Puzzling Out the Puzzle Pieces

The puzzle pieces of what has gone wrong are enormous, so much so that fitting two or three together is unwieldy, while attempting to piece all the pieces together is both a fantastical and terrifying project, overturning long-held dearly held assumptions about government, public safety, human worth, personal liberty, and the dignity of our lives. Simply put, piecing together the bigger picture puzzle is traumatizing. To protect ourselves, the puzzle pieces are commonly processed separately, which is to say without correlation.

Thus writes Damian Bennett, whose thesis (unless you call it his open mind) explains, directly or indirectly, the blindness of conservatives, notably of NeverTrumpers and of the GOP in Congress. (Thanks for the Instapundit link, Ed.) Damian, a longtime reader of No Pasarán, goes on to provide a plethora of useful information:

Things are not right. Not just this thing or that thing, but major things, multiple things. And these major multiple things have all gone wrong, seriously wrong, openly wrong in the recent span of the last five to six years — though some origins date back going on decades — bringing us to the now of now.

Is the above proposition credible? If you think not, then end of discussion. If yes, I would like to begin a discussion with you here about things gone wrong. 

The puzzle pieces of what has gone wrong are enormous, so much so that fitting two or three together is unwieldy, while attempting to piece all the pieces together is both a fantastical and terrifying project, overturning long-held dearly held assumptions about government, public safety, human worth, personal liberty, and the dignity of our lives. Simply put, piecing together the bigger picture puzzle is traumatizing. To protect ourselves, the puzzle pieces are commonly processed separately, which is to say without correlation. OR — or the more problematic defense is to see nothing at all. To see nothing at all explains why so much of what is wrong has gone wrong in plain sight.  

The first order of business is to identify the puzzle pieces. Below are some puzzle pieces, by no means all. I have curated links for each, sometimes with comment or takeaways, sometimes not; some are little propædeutics, others are simply illustrative. Some could easily slip from one rubric to another or another, because what's happening, what's going wrong, is of a piece, one thing feeds another. These are prods. They are only meant to get the ball rolling. Please feel free to enlarge. Provide your own. What may surprise some is that the source material here comes from both the right and the left, upsetting pat notions of political divides, of yesteryears' neat unbridgeable schisms. The NWO is not partisan. It is an appetite, the devourer that devours one and all.

Power. Shock and awe of the emergent ruling class.

The ruling class is certainly not new, but glutted on MMT fiat cash, they of late have come out the shadows to boldly take possession of all remaining human capital -- the plebs, you and me and the squirreled-away scrapings in our savings and 401Ks.

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell; the Eric Schmidt How-to Manual
  
• Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley; the Klaus Schwab How-to Manual.
  
• The UN Makes It Official: Global Warming Hysteria Is All About Redistributing Wealth (FNC, March 27, 2009): A United Nations document on "climate change" that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes -- all under the supervision of the world body. (Also, see U.N. Official Reveals below under Money rubric.)
  
• Greenpeace: Yeah, We Misled, But We Needed The Emotionalism! (Hot Air, August 20, 2009): Although [Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold] admitted Greenpeace had released inaccurate but alarming information, Leipold defended the organization’s practice of “emotionalizing issues” in order to bring the public around to its way of thinking and alter public opinion. ... Leipold said later in the BBC interview that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world. He said annual growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent cannot continue without serious consequences for the climate. (Also, see Emotionalized Science below under Science rubric.)
  
• NYC Letter: America's Ruling Class (E-Nough!, August 15, 2010): Although voted in by the electorate, representative government now represents itself. Whereas the electorate's interests are in creating prosperity, the government's interests lie in exploiting prosperity. The bigger, the more daring the exploitation, the more power needed. ... The exercise of power is checked at the limit of the law. [Pause.] But the clever ruling class writes sprawling, convoluted, contradictory defective laws that are passed to be "fixed" (or here) or, more bizarrely, they might vote the "fixes" and the defects together. These humongous laws are almost always tested in the courts, which effectively repeal or "fix" law from the bench.
  
• Klaus Schwab Says – You Will Own Nothing In 10 Years (Armstrong Economics, October 26, 2020)
  
• The Great Reset: “You Will Own Nothing, And You Will Be Happy”? (Russell Brand, January 29,2021): Markham White is one of the people that brought to our attention the phrase you will own nothing and you will be happy: "My question is if I don't own anything then who does? Who controls the resources? Well it seems like the most obvious answer is the very people who practically own everything now."
  
• Great Reset: Leaders Colluding To Make Us Powerless (Russell Brand, March 28, 2021): Eric Schmidt, "Let's posit that the highly educated, the people who are driving [the technology state] will be fine."
  

