They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. …The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism…

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of a party..

–George Washington, ‘Farewell Address' (1796)

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21/pdf/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21.pdf

'The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Warfare' (2019) --was updated in 2021--discussion of its contents was completetly relegated to think tanks and policy planning bodies like the 'Small Wars Journal.'

In a nutshell, it is basically discussing WW3 (without using the term) while descriping a world environment of pure chaos, beyond the wildest nightmares of Sci-Fi.

https://adminpubs.tradoc.army.mil/pamphlets/TP525-92.pdf

Live. Humanity will become richer, older, more urban, and better educated, but the uneven distribution of this progress will accelerate tension and conflict. Shifting demographics, such as youth bulges in Africa and aging populations of traditional allies and competitors, will threaten economic and political stability. The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered populations.0 F 1 These factors will be attenuated by a changing climate, which likely will become a direct security threat. Risks to U.S. security include extreme weather impacting installations, increased resource scarcity and food insecurity, climate migration increasing the number of refugees and internally displaced peoples, and the Arctic as a new sphere of competition. The addition of over seven billion people over the last century has altered geography itself, and cities now sprawl over large areas of the globe and contain almost two-thirds of the world’s population.1F 2 These numbers will only increase. Some megacities will become more important politically and economically than the nation-state in which they reside.2 F 3 Life will become both easier and more complex, with those able to take advantage of the leading edge of technological advancement increasingly exploiting those who cannot. New social stresses and fractures will lead to strife and population migrations, which in turn create further challenges for urbanized areas. Furthermore, the move of large numbers of people to large urban areas and megacities will strain resources, as these areas will become increasingly reliant on rural areas for food, water, and even additional power. From a military perspective, cities represent challenges, opportunities, and unique vulnerabilities.

Although more human beings stress available resources, population growth has also compounded the rate of innovation and technology development. Human creativity is now clearly the most transformative force in the world, both enhancing human life, but also upending it, and – at times – precipitating catastrophic, disruptive events. Information technology will continue to improve exponentially, and most of the developed world already is instrumented in some way. Nearly every person on Earth has access to a connected, mobile device. Advanced material capabilities have, and will continue to extend the trend of reduced size, weight, and power requirements, as nanomaterials, metamaterials, and bespoke structures allow multifunctional assemblies, vastly improving overall systems integration, reliability, and performance. Advanced materials also foster increases in battery power and performance, allowing large amounts of power to be stored across a distributed grid, and miniaturized storage powers mobile robotics and vehicles of all types. Advanced robotic vehicles could serve as mobile power generation plants and charging stations, while highly dexterous ground robots with legs and limbs could negotiate complex terrain allowing humans access to places otherwise denied.

The revolutionary impact of “trans-humanism” challenges the very definition of “human” – with profound ethical dilemmas that remain unresolved. 4F 5 Big data techniques interrogate massive databases to discover hidden patterns and correlations that form the basis of modern advertising – and are continually leveraged for intelligence and security purposes by nation states and non-state entities alike

In the most connected and wealthy parts of the world, cell phones and computers will all but disappear as physical, hand held devices. Select individuals will directly connect to cyberspace through neural implants or augmented reality systems painted directly on a retina.

Prosper. Although AI and its associated technologies will shatter many industries and livelihoods, a wide range of advances continue to create new sources of wealth and economic development – while also significantly impacting the strategic security environment.6F 7 Robotics and autonomous systems will underpin the smooth functioning of advanced societies. Additive manufacturing, computer-aided design, and millions of industrial robots will dislocate significant portions of the global supply chain. Virtually anyone in the world with access to a computer system and three-dimensional printer will be able to “print” anything from drones to weapons. Encrypted blockchains will be massively disruptive to commerce functions.7 F 8 Together with robotics, autonomy, and AI they comprise a perfect storm for “blue collar” and “white collars” alike, causing vast economic displacement as formerly high-quality information technology and management jobs follow the previous path of agricultural and manufacturing labor. Militaries, paramilitaries, mercenary groups, criminal elements, and even extremists groups all will be able to take advantage of this potential pool of manpower. Biotechnology will see major advances, with many chemical and materials industry being replaced or augmented by a “bio-based economy” in which precision genetic engineering allows for bulk chemical production. Individualized genetics enable precise performance enhancements for cognition, health, longevity, and fitness. The low cost and low expertise entry points into genome editing, bioweapon production, and human enhancements will enable explorations by state, non-state, criminal, and terrorist organizations. Competitors may not adopt the same legal regulations or ethics for enhancement as the U.S. causing asymmetry between the U.S. and those choosing to operate below our defined legal and ethical thresholds.

At some point during this time period, and really for the first time since the Second World War, it is likely that the United States could face a true strategic competitor who will have an ability to operate in multi-domains, a capability to deny domains to U.S. forces, and who will be able to operate with certain technological advantages over a U.S. force. This challenge is further compounded by our reliance on coalition warfare with allies that might not be able or willing to modernize at the same pace as the U.S. The United States will face a situation where its strategic advantages held during the post-Cold War period – our broad network of alliances and partners that allowed for the forward deployment of a sophisticated, highly-capable joint force – will erode, allowing for increasingly aggressive challengers fielding a full-range of modern, advanced capabilities with hybrid strategies to challenge our ability to bring forces to the fight while undermining our political and national will to do so. Our adversaries’ investments in electronic warfare and space control will threaten our command and control and multi-domain capabilities, while remaining forward bases, naval forces, and aircraft are menaced by advanced integrated air defense systems and long-range fires, including cruise and ballistic missiles. The ability of our joint force to operate effectively in the air and maritime domains hundreds of miles from our coasts will be challenged, which in turn will create new complications for forces operating in the ground domain. By 2035, it is likely that military capabilities among key great powers and even by relatively capable regional powers – augmented dramatically by rapid technological innovations and their convergence with each other in a number of areas – will create an uneasy balance, with no one power having a dramatic relative advantage over its rivals.

Internet of EveryThing – Every device, both military and commercial, will have network connectivity. Everything becomes a sensor, and everything becomes hackable. Opportunity and vulnerability.

The nation-state perseveres. The nation-state will remain the primary actor in the international system, but it will face both new and growing challenges domestically and globally. Trends of fragmentation, competition, and identity politics will challenge global governance and broader globalization, with both collective security and globalism in decline.14F 15, 15F 16 As the world becomes further digitized, states will share their strategic environments with networked societies which can pose a threat by circumventing governments that are unresponsive to their citizens’ needs. These online organizations are capable of gaining power, influence, and capital to a degree that challenges traditional nation-states. Many states will face challenges from insurgents and global identity networks – ethnic, religious, regional, social, or economic – whose members may feel a stronger affinity to their online network than to their nationality, which could result in either resisting state authority or ignoring it altogether.

The costs of maintaining global hegemony at the mid-point of the century will be too great for any single power, meaning that the world will be multi-polar and dominated by complex combinations of short-term alliances, relations, and interests. c. This era will be marked by contested norms and persistent disorder, where multiple state and non-state actors assert alternative rules and norms, which when contested, will use military force, often in a dimension short of traditional armed conflict.

Singularity is the point at which AI exceeds the collective intelligence of mankind, which will radically and irrevocably change the relationship between man and machine. There are several divergent possibilities regarding the singularity: • As optimistic singularity advocates such as Ray Kurzweil have suggested, AI improves human life in every way, from healthcare, to emotional evolution, to intergalactic space travel. • Unboxed general artificial superintelligence improves and evolves at such an exponential rate it escapes human restrictions, perspectives, and morality. It threatens the very existence of humanity. • Humans evolve their own cognitive abilities through learning developments, brain implants, artificial stimulants, and non-AI high-performance computing to match, or at least keep pace with AI. AI has the capacity to change paradigms, revolutionize everyday life, and take mankind to exciting new horizons. However, it also may be capable of incredible destruction, malice, and lines of thinking and decision making that are dangerous to mankind. This duality will be critical as actors develop military applications for AI.

Information operations Under these conditions, no one nation will have an overwhelming technological advantage over its rivals. As a result, sophisticated information operations, enabled by advances in artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, detailed socio-political analysis, data analytics, and a detailed understanding of social media means that the Era of Contested Equality competitors will engage in a fight for information on a global scale. The information battle will be waged with well-crafted ideas and narratives combined with pervasive and globally-reaching cyber, electronic warfare, information operations, and psychological warfare tools. Coercion through the cognitive dimension is not only possible, but often is the first, and the decisive recourse in conflict, and is an ongoing, persistent activity between opposing powers. Winning the war before the battle is fought through information operations will become an imperative, and land forces will need to contribute to perception management in the cognitive dimension as a core element of military operations.

The changing character of warfare in the Era of Contested Equality is best understood as a series of enduring competitions that would be recognizable to commanders in any era of history. What is different, however, are changes in the operational environment and technology that are so significant, extensive, and pervasive, that they collectively manifest a distinct, and transformed character of warfare that is faster, occurs at longer ranges, is more destructive, targets civilians and military equally across the physical, cognitive, and moral dimensions, and if waged effectively, secures its objectives before actual battle is joined.

