“The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse.”
-Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451
Anyone who has read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 will remember the menacing Mechanical Hound.
In fireman Guy Montag’s world, firemen burn outlawed books and where people hid them. The firehouse ‘dog’, a robotic beast, is an enforcer for the state. If you do not follow society’s rules, the Hound is unleashed. It tracks down and kills book readers using stored information about individuals. The Hound catches its prey and then injects it with lethal drugs.
Though configured as man’s best friend, Montag finds out the true nature of the beast. Being “fascinated as always with the dead beast, the living beast,” he touches the muzzle of the Hound. The Hound growls and Montag recoils.
“The Hound half rose in its kennel and looked at him with green-blue neon light flickering in its suddenly activated eye bulbs. It growled again, a strange rasping combination of electric sizzle, a frying sound, a scraping of metal, a turning of cogs that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion.”
Not long afterward, Montag tells Captain Beatty “It doesn’t like me.” Captain Beatty tells Montag:
“Come off it. It doesn’t like or dislike. It just `functions.’ It’s like a lesson in ballistics. It has a trajectory we decide for it. It follows through. It targets itself, homes itself, and cuts off. It’s only copper wire, storage batteries, and electricity.”
The Mechanical Hound attacks what it is programmed to attack. And when Montag becomes more and more inquisitive about books and one is found in his possession, the Hound is released to track him down.
~~~
The techno-capitalist-industrialist-open borders system that goes by “Progress” or “Development” or “the Science” or “Fair-Trade” or “Commercialization” or “Globalization” or “Open Society,” is summed into a single descriptor – “the Machine” – by Paul Kingsnorth in his book Against the Machine (See side bar, previous post, and podcasts below for more information.)
In the chapter Come the Black Ships, Kingsnorth describes the process of Machine as being
“a war against all ‘closed’ things; against limits and boundaries of any kind, cultural and ecological; against historical traditions, local economies, trade unions, national economic plans, nations themselves, tribal cultures, religions . . . anything that interferes with the path of commercial expansion and its associated culture of individualist liberalism. Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can’t be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world which the Machine is building. ‘Open’ things, on the other hand; well, they’re easy prey.”
That is our reality today. The West has colonialized itself with what it has colonized other nations – the Machine’s promise of the “open is good” gravy train. The WEF’s mission statement cloaks the Machine in good: “We bring together government, businesses and civil society to improve the state of the world” by “seiz[ing] opportunities for positive change.”
And so it is that the Machine’s process is advertised as that which benefits humanity in various ways. These include “Enhanced Customer Experience”, “Innovation”, “Diversity”, and “Advancements in Medicine, Education, Efficiency, Productivity, and “Sustainability” all while waging “a war against all ‘closed’ things” for the sake of its commercialization, monetization, and control of the process.
For the Machine to wage “war against all ‘closed’ things”, technology is employed to sniff out and snuff out the ‘closed’ – those people and their places unwilling to “be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world.” This machine I see depicted as Bradbury’s Mechanical Hound.
The Mechanical Hound represents the perversion of technology. Man’s best friend, a creature meant for companionship, aid, and protection, is turned into a technological tool of oppression. Its purpose is to impose order with terror.
With the Mechanical Hound in mind, consider digital technology which can be seen as friendly and helpful but can been programmed to avenge and punish citizens who break society’s rules. See China’s social credit system.
With the Mechanical Hound in mind, see the UK introducing digital ID cards. The UK government claims the system will simplify access to public services such as healthcare, welfare, and childcare, reduce identity fraud, ensure that only those with the right to work can be hired and is expected to minimize identity fraud by linking personal information to a secure digital format. With all these great “benefits” (for the state), what could go wrong? Say, if someone online says something that is considered “hate speech” by the UK government will the Hound be released to track that person down? That is happening today in the UK.
See a cashless society and Central Bank digital currency (CBDC) where purchases are monitored and financial accounts controlled by the government.
See the smartphone that “slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of” your pocket.
Consider the digital contraptions in your home and car that, like the Hound, can track you with information gathered from 5G towers that is downloaded to data centers that consume massive amounts of energy and water and taxpayer money – to monitor your physical and societal whereabouts so it can sell you more of the Machine’s process.
In Montag’s repressed society, books, book holders, and critical thinkers are dealt with. For books hold the experience and wisdom of ‘closed’ things – history, tradition, culture and religion – and must be done away with. And, so must thinking critically. For researching and comprehending what the Machine is doing to humans and their world is a threat. (https://www.thefire.org/news/10-worst-censors-2024)
With this in mind, consider the calls for censorship on our college campuses. In Britain you can go to jail for saying the ‘wrong’ thing.
In Montag’s repressed society, wall screens and pills replace books. The wall screens produce for Montag’s wife, Mildred, her ‘family’. Their home has three wall screens. She wants a fourth wall screen. We learn how depressing life is for Mildred when she attempts to commit suicide with an overdose.
How did we get amenable to the Machine’s control over us and thus take on a mechanized way of seeing and relating to the world? Bradbury provides insight.
Fahrenheit 451 is about more than censorship. It is about conformity to state-imposed uniformity. Books in 451 were seen as creating discord. They had to go. For, with the advent of visual media, TV in particular, people no longer read and didn’t want to hear anything but what they heard on the screens. People wanted censorship and conformity to the screens.
As Captain Beatty tells Montag,
“’The fact is we didn’t get along well until photography came into its own. Then–motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.’
“Montag sat in bed, not moving.
“’And because they had mass, they became simpler,” said Beatty. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?’”
“’I think so.’”
“Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. ‘Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
“’Snap ending.’ Mildred nodded.”
Captain Beatty, again:
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”
“Yes.”
Beatty’s Full Speech to Montag is provided below.
~~~~~
This our reality: the Machine and the Mechanical Hound.
Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine– On the Unmaking of Humanity has provided us a prophetic understanding of where we are and where we are headed. The Machine is moving us downstream, displacing us from what we value – in Kingsnorth’s words “the past, people, place, and prayer.”
Various entities participate and promote the Machine.
Mainstream media is run by the Machine. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, WSJ, NYT, WaPo and other outlets are the Machine’s mouthpieces. They talk down the “closed” and proclaim the “open.”
Both political parties promote the Machine. It is “progress” (and control) after all. The biggest threat to democracy is the Machine that consumes culture and churns out cogs.
Now that Mamdani has won the NYC mayor’s race, you can be sure that the Mechanical Hound will be released in NYC to enforce socialist jihad. Neither socialism nor Jihad exists without a Mechanical Hound.
Central planners – The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Trade Organization – represent the Machine’s values.
It takes no stretch of the imagination to see ourselves in Montag’s society or to see technology as that which mimics the good but is easily programmed to avenge and punish citizens who break society’s rules. The Mechanical Hound can tract us down to dispose of the ‘closed’ and conform us to the “Open is good” of the Machine.
Bradbury said that with Fahrenheit 451 he wasn’t trying to predict the future but to prevent it. He wanted to protect the present.
The terror of the Hound of Hell is becoming a permanent feature of the “open” (closing up) brave new (upside down) world.
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity | Paul Kingsnorth
Demetri Kofinas speaks with Paul Kingsnorth, a novelist, essayist, and former environmental activist who first came on many people’s radars during the Covid-19 pandemic with the publication of his viral three-part series “The Vaccine Moment.” His current work explores the intersection of technology, culture, and the divine. In his latest book, Against the Machine, Kingsnorth examines how our increasingly mechanized way of seeing and relating to the world—and to ourselves—has contributed to the death of Western culture, and what it would take to reclaim our humanity and save our souls.
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity | Paul Kingsnorth
How We Lost Ourselves to Technology—and How We Can Come Back
Do you feel uneasy? Do you feel a level of ambient anxiety? Do you feel despair, despite the fact that we live in the most luxurious time and place in human history?
The point is, you are not crazy. If you feel these things, you are simply attuned to reality—and it’s not a problem that’s solvable with less screen time or with meditation, red light, or sea moss.
Bari Weiss’ brilliant guest, Paul Kingsnorth, argues that the reason you feel this way is not this or that social media app or algorithm or culture war issue. That these are all superficial expressions of a thousand-year battle with what he calls “the Machine.” What exactly that means, he’ll explain tonight.
How We Lost Ourselves to Technology—and How We Can Come Back
How the KGB’s Playbook Is Destroying the West Today
Yuri Aleksandrovich Bezmenov (1939–1993), also known as Tomas David Schuman, was a Soviet journalist and KGB operative specializing in propaganda and ideological subversion.
Ideological subversion is the process of bending a society’s perception of reality so completely that it destroys itself.
The goal is to demoralize a society by undermining its moral, educational, and cultural foundations, making people unable to recognize or defend against threats.
Demoralization takes 15-20 years, the time needed to educate one generation with subversive ideas.
Five years ago, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist behind PayPal and Palantir, sent a prescient email to Facebook executives.
“When 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialist,” he wrote, “we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”
The email went viral after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory last week in the New York City mayoral race. Thiel then sat down with The Free Press’s Sean Fischer to explain what he saw in 2020 that no one else did.
Capitalism isn’t working for young people, Thiel said, citing burdensome student debt and regulations putting homeownership out of reach for many. “People assume everything still works, but objectively, it doesn’t. . . . If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.” (Emphasis mine.)
Thiel, who I see as also promoting the Machine, at least sees what the Machine is doing to the young.
And, of course, socialism/communism is a horrifying Machine that revels in terror to replace humanity with ideology.
~~~~~
The Machine’s AI Alchemy
Mary Shelly’s Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with creating a human being, used alchemy and electricity and body parts to create a creature (without woman). . .
A group of Stanford University scientists . . . used artificial intelligence to design new viruses capable of killing bacteria.
In a world where AI keeps creeping in on uniquely human territory by composing sonnets, writing songs or forging friendships, this seemed to be crossing a new Rubicon. Depending on your belief system, AI was doing what evolution, or God, or scientists working with genome-engineering tools aim to do.
“Machines are rethinking what it is to be human, what it is to be alive,” said Michael Hecht, a chemistry professor at Princeton University focused on designing novel proteins and artificial genomes. “I find this very unsettling and staggering. They are devising, coming up with novel life forms. Darwin 2.0.”
Monica Sanders, a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, wrote in her August 18, 2025, Oxford American article The Storm that Blew Us Apart recalling Twenty years after Katrina, we’re still living in the space between before and after:
The flood took homes and heirlooms, yes. But it also took the things that don’t have price tags: your grandmother’s pew at St. Peter Claver, the second-line route your cousin danced for the first time, the rhythm of being able to walk next door to ask for a lemon and stay for a two-hour porch talk.
We became refugees in our own country . . .
Some of us never came back.
Those who did found a different city. Not just rebuilt, but rearranged. The neighborhoods we knew—Broadmoor, Gentilly, the Lower Nine—returned with new names, new residents, and new rules. People who knew about noise ordinances but not about king cakes. People who brought nonprofits but not traditions. People who wanted charm but not character. The kind who say “N’Awlins” with a wink, and don’t hear the ghost in that mispronunciation.
Displacement gave way to gentrification. What was affordable became vacation rentals. What was vibrant became boutique. Streets that once held parades now hold pop-ups. We became the entertainment, not the community.
And yet, we remain. . .
All of us carry the “before” with us. . .
We talk about resilience now, but we forget that true resilience is cultural as much as physical. It’s knowing who to call when the lights go out. It’s gathering your neighbors even when there’s no power. Its memory passed like gumbo recipes and Sunday prayers.
Mutual Aid, New Orleans, 2005. Inkjet Print on Canvas, Clarence Williams
~~~
As helicopters rush off with the most desperately ill, throngs trapped for nearly a week in New Orleans climb aboard busses at the intersection of I-10 and Causeway Blvd., Saturday, September, 3, 2005. (Staff photo by Eliot Kamentiz, The Times-Picayune)
I began with Monica’s reflection on the effects of Hurricane Katrina, for order being swallowed up by non-order, an overwhelming flood, parallels the flood of disorder working to decouple us from people, place and the past and to colonize us for its reorganizing purposes which include efficacy, profitability and efficiency. (Order, non-order and disorder are terms coined by Dr. John Walton to describe cosmology in his Job commentary.)
That storm is blowing us apart. And as was experienced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we feel a pervasive sense of displacement, of being refugees in our own country, of living in thespace before and after the imposed transformation of our culture.
The source of dysphoria about our time and place being out of joint may not be readily recognizable. As with the “frog in boiling water”, we steep in its flood waters not recognizing the stew we are in. Screens constantly distract our attention away from what is happening to our existence.
The source: a flood of ideologically progressive technology and globalization that is wiping out our connections to people, place and the past. Its overwhelming force is our unmooring, our unmaking. Its irresistible force is displacing us in place.
I’ve been aware of the source for many years, starting when I bought a 286 computer in the 70s. The machine had an allure that had me come back to it constantly.
I’m becoming a neo-Luddite of sorts. I have a particular dislike for digital technology as it modifies the means of relating to ourselves, to those around us and to our world. Its dissociative medium detaches us from reality, thereby affecting identity, memory, perception, and truth.
The flood waters are rising around us. Look at what is going on with the tech-bro push for AI and transhumanism, with concerns about rare earth minerals, with chips, chips, and more chips, with 5G towers, energy and water consuming data centers, constant surveillance, mandated digital IDs – why do we need any of it?
