Happy New Year And Let's Get It On
There is another life: harmony, truth, faith, hope, light, joy
Related:
Misanthropes In A Land Of Plenty - Trump's re-election overshadows COP29 climate bash (Nov 11, 2024)
Supra-National Socialism And Revolutionary Virtue - DEI - diversity, equity and inclusion - are their false gods (Aug 03, 2023)
Journalists! What is to be Done? - The author takes a scalpel to the trade he joined three decades ago (Jun 29, 2021)
The Public-Private Censorship Industry - Official culture of playing loose with the truth could crush fragile trust in media (Feb 27, 2023)
Who Is Afraid Of Democracy? - It’s under attack from those paid to protect it (May 15, 2024)
Bank Chief Fired In Social Credit Blowback - Another example of conspiracy theory in action (Jul 26, 2023)
From Welfare State To Communitarianism - Pensions and Medicare to go; replaced by digital allowance. Food rationing is a pretext (Aug 02, 2022)
(2,700 words or just over 12 minutes of your company)
Jan 1, 2025
A Happy New Year to all readers, and a welcome in advance to those whom I trust will subscribe in 2025.
For all the shocking spectres of inhumanity, which we thought had belonged to the past, the recognitions (plural) rouse us as a reveille to act.
It is easy to become bogged down in the struggle and strife of daily existence.
Yet The People are principled and moral. And not because We act for a "greater good" but because truth is immutable. We seek harmony and light, which are our only guarantee of integrity, that goes before propert — and only if we secure these may we begin to hanker for joy.
There is order of things, from which we are distracted and not by accident.
Solar distraction
The world is an uncomfortable place right now. We are affected personally.
In ages past people blamed the solar system: the spheres were, they said, in commotion. Today it does not scratch the itch to blame it on the planets, though the ancient tendency is still there in the insistence that climate dysfunction is the primary cause of all ills.
There is a cosmic dance, that's not denied. But it is not one that we control. [1]
We, personally, are discombobulated, whether or not the spheres are in discord.
Cost of living and inflation is the same complaint that it ever was but there are frictional groans from the economy and, deeper, within the social structure, as from a fault in the rocks, that suggest a shock is coming that will splinter the foundations of the boastful constructions of a society that presumes to endure.
Political children
One realisation that won't go away, like the ache of a tooth, is that politicians are amplifying these problems.
There are always those who seek to make trouble: the relative, neighbour or work colleague who comes on too strong, demanding ever more of our time, until the point where we cannot allot more to this particular pleading person and put down our foot — when, in their pouting retaliation, they sabotage our work, spread rumours and make themselves a pain in the posterior.
This in an adult's body is the child that every parent has experienced. When the little one cries that you have not paid enough attention, or that your focus lies elsewhere, small "happenings" occur, baby sabotage but with an adult child more wily and clever wrecking and subversion.
Music of spheres
It is popular to believe that we live in the best of worlds.
Artificial intelligence, we are told, will fill the gap in an imperfect Earth, giving us material abundance without inconvenience — even as we signal our virtue by abstaining from energy: oil, gas, coal or nuclear.
Let government or whoever is in charge decide.
Most of us go little further than Voltaire's Dr Pangloss — as he satirized Leibniz — postulating that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
Gottfried Leibniz was addressing the question of God and the persistence of evil, which we also reduce to the lesser of two.
Voltaire was an Anglophile and cynic, and some say a British agent who helped pave the way for the French revolution of 1789 but that's a story for another time.
Have we adopted, with our modern ethos of the lesser of two evils, the attitude of "Devil may care"?
Misanthropes a plenty
Blaming all on the spheres. Abandoning food production, along with energy, is no mere act of "hope and chance" — it is direct disobedience of the order to "be fruitful and multiply."
Embarrassingly for Western functionaries, the host of November's COP29 (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) in Azerbaijan, president Ilham Aliyev, said “Having oil and gas… It is a gift from God.”
And in keeping with the injunction to "be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it," Aliyev said his country would be increasing investment in extraction and production, since oil and gas would be needed for “many more years.
See Misanthropes In A Land Of Plenty - Trump's re-election overshadows COP29 climate bash (Nov 11, 2024)
It is hard not to conclude that there is a spiritual game at play in which the lesser evil is still evil, and the evidence is in the absence of good works.
Mammon calls
And so back to mammon. The stock markets rise in nominal terms, as more currency is needed to buy the same share. Real estate levitates for the same reason of inflation.
This lets some of us shirk responsibility for fixing things - leaving it to technology or authority, as Charles Hugh Smith writes. [2]
Immanuel Wallerstein, whom Smith quotes, rejects the idea that “unlimited laissez faire” was a pillar of the profit-driven economic world system, rather that strong states back up monopolies and are a pillar for the profit-driven system.
