Thursday, December 31, 2009

ARE AMERICANS A BROKEN PEOPLE?

Note: This is why there isn't more resistance-Americans have been systematcially broken by the institutions of our enemy the US government, major corporations and the communist and fascist subversives. The base of the answer is stated in the article: morale. That comes from victories...

Read on:

Are Americans a Broken People?


Bruce E. Levine

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:28 EST

In general, Americans represent a collective battered spouse who hopes that the batterer will change. Spitting teeth and squinting through two black eyes, they usually go back for more of the same.

This isn't politics. It's pathology.

- The Devil and Mr. Obama

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?

Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?

No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can feel shameful - and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.

Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?

In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal.

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested these circumstances.

Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even this provoked few demonstrators.

When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more psychologically broken.

U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

Maybe.

Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves-more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.

Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.

The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.

We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:

Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented - or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings - or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions - or examples of authoritarian ones?

A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids - through fear - learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.

Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials - badges of compliance for corporate employers - in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted today's pharmaceutical societyl "[I]t seems to me perfectly in the cards," he said, "that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude."

Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.

Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance - for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.

When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything - this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.

Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."

Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves - and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything - not just organized religion - has become "opiates of the masses."

The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.

Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products - not themselves and their community - are their salvation.

Can anything be done to turn this around?

When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.

What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.

The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals - at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.

Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . ."

If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don't mean anything - they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."

A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."

An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.

--------------------
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
- Mark Twain

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
R. D. Laing

Monday, December 14, 2009

REGAINING PRIVACY

REGAINING PRIVACY


J. Croft
http://freedomguide.wordpress.com
http://freedomguide.blogspot.com

Every time you tell the truth about yourself-where you live, shop, your opinions, hobbies, whatever-every time you tell anyone else the truth about yourself you surrender your privacy. You give a potential enemy knowledge about you, you give them leverage.

You wouldn't tell your worst personal enemy where you live...

...shop...

...your opinion-well, of them as long as they didn't have a means of retaliation... or a means of retaliation they wouldn't use without a very good reason as the consequences would be severe...

...hobbies...

...but you tell your worst enemies these things and much more every day.

Who are they you ask? Isn't it obvious?

Well, for those this isn't obvious to it's those who own your life:

The banks and major corporations you take out loans for all the things we've been literally programmed to crave. The latest electronic toys, the latest fashions, a remodeled kitchen. Worse, we need to borrow just to keep a roof over our heads and transportation. That too has been socially engineered:

A dollar transformed from being backed by gold and silver and holding its value to a debt note backed only by illusion debased by over 99% since the federal reserve banking cartel was illegally set up in 1913.

The decimation of small town and farm life by the industrial revolution-banker's money backing major corporations that centralized mass production, innovation, into the major cities. Manipulation of the commodity markets, forever squeezing mom and pop stores and family farms force Americans to flood the cities... sacrificing their independence and self sufficiency for the Madison Avenue invention called the "American Dream".

The quiet, inexorably rising tide of government bureaucracy, laws, rules, regulations-and the government police forces required to enforce all those edicts, taxes-remind the people who owns them.

Bankers. Major corporations. Government. They are your worst enemies.

And what do you do? You take out loans because the major corporation(or subsidiary)you work for just doesn't pay you enough-because the bankers keep printing more dollars debasing the currency and therefore driving prices up. Because the government goes in and takes at least a quarter of your paycheck before you even see it.

Seeking a salve, you go out and use the 30 percent APR(if not more, or otherwise locked) credit card to go on a shopping spree, hoping that being able to buy some made in China crap will make you feel better. I suppose it does but you're just making that debt chain of slavery that much more secure.

Oh, let's not forget next April when you put off doing income taxes! Enforced by a unconstitutional IRS that is above the law and uses terrorist tactics and a self-written code that enables them to get you no matter what.

God forbid you're actually awake and start protesting this... then you're labeled some kind of insurrectionist (according to their files). Then you're monitored and once you're put on that list there's no getting off it.

Oh, and if you buy a gun through a federally licensed gun dealer (govt. snitch, agent compiling lists of gun owners) you and your weapon are registered with the government through the 4473 form and the NICS instant background check. Had to add that but back to regaining your privacy...