I recently came across an author that uses “the Machine” as the analogy for the inhuman forces at work to enclose all in its path for Progress. What Kingsnorth writes resonates with everything that I’ve read in dystopian novels: 1984, That Hideous Strength, Brave New World, and Darkness at Noon. Here’s Paul Kingsnorth with “Huxley and the Machine”:
Paul Kingsnorth’s, Against the Machine is “an account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. The culmination of two decades of my writing and thinking about technology, culture, spirituality and politics, it seeks to offer an insight into how the techno-industrial culture that I call ‘the Machine’ has choked Western civilisation, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us all in its image.
From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, this book shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game—and how our very soul is now at stake.
Against the Machine is the spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.”
~~~~~
Per Lewis Fried, Lewis Mumford, author of The Myth of the Machine, “insisted upon the reality of the Megamachine: the convergence of science, economy, technics and political power as a unified community of interpretation rendering useless and eccentric life-enhancing values. Subversion of this authoritarian kingdom begins with that area of human contact with the world that cannot be successfully repressed – one’s feelings about one’s self. “
Mumford:
The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.
Technology, instead of introducing us to freedom, has imposed on us the slavery of the machine.
Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.
A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Western culture no longer represents man: it is mainly outside him, and in no small measure hostile to his whole self: he cannot take it in. He is like a patient condemned in the interests of X-ray photography to live upon a diet of barium sulphate…In the end, as Samuel Butler satirically prophesied, man may become just a machine’s contrivance for reproducing another machine.
The great gains that were made in technics during the last few centuries were largely offset by a philosophy that either denied the validity of man’s higher needs or that sought to foster only that limited set of interests which enlarged the power of science and gave scope to a power personality. At a moment when a vast surplus was available for the goods of leisure and culture, the very ideals of leisure and culture were cast into disrepute — except when they could be turned to profit. Here lies the core of the inner crisis that has afflicted our civilization for at least two centuries. In the heyday of expansionism, the middle of the nineteenth century, scarcely a single humane voice could be found to defend either the means or the ideals of a power civilization…Blake, Ruskin, Morris, Arnold, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Dickens, Howells, Hugo, Zola, Mazzini, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen…denounced the human results of the whole process of mechanization and physical conquest. As with one voice, they protested against the inhuman sacrifices and brutalizations, the tawdry materialisms, the crass neglect of the human personality.
~~~~~
~~~~~
The truth is, men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible; or, to speak it in other words: This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable. Worship, indeed, in any sense, is not recognised among us, or is mechanically explained into Fear of pain, or Hope of pleasure. Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.
I like my hand crank pencil sharpener. It doesn’t spy on me and report on what I am doing. It doesn’t try to sell me a new pencil when one is sharpened down to the nib. It doesn’t try to hack my pencil and steal it from me. It doesn’t need electric energy, Wi-Fi, a password, and app to use it. I don’t need to buy antivirus software. My analog hand crank pencil sharpener is a simple mechanical device that is noninvasive. I use it to sharpen pencils needed for the highlighting and marginalia of the physical books I read to expand my personal bandwidth.
My ’64 Chevy Impala – the first car I ever owned – had hand-crank analog windows and a Delco AM Push-Button Radio (which I tuned to Chicago’s WLS-AM 890).The Impala had mirrors and no cameras, screens, and distracting bells and whistles. The car was not dependent on a semiconductor chip or software engineering.
The Impala got me from point A to point B without tracking my whereabouts and driving habits with an embedded GPS transmitter and selling that data to a third-party data broker that sold it to my insurance company so they can adjust my rate based on my driving. The Impala didn’t invade my privacy by automatically storing text and call data from my cell phone. The car was not a rolling data territory.
The corded Touch-Tone wall phone hung on the wall of my parent’s kitchen used copper wires. It didn’t pretend to be a computer. It held no apps with choice architecture programming. It wasn’t a branch of cyberspace. The phone didn’t spy on me and data grab me. When the conversation was finished, I hung up the phone and walked away from it. It wasn’t an extension of me. It wasn’t omnipresent.
Back in the ‘50s, our black and white TV used “rabbit ears” to get the best possible reception. Aluminum foil was sometimes placed on the ends of the rabbit ears to enhance reception.
The original television technology used analog signals to transmit video and audio. It wasn’t connected to a cable or Wi-Fi. The programming had commercials but it didn’t ply me with the ads I spent time looking at in the weekly newspaper insert. It was a passive non-spying device.
I listened to 45s and LPs using a turntable. The devices used in the first third of my life have been analog. I was born some twenty years before the end of the analog age (the 1970’s when signals went from waves to digital 1’s and 0’s and the use of transistors in computers).
Having lived with analog technology, I prefer it over the “convenience” of “time-saving” digital devices. My reasons, echoed as concerns in the podcasts below, include not wanting to be spied on and exploited.
I do not want to be data-colonized by devices. I do not want to be an economic zone for more products and services and a mishmash of values. And, I do not want to be a product of That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis; the title comes from a poetic allusion to the Tower of Babel).
If you’ve read that story based on themes from Lewis’ lectures, you know about the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments or N.I.C.E. It was run by some masterminds who thought they knew best for everyone, increasing human efficiency to the point of human dissolution.
From The Devils in Our World – Official Site | CSLewis.com we read . . . N. I. C. E.’s . . .goal was “… the scientific reconstruction of the human race in the direction of increased efficiency …” (That Hideous Strength, 258). In The Abolition of Man’s more abstract terms, it was the power of some — the conditioners — over others; it was the conquest of nature and of human nature in particular through eugenics. Ultimately, it meant the abolition of man (63-64). (Emphasis mine.)
I am no fan of the digital technology because I see that the digital technology is no fan of me, a human.
Should human life be appropriated for data collection? Should an imposed alternate reality be tolerated for convenience and to ‘save’ us from boredom? Should we allow the “properties of being” to go the way of all totalitarian systems?
What do you get from your cell phone, your HD TV or the internet? Is it truth, beauty and goodness or is it isolation, loneliness, and nihilism streamed in 0s and 1s? Is it truth, beauty and goodness or is it materialism and modification of behavior?
If anything, the golden age of analog is happening today, all around us, as evidenced by the proliferation of characteristically analog concerns: sensation, materiality, experience, affect, ethics, and aesthetics.
Analog concerns are human concerns whereas digital concerns are about data collection and modifying consumer’s behavior with choice architecture and ‘nudges” toward a profitable end for the “conditioners.”
I feel more secure and loved with a bookshelf full of classic books than with the bits and bytes of pseudo-reality that AI/ChatGPT promises.
Humans seek their own “profitable” ends via analog concerns. Have an analog New year.
~~~~~
I’ve been asked about my take on AI. There is a lot to consider. Here are a few thoughts:
It is said that individuals who learn to harness AI tools will improve their lives. They say that new AI technologies will save us time, help us live smarter, and become super-productive unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
They say that AI will have the potential to help out with the boring and tedious stuff in our daily lives. And, that AI will solve complex problems including the fictitious “climate change crisis,” and offer a host of other benefits to mankind including massive amounts of information to make better informed choices. (Did you know that Computers Can’t Do Math?)
The downsides of AI/ChatGPT? There will be censorship of certain information and values leading to disinformation and misinformation – a machine’s type of ‘lying’. AI is capable of false narratives.
AI/ChatGPT has no ethics or morality but there will be bias no doubt favoring DEI, ESG, CRT, political correctness, and the green new scam. We all know the acronym GIGO.
. . . we must remain vigilant on the question of whose values will be promoted in the age of AI. As Rickards predicts, these systems will fail when we rely on them the most.
MoneyGPT shows that the danger is not that AI will malfunction, but that it will function exactly as intended. The peril is not in the algorithms, but in ourselves. And it’s up to us to intervene with old-fashioned human logic and common sense before it’s too late.
Confabulation is a memory disorder characterized by the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive. It’s as if the brain, in its attempt to fill gaps in memory, creates a patchwork of experiences that may or may not have actually occurred. . .
Unlike lying, confabulation occurs without any intent to mislead. The individual genuinely believes in the truth of their statements, no matter how implausible they may seem to others. This can lead to a host of complications in personal relationships, professional settings, and even legal matters.
For all the proposed massive benefits of AI/ChatGPT, there is a real physical cost.
A peer-reviewed analysis published Tuesday lays out some early estimates. In a middle-ground scenario, by 2027 new A.I. servers sold that year alone could use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours (Twh) annually. That’s similar to what Argentina, the Netherlands and Sweden each use in a year, and is about 0.5 percent of the world’s current electricity use.
A “green energy” grid is not able to handle charging a horde of EVs let alone power the semiconductors needed to store and process your personal data. The only good to come out of this: nuclear reactors will be built to handle base loads.
One of the “masterminds” behind “green energy”- Joe Biden – has created anti-oil and gas policies that “limit pipeline infrastructure and increased production on federal lands.” Natural gas prices have escalated because of this. Americans will suffer.
When temps drop this winter, AI/ChatGPT is not what’s needed. We need cheap and reliable energy.
Going forward, I don’t see a need for AI/ChatGPT. Presumed to offer me a better self, I see AI/ChatGPT replacing thought and imagination with prescribed “answers.” We are not to think. We are to AI/ChatGPT.
Did the Greatest Story Ever Told come from AI/ChatGPT?
Will the greatest world ever known come about through AI/ChatGPT? No! That will happen when the New Jerusalem joins heaven and earth and we live in God’s immediate presence.
So, we use digital devices and AI/ChatGPT to save time. But what do we do with our saved time? Do we go back to a screen and throw away saved time? What does it mean to be “more productive”?
Digital technology and AI/ChatGPT seem to share the same ethics as Karl Marx:
“My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” – Karl Marx
“Keep people from their history, and they are easily controlled.” – Karl Marx
Besides the abolition of private property, Karl Marx wanted to destroy five things: the family, individuality, eternal truths, nations, and the past. All of this is possible with AI.
Will AI/CHATGPT become the opium of the masses?
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead them.” — Vladimir Lenin
And the best way to do that today is via a digital medium that includes AI/ChatGPT.
A post-human world, packaged and sold as modern conveniences and life enhancing, is being delivered by digital technology.
~~~~~
Still autonomous after all these years of data colonization? Asking for a friend.
In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources–our data–exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact, every time we unthinkingly click “Accept” on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit.
In October of 2022, I wrote “I’m becoming a neo-Luddite of sorts. I have a particular dislike for digital technology as it modifies the means of relating to ourselves, to those around us and to our world. Its dissociative medium detaches us from reality, thereby affecting identity, memory, perception, and truth.”
“The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan
With digital medium, have we transitioned from “lineal connections” to “configurations”? (McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 12)?
For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action”. Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed “the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure.” Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from “lineal connections” to “configurations”
Does a digital medium deskill users over time? Are “tech bros” looking to deskill more users with AI/ChatGPT and do away with human workers? Are we to become Zeros in a world of 0s and 1s? Welcome to the binary new world.
~~~~
AEI senior fellow Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience. In the technological age, we too often see basic human activities, from reading and writing, to shopping and conversing, as obstacles to efficiency that must be overcome, simplified, or replaced. And while digital technology has provided many benefits, it has also come with unintended consequences for our habits of mind and social interactions. Rosen argues that we need a “new humanism” that puts the human person front-and-center and encourages people to regularly “touch grass.”
The potential benefits of central bank digital currency or CBDC are being discussed by the “masterminds” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). We will be told that using CBDC will be more convenient, but for whom?
CBDCs create a “digital trail”, IMF’s handbook notes. Our data – transaction histories and user demographics — could be collected and stored. AND, our CBDC accounts could be restricted or blocked by the powers that be or AI as a form of a social credit system and digitally based conformity.
If instituted, say goodbye to privacy and, perhaps, your balance. Welcome to the Binary New World and the surveillance State.
Please don’t tell me it’s more convenient to use digital.
Gold and silver and even the fiat dollar are analog assets. They can’t be hacked.
~~~~~
“A September report by Mozilla News’ *Privacy Not Included team called modern cars the “worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy.”
“The team researched 25 car brands and concluded, “Every car brand we looked at collects more personal data than necessary and uses that information for a reason other than to operate your vehicle and manage their relationship with you.
“They can collect super intimate information about you — from your medical information, your genetic information, to your ‘sex life’ (seriously), to how fast you drive, where you drive, and what songs you play in your car — in huge quantities. They then use it to invent more data about you through ‘inferences’ about things like your intelligence, abilities, and interests.”
The new law would change the definition of “electronic communications surveillance provider” via an amendment to vastly expand what Goitein describes as “the universe of entities that can be compelled to assist the NSA.”
For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn’t quite believed that last argument—until now.
Access your file and learn more about the personal information LexisNexis Risk Solutions maintains about you in accordance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act:
I couldn’t pedal any faster. Heart and legs pumped and pumped and pumped until I threw my bike down in the front yard and heard “Wash your hands, Dennis. It’s time for supper.”
Summer, like a best friend ready to pal around, came around again before my freshman year in high school. I was ready that summer to go and do a lot of things, except for one. Did I tell you this story? After sixty years, some memories, like which stories I may have told, become muddled and others remain clear as the day they happened.
Before the start of my freshman year in the fall of ’67, I received a letter from the high school that detailed all the programs the school offered. The two that interested me were sports and band.
That summer I began cross country training under Coach Howard. I was a runner. The kids on my block called me Flash. I was always chosen first for street football and sandlot baseball. But that hot and sweaty five-and-ten-mile practice summer I found out that I was not a long-distance runner. I had only enough wind for sprints and to play the trumpet.
To play in the concert band, I had to tryout that summer. I auditioned with the band director Mr. Gilles. He had me play all the major and minor scales and sight-read several pieces. I learned a week later that I was accepted into the band. This was huge. I had played the French horn in the Junior High band.
