Several years into my education research I came across Arizona State University’s Center for the Future of War, which was largely funded by New America and Eric Schmidt of Google Alphabet. When I first found out about the program, they had three areas of focus: drones, autonomous weapons, and weaponized narrative. That last one is information warfare. We are living through total information warfare. As James Giordano asserts, the mind is the battlespace, though to my way of thinking the heart comes a close second.
Those in power have conceived a grand plan to enact a post-human holographic “reality” and harness life on the planet into a bio-electrical control grid. They’ve plotted it over decades, and it feels like we’re running the final laps in this race. As the noose of cyborg avatar capitalism tightens, their imperative is to keep us distracted, anxious, and angry with one another. Treats are tossed out to reward compliance and maintain the pecking order both digital and material.
Social media skirmishes contain us in THEIR game, keeping us reactive and depriving us of time for introspection. Only once we detach from the military-intel hivemind, can we come to know our OWN hearts and minds outside their subtle AI nudge systems. It takes a strong will to pull away and listen to that inner voice, the one in tune with the creative force of the universe.
There is too much noise, noise, noise.
When our child was attending a Philadelphia magnet public high school, we opted out of Google classroom. We may have been the only family in the district to do this. I’m not sure, but it was certainly not the norm. At the time I was only aware of issues around surveillance, intellectual property, and digital child labor. I had not yet learned of digital twinning and blockchain hivemind consciousness, Google’s Selfish Ledger, or Sophia DAO. Even so, I wasn’t going to sign on to an educational model that would mine my child’s intellect to create value for multinational corporations or store their digital footprint at the NSA Data Center in Bluffdale Utah.
It was hard on our high schooler. It’s kind of wild how quickly educators and administrators fell into Google’s embrace. Most certainly had no idea that the end game is to replace in-person teaching with a Pokemon-go style device-based learning ecosystem consisting of online classes and a smattering of community-based “projects” where social behaviors can be scored. No one was thinking about “education reimagined” as my child sat on the sofa waiting for a friend to text homework assignments that were sometimes posted to google classroom only after dinner. The days of writing on the chalk board or the whiteboard at the end of class were gone – poof. At the time we made this decision to opt out of Google, I thought I was doing my small part to save teaching as a human profession. This was four years ago. How much has changed.
This all came rushing back to me yesterday when I saw a tweet circulating that the Chicago Teacher’s Union was in a skirmish with Mayor Lori Lightfoot over the return to in-person teaching and learning. The teachers voted not to return to school, and the mayor shut down their access to Google classroom. Uh-oh. What now? The upshot is Chicago children are on their second day without instruction.
There were thousands of retweets of CTU’s tweet with the hashtag #LockoutLori. It was a scene practically tailor-made for this era of weaponized digital narratives. I ended up going through and posting hundreds of messages on the pages of people who had quote tweeted the original by CTU. In the message I shared two of my blog posts. The first was “Dear Teachers Using Google Classroom” dated September 2017. The second was “A Letter To Chicago Teachers on the Perils of Pay for Success Finance & Wrap Around Services” dated October 2019.
The latter was a piece I wrote when CTU was negotiating a new contract, which including a push for wrap around services under the banner “Sustainable Community Schools” and “Affordable Housing,” details here. While I don’t dispute that the need exists, with Pay For Success provisions baked into the Every Student Succeeds Act, the community school model is a Trojan Horse for social impact deals that will manage vulnerable families as a profit center rather than solving their problems.
About halfway through pasting in my replies I paused and wondered how many of these people were likely to respond? It could be a lot. These folks were really steamed. It was an emotionally charged situation, and I wasn’t sure how they would react to my feeble but determined attempt to broaden the perspective beyond the immediate crisis of what to do with the children. Fortunately, the number of replies was manageable.
Being in Philadelphia and having a child who has already navigated the public education (programming) system I have the distance to see this skirmish for what it really is. This is a dramatic spectacle meant to harden the resolve of people on either side of the “in-person” education debate, which at this point is inextricably linked to biosurveillance.
How many of the thousands of adults who liked or retweeted CTU’s post know ANYTHING about plans to phase out bricks and mortar schools in favor of blended learning models managed by community-based partners that have been groomed for a decade as trusted out-of-school time resources? I would say if we’re lucky, maybe 1-2% tops.
How many know about OTUS and plans to create interoperable data systems that track all sorts of things, including their estimation of your child’s neuroticism? Only they aren’t going to tell you that because the folks in the oak paneled rooms at the University of Chicago, like James Heckman who has set up the human capital finance equations, don’t want to fill the school board meetings. It’s really better that parents, and even educators, not know the amount of data these devices are capable of capturing, and how they plan to use that data to make predictions about everyone’s futures – children and educators alike.
We are only a few variants away from “public education” being transformed under austerity into one massive global United-Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4-aligned public-private partnership. The Gattaca grooming of coming generations will happen at the behest of the Impact Management Project. Key Performance Indicators, digital blockchain vouchers, smart city sensors collecting data with fidelity, tracking the long-range economic outputs of Metaverse-ready human capital. Children as livestock wrangled by algorithms, chatbots, and robots. Anytime, anywhere learning fueled by Skinnerian good-behavior scrip is right around the bend. Few can see it, because they’ve been trained to stay in Google’s boxes, in Twitter’s boxes. Push the button, get the programmed reaction – right on cue – and to think it all happened so quickly.
