Winter Patriot Community Blog

A shocking new report alleges widespread complicity between British security agents and their Pakistani counterparts who have routinely engaged in the torture of suspects, a report in the Observer has revealed.

You can read the whole post here and/or comment below.

Famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh ruffled a few feathers last week with comments in Minnesota regarding an alleged "executive assassination ring" -- a squad of elite killers who have allegedly been infiltrating foreign countries and murdering ... well, officially, nobody knows who their victims have been, really, but if this story were officially acknowledged (whatever that means these days), we would no doubt be told that the alleged victims of the alleged murders were "the worst of the worst", without whom America will now be safer, huzzah huzzah.

You can read the rest here, and/or comment below.

I've resumed blogging. Huzzah! I hope to have more for you soon. In the meantime, thanks to James for all the good recent work, and to others as well for keeping this site so interesting in my absence. You can read my most recent post here, and/or comment below. And I will rejoin you as soon as I can.

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.

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)

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