@TheFinest: Watched it... definitely a nice production.
I think a lot of the speculation about "physical" versus "spiritual" is quickly dispatched with one word: causality. If it affects you, it's causal. Whether it's "solid/material" or "intangible/immaterial" is irrelevant. All that matters is caus-and-effect.
Also, I think a lot of the supposed tension between "science" and "psychic phenomena" is resolved in one term: human ends. I think these drugs shake the presuppositions that we so easily carry around that we exist for the purpose of following commands and obeying orders. When this is shaken, you realize what you really are - a real being of the Universe that stands as a peer with any other. There can be no hierarchy when you partake of the deepest structure of reality in the Universe with anyone else. No priest, no theologian, no doctor, no king, no President, no general can any longer tell you your place in the world. You already know your place in the world and you know their place in the world and you know that it is the same. We all partake of the same reality as peers.
Hence, your own ends are on a par with the ends of any other individual. Collectivism as a justification for plunder simply goes right out the window. But so does materialism in the sense that costly material goods are a precondition to happiness/fulfillment. These are the twin pillars of Western civilization which is why it's so unsurprising that the Establishment is implacably opposed to the use of these psychedelics.
One of the things that have been consistently reported is the sensation of "other beings" and the feeling of communion or even conversation with these beings. This mitigates against my assertion above that the majority of the causal factors of consciousness reside within the skull. But another term I've heard used by more than one person is the feeling that one is a "radio tuner" or "radio receiver"... I wonder if this might not be literally true? The pineal gland has crystals in it and is situated in a position in the skull such that the skull could actually act as a parabolic for EM waves.
So this makes me curious if day trips are characteristically different from night trips. If so, this might not be solely a function of daylight or the absence thereof but of the difference between the EM radiation of the Sun and that of the Moon. We can detect high-frequency RF signals from the planets and other bodies (including Earth)... perhaps the pineal gland is sensitive to these? Experiments with shielding while taking DMT might help answer that question.
One other source of the sensation of talking to entities should also be kept in mind, namely, that these might be "archetypal beings" that really do reside within the skull and are activated by real people when they begin to fill that role. For example, if someone begins to assert a position of dominance over us, there is a set of automatic feelings and sensations that overtake us and "color" our experience with that individual. The vast majority of this has little or nothing to do with what that individual is objectively saying or doing and has mostly to do with a kind of theater being orchestrated within our own heads. The actors in that theater are purely fictional beings with purely fictional intentionalities - threats of punishment, promises of reward, lures and traps - whose purpose is to help us "simulate" or "anticipate/predict/understand" (in a praxeological sense) the behavior of those we interact with. I'm not saying this excludes the possibility of external realities - perhaps mediated through EM waves or something more subtle that the brain can "tune into" but which other scientific instruments cannot detect - only that we need to be aware that there is a distinction between the feeling of intentionality in awake consciousness which is always due to interaction with a real, intentional being and the feeling of intentionality which may occur in an altered state of consciousness where it is not clear precisely what is responsible for this sensation. It could very well be "all in our heads."
Clayton -
Clayton: Hashem:You're wrong about almost everythingCan you be more specific
Hashem:You're wrong about almost everything
I meant it with a playful tone, so the rest of the sentence was meant to show that. In other words I wasn't being serious, even though we've had some rigorous disagreements I was pointing out how cool the oddness of our point of similarity was over Thunderbolts of the Gods.
Really fascinating lecture courtesy NPA. Whatever the deficiencies of the NPA website, this is real science:
Thank you Clayton! I absolutely loved that lecture. I had always wondered about how a single cloud. This theory they have going is amazing. I want to buy his book but I had trouble understanding what his name was... any chance you were able to make out what it was and what his book was called.
I highly recommend watching that video everyone. As Clayton said, real science my friends. It's exciting!
The only one worth following is the one who leads... not the one who pulls; for it is not the direction that condemns the puller, it is the rope that he holds.
@Phi: http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/new-book/
OK, I'm going to go all Dan Brown on you all...
a) The Last Supper does indeed contain symbolism. But the symbolism is astronomical. Jesus, the center of the painting, represents the Sun. The disciples flanking him on each side are in groups of three... one group for each of the seasons. They are the signs of the Zodiac.
b) Just discovered this painting today. Holy crap. If you think the Last Supper has symbolism, this painting blows it out of the water. I'll just give my free-flow-of-consciousness thoughts on it.
Notice the keys. The silver key is pointing to the Earth. The gold key is pointing to Jesus (the Sun). The keys to the kingdom of heaven are the Earth and the Sun. Like DaVinci's painting, the disciples are arranged six on each side, flanking Jesus. They are the signs of the Zodiac.
