Feature Reference Article #18: Tech won't solve our unsustainability problems; we need to redesign the economy

What Negative Interest Rates Mean and What We Should Do. Ian Welsh. Aug. 21, 2019.

Alright, so Germany has now introduced a zero interest bond. That means, given inflation, people will get back less effective money than they started with.

At this point, outside the US, the average interest rate is negative.

As Stoller pointed out, that means that people with money can’t figure out anything productive to do with it which will make a profit.

That means that capitalists and banks, including central banks, have failed. It is their function, in a capitalist society, to allocate resources. Money represents resources: people, stuff, and land.

Now if we lived in a utopia, with no real problems, this would make sense, but we don’t. There are tons of real problems which need solving, lots of money floating around, and other capacity indicators show there are people and resources which are not being used, or which could be redeployed.

So capitalism is failing to do what it’s supposed to do, and so are capitalists.

The correct action in a situation like this is to get that money working. The government could borrow it massively, and do what needs to be done. It could (and I would suggest this is the better option) tax it away, and then spend it.

If capitalists absolutely insist on private enterprise doing the work, then they should massively raise taxes on any income or capital gains not used productively, and not count less productive things like loans–they should stipulate that the money must be invested into business activity. They should make stock option grants, stock buy-backs, and all similar activities intended to allow cash-outs impossible. They should get rid of private equity; just make it illegal. Almost all of its activity destroys viable business to create a pay day for a few people.

Heck, you should do away with all those things anyway.

People are very confused about profit. Profit is mostly socially constructed. It is not an independent variable. Taxes, laws, and regulations determine what is profitable and what isn’t. Billions of subsidies, tax breaks, and favorable land deals make extraction industries profitable, for example. Banks get to print money. Media companies like Disney rely on characters and ideas which, in the past, they would long have lost control over. Companies are allowed to pollute for free, to use vast amounts of water for nominal prices, and so on.

Meanwhile, a vast array of regulations and nickel and dime costs makes it impossible for small business to compete. Try starting a bank. Yeah, good luck with that.

This, too, is by design. Before Reagan, regulations were set up to make small businesses easier to start and keep running.

The point is that if investors can’t find anything in which to invest, government has failed to tweak profits correctly. You shouldn’t get rich in land speculation unless you’re building stuff that should be built. You should get rich in alternative energy, but mostly you don’t. You should get rich in making homes that are healthy and energy neutral, but instead we keep building unhealthy and environmentally-degrading housing.

You should make money rebuilding infrastructure, or building high speed trains, or reducing carbon, or reforesting, or making fish and phytoplankton stocks recover.

Yet, you don’t, so these things which need to be done in order to, like, avoid a few billion deaths, don’t get done.

That’s government failure.

Capitalism does not work without effective government control, if it is the dominant economic mode in a society.

So. We have lots of stuff that needs to be done. We have lots of resources and money which aren’t doing those things and, indeed, resources and money which apparently can’t find anything to do

Only a moron can’t look at those facts and know what to do.

Oh, and the 2008/9 bailouts made this situation far, far worse than it should have been. This endless printing of money is only to keep the useless rich afloat when they serve no useful, productive function. They are actually counterproductive, as they are actively stopping productive activity from happening.

Tax them. Stop propping them up and let incompetents die. Destroy, utterly, those members of the ruling class who are actively destructive, like Private Equity. Alter the rules so that productive activity is profitable, and while you’re doing all that, just have governments do the most important stuff themselves, with negative real interest rate loans.

None of this isn’t obvious to anyone who pays any attention.

Yet we don’t do it, because governments have been captured by failed rich people.

Normal. But not acceptable when the cost of inaction could be billions of dead people.

A globalised solar-powered future is wholly unrealistic – and our economy is the reason why. Alf Hornborg, The Conversation. Sept. 6, 2019.

Over the past two centuries, millions of dedicated people – revolutionaries, activists, politicians, and theorists – have been unable to curb the disastrous and increasingly globalised trajectory of economic polarisation and ecological degradation. This is perhaps because we are utterly trapped in flawed ways of thinking about technology and economy – as the current discourse on climate change shows.

Rising greenhouse gas emissions are not just generating climate change. They are giving more and more of us climate anxiety. Doomsday scenarios are capturing the headlines at an accelerating rate. Scientists from all over the world tell us that emissions in ten years must be half of what they were ten years ago, or we face apocalypse. School children like Greta Thunberg and activist movements like Extinction Rebellion are demanding that we panic. And rightly so. But what should we do to avoid disaster?

Most scientists, politicians, and business leaders tend to put their hope in technological progress. Regardless of ideology, there is a widespread expectation that new technologies will replace fossil fuels by harnessing renewable energy such as solar and wind. Many also trust that there will be technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and for “geoengineering” the Earth’s climate. The common denominator in these visions is the faith that we can save modern civilisation if we shift to new technologies. But “technology” is not a magic wand. It requires a lot of money, which means claims on labour and resources from other areas. We tend to forget this crucial fact.

I would argue that the way we take conventional “all-purpose” money for granted is the main reason why we have not understood how advanced technologies are dependent on the appropriation of labour and resources from elsewhere. In making it possible to exchange almost anything – human time, gadgets, ecosystems, whatever – for anything else on the market, people are constantly looking for the best deals, which ultimately means promoting the lowest wages and the cheapest resources in the global South.

It is the [il]logic of money that has created the utterly unsustainable and growth-hungry global society that exists today. To get our globalised economy to respect natural limits, we must set limits to what can be exchanged. Unfortunately, it seems increasingly probable that we shall have to experience something closer to disaster – such as a semi-global harvest failure – before we are prepared to seriously question how money and markets are currently designed.

Green growth?

Take the ultimate issue we are facing: whether our modern, global, and growing economy can be powered by renewable energy. Among most champions of sustainability, such as advocates of a Green New Deal, there is an unshakeable conviction that the problem of climate change can be solved by engineers.

What generally divides ideological positions is not the faith in technology as such, but which technical solutions to choose, and whether they will require major political change. Those who remain sceptical to the promises of technology – such as advocates of radical downshifting or degrowth – tend to be marginalised from politics and the media. So far, any politician who seriously advocates degrowth is not likely to have a future in politics.

Mainstream optimism about technology is often referred to as ecomodernism. The Ecomodernist Manifesto, a concise statement of this approach published in 2015, asks us to embrace technological progress, which will give us “a good, or even great, Anthropocene”. It argues that the progress of technology has “decoupled” us from the natural world and should be allowed to continue to do so in order to allow the “rewilding” of nature. The growth of cities, industrial agriculture, and nuclear power, it claims, illustrate such decoupling. As if these phenomena did not have ecological footprints beyond their own boundaries.

Meanwhile, calls for a Green New Deal have been voiced for more than a decade, but in February 2019 it took the form of a resolution to the American House of Representatives. Central to its vision is a large-scale shift to renewable energy sources and massive investments in new infrastructure. This would enable further growth of the economy, it is argued.

Rethinking technology

So the general consensus seems to be that the problem of climate change is just a question of replacing one energy technology with another. But a historical view reveals that the very idea of technology is inextricably intertwined with capital accumulation, unequal exchange and the idea of all-purpose money. And as such, it is not as easy to redesign as we like to think. Shifting the main energy technology is not just a matter of replacing infrastructure – it means transforming the economic world order.

In the 19th century, the industrial revolution gave us the notion that technological progress is simply human ingenuity applied to nature, and that it has nothing to do with the structure of world society. This is the mirror image of the economists’ illusion, that growth has nothing to do with nature and so does not need to reckon with natural limits. Rather than seeing that both technology and economy span the nature-society divide, engineering is thought of as dealing only with nature and economics as dealing only with society.

The steam engine, for instance, is simply considered an ingenious invention for harnessing the chemical energy of coal. I am not denying that this is the case, but steam technology in early industrial Britain was also contingent on capital accumulated on global markets. The steam-driven factories in Manchester would never have been built without the triangular Atlantic trade in slaves, raw cotton, and cotton textiles. Steam technology was not just a matter of ingenious engineering applied to nature – like all complex technology, it was also crucially dependent on global relations of exchange.

This dependence of technology on global social relations is not just a matter of money. In quite a physical sense, the viability of the steam engine relied on the flows of human labour energy and other resources that had been invested in cotton fibre from South Carolina, in the US, coal from Wales and iron from Sweden. Modern technology, then, is a product of the metabolism of world society, not simply the result of uncovering “facts” of nature.

The illusion that we have suffered from since the industrial revolution is that technological change is simply a matter of engineering knowledge, regardless of the patterns of global material flows. This is particularly problematic in that it makes us blind to how such flows tend to be highly uneven.

This is not just true of the days of the British Empire. To this day, technologically advanced areas of the world are net importers of the resources that have been used as inputs in producing their technologies and other commodities, such as land, labour, materials, and energy. Technological progress and capital accumulation are two sides of the same coin. But the material asymmetries in world trade are invisible to mainstream economists, who focus exclusively on flows of money.

Ironically, this understanding of technology is not even recognised in Marxist theory, although it claims to be both materialist and committed to social justice. Marxist theory and politics tend toward what opponents refer to as a Promethean faith in technological progress. Its concern with justice focuses on the emancipation of the industrial worker, rather than on the global flows of resources that are embodied in the industrial machine.

This Marxist faith in the magic of technology occasionally takes extreme forms, as in the case of the biologist David Schwartzman, who does not hesitate to predict future human colonisation of the galaxy and Aaron Bastani, who anticipates mining asteroids. In his remarkable book Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, Bastani repeats a widespread claim about the cheapness of solar power that shows how deluded most of us are by the idea of technology.