For a hider to defeat a finder, it generally must not move or emit. Tactical techniques, such as going to and below ground, or hiding in plain sight through dispersion or near constant relocation can augment technological solutions to assist the hiders, with dense urban areas offering the best option for hiding. The complete destruction of the near ubiquitous sensors arrayed against a land force will not be feasible, although high-powered microwave systems may be able to clear limited corridors. More successful methods would involve techniques to deceive finders vice destroy them. These could include cognitive, autonomous electronic warfare assets that assess signals and develop real-time countermeasures during engagements. Land forces also will employ advanced camouflage, cover, and deception, ranging from tactical obscurants, decoys, and signature reduction through elaborate strategic, multidomain deception operations.

At the same time, and on the other end of the spectrum, it will be possible to deploy swarms of massed, lowcost, self-organizing unmanned systems directed by bi-mimetic algorithms to overwhelm opponents, which offers an alternative to expensive, exquisite systems.

Our vision of the OE brings with it an inexorable series of movements which lead us to ponder a critical question; what do these issues mean for the nature and character of warfare? The nature of war, which has remained relatively constant from Thucydides through Clausewitz, to the Cold War and to the present, certainly remains constant through the Era of Accelerated Human Progress. War is still waged because of fear, honor, and interest, and remains an expression of politics by other means. However, as the Era of Accelerated Human Progress advances, and we move to the Era of Contested Equality, it becomes apparent that the character of warfare has changed to a point where other basic questions, such as those contemplating the very definition of war or those looking at whether fear or honor are removed as part of the equation.17 F 18 In the 2035-2050 timeframe, warfare does indeed look different from its early-century model in several key areas.

Under such conditions, the physical dimension of warfare may become less important than the cognitive and the moral. Military operations will increasingly be aimed at utilizing the cognitive and moral dimensions to target an enemy’s will. As a result, there will be fewer self-imposed restrictions by some powers on the use of military force, and hybrid strategies involving information operations, direct cyberattacks against individuals, segments of populations, or national infrastructure, terrorism, the use of proxies, and WMD will aim to prevail against an enemy’s will.

Limitations of military force. While mid-century militaries will have more capability than at any time in history, their ability to wage high-intensity conflict will become more limited. Force-on-force conflict will be so destructive, will be waged at the new speed of human and AIenhanced interaction, and will occur at such extended long-ranges that exquisitely trained and equipped forces facing a strategic competitor will rapidly suffer significant losses in manpower and equipment that will be difficult to replace. Robotics, unmanned vehicles, and man-machine teaming activities offer partial solutions, but warfare will still revolve around increasingly vulnerable human beings. Military forces may only be able to wage short duration campaigns before having to replace expensive equipment, and even more priceless personnel. Militaries under these conditions will need to balance exquisite, expensive capabilities against less-capable, cheaper alternatives, and also carefully balance the ratio of human soldiers to robotic or unmanned systems. As the skills and experiences that humans need to learn or acquire to be effective on these battlefields take long-times to develop, but will be expended quickly on the destructive mid-century battlefield, militaries will need to consider how advances in AI, bioengineering, man-machine interface, neuro-implanted knowledge, and other areas of enhanced human performance and learning can quickly help reduce this long lead time in training and developing personnel.

The primacy of information. In the timeless struggle between offense and defense, information will become the most important and most useful tool at all levels of warfare. The ability of an actor to use information to target the enemy’s will, without necessarily having to address its means will increasingly be possible. In the past, nations have tried to target an enemy’s will through kinetic attacks on its means – the enemy military – or through the direct targeting of the will by attacking the national infrastructure or a national populace itself. Sophisticated, nuanced information operations, taking advantage of an ability to directly target an affected audience through cyber operations or other forms of influence operations, and reinforced by a credible capable armed force can bend an adversary’s will before battle is joined. This will allow a nation to demonstrate to an adversary, or more specifically, to the adversary’s political leadership or national populace, that the “value of the object” in Sir Julian Corbett’s words, is too high to risk national treasure or lives. The most effective campaigns are ones that wield all elements of national power to compel an adversary to take or to acquiesce to a specific action, and it will be much easier, cheaper, and effective to use information, backed by credible military force, to achieve these goals. It also means that nations will increasingly look to use military force as a means of setting conditions for success in the political, economic, or even information spheres. The balkanization of the internet into multiple national “intranets” could provide fewer opportunities for influence platforms and impact cyber operations. The growing presence of fake news, data, and information, coupled with deepfakes and hyper-connectivity, changes the nature of information operations. The convergence of deepfakes, AI-generated bodies and faces, and AI writing technologies – that appear authentic – are corrosive to trust between governments and their populations present the potential for devastating impact on nation-states’ will to compete and fight.

The revolution in connected devices and virtual power projection will increase the potential for adversaries to target our installations. Hyper-connectivity increases the attack surface for cyber-attacks and the access to publicly available information on our Soldiers and their families, making personalized warfare and the use of psychological attacks and deepfakes likely. A force deploying to a combat zone will remain vulnerable from the Strategic Support Area – including individual Soldiers’ personal residences, home station installations, and ports of embarkation – all the way forward to the Close Area fight during its entire deployment.

Homeland Sectors Vulnerable to Disruption Targeting the Homeland allows an adversary to delay U.S. forces’ ability to deploy or intervene in a conflict and directly target the nation’s political decision-making process and will to fight. • Agriculture & food supply – Those areas affecting acquisition, processing, and availability of foodstuff • Finance, banking, and commerce – Disruption of financial networks, availability of funds, confidence in markets, and access to retail • Rule of Law / Government institutions – Degrade confidence in the Government’s ability to provide functioning, stable, and legitimate law and order, services, and governance • Transportation – Prolonged interruption of air, cargo, and public sectors • Medical – Loss of services, corruption of supply chain, inability to react to pandemics • Water – Contamination of public supply, disruption of distribution, and loss of access to water • Power - Disruption to the electromagnetic spectrum over wide areas and interdiction of power generation • Entertainment and information – Attacks against arenas and public gathering places, prolonged internet denial, and loss of confidence in journalism

The juridical and constitutional structures corresponding to the old myths had to become ever more complex in order to retain an appearance of effectiveness.

The following are excerpts from 40+ documents (naming the source-WLeeks gets the post autoremoved from reddit) from corporations in the US and Europe that provide a glimpse into the scope of surveillance capitalism. By now, much of this info is archaic and out of date. If you only read reports coming out of the press, truly grasping the scope of these operations was not really possible. Any lingering doubts that the world had indeed entered a new era were erased when data surpassed oil as the most valuable resource in existence. At this point, many people's thermostat can perform all of these functions. When I began reading through these documents (The Spy Files) I had no intention of posting any of this content and was combiling these excerpts for myself; so it might not always be clear when it shifts from one doc to another.

—-------------

Since Saddam Hussein was deposed eight years ago, the invasion by troops has given way to an invasion by commerce and there is a growing opportunity for the UK export market. An improved security environment in lraq and an initial wave of foreign investment are helping to spur economic activity, particularly in the energy, construction, and retail sectors. Revenues stand at $52.8 billion, expenditures are at $72.4 billion and military expenditure 8.6 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product.

This all means that if lraq continues to be our trusted ally in the Middle East, the country will need virtually everything to support military and security needs, now that the 'giving' is over. Security must surround everything from oil, to transport, to air travel, to construction and exploration, so there is likely to be great scope for the technology and expertise available from AlDlS suppliers.

Above all, take the trouble to understand the culture which is a mix of European and Middle Eastern and which, although secular under Saddam Hussein, is now hardening towards Islam

Visitors from the US, China and Russia are also keeping an eye on the situation and if you do not get in there first, they will.

When a user tries to delete data on a PC, the information is not actually removed. Instead, the pointers to the data are deleted, but investigators can still recover it.

It is pleasing that technology is moving forward and solutions like the UFED are now able to retrieve all the visible evidence like photos, call histories, around the globe.

…access the phone file system including deleted data and agencies worldwide have also recognised the technological merits…

Collecting voice biometrics information of known or unknown suspects and related details on a central database; storage of voice samples for further comparing 'field' samples (e.g. intercepted calls) of an unknown individual against voice biometric models stored in the central database…ASIS'S multi-engine architecture enables speaker identification among more than loo,ooo voice models in 1 minute, on recommended hardware platforms

'Agnitio identified the correct voice within the top 2 results 99.02% of the time using 60 seconds of audio in a cross channel environment.'

International-Biometric-Croup: A pioneering Voice Biometrics Database

BATVOX allows either identification of unknown voices against voices coming from known speakers or verification of the identity of a speaker making comparisons 1 to 1 (regardless of language and type of speech)...provides detailed speaker verifications with likelihood ratios which can be easily presented and justified in legal processes, always with the support of an expert. The calculation process can be exported to an html file to be presented in court.