First off, embrace lying. Lying protects. Lying is fun. Lying will lead the bad guys down the wrong path, keeping you safe(r).

So, lie about where you live-really, you need to move to a place where your name is on nothing-not the title, not the rental contract(nothing on paper if possible-lie otherwise-cash paid promptly on the due date is enough), certainly not any of the utilities. Don't tell relations not living with you, friends-certainly not work. And most certainly not your creditors or any government agent or bureaucrat. Route your mail through a P.O. Box using your old address to register. Do. Not. Update. Especially not anything the government demands. Practice an air of barely functional incompetence…

Don't have a connected landline phone, use a pre-paid phone. Never talk about revolution, bombs, guns, Alex Jones or anything else even remotely controversial on them either. Have more than one pre-paid phone, omit all correct personal data, and segregate your usage-one for personal affairs, one for work, one for your business, one for your survival group in case of emergency... you need a survival group-people you can go to and likewise whom you help in time of need. Speak in a pre-arranged code, phrases or substitute words for describing sensitive matters and such. Better still, have a meeting place and a dead drop; some place you can drop off notes and whatnot that you can access without being seen and not be suspicious.

Internet: when you move you will also stop accessing from your new home. Wi-fi and public access computers where you don’t have to register, and you will NOT log in and access personal information and then a patriot website right afterward. You will have separate sessions-sessions to read e-mails, accounts and such, and sessions to do more politically sensitive things like reading this. Do it from separate computers. Your wi-fi connection… have absolutely no identifiers on your portable device. That means you buy it second, third hand(better)off a private seller. Do not put your name or any other truthful information that could POSSIBLY be used to link you to your online words and actions.

Which leads to Keeping Your Mouth Shut. Embrace silence on personal matters when you don't have to give an answer. Nobody need know where you live. Otherwise every other measure you take will be wasting your time. Don't even let it on that you're taking measures to regain your privacy, or the next person who finds out will be some kind of government bureaucrat or agent...

Once you've secured the home front, everything else will fall into place.

Your automobile is already registered listing your old address... don't update that information. Have no bumper stickers, keep the interior pristine with not so much as a candy wrapper or gas store receipt. Have a locked container secured to the car for your valuables and personal information-and your gun in case you're pulled over. Manufactured traffic offenses are big government business. ...What would be better would be if you could ditch the car-live in an area you can walk to everything. Then you wouldn't need a driver's license in the first place-and states are requiring additional proof of residence, such as utility bills to weed out privacy seekers still wanting to drive. So you’d best find a place you can live without a car or band with other privacy seeking Americans, take over a small town and rewrite the rules… which would be a nice step for the movement. The GI’s of Athens, Tennessee showed us the way back in 1946.

Stop using credit cards. Their horrific interest rates aren't the only reason to quit them, they record every last item you buy with them. Including all your gun purchases... you should only be using cash or barter for those.

Quit the banks. They record everything you do with them, dick you over on their terms, take your money and make all the investing you could be doing yourself. Just quit them. Keep your savings in gold, silver, valuables. Take responsibility for your own finances. STOP TAKING OUT LOANS!!! And stop accepting checks. Both you and the sender are on bank records-which makes them government records. Oh, and since the banks have no idea where you live-repudiate your bank debt. They're at war with you, so strike back and starve them of their cash flow.

Work for cash. Be the best employee you can. Live cheap and stack your cash and you will soon be able to save enough to start your own for-cash small business. Live well under your means. Learn and live the 80/20 rule: you can get 80% results with 20% expense. Shop flea markets, swap meets, Craigslist. Yes advice on regaining your privacy blends into other areas, but that’s a good thing. Plus it helps build the underground economy; the truly free economy-our America.


This is only a starting glance at regaining your privacy, an introduction. You got just two choices: have your Freedom or have the few comforts those that have enslaved us lend you. The longer you remain in their slave system the tighter the control they will have over you and your loved ones. I’d act about now to regain your Freedom.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES:

ONE NATION UNDER SURVEILLANCE by Boston T. Party


I've recommended his books in the past. They're good. This one is no different and if what I write won't convince you you've been sold slavery as security then maybe this book will.



