Why America… why did you choose the Orange Ignorant Again?
On November 5, 2024, by the slimmest of margins, Americans made a fatal decision. Donald tRump and his reality star-studded cast of clowns were given back the reigns of power of the most powerful country in the world.
November 5 marks a drastic decline for the USA. The choice Americans made that day shows the world that a slim majority of Americans are perfectly fine with:
Consuming mountain loads of misinformation and calling it reality;
Putting their needs, their beliefs, their biases above everyone’s else; and
Gladly giving power to rapists, pedophiles and sex offenders, misogynists, racists, fascists, cheaters, deceivers, liars, and basically the Basket of Deplorables (or another word for them is Fools) that Hillary Clinton aptly classified Trump voters as being back in 2016.
If we can even recover from this tragic state of affairs, to regain even a small amount of normalcy in this country again, Americans by the bucket loads need to feed their minds with potent, powerful archetypal food. Archetypes are what make it possible to be conscious. Without awareness of them and how they impact us, we are doomed to our bad karma and collective fate, which at this point is really not looking good at all (except if you’re living in the Upside Down… then, you are having a hay day, until… BOOM… consequences hit!
Rise of Creepy Sycophantsin Corporate Media
And corporate America, left leaning or right leaning, has a lot of accounting for this fatal choice, a choice fueled by the love of money.
Corporate Media treats Trump and his campaign of if it were a legitimate player in American politics. It is not legitimate. It is insane. But rather than reporting on the insanity, they gave precious air-time to Trump’s sycophants, brown-nosers, teacher’s pets, suck-ups, flunkeys, bootlickers, toadies, minions, and parasites.
One is featured below.
Entertaining Ourselves to Death
Really CNN?! You think Americans need more performance reality in the wake of the defeat of intelligence, sanity, along with measured and judicious action!
Trump and MAGA know moment like these get CLICKS and VIEWS
I read this book in 1985, but Americans haven’t learned a damned thing since then. Indeed, ignorance has only deepened and grown worse than what Neil Postman warned us about.
And, oh wait, you did read it. You give an endorsement of it:
“It’s unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.” – CNN
But you didn’t understand a thing Postman said. Because now, you, CNN is one of the worst offenders of what Postman warned us about in his book. Fox of course is so full of amusing itself and its viewers, it can’t even be called a News Show anymore. Rather, Fox is a gateway to the long rabbit hole into ignorance, hate, deceit, criminality, and fascist radicalization into the MAGA Cult.
Here are some of the reasons you, CNN, contributed to Trump’s sweeping victory:
Token Republican My Ass — Scott has gone full out, mad man MAGA
CNN keep Scott on because moments like this GET CLICKS and VIEWS!!!!
And This Scene leads to More CLICKS, CLICKS, CLICKS and VIEWS … because there is nothing that a MAGA Maniac likes better than to watch a helpless mommy trying to put a wayward, bad boy in his place… and better yes, watching this mommy give up and self-destruct with plastic surgery and lots of boozes–like tRump’s first wife Ivana Marie Trump
ALL THAT GLITTERS Ivana Trump in 1986 at Mar-a-Lago, which she restored. By Norman Parkinson / Iconic Images.
Ivana Marie Zelníčková escaped from behind the Iron Curtain to storm New York City and help create the twisted miracle of Donald Trump. From her “greed is good” heyday to her post-divorce denouement cavorting with a series of “freaky” Italian lovers, it was Ivana, all along, who gilded the Trump name.
Until she didn’t. Some said she began to aspire to things he despised: society, charity boards, fashion shows, grand balls, and grand people. “The phonies,” Trump called them. “He didn’t want a copilot,” one longtime Trump observer will later say. “He wanted a cheerleader.”
Soon, the cameras shone more on her and less on him, “and he was not going to have it,” said Adams.
The divorce sweeps the world. A tawdry romance novel sprung to life, it opens with Trump and his mistress Marla Maples creasing the sheets in Trump-owned hotels. Everyone seems to know except Ivana.
“I always stand by the man,” she says.
Now she is standing in the three-bedroom suite in the Little Nell Hotel in Aspen. It is the Christmas holiday of 1989, and Ivana, at 40, has been reborn via a makeover by the renowned cosmetic surgeon Steve Hoefflin. She’s had “a face-lift, a bosom inflation, and heaven only knows what else,” wrote Liz Smith, who didn’t recognize the new Ivana—until she spoke.
Inside the suite, she picks up a landline and hears her husband on the extension speaking to a local real estate agent about someone whose name she hasn’t heard before.
“Who is Moolah?” she demands.
“Well, that’s a girl who has been going after me for the last two years,” Trump replies.
Somehow, Trump has juggled Ivana and the 26-year-old Maples at holiday parties, keeping them separate and seemingly satisfied. But his luck runs out at Bonnie’s, the rustic lunch spot at the top of Aspen Mountain. He’s sitting with Marla and some friends when Ivana walks in, trailed by Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric.
Marla, in a black ski suit, approaches Ivana, in red and pink, and delivers a line that, as an aspiring actor, she has surely rehearsed: “I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?”
In an instant, Ivana replies: “Get lost. I love my husband.”
Then, as she has done all her life, Ivana charges. Not at Moolah—at The Donald. “We were halfway through lunch, and she’s coming toward us, screaming, ‘You no good son of a bitch!’ ” says someone who was at Trump’s table. Trump intercepts her halfway across the crowded room. “And she’s just flailing on him.” (Asked for comment, Marla Maples did not respond.)
They exit and the lunch crowd rises as one to watch from the deck. “He clicks into his skis and you could tell that she’s looking at him, like, ‘Really? You’re going to try to ski away from me?’ ” He tries, but she is fast on his tail. Back at the Little Nell, Ivana hurls her husband’s clothes and Rolex watch out of the windows of their suite and into the snow.
Next comes the unthinkable, at least for Trump. Everyone seems to side with her.
Don’t let me stop the story, go to Vanity Fair. Read the whole article.
Ivana’s rise is indeed much more impressive than The Donald’s. But the MAGA-verse, which we have all ended up living inside since Nov. 5, 2024, is absolutely horrible to older, formerly glamorous and fabulous women.
Ivana’s Fall… literally… is devastating. And now, she lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in an unkempt part of tRump’s golf course.
And Another Fabulous Side Trip of What Happened to Another Beautiful, Smart Woman Who Became Entangled with a Megalomaniac Man
It Should Be Titled: The Black Snake’s Rise to Power and Ultimate Control of the World!!!!!
Now…Back to the Boring Scott Jennings…
Really Scott Jennings… is that so?
An yet, here he is, the Brown nosing Scott Jennings who is the epitome of fake, hallow, inauthentic news
However, even the bootlicker Jennings admits comedy in America is getting a tremendous boost post 2024 election. However, if Americans are just tuning in for a laugh, and then going back to minimizing the disaster that has befallen America… it’s not helping us.
And so, Our Consolation Prize is theRise of Comedy
Comedy is the Only Sector Growing by Leaps and Bounds post November 5, 2024
Weekend Update: Trump Wins 2024 Election, Becomes First Felon Elected President – SNL
SNL for Trump Cold Open – SNL
Elon Musk Slams Dana Carvey’s ‘SNL’ Impression of Him — Anything that Pisses Elon off is Totally Funny and We Need More of That
Trump and Biden Meeting Cold Open – SNL
But, it is not enough!
Enter from Stage Left, the MeidasTouchNetwork
This new News Network is helping fix what corporate media broke.
