Warning Signs of the Beast

Next up is two words, as far as I can tell, they are one of the few things that are mutually exclusive to one another. Semantics are important on some things, so again, I will give definitions I quickly find:

• Patriotism - is the feeling of love, devotion, and sense of attachment to a homeland or the country and alliance with other citizens who share the same sentiment to create a feeling of oneness among the people. This attachment can be a combination of many different feelings, language relating to one's own homeland, including ethnic, cultural, political or historical aspects.

• Nationalism - loyalty and devotion to a nation especially : a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups

Nationalism and patriotism are similar insofar as both words emphasize strong feelings for one’s country. However, the two words are not synonymous. Nationalism, while it refers to loyalty and devotion to a nation, tends to imply the placing of that nation above others, a tendency that is not necessarily implicit in patriotism.

Now for the main point behind this: I stated before, they are mutually exclusive. A person who is a Patriot is not a Nationalist, a person who is a Nationalist is not a Patriot.

• A Patriot is one who loves their country, accept that the past may not be the best, but they are willing to accept it and make a better country.

• A Nationalist beats the drum that their country is the best, none other can even come close. They ignore or deny any bad part of the past, and can not learn from it.

Anyone can apply this in with their groups and relationships. Are you and your friends patriotic to each other, or nationalist? Can you accept the past of each other and grow from it, or just say everything is perfect.

The next issue with the two, Patriots if something goes wrong, the Patriot will learn and grow to become better.

The Nationalist if something will go wrong and get mad and upset, just because of the ‘group status downgrade’ theory.

There are 3 classifications of people in a certain area,

• Citizen

• Civilian

• Felon

I touch on that for this:

A citizen is/has put their lives on the line for others to have rights (they have time in public service), a civilian enjoys their rights (they don’t have any time in public service), and a felon has done something to cause some of their rights to be taken away for certain amount of time.

Human rights, Statutory Rights, Rights at the age of majority.

Everyone has certain rights the are given and can not be taken away, but with each right there also comes certain responsibilities. Some of those responsibility is NOT to deny another persons rights of any kind, that may cause someone to become a felon.

There is also people that conflate rights to privileges. Those granted the privilege have met certain conditions, such as being of a certain age, and agree to abide by certain requirements, such as obeying the rules.

How many people around you know the following:

If you think about any time you have felt something was un-just or wrong, most of the time you can look at this list of the human rights and find the right of someone that was violated.

I know it is a long list, but same question of ‘why was this not taught in school?’

If you look at the most evil and vile of people of history, of the 30 human rights laid out, anyone can start counting how many they had disdain for others rights…

To take a look around,

How do people pull strings of the voices that influence us.

There are those people trying to pull strings to divide people based on anything… racial, religious, ethic, etc… lines. Once that string is identified in the whole of people, that string can be pulled to gain attention and power with the dominant group.

Those that seek that power will stoke that discontent with that dominant group; they will marginalize, tokenize, make ‘other’ anyone that is not in that majority group. That majority group have more to lose and more susceptible to fear based reasoning and afraid of losing what they have. With that fear based reasoning they are more likely to use violence, more likely to get away with it because they ARE the dominant power group.

If you notice anyone or a group that is making another group, large or small, that are being marginalize, tokenize, or being ‘othered’ that group, beware…

If the leader of the group can gain more support because they identify those people that have a smaller voice of people as a ‘enemy’. The majority paints a target on the minority back. If there is an identified as an ‘enemy’ then support grows within the majority.

Once the majority of people think in that way, It is one step away to have the majority think that those marginalized people are NOT deserving of all of their basic human rights.

To touch on the Citizen/Civilian topic again,

I can include Police, Firefighters, and EMS into the same category of Citizen, these people along with the military all serve the public interest. They all work to ensure all people enjoy their human rights. These people may or may not agree with their missions, and it speaks more about ones character to still do ones job, to help out ones team-mate even though they may not agree with it, but they know without them helping their team-mate would suffer. As I go on I can say ‘Citizen Group’ and you can insert any group in that space.

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwel

Is there a point for Citizens groups out there, YES, no matter where you are, there will be powers out there both foreign / domestic / other that wish to take away human rights.

If society working fully and properly, they should be bored, and looking at reducing numbers.

If as we grow, we can respect each others rights more and more, we should reduce down the amount of people are needed to protect those rights. If any public policy comes across that we need more money for ‘citizen group’ a fair question is are we moving to a better place if they need more…

Now don’t get me wrong, in all areas we still need a emergency response force in all areas to protect our rights, but it should be a race to the bottom, have the smallest possible ‘citizen group’. If we hear that more is needed for reasons beyond that ‘standard emergency response’, then some legislation needs to be looked at why they are needed….

