141

At the Lost and Found

Edward Curtin

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

Those who are never lost are forever lost.  Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore.

The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth. 

This is also common sense.

Everyone is a pilgrim on the way, and because there are no maps, we all get lost.  And it is only by getting lost in a deep sense that we can find ourselves and discover the truth about the world.

It is well known that Ernest Hemingway made famous the phrase “the lost generation” when he opened his novel The Sun Also Rises with the epigram “You are all a lost generation,” attributed to Gertrude Stein, who said she heard it from a garage owner who said it about a young auto mechanic in his employ.

It is less well known that Hemingway later wrote “that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be …But to hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty easy labels.”

He was thinking of how the madness of war with the calls to patriotism and God and country and the never-ending official lies about everything maimed people at very deep levels.  His words in A Farewell to Arms have lasted because they are so true in their dismissal of abstract obscenities and their embrace of the concrete:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain …. And I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it …. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

No doubt he was also thinking of the existential anxiety of being alive and the fear of death and nothingness that is conveyed in his powerful short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” that appeared in the 1930 volume Winner Take Nothing.  He was well acquainted with nothing (the not, nada) and knew that social circumstances only add to it, particularly wars and the nihilistic death wishes of lying political leaders.

Some say nothing has changed for millennia and that every age is similar and people are the same, always complaining about the present and recalling the good old days.  There is some truth in this, but the issue of assessing today in all its uniqueness remains paramount.  For every age and every generation is different; therein lies its potential and dangers.

Each can only be understood within its place and time.  We live in the era of high technology that has never before existed.  It is unique.  And it is uniquely dangerous.

Today is a time of unprecedented official lies about everything, endless wars hot and cold, class wars of the rich against the poor, medical wars of international elites against everyone, etc. –  it is a daily electronic digital  barrage meant to pound people into the deepest despair. 

Call it “The Lost World of the Information Superhighway.”  These lies have sown a vast sense of bewilderment, as intended.

Lostness for so many, including those who don’t know it and take those lies for truth. People who don’t know that there are still places, although they are shrinking, where truth can be found.  The problem is, of course, that even when they are told about media sites and writers that operate honestly and outside the propaganda mill, they usually refuse to go there. 

They prefer to live inside what Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans District Attorney who brought the only trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, correctly termed “the Doll’s House.”

Picking through the bins at the lost and found on the Internet, which is dominated by intelligence services and their Silicon Valley big tech partners, many who feel lost find “things” they think they have lost but which are counterfeit.  They cling to them as to false gods, not realizing that they have been placed there by the elite mountebanks and their accomplices, a process similar to a document dump that contains fabricated records.

It is an old trick.

Often what is really lost is the sense that life makes sense and is meaningful, but this awareness is often replaced with shards of false reassurance meant to distract and far too much information for anyone to comprehend.

What’s up?  Check your cell phone and head down the primrose path to unreality.

Just as there are two senses to being lost, one based on the awareness that if we refuse to grasp at straws and proceed through life by faith, the unknown road will bear us up (Thoreau said, “How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it…”), and the other being the more socially induced one of incessant propaganda, so too there are two ways of thinking about nothing.

The existential sense as described by Hemingway in his famous story mentioned above, and the sense of trivia or superficial preoccupations that distract.  C.S. Lewis described the latter sense very well:

The Christians describe the enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

This is a perfect description of the passivity of scrolling the internet or social media.  Much ado about absolutely nothing but distractions.  Tranquilized by trivia.

Our current situation has been long in coming.  Back in the early 1960s, there was a  highly touted intellectual named Marshall McLuhan whose 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was gobbled up by the baby boomers raised on television, whose rebellious members protested the inhumanity of IBM computer technology of that time.

Ironically, it was members of this generation who later created the computer revolution and have promoted the digital revolution.  They carry cell phones as sidearms to defend themselves from reality.

Newsweek called McLuhan “the oracle of the New Communications.”  He was an obscurantic celebrator of the electronic media and retribalized man long before the Internet, cell phones, personal computers, and digital mania.  McLuhan’s paeans to technology sounded very profound and liberating  with their vaguely Gnostic and Jungian rhetoric, which also fit with the 1960s “vibes.”  He called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve, for they in turn would liberate us.

He gave life to things while taking it from persons.  He wrote:

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. [my emphases]

Clearly this was a message of a prescient religious crank: mystical, mythological, technological nonsense perfectly in tune with the dawning new age. Not any coming of the Age of Aquarius, however, but that of the Age of Digital Control and endless wars.

By turning the person inside out and giving life to things, McLuhan was certainly anticipating and promoting the developments of the past forty years.  His ideas gave legitimacy to the passivity of the person in the face of the burgeoning mass media consumer culture.  They supported the growing commodification of all aspects of life, especially people. 

By externalizing the person, McLuhan was eliminating the idea of the autonomous self and opening the way for today’s era of consumers, blank screens for the reception of advertising, public relations, and propaganda on a vast scale.

In fact, what he wrote of television runs deeper for cell phones and computer screens.  “ … with TV,” he wrote, “the viewer is the screen.  He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that imbues his ‘soulskin with subconscious inklings.’

Inklings of abstract obscenities at war with the lost world of reality.

While many people sense this, they still embrace their killers, feeling that they would be lost without them. They have become appendages of their electronic appendages.  The current push to transform all person-to-person life into a digital one run by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with its mass surveillance powers is recognized by many but dismissed as a weird conspiracy.

This is so far from the truth.  A good indicator of this nonchalant attitude toward such developing trends is the vastly increased popularity of on-line shopping.  Its innocence conceals the future that is coming.

I recently won a very high-tech-looking electric toothbrush at the dentist.  When I opened it, I discovered it contained a gadget with a suction cup that could hold a “smart phone” that you could attach to the mirror.  The phone could electronically be linked to the toothbrush and it would monitor your brushing as you watched yourself brush.  Poor me, I felt so stupid: a man without a smart phone!

While everybody knows that the boat is leaking and the captain lied, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, such knowledge is abstract.  It is a sort-of knowledge, sensed but also denied.  Real but unreal.  Known but unknown.  And that’s how it goes.

It is very difficult for many conventional people to admit that the life they have known is disappearing while they dawdle in fantasy land, believing the propaganda of their rulers.  To live in the U.S.A. is to live in Neverland where no one ever has to be alone, never grow up, and always be “in touch” through the ether.  It is a country of lost children.

You can choose any issue of importance and its official explanation is certain to be untrue, obvious or subtle propaganda.

The lies about Ukraine and Russia; Covid-19, lockdowns, and vaccines; China and Taiwan; US forces in Syria and US support for Israeli aggression against Syria and the Palestinians; its support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless policies and war against Yemen; the economy, central banking, and inflation; the increasing censorship of dissident voices; digital IDs, digital programmable currencies, and social credit systems; the persecution of Julian Assange; the Great Reset; a series of binaries meant to suggest false alternatives, etc.

The list is endless.  All official lies to support a sinking ship captained by psychopathic liars seemingly intent on a world war that will destroy the world.  Melville’s Captain Ahab writ large. Like those traveling on the Titanic, today’s passengers on the flailing American empire’s Good Ship Lollipop are in for a surprise, and it won’t be a sweet trip to a candy shop.

Hemingway was surely right that “Winner Take Nothing.”  Yet losers also exit empty-handed.  Everybody knows this but goes on surrounding themselves with stuff, lots of things.  Hoarders are a popular TV subject because they represent the extreme form of this madcap method of trying to secure oneself from loss.

It is a form of mental and spiritual despair that could only exist in advanced capitalist consumer society.  Too many possessions and too much information.  Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes.  There is a reason why the world’s poor are called the dispossessed.  One could say hoarders are the possessed, and it is a form of demonic possession.

Recently I was called upon to help a hospitalized elderly relative by checking on her house.  The house is filled from attic to basement, in every nook and cranny, with collected things that serve no life purpose but were kept to provide a security blanket that was really a strangulation cord.