PRIVACY: HOW TO GET IT HOW TO ENJOY IT, from Eden Press

A classic. No it doesn't cover some of the more pressing technological threats given its vintage BUT, it does lay the groundwork in other areas to retake your privacy-which is your freedom.

http://www.edenpress.com/showbook.asp?index=400@10@A

GOOGLE SEARCH ON PRIVACY

Saturday, December 05, 2009

THE SECRET OATH KEEPER

THE SECRET OATH KEEPER

J. Croft

http://freedomguide.wordpress.com
http://freedomguide.blogspot.com

Being an Oath Keeper, I make a stand with other Patriotic Americans both in and out of service against all enemies foreign and domestic....

What if one is alone in their unit, their department the only one who actually paid attention when they recited the oath to protect and defend our nation from all enemies foreign and domestic?

One must not only reach teach and inspire, one must choose one's battlefield more carefully.

The first choice is whom of your fellow soldiers, officers you reach, teach and inspire. Don't be naive; you as an Oath Keeper have enemies embedded in all the positions of power in our America. They see Americans like us as a mortal threat to their tyranny, their crimes. So, just as the French Resistance, the Dutch Resistance had to use covert means to grow their numbers, so must we when we're in our units and departments and we are alone in honoring and upholding our Oaths.

Spread the message around. Use pamphlets, stickers, brocures. Use them carefully-cameras abound and a lot of East German Stasi wannabes will want to make you an example. So know when you're being watched and don't get caught. Can't be much of an Oath Keeper if you're kicked out of your unit, out of your department.

So, use your heads but spread the message wherever you can, as not only will your fellow soldiers and officers know there's an alternative to serving evil, the American People will know not everyone in service will go along with using LRAD weapons on children sitting on their own porches, or tasering or running them over with their cruiser. Certainly not going along with that nightmare scenario-martial law. Some are confused about that however... we already live under martial law when children are assaulted by oath takers-oath traitors-without consequence.

Since we as a people have allowed our police and military forces to be led by such oath traitors, the ranks filling with such filth we must be most careful whom we approach. The wrong person we talk to about the Bill of Rights, about the brave stand our Ancestors made at Lexington Green or the Alamo, or in Athens Tennessee* could lead us to the wrong side of a internal affairs investigation or court martial. Have to deal with lawyers-who all work together typically...

Know who you talk to before you talk to them. Someone who doesn't smirk, smile or shake with anticipation when they hear about new measures against the People, or who don't get off committing atrocities against their fellow countrymen. Best to just let the conversation roll naturally; when whom you're talking with confide with you that they just aren't with the steamroller of fascist... communist... tyranny-whatever you want to call the rising tide of anti-American Freedom hatred you tell them you're doing something about it, by being an Oath Keeper.

And that you can do a hell of a lot more if they joined up as well.

Then you won't be alone. Then you will begin the hard process of cleaning out your department, your unit of oath traitors and not only be able to say no to an official annoucement of martial law but to be able to say no to all the "little" acts of the martial law we live under now-the ones that see the oath traitors cleared and innocent lives ruined. Stand up for the American People and together we all can take our nation back.

*Battle of Athens, Tn-August 2nd 1946: GI's returned from cleaning out the tyrannies of Japan and Nazi Germany to a local tyranny of a Dukes of Hazzard kind. After repeated petitions to the Governor of Tennessee in vain the GI's formed a party and full campaign ticket, and were widely supported. The Cantrell political machine used voter intimidation and the local law enforcement to literally steal the ballots, took two of the GI election workers hostage, injured another GI(black as if that mattered)and holed up in the town jail threatening to shoot anyone who approached.

The GI's went to the National Guard Armory, requisitioned for themselves the few Garands, Enfields, .45 pistols and the lone .30 Browning and laid siege all night to that jail and the oath traitors holed up inside. The affair ended with some scrounged dynamite that blew the porch out and the criminals who had stolen the good people of Athens government surrendered. The Governor did nothing, fearing a backlash from everyone in eastern Tennessee and the GI candidates were sworn in.