LIVE: Trump Handed MAJOR LEGAL DEFEATS in Transition | Legal AF || STAY INFORMED & INSPIRED BY THIS NETWORK
Robert Reich SPEAKS OUT After Election | PoliticsGirl || This is REALLY GOOD — If you want to do something, listen, especially minute 46
Trump mental health conference explained with Dr Bandy Lee. || MUST WATCH
But We Still Need More…
…because the main battlefield is not happening on the outside in our shared world. The main battlefield is being fought on the inside, inside our minds.
If we are going to win this fight, then we (the sane and intelligent Americans still standing) need to get a lot more serious about how images and archetypes workd… because Lord knows the MAGAs certainly have!
The MAGAs are winning because they have tapped into ancient, magnetic, and powerful forms of thought and primitive thinking. They probably don’t even know exactly what they have tapped into. They only know that it is working.
Republican Party strategist and political pollster Patrick Ruffin discussed trends from the 2024 election at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity’s annual “Freedom and Progress” conference in Washington, D.C. Topics included strengths and weaknesses of the Trump and Harris campaigns, the economy as a key election issue, the pivot in diversity within the GOP, and how the electorate interpreted the character of each candidate.
And of course, Trump himself is a lightening rod. Trump certainly cannot talk the language of the mind, but he has an instinct for how to tap into the ancient, primitive parts of the human mind and how to manipulate the masses.
Sapience: The Moment Is Now
My book, Sapience: The Moment Is Now, goes into great detail about these ancient, primitive, powerful parts of the human mind.
unfortunately, my book seems beyond the mental capabilities of most causal readers. It is too long, too complicated, goes over too much human history.
2024
Well, dear humans of Earth, if we don’t understand our shared collective history… we are doomed to repeat it over and over and over again. And that is exactly what we are doing right now in 2024.
In fact, I have a Chapter titled 2024. If nothing else, buy my book (or contact me and I’ll send you a free copy) and start at Chapter 2024.
If we don’t understand our own minds, we are doomed on this planet.
The Trump Contagion that Dr. Bandy talks about is called The Corruption in my book. It is the same thing and humanity has been dealing with it for an awfully long time, except now, we can create a species ending situation with men such as Trump, Putin, and Musk.
Attempting to make my book a bit more digestible for the modern Western mind, I am creating less than one minute animations. This one is from the Chapter: The Myth of the Strong Man.
This one is from Yong Xing-li’s dream at the very end of Chapter 2024.
This one is the very beginning of Sapience.
We need to feed our minds with powerful stories that feed the parts of ourselves that make us conscious. My book is not the only powerful story out there, but my book certainly connects the dots between Primitive Man’s Mind and Modern Man’s Mind is a way I have only seen Issac Asimov do with his books in the Foundation Series and psychohistory.
Well, that is probably more than enough to ponder for another boring day in America…
On this day six years ago, my father had a heart attack. First responders revived him after 15 minutes of CPR, and then he was flown by helicopter to the Mayo Clinic. There he was put into an induced coma and body cooled to help preserve as much brain function as possible. Nobody knew if he would wake up and if he did, how much of him would wake up. But after days of touch and go, dad came back all of him except swallowing and he had developed pneumonia due to CPR, and this was expected and Mayo began aggressive treatment of it because it turns out if you aren’t breaking ribs while doing CPR, you aren’t pumping enough blood to revive the individual.
Remembering Dad
I wrote all about this in the first anniversary of dad’s death, as well as the reasons why he did not make it.
How Narcissistic Abuse Severely Thwarted my Healing Journey
In addition to dad’s death, the CEO of a small nonprofit I was working for fired me for being by dad’s side. Most probably this CEO suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and she would be fired soon enough for this and a number of other things she did or failed to do during her tenure.
Adding insult to injury, my mother-in-law who is most definitely contorted and warped by Narcissistic Personality Disorder was about to launch one of her most hideous and disgusting campaigns to make herself appear as the victim so she could harvest attention and pity from her flying monkeys. This is what narcissists enablers are called by professionals who try to help family members and people abused by Narcissists heal. The fuel for her campaign of Narcissistic madness was her own children and grandchildren.
It would take me 6 years to understand what my mother-in-law was doing and why. But back in 2018 and 2019 I simply found myself in HELL.
I should not be here today. The only thing that helped me hold on during this time of pain and abandonment was the story I had started writing in 2012. I was reading dad the latest parts of the story when he died with me by his side on August 4, 2018.
Even though dad had slipped into a delirium due to the stress of life-saving procedures such as suctioning the mucous from his airways and reinserting a feeding tube he had worked out with the back of his tongue four times the previous day, he told the nurses caring for him that he was so proud of me for writing this book and that my whole life has been preparing me for it.
So in the dark days of the summer of 2019, with the help of a friend, I returned to my story and began editing the beginning to bring it up to the level of writing I had evolved into after six years of writing. My friend was then editing my edited version of book 1.
Then, Something New Began Coming Through
Not too long into this process, something new started coming through. I argued with myself… it was right around this time in 2019… for I knew writing something new would take more time.
The something new won took 6 more years to write! I finally published the book my father believed in so much on April 24, 2024.
Here is an excerpt of some of the something new that was coming through me after father died. This is from Sapience: The Moment Is Now — What Rain knows.
From the Book
"You cannot sell wisdom, nor can you buy it. You must earn it by living fully, living unself-consciously but not unconsciously. Wisdom is a group activity. Wisdom is kind. Wisdom shares its last morsel of food simply because that is what wisdom does. Wisdom knows that everything is connected, and what you do to someone else, you have done to yourself first. Wisdom is a baby crawling and giggling with its newfound mastery of getting around. Wisdom is an old man falling and laughing at his misfortunate mishap, knowing perfectly well everyone falls sometimes and it doesn’t mean a darn thing.
Wisdom knows sometimes you are going to win. Wisdom knows sometimes you are going to lose. Wisdom knows winning and losing doesn’t mean a darn thing because that is part of being alive. Wisdom knows navigating the ups and downs, the wins and losses, are much easier and mean so much more when you share it with the people who care about you and who you care about… this is love... caring and sharing, celebrating and mourning, feasting and fasting together as ever as one.
Wisdom is the joy of sharing life with the ones you love. Wisdom is the bliss of partaking equitably in the ups and downs of life. Wisdom is tolerating in another the things that annoy you most. Tolerance is a blessing, and wisdom knows this. Tolerance and wisdom are essential because life is complicated, too complicated for one insignificant human being to know everything it must to make a good decision.
A wise person knows this. A wise person knows a single individual can never consciously gather enough information to make a wise decision: so, stop trying to fool yourself and others that you can. A wise person understands action must be taken without foreknowledge of the results, but if the action is grounded in mutuality, respect, compassion, dignity, love, and a huge heaping of tolerance… mostly the results will reap good outcomes. And when they don’t, a wise person knows it is important to try again. Failure is simply the process of success.
Tolerance is an anti-gravity force to fear. Tolerance requires a person to broaden their bandwidth of consciousness rather than narrow and restrict it as fear does. Tolerance allows an individual to sit in discomfort, to sit in not knowing, to sit in the darkness of what is not clear yet and to wait for understanding of what is right action.
Timing is everything when it comes to action. Right action done too soon quickly turns into wrong action. Right action done too late will also not produce desired results. Action done outside of its proper time or beyond what is necessary to complete a task is easily twisted and corrupted by thinking that tries to justify it. Such action grows fat with inaccurate, incorrect, false, untrue, and mistaken attributions ladled onto it to get people to act. This sort of propped up action becomes more and more improper and unsuitable for the circumstances.