Money. The root of all rot.

• U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare (IBD, February 10, 2015): The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man's stewardship of the environment. But we know that's not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this. At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.
  
• U.S. Billionaire Wealth Rises 40%, Up $1.1 Trillion, Since March 2020 (ZeroHedge, January 28, 2021): Institute for Policy Studies and Americans For Tax Fairness: "Not much has changed for America’s billionaires in the midst of the crisis—except the further swelling of their bank balances. "The combined fortune of the nation’s 660 billionaires as of Monday, January 18, 2021 was $4.1 trillion, up 38.6% from their collective net worth of just under $3 trillion on March 18, 2020, the rough start of the pandemic. At $4.1 trillion, the total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires is two-thirds higher than the $2.4 trillion in total wealth held by the bottom half of the population, 165 million Americans."
  
• Here Is The Hidden $150 Trillion Agenda Behind The "Crusade" Against Climate Change (ZeroHedge, October 14, 2021): Responding rhetorically to the key question, "how much will it cost?", BofA cuts to the chase and writes $150 trillion over 30 years — some $5 trillion in annual investments — amounting to twice current global GDP!
  

Science & Education. Bad education abets bad science. Bad science abounds.

• Military-Industrial Complex Speech (January 17, 1961) by Dwight D. Eisenhower: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
  Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. ... The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."
  
• Global Warming Bombshell (MIT Review, October 15, 2004): "But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records. But it wasn't so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
  Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!"
• NYC Letter: Hot/Cold, Part VI -- Emotionalized Science (E-Nough!, June 12, 2011): The science is emotionalized. But in a good cause, so that makes the emotionalized science sound. In fact, it is so sound that it is settled. That strong opinion makes for strong science is a time honored method predating the Novum Organum. ... There may be one or two more of these outlier "empirical" scientists, but "emotionalized" science still carries the day. [Pause.] The facts have yet to arrive, but soon. "Emotionalized" science has predicted the facts, which in bought science circles is like a guarantee.
  
• Scammers Impersonate Guest Editors To Get Sham Papers Published (Nature, November 8, 2021): "Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers."
  

Information, Misinformation, Disinformation & No Information. The real made unreal.

• The Propaganda Multiplier (Swiss Policy Research): "It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris."
  
• YouTube Deleted 2.5 Million ‘Dislikes’ From Biden White House Videos, Data Indicates (The Epoch Times, April 2, 2021) For a guy who purportedly received 81M votes, Biden Admin videos lack meaningful viewership. Biden videos are wildly, disproportionately ratioed. Try as they might, Big Blue Tech and Big Blue Media cannot fabricate post-election Biden popularity when it's tested in the market.
  
• The Dead Internet Theory suggests the human Internet died in 2016 or early 2017; it is now empty; much of dead-Net content is created by AI with the prime directive to convert Net-users into Net-consumers; dead-Net content is propagated by bots and abetted by "influencers" bankrolled by various corporations, further manipulated by dark government. It is intriguing because (a) it is correlative to much of what one finds and experiences on today's Internet, but (b) its assertions seem out-sized and preposterous. It is at (b) our incredulity kicks in and protects the dead-Net from serious scrutiny. Yet.
  Here are two overview videos: (1) The Dead Internet Theory (All Time, September 13, 2021), lays out basic argument (not quite as strongly argued as it could be); (2) The Dead Internet Theory 2 (All Time, September 28, 2021), a follow-on with a hard look at tech leviathan Google.
  
• Dying On The Internet (The Cinema Cartography, October 26, 2021) This is the sad goodbye-and-get-out of The Cinema Cartography. It is comprised of three video essays: (1) Death, is the voice looking to be, wanting to be heard; it lays out the stark case of Internet persona management, the graveyard of ideas; (2) Rigor Mortis, is a parody of an Alexa-like AI struggling mightily to find your meme breach-point; (3) Decay, this is Mr. & Mrs. Bond's trailing off, a literal walk-away from complicity with the deadening Internet and back into the natural world.
  

The great irony of our time, is that knowing what we know about Big Blue Tech, we act as if we do not really believe what we know. QED: those of you reading this who are still on FB or Twitter. 

Culture & Behavior. The world gone mad.

I believe we are in the midst of a mass psychosis. The literature on mass psychogenic illness often muddles mass psychosis with mass hysteria (as below). Hysteria has fallen on hard times. In 1980 it was removed from the DSM and parceled out to a wide variety of contemporary disorders. Today it only survives in medical literature as mass hysteria, which "is distinct from other types of collective delusions by involving physical symptoms... [O]utbreaks often include: symptoms that have no plausible organic basis; symptoms that are transient and benign; symptoms with rapid onset and recovery; occurrence in a segregated group." 