I will spare you the details, except to say that this relative is an intelligent woman, as was her deceased husband, and yet they surrounded themselves with so much “stuff,” never threw things out, kept papers from 70 years ago, old keys and coins, empty jewelry boxes by the score, etc.  An overwhelming scene to behold.  And why did they do this?  Because they thought they were protecting themselves against loss, against nothing, nada.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”  But there is nothing that will protect against the loss Eliot was referring to – the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe as a result of World War I.  A wasteland created by politicians. Like today.

We too are now living in a wasteland, and the only way to find our way forward is to acknowledge that we are lost and to jettison the false security of believing the vast tapestry of lies promulgated by the captains of the American-led Titanic.

I often think of the words of the poet Rilke as good advice, a step in the right direction where there is a lost and found worth visiting and insights await us. While primarily writing about the artist who time and again is that someone who emerges from the crowd and whose “winged heart everywhere beats against the walls of their time,” I think his words apply to every person, including journalists.

To plumb the depths of our sordid current world demands aesthetic, political, and spiritual resistance rooted in the open sociological imagination, a willingness to go wherever the facts and intuition leads us.  Rilke said:

Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence, namely the period of childhood …. [the child] has no anxiety about losing things …. And whatever he has once been lit up in love remains as an image, never more to be lost, and the image is possession; that is why children are so rich.

For a country of lost children, this is a good place to start.

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.
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ursel doran
ursel doran
Aug 29, 2022 10:45 PM

Hoarding when taken to the extreme is without a doubt a peculiar form of insanity.
I had a neighbor who was a Ph.D. teaching math at the local university, and his hoarding was beyond belief. In his small one-bedroom apartment there was a small path to walk between the junk piled to the ceiling. The landlord mentioned that he had a storage unit filled to the max also. Incomprehensible.

J. Maclain
J. Maclain
Aug 15, 2022 11:15 PM

Consistently calling out the cellular devices and screen technology, Curtain is one of the courageous who calls it for what it is. Internet/television and computers/phones are addictive and damaging like drugs and weaponized at the same time to cause physical, mental and spiritual damage. When people try to back out en masse is when the hammer will fall, I think. Makes sense to be in the clear long before then. Back to the real. Thanks Curtain, for the great quotes and fighting the good fight!

John Ervin
John Ervin
Aug 19, 2022 2:40 AM
Reply to  J. Maclain

(“C-U-R-T-I-N”). Its all good. Just saying.

Derek
Derek
Aug 15, 2022 7:56 PM

The lies about Ukraine and Russia; Covid-19, lockdowns, and vaccines; China and Taiwan; US forces in Syria and US support for Israeli aggression against Syria and the Palestinians; its support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless policies and war against Yemen; the economy, central banking, and inflation; the increasing censorship of dissident voices; digital IDs, digital programmable currencies, and social credit systems; the persecution of Julian Assange; the Great Reset; a series of binaries meant to suggest false alternatives, etc.

You left out Russia also allowing Israeli aggression against Syria. Russia “passively facilitates” Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah and their IRGC allies per the “deconfliction mechanism” agreed a few days before Moscow’s anti-terrorist intervention in Syria in September 2015.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-russia-israel/israel-russia-to-coordinate-military-action-on-syria-netanyahu-idUSKCN0RL10K20150921
Russia says they are violations but does nothing.

C’mon Ed credit where credit is due?

Hmm whatever happened to those S300’s Vlad set to Syria to send a message after that Russian spy plane was shot down?

Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Aug 16, 2022 9:47 AM
Reply to  Derek

Russia’s agreement was to join forces against Terrorist Factions in Syria, Not A War with an other Nation State.

mgeo
mgeo
Aug 16, 2022 9:52 AM
Reply to  Derek

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge. Turkey shot down a Russian combat plane. Since then, Russia was talking of selling S300 or S400 to Turkey. After selling drones to Ukraine and sending terrorists there, Turkey is even posing as peacemaker.

rossgopicotrain
rossgopicotrain
Aug 15, 2022 7:35 PM

Very well written article; thank you Edward Curtin for this very articulate and insightful piece of writing! RGB-Y2 out!!

Dallas Beaufort
Dallas Beaufort
Aug 15, 2022 10:59 AM

Being and Nothingness, rubbish

Edwige
Edwige
Aug 15, 2022 8:41 AM

The Rushdie “stabbing” has some fishy features….

He was supposedly put on a ventilator and then recovered. Ventilators have had a lot of bad press in the last couple of years. I’m only surprised they didn’t work remdesivir into the story somehow. Rushdie is supposedly going to lose an eye. There’s the secret society marker, the all-seeing eye symbolism. The Fruad has mentioned (utterly pointlessly – another big tell) that the event started at 10.45 so that’s a 19.

Salman is Saloman with one letter (a nothing) dropped. Saloman’s Temple is one of their major obsessions. WTC7 was also the Saloman Brothers’ Building.

This story advances several other agendas in addition. The most obvious concerns Iran. Restricting knives and moving to virtual meetings are others.

The FBI raid on Trump is passing without much comment either. It’s transparent theatre – but theatre with a purpose. The stated reason makes no sense: Trump could de-classify “classified” documents as head of the executive. It’s clearly about establishing a precedent that the leader of the opposition (which Trump still is in effect) can be raided at any time.

Tike
Tike
Aug 15, 2022 8:52 AM
Reply to  Edwige

Maybe another reason for the staged Trump raid was to embolden his following and build on it by making Trump the underdog/victim of injustice. I think he’s coming back. I don’t give a shit what happens next in politics — it’s such a clown show, always was but now it’s literal. Let the games begin. I’m all stocked up on popcorn.

Vagabard
Vagabard
Aug 15, 2022 9:37 AM
Reply to  Edwige

Rushdie was scheduled to speak on August 12th, between 10:45 and 14:00, (which includes 12:00). Author of ‘Midnight’s Children‘ (12:00am) (one of his earlier novels) about magical kids being born at midnight at the moment of India’s independence in August 1947.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight's_Children

August 2022. 75 years since August 1947. India’s independence. May be some connection there. ((7+5 =12))

Someone who’s symbolic of the liberal ‘higher criticism’ man vs religious fundamentalism. So his stabbing will lead to more intolerance of religion and more racism. More polarization. Which may have been the intention(?)  🙄 

The ‘not guilty’ plea by Hadi Matar was also odd, given so many witnesses.

Vagabard
Vagabard
Aug 15, 2022 10:31 AM
Reply to  Vagabard

I should also have mentioned that Rushdie himself is one of “Midnight’s Children” (or near enough) having been born himself in 1947 at the moment of (well marginally prior to) Indian independence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie

Derek
Derek
Aug 15, 2022 8:10 PM
Reply to  Vagabard

The ‘not guilty’ plea by Hadi Matar was also odd, given so many witnesses.

There is nothing odd about that as you are “innocent until proven guilty.” 
That’s what any lawyer worth his salt would advise to plead.
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/pleading-not-guilty-even-when-guilty-40222

Pleading Guilty at an ArraignmentAn arraignment is usually held within 30 days of a criminal defendant’s first appearance. At this hearing, the criminal defendant pleads guilty, not guilty or no contest. At this stage in the case, the prosecutor may not have thoroughly reviewed the case. Therefore, he or she may not have any incentive or knowledge to make a favorable offer regarding a plea agreement. Likewise, the criminal defense lawyer may not have much information about the case against the defendant and may not be able to recommend whether the defendant should or should not accept any offered plea agreement. The criminal defense lawyer instead may only be able to advise the defendant about the possible maximum sentence that a criminal defendant may receive if convicted of the offense either by pleading guilty or by being found guilty by a judge or jury.

Pleading Not Guilty at an ArraignmentFor the reasons mentioned above, most criminal defendants plead not guilty at the arraignment hearing. By pleading not guilty, the criminal defendant buys time. This gives his or her defense lawyer the opportunity to review the case and to assert all possible defenses. The criminal defense lawyer may explain the defendant’s rights. He or she may be able to work on motions to keep damaging evidence from being entered and to show that the prosecution does not have sufficient evidence to establish the defendant’s guilt.

