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Warring World(s) Part 5b. On Becoming a Formidable Foe (cont.)

Part 5b On Becoming a Formidable Foe (cont) (Previous part here)

The following is written in a rather didactic manner. An inevitable result, I think, of trying to pack a lot into a short essay and also trying to cater for a wide spectrum of experience and understanding amongst those that might read it. So, much of it will be redundant to many. There are a lot of opinions in these essays for which I don't give references. They come from my own experiences, some of which have been extreme. So take it as you will.

In the last Part (5a), I talked about beginning to oppose the conditioning in your life which has literally restricted you and your potential as a human being. The conditioning is all pervasive and like fish who cannot perceive the water they swim in because they have no experience of the water never being there, we cannot understand a life without this conditioning. We may imperfectly imagine it but that's all it will be unless we start making it a reality. We need faith to do this. Faith is believing in what you know to be true or can be true when it doesn't feel like it or you haven't experienced it yet, (these things unseen). And there will be times when it will feel impossible. But as many survivors of abuse, torture and addiction can tell you, it can be done. Programming can be overcome and meaningful and profound change can be brought about. You can change who you are. This is what free will is about; to allow you to become who you want to be, a free woman or man or alternatively a mental and financial slave. This is why the psychopaths spend so much time and effort undermining your sense of free will and personal authority.

To dominate you, they need to dominate your mind because they physically cannot guard and coerce you 24/7. They can only dominate your mind if you co-operate in doing that. Don't co-operate! Don't accept it!

To become a free person and to inspire others to do the same, you need character and nothing builds character like living in and pursuing the truth. And nothing destroys it so effectively as lying and acquiescing to lies. You make yourself so vulnerable psychologically to being manipulated by others when you engage in deceit. You can only blackmail someone who has been deceitful one way or another. That person, then, no longer has control over their own life. Somebody else has that control. This is the fate of so many of our politicians. They have done deals in the dark to gain power but they are no longer their own master. So what is the point? You can't do deals with the Devil and expect to win. So if you are going to run up against “the system”, you are going to need character to resist the fear and to guard against being blackmailed and manipulated one way or another. You will need a solid psychological, even spiritual, foundation and that is provided by pursuing truth in a committed manner.

We need to reduce the fear in our daily lives and increase (or take back) control before we can become part of that formidable foe of the system. This means shrinking back our lives until they are under our control and then after that advancing out into the community and engaging the system.

I am going to harp on the TeeVee again! I urge you again to remove it from your life. It is a major source of fear and helplessess. It also reinforces past deep conditioning. Research psychologists have found that survivors of torture and brainwashing still think their thoughts and concepts are their own even after they have come to accept they have been intensively brainwashed. I could talk on the reasons but the important point for us is that if you have been brainwashed by the TV, you won't realise it. But if you can get an adequate break from it, you will see it. Like a fish that spends enough time out of the water to appreciate the difference, it can now understand what the water feels like when it returns to it. Personally, I find it deeply offensive to be constantly lied to and manipulated. That's Tee Vee. And that's enough from me on TeeVee!

Shrinking your life down means seeing less people. That being the case, it makes sense to leave the shitty ones out; the contentious ones, the draining ones even if they are family. Actually, especially if they are family because they likely have a major negative influence on you because they have been around probably since childhood when the deepest conditioning went in. Don't argue with them, just be hard to reach.

If you are on a lot of committees, take a sabbatical from them. Later on after you have more control over your life you can choose which ones to pick up again. Get your finances under control. Debt is a form of slavery. Reduce your debt in any way you can. If the monetary system collapses, the less debt you have the better off you will be. Thanks to the US government's “Bail-Out”, there are now a lot of cashed up predators out there looking for (and creating) bargains, cheap assets. They intend to create a lot of hardship so as to profit from it. You don't want to have liens and mortgages hanging over you if you can help it. The ownership of your particular lending institution may pass into the hands of some real vultures looking for a short term profit which usually means cashing up the assets and that may have implications for your mortgage (if you have one, of course). At least do everything you can to minimise your debt and exposure. No sense in making it easy for them. Perhaps you could imagine you will lose your job in a month's time and start doing things from that perspective.

Buy yourself a copy of “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin. It has a very practical and complete program to follow to get control over your finances and the philosophy is in complete accord with where we want to go with all this. (Well, at least, where I want to go with this!). To become active in the community to bring about change, you will need time and energy which will likely reduce your work time and income and so you will have to reduce your need for money. Joe Dominguez retired as a less than highly paid analyst on Wall Street at the age of thirty one. He devoted the remaining thirty years of his life to working for free for community groups and charities. The book tells you how you can do the same.

Look for other ways to shrink or simplify your life because the easier it is to maintain, the more time and mental space you will have. Most importantly, you will get to feel what it is like being in charge of your own life instead of being at someone else's beck and call, be it your dominating mother, your bank manager, your boss or the local loan-shark (not in any particular order, you understand!). You will get to feel what it is like to have time to yourself. Be mindful of who and what you tolerate in your home. Aim to turn it into a sanctuary. We are designed to have stress in our lives. We need it to to keep us sharp. But we are not designed for continual stress. Unremitting stress leads to heart attacks and their psychological equivalents, burn-outs and breakdowns. This society tries to keep you so busy and puts you on 'hurry-up' so that you don't have time to think. Without peace and time to think in your life you can't see what is happening to you. Make that time; get that peace. . . . . and plan your next move. Following are some suggestions.

After shrinking down to get control and a better perspective, it's now time to expand out. Get to know your neighbours. Invite them for dinner. Listen to them and find out their concerns. Talk politics; talk about the future and the future of your children. Look for ways to help each other. Look for ways to trade in a non-monetary way. Build community groups such as food co-ops to grow vegies and buy in bulk. Not only will this be enjoyable, it will save you money and will reinforce the benefits of co-operation over competition and community over isolation.

I have a quote for you from “Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn and a question to follow it – (I borrowed it from the front page of this website)

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

The question is, “Would these people have been so easy to pick off if they had been living in an interdependent, supportive way with their neighbours?” There's a lesson here for us today.

Start to improve you neighbourhood with community projects. Lobby the Municipal authorities or Councils for changes. Pick projects or issues to start with that you can easily win because not only will you be standing up against the Council and perhaps (probably) some vested interests, you will be standing up against your's and your friends' conditioned learned helplessness. You want to start out kicking a couple of goals to learn in an experiential way that you can win.

Liaise with other community groups to find common concerns. Nominate and support you own candidates for upcoming municipal elections. (They must have no political party affiliations or be prepared to sever them before accepting the nomination). Get behind this candidate with everything you and your fellow community members have. Repeat this process until you have taken control of the Local Council (or whatever you call it in your area). You are now in a position to root out corruption and the inevitable and equally damaging incompetence that goes with it. The resultant prosperity and energy will snowball.

When State elections are imminent, propose to the community groups and local councilors that one of the councilors be nominated to run for the State Government; that you all work for his or her election on the proviso that they vote in the legislature according to the majority vote of the council. In other word, the State member becomes the agent of the council which is, in turn, the agent of the community groups. Again, no political party affiliations are permitted (you don't want any chance of split loyalty) and the electee agrees to only one term of office before it is rotated to another councillor. You want to minimise the possibilities for corruption, and besides, dealing with scumbags becomes debilitating!

