Etymology – from Greek, etymos, true, real, actual (the study of roots)
Life is full of slips.
Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us. Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us. Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us. And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.
Slips are double-edged.
It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control. Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.” Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.
Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.
In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide. They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations. This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior. Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories. It is not just words that have etymologies.
When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today. Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown. It slips in when people are asleep.
John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:
Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.
And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control. For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life. This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines. A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign. In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:
… the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual. The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything. Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.
Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively. Ellul again:
It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary). Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.
The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds. This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.
In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses. This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness. To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.
Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.” First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem. A slippery slope indeed.
But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare. It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.
In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum. I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously. The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality. Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it. And it will. But don’t say this out loud.
So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:
So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.
A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility. Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion. Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.
The other day I was going grocery shopping. My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.” Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred. “I prefer whipping,” she said.
I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”
We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she. She slipped, and I found humor in that. Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.
But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.
It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things. Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them. Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.
Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down. In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies. We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.
It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many. A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”
But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate. To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society. Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.
So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?
This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.
I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.
We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells. Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television. Close the computer. Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others. Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away. Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe. Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly. Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite. Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow. It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing. In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:
It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.
I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us. But without it we are lost. Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought. Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.” Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset. If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation. Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.
There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks. It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness. Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”
It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.
Your work is great Edward, thank you. You may like this (remove spaces):
tritorch . com / illFaresTheLand / index . html
As of 10 June 2021 VAERS/CDC/Wonder data shows 8 deaths of children 17 and younger following Covid-19 vaccination, as follows:
VAERS ID: 1242573-1
15 year old Colorado boy dies two days after first Pfizer/B Covid-19 shot, died on 4/20/21
Symptom, Cardiac Failure, heart failure
VAERS ID: 1243487-1
17 uear old Michigan boy died eight days after first Pfizer/B Covid-19 shot, died on 4/21/21
Symptom: self inflicted gunshot wound
VAERS ID: 1187918-1
15 year old New Hampshire girl died “3 or 4 days” after second Moderna Covid-19 shot, died on 4/6/21
Symptom: cardiac arrest
narrative: “I do not know the exact date of the first or second Moderna Vaccine. I am the PICU attending who cared for the patient after her cardiac arrest which we believe was about 3-4 days after her second Moderna Vaccine”
VAERS ID: 1307657-1
17 year old Ohio boy died four days after second Pfize/B Covid-19 shot, died on 4/23/21
Symptom: completed suicide
VAERS ID: 1349598-1
17 year old Ohio boy died four days after second Pfize/B Covid-19 shot, died on 4/23/21
Symptom: completed suicide
narrative [in part]: “On 19Apr2021, the patient received the second dose, and the patient was sick that day, headache/tired, diarrhea. On Tuesday (20Apr2021), the patient slept all day, headache, chills, diarrhea, no appetite, said he didn’t feel right. Wednesday (21Apr2021), tired/headache unable to stay online for school, diarrhea, slept for large portion of day. Thursday (22Apr2021), not feeling himself, up more but headache, diarrhea. Friday (23Apr2021) diarrhea – took his own life by hanging himself in the reporter’s basement in the morning hours. The patient did not have history or signs of depression, anxiety, or mental illness.”
VAERS ID: 1199455-1
17 year old Wisconsin girl died eight days after [unk if first or second] Pfizer/B Covid-19 shot, died on 4/10/21
Symptom: cardiac arrest
narrative: “Patient reported difficulty breathing and chest pain; suffered cardiac arrest and death”
VAERS ID: 1353097-1
15 year old girl unknown location died after moderna Covid-19 shot, date unknown
Symptom: cardiac arrest
narrative [in part]: “The reported cause of death was Cardiac arrest. It is unknown if an autopsy was performed. At the time of death, PRODUCT ADMINISTERED TO PATIENT OF INAPPROPRIATE AGE (15 year old female received vaccine) had resolved. Concomitant medication use was not provided by the reporter. Treatment of events was not reported. Limited information regarding the events has been provided at this time and a causal relationship cannot be excluded for the event of cardiac arrest. Follow up not possible as no contact details available”
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I keep coming back to the website to see if any new articles or comments have appeared, but every time I look again at your articles, I find another idea I hadn’t particularly noticed before. Cell phones and lock-downs, two ideas which go together like love and marriage, like horse and carriage.
How easily the idea of “cell” phones was sold to us. Of course, it will make us safer. If we are out in the car and have a problem, we’ll have our cell there with us to call for AAA. No one said, “Hey, can’t we call them something else? ‘Cell’ phones seems creepy.”
