Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free & Putin Is Gone

Creative Resistance, Ukraine, Culture, Resistance, Defiant Imagination, Struggle, Justice, Freedom

Preface from 2026 for Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free

In 2023, when I first wrote this reflection, I still believed the world understood what was at stake in Ukraine.

I believed that after the twentieth centuryโ€”with its mass graves, shattered democracies, concentration camps, engineered famines, and the terrible human cost of authoritarian powerโ€”we had learned enough to recognize the warning signs before the fire spread.

I was wrong.

By 2026, the war in Ukraine has become more than a war over territory. It has become a test of democratic memory, moral courage, and political imagination. And too often the world has failed that test.

The tragedy is not simply that authoritarianism returned. The deeper tragedy is how ordinary its return felt.

People still went to work. Markets opened. Families argued over dinner. Politicians performed certainty. News cycles churned. Social media raged. Many treated the destruction of a free people as background noiseโ€”something terrible, yes, but somehow distant, abstract, survivable.

History often arrives like that.

Not as thunder.

As normalization.

That is one of the reasons I keep thinking about Dickinson and Emily Dickinson.

In one of the most moving moments of the series, Emily is surrounded by fracture. Her aunt has died. The country has already been bleeding through two years of civil war. Her family is coming apart. Her brother is drinking. Her father nearly dies after a family conflict that tears the household in half. Her church burns. Her beloved pushes her away. Death hangs everywhereโ€”personal, political, spiritual.

And yet amid all of it, she sees a bird.

Or imagines one.

The series never fully resolves whether the bird is โ€œreal.โ€ Most people around her do not see what she sees. But that is precisely the point. Her imagination is not denial. It is perception. It is the stubborn human capacity to recognize possibility while surrounded by evidence of collapse.

That vision became her poem, โ€œHope is the thing with feathers.โ€

That poem matters even more now.

Because 2026 feels uncomfortably familiar.

The world again stands in a season where many people insist things cannot really become what they are already becoming.

The reelection of Donald Trump did not merely alter American politics. It sent shockwaves through alliances, institutions, democratic norms, and the fragile moral architecture that helped restrain authoritarian power after World War II. When America weakens its commitments, the consequences do not stop at its borders. Ukraine pays. Europe pays. Democracies everywhere pay. The cost is measured in fear, fracture, disinformation, abandonment, and lives.

That is why Ukraine matters.

Ukraine is not merely defending land.

Ukraine is defending the proposition that truth still matters, that free people still possess agency, that brute force and imperial fantasy do not have the final word in history.

In 2023, I imagined a world without Vladimir Putin.

In 2026, I understand that the deeper question is larger than one man.

It is whether the world can free itself from the political psychology that keeps producing Putins, Trumps, oligarchs, cults of grievance, and systems built on fear, spectacle, and obedience.

That is the real struggle.

And that is where Emilyโ€™s bird returns.

Hope is not naรฏvetรฉ.

Hope is not passivity.

Hope is not pretending the church is not burning.

Hope is seeing the fire clearly and refusing to surrender the future to it.

A world where Ukraine is free would not simply be a world without Putin.

It would be a world where people stop mistaking cruelty for strength, propaganda for truth, domination for order, and fear for patriotism.

It would be a world that remembers what democracy is for.

It would be a world that learns, at last, how not to build another Trump.


Introduction to Being In A World Where Ukraine Is Free | 2023

Resistance requires bold acts of creativity. Without creativity, we lack the ability to imagine a better world.

This blog focuses on creative acts of resistance and resilience regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These five Bs are just but a few of the billions of ways we can resist violence and hatred wherever and whenever it pops up in our world. Without resistance, destructive people like Putin will turn our world into a Hellish place.

Food, art, dance, and storytelling (in any form) have always been creative tools of resistance and resilience for oppressed people living anywhere in world during any age or time. There are many ways to resist creatively, as many as there are human beings alive on the planet right now.

Wherever you are, know you are not alone, and you can resist creatively. The world is slowly catching up to the realization that we cannot leave any human being behind to be devoured by beasts like Putin or other fiendish, fascists monsters.

Each human being, be they rich or poor, famous or obscure, is critical to the social currency and fabric of human life on Earth. Not one person is dispensable or disposable, no matter how much the haters want us to think this is so.

Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: Art by Monika Aichele | The New York Times | What Makes Some People More Resilient Than Others
The very earliest days of our lives, and our closest relationships, can offer clues about how we cope with adversity. Byย Eilene Zimmerman, Publishedย June 18, 2020

I. Bake for Ukraine

There are so many ways everyone around the world can help the people of Ukraine overcome Putin’s War. Bake for Ukraine. If you sell your creations, donate some of the money raise to individuals as chef Josรฉ Andrรฉs and his organization World Central Kitchen who are providing food to people trying to survive in places devastated by the same beast that held Europe in its grip in the wars that became global: WWI and WWII.

There is no ignoring this beast lives inside of Putin, his stooges, and his flying monkeys. We must stare it down right here, right now. We need to do what ever we can to help every Ukrainian wherever they are and in whatever way we can. We must merge our collective will into a force greater than the beast inside of Putin. If we fail, it will only grow stronger and swallow more of the world dissolving it into its acid of hate.

This is a beast desperate for its intoxicating food, which is destruction and death. So bake, shout, write your congressmen and women. Tell them to do more for Ukraine and all people suffering from brutality or indifference wherever they live in the world. If we do not deal with this now (if we do not stare down the beast wherever it pops up in our world), we will pay the collective price for ignorance (that is ignoring what we can do now to help others rather than just helping ourselves).

A. Bake for Ukraine — Acts of Creativity Are Acts of Resistance

Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: Bake for Ukraine | Acts of Creativity Are Acts of Resistance

This is a video I made of us (really Elena) creatively baking Putin out of our world.

Music: Sally Cooper by Foubert [as featured under Neutral Music on iPhone]

Series: Bake for Ukraine

Photos/videos: Me

**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****

The world sits at a crossroads once again.

Do we turn to the right or to the left?

One way leads towards greater freedom and self-determination for people and countries. It is not any easy path for it roots out corruption in imposes consequences on the people who steal from others, who lie, who double-deal, who smear and slander others, who take what others need to live, including their lives.

The other way leads to less freedom and no self-determination for people and countries. It is an easier path because you just have to follow the crowd and keep your mouth shut, even if that means your business is taken from you to line the pockets of some rich billionaire or your child is beaten up for spraying painting an act of resistance against a fascist government or showing too much hair under a veil. This is the way towards dictatorial rule of a few people who want to control everything.

Everybody on the planet is choosing right now. What will you choose?

B. Bake, Bake, Bake for Ukraine and to Free Oppressed People Everywhere

Elena baked all these gorgeous cakes! Drawing on her rich and beautiful Ukrainian culture and heritage, she is mixing and baking a better way to be and live in our precious, fragile world.

Bake, Bake, Bake for Ukraine | Cakes from October to FebruaryBeing in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: Bake, Bake, Bake for Ukraine | Cakes from October to February

This is another video I made of us (really Elena) creatively baking Putin out of our world.

Music: Space Space [I made this song using GarageBand!?!]

Series: Bake for Ukraine

Photos/videos: Me

**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****

Creativity is a powerful act of resistance.

When people are eating together, they are not fighting each other.

We all choose our path in life. Do you choose love and kindness, sharing food and fun times with other people.

Eating together also requires physically being in the same space, something increasingly rare in our fast-moving, high-tech world. Do you choose hate and rage using your keyboard to troll and disparage others sowing seeds of fear and loathing through dark myths, lies, and misinformation… a evil form of creativity, closely associated with Dark Empathy and Narcissism.

C. World Central Kitchen

Food brings people together. Food nourishes people. Food is an act of love!

When people are eating together, they are not fighting.

Cook, bake, and create for the people of Ukraine and all people who are living under tyranny or trying to escape it. When we cook and bake for people, we are not ignoring them or turning them away from our borders after desperate journeys of survival and escape from injustice and violence.

Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: World Central Kitchen founder vows to keep helping Ukrainians in need

II. Banksy & Other Street Artists for Ukraine

Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: Music: Ukraine Is | ROXOLANA [1] ะžั‡ะธะผะฐ ย ย ย 3:18

A. Who Is Banksy?

My good friend from Germany sent me a video about Banksy’s art in Ukraine. I did not know who Banksy is and had to look him up. Then, I was shocked I didn’t know about him.

Who is Banksy? The top theories and how he keeps his identity a secret --He might be one of the most famous names in the art world, but the same can't be said for the man himself -- By Sophie Prideaux Feb 10, 2021
Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: An artwork by Banksy showing Napoleon rearing his horse, wrapped in a red cloak in Paris, France. EPA
Banksy might be one of the most famous names in the world of art, but for the person behind the tag, itโ€™s a different story.
The street artist, whose thought-provoking works have appeared in almost every corner of the globe, could stroll past you in the street, and you would be none the wiser.
Banksy has managed to maintain anonymity despite years of making global headlines, thanks to a combination of careful planning and a trusted inner circle.
But, if you look hard enough, there are a few details out there about the elusive artist.

B. Banksy in Ukraine

Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: Ukraine | banksyfilm | Click here to watch on YouTube

So, then I searched for more of his street art in Ukraine and it is absolutely thought-provoking and inspiring!

Notorious graffiti artist Banksy reveals new work in war-torn Ukraine -- by CGTN
The world's most famous street artist Banksy has unveiled his latest piece of work, this time choosing a very special location to showcase his signature graffiti style: war-torn Ukraine.
Banksy posted a photo of the mural - a girl gymnast performing a handstand on a small pile of concrete rubble - on Instagram late on Friday. 
A work of world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy is seen at the wall of destroyed building in the Ukrainian town of Borodianka. /Gleb Garanich/Reuters

His work is a creative act of resistance against the brutal, evil will of Putin and his fiendish cronies. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says if the Free World remains united like a fist, Ukraine will win this war started by Russia.

C. Other Artists Supporting Ukraine Through Creative Acts of Resistance

As I scrolled through Banksy’s work, I also saw other beautiful and inspiring murals, graffiti, and creative acts of unity and resistance. Art is a powerful form of symbols, and symbols have long united human beings in accomplishing difficult and dangerous collective action.

Now is no different than 10,000 from now or 10,000 years ago. We need each other to do difficult, dangerous things. And untied, as President Zelenskyy says, we will smote the evil flame Putin light on his bomb of greed and hunger to control and crush anyone who does not worship him.

III. Ballet for Ukraine

Ballet has always been used to symbolize and defy great powers of death and destruction and to inspire hope. Here are just two examples of how ballet is defying Putin’s hate.

A. Ballet dancers from across Ukraine bring ‘Giselle’ to the Kennedy Center

Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: NPR | United Ukrainian Ballet Company members Liza Gogidze and Oleksii Kniazkov inย Giselle, choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky.
Altin Kaftira/The United Ukrainian Ballet
Some 60 Ukrainian dancers are scheduled to arrive in Washington, D.C., this weekend from The Hague. They'll perform Giselle, with choreography by Alexei Ratmansky, at at the Kennedy Center.
The dancers are refugees who fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion. With help from local officials and dance professionals, they formed the United Ukrainian Ballet Company. The artistic director is Igone de Jongh, a former prima ballerina with the Dutch National Ballet.
The stories of how these dancers fled Ukraine by train, bus, car and by foot are harrowing. Vladyslava Ihnatenko was dancing with the Odesa Opera House when the Russians invaded. She decided to leave when she could hear explosions from her apartment.  -- NPR, 1/28/23
Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: NPR: United Ukrainian Ballet dancer Vladyslava Ihnatenko was dancing with the Odesa Opera when the Russian invasion began.
Yevgeniy Repiashenko

B. Ballet for Refugee Kids in the Czech Republic

I learned about this beautiful program taking place in Prague, Czech Republic that helping Ukrainian refugee children find joy during a time of incredible stress and dislocation. I learned about this magnificent program from a friend who is in a writing group that we both belong. The story of how this program came into being is just as wonderful.

In the summer of 1995, Greater Europe Missionโ€™s president, Ted Nobel, visited GEM workers Greg and Debby Nichols in Odesa, Ukraine. As they walked along the beach, Debby told him about her crazy thoughts and dreams of organizing an evangelistic concert at the Philharmonic Hall of Odesa. President Nobel said, โ€œBut what if those are not โ€˜crazy thoughtsโ€™ but rather the still small voice of the Lord prompting you to move ahead with this dream?โ€ Those words still ring in Debbyโ€™s ears today. That was the beginning of three yearly outreaches reaching thousands of Odesans.  
Fast forward to 2022. The Nichols now live in Prague, Czech Republic where part of their work has been with refugees over the past six years. When the Ukrainian war began in February 2022, the Nichols jumped in with both feet to minister to their hurting friends. After many years of practicing listening to the still small voice, they are quicker to discern. And yet, it still surprises them when God invites them into ministries that only he could think up.  
As they personally provided help to over 50 refugees who journeyed out of Ukraine, the Nichols sought to bring Christโ€™s healing in varied ways to the bodies, minds and souls of the displaced Ukrainians. Out of this sprang the idea to create a ministry Center in Prague from which to better operate. As Greater Europe Mission sought to maximize its efforts toward the Ukraine crisis, GEM focused resources on two main areas of refugee ministry โ€“Bucharest, Romania and Prague, Czech Republic.  

You can learn more about ballet for refugee kids in the Czech Republic and Greater Europe Mission’s work here.


Special note, I just received an article from my friends that Prague unveiled a powerful new mural on anniversary of the Russian invasion.

Being in a World Where Ukraine Is Free: ย Prague unveils powerful new mural on anniversary of the Russian invasion | Expats-CZ
The creator of the piece, street artist ChemiS, designed a street mural with a similar motif in March 2022.

“Ukrainians are brave, you can see it every day. And they often stand on the ruins and speak for Ukraine to be free.” – ChemiS

Expats-CZ | ChemiS

I think it is also important to point out that Czechoslovakia was invaded by Hitler for the same reasons and in the same manner as Putin invaded Ukraine. A very good friend of mine who is German told me his father who lived through Hitler’s tyranny of German said that Putin gave the very same speech justifying why Russia was invading Ukraine that Hitler gave before invading Czechoslovakia.

Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia before Poland. The world did nothing. Hitler kept going.

Our next-door neighbor is Peter Stein and he has written a truly compelling book about being a boy in German occupied Czechoslovakia. His father was Jewish and sent to a concentration camp. His mother was Catholic and forced to work in a German factory for long hours throughout the war.

As I wrote in my last blog (February 23, 2023), Never Again the World Once Said... and yet here we are again.

Amazon: Peter J. Stein was a witness to history, a keeper of Holocaust memories and teller of its stories. He grew up the child of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who was forced into slave labor and later disappeared. Nazi-occupied Prague was full of German soldiers everywhere and Peterโ€™s loved ones vanished in mystery and secret. As a 12-year-old immigrant in America, he searched for a new identity that left his past behind. But as Faulkner tells us, the past is never past. When, as a college professor, a group of students sought his help to challenge a Holocaust teacher, Steinโ€™s memories of his childhood resurfaced. A Boyโ€™s Journey makes the past present and carries it into our future so that we do not forget.

C. BALLET BENEFIT RAISES FUNDS TO HELP UKRAINE’S CHILDREN

Throughout history, dance โ€” ballet in particular โ€” has played a vital role during times of war and exile. Ballet and other forms of art were used to both symbolize and defy great powers during World War II and other times of conflict. Today, as we near the one-year mark of escalated war in Ukraine, dancers from Ukraine and around the world are fighting back.
In August 2022, the National Ballet of Ukraine performed at Steinmetz Hall in Orlando, Florida. Presented by the Ginsburg Family Foundation, the Ukraine Ballet Benefit invited audiences to experience Ukraineโ€™s culture through its national artists while raising funds to support those whose lives have been upended by the war. The performance, with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, was professionally filmed by the Parable Foundation in partnership with Full Sail University, and the resulting feature film is now available for free streaming. -- Unicef USA, Ukraine, Ballet Benefit to Help Ukraine's Children, January 25, 2023
Ukraine Ballet Benefit
Coming Soon, the historic performance by the National Ballet of Ukraine from the Taras Shevchenko National Opera House, live from the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, Florida. Accompanied by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, this monumental performance brings together Ukraine and the America united for the hope of Ukrainian independence and sharing the light of hope to the world through the art and power of ballet. Presented by the Ginsburg Family Foundation, this performance was filmed and produced by the Parable Foundation, in partnership with Full Sail University. All proceeds raised are donated directly to Olena Zelenska Foundation, Razom, and UNICEF to provide humanitarian aid relief to Ukrainians impacted by Russian military invasion. -- Promo - Ukraine Ballet Benefit

Ballet and dance are most definitely brilliant, powerful ways to resist fascism and unite the Free World in collective resistance to smote the evil flame Putin ignited when he invaded Ukraine in 2014. Dance is a brilliant flame to counteract any evil flame ignited by a budding evil fascists or hater in the world.

Let’s dance our world back into harmony and peace so all can live without fear and terror.

IV. Blook & Blog for Ukraine

Where would we be without writing and words? Probably, we’d still living in caves, I suppose. The first volleys of every modern war (even medieval wars) begin with words of hatred and dehumanization of the target to the aggressors seeks to diminish, control, or destroy. It has always been this way. The war begins inside the mind.

So too does the resistance and resilience. Words and stories and video blogs (aka blooks) help reconnect us to what is most essential about ourselves and each other. Words inspire us to be better humans and to act in ways to create a better world. During times of war, words will destroy the swords and bombs because they live in the hearts and minds of people.

A. Blooking

I first learned about Olena from Anderson Cooper when he interviewed her in the first horror-filled and savage days after February 24, 2022.

Olena | What Is Ukraine

I created a playlist of some of her video blogs, also known as blooks, that I call: Olena in Ukraine Reporting Each Day How Terrorist Russia Inflicts Pain & Suffering in Her Homeland.

B. Blogging

Blogging is another powerful way to show what Putin is doing to real people, right now. And another powerful way to galvanize the world’s collective will against fascism and hate of any kind. As I explored in my last blog, fascism and hate is not confined to Putin and his cronies. It inflicts China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, the United States of American.

Fascism, hate, and ignorance lives inside of all of us. But, we do not need to be slaves to it. It only takes a little conscious awareness to illuminate the fullness of who you are and the choices that lay before you each day. It only takes a little self-awareness to choose loving kindness instead of hate and dictatorial impulses to control and degrade other human beings. No one on this planet is dispensable or disposable. No one!

To read more about this, see my previous blog entitled: Ukraine | “Never Again” the World Once Said

https://www.sapience2112.com/ukraine-never-again-the-world-once-said

V. Believe in Ukraine

Beliefs form our life boats upon the sea of being that we must all navigate throughout our lives. Here are two powerful individuals sharing how people survive against all odds to overcome the impossible and to thrive once again.

A. Love & War

I first learned of Esther Perel from my daughter who sent me a podcast to listen to from the series called We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle and an episode with Esther Perel titled Love & War.

Esther Perel: The routines, rituals and boundaries we need in stressful times | TED

This is a deeply moving and compelling podcast. It illuminates just how devastating Putin’s insane war has on every dimension of being human. War…wherever it happens, however it happens, however big or small it is…it tears apart the nature and fabric of life and everything life needs to survive.

Anyone who desires war and can’t wait for the shooting and killing to start is a deranged human being. This is something my brother-in-law actually said to his son just before the events of January 6, 2021 unfolded. My brother-in-law is a deranged human being devoid of empathy, filled with hate, and obsessed with himself.

Perhaps our modern world has done this to vulnerable human beings in the world making them feel unmoored, frightened, and insecure. Like animals, a hurting human can lash out and hurt other humans. But, there is something more ominous and menacing going on in the world today. A thing that is boiling over into the rise of hate groups around the world. A thing that puffed up Putin into a blimp of terrific terror who is pummelling the world with his particular brand of hate and horror.

I think Esther Perel is a wondrous voice of healing, hope, and regeneration beginning inside ourself and spreading throughout every relationship we have in every moment of our crazy, draining modern lives.

Esther Perel: The Power of Relational Intelligence |

This is another talk by Esther Perel that dives in deep into how relational intelligence guides us towards well-being, success, and a better, healthy, more nourishing life. We need to nourish ourselves so we can nourish each other. We need this sort of nourishment, this sort of insight and self-knowledge desperately now before we blow ourselves up with hateful wars or destroy our planet with woeful ignorance and lack of the collective action to save our planet from our self-destructive actions based on competition, greater profits over the greater good, and self-annihilating focus on things, power, and control.

Love always finds a way. When it doesn’t, the world will end.

B. The Will to Win

Clarissa Ward has been reporting in Ukraine since Putin’s dramatic escalation of his ugly, brutal war on February 24, 2022. Nearing the one year mark since this horrible day one year ago, Clarissa returned to some of the places where she reported to reconnect with people and places during the earlier days of this invasion. And she connects with survivors of Putin’s indiscriminate killings.

It is a compelling testament to the resilience of the Ukrainian people and how love is overcoming hate each and every day of Putin’s hate. It is the Will to Win!

The People Fueling Ukraineโ€™s โ€˜Will to Winโ€™ | Itโ€™s been one year since Russia invaded Ukraine, setting off the bloodiest land war in Europe since World War II. Since then, the bravery and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people has been on full display while its military has defied the odds and inflicted staggering losses on the Russian army. In todayโ€™s episode, we hear some of their stories and look at what comes next as the conflict drags on.

Whatever your joy is, whatever you like to do when you can really relax and sink deeply into yourself, do it now in one magnificent, massive act of creative resistance that will utterly, totally blow Putin’s flame of evil and hell out.

Archetypal Animations

Both Archetypal Animations Draw from These Creative Sources

Image From: Town & Country Magazine | New Banksy Artwork Confirmed in Ukraine

Image From: Illawarra Mercury | Banksy reveals artwork in war-torn Ukraine

Murals believed to be by Banksy have appeared in the Ukrainian town of Borodyanka, near Kyiv. (AP PHOTO)

Six months on since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, artists around the world have created poignant murals to support Ukraine. Hereโ€™s how artists have depicted the war across continents: (Go to their gallery to see the images) -- CNBC | The art of war: Artists around the world leave their mark in support of Ukraine
Street artists worldwide are paying tributes to Ukraine amid Putinโ€™s invasion and showing their support for Ukraine. The invasion on 24th February 2022 has been widely condemned internationally as an act of aggression and has triggered Europeโ€™s largest refugee crisis since World War II.
French street artist Seth Globepainter painted a little girl in Paris three days after the war began that symbolizes the Ukrainian peopleโ€™s courage and determination to face the Russian invasion. Seth Globepainter visited Ukraine in 2017 when he painted a mural of a little girl for the Back to School Project at the Popasna school, located close to the frontline of the Donbas war, curated by Oleg Sosnov, Unicef Ukraine and Sky art foundation. The artist states that the school children he met in 2017 were the inspiration for his mural โ€œOnwards Ukraineโ€. -- GraffitiStreet | Street Artists Paint in Solidarity with Ukraine, Worldwide 2022
A new mural featuring a young girl taking shelter under a Ukrainian flag with popular figures from children's entertainment can now be seen on Mojmรญrova street in Prague 4, a few blocks from Nรกmฤ›stรญ Bratล™รญ Synkลฏ. 
ChemiS, the artist behind the work, told journalists on Friday that the mural is an an expression of his stance against the war in Ukraine, and an appeal for continued support of Ukrainians affected by the war.

Image From: Letโ€™s talk about Ukraine | It’s more than just the economy. | Make Me Smart MarketPlace

A new street art mural has appeared in Cardiff depicting Ukraine's capital Kyiv under siege.
The artwork, which appears to show the city of Kyiv reflected in a person's tearful eye, has appeared in Northcote Lane in Cathays.
It was painted by the artist 'MyDogSighs', who has become known for his designs showing reflections in people's eyes.
A second piece of art, showing two hands held together in the shape of a heart in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, has also appeared in Llanelli.

Image From: Notes from Poland | โ€œGraffiti is my weapon against aggressionโ€: Polish street art in support of Ukraine

Image From: Association of Performing Arts Professionals | A Message from Lisa: In Solicarity with Ukraine

Image From: Grid News | War inspires art

Image From: CNN | Banksy Confirms 7 New Murals

Image From: The Culture Map | Street Art: Huge Wall Murals In Kyiv, Ukraine

Image From: Ukrinform

Music: Ukraine Is | ROXOLANA [1] ะžั‡ะธะผะฐ    3:18 &#j [4] ะะต ัะฒะพั    2:26

Ukraine | “Never Again” the World Once Said: But NOW

Perspective from 2026

When I wrote this in 2023, I still believed historyโ€™s warnings might be enough.

I believed the words Never Again still carried moral weight. I believed the memory of fascism, world war, mass death, and the destruction of democratic societies remained close enough to human consciousness to guide us away from the abyss.

From the vantage point of 2026, that belief feels painfully naive.

Ukraine did not merely become a test of military endurance. It became a test of democratic memory. And across much of the worldโ€”especially in the United Statesโ€”we failed that test. Not always through open betrayal. Often through fatigue, distraction, complacency, and the slow normalization of cruelty. We watched cities burn, civilians die, children disappear into the machinery of war, and gradually many people learned to look away.

At the same time, American politics revealed something even more unsettling. The nation that once helped defeat Nazism drifted toward open alignment with authoritarian power. During the second Trump era, what once would have been unthinkable became public fact: growing sympathy for Vladimir Putin, contempt for democratic alliances, attacks on institutions of law, escalating political intimidation, and the widening belief among oligarchic elites that wealth places them beyond moral accountability. The deeper revelations surrounding the Epstein world only sharpened that reality. It exposed not merely individual corruption but a culture of entitlementโ€”a ruling class convinced that power exempts it from the rules imposed on everyone else.