The temple of Solomon in the background is also a symbol of the Sun. Look at the golden-domed roof. But even more fascinating, the temple has four porticos, pointing in each of the cardinal directions. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. Each of these porticos is a season and represents three of the signs. Zoom in on the portico facing the viewer. Note how many men are standing there.
But it doesn't stop here. Look at the arches on each side of the temple. These are the equinoctial points, the points in Earth's orbit where we go through the "gate" of equal day/night. But wait a minute. Sun in the center, Earth going around. What is the term for that?? Heliocentrism! In 1480!!! Holy crap!!!!!111
In case you doubt the meaning of the arches, look even more closely. At the top, you will notice a band of twelve diamonds. Twelve. The Zodiac is the clock that tracks the annual motion of the Sun against the stars. Notice that the arches do not have a single passage. Rather, it is a prominent passage, flanked by two minor passages. The minor passages are the orbit of the Moon about the Earth whose orbit goes through the central passage.
Now we know what the big plaza is. It is the orbital plane.
By the way, this may account for the odd shape of the Christian cross - it depicts the elliptical orbit of the Earth as it goes around the Sun. During Winter (northern hemisphere), we make our closest approach to the Sun (the short leg of the cross), during Spring and Fall, we are at equal distances from the Sun (the equal, horizontal legs of the cross) and during Summer (northern hemisphere), we are at the greatest distance from the Sun (long leg of the cross). In fact, we usually reach aphelion (furthest distance from the Sun) during July 4th/5th. Independence Day. Think about that, "independence".
OK, that's all I have for now. There's a lot more to this painting so I'll be studying it in the future...
Clayton: OK, I haven't posted anything really weird in too long. [...] [...]
OK, I haven't posted anything really weird in too long. [...]
[...]
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
Clayton:Heliocentrism! In 1480!!! Holy crap!!!!!111
I have been wondering how much was known by TPTB before it was known by the masses, and for how long. It seems as if TPTB have been using their better understanding of the universe and "corrupting" knowledge to their favor, and that this has been one of the reasons they have been able to maintain their status.
For example, food. I forget where heard about this, but essentially that, tradionally, grains have been feed to slaves and laborers while the royals ate meats and fats. Rewatch all of those movies involving royalty and in which feats are had. The feast were high in meats/fats and low on grains.
All this leads to the conspiracy that TPTB have been pushing a diet to the masses that weakens them because they know of the effects on the body of a high-grain and low-fat diet.
@The Muff: Nice find. That is clearly a depiction of Sun worship. Here's Carlin on Sun worship:
I think the Glad You Came video has a lot more layers in terms of symbolism but looking at this, I might venture a guess that the band members are representing the five lesser lights (the minor planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) who literally "chase" the Sun through the sky. Mercury chases it most tightly, Venus next most tightly and so on.
It also seems to have a proselytic component. The Sun tattoo is being spread by some kind of intangible transmission in the early part and then there's some gratuitous vampire bites at the end... lol. Anyway, cool that you found another song by these guys with clear astrological overtones.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. There are no conspiracies. History is unfolding just as it is reported to be unfolding in the headlines of the New York Times.
Autostereograms. Anyone else here looked at these before? The first time I ran into these was probably 1995 and it just totally blew my mind. Not only could I not figure out how the hell they worked, I noticed that once the hidden picture is "in focus", the entire stereogram changes in character. The colors themselves become brighter and almost seem to sparkle or radiate. You can see the difference by bringing the hidden picture in focus, holding it, then snapping back quickly to the bare picture - the colors look dull by comparison.
What the hell is that? The colors are the same yet somehow different. Those who have experimented with psychedelics consistently report colors more brilliant than those of ordinary experience.... green that is greener than the greenest green you have ever seen, and so on. The colors in the autostereogram - once in focus - seem that way to me. They almost have an other-worldly sparkle or shine to them. Comments welcome.
Human visual system recognizes shiny surfaces by differences in colors in images coming from left/right eyes (I am not talking about geometrical/perspective diff here, only colors). For completely "Lambertian" surfaces, the colors are identical. For moderately shiny surfaces, the colors depend on an angle to observer, so the left/right images differ moderately (in color). When colors differ wildly for very small differences in angle, the mind interprets this as extremely shiny surfaces.
In autostereograms, there are a lot of microscopic differences between left/right images, so the mind interprets them as shiny.
