
On memes…




So what the US intelligence cartel is asking us to believe this time around is that America’s democracy has suffered yet another invisible attack, the evidence for which is of course top secret, and that the culprits involved are most of the governments the US intelligence cartel doesn’t like. Also, we’re being asked to believe that US-aligned nations like Saudi Arabia and Israel have had no similar interventions in the US electoral process at all.
And of course we’re already getting reports that this narrative will be used to justify sanctions against many of the accused nations, including Iran (which would necessarily kill the nuclear deal Biden campaigned on re-entering).
“The Biden admin is expected to announce sanctions related to election interference as soon as next week, three admin officials tell me,” CNN’s Kylie Atwood reports on Twitter. “They didn’t disclose details related to the expected sanctions but said that they’ll target multiple countries including Russia, China and Iran.”
So this completely unevidenced narrative is being used to justify support for increased aggressions which have already been long sought by the US intelligence cartel, which has an extensive and unbroken record of lying to us about exactly this sort of thing. The response to this is of course disbelief absent the mountain of evidence required in a post-Iraq invasion world, which (spoiler alert) will never surface. We will never be given any solid evidence for these US spy claims, yet US foreign policy and mainstream news coverage of it will march on as though we have.
In 2008, I wrote a book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In it I warned, based on my study of closing democracies in 20th century history, that America needed to beware of an all-too-possible slide into totalitarianism.
I warned that would-be tyrants, whether they are on the left or the right, always use a map to close down democracies, and that they always take the same ten steps.
Whether they “Invoke an External and Internal Threat” or “Develop a Paramilitary Force” or “Restrict the Press” or the final step, “Subvert the Rule of Law, these steps are always recognizable — and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At the time that I wrote the book, the “global threat” of terrorism was the specter that powers invoked in order to attack our freedoms.
The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and over the last 12 years. Periodically over the last decade, people would ask me when and if we had reached “Step Ten.”
We — my brave publisher, Chelsea Green, and I — are releasing videos of me reading the first and last chapters (see videos below) of “The End of America” now, in 2021, for free. And I am calling the sequel to this book, which I am now writing, “Step Ten” — because as of March of last year, we have indeed, I am so sad to say, arrived at and begun to inhabit “Step Ten” of the 10 steps to fascism.
Though in 2008, I did not explicitly foresee that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle for moving the entire globe into “Step Ten,” I have at various points warned of the dangers of medical crises as vehicles that tyranny can exploit to justify suppressions of civil rights.
Today, a much-hyped medical crisis has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms, that fears of terrorism did not, despite 20 years of effort, ultimately achieve.
Authorities in Oregon are investigating yet another series of mysterious cattle mutilations that have been plaguing the state for the last few years in what might best be described as a slowly unfolding flap. The latest development came to light earlier this month when the Crook County Sheriff’s Office issued a press release wherein they announced to the public that they were in the process of investigating “multiple suspicious cattle deaths” which occurred on “very rural ranch land as well as public BLM land.”
Although the bulletin was lacking in details such as where and when the incidents had specifically occurred, it did provide one rather tantalizing insight, indicating that “the cause of these cattle deaths were not natural.” Sergeant Mitch Madden of the Sheriff’s Office subsequently provided a bit more information to a local TV station, telling them that they were investigating three cases as well as a possible fourth event and that, in each instance, “certain body parts were removed from the cows.”
Spotify has removed an anti-lockdown song by Ian Brown, the former lead vocalist of English rock band The Stone Roses. The music streaming service claims the song violated its policies against COVID-19 misinformation.
Brown released the anti-lockdown song “Little Seed Big Tree” last September. “NO LOCKDOWN NO TESTS NO TRACKS NO MASKS NO VAX,” he tweeted while launching the song.
On March 12, Brown took to Twitter to announce that Spotify had removed his song.
“SPOTiFY stream the streams and censor artists like they have with my last song TOOK IT DOWN just put it down the memory hole! FREE EXPRESSiON AS REVOLUTION,” he wrote.
“Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”—Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times
Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.
With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.
Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.
This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

The right-to-repair movement is poised to explode in 2021. When your stuff breaks, you should be able to fix it yourself. Tech manufactures want to control the methods of repair and companies such as Apple and John Deere do so at the detriment of their customers. But people across the world are tired of it and 25 states in the U.S. are considering right-to-repair legislation in 2021.
“Right to Repair is unstoppable and coming to a state near you. Lawmakers everywhere are seeing that Right to Repair is common sense: You buy a product, you own it, and you should be able to fix it,” Kerry Maeve Sheehan, the U.S. policy lead for the repair community iFixit, said in a press release. “With 25 states considering Right to Repair legislation in the U.S., it’s only a matter of time before Right to Repair is the law of the land.”
Right-to-repair is a problem bigger than Apple charging $300 to replace a cracked iPhone screen. Covid-19 put hospitals in a desperate situation. Patients needed ventilators to survive and there weren’t enough to go around. When one broke down, it often required a special technician to repair. Manufacturers made it impossible for hospital staff to do simple repairs to life saving equipment. The right-to-repair medical equipment is the subject of California’s SB 605 and Hawaii’s SB 760.
In other parts of the country, farmers are unable to till fields because their fancy new John Deere tractors won’t start until a technician clears out error codes in its software. John Deere promised it would provide the equipment and documentation farmers would need to make their own repairs by 2021. It lied. Now Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Vermont, South Carolina, and Missouri are looking to make the right-to-repair agricultural equipment the law of the land.
The pandemic made the world reliant on technology for work and human connection. As the lockdowns came, Apple shut down many of its repair centers and it became hard, if not impossible, for people to get simple repairs for this stuff. The independent repair business boomed, but the people trying to fix had to work around draconian systems built into machines meant to keep out anyone but the original manufacturer. “I was fixing people’s devices that were under warranty because these people couldn’t wait 4 to 8 weeks for Apple to fix their stuff,” 17-year old repair entrepreneur Sam Mencimer told Motherboard in February.
Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington state are all considering broad laws that would apply to most of the stuff we use everyday.
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