This is where the old political maps fail us.

For years many people imagined politics as a straight line from left to right. But the deeper truth is closer to the U-shaped theory. At the extremes, supposedly opposing forces often begin to resemble one another. Authoritarian left and authoritarian right can converge in their contempt for pluralism, their appetite for purity tests, their hatred of independent thought, and their willingness to use fear, spectacle, and scapegoats to mobilize the wounded and disoriented. What appears to be opposition can become mirror image.

And that convergence did not remain abstract. It entered kitchens, holidays, friendships, marriages, neighborhoods, and families. Across these years, people lost one another. Conversations became impossible. Shared reality fractured. Bonds built over decades cracked under the pressure of propaganda, algorithmic rage, humiliation, and permanent emotional mobilization. One of the deepest wounds of this period was not merely political division but the breaking of trust itself.

Yet history also moved in ways few predicted.

One of the most startling examples was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Once among Trumpโ€™s most fervent defenders, she emerged as one of his loudest antagonists. Whether motivated by conviction, political calculation, factional conflict, or self-preservation, the reversal itself matters. It reminds us that movements built on grievance, spectacle, and personal loyalty eventually begin consuming themselves.

Carl Jung called this enantiodromiaโ€”the tendency of things to turn into their opposite when driven too far in one direction. We are seeing that now. Excess breeds reversal. Fanatic certainty generates fracture. Systems built on lies eventually collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. But enantiodromia is not salvation. It is destabilization. Collapse can produce renewalโ€”or something far darker.

And then there is Elon Musk.

Before 2024, many still saw him as an eccentric futurist, a symbol of technological ambition. By 2026, something more dangerous had become visible: the fusion of enormous private wealth, ideological radicalization, platform control, political manipulation, and contempt for democratic restraint. History has shown repeatedly that when concentrated capital merges with authoritarian appetite, democracy becomes fragile.

So why are human beings so vulnerable to this?

Because human beings are not primarily rational creatures. We are myth-making, fear-driven, belonging-seeking creatures. Under pressure, many people do not move toward truth. They move toward identity, tribe, certainty, and the emotional relief of being told who is to blame. Collective ignorance serves power because it makes populations governable through confusion. It turns citizens into spectators, neighbors into enemies, and suffering into background noise.

That is why remembrance matters.

โ€œNever Againโ€ was never meant to be a slogan of historical self-congratulation. It was meant to be a discipline of attention.

Ukraine exposed what happens when that discipline fails.

The road remains crooked. But history is not finished. The future still depends on whether enough people recover the courage to see clearly, think independently, defend one another, and refuse the old seductions of fear, spectacle, obedience, and forgetting.


2023 Introduction | Ukraine: Never Again the World Once Said

For over 5,000 years, civilizations have repeatedly succumb to the desire to have more than they deserve and to dominate their neighbors. Instead of civilizing our species, civilizations have rather made us crazier and more violent than our most primitive ancestor.

Case in point: One year ago, Putin ruthlessly escalated his invasion of Ukraine. It is an invasion that began in 2014 when he ordered his Russian army to go into Ukraine and annex Crimea. With Putin’s dramatic intensification to bring the people of Ukraine back under the heel of his will, the illusion that all Putin wanted was Crimea was irrevocably broken into 10 million shiny shards of hate, ruthlessness, and horror. With his revulsive choice to bomb Ukraine into compliance, the idea that we live in a civilized world was also shattered. And, even more horrifying, we have not learned a thing about letting a monster like Putin have his way.

Ukraine | The Un-Civilizing Effect of Civilization on Man’s Psyche

Instead of civilizing man, civilization has provided man the means to destroy itself. Civilization is a tool that allowed groups of humans to channel this little ability our primitive ancestors figured out to focus consciousness into a stream of attention and think.

This ability combined with the invention of civilizations has allowed human beings to do unbelievable things and to create amazing things that never existed in the world before.

But there is a price for focusing consciousness into such narrow streams, and then creating powerful tools of destruction using our minds. A bloodthirsty ruthlessness has steadily been growing in the untended gardens called minds and men (and women) are increasingly getting lost in shallow, superficial thoughts that they confuse with reality. Engrossed in the jungle of thoughts, it is easy to see how people naturally gravitate towards thoughts of how to achieve more power, glory, and self-gratification.

Once lost inside the superficial jungle of one’s own mind, the snake of ruthless lies in wait. Once bitten, men and women will do anything to gain more power and status over others.

Some of Earth’s most hideous monsters are disguised as ordinary human beings. Expect for one crucial thing–they have become infatuated with themselves and their own self-importance and rather than using all their extraordinary gifts of consciousness for good and the betterment of all mankind, they use it to better themselves.

Individuals who possess an exaggerated sense of their own self-importance are cultivating a narcissistic mind. Individuals who possess a ridiculous need to have more than they need or deserve are growing a coveting heart. Such people believe their own lies (they are nurturing ignorance), and they will stop at nothing to get money, power, or whatever they desire (they are growing a malevolent soul full of venom, hate and malice).

Such people are extremely sick with a serious disorder called narcissism. But, civilization is sick too because we the people of Earth keep allowing such individuals to rise to the pinnacles of power within our systems of governance where they can terrorize others with  licentious abandonment.

Ukraine | In A World Ruled By Narcissists

Ukraine | The Same Beast | Music: Hey Putin! Go Fuck Yourself! | WiT | [1] Hey Putin! Go Fuck Yourself!    3:53

I wrote about the consequences for our collective failure to deal with narcissist who grab hold of power in a previous blog titled: Memory Wars: How Society Fails to Deal with Sin. The civilized world has a whole lot of sin to go around the world dozens and dozens and dozens of times. No modern civilization on this planet at this time is free of sin and the failure to deal with it.

Ukraine | American Slavery

Part of this failure to deal with our collective sin as a civilized species is that we, the people of Earth, are infatuated with narcissists. We worship them as heroes, great men, strong leaders… that is until they go too far… then we are shocked, shocked, that they turned out to be a monster!

Ukraine | There Are Many Types and Flavors of Narcissists… But All Ruthless Rulers Are Malignant Narcissists

9 of the Most Famous Narcissist in History

Alexander the Great -- exhibited all the characteristics of a raging narcissist. He believed that you were either with him or against him and he took his faithful soldiers on endless battles, much to their expense, solely for his own glory and personal conquests. He showed no emotion for the bloodshed of his generals or soldiers but believed in his grandiose visions.

Henry VIII -- was considered to be both charismatic and handsome, but he was also one of the cruelest and most egotistical leaders in our history. Famed for having six wives, two of which he had beheaded. He was known to show narcissistic traits such as a lack of empathy and being overly concerned with his appearance.

Napoleon Bonaparte -- The term โ€˜Napoleon Complexโ€™ comes from Napoleon Bonaparteโ€™s behaviour, which was to act in an overly aggressive manner to make up for feelings of inferiority and low self-esteem. Napoleon was considered a tyrant by everyone that knew him, who had grandiose thoughts and believed he was special. In fact, in his book entitled โ€˜Thoughtsโ€™, he wrote: โ€œIt was precisely that evening in Lodi that I came to believe in myself as an unusual person and became consumed with the ambition to do the great things that until then had been but a fantasy.โ€

Adolph Hitler -- is undoubtedly one of the cruellest leaders of the 20th century, led a campaign that saw the death of millions of innocent people. His actions also incited one of the largest wars in our generation, all due to his unwavering beliefs that he, and all other white Germans, were a superior race to everyone else.

His actions are typical of a self-obsessed narcissist in that he showed no empathy for the suffering of others, he spread his false propaganda about superiority in order to further his campaign and he demanded total acquiesce.

Narcissistic people are charming, charismatic, and magnetic people. They are people (women or men) who can read you (your soul) like normal people read books. They study and gather information about you sensing your vulnerabilities, dreams, fears, and rage.

Narcissists create glittery narratives about themselves using the intel they’ve gathered about you. They promise to provide you with the sun, the moon, and the stars, if only you sign on the dotted line giving them full access to your soul.

Using their glittery narratives, well-crafted to make you think and do exactly what they want you to do, they use the illusion of whatever it is you want to see in them to manipulate you. Once hooked, you become something they consume for entertainment or they use as a deviant character in their narcissistic nightmare.

Ruthless men and women rely on natural born instincts to gather information and calculate how to manipulate others for maximum devilment and self-gratification. We all have these instincts, narcissists are simply willing to use them to hunt people.

These are dangerous people. They have become hollowed out by their bottomless selfishness and self-absorption. And they can become masters at whipping up crowds into mindless, hostile dummies who are willing to murder, maime, and destroy anyone or anything that doesn’t walk, talk, and quack like them (in other words, they hunt down and kill anyone who does not align with the narcissists).

Ukraine | “I’m the Greatest Duck-Miester on the Planet! OFF WITH YOUR Head!” | Music: Barbra Streisand – Duck Sauce | Barbra Streisand (Original Mix)  

The Whiteness Myth

Hitler’s rise to power is a perfect example of what an unchecked malignant narcissists can do. Part of his rise to power included creating a compelling myth that aligned to the wishes, fears, and desires of the German people of his time. He manufactured a hostile myth of white power that epitomizes how hideous and heinous a malignant narcissists can charm a civilized people into becoming mindless monsters.

THROUGHLINE explores Hitler’s myth creation and how he used it to justify the most abominable genocide ever committed in modern times. It is a myth still resonating in the hearts and minds of people around the world to this very day. It is this myth Putin is drawing upon to justify his dramatic escalation of his invasion of Ukraine one year ago.

ARABLOUEI: On November 9, 1938, Nazi party paramilitary forces executed a coordinated, planned attack on Jewish businesses and synagogues across Germany and Austria. At least 91 people were killed, and thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Many historians believe that this event, Kristallnacht, began one of the most deadly phases of the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews and other people deemed racially inferior to pure Aryans by the Nazi party. That same year, Heinrich Himmler, one of Adolf Hitler's top commanders, sent a team of Nazi scientists on a mission.
PURANDARE: Himmler sets up a unit within the SS. The name of this unit is the Bureau of Ancestral Heritage. And what is its job? Its job is to find out the origins of the Aryan race. In 1938, he sends a team of five members of this unit to Tibet.
ABDELFATAH: Tibet. But why? The answer to that question makes this story even weirder.
PURANDARE: One of the theories is that there was this island called Atlantis somewhere between England and Portugal, and the Aryans lived there.
ABDELFATAH: Himmler thought the Aryans might be from the lost city of Atlantis.
PURANDARE: And one fine day, a divine thunderbolt hit the island. The island sunk. And the people of the island fled elsewhere. They swam to safety. And they looked for a more secure place to live in. These were the real Nordics, according to the racial theorists. And eventually, they moved to the Himalayas, specifically to Tibet. Why? Because, well, Atlantis had sunk, so you want to go to a place where you don't get a sinking feeling. One way of doing it is to get into the mountains, and the Himalayas are really tall mountains. And Tibet in particular is known as the roof of the world, so you'll be safest there.
ABDELFATAH: Himmler was searching for evidence of these Atlantis Aryans, and it was all part of a larger Nazi project to legitimize their racist views through, quote-unquote, "science."
PURANDARE: Himmler was hoping to come up with the exact definition of the Aryan race, the defining features that distinguish them from the rest of humanity, so that it would be so much more easier to identify those who are, allegedly, racially inferior. That was the whole idea. -- The Whiteness Myth, THROUGHLINE, 2/9/23

Ukraine | Another Insane Myth Used to Manipulated the Masses

This sounds about as insane as QAnon’s political myth story claiming former President Trump is facing down the shadowy cabals of Democratic pedophiles!

Ukraine | Signs referring to the QAnon conspiracy theory โ€” with a Q โ€”  appeared at rallies for President Donald J. Trump.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times | What Is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory? — Kevin Roose, 9/3/21

Ukraine | It Could Not Be Clearer What We Are Dealing With… Again

Putin told his people one year ago that he needed to dramatically escalate his invasion of Ukraine to De-Nazify it. But who is really the monster in this equation?

Ukraine | “You Want It Darker? We Kill the Flame!” — Leonard Cohen | Leonard Cohen is telling us exactly what WE need to do in this moment of Ruthless Barbarity, the darkness Putin has plunged the world into once again, WE KILL THE FLAME... We (the Good People of Earth who honor life and respect freedom) WE kill the flame of EVIL Putin lit in 2014 and dramatically escalated last year! We don’t have a tomorrow to do this if we want OUR World Back.

Selfishness is not just something the super rich, celebrities, and ruthless rulers suffer from, all of us need to look in the mirror that we call the human soul and take a good long stare. As you look, ask yourself, are you being complicit in going along with a monster’s narrative and diabolical goals? And, if you are captivated and under the spell of a narcissist, it is your responsibility to wake up, now!

Ukraine | Putin is Not De-Nazifying Ukraine

Putin invaded Ukraine because Ukrainians were waking up. They were rooting out corruption and dysfunctional narratives imposed on them, first by Imperial Russia, then the Soviet Union, and now Putin’s deep desire to return to Imperial Russia, again.

Ukraine | How Ukraineโ€™s Orange Revolution shaped twenty-first century geopolitics
By Peter Dickinson | 11/20/20 | Atlantic Council

Ukrainians were doing the hard work of getting rid of corruption imposed on them by Russia that filled every system with deceit, duplicity, and double-dealings. Corrupt ion is how Putin rewards his Flying Monkeys, mainly oligarchs in Ukraine. All good narcissists cultivate Flying Monkeys to do their dirty work–be they oligarchs, presidents, or stinking rich capitalists.

Ukraine | “Look Mom! I’m A Monkey for Putin!” | Music: Wizard of the Hood (Collector’s Edition) | Violent J — Shiny Diamonds | Putin should be careful as Xi Jinping may very well turn Putin into his Flying Monkey!

This is why Ukraine was invaded. This and this alone. They were doing the hard work of flushing Putin and his shit hole corruption down the toilet bowel of history.

And we should do the same, right here in the Good Old USA. Yet, so many Americans seem intoxicated with authoritarianism and all the corruption that goes with it. These Americans seem to hero worship Putin and all the power and authority he has accumulated since ascending to the highest throne in his fatherland or motherland of Russia.

These Americans make distributing rumblings about how the United States should NOT continue to support Ukraine in its fight defend itself from a monster, which is Putin. At first, I thought line of thinking was just coming from Tucker Carlson, a nighttime host on Fox Entertainment and well-trained Russian Stooge, along with some other entertainment specialists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Ukraine | Inside the Mind of Marjorie Taylor Green | Music: Big Boys (Speed Up) by SZA and other DJ Remasters #Marjorie#TaylorGreen #TheScream #spacylady

Apparently, they all feel sorry for Putin’s shit ass army and are trying to help him regain the upper hand as Supreme Demon on the planet. I suppose they hope if they rub his back, he’ll rub their back when the time comes.

But his US stooges are failing him just like his army is failing. So instead of fighting a real war, Putin simply kills innocent civilians, kidnaps children (6,000) and sends them to Russian indoctrination camps, and arrests its own citizens who dares to speak out against his war.

But then one of my friends shocked me with this same shit ass idea!

He is a flaming ass liberal… who are supposed to be against anything the Putin USA entertainment team is rooting for!

What the hell is going on?!!” I thought to myself.

Then, I found a possible explanation in this article: Why Americaโ€™s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine

It discusses the horseshoe theory of politics proposed by French philosopher  Jean-Pierre Faye.

He believed that the political ideological spectrumโ€”traditionally construed as a linear progression from some form of socialism or democratic collectivism through a bourgeois-liberal center and on to some form of totalitarianism or fascismโ€”was not a straight line between ever-more-distant political positions but rather something like a horseshoe, with the extremes bending almost magnetically into conjunction with each other.
Based on his observation of the alignment of fascist and communist parties in early 1930s German domestic politics and then on the Nazi-Soviet alignment in the international sphere, perhaps best embodied by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he believed that the political extremes have much more in common than a traditional interpretation of the political spectrum might suggest.

But low and behold, here you see it happening right here in the US, right now, over the war in Ukraine. There is a bizarre and truly hideous union happening between the Far Right (including Tucker Carlson, Rep. Marjorie T. Greene, Sen. Josh Hawley and other MAGA supporting Republicans) and Far Left (including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and company).

And oh yeah…arrogant, ignorant rich guys are joining in too. You know that man… who owns too many companies… what’s his name again? He owns Tesla… SolarCity… SpaceX (which owns Starlink)… Neuralink (yes, brain chips to combat bad AIs)… The Boring Company (yeah, it’s pretty boring, they actually drill tunnels)… Wyoming Steel… and OH YEAH, Twitter.

The arrogant asshole who just cut Starlink off from Ukrainians, limiting their ability to navigate drones and make targeted strikes on the ruthless, aggression of Russia’s Imperial ambitions. He said he did it to prevent WWI, as if he ever could!

This man is Elon Musk-Rat, of course:

Ukraine | “My little good boy” Putin says to Elon | Music: Good Boy by GD X TAEYANG

Ukraine | Strange Bedfellows Align

I found this article disturbing but helpful in understanding something I had not been aware of until my “friend” enlightened me.

Why Americaโ€™s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine– The discourse surrounding Russiaโ€™s war on Ukraine has created strange bedfellows was published on July 4, 2002 and written by By Jan Dutkiewicz, a policy fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School, and  Dominik Stecuล‚a, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University.

Since Russia attacked Ukraine, unprovoked, on Feb. 24, the discourse surrounding the war that has emerged in the United States has created strange bedfellows. Although the majority of the American public, led by U.S. President Joe Biden, have thrown their support behind Ukraine, many on the left and right alike have rushed to defend Russian President Vladimir Putinโ€™s regime or, at the very least, have urged the United States not to intervene in Ukraineโ€™s defense.
Tucker Carlson, the face of Fox News and host of the most popular show on cable news in the United States, has been spouting pro-Kremlin talking points for months (and is frequently rebroadcasted on Russian state television). Other right-wing figures regularly spew out anti-Ukrainian disinformation and rail against sending heavy weapons to the country.
Meanwhile, the luminary of the American intellectual left, Noam Chomsky, has invoked former U.S. President Donald Trump as a model of level-headed geopolitical statesmanship for his opposition to arming Ukraine. Left-wing sourcesโ€”such as JacobinNew Left Review, and Democracy Now!โ€”have hewed to a party line that blames NATO expansion for Russiaโ€™s invasion and opposes military aid to Ukraine.
Online, armies of left- and right-wing accounts find fault with Ukraineโ€™s politics, policies, and president. In Congress, seven of the most fervent conservative Trump supporters voted alongside progressive champions Reps. Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush against banning Russian fossil fuels; even more surprisingly, Omar and Bush are joined by so-called squad members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib as well as the far-right fringe of the Republican Party in opposing the U.S. government seizing Russian oligarchsโ€™ assets.
All of these developments highlight a bizarre alliance between the two ends of the political spectrum. The question is: Why?

Ukraine | Letter to A Misguided Friend

I sent this article with a note to my “friend”. This is what I said to him.

I have found the holes in your wish-thought that Ukraine should stop fighting and ceded territory to Russia.  
This article provides some insight into part of your thinking problem.  I see your favorite philosopher and economist on the far Left (Noam) is in on this wish-thought.  
Sadly, he is falling victim to the very thing he so eloquently and valiantly fights against using his brilliant mind and words.
Words are weapons my dear friend. War is seldom fought solely with guns and bullets and bombs. War begins first inside the hearts and minds of men who want things to run in a certain way. The more you want things to run in a certain way, the more you seek explanations for why the world isn't working out that way.
Oddly, Trump's MAGA Republicans and Bernie's Radical Communist Liberals (I say this tongue-in-cheek) are aligning on the same side about what should be done (or rather not done) with Ukraine. All of it, and I mean man's ability to think itself, is a flimsy outline of reality. The more you grasp at it the more reality slips between the fingers of your mind.
This article explains why your thought-wish about what Ukraine should do is wrong. 
I understand your feelings. These are not wrong.  Feelings tell us when something is off kilter, when something is out of alignment, when something is dangerous! 
I wish there was no war in the world too.  
But wishing and seeing what is really happening to real people in real time are two completely different things. No amount of wishful ideas that have not dived nearly deep enough inside the human psyche can accurately articulate reality or make a thought-wish
Reviving a Yalta Conference mindset, but from the left, these ostensible progressives refuse Ukrainians agency, oppose U.S. armed involvement, and yet believe that the United States has the power and right to parcel out Ukrainian land in exchange for peace in Ukraine. In the heart of this perverse leftist anti-imperialism lies the un-imperial impulse to wield imperial power but only, ostensibly, in the name of peaceโ€”no matter the will of the locals. -- Why Americaโ€™s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine; The discourse surrounding Russiaโ€™s war on Ukraine has created strange bedfellows.

Ukraine | Righteous Rage

Rather than act like a grown up and have a discussion with me, this “friend” taunted and teased me about his opinions about Ukraine knowing how worked up I would get whenever he brought it up or the subject came up. He thought it was fun.

This “friend” is no longer my friend. I have decided he is a narcissists himself. In a nutshell, I exploded. In searching to understand myself, I encountered this meme about INFJs and Anger. I am an INFJ and this is exactly what happened, and for damn good reason.

From Quora INFJ Group
Heโ€™s a baby man who made the mistake of telling me (after coming to crash at our house without telling us far in advance that he needed to do this) that he did not support the US continuing to help Ukraine and wanted US to make Russia and Ukraine settle, being perfectly fine with letting Russia take territory and anything else Putin wants to take.
I could go on and list all the babyish qualities he clings to as a 70 year old man, but then I would fall ever closer into the category of a very angry (indeed raging) INFJ.
Letโ€™s just say I tolerated him for 9 days and nights and my husbandโ€™s running away from the responsibilities taking care of this Baby Man under the auspices of helping our friends who are Ukrainian refugees. Yes, I feel very deeply the injustice of what Russia is inflicting on Ukraine. And, I feel this is not a time for the world to blink and look away.
We are right now (the entire world) staring down the glut of monster. We have seen this monster beforeโ€ฆ many timesโ€ฆStalin, Lenin, Hitlerโ€ฆ it goes back thousands and thousands of years.
Ukraine | Putin (and all Ruthless Rulers before him) embody the Beast of Greed, Selfishness, & Fascism... We feed the beast with our Time & Attention… The Beast is Driving Us All to the End of the World… We all know this! If we choose to be UNCONSCIOUS about this REALITY, then we feel it as FEAR, ANXIETY, DREAD. The only people HAPPY about the Direction Dictatorial Rulers are taking the WORLD are Narcissists… the same EVIL Creatures that Putin IS!
And yet, here we are again, and there are some of us (many of us) on this precious planet pretending itโ€™s not there and letโ€™s just get back to being play boys and business as usualโ€ฆ
This is how we lose the planetโ€ฆ because this is the same attitude preventing global action on climate change.
And, then we little, stupid INFJs have to make such a big deal about these injusticesโ€ฆ thatโ€™s what my friend didโ€ฆ then I exploded. I scared myself!

All personalities (all people who have not been hollowed out by narcissism or turned into Flying Monkeys for a narcissists) are capable or Righteous Rage. If we can’t tap into it now, God help us all.

Ukraine | What Kind of World Do You Want to Live In?

So, I got rid of my “friend”. I’m not sure I can put Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are Rashida Tlaib into the narcissists box as my baby friend is, but the United States of America can surely walk and chew gum at the same time.

I think these individuals are falling victim to the narcissists’ game. Narcissists want us to believe there isn’t enough to go around.

They want us to think there isn’t enough money to deal with balancing the national budget and to help Ukraine fight the war. They want us to believe there isn’t enough money to feed all the hungry people in the US and help Ukraine fight the war. They want us to fear there isn’t enough money to fight racism and gun violence in the US and help Ukraine fight the war.

It does seem this way because every time Mitch McConnells or that guy who is Speaker of the House gets control of their body of congress, they are busy making policies and crafting legislations designed to stuff more money into their own pockets and the pockets of the rich friends (aka — Flying Monkeys).

Not having enough money is exactly what narcissists who are in power want you to think!

If you think this, they have won!

There is plenty of money to stop all wars and fed the entire world, if we wanted to do such a thing. We just need to dig is out of the claws of narcissistic billionaire like Elon Musk and Rage Entertainers such as Trump, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Steve Bannon.

Ukraine | The Narcissists Game

Narcissists all over the world play this stupid game. They play it with people’s lives. Lives and people are merely things to be used to get whatever the narcissist wants. And if the narcissist doesn’t get it, they go into rage mode.

That is really all they are good at doing… Raging like Toddlers or little ducks whenever they don’t get what they want.

What Is Narcissistic Rage?
Bouts of rage when not given the attention they feel deserve.
Screaming and yelling.
Angry or explosive outbursts.
Intense anger.
Sudden fits of anger.
Becoming verbally or physically aggressive.
Inability to control the rage.
Intentionally trying to inflict pain (emotional or physical) on others.

Do you want a toddler running your house?

We have to stop standing around wringing our hands, twiddling our thumbs, and wondering what to do whenever we hit global inflection point such as Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, climate change. We know what needs to be done.

We need to do it!

Black Panther Sirens + [Slowed + Reverb] + (Best Part Loop)

Rather than succumbing to the mesmerizing, hypnotic Call of the Sirens inside your mind–fear, confusion, trepidation–the things narcissists purposefully trigger with their double-speak and mythic narratives. It is all part of the illusion to fool you into complacency and into playing the narcissists game.

We all hear their songs: “There isn’t enough money. We’re going to start WWIII. This isn’t our war! It’s not our concern. Go away people in need.”

But the best way to do away with them, is to turn around and a face them straight in the eye. Under the scrutiny of a unified soul, heart, and mind, such hypnotic songs will fall silent and the hard work of routing out corruption can continue, everywhere, all at once!

