if an evidence pile-up featured, among other instances, ballot stuffing, backdated ballots, statistical improbabilities, electronic machine tampering, software back doors, affidavits from poll workers, not to mention the by now legendary stopping the vote in the dead of night, with subsequent, huge batches of votes miraculously switching from Trump to Biden.

Once again an omniscient army of oh so impartial “fact checkers” will say everything is baseless.

A perverse blowback

A perverse form of blowback is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear, the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of what happens next in Dystopia Central.

Both options are dire.

    The election stands, even if considered fraudulent by nearly half of U.S. public opinion. To quote that peerless existentialist, The Dude, there’s no rug tying the room together anymore.
    Was the election to be somehow overturned before January 20, the Deep State would go Shock and Awe to finish the job.

In either case, The Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.

It gets worse. A possible implosion of the union – with internal convulsions leading to a paroxysm of violence – may even be coupled with an external explosion, as in a miscalculated imperial adventure.

For the Three Sovereigns – Russia, China and Iran – as well as the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the conclusion is inescapable: if the current, sorry spectacle is the best Western liberal “democracy” has to offer, it definitely does not need any enemies or “threats”.

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Excellent interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRAK9Z362RY

James Corbett on COVID-19, The Great Reset, and Problem-Reaction-Solution

In this powerful interview, John Bush talks to James Corbett of the Corbett Report to shine light on how COVID-19 has accelerated the insider's plans to usher in a technocratic and authoritarian global government. By better understanding the plans and agenda of the global elite, we can more effectively strategize on how to opt out and insulate ourselves from the "Great Reset". Topics in the interview will include 9/11, COVID tyranny, vaccines, the 2030 Agenda, The Great Reset, agorism, solutions, and the elite's strategy of problem-reaction-solution. The two will also explore how blockchain technology simultaneously offers hope for decentralization while also providing a means for those in power to better track, trace, and control the public. You do not want to miss this in-depth interview!! Follow James' work here - https://www.corbettreport.com/ Subscribe to the Live Free Now Show here - http://livefreenow.show

....

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/big_brother_in_disguise_the_rise_of_a_new_technological_world_order

Big Brother in Disguise: The Rise of a New, Technological World Order

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

It had the potential for disaster.

Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube.

The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the heat to accessing work files, sending emails and making phone calls.

A year earlier, a Google outage resulted in Nest users being unable to access their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras. As Fast Company reports, “This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.”

Welcome to the Matrix.

Twenty-some years after the Wachowskis’ iconic film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a blue pill or a red pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.

We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.

Science fiction has become fact.

In The Matrix, computer programmer Thomas Anderson a.k.a. hacker Neo is wakened from a virtual slumber by Morpheus, a freedom fighter seeking to liberate humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by hyper-advanced artificial intelligence machines that rely on humans as an organic power source. With their minds plugged into a perfectly crafted virtual reality, few humans ever realize they are living in an artificial dream world.

Neo is given a choice: to take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be.

Most people opt for the blue pill.

In our case, the blue pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.

Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.

This is not freedom.

This is not even progress.

This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.

So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.

Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.

If ever Americans find themselves in bondage to technological tyrants, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, we’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”

By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)

These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones—poised to take to the skies en masse this year—will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?

Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

Indeed, it is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

In other words, the IoS will rely on technology being able to access and act on your thoughts.

Fourtane outlines several trends related to the IoS that are expected to become a reality by 2030:

1: Thoughts become action: using the brain as the interface, for example, users will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination.

2: Sounds will become an extension of the devised virtual reality: users could mimic anyone's voice realistically enough to fool even family members.

3: Real food will become secondary to imagined tastes. A sensory device for your mouth could digitally enhance anything you eat, so that any food can taste like your favorite treat.

4: Smells will become a projection of this virtual reality so that virtual visits, to forests or the countryside for instance, would include experiencing all the natural smells of those places.

5: Total touch: Smartphones with screens will convey the shape and texture of the digital icons and buttons they are pressing.

6: Merged reality: VR game worlds will become indistinguishable from physical reality by 2030.

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.

Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside, these smart pills can remind you to take your medication, search for cancer, and even send an alert to your doctor warning of an impending heart attack.

Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know?

Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?

For example, asks Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha:

What kind of warnings should users receive about the risks of implanting chip technology inside a body, for instance? How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could law enforcement obtain data that would reveal which individuals abuse drugs or sell them on the black market? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?

Let me put it another way.

If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications? Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home—locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.

While President Trump signed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act into law on Dec. 4, 2020, in order to establish a baseline for security protection for the billions of IoT devices flooding homes and businesses, the law does little to protect the American people against corporate and governmental surveillance.

In fact, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug.

After all, who cares if the government can track your whereabouts on your GPS-enabled device so long as it helps you find the fastest route from Point A to Point B? Who cares if the NSA is listening in on your phone calls and downloading your emails so long as you can get your phone calls and emails on the go and get lightning fast Internet on the fly? Who cares if the government can monitor your activities in your home by tapping into your internet-connected devices—thermostat, water, lights—so long as you can control those things with the flick of a finger, whether you’re across the house or across the country?

Control is the key here.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

George Orwell understood this.

Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things and its twin, the Internet of Senses, is just Big Brother in disguise.