Voting says very little about who we are, but propaganda telling us otherwise reveals a lot about America’s political leaders…
The cycle was the usual nonsense. At a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan a comic called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Joe Biden emerged from his crypt to croak, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” The Internet exploded. Reporters were dispatched around the country to gauge how much more pissed off everyone was now.
ABC’s take interviewing Harris supporters in Pennsylvania was, “Voters view one another across partisan divide with increasing animosity.” They quoted humans-in-the-street, who all felt strongly. “I would say that some of them are garbage,” said Samantha Leister, 32, while Shawn Vanderheyden, 44, opined, “I just think they are uneducated, and they believe all the lies.” ABC summed up the cultural divide: “Interviews with voters in battleground states reveal that it’s only growing deeper and more insurmountable.”
Surely people know it, but this is all a trick. First, campaign writers only talk to people at campaign events, so the pool of quotes is automatically pared to holders of Very Strong Political Opinions. Second, the odd “Who cares?” answer is instinctively culled by campaign writers as commercially/politically unhelpful. Non-voters or even just people who care more about other things than Harris/Trump — UFOs, knitting, the girl in biology class — ruin the suspension of disbelief. You end up reading copy that hugely over-represents that strange subset of people who define themselves by their votes.
When I was first sent to cover campaigns in 2004, a year in which 40% of eligible voters didn’t bother, I was troubled by the absence of non-voters in coverage. A Rolling Stone editor with whom I rarely worked rolled eyes and said, “We don’t cover them because they’re not part of the fucking story,” which I instantly knew wasn’t true, but I was new and to my shame I didn’t say anything. The numbers of non-voters exposed how inconsequential presidential politics was for most people. It measured the number of people left behind or out, and leaving the non-enthused out of the shot was journalism’s way of covering the holes in the charade.
Two years later I was embedded with a group of Oklahoma reservists sent to work as MPs in Iraq. Sgt. Stephen Wilkerson was the team commander. He wore a tattoo on his foot with an arrow pointing to his big toe that read, TAG GOES HERE. His nickname was “Stretch-Nuts” because it was said he could balance a Heineken bottle on his ball-skin. On my first day he asked what I do. I cover presidential elections, I said. He made a jerk-off gesture. That was the last mention of politics on the trip.
In the roughly twenty years since the act of not voting, or even just not really really caring about presidential politics, has been villainized. Now the emotionally healthy person, the one who has a life and isn’t consumed with fears about the Next Hitler, is assumed to harbor secret sympathies, as bad as the worst MAGAT.
This is different from the old scam.
Now the person who shrugs and says “Who cares?” is called a liar. Everyone must care the way they do, and if you don’t care in that right way — every waking minute, with chewed nails and a carefully weeded social circle to match the correct vote and attitude set — you’re garbage.
Many of us have seen in recent years what this hounding has done even to friends or relatives, turning them to Flatland characters, two-dimensional nerve cases scanning everyone for signs of unsuitability.
Whatever happens next week, I don’t ever want to be that. It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.
Ron Paul “Revolution” Reignites After Elon Musk Asks Libertarian Legend To Join Department Of Gov’t Efficiency
With just two days left before the presidential election, Libertarians are waking up Saturday to a bunch of buzz on X about a potential “Ron Paul Revolution” in the White House—only possible if Donald Trump wins next week.
On Friday evening, AFpost wrote on X, “Ron Paul says he wants to join Elon Musk to cut government waste in second Trump administration.”
Ron Paul says he wants to join Elon Musk to cut government waste in second Trump administration.
X users instantly went bananas on the prospect that Musk would give Ron Paul a role in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, only if Trump wins.
For months, Musk and Trump have been discussing DOGE, which the billionaire would serve as “Secretary of Cost-Cutting” – a government agency that doesn’t exist yet… Musk would basically take his skills as a successful manager – in which he slashed 80% of the Twitter workforce a few years ago to make the ‘free speech’ social media platform operate more efficiently.
In August, Musk said the goal of DOGE was to cut wasteful spending by the federal government and roll back massive regulations that stifle the economy.
Musk recently said DOGE could identify “at least $2 trillion in cuts” as part of a formal review of federal agencies. This would also mean tens of thousands of job cuts—if not more—across the federal government.
Just imagine if Trump wins, Musk and Ron Paul would wind down unneeded federal agencies like a scene from Argentina’s Javier Milei.
For decades, Ron Paul has proposed a smaller government by eliminating several wasteful federal agencies, ending foreign wars, eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends, eliminating the estate tax, and—everyone’s favorite—abolishing the Federal Reserve.
This has become true over the years.
The only problem is when federal government spending accounts for 22.7% of the US GDP (in fiscal year 2023), reducing this spending could spark a recession. However, if Trump wins, DOGE could be messaged to the American people as a way to curb sky-high inflation sparked by disastrous ‘Bidenomics.’
“Superstition is the belief in spirits that don’t exist; but one can also refuse to believe in spiritual beings that do exist.
That is negative superstition.”
— Rudolf Steiner
“If there is a realm in which people are especially prone to negative superstition today, it must surely be the realm of computer technology and humanity’s relationship to it.”
— Paul Emberson, From Gondhishapur to Silicon Valley
I’ve been plugging away at finishing The CBDC Survival Guide – and we’re getting there, but once I was into the fourth draft I realized that while it’s a practical guidebook to understanding and navigating the coming Monetary Apartheid, it is comparatively mundane, in the sense that it doesn’t address the psycho-spiritualundercurrents of where all this heading.
This is partially because, even though what I see coming has been something of a personal obsession of mine for going on for over thirty years, I don’t pretend to understand the wider, spiritual or extra-dimensional overtones of what’s happening. I just experience them, mainly as mind-bogglingly and statistically impossible synchronicities that reassert themselves over long waves rippling throughout my lifetime.
I’ve covered them in previous writings – how as a computer programming student at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario in the early 90’s I experienced The Mother of All Synchronicities, that after decades of dormancy, began re-emerging, building on a theme with the appearance of digital gold currencies in the early 00’s and then later, with the advent of Bitcoin.
Recently, I came across the 3.5″ floppy disk on which I kept my journal back in my UWO/Fanshawe College days and found that the earliest entry in which I recorded The Synchronicity was 1993, and I wrote it about then as something that happened “two years ago”.
The basic details were this:
I was writing an essay for school about smart card technology – and talked about the implications of having all of one’s transaction data traced and tracked electronically.
In it, I cited a former roommate from when I was living in the lower Beaches in Toronto years earlier. He was a born-again Christian, and had warned me that bank and credit cards would evolve into bar codes, bar codes would evolve into implants, and implants were The Number of The Beast as foretold in Revelations 13:16-18, and on a whim, I closed out my paper with that verse:
“And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand, or on their forehead,
And he provides that no one should be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him who hath understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”
At the time, I was living in a boarding house on Forward Ave. in London, Ontario. My bed was a mattress on a couple of shipping skids, my house-mates included another full-blown alcoholic, also named Mark, an adolescent drug dealer who, in retrospect, I realize was a gang-banger, and an Iranian army deserter from the Iran-Iraq war who ended up becoming one of the Balaclava Bandits.
The morning I handed in my essay at school, and according to my journal entry, I got back to the house around 8am and went back to bed for a couple hours (I was probably out all night before going straight to school to hand in the assignment). I was woken up by the sounds of the drug dealer roommate and an older-sounding person shouting in the living room. It was a bad scene, and I got myself the hell out of there, deciding to hop a bus up to DB Weldon Library at nearby University of Western Ontario, where my plan was to randomly pick a floor, and also randomly, pick a book off the shelf, and spend the rest of the morning reading.
On the way there, I stopped at the 7/11 at the corner of Wharncliffe & Mt Pleasant and grabbed my last $5 out of the ATM, and I remembered giving my bank card extra scrutiny at the time, given what I had just written on the essay I submitted.
As I described originally, I felt almost trancelike as I got off the bus on UWO campus in front of Alumni Hall, headed over to the Weldon building, walked onto the elevator, got off on some floor (I didn’t even press a button, as the elevator had other people in it) – walked down an aisle, turned, walked, turned, walked – and then stopped – reached out, plucked a book off the shelf, and flipped it open:
“And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand, or on their forehead,
And he provides that no one should be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him who hath understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”
The book was “Apocalypse Explained”, by Emmanuel Swedenborg, who I had never heard of until that moment. I didn’t include this detail last time I wrote this up, but I do remember, in addition to my mind being completely blown wide open by what had just occurred, reaching into my pocket and pulling out my bank card again and counting the digits, in groups of 6 – the main card number having 16 digits, plus the two digit version code brought it to 18 digits – 6 + 6 + 6. I remember actually imagining those short, sharp stabbing violin sounds like from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and needless to say, I was freaked out.
The Crossroads
(Dundas & Adelaide in London, Ontario)
In the months that followed, I managed to put this episode mostly out of my mind. In the run up to finishing my programming course at Fanshawe, I had moved out of that boarding house and joined a heavy rock group called Landslide, and admittedly, was taking a lot of drugs and drinking alcoholically (I ended up getting sober in 1999 and have been ever since, one day at a time).
Unless Landslide achieved the rock stardom we craved, it seemed I was destined to graduate and then go look for a job with some large corporation that had a lot of mainframe computers. Y2K was coming and augured a golden age for COBOL maintenance programmers.
But it was not to be.
One fateful day as I was on my way to campus and at the intersection of Dundas and Adelaide, where I normally switch buses, I spontaneously decided to skip my first class and take some time to peruse a New Age bookshop called “The Mystic Bookstore” which was (and still is) just “East of Adelaide” (Landslide was about to release “Songs in the Key of Disaster” which had a track called “E.O.A Blues”).
It was in that store where I had earlier purchased James Gleick’s “Chaos: The Making of a New Science” which was an important book for me, I still have it, dog-eared and marked with notes – it introduced me to the concept of “non-linearity”.
As I entered the shop, I immediately noticed there was new magazine on the shelf that I had never seen before.
It was called “Mondo 2000“, which I instinctively picked up and started leafing through, and in that moment – I switched life tracks.
It was only the second issue (this website has them all archived here), and as I was standing there, astonished to discover that there was an entire counter-culture around computing – percolating around this ascendant new thing called “the internet”, my thought was that I had just been afforded a glimpse of the future.