Nature, he writes, “provides us with virtually free, limitless energy”. This was a frequently voiced conviction already in 1964, when the chemist Farrington Daniels proclaimed that the “most plentiful and cheapest energy is ours for the taking”. More than 50 years later, the dream persists.

The realities

Electricity globally represents about 19% of total energy use – the other major energy drains being transports and industry. In 2017, only 0.7% of global energy use derived from solar power and 1.9% from wind, while 85% relied on fossil fuels. As much as 90% of world energy use derives from fossil sources, and this share is actually increasing. So why is the long-anticipated transition to renewable energy not materialising?

One highly contested issue is the land requirements for harnessing renewable energy. Energy experts like David MacKay and Vaclav Smil have estimated that the “power density” – the watts of energy that can be harnessed per unit of land area – of renewable energy sources is so much lower than that of fossil fuels that to replace fossil with renewable energy would require vastly greater land areas for capturing energy.

In part because of this issue, visions of large-scale solar power projects have long referred to the good use to which they could put unproductive areas like the Sahara desert. But doubts about profitability have discouraged investments. A decade ago, for example, there was much talk about Desertec, a €400 billion project that crumbled as the major investors pulled out, one by one.

Today the world’s largest solar energy project is Ouarzazate Solar Power Station in Morocco. It covers about 25 square kilometres and has cost around US$9 billion to build. It is designed to provide around a million people with electricity, which means that another 35 such projects – that is, US$315 billion of investments – would be required merely to cater to the population of Morocco. We tend not to see that the enormous investments of capital needed for such massive infrastructural projects represent claims on resources elsewhere – they have huge footprints beyond our field of vision.

Ouarzazate Solar Power Station (OSPS), one of the largest solar plants in the world. EPA/STR

Also, we must consider whether solar is really carbon free. As Smil has shown for wind turbines and Storm van Leeuwen for nuclear power, the production, installation, and maintenance of any technological infrastructure remains critically dependent on fossil energy. Of course, it is easy to retort that until the transition has been made, solar panels are going to have to be produced by burning fossil fuels. But even if 100% of our electricity were renewable, it would not be able to propel global transports or cover the production of steel and cement for urban-industrial infrastructure.

And given the fact that the cheapening of solar panels in recent years to a significant extent is the result of shifting manufacture to Asia, we must ask ourselves whether European and American efforts to become sustainable should really be based on the global exploitation of low-wage labour, scarce resources and abused landscapes elsewhere.

Workers in a factory of a Chinese solar panel maker in Hangzhou. EPA/STR

Collecting carbon

Solar power is not displacing fossil energy, only adding to it. And the pace of expansion of renewable energy capacity has stalled – it was about the same in 2018 as in 2017. Meanwhile, our global combustion of fossil fuels continues to rise, as do our carbon emissions. Because this trend seems unstoppable, many hope to see extensive use of technologies for capturing and removing the carbon from the emissions of power plants and factories.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) remains an essential component of the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change. But to envisage such technologies as economically accessible at a global scale is clearly unrealistic.

To collect the atoms of carbon dispersed by the global combustion of fossil fuels would be as energy-demanding and economically unfeasible as it would be to try to collect the molecules of rubber from car tires that are continuously being dispersed in the atmosphere by road friction.

The late economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen used this example to show that economic processes inevitably lead to entropy – that is, an increase in physical disorder and loss of productive potential. In not grasping the implications of this fact, we continue to imagine some miraculous new technology that will reverse the Law of Entropy.

Economic “value” is a cultural idea. An implication of the Law of Entropy is that productive potential in nature – the force of energy or the quality of materials – is systematically lost as value is being produced. This perspective turns our economic worldview upside down. Value is measured in money, and money shapes the way we think about value. Economists are right in that value should be defined in terms of human preferences, rather than inputs of labour or resources, but the result is that the more value we produce, the more inexpensive labour, energy and other resources are required. To curb the relentless growth of value – at the expense of the biosphere and the global poor – we must create an economy that can restrain itself.

The evils of capitalism

Much of the discussion on climate change suggests that we are on a battlefield, confronting evil people who want to obstruct our path to an ecological civilisation. But the concept of capitalism tends to mystify how we are all caught in a game defined by the logic of our own constructions – as if there was an abstract “system” and its morally despicable proponents to blame. Rather than see the very design of the money game as the real antagonist, our call to arms tends to be directed at the players who have had best luck with the dice.

I would instead argue that the ultimate obstruction is not a question of human morality but of our common faith in what Marx called “money fetishism”. We collectively delegate responsibility for our future to a mindless human invention – what Karl Polanyi called all-purpose money, the peculiar idea that anything can be exchanged for anything else. The aggregate logic of this relatively recent idea is precisely what is usually called “capitalism”. It defines the strategies of corporations, politicians, and citizens alike.

All want their money assets to grow. The logic of the global money game obviously does not provide enough incentives to invest in renewables. It generates greed, obscene and rising inequalities, violence, and environmental degradation, including climate change. But mainstream economics appears to have more faith in setting this logic free than ever. Given the way the economy is now organised, it does not see an alternative to obeying the logic of the globalised market.

It’s the rules which are the issue – not those who win. Theera Disayarat/Shutterstock.com

The only way to change the game is to redesign its most basic rules. To attribute climate change to an abstract system called capitalism – but without challenging the idea of all-purpose money – is to deny our own agency. The “system” is perpetuated every time we buy our groceries, regardless of whether we are radical activists or climate change deniers. It is difficult to identify culprits if we are all players in the same game. In agreeing to the rules, we have limited our potential collective agency. We have become the tools and servants of our own creation – all-purpose money.

Despite good intentions, it is not clear what Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and the rest of the climate movement are demanding should be done. Like most of us, they want to stop the emissions of greenhouse gases, but seem to believe that such an energy transition is compatible with money, globalised markets, and modern civilisation.

Is our goal to overthrow “the capitalist mode of production”? If so, how do we go about doing that? Should we blame the politicians for not confronting capitalism and the inertia of all-purpose money? Or – which should follow automatically – should we blame the voters? Should we blame ourselves for not electing politicians that are sincere enough to advocate reducing our mobility and levels of consumption?

Many believe that with the right technologies we would not have to reduce our mobility or energy consumption – and that the global economy could still grow. But to me that is an illusion. It suggests that we have not yet grasped what “technology” is. Electric cars and many other “green” devices may seem reassuring but are often revealed to be insidious strategies for displacing work and environmental loads beyond our horizon – to unhealthy, low-wage labour in mines in Congo and Inner Mongolia. They look sustainable and fair to their affluent users but perpetuate a myopic worldview that goes back to the invention of the steam engine. I have called this delusion machine fetishism.

Not the guilt free option many assume them to be. Smile Fight/Shutterstock.com

Redesigning the global money game

So the first thing we should redesign are the economic ideas that brought fossil-fueled technology into existence and continue to perpetuate it. “Capitalism” ultimately refers to the artefact or idea of all-purpose money, which most of us take for granted as being something about which we do not have a choice. But we do, and this must be recognised.

Since the 19th century, all-purpose money has obscured the unequal resource flows of colonialism by making them seem reciprocal: money has served as a veil that mystifies exploitation by representing it as fair exchange. Economists today reproduce this 19th-century mystification, using a vocabulary that has proven useless in challenging global problems of justice and sustainability. The policies designed to protect the environment and promote global justice have not curbed the insidious logic of all-purpose money – which is to increase environmental degradation as well as economic inequalities.

In order to see that all-purpose money is indeed the fundamental problem, we need to see that there are alternative ways of designing money and markets. Like the rules in a board game, they are human constructions and can, in principle, be redesigned. In order to accomplish economic “degrowth” and curb the treadmill of capital accumulation, we must transform the systemic logic of money itself.

National authorities might establish a complementary currency, alongside regular money, that is distributed as a universal basic income but that can only be used to buy goods and services that are produced within a given radius from the point of purchase. This is not “local money” in the sense of LETS or the Bristol Pound – which in effect do nothing to impede the expansion of the global market – but a genuine spanner in the wheel of globalisation. With local money you can buy goods produced on the other side of the planet, as long as you buy it in a local store. What I am suggesting is special money that can only be used to buy goods produced locally.

Locally produced goods. Alison Hancock/Shutterstock.com

This would help decrease demand for global transports – a major source of greenhouse gas emissions – while increasing local diversity and resilience and encouraging community integration. It would no longer make low wages and lax environmental legislation competitive advantages in world trade, as is currently the case.

Immunising local communities and ecosystems from the logic of globalised capital flows may be the only feasible way of creating a truly “post-capitalist” society that respects planetary boundaries and does not generate deepening global injustices.

Re-localising the bulk of the economy in this way does not mean that communities won’t need electricity, for example, to run hospitals, computers and households. But it would dismantle most of the global, fossil-fuelled infrastructure for transporting people, groceries and other commodities around the planet.

This means decoupling human subsistence from fossil energy and re-embedding humans in their landscapes and communities. In completely changing market structures of demand, such a shift would not require anyone – corporations, politicians, or citizens – to choose between fossil and solar energy, as two comparable options with different profit margins.

To return to the example of Morocco, solar power will obviously have an important role to play in generating indispensable electricity, but to imagine that it will be able to provide anything near current levels of per capita energy use in the global North is wholly unrealistic. A transition to solar energy should not simply be about replacing fossil fuels, but about reorganising the global economy.

Solar power will no doubt be a vital component of humanity’s future, but not as long as we allow the logic of the world market to make it profitable to transport essential goods halfway around the world. The current blind faith in technology will not save us. For the planet to stand any chance, the global economy must be redesigned. The problem is more fundamental than capitalism or the emphasis on growth: it is money itself, and how money is related to technology.