Perhaps we are at the end of the story of how civilizations function in the world, but perhaps, this is just where we are supposed to be, so we can get down to writing a better story of Earth.

Ukraine | “At the End of the World on the Very Last Day| Music: At the End โ€” A mix for the end of the world (part. 1) The National Parks | Final Archetypal Animation for The Half-Finished Heaven by Tomas Transtrรถme, which was my Winter Solstice blog for December 21, 2021

This poem is actually a very fitting poem for this blog and subject matter dealt with throughout. We do need the world to end as we know it now. We need it to end, so we (the Good People of Earth) can starting working on and bring in a new story of Earth with new characters who are not hollowed out by narcissism, greed, and half-baked plans. There are after all, far more good people of Earth than evil people. That’s another game the narcissists play on us… they pretend there are more of them and they are bigger and badder than the rest of us… but that is just another big fat lie. They are scaredy cats. They are far more scared of us than we are of them. Ukraine is showing us that Good People of Earth! Listen andLearn and Live a Better, More Peaceful Life! After getting rid of the Monsters — there is no peace while they stomp all over our beautiful planet!
Ukraine | These Are the Creeps Who Want the US to stop helping Ukraine rid the World of a Monster.
They are Narcissists, just like the Putin Monster.

These are just a few of the Greedy, Dumb, and Selfish Fools, a bunch of shallow narcissists, who want the US to let Putin crush Ukraine. They want theWORLD to live in eternal darkness, just like Putin wants. They need darkness to maneuver and manipulate people. They need to maneuver and manipulate so they can have more than anyone else, more than they deserve. They steal from the helpless, the weak, the sick, the poor so they can have MORE, MORE, MORE of everything in the World, which of course inside their tiny selfish minds, was made for them to devour!

But they are a very small minority of the world, consisting ofless than 5% of the entire population of Earth. This is what my friend from Ukraine told me (about these fools who are a very small minority), and I believe her. Indeed, I feel the truth in what she says. She is INFJ just like me.

The U Shaped Theory explained above is really our Super Polarized World right now. The Creeps on Either End of the Sphere all want the same thing (that is why they are aligning on the issue of Ukraine). They want deep down for the World to Walk, Talk, and Quack like they do. In short, they want the World to Look the Way They Want it to… which is the very particular way they have figured it ought to look and act (due to their particular brilliance) and calculated it should be arranged (based on their superior values). What they are failing to see is that they are acting like a dictator who is dictating to others how the World should be.

Now, there are latitudes to Polarization, so many people with passionate causes fall in varying degrees closer and closer to the middle, which is where most of the World lives… the Middle Way, a very ancient Taoist idea that we should all reacquaint ourselves with NOW. To live in the Middle, a person must not only think, but feel. Not only understand outer reality, but one’s inner reality. A person who lives in the Middle must be willing and able to Trust, Cooperate, Listen, Empathize, Share. This is how MOST People live, even today… BUT the Narcissists would have us believe otherwise, and they do incredible things (like invade other countries) to get us to believe the world is a Cruel, Dangerous, Hideous place…. but it is only that way because they are making it so!

Note about Mitch McConnell: He does not promote the idea that US should stop helping Ukraine. He has publicly said to his Republican Entertainment Specialists that they should wake up. But he does belong in the Polarized South because he has not spoken up against thelies, deceits, double-talk, and efforts of Trump and his Flying Monkeys to overthrow the 2020 election. YES, Trump is a Flying Monkey of Putin, and Flying Monkeys tend to be Narcissists or people who are well on their way to becoming Narcissists. Most little narcissists have their own little group of monkeys who entertain and help them bring about their EVIL plans.

The Beast of Fascism is RIGHT here in America with 30% of US population itching for the next Civil War… stupid, ignorant fools that they are convinced by the lies and deceptions of creatures like Trump, Green, Holly, Carlson, and many others!

Alan Watts said often (and it is an ancient saying): “The Path to HELL is Paved by the Stones of Good Intentions… All the Do Gooders in the World trying to make the world they way they want it to be… never able to deal with it the way it really is.”

If you missed my blog last year, you can read Ukraine Letters, here.

https://www.sapience2112.com/ukraine-letters-to-the-world-of-free-men-and-women

Comment from a friend about this blog:

What do we do when we see injustice, cruelty, inhumanity? What emotion would compel us to stand up and fight for what is right? What if not righteous anger?

My response:

You are absolutely RIGHT!
And I realized that Leonard Cohen in the last album he recorded before his death told us exactly how to use Righteous Anger in moments like these.
The entire world learned back in 1945 what needs to be done in moments like these.
Sadly, too many people have forgotten the lessons learned by our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers (many of whom did not survive these ancient times; I say ancient tongue and cheek, given the speed at which our technology propels and forces most of us to live our lives in the world today).
Ukraine is showing us (the Free World) what to do if we want to stay free.
WE KILL THE FLAME... this is what Cohen sings in his song You Want It Darker...
I use this song in one of the Archetypal Animations shared above. The one with Putin sitting on a train staring at his reflection, which is Hitler. (Sorry whoever owns Cohen's collection. I see the copyright claim on YouTube, but I did use a free sample available on Spotify.  Supposedly, these samples are made available to market Cohen's legendary work?!)
Putin lite the Flame of Evil. Do you know what Evil is?
Evil is Live spelled backwards. It is anti-Live. He is a force that destroys the environment necessary to support life... that is evil. Nature can be evil, consider the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost by a destructive event of nature, which destroyed the conditions necessary for life.
Now days, we don't hold Nature responsible for Her actions... death is a natural part of life and when we are born into the world, there is no guarantees we will live a long life. Ever since we became conscious as a species, we have known this and it terrifies us.
However, when a person (who knows what is necessary to sustain life) takes away the environment and self-agency every living being needs to survive... now, we get to a conscious choice that has been made. We have called such choices and such actions EVIL for as long as man has been civilized.
Putin is consciously raining death, terror, and destruction daily on the beautiful people of Ukraine. He wants the World to Be a Darker Place. That's what Creatures like him need to feel powerful and in control.
So WE KILL THE FLAME of Evil, which is what he is manifesting in our world right now.  
To KILL a MONSTER, you need a MONSTER. Our version of MONSTERS in our Modern World is technology... yes, it is very scary... yes, Putin is such a man who could push the button... but WE must stare him down and match him punch for punch with EVIL... might I say Righteous Evil?!!
All this is pouring into the Book I write (been writing for too many years, as you well know)... it is too much to explain in a comment on FaceBook. I know I am coming across as scary right now. I do apologize, but I've been through my own Hell and Survived it. I am trying now to communicate and help others survive Hell when it comes to visit... and it is coming... if Putin doesn't get us... Climate Change surely well.

Ukraine | Feature Archetypal Animation

Fantasy Planet Moon Light Magic Woman Hand | KELLEPICS | Stefan Keller  โ€ข  Deutschland / Germany  โ€ข  Member since March 22, 2017  โ€ข  #282

Silhouettes Man Psychology Shine Circles | geralt | Gerd Altmann  โ€ข  Freiburg/Deutschland  โ€ข  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  โ€ข  #30

Clock Pocket Watch Pendulum Commute Swing | geralt | Gerd Altmann  โ€ข  Freiburg/Deutschland  โ€ข  Member since Sept. 15, 2012  โ€ข  #30

Hand Flag Symbol Ukraine Kiev Ukrainian Kyiv | David_Peterson | David Peterson  โ€ข  Age 40  โ€ข  Canberra/ACT  โ€ข  Member since March 6, 2017

Putin and Missle — See blog April 2022

The End Of The World Walk On Water Young Woman Green | xusenru | Khusen Rustamov  โ€ข  Age 29  โ€ข  Samarkand/Uzbekistan  โ€ข  Member since Dec. 30, 2015

Music: End Of The World Ushuaia & The Wanderlust Orchestra [1] Prologue    0:36

Ducktators & Other Quacks of History

Image From:

Phantom Duck

Alexander the Greatโ€ฆpainted by Phantom Duck

Image From: Caesar Rubber Duck | Amsterdam Duck Store

Image From: Henry VIII rubber duck | Royal Armouries

Image From: Duck Napoleon — Daria Kolosova, Russia, 2022 | Singulart

Image From: Coming soon: The Adolf-Hitler Rubber Duck | Duck Planet

Image From:

Shenziholic's avatar

Adolf Hitler as a Duck — Published: Feb 27, 2007 by Shenziholic

Image From: Lenin Duck by

Mayana Nasybullova

Artist Mayana Nasybullova

Image From:

Sicksikmans's avatar

Joseph Stalin Duck — Published: Dec 29, 2013 by Sicksikmans

Image From:

TochFire79's avatar

Vladimir Putin the Duck Rider | Published: Mar 23, 2015 by TochFire79

Image From: Crying Fowl: Russia Mocked In Memes After Bulldozing Geese — August 17, 2015 14:42 GMTBy Anna Shamanska

Image From: President Xi pays visit to Inner Mongolia — China Daily

Music: Barbra Streisand – Duck Sauce | Barbra Streisand (Original Mix)   

Who Is The Monster

Image From: OPINION: Did we tolerate Hitler? How long will we tolerate Putin? | Kyiv Post

Thatโ€™s a funeral in the mirror, And itโ€™s stopping at your faceThatโ€™s right, itโ€™s come to thisYes, itโ€™s come to this, And wasnโ€™t it a long way down?” — These are the words of an early Leonard Cohen song aptly

Image From: Wagner head warns it could take two years to achieve Moscowโ€™s objectives โ€“ as it happened The Guardian

Image From: Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 360 of the invasionThe Guardian

Image From: How Washington Can End the War — The United States is the only credible peacemaker capable of stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine. — Guy Sorman November 15, 2022 — CJ

Image From: In pictures: Six months of war in Ukraine | Reuters | The body of a soldier, without insignia, who the Ukrainian military claim is a Russian army serviceman killed in fighting, lies on a road outside the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, February 24.

Image From: What caused the war in Ukraine? 5 Oct 2022 | Joseph S. Nye | The Strategist

Image From: In pictures: Six months of war in Ukraine | Reuters | A woman fleeing the Russian invasion hugs a child at a temporary camp in Przemysl, Poland, February 28. REUTERS/Yara Nardi

Image From: In pictures: Six months of war in Ukraine | Reuters | A refugee child fleeing from Ukraine gestures when waiting for transport at Nyugati station, after Russia launched a massive military operation against Ukraine, in Budapest, Hungary, February 28, 2022. REUTERS/Marton Monus TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Image From: In pictures: Six months of war in Ukraine | Reuters | A civilian trains to throw Molotov cocktails to defend the city, in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, March 1.  REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi

Image From: In pictures: Six months of war in Ukraine | Reuters | An aerial view shows a residential building destroyed by shelling in the settlement of Borodyanka in the Kyiv region, March 3. REUTERS/Maksim Levin

Image From: Can the Ukraine war now end only with Russiaโ€™s defeat? | The New Statesman

We should not assume that a quick conclusion based on mutual concessions is the best way to deal with an ongoing war.

By Lawrence Freedman

Image From: Russia-Ukraine War: What to know on Russia’s war in Ukraine — The Mainichi | A Ukrainian serviceman holds a baby crossing the Irpin river on an improvised path under a bridge that was destroyed by a Russian airstrike, while assisting people fleeing the town of Irpin, Ukraine, Saturday, March 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Music: Album: You Want It Darker Leonard CohenYou Want It Darker   

Putin’s Flying Monkeys

Image From: Coronavirus: Russia’s Putin gets vaccine but without cameras — Published: 23 March 2021 | BBC News

Image From: WILL WE EVER RETURN TO NORMAL AFTER TRUMP? | Vanity Fair

There is plenty of ugly fight left in Donald Trumpโ€™s presidency, which has already warped American culture. But itโ€™s not too soon to contemplate a post-Trump challenge: tyrant-proofing the country, in case the next one isnโ€™t such a clown.

Image From: โ€œTrump In The Wildโ€ Is The Nature Documentary We All Need | Sammiches & Psych Meds

The overgrown orange toddler has continued his mission to continually show his ass and embarrass America at this yearโ€™s NATO summit in Brussels. The news cycle has been a nonstop shit-storm of Trumpโ€™s bad behavior abroad.

Image From: Puppet Putin GIF | Tenor

Image From: Putin And Mini Trump GIF | Tenor

Image From: Putin taking his child out for a stroll… | Occupy Demorats

Image From: Total Control Xi Jinping | Cartoon Movement

Mr Xi has total control over China’s Communist Party, the state, and the Chinese military and dictates policy for the economy, development and foreign affairs.

Music: Wizard of the Hood (Collector’s Edition) | Violent J — Shiny Diamonds

Elon Musk Archetypal Animation

Image From: Elon Musk ‘donated’ Starlink terminals to Ukraine. U.S. taxpayers paid SpaceX millions for it. — SpaceX previously claimed the U.S. didn’t give them any money to send Starlink to Ukraine. (4/8/22) — Mashables

Elon Musk is a “Lair, lair… pants on fire!

Image From: Elon Musk: Starlink internet service now active in Ukraine (2/26/22) — KTLA5

The arrogant nerd can’t even make it a year.

Image From: Muskโ€™s Starlink isnโ€™t only option for Ukraine, Pentagon says — The Japan Times

Image From: Elon Muskโ€™s SpaceX says it can no longer fund Starlink internet in Ukraine — Firm reportedly asks US government to pick up bill as relationship between Musk and Kyiv breaks down (10/14/22) — The Guardian

Image From: Male human anus close-up — WikiMedia \ Reference is to: “Everyone has opinions just like they have assholes.”

Image From: North Korea fires ballistic missile with warning to US, South Korea, JapanStars & Stripes

Image From: Musk Says SpaceX Will Keep Funding Starlink for Ukraine (10/16/22) — VOA

Lair, lair… pants on fire!

Image From: Twitter Misinformation Efforts In Danger with Musk Takeover New Scientist

Image From: Putin’s threat on nuclear capabilities presents challenges (2/27/22) — Boston Globe

Image From: In the 2020 Netflix movie, “The Midnight Sky”, what could be the cataclysmic event that decimates most of the Earth? — Bad Bart 2 on Reddit


Music: GOOD BOY GD X TAEYANG — GOOD BOY    4:05

American War: A Novel About How Damage Begets Damage, Then & Now

Perspective from 2026 to American War

In 2026, American War feels less like speculative fiction and more like warning. When I first wrote this essay in 2023, I believed the United States was moving dangerously close to internal fracture. That concern has only deepened. We are living in a period of escalating political extremism, organized disinformation, civic distrust, and widening economic inequality. The social fabric has not snapped, but it is fraying in visible ways. What makes this moment unsettling is that daily life still often feels normal. People go to work, scroll their phones, plan vacations, argue online, and carry on. That is often how societies approach ruptureโ€”not with sirens, but with routines.

Watching Dickinson sharpened this recognition for me. In its portrayal of the years before the Civil War, Emily Dickinson and her brother Austin seem more attuned than many around them to the gathering storm. Much of their white social world behaves as though ordinary life will continue indefinitely. But history shows that political denial does not stop momentum. It often accelerates it. Before the American Civil War fully erupted, the country passed through years of polarization, moral evasions, regional grievance, media agitation, and failures of civic courage. That emotional atmosphere feels disturbingly familiar now. 

Since writing this essay, I have also published my book, Sapience: The Moment Is Now, available on Amazon. The book explores how societies drift toward authoritarianism not only through violence, but through psychological conditioningโ€”through propaganda, manipulated perception, mythmaking, oligarchic capture, and the gradual corrosion of shared reality. Its central argument is that democratic collapse rarely arrives all at once. It advances through normalization. Citizens adapt. Institutions bend. Language becomes weaponized. Fear becomes political currency. When enough people stop distinguishing performance from truth, a plausible dystopian future becomes possible. That is why the world imagined in my book is not fantasy. It is built from pressures already visible in our own time.

American War remains powerful because it understands a hard truth: damage begets damage. Nations that fail to confront trauma, injustice, inequality, and historical fracture do not escape them. They carry them forward until those unresolved forces erupt in new forms. The question in 2026 is no longer whether America is immune. The question is whether enough people will recognize the warning signs early enough to choose a different path.


Introduction to American War | 2023

I was captivated by another Throughline that aired on January 19, 2023. This episode explores possible Extremist Futures as envisioned by Omar El Akkad in his novel American War.

Omar’s novel is about America’s second Civil War. He imagines 50 years into our future. A time when climate change has turned Florida into an underwater theme park and climate disasters devastate the world. His vision is very similar to mine in my novel Sapience: The Moment Is Now (not yet published).

In American War, the world finally understands that it has to stop burning fossil fuels and bands them–but it’s too little too late. The US is the last to band fossil fuels. All states agree to switch to more sustainable energy except Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. These three states take up arms, deciding they would rather secede than stop burning fossil fuels.

They lose, again, but what follows is a years-long insurgency. This is where his story is mostly centered.


American War: Ignorance

Something Omar says in the beginning of this Throughline needs to be emphasized. He says, “We read to feel into another.”

This is how we come to know and understand each other. A country or a state (I’m thinking of you Florida) that bans books because they might be subversiveGod Forbid… they might give children ideas… is a system that seeks to keep its citizens in ignorance.

Break down the word: ig nor ance. States and countries that ban books are teaching their people to ignore what they see with their very own eyes.

And, people who are kept in ignorance are a heck of a lot easier to manipulate too!

He also says, “Story is the final act of Resistance!


American War: Disturbingly Plausible

The New York Time’s describes his novel: “Omar El Akkadโ€™s โ€œAmerican Warโ€ is a disturbingly plausible case in point โ€” a tale of a future America torn asunder by its own political and tribal affiliations.

This is what caught my attention too.

Throughline plays some from the audio book of American War that includes sound effects. Had I not caught the beginning, I might have thought I was listening to real, on-the-ground reporting.

Omar’s story feels real, very real. It feels like it is already happening.

He grounds his story telling by his real life experiences as a boy in Lebanon where he was a witness to the devastation of war and what happens to people in refugee camps.

Omar says, “A society subjected by warfare is akin to moving backwards in time.”

Think of what Putin is doing to his people and to the beautiful people of Ukraine. Every image coming out of his sick ego trip is likened to images from WWI.

The Academy Award nominated movie All Quiet on the Western Front vividly paints the insanity of rich, powerful men who send other men to die for their personal power and glory. In this movie (and of course the book), Paul Bรคumer and his classmates are just cannon fodder for a fatherland that has gone mad.

American War: All Quiet on the Western Front | Official Trailer | Netflix

If you are having a hard time remembering the horror and senselessness of death of WWI, then watch All Quiet to remind yourself that quiet means dead. Watch as these young, gifted boys sign up for service and get pumped up by grumpy, old narcissistic men who stuff them full of overly romanticized, patriotic notions of war and how they are defending the fatherland. It’s on Netflix, so you have no excuse.


American War: Euphemistic Fraudulence

Omar describes this souped-up patriotic messaging as euphemistic fraudulence.

Texas University’s McCombs School of Business published an article that was written by Robert Prentice titled: Euphemisms Inflict Collateral Damage on Integrity.

This article begins with the college admission scandal that caught up actress Lori Loughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli in acts of fraud to get their children into the best schools.

Robert writes, and this is important:

In an earlier blog post we suggested some reasons, grounded in behavioral ethics, that might help explain why reputable people and loving parents became involved in these frauds.  The conformity bias, the self-serving bias, and incrementalism all may have contributed. The evidence disclosed in the indictment offers additional clues.
A euphemism, sayโ€™s Websterโ€™s, is โ€œthe substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.โ€
Famed Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura writes of โ€œmoral disengagement,โ€ suggesting that people, such as Loughlin and Giannulli, who think of themselves as good people can do something bad so long as they can selectively suspend morality for their activities. One way people do this is by use of euphemisms.  Bandura notes:

“Language shapes the perception of events and the thought patterns on which people base many of their actions. The personal and social acceptability of given activities, therefore, can differ markedly depending on what those activities are called. Euphemistic machinations are used widely to detach and depersonalize doers from harmful activities. Cloaking detrimental activities in euphemisms can be a powerful weapon.”

โ€œWorking the Systemโ€ โ€“ Euphemisms Inflict Collateral Damage on Integrity
Examples of the โ€œsanitizing and convoluted languageโ€ (Gambino) of euphemisms that have helped people make their peace with wrongdoing include the following:
  • Dead civilians = โ€œcollateral damageโ€
  • Mass firings = โ€œright-sizingโ€
  • Lies = โ€œalternative factsโ€
  • Burning down villages = โ€œpacificationโ€
  • Fraud = โ€œcreative accountingโ€
  • Genocide = โ€œthe final solutionโ€
Empirical studies indicate that โ€œeuphemistic labels can psychologically sanitize unethical practices, facilitating our participation in them.โ€ (Moore & Gino).

American War: The World is Either Good or Evil

This is a lie. Every modern human being born today is told this lie.

Omar talks about how this idea is used to twist us into doing all sorts of evil things. It is a notion, an idea, a belief drilled into us since the day we are born until the day we are dead.

It is this very idea that the world can be cleaved into a good side and a bad side that allows us to be manipulated.

I would add it is precisely splitting the world into Good and Bad parts that lets us justify just about any abominable violence we can dream up.

It is also what allows ruthless rulers to turn plain, ordinary, decent human beings into killing machines and monsters.

Ruthless Rulers are already monsters and include men such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-um, Denis Sassou Nguesso, Abdullah Aziz Al Saud, Bashar al-Assad, and there are many more (see the list of Current World Dictators).

American War: World Dictators In 2022 By Location

We live with these monsters right here, right now on our planet. And they are pounding our world straight back to the Stone Age just as fast as they can.

American War: This is a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the current world dictators and authoritarian regimes. In 2022 there are 57 dictatorships in the world. We define a dictator as the ruler of a land rated โ€œNot Freeโ€ by the Freedom House in their annual survey of freedom.

What do you think? Are they winning? The Red countries that is… are there more red countries than yellow or green?

That is exactly what they want you to believe. But, perhaps you are beginning to sense out it is precisely this idea of division that is the problem.


American War: Empathetic Liars

One of Omar’s characters is an empathetic lair. He is the character that goes into the refugee camps and radicalizes the kids there.

Omar says there is no such thing as exotic suffering, but empathetic liars make you believe there is. Empathetic liars parse the fine threads of what we do and what is done to us. Empathetic liars play upon the lack of self-agency in a place like a refugee camp (or one of Putin’s prisons) and use it like a gleaming lure to hook their targets–kids (or Russian prisoners) whom they plan to turn into cannon fodder.

Omar says, “People go to bad place when their self-agency is taken away from them.” And the more damaged a person is, the more their circle of Trust closes in, making them extremely vulnerable to empathetic liars

And that is exactly what autocrats, dictators, and pretty much most of the Republican Party in the United States are doing. Whoever they are…all close ranks around their strong man, hype their followers up on Fraudulent Euphemisms, and close the circle of Trust until only one man can be trusted.

And, there sure are a lot of want-a-bee dictators who desire to be the one and only man the entire human race can trust–Putin, Trump, Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-um, Denis Sassou Nguesso, Abdullah Aziz Al Saud, Bashar al-Assad, or pick your poison.

Yes, Omar is very right to envision the coming of America’s Second Civil War! Heck, we might be staring down the path to WWIII.

I think Empathetic Liars is another name for Dark Empaths. Dark Empathy is not a good thing. Dr. Ramani does a very good job in this video explaining why all of us need to be on the look out for Dark Empaths and Empathetic Lairs.

TAmerican War: he Dark Empath VS the Narcissist: The Signs | Med Circle

American War: Reality? What Reality!

Omar talks about when a group of people believe anything they want to believe is real… you’re living in a very dangerous place and time.

Add the element of violent insurrection being a central part of a country’s narrative, and you have a tinderbox waiting to explode.

He admits he’s been amazed how reality has out did his fiction.

He warns, “There is a particular Force that when it emerges within a group of people, it must be stared down directly.”

I would add that when this Force is encountered: You cannot blink. You cannot turn away. And, if you falter, it will destroy you.

I’m writing about such a force too. I was reminded of a prologue I was playing around with to describe my story. I realize it is exactly what Omar is warning us about.

American War: The Last DJ on Earth | I wrote and read the beginning of this video. My husband plays the Last DJ and my friend Brain (who has since passed) plays the Persuader

Will we listen? Can we listen anymore?


 American War: Feature Archetypal Animation

Image from: American War by Omar El Akkad, book review: Should be read as a cautionary tale | The Independent — This impressive debut imagines a second American Civil War set from 2074 to 2095 and is set apart from other dystopian novels because of the fully realised plausibility of the scenario 

Image from: Penguin Random House Audio | โ€œPowerful . . . As haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in The Road, and as devastating a look as the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America. . . . Omar El Akkadโ€™s debut novel, American War, is an unlikely mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot elements familiar to readers of the recent young-adult dystopian series The Hunger Games and Divergent.โ€
โ€”Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Image from: The American Civil War, a Summary | AAREG

Music: 1865: Songs of Hope and Home from the American Civil War Anonymous 4 | [15] Home, Sweet Home / Polly Put the Kettle On   

 American War: First Archetypal Animation

Music: Heaven Or Hell | Don Tolive | [1] Heaven Or Hell    

Memory Wars: How Society Fails to Deal with Sin, Then & Now

Perspective from 2026 to Memory Wars

In 2026, Memory Wars feels less like reflection and more like warning fulfilled. Carl Jung used the word enantiodromia to describe what happens when a force becomes so one-sided and extreme that it eventually flips into its opposite. He observed that when consciousness is dominated by a single tendency, an opposing force builds in the shadows until it breaks through. That idea now feels painfully relevant to the United States. A nation that once presented itself as a beacon of liberty, democratic pluralism, and the rule of lawโ€”a nation that helped defeat World War II and the machinery of Nazismโ€”has drifted toward the very impulses it once claimed to resist. 