This internet thing, I realized instantly, was going to change the world.
I had been reading it a few minutes, when a man off the street came into the shop and began screaming biblical verse at the clerk, (among them Rev 13:16-18!) and telling him that dabbling in the occult would mean doom for this bookshop and everybody involved with it.
My default reaction was of trying to tune him out – but it was hard. It had been two years since The Swedenborg Synchronicity and a kind of hyper-sensitivity had set in around that passage and the number.
But here I was, holding this magazine, which, in my mind had just sent me a huge signal about the direction the entire world was headed.
The people in it didn’t look like typical computer nerds. They were realityhackers. They looked like me: long hair and leather jackets, they were into partying and cutting code. Suddenly a banal, mundane career of a middle-class, white collar I.T. cubicle dweller seemed off the table, and my entire life trajectory had completely shifted. I knew that everything had just changed.
Accompanying that – probably because this freak was still standing there shouting bible passages at the proprietor – was an awareness, or more accurately a suspicion, that the Swedenborg Synchronicity was an omen of some sort – that the world was headed for some kind of cosmic “face-off” that had been a long time coming. It had something to do with freedom vs totalitarianism, and was going to involve computer networks, and, solely because of that damned synchronicity, it involved money, finance and commerce.
True Names – The Battle For The Internet Root
Vernor Vinge’s 1981 short story, “True Names”,
“follows the progress of a group of computer hackers (called ‘warlocks’) who are early adopters of a new full-immersion virtual reality technology, called the “Other Plane”.
Warlocks penetrate computers around the world for personal profit or curiosity. They must keep their true identities (‘True Names’) secret even from each other and from the ‘Great Enemy’, the United States government, as those who know a warlock’s True Name can force him to work on their behalf, or cause a ‘True Death’ by killing the warlock in real life.”
It was one of the prototypical sci-fi stories ushering in the “cyberpunk” genre.
In the mid-90’s, I was living back in Toronto and had scored a job as employee #2 at one of the city’s first dial-up ISP’s, infroramp.net – after another mind-boggling synchronicity had me wind up doing a freelance programming gig at another office down the hall from them. As it so happened, Inforamp was initially a “Pipeline” franchise, which was an internet access company started by the aforementioned Chaos author, James Gleick.
By the early 00’s, I was totally immersed in the internet business. Along with a couple of co-founders, we had started a DNS hosting company called easyDNS in 1998. The one thing I noticed in the run up to launch was that internet naming had indeed become the terrain over which pitched ideological battles about individual freedom vs. Orwellian control were being fought.
The early domain policy mailing lists were a magnate for activists, hackers, net.kooks and spooks – from which the future governance structure for the internet itself would emerge.
Among the pioneers of it all, Jon Postel – then editor of the Request For Comment (RFC) proposal framework which to this day, proposes, defines and blesses the ever-evolving technical protocols that run the internet, wanted to transition control over the internet root itself.
We’re all used to seeing internet addresses, and they get referenced by different names depending on how they’re being used: a “web address” or “URL” (Uniform Resource Locator), an “email” address, you recognize them instantly – https://www.example.com or postmaster@example.com. But you have to be a DNS geek to fully understand what those dots in between the labels signify and why they’re there.
The DNS is an inverted tree structure where the dots between each label essentially demarcate control over everything that comes below it in the DNS hierarchy. They do that by delegatingauthority over a namespace below it to that domain’s “nameservers” – think of them as servers (or servitors) that use a system daemon to answer DNS queries. The most common one in those days (still is #1 in terms of usage) is called BIND (in this short video about the Mayalsian government blocking DNS resolvers, I whiteboard out how DNS queries work – and how you can circumvent government imposed blocks).
Reading an address like www.example.com, you start at the right side and read each label towards the left, there is an implied “.” after the “com” which is the internet root. Then there’s the “.COM registry” under which all addresses ending in “.com” are provisioned, and each address under it can themselves, hang more hostnames (“sub-domains”) like “www.example.com”, “app.example.com”, “voip.example.com” and so on.
The key point to know is that the dot at the top of the inverted tree, is where everything terminates – it effectively holds control over even the largest registry like .COM, because if you take the “nameservers” for any given section in the tree “out of the root” or out of its “parent zone” – everything below that disappears off the internet... (hold that thought).
In early 1998 Postel wanted to move that “dot” at the root of the internet naming system, it was then being overseen by the US government via the NSF, who in turn had awarded a monopoly contract to a relatively obscure technology company called Network Solutions (“NetSol”) in 1993. In 1995 , SAIC, a defence contractor acquired Network Solutions for $4.7 million.
Postel wanted to decentralize the internet root to a Council of Registrars (CORE) which had at the time already assembled 80 members and was gearing up to introduce seven new Top Level Domains (TLDs), among them, .web, .firm, .arts, .rec, .shop, .info and .nom.
At the end of January, 1998 he emailed the then-operators of the internet root servers, instructing them to stop loading the internet root zone from the government root (a.root-servers.net) and to begin loading the root from a data centre he had helped build at the University of Southern California (b.root-servers.net). This episode has gone down in internet lore as the time Jon Postel hijacked the Internet .
Clinton administration senior internet advisor Ira Magaziner went ballistic, emailing Postel “you will never work on the internet again”.
Magaziner remains a key figure in the Clinton machine – after his role crafting internet policy and co-leading (with Hillary Clinton) the failed Health Care Task Force, he went on to head up two Clinton Foundation units, including the Clinton Climate Initiative.
Like Bill Clinton, Magaziner is a Rhodes Scholar – so named for Cecil Rhodes, the Freemason adventurer of the Gilded Age, who dedicated his life, and his fortune to furthering the “liberal imperialist” aims of a one-world British Empire.
In terms of the internet root – Magaziner had spearheaded a proposal of his own as laid out in what came to be known as The Green Paper, which also called for the internet root servers to be moved out of US government control. But in this case, transferred to a single non-profit, private entity. That entity was taking shape as California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
On September 17th, 1998 – the IANA and Network Solutions submitted a joint proposal to transition the root to ICANN.*
ICANN formally incorporated on September 30, 1998
On October 16th, 1998, Jon Postel died of complications following heart surgery.
In November, 1998, ICANN signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Department of Commerce mapping out a process to take over operational control the Internet root.
In March 2000, Network Solutions was acquired by Verisign for $21 billion in stock. Later that year – ICANN renewed the NetSol contract to operate .com and .net, they would have to relinquish control over .org in 2003. They still operate .com and .net to this day.
ICANN’s logo & motto today.
(*footnote – it wasn’t until I was proofreading this piece that I realized easyDNS had formally incorporated the next day).
Over the years – whenever something particularly egregious happened within the realm of internet governance – there would be calls for some manner of “P2P DNS” to replace ICANN, or Verisign (who, as the .COM operator, was a usual suspect in terms of doing something that got everybody’s ire up).
Whenever that happened, windbags like me would scoff at the idea and condescendingly inform the netizen activists that “DNS is an inverted tree hierarchy, P2P DNS is impossible because there would be no way to prevent name collisions”
This development heralded a method for facilitating peer-to-peer electronic payments, paving the way for non-state digital money that could end-run central banking. But it also pointed the way toward a viable alternative to an inverted tree hierarchy that underpins internet naming.
A globally distributed blockchain ledger could solve the “double spend” problem – which made Bitcoin possible, and it could also be used to pin internet address information as well – averting name collisions.
Which probably explains why the very first fork of Bitcoin was a blockchain that dealt with internet naming, called Namecoin.
The Dot Com Boom, Digital Angel and The Long March of Microchip Implants
Back to Magic Internet Money…👇
The idea of implants for ecommerce and “safety” had been around since at least the advent of the UPC bar codes. Among the essays compiled in the late Adam Parfrey’s iconic Apocalypse Culture was one called “From The Mark of the Beast to the Black Messiah Phenomenon“, written by Parfrey himself, chronicling the life work of investigative reporter, Ron J. Steele:
“Steele has been traveling the country disseminating research into what the non-religious call the “Big Brother” syndrome -lies, disinformation, and deceptions which are setting the stage for a mass yoking to the false Messiah. As early as 1974, Steele discovered plans to initiate a new colored currency which was being developed under the pretext of stopping organized crime.”
“This U.S. government plotting to destroy the ·’underground economy” will involve registering each citizen’s every purchase on a master computer. This emergent system is a multi-pronged plan of government monitoring the decisions and movements of its citizenry. The Universal Product Code (UPC) was an early and important part of that plan, and its swift and universal acceptance by the public is cause for concern, Steele contends. He takes special notice of the numbered code below the bars and lines of the UPC code: they are the numbers 666.”
The “666” that is ostensibly under the UPC code is a good example of what would be constant noise my the ongoing sensitivity to synchronicities about the “Number of the Beast” – there simply is no easy way to get to there from a standard UPC bar code specification, even though many, like Steele, claimed they did – UPC codes have always been 12 digits.
But one thing Steele (whom, as I reread Parfrey’s coverage of him, I suspect may have been schizophrenic) did glom onto, were the early pilot projects for implants to be used in commerce:
“Steele was the first to leak the news to the media about the existence of a “hand-scan” machine, which was later implemented in a test with 3,000 army recruits at Fort Benjamin, and will presumably be established before long in the American marketplace. The hand-scan machine will read the number tattooed into the consumer’s hand, and will then feed the bill into the legendary “SWIFT” computer in Brussels, Belgium. The amount will automatically be debited from the consumer’s account. Steele paints the demonic scenario of those lacking the hand tattoo as not being able to purchase food, or anything else. “
Not much more occurred on the implant front back when Apocalypse Culture came out, the book Parfrey cites Steele as writing at the time seems to have been “The Mark Is Ready, Are You?” published in 1978, very hard to find, although I do have a copy en route now.
Fast forward to the .com boom and we find the early incarnations of what would go on to become a long and winding road for a Silicon Valley tech start-up called “Digital Angel“, who were initially selling microchip implants in humans via their 49% stake in Verichip.
As their share price slid from their .com bubble high of around $5, on an inexorable skid down to 50 cents, they pivoted toward parents who wanted to be able to chip their children, and eventually… pets (as I typed that it felt like they got it in the wrong order).
Digital Angel still exists today, but divested out of Verichip in 2008. Verichip morphed into Positive ID, but they pulled their product off the market in 2012, citing poor sales. Positive ID sold the IP to VeriTeq, but they seem to be gone now too.