Climate change and the other horrors of the Anthropocene don’t just tell us to stop using fossil fuels – they tell us that globalisation itself is unsustainable.

Alf Hornborg is Professor of Human Ecology, Lund University.

Read more: Lithium is finite – but clean technology relies on such non-renewable resources

Why degrowth is the only responsible way forward: A reduction of economic activity is necessary and just – and can lead to human flourishing. Joël Foramitti, Marula Tsagkari, Christos Zografos, openDemocracy. Sept 19, 2019.

To sustain the natural basis of our life, we must slow down. We have to reduce the amount of extraction, pollution, and waste throughout our economy. This implies less production, less consumption, and probably also less work.

The responsibility to do so must lie mainly on the rich, who currently enjoy a disproportionate share of our resources. But we should also do things differently, as much of today's economic activity is of little benefit to human wellbeing. Imagine what could be if we organized democratically to produce what we actually need, distributed those resources fairly, and shared them in common. This, in a nutshell, is the vision of degrowth: a good life for all within planetary boundaries. And while this might seem utopian, there are already concrete policy ideas to start such a transformation.

...

All this means that it is hard to see a way around a reduction of economic activity. Of course it is theoretically possible that we could grow and produce more within our limits if technology improves. But so far this hasn’t happened, there is little to show that it will, and as long as it doesn’t, we need a practical plan. The logic of eco-modernism – to blindly bet on future innovation – has already caused us to delay action for more than thirty years, and there is simply no time left. We need to act now, and within our current technological means.

...

many degrowth proponents are excited about a comprehensive ecological reform, and have contributed to the recently proposed Green New Deal for Europe. There are also economic models that examine how a post-growth economy would work in detail (see here or here), although more work is needed on that end.

...

Essentially, the riches of the wealthy part of the world are based on the exploitation of both nature and people in poorer countries.

...

 All we can do is distribute our resources fairly and try to produce what is needed within natural limits. Technological innovation can help us with that. But, as argued above, its potential is uncertain. This is why degrowth envisions a type of human flourishing that does not depend on better technology, although it includes innovation.

...

But what if it is not enough? What if what we want is not ecologically feasible to produce? In that case, the desires that capitalism has convinced us that we have are simply not compatible with the planet that we live on. The objective should then be to focus on what we actually need – to find more sustainable ways of reaching for a good life.

...

But what if it is the most basic needs that we cannot cover? A recent study has found that this might be a possibility. In that case, Phillips is right that the dilemma in front of us is difficult. However, this alone does not make the technological innovation at the scale he imagines possible, even if it would be necessary. Degrowth proponents believe that there is a lot of potential for social innovation that could improve our wellbeing and sustainability at the same time. Many people in rich countries currently live with unnecessary excess (while many of them lack basic needs at the same time). There is a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick, so to say, before we can declare that there is not enough to satisfy everyone’s basic needs with a sustainable amount of energy and resources.

...

Both degrowth and socialism center around the idea of sharing. Based on the same fundamental values, we could have much more interesting debates about what is truly important. We don’t need growth to reach a good life for all. What we do need is a genuinely democratic and radical transformation of our economy.

18 years of lies

9/11: take the quiz. via youtube.

9/11: A Conspiracy Theory. Corbett Report. Sept. 11, 2011.

TRANSCRIPT: 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.

These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.

Luckily, the news anchors knew who did it within minutes, the pundits knew within hours, the Administration knew within the day, and the evidence literally fell into the FBI’s lap. But for some reason a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists demanded an investigation into the greatest attack on American soil in history.

The investigation was delayed, underfunded, set up to fail, a conflict of interest and a cover up from start to finish. It was based on testimony extracted through torture, the records of which were destroyed. It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, Ptech, Sibel Edmonds, OBL and the CIA, and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening. It was lied to by the Pentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration and as for Bush and Cheney…well, no one knows what they told it because they testified in secret, off the record, not under oath and behind closed doors. It didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is of “little practical significance“. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had (except most of the victims’ family members’ questions) and pinned blame on all the people responsible (although no one so much as lost their job), determining the attacks were “a failure of imagination” because “I don’t think anyone could envision flying airplanes into buildings ” except the Pentagon and FEMA and NORAD and the NRO.

The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important.

The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping.

NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7’s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“.

The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide.

This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her. (and her and her and him).

Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

This is the story of 9/11, brought to you by the media which told you the hard truths about JFK and incubator babies and mobile production facilities and the rescue of Jessica Lynch.

If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever.

This has been a public service announcement by: the Friends of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, SEC, MSM, White House, NIST, and the 9/11 Commission. 

Because Ignorance is Strength.

New York Fire Commissioners Call for New 9/11 Investigation About “Pre-Planted Explosives”. Arjun Walia, Lew Rockwell.com. July 31, 2019.

Nearly 18 years after the tragedies that occurred on 9/11, the event is still serving as a massive wake up tool for humanity as more and more people become aware of the facts about our world that are hard to swallow. The good news is that awareness sparks change, and truth is a great catalyst to cause a shift in consciousness, a change in mass perception about what’s really happening on our planet. When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. 

9/11 has woken up millions of people, as thousands of architects, engineers, scientists and firefighters continue to create awareness about why they question the official explanation given to us by the US government regarding the events that day. Not only that, but numerous academics have become involved, with multiple studies published in physics and engineering journals concluding that all three towers must have been brought down by a controlled demolition. For example, a University of Alaska Fairbanks study looked at building 7. You can access the full study here. A paper titled “15 Years Later: on the physics of high-rise building collapses” in the European Scientific Journal also presents evidence for a controlled demolition. 

Because of 9/11, other false flag attacks like what we saw in Syria with regards to the supposed chemical gas attacks were much easier to accomplish. At the end of the day, the evidence speaks for itself, and in this age of mass censorship, the people are taking it upon themselves to seek out information that the global elite does not want us to know about.

This is precisely why they’ve captured Julian Assange, because Wikileaks was publishing information that was not a threat to “national security,” but rather a threat to political and elitist agendas, agendas that are highly unethical, immoral and practically unbelievable. The fact that it seems unbelievable is why a lot of evidence and credible sources in support of 9/11 being a controlled demolition are often deemed “conspiracy theories.”

The Official Story of the Collapse of WTC Building 7 Lies in Ruins. Paul Craig Roberts.

A research team at the University of Alaska’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, led by Dr. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Zhili Quan, and Professor Feng Xiao, Department of Civil Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, released yesterday for public comment their findings from a four-year study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001.  This is the first scientific investigation of the collapse of the building.   Here is the conclusion:

“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”

Notice three things: (1) it has taken 18 years to get a real investigation of the destruction of a building blamed on Muslim terrorists, (2) the only way “near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building” can occur is through controlled demolition, and (3) this remarkable finding is not reported in the presstitute media.

In other words, the study is assigned to the Memory Hole.  This is the way The Matrix operates. This is why you need this website.  The only purpose of print and TV news is to program you so that you insouciantly go along with the agendas of those who rule you.  Those who sit in front of TV news, listen to NPR, or read newspapers are programmed to be mindless automatons

9/11 After 18 Years. Paul Craig Roberts. 9/9/19.

I would appreciate hearing from readers whether they have come across a report in the print, TV, or NPR media of the highly professional four-year investigation of WTC Building 7’s demise.  The international team of civil engineers concluded that the official story of Building 7’s destruction is entirely false.  I reported their findings here: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/09/04/the-official-story-of-the-collapse-of-wtc-building-7-lies-in-ruins/

I suspect that the expert report is already in the Memory Hole.  Popular Mechanics, Wikipedia and CNN cannot label a distinguished team of experts “conspiracy theorists.”  Therefore the presstitutes and assorted cover-up artists for the 9/11 false flag attack on the United States will simply act as if no such report exists. The vast majority of people in the world will never hear about the report. I doubt that the real perpetrators of 9/11 will even bother to hire their own team to “refute” the report as that would bring the report into the news, the last place the perpetrators want it to be.

The 9/11 Commission report was not an investigation and ignored all forensic evidence. The NIST simulation of Building 7’s collapse was rigged to get the desired result.  The only real investigations have been done by private scientists, engineers, and architects.  They have found clear evidence of the use of nano-thermite in the destruction of the twin towers.  More than 100 First Responders have testified that they experienced a large number of explosions inside the towers, including a massive explosion in the sub-basement prior to the time the airliners are said to have hit the tower.  Numerous military and civilian pilots have said that the flight maneuvers involved in the WTC and Pentagon attacks are beyond their skills and most certainly beyond the skills of the alleged hijackers.  Wreckage of the airliners is surprisingly missing from impact sites.  And so on and so on. That Building 7 was a controlled demolition is no longer disputable.

On the basis of the known evidence, knowledgable and informed people have concluded that 9/11 was an inside job organized by Vice President Dick Cheney, his stable of neoconservatives, and Israel for the purpose of reconstructing the Middle East in Israel’s interest and enriching the US military/security complex in the process.

Most people are unaware of Robert Mueller’s role as FBI Director in protecting the official 9/11 story from the evidence.  Paul Sperry reports in the New York Post the many actions Mueller took as FBI director to hide the facts from Congress and the public.  https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/robert-mueller-helped-saudi-arabia-cover-up-its-role-in-9-11-attacks-suit/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site+buttons&utm_campaign=site+buttons

Patrick Pasin, a French author, provides additional evidence of Mueller’s misuse of his office to protect an official lie. An English language translation of Pasin’s book, The FBI Accomplice of 9/11, has been published by Talma Studios in Dublin, Ireland.  https://www.amazon.com/FBI-Accomplice-11-Documents-ebook/dp/B07TRXKNG2/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Patrick+Pasin&qid=1567967650&s=books&sr=1-1

Pasin’s book consists of his organization of the known evidence, which has been suppressed in order to perpetrate a false story of 9/11, into a compelling account of how a false flag attack was protected from exposure.  He details the plan “through which the FBI tried to prove the government conspiracy narrative—no matter the cost.”  Keep in mind that Mueller is the one that the Deep State set on President Trump.  Dirty business is Mueller’s business.