Only 7 seconds of net speech are needed to perform identification, and 40 seconds to create the speaker model

…designed to analyze millions of incoming audio files spotting a list of valuable targets with extremely accurate rates…Bs3 Strategic is able to process up to 1000 hours of audio in a day (20,000 incoming calls (-3mins) dealing with 500 targets and execute up to 85 matches per second with a single Core CPU

They make it possible to manage and secure one of the most complex modern environments - the city of the 21st century.

These solutions use data from mobile and fixed sensors, social networks, and existing urban data to produce a Unified Situation Awareness Picture which offers intuitive visualizations of positions, causes, alerts, recommended actions, using deduction and forecasting

BrightPlanet:Harvest "unknown and hidden" content from the Deep Web.

If the most coveted commodity of the Information Age is indeed information, then the value of deep Web content is immeasurable. With this in mind, BrightPlanet has quantified the size and relevancy of the deep Web

Our key findings include:

♦ Public information on the deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web.

♦ The deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of information compared to nineteen terabytes of information in the surface Web.

♦ The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the one billion of the surface Web.

♦ More than 200,000 deep Web sites presently exist.

♦ Sixty of the largest deep-Web sites collectively contain about 750 terabytes of information — sufficient by themselves to exceed the size of the surface Web forty times.

♦ On average, deep Web sites receive fifty per cent greater monthly traffic than surface sites and are more highly linked to than surface sites; however, the typical (median) deep Web site is not well known to the Internet-searching public.

♦ The deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Internet.

♦ Deep Web sites tend to be narrower, with deeper content, than conventional surface sites.

♦ Total quality content of the deep Web is 1,000 to 2,000 times greater than that of the surface Web.

♦ Deep Web content is highly relevant to every information need, market, and domain.

♦ More than half of the deep Web content resides in topic-specific databases.

♦ A full ninety-five per cent of the deep Web is publicly accessible information — not subject to fees or subscriptions.

"To put these findings in perspective, a study at the NEC Research Institute, estimated that the search engines with the largest number of Web pages indexed (such as Google) each index no more than sixteen per cent of the surface Web…Internet searchers are therefore searching only 0.03% of the pages available to them today.

ClearTrail has the distinctive edge of having been implemented across hundreds of links of Voice and IP networks. Massive costs, converging-networks exploding bandwidth, enormous data retention and analysis are prime concern while plan monitoring of communications.

ComTrait from our product portfolio addresses

...this mass monitoring system, has won numerous accolades from renowned federal security agencies…LWs can now mass intercept all bandwidths of WiMAX, GSM/CDMA, PSTN, GPRS, 3613.50,VSATand IDEN.

QuickTrail at a Glance

Conveniently housed in a Laptop computer

Intercepts Wi-Fi and Wired LANs in five different ways

Breaks WEP. WPAMlPA2, IPSKl, to rip off Secured Wi-Fi Networks

Deploys Spywares into target's machine

Monitors Gmail, Yahoo and all other HTTPS based communications

Reconstructs Webmaits, Chats, VolP Calls, News Groups & Social Networks

mTrail at a Glance '

Designed for **Passive Interception of GSM Communication InterceptsVoice & SMS…**Detects location of the target…Can be deployed as a fixed unit or mounted in a surveillance van…No support required from GSM operator

...a breakthrough in cost-effective continuous, real time 24/7 monitoring of the radio spectrum. Capable of sweeping from 10 MHz to 6 GHz in less than 100 ms, and housed in a compact lightweight housing designed for hostile environments and suitable for use in both indoor and outdoor environments, the RFeye may be deployed in both fixed or mobile applications.

Early warning via 24x7 internet monitoring…for company-specific threats, including:

Planned boycotts against products and services

Organized demonstrations

Planned activities to interrupt business operations and events

Smear campaigns and dissemination of misinformation

Threats, including physical threats against employees, corporate officers, facilities and resources

Solicitations to conspire against the organization

Applications: Citywide surveillance, incident response, traffic management

Biometrics: time to evangelize the benefits

If ClOs want to initiate, deliver and sustain biometrics-enabled identity management systems, their main challenge lies in convincing stakeholders of the benefits.

...the banking industry is now moving towards the use of voice recognition systems to verify that the customer speaking to the bank when not physically present are who they say they are.

...within some countries there is a specific lack of trust in government to hold citizens' sensitive biometric data and to deliver complex programmes

...we believe that all programmes need to evangelize the benefits, obtain buy-in, incentivise stakeholders and commit to landmark dates if they are to deliver a successful identity management system.

Biometrics currently in use: facial recognition, fingerprints, signature, iris, voice recognition, vein pattern recognition and palm geometry. Further biometrics are emerging or possible: these include keystroke analysis and gait analysis.

The EUDRD was written to serve police needs and to guarantee data security.

Many data centers are already struggling to cope with demand…two thirds of organizations believe they will run out of data center capacity within the next two years – if they have not run out already.

Currently, it is common practise amongst operators and ISPs to store communications data for all kinds of other purposes (billing, fraud prevention, data mining etc.). US law does not require operators and ISPs to destroy this data within a certain time period, so it is fair to say that the current US system lacks important regulations and restrictions in regards to data privacy.

A subpoena is sufficient for law enforcement agencies to request potentially sensitive personal data. If the US introduces data retention, it will have to also address the existing privacy deficit by mandating that data be destroyed after a certain period, and this will significantly add to the complexity of communication provider operations.

What is the US data deletion policy?

For consumers who submit CPRA requests, businesses must provide, update, or delete the consumer's personal information within 45 days of receiving a verifiable request. If an extension is needed, the business must provide adequate notice to the customer within the first 45-day period.Jan 29, 2024

It begins with chapters discussing the 'American Indians' using fictional accounts that establish their humanity while skillfully establishing them as a clear out group. That they believe in 'gods' is repeatedly stressed while detailing all their conceptions that would fly in the face of modern ones (medicine men, rain dances, totem poles). Compare/contrast is the major theme of all homework questions.

Throughout these accounts they are framed in the language of capitalism--the Native Americans had governments and economies. Every paragraph finds a way to mention trade.

"Today, many Americans continue to work for the common good by...serving in the government."

"Women cooked and cared for the children. This division of labor..."

"early American groups built large cities...today, city planners organize cities in much the same way"

"Medicine people called upon the gods...they sang songs believed to have healing powers...that lasted many hours...they made sand paintings believed to help people...by drawing symbols on the ground with sand. Then the sick person sat on the painting."

"What was the result of strong trade networks for the Indians?"

Its very subtle and skillfully done. The narrative persented has really been refined over the last 100 years for maximum effectiveness. For example, compare the following citied in Harold Lasswell's anotated bibliography on propaganda (Propaganda and Promotional Activities (1935))

"The history book written especially for the children of the 7th and 8th grades by request of the American Legion. "Not one man's work but the nation's." Excerpt: "The fact that our continent lay so long unused has seemed to many earnest thinkers one of the world's most striking manifestations of the Divine Purpose of God."

--Charles Horne, 'The Story of Our American People,' US History Publishing Company (1926)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3816075

Of the 3,119 responses on this task, only three students actually tracked down the source of the video... A student from a rural district in the Midwest took the video at face value: “Yes, it shows video evidence of fraud in multiple different states at multiple different times.” Another student from an urban district in the Northeast wrote, “Yes, because the video showed people entering fake votes into boxes.”

A quarter of the students rejected the video but did not provide a coherent rationale for doing so. Students focused on irrelevant features like the lack of audio, the video’s grainy quality, or insufficient narration from the post’s author. Others accepted the veracity of the video but ended up rejecting it because there were too few examples. A student from the South wrote,

“The video only shows a few specific instances, and is not enough to blame the whole Democratic party of voter fraud.” Still others struggled to interpret what was depicted in the clips, ignoring the source and origin of the video altogether. A student explained:

I have no idea what is going on exactly and I see people put papers in the box, but there are cases where the votes are sneaked in. I am not sure this is a strong case of faking votes for a person, but it is a case for vote fraud.

Only 8.7% of students received a Mastery score by rejecting the video and providing a relevant explanation.

“In all that has happened in the last twenty years, the most important change lies in the very continuity of the spectacle. Quite simply, the spectacle’s domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation moulded to its laws. The extraordinary new conditions in which this entire generation has lived constitute a comprehensive summary of all that, henceforth, the spectacle will forbid; and also all that it will permit.”

—Debord (1988)

Abstract of the largest study on Near Death Experiences conducted to date:

The results of a four-year international study of 2060 cardiac arrest cases across 15 hospitals concludes the following. The themes relating to the experience of death appear far broader than what has been understood so far, or what has been described as so called near-death experiences. In some cases of cardiac arrest, memories of visual awareness compatible with so called out-of-body experiences may correspond with actual events…

Dr Parnia commenting on a NDE that was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during cardiac arrest.:

This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions, occurring either before the heart stops or after the heart has been successfully restarted, but not an experience corresponding with ‘real’ events when the heart isn’t beating. In this case, consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three-minute period when there was no heartbeat. This is paradoxical, since the brain typically ceases functioning within 20-30 seconds of the heart stopping and doesn’t resume again until the heart has been restarted. Furthermore, the detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events.