The danger did not arrive wearing the old uniforms. It came wrapped in grievance, spectacle, selective memory, and the weaponization of forgetting. The old authoritarian patterns returned in modern form: attacks on institutions that restrain power, the rewriting of history, the manufacturing of enemies, the normalization of cruelty, and the demand that loyalty to leader outweigh loyalty to law. Memory itself became a battlefield. What a people remember determines what they will tolerate. What a people forget determines what can be done to them.

That is why this moment matters. The United States did not become the Fourth Reich overnight. Such transformations never happen all at once. They happen when civic memory erodes, when historical warnings are dismissed as exaggeration, and when citizens mistake comfort, spectacle, or tribal belonging for freedom. When the lessons of fascism are no longer lived, they become vulnerable to reenactment.

Jungโ€™s insight also carries another truth. Enantiodromia is not only collapse into shadow; it can also become the beginning of conscious correction. When a society finally sees what it has become, it can choose differently. That is the real work of memoryโ€”not nostalgia, not mythmaking, but moral reckoning. To remember honestly is to reclaim the capacity to resist. If memory can be turned into a weapon of domination, it can also become the ground from which democratic courage, moral imagination, and renewal begin.


Introduction to Memory Wars | 2023

Following are a few things that caught my attention this week, especially since they are relevant to what I am writing about in my novel about the role of consciousness and modern cultures. The first thing is Memory Wars. It is a six-part podcast exploring how society confronts sin. I only heard one episode, but it got me thinking deeply about how societies fail to deal with sin.

Memory Wars: A podcast exploring how society confronts sin

I heard S1E2: The Two Reconstructions that explores the similarities and differences between the Reconstruction that happened in the U.S. after the Civil War and the one that occurred in Germany after WWII.

America’s Antebellum Period

The biggest difference between the two Reconstructions is that after the U.S. Civil War (April 12, 1861 โ€“ April 9, 1865), there was no outside agent to oversee the period of Reconstruction following the demise of the Antebellum Period. Countless reparations and services were needed to repair the damage inflicted on nearly 10 million slaves alive at this time.

Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. Thatโ€™s right: a tiny percentage. -- How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.?
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The Root

Slavery started in Jamestown Colony, the founding county of the British Empire in North America. It is also the founding colony for the soon to be United States of America. Slavery grows into a brutal industry that lasts for more than 200 years allowing white men to make tremendous profits and becomes the basis for how the economy works in the United States.

America’s Reconstruction Era | Brief & Incomplete

More than 200 years of slave-based industry has made Americans deeply unwilling to confront the brutal realities of being a nation built by slaves and founded on slave-based economic models. America’s Reconstruction barely got started before it was shut down. America’s Reconstruction era lasted only from 1865 to 1877.

After this, any positive steps made during this very short time were quickly turned around by Jim Crow laws, which quickly crippled and reversed gains made by recently released slaves.

America still hasn’t reckon with its brutal history, racist culture, and slave-based industry specifically designed to make business owners and shareholders rich while keeping ordinary workers poor.

The US has intentionally engineered extreme inequalities and injustices into its systems of governance and business. They are written into laws and US constitution. They are meant to elevate white people above all other people.

There are many white people alive right now who feel they are engaged in a life and death battle to maintain these laws. These individuals are willing go to great lengths of hypocrisy and false piety to justify their sin. Some are willing to die for their beliefs and attack the Capital and Congressmen and women who do not believe like they do.

We’ve been here before. It doesn’t end well. Sin never does.

First Archetypal Animation | Justifying Sin

Memory Wars: How Society Fails to Deal with Sin: First Archetypal Animation: What they said they were doing…. What they really did… Justifying Sin | Music: Memory Streams | Portico Quartet | Immediately Visible

Memory Wars: Germany’s Reconstruction

In Germany after WWII, the U.S. led Reconstruction efforts.

On April 3, 1948, President Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act of 1948. It became known as the Marshall Plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, who in 1947 proposed that the United States provide economic assistance to restore the economic infrastructure of postwar Europe. -- The Marshall Plan (1948)

These efforts included exposing euphemisms Nazis used to mask their antisemitic and racial laws. Nazis did the same thing writing their sin into the German laws and policies. The Nazis were high on their brutal beliefs and worked like steamrollers to implemented their hellish vision in the lead up to WWII. Their fiendish frenzy included:

The 1933 โ€œLaw for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Serviceโ€ forced Jews and political opponents of Nazism out of Germanyโ€™s expansive civil service. 

Jurists wrote and enforced laws removing Jews from public service, set their own racialist view of Jewish identity with the โ€œNuremberg Race Laws,โ€ and eventually enforced laws disenfranchising, despoiling, and ghettoizing German Jews.

A large percentage of the planners of the Holocaust came from the judiciary. Men from the security apparatuses, ministries, and civil servicesโ€”those groups Hannah Arendt described as โ€œdesk murderersโ€ (Schreibtischtรคter)โ€”overwhelmingly came from the legal profession, marking just how much every step of the judicial process from training to the highest courts was active in the Nazi regime. -- The Reconstruction of Justice in Post-Nazi Western Germany; article on the continuities of German law and the jurists who spoke out against an authoritarian justice system. 

August 11, 2021

These efforts were laid bare to make Germans reckon with their sin. Lots of Nazis were put on trial, indicted, and executed or imprisoned.

Denazification did not end there. Ordinary German citizens were made to watch Hollywood movies that showed the atrocities committed by the Nazis and drove home the role complacency by ordinary Germany citizens played in the horrors of the Nazi War Machine.

Germans had to watch these movies to receive food or other relief items. German citizens also had to fill out questionnaires that determined the level of their Nazism and this determine what kind of work they were allowed to do.

Denazification of Germany

This video provides a good recap of the positives and negatives of German Reformation efforts.

And it details the differences between what happened in West Germany (implemented by Western Allies) and East Germany (implemented by Russia under Stalin). It brings viewers right up to our current era where the lure of authoritarian governments is looming large again in the minds of so many “modern” people and neo-Nazis are on the rise around the world.

Memory Wars: Denazification of Germany after World War II – Cold War Documentary

It is hard not to compare Putin’s outrageous claim that he is Denazifying Ukraine with the speech Hitler gave to the German people just before he invaded Czechoslovakia. He told his people he was reclaiming and reuniting the Deutschland, German speaking parts of Czechoslovakia.

Getting no push back from the rest of Europe, Hitler went on to invade Poland, France, Russia…and ultimately he would have invaded the world if we would have let him.

There is a direct line that needs to drawn by lies Hitler, Stalin (yes, this man was evil), and Putin tell about what they are doing or did. What they are doing is shining their warped beam of beliefs and focusing it into death and destruction.

In other words, these men are sin makers... they are creators of Hell on Earth. They are creatures who are far more deadly and dangerous than any dinosaur.

They are are monsters, not men.

Second Archetypal Animation | The Same Beast

Memory Wars: The Same Beast | Music: Hey Putin! Go Fuck Yourself! | WiT | [1] Hey Putin! Go Fuck Yourself!    3:53

Memory Wars: Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same?

Shortly after the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 on the National Mall, I was speaking to some patrons of a successful nonprofit about the importance of candid racial dialogue in politics and in the places we live, work and worship.
One of the participants had recently toured the museum and had a pointed question. Why, she wondered, were all the exhibits that visitors first encounter dedicated to slavery? Among other things, she was referring to a reconstructed cabin built by former slaves from Maryland and a statue of Thomas Jefferson next to a wall with the names of more than 600 people he owned. โ€œCouldnโ€™t the exhibits begin with more uplift?โ€ the woman asked, arguing that Black achievement was more worthy of the spotlight. She suggested that the museum should instead usher visitors toward more positive stories right from the start, so that if someone were tired or short on time, โ€œslavery could be optional.โ€
Her question was irksome, but it did not surprise me. Iโ€™d heard versions of the โ€œCanโ€™t we skip past slaveryโ€ question countless times before. Each time serves as another reminder that America has never had a comprehensive and widely embraced national examination of slavery and its lasting impact. Yes, there are localized efforts. But despite the centrality of slavery in our history, it is not central to the American narrative in our monuments, history books, anthems and folklore.

Third Archetypal Animation | How America Just Keeps Justifying Sin: Make America Backwards Again

Memory Wars: People Get Use to Anything…After A While People Just Think Oppression is the Normal State of Things” — Make America Backwards Again | Music: Jim Crow the Musical Add-2 | [16] Slave Awareness Skit
There is a simple reason: The United States does not yet have the stomach to look over its shoulder and stare directly at the evil on which this great country stands. That is why slavery is not well taught in our schools. That is why the battle flag of the army that tried to divide and conquer our country is still manufactured, sold and displayed with defiant pride. That is why any mention of slavery is rendered as the shameful act of a smattering of Southern plantation owners and not a sprawling economic and social framework with tentacles that stamped almost every aspect of American life. -- The Opinions Essay: Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same? By Michele L. Norris
JUNE 3, 2021

Locked Up: The Prison Labor That Built America’s Business Empires

This episode is presented by Reveal and shows how the American south quickly shut down Reconstruction and reinvented slavery by using the prison system as a new slave labor force. Before the US Civil War, less than 8% of people in prison were black. During the rise of Jim Crowe era and the prison industrial system that rose to replace slave labor, the new of black people locked up skyrocketed to over 75%. Most were incarcerated for petty crimes and sentences to hard labor for months and years. Some would not survive.

Fourth Archetypal Animation | Locked Up — How Jim Crow Created the New Slave Labor

Memory Wars: If you live long enough, you get to see things repeat themselves.” | Locked Up: Prison Labor that Built America’s Business Empires | Music: Jim Crow the Musical | Add-2 | [1] Welcome to Jim Crow  
Companies across the South profited off the forced labor of people in prison after the Civil War โ€“ a racist system known as convict leasing.
After the Civil War, a new form of slavery took hold in the US and lasted more than 60 years. Associated Press reporters Margie Mason and Robin McDowell investigate the chilling history of how Southern states imprisoned mainly Black men, often for minor crimes, and then leased them out to private companies โ€“ for years, even decades, at a time. The team talks with the descendant of a man imprisoned in the Lone Rock stockade in Tennessee nearly 140 years ago, where people as young as 12 worked under inhumane conditions in coal mines and inferno-like ovens used to produce iron. This system of forced prison labor enriched the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad company โ€“ at the cost of prisonersโ€™ lives. 
At the state park that sits on the former site of the Lone Rock stockade, relics from the hellish prison are buried beneath the soil. Archeologist Camille Westmont has found thousands of artifacts, such as utensils and the plates prisoners ate off. She has also created a database listing the names of those sent to Lone Rock. A team of volunteers are helping her, including a woman reckoning with her own ancestorโ€™s involvement in this corrupt system and the wealth her family benefited from.   
The United States Steel Corporation helped build bridges, railroads and towering skyscrapers across America. But the company also relied on forced prison labor. After US Steel took over Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in 1907, the industrial giant used prison labor for at least five more years. During that time, more than 100 men died while working in their massive coal mining operation in Alabama. U.S. Steel has misrepresented this dark chapter of its history. And it has never apologized for its use of forced labor or the lives lost. The reporters push the company to answer questions about its past and engage with communities near the former mines. 

Memory Wars: Behind the Lie of Monopoly 

“We’re born into the world and think the world is simply the way we are born into it.” — One of the guests on Throughlin’s History of the Game Monopoly

Fifth Archetypal Animation | Monopoly…More Than A Game

Memory Wars: Monopoly, So Much More Than A Game… If We’d Only See | Music: Master of the Game (Expanded Edition) | George Duke | [9] Part 1-The Alien Challenges The Stick/Part 2-The Alien Succumbs To The Macho Intergalactic Funkativity Of The Funkblasters

Monopoly is one of the best-selling board games in history! It was actually created to get people to think about real life monopolies and how they impact real peoples daily lives.

Most people just love to play Monopoly because it is fun, especially if you need a distraction from the stress and monotony of earning enough money to buy your daily bread.

How Monopoly has been marketed to us is probably why we often don’t notice the deeper messages embedded in the game.

In this episode of Throughline, the narrators explore the origins and history of Monopoly. It’s not what you think. In fact, it reveals how a critique of capitalism grew from a seed of an idea in a rebellious young woman’s mind who created this legendary game that celebrates wealth at all costs. But behind the legend, we’ve been told a lot of lies; one was the theft of a young woman’s brilliant idea.

There's more to Monopoly than you might think. It's one of the best-selling board games in history โ€” despite huge economic instability, sales actually went up during the pandemic โ€” and it's been an iconic part of American life at other pivotal moments: a cheap pastime during the Great Depression; a reminder of home for soldiers during WWII; and an American export during its rise as a global superpower. It endured even as it reflected some of the ongoing inequities in American society, from segregation and redlining, to capitalism run rampant. That's because Monopoly is also built on powerful American lore โ€“ the idea that anyone, with just a little bit of cash, can rise from rags to riches. Writer Mary Pilon, the author of The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game, describes Monopoly as "the Great American Dream in a board game โ€“ or, nightmare." -- Do Not Pass Go (2022) | Throughline

Memory Wars: Conclusion

We are responsible for noticing Sin. When we see it, we must name it. Sitting and watching from the sidelines is no longer an option.

We are responsible for paying attention to what is going inside and outside of our bodies.

If we misrepresent and falsify our sinful actions or fail to act to stop sin when we see it inflicted on others, we are whitewashing reality. This is sin and only leads us further down the road of turning Earth into Hell.


Memory Wars: Feature Archetypal Animation

Image from: SEPTEMBER 4, 2018 | The Bible Condemns American Slavery
by Jesse Johnson
Image from: Why the West is morally bound to offer reparations for slavery |The Conversation

Music: Still Living In Slavery | Mr Raoul K | [1] Dounougnan Magni – Intro    2:41


First Archetypal Animation

Image from: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Religious Text
BY PATRICIA R. HILL, DEPARTMENTS OF HISTORY & AMERICAN STUDIES, WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
Image from: Why the West is morally bound to offer reparations for slavery
This cartoon, โ€œThe Modern Mercuryโ€ by Jerry Doyle, appeared in The Philadelphia Record, December 7, 1935. 
Image from: World War II: The Holocaust | ALAN TAYLOR |  OCTOBER 16, 2011 | The Atlantic

Music: Memory Streams | Portico Quartet | Immediately Visible


Memory Wars: Second Archetypal Animation

Image from: Canada in WWII | Adolf Hitler
Image from: The image of Stalin in the Soviet art
Image from: Tinker Tailor Soldier Hacker: The Russian Factor In the DNC Email Scandal | Wilson Center

Music: Hey Putin! Go Fuck Yourself! | WiT | [1] Hey Putin! Go Fuck Yourself!   


Memory Wars: Third Archetypal Animation

Image from: Germany faced its horrible past.
Can we do the same?
— Washington Post

Image from: Swiggity the Single

Other images from January 2022 and 2021 blogs.

Music: Jim Crow the Musical Add-2 | [16] Slave Awareness Skit   


Memory Wars: Fourth Archetypal Animation

Image from: Locked Up: The Prison Labor That Built Business Empires
Image from: Locked Up: The Prison Labor That Built Business Empires | Look at the one black man sitting on the ground surrounded by white men with guns who worked for Lone Rock stockade where the relics from the hellish prison are buried beneath the soil today.
Image from: Locked Up: The prison labor that built business empires in the South, including Tennessee by NewsChannel 9
Image from: Locked Up: The prison labor that built business empires in the South, including Tennessee by NewsChannel 9
Image from : In the galleries: Gordon Parkโ€™s photos from the Jim Crow-era South — Washington Post
Image from: Jim Crow in Florida — Florida Humanities

Music: Jim Crow the Musical | Add-2 | [1] Welcome to Jim Crow    1:11


Memory Wars: Fifth Archetypal Animation

Play Board Game Monopoly Money Trade Hobby | pcdazero | Gianni Crestani  โ€ข  Age 58  โ€ข  San Bonifacio/Italia  โ€ข  Member since Jan. 28, 2012

Dog Top Hat Pet Canine K9 Dressed Up Puppy | Prettysleepy | Amy  โ€ข  USA  โ€ข  Member since July 24, 2016

Monopoly Monopoly City Los Excavator Pewter Token | dboschm | Deutsch  โ€ข  Member since April 10, 2013

Monopoly Money Power People Rich | GDJ | Gordon Johnson  โ€ข  USA  โ€ข  Member since June 3, 2015  โ€ข  #4

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God Wants You To Be Rich: But Not the Billionaires, Especially Now

Perspective from 2026 to God Wants You To Be Rich:

In 2026, the prosperity gospel stands exposed with even greater clarity. For decades, millions were taught that wealth was proof of divine favor, that poverty reflected personal failure, and that if they believed hard enough, gave enough, and obeyed the right spiritual authorities, abundance would follow. That story was never mainly about faith. It was about conditioning people to admire wealth, trust power, and mistake inequality for virtue.

That same machinery helped prepare the ground for Donald Trump. The language changed, but the structure remained. Promise greatness. Promise blessing. Promise that prosperity is just around the corner. Then channel hope, grievance, and desperation into political loyalty. Once that loyalty was secured, the rewards did not flow downward. They flowed upward โ€” toward billionaire donors, corporate insiders, and the insulated class that increasingly behaves as though law, consequence, and democracy are inconveniences meant for other people.

Alan Watts offered a useful meaning of ignorance: to ignore. Not stupidity. Not lack of intelligence. To ignore what is plainly there. To ignore who benefits. To ignore where the money goes. To ignore who grows richer while working families absorb the cost. That is the deeper danger. When people are trained to ignore systems of extraction, exploitation begins to feel normal, even moral.

The tragedy is familiar. Many once sent their savings to televangelists who preached heavenly abundance while building private kingdoms on earth. Today, a similar logic operates in politics. People are mobilized by fear, spectacle, resentment, and promises of restoration โ€” while public wealth, public trust, public institutions, and democratic safeguards are steadily transferred upward. The same old transaction remains: belief from below, accumulation above.

By 2026, the pattern is harder to deny. The prosperity gospel did not teach people how to become free. It taught many how to sanctify hierarchy. It taught them to see wealth as righteousness and power as destiny. That habit of mind has become politically dangerous. It leaves working people defending systems that strip them of security, dignity, voice, and democratic power โ€” while the billionaire class takes more and calls it freedom.


Introduction to God Wants You to Be Rich | 2023

The prosperity gospel is quintessentially an American theology. It is 17th century Puritanism colliding with 19th century New Thought; a spiritual movement that included unconventional and nonconformist thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James.

This strange mix then gets hitched to capitalism with a generous sprinkle of hand raising, hallelujah happiness on top; a highly energetic spiritual movement emerging out of little old Topeka, Kansas, in 1901.

This is where the Pentecostal Movement began when a student named Agnes Ozman received the gift of tongues during a prayer meeting at Charles Fox Parham’s Bethel Bible College.

The prosperity gospel makes it alright to be rich. In fact, if you’re not rich, you are probably not a good Christian and probably going to Hell.

God Wants You To Be Rich: The Lord is my banker; my credit is good

This is Charles Fillmore’s reinterpretation of Psalm 23.

Fillmore founded Unity in 1889 in Kansas City, Missouri. He wrote, โ€œUnity is a link in the great educational movement inaugurated by Jesus Christ; our objective is to discern the Truth in Christianity and prove it.โ€

It is one of the many religious movements towards the end of the 1800s coalescing and growing out of the New Thought movement.

Fillmore was known as an American mystic who was renowned for his spiritualist interpretations of Biblical Scripture.

His beliefs paved the way for even shinier and more fervent believers who felt God rewards those who are most deserving and faithful to him with money and wealth.

God Wants You To Be Rich: The Lord is My Banker; My Credit Is Good | Music: Money so Big (Sped Up)| MADAX | [1] Money so Big (Sped Up)

God Wants You To Be Rich: Laws of Prosperity

By the early 1900, the blending of the Puritan work ethic with New Thought was fully fermented into a very bubbly, verifiable, abiding religious zeal that would be enough to put any over-worked, poverty-stricken, overly anxious worker into a state of heavenly glory, at least for a little while, say the typical time of a religious revival promising wealth and prosperity to all of God’s law-abiding, hardworking sheep (Christian-speak for people of faith).

With earthquake-like economic disruptions caused by the Industrial Revolution, this refreshingly fervent religious pastime came just in time for greedy corporate capitalists who needed people to work hard, really hard, so they could make more money.

Add the Holy Fire of the Pentecostal church that believes spiritual gifts are the miraculous ways God works in the world today, and the bomb fire of the Prosperity Gospel Movement ignites into a big and growing spiritual fire of everlasting glory–Hallelujah…praise the Lord, our savior Jesus Christ!

One Baptist preacher, Russell H. Conwell, told his mostly-destitute congregation in 1915:

โ€œI say you ought to be rich; you have no right to be poor.โ€ 

Never mind about deep structural inequalities built into capitalistic systems that are designed to elevate and reward individuals who hold the reigns of power while holding down and keeping poor people who are not born into such privilege.

Russell Conwell and other very charismatic ministers (such as Kenneth Hagin, Ken Copeland, Oral Roberts, and Jim Bakker) blame poverty on an individual’s failure to believe hard enough or to be good enough people who deserve to be rich or to not giving enough of what little money they have to the preacher man.

The idea that you have to give money to get money is a fundamental message preached in the Prosperity Gospel like a little money seed that might grow into a great big money tree one day.

Ken Copeland writes in his Laws of Prosperity:

"Do you want a hundredfold return on your money? Give and let God multiply it back to you. No bank in the world offers this kind of return! Praise the Lord!โ€ 

Trumpism Is the Prosperity Gospel Running Wild in American Politics

Since its beginnings in the early 1800s, the Prosperity Gospel has ebbed and flowed. It grew rampantly in the 1900s, then waned during the WW I and II years. It rallied again during the postwar boom of the 1950s, then waned only to return bigger and better than before with the big hair days of the ostentatious 80s.

The mega fall of mega church tele-evangelical preachers and power couples such as Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye or Becki and Jerry Falwell Jr. might have hinted at an incredible reservoir of hypocrisy bubbling underneath all the pretty God Loves You, hallelujahs, and Praise the Lord, but it wasn’t enough to inoculate the masses from the powerfully, tempting, very yummy Gospel of Prosperity.

God Wants You To Be Rich: THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE | Official Trailer | Searchlight Pictures — Story of the rise and fall of the Bakkers during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s
God Wants You To Be Rich: Pool Boy Shares Details of Affair With Jerry Falwell Jr.โ€™s WifeThe pool boy whose affair with Jerry Falwell Jr.’s wife brought down an evangelical dynasty is telling his story in an upcoming documentary called “God Forbid.” Giancarlo Granda was working as a pool boy at the Fontainebleau Hotel in 2012 when he says Becki Falwell began flirting with him. In his new book about the eight-year relationship, he described the bizarre first encounter in a hotel room with Jerry Falwell Jr. watching them. Granda now says he regrets the affair.

Enter televangelist Joel Scott Osteen and his non-denominational very charismatic brand of christianity to save the day. He offers 40 powerful promises right from the mouth of God that he, little old Joel Osteen, can let you in on…if you buy his book, believe hard enough, and oh yeah, donated to his mega church in Lakewood, FL.

Jumping into the very big wake being made by Osteen and other mega-ministers who shepherd their ever growing flock of faithful followers with bigger, badder, ever better televangelism programming is the man with the yellow hair and permanent orange tan… and oh yeah, about half of the Republican Party who want to get in on all that fun and money!

And WOW-WE! Look how the Repubs are battling it out for who gets to have the biggest slice of followers! Looks like running down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring on Trump’s orange hand after January 6, 2021 wasn’t enough to save you Kevin. God isn’t shining his spiritual gifts of prosperity on you today Kevin–that’s for darn sure!

God Wants You To Be Rich: NBC: For the first time in 100 years, Republicans have failed to elect a Speaker of the House after GOP leader Kevin McCarthy fell short of the 218 votes needed to secure the leadership position.

But, I digress, let’s get back to Trump who makes a pretty simple political pitch that Jonathan Last sums up nicely in a piece he wrote after Trump whipped out a front page story about himself on February 6, 2020 at the 69th annual National Prayer Breakfast: Acquitted.

Trump’s simple pitch is this:

"God wants you to have what you want! I should know, because I have it! Come get yours too, for a small contribution!"
God Wants You To Be Rich: Ignorance Is A Choice | Music: Ignorance (Deluxe Version) | The Weather Station | [3] Tried to Tell You    3:39

It might be interesting to note that at this time, while Trump was at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 6, 2020, COVID-19 is already spreading in the United States.

Trump says nothing about COVID. Days and weeks after the prayer breakfast, Trump continues to gloat about his Acquittal but still fails to say much of anything about COVID.

He says nothing despite advisors warning him in December 2019 and in January 2020 and February and March of 2020 that COVID is coming!

Bob Woodward interviewed Trump during this time for his book Rage. Woodward repeatedly asked Trump about his response to COVID. Trump repeatedly played it down saying he didn’t want to cause a panic.

Rather than cause a panic, Trump turned commonsense ways of staying safe, such as wearing a mask, into a culture war.

God Wants You To Be Rich: Campaign U: Gen Z on the Bob Woodward-President Trump Tapes

As of this post, 1.1 million Americans have died of COVID-19.

The U.S. has one of the highest death rates from COVID since the beginning of the pandemic in 2019 and 2020. The vast majority of deaths occurred in 2020 while Trump was President and playing it down so he might get re-elected as President so he could make more money!

Personally, this doesn’t sound like a very good way to enjoy the fruits of the New Prosperity Gospel that Trump touts. Dying seems the very opposite of enjoying prosperity.