If you are in a cell, what can happen more or less often depending on what facility your cell is in? Lock-downs come to mind. Of course, on a smaller scale, we have become used to the idea that schools and public buildings can be “locked down” when there is a threat of a “lone wolf” shooter looking for a mass of people to shoot.
And along comes a lone wolf virus looking for a mass of people to infect in a super spreader incident. A lock-down, with precedent provided by the Chinese government, is the logical response. In some states nursing home residents were locked down next to victims of the virus who had been deported from the hospitals, and who could not be turned away from the facility regardless of its capacity to isolate or treat them.
Stories of people being welded into their apartments in China underlined the deadly nature of the threat, and made the soft lock-downs in the US seem more reasonable. Two or three weeks to flatten the curve, a small price to pay.
Eddy – Cell phones are the key and the subject of the article I am writing now. Pax, Ed
Edward I look forward to that topic.
Having just read an article at Global Research on the topic of the dangers of cell phones, I am also anxious to see what you have to say on the subject. There are so many outrages imposed on us these days, it is easy to lose track of some of the basic ones, like the EM radiation that surrounds us as never before. Thanks, Ed.
An incident which happened in Dublin Ohio over the weekend on a golf course, of all places, could be a microcosm of the nature of the Covid-19 deception. One player dominated the tournament and was ahead by 6 strokes at the end of the third round of the Memorial Tournament. As he walked off the course, he was accosted by two men in masks. After speaking for a few moments, the player doubled over in anguish. He had been told that he tested positive for Covid-19. He had to withdraw from the tournament due to the protocol in place.
Everyone was sympathetic to the player, Jon Rahm, but there was a sense of “that’s just the way it is” and “nothing can be done about it”. He had apparently had “close contact” with someone who had tested positive earlier in the week, and so had been required to undergo daily tests. All his tests had come back negative until the latest one.
He was “asymptomatic”, which we know is newspeak for “false positive”. I wonder if the person who he had had close contact with was also “asymptomatic”. Well, obviously they could not allow such people to continue to participate, or else they could have become a hot spot of perfectly healthy people spreading a deadly disease which they have to test you for in order to tell if you have it.
Of course, no one on the broadcast team said what was obvious about the whole thing. “The man is not sick. He’s the healthiest person in the tournament, performing at the peak of his abilities. ” Like many people caught up in this, their ample salaries depend on not offending powerful people.
I am not saying there was any political motivation behind this particular iteration of this farce, but it occurs to me that if Hitler would have known about how to work the Covid hustle, he could have saved himself embarrassment at the Berlin Olympics at the hands of Jesse Owens. “We’re sorry, Mr. Owens, but your Covid test has come back positive this time.” “But we’re ready run a race!” “We know, Mr. Owens, and we are truly sorry, but you will have to withdraw from the Olympic games and go into quarantine for two weeks.”
We know this stuff goes on in sports and at work places all the time in this sorry era. But this one, where they take out the top player, a conspicuously healthy individual, sums up the willful ignorance and enforced silence increasingly required to take part in any aspect of society.
Pure and unadulterated social dementia…
Yes, Edward! Until we overcome the use of FEAR as a weapon of control, we will remain paralysed, frozen to the spot and unable to revolt, to think clearly and to respond.
It explains why so many, otherwise intelligent people have been caught up in the epidemic of PANIC, engendered by the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the entire history of humanity!
Tools that should have assisted us in liberating ourselves from the deadly embrace of capitalism, have been turned against us. Effectively, we have imprisoned ourselves, we have become our own gaolers!
As education is primarily preconditioning for propaganda, those most educated are most easily propagandized. – Jacques Ellul
Neil, Thank you.
I agree with that assessment, and would add that the most educated and successful in any society are the most highly invested in the system, and all else being equal, have a more difficult time understanding that they have been propagandized. If the system is bogus, it undermines their self-image of a successful person.
Eddy…, thank you for your post. I agree.
The Death of Westernism as Global Hegemonic Project
Vietnam, a nation USA [AND WESTERN EMPIRE] militarily and economically, terrorized, massacred and laid wast with reckless and wanton bombing, napalm, bio and germ warfare etc. that included throwing captive Vietnamese out of helicopters if they didn’t “talk” [ditto Korean War] — has among the lowest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world, rate of:
Vietnam, 5 deaths per 10,000,000 involving this virus.