Pasin collects the evidence and weaves it into a compelling story.  It is all there.  The insider trading in advance of the airliner hijackings, the impossibility of cell phone calls from airliners in 2001, the anthrax letters sent to senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy which paved the way for the PATRIOT Act, the effort to blame American military scientists for the letters once it emerged that the anthrax was unique to a US military lab, the total implausibility of finding an undamaged passport in the rubble of the twin towers where fires allegedly were so hot that they melted steel.

It is extraordinary that anyone could have believed a word of this.  Try to image such intense heat as to melt steel but not enough to burn a passport!

Pasin’s book is easy to read.  He just lays it out, revealing falsification after falsification, lie after lie.  The obviously false story is fed to the world, and the experts who expose it as false are called “conspiracy theorists” by people too stupid and uninformed to carry their books.

This is America in the 21st century, and apparently the rest of the world’s population is not any brighter.

In 3 days it will be the 18th anniversary of 9/11.  What have we learned in these 18 years?  We have learned that thousands of experts with hard evidence cannot prevail over a transparant official lie.


9/11: the deep state false flag that keeps on condoning Western terrorism at home and around the world. Jeff J. Brown at China Rising, and for The Saker Blog. Sept. 11, 2019.

In 2010, I saw this 23-second clip of the 52-story World Trade Center 7 collapsing and was gob smacked. As a certified science teacher with a good knowledge of physics, I could tell it was brought down by controlled demolition, with thermite cuts seen and heard on the face of the building, during its six-second freefall – saying to myself, “What the fugg?”. Unlike Harry Potter, you can’t suspend universal laws of physics. It was the beginning of my long and painful journey into the dark, evil heart of Western empire. As much as the bitter truth hurts, I’ve never looked back. 

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do. – Bertrand Russell

Why 9/11 matters in 2019. Catte Black, off-guardian. Sep. 11, 2019.

On 9/11 2001 three steel-framed high-rise buildings collapsed completely at near free-fall speed allegedly due to fires – which, if true, makes them the only steel-framed high-rises in construction history to have ever done this. Only two of these buildings had been struck by planes.

The official explanation for this event is that Moslem terrorists somehow confounded all the usual security procedures and ‘attacked America’ because they ‘hated our freedoms.’

This version of the meaning behind 9/11 was the catalyst for the perpetual war currently being waged, the ultimate fail-safe irrefutable argument to silence criticism of the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the creeping emergence of fascism in the Western world.

A narrative as crucial as that needs to be closely examined, but the mainstream media has not only failed to perform this function, it has successfully persuaded many intelligent people that it doesn’t need to be done, and that only lunatics would bother subjecting the official story to any examination.

Eighteen years ago the idea of large scale false flags or government deceptions may have seemed absurd to most of us. But the unraveling of so many official narratives in recent years; the lies over WMDs, the lies over Ghouta, the lies over Libya and Ukraine, the repeat evidence for wholesale manipulation, if not fabrication, of events to promote war, means it ought to be impossible for any thinking person to simply take the events of 9/11 on trust any more.

How can any of us continue to question everything 9/11 has brought us, but not question 9/11 itself?

It all comes down to some very  basic questions:

• Has the government sufficiently explained its version of events?
• Does this version fit the observed facts better than any other?

The fact this is still considered by so many intelligent people to be an “out there” thing to ask speaks volumes about how much even the most savvy of us are currently brainwashed.

But beyond the media silence, complicity and ridicule things are changing.

Today New York first responders are launching a campaign for a new inquiry into the events of 9/11.

A new scientific study finds fires did not bring down WTC7.

The Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry are working on behalf of victims’ families to get justice for those who died or were injured that day.

The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is an empty meme invented to deter enquiry. We don’t think this is a good thing and we don’t intend to be controlled by it. We believe facts really should be sacred – however unpopular they may be and whatever label someone may have attached to them.


We are all hostages of 9/11. Pepe Escobar, via the Saker's blog.

Praying for a Pearl

Eighteen years after the game-changing fact, we all remain hostages of 9/11. US neocons, gathered at the Project for the New American Century, had been praying for a “Pearl Harbor” to reorient US foreign policy since 1997. Their prayers were answered beyond their wildest dreams.

Already in The Grand Chessboard, also published in 1997, former National Security Adviser and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, nominally not a neocon, had pointed out that the American public “supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”

So, Brzezinski added, America “may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”

As an attack on the homeland, 9/11 generated the Global War on Terror, launched at 11pm on the same day, initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon, later sanitized as Overseas Contingency Operations by the Obama administration. This cost trillions of dollars, killed over half a million people and branched out into illegal wars against seven Muslim nations – all justified on “humanitarian grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community.”

Year after year, 9/11 is essentially a You Have The Right to Accept Only The Official Version ritual ceremony, even as widespread evidence suggests the US government knew 9/11 would happen and did not stop it.

Three days after 9/11, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that in June 2001, German intelligence warned the CIA that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”

In August 2001, President Putin ordered Russian intel to tell the US government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings, MSNBC revealed in an interview with Putin that was broadcast on September 15 that year.

No US government agency has released any information on who used foreknowledge of 9/11 in the financial markets. The US Congress did not even raise the issue. In Germany, investigative financial journalist Lars Schall has been working for years on a massive study detailing to a great extent insider trading before 9/11.

Discrediting the official, immutable 9/11 narrative remains the ultimate taboo. Hundreds of architects and engineers engaged in meticulous technical debunking of all aspects of 9/11’s official story are summarily dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”

In contrast, skepticism rooted in Greek and Latin tradition came up with arguably the best documentary on 9/11: Zero, an Italian production. Just as arguably the most stimulating book on 9/11 is also Italian: The Myth of September 11, by Roberto Quaglia, which offers a delicately nuanced narrative of 9/11 as a myth structured as a movie. The book became a huge hit in Eastern Europe.

Serious questions suggest quite plausible suspects to be investigated regarding 9/11, far more than 19 Arabs with box cutters. Ten years ago, in Asia Times, I asked 50 questions, some of them extremely detailed, about 9/11. After reader demand and suggestions, I added 20 more. None of these questions were convincingly addressed – not to mention answered – by the official narrative.

World public opinion is directed to believe that on the morning of 9/11 four airliners, presumably hijacked by 19 Arabs with box cutters, traveled undisturbed – for two hours – across the most controlled airspace on the planet, which is supervised by the most devastating military apparatus ever.

American Airlines Flight 11 deviated from its path at 8.13am and crashed into the first World Trade Center tower at 8.57am. Only at 8.46am did NORAD – the North American Aerospace Defense Command – order that two intercepting F-15s take off from Otis military base.

By a curious coincidence a Pentagon war game was in effect on the morning of 9/11 – so air-controllers’ radars may have registered only ‘ghost signals’ of nonexistent aircraft simulating an air attack. Well, it was much more complicated than that, as demonstrated by professional pilots.

World public opinion is also directed to believe that a Boeing 757 – with a wingspan of 38 meters – managed to penetrate the Pentagon through a six-meter-wide hole and at the height of the first floor. A Boeing 757 with landing gear is 13 meters high. Airliners electronically refuse to crash – so it’s quite a feat to convince one to fly five to 10 meters above the ground, landing gear on, at a lightning speed of 800 kilometers an hour.

According to the official narrative, the Boeing 757 literally pulverized itself. Yet even after pulverization, it managed to perforate six walls of three rings of the Pentagon, leaving a two-meter wide hole in the last wall but only slightly damaging the second and third rings. The official narrative is that the hole was caused by the plane’s nose – still quite hard even after pulverization. Yet the rest of the plane – a mass of 100 tons traveling at 800 kilometers an hour – miraculously stopped at the first ring.

All that happened under the stewardship of one Hani Hanjour, who three weeks before had been judged by his flight instructors to be incapable of piloting a Cessna. Hanjour, nonetheless, managed to accomplish an ultra-fast spiral descent at 270 degrees, aligning at a maximum 10 meters above ground, minutely calibrating the trajectory, and keeping a cruise speed of roughly 800 kilometers an hour.

At 9.37am, Hanjour hit precisely the Pentagon’s budget analysts’ office, where everyone was busy working on the mysterious disappearance of no less than $2.3 trillion that Defense Secretary Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld, in a press conference the day before, said could not be tracked. So, it’s not only Boeings that get pulverized inside the Pentagon.

World public opinion is also directed to believe that Newtonian physics was suspended as a special bonus for WTC 1 and 2 on 9/11 (not to mention WTC 7, which was not even hit by any plane). The slower WTC tower took 10 seconds to fall 411 meters, starting from immobility. So it fell at 148 kilometers an hour. Considering the initial acceleration time, it was a free fall, not the least impeded by 47 massive, vertical steel beams that composed the tower’s structural heart.

World public opinion is also directed to believe that United Airlines Flight 93 – 150 tons of aircraft with 45 people, 200 seats, luggage, a wingspan of 38 meters – crashed in a field in Pennsylvania and also literally pulverized itself, totally disappearing inside a hole six meters by three meters wide and only two meters deep.

...