This is the Moneycircus view that the great powers never did abandon mercantilism (corporativist power protected and leveraged by the state, which arose in late Renaissance and peaked in the 17th and 18th centuries) and that "free trade" or neo-liberalism is code for forcing weaker states to lay themselves open -- so that the great powers can have their way.
Year of revolutions
The rise of revolutions in the next century, beginning with 1848, was the adaption of mercantilism to industrial production (the oligarchs focusing carefully on the social implications of the next industrial evolution).
See Supra-National Socialism And Revolutionary Virtue - DEI - diversity, equity and inclusion - are their false gods (Aug 03, 2023)
Your view is influenced by your focus, technology, demographics, political and world systems. These are mirrored within nations - writ large and small.
The power polarity, the variance of agency, is determined by great wealth firewalled by trusts, protected from taxes, their reputation guarded by libel laws and now "hate speech" censors, while The People are sent to prison for social media posts.
Charles Hugh Smith makes the point, qua Wallerstein, that systems misdiagnose problems, lack the feedback to adapt to reality, so "models" solutions that are a form of play acting, supported by control of the narrative.
At MC we have focused on the narrow instigation and implementation of social group think, using the owner-investor's spear: the military and intel control of the narrative and censorship.
This view is controversial enough and yet it is facile, sophomoric and inadequate. Many alt media colleagues won't go there.
Bend the political mind
This is just the beginning, the surface glimmer frightening our fellows, while persuading others to grasp for more like the greedy dog in Aesop's Fables who dropped his bone when he saw another in the water's reflection.
See Journalists! What is to be Done? - The author takes a scalpel to the trade he joined three decades ago (Jun 29, 2021)
Former German defence minister Andreas von Bülow said that 80-90 per cent of intelligence is gathered from public sources, yet those are increasingly under the control or influence of military and intelligence agencies. This is creating a feedback loop.
Through influence activities, state ministries and agencies fill newspapers and social media with information to prod the public towards certain perceptions, behaviours and outcomes. At the same time, social media vacuums up that information on behalf of corporations and state, crunching data and feeding it into algorithms and policy decisions, schooling and policing, and the whole cycle begins again.
True believers
The precise institutions involved what Mike Benz named the Censorship Industrial Complex - are less important than the outcome.
The popular mind is shaped to prepare the ground for political initiatives.
See The Public-Private Censorship Industry - Official culture of playing loose with the truth could crush fragile trust in media (Feb 27, 2023)
Who Is Afraid Of Democracy? - It’s under attack from those paid to protect it (May 15, 2024)
With the Biden administration in 2020, David Samuels explains in The Tablet that something more alarming happened.
"Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week, and that they were very often powerless to provide the slightest real-world evidence for."
The beliefs transmitted through social media were enforced by the federal bureaucracy, the Department of Justice Department and the FBI, along with the corporate sector, with the de-banking of "politically exposed persons."
See Bank Chief Fired In Social Credit Blowback - Another example of conspiracy theory in action (Jul 26, 2023)
Leaving democracy aside, even in an oligarchy or autocracy this implies that innovation grids to a halt, or is narrowly focused on the interest of a controlling elite: robotics, AI, which is why people equate the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum with neo-feudalism.
This threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is evidenced in many functional approaches, especially the dominance in business of managed outcomes.
Feudalism rekindled
This toxic avoidance of doubt is witnessed from the production line to the top of the food chain in the corporate "philanthropies" that direct international policy.
Outcomes are managed and policy is co-ordinated with objectives in mind. It is the declared objective of the Rockefeller “Lockstep” document of 2010; of the World Economic Forum’s The Great Reset; of the Lynn Forester de Rothschild and the Pope’s Council on Inclusive Capitalism; and of the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty.
From the perspective of citizens, these managed outcomes are presented to audiences who have no role in writing the script. It reminds one of “the science is settled” — there is supposedly no need to discuss how or why; the outcome will be imposed.
See From Welfare State To Communitarianism - Pensions and Medicare to go; replaced by digital allowance. Food rationing is a pretext (Aug 02, 2022)
Such group think requires uniformity. The NGO system creates a thought-confirming feedback loop, informing social media, creating "true believers" in a reality enforced and censored by federal and corporate bureaucracy.
Political model
With the waning of legacy media, this group think is imposed through social media.