Nothing odd about it at all.

John Ervin
John Ervin
Aug 19, 2022 2:51 AM
Reply to  Vagabard

Living near enough the Mexican border half my life, I couldn’t help notice that “Matar” in Spanish means to kill, or assassinate. Odd coincidence, 1st time seeing that as a name.

Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Aug 16, 2022 10:18 AM
Reply to  Edwige

I talked to a head nurse about those machines, you could spend time laying on your stomach.

Researcher
Researcher
Aug 16, 2022 5:31 PM
Reply to  Edwige

Yep. Total hoax. Where’s the video? Not a single video of this staged event?

John Ervin
John Ervin
Aug 19, 2022 3:00 AM
Reply to  Researcher

Great for book sales, only saying that as it seems a bit much that there is so little evidence for public view, with Rushdie reported to be so badly wounded, and cracking wise post-ventilator?

I remember my state of gross dubiety, years before I became a full-fledged Conspiracy Realist, when Ronny RayGun was supposedly shot and staggered into the hospital ER, where we were told a sidewinder bullet had wound its way to within a quarter inch of his heart.

Seemed a bit much, even to my young mind, long fed on such daily pap.

Then there’s the guy -Galenter? if memory serves?- who was an alleged victim of the Unabomber’s mail, supposedly devastated by the explosion, also losing an eye, then showing up years later in photos with no apparent eye damage?

Too much of this stuff. They may play out that fake hand of cards, hopefully.

John Ervin
John Ervin
Aug 19, 2022 3:03 AM
Reply to  John Ervin

The RayGun heroics seem like just a dramatic regurgitation of the Teddy Roosevelt incident, walking off on his own power after a shot in the chest at a speech he gave, eighty years before Ronny.

Researcher
Researcher
Aug 20, 2022 2:48 AM
Reply to  John Ervin

Yes. Exactly. All of those and more. Even going back to the faked Lincoln assassination. But it takes work to investigate enough of the hoaxes until you start to see the familiar patterns of deception.

Unfortunately, these highly scripted, staged “events” become part of the historical record, and shared false narratives and beliefs for the majority.

“And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

Samuel
Samuel
Aug 16, 2022 6:37 PM
Reply to  Edwige

As always, the unbelievable convenience of a “terrorist” attack for advancing an imperialist agenda/propaganda/talking point.

John Ervin
John Ervin
Aug 19, 2022 2:47 AM
Reply to  Edwige

Interesting dot connections, thanks, surely worth the review, especially as they show up so often. “They” also count on people thinking it’s bad form to question such atrocities, forever, the social taboos of showing a lack of grief, or whatever else, while they inundate the airwaves with graphic gore: I get “breaking” stories about car crashes etc. on my new phone, clogging everything.

jimbo
jimbo
Aug 15, 2022 5:40 AM

Splendid and thoughtful. Came across this below. It helps to explain part of our current ‘sordid’ state of affairs.

Over a century ago the world’s richest man, oil baron John D. Rockefeller, and his circle of advisors set about to completely reorganize how medicine was practiced in the USA and the rest of the world. The role of the Rockefeller Institute and figures like Simon Flexner literally oversaw the invention of a colossal medical fraud around claims that an invisible contagious extraneous germ, the polio virus, caused acute paralysis and even death in young people. They politically banned any efforts to link the disease to toxin poisoning, whether from DDT or arsenic pesticides or even contaminated vaccine poisoning. Their criminal project included intimate cooperation with the leadership of the AMA and control of the emerging drug industry, as well as of medical education. The same Rockefeller group financed Nazi eugenics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Germany in the 1930s as well as the American Eugenics Society. In the 1970s they financed the creation of patented GMO seeds which were all developed by the group of Rockefeller chemical pesticide companies—Monsanto, DuPont, Dow.

Today this control of public health and the medical industrial complex is exercised by David Rockefeller’s protegé and eugenics advocate, Bill Gates, self-appointed czar over the WHO and world vaccines. Dr Tony Fauci, head of NIAID, dictates vaccine mandates without evidence. The fraud behind the polio virus scandal after World War II has been refined with use of computer models and other ruses today, to advance one alleged deadly virus after the other, from Covid19 to Monkeypox to HIV. As with polio, none of those has been scientifically isolated and proven to cause the diseases claimed. None. The same tax-free Rockefeller Foundation today, posing as a philanthropic charity, is at the heart of the global medical tyranny behind covid19 and the eugenics agenda of the World Economic Forum Great Reset. Their poliomyelitis virus model helped them create this dystopian medical tyranny. We are told, “trust the science.”

http://www.williamengdahl.com/englishNEO12July2022.php

William Sabre
William Sabre
Aug 15, 2022 10:20 AM
Reply to  jimbo

For an upto date recognition of the detrimental effect on medicine that modern elite corporate powers have had, this article sums up the desperate condition of modern health care by some of the most recognised individuals in modern medical academia.

Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/

I’m hoping this isn’t them just rubbing it in and laughing at the fools who rely on modern allopathic medicine. If you are suffering try qualified Tibetan and Ayurvedic practitioners and always investigate Dr Campbell-McBride’s GAPS diet, as it exemplifies the motto of pretty much all ancient medicine techniques that ‘All disease starts in the gut’ and can be healed from.

dom irritant
dom irritant
Aug 15, 2022 12:33 PM
Reply to  jimbo

good article and on target, i passed it on to everyone that is still talking to me, the truth will out

Rachel Wild
Rachel Wild
Aug 14, 2022 11:37 PM

Met the Jehova’s Witnesses in town the other day. They were like very lovely children, but with an apparent malevolent streak. They called God ‘Him, insisted that He’s just about had enough of all the lies and psychopathic behaviour, and is readying Himself for a right old intervention… they were looking forward to it. Which is odd, considering they were imagining great floods, and plagues of locusts etc… It’s hard to find anyone who isn’t stark staring mad at the moment… but perhaps this is a problem which is as old as the ages too?

Paul Nicholls
Paul Nicholls
Aug 15, 2022 1:29 AM
Reply to  Rachel Wild

Jehovah’s Witnesses have always been stark raving mad, so nothing new there. (I oughta know, I was raised as such)

Grafter
Grafter
Aug 15, 2022 1:30 AM
Reply to  Rachel Wild

What happened to the guys patrolling streets with sandwich boards stating “The End Is Nigh” ?

paul
paul
Aug 15, 2022 8:37 PM
Reply to  Grafter

They all got jobs at Pfizer and the MHRA.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 15, 2022 9:55 PM
Reply to  Grafter

They ended.

mgeo
mgeo
Aug 15, 2022 6:21 AM
Reply to  Rachel Wild

When do we get new pronouns for the Almighty?

rememberingmonkey
rememberingmonkey
Aug 14, 2022 10:13 PM

Why does the title of this in my inbox include ‘Malone dies”???

Patrick L.
Patrick L.
Aug 15, 2022 12:11 AM

Wild guess: it’s because a short quote from Beckett’s novel of that name is the very first line of Edward Curtin’s piece.

Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody. 
I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of 
hell and in the execrable generations to come an honoured name. 
Enough for this evening. 

I wish the same (except for the honoured name) to the lying bastards who’ve been inflicting this torture on the planet since 2019.

bleak
bleak
Aug 14, 2022 10:01 PM

The Spirit of the Trinity is what this article is saying to me without saying it. The Trinity isn’t mentioned because either the author doesn’t believe in the Spirit of the Trinity or he’s trying to appeal to a broad range of cognoscenti (kind of an oxymoron?).

Beckett, Hemingway, Lewis, Cohen, Eliot, McLuhan… Yeats, Burroughs, Kerouac… … you can have them all. Nihilists, atheists, agnostics, pseudo-Jews, and fake Christians. Their words are the real nothing. There is nothing without God, Jesus Christ. We serve at His pleasure and are alone without Him. Abandoned, if you will, because we are unworthy.