Two Hit, Three Down. Lynn Margulis. 
The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel.

I comment here on the nanotechnology aspect of Jerry Mazza’s masterful review (Rock Creek Free Press, January 2010, page 6) of David Ray Griffin’s extraordinary 2009 book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False.

...

The scientific problem:
Why did three World Trade Center buildings (1,2, and 7) collapse on 9/11, after two (and only two) of them were hit by "hijacked" airplanes?

The scientific answer:
Because all three buildings were destroyed by carefully planned, orchestrated, and executed controlled demolition. Ignited by incendiaries (such as thermate) and high explosives (including nanothermite), the steel columns were selectively melted in a brilliantly timed controlled demolition. Two 110-story buildings (towers 1 and 2), plus one 47-floor building (WTC 7), were induced to collapse at gravitationally-accelerated rates in an operation planned and carried out by insiders. The apparent hijacking of airliners and the crashing of them into the Twin Towers were intrinsic parts of the operation, which together provided a basis for claiming that the buildings were brought down by Muslim terrorists. The buildings' steel columns, which would have provided irrefutable evidence of the use of explosives, were quickly removed from the scene of the crime.

...

The persistent problem is how to wake up public awareness, especially in the global scientifically literate public, of the overwhelming evidence that the three buildings collapsed by controlled demolition. (Much has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals). We, on the basis of hard evidence, must conclude that the petroleum fires related to the aircraft crashes were irrelevant (except perhaps as a cover story). We citizens of earth within and beyond the boundaries of the United States who demand detailed evidence for extraordinary claims agree with Griffin: the rapid destruction of New York skyscrapers on September 11, 2001, was planned and executed by people inside the US government.

Griffin's eight books about 9/11 are his call to his kind of truly patriotic action. They show in appropriate detail, accurately documented, that the official government conspiracy theory cannot be correct journalistically, scientifically, and morally. Muslim airline hijackers, in short, never triggered the collapse of high-rise steel-framed buildings at gravitational acceleration into neat removable pieces. They didn't remove the remaining steel girders before they could be studied as evidence for a huge crime. They were not described in telephone calls by passengers and crew members from the four airliners -- all the evidence for al-Qaeda hijackers on the planes dissipates under close inspection (for example, even the FBI now admits that the reported cell phone calls from 25,000 to 40,000 feet never happened).

And to me the most compelling and obviously incorrect accusation is that Muslim hijackers caused the pulverization of cement high-rise office buildings into tons of dust that contain crystalline thermate and other minute metallic particles not found in the usual charred remains of fire rubble. Minute iron-aluminum-molybdenum-rich spheres, steel perforated with swiss-cheese-type holes, and large quantities of unreacted nanothermite are not components of petroleum office fires. Besides the fact that building fire temperatures, even if fed by jet fuel, could not have risen beyond 1,800F, and hence they would be nowhere close to the 2,800F need to melt iron (or for molybdenum, which melts at 4,753F). The facile appeal to the presence of gypsum (calcium sulfate) in the office wallboard fails to explain why sulfur was found in the intragranular structures of pieces of steel. (There was no detection of calcium!) The New York Times, in a rare example of honest reporting about the WTC collapses, called this "the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation".

Nor could "Muslim" terrorists have accessed and then planted in these buildings huge quantities of nanothermite. This recently developed high explosive was developed mainly in secrecy by professional scientists and engineers who enjoy government grant support for "nanotechnology" by the military. Significant quantities of red-gray crystals of nanothermite have been found in several independently collected samples of WTC dust studied by a team headed by physicist Steve Jones, formerly of BYU. Niels Harrit, a University of Copenhagen professor of chemistry who specializes in nanochemistry, is the first author of a peer-reviewed paper reporting the team's results.

The two mutually exclusive "9/11 conspiracy theories", the patently and nefariously absurd tale our government imposes on us and the true, criminal story yet to be entirely brought to light, deserve the attention of all literate people. Remember: only two airplanes struck, but three building collapsed at free-fall velocities on that same day. Begin with Mazza's review [below] and Griffin's book [The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False; see also: The New Pearl Harbor; in PDF] that detail the nanothermite scientific studies. Examine the government's reluctant late admission that WTC 7 came down in absolute free fall over two seconds to realize this is a scientific impossibility unless all the steel columns were partitioned into neat, removable pieces by explosives. Find out what happened to two men, Hess and Jennings, trapped inside WTC 7 in its abortive explosion before noon. Truth here, as David Ray Griffin tries to tell it, is stranger and far more dramatic than even the best fiction.





Book Review 

Just Say No to NIST 

A review of 
The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Official Report about 9/11 
is Unscientific and False, by David Ray Griffin 

Review By Jerry Mazza, Rock Creek Free Press. January 2010. p.6.

The headline, "Just Say No to NIST" (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) is purposely patterned after Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No to Drugs." In the case of David Griffin's new book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, the NIST lies, half truths, omissions, and the outright corruption of honest science are the administrations' dope, administered by NIST, to lull inquiring minds into believing the fantasy of their lies.

NIST's violations of scientific method, as Griffin clearly explains, represent what he terms the "politicization of science," used to delude Americans to accept the Bush administrations' conspiracy theory. That is, the World Trade Center Tower 7, the Tower not hit by an airliner, fell into its own footprint in six seconds at 5:20 PM on 9/11 as a result of minor fires, not explosives planted in the 47-story steel-framed building to create a classic internal demolition — uncannily resembling so many we've seen in movies or on TV.

Griffin points out that the only two other buildings in history to have fallen from fires were the steel-framed WTC Towers 1 and 2 earlier that morning. Any and all previous fires in steel-framed buildings, those that burned for hours, even days, did not fell the buildings, let alone explode them, like Towers 1 and 2, into a pyroplastic cloud that hung for months in the skies over Ground Zero and Manhattan, and rolled through the streets of the financial district, graying it like a huge graveyard.

In Griffin's steady hands, the story of WTC 7 becomes the fulcrum to understand how Towers 1 and 2 were felled with similar internal demolitions, as opposed to the fires caused by the jetliners impact, how Towers 1 and 2 then exploded into their own footprints as they fell within 10-second free-falls, which Griffin explains in great engineering and science-based detail.

Of course, Griffin reminds you that NIST itself is a government agency, working for the US Department of Commerce, subject to control by the White House, not unlike the 9/11 Commission, which was controlled by its White House author Philip Zelikow. Zelikow wrote the outline of the Commission's inquiry and findings before the group ever met.

Working with physicist Steven Jones and a battery of top scientists and engineers, Griffin has shepherded a vast amount of information into The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, to present the explosive results of their findings. Jones, formerly a physics professor at Brigham Young University, was released from his job because of his studies. They were of samples of dust gathered from Ground Zero, at Tower 7, as well as at the Tower 1 and 2's sites. They all indicated the presence of super nanotech versions of thermite and/or thermate (thermite plus sulphur for added heat).

The nanotechnology allowed the thermate to be broken down into minute, even more potent particles which could be aerosolized and used to spray on or within the walls of the towers, to be ignited for later havoc. The fact that NIST refused even to consider nano-thermate presence and destructive potential, but rather summarily dismissed the use of it, is a sin against science, as Griffin points out. It is a sin, too, against the almost 3000 souls who were lost on 9/11, as well as all those Americans who innocently believe the administration conspiracy theory.

This is not to mention the second wave of slaughter, the many illnesses and deaths from cancer, pulmonary disease and body poisoning, which are occurring with first-responders who worked non-stop on the pile for up to eight months. These are not the illnesses of mere smoke inhalation, but of the massive number of toxic substances exploded into the air by the literal pulverizing of the three towers that each sunk in free fall to the ground into their own footprints.

Fire doesn't pulverize a million tons of concrete. High-powered explosives do.

Griffin brings a plethora of examples of NIST's violations of scientific method which ignore or skirt, omit or bluntly lie about the questions raised by the presence of these explosive substances, just as FEMA and the EPA denied their by-products devastation throughout the WTC and New York City, making it the greatest environmental disaster in US history.

Griffin documents the facts of the nanotech-thermate and its heat-generating energy. He describes how firefighters found streams of melted steel, molten for months under the debris, and pouring out, along with the presence of Swiss-cheese-like chunks of steel filled with melt-holes. This was lifted and shipped away as the debris .

Through all of NIST's obfuscation, which would bring most of us to our feet raging against the government-front NIST, Griffin, author of some 35 books, keeps a level hand and the cool rationality of the philosopher of religion, politics and science that he is. He deconstructs the falsehoods, page after page, chapter by chapter, with an impenetrable sense of logic.

In short, the black-on-black covered, 328-page The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, seals the doom of NIST chicanery and lies, a disgrace to those who participated in creating them. As well as being an expose of the "politicization of science," this book is a history of perhaps the darkest time in Americas' history. It is a document driven by Griffin and his colleagues' passion for truth, a book that wishes to and succeeds in toppling the NIST lies like the ill-fated towers. ...



Some of the Many Things Most Americans Never Heard About 9/11. Paul Craig Roberts. Sep 11, 2019.

The “Dancing Israelis” who turned out to be Israeli Mossad agents caught filming and celebrating the destruction of the twin towers. Arrested by police and released without investigation, they were not mentioned in the 911 Commission Report.  Later on Israeli TV they said they were sent to New York to film the destruction of the twin towers.  Allegedly, there was no advance warning of the event, but obviously the Israelis knew.

