Listen to a reading of this article:
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It’s trippy how a government that’s been democratically elected by free people behaves in exactly the same way you’d expect a government to behave if it was run by corporations.
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I just cannot understand how we keep failing to solve the world’s problems using a system of making as much money as you can while paying your workers as little as you can and offloading as many of your costs onto the biosphere as possible.
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What’s funny about Joe Rogan is he clearly didn’t start off with an oppositional relationship to the mainstream media; that opposition was thrust upon him by the mass media constantly lying about him and smearing him for having a large audience without conforming sufficiently to establishment groupthink.
This was the most significant part of the Rogan-Gupta exchange, and it's not getting enough attention. The media class' open disdain for Rogan is turning him further and further against them, and now it's got him asking if western media run propaganda for US foreign policy. pic.twitter.com/26bEeaNJvZ
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 14, 2021
So now you’ve got someone with a massive platform who nobody can control openly asking if the public is being propagandized by the media about nations targeted by the US-centralized empire. If he keeps chasing that rabbit, things could get very interesting and/or very ugly.
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Propaganda is the answer to most important political questions. Why are things so fucked? Propaganda. Why do people keep supporting corrupt parties and voting for corrupt assholes? Propaganda. Why is there no antiwar movement? Propaganda. Why don’t the people rise up? Propaganda.
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What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has institutional safeguards which prevent dissent from having any effect?
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You don’t actually have “free speech” in your country if there are mountains of institutional roadblocks set up to prevent anyone from using their speech to effect meaningful political changes. It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say.
“I can say whatever I want in my country!” Yeah you can say whatever you want on a desert island too, and because your status quo is locked in place in countless ways it will make the exact same amount of difference.
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Wikipedia is just as aggressively manipulated by imperial narrative managers as news media and social media. Whoever controls the narrative about the world controls the world itself.
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The financial elite hate crypto not because crypto itself poses a threat to their empire, but because its existence is destroying trust and belief in the “realness” narrative of money among regular people. Bitcoin is imaginary, but it’s worth real money. Why? Because money is also imaginary.
The complexity of the markets is absolutely essential in controlling the narrative around why a few live like kings while the rest work like slaves just to keep a roof over their heads. You, regular person, are not meant to understand it. Because if you did it could not continue.
If you define crypto as shares it makes it clear that shares don’t need to be based in any kind of physical reality in order to create “value” in a market-based system. Crypto as currency makes it clear that currency doesn’t need the trade of a national economy to back it.
Crypto shows that it’s all made up, this whole psychopathic numbers game where the digits on your bank app dictate whether you live or die, or the digits on spreadsheets dictate whether we avoid near-term extinction or not, it’s all made up. And we can change it whenever we like.
I’ve always hated Monopoly. What a tedious, vindictive waste of a perfectly good afternoon. I am so pissed off that we’re going extinct over what essentially is just a global game of Monopoly that virtually none of us want to play.
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In the escalations between the US and China, one is the aggressor and the other is acting defensively. You can tell which is which by asking yourself how the other would react if the situation was reversed. If China started doing this to the US there would be war instantaneously:
People say “That military presence is to protect China’s neighbors from Chinese aggression.”
Look up all the USA’s murderous interventions in Central and South America. China would be far more justified setting up a military presence to protect nations like Cuba and Venezuela. Yet it doesn’t. This means between the US power alliance and China, Washington is the aggressor and Beijing is acting defensively in response to that aggression. The reason western news media do not report on these escalations in this way is because western news media is propaganda.
When you’re used to being in power a movement toward equality can feel like a personal attack. Marginalized groups being elevated gets turned into “There’s a war on white men!” China refusing to let the US rule the world gets turned into “China’s trying to take over the world!”
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That there would be a second cold war was guaranteed after the success of the first one. If your empire succeeded in attaining global hegemony in a game of subversion and manipulation which happened to greatly enrich your military-industrial complex, why wouldn’t you do it again?
I mean sure you’re gambling the life of every terrestrial organism every day you roll the dice on brinkmanship with nuclear-armed nations, but you wind up sitting pretty if your gamble pays off and the world doesn’t get incinerated. It’s a no-brainer for people with no brains.
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Seems like every country on earth gets compared to Nazi Germany except the imperialist one that’s been slaughtering people by the millions to conquer the world because it believes it’s exceptional.
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If:
✅ Police come to your doorstep
✅ To question you about social media posts
✅ And interrogate you about protest activityThen you do not live in a free country. #auspol https://t.co/zif5CySsD7
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 10, 2021
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Things are so deeply, deeply fucked in so very, very many ways, and they are getting worse so very, very fast. And because status quo narrative control is so effective, hardly anyone is even aware of this. If humanity makes it out of this mess alive, it will look like a miracle.
But also, there is so very, very much we do not understand, and humans have so very, very much untapped potential we simply haven’t woken up to yet. There is plenty of room for future miracles to be hiding in all that space.