The time to worry is if we start/begin to deify citizens. If we start hearing claims that a citizens life is more valuable than anyone else, and those claims come in many forms. You can sit back and ponder, why is one life more valuable than another, why should one not matter in comparison?

I heard some strange things;

that come out of the mouth of ‘People of God’. Some of which was a person talking in a interview setting, he said ‘Women are of the Devil, everything they touch turns evil”…This is a extreme example, but still shows how a idiotic state of mind of some people.

Immature people in their default state are bullies…(A bully is someone that tries to lower other people to elevate themselves) and women are a easy targets for bullies, they try and lower women to elevate themselves.

Women have dealt with this for many reasons, some of the most obvious is simply looks. If some bully does not match what they see as ‘ideal’ then they feel like they need to elevate themselves over that woman, sometimes by force. Sometimes it is just for the simple fact that they are a woman.

This has been the case for a VERY LONG time, but what the issue comes down to is respect. If there is a bully to anyone, they do not have any respect for them as a person, and also justify by any means for their actions.

Without any respect, people think they can and often will ‘walk-over’ others because to them, they don’t matter. Back to this ‘Person of God’, he has no respect for women, he has no respect for other men that do respect women. And he uses the Bible to justify his stance.

In the end, women deserve 2 things, to be WHO and WHAT they want, everything else does not matter.

In our age there is no such thing as:

"keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”
—George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda

The first part of this quote can be taken several ways, one way is the pebble in the shoe syndrome, if not familiar with it, you can ignore so many things until it becomes a pebble in your own shoe, if waiting that long it may be too late to do anything about it. A longer version is the post-war poem ‘First they came…”

When we think about consuming mass media; does not matter where it comes from, written, nightly television, online etc… everyone has a bias. Some is subtle, and some will come out and say ‘This channel is propaganda for one point of view’.

Look at people that use propaganda, they know how to manipulate people, and they think that those people are not of the best intelligence. They just care about getting their point across for their own nefarious ends.

Some people to gain a following will use propaganda just to get eyes on them, they change what they say over time because their following has changed, but they don’t care because they think their audience won’t notice moving from fear to fear. They say A is good one moment while say you should fear B. Then as items change they say you should fear C and B is good. etc....

When you try and make a profit off tragedy, you end up creating a monster that nobody can control, and possibly even have it turn on its creators...

Let me go more in depth on what a media outlet might do if they want to support propaganda of a group that insists on divide of people and don’t respect anyone:

• They would find a divide amongst the population and cater to the side that is more susceptible to fear based thinking, keeping people fearful means more eyes glued to them, the group think they have something to loose.

• Other, marginalize, and tokenize all other voices that do not pay attention to their topics.

• Undermine systems of government to include;

  • representative institutions, so you remove that voice of people that are marginalized, those that got ‘othered’

  • Safety institutions, IE Public health; it would make the government seem ineffective, weak, perhaps needing to be replaced

• Claim to be the sole information that people should receive, all others are fake.

• Symbols of national power, particularly the military, couple that with rhetoric saying that the country needs to remain strong, it is likely that para-military groups would spring up

• Conflate patriotism with obedience to a faction within a nation, and drown out all other voices

• Feed conspiratorial and fear based thinking, because fear is a paralytic to a country and freezes progress, makes it weak.

This list (mostly) was from a fictional story, told from Justin King.

Most seeing this list will feel one of two ways,

1. That this fully describes a actual mass media in real life, and list something under EACH topic with evidence.

2. If they consume that mass media they can pick out a few things of other media here and there with evidence... but not all points.

Guard what you consume in media, there are many paths, some good, many others not so...

There is a difference between a ‘Fan’ and a ‘Fanatic’

one just takes it more to a extreme than the other.

Here is a little bit of history lesson, When America was formed, there was a ‘United States Department of War’ that existed until 1949 when it was rebranded to ‘United Stated Defense Department’. Just because it re-branded, it still contains all-things war under it’s umbrella.

The term ‘National Security’ did not even exist until the 1930’s, and up to the 1950’s was relatively unknown. Before then it was ‘National Defense’ and used mainly with the US Department of War.

During the ‘Red Scare’ period it became a more household term, and people became a ‘Fanatic’ about it. But what does that term fully defined as? I don’t think that it can truly be defined because security involves more than defense.

I heard an elastic and expansive alternative;

‘To be more concerned with measures that prevent trouble than with those which salvage what one can from disaster’, But this also rendered the definition uncontainable.