The Roman Church abandoned the Spirit when it began worshipping human idols. The Jews abandoned the Spirit when they didn’t recognize Jesus Christ as the Savior of humanity.

The (Jewish) Kabbalah is the root of western occult ritual magick, the language of confusion, chaos and self-will, where the Ein Sof (or Ain Sof), aka Negative Existence, the unspeakable, unknowable “God” of esoteric Judaism. Holly Wood is their medium.

Look where we are now.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

-Romans 8:26

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

-1 Corinthians 2:14

And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

-Acts 2:38

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 8:25 PM

People go to war to get a shiny medal for killing innocent people if that’s not messed up I don’t know what is?!?Doctors and nurses injecting patients with something they have no idea about but the elites say it’s ok must be even though they are supposed to be medical professionals.Police beating innocent protesters even though they know it’s wrong!!! But because they obey orders from above they have no humanity for others it’s absolutely insane .Why are people not thinking for themselves instead of the system.All these police documentary’s you bad I’m good!?All these documentary’s rich house poor house,Beneft street or super nanny,Nowhere have they aired a program about the parasites?!?Its devide and conquer

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 8:52 PM
Reply to  Annie

There I’ve vented tonight I am just appalled how the 1% have done this and we have allowed it to happen.Billions of people have excepted their servitude who have listened to maniacs.Step back and see the absurdity.

Bee
Bee
Aug 14, 2022 10:34 PM
Reply to  Annie

……seems the majority ask questions and readily accept the answers they are given…some of us ask the same questions and question the answers they are given ’cause they just don’t seem right…every day have a controlled eruption… or watch an old scifi…’They Live’ by John Carpenter’s a good one…take care Annie and be sure to have a controlled eruption every day!!

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 11:48 PM
Reply to  Bee

Hehehe I will 👍

Jeffrey Strahl
Jeffrey Strahl
Aug 14, 2022 7:52 PM

Curtin basically misinterprets McLuhan. Eric Francis Coppolino has communicated extensively with McLuhan’s son and grandson, his take is totally different from Curtin’s. Check out this interview with Jeremy Nell of Jerm Warfare late July, audio file only.
https://planetwaves.fm/we-robot-life-under-full-digital-conditions/

Edward Curtin
Edward Curtin
Aug 14, 2022 10:02 PM
Reply to  Jeffrey Strahl

Jeffrey – Because their take is different from mine – and I knew that – doesn’t make their interpretations correct and mine wrong. I have studied McLuhan closely and emphatically stand by my critique of him.

Jeffrey Strahl
Jeffrey Strahl
Aug 15, 2022 1:37 AM
Reply to  Edward Curtin

Edward, it’s not because his take is “different,” but because he knows the son and grandson well, and has studied McLuhan’s work extensively. The man did not at all embrace the developments of hi tech society. “McLuhan was certainly anticipating and promoting the developments of the past forty years. His ideas gave legitimacy to the passivity of the person in the face of the burgeoning mass media consumer culture. They supported the growing commodification of all aspects of life, especially people.” Not even remotely the case. He described what’s going on, did not at all embrace it.

les online
les online
Aug 15, 2022 12:26 AM
Reply to  Jeffrey Strahl

I never could get into ‘Understanding Media’, but had no trouble with Lewis Mumford. I’m wondering if Coppolino’s October surprise (aka prediction) will be official Witch Hunts, Trials, and Burnings at The Stake…There’s certainly a lot of heresy & heretics around trying to gum-up The Great Reset’s easy acceptance…

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 7:42 PM

I’m here to fight for my children my grandchildren I’m here to fight for everyone’s children for humanity.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 9:42 PM
Reply to  Annie

By fighting you are playing their game, for which they have already written the rules, but are keeping the rule book (in it’s entirety) purposefully obfuscated.

Try peaceful non-compliance for fun and games.

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 11:50 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

We’ve tried that though something tells me there’s more in the pipeline to come.

sabelmouse
sabelmouse
Aug 15, 2022 10:22 AM
Reply to  Annie

we have?

ZenPriest
ZenPriest
Aug 15, 2022 10:26 AM
Reply to  Annie

Fight agents in the Matrix? Always lose.
Realise the Matrix is fake, believe yourself to be the One (know the truth of reality). Win.

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 7:32 PM

Don’t have me pending offgaurdian you know I’m right.They the elites can maime and kill innocent people destroy their businesses destroy their lives and we just wave a placard at them?!?Not working is it because they are still killing us this is the biggest crime against humanity and we are letting it happen?!?Protesting doesn’t work.

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 7:24 PM

We don’t need protesters we need valour we need martyrs.Governments don’t care about protesters the protesters are still paying tax.It’s ludicrous to think these multi billionaires cares about a few Herbert’s protesting?!?We need to go en mass millions billions of people take down this criminal takeover.

John Ervin
John Ervin
Aug 19, 2022 3:11 AM
Reply to  Annie

Was it Dostoevsky or some great one or other who wrote, “If you want to overcome the world, overcome yourself.”

Seems like we are being reduced to that, and prayer. As a starting point, at least. They have all the bigger weapons, and all the “higher” ground, these days!

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 6:47 PM

I’ve stood back watched everything that has been happening in the past 2 and a half years and I’ve realised your rulers are completely insane?!?.From convid to monkey pox to food and fuel shortages to the destruction of society it is completely insane it’s actually laughable when you think about it these elites have no idea what they are doing they are completely inept headless chickens,It’s like a tragic comedy they are mad.I thought I was mad believing what my heart told me was called a conspiracy theorist ain’t bo way I’m as mentally retarded as our so called rulers.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 9:05 PM
Reply to  Annie

Fear is the fertile field where the seed of insanity takes root.

So what are theses ‘rulers’ afraid of?

.

rememberingmonkey
rememberingmonkey
Aug 14, 2022 10:19 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

Death.

Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; 15And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage

Gordon
Gordon
Aug 14, 2022 11:29 PM

I’ve come to realise over the 4-5 years, reading the teachings of Buddha, pain and suffering, Christian original sin. Are fear, fear us the one and only enemy in our nature. Conquer fear, and you’ll.never die
Death where is thy sting, where is thy victory

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 11:52 PM
Reply to  Gordon

👍

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 11:51 PM

Yes

Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Aug 15, 2022 5:42 AM
Reply to  Annie

Penpal your Fem pals in the US before they finish training as gladiatrix for the New Rome Colosseum….would help.

NameWithheld
NameWithheld
Aug 14, 2022 6:35 PM

the kind of utter garbage the BBC pass off as journalism. Crying once isn’t enough:

Hervé Trentin, a 34-year veteran of the Gironde fire department, stood on the edge of a charred section of forest wiping tears from his cheeks. It was the second time he had cried that morning.”

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 7:12 PM
Reply to  NameWithheld

Hahaha and he’ll probably cry again tonight while wiping his tears with bullshite.

Violet
Violet
Aug 14, 2022 7:16 PM
Reply to  NameWithheld

Boo boo pass me an onion.

wardropper
wardropper
Aug 14, 2022 8:07 PM
Reply to  NameWithheld

It’s Hollywood’s addictive influence.
Everybody thinks they’re a great actor today – just waiting for that talent scout to visit their village…

We get a cryer almost every day now on Icelandic TV.

Hint: Many people still know what bad acting is.

I’m pretty sure that if I lost a home, or a child, or a parent in a catastrophe, my grief would remain hidden from the superficial glare of media attention – unless, of course, I knew the name of some rabid sub-human politician who was directly responsible… in which case I expect my personal reaction would be public enough.

Even then, I would keep my tears to myself. Today’s media don’t deserve any access to genuine human feeling, however much they may seek to profit from it.

mgeo
mgeo
Aug 15, 2022 6:30 AM
Reply to  NameWithheld

I remember this BBC report from Bergamo, Italy in mid-2020, along these lines: .. is a broken man due to all the deaths around him; he tries to carry on by volunteering to deliver food to the elderly.