You can expect someone elected in this nature to be frozen out in terms of influence for a time by the State Government which may even attempt to penalise your municipality (much like penalising the Gazans for electing Hamas but in a much more minor way , hopefully!), but hang in there. Eventually they will have to deal with your representative and by the time they do you will have a lot of credibility. Groups from other municipalities, I would expect, will approach you once you are seen to be successful and prospering. The good people, the ordinary citizens (like you and me) greatly outnumber the corrupt and the psychopaths. I think people are just waiting for a mechanism or method to turn dreams into reality.

Political parties have shanghaied democracy. You elect a representative who then doesn't listen to you and the reason why is simple. He owes his political future to the party because without the party endorsement he is dead (politically). This happens in both parties, of course, and because the vast majority of incumbents are re-elected, why should he pay any attention at all to the voters' wishes? There is a way to get their attention, though. At the next Federal election, see if you can't organise your area to vote against the incumbent which ever party he may belong to. The two parties are just two faces of the same coin which is readily apparent to all, now, anyway. So what's it matter to anyone which party “represents” you? Not much.

You can't change the parties but you most certainly can change the faces of the representatives. A majority of incumbents hold their seats with only a few percent or less of the vote. You can swing this and remove the incumbent; you know, that snake that voted for the Patriot Act; that snake that voted for the Bail-Out. Go join the challenger's campaign whether that be Republican or Democrat (or whatever Tweedledum and Tweedledee are called in your country). Take your friends with you and tell them, “We're from the community and we're here to help you!” If they wont let you into their camp, campaign for them anyway! Make a massive impact on the snakes that have voted against your interests; that have sold you and the next generation down the river of debt. If the PTB want to make a fuss about this strategy, that's all to the good because the publicity will focus attention on the glaring fact that both parties are the enemy and not this one or that one and the idea of voting out the incumbent whoever he may be will spread. The aim of the strategy is not to get someone elected but to get someone UNELECTED. If this strategy is repeated and spread widely, then either you will get some decent representation or you will grind the system to a halt. Either way you will go a long way towards bringing the cosy two-party system down and making them paranoid about their volunteers! Sound like a plan?

Back to the local community level, start a LETS scheme. LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading Systems. If you are not familiar with what they are, you can read about them here. The ideas of LETS schemes are great and have great potential. Many, though, make the mistake of trading in a currency unit other than dollars (or whatever the national currency in their particular country is). It is much much better to have what is known as “equivalence”. The dollars of the LETS scheme equals exactly the dollar of the national currency. They are for all intents and purposes the same. It's no more that a system of IOUs then. If you use dollars and can settle up in dollars should someone wish to leave the scheme, then you will be acting exactly like a bank, creating money (and out of the same thin air that they use!), only the community will gain the benefit and there is not much the government can do about it. After all, all you are doing is extending credit to each other to be settled up at some future date. The process is no different from the corner store having customer accounts except that in the LETS scheme you will exchange that debt for goods from someone else. If the government wants to say you are acting like a bank then they have to admit what banking really is. If you are guilty of fraud, counterfeiting or acting illegally, then so are the banks.

Start out by issuing everyone with a book of blank IOU's. In other words, a cheque book. Each LETS member has an overdraft limit which can be increased over time as they demonstrate an ability to trade and thereby discharge their debts. Make this trading subject to tax. Don't try and avoid it. It's the second common mistake with many LETS schemes. Keep it legal and open. Mind you, it would be wise to keep all records and computer programs duplicated two or three times at different locations in case of a raid and seizure. You want to keep it going.

A LETS scheme could be really kicked into high gear should you and your community take charge of the local council. The council can then run it and can also guarantee the credit balances because it has a guaranteed income in the form of rates. It can accept payments through the LETS scheme for rates and in doing so giving the LETS units (dollars on credit) guaranteed value. It can avail itself of some cost free financing by paying for some services through its own LETS account. Municipal workers could be paid partly through their LETS accounts. LETS money stays in the community and so keeps going round and round rather than being flushed out every time it is spent with a corporation.

The difference between prosperity and deprivation in a community is governed by the amount of currency in circulation to pay for the goods and services being produced in the community. It is no more complicated than that. A well run LETS scheme will effectively increase that amount of currency and consequently lead to increased prosperity and well being in the community. During the Great Depression in the Thirties, the currency level (Money Supply) was deliberately reduced to one third of its 1929 level. That's what caused the deprivation. The bankers are in the process of doing it again. A LETS scheme will work directly against the banks

One of the major benefits to the psychopaths that run our societies from this economic shrinking going on is that it creates mass unemployment amongst our youth. They are then much more susceptible to being recruited into the armed services and being fed headfirst into the war machine. If you want to stop this war machine then one very effective strategy is to choke off the supply of recruits. Or if you simply don't want your children being sucked into this machine, then you are going to have to create alternative employment for them. With your now vibrant community groups, you can look to starting businesses that will employ these young people in activities that will be beneficial to all. Perhaps you could provide scholarships to students to train in skills needed in your community. A LETS scheme can help in all this, too. You could also target workers currently employed in war industries in your area.

You may think that the government will impose a draft if it can't get the soldiers it wants through economic conscription. But I doubt it very much. That system broke down disastrously in the Vietnam war era and would do so again for the same reason. The conscripts did not decide of their own free will to go to war and they were acutely aware of that. An economic conscript will more readily believe he chose freely (even though that's not the case) and so will much more likely do what he is told. Big difference.

One final suggestion is that if you are going to engage in protests or demonstrations, wear your sunglasses and perhaps a hat and take your video camera with you. Encourage others to do the same. Film the cops and anybody you suspect of being an agent provocateur. In fact, get in the habit of carrying your camera with you in the car wherever you go. I personally think demos are far less productive that other strategies. They sometimes produce injuries and often waste time subsequently with court appearances and perhaps even jail. I think it is much better spending your finite amount of time and energy in throwing the bastards out or simply going around them rather than complaining to them about their own behaviour. All appealing to Caesar about Caesar does is tell both Caesar and you that you think he has the power and you don't. You've got the power. Use it!

It has taken the psychopaths generations to maneuver us into this sorry state so it will take time, years, to turn it all around. But the sooner it starts, the sooner it will happen and maybe the easier it will be. In the meantime, you will be improving your lot and the lot of others, regardless.

Warring World(s) Part 5a. On Becoming a Formidable Foe

Previous Part 4b here

On Becoming a Formidable Foe

There's a war going on and it's been going on ever since so-called “civilisation” i.e. specialised and hierarchical society, began. It's a psychological war and it's being waged constantly against we the “common people” by those who would dominate us in order that we serve them.