My stint with the French horn came about when the Junior High band director Mr. Palmero decided that he didn’t like the sound coming out of my beat-up Conn trumpet. The horn was a gift from an uncle who used it, from its appearance, for anything but playing. Mr. Palmero had me switch to a rental French horn. This lasted two years.
That summer – the summer before high school – my father, bless his soul, bought me a brand-new Bach b-flat trumpet. The new horn and lots of practice paid off. And that part of my Junior High experience was behind me. But how could I forget those two years?
Junior High School had a social system of Greasers and Climbers. You were lumped into one or the other based on your appearance. Greasers, like my colorful friend Juan, wore a black leather jacket, black pants, black socks and shoes and a white tee shirt. The absence of color except for the tee was Juan’s Greaser uniform.
Climbers, like most of my friends, sometimes wore paisley shirts with white collars, bell bottoms and white socks, but mostly dressed in color. I wore simple button-down shirts and sometimes a paisley shirt with bell-bottoms and black socks. I walked around with a French horn case. I wasn’t sure of the privileges accrued to either group other than being liked for what you weren’t.
I remember Juan pestering me to become a Greaser. He even had his girlfriend Lucille tell me that she would doing anything for me if I would become a Greaser. This conversation took place one morning in one of my eighth-grade classes. Lucille, who sat in front of me, turned around and offered herself on the altar of Greaserdom. I declined the invitation. I had more than I could handle. Three girls wanted my attention – in the hallways and in the band. All three played an instrument.
Diane, who I sat next to, was first chair French horn. Mary K. was a flutist and Mary E. played the clarinet. In the social scheme of things, we were considered Climbers because we played in the band and dressed in more than black and white.
I liked the attention of Diane, Mary, and Mary, but I didn’t want to go “steady” as was their intention. I put “going steady” in the same category as having to choose to be either a Greaser or a Climber. I was an independent sort. I was wary of anyone pressuring me to do something I wasn’t inclined to do, as when I was told to play the French horn. I continued on the horn because it kept me playing music. But I should return to telling you about that summer before high school.
Several days a week I had cross country practice. I also practiced my trumpet every day and I worked a part time job at a photo store. At church, I was moved up into the Senior High Youth group.
Our teens group met on Sunday mornings and after church on Sunday nights. Those evening times included going out for pizza or ice cream. During these outings I noticed that the older girls in the group were cliquish and something of a mystery. I wondered what they were saying when they whispered to each other. They weren’t like the junior high girls. They weren’t passing me notes telling me what they were thinking. But that secretiveness, as I recall, made those times wait-and-see fun.
One of the first weekday outings for our group that summer was a picnic at a local park. When we gathered in the parking lot of the Bible church there was a lot of discussion about who was riding with whom. There were only a couple of drivers and cars. I was a freshman. I had no driver’s license or car yet. Neither did my best friend Bill, also a freshman.
A ‘63 convertible T-bird, radio blasting, pulled into the lot. The guy driving was Ken. I’d seen him in the Sunday meetings. He had said that he transferred from another area high school and would be a senior in the new high school. He asked Bill and I if we wanted a ride to the park. We agreed. I remember thinking that going my own way, in James Dean fashion, would be noticed by the girls.
After several group outings, Ken started calling me and asking me to come over. He said that he had a Triumph TR3 that he was rebuilding and that he needed some help. I told him I didn’t know anything about cars. It didn’t matter to him. He begged me to come over. I finally accepted his invitation one hot, boring summer afternoon. I thought why not learn about cars. I would be driving soon enough.
That afternoon I rode my bike across town to his parent’s house. I found the garage door open with Ken standing inside. He was holding an oily car part in his hand. The TR3 was parked in the garage with the hood up. I asked about his parents. He explained that his mother worked in a clothing store and that his father worked at the local country club in the men’s locker room. ‘They’re never home during the day’ he told me. I remember hearing this and feeling a bit uneasy not knowing the neighborhood or Ken that well. It must have shown. He immediately began talking about what he was trying to do.
As best as I can recall, he said something to the effect that the Triumph had a stock positive earth electrical system and he was trying to connect a radio. Positive earth and negative earth connections had me at a loss. I knew about magnets. They had positive and negative poles and that opposites attract and like polarities repel.
I remember becoming interested in seeing the sporty little car repaired when Ken said that he might let me drive it. To help him make the polarity conversion, I read aloud the steps in the Triumph manual as he made the changes. The first step, as I recall, was to disconnect and remove the battery.
After the polarity conversion was completed, Ken invited me inside. We washed up and Ken offered me something to drink. He handed me a glass of lemonade and we sat in the kitchen. We talked for a while and then I went home. And that is how things went the next two times I came over to work on the car. We cleaned the carburetor, worked on the engine, and talked afterward.
I learned that Ken liked golf, Edgar Rice Burroughs books, and Edgar Cayce books. All three of his likes were not in my universe. I told him about cross country practice, summer band practice, and my job. I didn’t have any time to read that summer.
When I was invited over a fourth time, we worked on the brakes. After we finished, he invited me in again for a drink. This time he offered me a Coke and some rum to put in it. I said no. Then he asked me if I wanted to play cards. I told him I didn’t know how to play cards. He said he’d show me. I thought that here was something else that I could learn, so I agreed.
Ken left the room and came back with a deck of cards. He began to tell me the different hands and their value and the rules of the five-card stud, his favorite game. He dealt the cards and I gathered them up, holding them fanned out in my hand just like in a TV western.
I quickly lost every hand I played but Ken convinced me to keep trying. After winning one hand he asked me if I wanted to bet on the next hand. I told him I don’t bet. He said it would only be for candy. So, I continued to play. When my pile of M&Ms disappeared, I said I had to get home for supper. I got on my bike and headed back across town toward home.
I should remind you that while I was meeting with Ken on free afternoons, I was still doing all the things I mentioned before.
Ken called again the following week. I came over and we worked on replacing the radiator. When that was done, we cleaned up and sat down for a couple Cokes. Again, Ken wanted to play cards. And again, we played several hands. After I won a few hands, Ken wanted to know if I wanted to play for stakes. I told him that I just like playing.
But Ken persisted, asking me if I wanted to “up the ante.” I told him no. After several more hands he asked me again and I said “what are you talking about.” He said that if I were to lose the next hand that I would have to do whatever he wanted and that if he was to lose that he would do whatever I wanted. The “stakes” as he called them sounded weird to me. But at the same time, I knew that I always had the power to say no, so I played along thinking that friends don’t mess with friends. What could he ask me to do? Buy him a Coke or an ice cream the next time the teens group went out?
I lost the next hand. He then told me that he wanted me to clean the house – sweep, vacuum, everything. I looked at him like he was crazy. He then said that I had agreed to the stakes and had lost and must do what he wanted. I told Ken that I wouldn’t clean his house.
He came back and said that I had to because I gave my word and because I am a Christian. He then left the room and came back to the kitchen with a small men’s Speedo swimsuit. He told me that he wanted me to wear the Speedo while I cleaned the house. I had no idea that Ken would impose that on me. I remember a feeling of revulsion and saying “No way!”
I would not do what he wanted. I’d pay the bet some other way. Rattled, I got up and headed for the door. I promised to come back another day and help him with the TR3. That was the best I could offer. I got on my bike and sped off toward home.
Some weeks passed. At the start of August, twenty days before school started, I got a phone call from Ken. He wanted me to come over. He said the Triumph was ready to roll. I agreed to come over, thinking that this would be a harmless way to honor my bet and be done with the whole business. And maybe I’d have the chance to drive the car, as he had said.
I headed over to his house and found the Triumph parked on the street. Ken walked out of the garage and asked me if I was ready for a ride. We got in the sports car and Ken started the engine. He shifted into first and then turned on the newly installed radio. He drove the TR3 out of the neighborhood and headed for the nearby highway. The convertible sports car responded quickly, moving effortlessly through five gears. But since I hadn’t learned to drive stick shift, he wouldn’t let me drive the car.
We returned to his house an hour later. Ken parked the car in the garage and we went in for a Coke. He asked about playing cards again. I said I wouldn’t. Then he said that he had a roulette game in his room. Ken wanted to show me. I went with him to his bedroom thinking that I would see this thing he was so interested in and then head home.
When we got to his bedroom, Ken uncovered the roulette game from a box that was stored under a bunk bed. He spun its center wheel, showing me how it worked. He handed it to me and I sat down on his bed to hold the wheel on my lap. I spun the wheel to see where the ball would land. As I did, Ken sat down next to me. I quickly moved over to make room for him. Ken then moved closer, put his arms around me, and started wrestling me down to the bed.
At this point in the story, a reader might view me as naïve or even stupid for hanging around Ken after the Speedo incident. I was both and wound up tight. In church, Ken acted one way and with me he acted so weird. I do remember feeling mortified at being attached to what happened and for not picking up what Ken was doing.
I never told my parents about Ken. I had thought that I was on my own and what would they understand anyway. And I remembered the sting of humiliation I felt once before.
My mother had asked me to do something – maybe wash the supper dishes. I said that I wouldn’t. I was being defiant. She got my father involved. He had me go into my bedroom and pull my pants and underpants down in front of my mother. Then he smacked me hard with a wooden stick.
No twelve-year old boy wants to pull down their pants. Not in the Junior High locker room. Not ever in front of their mother. I deserved the punishment but not the process. But I digress.
I would remind the reader that I was fourteen years old that summer and about to enter high school. And it was the sixties. There was no internet, no social media. I had to figure things out myself with the information that came from an eighth-grade sex education class and a birds-and-bees sit-down with my parents.
The Sex-Ed talk, the graphic charts, the film strips and the short movies made the class squirm and giggle. I squirmed again when my parents took me aside to talk about sex.
They showed me a series of prenatal pictures from the 1965 April issue of Life magazine. On the cover was a photograph called Foetus 18 Weeks and the words “Drama of Life Before Birth.”
My father talked about how a woman becomes pregnant. He talked about waiting until marriage to have sex. He told me about nocturnal emissions. He said that I should masturbate if I can’t contain myself. He told me how. And then he ended our talk saying that I should never ever let a man put his penis in my mouth. I had never had such a thought and it wasn’t mentioned in the sex ed classes. This sounded like Drama of Life After Birth and something bizarre.
Things were changing rapidly in my life and in the world. Like any teenager, I wanted to fit in and be accepted. I thought the acceptance of an older friend would be a good thing. I believed in friendship. Hanging around with Bill, my best friend, I learned to value friendship as the most important and most freeing of relationships. And I still do today. I can’t tell you why being free is so important to me. I can tell you that friendship is not suffocating.
Trying to be a friend to Ken kept me coming back one more time. But as I found out, he wanted to be a predator and not a friend. I should return to what happened that afternoon.
Ken, taller than me, leveraged himself on top of me on the bed. He used his feet against the footboard of the bed and his tall frame as a lever to pin me face down. I kept thrashing about, trying to push myself out. I was telling him to stop. He grabbed one of my legs and pulled it up onto the bed. I tried to roll out sideways but couldn’t. He kept forcing my shoulder back down. Then I saw him grab a rope from the wall side of the bed. He must have hidden the rope for a time like this.
Ken tried to loop my neck and hands to the bunk bed post. I fought to keep the rope off of my neck. Then, with his full weight on top of me, I felt Ken’s pelvis thrusting back and forth on my backside. In that moment, with Ken rubbing himself on me and me thinking that my life might end, I felt a huge surge of adrenaline.
I pushed myself straight up from the bed with all of my strength. Still face down, I put one leg on the floor and then the other. I had to forcefully wrench my head out the headlock he put on me. When I finally pulled myself free from the rope and his grip, I ran out of the room, headed straight for my bike, and fled. That summer.
How do these things I’ve told you not mess with someone’s head? If I told you that this story is true and you know me, then you know it is true.
“I’ve learned a lot in these last four years. Most importantly, I’ve learned that I’m not alone. One in six men have an abusive sexual experience before they turn 18. Secrecy, shame and fear are the tools of abuse, and it is only by breaking the stigma of childhood sexual abuse that we can heal, change attitudes, and create safer environments for our children.”
In a remote lab something is created using special occult-like knowledge and unethical scientific experiments. The creation does not emerge organically. What’s brought into existence is an intentional mutation of the natural order. Uncontrolled, the monstrous creation escapes into the public. People begin to die and the remorseless creators work to conceal their involvement.
So goes the recent account of the gain-of-function alchemy performed by a cabal of doctors -Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, the doctors of the National Institutes of Health and of EcoHealth Alliance – in the Wuhan Lab and the ensuing lab leak of transmissible COVID-19 into the world of humans.
A parallel to the Wuhan horror story is an older science-off-the-rails account published in 1818. It is referenced in Jack Butler’s 2021 National Review article titled Frankenstein, the Original Lab Leak, Mary Shelley’s warning about the dangers of heedless scientific advancement takes on new relevance today.
Of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Butler writes:
Shelley’s gothic tale has become a byword for the view so, uh, ably expressed by Jeff Goldblum (playing Ian Malcolm) in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”.
The quest to unlock the secrets of heaven and earth and a burning desire to conquer the laws of nature are the driving forces behind Victor Frankenstein’s act-like-God creative act. And what he creates he cannot control. The same driving forces and results apply to the scientists of the Wuhan lab creation, as Butler notes:
Before the creature is made, Frankenstein delights in the possibility that a new species would bless him “as its creator and source” and that “many happy and excellent natures would owe their being” to him. If what we now quite reasonably suspect about the lab leak is true, then the Wuhan Institute of Virology can likewise claim the paternity of a new species, as well as of the many cases, deaths, and variants that have literally plagued the world since.