Source? (Not that I doubt you, just curious to dig around some more). The difference is striking to me - looking at a printed page with an autostereogram on it is more like looking an image on a computer screen. While in focus, the picture appears to be "lit from behind", as it were. I guess maybe that's the essence of the effect - the colors appear to be far more brightly lit or "sparkly/shiny" than they are when viewed normally.
Um... The last time I read about this was some 25 years ago, in a Soviet magazine for kids, no less.
I guess it's quite obvious that slight changes in view angle cause the more pronounced changes in light flow in exactly the places with high reflectance ("shiny"). In other words, "shiny" => "high variance of luminance by viewing angle" => "images for left and right eyes may differ drastically". This is trivially demonstrated by holding a mirror so that one eye sees in it the sun, while the other sees some dark object.
That the human eye reverses this causal chain for recognition is the usual application of natural selection (or any other idea of getting fit to live). So the mind makes inference "images for left and right eyes differ drastically" => "the surface is shiny".
Of course, this "binocular" detection is not the only mechanism for detection of shininess - people can easily tell shiny objects from dull based on flat images - they look for pronounced variance in luminance (bright spots, "specularities") inside borders of the same object, instead of among two images of it.
I would google up something, but my current connection is terrible. I would use keywords "binocular" and "specular reflection" and "detection" or "recognition". This looks a bit relevant, despite being about computer vision, not humans: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/BOOKS/MAYHEW/scan/139-146.pdf.
@Andris: Thanks for the resource, I'll take a look through that. I guess the part that is most remarkable to me is the artificiality of the effect and how jarringly disjoint the autostereogram is with respect to the rest of the visual field. You can detect this by holding the hidden picture in focus with your eyes but concentrating your mental attention on the rest of your visual field, which looks qualitatively different from the autostereogram.
I also wonder what this can tell us about the nature of conscious experience.
Hold on, I think what you need is actually "binocular lustre" (found it mentioned on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binocular_rivalry).
A novel (I think) game idea. I'm calling it "Quantum Knights"
Equipment: Standard chess/checkers board. 16 white pieces, 16 black pieces. Pieces shaped like checkers (draughts).
Starting position: Each player arranges all his pieces on the two backmost ranks of the board - two ranks of 8 pieces.
Rules: Play proceeds by turns, beginning with white, one move per turn.
In the initial state, a piece can only move one space directly forward, backward, left or right.
A player can move a piece into any empty square, or a square occupied by the enemy (removing the enemy piece) or he can move into a square occupied by one of his own pieces by "stacking" the moving piece on top of the piece in the destination square.
When pieces are stacked together, their behavior is altered. Two pieces stacked together must move two spaces whenever the whole stack is moved. A stack of three pieces must move three spaces, and so on. However, the stack does not have to move only in one direction, it can make a single 90-degree turn. So, a stack of 3 pieces can move 3 spaces forward, backward, left or right or to any of the squares that a Knight in chess can move to.
Just as pieces can be stacked, they can also be unstacked. The top piece on any stack can be removed from the stack to any of the squares directly forward, backward, left or right of the stack. The top two pieces of a stack can be removed and placed in any of the squares reachable by a stack of two pieces, and so on. The unstacked pieces move like any other... they can move to an empty square, they can move to a square occupied by an enemy piece (removing it from the board) and they can move to a square occupied by a friendly piece and stack again on that.
Stacks should be made no larger than 8 pieces.
Moves are never "blocked" by other pieces - all moves act as a "leap", like the Knight's leap in chess.
The game is won by the last person to move (the last person who has any pieces remaining on the board).
I guess it is implied that the whole enemy stack is removed if my stack or piece lands on top of it?
BTW, don't you want to restrict rules a bit, so that either the whole stack or the topmost piece can be moved, not any part of stack? That would make high stacks less fearsome, otherwise they behave like strategic nukes. Or was the intent to model cold wars?
@Andris: Yes, the entire captured stack is removed from the board. And that limits the power of larger stacks just like the high value of a Queen in chess limits her capacity to occupy threatened squares. For example, consider a stack of 3 and a stack of 4 enemy pieces. As long as the 3-stack is "protected" by one or more other pieces, the 4-stack will never attempt to capture it because it would be an obvious loss (the 4-stack would be captured on the next move). The 4-stack can't even move within the 3-stack's attack range because the 3-stack would immediately capture the 4-stack for a net win of one piece.
Furthermore, a tall stack is not quite as powerful as it might at first seem. Consider a stack of 8 (tallest). It can move to any square reachable in 8 steps (with one 90-degree turn along the way). However, in order to move to a square reachable in 7 steps, you must "unstack" the top 7 pieces and leave one behind in the original square. To move to a square reachable in 6 steps, you must "unstack" 6 pieces and leave two behind, and so on. Hence, you can't move an 8-stack, say, 3 spaces over (in one move)*. This means that taller stacks only become more powerful in proportion to the perimeter of their territory (not area), and by virtue of their ability to unstack into less powerful stacks.