I have called those that would dominate us “psychopaths”. While I have resisted defining them for a number of reasons preferring, instead, to simply describe them, I will say this, again; that these people exist is beyond question and that a “psychopath” is someone who has effectively no conscience. Consequently, they feel no shame, no remorse and no guilt at exploiting others. They have nothing inside them mentally to which we can appeal to in an effort to have them change their ways, to co-operate with the rest of humanity. (Further description is to be found here.) This makes negotiation with them effectively impossible and worse than a waste of time (See this article and comments from the Forum on Camp David for an example), given that while ever they have an opportunity to exploit others, they will. So the focus should be on taking away that opportunity. Ultimately, that means physically containing them; isolating them from the rest of the community in as humanitarian a way as possible. After all, we don't want to emulate their behaviour in our efforts to stop this very same behaviour. This is one of the follies of employing violence and retribution in fighting them. In the end, of course, we wish to identify and remove the causes for this anti-social condition. However, before we can change the causative circumstances, we have the more immediate problem of how to wrest control of ourselves and our society out of their hands.

There are many among us who function in a way that may be seen as psychopathic but who are not in fact psychopaths but are simply unthinking or opportunists and people of weak character who enjoy power but ultimately just “go with the flow”, “change with the wind” and “do what they're told”. For the purposes of these essays, I will call them “enablers”. Though we are all enablers to some extent, I will generally mean those that follow orders and who either never think there is anything wrong with doing so or will not look at it for fear of losing their position in life and whatever that entails. These people believe in “authority”. But these people can be appealed to to change. It is best done through example. These people can change and they will because they “change with the wind”. The “wind” being our collective example. When a critical mass of revolutionaries is reached it suddenly overwhelms the old order. The reason is that these enablers “flop over”, as it were. I need to talk more at length about the intoxication of power and the making of psychopaths and will do so in a subsequent essay.

On the other hand, the psychopaths, as said before, cannot be changed by us or by themselves. Picking the difference between these two groups is difficult. Fortunately for us, we don't need to differentiate in terms of strategy or tactics to use against both groups. At least, not until we as a society are in a position to permanently isolate them as individuals. We have this tragedy in our midst, lets us use the urgent need to repair it to better ourselves and succeeding generations rather than making it worse. The end, dignity, freedom and respect for all (who would likewise respect others), has to be the means as well. Where to start? We start by undoing the conditioning that has filled us with fear. We treat it as a phobia against disobedience and as a mental agoraphobia, a fear of stepping outside our now self imposed mental prison. We do this by mentally challenging the erroneous thoughts that govern our behaviour and then we start to physically challenging these same erroneous thoughts through acting differently. Pretty soon the power evaporates out of the conditioning, we see the lie behind it and we are free! Well, freer at least. It's a process.

Violence and the threat of violence are the methods, or weapons of choice of our would be dominators. Alice Miller has detailed the way we are parented, which she calls “poisonous pedagogy” using violence and the threats of violence together with messages of unacceptability. The effect of this process is to leave us all with a very stunted sense of our own autonomy. In other words, our sense of our own freewill which lies at the heart of our creativity and our “image in the likeness of God”. This loss of our ability to understand and use the full extent of our freewill stunts our ability to perceive and experience life; in short, it stunts our nature as human beings, our humanness. This same method of inculcating “desirable” behaviour and thinking is repeated by our society's institutions. We fall victim to these messages because we have been programmed to throughout our childhood. We are like battery hens who maintain their own cages through the mental constructs placed there by others and by believing the story that they were created thus, it has always been this way and this is their destiny. If we are to change our society and its destructive behaviour and goals, we will have to first undo this crippling conditioning. We can do this in our everyday life, and starting today.

We have seen that the 5% or so of our population that are psychopaths have had inordinate influence over the rest of us simply because we have been largely unaware of their existence. If we have been aware of them, we have been blind to their methods and ironically, to their methods of blinding us. We have been lied to from birth by our culture. This has effectively brainwashed us into seeing ourselves and our society upside down; into seeing reality as the controllers in our society would have us see it i.e. that they are in control and we are helpless; that they know what's best for us and we do not. Without this faulty worldview in place in all of us, the psychopaths would be helpless. This psychopathic culture can only function through our co-operation and we outnumber them 20 to 1! We don't need violence and violent weapons. We simply need to change our thinking and subsequent behaviour. The answer is simple, the doing of it less so because the transition process can be a little uncomfortable for everybody! It calls for courage and persistence.

On the way to achieving a critical mass in our society, there will be hardship but there will also be rewards along the way. You will inevitably grow into a more alive and more formidable person. We have a tendency as human beings to want different outputs without changing the inputs. We want a better life without having to make changes in this same life. This is magical thinking. It can't be done. To improve our lives, we have to change and to do that we have to commit to it. We have to “get real” and seek the truth, reality. Change is coming, anyway, so why not take control of what you can, now?

Societal change must start within you as an individual. Without this change you will not be able to contribute to the change in others. So if you look to others first, you will just be a follower and that is not going to advance yourself and it is not going to help advance others. Besides if you have been following the wrong people up till now, how are you going to discern the right ones without changing your worldview first? You would still be looking for essentially the same sort of leader. This is what elections in “two-party states” are all about. Still looking for someone to obey and that is what has led us to this sorry impasse. The “right sort of leader” is one you want to emulate not one you have to, or even want to, obey.

Once you start to change you will be attracted to people who are attempting to do likewise. It now becomes a “chicken and egg thing”, encouraging each other and following each other's example. When this spreads far enough, or goes viral as they say, we have societal change. So the changes I propose are divided into individual and community for clarity of presentation but, as I said, once started on an individual level, it will become a dynamic interaction.

First the individual. This is you, dear reader! The initial focus will be on all the bullshit in your life and getting rid of it (pardon the bluntness. I include myself in all this, BTW). We have been taught bullshit and we repeat it to ourselves every day. Replacing it with truth will simplify your life with yourself and with others. It will reduce the stress and conflict and lead to more happiness. It has to because you will be seeing reality more clearly and will be able to make much better choices. If the reality is that you are afraid of your own shadow, don't bullshit yourself about it. Admit it. Now you can do something about it. The first thing you need to do to fix a broken leg is to face the fact that it is broken. Nothing is going to get better until this first step is taken. Reality cannot be in conflict with itself as there can only be one reality. But you can be in conflict with it and if you are you will pay for it. Alice Miller in her book, "The Body Never Lies", goes to great lengths to show how not facing the reality of our childhood, for instance, will hobble us throughout life and cause ill health and even early death. Nothing can change until we face the truth, whatever that may be. Through truth we undo lies and through undoing lies we gain freedom; freedom from the mental shackles put there by those that would oppress us.

Through knowing truth, you make better choices that will help you rather than some controller that you have been pleasing. That's not to say there won't be some friction with those you work with or live with and love (especially if you live with a controller). It's a sad thing to watch, as an addict is going through the process of fighting his addiction, those around him become threatened and start undermining his efforts. Few welcome change. Forewarned is forearmed!

Buckling under to someone because you love them is not helping you, or them either. Someone is manipulating your immediate controller (they always are, it's part of the territory) and so is manipulating you in turn. By pushing back at who ever it is you love and who is doing this to you, you stop them from relieving their pressure by passing on the bullshit to you and so put pressure on them to pass it back to where it came from. That is helping someone you love.