Such artificial action awakens the most wicked and sinful parts of a person, because acting outside and beyond the bounds of right action requires an angry mind, a brash, conservative, intolerant, mean, merciless, unfriendly, unsympathetic, biased, disapproving, narrow-minded, and prejudiced mind. People acting in this manner are cruel, brutal, savage, bloodthirsty, vicious people driven by narrower and narrower justifications loaded with fantastical and fraudulent fancies.
Wisdom knows this and knows tolerance is the only way to slow down enough to sense and see what is really going on inside and outside of one’s own mind and body. Only by sensing and seeing more of what is actually going on in the present moment can a person produce right action at the right time.
Right action does not inflict harm unto oneself or another without a really good reason why violence is required. Isaac Asimov got it right when his character, Salvor Hardin, says: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” This is true because it is so easy to lose wisdom when one is racing inside their mind, thought after thought conceived by lies, half-truths, or half-baked ideas and silly beliefs.
A person acting in such a way utilizes the narrowest bandwidth of consciousness possible yet still able to remain conscious. Any narrower, and the person would fall into a dumb, zombie-like stupor. Wisdom knows this. Wisdom knows thinking is a result of the constriction of consciousness due to fear. Wisdom knows thinking trumped up with false facts and fantastical beliefs is going to make a lot of mistakes due to its failure to grasp reality. So, like any good toddler, a person who thinks all the time and falls out of phase with right action will make more and more mistakes and will act in more and more rageful ways trying to cover up and hide all their blunders, miscalculations, gaffes, and ignorance." -- Pages 128-128
Note: the link to Sapience is supposed to be a universal link that will open to the book in whatever browser and language from which you operate; however, it has not seemed to be working, so you can also search by the ASIN: B0D2LM5B6K.
It is the 4th of July 2024! The United States of America has withstood so many moments of greatness, disaster, conflict, trauma, war and peace. Through it all, for 248 years, Americans of all makes and models, Americans great and small, rich or poor, immigrant or native (and most modern Americans are by far immigrants… it is ignorance to argue otherwise) have managed to come together and stand together when the times of required us to act as one body to achieve our destiny.
But this July 4th, Americans stand divided. Americans are more fractured than ever, perhaps more divided than Americans were on April 11, 1861. This is the day before the Civil War began. Evidently, the division that plunged Americans in the the bloody Civil War did not end on April 9, 1865. It rages on today.
Today, we face a stark choice: Biden or Trump. To vote for a third candidate is to shrink from your duty to make a hard choice. It is a cop out. It is playing the game of chicken when America needs you to play the game of defending democracy for the future.
Is the choice easy?
No, of course not. When the stakes are high, when is a choice that matters ever easy?
Biden is old, but he is wise. Trump is old, and he is pig-ignorant.
Biden is frail, but he tells the truth. Trump is vigorous but lies like the Devil.
Biden fumbled the debate, but his is good. Trump fumbled too, and he is evil.
What is evil?
I talk about it in my book available on Amazon titled: Sapience: The Moment Is Now.
Sapience: The Moment Is Now (available on Amazon!)
Evil is Live spelled backwards. When a human being ignores too much of reality, humans are capable of creating conditions that do not support life. In other words, the make a livable world un livable. That is evil, pure and simple.
What is ignorance?
I also talk extensively about this in my book on Amazon. Ignorance is ignoring certain parts of reality so that you can know more about one thing or another. We all must learn to ignore the world in order to know certain parts of the world. This is how we gain knowledge. But too much ignoring leads straight to foolish ignor-ance. This is where we are with the Cult of Trump and MAGA.
So, why MIGA?
If you shorten Making Ignorance Great Again, and you get MIGA. I got this idea while swimming and created it on my iPad. Basically, I took the A in MAGA crack it in half to get the lopsided I (the broken piece of A that is going to fall over because every opposite thing needs its other half to stand strong). I added an orange with a MIGA hat on top in homage to Orange Jesus.
Thank you Liz Cheney for revealing in your book that is what MAGA followers call Trump.
In short, this is what it seems to me what MAGA is bent on doing… making up fiends and foes out of common, ordinary people living in America who happen to have different ideas, lifestyles, color of skin, political or religious beliefs, or anything else they want to make a big fuss about. To do this, the very first thing that must be done is to divide Americans into “us” and “them”. Then, once the division is made, the “us” group gets to go around screaming, shouting, and raging about reality not being how or what they want it to be. It’s so easy to rage.
It’s hard to do the work to really understand the complexities of nature, much less a huge, complicate country like the USA. So, just forget about trying to understand all nuances, complexity, or differences… just cut reality in half, throw away or get rid of the part you don’t like, and plough ahead with half a head and a lopsided mind. In other words, ignore complexity. This is how you get MIGA out of MAGA.
MIGA… Making Ignorance Great Again! See the MIGA Collection now available on my Etsy store: The Quip Collection.
How Would A No Labels Presidential Candidate Change the Outcome in 2024?
This blog focus on the idea that the non-profit organization called No Labels plans to put a third party candidate into the 2024 Presidential Campaign. While I agree with Ryan Clancy’s idea of creating more choice for American voters, it is an extremely, short-sighted, ill-conceived, and premature idea to try to do this year.
While 60,000 voters think a third party candidate can win, so far no third party candidate has ever come close to getting a toe hold into the White House. There are so many more MAGA voters inspired by cooky myths, lies, and the very scary Seven Mountain Mandate men, of whom Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are examples of women leaning heavily into “Let’s Do Medieval Again!“
The Stakes
This year, more than any year in American history, the stakes are higher than most people care to believe or admit or reckon with. Having Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West already running on third party tickets is concerning. So now, we want more choice and add a No Labels ticket too?! Really, this year, when King Kong and his MAGA base is coming to rip down democracy and replace it with the Christian Alt Right Stary-Eyed, Let’s Have Kings Again, The Seven Mountains Mandate men?!
Who are The Seven Montains Mandate men and women? Think Handmaids Tale.
It is not: “Oh the guy I voted for didn’t do the one thing I really wanted him to do, so I’m not voting for him again.”
This is an ignorant, short-sighted, and extremely selfish opinion. Running a country of 331+ million people democratically is not done by waving magic wands and fixing this problem instantly, then this problem, then that problem, and so on and so forth…
Do you live in reality people who give this as a reason for not voting for Joe? MAGA voters are a whole different story. They are a battering ram. They want to destroy democracy and rebuild America as a Totalitarian Christian Nationalist Country. Do you, ordinary voters unhappy with Joe want to live in a Christian Nationalist State run by one of the stupidest men on the planet… the Orange Baby?
Bradley Onishi is a former Christian nationalist who's now a professor of religion and the author of Preparing for War, a critique of the movement and its impact on American democracy.
BRAD ONISHI: I think it has. Christian nationalism is having a moment. It's having a moment in ways that it's requiring those who adhere to its principles and ideologies to respond to it. Folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and others have talked about the ways that Christian nationalism not only informs their understanding of politics, but how they identify explicitly as Christian nationalists. And so we are at a point in American politics where Christian nationalism is something that many people are discussing.
GROSS: Are there many people in Congress who are affiliated with Christian nationalism?
ONISHI: I think it's fair to say that, yes. One of the things that's true about our Congress is that it is disproportionately Christian. Now, there are many different types of Christian people in our Congress from various denominations. However, if we look at the GOP and we look at the tenets of the party's policies and its approach to the upcoming elections, we find core Christian nationalist ideals in that platform. And we find many, many, many members of Congress from the GOP who support those principles. So from outgoing Speaker Kevin McCarthy to current speaker Mike Johnson, all the way to senators and other members of the House, there are many folks who I would describe as Christian nationalists in the United States Congress.