Edwige
Edwige
Aug 15, 2022 8:12 AM
Reply to  NameWithheld

There have never been wildfires in summer before, especially during a drought.

It’s another example of the normal being pathologised. A combination of making people detached from previous reality and turning the emotions up to eleven is how they imagine they can get away with this garbage.

NameWithheld
NameWithheld
Aug 15, 2022 8:44 AM
Reply to  Edwige

Portugal has fires all the time in the summer. A huge percentage of them are arson (~70%). The rest are accidents.

the concept that dry foliage somehow spontaneously combusts is utter nonsense and a lie, however thats what the UK public are being sold

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 4:22 PM

I’ve scrolled through TikTok just to see what it’s about I have never been so embarrassed for humanity?!?! It is the worse of what is wrong with social media.

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 4:29 PM
Reply to  Annie

I found out TikTok has access to all your files your contacts your text messages it’s pure surveillance pure evil.

Howard
Howard
Aug 14, 2022 5:15 PM
Reply to  Annie

Annie, relax: everything has access to everything in your life The “pure evil” you speak of has a name: Terms of Service.

We the people desperately NEED our own Terms of Service, which we would require anyone who wishes our business to agree to.

Of course it wouldn’t stand up in Court.

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 5:24 PM
Reply to  Howard

We need to take back our rights our thoughts our feelings our God given rights to a fair world.These parasites are above the law we the others get punished,Laws are set out to punish the poor and enrich the rich the laws an ass.

mgeo
mgeo
Aug 15, 2022 7:15 AM
Reply to  Howard

Jimmy Carter implemented what he claimed was simplified language in business contracts. Today, most contracts remain needlessly long and obtuse. Invariably, they include a clause whereby the vendor can alter the “contract” unilaterally. That is democracy and “free market” for you.

Edwige
Edwige
Aug 15, 2022 8:13 AM
Reply to  mgeo

All but one of Carter’s cabinet was on the Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.

ttshasta
ttshasta
Aug 14, 2022 5:34 PM
Reply to  Annie

Maybe it’s a reflection? Who made the mirror? I have heard in China tiktok has many kids solving math problems, building and such. Maybe the ccp or algorithms reward different behavior for different users?

Albeit here in CA many construction workers are not the brightest.
A co worker, 46YO, buys the one chip challenge, a ghost pepper chip so hot it makes you cry, drool, and retch, which he videos himself doing and posts to facebook. He also wears a “I PEE IN POOLS” hat, .. to work.

A swath of people are infantilized, and misinformed / disinformed(?) now, which is why I read this site daily.

Annie
Annie
Aug 14, 2022 7:50 PM
Reply to  ttshasta

I read this forum daily just to feel I’m not insane and still alive 👍

Martin Usher
Martin Usher
Aug 14, 2022 8:52 PM
Reply to  ttshasta

Your co-worker is about the right age to be a middle aged punk. You’ll recall that punk was a glorified form of nihilism that was lionized in the media as being some kind of reaction to intellectualism. Most of us at the time just shrugged, made a wry joke or two and said to ourselves “They’ll grow out of it”. But just supposing they didn’t?

(FWIW — I always thought that it was Astroturf anyway — a sort of counter-counter-culture.)

Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Aug 15, 2022 7:50 AM
Reply to  ttshasta

Jing-tong-tiddle-I-pool.

Nick Baam
Nick Baam
Aug 15, 2022 2:42 PM
Reply to  Annie

Totally disagree. I’ve seen more truth on TikTok in the last six months than in the last 20 years of the New York Times.

Sebastian
Sebastian
Aug 14, 2022 4:08 PM

Another excellent Sunday reflection from Mr. Curtin – look forward to these pieces immensely. Best contributor, by far, on this site.

Thanks.

mjh
mjh
Aug 14, 2022 8:47 PM
Reply to  Sebastian

I, too, love his writing, even when I don’t fully understand it! A bit like reading poetry. And anyone who quotes, or even paraphrases, Leonard Cohen has to have a good head on his shoulders!

Nick Baam
Nick Baam
Aug 15, 2022 2:44 PM
Reply to  mjh

I’ve seen the future, it is murder, you mean?

Steph Amson
Steph Amson
Aug 14, 2022 3:28 PM

When I was a lot younger and beginning to learn about spiritual things, I heard people say ‘look within.’ One day I sat myself down, testing this advice, and tried to listen to the within. I heard nothing, and then decided there was nothing. I laugh at myself now so many years later because I realize now the whole of myself was within, my hopes, dreams, plans, everything I think. My thoughts come from myself but also from somewhere else, as Jung calls it the great unconscious. As a Swedenborgian we believe that if your conscience pricks you, that is God speaking to you. So as I thought nothing was within, really everything was, is, within.

The media is very powerful, it seems, but their version of reality is artificial, it’s something they want us to believe. In social media there are farms of paid posters championing the governments position, all to give the false impression that the population is behind them.

Going forward it comes down to the practical money world where if you don’t do what they say you will lose your livelihood, and a choice that each of us has to make. This is the war we are fighting, our power to make the hard choice to back these goons, or not. The choices we make ‘speaks’ to our friends families and acquaintances of our truth better than thousands of words, and more convincing.

I stand in UK rain
I stand in UK rain
Aug 14, 2022 4:03 PM
Reply to  Steph Amson

How true. That which is within is so undernourished in modern culture, work and life in general. This is more than the critique of culture being obsessed with surfaces and short term gain. It goes deeper than that. There is a depth, or reach, to the obsession with the without. Distance, numbers and external recognition corrode the deep (non)self, yet these very things are accorded the greatest value.

Steph Amson
Steph Amson
Aug 14, 2022 4:09 PM

Absolutely, hundred percent.

Paul Vonharnish
Paul Vonharnish
Aug 14, 2022 3:03 PM

The article brought this item to mind: >

Excerpted from: Land of Toys – Wikipedia
 
“The Land of Toys (Italian: Paese dei balocchi) is a fictional location in the Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) that is disguised as a haven of freedom and anarchy for boys and occasionally girls, but is eventually discovered to be far more sinister.”
 
“To its unsuspecting visitors (like Pinocchio and Candlewick), the Land of Toys appears to be a fantastic haven for wayward boys and girls to do whatever they want with no consequences or law; to act as they please without recrimination. However, the truer and more sinister purpose of the Land of Toys is eventually revealed: by means of a disease that affects people who never study, the boys and girls turn physically into donkeys (in Italian culture, the donkey is symbolic of ignorance, stupidity, goofiness and labor). Subsequently, they get sold by the Coachman.”

Land of Toys – Wikipedia

Refer to the section “Land of Toys in the original novel” for more insight…

Howard
Howard
Aug 14, 2022 5:20 PM

This is undoubtedly the very Land the ruling elites have discovered and are determined to get to eventually. We should do everything in our power to help them along their way.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 9:11 PM
Reply to  Howard

They are not ‘elites’

Christine Thompson
Christine Thompson
Aug 14, 2022 10:53 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

You’res so right, of course; they’re global scum. I ‘see red’ when people (writers of articles, etc) refer to them as ‘elite’.

Howard
Howard
Aug 15, 2022 3:32 AM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

On the other hand, the very term “elite” sucks – so these “ruling” psychos are welcome to it.

les online
les online
Aug 15, 2022 12:38 AM

Donkeys, of course, do lots of the work, they labour…So if you ‘never study’ you’re fated to be a worker – and no one these days wants to be a beast of burden, doing society’s shitwork…

Stewart
Stewart
Aug 15, 2022 6:07 PM
Reply to  les online

The Donkey, by G K Chesterton

When fishes flew and forests walked
   And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
   Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
   And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
   On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
   Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
   I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
   One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
   And palms before my feet.