The first thing to do now is to stop watching TeeVee. It really is demeaning. You are being treated as an idiot and all the psychological messages that go along with that. Not only that, but it reinforces all the programming you received as a child; all the notions this destructive society runs on: competition (one winner, lotsa losers); righteous violence (an oxymoron if ever there was one); authority's right to dominate and wealth equals wisdom (but don't get me started!). The moving light show induces a state of dissociation and thus allows free passage to all sorts of messages, overt and covert. It's brainwashing, pure and simple, and there is no point in fighting your past conditioning if you are also routinely reinforcing it. It's like fighting alcoholism and taking a break every now and then to refresh with a double bourbon. Nuts! So throw that damned box out. If you can't throw it on the municipal garbage tip, stuff it in the garage. If the family politics wont allow that, at least negotiate for it to be put in a room at the end of the house and away from the hub where it dominates thinking and behaviour and you can avoid it. This may seem extreme but if you can live without TV completely for a month and then sit down for a night to watch it you will see why I'm adamant.

We'll come back to the TeeVee later. But, in the meantime, start the experiment. Same goes for newspapers. Save yourself the money. I don't listen to radio either but there's not much of a selection where I live and besides I have issues with it that are peculiar to me. Be discerning. Certainly don't listen to talkback or the news. It's best if you can do without it altogether for a month (rather than having to turn it on and off all the time) just to give yourself a point of comparison. Tape some music and listen to that instead and get your news from the internet.
Next, we all talk bullshit to ourselves and to others. Start challenging obvious bullshit from others. There's no need to get aggressive or moralistic about it. Be respectful because that's what we want more of in the world. Plus, you might have made a mistake in your assessment. Lead by example. Just ask people to explain themselves further. “I don't understand. How does that work?” for instance. These are reasonable questions in any case. Most people are happy to answer them but liars don't like being questioned. Pretty soon people start thinking about what they say to you first before opening their mouths. And pretty soon, too, you start hearing less bullshit (and perhaps better explanations). Your quality of life has already gone up one notch if not two!

Start listening to what you say to others. Think,”is that strictly correct?” Think about whether or not you are leaving people with an incorrect idea of what is going on i.e. misleading them. It's not the straight out lie that's so harmful, it's the deception. Deception is about what is not real. Living in “not real land” is akin to living in delusion which is insanity coming on. You don't want to go there. You're into reality now and the autonomy that it gives you. The more you practise spotting the bullshit in your own talk, the easier it is to spot in others. Authority figures rely on bullshitting you and not being challenged. You now have your first weapon against the next would be Hitler.

By being respectful of others and yourself (i.e. talking adult to adult) you upset the would be controller's playbook. Power junkies worship the hierarchical thinking of the “pecking order”because the hierarchy grants them power. It allows them to “kick down”. But it also demands that they “kiss up” and they're conditioned to it. So your would be controller's first objective is to establish if you are inferior or superior to him. If you do not give him clues that indicate you are an inferior, otherwise known as a victim, from your response, he will likely become confused and is more likely to treat you as if you are a superior, just in case.

Body language is crucial. No shuffling of shoes here! And certainly no looking down, either. Maintain eye contact. If you find that difficult, look at the bridge of their nose, the point right between their eyes. They can't tell that you are not looking into their eyes plus you can see much more of their body with your peripheral vision. Look for indications of doubt and fear in their behaviour. It's a martial arts technique. Practise it at non threatening times. It is also a handy technique to use when some bozo decides he's going to stare you down. Just look at the bridge of his nose, relax your body but pay close attention to his and tell yourself you've got all day to play this game.

If you stop accepting being jerked around you magically stop getting jerked around. It's quite amazing. It's like you have taken down that big neon sign over you head. You know the one, the one that says, "Victim"!

I have the good fortune to know a number of women who have knowingly risked their lives at different times, individually, to speak out truth against serious, organised and well-connected criminals; some of these criminals were/are in the police and government. I figure if they can do that then we can, at least, look the next intimidating punk in a uniform in the eye and ask him calmly and evenly, “Would you mind repeating that?” People who like to dominate others are by definition cowards. They have the need because they lack courage and self esteem. They made a different decision to the one we made to the same programming (I'm assuming I'm amongst friends here!). But more on this later, too.

If you are serious about wanting change, you have some homework to do. Changing will be hard only because it will rub up against your conditioning of learned obedience and learned helplessness. All the more reason to press on! Pressing on is the behaviour, indeed the hallmark, of a formidable person. It will likely displease others around you at first and this might surprise you. But this is also good because you will get to see your own conditioning concerning being an acceptable person! A formidable person is one who does not dance to other's tunes. She or he hears and follows their own piper. (that's for you, McJ!)

I have some additional homework for you, folks; some reading to fill in all that time you now have since throwing out the TeeeVeee.

Anything from Alice Miller (here's a free download of an early book, "For Your Own Good")

"Escape From Freedom" by Erich Fromm (I have to re-read this myself. So if I have to, everybody has to!)

"On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill (he makes an extremely good point, amongst others, about the making of laws to protect people from themselves) Look in the reference section of your local library.

This essay (link courtesy of Littlehorn), “Punishment Vs Restitution” by Roderick T. Long, paying particular attention to the author's notion of what is your domain or sphere of authority and what is not. I fully endorse his views on violence as well.

“The Tao of Pooh” (believe it or not!) by Benjamin Hoff. He has a lot to say about the reality of people in a very engaging way.

Read what you can find on assertiveness and on body language.

And as a parting thought, a piece of wisdom from my part of the woods,

“Never take your eye off the bully”!

As always, questions and comments sought.

Next part - On Becoming a Formidable Foe (cont)

Homeland Security Video Podcasts: Milgram's Muppets

Viewpoints In Homeland Defense And Security
Homeland Security Leaders Give Opinions on Current Issues and Challenges (Author: NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security)
http://www.podanza.com/podcast/viewpoints-in-homeland-defense-and-securi...

The above site has video podcasts in which "Homeland Security Leaders Give Opinions on Current Issues and Challenges". I watched a couple of pod casts this morning.

The interviewers and their guests speak in very reasonable sounding tones. They sit up tall and straight, yet relaxed, and enunciate clearly. The issues they address are real.

In "Managing The Data Explosion" in fusion centers where the analysts tackle all hazards and all crimes they talk about circular reporting. Everybody keeps sending the same information around and around. Just like we get the same joke via email. It comes as tube, then someone takes a few lines out of it and sends it as text. Then it shows up on an RSS feed or something.Then you send it out to two different mailing lists, and your friend Bob is on both lists and then takes credit for originating the joke. Homeland Security wants to control all that so their analysts don't have to slog through it all to solve hazards and crimes. That's a real data management issue, I guess.

After they have solved abstracting and distributing:

"There will be a day when we turn to citizens to become collectors of information. And that information will be flowing through the centers. And that information will be analyzed not just by the police but by many other disciplines and then the data needs to be pushed out through those other disciplines."