We are where we are because of our collective conditioned behavior patterns. Any movement away from our self-destructive patterning will necessarily come from an unpatterned direction, and will therefore be unexpected and unanticipated. That’s why it will look like a miracle.
We go on because we go on. Because our heart keeps beating and our lungs keep inhaling, and because the human organism is deeply hardwired to desire life, and because life is beautiful and delightful. We fight on because what the hell else are we going to do?
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As power-driven agendas of global conquest give rise to international propaganda wars that are increasingly turning our information ecosystem into white noise and indecipherable gibberish, people may soon cease looking outside themselves for truth and begin looking within.
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23 responses to “Crypto Invalidates The Money Narrative: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
Great articles.
Love the audio option.
Your “notes” columns are my favourites. You have a great way of cutting through crap.
Crypto. Money is a huge, fascinating and enormously important topic that I can’t get into here. But I would like to suggest that that criminal financial elites do not hate crypto, they invented it,. principally to compete with gold, demand for which was beginning to overwhelm them, but also to facilitate money laundering for international crime, particularly trafficking of various sorts. Crypto is opposed my non-criminal financial elites, some of whom are decent people (though as a class they are parasites and swindlers)
Well, I’ve got to say this for Wikipedia: it saves a lot of time. When you look up someone you’ve never heard of and you read in his Wikipedia entry that he’s spreading misinformation or fake news, you immediately know it’s someone you can trust and that you can go on reading his article without fear of being gaslighted like you might be by the New York Times or the Washington Post (e.g. Saddam’s WMD’s, Russiagate etc.)
With the help of a bunch of deep state (including the CIA, the MIC, Big Pharma and Big Money at large) controlled (and possibly funded) trolls, Wikipedia has become the incarnation or George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. However, it would be unfair not to credit the great precursors: Tomas Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, Robespierre and the Terror, the Ku Klux Klan, Lenin and the Cheka, followed by the KGB and the German Stasi, Heinrich Himmler and the Gestapo, Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda or Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. A power-crazed psychopath writes a few words somewhere and you’re socially dead. Wikipedia only provided a new logo.
You shouldn’t trust everyone that you think agrees with you. Here’s a quick test- without searching the internet, can you name a modern day fascist who disagrees with you about vaccines?
Joe Biden.
You can’t. And it doesn’t bother you.
FFS John, get it right.
They’re experimental RNA vaccines, first developed in 2020, and then, with another amazing development, time machines, were expedited and declared safe.
Big Pharma were only given worldwide indemnity ‘just in case’
So who is the fascist that disagrees with you? That’s the question.
Joe Biden was the correct answer
However much you may dislike him, calling Joe Biden fascist redefinition of the term.
However much you may dislike him, calling Joe Biden fascist requires redefinition of the term.
“You can tell which is [aggressor and which is defender[ by asking yourself how the other would react if the situation was reversed. If China started doing this to the US there would be war instantaneously”
Indeed, simply imagine the Chinese navy patrolling the Gulf of Mexico. Oy veh! The world’s largest organized crime syndicate, the Israeli-US government would not hesitate to start a hot war, with the reflexive support of its compliant, patriotic population
“(T)here is so very, very much we do not understand, and humans have so very, very much untapped potential we simply haven’t woken up to yet. There is plenty of room for future miracles to be hiding in all that space.” Oh yes. Behind capitalism and its propaganda, laying its philosophical foundation, is the scientific materialism of the 18th Century. That this philosophy was undermined by psychical research in the mid to late 19th Century and quantum physics in the early 20th, not merely undermined but totally and unequivocably refuted, must be kept under wraps, ignored and suppressed, for capitalism and its propaganda to continue to function. It may well be the role of nonmaterialist science (ever-increasing and intensifying research into subjects like telepathy, clairvoyance, NDEs, OBEs, mediumship, morphic fields and resonance, indications of an afterlife, etc.) to trigger, much more than politics or economics, the revolution longed for by all of us who despise the obscene, insane status quo. As within, so without.
What an interesting essay. In my view, we have long entered the era of science. The concept of miracles belongs to a bygone age. Beauty expresses itself for me in the evidence with which moving material living nature confirms (or sometimes denies) the speculative concepts which our scientists and poets create to share with us. in other words, mater is the primary existence and thought including human thought, the reflective capacity of consciousness, is the (mental) cognitive process through which we come to know of our environment.
And we can all become scientists and poets, making food and tools in the morning, poems and songs in the afternoon, and love and cheer in the evening. There would be no time for war in an intelligent civilised community where sharing and mutual caring is the norm. It is only the functional necessity of a primitive and dying economic system which postulates competitive individualism as a condition of existence. We must rise above and move beyond all that.
Truth is the outcome of the varified interrogation of nature. It is always both relative and absolute in the same instant. That is, it is (as is existence in general) contradictory having energy flowing in different and opposite directions at the same time. We move from one point to the next in space, from this moment to the next in time as the balance of these contradictory energy flows are altered by their own intrinsic discordance. Heraclitus of Ephesus coined the word “dialectical” to identify this pervasive motive tendency.