God Wants You To Be Rich: Wrapped & Tied in Knots of Powerful Positive Thoughts

Tara Isabella Burton sums it all up very well in her 2017 article published in VOX.

Itโ€™s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trumpโ€™s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. Itโ€™s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospelโ€™s proliferation in America โ€” individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of โ€œpositive thinkingโ€ โ€” shape how we, as a nation, approach politics.

Also see, Throughline’s very excellent episode, Capitalism: God Wants You To Be Rich, which aired July 8, 2021. Towards the end of this episode, they play a soundbite from an archived recording from a Trump rally.

TRUMP: You know, I said the other day - 'cause so many people, they carry around "The Art Of The Deal" because they're begging. They're begging their politicians, please, please read "The Art Of The Deal" when you negotiate with China and with Japan or with Mexico and with Vietnam.

One of the speakers in this episode unpacks what Trump is plugging into here.

BUTLER: And I think this is crucial for right now. It flows into a kind of Christian nationalism. It means that God is especially favoring, you know, the nation as a special place. And so the people who live in it, who follow after this particular kind of thing, are going to be more blessed than anybody else in the world.

And another speaker unpacks it a little further.

BOWLER: I think people crave - even if they might hate it, they crave a gospel where the responsibility always falls back on them. Because it's always the one thing we can control is ourselves. So if you preach an empowered individualism, you've got a gospel you can believe in, which is always us.

Also, check out How ‘Prosperity Gospel’ preachers bend the Bible’s words

The prosperity gospel goes by many names: Word of Faith, Health and Wealth, Name It and Claim It. This โ€œdifferent gospelโ€ teaches that God provides rewards, including personal happiness, financial wealth and physical health, for believers who have sufficient faith. Prosperity theology developed in America in the last century and has been called a โ€œbaptized form of capitalism.โ€
The preachers associated with the movement โ€” including Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and Creflo Dollar โ€” have some of the largest congregations and best-selling books in the country, and they host television programs that seem to air at all hours of the night (and are some of the most-watched programming around the world).

1. John 10:10 โ€” โ€œThe thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.โ€

The signature verse of the prosperity gospel, John 10:10 is used to suggest that God loves his followers and wants them to have every good thing. But interpreting this verse to promise physical gain neglects the depth suggested by its context.
The preceding verses illustrate the parable of the sheep and their good shepherd, Jesus, who calls them by name. The sheep know the good shepherdโ€™s voice and follow. Verse 10 contrasts Jesus with false shepherds who steal and kill and destroy. The abundance of life suggested here has to do with knowing and being known by Jesus, not material things. The Tyndale Commentary explains, โ€œHe does not offer them an extension of physical life nor an increase of material possessions, but the possibility, nay the certainty, of a life lived as a higher level of obedience to Godโ€™s will and reflecting his glory.โ€

2. James 4:2 โ€” โ€œYou do not have because you do not ask God.โ€

This verse is used to bolster the โ€œname it and claim itโ€ part of the prosperity gospel โ€” if you donโ€™t โ€œhave,โ€ itโ€™s because you havenโ€™t prayed enough. This interpretation ignores the verse that follows, in which James says, โ€œWhen you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.โ€
Creflo Dollar says this of prayer: โ€œWhen we pray, believing that we have already received what we are praying, God has no choice but to make our prayers come to pass.โ€
While prayer (including intercessory prayer) is crucial to the life of a Christian, using it to force God into appeasing the believerโ€™s desires also goes against the very prayer Jesus prayed on the eve of his crucifixion: โ€œYet not my will, but yours be doneโ€ (Luke 22:42

God Wants You To Be Rich: Feature Archetypal Animation

Money Rain Money Tree Marketing Nature Fun Grow | Anik_Islam | Anik Islam  โ€ข  Age 21  โ€ข  Dhaka/Bangladesh  โ€ข  Member since Dec. 27, 2020

Money Dollar Coins Tree Finance Business | kalhh | kalhh  โ€ข  Age 55  โ€ข  Deutschland  โ€ข  Member since Nov. 8, 2013

Room Money Dollar Wealth Success Finance Currency |

Jesus Lion King Christ Prayer Christian God Holy | andremsantana | Andrรฉ Santana AndreMS  โ€ข  Age 44  โ€ข  Campo Grande/Brasil  โ€ข  Member since Oct. 2, 2013  โ€ข  #189

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Music: Betty (Get Money) | Yung Gravy | [1] Betty (Get Money)    2:26


First Archetypal Animation

Money Greed Finance Selfish Currency Economy | TheDigitalArtist | Pete Linforth  โ€ข  Age 56  โ€ข  UK  โ€ข  Member since March 26, 2014  โ€ข  #209

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Music: Money so Big (Sped Up)| MADAX | [1] Money so Big (Sped Up)    0:43


Second Archetypal Image

Image: Trump Acquitted

Trumpism Is the Prosperity Gospel of Politics

Success is yours, if you will just enter into a personal relationship in supporting Donald Trump.

byJONATHAN V. LAST 

FEBRUARY 11, 2020 5:14 AM

Music: Ignorance (Deluxe Version) | The Weather Station | [3] Tried to Tell You    3:39

How to Stand Up to a Dictator, Maria Ressa: Then & NOW

The last chapter of Maria’s book is: Why Fascism Is Winning and its subtitle is Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate. She is the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courage and work standing up to President Duterte, 16th President of the Philippines who was elected to the role of the presidency on June 30, 2016 (exactly 6 months after Trump did the same thing in the United States).

Both men went to work attacking the Press. Both men claimed they, and they alone, knew what is right and wrong. Both men labeled any coverage from the press that they didn’t like as Fake News, Unreliable, Unprofessional, Untrue. Both men worked furiously to annihilate truth, facts, and reality. They knew divided we fall!

To some extend, both men succeeded beyond their wildest mad fantasies!

How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): Duterte’s Mad War

Duterte went to war, he said, to reduce ‘crime, corruption, and illegal drug trade‘. Many cheered. In reality, he would leave a brutal, bloody legacy of dead. Official numbers account that 6,248 people were killed, but human rights groups say the number is much higher, as high as 30,000 people.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Image (GETTY) from BBC article: Mr Duterte’s war on drugs has claimed an uncounted number of victims

Investigations show many victims of Duterte’s war on drugs were his opponents, leftists, drug users (who needed treatment, not a bullet), and some dealers. The UN has implicated Duterte in more than 1,000 killings and disappearances of people. Police whistle blowers have told how they planted guns and drugs on these victims to frame them as involved in the drug trade. For more on these stats, please see the BBC’s June 30 article: The bloody legacy of Rodrigo Duterte.

2026 Postscript โ€” The Export of Brutality

What happened in the Philippines did not stay in the Philippines.

The logic of Duterteโ€™s drug warโ€”label a group as dangerous, strip them of humanity, and justify state violence as โ€œnecessaryโ€โ€”has now echoed inside the United States. Under Trumpโ€™s renewed administration, immigration enforcement has taken on this same moral framing: not as policy, but as war.

ICE crackdowns have intensified under the language of โ€œpurificationโ€ and โ€œrestoring order,โ€ and with that language comes permissionโ€”implicit and explicitโ€”for violence. The reported killings of individuals like Good and Prieti during enforcement actions are not anomalies; they are signals. They show how quickly a system built on fear begins to treat human beings as expendable obstacles rather than citizens, migrants, or neighbors.

This is how the line moves: first criminals, then suspects, then categories of people.

Alex Preti Renee Good
Reason Magazine
Border Patrol agents started the .

How Dictatorship Spreads (Philippines โ†’ U.S.) [2026]

Authoritarianism spreads less like an invasion and more like a contagion of ideas.

Duterte normalized extrajudicial killing under the justification of safety. That normalization did not need to be copied exactlyโ€”it only needed to be believed as effective. Once people accept that โ€œsome lives must be sacrificed for order,โ€ the moral barrier collapses.

The United States, long seen as a stabilizing democratic force, adopting even fragments of this logic sends a powerful global signal: that brutality works, and that it is permissible.

If America reinforces this model rather than rejects it, it doesnโ€™t just fall inwardโ€”it legitimizes authoritarian tactics outward. Other leaders no longer need to hide what they are doing. They can point and say: โ€œEven the United States does this now.โ€

That is how the virus spreads.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): Trump’s Mad Dash to Dictatorhood

Trump’s 4-year term is just as distributing. He knew COVID-19 did not bode well to be elected for a second term. So when the virus arrived in the United States, Trump went into deny, distort, and distract mode.

He continually played down how deadly the virus was and mocked people who wore masks. This turned a cheap, easy, commonsense public health approach of keeping people safe into a culture war.

Veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on Monday called the former President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic a โ€œcrimeโ€ that killed more than 1 million people.

The Hill reports Woodward said: โ€œI call it a crime, not telling the people that he had been warned that โ€” by his national security advisers in the most vivid way, which is outlined in these tapes, the interviews with them, where they are telling him.”

This is the reason why Woodward released the tapes he recorded with Trump early in 2020 as he interviewed him for his books Rage and Peril; earlier, he wrote Fear.

As of November 23, 2022, over 1 million US citizens have died of COVID; the vast majority of these deaths occurring while Trump held office before a vaccine was available. Trump crippled the CDC and turned public health guidance into a political weapon.

I haven’t even gotten into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. You can read all about this in my blogs When Do We Get To Use Violence? and Free to Choose.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: This is a real time snap shot of COVID cases in the world as of 12/1/2022, 1:20 PM | John Hopkins COVID Tracker

2026 Postscript โ€” From Chaos to Structure

In 2022, Trumpโ€™s authoritarian tendencies were chaoticโ€”impulsive, reactive, and often incompetently executed. By 2026, they have become more structured, more strategic, and more dangerous.

The attacks on institutions have matured into systemic pressure: the reshaping of federal agencies, the targeting of perceived internal enemies, and the expansion of executive power under the justification of national emergency and internal threat.

What was once denial, distortion, and distraction has evolved into something colder: normalization.

Where COVID exposed the cost of disinformation in lives lost, the current phase exposes something deeperโ€”the willingness to institutionalize that disinformation as governing logic.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator & DOGE
DOGE and It’s consequences:
Image: The Spiggle Law Firm
Government Efficiency (DOGE …
How to Stand Up to a Dictator & Pete Hegseth
This image features a quote from Pete Hegseth during a congressional hearing regarding the war in Iran. Hegseth identified critics of the Iran war in Congress as a major adversary.ย  He described their comments as “reckless, feckless and defeatist”.ย  This testimony occurred during his first appearance before Congress concerning the conflict.ย  Image from:
Facebook
Pete Hegseth told the H

How Dictatorship Spreads (U.S. Internal Evolution) [2026]

Authoritarian systems donโ€™t arrive fully formedโ€”they iterate.

The first phase is disbelief: โ€œThis canโ€™t happen here.โ€
The second is fatigue: โ€œThis is just how things are now.โ€
The third is adaptation: people begin to adjust their behavior to survive within it.

By 2026, the danger is no longer just Trump as an individual, but the ecosystem that has learned from his first term. Loyalists are more prepared. Institutions are more compromised. Resistance is more fragmented.

And globally, this evolution matters.

When the United States moves from chaotic authoritarian flirtation to structured authoritarian governance, it becomes a modelโ€”not a warning. Countries on the edge of democratic backsliding now have a blueprint from one of the most powerful nations on Earth.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): There Is A Big Yang to Pay When Facts Fall Prey to Authoritarian Disinformation Campaigns

Since we are on the topic of global pandemic, let’s take a look at President Xi Jinping. He has recently been elected to a historical third term. This of course is code for President for Life.

He has cozied up to Putin, imprisoned Chinese Wiegers, carried out a brutal crackdown on democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and most recently was posturing in a tense standoffs about the fate of Taiwan. Many think Taiwan could be the next Ukraine as XI Jinping lines up his ducks to make Taiwan China again.

But real life, especially nasty little viruses, don’t always go along with the next chapter of the Dictator’s Playbook. President Xi Jinping took a hardline approach to COVID when it first emerged in Wuhan, China.

Zero COVID policy worked at first and it became the main strategy of Xi. Local authorities eager to prove how loyal they are to Xi have implemented extreme lock down measures, including locking people inside their homes and whole apartment complexes.

Xi has bragged about how effective China’s Zero COVID policy has worked, while the rest of the world suffered. He didn’t put much effort into vaccination efforts other than insisting China make its own vaccine while claiming Western-made vaccine like Pfizer or Moderna would be ineffective.

China would never do something crazy like use a COVID-19 vaccine made in the West! Heck, the Western World is falling apart… look at what happened at the US Capitol!

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Archetypal Animation for When Do We Get To Use Violence?

Well, Xi is right about the US Capitol. We have lost our collective mind, but it is not because we have a free society and democracy (that is what he and his flying monkeys blame all the evil on).

The reason we are losing our collective mind is because our trust landscape is being destroyed by people who want to be just like him–a bully and a dictatorand digital clones, keep reading! But when you tell lies and spread disinformation to prop up your authoritarian ambitions, they tend to come back and bite you in the butt. And that is what is happening in China now.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Map fromChina COVID unrest shines light on history of dissent by Nikkei Asia

CNN reported more than 17 protests occurring all over China, some very bloody. The deaths of people trapped inside their high rise apartment because the fire escapes had been locked due to Zero COVID lockdown measures ignited these protests but anger has been building all over China after 3 years of overzealous lockdowns. These measures are killing people too. Some have not been able to get medical care for heart attacks or other life threatening health conditions, others have committed suicide, all locked down have complained about getting rotten and substandard food or no food. This has lasted for months at a time.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: ‘Unbelievable scenes’ in China as protesters speak out against zero-Covid policy

Xi put himself into this very small box.

The protests are a real threat to his authority, but so too is China’s failure to create a vaccine that works. Virologists have compared China’s vaccine to Pfizer and Moderna and found it is not as effective.

Compounding the limited effect of China’s vaccine, China just has not put as much effort into vaccinating its population, relying instead on enforcing its Zero COVID policies with upmost brutalities. The result is the vast majority of China’s population are under vaccinated or not vaccinated. Nor do many individuals have immunity from a previous infection compared to the overall population.

If they let up on Zero COVID without vaccinating their population with a vaccine that works, COVID will roar through its population killing millions and while it does, it will be mutating and this could cause a BIG problem for the rest of the world, again.

If Xi relents and allows Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to be used in China, he reveals his lies about Western democracies to his people and he looks weak.

Oh what a sticky misinformation landscape Xi has created for himself!

2026 Postscript โ€” Control Refined, Not Relaxed

China did not abandon control after the Zero COVID protestsโ€”it refined it.

Where brute lockdowns once sparked visible resistance, the state has shifted toward more sophisticated forms of digital surveillance, predictive policing, and narrative control. The lesson Xi Jinping learned was not that control fails, but that it must become less visible and more psychologically embedded.

The external posture has also hardened. Taiwan remains a focal point, and China continues to test the boundaries of how far authoritarian power can extend without triggering unified global resistance.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator -- Palantir & ICE
Digital Surveillance in 2026
Image:
YouTube
How Palantir Assists ICE | Interesting …

How Dictatorship Spreads (Chinaโ€™s Model) [2026]

China represents a different branch of the authoritarian evolution: not chaos, but precision.

Its model shows that a population can be managed not only through fear, but through dependency, convenience, and digital integration. This is authoritarianism that doesnโ€™t always feel like oppressionโ€”it feels like infrastructure.

As Western democracies destabilize internally, Chinaโ€™s model gains appeal. It offers what struggling nations crave: order, predictability, and control.

If the United States falters, the ideological competition weakens. The world doesnโ€™t just driftโ€”it tilts.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator -- Corruption, Billionaires, Trump
Colosseum of Power explores how Billionaires are using their technology to buy elections and lull Americans into complacency (This graphic novel is available on Sapience’s Shop: The Quip Collection)

How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): If Disinformation Doesn’t Work, Create A Scapegoat and Attack It

This is what Putin is doing now in Russia. He is losing the war in Ukraine. He looks weak and stupid. He needs a good distraction so his citizens don’t rise up against him and who knows, perhaps they castrate the man.

After all, it is his actions, and his actions alone, that have cut the Russian people off from the rest of the world–no Facebook, no Twitter, no vacations to Paris or Italy, no McDonalds–all because of his war with Ukraine.

So what does Putin do? Putin makes being gay illegal in Russia. He calls it a sickness of democracy and the Western World. He claims Russians don’t have gay people.

Come on Putin… now you look even more stupid than before. To read more about Putin and his flying monkeys, see Ukraine Letters.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Scapgoat from January 2021 blog

2026 Postscript โ€” The Weaponization of Identity

Putinโ€™s use of scapegoating has only intensified. As military outcomes fluctuate and internal pressures grow, the targeting of LGBTQ+ communities, dissidents, and โ€œWestern-influencedโ€ citizens has expanded into a broader cultural purge.

This is not random crueltyโ€”it is strategic cohesion. By defining an internal enemy, Putin reinforces loyalty among those who fear becoming the next target.

Can you name the ways Trump and company are scapegoating Americans?


2026 — AI Overview

Donald Trump and his allies have consistently utilized scapegoating as a political strategy to build power, focusing blame on immigrants, political rivals, the media, and specific officials to rally supporters. Key targets include immigrants, blaming them for crime and economic issues, and Democrats/critics like Hillary Clinton and Obama. [1234]

Key figures and groups targeted include:

  • Immigrants and Refugees:ย Portrayed as invaders causing economic instability and crime, often used to justify stricter policies.
  • Political Rivals & Government Officials:ย Including Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Democratic Congressional leaders, often branded as culprits for policy failures.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci:ย Used as a target for public frustration regarding COVID-19 recommendations.
  • The Media (“Fake News”):ย Labeled the “enemy of the people” to undermine negative reporting.
  • The “Deep State” & Federal Employees:ย Accused of sabotaging the administration.
  • International Bodies and Allies:ย China was used to push trade issues, while others have been blamed for perceived,ย 0.5.11ย US weakness.ย [1,ย 2,ย 3,ย 4,ย 5,ย 6]

The MAGA movement has also utilized broader targets like “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) to blame for various societal and institutional issues. [1]

How Dictatorship Spreads (Scapegoating as Glue)

Every authoritarian system eventually needs a scapegoat.

Fear alone is unstable. It must be anchored to a visible โ€œother.โ€ Once that โ€œotherโ€ is defined, society reorganizes itself around avoidance, compliance, and silent agreement.

This tactic travels easily across borders because it adapts to local culture. In one country it is immigrants. In another, intellectuals. In another, religious or sexual minorities.

The specifics change. The mechanism does not.

And againโ€”the United States plays a pivotal role.

If America normalizes scapegoating at scale, it accelerates this tactic globally. It tells every would-be strongman that division is not a liabilityโ€”it is a governing strategy.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): The Dictator’s Playbook

Dictators around the world and throughout history use the same tactics. They attack the truth, exaggerate threats to make people afraid, and enflame emotions to herd as many people as possible under their make-believe umbrella constructed out of their annoying, droning chant: “I and I alone can fix it.

That is the secret spell of a dictator. This stupid chant is his top-secret, classified magic potion. This is what every dictator throughout time has ever used to manipulate the masses. It is called ignorance dust. It is what evil fairies use to make their mischief.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: My drawing from April 2021 blog

What they don’t say out loud is …they broke it and they made up the boogeyman who you are now afraid of!

Dictators systematically claim they represent truth, decency, and dignity while fabricating facts, fiends, and fantasies about their own greatness.

Dictators pit people against each other, then they sit and watch the carnage on TV.

PBS recently aired a miniseries on the Dictator’s Playbook. Also, this 11-page PDF summarizes a 2011 book written by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith titled: The Dictators Handbook, Why Bad Behaviour is almost always Good Politics

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: PBS recently aired a series on the Dictator’s Playbook | This is Episode 3 Benito Mussolini

And if these resources aren’t enough, Dr. Mark Van Vugt wrote for Psychology Today The 7 Steps to Becoming a Dictator.

1. Expand your power base through nepotism and corruption.

2. Instigate a monopoly on the use of force to curb public protest.

3. Curry favour by providing public goods efficiently and generously.

4. Get rid of your political enemies.

5. Create and defeat a common enemy.

6. Accumulate power by manipulating the hearts and minds of your citizens.

7. Create an ideology to justify an exalted position.

You should read the article because Mark gives some very lively examples.

2026 Closing Reflection โ€” The Global Stakes

What Maria Ressa warned about was never confined to one country.

Authoritarianism is not just a political systemโ€”it is a psychological condition that spreads through fear, repetition, and the erosion of shared reality. Each country that falls doesnโ€™t stand alone; it becomes proof of concept for the next.

This is why the United States matters so deeply in this moment.

If it resists, it disrupts the pattern.
If it falls, it accelerates it.

Because when one of the worldโ€™s most visible democracies begins to mirror the tactics of dictators it once condemned, the signal to the rest of the world is unmistakable:

The guardrails are gone.

And once that belief takes hold, the descent is no longer unthinkableโ€”it becomes inevitable.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): So, Just How Do You Stand Up to a Dictator?

Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate

This brings us back to Maria Ressa. She stood up to Rodrigo Duterte and to Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook nightmare. In an interview with Dave Davies on FreshAir she said:

I wasn't the only one under attack in Rappler. And Rappler is about a hundred people. We're - we just became - we hit 10 years. We're 10 years old January this year. So my gosh, we're going to be 11 by January next year. But it's 63% women. And our median age is 23 years old. So when our younger reporters came under attack, I became far more protective of our team.
And within a short period of time, we increased our security six times, seven times, because at some point it became very clear that online violence is real-world violence. And, you know, in your introduction, you talked about the attacks of President Duterte and Facebook. I think, by 2016, I was calling for an end to impunity, impunity of Rodrigo Duterte and this brutal drug war and impunity of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. They go hand in hand. One could not have happened without the other.

DAVIES: When you started Rappler, this news service, one of the things you note is that the population of the Philippines had already become remarkably attached to digital technology. Different from a lot of places in that way, wasn’t it?

RESSA: Yeah. Look, we were the texting capital of the world before this, the SMS capital of the world. And then we became known as the social media capital of the world. And by January 2021, for six years in a row, Filipinos spent the most time online and on social media globally. A hundred percent of Filipinos on the internet today are on Facebook. Facebook literally is our internet.

DAVIES : I mean, it seems that what you were discovering was that social media platforms, like Facebook, have discovered that people respond to sharply emotional messages. And so the algorithms give them more of that – anger, hatred, resentment – which, in turn, brings more engagement, which is what their economic model is based on. And it – you observed that this was allowing people who were telling lies that were destructive and poisonous to democracy to spread faster than truth.

The interesting thing is that you actually had conversations with Facebook executives about this, right? You met with a bunch of them. Did they get it? What did they say?
RESSA: Rappler was essentially an alpha partner of Facebook. We knew Facebook in the Philippines better than Facebook did. And I went to them with the data, hoping that they would give me more data and fix it. I thought it would be an easy fix 'cause in 2016, it was alarming to see this kind of, you know, incitement of hate. In 2017, I was one of about a dozen startup founders that Mark Zuckerberg met with. And, you know, I was trying to get him to come to the Philippines to see how powerful Facebook was. And at that point, 97% of Filipinos were there. And that's what I told him. I said, you know, you really have to come 'cause 97% of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook. So he started frowning. And I thought, OK, I must have been a little too pushy. And then, he looked at me. And he said, Maria, where are the other 3%?

DAVIES: (Laughter).

RESSA: I think that was the problem, right? They were so focused on market share, their profits, their goal for the business, that they forgot to look at the social harms. I also don't think it's a coincidence that they do not tell the difference between fact and fiction. It doesn't have any business or economic benefits to doing that. So at this point, you don't even have facts. So what did they do? They outsourced it. They gave - it became a fact-checking network that was doing this. But it was never integral to the product by design. Social media divides and radicalizes, and this is what we're seeing in the world today.

DAVIES: You write that, at one point, Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to start to really focus on weeding out offensive content. And you said, you’re missing the point. It’s – the problem isn’t content; it’s distribution. What did you mean?

RESSA: Because so much of the debate centers on content when that isn't the problem. Doesn't matter if your crazy neighbor talks about a conspiracy theory. You'll still like your crazy neighbor, and you listen. But it becomes different when that's the front page of your town newspaper. Imagine, the crazy things now make it to the front page. That is what goes viral. And that's the world we live in. Doesn't matter if it's real or not as long as it captures your attention. So it is your amygdala that decides, right? If you get angry, you'll share it.
And this is the - I mean, look, there is a - E.O. Wilson, who studied emergent behavior in ants, said that our greatest crisis that we face is our Paleolithic emotions, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technology. That godlike technology manipulated us to the point that the very systems of democracy that gave rise to this is now at the verge of failure.

DAVIES: You know, at the end of the book, you kind of ask the big question, which is, what do we do about this? I mean, now that you’ve – it’s apparent how harmful and poisonous this can be for democratic institutions. You know, in the United States, I mean, tens of millions of people believe made-up stories about a stolen election despite plenty of fact-checking that has been published debunking a lot of these stories. You think you have some strategies that might be effective? I mean, this is a little complicated, but share some of these ideas with us.