*But you can get creative... for example, an entire 8-stack could move like a 4-stack in two moves: on the first move, the top 4 pieces are unstacked and moved to the destination square, on the next move, the remaining 4-stack moves to the destination square.
Okay, Clayton, what is the deal with the new avatar?
Our very own Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking out for us, er, spying on us.
Add to this ECHELON, CALEA, V-chip, PATRIOT Act, NDAA, millimeter wave scanners, UK camera grid, US drones, Room 641A, REAL ID (now PASS ID) - most of this in the last 20 years and the majority of that since 9/11 - and you begin to wonder if the Alex Jones/David Ickes aren't so insane after all.
Of course, the TICTU logo bears more than a passing resemblance to the Bohemian Club's logo. Also note that there is an Alien's head (the black oblong encircled by the owl's wings, with the feather-tips being the eyes), as well as the a crescent-moon formed by the black semi-circle enclosed by the owl's wings. It's a sick joke but that shows the mentality. It's all just a joke to these people.
Anyway, I thought these assholes' logo deserves to be made famous. Hence, it is my new avatar.
I don't care what anyone says, David Icke is damn close to the mark. I see no reason why Rockwellian libertarianism would not be quite welcome to Ickean audiences...
The most interesting part:
Guy: Why lizards?
Icke: Why humans?
Guy: Why lizards? Icke: Why humans?
I know, how cool is that! I'm going to have to buy one of his books.
Prince William, 2nd in line to the throne of England. Born 21/6. 216 = 6 x 6 x 6
Married Catherine Elizabeth Middleton 29/4. 29+4 = 33. Catherine, 9 letters. Elizabeth, 9 letters. Middleton, 9 letters. 999 - flip it upside-down, what do you get?
Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111
Also, British royalty once dined on human flesh. How pleasant.
I really like the tenor of David Icke's message overall. Even his crazy Lizard stuff is endearing in its own, odd way (packed-out audiences paying $60 a seat seem to agree!) However, Icke has a lot of problems. His reasoning is often fuzzy-headed. This could be made up for with evidence but he usually foregoes evidentiary support. As I am someone who accepts Austrian methodology the synthetic a priori is not a big, bad no-no - I'm happy to infer truth about the world from the "subjective" facts of my own experience. But it requires a certain level of deductive discipline. The saying in my line of work (computer engineering) is, Garbage-In-Garbage-Out.
And he is not always forthcoming with his sources. Icke has been hugely influenced by Theosophy (Blavatsky, the namesake of this thread!), Alice Bailey, etc. No problem here, except that Theosophy itself is basically just a compendium of wacky, fad-beliefs from the late 19th-century. Blavatsky clearly had a big heart and wanted to nudge humanity along in its path of moral progress but, like Icke (pun!), she gave very fuzzy reasoning, little or no evidence and rarely cited her sources.
I found this very gentle and sympathetic expose of Icke on YT.
All in all, he seems to me to be a man who's trying to make a living selling his own big-hearted view of the world. There's no crime in that. But a lot of his specific statements about the nature of reality and the particular structure of the modern social order are just mumbo-jumbo. Icke is admirably wrong.
I know it's an oft repeated question, but it's one he doesn't answer: what does he base his 'lizard hypothesis' off of?
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger
@Jargon: As best as I can tell (not having read any of his books), it's a combination of revelations and purported eye-witness testimony.
They deleted the other video. YouTube is evil*.
*I'd gladly pay $20/yr. to a video-hosting service like YT without YT's bullshit
OK, depressing post. Needs to be made, though.
First off, I'm a huge fan of StormCloudsGathering. Here are two vids that explain our trajectory towards the coming war with Iran:
When you combine these videos with the understanding that 9/11 was not an accident - it was The New Pearl Harbor - you realize that the sequence of major world events since 2001 has been almost entirely scripted and is proceeding apace.
In other posts, I have speculated that the US is set to lose this war and I'm sticking by this. I believe that sophisticated contrarian investors like Jim Rogers and Marc Faber, for example, understand this coming shift. I am predicting that the US will be to WW3 what Germany was to WWI - the predestined loser in a rigged war.
Why? There are several reasons.
First and most importantly, US culture has long been a sore-spot with the Elites. It is long past due to be brought to heel. The idea of popular gun ownership, the culture of loud-mouth opinionated bumpkins mocking Very Important People like the European Elites, the idea of "inalienable rights", including strong property rights, the tiny remnant of common law in American jurisprudence, the whole concept of patriotism (suspicion towards government), and so on and so forth.