His advanced concepts were retrieved by GWF Hegel and applied theoretically to try explain the motion of reality, and it was K Marx, F Engels, Josef Deitzgen and their fellow “Young Hegelian” students who turned their professor’s concepts right-side up to explain how things actually changed into their opposite in the flow of existence.
As people learn to look, both inside themselves (with their assembled mental reflection of external reality) and at the same time, take in and understand the new moments of external historical development, thus deepening our knowledge of material reality in the process of reflective, active, creative, scientifically proven new concepts – that we will enrich our “truth for now” and actively – together – change the world consciously. Our new digital native generation, informed with a quarter of my years of lived experience, but living and thinking with all the evidence of the “now” as their guide, who are already discarding the old fictions of bourgeois thought modes.
May I please live a little longer to see humanity enter the scientific socialist age of equality where every human is respected, cherished, and becomes the object of love rather than hate. Where every human subject is a putative friend, not an competing enemy. We can do this if we choose. Thank you Caitlin for always provoking me to think again and anew.
Hey Caitlin .You outdo yourself with every article I read from you. This one is a GEM .It makes people like myself comfortable in my skin knowing I am not the only one that feels this way ,because you have such a talent with words.
Cheers from Canada
“It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say.” Orwell: “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words [or Medium] in which to express it.” https://seaclearly.com/2021/05/01/a-final-warning/
Stephanie Kelton’s bestseller, The Deficit Myth, offers the world a clear and concise way that money can and should be managed as a tool for good, while exposing all of the lies of neoliberalism. Central banks freak out and rush “the great reset” and their CBDC (central bank digital currency) idea. God forbid sovereign governments use their fiscal authority to invest in public purpose again and create a healthy society. But when Technocracy’s goal all along has been to dissolve the nation-state, you can see how MMT throws a wrench in their gears. Check out Kelton’s TED talk. The cure to society’s ills couldn’t be more obvious.
When I first watched her “Angry Birds” video, several years ago, the light went on and has never gone out. MMT is on to such a simple, self-evident truth, but we’re been conditioned to view economics as the capitalists want us to, as if a nation, which by fiat (mere spending decisions) creates money out of thin air, is like our families, struggling to make enough money to pay our bills. Of course, you never hear “how will you pay for it” when they want to give huge tax breaks to the rich or to start the next criminal war.
If the banker could change the rules in Monopoly as easy as they can change the rules in the real/fake economy, nobody would play.
An excellent piece Caitlin.
Although Joe’s not long for this Earth.
Two reasons:
• He gets up the noses of too many plutocrats.
• He’s adopted a Paleo diet.
Silly bugger.
This post is crisp and clear compared to some other posts.
If volume of output some times interferes with quality of the post, it’s better to focus on quality and clarity.
Reminds me of some of the great speeches of significant and historical persons like Lincoln, MLK etc.
Thank you Caitlin for making a difference in the world at least for the people who follow you.
It’s not a secret they have been profiling your IP address on your rooter, cell phone, computer, etc. They cannot just handcuff anyone right away because they have to prove if you really did it (this is why they come with those apparently dumb questions) or if you have been hacked for someone else using your IP. You see the long way they have come since the 90s till today? How many was invested to built a worldwide internet to be used like that? It’s a cursed fate. We have been always falling in the common place of villains every time someone discover something outstanding in technology to benefit everyone. But it’s not by accident as well. Our oil and gas civilization was built by gangsters and criminals. And they still well and alive on the top elite sponsoring all what happened since 9/11 with your money. Now this time of history is coming to an end. They want to get the best of it while they still can. Some still pushing towards China (Doug MacArthur left Korea cursing China while Eisenhower took the army from him) and Russia (Patton’s idea near and dear to him) while others are trying to make partnerships to earn profits on both sides just in case of an eventual conventional war which can escalate to a bad end). So, the house is divided. There is no way to win anything. Some think they have gone too far while others too little. One thing is certain – it will not last. How it will end? A war would be perfect to make the coverup. That’s all what they think as solution. But it will fail if the other side just stay at distance watching the rotten western tree collapse itself. Can you imagine after all what they have done and gone through to reach the end without “Santa” coming? In the 50s-60s they didn’t had the numbers to win. And they still don’t have the numbers today to win. All what they have is propaganda to make others believe. If they can convince billions to change one status quo to another based on lies, what do you think they can do after that? They are facing an unexpected resistance. I think the 100 monkey finally came. The epilogue still to be written as we walk in unprecedented historical times. How exciting, isn’t?
“You don’t actually have “free speech” in your country if there are mountains of institutional roadblocks set up to prevent anyone from using their speech to effect meaningful political changes. It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say.”
The situation is probably more absurd then you realize. In the U.S. we now have something called “free speech zones”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
which in fact have been used at the political party conventions and other events. These are fenced off areas, away from the press, where protestors can exercise free speech. Apparently, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution exist in these areas but not elsewhere. It is one more example of the U.S. government– once characterized as a nation of laws, engaging in illegal and unconstitutional behavior.