USA — at that rate — with 325,000,000 people: would only have 166 deaths. [Feel free to do the math, compare and contrast with rest of NATO “alliance” and those nations under its boot.]
Note that Vietnam, no later than February 2020: mandated their government policy be: to administer Chloroquine treatment.
And simultaneously: ongoing clinical trials on this inexpensive and highly effective treatment for the Sars Cov 2 virus.
From Feb. 20, 2020, Vietnamnet Global:
https://vietnamnet.vn/en/society/vietnam-develops-effective-treatment-regime-for-covid-19-patients-617933.html
Among other things, this — this is Westernism: a conscious decision to murder your own people in the West: first by denying treatment; then by pushing dangerous and deadly “vaccines.” In fact the vaccines as a medical reality are killing more than virus otherwise would have in the West, had known treatments been the government policy in the NATO etc. nations.
Which of course begs the obvious question: there was ZERO ZERO ZERO need for any vaccine.
What is the next act: a comprehensive war crimes and crimes against humanity trial; or more of same, more deception, more crimes and brutality, more crimes against humanity?
OPERATION-CORONA-9-1-1 succeeded in dividing USA citizens even more, with majestically tragic social consequences.
This ubiquitous moral turpitude, its various and sundry [and sinister forms]: did not appear by a magic wand.
This was no “random event”.
The social consequences alone, of this ongoing crime still in progress — the massive and unprecedented violation of all our civil rights — how can justice be done, even just on this dimension of this mother of all crimes against humanity?
Fauci runs free, the military leaders complicit in it run free, Trump runs free, Gates, Biden, Walensky, etc. all running free, all these covid criminals, — these have no place in civilized society — absent paying for their crimes, and many many many others here in particular and West in general.
Every president and prime minister in the western capitals. . . they are not even human beings yet; and yet they are political leaders of richest nations in human history.
But they won’t pay, and . . . this is what chaos therefore looks like and how it is created in the first place. This is why this happens: actual criminals in charge. Who have zero interest in sanctity of human life, and take the liberty to wreck our lives; these ones have no conscience.
Hitler may have perished in a bunker circa 1945; his ghost lives in every Western Capital. We are the Nazis; his de-facto Progeny.
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Yes, all except the story about the “virus”. Never been isolated, and what we see is purely computer generated. I really think national comparisons (conceived in political terms) is really not meaningful. First what did they use to distinguish deaths by influenza and this so-called COVID? The only “test” is the RT-PCR which can’t test for infections and pumps out false positives. Perhaps Vietnam avoided the RT-PCR altogether. What were the cases of influenza per capita versus the US that saw an almost disappearance of influenza – replaced with “COVID” as cause of death.
I appreciate the Vietnamese may have avoided the deadly Western needle and other toxic solutions for “health”, and most importantly the brainwashing about a pathogenic virus that has absolutely not proof of ever having existed.
Some dispute that Sars Cov 2 was actually sequenced and isolated.
This camp has little to stand on, but for most: This was isolated January 2020.
Westernism chose to block known prophylactics from that time forward; this action has nothing to do with “brainwashing”.
Inexpensive and long used and safe prophylactics that cured the ill, prevented death, prevented suffering; the chloroquines and ivermectin– Westernism blocked this medicine from hundreds of thousands and millions.
WHY?
The Emergency Use Authorization — the FDA allowing experimental moderna and pfizer/B shots to be distributed to the public — this could only be approved, this EUA: if and only if there was no other treatment.
This is sine qua non for EUA to be in play.
This was a means to an end.
The fact a nation, Vietnam, that Westernism and its Military Arm in Service of Western Empire poisoned the land and tried to bomb back to the stone age, while murdering millions. . . this is a wonderfully perfect comparison.
5 deaths per 10 million people reported in Vietnam from Sars Cov 2.
Count up all the deaths in Europe, in NATO and those under its boot. . . . & in USA: comparing a civilization, the nation of Vietnam, which values the sanctity of life, versus Westernism is exactly the point.
It’s a irrelevant as to whether or not the virus has been isolated. Don’t be sidetracked into pointless (and more importantly, endless) ‘debates’ about WHO created it or why. All those roads lead down the rabbit-hole. Keep focused on the scam, on fighting the fear.
Thank you William…, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to find the virus came from Maryland or North Carolina.
Jim you have a narrative that requires a never proven – in all of history – pathogen particle.