Am I dreaming?
Anyways,

In the award-winning "Chds Thesis Series Spring 2008: Introducing The Future Now: Using Memetics And Popular Culture To Identify The Post 9/11 Homeland Security Zeitgeist" the interviewee in the podcast describes how she has tracked "memes", aka units of communication, like "Where's the beef?" She has found that the original intent of some of Homeland Security's memes have been morphed in popular culture to the point where Homeland Security is another way of saying "the bad guys". This is important for Homeland Security because the next time they have a message they are going to have to be more careful about their memes.

The issues for both of the interviewees are real except, perhaps, the raison d'être for the entire effort. There were some real issues for the subjects of Milgram's experiments, too. Like exactly when and how to push the button that tortured the victim. "Why?" was the real issue, though.

Are these video pod casts actual recordings of Milgram's Muppets? It's fun to watch just like a Muppet show.

Are the Homeland Security Memes delivered in a strong, clear, authoritative voice? Is that why they continue to press the buttons that sends electronic shocks through the constitution and shocks through people in ways the constitution never conjectured?

Have they caught any bad guys yet? They have made a bunch up. They have tortured lots. They let the ones they know about walk away into lovely retirements.

Rolling Stone magazine reports on the big brother Golden Shield in China, and in another article shows that Homeland Security hasn't caught anybody yet.
Winter Patriot cast very serious doubts about the veracity of the terror plots, from the ridiculous liquid bombers to a punk trading crappy old stereo speakers for a hand grenade. The security forces haven't caught anybody they didn't make up themselves.

But they are getting better and better at knowing when to push the buttons. In fact, they investigate credit card fraud. But they won't be hired to actually wire up the system because then they would find out that the wires don't actually do what they think they do.

They could be really good actors and know already. Hard to say.

Rashid Rauf
http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/search/label/Rashid%20Rauf

Golden Shield:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/

Milgram:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Warring World(s) Part 4b Introduction to "The System" (cont)

Previous part Part 4a Introduction to "The System"

Part 4b INTRODUCTION TO “THE SYSTEM” (cont)

A friend asked me the other night what I meant when I said this current financial fiasco was deliberately engineered. I started to think about gearing and derivatives (such as I understand them) and the bundling of dodgey loans with good ones and onselling them to unsuspecting (but greedy) investors, lending policies and the “Gnomes of Zurich”. (You never hear about the Gnomes anymore. I miss them!). But I quickly realised that what was needed was a foundational understanding about what money is, what it is supposed to be and how it comes into being and by whom. It had to be short and simple explanation, too, because it really is simple and a long explanation would lose that. If you can grab the simplicity of it, you will never be bamboozled by any schtick. So I said, “let me think about it and I'll get back to you”. So on to the computer I went and hit the Google button (actually the Cuil button) to find what I was after. I didn't find it. Then I thought I need to write about the “Moneychangers” anyway, so why not set out the banking system as simply as I could in that essay. So here it is. I hope old hands at this stuff will bear with me.

In Medieval times, Christians weren't permitted to lend money at interest. This was called usury and was a sin. Jews weren't permitted to lend money at interest to fellow Jews but they could lend and charge interest to outsiders, read Christians. So, the religious law from two religions created an industry and a market and a captive one at that. (Later when Christians began to lend money at interest, usury was redefined to mean charging interest at exorbitant rates rather than any rate). This arrangement created some animosity, as you would expect. Shakespeare's “Merchant of Venice” with its depiction of the Jewish moneylender, Shylock, is a good example of it. In fact, it added a word to the lexicon, shylocking, as an alternative to the term loansharking. Jews seem to be associated in history with moneychanging and moneylending in the popular imagination and with some reason.

What makes shylocking or loansharking so insidious is not just the high rate of interest charged but the fact that the interest is compounded i.e. interest is charged on interest. The debt explodes exponentially and soon threatens to devour the hapless debtor. Where did this poisonous notion of compound interest originate? Where else but Babylon! Yes, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon is credited with inventing compound interest. And it was during his reign that the Jews were in exile there. Judaism was a literate culture and so Judean slaves were sought after as administrators. It is reasonable, I think, to assume that some of the Jewish slaves worked with the system and became very familiar with it. I think it reasonable to assume also that it was the Jews who brought the concept, and indeed the practice, of usury with its compound interest from Babylon through to more modern times.

The problem with compound interest, as I said before, is that it grows exponentially and, also, that it is infinite in nature. But this is a finite world. Certainly our hapless debtor has a finite amount of time and energy to devote to paying off his debt. The finite time limitation of a debtors life has been gotten around in some countries through the practice of inheriting debts from the previous generation. It is also achieved when a government enters into debt as a government lives on from one generation to the next. There is still, though, the finite resources of people and raw materials. So, we now have an infinite variable in a finite equation. This will not lead to a happy ending.

Usury (and I use the word in its original and correct sense) is mostly the province of banks these days. In Medieval times it was largely the province of goldsmiths who were most often Jewish and who were the forerunners of our present day bankers. They started what would become known as the Fractional Reserve Banking system only in those times it would be more accurate to call it fraud. People who had gold in any sizable amount would leave it with goldsmiths for safekeeping, literally, i.e. to keep it in their safes. The goldsmiths would sometimes offer to lend the gold out at interest and charge a margin for doing so. This was fine and dandy (even if it was a sin for the gold owner and now lender). Sometimes a gold depositer would travel and to save the danger of being robbed while en route with his gold, he would avail himself of the practice that goldsmiths had evolved for themselves of dealing in gold receipts or what we might now call cheques. The goldsmiths kept accounts with each other and would settle any differences after a period of trading in these receipts (or cheques) periodically. A traveller could put his gold on deposit with one goldsmith and receive a receipt for it and “cash it in” with another goldsmith upon arrival at his destination. Pretty neat system, yes? Yes, but there's a twist and here comes the fraud.

After a while the goldsmiths found that not every depositor came on the same day to withdraw all his gold. In fact, they discovered that all they needed was about 10% to cover claims and most of the gold wasn't physically lent out anyway but rather the loans took the form of receipts backed by the gold on deposit. All this amounted to a golden opportunity (sorry about the pun) for the goldsmiths. They could use all the gold on deposit as the 10% cover for claims. In other words, they could lend out ten times the value of gold they actually had. So if a goldsmith had 10 million shekels worth of gold in his safe, he could make one 100 million shekels worth of loans and if he paid 3% to the depositor and charged 6% to the lenders he was in clover. 100 million at 6% is 6 million less 10 million at 3% which is 0.3 million leaves a profit of 5.7 million or 57% per annum. This really is a goldmine! Modern bankers essentially do the same thing except they don't even need gold now. So if you ever wondered how the Rothschilds, for instance, got so rich, now you know.

To explain how the modern bankers do it without gold, I will use an example involving the cheque book system. A cheque is a promisory note or simply a promise to pay. It's not the money itself. Suppose you want to buy a new car. You go to the bank and they approve a loan for you. They don't hand over a bag of cash. The give you a line of credit or the same thing by another name. What they do is allow you to overdraw your account. So you can write out a cheque for say $20k and they won't bounce it. They will honour it, in other words, with someone else's money, you think. But not so.