Second, much of the US debt is owed to a lot of very powerful people. They want to be repaid. The only portion of the debt that is legitimate on a libertarian analysis is that portion which is held by private investors, not public institutions that purchased it with money stolen from the taxpayers (including the Fed and foreign central banks). But if 2008 is any lesson, the world works in precisely the opposite order. The private holders of bonds are going to get shafted while the foreign institutions will be paid back every last penny. How? Anything is possible during a war and the ensuing treaty negotiations.
Third, the process of political aggregation is out-of-whack and requires "re-balancing". The process of divide-and-conquer is almost infantile in how it operates. Think of a wealthy father of two sons. Only one son will be the heir. In order to protect himself against his sons and to command their obedience, the father constantly switches his affections from one to the other son, depending on who is most ingratiating and poses the least threat to the father himself. This is literally how the royal elites operate - even in their own households. The expression of this process in the public sphere is merely a reflection of the internal order within their households and within the upper echelons of the social order (the noble and wealthy Elites). An attempt was made to bring about world government in a civilized, polite manner back in 2009 at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. When this failed, the Elites pulled the pin on the grenade. Oil platforms started blowing up, and Arab nations started toppling like dominoes and US warships kept ending up in the Strait of Hormuz and in the Indian Ocean arrayed around Iran.
The United States has long been a threat to the balance-of-power and has needed to be cut down to size. The process was to have begun much earlier but had to wait until 1913 to begin in earnest. Just look at a graph of US military spending (and overall Federal spending)... it's a bubble if there ever was one.
OK, so what's going to happen short-term?
My predictions: Gold, short-term (until the election) will continue to rise. Don't buy right now. After the election, I expect a correction period as all the people nervous about the election (haha!) will realize that the sky is not falling on Nov. 7th. The type of people who "put gold in their portfolio" in the lead-up to an election are also the types who will dump it afterwards. In other words, look for the price of gold to correct immediately after the election. Do your buying in that window.
As soon as the last ballot box closes, real inflation is going to go stratospheric. Food, gas, utilities, it's all going to the Moon. The Establishment will find some boogey-man or other to blame.
I predicted sometime back - and stand by this prediction - that we will have war within the year after the 2012 election. Unlike the 2001 Afghanistan and 2003 Iraq actions, the pretext hostilities will begin without any warning and will likely be followed by instant military response. In other words, by the time you hear on CNN that Iran has shot at US warships, we will already be over Tehran dropping bombs. I predict an instantaneous and massive callup of reserves. The dominoes will begin falling as Russia and China begin to engage and push back. This will be the trigger for a draft. The markets will basically go berserk. Paper assets will become good for rolling cigarettes, wiping yourself, and so on. Many Americans will welcome the draft as a relief from the economic impossibility of feeding oneself without a job in a near-hyper-inflationary environment.
Tick-tock.
On a lighter note:
My latest conspiracy theory:
The eugenics movement got its ass kicked in the 20th century. Like communism, eugenics is an ideology that naturally appeals to collectivists and statists. However, out-and-out eugenics (sterilization/exterimination programs) proved too bitter a pill for the squeamish public to swallow.
Today, the eugenics movement survives in many, less ambitious forms. Family law, for example, owes a lot to the eugenics laws and sterilization orders that began in the early 20th century. While those have gone by the wayside, a lot of the powers that the courts seized during that time simply morphed and survive to this day.
The Alex Jones types think that the eugenics movement is about population reduction. It's not and never has been. It has always been about reconstitution of the population. And while the academic eugenicists - the ones who have written the position pieces and journal articles on eugenics - have consistently stated that eugenics is about "consciously guiding human evolution" towards "greater intelligence", "greater health disposition", "greater athletic prowess" and so on, the fact is that the Elites care about one parameter more than all others combined: servility. Everything else is negotiable.
You've read the stuff about Schwarzenegger having Nazi connections (his father was a Nazi and there are photos of Arnold himself wearing a Death's Head SS emblem, for example). This has always made me deeply curious. Arnold has been promoted way, way beyond his inherent talents. While he was a world class bodybuilder, there were many other contemporaries who were absolutely as good, perhaps better in some ways. Look at Lou Ferrigno, for example, who lost to Arnold at the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition.
So here's my conspiracy theory. I don't believe the Nazi party was a wholly endogenous movement within Germany. The conditions for radicalizing the German population were established at Versaille and I believe (but cannot prove) that the rise of the Nazi Party was catalyzed by money from the international Elites. After Nazi Germany had played its role in WWII, all the "good stuff" from the Nazis - including the rocket program (later became NASA), eugenics, etc. - was salvaged and exported.