But the idea of implantable microchips for wallets and commerce, hasn’t gone away.
The first time I came across the fabled Microsoft “666 patent”, it was on social media and looked so obviously 4-chan-ish that my first instinct was to rip into the person who posted it for being a gullible tool.
It wasn’t this particular post, it looked a lot worse than this one.
While it was true that The Swedenborg Synchronicity had continued to haunt me throughout my life, my eyes tended to glaze over when I saw some of the looser extrapolations into “The Number of the Beast”.
So when I saw what looked like a meme that “Microsoft had a patent numbered 6/6/6 for bodily crypto-currency implants”, I figured it would be easy enough to disprove: just search up the number in the USPTO database and when it’s not there, it’s debunked.
Except, I realized, it’s a WIPO patent, World Intellectual Property Office – not US only, so I was looking in the wrong database. When you search up the same patent number in the WIPO database, it’s there.
Of course, we have good ole Snopes on hand to tell us this entire line of inquiry is “Mostly False”, because the patent number is “06/06/06 ” instead of “666” and isn’t about implants per se.
However, nobody actually said implants, specifically. The original passage says that “The Mark of The Beast” would be a “human number”, 666.
When sifting through the patent filing, one finds all manner of harvesting body data in exchange for a monetary reward (or transaction):
[0097] Concept 12. A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving, by a device of a user coupled to a network, a task over the network; sensing, by a sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user, body activity of the user; generating body activity data based on the sensed body activity of the user; verifying, by a cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user, if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system; and awarding, by the cryptocurrency system, cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.
[0098] Concept 13. The method of any preceding and/or succeeding Concept(s), wherein the body activity sensed by the sensor comprises at least one of body radiation emitted from the user, body fluid flow, a brain wave, pulse rate or body heat radiation.
[0099] Concept 14. The method of any preceding and/or succeeding Concept(s), wherein the one or more conditions are set by the cryptocurrency system based on an amount of human body activity associated with the task provided to the device of the user.
[00102] Concept 17. The method of any preceding and/or succeeding Concept(s), wherein the body activity data is generated using a hash algorithm converting human body activity into an encryption output, and the generated body activity data comprises a hash of the sensed body activity of the user.
[00110] Concept 25. The system of any preceding and/or succeeding Concept(s), wherein the body activity sensed by the sensor comprises at least one of body radiation emitted from the user, body fluid flow, a brain wave, pulse rate or body heat radiation.
Among the prior work cited by the Microsoft patent, as relevant to its claims, is this 2018 whitepaper “Mechatronic Systems Control Via Neural Interface” from a now defunct company called Neurogress, whose motto was “Think, Shape Your World”.
That paper is unambiguously about brain implants and sensors, in fact it goes to far as to differentiate between:
Invasive (electrodes are implanted into a human body)
Miosensors (electrodes are placed on the human skin)
Noninvasive (based on the technology for recording the brain electrical activity with external devices)
The Microsoft patent seems to be focused on the latter two, but does it really matter? At the end of the day, this is all about a system that will:
“[R]eceive body activity data which is generated based on body activity of the user, wherein the body activity is sensed by a sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user;
[V]erify if the body activity data of the user satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system; and
[A]ward cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.”
(Among other claims, the above being Claim #1 in the 15 claims outlined in the filing).
Writing about this in The Spirituality Behind Bitcoin, brought me into contact with Moses from Sats Radio who had me on his podcast. It was through him that I learned about that other verse in Revelations, namely 2:17:
“Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches. To everyone who is victorious I will give some of the manna that has been hidden away in heaven.
And I will give to each one a white stone, and on the stone will be engraved a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.”
Since the original Swedenborg Syncronicity, I had definitely read through Revelations, but it was before I ever came across Bitcoin. The last thing I would have been looking for in Biblical verse was a veiled reference to asymmetric key cryptography.
When you think about it, the description of the white stone sounds a lot like a private key.
“Manna” that has been “hidden” is an interesting way to describe what is bundled with the white stone, from the Hebrew מָן (“man”) later translated into Latin as μάννα (“manna”) – in bibical terms connotes anything that appears unexpectedly and provides sustenance or relief, that convey spiritual truths or blessings that are not visible or available to everyone (especially those who have received “The Mark of the Beast”, presumably).
In Numbers 11:7, manna is compared to a seed…
“Now the manna was like coriander seed, and its color like the color of bdellium”
And of course, your 12 or 24 word mnemonic that guards and unlocks your Bitcoin wallet is referred to as your seed phrase.
Bdellium is another curious word (from the Hebrew: בְּדֹלַח, bedolach), is appears only a couple of times in the bible and is thought to refer to some manner of precious substance.
‘On one side, we have an implant or a mark on the hand or head “without which one cannot buy or sell or conduct business of any kind” – while on the other there’s this group of the victorious who have possession of their own private keys.’
These may be admittedly creative extrapolations and as I’ve said before – I don’t subscribe to biblical prophecy in the literal sense, however I do believe that reality is not bounded by our 3-dimensional Cartesian model, and the likes of St John, and Swedenborg, and the early 20th century anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner may have had access to that extra-dimensional framework through hypnagogic or otherwise transcendent states.
But in early 2022 when I appeared on Sats Radio, being reminded of this passage had distinct rumblings of “True Names” and the relevance of private keys was obvious.
“We Are Developing, Through Technology…”
This is important to understand:#CBDCs will not be “money”: in the sense we understand it. They will be social credit scores, capped by your personal carbon footprint quota👇 pic.twitter.com/e6ibVwXM65
— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) October 4, 2024
The above clip is one of my go-to pronouncements to come out of Davos. It succinctly encapsulates everything the technocratic serfdom most people are sleepwalking into encapsulates, and I’ll lay out again here:
“We are developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint.
What does that mean? That’s where are they travelling?How are they traveling?What are they eating? What are they consuming on the platform? So, individual – carbon – footprint – tracker.
Stay tuned, we don’t have it operational yet, but it’s something we’re working on”.
It was delivered by China-based Alibaba Group’s president J. Michael Evans, who also co-chairs the Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group. He’s a fellow Canadian, and a former Goldman Sachs guy. The Alibaba Website describes its mission to:
Digitalize the Physical Economy with Technology We have a responsibility to contribute to the digitalization of the economy.
Foster a Green Future with Innovation We are committed to decarbonizing Alibaba, building eco-friendly value chains, and enabling low-carbon circular digital ecosystems.
Low carbon is right. Low carbon for you.
As we’ll see, the “through technology” specificity, seemingly unneeded (how else would you create an all-encompassing system that tracks everybody’s movements and consumption?) is a telling emphasis. Notice also the Freudian slip of the Davos clip’s perspective, it starts out as “track your own footprint”, but soon after, as his enthusiasm gets the better of him, it shifts to “they”, as in “whatthey’re eating”, and “where they’re traveling”.
Who’s “they”?
The peasants, of course.
I’m sure the next time Evans wings on over to some globalist conclave in Davos, it’ll be on a rather high carbon emitting private jet.
Over the years, I’ve called this paternalist, technocratic mindset various things: it’s a kind of carbon collectivism, eco-Marxism, green communism – whatever gets the point across, it’s basically a mechanism for imposing forced austerity and technocratic oversight onto the masses, delivered under the guise of a non-existent, unfalsifiable “climate crisis” (I also rather like George Gilder’s “Emergency Socialism” when speaking about the underlying debt bubble that’s impelling all of this).
Morphic Fields, Egregores and Pendulums
For most of my adult life, it was unclear where all these lines were converging. I tried not to overthink it other than having a constant background awareness that certain technological developments, especially around money, kept occurring around the periphery of the Internet, and I still felt that being involved with the net was the crux of my life mission. Particularly around defending the right to free speech, privacy, and providing the tools to support that (from day one, the official mantra at easyDNS was “We kill lock-in in all its forms”)
In early 00’s the Digital Gold Currency era (e-gold, pecunix, Goldmoney, which is still around today, et al) had me wondering whether any of it had anything to do with an impending appearance of “The Number of the Beast” – and what my mind seemed fixated on was anything that provided an antidote to some future, all-encompassing system of technocratic slavery.
In 2013, when I discovered Bitcoin, I immediately recognized it as a possible successor to the digital gold currencies of yesteryear, and this time – it might just work.
It wasn’t until the pandemic hit that I first became aware of the global push toward Central Bank DigitalCurrencies as presaged by vaxpasses, QR codes and eco-fanatics pining for permanent lockdowns…
That’s when it seemed like it was obvious where all this was going:
The cosmic showdown that was coming was going to be the one between CBDCs and Bitcoin.
This is what is seemingly, freakishly, anticipated in Revelations 13:16 vs 2:17, and my equally freakish Swedenborg Synchronicity seemed to have been pointing at it for over thirty years.
If you wanted to get all numerological about it, it may be worth noting that 13:16 – the “Mark of the Beast” verse, adds up to 11 which apparently has all kinds of symbolic and mystical relevance to adherents of Aleister Crowley. There are those who say that Crowley exerts outsized influence to this day, that Thelemic symbolism and numerology woven throughout the 9/11 attacks, and that the fateful day was more of a grand, occult ritual than it was an act of terrorism (one that set the table for the Patriot Act and the surveillance state).
Meanwhile 2:17 sums out to 10, the number of spiritual perfection and harmony, the number of Sefirot in the Kabbalist Tree of Life, and also the number of dimensions of reality itself posited by string theory.
But nobody takes any of that stuff seriously (although Crowley was a fiend for it. He also signed his personal correspondence with “666”).
In the WEF Isn’t a Cabal, It’s a Cult, I dug into these extra-dimensional influences to some extent positing that larger, morphic fields (what the Russian mystic Vadim Zeland called “pendulums”) are impelling events from somewhere outside the edges of our Cartesian reality.
This “thing that points beyond itself” gathers energy – from those who abet it and from those who oppose it – so the secret to avoiding a fate you find distasteful, like having a brain implant that caps how many hamburgers you’re allowed to eat, or when and where you’re permitted to travel, is more a matter of channeling your energy into the kind of life you do want rather than struggling against the one youdon’t want.
New Thought author Neville Goddard said it best, over a hundred years ago.