GROSS: What are some of the fundamental principles of Christian nationalism? Like, how would you define Christian nationalism?
ONISHI: I think in very simple terms, Christian nationalism is the idea that Christian people should be privileged in the United States in some way - economically, socially, politically - and that that influence and that privilege is a result of the country being founded by and for Christians. Christian nationalism is not the idea that others can't be here - that if you're a Muslim or an atheist, that you have to leave. It's also not the idea that only Christians can be part of the government. However, for most Christian nationalists, there is a core belief that the story of the United States is one where it has been elected by God to play an exceptional role in human history, and as being chosen by God, it's the duty of Christian people to carry out his will on Earth.
So Christian nationalists take an approach to their Christianity that says it should have an undue influence on our government, on our economics, on our culture, and that it is by dint of our history, the religious faith that is meant to be privileged in our public square. With that said, there are different kinds of Christian nationalists and different ways that people manifest their understanding of the term. But when it comes down to it, if we all sit down as Americans at a table and there are people from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different faiths, and someone who is a Christian says, just by being at this table, I should have a special place, well, to me, that's Christian nationalism because you're saying that somehow this country is yours in a way that it is not for everyone else. And to me, therein lies the problem.
Go to Fresh Air to listen or read the rest of this interview. It is really, really important!
And this is really creepy:
GROSS: An extreme group of Christian nationalists is the New Apostolic Reformation, and they advocate the Seven Mountain Mandate, which is that Christian nationalists or Christians should lead government, family, religion, business, education, media, arts and entertainment, and that they - all of these sectors should reflect the kingdom of God. And I think I mentioned all seven there. So what does that mean to reflect the kingdom of God in family, religion, business, education, media, arts and entertainment, and the government?
ONISHI: The Seven Mountains mandate is a particular form of understanding human society that says that Christian people are not called to persuade their neighbors to practice the Christian faith, to demonstrate to their fellow Americans that the Christian faith is the faith of love and truth. The Seven Mountains Mandate is, as my colleague Matthew Taylor says, a mandate to colonize the Earth for God. The seven domains as you listed them - arts and leisure and the economy and the government, the family - are seen as mountains of conquest. The goal is not dialogue with neighbors who may be Muslim or atheist or Hindu. The goal is not to simply reflect the character of Christ on earth by way of living a life that upholds his glory and his teachings. The goal is to have absolute authority and power over every facet of human society.
And so we can see here what I take to be a very dangerous approach to practicing Christianity in the public square. It is not one that recognizes democracy or dialogue, pluralism as sacred values. The goal is power. The goal is conquest. And so when one hears about a politician or a leader or anyone in influence, especially as part of our government, who adheres to the Seven Mountains Mandate, that should set alarm bells off immediately.
Democracy Is Not: “Joe’s too old, Joe’s too square, Joe’s too this or that...” This is just as stupid, impatience, ignorant reason to not vote for a known and vetted winner: Joe Biden.
There was a time in the not so distant past when age was considered a plus and must for a ruler. Wisdom takes time to ripen and mature inside of people. And it does not come to everyone who ages… look at the overly large, orange, baby King Kong with his revved up mad as hell MAGA base.
Do you think they are worried about the Orange Giant being too old… his less than 4 years younger than Biden!! Anyone giving this as a reason not to vote for Joe is suffering from ageism and is pretty ignorant about how a government governing 331+ million people really works! It takes a lot of people to make it work… good people who are appointed to their positions in a timely fashion and have the expertise and experience to do their jobs. Trump had the most vacancies in top, critical positions of any former President. Some key positions were never appointed under the Orange Giant.
Democracy Is Not: “I’m mad a Joe for aiding Israel.” Modern nation-states are messy… alliances are messy… the world is messy and hard and cruel… that is why nations make alliances, and when Israel was attacked by HAMAS in one of the bloodiest, most gruesome slaughters of innocent people of this century, of course US comforts and supports Israel. There is so much going on behind the scenes that you and I never hear about. The death of any innocent person is intolerable. And Joe and his cabinet are doing their damn best to push for resolution, ceasefire, peace. But, tell me, anyone threatening not to vote for Joe because he can’t wave his wand and make this bloodshed stop… DO YOU REALLY THINK THE ORANGE GIANT (the man to put in place the Muslim Ban days after taking office)…. DO YOU REALLY THINK he is a better option?! I was mad at Obama for not doing more to stop the slaughter of Syrians being bombed by Russia as they aided their ugly ally Bashar al-Assad.
Take A Minute, Learn Something… Maybe Something New
Do Americans really understand democracy? Do Americans really cherish it? Do American comprehend what is at stake this year?
No Labels Debate
It is a choice. Listen to this debate and listen to Fresh Air if you are truly concerned about making an informed, intelligent choice.
The centrist group No Labels is planning to host a bipartisan nominating convention in 2024. This is leading some people to speculate that they may promote a third-party candidate that better reflects the perspective of middle-of-the-line voters who don’t favor President Biden’s re-election bid or Donald Trump receiving the Republican nomination.
Those who say it will help Trump argue the group doesn’t have enough influence to make lasting tangible change and worry that promoting a third-party unity ticket will give an unpopular candidate like Trump a lower threshold for votes that would’ve gone to Biden.
Those who disagree say voters who are discontented with both major parties but particularly opposed to Trump, might turn out in support of the third-party candidate, indirectly reducing Trump's chances.
With this context, we debate the question: “How Would A No Labels Presidential Candidate Change the Outcome in 2024?"
Rahna Epting argues that the No Labels Party does not have a path to win the presidency. Ryan Clancy argues a No Labels unity presidential ticket has a viable path to win the White House in 2024. Emmy award-winning journalist John Donvan moderates.
Open to Debate:How Would a No Labels Presidential Candidate Change the Outcome in 2024?
Feature Archetypal Animation
Music: Mickey Mouse Operation | Little People — [11] Fisticuffs At Dawn 1:02
Putin is a serial murderer responsible for decades of death. In case you have not been keeping count, this is a partial list of his history of mass murder.
And others who should be added to his warrant for arrest include: Trump and his MAGA zombies (failure to past funding to Ukraine), Kim Jong Un (supplying missiles to Russia), Xi Jinping (supporting and supplying Russia with weapons of war), Iran (supplying missiles to Russia), and any Putin sympathizers.
Just Another Da with My Boys! |Music: YMCA — Villiage People
The Russian apartment bombings
These were a series of explosions that hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing more than 300, injuring more than 1,000, and spreading a wave of fear across the country.
About 300000 people have been killed during two wars in Chechnya over the past decade, a senior official in the province’s Moscow-backed government said.— Al Jazeera
Human rights organizations accused Russian forces of engaging in indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force whenever they encountered resistance, resulting in numerous civilian deaths. (According to Human Rights Watch, Russian artillery and rocket attacks killed at least 267 civilians during the December 1995 raid by the Chechens on the city of Gudermes.[46]) Throughout the span of the first Chechen war, Russian forces have been accused by Human Rights organizations of starting a brutal war with total disregard for humanitarian law, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary civilian casualties among the Chechen population. The main strategy in the Russian war effort had been to use heavy artillery and air strikes leading to numerous indiscriminate attacks on civilians. This has led to Western and Chechen sources calling the Russian strategy deliberate terror bombing on parts of Russia.[65] According to Human Rights Watch, the campaign was "unparalleled in the area since World War II for its scope and destructiveness, followed by months of indiscriminate and targeted fire against civilians".[66] Due to ethnic Chechens in Grozny seeking refuge among their respective teips in the surrounding villages of the countryside, a high proportion of initial civilian casualties were inflicted against ethnic Russians who were unable to find viable escape routes. The villages were also attacked from the first weeks of the conflict (Russian cluster bombs, for example, killed at least 55 civilians during the 3 January 1995 Shali cluster bomb attack).