In particular, we know that the Elites decided to switch from a policy of "negative" eugenics to a policy of "positive" eugenics... trying to alter the reproduction patterns of the population based on positive incentives. The spread of easy-money, single-Mom welfare, for example, is perfectly in line with the actual eugenical program, even though it contradicts the surfacial academic/scientistic eugenics program (breeding smarter people). What matters is that welfare subsidizes the breeding of the servile.
But we also have seen a massive rise in the harping on physical fitness and athleticism. If you were to rank the attributes that the Elites would want to breed in the public, they would be in order: 1) servility/conformity, 2) bullet-proof health (no matter diet, sedentariness, toxin intake, etc.), 3) athleticism (especially hand-eye coordination and small-motor control) 4) technical intelligence (but not social intelligence as this mitigates against #1).
Public policy programs - such as easy-welfare money - can only go so far in promoting these eugenical goals. At some point, some kind of intervention into breeding patterns is necessary. This is where I wonder if Lebensborn itself was salvaged and continues to secretly exist - initially in the bodybuilding movement (for which Mr. Schwarzenegger was an early poster-boy) - and later spreading across the athletic world. I cannot specify precisely how the program would work except to note that sexual laxity has made out-of-wedlock pregnancy fairly painless in many parts of the world where eugenicists have influence. The 2010 movie Salt, for example, contains a suggestion along these lines with Evelyn Salt herself being the daughter of a chess-grandmaster (mother) and champion wrestler (father). No mention is made of her parents being married or any other facts about her parents beyond their exceptional talents.
Anyway, this is more of a conspiracy hypothesis than a conspiracy theory. If anyone is aware of any evidence or writings along these lines, references are very welcome.
Wisdom from Russell Means.
Clayton: The conditions for radicalizing the German population were established at Versaille and I believe (but cannot prove) that the rise of the Nazi Party was catalyzed by money from the international Elites.
The conditions for radicalizing the German population were established at Versaille and I believe (but cannot prove) that the rise of the Nazi Party was catalyzed by money from the international Elites.
Antony Sutton did.
@Jargon. Nice, thanks. Available here.
Disclaimer: This post isn't about solutions. I'm just describing the problem.
There is a theme in much of fiction: the "dark side", dark forces, dark arts, sorcery, etc. This theme is also present in religion. Here is a fairly decent lecture by an SDA preacher on the unsavory history of the Jesuits from day one:
Lest too much credit be given to the Jesuits, I will state outright my view that the Establishment is an impossibly complex logjam of entangled relationships, loyalties, hatreds, symbioses, and so on. I point out the Jesuits only to illustrate the true nature of the Establishment in general. The Jesuit order is one of the most well-organized and most frankly hate-filled organizations on the planet and, of course, in the name of all that is holy and good.
The existence of the dark side is literally true at least in the sense that it is a component of the human psyche, the human soul. The Establishment that has come to dominate the world today is almost wholly an expression of the dark side. The dark side is not merely human foibles - revenge, jealousy, greed, etc. The dark side is a cultivation of human weakness, a carefully calculated exploitation of human weakness.
I think the greatest expression of the dark side is in luring people into self-treachery - preparing them to betray themselves from the day they are born. What is self-treachery? It is willing enslavement, willing cuckoldry, willing despoilation. Once put into the context of the dark side, the obsession of the Establishment with children - educating them, indoctrinating them, manipulating them, abusing them - becomes self-explanatory. To put it in the starkest terms possible, the Establishment sees children as the next generation of willing slaves.
Modern culture encourages a lot of ego-boosting ideas - you have a voice in politics (you don't), your vote affects the outcome (it doesn't), you are a peer in the unfolding of science (you're not), in the study of history (you're not), everything is new and modern and different than it was 200 years ago (it's not) and so on. In other words, the Establishment encourages the common man to feel that the era of elitism is long since over. We're all peers now, merely as a matter of fact.
The reality is that a great deal of history is simply fabricated. A great deal of science is nonsense. All of electoral politics is an idle waste of time. If you are a serious-minded person who reads the news, reads books, and so on, you need to realize that you are being lured into consuming your time in frivolities. "Obama down 3 points on less-than-stellar debate performance." And you'll waste an hour reading an article spelling out in excruciating detail every possible eventuality of the election... all of which are equally meaningless to you.