Since none was ever isolated and purified (FOI requests for such evidence is simply no where to be found) this has been a manufactured “pandemic” a psyop – call it Operation COVID. The test (RT-PCR) perpetuates the scam. You must know that the inventor was emphatic that it cannot be used as a means of investigating infection. Yet it was used at levels of amplification that guarantees massive false positives.
This is not about a contagious pathogenic virus, except as pretext. The counts are fraudulent. Vietnam may not have used the RT-PCR protocol and ignored the Western propaganda. Good for them.
I think a deeper investigation regarding what Vietnam did or didn’t do would be valuable. HCQ is not a cure, it’s a temporary treatment that has helped with parasitic infections, and appears to relieve respiratory ailments. All treatments contain toxins which should be only temporarily used.
On the issue of the bogus pathogenic virus, I would ask you watch this from Dr. Stefan Lanka: https://www.bitchute.com/video/jw3D3fexbCij/?fbclid=IwAR2y4VCyOpLJrNy6v3hDCfaL-2vFSpn4bMfaDKkl1jZdccw6D1BBsU1P3WU
Thank you Edward for sharing your freedom and your compassion.
Yes, life is full of slips. “Now is the time to just do what you are told” uttered by that Dr. Sickle, not worthy to be called doctor, reminded me some of Ceausescu’s last public words back in December 1989… Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xntDto5TX10
At 2:30 he starts saying: ” Comrades stay calm. Comrades… comrades…stay calm…comrades…comrades…
Tremendous work Edward ! I am inspired to add my last week’s thoughts. –
“The truth is that men are tired of liberty” (Benito Mussolini) . We console ourselves with the likelihood that they will eventually once again become tired of enslavement and incarceration.
The other relevant thought was that “by far the most effective form of teaching, leadership, propaganda, indoctrination, or persuasion, is where the pupils or subjects are convinced that they worked this out or did it all by themselves.”
As per the CDC the group most at-risk of “death from covid” is the 85+age.
As per the CDC the average age of “death from covid is ~78 yrs.
The current average life expectancy for everyone is ~78 yrs.
The “Baby Boom” in the U.S. began ~1946.
1946 was the first year with the largest increase in birth rates, with an increase of about 25%.
The cohort life expectancy (life expectancy for a particular year/group) in 1946 was ~74 yrs.
1946 + 74 = 2020.
As per the CDC, 2020 saw about a 23% increase in deaths in the U.S
Many countries that didn’t share the 1940’s Baby Boom have seen far fewer deaths.
So in summary, those deemed most at-risk of dying “from covid” are already 9%-10% beyond the current average life expectancy.
~12%-15% beyond their cohort life expectancy.
The average current life expectancy remains unchanged.
That Baby Boom inevitably produces a “Death Boom”, especially given decreasing birth rates since the mid-1940’s-50’s.
We have begun entering that “Death Boom”.
Many people are scared to death, of death.
And desperately looking for any way to eek-out a few more years.
This is important evidentiary data that is not being presented, or discussed.
Thanks Adrian…, I recently checked Annual Deaths due to Alcohol and Opioid usage…I think it could make covid appear insignificant…., and again, this is every year! The below quote was taken from the National institute on drug abuse.
Here is link: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdose-crisis
“In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates.”
I felt so reassured by the nice drug corporation that I asked for a second helping of cotton candy !
“World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control.”
Too many people seemingly fail to realize the WEF (amongst the other Elitist orgs) are financed by the modern Hydra that is representative of Big Everything.
And too few people seemingly fail to recognize their own support for & enabling of the many convoluted aspects of that Big Everything.
In this age of amongst the grestest concentrations of wealth & assets known in modern history, most everything most people now do, benefits the Elite at the top.
Feudal periods are marked by their vast concentrations of wealth & assets.
A concentration that brings great power & control to those that own the most.
Leaving the lower classes, the mere serfs, to doing only those things they are allowed to do, for the benefit of the Lords at the top.
Even most small businesses today represent the lowly land-workers, the tenant-farmers.
Whereas those tenant-farmers could only barely make a living working lands owned by the Lords, even most of the “self-employed” today are mere middlepersons, reselling wares made by the corporations owned & controlled by those at the top, and/or relying on equipment, tools of the trade, rents & such that come from those at the top.
Even trying to seek independence via investments means investing with the mega asset management firms, or the corporations largely owned & controlled by those firms.
Today, just the top-three asset management firms hold almost 40% of all outstanding shares in the market.
The top-five asset management firms hold close to 70% of all outstanding shares.