People use this as a talking point to stir fear in people, to control people, to make people bend and do things against their own self interest.

Let me give some examples; insert any of the following words in the ####

We need to have people learn ### for national security, if you can not do something, enemies may see that and exploit that as a disadvantage and use it against us.

• Cursive

• Stick Shift

• Morse code

• Basic Math

• etc….

You can stick just about any word in there, some of that seems silly, people can and will find justification for any of it.

A synonym term could also be applied to ‘In protection of National Identity’ {now speaking from the USA}, Part of our ‘National Identity’ from the beginning is NOT having a set ‘Identity’, we are to strive to be inclusive and accepting of all diversity.

Example: The USA does not have a National Language. Canada has English & French. Belize has English. France has French. Spain has Spanish. etc… but the USA does NOT have one. How are we to protect our ‘Identity of ALL/NONE’?

If you ever come across the term ‘National Security’ ask yourself, Are they trying to stir fear in me to control me, or are they trying to protect a identity of XYZ (does that match the identity of EVERYONE)

To go into base, the root, the bed rock
of what LAWS are…

The best definition I can come up with is ‘to legislate morality’

There are many ways on that can be accomplished, but it can be distilled down to 2 basics;

A group determining what the ‘moral’ stance is, and over time if the morals of the group change, that is recognized and laws adapt.

A set of pre-determining laws dictating morality, these require the group to adapt to the laws.

Now, this is one reason why Religion is separate from Government.

Religious law require MORE interpretation, and often based on bias of the leadership of whom is telling of the ‘law’.

Now some is crossed over, like no taking of a human life, but both accept some exemptions.

With those exemptions, one adapts over time based on public, other relies on interpretation of a few.

If some lawmakers in government inject THEIR religion into government, they may make laws that obviously the public as a whole did not want.

IE; if 80% of the public does not want or care, but 15% want it. Margin of 5%, and it becomes law…

There are several books of laws, and justice systems.

There is a justice system for ‘normal’ people

There is a justice system for ‘rich’ people

There is a justice system for Corporations

There is even more that that (which I will save for later…)

In the most ideal world, there would only be one justice system, one set of laws, cause and affect is equal for all.

We are NOT in an ideal world.

When conflict between two justice systems does happen, it is telling on who have the assumption of systemic/institutional correctness over empiricism. If taken too far that system will know over time and abuse that system.

There have been so long that one justice system have influenced law makers, and those law makers protect their interest in return.

If looking to the past

President 32 — Franklin D. Roosevelt. In office from: 1933-1945

Labor power and unions were all over.

Some of the things labor unions wanted:

• Children NOT to work

• Better wages

• Reasonable Hours

• Safe Working conditions

• Protection for those injured or retired.

Take any job field now, and how many of these are slowly declining.

• Children laws are almost clear, with the new digital economy, I have heard down to 12 year olds being hired ‘under the table’ for single use jobs. [Gig Economy]

• FDR said “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” In my opinion, the base floor should be: 2(two)percent of a areas average rent per hour. [IE: Average rent in a area is $750, so 2%=$15.50, so minimum for that area should be $15.50/hr]

• I have heard of EMT positions [EMT-B], to live they need to work 80-120 hours a week. These are people that work to better themselves and their community, and told to work more if they want to make more money. They want to move to be a Paramedic [EMT-P] but can’t because of the amount of work they need just to survive

• Hearing a statistic of Nursing, for every additional patient a nurse takes on their shift, probability of a mistake increases 7%. Their mistakes not only affect their safe working conditions, but others as well. [Hearing some short-staffed hospitals where nurse-patient ratio is 10-1, that is 70% chance of a mistake]

• The last one is hard to describe this, it is hard and heartbreaking, seeing someone injured/sick/elderly that are being forced to work, they need more money just to pay medical…

If you ask anyone ‘when was the best era of United States of America’ vast majority of people will say around the 1950’s, this was when Labor-power and Unions were at their peak after they got what they needed from FDR. Since then Labor-power has beed suppressed slowly…

There has been a long time trying to making make everything down to the lowest common denominator.

There is a certain group of people that wish to create a wall of ignorance around the general public. The less informed people are, the more easily they can believe anything else.

If in school you are taught just enough to do a job, not why, not how to think on how to do anything else, does that not make every school a trade school? Just teach people to do one little thing, and you bind them to ONLY do that thing from now on.

Schooling and Education is two separate topics. Schooling can teach you math, education can tell you why it is important.