Before I ever came across the above article, I read Frankenstein. What had drawn me to Mary Shelly’s “ghost story” was what I had read in various science articles. These pieces discussed gain of function, the Executive Order 14081 Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing, coding genetics, the reanimation of dead cells, Neuralink – brain chip implants, human+, AI, transhumanism, transgenderism, and more. Reading about the desire and ability to tamper (or tinker) with the human body to effect change in it and wondering if technology was going to a dark place had me think of Frankenstein.
From the movies I learned that Victor Frankenstein had a lab, an assistant Igor and a bizarre desire to create something outside the natural order – a creature assembled from cadaver bits-and-pieces and strange chemicals, animated by a mysterious spark. I saw the brute, electrodes on his neck, clunking around the screen. I heard the screams of terrorized town’s people.
From the book I learned of Victor Frankenstein’s (no electrode, no Igor) description of his creation:
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips
From the book I also learned that the monster was not given a name. Frankenstein variously calls it “creature”, “fiend”, “spectre”, “the dæmon”, “wretch”, “devil”, “thing”, “being”, and “ogre”. The creation says to Victor “I Ought to Be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel”. The book, I soon realized, had more to offer than depicted in the silly horror movies.
The book’s subtitle – The Modern Prometheus references Mary Shelly’s Gothic tale to Greek mythology’s interpretation of creation. Prometheus was the Greek Titan who fashioned humans out of clay and gave them fire. While Zeus was away, he stole fire from his hearth and gave it to humanity in the form of science knowledge. He taught humans the use of fire and how to trick the gods.
Victor Frankenstein, in his unchecked pursuit of the secrets of heaven and earth, “creates life and thereby challenges God (instead of Zeus) and is punished by having his creation kill a number of his close relatives and friends, including his bride on their wedding night”, writes Stephen Kearn.
Victor doesn’t get burnt, even though he plays with fire taken from God (There is no mention of God in the novel. Perhaps Mary Shelly was a deist who thought of God as away and uninvolved with humans). But unlike Prometheus, Victor doesn’t receive eternal punishment for defying God.
We do read that Victor constantly (every other page practically) regrets what he’s done. But he never acknowledges his creation or its murderous ways to anyone, except later to his father who thinks Victor is delusional. Victor remains silent when he should have spoken up at a trial to defend the innocent. Victor’s self-indulgent ruing does not lead to repentance. By remaining silent he covers up his madness. I wonder about the attitude of Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins’ after they learned of the deadly effects of their horrid creation.
Throughout, Victor receives constant support from family and a close friend, none of whom know what he’s been up to. But Victor, to hide the works of his hands, goes it alone.
Victor is a self-absorbed monster. He’s a loner in his own dark world. No one is allowed to enter it, not even his best friend Henry Clerval who then ultimately encounters the product of Victor’s solitude when he is murdered by the beast. The novel would have us ask, “Who is the monster? The creator or the creation?”
Another aspect of Shelly’s tale is the Faustian nature of Victor Frankenstein. As a student, Victor is dissatisfied with the limits of the natural philosophy he studies. He seeks to penetrate the secrets of nature and find where the spark of creation comes from.
“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”
With such a grandiose desire, Victor trades the integrity of his soul for the capacity to tap into the forbidden knowledge. He studies alchemy and the occult. And like the damned Faust, he pays a tremendous price for his newfound ability. He eventually loses his brother and wife to the effects of his own creation.
There are many aspects of the novel that are never broached in the movies. Isolation, loneliness, the need for companionship, Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve, the garden of Eden, even Rousseauism. Mary Shelly, daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and her mother the philosopher and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, was well aware of the pedagogical and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The monster begins his existence as Rousseau’s natural man. He lives according to his basic needs and is content. When people come into the picture he learns virtue and develops vice.
The hideous creature, hiding in the woods from the volatile rejection of townspeople, comes across a cottage and its inhabitants – a blind grandfather, a boy and a girl. He watches them interact day after day through a crack in the wall. He sees how well they get along and love each other.
They play music and read out loud at night. Milton’s Paradise Lost is one of the volumes read. That is how, over time, the creature, ‘born’ sentient and tabula rasa, learns about humanity and how to speak. But the creature is ultimately rejected by them because of his horrid appearance. So, the once-innocent creature with growing malice turns to evil.
I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me?
Rousseau: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”. The creature: I am the way I am because of how people treat me”. (There are many creatures like this running around today.)
The monster, isolated and lonely, demands that Victor produce a female creature. In a contest of wills, it says “You are my creator but I am your master – obey!” If the monster gets what he wants he promises to go far away with his companion and won’t terrorize him anymore. Victor balks at the idea of another such creation.
Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.
That last line makes me think about all the tinkerers whose ability to engineer and tailor organisms – from transgenderism to mRNA vaccines to brain implants – could affect the existence of the whole human race. There is much of the implausible nature of Shelly’s novel that seems plausible today in the hands of Frankenscience. “Be careful what you wish for” I hear Shelly prophetically say.
Shelley’s novel doesn’t present scientific and technological advancements as purely monstrous. Rather, it is the callousness of the creator, who cannot or will not anticipate the dangers of their invention, who is truly monstrous. Throughout the novel, the reader is invited to bear witness to this ironic parallel.
“What do these people harvesting full term babies (like the witches poses as midwives did in older days) and collecting hundreds of samples (also like the witches poses as midwives) hope to do with these bodies of babies? The reasons are remarkably similar to the reasons a witch would have given. Witches used the body parts to gain knowledge and power (to heal or curse). And Francis Collins (Director of the NIH) gave similar reasons for the Pitt funding. . ..
“But Collins, Biden’s NIH, and the University of Pittsburg are hardly the first to practice such dark arts.
“Since the 1960s, aborted babies have been used to develop vaccines . . ..
“In times of old, parts of the babies were used to advance the magic of the witches, to gain dark knowledge, or as an ingredient in a potent brew. And today, baby parts are collected to gain scientific knowledge and to provide good ingredients to medicines and food. And while moderns view the distinction between science and magic as significant, are they really so different?” (Emphasis mine.)
~~~~~
“The power to kill could be just as satisfying as the power to create.” – Brandon Shaw in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope.
Air Vax Could ‘Radically Change’ How People Are Vaccinated
“Yale University researchers have developed a new airborne method for delivering mRNA right to your lungs. The team has also used the method to vaccinate mice intranasally, opening the door for human testing in the near future.
“While scientists are hailing the creation as an easy way to vaccinate the masses, critics wonder if the development of an airborne vaccine could be used for nefarious purposes, including covert bioenhancements, which have already been recommended in academic literature.3
. . .
“Aside from the concerns of airborne delivery, mRNA COVID-19 shots are associated with significant risks — no matter how you’re exposed. People ages 65 and older who received Pfizer’s updated (bivalent) COVID-19 booster shot may be at increased risk of stroke, according to an announcement made by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
“Further, a large study from Israel revealed that Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA jab is associated with a threefold increased risk of myocarditis, leading to the condition at a rate of 1 to 5 events per 100,000 persons. Other elevated risks were also identified following the COVID jab, including lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes), appendicitis and herpes zoster infection. (Emphasis mine.)
5G FEMA & FCC Plan Nationwide Emergency Alert Test for October 4, 2023
The national test will consist of two portions, testing WEA and EAS capabilities. Both tests are approximately 2:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Oct. 4. The WEA test will be directed to all consumer cell phones.
“The most important change to make is cutting out industrially processed seed oils, which are misleadingly labeled as vegetable oils. Examples of seed oils high in LA, which will radically increase oxidative free radicals and cause mitochondrial dysfunction,17 include soybean, cottonseed, sunflower, rapeseed (canola), corn and safflower.”
“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.” ― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.
In his Substack post What did Jacques Ellul mean by Technique? , Samuel Eastlund adds a fourth foundational element to the three mentioned in Ellul’s “technique” definition above:
“Technique is one of the spiritual powers (Col. 1:16, Eph. 6:12) which controls the modern world, which people give their allegiance to and which keeps them in bondage.”
Eastlund continues . . . “As David Gill puts it in his comparison between Ellul and Francis Schaeffer, ‘What is significant and ominous today is that technique itself (rationality, artificiality, efficiency) has become universal, autonomous, and self-automated’. One of the gods of the modern world is efficiency; it is a presupposition of the way we do things that the more efficient something is, the better it is. This becomes obvious when engaging in a discussion about Technique with those not already opposed to it.”
*David W. Gill, Jacques Ellul and Francis Schaeffer: Two Views of Western Civilisation, p. 11
I’m becoming a neo-Luddite of sorts. I have a particular dislike for digital technology as it modifies the means of relating to ourselves, to those around us and to our world. Its dissociative medium detaches us from reality, thereby affecting identity, memory, perception, and truth.
Born into analog times, I enjoyed a continuous stream of organic information that fostered a holistic perspective. During childhood in the 50s and into the 60s, I received information, or better, life in continuously variable physical quantities. I stayed outdoors until it was dark. I rode my bike everywhere. I played with kids – German, Italian, Mexican, Polish and others – on my block. I walked to the library to look up things. With my allowance in hand, I ran to the Five and Dime to see what I could buy. I read the Sunday comics on the front room floor. I watched Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo and Lassie on a B&W rabbit-eared tube-filled box. I played 45s on a turntable in my bedroom. I played table games with friends from school and the neighborhood. I attended church. I listened to AM radio on a transistor radio. I learned to play the trumpet.
In high school I played my horn in the band, orchestra and church. I ran cross country and track. I studied French for four years and got into the NHS my senior year. During the summers I worked and took summer school courses. I wasn’t a spectator.
My analog life was harmonized within the perceived analog universe of light, color, sound, force, wind, rain, and seasons. And like a camera and cassette recorder, my analog brain captured a continuous stream of organic information from the real world. I was my own screen saver . . . and social media and Google search.
Those were times before “technique” “penetrated”, “modified”, and atomized life into efficient bits and bytes. Technology didn’t dominate. Like the phone on the wall and the record player, objects were just another thing among many other things. Objects were there to serve, not dominate. I could dial down interest in a thing, walk away, and move on to the more interesting organic things.
In contrast to 0’s and 1’s trying to emulate analog life and the annoying apps with their prompts, pop-ups, and passwords, analog times seemed natural, unintrusive, and rather hassle-free. Digital technology, as it relates to human interface, comes across as contrived and as pushy as a foot-in-the-door salesman and damn frustrating in its effort to achieve maximum efficiency. Add dismissive of your concerns.
In contrast to the soulless 0’s and 1’s programmed to contain life like the characterless pre-fab concrete industrial buildings that contain employees, my childhood was a multi-dimensional free-range human life. I lived life at the speed of life and not at the speed of sound.
Come to think of it, I never swore until I started dealing with computers, hand-held and otherwise, and software. And, even with growing up with talk of a U.S. and Russia nuclear war, I was never alarmed about my times and my country until the rise of That Hideous Strength the technocratic state. The spirit of the age could be felt in the analog times, but now I sense that the spirit of the age is oppressive through technological means.
Consider that technology may have “penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being”. The signs of spiritual oppression include
a fixation on depression
confusion
fear, anxiety
isolation
compulsive thoughts, feeling and behavior
abnormal medical problems
*****
You live as long as I have (70 yrs.) and you see how technology has modified human existence. Human interaction, for instance.
Every morning I work out at the fitness center in the complex where I live. I arrive 5:30 AM. I am usually the only one there at that time.
As is her habit, a young woman comes into the fitness center about an hour later. She walks over to the treadmill looking at her phone the whole time. She has not once looked up and looked over at me to acknowledge me. She’s in a world of her own.
*****
To be sure, I am not a technophobe. I have worked as an engineer for most of my life. I am currently working on improving substation communications for a large utility. I see good uses of technology every day including the recent NASA test: diverting of an asteroid. Technology has its place as a servant of mankind and not as its master.
*****
Well, I’ve given my thoughts. What’s your relationship with digital technology? Has it penetrated and modified your life and to what limit?
Does technology – 4K UHD TV, autonomous vehicles, 5G, esc. – deliver organic value to you? Do the bells and whistles of new technology make life more meaningful?
Are you OK spending time on passwords and renewing passwords and renewing passwords and two-step authentication and One-Time Passcodes. Are you OK paying for cyber security and renewing cyber security and VPNs and renewing VPN software and updates and updates and updates?
Are you worried about being hacked?
Are you worried about your livelihood being held for ransom?
As I am writing this, I received a text message alert from my employer: Cyberattack Impacting Critical Infrastructure. IT Security team received numerous ransomware alerts. The system that hosts the virtual servers in our environment was compromised. It was apparent someone had actively taken over the system and changed the credentials to block access. All systems were shut down at headquarters and offices with data centers.
Of course, normal business is affected. Production has slowed to almost a halt. The “fix” will be expensive. Modern technology with its propensity for “technical efficiency and systemization” can also be used for disruption, chaos and loss of income.
How do you find interfacing with machines? Does an App give you a sense of control, of power, when you punch in inputs and the device ‘replies’ with a programmed message to your commands?
Are you OK inputting to an algorithm and receiving a canned response?
Do you get the sense using a digital device that you are being programmed and used by it?
Are you OK giving out your digital ID and having your data mined and surveilled by Big Tech, Big Brother, and China?
Are you OK with software tracking your online patterns and then using the data to manipulate and increase your engagement with a product or service?
Are you OK being monitored online night and day? Have you watched The Lives of Others?
Are you wondering if you said something ‘wrong’ online and the FBI will show up at your door?