And those firms exist as the largest shareholders/investors of each other.
So pretty much everyone is enabling that neo-feudal system.
Pretty much no one wants to make the sacrifices necessary to interrupt & change that neo-feudal system.
People have become way too spoiled & comfortable with the status quo.
But continue to gripe about their own complacency & involvement in that neo-feudal system.
Though largely failing to recognize their participation.
Those neo-feudal Lords are taking over because we, MOST EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US, are allowing them to.
Just like feudal systems & serfs of the past.
TALK – (REAL) ACTION = ZERO!
Talk is cheap.
People, ALL people, need to stop griping, and just take action.
Real change begins with oneself first.
“Real change begins with oneself first”. How true!
Two years ago I discovered online a wonderful series of socratic dialogues between two human beings searching to understand what is action, truth, love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux-1aRB8Res&list=PL1n30s-LKus7XDJA0eXbd5n3f9qDcQOWP
Nameless, thank you. I agree the individual must ‘work’ on him/herself, but there is also opportunity for community action. Commune – Communicate – Community – Individuals can contribute to the communities well-being and growth and the community effort can be helpful to the individual.
Joseph, I agree.
Self knowledge is useless if it fails the test of everyday relationship in a community.
Let us not be afraid to voice what is instead of allowing the criminal zeitgeist to possess our minds through their insidious propaganda.
“It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.” This John Fowles quote from the article reminds me of how much slippage we experience daily, as select “news” is first elevated to a screaming urgency, and then vanished down the memory hole to make way for the next authorized emergency. Some of us insist on remembering the previous narratives, but the good citizens have mastered the art of forgetting. “We have always been at war with Eastasia.”
Being bombarded with excess information is like living in a hoarder’s house. You know the tool you need is in the house, but it is buried under piles of old newspapers and magazines. A simple job then becomes complicated, possibly not worth the effort of finding the tool or expense of going and buying the tool again. So the faucet will continue to drip.
Perhaps this is the incentive to forget the previous narratives. “We have always known that a leak from the Wuhan lab is the most likely source of the deadly virus.”
I admire the the fact that several of the commenters here have managed to do without TV for many years. Eventually, I may get there myself. I still watch some, but one thing I have always had an aversion to is the “news”. Even as a child, I avoided it, and have never made a habit of watching it.
In the last several years, I have seen information (not on TV) which is compelling to the idea that many TV news events are staged, and any careful analysis shows that they did not come about organically. This is mainly true of reported events which support a political agenda, such as gun control or starting a war, but also extends to apparently mundane reporting on occasion.
So I don’t watch the news (though I do read a lot of commentary which indicates what is being reported), but I have learned that most entertainment shows and films to one extent or another are also imbued with an undercurrent of meaning which serves to prepare us to accept future or evolving policies or events.
So if I want to indulge in some escapist viewing and not be effectively propagandized at the same time, I need to keep my critical thinking skills polished and on alert for why the huge corporations are presenting this story in this way.
It is one of the opportunities and one of the pitfalls of fiction, that the author has a great deal of liberty in the themes he presents, and that the prejudices of the author are always present in his work. If that author is unscrupulous or is controlled by entities with an agenda, the reader or viewer is in danger of absorbing the propaganda unwittingly.
I haven’t had a TV since the first Iraq War. Still, I have many TV jingles (as well as radio commercials) that can bounce around in my head unbidden: an L&M cigarette commercial tune (even though I never smoked cigarettes) or a Mr. Clean tune. I wonder what the original intention was for those parts of my brain now given over to recalling an L&M jingle might be for, what greater purpose? I think the advice to unplug from the computer, the TV, the “news” can get us back to a rootedness we need to call on a deeper wisdom to chart these times. Thanks Ed.
“Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.” – a wonderful Ellul quote that really left me thinking.
Several days ago my 6-year-old grandson’s kindergarten teacher was I thought rather easily – “set into motion.” The little fellow was sent home from school, and had to take a covid test (we’re still awaiting the results) – (and don’t get me started on the whole false-positives issue which the school will studiously ignore anyway). If he tests positive he will not be allowed to return for 10 days. Retesting will then be a moot point as the school year will then be over. My grandson’s crime? He “sneezed.” Yes, that was the extent of it. No temperature, no cough, he had no other sign of illness. He just “sneezed.” Even the school nurse did not think he was “ill,” but her medical opinion was irrelevant in the matter given our new normal of – “individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.” No sign of “rational” or “well grounded” adult decision making in sight.