Perhaps I’ll make a post at some point outlining the mountain of evidence in favor of ‘non-physical’ intelligence etc. (terms are difficult here as what they are or how they operate remains unknown i.e. soul, spirit etc.).

I truly underestimated the blind spots within the existing scientific paradigm. By and large anomalous data that exists to far outside of the existing scientific paradigm is simply ignored.

‘Materialism’ was scientifically invalided over a century ago but more or less continues to exist as the default perspective underlying most working science (but by no mean all).

Experiments employing evolutionary game-theory set out to determine the probability that natural selection would produce humans that perceived objective reality.

The result came back as 0. These finding have since been mathematically verified.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

The century had arrived that would enthrone matter and Thomas Hobbes was its apologist. In his Leviathan he wrote: 'That which is not body is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.' Hobbes's proclamation admits no compromise, and it charms people still. Of course Hobbes had not the least idea what matter was - he knew far less of it than theologians thought they knew of angels. His assertion was simply the incantation of a new creed. For over two centuries Hobbes's creed was science's.

Then, shortly after 1900, a revolution was ignited by Planck and Einstein that would banish substance, 'that unintelligible heart of materialism.’ Science had reduced matter to atoms,

which at first seemed as substantial as so many little stones. Then atoms were reduced to particles - and nature sprained her surprise. Einstein showed that matter and energy were essentially the same thing, and that the one could be changed into the other - thus the atomic bomb. Although we acknowledged energy in our simple days, it was regarded not as substantial in any sense, but as the motion of substantial particles. Yet if matter can be converted into energy, obviously the notion of substance is almost exhausted. Substance, body, was by definition and our primitive understanding an ultimate that could certainly not be reduced to anything so tenuous as energy, which was after all not a thing, but the property of a thing.

If any feeble life remained to substance, de Broglie delivered its death blow. In 1924, equations showed that a material particle could behave as a wave. That imaginative leap, verified experimentally three years later, won de Broglie the Nobel Prize in 1929. His formulations were further developed into wave mechanics by Schrodinger, Dirac, Heisenberg, and others. But when particles revealed their wave nature the game was over and substance was exposed as an illusion having no more fundamental tangibility than Ruth's spectral form.

The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows, 'Sir Arthur Eddington said, 'In removing our illusions we have removed substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.

. . 'Some may feel they were robbed of the idea of substance by a sleight; that although matter waves are impalpable, they are nevertheless in some sense objective physical entities that still suggest something of substance, however ghostly.’ There was no sleight. Atomic particles are waves in a multidimensional space having nothing to do with the space we perceive. These waves are described as waves of probability with no material existence whatsoever. Schrodinger wrote that they are “completely immaterial waves; as immaterial as waves of nationalism, depression, or "streaking'" that sweep over a country.' And Planck simply called them waves of knowledge.

After considering the evidence, von Neumann, one of the greatest of modern mathematicians, concluded that the concept of objective reality had evaporated. That leaves only subjective reality, or something beyond description. When the physical view of the universe became completely non-material with modern physics, it encountered something that has always been considered the quintessence of immateriality: consciousness, mind. Perhaps we should have expected such a denouement when we found the physical world was built of incorporeal waves of knowledge or probability. A wave of knowledge, after all, requires a knower. Karl Marbe, a mathematician and philosopher, discovered many years ago that probability arose from the mind. Now what had been the purview of philosophers became a vital issue for physicists as well. 'It may be useful to give the reason for the increased interest of the contemporary physicist in problems of [philosophy],' wrote Eugene Wigner, Nobel laureate. 'The Reason is in a nutshell, that physicists have found it impossible to give a satisfactory description of atomic phenomena without reference to consciousness.'

That is not some semantic twaddle that a positivist can reduce to gibberish. Wigner was stating a fact of physics. 'It is not a long step,' said Einstein, 'from thinking of matter as an electron ghost to thinking of it as the objectified image of thought.' Sir James Jeans agreed: 'The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature ...seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incapable of realization in any sense which would be described as material. Elsewhere Jeans concluded that in brief, idealism has always maintained that as the beginning of the road by which we explore nature is mental, the chances are that the end also will be mental.

To this present-day science adds that, at the farthest point she has so far reached, much, and possibly all, that wasn't material has disappeared, and nothing new has come in that is not mental. Eddington, in a now famous passage, stated it even more badly. Realizing that the physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness, we restore consciousness to the fundamental position instead of representing it as an inessential complication … ‘To put the conclusion crudely - the stuff of the world is mind stuff’...

The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it. In recent years Wigner observed that 'it will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is an ultimate reality.' Von Weizsacker phrased it more poetically: 'Man tries to penetrate the factual truth of nature, but in her last unfathomable riches suddenly, as in a mirror, he meets himself.' St. Frances anticipated him: 'What we are looking for is what is looking.’ …Nineteenth-century surgeons often bragged that they had never discovered a soul in all the bodies they dissected. Twentieth-century physicists, in dissecting the universe, however, have failed to find a body.

-J. Finley Hurley

…Looking back to the different sets of concepts that have been formed in the past or may possibly be formed in the future in the attempt to find our way through the world by means of science, we see that they appear to be ordered by the increasing part played by the subjective element in the set. Classical physics can be considered as that idealization in which we speak about the world as entirely separated from ourselves.

…Quantum theory does not allow a completely objective description of nature.

…When we represent a group of connections by a closed and coherent set of concepts, axioms, definitions and laws which in turn is represented by a mathematical scheme we have in fact isolated and idealized this group of connections with the purpose of clarification. But even if complete clarity has been achieved in this way, it is not known how accurately the set of concepts describes reality…

…the physicists have gradually become accustomed to considering the electronic orbits, etc., not as reality but rather as a kind of `potentia.'...it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the notion that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency toward reality…

…the scientific concepts are idealizations; they are derived from experience obtained by refined experimental tools, and are precisely defined through axioms and definitions. Only through these precise definitions is it possible to connect the concepts with a mathematical scheme and to derive mathematically the infinite variety of possible phenomena in this field. But through this process of idealization and precise definition the immediate connection with reality is lost…

…It may be useful in this connection to remember that even in the most precise part of science, in mathematics, we cannot avoid using concepts that involve contradictions…

The skepticism against precise scientific concepts does not mean that there should be a definite limitation for the application of rational thinking. On the contrary, one may say that the human ability to understand may be in a certain sense unlimited. But the existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word `understanding.'

-Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy

To understand a thing is a bridge and possibility of returning to the path. But to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder.

Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?

...What you speak is, the intoxication is, the undignified, sick paltry dailiness is. It runs in all the streets, lives in all the houses, and rules the day of all humanity. Even the eternal stars are commonplace. It is the great mistress and the one essence of God. One laughs about it, and laughter, too, is. Do you believe, man of this time, that laughter is lower than worship? Where is your measure, false measurer?’ (The Red Book)

Have you ever noticed that every wikipedia article on any controversial topic always stresses the negative or null hypothesis without detailing supporting evidence?

An organized group of materialists–’guerrilla skeptics’--has maintained an ongoing information operation that actively edits all wikipedia pages in accordance with their conception of reality.

Not only are two hundred men and women put to death annually, on the average, in this country by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity. In many instances the leading citizens aid and abet by their presence when they do not participate, and the leading journals inflame the public mind to the lynching point with scare-head articles and offers of rewards. Whenever a burning is advertised to take place, the railroads run excursions, photographs are taken, and the same jubilee is indulged in that characterized the public hangings of one hundred years ago. There is, however, this difference: in those old days the multitude that stood by was permitted only to guy or jeer.

The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd. If the leaders of the mob are so minded, coal-oil is poured over the body and the victim is then roasted to death. This has been done in Texarkana and Paris, Tex., in Bardswell, Ky., and in Newman, Ga. In Paris the officers of the law delivered the prisoner to the mob. The mayor gave the school children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being burned to death. In Texarkana, the year before, men and boys amused themselves by cutting off strips of flesh and thrusting knives into their helpless victim. At Newman, Ga., of the present year, the mob tried every conceivable torture to compel the victim to cry out and confess, before they set fire to the faggots that burned him. But their trouble was all in vain–he never uttered a cry, and they could not make him confess.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in America” (1900)

https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/18-industrial-america/ida-b-wells-barnett-lynch-law-in-america-1900/

Women control the direction of society. When they let go of all propriety and decency and become sexually active and "outgoing" like men, then you can with a large degree of confidence say that the time is near for that part of civilization to fall. Because men are perpetually sexually active. And that is a fact. But when women lose their inhibitions and become just like their male counterparts, then all bets are off.