Adverse effects observed at exposures below the assumed threshold SAR include non-thermal induction of reactive oxygen species, DNA damage, cardiomyopathy, carcinogenicity, sperm damage, and neurological effects, including electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Also, multiple human studies have found statistically significant associations between RFR exposure and increased brain and thyroid cancer risk. Yet, in 2020, and in light of the body of evidence reviewed in this article, the FCC and ICNIRP reaffirmed the same limits that were established in the 1990s.
Are you OK with technology reconditioning your children?
What do you think of the following quote (a screen capture from the video):
-Willem H. Vanderburg: “The Life and Work of Jacques Ellul” (2012)
“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” ― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Dr. Robert Malone: The CDC Voted Unanimously To Recommend The Covid-19 Vaccine For Children As Young As 5 AND the CDC will provide ‘sneaky’ liability protection for Big Pharma vaccines. The CDV won’t protect you, it will protect itself and its cohorts.
Road map to Control:
In 2016, domains for government vaccine passport websites were registered by the same person. Some of these are in current use now.
An in-depth look into the Covid 19 narrative, who’s controlling it, and how it’s being used to inject an untested, new technology into almost every person on the planet. It’s not about the virus. It’s about the vaccine. Problem reaction solution. Slogans slogans slogans.
I’m proud to announce a new venture of mine- Defend Our Kids: Texas, where we will be working overtime to get drag shows for kids shut down for good. And Texas is only the beginning.
Thomas Malthus believed that so-called “positive checks” (such as plagues and starvation) and “preventive checks” (such as birth control measures and delayed marriage), worked to keep population growth and food growth in balance.
The Left, as prompted by the Davos/WEF elites, are similarly concerned about population growth. That is why they promote the “positive” checks of pandemics and the “preventive checks” of abortion, homosexuality, and mutilating children in the name of affirmation.
In An Essay on the Principle of Population, neo-Malthusians [the authors] tells us what they think is required to make their anti-growth philosophy work:
“organized evasive action: population control, limitation of material consumption, redistribution of wealth, transitions to technologies that are environmentally and socially less disruptive than today’s, and movement toward some kind of world government”
– Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977), p. 5.
Two-time loser Stacy Abrams is a neo-Malthusian. She holds the view that misery or vice are necessary equalizers between growing population and the means of subsistence:
“Those in power are denying the existence of women, they are seeking to erase us as an entire category of people… Our kids are having their childhood stolen from them… They need to hear your voices of courage and truth.”pic.twitter.com/GG6KWmt5r6
“Community digitalization holds unprecedented promise. The tools, values, and organizational paradigms that constitute and follow from digitalization enable human enterprise to be organized better, differently.”
“The promise of digitalization won’t be realized automatically; it will require a massive collaboration across societal stakeholders.”
Bas Boorsma, quoted above, offers the promise of a better tomorrow by fostering digital enablement of our communities. His words can be found on a Thunderbird School of Global Management webpage.
There, Boorsma, professor of practice and author of the revised and well-intentioned New Digital Deal: Beyond Smart Cities. How to Best Leverage Digitalization for the Benefit of our Communities tells us that if we were “to focus on collaboration, strategy, and vision – and forge the rudiments of a New Digital Deal” it would “help us mitigate the current [COVID] crisis as well as the ones that will follow, and to ensure the societal resilience and well-being of tomorrow.”
Elsewhere, Boorsma specs out 20 Building Blocks of Successful Community Digitalization with an imperative that “Connectivity, solutions, architectures, cyber security and data need to be managed comprehensively in order for a community to not end up stuck in silos and to be sufficiently future ready” .
Looking past the “unprecedented promise” of community digitization and “the Art of Connecting Everything” to the implications for end users, would community digitalization be a blessing or a bane?
What “values and organizational paradigms” would follow from digitalization? Do they come from the collaborative “societal stakeholders”? Would “human enterprise be organized better, differently” via community digitalization? By whose standard?
What power does community digitalization give to collaborative “societal stakeholders”? Could such power corrupt them? Could absolute community digitalization corrupt them absolutely? If none of these inquiries concern you, these questions should at least alert the reader to the specter of technological control not only of public space but also of private space. This is the agenda of the technocrats and stakeholders of the World Economic Forum and their Great Reset.
One would expect a School of Global Management to promote a unified theory of world digitization. One would also expect such a school to concern itself with making sure that the world in crisis mode can count on digital technology that is not compromised by digital divides and digital disruptions.
From the webpage:
Digitalization (also called digitization) has become increasingly important through the COVID-19 pandemic as people rely even more heavily on digital technologies to stay connected, informed, and safe. The pandemic has also highlighted how vulnerable many systems are across society. Even in wealthy nations like the US, many communities, governments, hospitals, and schools were underprepared to leverage technology to deal with the pandemic.
From an end user perspective, during the aforementioned “crisis” you and I were locked down and forced to rely on digital devices to relate to the world. Along with communities, governments, hospitals, and schools, we received orders and instructions from the commissars of COVID scientism. Crisis-leveraged communication technology was well-prepared to disseminate societal divides and disruptions.
Federal and state mandates fragmented communities, decoupling associations within work, church, family and the neighborhood. People were driven to their devices – to community digitalization – wherein the focus was on one small thing – COVID. With one voice, mass communication platforms via digital technology delivered constant fear porn and repeated promptings.
End users were coached to fear COVID with words like “deadly virus” and “pandemic”. They were lectured over and over to fear alternative voices and alternative medicines and to cling to the state and pharma-sponsored authorities. To sustain fear, the media deployed data gathered from pan-digital sources. COVID case numbers and deaths were posted in the corner of a news screen and dribbled across chyrons. COVID commissars, obsessed with party loyalty, supplied the media with repeated promptings and slogans such as “Flatten the curve” “We’re in this together” “Get the vaccination” “Wear a mask”.
With one voice, mass communication platforms via digitalization delivered mass formation psychosis to the end user.
. . . the corona crisis was primarily a psycho-social phenomenon that marked the transition to a technocratic system, a system in which the government would attempt to claim decision-making rights over its citizens and, step by step, take control of all private space. -Professor Dr. Mattias Desmet The Psychology of Totalitarianism
Humiliations galore! That and more are the implications of community digitalization made manifest during the recent “crisis”.
We learned of the push toward technological tracking and tracing of populations. Of digital vaccine passports. And of the digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record (DCVR). You save it on your phone and use it as proof of vaccination wherever you go.
Consider the coming digitized social credit score, a social ranking generated via social media databases. Data showing your will to conform to the globalist directives will determine whether you are in or out of the stakeholder society. An algorithm, not personal knowledge, will determine whether you are ‘worthy’ of access to a host of things and even worthy of buying a car, a home and even groceries.
In tandem with a digital credit score, digital currency will replace anonymous cash. The Biden regime is already moving in that direction. Community digitization will make it possible for societal stakeholders to know your every purchase along with monitoring and censuring “unacceptable” speech and behavior.
Digitization, via apps, AI, smart devices, cameras, and satellites, will monitor and control finances, spending, energy use, vaccine status, and conversations. End users will be monitored night and day.
One can expect a swarm of digital “influencers” – decimators of globalist propaganda.
One can expect more stolen elections where machines are involved.
One can expect the “everything” app from transhumanism accelerant Elon Musk.
One can be expected to be treated like data, like a stream of bits needing to be directed, and not as a human. Dehumanization is a product of digitization. The digital world is flippant and shallow and without regard for the human using it. I don’t want a digital ID and a relationship with another digital ID. I don’t want simulated reality.
One can expect the relationship of parents and children to be further separated by digital technology.
If digitization is omnipresent and technology is leveraged, what do you think the World Economic Forum dominionists will do with One World community digitalization? One can readily see, based on the recent COVID mass formation experience, that digital communication systems are able to focus worldwide attention on a manufactured “crisis”. And with each “crisis”, social engineering of the “you-have-no-choice” totalitarian order follows.
Climate change is the crisis du jour. This “crisis” is being leveraged through digital communications. End users are being forced to make sacrifices for a green agenda meant to stave off a climate crisis that many scientists say doesn’t even exist. The green agenda is bringing about a global recession and famine.
Keep in mind that the same people who want to digitize your life want to track your every move – on the web and physically. They want to monitor your purchases, your thoughts, and your associations which might lead to pre-crime. Show them the man and they’ll show you the crime.
Keep in mind these same people also promote lock downs, vaccine passports, open borders, abortions, bail-less release of criminals, antifa, BLM, gender confusion, homosexuality, CRT, queer theory and redistribution.
With total interconnectivity, end users can expect total subjugation to the spirit of the age. Think Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth and Ministry of Love as depicted in Orwell’s 1984. End users can also expect to be subjected to evil machinations akin to organizations such as N.I.C.E. depicted in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.
As for me and my devices, we will not follow the spirit of the age. We are already well-connected.
And the Searcher of Hearts knows what the spirit is thinking, because the spirit pleads for God’s people according to God’s will. – the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Roman church 8:27
*****
Ah, the promise of a better tomorrow with a New Digital Deal today. Where have I heard of a New Deal before? Oh yes. It was involved in mitigating another crisis, a crisis created and sustained by the government – the Great Depression. (Download Great Myths of the Great Depression pdf below for an overview of the causes of the Great Depression which include the government’s disastrous manipulation of the money supply via Keynesian economic theory and its terrible interventionist policies. Déjà vu all over again today.)
Halloween 2026. It is now the sixth year of the COVIDization of the earth. The “natural” approach for your body is considered foreign, extreme, and unacceptable. Injecting foreign substances into your body has become the prescribed and enforced way of life. Getting the jab is compulsory. The enforced mandate way of life has become the unnatural way of life for millions. And, the unnatural way of death.
Experimental COVID vaccines have exterminated millions. Survivors of vaccinations have become chronically ill. Those who received booster jabs were counseled to expect a different result. The jab, mandated “for you protection”, was the means for your submission.
The same intelligentsia who told us in 2020 that gender is just a social construct produced a science that is just a social construct. “The science” behind mask mandates soon had people turning their bodily autonomy over to vaccines. Vaccines had people turning over their bodily autonomy to the State.
A “flatten your tummy in four weeks” kind of sales pitch was initially used to convince people to buy into lockdowns. With the carrot of “Two weeks to flatten the curve”, authoritarians were able to put their foot in the door. As people subscribed to more and more to a medicalized society, authoritarians were handed the run of the place. The carrot was replaced with a stick.
People were mandated to take a vaccine they didn’t want or need, to download apps on their phone connected to government databases, to scan themselves into venues and events with QR codes to receive government permission to enter, and to obtain an obedience passport showing their vaccination subscription plan. And now, there are more “for your protection” ways to submit!
“More technology means more control of your world” was the advertisement in 2021. What wasn’t advertised was the fact that more technology facilitated more control of your world by others.
States have instituted digital driver’s licenses. The digital license shows your COVID-19 status, your health records, your financial records, your credit scores, your travel records, your spending, your voting record, your licenses and permits, and social credit scoring. All of this information and more is available to government employees!
Vaccines have been developed to tag and track people. The jabs download nanoscale biochips that send out a fluorescent signal – Luciferase – that can be read by an app on a smartphone. If your scan doesn’t yield a “smiley face”, you are out of society until you repent and yield. The vaccination transmission of the biochips is the reason the available protocols like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin were rejected by the government. The media passed out tracts: The State has a wonderful plan for your life.
We have been told that “for the sake of standardized immunization record keeping” quantum dot tattooing must be done. One has to accept discrete microneedle-delivered microparticle patterns that deliver near-infrared light-emitting microparticles to the skin. This, so you can prove vaccination via a smartphone app.
Children are having their vaccine records embedded beneath their skin. A dye that is invisible to the naked eye is injected into them at the time of re-vaccination. An app shines infrared light onto the skin and reads the child’s vaccine records.
Looking back at 2021, there were many who sought to secure their livelihood and to stave off death anxiety in the face of what they were told was a deadly pandemic. They began turning over the keys of their human agency to the terror management handlers of the State. Their capitulation came about as people doubled down on irrationality and self-deceit. For they believed and acted on everything that the State told them. The State told them to be afraid and they became afraid.
Overnight, people’s behavior changed. They began wearing protective gear, self-isolating, standing six feet apart and taking the experimental jab. All this and more were done to deal with the apprehension, worry, and fear related to death. All this and more continues to be done even though for most people the recovery rate from COVID and its variants continues to be over 99.5% and recovery provides a greater immunity than the vaccines.
In their attempt to protect their symbolic immortality, the mask wearing vaxxed staunchly defend “COVID is a death threat” and COVID vaccines are “safe and effective”. They shame-attack and distance themselves from the unvaxxed. This has always been encouraged by the State media. And so, a medical apartheid has been created and sustained, as planned by the State.
The generalized anxiety produced by wagering one’s existence on “the science” leading to self-deception continues to be exploited by the “Great Reset” psyops generated by the State media. As the death knell of “the threat of COVID variants” continues to ring out in the news and social media, otherwise normal levels of concern have shot up to a towering level of existential dread. And that level of terror is maintained with mandates.
The State reinforces ubiquitous visible death cues – face masks, anti-bacterial sprays and wipes, social distancing signs and public health campaigns. The fearful are reminded to remain fearful.
In exchange for not having to fear what they are told to fear, people have accepted the extortion of the State’s “For your protection” protection racket. They accept the loss of their freedom and their physical and mental health in exchange for State enforced “peace of mind”.
Some said “No” to the protection.