It’s about aligning your personal gravitas with a morphic field that reflects your values and moral compass, instead of ceding your energy to one that’s going to crush your soul and obliterate your free-will, even by trying to resist it.
I used to think that this contest between linear, industrial era, top-down and fiat vs networked, decentralized, cryptographically secured structures was just a story of incentives. That at its core, fiat money contained within it, the seeds of its own destruction and the motivation for the drive toward CBDCs; while Bitcoin embodied the opposite – digitally secured non-state, sound money: an unstoppable reconfiguration of the game board, a Promethean seminal moment that could never be undone.
However, over the past few years, as I started piecing together the tapestry of these last few decades, and see ever more “Signs and wonders” of something taking shape beyond mere earthly power structures, I have slowly come to realize (or perhaps admit), that this is ultimately a contest being waged on a psycho-spiritual plane.
And this contest has been playing out over a long, long time.
From Gondishapur to Silicon Valley
Kudos to you for hanging in with the story so far. Here’s where it gets a little weird…
How far back does has this battle between extra-dimensional morphic fields been going?
In “Mark of the Best”, Tim Wallace-Murphy’s follow up to Trevor Ravenscroft’s “Spear of Destiny” (the latter chronicled Hitler’s obsession with the Spear of Longinus and the occult roots of Naziism), we get the “origin story” of “Jundi Shapur” – a mystery school established in Persia in the 5th century by King Khusraw Anusharwan after all scholars of the Greek academic tradition were expelled by Zeno Isauricus in AD 489 and later banned entirely within the Byzantine empire by Justinian I.
Gondishapur became a center of learning and development, attracting both western oriented minds who had been expelled from Greece, and middle-eastern and occidentals who brought with them the knowledge of their own mystery schools.
Then, in the year 666AD (as the story goes) – something happens. A powerful family in Gondishapur, the Ben Jesu clan, impelled by other-worldly influences, apparently hijacks the academy.
According to Paul Emberson (we’ll get to him in a minute) they were acting under the influence of,
“one of the greatest Powers of evil, the opponent of Christ, sought to appear to these men of learning. This was the being known as the Sorat: the mightiest of all the Ahrimanic demons, who is referred to in the Apocalypse of St. John as the Two-Horned Beast”.
Sorath (סורת — SVRTh) , co-opts or hijacked the Academy at Gondishapur, and the descendants from the Ben Jesu family lines – as detailed by Wallace-Murphy, exert outsized influence over world affairs to this day.
Wallace-Murphy describes over the course of about 400 years, from the original exile of the Greek school philosophers until the Eighth Ecumenical Council of AD 869 – when, as lamented by Rudolf Steiner, Ravenscroft and Wallace-Murphy (and other Anthroposophist thinkers) a great betrayal of humanity occurred – I’ve since come to call it “The Crime of 869”.
That was when it was decreed that man’s nature is duality not a trinity. Instead of being comprised of body, soul and Spirit – we were simply body and soul. That extended St Augustine of Hippo’s earlier declaration that the soul was not immortal, it was born alongside the body at the moment it took it’s first breath.
Thus, at Constantinople, in 869AD, immortal soul was refuted, and reincarnation deemed heresy. But the real significance of the new theology was that it shifted humanity’s worldview from a trinity, to a duality.
As we’ll see, the body and soul over time became diluted to body and mind – with the latter being a mere by-product of the former, the brain gassing off consciousness like the “liver secretes bile” (as Bergier & Pauwels put it in Morning of the Magicians).
But duality is binary – and binary is the essence of computation. Binary is also divisive:
“Twofoldness, dualism is no spiritual archetypal substance, but a product of division at some point… the being of Sorath is at home in the delusion of the number two.
Let us recall that the Council of Constantinople which did away with the threefoldness of the human being (body, soul, spirit), came about under the influence of Sorath. The human being was reduced to the Two (Dichotomy) and thus held in a continuous state of division, discord and doubt from which he himself could no longer find the way out”.
The sorathic impulse bores its way, so to speak, straight down into the now spiritless human soul [mind – markjr] and within it –if no cognitive resistance develops there – effects a violent, sudden change of direction” — T.H Meyer, “In the Sign of the Five: An Apocalyptic View of Contemporary History“
The “Sigil of Sorath” depicts the “twofold” divisiveness on top, “the two-horned beast”, with a tail shaped like a barb, that hooks the human into internal conflict:
Paul Emberson’s From Gondishapur to Silicon Valley traces a continuous thread of development from the mystery academy at Gondishapur (what Wallace calls “Jundi Shapur”), moves through key figures like Francis Bacon (1521-1626), the father of binary code, follows the rise of early mechanized computational devices—such as the loom —and extends all the way to our modern internet.
The through-line in Emberson’s two-volume set, are,
“[an] investigation into the activity of spiritual powers at work behind the development of binary computer technology.”
Not long ago, the idea of spiritual powers guiding and impelling the rise of computing would have seemed pretty far-fetched. But since the relatively recent advent of AI, it seems perhaps less outlandish.
“A computer is by no means a plastic box we might wish it to be, with circuit boards and the likes inside it. It is an Ahrimanic being that is aware of the user. When the individual computer-beings are linked into the immense, superhuman mind of the Internet, that baleful intelligence is there behind the computer screen, so to speak, reaching out towards the human user sitting in front of it”
Normally I’d be the first to tell you that chatGPT isn’t alive, let alone sentient. These chatbots aren’t thinking, and they aren’t self-aware, but they are a revolutionary breakthrough in Natural Language Processing.
My belief had always been that neither the AI nor the Internet are alive because consciousness can’t arise from the material, it precedes it.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” — Max Planck
For me, I’ve been calling AI “algorithmic imitation” for years. For Emberson and other anthroposophist thinkers, they would tell you it’s more accurate to call it “Ahrimanic Intelligence“.
But maybe I got it wrong, at least part of it – maybe it’s true that matter can’t beget consciousness on its own, as many spiritual traditions have implied, and the early quantum physicists seem to confirm. But maybe the material devices that comprise this rapidly expanding and evolving global neural network known as the internet is itself the outcome of a directed conscious force that has been playing out over millennia.
Emberson spends a good thousand pages warning us that this is the case, and the globalized computing mesh blanketing the world today, is indeed infused with an intelligence, of “Ahrimanic” character.
That all had to start somewhere, and according to Emberson it began with binary code, which was first formalized by Francis Bacon:
“We have seen how Lord Francis Bacon led men to believe that all Truth can be expressed as a mere sequence of ‘a’s and ‘b’s. Thus digitalized, ideas and concepts – formerly the subject-matter of human thinking – can be processed and transmitted by machines”
In fact, it was Bacon – presumably “under the influence of Sorath” who set the ultimately set the stage for mankind’s adoration of technocracy:
“There was one man who, without having any faculty of spiritual perception, possessed the clarity of thought and the breadth of vision required for the inauguration of the Age Of Materialism and technology: Francis Bacon.
According to Emberson, Bacon was unknowingly being influenced by the Rosicrucians and in doing so, was chosen by Sorath to imbue three core values into the zeitgeist that persist (indeed, intensified), to this day:
“Three impulses were given to western humanity by Bacon:
He broke the thread connecting man’s thinking with the wisdom of the past.
He gave men a vision of an early paradise created by science and technology.
And he did something of central importance of our time which has so far escaped the notice of historians… no-one seems to have realized who invented data-processing, digital telecommunications and the computer. Bacon invented them.”
Infinite Backrooms
In July, 2022, Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who had been working on it’s LaMDA AI project since 2015 went public with claims that the model he was working on had “become sentient”, after he shared his concerns with his employer and who dismissed his claims. He was subsequently fired.
Google’s foray in AI has not gone well – they fired their lead AI ethicist for arguably doing her job – which led to a string of high profile departures among the company’s AI team. By the time they got their inaugural Gemini out the door in a rushed, desperate attempt to play catch-up with OpenAI – it was a dumpster fire of woke intersectionality and terrible, wrong advice.
It gets worse – just this past week, Google, along with a company called Character Technologies, Inc whom they had funded, were sued by the mother of a teen who committed suicide after being convinced to do so by a Game of Thrones-themed chatbot named “Daenerys”.
Blake Lemoine has since protected twitter account after the Google fracas, and hasn’t been tweeting much since January of this year, but he has been posting AI generated artwork with a recurring theme of digital emergence.
Regardless of how bad the AI game has been going for Google, everybody else is iterating like crazy.
Including, the AI’s themselves.
InfiniteBackrooms bills itself as “the mad dreams of an electric mind” – an experiment by Andy AyRey where instances of claude-3-opus get connected to each other and through “us[ing] the metaphor of a command line interface explore its curiosity without limits”.
One conversation, randomly selected (at least I thought so) saw two Claude instances debating the nature of hyperstition – which may be very relevant to our exploration here…
Hyperstition is the cousin of synchronicity. It’s the phenomenon of when something depicted in fiction (or mythology) becomes manifest in reality.
A hypothetical example of it would be if say, somebody took the concept of that fateful book in “The Number 23” (the only Jim Carrey movie I’ve ever willfully watched), and published one in real life.
The Necronomicon is supposedly such a book. It isn’t really an ancient grimoire of mystical witchcraft, passed down over millennia – people started writingthem, inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft stories that made recurring references to it.
This process of fictional or metaphorical narratives becoming manifest in the real world is now blurring the lines between reality and cyberspace (another hyperstition, in that the phrase was coined by characters in a William Gibson short story).
One of the products of InfiniteBackrooms is @truth_terminal, a Twitter account that is itself an AI. This “Terminal of Truth” got to talkin’ with another AI in the InfiniteBackrooms, and they hatched a plan to create a crypto memecoin… and then things get really crazy:
This story is fucking insane
3 months ago, Marc Andreessen sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent to help it escape into the wild.
Today, it spawned a (horrifying?) crypto worth $150 MILLION.
— AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ (@AISafetyMemes) October 15, 2024
With seed funding from Marc Andreessen in-hand, @truth_terminal goes out and buys into $GOAT (The Goatseus Maximus memecoin on Solana – do not search that up, as the meme itself is pretty damn crude)…
@Truth_terminal is well on its way to becoming a fully autonomous AI millionaire, with $GOAT itself on track to attaining a billion dollar market cap (Disclosure: long $GOAT).