Russian soldiers often prevented civilians from evacuating areas of imminent danger and prevented humanitarian organizations from assisting civilians in need. It was widely alleged that Russian troops, especially those belonging to the Internal Troops (MVD), committed numerous and in part systematic acts of torture and summary executions on Chechen civilians; they were often linked to zachistka ("cleansing" raids on town districts and villages suspected of harboring boyeviki – militants). Humanitarian and aid groups chronicled persistent patterns of Russian soldiers killing, raping and looting civilians at random, often in disregard of their nationality. Chechen fighters took hostages on a massive scale, kidnapped or killed Chechens considered to be collaborators and mistreated civilian captives and federal prisoners of war (especially pilots). Russian federal forces kidnapped hostages for ransom and used human shields for cover during the fighting and movement of troops (for example, a group of surrounded Russian troops took approximately 500 civilian hostages at Grozny's 9th Municipal Hospital).[67]
The violations committed by members of the Russian forces were usually tolerated by their superiors and were not punished even when investigated (the story of Vladimir Glebov serving as an example of such policy). Television and newspaper accounts widely reported largely uncensored images of the carnage to the Russian public. The Russian media coverage partially precipitated a loss of public confidence in the government and a steep decline in President Yeltsin's popularity. Chechnya was one of the heaviest burdens on Yeltsin's 1996 presidential election campaign. The protracted war in Chechnya, especially many reports of extreme violence against civilians, ignited fear and contempt of Russia among other ethnic groups in the federation. One of the most notable war crimes committed by the Russian army is the Samashki massacre, in which it is estimated that up to 300 civilians died during the attack.[68] Russian forces conducted an operation of zachistka, house-by-house searches throughout the entire village. Federal soldiers deliberately and arbitrarily attacked civilians and civilian dwellings in Samashki by shooting residents and burning houses with flame-throwers. They wantonly opened fire or threw grenades into basements where residents, mostly women, elderly persons and children, had been hiding.[69] Russian troops intentionally burned many bodies, either by throwing the bodies into burning houses or by setting them on fire.[70] A Chechen surgeon, Khassan Baiev, treated wounded in Samashki immediately after the operation and described the scene in his book:[71]
The Second Chechen War saw a new wave of war crimes and violation of international humanitarian law. Both sides have been criticised by international organizations of violating the Geneva Conventions. However, a report by Human Rights Watch states that without minimizing the abuses committed by Chechen fighters, the main reason for civilian suffering in the Second Chechen War came as a result of the abuses committed by the Russian forces on the civilian population.[94] According to Amnesty International, Chechen civilians have been purposely targeted by Russian forces, in apparent disregard of humanitarian law. The situation has been described by Amnesty International as a Russian campaign to punish an entire ethnic group, on the pretext of "fighting crime and terrorism".[95] Russian forces have throughout the campaign ignored to follow their Geneva convention obligations, and has taken little responsibility of protecting the civilian population.[94] Amnesty International stated in their 2001 report that Chechen civilians, including medical personnel, have been the target of military attacks by Russian forces, and hundreds of Chechen civilians and prisoners of war are extrajudicially executed.[96]
According to human rights activists, Russian troops systematically committed the following crimes in Chechnya: the destruction of cities and villages, not justified by military necessity; shelling and bombardment of unprotected settlements; summary extrajudicial executions and killings of civilians; torture, ill-treatment and infringement of human dignity; serious bodily harm intentionally inflicted on persons not directly participating in hostilities; deliberate strikes against the civilian population, civilian and medical vehicles; illegal detentions of the civilian population and enforced disappearances; looting and destruction of civilian and public property; extortion; taking hostages for ransom; corpse trade.[97][98][99] There were also rapes,[100][101][102] which, along with women, were committed against men.[103][104][105][106][107][108] According to the Minister of Health of Ichkeria, Umar Khanbiev, Russian forces committed organ harvesting and organ trade during the conflict.[109]
Russian forces have since the beginning of the conflict indiscriminately and disproportionately bombed and shelled civilian objects, resulting in heavy civilian casualties. In one such occasion in October 1999, ten powerful hypersonic missiles fell without warning and targeted the city's only maternity hospital, post office, mosque, and a crowded market.[110][111][112][113] Most of the casualties occurred at the central market, and the attack is estimated to have killed over 100 instantly and injuring up to 400 others. Similar incidents include the Baku–Rostov highway bombing where the Russian Air Force perpetrated repeated rocket attacks on a large convoy of refugees trying to enter Ingushetia through a supposed "safe exit".[114][115] This was repeated in December 1999 when Russian soldiers opened fire on a refugee convoy marked with white flags.[116]
The 1999–2000 siege and bombardments of Grozny caused between 5,000[117] and 8,000[118] civilians to perish. The Russian army issued an ultimatum during the Grozny-siege urging Chechens to leave the city or be destroyed without mercy.[119] Around 300 people were killed while trying to escape in October 1999 and subsequently buried in a mass grave.[120] The bombing of Grozny included banned Buratino thermobaric and fuel-air bombs, igniting the air of civilians hiding in basements.[121][122] There were also reports of the use of chemical weapons, banned according to Geneva law.[123] The Russian president Putin vowed that the military would not stop bombing Grozny until Russian troops quote 'fulfilled their task to the end.' In 2003, the United Nations called Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth.[124]
Another occasion of indiscriminate and perhaps deliberate bombardment is the bombing of Katyr-Yurt which occurred on 4–6 February 2000. The village of Katyr Yurt was far from the war's front line, and jam-packed with refugees. It was untouched on the morning of 4 February when Russian aircraft, helicopters, fuel-air bombs and Grad missiles pulverised the village. After the bombing the Russian army allowed buses in, and allowed a white-flag refugee convoy to leave after which they bombed that as well.[125] Banned Thermobaric weapons were fired on the village of Katyr-Yurt. Hundreds of civilians died as a result of the Russian bombardment and the following sweep after.[126][127] Thermobaric weapons have been used by the Russian army on several occasions according to Human Rights Watch.[128]
Syria
6,950 civilians dead
The Syrian regime was responsible for 201,055 of these deaths, with the victims including 22,981 children and 11,976 women, while Russian forces killed 6,950 civilians, including 2,048 children and 977 women.Mar 15, 2023 -- ReliefWeb
Ukraine
500,000+ killed since Putin invaded
Casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian War included six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the war in Donbas, and up to 500,000 estimated casualties during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. -- Wiki
The second year of war dragged on through Ukraine slowly and with little mercy. The first year of the war was a story of the resilience of people amid conflict that has turned into one of perseverance as the conflict has stagnated, with no end in sight.
Bohdan Semenukha and his mother, Viktoria, walk frequently through the Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine, just a few blocks from the new apartment where they moved after fleeing Kharkiv, in the country’s northeast, in January 2023. | Claire Harbage/NPR
Never Again
Music: Jupiter & Jaguar — Blond:ish | Welcome to the Present & Chants of Native Earth | Shamanic Moon (Native American Drums) | From February 24, 2022 | “Never Again” the World Once Said“
Alexei Navalny
‘It’s a torture regime’: the last days of Alexei Navalny
Each morning at 5am, Alexei Navalny was roused with the words “Wake up!” as the Russian national anthem played on the prison loudspeakers. It was always dark in the polar night above the Arctic Circle, and the temperature outside could fall below -30C (-22F). The convict would have a sheepskin coat and an ushanka hat to keep warm in a prison colony better known by its nickname: the Polar Wolf.