*****
I wanted to get away. Alone. No smartphone, no laptop, no high-speed internet downloading rapid fire ads and lies and clichés, no web tracking devices, no unholy ghosts of the machines.
Before driving up north, I disconnected the “24/7 safety connect” that came with my car. I called the phone company and ended the “free trial” phone number and WIFI that came with the car. I disconnected from everything that kept tabs on me and wanted my attention. I bought a burner phone to take with me in case of emergency and reminded myself that good things happen when I shut out the digital universe
Driving north on Interstate 39, I thought about my first car: a used blue ’64 Chevy Impala. I paid a friend $400 for it. The Impala had all I needed: lots of space, four roll-down windows for air conditioning and a push button AM/FM radio. With a car like that, I told myself, who needed to be surrounded by semiconductor bells and whistles? And, why the hell go to war to secure rare earth minerals for bells and whistles or for cell phones and laptops and EVs and for augmented and virtual reality . . . when life can be as simple as a ’64 Chevy?
The first time I visited Horicon Marsh my life had been skewing sideways. Seemingly out of the blue I had become teary-eyed, anxious, irritable, angry and depressed. I had a major depressive episode and that wasn’t like me. It seemed that I couldn’t log back in to who I was. My username and password weren’t being recognized. So, I went to the wildlife refuge to look for my backup files.
Yikes! I shut out the digital universe and here I am talking to you in digital terms! Bear with me while I switch back to analog!
While at Horicon Marsh, I came to realize that it was a concussion that had knocked me for a loop. Six months before a truck had rear-ended my car. The impact caused my head to bounce off the steering wheel. I was taken to a hospital and diagnosed with whiplash and a concussion. After that happened I became sensitive to just about everything. The concussion came with an overwhelming sense of mourning that I couldn’t wave off.
I’d a previous knock on the head during my high school years. I was knocked unconscious. When I finally opened my eyes there was a circle of concerned faces looking down at me. They helped me up and sat me down. I waved off calls for an ambulance or a doctor. But I couldn’t wave off the feeling that I had become a ghost walking beside myself. The ghost returned after the second concussion.
*****
There are a lot of things you think about when you travel 400 miles. For one, the undeniable understanding that the vortex of the present age wants to suck you in and spit you out as unnatural and unholy – as a Pagan-Progressive.
I think about Halloween. Many of the neighborhood houses look like shrines for the COVID death cult. Front yards display skulls, skeletons, tombstones, and witches. Inside, parents have so terrified their kids with thoughts of the COVID Boogie man that the kids can’t wait to get the jab to feel safe and normal again.
Homeowners this year, by order of the CDC, must pass out masks and punch cards for free ice cream with each booster shot they receive. But first the child has to show the homeowner their Vaxx Band – a color-coded wristband representing the latest booster shot. I heard that if a kid didn’t have the wristband, kids made fun of him by calling him a “Vaxx-Virgin”. That’s CDC black magic for you.
I think about worlds far away from the madness. GN-Z11, the recently discovered high-redshift galaxy found in the constellation Ursa Major, is the farthest recognizable galaxy ever observed. If I wanted to drive to GN-Z11, at say 120 MPH, it would take me over 178 quadrillion years. That wouldn’t include stops for gas and using the restroom.
Light from GN-Z11 takes over 13 billion years to reach Earth. GN-z11’s levels of redshift shows that it existed 400 million years after the Big Bang. One report said that there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be any alien life there. Let’s hope they’re not collectivists.
Like I said, there are a lot of things you think about when you travel 400 miles in a car. One of those things is where to stop when nature calls. As a woman, indoor plumbing is always my first choice. But the restaurants, gas stations and interstate rest areas all require a mask and a vaxx card to use their restrooms.
I am bare-faced undocumented. So, I travel like an illegal alien. As I go along, I look for a thicket of trees and bushes that won’t require a mask and VaxxPass and also provides a view of my car. There are life forms that want my catalytic converter for its precious metals – platinum, palladium, and rhodium. As you know, in the present age stealing to survive is the victim’s pleading. If one is caught, the system will spit you back out – without bond.
I think about Horicon Marsh in southeast Wisconsin. The wildlife refuge is an undisturbed sanctuary for migratory birds, waterfowl, and migratory me. This is my second trip to the wetland.
Entrance
What I take in there doesn’t lie to me. The cattails and marsh grass don’t lie to me. The black-crowned night heron and the double-crested cormorant don’t lie to me. The turtles, frogs and otters don’t lie to me. The butterflies and gnats don’t lie to me. The weather doesn’t lie to me. There is no deceit and no agenda in this eco-sphere of truth.
I told myself that when I die, I want to die in nature by nature and not from some experimental jab produced by “follow the science” gravediggers. “Alas poor Gabby! I knew her, Horatio: a woman of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.” -my mind wonders when I’m driving.
Ten years ago, September, Wisconsin kids were back in school. I had the marsh to myself. I brought a camera hoping to capture some of the truth in beauty I imagined would be found in that wetland. What I captured that visit was the seen and unseen – the union of heaven and earth. How else can one describe transcendent beauty?
I’m traveling to Horicon Marsh this time because evil is so oppressive these days. People have been subjected to the banality of evil – Dr. Fauci’s manipulative “noble lies” – and to the blatant evil of a Dr. Frankenstein experiment. Child sacrifice abortions are being promoted to produce vaccines that promise pandemic protection and immortality for the self-obsessed. The best laid plans of pillars of dust leave us with nothing but grief and pain. Pillar of dust schemes have earth, not heaven, written all over them
I’m traveling to Horicon Marsh to reconnect to the primal true, to home base. I need alone time with God. I am determined to commune with God. This time, instead of recording things with a camera, I am memorizing scripture.
*****
For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.
After driving all night, I arrive at the city of Horicon in the early afternoon. I drive north on Palmatory Street until I reach the Palmatory Street Overlook within Horicon Marsh. I get out of my car to survey the vista.
The 11,000 acres of the fresh water marsh opens up before me. The October air is cold, apple crisp and clear. Summer haze has given way to steam fog on the marsh. A saturated blue sky canopies the marsh. The complementary colors of fall’s red, orange and gold leaves make the blueness “pop”. The gilding of the wetland by the low, slanting light of the autumn sun reminds me that the light of day is not a social construct. Light existed long before man decided to walk in it or not.
The shower of photons emitted from the sun eight minutes ago make it possible for me to see the marsh. The photons were created tens of thousands of years ago by fusion reactions inside the Sun’s core. After spending countless time bouncing around in the sun’s radiative zone, they finally escape the Sun’s surface. Eight minutes later the photons hit my eyes and I wonder if I brought my sun glasses.
I drive around to the visitor’s center. I park right in front to ward off the catalytic converter diverters. The sign on the door says “You must renounce all sanity and subject yourself to something that knows nothing about you.” In other words,
BY ORDER OF THE CDC
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO WEAR A MASK AND
SHOW YOUR VAXX STATUS TO ENTER THIS FACILITY
Nature call Plan B is now in effect.
I walk around the visitor center and set off on a hiking trail. The teeming wildlife life that I saw ten years ago must have recoiled in this October’s chill. I see no one else on the marsh. Solitude sets in. And except for the occasional honking of the Canadian Geese and the crackle and snap of marsh grass under my feet, the marsh is quiet.
In this setting I begin to recite the Psalm I memorized over the summer:
Bless the LORD, O my soul.
O LORD my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
wrapped in light as with a garment.
You stretch out the heavens like a tent,
you set the beams of your chambers on the waters
you make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
you make the winds your messengers,
fire and flame your ministers. . .
As I’m walking, I see a narrow strip of land on my left. It divides two small lakes. The circumference of each lake is outlined by cattails and tall reed grass. I leave the hiking trial and take that path.
Out in the open, the wind brushes past the grass, causing a shivering sound. On both sides of me come bahloops. Creatures I can’t see are jumping into the water as I pass by. A muskrat scurries across the path and then dives into the water. Then I see something I didn’t expect.
Who are these two men walking towards me? They’re dressed like hunters. Where did they come from? Were they sitting on the bank where I couldn’t see them before?
Here I am – a woman alone on the marsh with two tall men approaching. Yelling for help wouldn’t do any good. Should I run? I look behind me. When I turn back, I see two blazing white-gold figures standing in front of me. I knew I should have brought my sunglasses.
One of them looked like a Roman warrior. He had a breastplate and was holding a sword. The other looked like a scribe. He was wearing a white tunic and was holding a scroll.
I rubbed my eyes. It was a long drive up here and I didn’t get much sleep, so, maybe . . .
“Peace be with you,” the one with the sword said.
“Do I know you guys?” I stammered. “Are you from GN-Z11?”
“You know the One Who sent us,” said the one with the scroll looking at the scroll.
“You must be Fire,” I said to the one with sword. “And, you must be Flame,” I said to the other. Then I realized that I was saying silly things and was too stupefied to say anything coherent.
“Gabby, the Lord of the Spirits sent us,” they said to together.
I remained quiet.
“Do not be afraid Gabby. The Lord hears your prayers. He hears you reciting the Words of spirit and life. He knows your meditations and your concerns. He sent us to encourage you to walk and not grow faint. All that is written, and now written in your heart, will come to pass.
There are those who have heard the word as they stand by the sidelines, but immediately the Accuser comes and snatches away what they heard. Others have received the word with excitement. But they were short term enthusiasts; they had no root in themselves. When the word brought them trouble or hostilities, they quickly became disillusioned and disowned the word. Others heard the word and the worries of this present age, and the deceit of riches, and the desires for other kinds of things came in and choked the word. They produced no fruit.
Preserve and nourish the good word which has been sown in you. The mystery of the kingdom of God has been revealed to you. Abide in the love of the Lord.
Gabby, proud men have proclaimed that they will take men into the future, they will build their own future. Yet, it is not given to man to know his future except for what’s been revealed and uncovered in the Kingdom of God.
There will be no digital-based resurrection of man. The Singularity they are building will fall and crumble into the air. The builders will be scattered. The digital swarm will not overtake you. It will overtake them.”
I suddenly blurted out Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more -words from the end of the Psalm I had been reciting.
“All that is written, and now written in your heart, will come to pass. The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.”
They turned and walked away as they had come – as two hunters. I was alone again on the marsh. The stillness seemed to be waiting for my response. It was a gaggle of geese that sounded off.
I spent three days at the marsh. Vee formations of Canadian geese and ducks swooped in to eat and rest before taking off south again. Stately spindly-legged cranes stood fishing in the water near the tall marsh grasses. The solitude of marsh life restored my soul.
I spent the nights at a local campground. I ate what I brought from home. Returning home, I again had a lot to think about . . .
*****
What happened on the marsh wasn’t virtual reality. And those two weren’t digital non-fungible tokens that popped out of the ether for my perusal. What happened was rock-solid reality and not fleeting bits and bytes. This digital age would have me view myself and the world through the eyes of software developers – their menus, their data streams.
I remembered what I felt for a time after my concussions: like I was a ghost walking beside myself. My mind seemed disconnected from my body. This digital age would have me live in that psychosis, in a mental state where the idealized virtual version of myself – the “augmented human” self – exists alongside my physical self.
Horicon Marsh
I wondered why so few had noticed in 2021 that the providential care offered by the gods of the digital age came in the form of slavery to devices and codes? Mankind has since become addicted to vaccinations of tech-steroids. Mankind has come to believe that it needs new ‘booster’ technology to survive.
And why have so few balked at the fact that augmented man is surveilled man? Once your tagged, your physical and virtual lives are tracked. Smart devices, sold as technology for you to control your world, are actually used by others to control your world.
It’s easy for me to see that augmented man is distracted man. Look at how people are driving! With the nearest device someone can lose themselves in a neurotransmitter stream of online entertainment. And it occurred to me that the Sowers of the digital seed want people distracted. They want people to look and look and never see and hear and hear and never understand the Kingdom of God. Otherwise, they would turn and repent.
It’s easy for me to see what happened to intelligent debate. The digitally distracted, with a fear of missing out, take in vast amounts of information they don’t know what to do with. A huge pile of information does not create deep thinkers. And that is why the technocracy is creating algos to do your thinking and voting for you.
After a few hours of driving, I get a little silly:
What did one photon say to the other photon? No matter how far I travel to show up, people still throw shade on me.
What did one dust particle say to the other dust particle? I meet you on ground level.
I had a lot of questions for Fire and Flame but I wasn’t sure what would come out of my mouth. I wasn’t going to ask them for protection. I already had a sense that they were watching over me as I walked every morning.
About twenty miles from home I remembered the email my company sent out before I left town. The email was a company-wide invitation to sign up for a points reward program. You behave the way they want you to and they reward you with points toward a treat – some gift you pick off a list.
So now my company wants to treat me like a dog and just like the CCP treats its people. I won’t sign up for their social credit system. I didn’t sign up for the vaccine or testing or mask program. I don’t do de-humanizing things to myself.
In my driveway everything I thought about this trip hits home. I live alone and will likely die alone. I am told that I can live a connected life, a one-with-mankind Singularity kind of life. But what does it profit me if I gain the whole digital world and lose my soul?
Episode_1389 The trillion dollar infrastructure bills and >>>>Christine Anderson’s Freedom speech!Episode_1395 The rise of transhumanism and the want of omnipotence
“The COVID vaccines . . . the most dangerous vaccine ever created in history. It is 800X more dangerous than the smallpox vaccine with respect to death, and over 25X worse with respect to permanent disability . . .”