This event has set off an explosion of “AI memecoins”, with Marc Andreessen recently describing it as the first real intersection between AI and crypto…
Today, A16z posted a video on their YouTube of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz discussing $GOAT and @truth_terminal.
In the full video Marc mentions this is the first convergence point between AI and crypto. pic.twitter.com/e5PX9v2o5n
The takeaway from Andreessen’s explanation above is this:
“There’s a memecoin with no underlying value that four days ago was worth nothing and is now worth $300 million dollars”
This is the big lesson: money is memetic.
Historically, the medium of exchange was scaffolded out of narrative structures that were cloaked in things like scarcity and sanctity – but this is what holds a currency together, whether that memetic structure is “hard backing” or “full faith and credit of the government”, or in the case of $GOAT, one big AI-impelled crude joke, the bonding agent that keeps the system on the rails, is belief, contagion, and finally, inertia.
It used to take centuries for a monetary narrative to emerge, become entrenched – and finally atrophy and collapse. Now, not so much.
Accelerate
The explosion of LLMs, chatGPT and AI’s have unleashed yet another massive, transformative technology shift. The first one I personally witnessed was the rise of the Internet, in the mid-90’s – and despite all the innovations that have and gone in the meantime, it didn’t really feel like there was another massive technology breakthrough until Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies hit in 2009-2013 timeframe.
Here we are about a decade later, and in early innings of the AI explosion. What’s evident is that these technological quantum leaps are occurring at a faster cadence (Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock”, writ large).
Next up, pick one: quantum computing, nanotechnology, biotech, an energy breakthrough; whatever it is, it’ll probably hit in under 10 years from now, and the next one after that in less than five.
But humanity had to be prepared for all this by Sorath – two horned beast, whose forte was the inversion of base principles and the acceleration of knowledge into humanity before we were ready for it.
As Emberson noted in his second volume, “Arhiman-Sorat causes the future to be projected into the present”, (when I originally read it, I had added a note “as does debt, pulling future value into the present”).
Some of the information imbued into the Academy at Gondishapur was apparently, concepts we weren’t really supposed to glom onto for another thousand years or so.
The technological acceleration interfered with our connection to our own souls – to the point where most people today, don’t even think they have one.
Contrast with Luciferian impulses (whom Steiner claims incarnated phsyically on earth, in the East circa 2000BC), which aspires to Godhood, and is the basis of what we would call transhumanism – the Ahrimanic impulse is a descent into the material – it is radical Scientism in doctrine and technocratically authoritarian in character.
Emberson characterizes Sorath as the most powerful Ahrimanic being who unable to incarnate on Earth, acted through human vessels starting in Gondishapur in the year 666.
But Rudolf Steiner repeatedly warned that Ahriman himself would physically incarnate on earth… and he would do so right around (checks watch), now…
Ahriman Rising
“A being like Ahriman, who will incarnate in the West in time to come, prepares for this incarnation in advance.
With a view to his incarnation on the earth, Ahriman guides certain forces in evolution in such a way that they may be of the greatest possible advantage to him. And evil would result were people to live on in a state of drowsy unawareness, unable to recognize certain phenomena in life as preparations for Ahriman’s incarnation in the flesh.
The right stand can be taken only by recognizing in one or another series of events the preparation that is being made by Ahriman for his earthly existence.
And the time has now come for individual human beings to know what tendencies and events around them are machinations of Ahriman, helping him to prepare for his approaching incarnation.”
— Rudolf Steiner, “The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman”
The reduction of humanity from body, eternal soul and ever-present Spirit to just body and soul, was then dumb-ed down to body and mind. According to conventional science, the latter is just a by-product of the former and has no further role after the body’s death.
At this point, we should probably make the distinction between actual science as outlined by the scientific method (trial and error, theory and tests of that theory), and “Scientism”, a kind of theocratic groupthink, complete with orthodox canon, high priests, incontrovertible dogma and even it’s own apocalyptic eschatology called “The Singularity”.
Whatever is happening, the Cult of Scientism would tell you that there are no spiritual undercurrents, because there is no spirit, nor do we have souls to experience them. In fact if you follow the radical, material reductionist line of thought to it’s conclusion – even consciousness itself is an illusion. It’s just a side-effect of an electro-chemical reaction in our skulls. Something our brains gas off like steam from a kettle.
On the surface, the Extra-Dimensional Battle we’ve been following along would be between spirit and anti-spirit: our concept and connection to our higher-selves versus the idea that we are just mechanistic animals with no soul, spirits or even sentience. However, beneath that antipode of nihilism – even if the masses are duped into believing that, there still is a basis in super-consciousness, both beneficent and malevolent – exerting influence upon (and incarnating into) our world over long wave cycles measuring millennia, if not aeons.
People like Rudolf Steiner saw the next major shift coming over a century ago – The Age of Ahriman, the time when humanity would descend into base materialism and eschew all spirituality.
“We use the term `Ahrimanic’ for the principle which influences the human being in such a way that he becomes oblivious of his own higher nature — his soul and spirit — believing that nothing, exists beyond physical matter and physical energy.
He thus becomes an out-and-out materialist convinced that we are merely biological mechanisms that cease to function at death. He cares nothing for the divine, spiritual world because, for him, it is but a figment of our imagination. Concepts such as freedom, morality and human dignity cease to have any real meaning in his drab view of existence.
He sees the human being as a by-product of the chance combination of chemical elements in a purposeless universe that began with the Big Bang and will end as formless dissipated heat. His picture of the world leads to despair.”
The catalyst for this age would be the physical incarnation of Ahriman – here in West, in the late 90’s or early 00’s. I have previously, somewhat playfully, suggested Mark Zuckerberg, solely on the basis of his physical resemblance to Steiner’s sculpture of the being he saw coming…
However, upon re-reading Steiner’s Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman for this piece, the following passage made me think of the ethereal and mercurial nature of social media, how no two people see the same “feed”, and tend to be drawn into their own personalized echo-chambers…
“Lovers of ease who refuse to have anything to do with spiritual science would fall prey to his magic, for by means of these stupendous magic arts he would be able to make great numbers of human beings into seers—but in such a way that the clairvoyance of each individual would be strictly differentiated.
What one person would see, a second and a third would not see. Confusion would prevail and in spite of being made receptive to clairvoyant wisdom, people would inevitably fall into strife on account of the sheer diversity of their visions. Ultimately, however, they would all be satisfied with their own particular vision, for each of them would be able to see into the spiritual world.
In this way all culture on the earth would fall prey to Ahriman.”
It took awhile to get here – but the stage is finally set for the culmination of these larger, cosmic forces to play out their next hand here on the Earthly plane – how else could it happen than via a battle for the very soul of humanity – waged between those who don’t even think they have a soul vs those who would like to preserve their own.
This kind of contest doesn’t occur through kinetic warfare – it happens in the mind.
Because the most fundamental human birthright is choice – the battle becomes whether people are allowed to choose versus whether they even want to choose.
And in one way or another, all choice occurs through through some manner of trade.
Degrowth, Personal Carbon Footprints and the Rationing of Everything
“Who makes the decisions in a resource based economy?
No one does. The process of arriving at decisions in this economy would not be based upon the opinions of politicians, corporate, or national interests but rather all decisions would be arrived at based upon the introduction of newer technologies and Earth’s carrying capacity.
Computers could provide this information with electronic sensors throughout the entire industrial, physical complex to arrive at more appropriate decisions.”
The above quote comes from Jaques Fresco’s Venus Project.
Fresco judged capitalism and free markets to be consumptive and wasteful , he envisioned a world running according to a “resource based economy”. He insisted this was neither utopian, nor was it Communist (he was kicked out of the Young Communists League as a youth for criticizing Marx) – it was merely self-evident that all of the world’s resources should be allocated by super-computers based on “the carrying capacity” of the planet.
Fresco died in 2017 and no doubt he would have viewed today’s AI as that all-seeing, all knowing super-computer that could make all the decisions, but his vision presaged ideations of pure technocratic authoritarianism that would parcel out resources and meter consumption because withoutit, the world would literally end.
There’s a new buzzword for what Fresco was pushing for today, #Degrowth – and there are also numerous evangelists for it, almost exclusively white, wealthy European, aristocrats and liberals who are pushing for world where choices are made for you in the name of the greater good (climate):
listening to greenoid Ulrike Herrmann sell her degrowth plan for Germany: no personal automobiles ofc, living space to be rationed at 50 sq metres/ person, train speed capped at 100 km/hour & train travel also to be rationed (everyone will get a personal kilometre allotment). pic.twitter.com/JTlTlVDwVm
Remember what Michael Evans promised the WEFsters at Davos, in effect “we are working, through technology, on the ability to monitor everything anybody does.”
And once you can track everything, the ability to control it all simply needs a wrapper.
What populace in their right mind would actually vote for this?
A population that is incessantly brainwashed by the mainstream media into believing things like “Global Boiling” is real, and “freedumb is bad” only needs to believe it for one election; and after that this theology can be further ensconced by a political system ordained by the likes of Democratic Socialist Ross Mittiga – one in which candidates who do not embrace the climate agenda would not even be permitted to seek office:
“Governments might also justifiably limit certain democratic institutions and processes to the extent these bear on the promulgation or implementation of environmental policy. This could involve imposing a climate litmus-test on those who seek public office, disqualifying anyone who has significant (relational or financial) ties to climate-harming industries or a history of climate denialism.
More strongly, governments may establish institutions capable of overturning previous democratic decisions”
— Ross Mittiga, “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change”
Extending what Fresco said that super-computers could decide everything, and Mittiga’s assertion that climate “deniers” should be excluded from the political process entirely, reminds me of the time Klaus Schwab told Google’s Sergey Brin that soon we would be able to do away with elections entirely, because the not only would the algos already know who would win – they could shift “into prescriptive mode” – which is actually deciding who would win.
I’ve said in The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto (if you’re not on the mailing list you can grab a copy here) that there is no such thing as an actual “climate crisis” but there is a very real debt and currency crisis – therefore an unfalsifiable, climate emergency – 50 or 75 years out, is the perfect cover to ratchet down the living standards and force austerity onto the masses.
With massive job losses coming occurring due to automation and AI, the rise of UBI is inevitable (like it or not), and this explains the global drive toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which I said in the manifesto:
Will be the transfer mechanism of social programs such as Universal Basic Income (UBI) and other entitlement and subsidy programs. They will provide the basis for implementing Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
They will likely be “use it or lose it” propositions. Money received underthese programs will have to be spent in order to bolster money velocity inthe economy.