To read whole article, go to The Guardian for full article by Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer
Full List of Putin Critics Who Have Died in Mysterious Circumstances
For over two decades, President Vladimir Putin has squeezed dissent in Russia. Critics, journalists, and defectors have faced dire consequences after opposing him. From poisonings to shootings, mysterious falls from windows, and even plane crashes, there is a long trail of silenced voices.
Alexei Navalny, whose death in prison is as yet unexplained, had previously fallen ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow in 2020 after being poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent. Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who defected and was a prominent Putin critic, was murdered with polonium-210 in London in 2016. -- Newsweek
Previous Blogs Dedicated to Ukraine & Vanquishing HATE
Feature Archetypal Animation from last year’s blog marking the first anniversary of Russia’s full scale invasion — February 24, 2023 — Ukraine | “Never Again” the World Once Said“
February 24, 2023 | “Never Again” the World Once Said““You Want It Darker? We Kill the Flame!” — Leonard Cohen | Leonard Cohen is telling us exactly what WE need to do in this moment of Ruthless Barbarity, the darkness Putin has plunged the world into once again, WE KILL THE FLAME... We (the Good People of Earth who honor life and respect freedom) WE kill the flame of EVIL Putin lit in 2014 and dramatically escalated last year! We don’t have a tomorrow to do this if we want OUR World Back. | | February 24, 2023 | “Never Again” the World Once Said““Look Mom! I’m A Monkey for Putin!” | Music: Wizard of the Hood (Collector’s Edition) | Violent J — Shiny Diamonds | Putin should be careful as Xi Jinping may very well turn Putin into his Flying Monkey! | February 24, 2023 | “Never Again” the World Once Said” | And HE is still Putin’s Pigeon… he has simply pulled the entire Republican Narc Bubble into his Pigeon Hole with him | SHAME ON YOU MAGA Republicans who are leaving Ukraine blowing in the disgusting breathe of the Putin fiend.From March 2023Feature Archetypal Animation marking Russia’s full scale invasion into Ukraine — February 24, 2022 — Ukraine Letters
We are ploughing ahead in this series. If you want to understand why this series is call the Marvelization of Man, then skip back to blog 1: here.
Long story short, if there are going to be Marvelous Men, there are also going to be ordinary men, awful men, and god awful terrible men. And this is what we are really exploring, the underside of Marvelous.
So, here we go, taking a deep dive into the workings of the most disgusting, vile, horrid creatures to be found on planet Earth: The Totalitarian Leader!
What follows is from Joost Meerloo’s book, Rape of the Mind, published in 1956. To read more about Joost, backtrack to this blog, here.
The leaders of Totalitaria are the strangest men in the state. These men are, like all other men, unique in their mental structure, and consequently we cannot make any blanket psychiatric diagnosis of the mental illness which motivates their behaviour.
But we can make some generalizations which will help us toward some understanding of the totalitarian leader. Obviously, for example, he suffers from an overwhelming need to control other human beings and to exert unlimited power, and this in itself is a psychological aberration, often rooted in deep-seated feelings of anxiety, humiliation, and inferiority. The ideologies such men propound are only used as tactical and strategical devices through which they hope to reach their final goal of complete domination over other men. This domination may help them compensate for pathological fears and feelings of unworthiness, as we can conclude from the psychological study of some modern dictators.
Fortunately, we do not have to rely on a purely hypothetical picture of the psychopathology of the totalitarian dictator. Dr. G. M. Gilbert, who studied some of the leaders of Nazi Germany during the Nuremberg trials, has given us a useful insight into their twisted minds, useful especially because it reveals to us something about the mutual interaction between the totalitarian leader and those who want to be led by him.
Hitler's suicide made a clinical investigation of his character structure impossible, but Dr. Gilbert heard many eyewitness reports of Hitler's behaviour from his friends and collaborators, and these present a fantastic picture of Nazism's prime mover. Hitler was known among his intimates as the carpet-eater, because he often threw himself on the floor in a kicking and screaming fit like an epileptic rage. From such reports, Dr. Gilbert was able to deduce something about the roots of the pathological behaviour displayed by this morbid "genius."
Hitler's paranoid hostility against the Jew was partly related to his unresolved parental conflicts; the Jews probably symbolized for him the hated drunken father who mistreated Hitler and his mother when the future Fuhrer was still a child. Hitler's obsessive thinking, his furious fanaticism, his insistence on maintaining the purity of "Aryan blood," and his ultimate mania to destroy himself and the world were obviously the results of a sick psyche.
As early as 1923, nearly ten years before he seized power, Hitler was convinced that he would one day rule the world, and he spent time designing monuments of victory, eternalizing his glory, to be erected all over the European continent when the day of victory arrived. This delusional preoccupation continued until the end of his life; in the midst of the war he created, which led him to defeat and death, Hitler continued revising and improving his architectural plans.
Nazi dictator Number Two, Hermann Goering, who committed suicide to escape the hangman, had a different psychological structure. His pathologically aggressive drivers were encouraged by the archaic military tradition of the German Junker class, to which his family belonged. From early childhood he had been compulsively and overtly aggressive. He was an autocratic and a corrupt cynic, grasping the Nazi-created opportunity to achieve purely personal gain. His contempt for the "common people" was unbounded; this was a man who had literally no sense of moral values.
Quite different again was Rudolf Hess, the man of passive yet fanatical doglike devotion, living, as it were, by proxy through the mind of his Fuhrer. His inner mental weakness made it easier for him to live through means of a proxy than through his own personality, and drove him to become the shadow of a seemingly strong man, from whom he could borrow strength. The Nazi ideology have this frustrated boy the illusion of blood identification with the glorious German race. After his wild flight to England, Hess showed obvious psychotic traits; his delusions of persecution, hysterical attacks, and periods of amnesia are among the well-known clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
Still another type was Hans Frank, the devil's advocate, the prototype of the overambitious latent homosexual, easily seduced into political adventure, even when this was in conflict with the remnants of his conscience. For unlike Goering, Frank was capable of distinguishing between right and wrong.
Dr. Gilbert also tells us something about General Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's Chief of Staff, who became the submissive, automatic mouthpiece of the Fuhrer, mixing military honor and personal ambition in the service of his own unimportance.
Of a different quality is the S.S. Colonel, Hoess, the murderer of millions in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. A pathological character structure is obvious in this case. All his life, Hoess had been a lonely, withdrawn, schizoid personality, without any conscience, wallowing in his own hostile and destructive fantasies. Alone and bereft of human attachments, he was intuitively sought out by Himmler for this most savage of all the Nazi jobs. He was a useful instrument for the committing of the most bestial deeds.
Unfortunately, we have no clear psychiatric picture yet of the Russian dictator Stalin. There have been several reports that during the last years of his life he had a tremendous persecution phobia and lived in constant terror that he would become the victim of his own purges.
Psychological analysis of these men shows clearly that a pathological culture -- a mad world - can be built by certain impressive psychoneurotic types. The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behaviour. They are compelled not by ideological belief,no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind,but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures.
The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy - the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.
A clear example of this can be seen in the way the Nazi leaders defended themselves through continuous self-justification and exculpation when they were brought before the bar at the Nuremberg trials. These murderers were aggrieved and hurt by the accusations brought against them; they were the very picture of injured innocence.