The alleged fundamentalist orthodox fanatical Muslims who were prepared to die to be martyrs, but who drank, drugged, and lived with strippers and prostitutes in Florida. They were the patsies paraded through flight schools and left a highly visible public record.  They all flunked out and could not even fly small planes, but performed miraculous flight feats in their attacks on the WTC towers and Pentagon that military and civilian airline pilots say are beyond their own skills.  These Saudi Arabians were being operated by US or Israeli intelligence to create a record to serve as a parallel patsy operation that could be used to cover up the false flag attack.

Numerous video cameras recorded whatever exploded at the Pentagon, but the FBI has refused to release them for 18 years. Clearly, the videos do not support the official story.

About half of the alleged hijackers have been found alive and well and deny that they had ever left their countries.

In 2001 no cell phone calls were possible from aircraft at the altitudes from which calls were reported.

The airliners that allegedly hit the twin towers were flimsy compared to the steel and concrete of the towers.  The airliners would have smashed against the structure and fallen to the street below.

Pre-knowledge of 9/11 was widespread.  The stocks of the two allegedly hijacked airlines were sold short prior to the event, resulting in large profits when the stocks fell in response to the hijackings. The short-sellers were swept under the carpet and not investigated.

FBI director Robert Mueller was instrumental in covering up for the false official story of 9/11, a story that has zero evidence in its behalf.

If a handful of young men with no intelligence service or government support can defeat the entire national security state of the United States and all of its NATO and Israeli allies and successfully attack with devastating results both New York and the Pentagon itself—the very symbol of American military supremacy—the Soviet Union could have wiped out the US and all of Europe without detection.  Don’t you wonder how we survived the Soviet Union when the “Great American Superpower” was so easily defeated by a handful of young Saudi Arabians?

Four hijacked airliners are alleged hijacked, all at airports served by an Israeli security company. All four airliners allegedly crash.  Two into the WTC towers, one into a field in Pennsylvania, and one into the Pentagon.  Yet no airliner debris exists.  The Pentagon’s lawn is not even scratched.

The President of the United States refuses to testify before the 9/11 Commission unless he is accompanied by his handler, Vice President Cheney.  Both refuse to testify under oath. The 9/11 Commission is oh-so-respectful to the distinguished president and vice president.

One member of the 9/11 Commission, a US Senator, resigned from the Commission, saying that “the fix is in.”  After the Commission report was issued, the Commission chairman, vice chairman, and legal counsel wrote books in which they said that information was withheld from the Commission, that the Commission was lied to and considered referring the false testimony to the Justice (sic) Department for prosecution, and that “the Commission was set up to fail.”  And not a peep from the controlled pressitute media whose only function is to deliver the controlled explanations that the ruling oligarchs want planted into Americans’ minds.

Tenants of the WTC buildings reported constant noises, floors sealed off, service disruptions and that the excuse was the installation of fiber optic cable. If the buildings faced condemnation as reported because of asbestos fireproofing, who would go to the expense of installing fiber optic cable to upgrade the Internet capability of condemned buildings?

Scientists have found reacted and unreacted nano-thermite and other elements used in controlled demolition.  They have proved the existence of these elements.  They have samples from the WTC dust left which they have offered to scientists and governments for testing in order to prove or disprove their own findings.  No takers.

...




Person Honors The Dog Heroes Of 9/11 That Are Often Overlooked In A Beautifully Sad Twitter Thread. Bored Panda. Sep. 13, 2019.

links from: 2018 & 2017

Propaganda and the American Myth

Empire in Decline - Propaganda and the American Myth. Cognitive Dissonance. Aug. 31, 2019.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive…ourselves.” - With apologies to Sir Walter Scott.


If only life was as neat and orderly as my ancient history text book showed it to be. There it was on glossy paper, spread out across several sets of adjoining pages, maps of the ancient and modern world. Sometimes there were time lines top and bottom, along with countries helpfully outlined and identified. Underneath their modern English names were one or two older names in smaller stylized script, often including exact beginning and end dates. I remember one in particular caught my eye. “The United States of America” followed by the year 1776. But with no end date indicated, it looked like unfinished business to me. You’ve got to love those historians and their precise dates.

Of course, in reality there are no exact dates for the birth and death of city/states, other than in the historian’s mind. Children continue to be born, the old still die, and life goes on under ever changing circumstances. But you are rarely informed of the subjective nature of historical events when you’re young and impressionable, so they’re presented in the history books as cold hard facts. The last thing the reigning Imperial Empire wants is to appear uncertain about prior eons, epochs and echoes in time.

Long before we begin to read and comprehend on our own, we’re presented with the illusion of a specific beginning and end to everything, often accompanied with very clear lines of demarcation. This concept is continuously reinforced through our daily indoctrination via carefully scripted news stories, including political and social opinion presented as ironclad fact care of our modern corporate media saturated existence. Naturally, critical thinking is strictly optional and effectively discouraged.

Mix in a healthy dose of hard-core science, where you learn very early there are correct and incorrect answers to all your questions, and the pattern of modern social myth making emerges. Of course, all the important ‘correct’ answers are held for public safekeeping by our cultural high priests and authority figures, be they academic, governmental, corporate, scientific or religious. Lest you forget, cultural icons, heroes and authorities must always be revered and deferred to, so leave the difficult thinking to them.

Maybe now’s a good time to remember that most history books are written, and re-written, by those very same keepers of the public mythology. What we believe as a culture, sometimes called our public myth, is usually determined by those whose pockets are the deepest and most powerful, not by those who are the wisest and most knowledgeable.

Have you ever read a story or book written by the survivors of the vanquished, the so-called losers? I have, a number of times, and it’s usually very enlightening to see the world from the other side of the bloody divide. In their hands, our cultural myths are not treated with the same loving care and respect we afford them, nor should they be. But of course, they must be lying because they have an ax to grind.

Revisionist history is how those in power politely describe the writings of the marginalized and defeated, roadkill crushed and mangled by the leviathan in the head long rush of conquering empire. The public myth informs us the losers can do nothing but taut the victorious with their lies. Ignore them and they’ll fade away. Besides, the winners never lie about the facts, though we’re told there’s plenty of room for differences of opinion. And just about everything can be reduced to an opinion if you’re looking to malign and obscure.

Of course, one of the duties of the Empire’s leadership and servile sycophants is to distort the written record so it conforms to the public myth. This is the principle reason why recently retired or replaced holders of powerful governmental, corporate and military positions are handed (large) advances to write their memoirs and recollections. That, and to reward them with large legal payoffs for a job well done. While they are often declared ‘best sellers’ by the compliant mainstream media, it is not uncommon to find these books sitting in the remainder bin six months later selling for nickels on the dollar.

These sacred tomes of divine wisdom are quickly embraced by other propagandists as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help their Gods of propaganda. Once in their hands, the book’s cherry-picked facts, fiction and opinion-masquerading-as-fact are quickly woven into the fabric of the public myth as unimpeachable supporting documentation. Thus, another turn of the propaganda cycle is complete and ready for public dissemination and indoctrination.

Napoleon Bonaparte is alleged to have declared history as little more than a set of lies agreed upon. His assessment is not that far from the ‘truth’ from my point of view.





Belief vs. Knowing

We all possess extremely complex belief systems and world views. How they develop and evolve is greatly influenced by external information sources we rarely question or challenge. After all, these sources are our cultural authority figures, the experts, professionals and intelligentsia that form our cultural propaganda delivery and support system. These sources cannot be seriously questioned, particularly from within, without being declared a heretic. Just look at how non-conforming individuals, web sites, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are treated as an example of how heresy is handled these days.

While we may not pay much attention to mainstream media playing in the background, our unconscious mind is absorbing it all, raw and unfiltered. This information feeds into, and broadly supports, our world view with little conscious thought or scrutiny. Regardless of whether it is ‘news’, game shows, sports or soap operas, ultimately it is all programming. This is the reason why constant repetition is so vitally important to both effective propaganda and commercial advertising. It must be true since it is repeated so often, a self-confirming conclusion all positive feedback loops share. Our mind absorbs and retains everything, even when we do not consciously look or listen.

It’s shocking to realize how seldom we change our basic beliefs or understanding when confronted with critical new information that normally would propel reassessment and modification. Instead, we bend or ignore input to fit our established world view. Economist John Maynard Keynes once said “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” Sadly, most people don’t subscribe to this logical practice. Instead, confirmation bias, the desire to maintain our cognitive continuity (aka our worldview) and outright denial are some of the tools we use to manage and manipulate information to our liking.

And rest assured, there are plenty of governmental, religious, corporate and wealthy individuals and entities ready and willing to help us accomplish this through deliberate and targeted propaganda. The most common personal warning sign we may be sipping from the ‘wrong’ information straw is the emotional pain of cognitive dissonance, usually inflamed when new information is in conflict with our long established and dearly held beliefs and world view. We usually avoid this pain entirely by only watching or listening to sources of information we are in agreement with.

Rarely do we push through this emotional pain to reappraise our inventory of previously established ‘truths’ for validity or relevance. It’s so much easier to discard ugly deviations or cherry pick information that confirms our preferred vision, rather than conduct a top to bottom review that is called for when the facts change. Intellectual laziness is the polite term for this phenomenon. I think a more honest explanation is deliberate and mostly conscious denial.

However, even when I’m alert for and aware of this cognitive phenomenon, I’m still surprised how often I indulge. It’s frightening to recognize how deeply conditioned we are in the art of self-deception. The truth truly does hurts when it’s in conflict with what we believe we know. So, we employ the most powerful pain killer known to man, that of denial and self-deceit.

It’s extremely difficult to reject popular opinion and strike out on our own independent path. Group think is indoctrinated into us from birth and socially rewarded at every turn. It is emotionally safer and much more comfortable if we stay huddled near the center of the pack. The result is herd mentality in all its glory, corralled by the public myth of which we are complicit and dutiful keepers.