George Mc
George Mc
Aug 14, 2022 2:39 PM

The next generation of photogenic young green activist babes is already on the assembly line:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/14/whats-the-alternative-to-give-up-environmentalist-bella-lack-the-new-queen-of-green

“Bella Lack, a leading voice in the next generation of environmentalists, is on a mission to redefine activism. She talks about optimism, collective responsibility and finishing her A-levels”

That would make her 18 though frankly she looks little more than half that age in some of those photos. Still, it’s amazing what such gritty determination can do as she undoubtedly seizes the microphone to storm the barricades which she is clearly being prevented from doing:

“For a while at school, Lack didn’t tell her friends about her interest in activism, for fear of alienation. “I thought when they found out they’d think it was so strange,” she says. (Her first Twitter handle, a pseudonym, was purposefully obscure.) Now most of her friends are educated in key climate issues, and they share and discuss new information when it drops. Still, Lack struggles with the “activist” label. “There’s a stigma,” she says. “What did Boris Johnson call them? ‘Tree-hugging, mung bean-munching eco freaks?’” She tuts. “That’s the thing about activism. It’s seen as railing against the system. Constantly castigating what’s happening.” She thrusts her hand into the air as if angrily wielding a placard. “What if it were about imagining what a different future might look like? And moving towards something better?” Car-free streets. Cleaner city air. Wild spaces in urban areas. To Lack, the fun and excitement of activism lies in developing solutions for a more positive future. “I think we need to redefine the word,” she says. This will encourage young people to “find their own way” and free them of any anxiety associated with existing labels.””

She is on a crusade against those evil businesses pushing their cars and pesky human activities and resisting the return of “Nature” to the community i.e. resisting the emptying out of the community.

Martin Usher
Martin Usher
Aug 14, 2022 9:00 PM
Reply to  George Mc

My wife’s got a cookbook that’s covered in paper from the 1970s back when it was fashionable to cover hard cover books. The paper is covered in eco-slogans that would be right at home in our contemporary pre-A level world. People have been aware of problems with ecology for generations — literally — but in order to transform anything beyond a personal level it requires a change in political outlook, aka ‘the system’. This is a no-no even today — the system can’t change, everything and everyone has to bend and adapt to it. Young people are preferred activists because a) they have no institutional memory and b) its easy to blame older generations for whatever ails us. So trite solutions will be trotted out, much noise made, a few stars are born and forgotten — and nothing changes. Again.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is planned. (But wait! Haven’t we discovered from older documentation that it had in face been planned? Are we, the people, going to learn anything from this?)

Arthur Foxake
Arthur Foxake
Aug 14, 2022 10:13 PM
Reply to  George Mc

It’s a pity there are no large, uninhabited islands left on the planet, a place without smartphones, internet access, computers, TV, hot and cold running water and all the other trappings of civilisation, where we could dump these fools and dreamers with just basic tools and food for a year and see how they get on with going back to nature.

I remember the 1960s, before all the eco – activism and woke ideology got going. Things were not perfect but we seemed to be happier and life was a lot less complicated.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 11:09 PM
Reply to  Arthur Foxake

Interesting you use the phrase: ‘…trappings of civilisation…’

Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Clive WilliamsCoronavirus
Aug 15, 2022 5:01 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

Trip dip rise fall point change stop wait stop wait stop wait…trappings post 1960’s.

les online
les online
Aug 15, 2022 12:51 AM
Reply to  Arthur Foxake

I’d just learned how to use a PC when The Pandemic was declared to be real. I’ve been spending time daily on it since…It’s gotten so that i now cant recall how it was i filled my days BC & BC (ie Before ‘Covid & Before Computer)…Slowly i slipped into The New Normal that it feels like it has Always been The Normal…
As for the Old Normal, it does seem that within it things “seemed to be happier and life was a lot less complicated” But that could be “Just My Imagination”…(Rolling Stones cc 1980s)…

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 15, 2022 1:11 AM
Reply to  les online

There is no Old Normal

There is no New Normal

There is only Change

New Name
New Name
Aug 15, 2022 4:28 AM
Reply to  Arthur Foxake

QR Codes

You forgot to add face recognition cameras and QR codes. Where would we be without them ? The last two sentences of your post contradict long first. You must be happy with convid.

wardropper
wardropper
Aug 14, 2022 2:19 PM

“Those who are never lost are forever lost. Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore”

But what about those who do find their way to shore… Are they condemned to get lost again…?

Somehow I think not. It is possible to learn from experience.

Howard
Howard
Aug 14, 2022 3:36 PM
Reply to  wardropper

The shore is an illusion, at best a narrow strip separating one endless sea from another. To remain on this “shore” is to exist within a realm closer to nothing than the sea itself.

I have never been able to fathom where this idea that life is a joyful romp through an idyllic paradise came from. Perhaps from the same religion which teaches life is terrible but will be followed by eternal bliss?

Perhaps people decided they wanted their heaven now, so they pretended the world was wonderful beyond words – and if they could just rid it of those who interfere with their sense of wonderment everything would be fine?

God the Father, as it turns out, didn’t “die”; he became God the caretaker. He tends the Garden of Panache and weeds out the naysayers.

wardropper
wardropper
Aug 14, 2022 5:48 PM
Reply to  Howard

I think for most people you are right.
I’m simply leaving room for the few who make it to a real shore, after a lot of lesson-learning, experience, self-reflection and openness to the concept of ‘spirit’.

I certainly understand where you are coming from with your, “I have never been able to fathom where this idea that life is a joyful romp through an idyllic paradise came from”.

I’ve mentioned this before, but, if you missed it, you might like this little narrative about Rudolf Steiner:

A group of his fellow workers were on a picnic with him one glorious day out in the country. WW1 was looming, and there was great unrest in Europe, despite the general feeling of the privileged and protected that everything would be okay for them.

One of Steiner’s young colleagues, affected by the idyllic surroundings and lovely weather, exclaimed, “Oh, why can’t everybody just be happy!”
To which Steiner replied, “But what if the purpose of life is not to be happy, but to learn and to work…?”

Horrendously down-to-earth for a man with such a passionate interest in the spirit, but with a strong ring of truth about it and a compelling relevance to our times – as well as to your comment, I think.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 9:19 PM
Reply to  wardropper

But what if ‘to learn and to work…’ is what makes you happy?

I always enjoyed chatting with Steiner, but he did have the habit of writing down my thoughts without absolute accuracy.

wardropper
wardropper
Aug 15, 2022 2:32 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

I think that’s exactly the point.
One is of course very lucky to find in life the sort of work which both teaches you AND makes you happy.

My own piano teacher way back told me not to worry about being ‘successful’, but to try to be a useful musician. His feeling was that success might indeed come, but it certainly isn’t a basket to put all your eggs in…

At any rate I think I have ended up being useful in the service of music, and that definitely makes me ‘happy’, even if there is always more hard work ahead.
I am one of the lucky ones – having a gift for music as well as having plenty of outlets for repaying that gift – even in retirement!

I wish everybody could be so lucky.

Incidentally, it’s almost 60 years since I first came across Steiner, and one of the reasons I still consider him an essential teacher is how well he does express what I sometimes think are my own ideas.

He is a thinking man’s thinker…

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 15, 2022 8:55 PM
Reply to  wardropper

Indeed…

Reminds me of when I was a Taoist monk back in the seventh century.

We had a liberating phrase:

“Before Enlightenment:

Chop wood carry water.

After Enlightenment:

Chop wood, carry water.”

Patrick L.
Patrick L.
Aug 15, 2022 12:22 AM
Reply to  wardropper

One of Steiner’s young colleagues, affected by the idyllic surroundings and lovely weather, exclaimed, “Oh, why can’t everybody just be happy!”

To which Steiner replied, “But what if the purpose of life is not to be happy, but to learn and to work…?

“I call this world ‘the Vale of Soul-Making'” – John Keats (dead at 25).

rememberingmonkey
rememberingmonkey
Aug 14, 2022 10:29 PM
Reply to  Howard

He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 11:15 PM

For only when they that love hate shall hate love will the love of hate be the hate of love.