OK, you've selected your car and write the nice car salesman, Honest John, out the cheque for $20k and hand it over. You may think you have spent your money but you haven't yet. Nothing has changed with your account at the bank. The Honest John takes your cheque to his bank and deposits it into his account. His balance goes up by $20k and at that point the money supply i.e. the total amount of money in the nation (which is made up of all the credit balances in all the bank accounts) available to purchase goods and services has just increased by $20k. Money has been created. John's bank then sends the cheque to your bank and your account is now $20k in the red. At this moment the national debt which includes all the debit balances in all the bank accounts in the nation has just gone up $20k, too. The new money has been created by new debt and the banks' Double Entry bookeeping systems (collectively) balance and everything looks hunky-dory. Nobody's money was borrowed. The new money was created by a bookeeping entry, out of nothing, out of thin air, if you like. Isn't that neat? Bankers think it's beautiful because they get to charge interest on that money which costs them virtually nothing because the interest they pay on credit balances in chequeing accounts such as Honest John's amount to bugger all, to use the technical term. Nearly all the money of a nation is created in this manner and so it attracts interest. How would you like to issue the money supply, the currency, of a nation, all of it, and get paid interest on all of it? Now, that's really neat. And it's legal now (well, sort of). But it is still fraud.

It's fraud because the backing for the money supply (the nation's currency) that gives it value is not gold (fictitious or otherwise) in a safe somewhere any more but the GDP of the nation; the value of the production, the wealth created in any given year by the population as a whole. None of it is produced by the bankers. They didn't produce it so don't own the backing of the currency and therefore should not be paid the interest on it. The interest belongs to the producers, the people who provide the value for it, or their representative government. If governments received the interest on the Money Supply, you could probaly forget about taxes. They would be very drastically reduced, at any rate. This is an immense scam perpertrated on the public. What lengths do you think the psychopaths running this scam will go to to protect it and keep it going? If history is anything to go by, any length at all. This scam, by the way, is unconstitutional both in the US and in my country, Australia. Both countries' constitutions charge the government with the responsibility of issuing the country's currency. So it's arguably legal but only arguably. It doesn't seem to bother them, though, and you'll see why shortly if you can't see it or don't know it already.

But first there are a few more wrinkles to explain. The banks create and lend money and they also control who they lend it to. They play favourites and this is how an elite class grows up around the bankers and how they keep much of the hoi-poloi struggling. They need to do this to keep labour competing for the demeaning jobs in their overbearing corporations. The poor aren't poor because the rich are rich, by the way. The poor are poor because the rich choke down the economy to maintain scarcity for a sizable section of the community. This gives them power.

The other thing they control is the overall level of production in the nation. They do this by varying the amount of the Money Supply, the money in circulation that we need to spend to buy things, through the amount of loans they make day to day, month to month and creating booms and busts in the process. The money is created through loans and is similarly extinguished when they are paid back so new loans have to be created of a similar amount to maintain the level of the money supply. If they are not, then the money supply shrinks over time and that means there is less money to buy the nation's production and therefore production is wound back and unemployment is created instead. This is the bust and is exactly what is being experienced around the world at the moment and for this same reason. The US government, in particular, is throwing money at the banks but they are not lending it on and thereby deliberately creating this recession, soon to become depression. They are shrinking the Money Supply even while all this money is being thrown at them. If the government lent the money directly to the public and businesses, there would not be a problem any longer. It's that simple.

Always before a bust, there is a boom. The psychopaths that run our banks periodically lend money seemingly without restraint but always covered by mortgages or titles over assets. Everybody gets busy building products and businesses and lots of wealth is created inspite of the interest that is charged on the money that enables all the exchanging going on. This extra interest is, of course, a boon to the bankers. When everybody is loaded to the maximum with debt, the banks start shrinking the new loans rate and often raising the interest rate as well. Though, not this time. Money gets “tight”, literally. It's one big game of musical chairs now as people scramble to get increasingly scarce cash to make their payments. Some lose out and lose their homes and businesses. The bankers and their surrounding clique get to buy up some cheap assets now. So, through boom AND bust, they win.

It's like a big economic suction pump. When the loans are freely flowing it is like the upstroke of the pump. It is being primed with the wealth from the toil of the public and the interest from the wealth goes to the bankers. When the loans and therefore the Money Supply shrink, it is like the down stroke of the pump and a goodly proportion of that wealth itself is squeezed up to the bankers and their surrounding elite who have done nothing except provide a bookeeping service. This is psychopathic behaviour.

There is one last nasty direct consequence of this system. When a loan is issued, the money comes into being and so the loan principal can be paid back in full. However, the loan attracts interest and must be paid with money but the money to pay the interest has not been created through a loan and so doesn't exist. The debt now is larger than the amount of money in existence and so cannot be paid unless a further loan to cover the interest is made. But this is just putting off the inevitable day and, in fact, making it worse because now there is interest due on the interest! This is the reason why any nation's national debt is far, far larger than it's Money Supply. If all the money was used to pay off bank debts, there would still be debts owing. It is not a sustainable system, to say the least.

I mentioned before that this activity of creating the nation's Money Supply is illegal, or at least unconstitutional, and yet they don't seem to worry about it. Here's why. This corrupt process delivers massive wealth into the hands of these psychopaths and they use it to corrupt the whole system of society. They buy off the politicians and the judiciary to pass and interpret the laws that cover the unconstitutionality of their practice. They buy the lawyers and the media to be their mouthpieces and give them respectability. They buy the police and the security agencies both directly and through the government to harrass and otherwise deal with any credible threats to their position. They buy the government and create bogus oversight commissions. They buy and sell anything and anybody. Welcome to the machine!

Of course, changing the form of government to a totalitarian one would remove any potential to correct this questionable legality and unquestionable immorality. Welcome to the future (if they can pull it off which is by no means certain).

Here endeth Part 4, the description of the three pillars of our all pervasive “System”; Religion, the Law and the Banks and the two mechanisms which facilitate it, the hierarchy and debt money with compound interest, ironically brought to us by the two religions of our culture. Needless to say, all three pillars dominate through employing fear and deceit. But with knowledge, deceit is dispelled and fear also. At least, the fear that is programmed in. They still have fear that can be induced by violence but that will not be enough to save them. They tell us that through their behaviour because if violence was enough they wouldn't invest all this effort to deceive and programme us. Now there's a somewhat happy thought to end this Part with!

Next Part - Part 5a. On Becoming a Formidable Foe

Warring World(s) Part 4a Introduction to "The System"

Previous Part 3 here

Part 4a Introduction to “The System”

Part 1 focused on the enemy being the psychopaths in our societies and not the people the psychopaths point us at. That these psychopaths create and market wars for their own profit and that the wars are ultimately against the rest of humanity who are largely uneducated to this ruse.

Part 2 sought to expound a little on how psychopaths think; how they are fundamentally different from the rest of us; how they have no conscience and what that means. I probably should have included in Part 2 how people generally become enamored with power and how this can lead to psychopathy. I will make amends for that now and will then look at how these psychopaths leverage their corrupt mindset into real power over our society by looking at the three main institutions or professions and the two mechanisms they use. But first, power.