I love your following observation –
“In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses. This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness. To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.
Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.” First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution…”
Thanks for another wonderful piece Ed.
PS – be sure to stifle any urge you might have to – “sneeze!”
Hello Gary, Did anyone suggest that the indoctrination teacher might consider some psychological counseling or some other form of de-programming?
Sometimes I think there are many people who enjoy this entire sham…the masks, the fear, the uncertainty might give some people an essence in place of their intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, emotional vacuum/shutdown condition !
There was a great deal of pine pollen last week…, good grief, I’m sure people were sneezing a green storm. That does not mean they should be harpooned with Ghoul Gates secret death formula!
You’re right Joseph – a simply allergic sneeze it was. But now I wonder will my six year old grandson worry in the future that if he sneezes that he might be deathly ill? Such madness.
Brilliant essay. I live in rural Arizona, and have not had TV for several years. It was like true liberation from life-destroying habits. I have a friend who often says that he decided years ago to “hide out” from the craziness, yet whenever I go to his house the TV is blaring mindlessness. When I asked him how this fit in with his “hiding out” he got very angry with me. He thinks he is well informed politically because he watches CNN and Fox!! I tried to open his mind a bit by forwarding articles like this one, and it only made him madder.
Those who choose the “blue pill” do not want their “reality” disturbed.
perhaps time to acquire some slips, like sweet potatoes, and cultivate our own gardens-a comfortably slippery slope.
Mr. Curtin you’ve captured the journey brilliantly. Etienne de La Boetie’s The Politics of Obedience, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude is worth a read, if you haven’t. Also, 33 Myths of the System by Darren Allen. Of particular interest is Allen’s take on how humanity’s recovery to our natural existence, not simply a moment in a meadow, requires rethinking the entirety of civilization. Other than a reprieve with the collapse of the fall of Rome, during the Medieval period, what we have has been the theme of civilization’s dystopian in one form or another.
Our old buddy Eric Blair obliquely referred to this preparatory propaganda in talking about how the use of language limited what can be talked about and what can be thought. This type of molding has been going on for a long time.
A speaker I saw on video some years ago, whose name escapes me for the moment, mentioned that we often use the word ignorance where another word, nescience, would be more descriptive. It is possible to be unaware of information because we have not been exposed to it. It is also possible to be exposed to information and to ignore it, which is real ignorance – much in evidence these days. But nescience means that we don’t know something because we have not had the information available to us.
These days, with the roiling torrents of information roaring by us all day every day, perhaps another word is needed to describe our condition of too much information of varying degrees of value inundating our minds and preventing us from knowing some information, perhaps important information, which is actually available but which we do not know because we are exhausted by the excess of information and the need to sort it all out ourselves rather than rely on some trusted authority.
“With all the words that I have heard, I don’t see how I’ll tell,
Don’t see how I’ll ever play the tune I hear so well.”
-Robin Williamson, The Tune I Hear So Well.
I absolutely agree with you. We need a natural space and time to spend there to shed all the subtle suggestions which otherwise can define our lives. We need immersion in God’s creations to have a chance to recognize the false creations of man.
Brilliant thought provoking and fascinating ultimately life affirming inspiring piece Ed it resonated deep within me now to put it into action to begin the pushback against this antihuman insanity
Mr. Curtin, you’re so, so important to the world right now. You’re a cool stream of water over a frenetic red-hot angry mob. I’m not a writer, but that’s as good as I can describe. In short, I’m taking your advice to heart and trying to live as you suggest. Too much TV and computer.
Indeed, the best vacations are the ones where you don’t know you need a break, and then at the end of the trip you think, “gosh, why was I worried about that?!” Beethoven knew that. So did Einstein.
Regarding received opinion, I also like Milan Kundera’s view:
“Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress! With a wicked passion, Flaubert used to collect the stereotyped formulations that people around him enunciated in order to seem intelligent and up-to-date. He put them into a celebrated *Dictionnaire des idees recues.* We can use this title to declare: Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the *nonthought of received ideas.* Flaubert’s discovery is more important for the future of the world than the most startling ideas of Marx or Freud. For we could imagine the world without the class struggle or without psychoanalysis, but not without the irresistible flood of received ideas that–programmed into computers, propagated by the mass media–threaten soon to become a force that will crush all original and individual thought and thus will smother the very essence of the European culture of the Modern Era.” Milan Kundera, Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe, *The Art of the Novel*, 1986. Perennial Classics, pp 162-3.