Dr. Harvey Risch: No. I put it the other way around. The unvaccinated should be afraid of the vaccinated. They’re just as infected. In fact, maybe more infected. If vaccinated, people are infected. So it is well known that it is the vaccinated people that generate the mutant strains and not the unvaccinated people. And that has led that corruption of the medical establishment saying that unvaccinated people are generating the mutants is an absolute falsehood. It is exactly the opposite. This has been known for 100 years that it’s vaccinated people who are more prone to generate mutant strains. (Emphasis mine)
In his current state, it might take years for Vic to recover his right mind. He’s been flaying around and mumbling the whole time in the back seat of my car. His mind, no longer aware of surroundings, seemed to be in a state of virtual reality. And that is the reason for the all-night drive.
I was told to not bring a phone or any electronic device with me. I was given a hand-drawn map with sketched landmarks to direct me once I left Highway 16.
Down the backroads, I questioned what I saw. Those Aspens by a fence – is that what’s shown here? Was that the rock formation I was supposed to turn at? Where are the three lone towering Ponderosa Pines? Is that the field of wildflowers I drive alongside?
After two hours I found myself at a huge rock formation that jutted out northward per the “N” on my map. According to the sketch, an Indian would be there waiting for me. What happens now?
Out from behind a rock came the Indian. He came over to my car and looked inside. When he saw Vic, he shook his head. He looked at me, pointed to himself and said “Notah”. He asked me if I had any electronic devices. I assured him that I didn’t. He told me to follow his pickup truck.
After driving an hour or so, somewhere around Bighorn National Forest, we drove up to the off-the-grid Fire and Flame Human Refuge. Notah helped me walk Vic to the door of the lodge. A petite older woman came out and helped me walk Vic inside. I turned to thank Notah but he was gone.
Inside, there was pine wood everywhere. I felt I had returned to summer camp. A door swung open and the room filled with the aroma of baked corn bread . . . and chili?
With the woman’s help, I brought Vic into the Great Room. I settled him in an arm chair that faced outside. A field of wild flowers was in view. In the distance, fir tree-skirted mountains. Vic put out his hand and began twitching his thumb as if flicking a TV remote button.
There must have been twenty-five people in the Great Room. Catatonic people.
Sharon introduced herself. She was the one who had helped me with Vic. I learned that she managed the refuge. I asked about the people in the Great Room.
“Do you see that woman standing by the window?” Sharon pointed.
“Yes.”
“That is Marisa. She is not looking at the wilderness in front of her. She sees only her reflection in the glass. Up till now Marisa has spent most of her time taking selfies and posting them on social media.”
“What about that man who seems to be constantly scrolling with his finger?”
“Before Bill came here, he was constantly checking social media pages for updates. He developed the scrolling-finger habit as part of a social-validation feedback loop. Dopamine was released into his brain when someone liked or commented on something he posted. Right now, he’s in withdrawal from the social-validation feedback of dopamine.”
“What about that teenage girl over there? The one with the wide-eyed look?” I asked.
“Myra was brought here by her mother. She had isolated herself from her family. She spent hours of the day on social media. Myra has a fear of missing out. It is a common phenomenon for teens to want to be socially connected. Technology offers a non-stop social-validation feedback loop. A teenager, fearing the possibility of social alienation, goes online constantly for validation.
Myra developed a sleep disorder after staying up all night texting. Her school work suffered. She developed poor eating habits and gained weight. The negative effects of her social media interface made her depressed, angry and less social. Technology presents teenagers with a false sense of relational security while ignoring those in the same house.”
“Is that young boy here for the same reason?” I nodded my head in the boy’s direction.
“Yes, similar reasons. His father brought him here. John was online playing games for hours and hours. His father asked him to spend time with him outside – play catch, go fishing. But John refused. Like Myra’s social-validation obsession, when John didn’t play or interact with the games, he thought he was missing out. His father could see that John was missing out on life, so he brought him here.”
“What about that older couple sitting in the arm chairs?”
“They are Jim and Sally. Their close friends brought them here. They were very concerned for them. They told me that Jim and Sally would get up in the morning, turn on the TV and listen for the weather forecast. They would leave the TV on the rest of the day and sit and listen to the world’s take on things and the advertised solution: problem, problem, problem, cure; problem, problem, problem, cure; problem, cure; day and night.
By their friend’s account, Jim and Sally had become terrified, angry and even despairing by what they heard. Honestly, that’s what Noise does to people. C’mon. Let’s listen to them for a moment . . .”
“Jim, you are a racist.”
“We both are Sally. They said so.”
“They’re telling us that we could die from cancer or climate change or COVID or the guy in the White House if we don’t do something.”
“How about we just die, Sally, and be done with the whole business?”
“Now Jim. We should listen to them. They know better than us. They’ve told us so many times that we can’t trust our own thinking . . .”
“I am glad their friend brought them here,” Sharon said. “They needed relief from the Noise . . . At Fire and Flame, we don’t give people sedatives. We give them space to work out their salvation.”
Sharon then asked me why I brought Vic to Fire and Flame.
“Vic has been a friend of mine since high school. We hung around each other and kidded each other all the time. But then things changed when he got devices. He was no longer present with me or to anyone, really. It seemed to me and his other friends that Vic was using technology to avoid us. He talked incessantly about what this and that could do.
Vic’s other friends gave up on Vic. They had come to find out that Vic had spent large portions of his paycheck on new devices. He bragged about the new devices until one day he came to one of his friends and asked him for a loan. Vic wasn’t able to pay the mortgage. He had to borrow money. But that wasn’t the breaking point for Vic.
I heard from a friend that Vic wanted to join me at the Remnant camp to escape the COVIDians. Two people had come to his door and asked him for his Vax papers. Vic learned the reason they came to his door: they had been monitoring him through his devices. He didn’t have Vax papers because he refused to be vaccinated.
The two COVIDians declared Vic “unsafe’ and told him that he was banned from the Internet, email and online accounts. They took away his phone, laptop and internet connection. They wrote his name down on a ledger and said they would be back the next day.
I relayed back to Vic that he could come to the Remnant camp but he would have to go to Fire and Flame first.”
As I was talking to Sharon, Vic got out of his chair and began walking around the Great Room. He was again flaying his arms and mumbling to himself.
“When they first come here,” Sharon said, “they are agitated.” They haven’t been used to having their hands free. They are restless, hyperactive, and full of nervous energy. They cannot tolerate a sense of boredom and look for highly stimulating activity. They walk around and say and do things and are unaware of the effect they have on others. It will take time for Vic to become focused and to stay focused on reality.
“Fire and Flame . . .?”
“Fire and Flame is a portal to a world away from the constant pinging of digital devices. The Dark Forces of this world produce relentless Noise. It is meant to unsettle and distract you from The Message. Here, there is Signal not Noise.”
“Message? Signal?” I asked.
“You will find out tonight.” Sharon replied. “C’mon I’ve prepared a room for you. You can rest before dinner.”
****
A bell rang. We were summoned to dinner and I was again reminded of summer camp. I got up, splashed some water on my face, got dressed and headed down the hallway.
The dining room was another pine-paneled Great Room: floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides and a fireplace. Twenty-four pine-wood tables filled the room.
When everyone had gathered and were seated, Sharon asked “Evangelist Mark” to please ask the Lord’s blessing on the meal. Evangelist Mark stood up and prayed the blessing on the cornbread, chili, salad and the lemonade (what I used to call “bug juice” in my camp days). Odd how the past and present comingle and not just in my dreams.
I looked around the room. Six people sat at each table. And though so many filled the Great Room, there was little chatter. I saw many somber faces. Some stared off and ate, unaware that others were sitting across from them. Others fidgeted with their silverware and played with their food. A few were animated and tried talking to those around them but received no response.
Sharon sat down and gave a big sigh. She and her helpers had made sure everyone had food before sitting down. “How’s the food?”
“Delicious! The aromas had made me when I came in this morning,” I replied. “Is that Bach I hear in the background?
“Yes. Bach is the sound of redemption. It is particularly effective in helping to balance our brains between dissonance and consonance. The mind is then able to focus and attain deep concentration. This enables an inner quickening of the imagination, creativity, memory and intuition.”
Across the table from the two of us sat Joe. Sharon asked Joe to tell me why he had come to Fire and Flame.
“Well,” Joe began, “. . . a 5G network. I was told that it was the bee’s knees. They said it was designed to connect virtually everyone and everything together including machines, objects, and devices. With it, I was to be almost omniscient – aware of everyone and everything through a mobile ecosystem.
But using it day after day I found myself thinking about the device and what it wanted me to be aware of and wanted me to do next. I had become connected to an impersonal object that was directing my life with its AI. I was fooling myself – actually, I was subverting myself – pretending to be aware and to be in control of my life.
“That’s what brought me here. The addiction to being omniscient and to controlling things was intense. I spent most of my time working the device. I was doing apps, pushing buttons – nonstop! I finally asked myself “Why does my heart tell me to think like this? Inside my head . . . it was like John Cage music playing over and over.
One day I heard of Fire and Flame from a neighbor who was fleeing the COVIDian and Woke persecutions. He said that he was going to the Remnant camp. One night I left everything behind when his car showed up. He drove me here.”
Joe ended his account with a smile.
“Jennifer,” Sharon leaned over. “This afternoon Vic broke into my office. He was looking for a device to get on the internet. I have none. Then he started breaking into cars and trucks looking for a way to connect and found nothing. Then he ran into the woods. Notah found him and brought him back.”
“Vic may try again tonight. If he does Notah will follow him. No one is a prisoner here. We understand it’s a major struggle to be free from Noise. Notah will ask if he wants to return. If not, he will take Vic to a bus stop many miles away from here.
“We are a refuge for humans. We can’t help trans-humans, if that is what Vic wants. They are wired for Noise. We are to live as humans, we are to love. Trans-humans cannot live, cannot love. They only obey digital prompts and inputs.”
****
At twilight, the group from dinner came down to the fire pit. We sat down on the semi-circle of logs around the bonfire. The sun had gone down behind the horizon of mountains and no longer gilded their peaks.
Above us, in the blue-to-black July sky, a conjunction of terrestrial objects – Venus, Mars and the moon. They were easily visible. Venus shone brighter and slightly below the red planet. The familiar moon was making its circuit below.
Across that cosmic vista came a silhouette of a black whirring object. And then another. Sharon leaned over and told me “They are the regime’s Charon drones. They are keeping an eye on us. The regime and the people of the Noise are terrified of the people of the Signal”.
At that moment, a young boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, got up and stood next to the fire. He began . . .
Psalm 1
Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees . . .
The boy recited the Psalm from memory. He sat down and then an older woman – a grandmother? – got up. She began to recite Psalm 61 from memory . . .
Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer. From the end of the earth I call to you, when my heart is faint.
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I; for you are my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy . . .
When she had finished, a teenage girl stood up and recited Psalm 104 from memory . . .
Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, you are very great. You are clothed with honor and majesty, wrapped in light as with a garment. You stretch out the heavens like a tent, you set the beams of your chambers on the waters, you make the clouds your chariot, you ride on the wings of the wind, you make the winds your messengers, fire and flame your ministers . . .
When she had finished, she sat down. Each of them had recited their Psalm as a dramatic reading. The words came from their soul.
The drones, now four of them, blotted out starlight as they hovered and circled. I looked around. Was I the only one who noticed them?
Someone yelled “Evangelist Mark! Give us the Good News!” More joined the call.
A man, fiftyish, got up. He took off his glasses and handed them to Sharon. (I learned later that they were husband and wife.) He covered her with a blanket.
The night air had become chilly. More wood was thrown onto the bonfire. People huddled together under blankets. Faces became animated with the fluctuating glow of the roaring fire. All eyes were on Evangelist Mark.
This is where the good news starts – the good news of Jesus the Messiah, God’s son . . .
I recognized the words from the opening of The Gospel According to Mark.
“A shout goes up in the desert; make way for the Lord! Clear a straight path for him! . . .” . John the Baptizer appeared in the desert . . . “Someone a lot stronger than me is coming close behind” . . . This is how it happened . . .After John’s arrest, Jesus came in to Galilee, announcing God’s good news. “The time is fulfilled! God’s kingdom is arriving! Turn back and believe the good news!” . . .When the sun went down and evening came, they brought to Jesus everyone who was ill, all who were demon possessed . . .
Jesus went back to Capernaum . . . a crowd gathered with the result that people couldn’t even get near the door as he was telling them the message . . . A party arrived: four people carrying a paralyzed man, bringing him to Jesus. They couldn’t get through to him because of the crowd, so they opened up the roof above where he was . . . they used ropes to let down the stretcher the paralyzed man was lying on. Jesus saw their faith and said to the paralyzed man, “Child, your sins are forgiven!” . . .
Evangelist Mark, from memory, continued his dramatic narration of the whole gospel to its conclusion . . .
When Jesus was raised, early on the first day of the week, he appeared first of all to Mary Magdalene . . . Later Jesus appeared to the eleven . . . he told them off for their unbelief and hardheartedness . . . “Go into all the world and announce the message to all creation” . . . When the Lord Jesus had spoken with them, he was taken up into heaven, and sat down at God’s right hand. They went out and announced the message everywhere. The Lord worked with them, validating their message by the signs that accompanied them.
For over an hour, the fireside group sat captivated by The Message. When Evangelist Mark sat down, someone in the group began singing. Then others joined:
If we die with him, we shall live with him;
If we endure patiently, we shall reign with him;
If we deny him, he will deny us:
If we are faithless, he remains faithful. For he cannot deny his own self.
While they sang, I looked for Vic. Then I saw him leaning against a tree, back from the group. Shadows came and went across him, as many began walking back to their rooms. Was that a sparkle of belief in his eyes? Was that the glistening of a tear?