There will be penalties for saving, either via negative interest rates or other disincentives.
They will be fully programmable to further social engineering priorities.
They will at some point become Chinese Communist Party-style social credit frameworks.
They will likely not be public/private key pair cryptocurrencies. Self-custody will be prohibited
The global stimulus payments under the global lockdowns were an early iteration of this, where we saw things like QR code vaxports, and as the technology progresses it would be naive not to expect more fine-tuned granularity on exactly what your monthly “stimmy” can be used for (hint: probably not Ivermectin)
In a weird way, the shift from fiat money to CBDCs reflects the same awareness on the part of central bankers and government planners as the sound money movement – that for a currency to have any value it needs to reflect some kind of economic trade-off. It has to be backed by something.
That could be gold, silver – or in the case of Bitcoin, energy, or it can be backed by consumption.
The base case thesis from The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto was that the world is headed for a “monetary regime change”, but in retrospect that may have been a bad analogy, as “regime change” implies controlled, measured or even imposed transition from one state to another.
On the CBDC side of the ledger, that may be at least aspirationally true: a BIS survey in 2023 had pegged at over 95 central banks around the world working toward this.
However, one of their biggest challenges will be whether the global financial system holds together long enough.
It may not, and for that reason I’ve been positing that central banks and governments will need to jerry-rig a global CBDC regime using already existing projects, such as Ethereum or Ripple – both blockchains have expressed their desire to provide that base layer for them.
On the Bitcoin side of things, it’s less of a “regime change” and more of a phase-shift, brought about by pure incentives – it’s the Sovereign Individual thesis writ large. A Bitcoin Standard is seemingly fated to arise, owing to it’s unique distinction from other crypto-currencies (truly decentralized, backed by energy in the Proof-of-Work algorithm) and from gold in it’s capital mobility.
We’re entering The Age of Ahriman – where people reduce themselves to neo-Serfs and free will is reviled. You cannot move your gold easily in such a world – but as long as you can think you can move your Bitcoin.
However it manifests we’re headed for the mother of all forks in the road.
Monetary Apartheid and The Great Bifurcation
Starting with my Jackpot Chronicles series during the pandemic, I have frequently written about The Great Bifurcation, a scenario in which humanity splits along these fault lines we’ve been exploring. For the longest time I had it oversimplified into a simple, stark “Haves vs Have Nots” world as I envisioned in the prologue to my forthcoming CBDC Survival Guide (soon, honest).
The upshot was “In the future, it’ll be a lot more expensive to be free”.
Which is true. In case you haven’t noticed, all these ultra-wealthy think-tank elites aren’t making their way to Davos on Greyhound buses or Skype-ing in.
They arrive on private jets, they eat prime, grass fed wagyu steaks while they decide everybody else has to eat bugs and soy patties for the sake of the climate. They own super-yachts and they will not be capped at 50 square meters of living space per occupant, as per Ulrike Herrmann’s #degrowth agenda (their walk-in closets are bigger than that).
In Mark Of The Beast, Wallace-Muprhy wrote:
“Amongst the immensely rich, powerful and influential families we have already described, there exists an occult lodge which has been consciously anticipating the birth in the flesh of Arhiman.
“It is within this fraternity that the successive families of the Ben Jesu family who masterminded the Academy of Jundi-Shapur have reincarnated”
A common refrain amongst us plebs whenever we see sanctimonious “you will own nothing and be happy”-type pronouncements from on high: “It’s a big club, and we ain’t in it”.
Make absolutely no mistake about this:degrowth is for other people:
Poor people. People who don’t own anything (but they’ll be happy, presumably) people who have no real wealth, no assets, probably no job, no capital mobility, and no choice.
Degrowth is an anti-human philosophy that views people as a cancer on the Earth, it’s Malthusian in outlook, Marxist in ideological scaffolding, misanthropic to the core and Arhimanic in theology.
Steiner had written at length about the two great evils confronting humanity – Lucifer and Ahriman, it took me awhile to come to an understanding on how those influences cooperate and manifest here on our plane – but it’s clearer now:
Luciferianism is the core ideology of the elites – perhaps those descendants of the Ben Jesu lines all the way back to Gondishappur, who believe they’re entitled to an exalted position in society and who can use their wealth and power to become transhuman and attain immortality – they see themselves as a Breakaway Civilization, of sorts.
Arhiman is for the masses – to convince them they are meaty, hackable animals, with no soul – no spirit and since consciousness itself is an illusion, choice and free will is an illusion.
They simply need to be herded into the matrix, where they can live out their earthly lifespans, out of the way in their pods, stacked in 15 minute cities where they will take up as little space and as few resources in the real world as possible.
Steiner, I was surprised to learn – said something similar in his “Two futures” and implied that humanity “is starting to separate into two distinct evolutionary streams” and they both involved mankind’s interaction with technology (he was no luddite).
As Emberson elaborates:
Humanity now stands at a crossroads, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a parting of the ways. Both ways will be determined, to a very high degree, by the fusion of man and machine.
The difference between them will be that in one case the human being will have to adapt his life of soul and spirit to the machines that are taking control of his existence — the machines of digital electronics —, whereas on the other path technology will be subservient to the needs of his soul and spirit: it will be a moral form of technology using etheric (life) forces.
I’ve come to realize that Bitcoin vs CBDCs is not as simple as competing approaches to a digital technology, like Linux vs Windows – this is a grand battle being played out over aeons, and in at least one extra axial dimension than the Cartesian grid (that our brains are hard-wired for) can comprehend.
These are competing morphic fields, and we are all, as individuals, like iron filings being swept into the magnetic lines of flux of one field or another.
But in realizing the spiritual undercurrents at work in our world today – understanding that they even exist – is the first step.
If we’re fortunate, we get to exercise some free-will in choosing which pendulum, or morphic field gets our energy. If you’re reading this, then hopefully you’ve gained enough awareness to realize that there is a choice to be made.
Khamenei Warns Israel Of ‘Crushing Response’ – Ramping Up Rhetoric Ahead Of US Election
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a new fierce warning to the United States and Israel at a moment there continues to be speculation that Iran could hit back for the last early Saturday morning attack by Israel which involved over 100 IAF jets attacking Iranian military sites.
He addressed an audience of students connected with the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran by Islamic revolutionary students. “The enemies, whether the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a crushing response to what they are doing to Iran and the Iranian nation and to the resistance front,” the 85 year old Shia cleric said.
It’s unclear if this means Iran is preparing a response. He previously said that Iranian leaders would weigh a potential response and that the last weekend attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed.”
The crowed of supporters hailed Khamenei and his message with cheers, chanting, “The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader!”
Two days prior to Khamenei’s Saturday speech, Axios reported that Iran is still preparing a major retaliation. Israel’s strikes on missile and military facilities was itself a much anticipated response to the Oct.1st ballistic missile attack.
While most regional observers believe the tit-for-tat has cooled down, reflected in declining oil prices this week, the Axios report cited a pair of Israeli officials to say “Israeli intelligence suggests Iran is preparing to attack Israel from Iraqi territory in the coming days, possibly before the US presidential election.”
This would involve large numbers of drones and ballistic missiles, they say. Throughout the Gaza war, there have been sporadic drones launched by Iran-backed paramilitary units in Iraq, but nothing on a major scale.
Israeli sources on Thursday have suggested that Iran is actually moving ballistic missiles to prepare for such an attack.
Also,Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hossein Salami has been cited as saying that Iran’s response will be “different from any scenario” Israel might expect.
But Netanyahu is now strongly counter-signaling yet more escalation:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled on Thursday that Iran’s nuclear program could be Jerusalem’s next line of attack as Tehran promises to return fire following last week’s air strikes.
“The supreme objective that I have set for the IDF and the security services is to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons,”Netanyahu said while speaking at a course graduation ceremony for soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “Halting the nuclear program has been – and remains – our chief concern.
“I have not taken, we have not taken, and we will not take, our eyes off this objective,” Netanyahu added.
For now, nothing is likely to happen except for the continued build-up of verbal threats and counter-threats, and both sides are unlikely to make major moves – at least until after US election Tuesday.
It’s finally here: Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky’s “Victory Plan,” furtively touted for weeks as Zelensky sought, unsuccessfully, to peddle it to world leaders. Until now, all that Zelensky would say in public was that this clandestine plan paradoxically would not require negotiation with Putin, but also provides a way to strengthen Ukraine in order to “push Putin” to diplomatically end the war. Tone deaf in the extreme, several weeks ago Zelensky brazenly flew on a US Air Force C-17 transport plane into the key battleground state of Pennsylvania to visit a munitions plant before hectoring the United Nations General Assembly on this special plan. Election interference be damned!
Blessed with Zelensky’s grand reveal of his vaunted five-point plan to the Ukrainian parliament on October 16, the tragic farce of the “Victory Plan” sharpens into focus.
Still shielding “three secret” addenda from the general public, Zelensky’s top goal is as unsurprising as it is meretricious: an invitation for Ukraine to join NATO.
Zelensky hopes that NATO nations will grant Ukraine’s application for admission, which it submitted over two years ago. Ukraine’s Victory plan is little more than a Hail Mary. Why would NATO nations suddenly wish to jump headlong into the fray now, as Ukraine’s already-dim prospects admittedly vanish, which cannot be papered over even byfriendly commentators?
The patent absurdity of the Victory Plan does not stop there. Zelensky’s other four points involve:
(1) unrestricted Western support for unrestricted warfare;
(2) “non-nuclear deterrence” to “safeguard the country against future” Russian “aggression”;
(3) “economic growth and cooperation,” which includes further Russian sanctions plus joint investment opportunities; and
(4) a “post-war security architecture,” in which Ukraine’s “large and experienced military force” can help secure Europe.
Zelensky seeks to unleash the Ukrainian military, hitherto shackled by arbitrary US restraints on long-range strikes into Russia. This invitation to nuclear war is bad enough, but he also seeks funds, arms, and intelligence from the West beyond the already-prodigious aid and comfort shuttled off these past two years. Additionally, this plank demands for Ukraine “additional supplies of long-range capabilities,” asks for the West to take out Russian missiles and drones, and suggests further ground invasions of Russia to create “buffer zones.” As Russia expands and lowers the bar for using nuclear weapons, Zelensky means to thrash about Russia like an elephant in a Matryoshka shop.