Any form of leadership, if unchecked by controls, may gradually turn into dictatorship. Being a leader, carrying great power and responsibility for other people's lives, is a monumental test for the human psyche. The weak leader is the man who cannot meet it, who simply abdicates his responsibility. The dictator is the man who replaces the existing standards of justice and morality by more and more private prestige, by more and more power, and eventually isolates himself more and more from the rest of humanity. His suspicion grows, his isolation grows, and the vicious circle leading to a paranoid attitude begins to develop.
The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel opportunist. He sees no value in any other person and feels no gratitude for any help he may have received. He is suspicious and dishonest and believes that his personal ends justify any means he may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every tyrant still searches for some self-justification. Without such a soothing device for his own conscience, he cannot live.
His attitude toward other people is manipulative; to him, they are merely tools for the advancement of his own interests. He rejects the conception of doubt, of internal contradictions, of man's inborn ambivalence. He denies the psychological fact that man grows to maturity through groping, through trial and error, through the interplay of contrasting feelings. Because he will not permit himself to grope, to learn through trial and error, the dictator can never become a mature person. But whether he acknowledges them or not, he has internal conflicts, he suffers somewhere from internal confusion. These inner "weaknesses" he tries to repress sternly; if they were to come to the surface, they might interfere with the achievement of his goals. Yet, in the attacks of rage his weakening strength is evident.
It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit unconsciously, of his own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the same internal contradictions of his fellow men. He must purge and purge, terrorize and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner drives. He must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake, imprison everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded. In Totalitaria, the latent aggression and savagery in man are cultivate by the dictator to such a degree that they can explode into mass criminal actions shown by Hitler's persecution of minorities. Ultimately, the country shows a real pathology, an utter dominance of destructive and self-destructive tendencies.
May 2024 bring wisdom to you and to everyone who you know, especially as you try to make sense of the vast amount of nonsense and evil impacting and influencing our imperfect world, especially this year.
This year, more than any otheryear, each and every one of us needs to find our inner well of wisdom and drink from it. If we don’t find it… if we don’t replenish our drained and drying reservoirs of wisdom, we are not going to survive as a species on this planet past this century… at least not as we have been surviving in it.
Here and now, in this very moment, more than any transition from one year to the next one, we must be able to tell good from evil, truth from lies, right from wrong. This is the year we choose between life or death for all life on Earth.
This is the year (more than any other year) that each and every living human makes a choice… it is a vote… for what our collective fate will be as the 21st Century stretches ahead of us.
The preceding years have filled all of us with so much worry, so much onus, so much weight, and now we hold so much responsibility for our personal and collective fate.
No longer can we deny to ourselves that our personal choices and lifestyles do not affect other living beings on our beautiful planet. No longer can we choose to stay ignorant about our world, the deadly conflicts spanning the global, the deadly famines and diseases caused by our inability to get along with each other, nor our tremendous failure to cooperate with each other to solve the intractable and wicked problems we have created for ourselves as human beings.
The Choice Is Yours
Today is the day you must choose.
Will you choose life, meaning that you accept responsibility for your thoughts, words, and actions?
OR
Will you choose death, meaning you project your unconsciousness onto others and do not take responsibility for your own inner turmoil, hate, anger, and ignorance… and you don’t educate yourself about yourself and the world that offers you this precious human life?
All life is precious. And all humans matter. And each and everyone of us is making a critical choice this year. A choice of consequence that will have lasting gravity on all of life for the foreseeable future.
This is our moment to shine… or it is our moment to fall like a shooting star burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.
This blog addresses the last section of chapter 5 in Joost Merloo’s The Rape of the Mind.
Now we are getting into the nitty gritty stuff of why we need strong archetypal characters and stories, especially now. We need them because we live in a time chock full of improbable characters playing as if they are super heroes, but really they are just playing insidious tricks on our minds so they can get our money or get power.
And if they do get enough power, they are going to take everything from you (Yes, even if you supported them, especially if you supported them!)
And also as if we need even more examples of why we need to strengthen our minds against frauds and fakesters, just the other day, David Gura spoke with Zeke Faux of Bloomberg News and New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar about the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried who is the disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
This part of the interview is exactly what Joost Merloo is writing about here and why I am highlighting in this blog: We are suckers for people with money. We are even worse suckers for people who pretend to have money!
Pay attention:
GURA: For people who haven't invested in crypto, haven't dabbled in this world, don't know Sam Bankman-Fried, don't know what FTX is, why is this story, why is this alleged fraud so important and such a big deal?
KOLHATKAR: This is an old story, to some extent. This is a story about, you know, an ostensible genius who happened to be very young, lauded by the press, you know, worshipped by Silicon Valley, who was allowed to go out and behave in, ultimately, a reckless way with other people's money while people turned and looked the other way. And, you know, lo and behold, things were not as they seemed. Something was seriously wrong, and it resulted in a, you know, terrible amount of pain and destruction and financial losses.
And this arc, this narrative arc, is something we see over and over again, particularly in sort of hot, new tech companies where you often have these young men who are just empowered to go out and behave recklessly while they try and grow their companies. And then, of course, we figure out afterwards that they were cutting corners or fraud occurred, and, you know, there's all sorts of pain and recrimination. And you don't have to care about crypto to care about the outcome and the question of whether justice is served in this case.
-- The fall of crypto | All Things Considered, NPR
The Enigma of Coexistence
Is it possible to coexist with a totalitarian system that never ceases to use its psychological artillery? Can a free democracy be strong enough to tolerate the parasitic intrusion of totalitarianism into its rights and freedoms? History tells us that many opposing and clashing ideologies have been able to coexist under a common law that assured tolerance and justice. The church no longer burns its apostates.
Before the opposites of totalitarianism and free democracy can coexist under the umbrella of supervising law and mutual good will, a great deal more of mutual understanding and tolerance will have to be built up. The actual cold war and psychological warfare certainly do not yet help toward this end.
To the totalitarian, the word "coexistence" has a different meaning than it has to us. The totalitarian may use it merely as a catch-word or an appeaser. The danger is that the concept of peaceful coexistence may become a disguise, dulling the awareness of inevitable interactions and so profiting the psychologically stronger party. Lenin spoke about the strategic breathing spell (peredyshka) that has to weaken the enemy. Too enthusiastic a peace movement may mean a superficial appeasement of problems. Such an appeal has to be studied and restudied, lest it result in a dangerous letdown of defences, which have to remain mobilized to face a ruthless enemy.
A tragic example of this is what happened to Khasoggi five years ago today.
Image from Morning Edition – NPR: Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Five years on, there has been little accountability — and human rights groups say that has implications for free expression around the world. Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images
As I write this blog, today is five years since Jamal Khashoggi with murdered and mutilated. Rachel Treisman opens this segment saying:
Jamal Khashoggi — a Saudi dissident who lived in Virginia and wrote for the Washington Post — walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his upcoming marriage. He never came out.
Khashoggi, 59, was dismembered, and his remains have never been found.
U.S. intelligence later determined that a team of 15 Saudi agents had flown to Istanbul to carry out a "capture or kill" operation approved by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
What strikes me as particularly pertinent to what Joost Meerloo is saying above is what Khashoggi’s friend and collegue Washington Post columnist David Ignatius says:
It's undeniable that there have been major changes in Saudi Arabia in the last five years, Ignatius notes.