We have lots of sayings in our culture that show a common knowledge of the effects of power but these are never acknowledged by those in power who, of course, are the very ones suffering from them. Some of these sayings are: “He's drunk with power”; “The power has gone to his head”; and my favourite (of Scottish heritage, I believe), “The working class can kiss my arse, I've got the foreman's job at last”! We know instinctively what they are conveying; that people exercising power over others change. Their attitudes, politics, priorities and even worldviews change and change for the worse. Arrogance goes up and compassion and common sense goes down. They become immature and insufferable yet they would have you think they are now superior. What is going on here? Where else or in whom else do we see this metamorphosis?

During my life, from early childhood onwards, I have had to deal with many alcoholics both within and without my family. Similarly, I have also had to deal with many psychopaths also both within and without my family. I am very familiar with both groups. It was a memorable day, indeed, the day I realised there was a striking similarity between the two and what that meant. And it was this; that both groups ended up with upside down priorities and engaging in behaviour that was destructive to both themselves and others and being seemingly totally oblivious to or caring about the consequences. Upon further thought, I realised that they both got to the point of their seemingly insane behaviour by the same process; incrementally, bit by little bit. At each step losing sight of where they had come from, the change that had occurred in themselves. I realised that the same delusional process was at work in both groups.

Deep sea divers can sometimes suffer from what is called “rapture of the deep” where narcosis sets in and the diver experiences this state of euphoria and thinking he is blissfully safe and in control when, in fact, he is in deep and imminent danger. This process of narcosis is the path trod by all substance abusers and addicts. I was very familiar with this phenomenon in alcoholics and now I saw that it happened with psychopaths as well. Psychopaths have the same pathology as addicts.

If you have a tendency to dismiss psychopathy because you cannot imagine people behaving like that, then just think about addicts and their behaviour. It happens.

So if psychopaths behave like addicts, what are they addicted to? The answer seems obvious, doesn't it? Power, power over other people. To quote “The Oracle” again, “What do men with power want? More Power”. Quotes such as this from the movie “The Matrix” hit you because you already know the truth of them.

I have argued previously that we are not given power over others. This is God's province and he has granted us free will so even he is not exercising power over us. “That all men are created equal” is pronounced as self evident and is accepted as such because it is (if that's not too circular). Exercising power over others finds its ultimate expression and ultimate offensiveness in torture. Torture, pared down to its essence, is an attempt on the part of the torturer to replace God in the life of the tortured with himself. I will return later to this subject of torture and talk of its ability sometimes to bring about psychopathy, particularly in children.

Exercising power over others is addictive and also narcotic i.e. it may feel good but it induces a delusion. It affects the mind's ability to accurately perceive reality and to exercise control over itself, to restrain itself. It slowly shuts down the voice of conscience. Life becomes the singular pursuit of the addictive substance, power over others, and woe betide anybody who gets between and addict and his life's desire. If pursued far enough and long enough, psychopathy is the outcome. As we are all susceptible to drug addiction, so are we also susceptible to power addiction but we restrain ourselves. We choose not to commit to this dark path. Somehow, I think that most people have an appreciation of this destructive process. Yet all of our institutions in society are structured as if this didn't happen. The hierarchy is the dominant structure used and not only does the hierarchy not encourage restraint, it rewards the opposite, dominance and exploitation. A look at these institutions and particularly the ones that are the pillars of “The System” is next. To start, I would like to briefly return to the New Testament Gospels.

Jesus paid out big time on three groups, the priests, the scribes (lawyers) and the moneychangers. These three groups conspired together in Judean society to exploit most of the people. Nothing has changed! These three groups down through the ages have manufactured misery and fear when none was necessary so as to gain privilege and power over others for themselves. They did it by working on peoples' minds. This is a crucial point because in it lies the key to our liberation from these same groups who are still doing it to this day.

First, the priests. Our dominant Christian culture was fostered first by the Catholic Church and it still remains a powerful force in our society. Various reformations caused rival denominations to be established and these denominations seem to be forever splitting. Each time saying the “old” denomination was wrong. No argument there from me! But, unfortunately, the new group always takes the really bad part with them; the desire to dominate and the structure to do it with.

Though Christianity was persecuted by the Jews and the Romans, it flourished for three hundred years. Christianity took the form of many small regional churches. They co-operated with each other but were autonomous. Then the Emperor Constantine came along. He had two problems. The first one was that he didn't have enough troops to maintain the level of control he wanted over his empire (and, anyway, to do so would have bankrupted his treasury). Constantine set about resolving this problem by instituting his own church, or religion to be more accurate. He reasoned that it was more effective to control people psychologically through religion than physically through the use of soldiers.

He started out by putting all church leaders on the state payroll making them psychologically and financially dependent on the State and thus separating them (in their own minds) from their flocks. Next he announced the Council of Nicea whereby all church leaders were required to attend. Money buys compliance. Constantine promptly locked them all up and said they weren't getting out till they had formed themselves into a monolithic church and agreed on a common set of beliefs (this became known as the Nicene Creed). This resulting church would be given the authority of the State, be financed by the State and take its direction from the Emperor. Again, money buys compliance. For more information on this, I suggest you read Malachi Martin's, "The Fall and Decline of the Roman Church".

According to the Gospels, Jesus was given a similar offer by Satan when he was tempted in the desert, "All this", he said, indicating “The World”, "I will give to you if you but bow down and worship me". But Jesus rejected the offer. However, the church elders when faced with the same offer rather unwisely did not. That wasn't the end of it, either. There were many other religions in the empire which couldn't be left to themselves as this would frustrate Constantine's plan for a “Universal” religion, a one stop God-shop for the whole empire. Constantine was into centralisation. The largest one of these other religions was Mithraism. Mithraism worshiped the sun god Mithra. So, in fact, Constantine formed a new religion out of these two. For sure, Christianity was dominant but it took on a new character, one of dominance and power. The Mithraism was included through adoption of their winter solstice festival (birth of the new sun in the heavens and the birth of Mithra which was witnessed by shepherds and Magi bearing gifts!). This became Christmas (birth of God's Son on Earth and the Christmas story) and the spring fertility celebration (bunny rabbits laying eggs!) worshiping Astare (there are various spellings) which became known as Easter. The head would be known thereafter as “Pope” presumably after “Pater Patratus” the title of the head of Mithraism (both titles mean “father”). The title "Pontiff" belonged to the Emperor but was later appropriated by the RCC. The day of worship became Sunday in deference to the Mithraists. Churches (the buildings, that is) were thereafter oriented East-West to face the dawn sun and the whole occult fascination with magical thinking, magical rituals and playing dress-ups came along for the ride. Mithraism was a warlike religion and this spirit seems to have carried over into the new offspring, the RCC. And we now had a priest class which didn't exist previously (King James version of the Bible with its insertion of words such as “bishop” and “deacon” notwithstanding).