Howard
Howard
Aug 15, 2022 3:36 AM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

wardropper
wardropper
Aug 15, 2022 2:40 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

Yer wot … ?

I’d like to see what that looks like in Cyrillic and Chinese script…

peter mcloughlin
peter mcloughlin
Aug 14, 2022 1:49 PM

“You can choose any issue of importance and it official explanation is certain to be untrue, obvious or subtle propaganda.”
This can certainly leave the individual in an intellectual and spiritual wilderness. But if we look to pattern we can see one thing shining brighter than anything – power. It is the one thing that seems real: but it is an illusion. Go back, and you will find truth.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/

Violet
Violet
Aug 14, 2022 1:45 PM

Anthony Hilder interviews Jordan Maxwell and Tim Cook about the global takeover plan, (1990’s).

https://youtu.be/a1uKCdn4uwo

Benton
Benton
Aug 14, 2022 11:47 AM

It’s hard to know the real “truth” in many cases and one can only keep on searching. But it is quite liberating to know that the official story in most cases is pure bullshit.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 9:21 PM
Reply to  Benton

It is usually a mixture of the ingredients of both truth and fallacy… that is the trick to keep the unwary in a state of confusion.

Benton
Benton
Aug 14, 2022 9:35 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

Sure, but if one take a step back and look at the bigger picture it becomes pretty obvious the whole thing is a fraudulent setup. And the only thing one can do is to try to fend off the details that affect you. Because whole shit is beyond any repair.

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 11:16 PM
Reply to  Benton

Sometimes the frame is more enthralling than the picture.

Benton
Benton
Aug 14, 2022 11:33 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

I used to dig deep on many issues. But since we all have a limited lifespan I don’t have the time or effort to turn every single stone to see what slimy things crawls beneath. And the end result of their actions are often more revealing than the action itself.

sabelmouse
sabelmouse
Aug 14, 2022 10:39 AM

i am rereading lessing’s shikasta, and studying ACIM at the same time. very interesting

Wisenox
Wisenox
Aug 14, 2022 10:37 AM

Here they go again.  Pay close attention to how they work these things to sucker the sheep into their own demise. 
“If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group.”

comment image

https://www.globalresearch.ca/elite-coup-kill-enslave-us-why-cant-governments-legal-actions-protests-stop-them/5787699

That was Malone’s 4th or 5th attempt of the year to get innocent people to mass protest and separate themselves, and the familiar Doctors for Covid Ethics scam is right there also.  They aren’t on your side!

We can easily see how they use bands to identify target groups when we look at history.  Here’s a couple examples:
White Armbands Day – Bosnia:
“Forcing people to wear white armbands was the last symbol of genocidal intent. White armbands signify that even those who were not forced into camps or killed had to be marked.”
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/30/for-bosnians-whitearmbanddaymarkspainfulchapter.html

Ukraine:
“Propagandist Alexander Kots said that the white bands on the sleeves indicate that these people went over to the side of the Russian army and were allegedly shot by Ukrainians forces for “collaborating” with invading Russian troops.”
https://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-mass-civilian-casualties-in-kyiv-region-staged/

Of course, there’s no need to explain how bands and stars were used to identify people in WW2 Germany.

See how they come across as some kind of movement for freedom?  See how they set up the opposition themselves by getting sheep to join in things like “We are human, we are free.”?  Its a set up, just like every other mass organized protest.  They have tried repeatedly to foment civil unrest, and they are always the ones deciding what the people protest about.  They already have a plan to execute as soon as the sheep buy into the subversion.

Its different if you protest for the reasons they decide upon, versus protesting the things that are actually important, like the patents.  One puts them on the defensive, the other puts you in the hole.
Also, the dove symbol seen on the ‘We are garbage’ flyer was also featured on the Canadian trucker convoy logo.  It means world peace.  Peace means a quiet population (one under total control and obedient).

Mike
Mike
Aug 14, 2022 4:42 PM
Reply to  Wisenox

It says Henna Maria is one of the founders of https://wearehumanwearefree.org/founders/
I don’t think she is trying to sucker anyone. She did work for the UN or something at one point tho. In this video she seems to be arguing against demonstrating with “reignite world freedom”.

Nearly all liberation movements from the past have been co-opted. This is how it happens. Pay attention my friends.

https://odysee.com/@hennamaria:3/This-Is-How-The-Freedom-Movement-Gets-Co-Opted:1

I would consider wearing an orange arm band if it helps connect with people.

Henna Maria talks about save out food movement. Sounds good to me.
https://odysee.com/@hennamaria:3/save-our-food:5

Mike
Mike
Aug 14, 2022 5:33 PM
Reply to  Mike

In this video she talks about street activism. How she has been doing it for 2 years every week and how 80% of the restaurants in the area let her group in as a result. She says it is important to give a face so people don’t buy the propaganda they see on tv. To practice communicating with people in the real world. Doesn’t look like she wears any orange arm band. Maybe it is reverse psychology to get people to not wear masks.

https://odysee.com/@hennamaria:3/WhyStreetActivismIsSoValuable:9

Wisenox
Wisenox
Aug 14, 2022 7:05 PM
Reply to  Mike

Her name is an obscure reference to John the Baptist eating cake dipped in oil. Much better job of using the symbolism than most people, though.
St John’s Bread and fruit of the carob tree, red riding hood, manna, nectar, round, shaped like a ball, gog, etc…

I actually have a deep appreciation for the symbology. I can definitively date it to 15,000bc in Lascaux caves. The original meanings were actually beautiful, but something got twisted in Akkadia or Sumer. Still have to give the award to the artist who crafted the Rockefeller oracle (Bes), though. I assume that one was a promotion for the family, because they used to consecrate their temples that way. Declared a city, declared a peak, gifted an oracle.

Her other “activisms“, her term, also show the symbolism; likes the dove.
John’s constellation is Capricorn.
Is she actually a Capricorn, or just using the screen name?

Christine Thompson
Christine Thompson
Aug 14, 2022 8:18 PM
Reply to  Wisenox

The articles which have the ‘We are human, we are free’ information/flyers are NOT written by Robert Malone! They’re written by an Australian bloke called Robert J Burrowes; he’s a regular contributor to the excellent Global Research site.
I had several exchanges of emails with him, a couple of months ago.

I do not think that he’s on the wrong side of this!!! People just can’t go around claiming that everyone who denounces what’s going on ‘must’ be ‘controlled opposition’.
Someone here on Off-G, a day or two ago, commented that they were fed up of all the posts claiming that so many people are ‘controlled opposition’. I totally agree with that commenter.
It’s verging on paranoia, for so many people to put forward the claim that most people who are, at face-value, on the right side of this, are ‘controlled opposition’. Come on…!

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 9:26 PM

It is the fallacy of the sweeping generalisation and should be given as much weight as a feather floating in the wind.

Bob the Hod
Bob the Hod
Aug 15, 2022 1:47 PM

As I read it, most accusations of “controlled opposition” actually amount to a person saying “If you don’t agree 100% with my dogma, then you must be my enemy.” So, like much else than is wrong with discourse these days, blinkered, myopic, self-defeating and predicated upon logical fallacies.

Researcher
Researcher
Aug 16, 2022 6:21 PM
Reply to  Bob the Hod

No. That’s an outright lie. There’s wolves in sheep’s clothing and recognizing them and their agents is imperative.

There are FREEMASONIC SHILLS WHO WERE ALWAYS (worked for the UN, Bankers, government, media, PhRMA) AND STILL ARE WORKING FOR THE RULING CARTEL.

Their entire aim is to keep people brainwashed and completely docile under the thumb of the controllers.

They consistently don’t expose anything of worth, often spread disinformation, but the biggest tell off all is they keep the biggest lies, such as germ theory, the fraud of virology, fake history, fake science, Freemasonry and the control and ownership of all countries (incorporated municipalities) by one cartel, a complete secret. They have the worst of intentions and they are not freedom fighters but the opposite.