RESSA: In the short term, we decided, as we were walking into our presidential elections, that we would try to figure out what a whole-of-society approach to civic engagement could look like. And we created a four-layer, facts-first pyramid - four different layers. The bottom layer are 16 news organizations - the first time news groups worked together. You know, I've been trying since 2016, but we finally all work together. And that is the supply of fact checks.
But as you know, fact checks are really boring. They don't get wide distribution on social media. So that leads to the second layer. It's called the mesh - 115, 116 different civil society groups - NGOs, human rights organizations, climate change groups were there - business, the church. The Philippines is Asia's largest Roman Catholic nation. And the goal of the mesh layer is to share those boring fact checks, but to add emotion because emotion is what moves it through distribution. And what we found when we did that was that inspiration spreads as far as anger. The third layer are academic institutions. Eight of them total that took the data from the first two and every week told Filipinos how we were being manipulated, who was winning, who was losing, what were the media narratives being seeded? And then finally, the last layer, layer four, is rule of law. It's legal organizations from the left to the right in the Philippines, from the free legal group to the integrated bar of the Philippines to the Philippine Bar Association.
They filed, in less than three months, more than 21 cases, tactical and strategic, that helped protect the three layers. It worked. We were able to - it was the most successful attempt to try to take over the center of our information ecosystem. We mapped it. But more than that, within two weeks of launching this facts-first pyramid, the Philippine government - the office of the solicitor general filed a petition at the supreme court against Rappler and our commission on elections, because we were working with them at that point. They said that fact-checking is prior restraint. They tried to stop us from fact-checking. It almost made me laugh.

DAVIES: To kind of summarize here, it sounds like what you’re proposing is that news organizations need to overcome some of their competitive instincts and work together when there is important fact-checking to be done, connect them to other organizations in a way that puts energy and emotion into it and get that out there.

RESSA: Think about it like this. Like, if you don't have integrity of facts, you cannot have integrity of elections. And ultimately, what that means is that these elections will be swayed by information warfare. I mean, you know, it's funny. Americans actually look at the midterms. And they say, well, it wasn't as bad as it could be. Death by a thousand cuts - it's still bad. And if we follow, you know, what - the trend that we're seeing, if nothing significant changes in our information ecosystem, in the way we deliver the news, we will elect more illiberal leaders democratically in 2023, in 2024.
And what they do is they crumble institutions of democracy in their own countries, like you've seen in mine. But they do more than that. They ally together globally. And what they do is, at a certain point, the geopolitical power shift globally will change. Democracy will die. That point is 2024. We must figure out what civic engagement [looks like and], what we do as citizens today, to reclaim, [and] to make sure democracy survives.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): Surveillance capitalism

In Maria Ressa’s interview on 1A, she explained surveillance capitalism and how it enabled want-a-be dictators like Duterte and Trump to actually get elected in Free and Fair elections. Something she told Jen would never have happened pre-Facebook (and other social media era).

Here is how she explains it:

technology has degraded facts and broken our societies. I became a journalist because I believe that information is power - itโ€™s how we get justice. The death of democracy began when journalists lost our gatekeeping powers to the technology platforms that not only abdicated responsibility for protecting us ... but also destroyed democracy by destroying the facts ... for immense profit.
Like the age of industrialization, thereโ€™s a new economic model that brought new harms, a model Shoshana Zuboff called surveillance capitalism - when our atomized personal experiences are collected by machine learning, organized by artificial intelligence - extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will - a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlovโ€™s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences. This is happening to you - to all of us around the world.
Engagement based metrics of these American tech companies mean that the incentive structure of the algorithms, which is just their opinion in code implemented at a scale that we could never have imagined, is insidiously shaping our future by encouraging the worst of human behavior. Studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts.
Without facts, you canโ€™t have truth. Without truth, you canโ€™t have trust. Without these, we have no shared reality, no rule of law, no democracy.
In my upcoming book, the prologue I submitted last year began with the splintering of reality in Crimea in 2014. I had to revise that when Russia invaded Ukraine using the same narratives seeded then. Would that have happened if the platforms had acted 8 years ago? That is the true cost for the world.
Now these networks form a global nervous system of toxic sludge partly fueled by geopolitical power play. In 2018, we connected the information operations in the Philippines with Russian disinformation networks through websites in Canada. In 2020, Facebook took down information operations from China that were creating fake accounts for the US elections, polishing the image of the Marcoses, campaigning for Duterteโ€™s daughter, and attacking me and Rappler. In 2021, the US and the EU called out China and Russia for Covid-19 disinformation.
We are all connected.

To read more on how to tackle this huge problem that the whole world faces, a psychological-social virus just as deadly as the Coronavirus, see her speech: The Assault on Freedom of Expression. It is jaw dropping.


No one can afford to sit on the sidelines and watch how this all plays out. Every human being alive right now has a choice to act or watch democracy fall. And if the choice is to watch, you will also watch the world fall over the Climate Cliff.

You (reading this right now)… you will be alive to watch this all happen. It is happening right now and it is going to happen faster than anyone has previously predicated.

If we don’t save democracies, we will never get around to collaborating like we have never collaborated before as a global species to solve the looming climate crises bearing down on all of us right now. These climate crises are going to push the entire human race over the Climate Cliff.

It is time to Wake Up!

And Ron DeSantis (another want-a-be dictator), go buy yourself a mask, fins, and snorkel because if Florida is where Woke Goes to Die…well, Florida ain’t going to be around after Earth’s glaciers melt… and it’s going to happen much faster than the Woke People you disparage are telling you it will happen!

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The world with a 70 meters sea-level rise

Think about it. Think about it hard.

What will you say to your children and grandchildren 50 years from now when there are no more democratic countries and we fail to act on Climate Change?

What will you tell them when you did not try to stop the Putins, the Xis, the Trumps (and his flying monkeys), and the rigid old men in Iran persecuting and killing their young people?

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Archetypal Animation for Ukraine Letters | March 2022

And old men of Iran, for what? What are you killing your young people for… a strand of hair sticking out from a veil?! Come on you stupid old men… what are you going to do? Kill every young person in your country? Yes, probably you will… the ouroboros is the symbol for rigid old men clinging to their dictatorships.

And the North Koreas…well, Kim Jong Un is sitting pretty these days not collaborating with anybody not even his fellow dictators and firing off his rockets… he is the ultimate symbol for a manly male, a tough pluck... a virile coward if I ever saw one. Someone has to enjoy all the spoils he directs only to him and his loyal supporters.

Maria Ressa says we are all living in the upside-down now. Yes, the very same weird world as depicted in Stranger Things. In this world, only the ruthless get to relax in luxury. Everyone else suffers unbelievable poverty, abuse, and gets crushed under super surveillance systems created by dictators afraid of losing power.

We may be wise enough to know that Facebook is tracking us using super surveillance systems and this is pretty bad… this is where we are now. We all exist in a world of digital clones that are used against us to make huge profits for the ridiculously rich people of the world (think Elon Musk— you can be a corporate dictator too!). These are nasty little things corporations and social media platforms use to make more money by tearing truth, facts, and reality into tiny shreds. Read Maria’s book!

But the next step is not so very far away in our collective global future. The people fighting for their very lives in Ukraine RIGHT NOW know this! They know Putin will not stop if he wins Ukraine. No strongmen, no dictator, no authoritarian is ever satisfied with what they have. They always want more. That is their purpose in life. They have made themselves into monsters and the only thing they can do is devour the entire world. There are a lot of monsters alive RIGHT NOW trying to do this very thing.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: ย One of the images used in Feature Archetypal Animation from November 23, 2022 | The Monsters We Make

The next step Maria Ressa is very clear about is the fall of democracies around the world and the rise of dictatorships ruled by the ruthless. I believe her. And guess what? There is not much room at the top. What all ruthless rulers eventually do if they last long enough is turn on the very people who put them in power. Think about it. Ruthless rulers always need a foil, a ploy, an enemy, a scapegoat. Once they kill all the obvious people, they will start in on their loyal base of followers, the very people they put to sleep using their maniacal evil fairy dust: ignorance.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Archetypal Animation for When Do We Get to Use Violence | January 2022 blog

This is happening NOW on our watch!

How will you explain this to your children?

How will you explain food shortages, water shortages, raging floods and fires, sunken cities, more global pandemics, and governments that won’t even allow you to hold up a blank sheet of paper to protest not being able to protest for your most basic human needs and rights?

How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): Feature Archetypal Animation

Index Finger Hands Poor Clouded Sky Water | Inactive account โ€“ ID 8385

Head Human Head Half Profile Portrait Side View | Inactive account โ€“ ID 8385

Rodrigo Duterte | The Daily Beast

Graffiti Trump Mural Cologne Street Art Urban Art | clecaux | Cรฉcile Lecaux  โ€ข  Kรถln/Bonn/Deutschland  โ€ข  Member since July 13, 2017

Xi Jinping | Xi’s Back, Claims Chinese Media. Here’s Why His Appearance Is Big News

Vladimir Putin Russia Kgb President Ukraine | ProsaClouds | Deutsch  โ€ข  Member since Jan. 21, 2016

Zombie Devil Evil |diggersstory | Patter Hill  โ€ข  Big O town in Florida/USA  โ€ข  Member since Aug. 28, 2014

Music:

It Can Be Done but Only I Can Do It; Omar S

[1] Solely Supported    6:33

[2] Supported Solely    8:02

[3] Look Hear Watch    5:50

[4] Ganymede    7:54

[5] You Wish    8:46

[6] Over You Too    11:28

[7] It Can Be Done but Only I Can Do It    6:18

First They Crumble, Then They Fall: Pay Attention Now or Pay with Fate

I just finished watching the first season of Apple’s Original TV series Foundation based on Isaac Asimov’s book series by the same name. I was especially interested in how Asimov deals with the inner workings of a highly advanced technology-based empire spanning the entire galaxy. This Empire must deal with all the peculiarities that make life so interesting and precarious on Earth, except it manages hundreds of thousands of planets that are spread light years apart from each other. It’s an Empire whose human descendants don’t remember where they came from, which of course is Earth.

First They Crumble, Then They Fall: Synnax & Trantor

The first episode takes you in immediately. Gaal Dornick is leaving her home world, Synnax. Her world is sinking underwater due its people’s sins of not taking better care of their planet. They deal with this global disaster by banning science, executing intellectuals, and returning to superstition and religious-cults to survive their own undoing. She is off to met Hari Seldon, a mathematics professor at Streeling University on the planet Trantor who developed psychohistory, an algorithmic science that allows him to predict the future in probabilistic terms.

Some unexpected things happen to Gaal on Trantor. People in the galaxy call this planet the machine planet. It is where spectacular special effects occur. Apple won a Golden Globe (or something like that) for the special effects in this first episode, called The Emperor’s Peace.

First They Crumble, Then They Fall: Home of the Empire

Trantor is also the planet where the Empire is based. It looks like a machine from space because its needs a massive amount of infrastructure to run and rule an entire galaxy full of people who are constantly getting into conflicts and warring with each other. That’s an Empire’s job–right?–to run and rule the people of its realm fairly and justly and to keep the peace?

No,” you say?

Well, you are right…most empires, including future highly technical ones, tend to do a pretty crappy job of ruling their territories and people. Disparities tend to develop between those with power and those who supply the power to run the empire. For instance, everyone in Trantor lives in the machine environment that goes 100 levels underground. The exception is the people living at the Imperial Palace. Here it is green and lush and luxurious. That’s one obvious inequity. There are many more and there are various rebellions against each one, all at a different stage of rebellion against the Empire.

This is what Hari is trying to warn the Empire about. There is a looming disaster coming that is going to crush everything. The Empire will fall and humanity, what is left of it, will plunge into 30,000 years of primitive darkness unless…

It’s the same problem the Lorax had with the Once-ler.

Empires often resort to use of excessive force to put down resistances. They don’t want to look weak! They also tend to think they know everything, and thus different points of view such as Hari’s are viewed as threatening and something to be exterminated. Rules and laws mainly serve as a pretexts for violence and use of deadly force to control the masses. And then wait until you see how this Empire deals with the rather awkward process of succession. Changing from one ruler to another ruler is always a rather fragile and weak time for empires. Researching Ruthless Rulers for my book, ancient Rome was a viper’s nest around issues of succession.

First They Crumble, Then They Fall: Critique About Series

I read criticism from one source that after the first episode, the Apple TV series veers far from Isaac Asimov original novels. Apple has Asimov’s daughter consulting on the script and in production. And as for veering from the storyline of the books, these critics simply don’t have anything else to criticize. Of course a TV series or movie is going to veer from the original written work, film is a completely different story telling device. A filmed telling of this vastly complex world is necessarily very different than a written telling of it… full stop.

First They Crumble, Then They Fall: Female Cast and Characters

I think Apple hits it out of the ball park with the female leads! They are impressive.

Lou Llobell plays Gaal Dornick. I couldn’t find much on Lou, but I sure want to see more of her. She is so feisty, intelligent, instinctive, and deeply intuitive–she far surpasses her male counter leads.

Leah Harvey plays Salvor Hardin, the Warden on Terminus. I didn’t find much on her either, but she knocks it out of the ball park and beyond in this role. She too is feisty, tough, intelligent, instinctive, curious, protective, and deeply intuitive. She also far surpasses her male leads…though I do admit, I have a serious crush on her lover, Hugo.

Salvor Hardin and the Huntress behind her

Laura Brin plays Demerzel. She is the last of her kind after the Robot Wars. She serves as Minister to Emperor Cleon. She is one powerful mix of Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation; 7 or 9 from Star Trek: Voyager; and Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. She knows how to handle Cleon’s mercurial moods.

T’Nia Miller plays the religious leader Zephyr Halima who is from Mirrus Twelve. She is positioning herself to be the next Proxima; the head of a mother worshipping religion dedicated to the Three Goddesses–Maiden, Mother, and Crone. She is a stunning and mighty woman. I would follow her.

Kubbra Sait plays the Grand Huntress from Anacreon who has a big grudge against the Empire. She is badass, fast, cunning, and beautiful in a terrifying way.

First They Crumble, Then They Fall: Male Cast and Characters

The male cast members are great too. They include:

Jared Harris plays Hari Seldon, very convincingly. He is a professor, mathematician, and creator of psychohistory algorithmic science. Basically, your good old troubler maker for the Empire. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? You’re going to have to watch to find out.

Lee Pace plays Brother Day. I hated this character at first, then I begin to like him. Oh yeah, he played Elvenking in the Hobbit too

Cassian Bilton plays Brother Dawn. He is less well known, but his performance is right up there with the women, especially when he is wrestling with the more feminine parts of himself.

Terrence Mann plays Brother Dusk powerfully. I liked him best first, then began to hate him.

Alfred Enoch plays Raych Seldon, Hari’s adopted son. He is awesome and deeply complex character shrouded in mysteries.

There are plenty more amazing characters; after all, this empire needs to populate an entire galaxy with humans!

First They Crumble, Then They Fall: One Shadow

I was sad to read Josh Friedman left as a key writer earlier in the series. He has written and produced blockbusters such as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Avatar: The Way of Water. Wiki says he left due to creative difference with the network over radical difference in vision. I wish I knew more about what these were. He says he was pressured to leave. Several cast and crew left with him. This is a shadow on what I otherwise think is a TV series that is well worth watching and has done a tremendous job in making the cast diverse and reflective of many different skin tones, ideologies, and everything else we humans use to divide ourselves from one another.

First They Crumble, Then They Fall: Music Feature Archetypal Animation

Music: Foundation: Season 1 (Apple TV+ Original Series Soundtrack) by Bear McCreary [1] Foundation Main Title ย ย ย 1:27

Continuing with the theme of empires, there is a movie worth watching called Waiting for Barbarians (2019). It is based on a novel by the same name written by J. M. Coetzee and published in 1980. This story takes a piercing view into the bureaucratic nature of empires, particularly the warring aspect of them.

The movie begins in a lowly desert outpost on the frontiers of an unnamed Empire, but I can hazard a few guesses. It is run by a Magistrate (played by Mark Rylance) who is humble, curious about ancient artifacts, and does a very good job of maintaining the peace. Mostly he leaves the native people alone, listens, and looks for ancient treasures as he tries to understand what might have existed there before.

Then, Colonel Joll (played by Johnny Depp) arrives wearing his sunglasses!

The sunglasses tell you everything you need to know about him. By the end of the movie, you realize he’s the barbarian.

When Do We Get To Use Violence: MAGA Mind & the End End of Now

And Other Damnable Things to Remember about January 6, 2021

First Archetypal Animation | Trying to Work It Out 

When Do We Get To Use Violence: Trying to Work It Out | Music: 40 Thieves – The Work Of A Craftsman | The Noam Chomsky Music Project | An Incredible Moment

In the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, my brother-in-law was heard telling his son, “I can’t wait for the shooting and killing to begin.”

I don’t share this to expose what a despicable man he is (although after spending 2.5 weeks with him after attending a memorial service for my sister-in-law who lost her battle to breast cancer, he showed me just how repugnant, wretched, beastly, and hate-filled he has become as a sorry excuse for a man. I am video blogging about the good, the bad, and the ugly in my Big Sky Series).

Rather I share this sad sentiment to shine light on the reality that the 309,000 people living in the US who do not believe in the Big Lie and do not believe violence is justified to overturn an election whose results they don’t like probably know someone who does.

The Conversation reports:

The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats have been tracking insurrectionist sentiments in U.S. adults, most recently in surveys in June. We have found that 47 million American adults โ€“ nearly 1 in 5 โ€“ agree with the statement that โ€œthe 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.โ€ Of those, 21 million also agree that โ€œuse of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.โ€

Why should we be paying attention to this when there are so many other Big Problems such as Climate Change, poverty, and disease that need our time and attention. Because the ramifications of the United States of American falling prey to autocratic, authoritarian, dictatorial rule are huge. And as a democracy, we have never been nearer to such an outcome since the Civil War.

Here is what Timothy Snyder, Yale history professor, predicts would happen if a Trump 2024 coup that is carefully being architected right now through our legal systems and then shored up with new legislation restricting voting rights and further bolstered by installing more compliant men and women at state and local levels who are willing to do as the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused to do when Trumped asked him to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in Georgia.


Yale history professor Timothy Snyder predicts the horrific aftermath of a Trump coup in 2024

If Trump runs in 2024, he will lose the popular vote. If corrupt GOP state legislators install Trump as President, the United States will quickly and catastrophically cease to exist. That's what Yale history professor Timothy Snyder says in the latest issue of his "Thinking About" newsletter.

“In a situation where he is installed as president after losing an election, Mr. Trump would vainly try to control what will quickly cease to be the United States. His allies who wish to destroy the state will be the only winners.ย  The precise scenario of the collapse of the United States is impossible to predict, but some of the following is likely to happen, and quickly.ย 

Tens of millions of people protest.ย Paramilitaries on both sides emerge.ย Violence leads to fake and real stories of deaths, and to revenge.ย  Police and armed forces will know neither whom they should obey nor whom they should arrest.ย  With traditional authority broken, those wearing uniforms and bearing arms will become partisans, take sides, and start shooting one another.ย  Governors will look for exit strategies for their states.ย  Americans will rush to parts of the disintegrating country they find safer, in a process that looks increasingly like ethnic cleansing.ย The stock market and then the economy will crash.ย The dollar will cease to be the world currency.”ย 

MARK FRAUENFELDER  | BoingBoing | 8:38 AM THU JAN 6, 2022
Snyder is the author of the short book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Read Mark Frauenfelder's full article for highlights from this book. It sounds frightening like Margret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale!

It would perhaps be easier if the 47 million people who believe the election was stolen, and especially the 21 million who are ready to take violent action to right their misperceived wrong, lived in a single state like Texas, and then let that state secede from the union like the South wanted to do during the Civil War. But that is not our shared reality. We are interwoven and connected to the 47 million American adults who believe the election was stolen from Trump and cross paths with the 21 million adults who are willing to use violence to get their way.

They are our brothers (or brother-in-laws), sisters, uncles, aunts, parents, children, and friends. So what do we do?

We stay informed. We find was to stay sane as my Big Sky Series is video blogging about. We endure the uncertainty and the extreme discomfort, anxiety, and fear that goes with it. And despite it all, we find ways to restore our sense of faith in people that at our centers, we are capable of heroic acts of kindness, goodness, and unselfishness as demonstrated just yesterday when Los Angeles police officers risked their lives to pull a pilot from his crashed plane seconds before a commuter train crashed into it.


What follows is a curation of some of the reporting on Jan 6 one year later and what has been learned as well as what remains a threat. It is by no means a comprehensive list. For example, I have made a conscious decision not to highlight “news” sources touting the Big Lie even as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pulls the oldest trick days after marking this sad day in American history. It is a standard go to trick in the authoritarian’s playbook, which is pretend the other side is doing exactly what you are doing.

The Hill reports:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnellโ€™s (R-Ky.) office knocked Democrats over โ€œthe leftโ€™s Big Lieโ€ โ€” which it pegged as the belief that โ€œthere is some evil anti-voting conspiracy sweeping Americaโ€ โ€” as Democrats look to push for federal voting rights legislation.

A memo from the minority leaderโ€™s office on Sunday predicts that Democrats will โ€œtry to use fake hysteria to break the Senate and silence millions of Americansโ€™ voices so they can take over elections and ram through their radical agenda,โ€ likely referring to calls by many Democrats to abolish the filibuster in the Senate to pass voting rights reforms.

I have roughly laid out the information below by news sources, begining with a compelling interview with Evan Osonos about the building of a Right-Wing media empire just in time for the 2024 election.


FreshAir Reporting

Second Archetypal Animation | Purveyors of Rage

Building of a Right-Wing Media Empire to Cancel Cancel Culture

When Do We Get To Use Violence: Purveyors of Rage Culture | Music: Madvillain – The Illest Villains – Madvillainy

And How Dan Bongino is Building a Right-Wing Media Infrastructure in time for 2024

January 6, 2022; 1:40 PM ETHeard on  Fresh Air

Fresh Air Interview with EVAN OSNOS who wrote about Dan Bongino in the New Yorker about how he is building a right-wing media empire just in time for the 2024 election--how to cancel cancel culture.

A Several Things That Grabbed My Attention:

When Evan Osnos asked Bongino for an interview, Bongino refused stating, “Why should I want to talk to the enemy.”

Bongino calls face masks mouth diapers and face burkas. While Bongino is vaccinated himself, he tells his followers to remain unvaccinated. When asked about this, he doesn’t see the connection to his vaccination status and continued health versus his followers deaths because they listened to him, remained unvaccinated, caught COVID, and died.

His fellow secret service agents said, “It’s like there are 2 Bonginos; the one who was a secret service agent and the one he is now.” He plays into the suspicion conservatives have that government is not working for us–the common man and woman in America with conservative values.

Bongino made the link between war and the battlefield with politics and differences between parties. He has been very successful in marrying the idea that violence and politics go together. He wrapped himself very tightly around Donald Trump that helped his growing business rise exponentially. He is better at tapping into rage than Alex Jones and others doing the same. Rush died. FoxNews and Matt Drudge are grappling with intense competition on the right for the spotlight.

He has a lot of gun related advertisers and survivalist businesses as well as Omaha steaks and sleep products. Guns and survivalist thinking are phenomena confined to the right. He promotes the idea that elections are rigged and are not to be trusted. He grew up during the time of the NRA dominance and embraces the idea and term the NRA promoted about having a combat mindset.

It is important to understand why we are at the moment we are now, which is arguably worst than one year ago.


Wildland: The Making of American Fury

Book by Evan Osnos

Images from top to bottom:


“A sprawling, fascinating journey through the dawning decades of the 21st century . . . through acute observation, extensive interviewing and dogged research, Osnos weaves an intricate tapestry that gradually reveals how Americans experienced the last two decades.”

โ€•Lizabeth Cohen, The Washington Post

“One of the books of the year . . . Wildland by The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos draws the backstory to America’s rage through deep reporting and ‘thousands of hours of conversations’ in three places he lived before D.C.”

โ€•Axios

“Osnos offers the most personal and the most powerful description yet of a country ‘so far out of balance that it [has] lost its center of gravity’ . . . My hope is that everyone who reads this great book will be enraged enough to redouble their efforts to undo the damage the greedy have wrought, and to take back America for its decent citizens, once and for all.”

โ€•Charles Kaiser, The Guardian

“Visionary in scope, compassionate in procedure, Wildland brilliantly transmutes our national chaos into absorbing narrative order. Evan Osnos has penned a definitive portrait of what we have allowed ourselves to become: a nation reaping the harvest that long negligence has sown.” 

โ€•Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies


Day of Rage

6 month NYT Visual Investigation

This is a six-month Times investigation that has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened โ€” and why.
Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol | NYT Visual Investigations
6,344,823 views, Jul 1, 2021

This is a 40-minute documentary about January 6, 2021. It was produced by The New York Time’s Visual Investigations team that synchronized and mapped thousands of videos of the U.S. Capitol riot to provide the most complete picture to date of what happened on Jan. 6 โ€” and why. It was a massive effort that occurred over six months and involved resources from across the Times newsroom. The Visual Investigation team went to court to unseal police body camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications and interviewed witnesses.