I often say all writers are essentially propagandists and this applies to myself as well. I’m using this forum to present information in the most compelling manner possible to make my case. In effect I’m feeding you my point of view to build a train of thought leading directly to my preferred conclusion. This is not necessarily good or bad, but simply a tool or technique of persuasion which can be used for all sorts of purposes and outcomes. Obviously, it can be used to educate or to subjugate, but either way the recipient is an active (and often willing) participant.





Check Your Premise

The most effective propaganda is one whose basic premise is slipped by the target so smoothly it is never recognized for what it truly is. Once the premise is planted and accepted, the hard work is done and the implanted meme can now be leveraged and expanded upon from there. The concept is the same regardless of whether one is teaching basic math before moving on to geometry or the virtues of ‘democracy’, which is then used as a legitimizing façade for a ruling oligarchy or corpocracy.

What’s that you say? You’re too smart to let the wool be pulled over your eyes? That you can discern truth from lies and would eventually figure it out given enough time and inclination? Honestly ask yourself, how much time and effort would you put into thoroughly examining something you already believe to be true? Most would deem it a major waste of their time and not give it another thought. Given the choice between the pleasure of confirming our beliefs and the pain of confronting them, we cognitively caged humans are quite predictable.

Most people perceive complex information as bundles of facts compiled into conclusions and truths, most of which we believe we have originated in part or in whole. We have all witnessed another person take something they heard, saw or read, then modify and embrace it before declaring it their original idea or creation. This cognitive grooming and assimilation occurs so seamlessly and naturally that many ‘honestly’ believe they came up with it on their own and would be highly insulted if we challenged their supposition.

Rarely do we recognize that many of the truths we hold as impeccable are based upon long lines of previously assimilated information provided by others and embraced as our own. If at any point some of this information is proven false or misleading, the entire sequence is suspect along with our own impeccable truth. Consider a long string of numbers to be added together. Make a mistake at any point in the line and the final sum, or ‘truth’, is incorrect to some degree or another.

How we view our world is based upon many preconceived notions and beliefs. Change just one small piece we previously thought correct and everything changes to some extent, no matter how small. Change two or three and suddenly we have a crisis of confidence and a cognitive dissonance. Yet when we feel that pain, how often do we reboot and re-examine everything? And why would we re-examine what we ‘know’ to be correct, particularly when most everyone else in our section of the herd remains in agreement? Peer pressure and conditioning are hard to resist, even in the privacy of our own head.

“We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe





Deadly Debt

My basic premise, and the basis for this article, is that the American Empire is in decline. From my point of view, it’s become readily apparent the so called “American Experiment” has peaked and is now deteriorating. While I can’t produce an exact date for this change, it doesn’t diminish my argument in the least. I’d be hard pressed to give you the specific date for the decline of the Roman Empire, but clearly it followed the same trajectory. Did Rome’s downward spiral start when the capital was moved to Constantinople in 330 AD or when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD? It matters little at this point, except to the propagandists and historians.

Actually, I would argue that while a succession of Empires has come and gone, the culture of human exploitation and destruction we call civilization has grown exponentially in efficiency and lethality over the last several hundred years. We Americans now stand proudly at the pinnacle of the insanity, picking up where the Greeks, Romans, Asians and Europeans left off. I’ll leave that thought for another day, but I think you get the picture.

America as a social and financial entity ceased to function with any semblance of efficacy or fairness decades ago. This reversal in trajectory is the primary reason behind the massive increase in financial engineering used to paper over fundamental socioeconomic problems and extract the last of the profits. To argue over this or that detail is to be in denial of the obvious. In fact, I consider the official bickering over these details as a deliberate attempt to distort and distract while the final looting and rape occurs.

Negative interest rates, now common in Europe and Japan (and coming soon to the US) are a perfect example of the financial wheels coming off the socioeconomic cart. When all incentive for prudence, precaution and personal responsibility are explicitly discouraged, even penalized, the decline and fall of civil society is a foregone conclusion. For example, prudence in the form of saving money is discouraged with near zero interest paid on any sums saved, while the use of ever more debt is encouraged with zero down and zero interest rates charged on the amount borrowed. Negative interest rates will only serve to fan the flames of the already raging fire.

Can you imagine the consumer feeding frenzy negative interest rates will ignite when a manufacturer of (for example) automobiles or trucks informs you they will pay you 1%, 2% or more of the outstanding balance on the ‘loan’ each year just to buy their vehicles? You would wind up paying less than the amount you borrowed. Of course, this isn’t really free money since the manufacturer will simply jack up the original price to compensate themselves and their finance partners for paying you to buy from them. Imagine the inflationary spiral this will create.

The unofficial socioeconomic policy is to delay the inevitable as long as possible, while promising the plebs ‘the authorities’ are on it and all will be well. Just fork over more money, power and control and everything will be right as rain. Unfortunately, perverse financial, cultural and political incentives dictate it’s in practically no one’s best interest to confront systemic socioeconomic issues and arrest the fall simply because great pain will come long before any gain is ever realized.

Those who already possess substantial wealth demand they not only maintain it, but expand it. This elite group controls ninety five percent of the global wealth and ninety-nine percent of the political power, but at best represents one percent of the global population. The entire middle class, decimated by decades of inflation without a corresponding increase in wages, desperately clings to what little they have remaining. Ultimately, for the vast majority, as it now stands this is a losing battle. So, we dither, delay and deny while remaining drunk on cheap credit and consumer pleasures.

And then there are the poor, aka the expendables, globally the largest group by far, powerless in every sense of the word and focused solely on day to day survival. With the middle class increasingly squeezed lower into their already tight quarters, the only place left for them is further down and out.

Those who can, won’t. Those who might, deny. Those who can’t, suffer.





Plausible Deniability and False Hope
Using so-called “experts” to push misleading information and outright propaganda along with other targeted psychological operations, our leaders are pushed, prodded, threatened and empowered by the elite one percent to outright lie about economic conditions both here in America and globally. The rest of the first and second world nations follow suit for their own political survival and personal economic enrichment.

They disseminate lies, half-truths and fake news; not because they expect them to withstand close scrutiny, but rather to enable those who wish to believe the lie a plausible excuse to do so while daring those who don’t to contest their power to do and say as they please. Remember our conditioning; when in doubt, defer to authority and suspend disbelief. This is quite similar to ‘gaslighting’, a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or entity seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and even their sanity.

A classic sales technique is the assumed consent close. Rather than directly ask you to purchase the new car, it is assumed you will purchase. The sales person goes in for the kill by asking closing questions. “Do you prefer the red four door we first looked at or the blue convertible with the leather interior? What is the maximum monthly payment you are comfortable with? Will one or both of you be applying for credit? Do you want the satellite navigation registration in your name or your husbands? May I have the keys to your car so we can determine your trade-in value?” You’d be surprised how many new automobiles, rooms of household furniture, whole life insurance, investment packages and pieces of expensive jewelry are sold in this manner.

Something similar to this technique is used by the mass media to sell us things we already want to buy. Only they aren’t selling the death of America, but rather America’s supposed remarkable resilience and miraculous comeback from near financial death in 2008, a blatant falsehood people only now are beginning to recognize. We’re being sold false hope with outright lies and opinion disguised as factual news and official declarations.

False hope binds us to impossible situations and debilitating conditions.

As long as we believe there is residual value in keeping America on life support, meaning we believe our personal financial situation hasn’t deteriorated significantly enough to push the panic button, we will continue to support this mess rather than clear the smoking debris, remove the leadership and much of the autocracy and start over again. As long as those in power can at least partially shield the majority from major financial reverberations and dislocations, meaning “We the People” slowly degrade rather than explode, we will take a path that best preserves our own personal interests.

As Mrs. Cog likes to say, it’s a recession when it crashes into someone else and a depression when is crashes into you and me. As long as we can defer to authority and demand someone else do something about ‘it’ while also maintaining our own status quo, we will do nothing to confront our fundamental socioeconomic problems. Throughout ancient and modern history, this is the usual path taken by the majority until it is far too late to do much more than sweep up the pieces and bemoan the loss of several generations to devastating financial, social and political distress. Because the nation’s wealth was looted long before the fall, there is little capital and resources to work with in order to rebuild. Thus, the reason for the loss of several generations.

This is the primary purpose of the constant propaganda messaging, to assure those who wish to remain safely within their fox holes (after all, ignorance is bliss) that they can indeed remain hidden in their fox holes. Desperate people do desperate things. The puppet masters do everything in their power to convince people it is best to duck and cower rather than stand up and push back. This is their leverage, as it has been for thousands of years of global history. Those who rule keep the population confused, divided and afraid (and lately, sick) but not so much that doing so reduces our productivity, thereby diminishing their power and wealth.







Wolves Among the Sheep

And the truly frightening realization, something I suspect most of us know deep down in our hearts but don’t actually acknowledge, is that the majority of people in positions of power and/or wealth are either sociopaths or harbor strong sociopath tendencies. Which means they do not think in terms of civic duty and public service, but rather about personal gain and ever more power. As conditions continue to deteriorate, less and less sane and well-meaning people will be willing to step up and attempt to lead, creating an even larger power vacuum the sociopaths are more than willing to fill.

Those who claim “They would never do that” are hopelessly and dangerously deluded, mesmerized by the great American myth or just hopelessly deep in denial. For crying out loud, of course they’d do ‘that’, just as you and I are capable of doing just about anything when subjected to great stress and pressure. The difference is that in the grand scope of things, whatever we might do would harm mostly ourselves and maybe those nearest to us, while ‘they’ can and will harm thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, to maintain their status quo and position of power.