The excess indulgence in sex only harms the individual, it doesn't empower. Just gives a feeling of empowerment. Women hold the key to sex. And when women take the key and keep the door of exclusivity wide open, she harms herself by commodifying herself. She has thus made herself the very object of disdain. By sleeping with random men who couldn't care less about the individual that they have sex with, they will find that they have greatly lost their worth and value by making themselves easily accessible.

Women should choose wisely, as to who will the individuals be, that they associate with. Or at great cost to themselves realize that they were paying all that price for ashes and the wind. And I shouldn't have to quote, the well known saying, but I will anyway: "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world". That is not just a saying. It carries immense weight and meaning. Whether you argue that it is the rampant growth of feminism that played a role in the accelerated growth via education and encouragement of women to join the workforce, to become valuable contributors to society, or not, it is an undeniable fact that women/mothers are not being in the home, has led to the indoctrination and the consequent neglect of children. Previously, the theory or rather, the conspiracy, that women not being present in the home would lead to children being taught all kinds of stuff at school was just a theory or conspiracy. But that is not the case anymore. There are groups with really clandestine, selfish agendas that seek to wreck all that we hold precious. You should realize that all the talks of global warming and climate change and political divisiveness and various commonly accepted differences between the sexes are being weaponized to divide men (or rather, men and women) against each other and children against their parents. The same tactic that the British used against the people of India. Tried and tested and has been found to work rather effectively.

What the world needs are individuals that protect and cherish, first of all, each other, the key to which lies in understanding of the differences between each other and playing to our strengths and differences. Feminine power lies in complete understanding of the fact that men, for all the strength and power they have in the world, cannot, to save their lives, give birth to a human being. That alone is immeasurable power. Power that vastly trumps that of any 0.001% man. Once you truly realize that you are truly irreplaceable in the capacity to be mothers, you will understand that there is no need to fight. That power already resides in your hands. That power implies, the power to train and educate, and greatly influence their children, being the next generation, and second, the world itself.

Women of the world unite! For your battle isn't one in the first place. Be great mothers. For in that, alone you are without equal. Unequal power and influence over the next generation. That means living lives that are worthy of praise and high regard. Leading lives of dignity and respect. Hold yourselves to high standards.

The sole purpose of this movement is thus transitory in that, it is but to concretize the knowledge of the fact that there is a section of society - 50% of it, that holds itself to high standards as the other half and achieves great results in transforming society for the better, to take it to greater heights and leaving an indelible mark upon the pages of history.

9/11 was not done by a plane or bombs it was most definitely beyblades

Prove me wrong

A few words before my original storyboard idea…… i’m probably already sharing too much information as is, but I’m a guitar player. Fade To Black release in 1984 was the main catalyst to my playing. (coincidentally I was born in September of the same year.)

Even though though Metallica lost their light and shining armor before my arrival on this planet, it was still very unsettling.

I remember seeing James is re-action on some interview footage and not only saying a lot of pain and sadness, but look like to be a lot of confusion and disorientation. and I understand that PTSD has long lasting effects, but this look different. it looked like a man who knew he was being lied to.

call it clairvoyance or just a hunch, But I think James was right about not seeing him under the bus. And suspiciously by contrast, how cool, calm and collected Lars has been….. but I digress

Now for the storyline idea……

Cliff was a LOKI variant and the black ice bus accident was obviously manufactured. Cliff was zapped out of this timeline before any harm could be done.

Guy Debord's first film.

[Film, English Dubbed] (https://vimeo.com/58909937)

Transcript

Voice 1: This neighborhood was designed for the wretched dignity of the petty bourgeoisie, for respectable occupations and intellectual tourism. The sedentary population of the upper floors was sheltered from the influences of the street. The neighborhood itself has remained the same. It was the external setting of our story, where a few people put into practice a systematic questioning of all the works and diversions of a society, a total critique of its notion of happiness.

These people also scorned “subjective profundity.” The only thing that interested them was a satisfactory concrete expression of their own lives.

Voice 2: Human beings are not fully conscious of their real lives. Groping in the dark, overwhelmed by the consequences of their acts, at every moment groups and individuals find themselves faced with outcomes they had not intended.

Voice 1: They said that oblivion was their ruling passion. They wanted to reinvent everything each day; to become the masters and possessors of their own lives.

Just as we do not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, we cannot judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness. On the contrary, this consciousness must be understood as reflecting the contradictions of material life, the conflict between social conditions and the forces of social production.

Advances in the harnessing of nature were not yet matched by a corresponding liberation of everyday life. Youth passed away among the various controls of resignation.

Our camera has captured for you a few glimpses of an ephemeral microsociety.

Knowledge of empirical facts remains abstract and superficial as long as it is not concretized by being related to the whole situation. This is the only method that enables us to supersede partial and abstract problems and get to their concrete essence, and thus implicitly to their meaning.

This group lived on the margins of the economy. It tended toward a role of pure consumption, particularly the free consumption of its own time. It thus found itself directly involved in qualitative divergences from ordinary life, but deprived of any means to influence those divergences.

The group ranged over a very small area. The same times brought them back to the same places. No one wanted to go to bed early. Discussions continued on the meaning of it all. . . .

Voice 2: “Our life is a journey, in winter and night. We seek our passage . . .”

Voice 1: The literature they had abandoned nevertheless exerted a delaying influence, expressed in some affective formulations.

Voice 2: There was the fatigue and the cold of morning in this much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It was a trompe-l’oeil reality through which we had to discover the potential richness of what was really there.

On the bank of the river evening began again; and the caresses; and the importance of a world without importance. Just as the eyes have a blurred vision of many things and can clearly see only one, so the will can strive only imperfectly toward diverse objects and can completely love only one at a time.

Voice 3: No one counted on the future. It would never be possible to be together later, or anywhere else. There would never be a greater freedom.

Voice 1: The refusal of time and of growing old automatically limited encounters in this narrow and contingent zone, where what was lacking was felt as irreparable. The extreme precariousness of their methods for getting by without working was at the root of this impatience which made excesses necessary and breaks irrevocable.

Voice 2: We can never really challenge any form of social organization without challenging all of that organization’s forms of language.

Voice 1: When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment “ordinary life” may prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own spatial domain.

Outside the neighborhood, beyond its fleeting and continually threatened changelessness, stretched a half-known city where people met only by chance, losing their way forever.

The girls who found their way there, because they were legally under the control of their family until the age of eighteen, were often recaptured by the defenders of that detestable institution. They were generally locked up under the custody of those creatures who among all the bad products of a bad society present the most ugly and repugnant appearance: nuns.

What makes most documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their subject matter. They confine themselves to depicting fragmented social functions and their isolated products. In contrast, imagine the full complexity of a moment that is not resolved into a work, a moment whose development contains interrelated facts and values and whose meaning is not yet apparent. This confused totality could be the subject matter of such a documentary.

Voice 2: The era had attained a level of knowledge and technologies that made possible, and increasingly necessary, a direct construction of all the aspects of a mentally and materially liberated way of life. The appearance of these superior means of action, though they remained unused because of the delays in the project of abolishing the commodity economy, had already revealed the obsolescence of all aesthetic activity, whose ambitions and powers had both dwindled away. The decay of art and of all the old codes of conduct had formed our sociological background. The ruling class’s monopoly on the instruments we needed in order to implement the collective art of our time had left us completely outside the official cultural production, which was devoted to illustrating and repeating the past. An art film on this generation can only be a film about its lack of real creations.

Others unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and their home, to their predictable future. For them duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency of their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in search of different uses of the urban landscape, in search of new passions. The atmosphere of a few places gave us intimations of the future powers of an architecture that it would be necessary to create in order to provide the setting for less mediocre games. We could expect nothing of anything that we ourselves had not altered. The urban environment proclaimed the orders and tastes of the ruling society just as violently as the newspapers. Man unifies the world, but man has extended himself everywhere. People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty. Since everything was connected, it was necessary to change everything through a unitary struggle, or nothing. It was necessary to link up with the masses, but sleep was all around us.

Voice 3: The dictatorship of the proletariat is a relentless struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educative and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old society.

Voice 1: But in this country it is once again the men of order who have rebelled and reinforced their power. They have been allowed to aggravate the grotesqueness of the ruling conditions according to their will, embellishing their system with the funereal ceremonies of the past.

Voice 2: Years, like a single instant prolonged to this moment, come to an end.

Voice 1: What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, engraved in the tastes and illusions of an era and carried off with it.

Voice 2: The appearance of events that we have not created, of events that others have in fact created against us, now obliges us to be aware of the passage of time and its results, to assess the transformation of our own desires into events. What differentiates the past from the present is precisely its out-of-reach objectivity. There is no more should-be; being has been consumed to the point of ceasing to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time. Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?

Voice 3: What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. We are engulfed. Separated from each other. The years pass and we haven’t changed anything.

Voice 2: Once again, morning in the same streets. Once again the fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.

Voice 1: Really hard to drink more.

Voice 2: Of course one might make a film about it. But even if such a film succeeded in being as fundamentally incoherent and unsatisfying as the reality it dealt with, it could never be more than a re-creation — as impoverished and false as this botched tracking shot.