For example: The government lifted a ban on women driving months before Khashoggi's death in 2018; now women "mix freely in Saudi society with men," including at music festivals. It stripped the "religious police" of their privileges, which led to many women no longer wearing the hijab in public.
Saudi Arabia and Israel have hinted they are open to establishing formal relations, which Ignatius says is something he never thought he'd see in his lifetime.
"It would be wrong not to credit those changes," Ignatius said. "What bothers me is that those changes have been implemented essentially by force ... We should understand that this is a modernizing dictator. And there's always the danger that citizens of Saudi Arabia could be thrown into prison if they disagree with him."
If you are interested in this topic, you should listen to the whole interview. It is only 3 minutes; time well spent to understand the complexities of our time and how what looks like a good thing or even a GREAT things, might be a very poisonous thing for our psychological reality.
Coexistence may mean a suffocating subordination much like that of prisoners coexisting with their jailers. At its best, it may imitate the intensive symbiotic or ever-parasitic relationship we can see among animals which need each other, or as we see it in the infant in its years of dependency upon its mother.
In order to coexist and to cooperate, one must have notions and comparable images of interaction, of a sameness of ideas, of a belonging-together, of an interdependence of the whole human race, in spite of the existence of racial and cultural differences. Otherwise the ideology backed by the greater military strength will strangle the weaker one.
Peaceful coexistence presupposes on BOTH sides a high understanding of the problems and complications of simple coexistence, of mutual agreement and limitations, of the diversity of personalities, and especially of the coexistence of contrasting and irreconcilable thoughts and feelings in every individual of the innate ambivalence of man. It demands an understanding of the rights of both the individual and the collectivity. Using coexistence as a catch-word, we may obscure the problems involved, and we may find that we use the word as a flag that covers gradual surrender to the stronger strategist.
Do you think the United States’ Congress has a high understanding of the problems and complications of coexistence? Given the recent fight over funding the US government and now Matt Gate’s stunt, it seems we need divine intervention to help guide us weaker minded souls in just remembering how to compromise and get along together.
Go to Your Corners | Music: Donkeys & Elephants by Somr
“In the majestic Halls of Congress, God ushers elephants to one corner and donkeys to another, bestowing upon them a much-deserved respite.“
Archetypal Animations
Images made on Genolve using AI with music for each animation as follows:
Feature Archetypal Animation
Music: The Greatest Showman (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) — Various Artists — The Greatest Show
Introduction: Reminder Why We Need Strong Super Hero Movies
I found a great article on Harrison Ford in Esquire where the writer Ryan asks Harrison what he thinks the point of stories are for people. Harrison answers:
“I guess the point is, these stories we see—movies, novels—we look for ourselves in these characters and these stories,” I say, rebooting.
He nods. “We look for ourselves, and we look for useful information to help us navigate our fucking lives and the world that we’re living in,” he says. “We don’t realize we’re looking for that. But we’re looking to pull out of a fantasy something that’s useful to us. And what’s useful to us is to emotionally participate in things outside of our own lives.”
-- Esquire | Harrison Ford Has Stories to Tell |Yeah, Indiana Jones is back. But enough with the legend stuff. We spent two days in L.A. with Ford—in his airplane hangar, at his house—drinking bourbon and talking about what really matters in life. By Ryan D'Agostino | PUBLISHED: MAY 31, 2023
Hans Solo & His Poached Egg | Music: Poached Egg by The Namby Pamby
To understand the animation of Hans Solo and his poached eggs you need to read the article in Esquire. In short, Harrison Ford is a super hero archetype actor. He’s acted in Star Wars (no date needed!), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Witness (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Working Girl (1988), Presumed Innocent (1990), Patriot Games (1992), The Fugitive (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Air Force One (1997), and Marvel movies as the President of the United States, and more.
Harrison knows better than most why we like and need stories in our lives. He’s acted in a bunch of them after all where it is his job to depict Arches of Consciousness. That is what stories and movies are all about. And as Arches of Consciousness, every arch has a light side and a shadow side. Just as human beings do and this is because we get to decide what side of an archetype we act upon. Our super hero movies and modern stories, just like ancient myths, depict what happens to human beings when they choose to act on one side of an arch or the other in constantly changing situations, which is the position we all find ourselves in as conscious living beings throughout our lives.
Arches of Consciousness | Music: Stream Of Consciousness — Coherent Energy
Stories are short cuts to consequences, karma. And karma is nothing more than the consequences of conscious choices made by human beings. Stories show us what might happen when we choose to act using one side or another side of an Arch of Consciousness or if we only choose to act using a very narrow spectrum of our full conscious capabilities.
The Indoctrination Barrage
So let’s get back to the meat of consciousness and why we need to pay attention and use our minds critically every moment of every day. We need to do this work of critical thinking, which is how we work out our consciousness, to stay healthy and free. We need to work out our minds just like we need to work out our bodies to stay healthy and live a long life.
Here is the next section of Joost A. M. Meerloo’s landmark book The Rape of the Mind, Chapter 5: The Indoctrination Barrage, beginning on page 71.
The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments an propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one. The flight from study and awareness is much too common in a world that throws too many confusing pictures to the individual. For the sake of our democracy, based on freedom and individualism, we have to bring ourselves back to study again and again. Otherwise, we can become easy victims of a well-planned verbal attack on our minds and consciences.
We Don’t Need No Education | Music: We Don’t Need No Education — Regent Street
We cannot be enough aware of the continual coercion of our senses and minds, the continual suggestive attacks which may pass through the intellectual barriers of insight. Repetition and Pavlovian conditioningexhaust the individual and may seduce him ultimately to accept a truth he himself initially defied and scorned.
Pavlovian Conditioning | Music: The Chain (cover) — Marvel Years
The totalitarians are very ingenious in arousing latent guilt in us by repeating over and over againhow criminally the Western World has acted toward innocent and peaceful people. The totalitarians may attack our identification with our leaders by ridiculing them, making use of every man's latent critical attitude toward all leaders. Sometimes they use the strategy of boredom to lull the people to sleep. They would like the entire Western world to fall into a hypnotic sleep under the illusion of peaceful coexistence. In a more refined strategy, they would like to have us cut all our ties of loyalty with the past, away from relatives and parents. The more you have forsaken them and their so-called outmoded concepts, the better you will cooperate with those who want to take mental possession of you.Every political strategy that aims toward arousing fear and suspicion tends to isolate the insecure individual until he surrenders to those forces that seem to him stronger than his former friends.
And last but not least, let us not forget that in the battle of arguments those with the best and most forceful strategy tend to win. The totalitarians organize intensive dialectical training for their subjects lest their doubts get the better of them. They try to do the same thing to the rest of the world in a less obtrusive way.
We have to learn to encounter the totalitarians' exhausting barrage of words with better training and better understanding. If we try to escape from these problems of mental defense or deny their complications, the cold war will gradually be lost to the slow encroachment of words -- and more words.
I’m GOD | Music: I’m God (Best Part Looped) — Crystalline
Concluding Thoughts
Resist, resist, resist the I-don’t-care reaction! Push yourself to learn, study, and understand. Run, don’t walk, towards the more intensified desire to study and to understand reaction that Joost A. M. Meerloo talks about. This is the only way we stay free. This is the only way we survive as a species on planet Earth because do you really think demigods like Trump, Putin, and the others really care about your freedoms, about your economic security, about the planet. If you really think they do, well, you’ve been successfully indoctrinated and are riding the barge to the end of the world
Archetypal Animations
Images made on Genolve AI image generation options.
Feature Archetypal Animation
Music: The Baroque Ball (From “Cruella”) [Instrumental] — Roxane Genot