We don’t wish to face the stark reality we as a nation are in way over our heads. As long as we are not forced to look too closely at the terrible condition this country is in and where it’s headed, we are all too willing to do our part and avoid critical thinking. Like an old bull unknowingly led to slaughter because he thinks he’s off to mount the next cow, we’re desperately trying to keep alive the magical American myth of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness while shielding our eyes from the rotting corpse it is rapidly becoming.

That assessment is probably too harsh for the average American’s sensibilities. But let’s ask ourselves a few questions in an effort to discover the truth, or at least something approaching the truth as we know it. First, let me be clear on something before I get flamed for my harsh tongue. I’m not America bashing in the least; I am America myth bashing. The American myth of exceptionalism is enabling our self-destruction as we stand idly by, applauding and supporting the mythical facade our leaders and media display 24/7.

As long as we cling to the hope that all America needs is a tune up and some minor repairs, we’re condemned to a long and painful death spiral. We’re being told exactly what we want to hear because we’re desperate to hear it. To claim otherwise is to lie to ourselves and to each other.

America is crumbling from the foundation up, and yet all we talk about is a fresh paint job and a new screen door (both bought on credit) while handing our grandchildren a bill they’ll never be able to pay. The only way we can live with this lie, while handing suffocating debt to our own future family members, is to deny it’s even happening.

The big lie, one we must continue to tell ourselves, has taken on a life of its own and is consuming everyone and everything in its path. We are addicted to our own public myth. And to sustain the lie we must ignore the truth or face the cognitive consequences, a fate worse than death for a nation incapable of telling itself the truth.

The only way to break through the lie is to go back through decades of propaganda and myth and recognize these lies and our core self-deceit. Since this is too painful, both individually and as a society, we distort reality as quickly as we change channels or YouTube streams. Can you say cute cat videos?

It’s not just our leaders who are corrupt, but us as well. We all know something is seriously wrong, even if we don’t know precisely what is broken or how to fix it. And yet there we are, whistling through the graveyard under the guise of minding our own business…. as if America is none of our business. We think “Just leave me alone and let me live my life in peace” without acknowledging that doing so perpetuates the very system that is slowing suffocating us.

Contrary to popular belief, the fish doesn’t rot from the head down, but rather from everywhere and all at the same time. We comfort ourselves by saying it’s our leaders who lie to us, but the only way a long-term confidence game can succeed is for the ‘victim’ to fully participate. No one forces the victim to be conned… at least not yet.

The conman’s baited hook is the great America myth; you work hard, keep your nose clean, live a good life and retire sitting pretty. While some of the baby boomers are actually living the dream all the way to the end, this is occurring less and less these days and the future looks particularly bleak. Have you noticed how many elderly folks are working at McDonalds and Walmart? Do you ever wonder why this is?





Petulant Children

We have become cowardly, unwilling to commit to the difficult path of setting aside even a minimum of today’s self-gratification in order to assure our grandchildren a functioning society to live and prosper in tomorrow. This is the ultimate act of selfishness, compounded by the fact we self-righteously declare we’ve been hijacked by our leaders. The sad fact is our leaders are doing exactly what we want them to do, to continue perpetuating the lie while telling us it’s the truth.

“Daddy, tell me everything is going to be OK.”

“Everything’s going to be just fine honey bunny.”

“I love you daddy.”

Did we really think we could put our country’s toys, tools and war machines on the national charge card and not worry about the bill, just because some politicians said we could? What are we, 5-year old children, pointing our finger elsewhere when asked who broke the mirror? Even if we personally follow the path of fiscal prudence, we all swim in the same piranha-infested swamp. Therefore, as infuriating as it may be for some to read the following, we all share some responsibility, however small, for the present state of affairs. The only question now is, what do we do about it? Citizenship is about individual responsibility to ourselves and to our fellow citizen, something we’ve been avoiding for quite a while now; at least since we started collectively calling ourselves consumers.

Endless propaganda is used to lull us into a drugged stupor so we don’t dwell on what we’re doing to our children’s children. American flags wave in the background as chiseled men and sultry women expound on how wonderful we are for loving this great nation of ours. The great American love story, brought to you daily via TV and streaming soap operas. This is where the bad guys always loose, men are virile and women sexual objects to lust after. Watch closely children, this is the American dream.

And why wouldn’t we love America the myth? It’s everything we are told we want without the pain of actually creating and maintaining it. Nationalism is our unifying religion, an increasingly fatal addiction to our public myth that enables us to fiddle while America burns. Alas, the carnival ride is breaking down with increasing frequency. More drugs over here doctor, the patient is waking up.

Desperate for relief, we seek refuge with fellow like-minded herd dwelling walking wounded, a perceived safe haven inside occupied territory for the psychically-damaged and emotionally-demoralized, in the deluded belief hiding is an effective emotional pain reliever. Surrounded by lies and deceit, we are indoctrinated to such an extent we still speak the language of defeat and denial without even realizing it. One cannot become clean immersed in filthy shared bathwater, just less dirty than the one behind us and dirtier than the one in front.

So how do we deal with this, and what does this have to do with you and me specifically? After all, aren’t we all just ‘victims’ in a long line of walking wounded, exhausted from moving in and out of various stages of loss and grief? One moment we’re angry with zombie friends, family and neighbors, imploring them to wake up and see the insanity. The next we’re filled with self-righteous indignation as another patsy’s head is placed on the public pike, sated temporarily by the public flogging and bloodletting.

In my opinion we have no choice but to start at the beginning. While we must speak truth to power, first and foremost we must speak truth to ourselves, to talk openly and honestly about what has happened and where we are going. A significant component of the seduction of denial is the avoidance of personal responsibility. This must stop, thus my declaration we are all responsible for this mess. I have no doubt America can stop its decline, but the process begins with you and me, not they and them. Contrary to popular opinion political leaders do not lead, but rather follow the strongest stench coming from the biggest wallet.





Step One….

How do we as individuals tackle this seemingly huge and insurmountable problem? As a former financial planner and stock broker who still runs personal money, I try to use a modified version of my own trading rules in my personal life. They are as follows.

One; know ourselves, particularly our strengths and weaknesses. This is admittedly much easier said than done, simply because the disassembly (and reassembly) of our interlocking myths, beliefs and illusions is NOT a one-time event, but rather a long and laborious process. One or two particular insights or kernels of awareness are not sufficient to reveal the huge tangled mess. In fact, to believe it is a one-and-done event is actually more destructive than doing nothing, since we change very little about ourselves yet believe we have. Similar to Russian nesting dolls, where several more a hidden inside the first, the rabbit hole runs deep.

Two; understand this is far more about perspective than it is about facts, truth or knowledge, three words often used interchangeably and incorrectly. Facts are rarely more than pieces of information which may or may not be correct, truth is almost entirely based upon a point of view often (but not always) derived from arranging facts in a particular order. And knowledge is the inner awareness and acceptance that facts and truth are little more than moving parts in a general consensus reality. Meaning two people can use the same set of facts, yet claim different truths based upon those facts, while a third person, relying upon a large body of knowledge, understands facts and truth are at best subjective and at worst enslaving.

Three; always consider the possibility there is far more to learn about a subject (and ourselves) than we are aware of. The art of propaganda and manipulation is the leveraging of our own biases and assumptions, of nudging and sliding us one way or another. We dismiss the notion we are influenced by these forces because we believe we would recognize them when we see or hear them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Look intently, critically and repeatedly for gaps and weakness in our thinking, especially if we believe nothing is wrong with our thinking. I force myself to read/watch/listen to information I think is contrary to my settled opinions, and I’m always amazed to discover something new-to-me every time I do so.

Four; from time to time, mentally clear our minds from the 10,000 daily distractions that bombard us via every glowing screen we own…or more accurately, every glowing screen that owns us. Yes, I understand this is nearly impossible since so much of our necessary daily activity requires screen interaction. I still manage personal money, which means I must remain plugged in nearly all the time. The weekends are less hectic and afford better opportunities to at least attempt some decoupling from the matrix. Audio books concerning deep dive subjects we’ve always wanted to explore are a perfect alternative to the jibber-jabber intrusions of daily life and can be listened to while doing chores, driving and so on.

Five; trust our instincts and inner knowing more so than our heart and mind. My most shocking early revelation was that my mind lies to me and my heart (emotion) confuses and deceives me. This is not surprising since a lifetime of conditioning and programming instructs us to believe knowledge, truth and wisdom are found externally and only from official sources and authorities. This deliberately narrowed point of view has dulled, if not completely switched off, any intuitive connection we might have with our inner knowing self.

Since we are never taught to consult, let alone trust, our inner knowing, we have all been successfully subjugated to one degree or another by external forces. Worse, we consider this ‘condition’ to be completely natural and normal. Because our cognitive box is the only reality we’ve ever known, it is nearly impossible to ‘think’ outside of it. The more firmly we are chained to the existing reality, the more difficult it is to imagine any other. Therefore, we must attempt to disconnect as completely and often as we can.

These practices slowly develop (re-awaken might be more accurate) a clear-eyed view and a deeper understanding of ourselves, our fellow man and the real world, not as we wish to see it, but as it really is. Unfortunately, we still engage in wishful thinking way too often, constantly pushing the hope ‘dope’ button for increasingly meager superficial rewards. Considering the direction our world is headed, it’s going to be more difficult to think clearly unless we begin to make personal changes now. Old habits die hard because we desperately cling to them for emotional support. Understanding why we do this will go a long way to helping us jettison our old baggage. Even if we are trapped on the crazy train to hell, just because we can’t get off doesn’t mean we must fully participate in the insanity.



08-31-2019

Cognitive Dissonance