Christianity was back to the good-old bad-old days of the Pharisees complete with their violent, genocidal and exclusivist Old Testament. The New Testament was assembled using the four main Gospels and the writings of Paul, largely. Paul, being a Jewish scribe (lawyer), was very familiar with the Books that would later form the Old Testament and was fond of quoting them, thus, tying the two books together. The focus shifted subtly but significantly to include the earthly authority both of government (the Emperor) and the priest class. Books or scriptures that didn't accord with that were left out and were, indeed, rounded up and burnt. Knowing this, it is quite easy to see how Christianity has the dominating and often warlike spirit it has today which is quite at odds with the spirit of Jesus evident in the Gospels. It is also quite easy to see why psychopaths would be attracted to this new religion now; this Roman (Empire) Catholic (Universal) Church.

Just to rub salt into the wound, the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) was structured using the hierarchical model of the Roman army and Roman bureaucracies. So the RCC has brought down to us through the so called Dark and Middle Ages, not only the spirit of the Roman Empire with its obsession with centralism and power (empire) but also the mechanism to manifest it, the hierarchy. All breakaway denominations have taken with them this same attitude and structure.

I mentioned before that Constantine had two problems. The second one was that he had a lot of Christian soldiers in the ranks who were there for economic reasons and who weren't too keen on killing. He would soon be also facing a significant battle against his rival, Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome and would be outnumbered. Fortunately, Constantine saw a sign in the sky. It was a cross and he heard Jesus say to him, “With this sign, go forth and conquer”. Lucky for Constantine, Jesus, upon re-entering heaven from earth had apparently done a 180 degree rethink on his policy of non-violence and decided war and killing were good things (provided you are a Christian, presumably). Also fortunately, the priests were on board now and could endorse this new policy and they had authority because being priests, they could talk with God; an ability the punters in the pews had suddenly lost. The short of it all was that we now had the phenomenon (indeed, the oxymoron) of the Christian Soldier gleefully killing for Jesus.

They won, by the way, which proved that Constantine was a godly man and saw and heard correctly. Either that or that he was one cunning SOB. History tends to the latter interpretation. Little wonder, then, that the Pope had his own army in later years and waged his own wars. Little wonder also that Popes and other churches' leaders have not stopped wars by simply reminding their adherents that they are not supposed to go and kill people and instead, you know, love your enemies. The RCC cannot come out in opposition to wars because they fear being seen as partisan politically. The only way not to be seen as such and to still oppose wars would be to do so in principle. But it cannot do that because fighting wars for God is part of its foundation myth. Other churches cannot do so either because they borrow the RCC history to trace themselves back to Christ. Which is ironic because the RCC cannot trace itself back to Christ in the way it claims, anyway. It claims that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and therefore the first Pope. He was neither. This is a matter of historical record. He wasn't a bishop anywhere, not even in Jerusalem. After Christ's death, James, his brother, became the head of the Christians in Jerusalem.

The Christian faith was co-opted by Constantine and turned into an instrument of power and dominance and given the tools (hierarchy and State authority) to use and abuse. So what's not for a psychopath to love about religion?

Next, the Lawyers. The situation is particularly bad in Common Law countries. Down through the centuries the Law has been shaped by the lawyers. They run it and they run it for their own benefit. If you have enough money, they will get you acquitted. It's that simple. Eighty percent of defendants in serious criminal trials go free in Australia and yet innocent people are found guilty and jailed. The figures vary but estimates of between five and ten percent have been made. It is similar in England and the US, I believe. With privatised prisons, the situation has become a real nightmare. (see here) – over incarceration is inevitable.

Though there is a judge presiding, he doesn't run the case. The lawyers do. The judge is reduced to an umpire. Two lawyers battle it out in front of the jury and the best legal team wins. It has become a sporting contest whereby the best team wins and justice loses. A whole legal hurdy-gurdy has grown up around admissibility of evidence. It gets truly bizarre and is the main reason criminals with deep pockets go free. Truth and Justice are not the issues. Money and style are. And don't forget the judge is a trained lawyer. Judges (lawyers) make case law. Lawyers are over represented in any government and they legislate laws. The lawyers in government are deferred to by non-lawyer politicians, especially in this area. These lawyer/politicians make ambiguous laws and full of loopholes requiring judicial adjudications and lots of appeals. It's good for business. The lawyers control everything from the training institutions in universities to the making of the laws through government and from the Bench, to pimping for the crooks and fleecing you and me. They stifle any reform be it of their own profession or reform in government. It is their very own Sacred (Cash) Cow. They mystify the whole process and create the helplessness which then creates the demand. Too easy!

The Law Profession is at the heart of institutionalised corruption in our society. The legal fraternity will actively discourage a member from following their conscience and insist they follow the letter of the law as written (and interpreted for them) no matter how bizarre the result. By doing so, they institutionalise corruption and advance its cause. Because almost all of the profession is driven by money and the highest bidder, be it in court or in government, this exaggerates class privilege and all the corruption and abuse that goes along with that. It owes no allegiance to truth. It is a cancer.

Police corruption is exacerbated by the lawyers. Because they make it so hard for police to get a conviction, the police are encouraged to fabricate evidence and frame suspects. Pretty soon this becomes routine and necessary for promotion and next comes framing completely innocent victims. Hence the high wrongful incarceration rate.

From Bernard Chazelle at A Tiny Revolution-
In 1998, Judge Keller rejected the request for a new trial for a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA tests after his trial showed that it was not his semen in the victim.

“We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” she later told the television news program “Frontline.” “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important.”

The people in this article from the New York Times have so much wrong with them, I really wouldn't know where to start. But suffice it to say that all the characters had significantly more power than the hapless inmate who lost his life because none of them, despite the excuses and apologetics, in the end cared enough. Power anaesthetises you to others' pain. This situation does not perturb the ultimate controllers in our society (subject of the next institution) because it adds to the pervasive atmosphere of helplessness and arbitrariness which, as we've seen, contributes to triggering obedient behaviour.
At present, the Common Law system rewards people without conscience. It is tailor made for psychopaths.

I have talked about two of the three institutions, religion and law, and one of the mechanisms, the hierarchy. This essay is getting long, so I'll continue with the third institution that has grown up around the “Moneylenders” and the second of the mechanisms, compound interest, in a further installment.

Next installment - Part 4b

newjesustimes's picture

My Space blocks traffic to WinterPatriot

I put a link from a myspace profile to winterpatriot.blogspot.com and got to a page with the following information:


The link you are trying to visit has been disabled.


You have reached a link that is no longer in service. That means the link was very naughty, and, much like head lice, had to be eliminated before it spread.


You may be asking yourself, 'Hey, what was it about that link that got it in trouble?' An excellent question! Usually, it's one of the following reasons:

-     

The link was spam! No one likes spammers, and we don't like their links.

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You almost got phished! There are people out there who want to steal your MySpace password. They want to log in as you and send spam, harass your friends, change your profile, and generally run amok. Phishing pages are usually designed to look like MySpace to trick you. Other sites may also ask for your MySpace login information to customize your profile, insert videos or slide shows, track visitors, or any number of other things.Don't make it easy for them. ONLY USE YOUR MYSPACE LOGIN INFO ON
WWW.MYSPACE.COM!!

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Viruses are not fun! Neither is adware, spyware, or malware. We cut the links to places that are known sources of infection.


If you really did want to check out some spam, viruses, or phishing pages, we're really sorry to have interrupted. We're sure you can find it elsewhere. There's plenty on the Internet

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