"The model of politics in which operatives are constantly running permission structure games on the body politic, assisted by members of the press and think tankers eager to be of service to the party, has more in common with pyramid schemes and high-pressure network-marketing scams than it does with reasoned democratic deliberation and debate. At this point, it hardly seems controversial to point out that such a model of politics is socially toxic." [3]
The most extreme examples were Covid, Russiagate and the Iran nuclear deal. But also race and gender politics, voting practices and the response to the election of 2020.
In return The People gave up liberties, social norms were inverted, all to seemingly justify the largest wealth redistribution in history, upwards, to the top one per cent.
The individual is beguiled to yield personal integrity of the mind, to believe external orders, regardless of their contradiction or illogic - the medical designation of schizophrenia.
To know not
False consciousness, the Marxist concept, is central to the official narrative as internal monologue.
Samuels, in the article linked above, says humans have not always been conscious. Until relatively recently we had a bicameral brain, which processed voices from plants, burning bushes, animals, the entrails of birds and turned those into rules for life.
He cites Julian Jaynes, author of “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”
We learned consciousness, he argues, as language developed — what we call the internal monologue, through which we created metaphors and allegories, and gradually developed the skill of abstraction.
The military intelligence pursuit of hybrid war in which any citizen is a potential enemy, attempts to locate consciousness outside the self, reverting us to the pre-consciousness state of ancient millennia.
Their objective is to use artificial intelligence to guide thought and behaviour. The result of this automated permission structure is institutional schizophrenia.
Governments functionaries, which former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern declared are “your single source of truth,” are incapable of truth, because they have none to tell. They are a machine product driven by managed outcomes.
Whatabout the vacuum
A narrow view of the power structure risks falling into “whataboutism.”
It is not enough to point out that corporations profit from war, or that oil barons and bankers financed both sides of WW2, or that tde Anglo-American Establishment finance the same dictators they send us to fight.
It is more important to know that networks manipulate humanity, and have done for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Tell me
Tell me something new. Tell me about now. This is not history, this is about standing on the right side of the present or burying your head in the sand as we are jabbed and jostled in a war on humanity.
Do not be afraid of first steps; we can revise our understanding as we learn. Form a mental image, however rough, and do not be bullied into silence.
Abstract concept do not refer to a single object but multiple, interacting and complex relationships. That is why we need metaphors to envisage them.
If you see an octopus, that's fine.
The most famous octopus cartoon was drawn in 1912 by Alfred Owen Crozier, who opposed the re-establishment of a U.S. central bank, which Senator Nelson Aldrich proposed.. He titled his cartoon the "Octopus-Aldrich Plan: The Coming Money Trust".
Trust was the word used a century ago for monopolies and Crozier was right.
The journalist Danny Casolaro was on the brink of uncovering a government conspiracy he dubbed The Octopus, and in 1991 he died in suspicious circumstances.
No-one has copyright on The Octopus, so do not let anyone tell you it is anti-Semitic. Likewise globalist, or the money power, or owner-investors or oiler-bankers. These may be placeholders or calling cards to describe one of many components - of a power that is very real.
In cinema, Sidney "Paddy" Chayevsky captured the money power in his 1976 film Network:
"It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!"
His big boss character, Arthur Jensen, continued:
“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon."
So much for the mechanism. The powers that be answer to someone. We decide to whom we answer.
We are raised to expect more, as St Francis of Assisi said in his prayer:
"That where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
that where there is error, I may bring truth;
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
that where there is despair, I may bring hope;
that where there are shadows, I may bring light;
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy."
No person, whether they define themselves as bureaucrat, journalist, deputy, sheriff, CEO or even community organiser should seek any less.
[1] NASA, 2020 - Discovery Alert: The Rhythmic Dance of a 5-planet System
[2] Charles Hugh Smith, Substack, Dec 28, 2024 - An Unpopular Essay: What's Ahead 2025-2035
[3] David Samuels, Tablet, How Barack Obama Built An Omnipotent Thought-Machine, And How It Was Destroyed
superb piece of writing MC; thx for your insights and energy in bringing light to a dark place of subsistence we otherwise call, 'modern-day living.' And it appears that 2025 has been brought in with a bang (pardon the pun) as it's been reported that an act of terrorism has been perpetrated in New Orleans on New Year's Eve (U2 or Cranberries anyone); with the usual suspects identified as the culprits (i.e., Islam). As the adage goes, the more things change the more they remain the same! That is all!! RGB-Y4 out!!!!
Because the space weather has been mentioned in my last comment, it is necessary to give at least one link. I appreciate that Stefan burns even if I use other 'experts' to analyze the raw data which I am absolutely unable to make sense of. Burns mixing hard science with astrology and 'simple' inner work, thus being right on track with traditional approach of celestial phenomenon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1GN-hENZCc