Sharon and her husband Tom – “Evangelist Mark” – walked me back to the refuge rooms. I was tired. Tomorrow I would make the long drive back to the Remnant Camp and to people of the Signal there. Sharon told me that Notah would help me ditch the drones. He knew when they came and went. He could tell by their noise.
“Episode_1093 The people aren’t waiting politicians to save them anymore, and we discuss the effects of the vaccine.”“Episode_10979 Our military is being weakened and Christian churches are under attack in Canada”
*****
Who is Dr. Malone?
*****
Informed Dissent:
Camilla Canepa was operated on by Gianluigi Zona, director of the neurosurgical and neuro-traumatological clinic of the San Martino hospital: “I had never seen a brain that was affected by such an extensive and severe thrombosis.” . . .
The girl arrived in the emergency room in the Lavagna hospital on June 3, just a week after the AstraZeneca shot. She had complained of severe headaches.
“Go and tell John [the Baptist], replied Jesus, “what you’ve seen and heard. Blind people are seeing! Lame people are walking! People with virulent diseases are being cleansed! Deaf people can hear again! The dead are being raised to life! And – the poor are hearing the good news! And God bless you if you’re not upset by what I am doing.” From Matthew’s Gospel account 11 v. 5
“The Lord will work out his plans for my life—for your loving-kindness, Lord, continues forever. Don’t abandon me—for you made me.” Psalm 138 v. 8
>>>
I’ve worked as an engineer for most of my life. I work in a field where I don’t get to hear directly from those who benefit from my work. Yet, I take pleasure in doing good work, knowing that my detailed designs bring about a better life for hundreds of thousands even though they most likely take no account of where the benefit derived.
In a world of chronic whining, ingratitude and deconstructionism, I am grateful when I hear and see things which are constructive and about those miracles that change things for the better.
Now, one might suppose from reading the Scripture that miracles are instantaneous. Point your finger and BAM! Life is changed for the better. But the greater reality is that most miracles take time and use human input. See below.
There is great joy to be found in the noble engineering work of others. I think you will see what I mean after watching these videos.
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
*****
“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
*****
“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
*****
“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
*****
To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
*****
“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
*****
Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
*****
If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
*****
“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
*****
“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
*****
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
*****
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
*****
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
*****
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
*****
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
*****
God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
*****
From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
*****
“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
*****
One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
*****
“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
*****
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
*****
“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
**
“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
*****
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
*****
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
*****
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*****
This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
*****
“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
*****
Cindy Wity 
The Hound of Hell
November 9, 2025 Leave a comment
“The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse.”
-Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451
Anyone who has read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 will remember the menacing Mechanical Hound.
In fireman Guy Montag’s world, firemen burn outlawed books and where people hid them. The firehouse ‘dog’, a robotic beast, is an enforcer for the state. If you do not follow society’s rules, the Hound is unleashed. It tracks down and kills book readers using stored information about individuals. The Hound catches its prey and then injects it with lethal drugs.
Though configured as man’s best friend, Montag finds out the true nature of the beast. Being “fascinated as always with the dead beast, the living beast,” he touches the muzzle of the Hound. The Hound growls and Montag recoils.
“The Hound half rose in its kennel and looked at him with green-blue neon light flickering in its suddenly activated eye bulbs. It growled again, a strange rasping combination of electric sizzle, a frying sound, a scraping of metal, a turning of cogs that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion.”
Not long afterward, Montag tells Captain Beatty “It doesn’t like me.” Captain Beatty tells Montag:
“Come off it. It doesn’t like or dislike. It just `functions.’ It’s like a lesson in ballistics. It has a trajectory we decide for it. It follows through. It targets itself, homes itself, and cuts off. It’s only copper wire, storage batteries, and electricity.”
The Mechanical Hound attacks what it is programmed to attack. And when Montag becomes more and more inquisitive about books and one is found in his possession, the Hound is released to track him down.
~~~
The techno-capitalist-industrialist-open borders system that goes by “Progress” or “Development” or “the Science” or “Fair-Trade” or “Commercialization” or “Globalization” or “Open Society,” is summed into a single descriptor – “the Machine” – by Paul Kingsnorth in his book Against the Machine (See side bar, previous post, and podcasts below for more information.)
In the chapter Come the Black Ships, Kingsnorth describes the process of Machine as being
“a war against all ‘closed’ things; against limits and boundaries of any kind, cultural and ecological; against historical traditions, local economies, trade unions, national economic plans, nations themselves, tribal cultures, religions . . . anything that interferes with the path of commercial expansion and its associated culture of individualist liberalism. Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can’t be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world which the Machine is building. ‘Open’ things, on the other hand; well, they’re easy prey.”
That is our reality today. The West has colonialized itself with what it has colonized other nations – the Machine’s promise of the “open is good” gravy train. The WEF’s mission statement cloaks the Machine in good: “We bring together government, businesses and civil society to improve the state of the world” by “seiz[ing] opportunities for positive change.”
And so it is that the Machine’s process is advertised as that which benefits humanity in various ways. These include “Enhanced Customer Experience”, “Innovation”, “Diversity”, and “Advancements in Medicine, Education, Efficiency, Productivity, and “Sustainability” all while waging “a war against all ‘closed’ things” for the sake of its commercialization, monetization, and control of the process.
For the Machine to wage “war against all ‘closed’ things”, technology is employed to sniff out and snuff out the ‘closed’ – those people and their places unwilling to “be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world.” This machine I see depicted as Bradbury’s Mechanical Hound.
The Mechanical Hound represents the perversion of technology. Man’s best friend, a creature meant for companionship, aid, and protection, is turned into a technological tool of oppression. Its purpose is to impose order with terror.
With the Mechanical Hound in mind, consider digital technology which can be seen as friendly and helpful but can been programmed to avenge and punish citizens who break society’s rules. See China’s social credit system.
With the Mechanical Hound in mind, see the UK introducing digital ID cards. The UK government claims the system will simplify access to public services such as healthcare, welfare, and childcare, reduce identity fraud, ensure that only those with the right to work can be hired and is expected to minimize identity fraud by linking personal information to a secure digital format. With all these great “benefits” (for the state), what could go wrong? Say, if someone online says something that is considered “hate speech” by the UK government will the Hound be released to track that person down? That is happening today in the UK.
See a cashless society and Central Bank digital currency (CBDC) where purchases are monitored and financial accounts controlled by the government.
See the smartphone that “slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of” your pocket.
Consider the digital contraptions in your home and car that, like the Hound, can track you with information gathered from 5G towers that is downloaded to data centers that consume massive amounts of energy and water and taxpayer money – to monitor your physical and societal whereabouts so it can sell you more of the Machine’s process.
In Montag’s repressed society, books, book holders, and critical thinkers are dealt with. For books hold the experience and wisdom of ‘closed’ things – history, tradition, culture and religion – and must be done away with. And, so must thinking critically. For researching and comprehending what the Machine is doing to humans and their world is a threat. (https://www.thefire.org/news/10-worst-censors-2024)
With this in mind, consider the calls for censorship on our college campuses. In Britain you can go to jail for saying the ‘wrong’ thing.
In Montag’s repressed society, wall screens and pills replace books. The wall screens produce for Montag’s wife, Mildred, her ‘family’. Their home has three wall screens. She wants a fourth wall screen. We learn how depressing life is for Mildred when she attempts to commit suicide with an overdose.
Consider that it is depressing to live in places run by Democrats: (Illinois state legislature passes assisted-suicide bill)
~~~
How did we get amenable to the Machine’s control over us and thus take on a mechanized way of seeing and relating to the world? Bradbury provides insight.
Fahrenheit 451 is about more than censorship. It is about conformity to state-imposed uniformity. Books in 451 were seen as creating discord. They had to go. For, with the advent of visual media, TV in particular, people no longer read and didn’t want to hear anything but what they heard on the screens. People wanted censorship and conformity to the screens.
As Captain Beatty tells Montag,
“’The fact is we didn’t get along well until photography came into its own. Then–motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.’
“Montag sat in bed, not moving.
“’And because they had mass, they became simpler,” said Beatty. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?’”
“’I think so.’”
“Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. ‘Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
“’Snap ending.’ Mildred nodded.”
Captain Beatty, again:
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”
“Yes.”
Beatty’s Full Speech to Montag is provided below.
~~~~~
This our reality: the Machine and the Mechanical Hound.
Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine – On the Unmaking of Humanity has provided us a prophetic understanding of where we are and where we are headed. The Machine is moving us downstream, displacing us from what we value – in Kingsnorth’s words “the past, people, place, and prayer.”
Various entities participate and promote the Machine.
Mainstream media is run by the Machine. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, WSJ, NYT, WaPo and other outlets are the Machine’s mouthpieces. They talk down the “closed” and proclaim the “open.”
Both political parties promote the Machine. It is “progress” (and control) after all. The biggest threat to democracy is the Machine that consumes culture and churns out cogs.
Now that Mamdani has won the NYC mayor’s race, you can be sure that the Mechanical Hound will be released in NYC to enforce socialist jihad. Neither socialism nor Jihad exists without a Mechanical Hound.
Central planners – The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Trade Organization – represent the Machine’s values.
It takes no stretch of the imagination to see ourselves in Montag’s society or to see technology as that which mimics the good but is easily programmed to avenge and punish citizens who break society’s rules. The Mechanical Hound can tract us down to dispose of the ‘closed’ and conform us to the “Open is good” of the Machine.
Bradbury said that with Fahrenheit 451 he wasn’t trying to predict the future but to prevent it. He wanted to protect the present.
The terror of the Hound of Hell is becoming a permanent feature of the “open” (closing up) brave new (upside down) world.
~~~~~
Read Fahrenheit 451: Beatty’s Speech to Montag
~~~~~
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity | Paul Kingsnorth
Demetri Kofinas speaks with Paul Kingsnorth, a novelist, essayist, and former environmental activist who first came on many people’s radars during the Covid-19 pandemic with the publication of his viral three-part series “The Vaccine Moment.” His current work explores the intersection of technology, culture, and the divine. In his latest book, Against the Machine, Kingsnorth examines how our increasingly mechanized way of seeing and relating to the world—and to ourselves—has contributed to the death of Western culture, and what it would take to reclaim our humanity and save our souls.
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity | Paul Kingsnorth | Listen Notes
~~~
How We Lost Ourselves to Technology—and How We Can Come Back
Do you feel uneasy? Do you feel a level of ambient anxiety? Do you feel despair, despite the fact that we live in the most luxurious time and place in human history?
The point is, you are not crazy. If you feel these things, you are simply attuned to reality—and it’s not a problem that’s solvable with less screen time or with meditation, red light, or sea moss.
Bari Weiss’ brilliant guest, Paul Kingsnorth, argues that the reason you feel this way is not this or that social media app or algorithm or culture war issue. That these are all superficial expressions of a thousand-year battle with what he calls “the Machine.” What exactly that means, he’ll explain tonight.
How We Lost Ourselves to Technology—and How We Can Come Back
~~~~~
From Doug Ross’ substack:
Top 20 Chilling Insights from Yuri Bezmenov
How the KGB’s Playbook Is Destroying the West Today
Yuri Aleksandrovich Bezmenov (1939–1993), also known as Tomas David Schuman, was a Soviet journalist and KGB operative specializing in propaganda and ideological subversion.
Ideological subversion is the process of bending a society’s perception of reality so completely that it destroys itself.
The goal is to demoralize a society by undermining its moral, educational, and cultural foundations, making people unable to recognize or defend against threats.
Demoralization takes 15-20 years, the time needed to educate one generation with subversive ideas.
Read Bezmenov’s 20 key insights
~~~~~
~~~~~
From the Free Press:
Peter Thiel Says Capitalism Is Failing the Young. Is He Right?
Five years ago, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist behind PayPal and Palantir, sent a prescient email to Facebook executives.
“When 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialist,” he wrote, “we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”
The email went viral after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory last week in the New York City mayoral race. Thiel then sat down with The Free Press’s Sean Fischer to explain what he saw in 2020 that no one else did.
Capitalism isn’t working for young people, Thiel said, citing burdensome student debt and regulations putting homeownership out of reach for many. “People assume everything still works, but objectively, it doesn’t. . . . If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.” (Emphasis mine.)
Thiel, who I see as also promoting the Machine, at least sees what the Machine is doing to the young.
And, of course, socialism/communism is a horrifying Machine that revels in terror to replace humanity with ideology.
~~~~~
The Machine’s AI Alchemy
Mary Shelly’s Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with creating a human being, used alchemy and electricity and body parts to create a creature (without woman). . .
A group of Stanford University scientists . . . used artificial intelligence to design new viruses capable of killing bacteria.
In a world where AI keeps creeping in on uniquely human territory by composing sonnets, writing songs or forging friendships, this seemed to be crossing a new Rubicon. Depending on your belief system, AI was doing what evolution, or God, or scientists working with genome-engineering tools aim to do.
“Machines are rethinking what it is to be human, what it is to be alive,” said Michael Hecht, a chemistry professor at Princeton University focused on designing novel proteins and artificial genomes. “I find this very unsettling and staggering. They are devising, coming up with novel life forms. Darwin 2.0.”
AI-designed viruses raise fears over creating life – The Washington Post
Rate this:
Filed under 2025 Current Events, AI, central planning, Economic World Forum, Globalism, Political Commentary, Progressivism, social commentary, Technocracy, technology, totalitarianism, WEF, World Economic Forum Tagged with Against the Machine, AI, artificial intelligence, censorship, central planning, Fahrenheit 451, Globalism, progressivism, technology, totalitarianism