This is culture jamming. The dark side employs the means of war to subjugate and manipulate the population. But it's the scope of the thing that is its true genius. The human mind measures everything by ratios; in music, you hear whether a pitch is "higher" or "lower" and you hear whether two pitches are harmonious or dissonant... but you do not hear that one pitch is precisely 223.983 cycles per second. So, when the entire baseline of cultural normalcy is pushed down, no one notices that the culture is being debased. The ambition of the Establishment knows no bounds... they manipulate - at one level or another - literally the entire economy. But the manipulation does not stop at the economy. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Art, music, news, media, web content, web apps, and on and on, are all tools of manipulation.
In the lecture linked above on the Jesuits, the lecturer reads a quote regarding the Jesuit plan to take over the adamantly Protestant American South by seeding Catholic families throughout the South and then literally breeding Protestantism out. Is it really so insane? Have you ever wondered why the floodgates of the Southern US border have been thrown open to a flood of illegal immigration by almost exclusively Catholic Mexicans and other South Americans? Have you ever wondered really why the Catholic church is anti-birth control? They don't give a rat's ass about non-Catholics. In fact, they're happy if non-Catholics use birth-control. Where their position matters is in respect to Catholics because they're the ones that will be told by their priest or whatever that they can't take birth-control.
Of course, two can play this game and do. Some strains of Protestants are vehemently anti-birth control and conscientiously natalist. I once listeed to a Presbyterian minister deliver a sermon on the judgment God is visiting on Presbyterians for allowing birth-control into their midst, causing a collapse in the church as average family size has shrunk, depleting the ranks of new Presbyterians.
But returning to the point of scope and elitism; Hitler said in Mein Kampf (ghost-written by a Jesuit, by the way):
... in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
It is the scope of the dark side that makes it work. It's just like how a central bank works - by stealing a penny from everyone, day after day, year after year, compounding in interest as it goes, the water level is continually rising and nobody seems to notice because all boats rise with the tide. Yet the differential between the early and later users of new money that redistributes wealth from the later users to the early users is how we are robbed. It wouldn't work if the central bank just zeroed out the bank accounts of all the billionaires and transferred their funds to the government. Then there would be a massive outcry. It's the fact that we're all suffering at the same rate, so that the individual who points it out is the whiner, the complainer, the lazy-bones who just can't handle the "pace of modern society". In truth, he is the perceptive individual, the one who has seen that we're all on hamster wheels running ourselves to death for the benefit of another. Our children are despoiled so that the children of the Elite can fly around in Leerjets and ride around in Rolls Royces paid for on our backs.
Consider the heart-rending case of the Belgian girls killed, starved and raped in dungeons by European elites. "What?" you say, "I never heard of this". Of course you didn't. Why did this happen? Is there really a "worldwide Satanic conspiracy"? Yes and no. The sorcerers of the dark side are not a monolith. They hate each other as much as they despise and trample the common man underfoot. But the means they employ are inherently monolithic because it is the same human nature that they are exploiting, one and all.
Returning to the case in Belgium, why did this happen and at that time? Well, the Maastricht Treaty forming the European Union had been signed just a couple years prior and Brussells is its headquarters. How interesting that a sex ring reaching to the pinnacles of power should be discovered - and covered-up by the bluntest means - just a few years afterward? I can give you a good hypothesis of precisely why these girls were abducted, raped and murdered... it was done not to worship Satan but to "seal the deal". Lavish parties were thrown for very senior people in the respective governments and all kinds of "excesses" were made available to these "VIPs" ... illegal drugs, prostitutes and, "Shhhhhh, don't tell anyone but (whispering) there's a girl downstairs who would like to meet you... follow me." Ah, the wonders of hidden video cameras plus drugs, prostitutes and underage girls to manufacture dirt. The same thing has been done in the US - cf the Franklin Scandal.
Are you starting to get the picture? The fact is that we are slaves. We live in a culture of command, punishment and liability. You work because you are told to work, not because you can earn a profit and provide for your own family. The means for protection from exploitation by your fellow man are largely absent, and we stand naked and vulnerable to our superiors. The process of divide-and-conquer has been pushed to an ever-finer level of granularity. Have you ever browsed Internet pornography? Is there anyone who hasn't? Have you ever wondered why the government is so intensely interested in tracking what websites you visit?
Do you see? The same means by which the dark side is used to yoke politicians to the will of the Establishment are in the works to be applied to you and me as individuals. You think we live in an enlightened era of sexual tolerance? Think again. They can flip a switch and social tolerance of sexual deviancy can be reset to 1472 AD levels overnight. Human nature has not changed one iota since the Dark Ages... human nature is essentially a biological constant. The Establishment understands this and they are happy to encourage the wider public to engage in every imaginable kind of excess. Sure, use drugs. Watch porn. Gamble your money. Meanwhile, they'll be carefully recording your every act and stashing it in their infinite database in Moab, Utah.