Haley Willis, The New York Times

Peril

Book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa

When Do We Get To Use Violence: Sources for images from top to bottom:

  • Perilย Hardcover โ€“ September 21, 2021 | Amazon
  • Democrat Party cartoons and comics | Cartoonstock
  • 7 Basic Characteristics Every Democracy Needs | The Advertiser Mirror, March 2, 2021 | (1) Civil liability, (2) Democratic values, (3) Guarantee of rights and common welfare, (4) Decentralized democracy, (5) Political participation, (6) Constitutional principle, (7) Democratic models
  • โ€˜American democracy will continue to be testedโ€™: Peril author Robert Costa on Trump, the big lie and 2024 | Interview by David Smith in Washington | A Trump 2024 sign seen at a vendor’s table during an anti-vaccine, anti-mask mandate rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, last month.ย Photograph: Paul Weaver/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock | The Guardian, Sep 26, 2021
  • Arkansas school apologizes for political news summaries in yearbook | By Joseph Wilkinson, May 25, 2021 | Daily News | “The yearbook from Lincoln Junior High in Bentonville, in the stateโ€™s northwest corner, falsely but confidently read, โ€œPresident Trump WAS NOT impeachedโ€ under a photo of the former president, according to photos obtained byย local CBS affiliate KFSM.”
  • Chaos in Washington as Trump supporters storm Capitol | Tuesday, Jan 11, 2022 | Israel Hayom — This is where we stand | US President Trump tweets: These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.
  • The Dan Bongino Show | iHeart | Heโ€™s a former Secret Service Agent, former NYPD officer, and New York Times best-selling author. Join Dan Bongino each weekday as he tackles the hottest political issues, debunking both liberal and Republican establishment rhetoric. [Note: He is a former Secret Service Agent and NYPD officer…he is not so much debunking Republican establishment rhetoric as wrapping it and building a new authoritarian narrative to pave the way for Trump’s glorious return.]
  • Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World? | The Great Manipulator | By David Von Drehle | Feb. 2, 2017 | Cover of Time
  • Top Fox hosts lobbied Trump to act on Jan. 6, texts show | By David Bauder, December 15, 2021 | AP | “The revelation that Fox News Channel personalities sent text messages to the White House during the Jan. 6 insurrection is another example of how the networkโ€™s stars sought to influence then-President Donald Trump instead of simply reporting or commenting on him. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade allย texted adviceย to Trumpโ€™s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as a mob of pro-Donald Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, vice chair of the congressional committee probing the riot.”
  • Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa review โ€” the secret plan to keep Trump in power | The veteran journalist Bob Woodward reveals just how close America was to a coup this year. Review by Justin Webb | The Time UK

Peril is a book by American journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa about the last days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as the presidential transition and early presidency of Joe Biden. The book was published on September 21, 2021, by Simon & Schuster.

 Wikipedia

“The book details how Mr. Trump’s presidency essentially collapsed in his final months in office, particularly after his election loss and the start of his campaign to deny the results.” โ€” Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times

โ€œThe clear theme of Peril is not a rehash or account of what transpired over the past year or so. It is a waving red flag designed to warn the electorate and chattering class that this story is far from over.โ€โ€”Mediaite


Marketplace Tech Reporting

The tech legacy of tracking the Jan. 6 insurrectionists

Marketplace Tech Description: One year after the assault on the Capitol, more police departments have deployed artificial intelligence programs for surveillance.
When Do We Get To Use Violence:

Excerpt:

In the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, law enforcement agencies and internet sleuths identified hundreds of people who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Many were later arrested or faced consequences at their jobs or in their communities.
Authorities used a variety of technologies to speed up that process, which was needed because there were millions of images, videos, messages, social media posts and bits of location data to parse.
Anjana Susarla is professor of responsible artificial intelligence and information systems at Michigan State University and has been studying the role that tech, especially image recognition, is playing in the ongoing search for suspects. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Amanpour and Company Reporting

Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun

When Do We Get To Use Violence: โ€œTrumpโ€™s Next Coup Has Already Begun,โ€ Reports Barton Gellman of The Atlantic | Amanpour and Company 166,157 views, Dec 10, 2021
Overview: Barton Gellman was among the journalists who predicted in 2020 that President Trump would not admit defeat if he lost the presidential election. Now, in a cover story for The Atlantic, Gellman says the former president is in an even better position to seize power. He speaks with Hari Sreenivasan about why he believes democracy will be on trial in the 2024 presidential election. Originally aired on December 10, 2021.

PBS NewsHour & WAMU Reporting

January 6 Was A Shot Across the Bow | It is a Harbinger

When Do We Get To Use Violence:ย Jan. 6 attack was a ‘warning shot’ and likely a ‘harbinger,’ experts say. Hereโ€™s why
9,706 views, Jan 6, 2022
To read the full transcript of this report, see Jan. 6 attack was a โ€˜warning shotโ€™ and likely a โ€˜harbinger,โ€™ experts say. Hereโ€™s why

The Possible End Of American Democracy As We Know It

December 9, 2021, 3:52 PM ET

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman says the Republican party is increasingly unwilling to accept defeat and, in fact, is "prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy." His new Atlantic article is 'Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun.'

Third Archetypal Animation | As The End of Democracy Draws Near

When Do We Get To Use Violence: As The End of Democracy Draws Near | Music: American Democracy: The Endgame of the Human Race byย Noam Chomskyย (Available on Spotify)
[Also see a Dec. 30, 2021 Interview with Noam Chomsky on Rising Fascism in U.S., Class Warfare & the Climate Emergency | Noam Chomsky warns the Republican Party is “marching” the world to destruction by ignoring the climate emergency while embracing proto-fascism at home. Chomsky talks about the January 6 insurrection, how neoliberalism is a form of class warfare and how President Biden’s climate plans fall short of what is needed.When Do We Get To Use Violence: As The End of Democracy Draws Near | Music: American Democracy: The Endgame of the Human Race byย Noam Chomskyย (Available on Spotify)
[Also see a Dec. 30, 2021 Interview with Noam Chomsky on Rising Fascism in U.S., Class Warfare & the Climate Emergency | Noam Chomsky warns the Republican Party is “marching” the world to destruction by ignoring the climate emergency while embracing proto-fascism at home. Chomsky talks about the January 6 insurrection, how neoliberalism is a form of class warfare and how President Biden’s climate plans fall short of what is needed.

The voices of those who experienced the Jan. 6 Capitol attack firsthand | January 06, 2022 | By Naomi Starobin and Gabe Bullard, WAMU

The Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol affected many people โ€” residents, elected officials and their staff, journalists, and the police who were called in to protect them.
WAMU's Naomi Starobin and Gabe Bullard put together this montage of the voices of some of these people who talked about the events of that day and how it impacted them.

America Interrupted

This is the full episode of the PBS NewsHour for Jan. 7, 2022. At minute 23:30, Judy introduced a podcast she and three amazing women reporters witnessed and reported on live while the insurrection unfolded. Lisa Desjardins was inside the Capitol as the rioters invaded and had to hide. She tells about her experience inside the Capitol that day. Amna Nawaz was previously a war correspondent and has parachuted into dangerous places to report on them. She was outside of the Capitol as the rioters invaded and interviewed them in real time. She said the force and energy was just as violent and vitriolic as any of the places she reported during her days as a foreign correspondent reporting on wars. Yamiche Alcindor was at the White House as the day unfolded reporting on what Trump was not doing as the carnage at the Capitol unfolded.


The Jan. 6 insurrection, 1 year later | PBS NewsHour presents
7,241 views, Premiered 4 hours ago
Description: Congress is still investigating the people and organizations linked to the Jan. 6 attack โ€” the most violent assault on the U.S. Capitol since the British attack during the war of 1812. The PBS NewsHour looked back at what happened that day, the lasting impacts on those who survived, where the investigations stand, and the broader effects on American politics, culture and democracy itself.

Fourth Archetypal Animation | Carnage at the Capitol

Carnage at the Capitol | Music: Noam Chomsky — Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind | A Real War

The Conversation Reporting

21 million Americans say Biden is โ€˜illegitimateโ€™ and Trump should be restored by violence, survey finds

The Conversation

September 23, 2021 | 8.29am EDT

For months, my colleagues and I at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats have been tracking insurrectionist sentiments in U.S. adults, most recently in surveys in June. We have found that 47 million American adults โ€“ nearly 1 in 5 โ€“ agree with the statement that โ€œthe 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.โ€ Of those, 21 million also agree that โ€œuse of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.โ€

The Guardian Reporting

Trumpโ€™s โ€˜cult-like controlโ€™ of Republican party grows stronger since insurrection

The Guardian | David Smith in Washington@smithinamerica, Wed 5 Jan 2022 02.00 EST

Fifth Archetypal Animation | “I Just Want to Occupy Your Mind”

“I Just Want to Occupy Your Mind” | Music: Noam Chomsky — Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind | Controlling the Public Mind
"In the year since the insurrection that reverberated around the world, Trumpโ€™s stranglehold on Republicans has seemingly become stronger, not weaker. Graham was soon back on the golf course with him; McCarthy was soon kissing the ring at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Many leaders of the party have set about changing the narrative of the insurrection to portray it as a heroic last stand โ€“ a new โ€œlost causeโ€.

(…)

"Trump was the first president in American history to inspire an attempted coup. After a rally where the defeated incumbent urged supporters to โ€œfight like hellโ€, the angry mob laid siege to the US Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joe Bidenโ€™s victory."
"Five people died, scores of police were beaten and bloodied and there was about $1.5m in damage in the first major attack on the Capitol since the war of 1812. More than 700 people have been charged in one of the biggest criminal investigations in American history."

(…)

"Today the loudest voices in the Republican party belong to the extremists. For them, Trumpโ€™s โ€œbig lieโ€ that the election was stolen from him due to voter fraud, rendering Biden an illegitimate president, goes hand in hand with the lie that the insurrection was a morally justified crusade, an righteous endeavor to save democracy, not destroy it."
"Trump himself perpetuates this through a regular barrage of interviews, rallies and emailed statements since he was barred from Twitter. Notably he has sought to lionize Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead during the riot, as a martyr."
"Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman, has cast rioters currently held in detention in a similar light. In November she visit a Washington jailโ€™s so-called โ€œpatriot wingโ€ and complained the inmates were enduring โ€œinhumaneโ€ conditions because of their political beliefs."
"Other pro-Trump Republicans in the House echo these messages โ€“ one referred to the Capitol attack as a โ€œnormal tourist visitโ€ โ€“ or do little to contradict them. Some Republican senators are evidently more uncomfortable with the web of deceit and urge the party to look forward to the next election. But again only a small minority are willing to take Trump on directly."

WBUR Here & Now Reporting

Dark day on the calendar of American history’: Historian explains how Jan. 6 will be remembered

Even in the early moments of the insurrection, Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley suggested former President Donald Trump would need to take some responsibility for goading on his supporters.
One year later, he joins Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd to reflect on Jan. 6 and how history will view that day.
This segment aired on January 6, 2022.

It is kind of like a NeoCivil War still going on today. It really is all hands on deck to save democracy and the right to vote today.

Douglas Brinkley

Vermont Democrat reflects on fleeing the Capitol on Jan. 6 riot, one year later

WBUR | January 06, 2022

"Rep. Peter Welch (VT-D) joins Here & Now's Scott Tong to reflect on trying to flee angry rioters in the Capitol building on this day last year, and what the legacy of that insurrection is today."
"Capitol police told us to get on the floor and put on our gas masks. Then, I heard a shot from the floor below us.  There was an immense sense of peril."

Sixth Archetypal Animation | No Way Out!

No Way Out! | Music: Noam Chomsky — Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind | Conscious Manipulation
Plays clip of Danny Rodriguez accused of tasing Officer Fanone who breaks down crying saying he couldn't believe how stupid he was he thought he was going to be a hero.
New FBI Video Shows Interrogation Of Jan. 6 Defendant Accused Of Tasing Officer
240,380 views, Nov 30, 2021

Extremism and accountability: how the aftermath of Jan. 6 impacts future plots

WBUR | January 06, 2022 by Amanda Beland & Tiziana Dearing

It started with 'The Big Lie." Many argue that led directly to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th last year.
Over the last twelve months, hundreds have been arrested and charged in connection with the insurrection, including nearly a dozen from New England and six from Massachusetts.
But that's just a fraction of those who breached the Capitol that day. And as investigations - both by law enforcement and Congress continue - it has become clear that there was coordination, planning, at least by and for some of the participants, behind that breach.
We talk more about accountability, and what the future may hold for extremism locally and nationally with Joan Donovan, Research Director at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and Andrew Lelling, former US Attorney for Massachusetts under the Trump Administration. Lelling coordinated with the U.S. Attorney's office in the District of Columbia on prosecutions.

POLITICO Reporting

The legacy of the Jan. 6 committee … and what’s still left to do

POLITICO Byย RYAN LIZZA,ย KYLE CHENEYย andย KRYSTAL CAMPOS

The legacy of the Jan. 6 committee … and what’s still left to do
1,200 views, Premiered Jan 6, 2022
Description: One year after the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, the House select committeeโ€™s investigation into what happened that day is far from over. Much of the committeeโ€™s work has been behind closed doors, but the bipartisan group of lawmakers plan to enter a more public phase in 2022. This week, Kyle Cheney joins Ryan Lizza to answer a big question: What has the Jan. 6 committee accomplished so far?

The 2021 Lie of the Year: Lies about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and its significance

POLITICO Visual Reporting Team | Possible Up for An Academy Award

ANNOUNCING: PolitiFactโ€™s 2021 Lie of the Year
7,615 views, Premiered Dec 15, 2021

More Amanpour and Company Reporting

Seventh Archetypal Animation | Blessed Be The Fruit

Blessed Be The Fruit | Music: Tjenerindens Fortaelling (The Handmaid’s Tale) Symposium Prologue (2195AD) [Offred and the Handmaids]

Margaret Atwood Sounds the Alarm on Authoritarianism | Amanpour and Company
58,856 views, Dec 29, 2021
Description of Interview: President Biden has promised to face down authoritarianism and defend democracy โ€“ something Margaret Atwood sees as surprisingly fragile. The author is renowned around the world for her dystopian novels, including "The Handmaidโ€™s Tale." In her latest project she takes a turn, with a focus on utopian ideals and how we might do better. Itโ€™s all part of a new online learning experience on Disco called "Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible." Originally aired on December 7, 2021.

“Did you ever imagine when you wrote the Handmaids Tale that this amount of reality would shape up decades later.”

Amanpour and Company
Amanpour and Company
Is Trump Laying the Groundwork for a Coup in 2024? Bill Moyers Weighs In | Amanpour and Company
79,722 views, Jan 5, 2022
Description of Interview: Clashing ideologies about the meaning of democracy in America are no less harrowing than the events of January 6. Journalist Bill Moyers, a 30-time Emmy Award winner, shares his views and concerns in the new PBS documentary "Preserving Democracy," airing tomorrow. Moyers speaks with Hari Sreenivasan alongside historian Kathleen Belew โ€“ who also appears in the film โ€“ about the insurrection and the danger of a recurrence. Originally aired on January 5, 2022.
Ronan Farrow: Who Were the Rioters on Jan. 6th? | Amanpour and Company
1,327,162 views, Feb 10, 2021
Description of Interview: In the Trump impeachment trial, a key element of the prosecution's case is a dramatic video taken at the Capitol during the insurrection. Who were the actual faces in the crowd? Ronan Farrow has profiled three different rioters to learn more about their backgrounds. All three have been arrested and now face criminal charges. One made threats on Farrow's life. Michel Martin speaks with the reporter about his investigation. Originally aired on February 10, 2021.
Jason Stanley Warns: “America Is Now in Fascismโ€™s Legal Phase” | Amanpour and Company
76,730 views, Jan 6, 2022
Description of Interview: Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley sees January 6, 2021 as part of a history of fascist impulses in American politics. This is the focus of his book "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them." His latest article in The Guardian is titled โ€œAmerica is now in fascismโ€™s legal phase.โ€ Stanley speaks with Michel Martin about what he calls an โ€œextremely critical momentโ€ for democracy around the world. Originally aired on January 6, 2021.
A New Study Shows Us the Single Biggest Motivation for the Jan. 6 Rioters | Amanpour and Company
881,468 views, May 6, 2021
Description of Interview: A new study on the January 6 Capitol insurrection finds that of the nearly 400 rioters arrested or charged, 93% are white and 86% are male. Michel Martin speaks to the studyโ€™s principal investigator, Professor Robert Pape, to discuss these findings and some surprising revelations about the attackers and their motives. Originally aired on May 6, 2021.
Jason Stanley: Did This 2 Min. Video Help Incite the Jan. 6 Rioters? | Amanpour and Company
1,111,612 views, Feb 12, 2021
Description of Interview: As former president Donald Trump's second impeachment trial enters its third day, the question remains whether his words or actions incited the January 6 assault on the Capitol. But little attention has been paid to a video that was shown that same day, at the January 6 "March to Save America" rally in Washington, D.C. Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascist propaganda, claims that this short video -- shown immediately after Rudy Giuliani left the stage, prior to the attack on the Capitol -- was full of themes and tactics that threaten liberal democracy. Stanley breaks the video down with Hari Sreenivasan and elaborates on its role in the violence that took place on that infamous day. Originally aired on February 11, 2021.

โ€œRed Flags Everywhere:โ€ Why Did the FBI Dismiss Jan. 6 Warnings? | Amanpour and Company
110,875 views, Nov 10, 2021
Description of Interview: "Presidents are not kings, and the plaintiff is not president." These were the words of a U.S. Federal judge rejecting former President Donald Trump's request to withhold records about the January 6th insurrection. The ruling will give a bipartisan house committee access to hundreds of pages of documents from the Trump White House. The committee also has issued 10 new subpoenas to former Trump officials. The Washington Post has conducted its own extensive investigation called "The Attack: Before, During and After." It included more than 75 journalists and interviews with over 230 people. Here is Michel Martin speaking with Post reporters Amy Gardner and Aaron Davis about the cascade of warnings received before January 6th. Originally aired on November 10, 2021.

CNN Reporting

What it will take to save American democracy | Opinion by Fareed Zakaria | January 10, 2022

Fareed Zakaria | January 10, 2022
"We often hear that, unlike in fledgling democracies, America's institutions are strong. But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man." If people abuse them, attack them, disregard them, they will slowly collapse."

Also, keep an eye out for Fareed Zakaria’s latest special on CNN: The Fight to Save American Democracy. It provides a deep dive into the rise of totalitarian, authoritative, and fascist regimes that follow surprisingly similar recognizable patterns to grab power and control thereby crushing previously democratic societies like Hitler did in 1930’s Germany. The parallels are terrifying. This special will be available at the link above on Jan 16, 2022.

Fareed Zakaria fears American democracy could be in peril
293,953 views, Dec 1, 2019
Fareed: Democracy is decaying worldwide
130,539 views, Feb 25, 2018
Fareed Zakaria: This is how Republicans keep their power
716,275 views, Sep 27, 2020
Is democracy safe for the world? โ€” with Fareed Zakaria (1998) | THINK TANK
2,718 views, Dec 13, 2020
Fareed Zakaria: Is this the Worst of Times? | The Agenda
50,996 views, Jun 15, 2021
The Future of American Democracy
1,221 views, Jan 20, 2021


New York Time’s The Daily Reporting

The Daily | NYT

Jan. 6, Part 1: “The Herd Mentality’

Inside an F.B.I. interview with one of the Capitol rioters.

Eighth Archetypal Animation | Herd Mentality

Herd Mentality — Hey Guys — Just Follow the Herd | Music: Music: Noam Chomsky — Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind | Delusion

Jan. 6, Part 2: Liz Cheney’s Battle Against the ‘Big Lie’

A conversation with the Republican House member about the Capitol riots and the state, and future, of the Republican Party.

The Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi Reporting

The Politics Hour: January 7, 2022

Description: Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md., 8th District) talks about the year since the Jan. 6 insurrection, which he writes about in his new book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Virginia Delegate Marcus Simon (D-53rd District) previews the legislative session, and the strategy for Democrats in a Republican-controlled House.

Power of Denialism

Denialism Is A Dangerous Virus | The Daily Show

January 6th: Did It Even Happen?! (Spoiler: Yes) feat. Chris Hayes & Jordan Klepper | The Daily Show | 587,715 views, Jan 3, 2022

“Don’t Look Up!”

DON’T LOOK UP | Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence | Official Trailer | Netflix
14,080,063 views, Nov 16, 2021
Description: Based on real events that havenโ€™t happened - yet. Donโ€™t Look Up in select theaters December 10 and on Netflix December 24. DONโ€™T LOOK UP tells the story of two low-level astronomers who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth. Written and Directed by Adam McKay.

This awesome movie with an all star cast (better watch out conspiracy theory believers (that’s you QAnon, Deep staters, False flagers operations, “Stolen election” conspiracy theory, Illuminati believers, etc.) totally captures humans ability to ignore and deny reality and facts in pursuit of selfish, egotistical, self-obsessed, money-grubbing, miserly, opportunistic, self-absorbed interests. Did I miss an adjective here?


Where Do We Go From Here?

Paul Solman explores Political polarization prompts efforts to bridge the gap through shared experiences
4,427 views, Jan 10, 2022

This was such a hopeful and inspiring segment in the face of so much depressing realization of the forces at work in this moment and the terrible odds the U.S. has it to make it as a democratic nation beyond 2024.

Description: PBS NewsHour spent much of last week trying to examine what still divides our country and the deep polarization that preceded the Jan. 6 riots. Now, Paul Solman looks at multiple efforts to bridge those major political and cultural fissures in the U.S., beginning with smaller steps forward.

Is There Room for Redemption in Our Cancel Culture? | Amanpour and Company
3,914 views, Jan 7, 2022
Description of Interview: Loretta J. Ross is a visiting professor at Smith College whose teaching focuses on white supremacy in the age of Trump. Ross speaks with Michel Martin about January 6 as a possible opportunity for reflection and healing. Originally aired on January 6, 2022

I wanted to link you, my readers who have made it this far down, to Christiane Amanpour’s January 7, 2022 episode, but it is only available to view on your local PBS station. In this episode Christiane with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Timothy Snyder; Loretta J. Ross speaks with Michel Martin on whether January 6 provides an opportunity for reflection and healing.

Here is the link to Christiane’s interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Timothy Snyder that really hits it out of the park as far as what are the take away lessons from Jan. 6, 2022 and things to pay close attention to in the years leading up to the next US Presidential Election in 2024. Will this fragile democracy make it? Listen and learn for you are part of the answer.

I was also looking for Christiane’s interview with the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu who died in the early days of this dawning year. Christiane’s Jan 7, 2022 episode was a recollection of interviews she had done that spoke to the actions and ramifications of the events of Jan 6, 2021. I have not found a link to her interview, but I found this one on the Dalai Lama’s Finding Joy and Happiness station on YouTube. It speaks to the same spirit that Christiane had recognized and was illuminating with her interview with Desmond Tutu.

Finding Joy and Happiness | 207,835 views, Jul 1, 2021
Description: His Holiness the Dalai Lama reunites online with Archbishop Desmond Tutu from his residence in Dharamsala, HP, India on June 24, 2021, on the occasion of the release of their new movie "Mission: Joy - Finding Happiness in Troubled Times". For more info please see https://missionjoy.org/

We have so much to learn from these two Holy men who stand outside of the self-destructive forces of modern Western Civilization that seems hell bent on standing in a circle and annihilating the world in a mutual massacre of scapegoats. It doesn’t matter what side you stand on when the massacre of scapegoats begins the world is at the beginning of the end for the human race for we have evolved technologies too powerful for our primitive, puny minds to handle with the compassion, understanding, and care necessary to use them anymore.


What is our collective fate? I have no idea, but I am certain each and every person is casting their votes in the ever unfolding moment. We do it in their hearts and minds. We do it in the thoughts we think. We do it even more loudly in the actions we take.

As the old saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words.”

Recently, as I have been struggling to understand and survive my husband’s toxic family structure long poisoned by his mother’s narcissistic personality disorder, I ran across this truth in a video by clinical psychologist Dr. Ramani who is a leading expert on Narcissistic Abuse, Psychopathy, and Sociopathy. She counsel her patients who are mainly the victims of narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths that their words and what they say they will do is always in direction opposition to what they do. It is the very same issue that all of us must heed now in our struggle to save our democracy and this is because our current most dominant system of consciousness, Western Civilization, rewards people who are narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths.

We have the power to create a more perfect union, but this creative process is on-going and must be lived with as much consciousness of ourselves and our own inner, hidden motives as possible. Without that, without conscious growth as an individual, we are doomed to live out our fate, which is our own unconsciousness projected out onto others.

Sources for schema above include (beginning from bottom to top, except when repeated from same source):


Remember that you are a beautiful conscious being! Let your light shine today. When you are fully connected to who you are deep down at the center of your being, your actions will align with life and you will be a creative force for change rather than a destructive force.

The choice is always yours.


The Breakdown of Archetypal Animations

Feature Animation

Hate = Fate

See Human | Heaven | Hell for sources of images and music.


First Archetypal Animation | Trying to Work It Out 

Image Source: Donald Trumpโ€™s Latest Reality Show: The 2020 Election | Trump has been gearing up for the next presidential election since he took office. | Byย John Feffer for The Nation, March 10, 2020

Image Source:
Soldier/submachine gun by WikiImages | Pixabay | Deutsch ย โ€ขย  Member since Dec. 13, 2011
Dead man by soumen82hazra on Pixabay |
English ย โ€ขย  Member since April 24, 2020
Gild Walking with Teddy Bear by reyerbaby on Pixabay | lisa runnels ย โ€ขย  Age 59 ย โ€ขย  magee/united states ย โ€ขย  Member since Jan. 13, 2012

Image Source: Four officers who responded to U.S. Capitol attack have died by suicide by Jan Wolfe for Reuters, August 2, 2021

Image Source: 7 Basic Characteristics Every Democracy Needs | The Advertiser Mirror, March 2, 2021 | (1) Civil liability, (2) Democratic values, (3) Guarantee of rights and common welfare, (4) Decentralized democracy, (5) Political participation, (6) Constitutional principle, (7) Democratic models

Image Source:ย US Capitol riots: Police officerโ€™s death intensifies Capitol siege questionsย | Jan 8, 2021
โ€œTrump supporters near US Capitol where they stormed the historic building, breaking windows and clashing with police. They also erected a noose in the Capitol grounds. Photo / Gettyโ€

Image Pixabay:ย Apocalyptic War Dangerย |ย huckyย | Other images by Hucky

Image Pixabay:ย Disasterย Apocalypse Apocalypticย |ย tomasvl


Music40 Thieves โ€“ The Work Of A Craftsman | The Noam Chomsky Music Project | An Incredible Moment

40 Thieves – The Work Of A Craftsman | The Noam Chomsky Music Project
25 views, Dec 3, 2021

Second Archetypal Animation | Purveyors of Rage Culture 

Images from Pixabay:
Red monster by GregMontani
Greg Montani ย โ€ขย  Age 46 ย โ€ขย  Bayern ย โ€ขย  Member since May 11, 2015
Green Scream by DaModernDaVinci
Shaun ย โ€ขย  Perth/Australia ย โ€ขย  Member since Dec. 15, 2018 ย โ€ขย ย #947
Man Eating Hand by Sammy-Sander
Sam Williams ย โ€ขย  Italy ย โ€ขย  Member since Nov. 8, 2018

Music: Madvillain โ€“ The Illest Villains โ€“ Madvillainy

Madvillain – The Illest Villains – Madvillainy (Full Album)
1,361,909 views, Jul 1, 2014

Third Archetypal Animation | As The End of Democracy Draws Near

Pixabay Images:
Sinking Statue of Liberty by PhotoMIX-Company
Photo Mix ย โ€ขย  Europe ย โ€ขย  Member since Oct. 21, 2015

Chaos in Washington as Trump supporters storm Capitolย | Tuesday, Jan 11, 2022 | Israel Hayom โ€” This is where we stand |ย US President Trump tweets: These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.