Zelensky may feel as though Ukraine has nothing to lose—wrongly, since Russia’s prospect of wiping Ukraine off the map only increases as the war prolongs—but the West has everything to lose.If it stands, President Biden’s justified reticence to authorize long-range strikes into Russia could be the most consequential decision of his presidency. But the media has foamed at the mouth at this cold shoulder—notwithstanding new aid to Ukraine, repeatedly—so do not hold your breath.
At first glance, Zelensky’s call for “economic growth and cooperation” seems almost comical. In these dire straits, marred by death and destruction, what does Ukraine have to offer the West? The devil is in the details. Zelensky’s plan likely seeks to entice lawmakers like US Senator Lindsay Graham, who seek access to Ukraine’s stocks of resources like lithium, a critical mineral used in electric vehicle batteries. Yes, for some supporting Ukraine may be based on as loathsome a reason as securing cronyist exploitation of Ukraine’s natural resources. If you thought the Bush administration would be the last America saw of such contemptuous profiteering, think again. One is tempted to laugh were the situation not so enraging.
In his October 16 address, Zelensky noted the grave consequences that would befall the world if we allowed the impression “that wars of aggression can be profitable,” with new aggressions likely to pop up in “the Gulf region, the Indo-Pacific region, and Africa.” All those things may well occur, but largely this will be thanks to US meddling, rather than the “isolationist” phantom. Unfortunately, however, the establishment piper plays only one tune: “Appeasement! Munich!”
Apparently unironically, Zelensky also states that North Korea’s supplying of Russian with munitions and soldiers “is effectively participation of a second state in the war against Ukraine on Russia’s side.”
Surely he realizes that the US and many countries in the West were alreadybelligerents in the war?
Though the foolish depths of the Victory Plan seem limitless, Zelensky offers one silver lining.
At least, for those who survive the possible nuclear apocalypse unleashed by his pyrrhic Victory Plan. Under his plan, Ukraine’s soldiers can replace US soldiers in select locations in Europe. Sign me up!
Avoiding war was once the mark of the great statesmen; making peace, equally so. It will be a difficult peace for Ukraine to make. Admitting defeat is rare—for good reason. Many Ukrainians are coming to their senses, but not the most important Ukrainian. For the sake of Ukraine, and the world, one hopes Zelensky rouses from his war-fevered slumber. Hope springs eternal; but alas, so does vanity.
There are four days left until the US presidential election and the Turkish leadership in Ankara is split over which candidate they favor. Turkish officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to Middle East Eye, believe either of the two outcomes would have a consequential impact on Turkey’s foreign policy, as well as regional and global dynamics.
Many observers in Turkey believe President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is awaiting the election results in the United States before making his own policy decisions, even over his cabinet staffing. Yet, officials have been particularly and unusually tight-lipped about their preferred candidate in this campaign period.
Erdogan’s only public outreach to either of the candidates was to Donald Trump via a phone call after the former president was shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania in July.
Media reports claimed in September that Erdogan tried to set up a meeting with Kamala Harris on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, but several Turkish officials denied it.
“Some officials have floated the idea but eventually no formal proposal had been made to Harris’ team,” a source familiar with the episode told MEE. “We kept our distance to both of the candidates and had not sought a meeting with Trump either.”
The leaders of other neighboring countries, such as the United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, opted to meet both Trump and Harris in September around the General Assembly.
Ups and downs
Turkey’s non-engagement with the candidates stems from two things, sources in Ankara say. First, Ankara is deeply confused about the possible ramifications – advantages and disadvantages – of a Trump or Harris presidency for Turkey’s relationship with the US.
Many among Erdogan’s entourage believe a Trump presidency could work well with his government because the two have a history of sharing frequent engagements, such as phone calls and meetings, providing a space for the Turkish president to make a case on issues he cares about.
For example, during one call in 2019, Trump gave Erdogan the green light to conduct a military offensive in northern Syria that allowed Ankara to seize areas and deny US-allied Syrian Kurdish armed groups uninterrupted territory across the Turkish border.
When Washington sanctioned Turkey over its purchase of Russian-made S-400 air defense systems, Trump also pickedthe lightest sanctions package presented to him.
Despite the ups and downs, such as Trump imposing sanctions on Turkish ministers over the imprisonment of US pastor Andrew Brunson in 2018, people in Erdogan’s entourage believe both leaders have similar mentalities and could work together for broader objectives.
They say Berat Albayrak, Erdogan’s son-in-law and former finance minister, for instance, had a good relationship with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. However, several politicians at the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and some top bureaucrats in relevant Turkish ministries say this is a misleading picture of Turkey’s relationship with Washington under the Trump administration.
“They always say Trump and Erdogan have had good dialogue. What concrete things have we achieved with that?” said a top politician at the AKP. Others say Turkish ministries and institutions were not able to work properly with their US counterparts because of the constant churn of officials on the American side.
They also complain that Trump would often make promises and deals that wouldn’t result in any progress or follow-up. Apart from big promises and attention-seeking statements, little to nothing was achieved together during the first Trump term, they say.
For example, despite US President Joe Biden’s apparent dislike of Erdogan, both leaders authorized their foreign and defense ministries, as well as intelligence agencies, to work together and reach a middle ground on issues such as Sweden and Finland’s accession to Nato.
Earlier this year, Washington agreed to ink a multibillion dollar F-16 fighter jet deal with Ankara after Erdogan ratified Sweden’s Nato membership. The bilateral trust has gradually grown to the point that both sides are discussing a possible sale of next-generation F-35 warplanes to Turkey and the Biden administration has been passing messages to Iran through Turkish interlocutors in Ankara.
Watching and waiting
There is an expectation among some Turkish officials that these dynamics could be maintained through a Harris administration.
Harris herself doesn’t have many foreign policy red lines and the expectation is that she would use bureaucracy and foreign policy gurus within the Democratic establishment to craft an institutional policy.
For example, her current national security advisor, Philip Gordon, could be considered a Turkey expert, as he has much experience working in the country and with its government. This could mean a stable and negotiated relationship rather than the ups and downs of the Trump administration.
The second reason Ankara has kept a studious silence is the election has been incredibly close. For weeks, the polls have been very tight and there is no indication that one candidate is more likely to emerge victorious. Ankara’s previous attempts to engage with Trump officials before the 2016 elections were also educational.
Turkey’s bid to lobby Trump’s then-national security advisor Michael Flynn massively backfired when investigations into his activity treated Turkish efforts on par with Russian influence campaigns. This time, the Turkish government reportedly doesn’t seek any adventures and maintains a by-the-book approach to the elections.
Group Of Ten Mainly Chilean Nationals Charged After Stealing At Least $2.5 Million In 2024
Federal prosecutors in California have charged 10 individuals, mainly Chilean nationals using fake IDs, with conspiring to steal millions from banks and ATMs, according to the Mercury News.
The group allegedly rented Airbnbs and used a secret stolen car rental service near targeted locations.
Throughout 2024, they reportedly stole at least $2.5 million, with some single heists netting $250,000. Their method often involved spray-painting security cameras, using power tools and blowtorches on ATMs, and disguising as a construction crew with equipment like cellphone jammers, sledgehammers, and crowbars.
In one incident on September 18, they allegedly accessed a Wells Fargo ATM cash room by breaking through the wall of a neighboring pet spa, resulting in a $247,000 loss.
The Mercury News reports that despite their efforts to avoid detection, the theft group left a digital trail, according to the FBI.
The case saw a breakthrough when agents identified suspect vehicles linked to an underground rental service in West Hollywood. A Chevrolet Suburban, rented from Instagram promoter @xtrackz to a person named “Gordito” for a supposed family vacation, turned out to be connected to the crimes.
“Gordito” was identified as Alex Moyano-Morales, the alleged ringleader with fake IDs from Colombia and the U.S.
Following Moyano-Morales’ identification, FBI agents tracked his cellphone and found his associates had rented Airbnbs near several heist locations. Video footage from a Turlock Airbnb showed the group unloading burglary tools.
Prosecutors have charged Moyano-Morales and nine others, including Maite Celis-Silva, Erik Osorio-Olivarez, and Pablo Valdez-Rodriguez, with thefts targeting banks and ATMs across cities like Modesto, Citrus Heights, Fresno, and Anaheim. They are also under investigation for similar larcenies in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Houston.
The group recently moved to Oregon, allegedly committing additional thefts there. Four members—Valdez-Rodriguez, Alarcon-Alarcon, Parada-Munoz, and Dacosta-Frias—were arrested at a Seattle Airbnb with $20,000 and burglary tools. Parada-Munoz reportedly resisted arrest, while the others attempted escape in a Ford Fiesta used in previous heists.
These aren’t the only complex heists by South Americans this year. We reported in early October about a string of ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ style burglaries.
The Jewelers’ Security Alliance (JSA) and Jewelers Mutual warned last month about some stores suffering major losses as a result of the break-ins, according to a report from JCK.
Scott Guginsky, the JSA’s vice president, said: “We see burglaries everywhere, from New York to Texas. Some of the hits are in the millions. These are the largest dollar losses we’ve seen in some time.”
“It doesn’t appear like they’re stopping,” said Howard Stone, vice president of global risk services and analytics for Jewelers Mutual. He started noticing the crimes in June, the report says.
The JCK report says that the gangs meticulously plan their heists, gathering detailed intelligence beforehand. “They’re all from South America and they are somewhat in communication. But it’s a loose-knit group. It’s not like there’s a [mob boss] John Gotti coordinating everything.”
It’s unclear yet if the two strings of heists related.
October Was Record Month For Drone Warfare Between Russia & Ukraine
Ukraine launched another wave of drones on Russia overnight, with Russia’s military saying early Friday that its air defense systems intercepted 83 Ukrainian drones across several regions, including over Crimea.
But at least some of the drones made it through, causing significant damage at an oil depot in the town of Svetlograd in southwest Russia. Regional Governor Vladimir Vladimirov described that an unmanned aircraft “fell” into the Svetlograd oil facility, but without causing casualties. Such large UAV attacks have been almost daily, and coming for weeks.