Schooling is temporary, education is a lifelong process. The issue is in a question ‘Is there schooling about education?’ That is the key…

Having a discussion about the SCA, someone made a statement that you can take any gathering of the SCA, and there is more university degrees in that gathering than any other group. It then came up that in the SCA, ‘critical thinking’ is a systemic part of the identity. Places that still teach critical thinking, use Marcus Aurelius as their main text to learn from. Within the SCA, just about everyone knows or at least knows of. Just about any other groups probably never heard of Marcus Aurelius. Do the two go together; hand and hand, Critical thinking and education.

So… Without Critical thought, what is schooling worth other than just being a trade school?

People have looked down upon any critical thought, it has been demonized, and everything that might cause critical thought is actively trying to be removed.

Critical thinking causes independent thought. To not have it; spreads ignorance…

Taking a look at an end result of gangster-capitalism (neoliberalism),

everything shifts to having a market dictating all aspects of life, not only for the monetary aspect, but it starts to take over the social. People look at their social lives and base it on a make-believe ‘market’. This takes on a devious monster, people will NOT act on anything unless they get something they perceive of more value out of it because of their actions.

This then morphs into a ideology of self interest. This can be spotted as celebrity culture promoting more consumerism, lifting of ‘the market’ is the center of everything. Over time, citizenship becomes intertwined with having ‘things’, and ‘the mall’ becomes the temple of the state.

While that is shifting there comes a decline if the social state, where a government works for the benefit of the individual citizen, and a rise in the punishment state, where the citizen works for the benefit of the government.

While these shifts are happening, the most insidious aspect happens, there becomes a ‘individualization of problems’. All problems are privatize and everything is a matter of personal responsibility. Culturally it becomes more difficult for people to translate problems in to systemic considerations, and any social structure begins to collapse….

When you individualize problems, you both have to take responsibility individually for those problems and have a right to engage them in ways that may suggest that the government is the enemy of freedom rather something that could be useful in dealing these issues.

When addressing issues this way, you can’t address them systemically, so they begin to increase criminalize the social problems, (instead of handling a small social dispute in a small way, it then becomes a criminal matter).

A notion of freedom emerges that is completely removed of social responsibility, it becomes a freedom that says ‘I can do what I want, self interest is all that matters, all problems are individualized’. There is a shift of fundamental values of protecting the public good, to many ways destroying it.

This belief in that type of freedom is individualization of the social; in that the ‘social contract with other people’, ‘the social sphere of family/friends’, ‘social good for our community’, ‘public good for all’, all begin to collapse, we loose sight on seeing how those interconnection to make ‘a shining city on the hill’ possible.

With ‘the market’ dictating everything, making everything of self interest, people believe that every problem is individualized, ALL problems become reactionary. Crime goes up because people are blamed on all of society’s ills. More people become alienated because everyone is always looking for someone to blame, they are the others, and others should be punished.

To truly solve problems require going to a proactive stance, interest of the social, to see certain problems are systemic, look beyond ‘the market’ to help out each other.

I would like to touch on a bit of responsibility to others…

No person stands alone, (there may be brief points, but they are fleeting) we will always have others that we report to that are our responsibility, and on the same coin, there are others that have a responsibility over us and they have people that they report to.

Psychology states that the average person can only handle 4 different directions of constant responsibility for each mask. Some have more due to nature or training, but I will go on 4 for examples

• This means that we can be effective if we have 3 people we manage, and report up to 1 person. If we are pushed beyond that limit, we start to compartmentalize.

• We trust (for good or bad) in people that we don’t need to pay constant attention, and check up on them once every so often.

• we start to form a hierarch, promote some under to take some responsibility with their own responsibility under them, so that in the end we only need to pay attention to the fewest directions, and they have their own directions.

There come a problem that needs to be addressed, it comes down to the motivation of the responsibility, or for whom are we taking on the responsibility for.

• The easy part is when the parts work the way when all have good motivations. All parts are working to a goal, all parts know that the one at the top CAN NOT handle every little responsibility, and a spear is formed, all with a common goal in a close to an altruistic way, to move the spear.

• The bad part comes when someone in the spear has the motivation that it is all about themselves, everyone is to serve their interest (no matter where they are in the spear) there is a term for this, it is called: corruption.

We have all heard of corruption before and at its base, it is someone that has a responsibility to others, and they use that responsibility for their own self serving interest.

Corruption grown like a mold, if it happens anywhere it spreads down because it shows in subtle ways that is hard to see overtly, the corruption spreads because that is what is demonstrated from above, and then others copy it.

Now for the dark cousin of corruption, if someone near the tip of the spear is corrupt, then they start filling up people below them to help them that feed their self serving ways, if they think someone is not serving them, they are replaced with someone that will. This is called cronyism.

When cronyism starts to happen, this then spreads like cancer, the main thing that happens in the spear is keeping things to serve the self serving interest of those above….

Once some of this is recognized, look closer to the tip of the spear, identify the motives who leads whom….

Now to believe this or skip it — both is proof….

“I thought if you told people facts, they'd draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don't run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.” — Jim Holden

James S.A. Corey, Babylon’s Ashes

I would like to touch on the term Cognitive immunization, it is a bit complex but let’s work on it….

To understand one self, one must understand ones own beliefs. We have all met people in our lives that cause a bit of Cognitive dissonance in our lives and we must works out which one we are to believe, and most of the time, we will hold on to that decision.

{to be clear - Cognitive dissonance is a term for the state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other. The clashing cognitions may include ideas, beliefs, or the knowledge that one has behaved in a certain way.}

There comes a point where Cognitive dissonance we will reject any new information, this is called Cognitive immunization, the beliefs become even stronger, EVEN when in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.

To take one step further, Confirmation Bias is — avoiding any information that one has the Cognitive immunization against, and seek out information that they WANT to see.

People have the Confirmation Bias in an effort to comfort themselves, to face a paradox is uncomfortable, to face Change is uncomfortable. After so long, people refuse to feel that feeling of being uncomfortable and slowly have the immunization on themselves.

People as a whole wish to see the whole world as predictable, rather than full of chaos, paradox, and ever changing…. They will choose to have their confirmation bias go deeper to the point where the world will seem orderly, controllable, and certain in their eyes.

When the Cognitive immunization en-mass, a certain path begins, and couple things happen:

1. People isolate themselves from others outside that cognitive bias.

2. People limit exposure and start to listen ONLY to those that share the same cognitive bias. They tend to take any bad stories that they perceive to be from a bias that they don’t agree with as intentionally “fake”. The more the desire to make order of the world they want, the greater the desire to seek out other views.

3. People begin to anchor their Cognitive Bias, to the point to where it becomes doctrine to them. Anyone without THEIR bias is ‘the enemy’ or ‘the other’

4. People begin to associate like-minded groups, and try to undermine others that are seen as ‘the enemy’

5. Finally Repetition, doing things over and over becomes habit, and to change that habit involves the uncomfortable word ‘change’

Some will take that need to see the world as organized, and they will use that to control others. They will put forward sweet lies over and over, tell people to ignore the hard truths. The more people believe the sweet lies, the more they DO NOT want to even consider the bitter truths.

There have been several cases over history, people that seek power will tell people what they WANT to hear, they know on a base level that people have a cognitive bias and immunization in a certain area. If they feed the sweet lies over and over, they send people down further the path, and the cognitive immunization gets further and further anchored. They think the one feeding the sweet lies is the path they should be followed.

Everyone knows that the backbone of a free society, is that people voting is key, and all accept the results regardless if that is what they wanted or not. Over the long term, humanity mindset moves to a brighter future (people that want power over freedom will NOT move to that brighter future)

Claiming intentional fraud offers a single explanation for what would otherwise need to be an improbable series of coincidences. The fraud narrative rejects the unwanted election result in a way that satisfies the desire to view the world as orderly. The election fraud narrative can shield people from the idea of blind chance deciding their fate.

To be compelling, the fraud narrative also needs to be paired with another important element: an enemy.

And the more powerful, nebulous and covert the enemy, the more psychologically useful it is for sense-making. If the enemy is not portrayed as powerful, then it’s harder to imagine it being responsible for large-scale negative outcomes. And if the enemy is not portrayed as operating in the shadows, then it cannot be viewed as responsible for a multitude of diverse outcomes.

These findings suggest that attributing misfortunes to an unseen enemy or network of enemies can help people cope with feelings of lack of control in their lives

Any election conspiracy is so dangerous because it plays to people’s deep-rooted need for order and control and is impervious to arguments based on evidence.

The result of all this? The one seeking powers’ supporters can feel safe investing in this narrative — and may well continue fighting zealously for it long after the election is over......because it walked down the path of cognitive immunization….

There was a poster sold at the U.S. holocaust Memorial Museum,

and it summarizes the early warning signs of Fascism, things to look out for, things to pay attention to....

I could simply just put the poster up, but I choose to take a deeper dive into each subject. As I have been going through the list, to make it easier, to look at them, each one has their own section, and can go back and read my point of view on each subject.

Many of the ideas applied in the past, present, and unfortunately into the future....