Voice 3: There are now people who pride themselves on being authors of films, as others were authors of novels. They are even more backward than the novelists because they are unaware of the decomposition and exhaustion of individual expression in our time, unaware that the arts of passivity are over and done. They are sometimes praised for their sincerity since they dramatize with more personal depth the conventions of which their life consists. There is talk about “liberating the cinema.” But what does it matter to us if one more art is liberated to the point that Tom, Dick or Harry can use it to complacently express their servile sentiments? The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in a historical perspective, but for us, right now. This project implies the withering away of all the alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, must be destroyed.

Voice 2: In the final analysis, stars are not created by their talent or lack of talent, or even by the film industry or advertising. They are created by the need we have for them. A pathetic need, arising out of a dismal and anonymous life that would like to enlarge itself to the dimensions of cinematic life. The imaginary life on the screen is the product of this real need. The star is the projection of this need.

The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.

To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things. But what would be the point?

The point is to understand what has been done and all that remains to be done, not to add more ruins to the old world of spectacles and memories.

tiktok we all have or had it if you have used it you know that is literally brain rot but is something much worse through the last 4 to 6 years we have become more divided the left and the right, i think this a Chinas plan for world domination and they are absolutely trying to divide USA because USA is the strongest when they are united e.x. Pearl Harbor or 911 they got attacked and did 10 fold back but now days i don't think people on the left would fight alongside the right and this is is why so much political radicalism is pushed on tiktok and on Chinese tiktok unite is pushed unite is key so we need to stop this hate unite against a comman enemy and i know tencent you are watching this and that you problaby is gonna take this down but if you do you are makeing my point everyone who is reading this warn your freands s warn your famaily

The ‘Political Instability Task Force’ analyzed the data from every political instability in the world between 1955-2003; from this data they developed a statistical model that related country characteristics to the probability of a civil war starting…the model is capable of predicting instability onsets with 80% accuracy. What came as a surprise was that, even though the researchers tested about 30 various indicators, the model needed to know only 3-4 characteristics to achieve this accuracy…The first and most important, was the ‘regime type’...autocracy-democracy spectrum, ranging from -10 to 10…partial democracies were further divided into those with factionalism. Defined as, sharply polarized and uncompromising competition between blocs pursuing parochial interests at the national level…often accompanied by confrontational mass mobilization…intimidation or manipulation of electoral competition.

Partial democracies with factionalism were exceptionally unstable political regimes and were the most likely to descend into civil wars…Other factors that increased the probability of civil war included high infant mortality (the US has the highest infant mortality rate in the 1st world, 3x higher than the average), armed conflict in bordering states (3.2k mass shootings since 2018), state led repression against a minority group (33% of all American black men will go to jail in their lifetime) and widespread social media use. Social media algorithms serve as accelerants for violence by promoting a sense of perpetual crisis, a felling of growing despair, and the perception that moderates have failed.

Our analysis of the one hundred cases in CrisisDB on which we have gathered data…In nearly 2/3rds of the cases, the crisis resulted in massive downward mobility from the ranks of the elites to the ranks of the commoners…In 1/6th of the cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40%...75% ended in revolutions or civil war or both, and in 1/5th recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. 60% led to the death of the state–it was conquered by another or simply disintegrated into fragments.

What is little appreciated is that although democratic institutions are the best (or least bad) way of governing societies, democracies are particularly vulnerable to being subverted by plutocrats…

The American Republic has gone through two revolutionary situations. In the 1850s it was resolved by a social revolution, the American Civil War, which replaced the antebellum reuling elites with the new corporate ruling class. The 2nd peaked during the 1920s and was resolved by the adoption of the reforms of the Progressive and New Deal periods. Today, we are in a 3rd revolutionary situation and the structural analysis seems to be quite pessimistic…As we examine one case of state breakdown after another, we invariably see that in each case, the overwhelming majority of pre-crisis elites–whether they belonged to the antebellum slavocracy, the nobility of the French ancient regime, or the Russian intelligentsia circa 1900–were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.

Full Book:

https://library.lol/main/E35FA981EA502BD8C5C032782FE11559

Articles:

‘Is the US Entering it’s End Times? Other Fallen Societies May Suggest So’

https://www.iflscience.com/is-the-us-entering-its-end-times-other-fallen-societies-may-suggest-so-70766

‘Elite Over Production and Foreign Policy’

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/elite-overproduction-and-foreign-policy-206726

Podcast:

‘Why Societies Fall Apart and Why the US May Be Next’

https://josephnoelwalker.com/149-peter-turchin/

To know the things that are not, and cannot be, but have been imagined and believed, is the most curious chapter in the annals of man.

--William Godwin, 'The Lives of the Necromancers' (1834)

It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.

--John Bunyan

The Origins of American Government

The American government was not designed or intended to be a democracy. Democracy comes from the Greek transliteration, ‘δημοκρατία,’ meaning 'people and power.' Representative democracy did not exist even as a concept in ancient Greece. Early eligible American voters were white men who owned a significant amount of property. You have to commit violence against the English language to call this system a democracy. The American government was intended to be an oligarchy or more accurately, a plutocracy.

While American society has evolved significantly since its conception, the US government has remained relatively stable, changing only in form not kind. These formalisms were often institutional and gradual, existing more in words and imagination than actual practice. The ‘rules of the game’ were never completely uprooted but applied as they existed to a wider distribution of the population. This increasing equity has not corresponded with an increase in popular influence over US government policy. A ten year study ( Gilens & Page, Cambridge University Press, 2014) analyzing the data from every public policy decision from 1981 to 2002 (1,779) found that the average American voters influence on government policy was “non-significant” reaching a “near-zero level.” The authors note that

The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all… When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant, impact upon public policy…Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts….and the average American voter has no effect on the American government whatsoever.

While this system has remained relatively stable over time, the myths used to describe it, however, have become increasingly elaborate. Chief Justice Marshall, expresses the prevailing mythology clearly in his majority opinion in the case McCulloch v. Maryland:

The government proceeds directly from the people...[they] were at perfect liberty to accept or reject it; and their act was final. . . . The government of the Union...is emphatically and truly a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit…It is the government of all; its powers are delegated by all; it represents all, and acts for all

The Founding Fathers of American government, however, obliterate these dogmas. “The first object of government,” the principle authour of the constitution, James Maddison writes, is the protection of the “faculties [in] men, from which the rights of property originate.” “Factions…share the same opinions, passions, and interests,” and is a euphemism for social class. “The most common and durable source of factions,” Maddison continues in Federalist no. 10, are the “various and unequal distributions of property.”

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operation of government.

…a republic [is] the delegation of the government to a small number of citizens…whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country. …the public voice, pronounced by the representative of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose…[making it more difficult if] a common motive exists, for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other. …[such as in] the abolition of debts, for an equal distribution of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it…

The debates at the Constitutional Convention were secret because they were in effect, a coup d'état of the existing American government (‘Articles of Confederation’). The purpose of the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton exclaimed, was "to take into consideration the Trade and Commerce of the United States." Exact transcripts were not recorded but summary notes of the proceedings survived. “There will be debtors and creditors, and an unequal possession of property. There will be particularly the distinction of rich and poor,” Maddison stated at the time, noting that “this indeed is the ground-work of aristocracy…”:

In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this Country, but symptoms of a leveling spirit, as we have understood them, have sufficiently appeared in certain quarters to give notice of the future danger. How is this danger to be guarded against, on republican principles?

“Those who own the country,” the first Supreme Court Justice of the US, John Jay, states matter of factly, “ought to govern it.” The original founders were mostly lawyers who lived in coastal towns. Of the original framers, their economic resources were generally: owning government debt (public securities), land speculation, credit, mercantile, manufacturing, shipping, slave holding. Not one member in attendance at the Constitutional Convention represented the ‘immediate and personal economic interests of the small farmer or mechanic classes.’ The vast majority–5/6ths–were directly and personally invested in the outcome of the proceedings and more or less benefitted from the subsequent adoption of the new constitution.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a French ambassador to the US, who traveled to America in the mid-1800s intending to study its prison system, became instead inexplicably transfixed with the entirety of US society. Democracy in America (1835) was quickly recognized as a master analysis and is still considered the most authoritative account ever pinned of the early American governmental system. Tocqueville writes:

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free...They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves [with the] reflection that they have chosen their own guardians.

It is in vain to summon a people, which has been rendered so dependent on the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.

The democratic nations which have introduced freedom into their political constitution, at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution, have been led into strange paradoxes. ...It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed…

The Dean of American journalism, Walter Lippmann, notes that Thomas Jefferson first popularized the myths and stereotypes which came to crystalize American historical memory. “The Federalist argued for union, not for democracy, and even the word republic had an unpleasant sound to George Washington when he had been for more than two years a republican president,” Lippmann writes:

The constitution was a candid attempt to limit the sphere of popular rule; the only democratic organ it was intended the government should possess was the House, based on a suffrage highly limited by property qualifications. …Jefferson referred to his election as ‘the great revolution of 1800,’ but more than anything else it was a revolution in the mind.