They are always pushing useless approaches such as handing money over to them and their orgs, pointless protests, joining ineffective groups, and voting for their candidates, when they know very well, democracy is a complete illusion. They are pathological liars and members of the cartel.

rememberingmonkey
rememberingmonkey
Aug 14, 2022 10:36 PM
Reply to  Wisenox

Is it really Malone or someone using his name? If. as we are constantly being told, that we cannot know the truth, it would be prudent to make sure this is from him.

El Zafio
El Zafio
Aug 15, 2022 7:17 AM

 Debunking Robert Malone

“SARS-CoV-2”: Bailey, Cowan, Kaufman respond to Cole, McCullough and Malone
https://odysee.com/@drsambailey:c/SARS-CoV-2-Bailey-Cowan-Kaufman-respond-to-Cole–McCullough-and-Malone:3

Addressing Dr McCullough, Dr Malone and Dr Cole’s SARS-CoV-2 claims: Where’s the evidence?
https://odysee.com/@TheTruthSeeker:f/Response-to-Dr-McCullough-Dr-Malone-and-Dr-Cole%E2%80%99s-SARS-CoV-2-Claims-Where%E2%80%99s-the-Evidence:3

“There’s something VERY wrong with Dr. Robert W. Malone!”
https://stateofthenation.co/?p=103469

Robert Malone: An Enigma Wrapped in Many Unanswered Questions
https://truthcomestolight.com/robert-malone-an-enigma

Researcher
Researcher
Aug 16, 2022 6:09 PM
Reply to  Wisenox

Yes. Malone et al and anyone claiming “covid” exists is part of the controlled opposition.

They are shills using disinformation, Gematria, signs and symbols that are easily recognizable as Masonic and/or occult, such as the black crow (not a dove) symbol on that image.

Also, Orange = 33 in Gematria.

George Mc
George Mc
Aug 14, 2022 9:13 AM

I am haunted by Monbiot’s idiotic diatribe against the farming industry here:

https://twitter.com/RTE_PrimeTime/status/1549524231469371392

And I am wondering how that works. Monbiot …. Just look at him. Doesn’t he have that rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights look?

So …. in an age when the media control is unprecedentedly centralised, when the whole of visible “Science” has clearly been bought and now produces endless articles spouting the requisite phony “facts and figures”, and when the most asinine claims can be reiterated po-faced, how does this Monbiot phenomenon work? Does George get his briefing every morning? Is there a backstage “debate” which amounts to hacks getting their instructions? Has Monbiot himself been effectively lobotomised by this insultingly obvious absurd nonsense? Has he been given the “offer you can’t refuse”?

George Mc
George Mc
Aug 14, 2022 11:51 AM
Reply to  George Mc

In any case, Monbiot – whether spook or dupe – is another tool in the great impoverishment of the public. And truly spooks and dupes are scarcely to be distinguished. The distinction revolves around whether they are consciously or unconsciously following the ruling class agenda. They may even be somewhere in between. Either way, they function as zombies for the overlords.

Thus the field of The Celebrity Walking Dead, caught in a strange twilight similar to that described by Tolkien in relation to the Nazgûl. They are only semi-conscious and reside in that crepuscular world of shifting shades.  

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 9:32 PM
Reply to  George Mc

Perhaps he has ‘…that rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights look…’ because he is aware that farmers actively eradicate Leporidae?

Sgt Oddball
Sgt Oddball
Aug 15, 2022 12:38 PM
Reply to  KiwiJoker

…♪ “Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run…” ♪

Edwige
Edwige
Aug 14, 2022 9:05 AM

Funny how MSN has just spent the last couple of days recommending an article about ‘nothing’.

It all sounds like Ewen Cameron’s “de-patterning” to me, only the attempted method being societal trauma rather than ‘the sleep room’.

Donald Duck
Donald Duck
Aug 14, 2022 7:52 AM

With the end of the Pacific war (1945) the US military abandoned the airbases and stopped dropping cargo. In response, charismatic individuals developed cults among remote Melanesian populations that promised to bestow on their followers deliveries of food, arms, Jeeps, etc. The cult leaders explained that the cargo would be gifts from their own ancestors, or other sources, as had occurred with the outsider armies.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the military personnel use. Cult behaviours usually involved mimicking the day-to-day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles. The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.

In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and cut new military-style landing strips out of the jungle, hoping to attract more airplanes ‘Big Silver Bird’. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

Cargo cults were typically created by individual leaders, or big men in the Melanesian culture, and it is not at all clear if these leaders were sincere, or were simply running scams on gullible populations. The leaders typically held cult rituals well away from established towns and colonial authorities, thus making reliable information about these practices very difficult to acquire.

Coming to our own times we have own covid-mask cult. It was thought and also common practise that Magic Mask kept away covid-bogeyman. Covid-Bogie-man would carry you off if you walked outside, better to keep on magic mask. Big white automobile will cruise the streets making noise looking for victims of Covid-Bogie-man.

The whole practise has been so idiotic and childlike that one’s belief in reason and reality has been severely tested.

But alas, if all the people in the short-run can be so easily be ‘fooled’ step by step into something which they do not want, and if this is not an exception which we could afford to neglect, then no amount of retrospective common sense will alter the fact that in reality they neither raise nor decide the issues but that the issues that shape their fate are normally raised and decided for them. 

Edwige
Edwige
Aug 14, 2022 8:58 AM
Reply to  Donald Duck

Try the Dennis O’Rourke 1981 documentary ‘Yap: how did you know we’d like TV?’ for the Pacific islands in reality in more recent times. The Americans in it are so obviously CIA-pretending-not-to-be-CIA it’s hilarious. The film can be found for free download.

Placental_Mammal
Placental_Mammal
Aug 14, 2022 1:24 PM
Reply to  Donald Duck

Melanesia

There is something magical about the South Pacific. The coral reefs are amazing. As are the volcanoes. Manta Rays. I wonder how much ecological damage the US forces did while they were there.

Victor G.
Victor G.
Aug 14, 2022 3:40 PM

I wonder how much ecological damage all the above ground nuclear testing did?
Too bad Petra has abandoned us. I think, at heart, she was trying to comfort us with her personal Occam’s Razor and the certainty that it’s all a hoax …

KiwiJoker
KiwiJoker
Aug 14, 2022 9:35 PM
Reply to  Victor G.

They were below ground as well.

And they weren’t tests.

Christine Thompson
Christine Thompson
Aug 14, 2022 8:25 PM

One of the books I’m currently re-reading is Paul Theroux’ “The Happy Isles of Oceania”. I first read it 25+ years ago.

mgeo
mgeo
Aug 15, 2022 7:29 AM

The nuclear test sites, nuclear waste (dumped up to maybe 1980s), decommissiond nuclear subs (that have been sunk), Great Garbage Patch (from consumerism) and certain chemical wastes continue to do their work.

Captain Birdheart
Captain Birdheart
Aug 14, 2022 7:06 AM

For a country of lost children, this is a good place to start.

Second interview

Edwige
Edwige
Aug 14, 2022 9:00 AM

The film CITY OF LOST CHILDREN is full of creepy child abuse hints. The lost boys are of course in Peter Pan and were the Victorian name for children who’d disappeared into trafficking/abuse. J.M. Barrie’s interest wasn’t benign judging by those children he “adopted”.

Placental_Mammal
Placental_Mammal
Aug 14, 2022 1:26 PM

Freely available on goo tube. Not something they would automatically censor like “vaccine” deaths and damage.

Patrick L.
Patrick L.
Aug 15, 2022 9:08 AM

Admin, why was my comment deleted? Was it the word “bawbag” that caused offence?

“It’s 2022, Year 3 of COUPVID, censorship is rife, inflation is rampant, everyone is worried, and this bawbag in my home town thinks it’s a good use of his own and other people’s time to go around pestering them to believe that the earth might be flat”