That is not what is happening today.

Consider this, the 'good German' did not seek out bad things. He did not necessarily condone bad things. He simply accepted at arm's length the Third Reich for what it was, did what was required, and got on with his life. All this worked perfectly well for him till Hitler began losing the war and the protections of the shared psychosis that was the National Socialist state evaporated. After the war 'good Germans' were de-Nazified, that is, their delusional ideology was treated, NOT some transient organic symptomology. Today's 'good global citizen' is being eased into a NWO no less immoral and dangerous than the Third Reich. Medical apartheid, state monopoly on truth, door-to-door compliance checks, federalized snitching, psychiatric detainment, and more — what is not already firmly in place is on the way.

• The Rape of the Mind (1961) by Joost Meerloo, MD (Hat tip DH): “[T]he totalitarian systems of the 20th century represent a kind of collective psychosis. Whether gradually or suddenly, reason and common human decency are no longer possible in such a system: there is only a pervasive atmosphere of terror, and a projection of 'the enemy', imagined to be 'in our midst'. Thus society turns on itself, urged on by the ruling authorities.”
  
• COVID-19 And The Political Economy Of Mass Hysteria (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, February 3, 2021): This is the key paper; it's not too long with an abundance of insights, though the academese can be stilted. Here are a few illustrative takeaways: (1) [T]he only task of a minimal state is to protect private property rights. It is not the task of the minimal state to protect its citizens against all risks of life, such as getting a cold or the seasonal flu. ... Indeed, the state´s attempt to reduce infection rates in the form of mandatory face masks, the shutdown of businesses or shelter in place orders does violate the private property rights that the minimal state is supposed to defend and may produce negative externalities in form of depressions, alcoholism or suicides.; (2) [E]mpirical research found that in countries with higher welfare spending, people are less religious... Religious beliefs, however, have been shown to increase psychological wellbeing. Without a spiritual framework provided by religion and belief in an afterlife, there is a tendency for fear of death to increase and for the population to become more responsive to psychological problems and mass hysteria.; (3) [T]he state may actively want to instill fear in the population, thereby contributing to the making of mass hysteria. Illustrating this point is the leakage of an internal paper of the German Department of the Interior during the first weeks of the COVID-19 crisis. In the paper, the state experts recommended that the government should instill fear in the German population.
  
• The World Is Suffering From Mass Delusional Psychosis (Lew Rockwell, February 19, 2021): Mark McDonald, MD “There was never a medical crisis. There were always enough resources to deal with the people who were sick … Many resources were in fact turned away … The question then, for me, became, ‘What’s the real crisis? What are people really suffering from?’ It became clear to me, very quickly, within the first two or three weeks in March [2020], that it was fear. ... They believe that they are going to die — no matter what age, no matter what state of health they’re in — if they don’t leave their house with a mask and gloves on every day and run from [other] human beings. That’s delusional psychosis. It’s false, it’s wrong, it’s not backed up by evidence. And many, many Americans are living that and believing that.”
  
• ‘The West Is Firmly In The Grip, Not Of A Virus, But Of Delusional Madness’ (Neil Oliver, August 28, 2021)

There. My 2¢. Your turn. Feed the kitty.

A few days later, NP reader Damian Bennett had this to add:

I have read that the woke represent about 6% (!?) of Americans. How to account for their outsized influence? The woke have captured whole sectors vital to public discourse: legacy media, tech social media, infotainment, Hollywood, C-suites, academia, government bureaucracies, and government executives and officials. The woke own the Overton window and command the tools to shape topical proposition and argument. What's more, and this is critical, is stoked wokèdness to bring about outcomes necessary for ushering in the NWO. (This is not to suggest there is an alliance between wokèdness and the NWO. Once established the NWO will get busy purging the woke on the pretext of the very outcomes wokèdness wrought -- much as Lenin once in power purged the Revolution, beginning at the margins.) 

…/… 

 

Wokèdness is an ideology that is self-defined by personal fragility. Its acolytes presume privilege over you and demand elevation above you. They are frail and swooning, wounded by everything, afraid of everything, afraid of you. Cancel yourself!

Outside the protected battlespaces of Twitter and FB the woke are base cowards. This purported 6% will not fill out the barricades nor prevail when conflict moves into the real world. And that, ladies and gentlemen and indeterminate pronouns, is where we are headed.

…/…

Stay healthy. Stay Safe. Stay Sane.