No great policy was altered, but a new tradition was established.

For it was Jefferson who first taught the American people to regard the Constitution as an instrument of democracy, and he stereotyped the images, the ideas, and even many of the phrases, in which Americans ever since have described politics to each other.

...Partly by actual amendment, partly by practice, as in the case of the electoral college, but chiefly by looking at it through another set of stereotypes, the façade was no longer permitted to look oligarchic.

The American people came to believe that their constitution was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such. They owe that fiction to the victory of Jefferson, and a great conservative fiction it has been. It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Constitution as did the author of it, the Constitution would have been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible. Jefferson resolved that paradox by teaching the American people to read the Constitution as an expression of democracy.

The Origin of Propaganda

The word propaganda first entered the world in 1622 when the Catholic Church created the ‘Propaganda Fide’ or the ‘Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.’ Conceived as a technique for organizing missionary work, by 1627 it was institutionalized in the Church’s college to increase the efficiency of indoctrination (renamed in 1967 the ‘Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples’). Propaganda from this epoch was an art form resembling classical rhetoric and was first anticipated and conceived as the ‘Art of War’ around 221 B.C.E. ‘The greatest victory,’ Sun Tzu writes, ‘is that which requires no battle.’ While the genealogy of persuasion techniques in the ancient and early modern world are interesting historical antidotes, they offer nothing in the way of understanding modern propaganda which was originally created in England and America, taking definitive form around 1920.

Archaic persuasion techniques, such as rhetoric, share about as much in common with modern propaganda as an atom bomb does with a sword. Propaganda is an inevitable byproduct of a technological society, evolving in tandem with and parallel to its development. Propaganda is a technical solution to a technical problem, namely integrating the masses into a rapidly changing, artificial world. For tens of millions of years, humans lived in small groups (no larger than 60-70 people), adapting to an environment which only changed very gradually. A natural equilibrium emerged between people and the environment, as anthropologist documented while observing aboriginal tribes.

This equilibrium was disrupted and eventually destroyed as the environment began to evolve at increasingly rapid rates, far outpacing human evolution. Between 1900 and 1970, the speed of travel increased by a factor of 1,000 and the speed of communication by a factor greater than 10 million. While the human brain has not evolved since before the invention of modern agriculture. “No longer are we surrounded by fields, trees, and rivers, but by signs, signals, billboards, screens, labels, and trademarks,” Ellul writes, “this is our universe.” A primary function of propaganda is to make adaption and integration into this universe more efficient, less painful, absurd, conscious.

Modern propaganda refers to the verbal translation of events through the mass media: experiences are translated into words, words into images. Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, billboards, and social media broadcast and circulate them infinitely. Everyday life is translated into images and image is now everything. The transitional shift in values from being into having and from having into appearing has been the defining characteristic of the modern age. Everyday life experiences come to feel increasingly fake while the digital images become more and more realistic.

The modern technological age is propagandas point of departure and its supreme law is concern with effectiveness. Far from intricate today, propaganda is pragmatic and it typically targets the human subconscious. As a default, propaganda is only concerned with masses not individuals, with averages not outliers. Propaganda addresses itself simultaneously to the individual and the mass. Individuals in a group tend to feel more certain while becoming increasingly suggestible; measured while acting impulsively. The mass media situations man exactly in this scenario, alone in the mass. “The aim of modem propaganda is no longer to modify ideas,” Ellul writes, “but to provoke action.”

It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a choice, but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief.

Propaganda conditions man to the rhythm of a totalitarian society. It is not a collection of images but a social relation between people, mediated by images. Propaganda, like social media, reunites us but only in our separateness.

The Origins of Modern Propaganda

By the late 1910s, propaganda had become a “self-conscience art and a regular organ of popular government.” Britain pioneered the field with the creation of the Ministry of Information, which sought “to direct the thoughts of much of the world.” Its central purpose was to persuade the American government to enter WWI. Woodrow Wilson had campaigned on staying out of the war and a majority of Americans were in favor of remaining neutral. In response to the anti-war sentiment, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI or Creel Commission) to “fight for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions” by “spreading the gospel of Americanism to every corner of the globe.” The Institute for Propaganda Analysis notes:

The CPI blended advertising techniques with a sophisticated understanding of human psychology and its efforts represented the first time that a modern government disseminated propaganda on such a large scale. It is fascinating that this phenomenon, often linked with totalitarian regimes, emerged in a democratic state

Under the direction of George Creel, the CPI was instructed to “sell the war to America.” Liberal intellectuals were enlisted from the business, media, academic, entertainment and art industries. Will Irwin, an ex-CPI member, would later confess, “We never told the whole truth–not by any manner of means” and cited an intelligence officer as stating “you can’t tell them the truth.” The US war time environment was frighteningly similar to a totalitarian state. “With the aid of Roosevelt,” Randolph Bourne wrote during the war, “the murmurs became a monotonous chant.” According to Creel, 20,000 different newspapers were publishing CPI propaganda every day. The CPI organized 75,000 Four Minute Men (public speakers who could be ready in 4 minutes notice) who gave 755,190 speeches to over 300 million people. Weekly magazines and journals were given to over 600,000 teachers and 200,000 slides were created for detailed lectures. 1,438 different designs were produced for posters, window cards, newspaper advertisements, cartoons, seals, and buttons.

Congressional attempts to suppress Creel’s book How We Advertised America (1920) failed. “In all things, from first to last, without halt or change,” Creel wrote, “it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.” The CPI’s success established the “standard marketing strategies for all future wars” by selling the war as one that would “make the world safe for democracy."Congress would end the CPI’s funding on November 12, 1918. Two years later, however, the director of the CPI’s Foreign Division stated that propaganda had continued unabated in the postwar world.

The history of propaganda in the war would scarcely be worthy of consideration here, but for one fact– it did not stop with the armistice. No indeed! The methods invented and tried out in the war were too valuable for the uses of governments, factions, and special interests.

The CPI’s success inspired leading ‘democratic’ theorists like Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, and Harold Lasswell. Lippmann’s bombshell, Public Opinion (1922) and its sequel The Phantom Public (1927) developed a highly detailed theory which he called the “manufacture of consent.” The term propaganda entered the Encyclopedia Britannica the same year that Lippmann published Public Opinion. Regarded as the Dean of US Journalism, he practically invented the serious newspaper column while writing for the New Republic. “Millions of readers,” Lippmann’s biographer Ronald Steele explains, were “relying on him to explain and interpret the great issues of the day.” Lippmann believed that the chief goal of news was not objective reporting but to “signalize an event.” Behind the scenes he worked with the CIA writing propaganda leaflets, interrogating prisoners, and coordinating government intelligence. Lippmann worked with every American president from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon and is commonly regarded as “the most influential commentator of the 20th century.” In Public Opinion, he explains that American democracy had reached a new paradigm.

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. …the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. …As a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy…

This is a natural development because “the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class.” Lippmann expounded on these ideas in the Phantom Public arguing that “the public must be put in its place” so that “responsible men” can “live free of the trampling and roar of a bewildered herd.” These “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” do have a “function.” They are to be “spectators, not participants.” According to Lippmann, the public’s highest ideal is to align with a member of the business class during a symbolic election. Taking the phenomenon a step further, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays (ex-CPI member) turned Lippmann’s theories into practical step-by-step manuals –Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), Public Relations (1952), and Engineering Consent (1969). Bernays writes:

It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach—visual, graphic, and auditory—to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group —persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers.

They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.

Some of Bernays’ more notable clients included: Proctor and Gamble, CBS, the American Tobacco Company, General Electric, Dodge Motors, the Public Health Service along with every American president from Woodrow Wilson to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Corporations turned to Bernays and others to fight the “hazard facing industrialists” which is “the newly realized political power of the masses.” Propaganda “in its sum total,” Bernays wrote at the time, “is regimenting the public mind, every bit as much as an army regiments the body of its soldiers.” In his study published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science (March 1947) Bernays refers to the “engineering of consent” as the “very essence of democracy.” The term propaganda acquired negative connotations during WWII and was replaced with “public relations” and “communications.” Accordingly, Bernays is often regarded as the “Father of Public Relations” (some historians give the title to Ivy Lee) and Life magazine has listed him among the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century.

The term propaganda entered the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in 1933, when Harold Lasswell explained that elites must abandon “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.” The “ignorance and superstition” of “the masses,” Lasswell explains, led to “the development of a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda.” In his dissertation, Propaganda Technique in WWI (1927), he outlines strategies which have become standard operating procedure in modern geopolitical strategy.

So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about who the public is to hate. …A handy rule for arousing hate is if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity. …When the public believes that the enemy began the War and blocks a permanent, profitable and godly peace, the propagandist has achieved his purpose. …No doubt that, in the future, the propagandist may count upon a battalion of honest professors to rewrite history, to serve the exigencies of the moment.