But, remember, everything is new and different now! This is the message put out by the Establishment as a lure. "On or about December 1910, human character changed." - Virginia Woolf.
This is the dark side. This is how they operate. Deception, misdirection, guilt, shame, extortion, threats, thuggery. All around the world, there are different faces doing the beating, spying and intimidating, but the modus operandi is always exactly the same. It is the dark side. It is a kind of sorcery that evokes an involuntary response within the victim, an involuntary reflex of helplessness and powerlessness that psychologically compels submission, even in the most willful and insolent individual who is subjected to it. And it is so predictable, so automatic a mechanism that an entire machine has been built whose sole purpose is the exploitation of this response in every facet of human life. Drugs, causal sex, dancing, smoking, prostitution... every entertainment or vice which is, in excess, at worst a minor weakness of human nature... every one of these relatively benign behaviors has been converted through the power of the dark side into a hook for manipulation and exploitation.
It is sorcery and it should be taken as seriously as sorcery was once taken. Everything's new and different, remember? And God is dead, and so is religion. The Vatican is a non-entity and the Jesuits are just a figment of the imagination of paranoid conspiracy theorists. There is neither good nor evil, just a happy, warm, all-embracing mediocre as Democracy ushers the world into The End of History.
Clayton,
Perhaps you have done so, but could you outline why it is that you believe that there is indeed "an establishment", rather than governments as they present themselves?
outline why it is that you believe that there is indeed "an establishment", rather than governments as they present themselves?
Of course there are governments and they are what they present themselves to be (territorial monopolists on the use of legitimate violence, etc.) But the popular view is that "that's all there is to it." That's not all there is to it. Maybe 200 years ago, that was most of the story. The King was King and that was pretty much it. There was still a back-story, though. The back-story was all the intrigues, running family feuds, inter-marriages, infighting, diplomatic courtships and betrayals, and so on.
The orthodox history of the rise of democracy is that the monarchs became obsolete but the stupid morons never figured it out. Ever. One by one, they were toppled by the "natural forces" of democracy, wringing their hands "oh dear!" First France. Then Russia. Then Austria-Hungary. And on and on. Of 22 monarchs at the onset of the 20th century, just 9 were still sitting on a throne by the end of WWII.
Today, we have a "sanitized" view of politics. The superficial apparatus of government is all there is to it. If you speak of "shadowy forces", you mean that there are these sinister people with the collars of their trenchcoats turned upward tip-toeing around the halls of government power, subverting it to their own ends. But this is based on the backwards/upside-down orthodox history, which is simply not credible. Only if the stupid monarchs and their nobility stupidly stood by whiile they were swept over by a tidal wave of democracy whose innate power vastly exceeded their own could this view be believed.
Governments operate at the behest of their owners. That's the key. Governments are, in fact, what they appear to be ... except that they also happen to be the property of somebody or other. We're not used to the idea of property that is not itself the creation of government statutes. That's why it's so hard to conceive of a government itself as property. But it's right there in front of your face. She repeatedly says "My government." Think about that. People say "the Queen is separate from politics". You bet she is. She's separate from the politics of her governments (she has 16) like she's separate from the inner-workings of her Rolls Royces... politics is best left to politicians and mechanicking to mechanics.
When seen in the proper light, you realize that the idea that the "Establishment" is some kind of shadowy, subversive minority among the ranks of government bureaucrats, desperately hiding their dangerous secrets from the co-worker across the aisle is completely wrong-headed. The Establishment are a tiny, shadowy minority that stands entirely above and apart from the political apparatus of government. They can say "our government(s)" because they actually own them.
However, owning governments - or anything that the Elites own, for that matter - is not as simple as plunking down sacks of gold and signing the transfer of title. Control of governments has always been an insanely complicated and entangled business. Colonialism, in particular, has multiplied the complexity. The international power of religious, cultural and ethnic identities further complicates things. The rise of the mercantile class (industrialization/capitalism) has been another complicating factor. I also tend to take a deflationary view of the rise of populist movements (democracy, communism, unionism, etc.) as I believe the Elites have invariably had a hand in fostering these movements as weapons to use against one another more than those movements have actually reflected any "awakening" on the part of the masses or power-shift away from the Elites to the masses.
The United States is best viewed as a rat's nest of all of these complexities rolled into one, giant ball of string. But the one thing that the US government is most certainly not is "... one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." The idea that the President is the most powerful man in the nation - let alone the world - is infantile.