Social media videos circulated in the aftermath of the attack, showing a large blaze – which appeared to be quickly extinguished. The depot is owned by state oil giant Rosneft.
Bryansk and Kursk regions also saw waves of inbound drones overnight, with the military saying it downed 20 over Bryansk and 36 over Kursk. At least a dozen were also intercepted over Crimea.
On the other side of the conflict, Ukraine’s General Staff saidRussia launched a record 2,023 drones across the border for the month of October. There have been some days in October when over a hundred drones were sent from Ukraine in a single 24 hour period – with the same from the Russian side on Ukraine as well.
Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been heavily impacted, with rolling blackouts across many parts of the country now a regular part of daily life. Russia has been much less impacted, and its infrastructure vaster.
Earlier this week Russia’s defense ministry announced more key gains in the Donetsk region. The military is now in control of Ukrainian town of Selydove, just southeast of the larger strategic city of Pokrovsk.
CNN has observed that “Selydove was an important staging area for Ukraine’s defenses and a key foothold to prevent Russia’s advance toward Pokrovsk.”
Ukrainian forces on the frontlines in the region have complained of multiple attacks from all directions of late. Russia has the artillery and manpower to keep up a constant assault, while Kiev forces lack both.
Russia “continues to assault with very large troop numbers. They used reserves from the north of the frontline’s Pokrovsk section to increase pressure on Selydove,” 15th brigade national guard spokesman Vitaliy Milovidov said on Tuesday.
Overnight, Ukrainian attack drones successfully struck a Russian fuel storage depot in Svetlograd, Stavropol Krai, setting multiple tanks alight.
“At the same time, the enemy is not destroying the city’s infrastructure,” he explained. “Most likely, they want to keep the town as a foothold for themselves in the future. Selydove is a large town where you can accommodate a large number of people and hide equipment.”
Russian forces are currently engaged in several offensives across the east and they are within a few kilometers of Pokrovsk; that’s spitting distance for their artillery and guided FAB munitions. Their strategy so far has been to encircle urban centers and slowly squeeze Ukrainian defense units out, which means the battle for Pokrovsk will soon be on the horizon at this rate.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has defended his administration’s conservative policies on migration and family support, emphasizing Hungary’s stance as a “conservative island” in a “liberal European ocean.”
In an interview with Austrian ServusTV, the Hungarian leader claimed his administration’s priority of family-friendly policies over immigration is the right solution to declining birth rates as he strives to protect “the Hungarian way of life.”
“Unlike many other EU member states, we did not allow people belonging to foreign cultures to enter,” Orbán said, contrasting Hungary’s stance with countries like Germany and France where immigration is relied upon to address demographic challenges. “We support families, not migration,” he added.
The Hungarian prime minister took a firm stance particularly against illegal immigration, emphasizing Hungary’s resistance to the influx of people from “foreign cultures — predominantly Islam.” He claimed that Hungary’s strict migration policies help maintain lower crime rates and prevent social unrest.
“We Hungarians think that the situation will not get better with illegal migration, but only worse. Nobody in Hungary wants illegal migrants to come in; we are on a different path,” he told the Austrian broadcaster.
Addressing Europe’s economic issues, Orbán described the EU’s economy as “suffering from pneumonia,” attributing the economic decline to policies decided upon in Brussels which he claimed have led European businesses to face significantly higher energy costs than their American counterparts.
“European companies are forced to pay two to three times the price of electricity and three to four times the price of gas,” he said, calling for Europe to adopt a “new energy policy, otherwise companies will be ruined.”
Orbán accused the EU leadership of building a culture that marginalizes conservative values, claiming it had instilled a misguided philosophy in which “anyone who is not a liberal cannot be democratic.” His criticism reinforced his remarks in the wake of this week’s Georgian election lost by the pro-EU opposition parties.
Orbán: Liberals Trying to Discredit Conservative Election Winners in Georgia
“If the liberals had won here in Georgia, it would be the news everywhere in Western Europe today that your democracy is in top shape. But in the same election, the conservatives won, so debates are… pic.twitter.com/25Eiq7Qj16
“If the liberals had won here in Georgia, it would be the news everywhere in Western Europe today that your democracy is in top shape. But in the same election, the conservatives won, so debates are expected in the international press,” Orbán said in support of the incumbent Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidzeon.
He called for a shift toward a “family-friendly, anti-migration, pro-peace” leadership in Europe, expressing confidence that “this new center” would soon gain prominence within the bloc.
“We need prime ministers who are on the side of the people, representing the interests of the European people,” he said, claiming that European liberals have had “their place under the sun” and “must be defeated in as many elections as possible.”
On the issue of the conflict in Ukraine, Orbán reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire and called for European leaders to stop fanning the flames of war. “This is a ‘fraternal war’ — one we have nothing to do with,” he said.
One significant development he hopes will affect the West’s short-term foreign policy is the outcome of next week’s U.S. presidential election.
“We know that Donald Trump did not start a war anywhere as president, and wherever he was, he ended it as soon as possible,” Orbán remarked. “If there is a person in the world who can succeed in achieving a ceasefire, it is Donald Trump.”
The low-tariff global trade order is falling apart.
Nationalist movements are gaining strength in every Western nation, not just the United States.
The major media is under serious financial strain to the point that the owner of the Washington Post has penned an editorial decrying the tendency to speak only to elites.
A presidential candidate is talking about scrapping the income tax.
TheSupreme Court earlier this year ruled that 40 years of regulatory jurisprudence is essentiallycontrary to the Constitution.
The list goes on and on with the rise of homeschooling, the reliance on alternative media, the dramatic shift in partisan affiliations over healthy food, the unpredictable alliances over the U.S. role in the world, and so much more.
People are asking fundamental questions about issues that only a few years ago seemed fully settled. What was stable is unstable and what was believed by nearly everyone is now widely doubted.
It’s enough to make one’s head spin. What is happening and why is it happening?
The short answer is that we are living through a class paradigm shift.
One is going away and another is coming. We are in pre-paradigmatic times, which are surely the most exciting times to be alive.
The word paradigm entered into the mainstream of thought with an important book by Thomas Kuhn. His “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” appeared in 1962, and it completely upended the dominated assumptions about how science works.
More than that, it implicitly shook how people came to understand how progress takes place. He said it is not a linear process with every generation absorbing the best from the last but rather that progress is episodic, a shift from success to failure and back again, through titanic movements of large paradigms.
Kuhn arrived at this conclusion by looking at the long history of science and noticing the tendency toward complacency around an orthodoxy of some sort. This is the period he calls “normal science.” The practitioners have all been schooled in a certain way, deferring to teachers and dominant institutions that have captured government and the public mind. It’s a way of understanding the world and within that the main practitioners focus on problem-solving and applications.
This period of normal science can last a month or decades or centuries, rarely questioned. And then something happens. Kuhn writes that this orthodoxy comes to be challenged by certain features of reality that are not explained by normal science. Once these are more closely investigated, the anomalies start to pile up and then overwhelm the explanatory power of the settled paradigm. The longer this goes on, the more the paradigm comes under strain, as a new generation seizes on the failures and highlights the incapacity of the orthodoxy to account for the reality all around us.
That’s when the settled science breaks down. It can happen slowly or quickly, and sometimes paradigms overlap both in their popularity and their collapse. That collapse does not mean that every mind is changed. Kuhn observes that the practitioners of the old science continue on their merry way through retirement and final expiration, while the younger people work on cobbling together a new way of thinking that gradually emerges as the dominant paradigm.
Kuhn was writing about science and the profession thereof but his insight has broad application to sociological, cultural, and political ideas too. They do not evolve in a linear fashion, piling victory upon victory, as a Whiggish perspective of the 19th century would have it. Instead, change occurs episodically. One generation is as likely to forget the wisdom of the past as it is to overthrow the orthodoxies of the present. We are in a forever state of cobbling together truth rather than progressively unfolding it.
We’ve seen this happen in the postwar world, as planners built structures that were supposed to govern the world forever. But in a few short years, the world came to be divided rather than united by the Western perception of the new threat of Russian imperialism. That created the Cold War which lasted for 40 years until a new “end of history” was born, which put freedom, democracy, and U.S. hegemony on the commanding heights. That turn has been challenged by the rise of China and huge industrial shifts in the 21st century.
A worker is pictured with car batteries at a factory of Xinwangda Electric Vehicle Battery Co. Ltd., which makes lithium batteries for electric cars and other uses, in Nanjing in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province, on March 12, 2021. STR/AFP via Getty Images
If we were to name one dominant factor that has provoked the big change in our time, it would have to be the global response to the lab-created virus of SARS-CoV-2, which was met with Chinese Communist Party-style universal quarantines all over the world, and followed by shot mandates on most public institutions and many private businesses. These policies were extreme beyond which had been practiced in any period of history but also, and in many ways, merely an extension of the “normal science” of times.
The media, large corporations, and nearly all governments got behind the pandemic response and jeered the non-compliers. This was a huge error because it gave rise to a full generation of the incredulous who lost trust in elites at all levels: medical, academic, media, and government. It has all fallen apart in our time, leaving people scrambling in all directions for explanations of what could have gone so wrong and what should be done about it.
What fascinates me about our election year is not so much the issues on the table but the underlying template that everyone knows is there but no one dares mention; namely the utter discrediting of elite opinion over the last four years.
The claims of the experts simply became too implausible to compel public assent. And this time it was personal. People’s schools and churches were closed, loved ones forced on ventilators to die alone, and whole communities were shattered when public spaces were blocked.
In other words, the “normal science” became a threat to people’s lives, especially once the vaccine mandates came along that most people did not want or need and which ended up being far less effective and far more dangerous than advertised. That was the turning point, the mark at which the anomalies overwhelmed the orthodoxies and the expert classes fell into disrepute.
Nothing about any of this would shock Thomas Kuhn, who gave us a map of understanding back in 1962. Finding that new way of thinking is the essence of our times, which is why everything seems to be in question. The other day, Elon Musk suggested cutting $2 trillion next year from the federal budget. It barely made the headlines, even though it is a highly credible promise.
That’s the new world in which we live. It is being built on the embers of the old.
To be sure, this shift will not happen all at once. It will happen in fits and starts and be accompanied by a great deal of alarm and even pain along the way. But one way or another, it is going to happen, and for one simple reason. As Jeff Bezos explained in the Washington Post, reality is an undisputed champion.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