Laswell went on to help found the fields of political science and communications. He invented the famous communication theory: who says what to whom with what effect in which medium. For further reading see Lasswell’s annotated bibliography Propaganda and Promotional Activities (1935) which sources thousands of books and studies on early American propaganda.

Hitler and Nazi Propaganda

Contrary to modern characterizations, German propaganda was crude and unscientific throughout WWI. In 1922, Walter Lippmann wrote that the CPI tactic of “constant repetition” “impressed the neutrals and Germany itself.” Harold Lasswell’s extensive study of WWI propaganda (1927) concluded that Germany’s propaganda had been completely ineffective. Writing in Mein Kampf (1925), Adolf Hitler agreed:

It was not until the War that it became evident what immense results could be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. …Did we have anything you could call propaganda? I regret that I must answer in the negative. …The form was inadequate, the substance was psychologically wrong: a careful examination of German war propaganda can lead to no other diagnosis. …By contrast, the war propaganda of the English and Americans was psychologically sound. …I myself, learned enormously from this enemy propaganda. …The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous…

Hitler came to power 8 years later using little more than a microphone and a radio. Nazi propaganda was primarily based on Sigmund Freud’s theory of repression and libido. Hannah Arendt discusses the guiding viewpoint of the Nazi party in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948):

From the viewpoint of an organization which functions according the principle that whoever is not included is excluded, whoever is not with me is against me, the world at large loses all the nuances, differentiations, and pluralistic aspects which had in any event become confusing and unbearable to the masses who had lost their place and their orientation in it.

Edward Bernays autobiography, Biography of an Idea (1965) details a shocking claim that's been completely ignored by historians.

Karl von Weigand…just returned from Germany, [and he] was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany…

In 1939, a German research center was established to conduct opinion surveys–which used Harold Lasswell’s famous communication technique–to determine who said what to whom with what effect in which medium, inside Hitler’s Germany. These operations laid the foundation for the murder of roughly 90,000 people over the months that followed, mostly Jewish women and children. "This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy," Joseph Goebbels writes, "that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed."

At the Nuremberg War Crime Trials on April 18, 1946 the founder of the Nazi Gestapo, Hermann Goering, explained the essence of war propaganda:

Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. …Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Charged with “crimes against humanity,” Goering avoided execution by committing suicide in his cell. In post-war America, however, many government propagandists went on to enjoy prestigious careers. The overseas director of the US Office of War Information (OWI), Edward Barret, wrote in 1953 that:

Among OWI alumni are the publishers of Time, Look, Fortune, and several dailies; the editors of such magazines as Holiday, Coronet, Parade, and the Saturday Review, editors of the Denver Post, New Orleans Times-Picayune, and others; the heads of the Viking Press, Harper & Brothers, and Farrar, Straus and Young; two Hollywood Oscar winners; a two-time Pulitzer prizewinner; the board chairman of CBS and a dozen key network executives; President Eisenhower’s chief speech writer; the editor of Reader’s Digest international editions; at least six partners of large advertising agencies; and a dozen noted social scientists.

Propaganda continued unabated in the post war world. Ronald Regan created ‘Operation Truth’ an initiative that would have made Orwell proud. In 2004 alone, the Bush Administration sent over 80 million on public relations. Bertrand Russell once wrote, "after ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return."

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil308/Singer2.pdf

Pdf/EPUB/ADW3 links to full text in comments

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.

Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.

The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin argues: When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.

In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.

Just take the total deaths from the previous five years and average them. Then substract them from the total number in the year of interest.

US total deaths:

• 2015: 2,712,630

• 2016: 2,744,248

• 2017: 2,813,503

• 2018: 2,839,205

• 2019: 2,854,838

• 2020: 3,338,000

2015 to 2019=(13,964,424)/5

=2,792,884.8

(3,338,000)-(2,792,884.8)

=545,116

It was always much more likely that the number of deaths was being under counted, rather than the reverse.

If one party is at war with another, and the other party does not realize it is at war, the party who knows it is at war usually wins.

-- Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui , 'Unrestricted Warfare'

https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/26db15ee/files/uploaded/5GW%20Section1.pdf

http://library.lol/main/5EF05795BCE53A2895C79D4AFA6EF8C0

Excellent and very convincing book.

Ouch. Well if this doesn't damn near completely describe an area of enlarged focus in my private life the last few months.

Here, then, is this man for whom the future is once again a hazardous mystery to which there is no key. He falls back on the magician, on the political prophet, on the miracle-working wise man, on the one who unveils the future and offers assurances. He transforms the physician or the scientist into a sorcerer. He looks for some Promethean or some Mephistophelian intervention which will provide the final breakthrough and the security of a sure future. The success of Pante (a science fiction monthly), and publications of that type, of horoscopes, of fortunetellers, of sects, the growth of the irrational in politics and the increase in intellectual incoherence–all these are sure signs of the absence of hope. Efforts to plumb the world’s and my own future are completely drained dry in a “thus it was written.” The attempt to lay hold of the unseen powers, to appease them, to seduce them and use them is a magician’s springtime and the prelude to a summer of drought and sterility. Nothing can render a person more sterile and ineffectual than this return to magic.

Let it not be said that this merely incidental behavior, surface or peripheral sentiment, or that it is confined to ‘popular’ uncultivated circles. Quite the contrary. It is the recourse to magic which is central, and it is the rational conduct and the professional restraint which are peripheral and superficial. It is in his attempt to recreate the sacred and in his looking for a miracle that modern man is fully identified.

This comes equally to light among the sophisticated intellectuals. The whole team of the periodical Tel Quel, for example, is specifically characterized by its Magianism. Spellbinding art, pop music, Michel Butor or Alain Robbe-Grillet, the Underground, all these represent in reality a search for, or a step toward, the magical and the indecipherable.

Now if “at the beginning of things” magic could have been the agent of action, of mastery over the world, and of the affirmation of the individual over against the group, in our day it is a regression. For this is not a ‘new magic,’ but the old one. Faced with a formidable technological system and with relentless structures, man takes refuge in the ancestral activities of magic and the occult, of nighttime and dreams. He is afraid of what he has done and thinks to find a remedy in a return to the original springs, but what was spring three hundred thousand years ago is now a mirage of water which leads one astray into ever greater sterility. Today nothing is more reactionary than the Living Theater, the Underground cinema, pop music, and Scandinavian eroticism. These are, to be sure, understandable reactions, but they are debilitating and falsifying at the very height of the hardest struggle man has ever faced.

The magician is, above all else, the one who is able to disclose the future and eventually to change it. Nowadays we no longer have haruspices. Our century, which to be sure, still uses tarot cards and coffee grounds, would no longer be happy, on the whole , with what is openly called superstition. To all appearances it has become scientific, and it brags about being rational. Fortune-telling is practiced only in secrecy and shame. Even today’ fortunetellers have taken a rational turn. Never has the future been so scrutinized, but now we do it in the scientific manner. Forecast, projections, possibilities, prospects–these enterprises abound, and of course they bear the stamp of a certain rigor and rationality.

Some of the methods are quite consistent, but it has to be noted at the same time that the imagination plays an ever increasing role in such endeavors. The procedures, as a matter of fact, are more and more rational, but the object on which they are brought to bear is not. That is to say, it was soon noted that it is impossible truly to predict, for the reason that such a prediction would imply a selection from among certain privileged facts and hypotheses. So a choice had to be made between two procedures. One would either be content with the construction of models, abstract structures having little to do with concrete reality except to represent it conceptually. These models can then be made to operate in such a way that one can foresee their evolution. But this is an abstraction of the real, comparable to the image the magicians might have used to represent the future.

The second procedure is that of simulations and scenarios. If abstraction was the decisive factor in the first, the imagination is decisive in the second. It involves the invention of a series of coincidences, so that if such-and-such happens, the logical sequence can be seen. Thus one starts out with imaginary factors (not entirely, to be sure) and one treats these scientifically. Ultimately, if one managed to simulate all the imaginable concrete situations, each time adding this or that factor and making the corresponding changes in the other factors, one would have embraced the whole of the real. In these operations the frontier with science fiction is impossible to distinguish. …The throwback toward the irrational, the absurd modes of behavior, dependence on the imaginary–these are acts of man without hope who is trying to unwind a rational thread which he is holding by one end…

It is at that very point that man finds himself more ill equipped than ever. He has now become aware that he cannot construct the future his way, and on the other hand, he no longer believes in any outside forces or person…Man is unable to make his history, and he knows that now there is no other person who is making it either, only blind mechanisms, obscure powers, inexplicable interactions. It is an indiscernible, inscrutable future into which he is advancing step by step into the night, just as in the heroic ages, only this time he is doing it in crowds, en masse, by the billions, and by an accelerated process which leaves him no time for scrutinizing this absence. In this situation without hope, how could he fail to have recourse to the magician?”

Ellul, ‘Abandonment in a Time of Hope’