Image from: Bipartisan commission to investigate January 6 attack on U.S. Capitol by Megan Coleman, May 14, 2021 | CNYCentral

Image: Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World? |ย The Great Manipulatorย | By David Von Drehle | Feb. 2, 2017 | Cover of Time

Image: Perilย Hardcoverย โ€“ September 21, 2021 | Amazon

MusicAmerican Democracy: The Endgame of the Human Race by Noam Chomsky (Available on Spotify)


Fourth Archetypal Animation | Carnage at the Capitol

Images from Pixabay:
Watching the World Fall Apart by Alexas_Fotos
Here and now, unfortunately, ends my journey on Pixabay ย โ€ขย  but it continues on Pexels.com/under the same name ย โ€ขย  Member since Jan. 6, 2015

Chaos in Washington as Trump supporters storm Capitolย | Tuesday, Jan 11, 2022 | Israel Hayom

Image from: Bipartisan commission to investigate January 6 attack on U.S. Capitol by Megan Coleman, May 14, 2021 | CNYCentral

Music: Noam Chomsky โ€” Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind | A Real War

Noam Chomsky Propaganda And Control Of The Public Mind Full Lecture
162,371 views, Jan 12, 2012

Fifth Archetypal Animation | “I Just Want to Occupy Your Mind”

Pixabay Image: Mysterious, Fiction, Vampire, Wizard by Sammy-Sander |Sam Williams ย โ€ขย  Italy ย โ€ขย  Member since Nov. 8, 2018

Image source: Top Fox hosts lobbied Trump to act on Jan. 6, texts showย | By David Bauder, December 15, 2021 | APย 

Image source: Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World? |ย The Great Manipulatorย | By David Von Drehle | Feb. 2, 2017 | Cover of Time

Image source: The Dan Bongino Showย | iHeartย 

Music: Noam Chomsky โ€” Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind | Controlling the Public Mind (See above)


Sixth Archetypal Animation | No Way Out!

Pixabay Images: Statue, Human, Move, Run by Filmbetrachter | Deutsch ย โ€ขย  Member since Jan. 28, 2017
Fallen exit sign | TBF

Music: Noam Chomsky โ€” Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind | Conscious Manipulation (see above)


Seventh Archetypal Animation | Blessed Be The Fruit

Image from: The Handmaidโ€™s Tale Season 4 Episode Release Guide by Louisa Mellor for Den of Geek

Image from: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 4 Arrives On Hulu On April 28; See Details Here by Arundhati Vivek for RepublicWorld

Music: Tjenerindens Fortaelling (The Handmaid’s Tale) Symposium Prologue (2195AD) [Offred and the Handmaids]


Eighth Archetypal Animation | Herd Mentality

Images: TBA

Music: Music: Noam Chomsky โ€” Propaganda & Control of the Public Mind | Delusion (See above)

Poems & Koans: Reflections on Time

Time flies like butterflies

Poems & Koans: Reflections on Time: Time Flies

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Sipping the nectar

Poems & Koans: Reflections on Time: Sipping the Nectar

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of Distant Stars

Poems & Koans: Reflections on Time: Distant Stars

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Haikus

After a month of listening to Alan Watts, I understand that it is I who create the problems I perceive. And only I can grow out of them.

There is nothing more to say.

All my blogs have been for not. I think perhaps the only thing left for me to do here is attempt to master the art of writing a descent haiku. This is an ancient art form using words like paint brushes to capture things that cannot be said, only felt, in three brief sentences.

“Haikus can be written for just about anything. There are haikus for humor, to raise social awareness, to evoke emotions, or to reminisce on the past. The idea of compression, though, remains the same. Haikus are a microcosm of a larger idea or feeling.”

Poetry with a Purpose: Why the Haiku?
Haiku began in thirteenth-century Japan as the opening phrase of renga, an oral poem, generally a hundred stanzas long, which was also composed syllabically. The much shorter haiku broke away from renga in the sixteenth century and was mastered a century later by Matsuo Basho, who wrote this classic haiku: An old pond! -- Haiku | Academy of American Poets
Bashล is usually credited as the most influential haiku poet and the writer who popularized the form in the 17th century. Outside Japan, Imagist writers such as Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme wrote haiku in English. -- Haiku | Definition, Format, Poems Example, & Facts | Britannica

Thinking Is A Hard Habit To Break

The habit of thinking and writing about such thoughts; however, is hard to break. Thus, I will indulge in recalling that yesterday was September 11.

It has been 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. For 20 years, 9/11 is a day of remembrance, grieving, and reflection about all that has transpired since that day. This includes the war on terror, which has become known as the Forever Wars.

Reveal just aired a hard-hitting episode on the costs and aftermath of these wars. In short, over 3,000 people died on 9/11 and in the past 20 years as the US searched for those responsible for this horrific attack, more than 900,000 soldiers, contractors, and civilians have died in the Forever Wars.

Poems & Koans: Reflections on Time: Photo from Reveal | September 11, 2021 | Episode: Forever Wars

It is so easy to tear asunder and destroy the delicate balances sustaining all life on earth. Human beings have proved to be especially adept at doing this due to beliefs, attitudes, values, and misguided directives that are held doggedly to inside our minds and that only serve to gouge out deep trenches inside of ourselves (inside our souls) that make it possible for a good and decent person to do the most horrible things. These trenches inside of us is what separates us from each other and most of us will never escape their great depth and gravity.

It does not matter what steadfast beliefs a person clings to or what side they are fighting for because the result is the same. Once a person begins to cling to symbolic thought (replacing insufficient symbols for reality), the digging of the Pit of Peril begins and grows deeper and deeper as more and more adamant beliefs replace reality with rote responses and reactions. The harder a person clings to their resolute beliefs, the deeper and wider the trench of separation grow inside. This is the story of separation. It is the fall of man.

It is so much easier to love one another and to try to listen to one another to understand each other and live in peace rather than cultivate the inner forces of hate and separation.

September 11

Following the theme of remembering 9/11, these are two photojournalistic reflections of this day of remembering and reflection.

Poems & Koans: Reflections on Time: Today Was 9\11
Poems & Koans: Reflections on Time: A Day Between 9 11 Flags | Sept. 6, 2021

The Last Enemy

I will also mention one more thing regarding a synchronicity that occurred around this time. It is always important to pay attention to synchronicities when they occur in one’s life. Each person’s synchronicities are utterly unique and appear to help you grow as a conscious being. I share mine synchronicity story only as an example.

It began when I received my latest Netflix DVD. The title was The Last Enemy. I had no idea what it was and why I had put this in my cue. I almost sent it back without watching it thinking it was probably nonsense and I had made a mistake. However, I ended up watching it the day before September 11, 2021. It was absolutely relevant to this moment in time. It was made in 2012 and is about a fictional future where a devastating terrorist attack (like what happened on 9/11) turns Britain into a super surveillance state to keep everyone safe from those who might want to do us harm… but is everyone really safe? There is also a mysterious pandemic going on too.

I understand why Qers, plandemic believers, and even anti-vaxxers grow and harvest such ideas inside their minds. These are exciting concepts rich with conflict and mistrust. And such concepts provides the mind with a powerful fuel that speeds people through their daily activities, and quite often very dull routines. It is a type of mind fuels that provides individuals with a deep sense of meaning and purpose that they are fighting something evil.

That’s what this series explores.

Poems & Koans: Reflections on Time: The Last Enemy
Set in a recognisable, near-future London beset by terrorism and illegal immigrationThe Last Enemy features the introduction of "TIA" (Total Information Awareness), a centralised database that can be used to track and monitor anybody, effectively by putting all available government and corporate โ€“ i.e. credit card and bank activity, phone use, internet use, purchases, rentals, etc. โ€“ information in one place.
The story deals with a political cover-up centred on a sanctioned but secret medical experiment run amok with key members of the government trying desperately to hide all evidence of their experimental batch of vaccine that seems to be causing a deadly virus. The complex story unspools to reveal the moral, social and privacy concerns of this hypothetical TIA system in a post-7/7 world, including such control mechanisms familiar to both real life and science fiction as retinal scans, fingerprint identification and ubiquitous camera and cellphone surveillance footage.
The story is told through the eyes of a mathematical genius, Stephen Ezard, who is portrayed as a recluse showing some signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But the shy genius overcomes his own inhibitions to burrow into a highly compromised British government using his brilliance and their TIA system only to find himself ultimately trapped by the people he most trusts, and to learn he is a pawn in manipulative Security State machinations which take the people he most loves from him and compromise him forever. -- From Wiki

Alan Watts

Lastly, this is one of the Watts lectures I listened to in the past month.

Alan Watts – What Real Ideas Do You Operate On

“Reality escapes all concepts. If you say there is a god that’s a concept. If you say there is no god that’s a concept. Nagarjuna is saying that always your concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in a sieve.”

— Alan Watts

Diamond Body & The Secrets of the Golden Flower: Lessons for Our Time

โ€œIf you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.โ€ โ€•Lao Tzu

There are so many problems in the world; huge, convoluted, intricate, life and death problems that have no easy answers or solutions. If you are listening to someone who is saying: “I KNOW WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD.” This person has no clue what is wrong or what to do about it.

Humanity in its broadest sense is floating once again on a vast and mighty Sea of Uncertainty. For some (and I am only talking about the individual level, not the collective), the uncertainty is no less than life or death. For others, they can only watch as a helpless observers to the multiple crises unfolding and must bear witness to the individual and collective descent of humanity, doing whatever they can to help, no matter how small the action may seem. For still others, this moment fills them with fear and they run away and deny the realities of this moment, preferring to hide their light of consciousness under a bushel. The worst among us, are using this moment and their light of consciousness to misled, misdirect, confuse, and frighten others so they may benefit and profit from the disorientation, confusion, and mayhem touching everyone’s life right now (e.g., this might mean they cultivate a flock of admirers who hang on your every word; they sow seeds deceit to gain money, power, status; or they indulge their criminal instinct certain no one will notice in all the chaos).

An illustration of the parable, together with theย parable of the Growing Seed, which follows it inย Markย chapter 4 (Source: Wikipedia)

"And no man, when he hath lighted a lamp, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but putteth it on a stand, that they that enter in may see the light. For nothing is hid, that shall not be made manifest; nor [anything] secret, that shall not be known and come to light. Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he thinketh he hath."โ€”โ€‰Luke 8:16-18, King James Version

Crisis and complexity is not new to us as human beings. We have always been a species who had to find a way to survive through crisis and calamity. Long ago, such fate was visited upon us as a species by nature. More recently, we create the fate we must survive be it culturally, socially, politically, or any thing that calls upon our membership to the human race. It is not possible to be alive today without wearing both hats: that of an individual and that of a member of a collective.

Today, witness the shambalic pull out of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

PBS NewsHour West live episode, Aug. 19, 2021 | The Fall of Afghanistan

The destructive earthquake in Haiti:

Haitians left homeless by 7.2 magnitude earthquake now brace for storm

The brutal, heartless War in Yemem and the death toll of children.

Stalked by death: How rising food insecurity is killing war-torn Yemen’s children

The desperate journey immigrants from around the world make across the Darien Gap.

How U.S. immigration policy affects fate of migrants braving the deadly Darien Gap

Anti vaxxers fueling the Delta variant’s death toll, even among children.

Vaccine, mask opponents are fueling the delta variant’s death toll. Will incentives help?

I have left many tragedies out. But if you are a human of goodwill and good conscious, you know what I have left out. Again, I am focusing on the actions and consequents or non-actions and consequents of individuals, not collectives (of which we are all members of one kind or another; the actions/consequents or non-actions/consequents of collectives are an entirely different order).

Because I am human and because I am enraged by the tremendous amount of misinformation spread by anti vaxxers, I am going to pick on the anti vaxxers for a moment to illustrate something critical in understanding the Secrets of the Golden Flower and Diamond Body.

I have had a glimpse into their world, and I have seen them congratulating each other for getting kicked off social media platforms when the spread misinformation. I see them admitting to each other how they choose not to get vaccinated nor wear a mask and then just pretend in crowds they are vaccinated–taking a don’t ask, don’t tell approach to what they view as an unjust infringement of their individual liberties. I see them celebrating sickness and their body’s ability to fight off anything. I see them comparing mask mandates to Hitler’s Germany. I hear them proclaiming if they resist, they will rise up on the other side of this as the people who are going to bring in a more beautiful world or the people who are going to overthrown totalitarianism in all its manifestations or the people who will be the new Super Athletes of the world (a echo of Hitler’s Super Race myth). I hear them crying fowl that they might not be allowed into bars, restaurants, gyms, workplaces, or even to donate an organ if they cannot prove they’ve had the vaccine.

Have they not seen the suffering of individuals crossing the Darien Gap? Have they not seen the children dying in Yemen because they don’t have food? And there are many children in the mighty Untied States suffering from food shortages too–where is their attention and empathy for striving children anywhere in the world. Or for the plight of the people in Haiti who 6 days later still lack medical equipment, food, water, or help of any kind! Or the millions of people left stranded in Afghanistan after Western powers left (primarily my country: the U.S.) leaving them to the mercy of a brutal, barbaric, backwards, twisted regime that hunt and kill people based on a warped and twisted worldview and religious interpretation filled with hate, especially against women and girls or men who choose to believe different than they do.

Apparently, they have not. They have been too focused on their own fears (real or not) that their rights are being trampled on and the world is going to be ruled by Hitler’s once again.

I have also caught a glimpse into some who are promoting some of the most stubborn and kooky anti-COVID theories. Among some of the staunchest anti-vaxxers, you will hear how society is sick and going to die now. These messages send their followers into pure panic to the point some are digging bunkers and preparing for the end of the world. I know some who are doing this.

Many of the farthest out narratives draw upon religious symbolism and language such as expressed by Catholic Cardinal Burke, who recently was put on a ventilator due to the disease he denied existed. Just in December of 2020, he preached about forces, totalitarian in nature, determined to rule over us .

Where I have seen some of the most infantile responses to COVID-19 is inside the Facebook bubble that I got sorted into. It is a group of people who are passionate about Climate Change. They are people who want to change the system in order to bring in a new, better, more beautiful world. Who could argue this is wrong, expect COVID-19 has revealed to me that there is a long and very dark shadow carefully hidden underneath many of my duly sorted Facebook men and women good intentions to save the world (and I count myself among those concealing a dark shadow).

Here is what Alan Watts says about do gooders:

Alan Watts – The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions | AfterSkool
Alan Watts – The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions | AfterSkool
Alan Watts – The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions | AfterSkool
Alan Watts – The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions | AfterSkool

I know for a fact that I suffer from the same unconscious desire to save the world, and I hide the same shadow underneath all my flowery virtue-isms. I am not that guy standing in the creek, facing down the alligators while holding a log for others to walk safely across. I am a slow learner and it has been hard to accept I can’t do a damn thing about the world, expect possible try to live my own life with a little joy and attention to those I love, and possibly cultivate a little more High Virtue actions by accepting all of who I am.

I know that most of my vexation and annoyance at the selfish and immature behavior of the anti vaxxer crowd is a sign I am not fully become conscious of my own annoying, naive, and stupid behavior. Nor have I fully forgiven myself for the foolish, puerile behavior I have become conscious of.

Alan Watts also says further that when one sets out upon the path of self-development, all the debtors suddenly appear seeking payment for your past karma (karma is nothing more than action and all action (or non-action) has a consequence).

Alan Watts ~ Becoming Free Of Past Karma |
577,631 views; May 20, 2020

“It is believed generally in India that when a person sets out on the way of liberation his first problem is to become free from his past karma. The popular theory of karma the word that literally means action or doing in Sanskrit. So that when we say that something that happens to you is your karma it’s like saying in english it’s your own doing. But in in popular Indian belief karma is a sort of built-in moral law or a law of retribution such that all the bad things you do and all the good things you do have consequences which you have to inherit. And so long as karmic energy remains (all the bad things you do and all the good things you do) you have to work it out and what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action which in Sanskrit is called: nishkama karma nishkama. This means without passion or without attachment.— Alan Watts

The Taoist Way – Alan Watts Chillstep Mix | 186,070 views; Dec 3, 2020

“Now when the time comes that you start to get out of the chain of karma all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for payment. In other words a person who begins say to study yoga is felt that he will suddenly get sick or that his children will die or that he’ll lose his money or all sorts of catastrophes will occur because uh the karmic debt is being cleared up and uh it there’s in no hurry to be cleared up if you’re just living along like anybody. But if you embark on the spiritual life a certain hurry occurs and therefore since this is known uh it’s rather discouraging to start these things. The christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to be to change your life shall we say to turn over a new leaf you mustn’t let the devil know.” — Alan Watts (around minute 23)

I foolishly got into a debate about which perspective was right regarding COVID–is it a lie or is it really happening. It was a futile discussion for if I had truly learned anything from listening to hours and hours of Alan Watts via YouTube, I would have simply accepted this position as part of the great happening we are all apart of… and yet, sometimes, I find myself separating from Watts universal, masterful perspective and descending into questioning… but why?

In the course of this rather rancorous discussion, we found we agreed on relative realities and I shared my series on bubble realities.

https://www.sapience2112.com/the-storytelling-species-makers-players-of-reality-bubbles
The Storytelling Species: Makers and Players of Reality (Part 1 of 6)

However, that was about all we agreed upon. After a lengthy illness from which I have still not recovered, I found considerable criticism of my thinking. It is futile to engage in further thought of our ongoing disagreement, but one negative assessment must be addressed. My dialogue partner said: “A story is just a story.”

Well this is true if you are perceiving and arguing simply from the physical realm of reality that we all live in. This includes bodies and bridges, cities and towns, trees and skyscrapers– you get the picture. This is not true when you are perceiving and working from the non-physical world. The dimension where the Diamond Body exists.

In this realm of being, nothing is concrete or enduring. Here, we are confronted with the very best that dwells inside of us and is part of our psyche and developing personality. And, here, we are also confronted with the very darkest, destructive, may I say, evil parts of ourself. Every human being on the planet has a good and bad side. Without these poles, consciousness as we know and understand it would not be possible.

To live together in harmonious groups of people and not tear each others heads off, human beings had to build internal ramparts to protect the individual from out-of-control collective action and to protect the collective from out-of-controlled individual action. We call individual action that is not in accord with the harmony of the collective criminal behavior.

Stories are one of the most important ways societies build and maintain these inner ramparts that protect individual and collective from catastrophe action. When these powerful inner forces begin to crash over and break down the social ramparts carefully constructed over centuries, some of man’s most destructive instincts are let loose. For some of us, this brings death.

Carl Jung was well aware of the dangers that come from inside a perfectly normal man and a perfectly respectable woman, even child. Here are several case Jung handled during his career that helped him understand what is happening the psyche of human beings–the realm of the Diamond Body.

The Symbolic Life | Carl Jung Depth Psychology | Image for blog by Mr. Purrington | 9.7.20
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/09/07/carl-jung-on-crime-and-the-soul/#.YSEWIy1h1nt
Carl Jung on ‘Crime and the Soul’ | Carl Jung Depth Psychology
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/09/22/as-a-result-of-the-murder-the-woman-was-plunged-into-unbearable-loneliness/#.YSFPQC1h1ns
As a result of the murder, the woman was plunged into unbearable loneliness — even the animals and plants knew she was a murderess | Carl Jung Depth Psychology

That’s about all I am going to say about current events, anti vaxxers, clearing karma, and the Diamond Body for now. I may turn this into another series. I would just like to point you to the work of Richard Wilhelm who wrote The Secret of the Golden Flower in 1931. He work proved pivotal to Jung’s work on human psychology and psyche, and Jung and Watts were close friends. Watts often drew on the understandings he obtained through long conversations with Jung before Carl Jung died in the early sixties. Sadly, Watts, though much younger, would die himself in the early seventies.

We have been here before as a species on the brink of unrecoverable disaster. If we are luck, we will find a way forward together (as we have done before) and have another opportunity to pull ourselves back from the brink of extinction. Or, as Alan Watts, loved to say, “Perhaps we are that species who does itself in in interesting ways.”


THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER  -- A CHINESE BOOK OF LIFE  | Translated and explained by RICHARD WILHELM with a European Commentary by C. G. JUNG | First published - 1931
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

The original German edition of The Secret of the Golden Flower, of which the following is the authorized English translation, appeared first in the autumn of 1929. On March 1st, 1930, Richard Wilhelm died. In May, 1930, memorial services in his honour were held in Munich, and Jung was asked to deliver the principal address. The latter finds an appropriate place in the English version, 1 which is published a year or more after the co-author's death. The address will be welcomed, not only for what it tells the reader of Wilhelm, but for the further light it throws on the standpoint of the East. 

The relation of the West to Eastern thought is a highly paradoxical and confusing one. On the one side, as Jung points out, the East creeps in among us by the back door of the unconscious, and strongly influences us in perverted forms, and on the other we repel it with violent prejudice as concerned with a fine-spun metaphysics that is poisonous to the scientific mind. 

If anyone is in doubt as to how far the East influences us in secret ways, let him but briefly investigate the fields covered to-day by what is called "occult thought ". Millions of people are included in these movements and Eastern ideas dominate all of them. Since there is nowhere any sign of a psychological understanding of the phenomena on which the ideas are based, they undergo a complete twisting and are a real menace in our world. 

A partial, realization of what is going on in this direction, together with the Westerner's native ignorance and mistrust of the world of inner experience, build up the prejudice against the reality of Eastern wisdom. When the wisdom of the Chinese is laid before a Westerner, he is very likely to ask with a sceptical lift of the brows why such profound wisdom did not save China from its present horrors. Of course, he does not stop to think that the Chinese asks with an equal skepticism why the much boasted scientific knowledge of the West, not to mention its equally boasted Christian ethics, did not save it from a World War. But as a matter of fact, present conditions in China do not invalidate Chinese wisdom, nor does the Great War prove the futility of science. In both cases we are dealing with the negative sides of the principles under which East and West live, and it has not yet been given, either to individuals or to nations, to manage the vices of their virtues. Mastery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophes. Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the daemonic forces of the latter and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture. The solution cannot be found either in deriding Eastern spirituality as impotent, or by mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality, and that science must turn to the spirit for the meaning 
of life. 

This is the point of view established in The Secret of the Golden Flower. Through the combined efforts of Wilhelm and Jung we have for the first time a way of understanding and appreciating Eastern wisdom, which satisfies all sides of our minds. It has been taken out of metaphysics and placed in psychological 
experience. We approach it with an entirely new tool, and are protected from the perversions the East undergoes at the hands of the cult-mongers of the West. At the same time, its meaning for us is greatly deepened when we know that, despite the gulf separating us from the East, we follow exactly similar paths when once we give heed to the inner world. 

But this book not only gives us a new approach to the East, it also strengthens the point of view evolving in the West with respect to the psyche. The reshaping of values in progress to-day forces the modern man out of a nursery-world of collective traditions into an adult's world of individual choice. He knows that his choice and his fate now turn upon his understanding of himself. Much has been taught him in recent years about the hitherto unsuspected elements in his psyche, but the emphasis is all too often on the static side alone, so that he finds himself possessed of little more than an inventory of contents, the nature of which serves to burden him with a sense of weariness rather than to spur him on to master the problems that confront him. Yet it is precisely the need of understanding himself in terms of change and renewal, which most grips the imagination of modern man. Having seen the world of matter disappear before his scientific eye and reappear as a world of energy, he comes to ask himself a bold question ; does he not contain within his psyche a store of unexplored forces, which, if rightly understood, would give him a new vision of himself and help safeguard the future for him ? In this book his question is answered from two widely different sources, an ancient Chinese yoga system and analytical psychology. Stripped of its archaic setting, The Secret of the Golden Flower is the secret of the powers of growth latent in the psyche, and these same powers as they reveal themselves in the minds of Western men also form the theme of Jung's commentary. 

In the commentary he has shown the profound psychological development resulting from the right relationship to the forces within the psyche. 

In the German edition Jung's commentary comes first, followed by Wilhelm's exposition of the text, and then by the text itself. At the author's request, the order has been changed so that his commentary follows the text. 

The Chinese words in this edition are in the Anglicized form. For making the necessary transcriptions, I am indebted to Mr. Arthur VValey, and to Colonel Egerton of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. The latter has been kind enough to give his personal attention to the editing of my manuscript. 

As a possible aid in keeping in mind the relationships between the various Chinese concepts such as ksing-ming, kuei-shcn, etc., I have added two summaries, one written and one diagrammatic. 

Fortunately for me, I have made this translation under the supervision of Dr. Jung, and to that fact, and to the further aid I have received from Mrs. Jung, I owe any success I may have had in meeting the difficulties presented. 

It has also been my privilege to have the completed manuscript read and criticized by Dr. Erla Rodakiewicz, and for her invaluable 
assistance I am deeply grateful.

1 See Appendix, p. 139. | Cary F. Baynes. Zurich, March, J 931.

May we find peace, understanding, and love among all humans once again.

Five years later: