As we approach the Tribulation. Anyone with even a brief knowledge of history realizes that the continuum of: progressivism-->socialism-->communism-->totalitarianism simply doesn't work. It never has and it never will. In fact, looking through the pages of history reveals that it only results in enormous human suffering, death and destruction. Don't believe me - just review world history.
Yet, the Tribulation will be the ultimate form of the above. Support of such government structures requires massive lies and distortions - whether it involves personal denial of the truth or intentional lies and distortions. The post-rapture public will initially support this movement into the ultimate and unprecedented form of totalitarianism as the world will initially embrace the actions of the antichrist and false prophet. Of course, as usual it won't last long as the usual carnage, pain, death, and suffering results, as it always has.
For now, we're seeing the movement into this form of government, and it comes with the necessary lies and distortions.
As stated before, we go where the news leads, and today it is interesting how many news stories point in this direction. The world is preparing for the arrival of the antichrist - there is no doubting that. Another interesting reflection is just how much today's world follows Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm".
[Disclaimer: I don't personally agree with every word from every article below. Additionally, I have many good friends and colleagues who would be considered on the "left" and are very good people whom I love dearly. But in today's world - as a "watchman" watching world events shape up exactly as we would predict, based upon biblical prophecy - it is now impossible to ignore politics (which would be my strong preference). The political game being played today by both sides of the aisle are too important in terms of prophetic development to ignore and the political environment is most definitely part of the process in paving the road towards the Tribulation. To ignore various political movements because of a need to "not offend" has become a greater evil than reporting the reality of various movements into the Tribulation. To ignore such, willingly, would actually be the same as active support of these lies and distortions and would, in turn, necessitate being disloyal as a watchman.]
In George Orwell's immortal dystopiaAnimal Farm, the ruling pigs distilled the revolutionary ideology for the stupider animals, such as the sheep, hens and ducks, to a simplistic but highly useful slogan, "Four legs good, two legs bad". Not only did it explain to the dumb masses the essence of the pig-led revolution, but it also performed an important ancillary function of silencing the opposition. Any time somebody tried to question the leaders' guidance, the proletariat on cue would start chanting in unison, "Four legs good, two legs bad," drowning out the miscreant.
How often have I wondered, listening to left-wing intellectuals bloviate on TV, how these ostensibly educated and intelligent people could, with a straight face, robotically spout arrant nonsense while contemptuously ignoring the contrary factual evidence cited by their ideological opponents, or their attempts to point out glaring contradictions in progressive "reasoning" (to the extent that reciting the talking points by rote can be characterized as "reasoning").
Conservatives are particularly aggravated not so much by the arguments of their leftist opponents as by the latter's superior attitude and reluctance to engage in serious intellectual debate. The leftists always look and sound as if they know everything worth knowing and see no need to validate their beliefs in an open give-and-take. They show palpable disdain for the opponents of their worldview whom they barely acknowledge as really human, much less respect as their equals.
But why do leftist intellectuals seem so unabashedly, even proudly, dumb? What's behind their utterly predictable, kneejerk behavior? Are they just plain stupid? To be sure, there is no dearth of dumb individuals on the left (justwatch MSNBC), but most of them are smart enough. The real reason is different: They are just Pavlovian dogs obeying the dog whistle.
In his famous experiments Nobel-prize winning Russian biologist Ivan Pavlov trained his dogs to react to the bell they had been taught to associate with feeding in exactly the same way as if food was actually being delivered. The conditioned reflex, as Pavlov called this behavior, or the dog whistle in contemporary American parlance, hold pride of place in the ideological playbook of the progressives.
From early on, they are trained, like Pavlovian dogs, to respond in a prescribed manner to certain stock terms and formulas: "wealth sharing" good, "capitalism" bad; "progressive" good, "conservative" bad; "'New York Times' good", "Fox News" bad; "Democrat" good, "Republican" bad... In short, four legs good, two legs bad. It is a very effective way of inculcating the approved attitudes and views into the minds of the adepts of the dominant creed.
The power of the dog whistle is vividly illustrated by an experimentrun by media analyst Mark Dice. Using familiar progressive shibboleths like "trust the government", "ban all guns" and "keep everybody safe," he easily induced a number of California college students to sign fake petitions to ban the Second Amendment, put all registered gun owners in prison or concentration camp and even to execute them. A typical response of the signers was, "No problem."
Once the progressive ideology has acquired a sizable following and gained the allegiance of the elites; once it has become fashionable, hip and with it, the bandwagon effect kicks in. People yearn to belong, to be part of something bigger than themselves, to be on the side of the angels (that is to say, the winning side).
To a regular person no fate is worse than that of the outcast. The Greeks of antiquity knew it and invented the institution of ostracism, which many considered to be worse punishment than death. Normally, people find it far more comfortable to toe the line, blend into the surroundings and lose themselves in the crowd than to plant one's banner on a lonely hill and challenge the dominant worldview. Martin Luther's "Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise" is not for the faint of heart.
If anything, intellectuals are even more susceptible to propaganda. They are more heavily invested in the ideological Zeitgeist and easier to control than man in the street, for they have an acute need to validate their status in the eyes of their peers.
Interestingly, or maybe ominously, the Bible speaks of the end times in 2 Timothy 3 and writes of "men of depraved minds" who are "always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth." I don't know if these are the last days, or just the last days of freedom, but our republic is now beset by millions of fiction voters who elected a fiction president based on fairy-tale promises. And it's looking less and less like our story ends with "happily ever after."
When a person who lives a sincere life finds that part of his ideology conflicts with the Truth, he alters his ideology. But what if you not only were attached to your ideology like a drunkard to drink, but didn't acknowledge Truth's existence? It is then that you, instead, rationalize away the Truth.
In fact, with his denial of Truth, the leftist places his ideology where Truth should be: the center of his life. This ideology, which just reflects his emotions, anyway, then takes on the role of God. It becomes the ultimate arbiter, the fiction that becomes "fact." This is why Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once said, "National Socialism is a religion. ...My Party is my church...." Like him, today's leftists have repeated a big lie to themselves so often that it has become the "truth."
Their greatest act of self-delusion - their ultimate denial of reality and the one that facilitates all others - is their embrace of moral relativism, the idea that there are no moral absolutes. The appeal of this fiction is that it allows one to justify any behavior imaginable. After all, my sins are not sins if there's no vice, only viewpoint. Who is to judge? Who is to say? There's no black and white, only gray.
But once you unmoor yourself from objective moral reality, there is no limit to how immoral you can become. This is why Fyodor Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov said that without God, "everything is permitted." It's why occultist Aleister Crowley insisted, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." And it explains leftists' bizarre thinking. Did you ever wonder, for instance, how modern liberals can say something so preposterous as "The truth is no defense against a hate-speech charge"? It's not hard to understand.
This blatant hypocrisy and disregard for fact, of course, is nothing new, and reflects a long history of wealthy elites promoting progressive causes and policies from their privileged enclaves. In 2005 Hoover fellow Peter Schweitzer profiled some of these Potemkin populists whose lives have nothing to do with their principles, and who never have to live with the consequences of their policies. MIT professor Noam Chomsky, for example, one of the most prominent left-wing critics of America, has called capitalism a “grotesque catastrophe,” one “crafted to induce hopelessness, resignation, and despair.” Yet Chomsky, Schweitzer writes, is “himself a shrewd capitalist, worth millions, with money in the dreaded and evil stock market, and at least one tax haven to cut down on those pesky inheritance taxes that he says are so important.” Chomsky has set up an irrevocable trust to shelter his money, with his tax attorney and his daughter as trustees. Fans of redistributing wealth via the income tax like Chomsky are careful to make sure that somebody else pays for their political idealism.
Or take progressive filmmaker Michael Moore, who boasted about not owning stock but then set up a private foundation that in 2005 owned nearly $400,000 in corporate stocks and bonds, including pharmaceutical and medical companies like Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly, the targets of his documentary Sicko, which attacked the American health-care system. Moore’s foundation, however, doesn’t lavish funds on activist causes: “For a man who by 2002 had a net worth in eight figures,” Schweitzer writes, “he gave away a modest $36,000 through the foundation, much of it to his friends in the film business or tony cultural organizations that later provided him with venues to promote his books and films.” John Kerry, George Soros, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Ralph Nader––as Schweitzer documents, all these scolds of capitalist greed and champions of the oppressed have done very well manipulating the system to increase their own power and privilege, and ensuring that their money doesn’t end up in the government’s hands to finance the social justice policies they loudly champion.
Examples of this conflict between progressives’ ideals and their lives are as common as flies. People with King-Kong-sized carbon footprints left by private jet travel and 30,000-square-foot homes decry climate change and propose policies that will raise fuel and electricity prices for the masses. Champions of public schools and the policies that enable their failure put their own kids into exclusive private schools even as they attack charter schools that benefit minorities. Congressmen like Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, who cast themselves as the defenders of the little guy against rapacious and heartless corporations, endorse environmental policies that dump precious water into the Pacific in order to protect baitfish, throwing out of work Mexican farmworkers. Preachers of multicultural diversity and the boons of integration live in gated enclaves and high-end zip codes far from the dark “other.” Gun-control fanatics eager to gut the Second Amendment protect themselves with armed private security. And the scolds of bigotry and racism routinely indulge the most vicious slander and calumny against conservatives, Christians, pro-life women, and anybody else who doesn’t agree with their doctrines.
The demonization of wealth spent on conservative political causes, even as many more millions are spent on progressive ones, is just another example of liberalism’s moral incoherence. It reflects as well a two-bit postmodern carelessness about the distinction between words and deeds. For the affluent progressive, chanting the right mantras about fairness, equality, and justice creates a reality that masks how their beliefs and policies create unfairness, inequality, and injustice, and obscures how far their lives are from the clients they patronize and exploit politically. But as Eric Hoffer said, “Facts are counterrevolutionary.” The costs of the Democrats’ attempts to realize Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform America” are creating a mountain of unpleasant facts that just might awaken enough voters to the hypocritical and duplicitous myths that comprise progressive politics.
Secret units within the 'Five Eyes" global spying network engage in covert online operations that aim to invade, deceive, and control online communities and individuals through the spread of false information and use of ingenious social-science tactics.
Such teams of highly trained professionals have several main objectives, such as “to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet” and “to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable,” The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald reported based on intelligence documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The new information comes via a document from the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), entitled 'The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations,' which is top secret and only for dissemination within the Five Eyes intelligence partnership that includes Britain, the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
The document outlines what tactics are used to achieve JTRIG’s main objectives. Among those tactics that seek to “discredit a target” include “false flag operations” (posting material online that is falsely attributed to a target), fake victim blog posts (writing as a victim of a target to disseminate false information), and posting “negative information” wherever pertinent online.
JTRIG's ultimate purpose, as defined by GCHQ in the document, is to use "online techniques to make something happen in the real world or cyber world." These online covert actions follow the “4 D's:” deny, disrupt, degrade, deceive.
Using tested manipulation tactics, JTRIG attempts to influence discourse and ultimately sow discord through deception.
When reached for comment by The Intercept, GCHQ avoided answering pointed questions on JTRIG while insisting its methods were legal.
Russia sees merit in the advice against use of force in Ukraine which US National Security Adviser Susan Rice voiced, but believes it was wrongly directed towards Moscow. Washington would be a more appropriate recipient of the piece of wisdom.
“We have noted the expert assessment of Susan Rice based on multiple cases when American troops were sent to various places of the word, especially those where the US administration believed the norms of Western democracy were in danger, or where the local regimes were getting out of hand,” a Russian Foreign Ministry source told news agencies on Monday.
The source added that, “We expect that national security adviser would be giving to the US leadership the same advice on the mistaken path of the use of force if it decides to conduct a new intervention.”
The veiled reproach comes after a Sunday interview, in which Susan Rice said bluntly that sending troops to restore ousted President Yanukovich’s leadership in Kiev "would be a grave mistake" on the part of Russia.
Rice did not elaborate on why she believed Moscow would even consider using military force to help Yanukovich. During the three months of confrontation in Ukraine, Western officials flocked to the country in support of the opposition crowd. Russia, meanwhile, distanced itself from the situation and only criticized the West for what Moscow considered blatant meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs.
“The position of some of our Western partners doesn’t show genuine concern, but a desire to act out of geopolitical self-interest,” said a statement on the Russian foreign ministry’s website.
Following the ouster of President Yanukovich, Moscow has not changed its stance nor voiced any support for him. It only criticized the opposition for not keeping its word and breaking a West-sponsored reconciliation agreement, which it signed with Yanukovich.
Progressive activists still talk as if we can afford any level of social service expenditures if we raise taxes on the rich, but workers can’t be created by raising taxes. Everything that the left has done, from breaking up the family to driving out manufacturing industries to promoting Third World immigration has made its own social welfare spending completely unsustainable.
By 2031, nearly a century after the Social Security Act, an estimated 75 million baby boomers will have retired. Aside from the demographic disparity in worker ages is a subtler disparity in worker productivity and independence as senior citizens are left chasing social spending dollars that are increasingly going to a younger population. ObamaCare with its Medicare Advantage cuts was a bellwether of the shift in health care spending from seniors to the welfare population.
Increasing welfare is only a form of Death Panel economic triage that doesn’t compensate for the lack of productive workers. It’s easy to model Obamerica as Detroit, a country with a huge indigent welfare population and a small wealthy tax base. The model doesn’t work in Detroit and it’s flailing in New York, California and every city and state where it’s been tried.
After a century of misery, the left still hasn’t learned that there is no substitute for the middle class. It’s not just running out of money, it’s running out of people.
The welfare state has no future. It is only a question of what terms it will implode on and what will happen to the social welfare political infrastructure when it does. The violence in Venezuela and the slow death of Detroit give us insights into the coming collapse of the welfare state.
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