#LockoutLori is part of the Skinner control system. CTU knows this. Lori Lightfoot knows this. They are playing their assigned roles, victim versus bully. Pavlovian response kicks in. We know how to do this. The Internet trained us how to do this. So we do it over and over and over with the right hashtags to feed the simulation. Open Source Intelligence on tap 24/7.
For a bit of some background on behaviorism and Skinner and an interesting connection to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, see this video I made during a site visit to Susquehanna, PA last summer. Don’t worry, it’s relevant. Remember, I cast a WIDE net, but in the end it all hangs together.
Skinner logged the data from his experiements on a new-fangled machine called the cumulative recorder. The Smithsonian has one in its collections. It was a roll of paper that was marked to show documentation of animal behavior over a period of time. I believe today’s equivalent will be the blockchain identity system and the amount of data it will gather on each of us through external and internal sensor networks will soon be beyond what we can even fathom. Remember Bettina “vending machine blockchain government” Warburg from my previous post on the Nam Shub of Enki and Sumerian tablets? Well she’s one of the key people advancing the blockchain spatial web and related supply and value chains. Her current job is managing partner at ANIMAL VENTURES.
I believe the Mormon Transhumanist Association is aware of this as people like Lincoln Cannon speak about the possibilities of making copies of human lives and the possibility of laws guiding how to manage identity through eternal life as expressed by Brigham Young. I know you might be thinking this seems rather tangential, but Ben Blair, a Columbia University graduate, is the current president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Early in his career Blair was employed by K12.com. It turns out when I was doing the information picket of the Texas Blockchain Summit one of the people I met knew him. He, too, shared concerns aroud blockchain consciousness and post-humanism. Ben went on to be a co-founder of Teachur.co, which was later renamed Newlane University, a low-cost online competency-based learning program with a monthly fee-based structure.
I sense this is the type of “lifelong learning” infrastructure that may be on the way linked to a Universal Basic Income, a Learning Economy where the online learning management system learns how to be human by interacting with you. Of course social impact investment deals would be layered in as well to help global capital flows. It should be noted that Evernym and Instructure are both based in Salt Lake City and have ties to Brigham Young University. Brigham Young University affiliates are also advising Learning Economy and Michael Crow’s blockchain education efforts towards a universal education. No one is supposed to grasp the part about the machine learning us.
Learning Economy is how global impact investors will track us through the Metaverse – by our digital wallets full of micro-credentials that testify to our worthiness as human capital for remote robotic and platform gig labor in Richard Baldwin’s Globalization 4.0.
Today I was listening to a wonderful compilation of interviews and a biographical sketch of John Trudell, a leader of the American Indian Movement. Trudell spoke of the ways in which we are being raised by technology, of the ways those in power use our spirit energy to power their tech-no-logic system. He says we need to remember who we are; that we are human beings and part of the earth. We need to take responsibility; we need to remember the power we have. Stories of spirit and power were once taught to children, but those stories have been lost to civilization and educational programming. Power is not something outside of us, money or access to systems of domination, it is inside of us. Once we know that, our real power can never be controlled.
Trudell also said the good guys are fighting the bad guys, and the bad guys are fighting the good guys. Both sides, however, are riding the same train. If we choose to stay in Google’s train, the train of state intelligence and war and debt-finance, our precious children, will be taking a one-way trip to the land of cyborg avatar capitalism. The destination for distance learning is an inhumane data warehouse where machines suck up spirit energy and siphon it into the human digital twins described by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. One day, if not already, these twins – optimized by Artificial Intelligence – will run us. When the day arrives, I fear we may not even know it’s happened. We need parents who are willing to grow a backbone and say no to their proposed cyborg future. Break the Skinnerian conditioning, know your spirit, take responsibility, and their power over you will not hold. See below a video of my friend in Tokyo paying a visit to the office of the Japan Science and Technology Agency’s Moonshot Project and refusing this future.
Weaponized Narrative 101
Recognize weaponized narrative exists.
Before responding to a provocation, their programming, pause and consider if there are nudges in play?
Are you being pressured directly or indirectly to choose a side?
Look around.
Is the “game” you’re in one that YOU created?
Or is it one into which you were placed?
Is it perhaps Google’s selfish ledger?
They want your children to want to stay in there, to live in a world of code.
That is what compulsory education is about now – hastening the creation of substrate independent minds.
Remote learning fills out the ledgers – quickly.
Maybe it’s time to step outside the game, get some fresh air and a new perspective.
Maybe it’s time to get off the damn train because it goes to digital twin land.
Maybe it’s time to to wander, put your hands in the dirt, and deprogram.
I have a Master’s from Arizona State and was among those in the first blush of online learning, in the 90s, as it was being created, as adjunct faculty in foreign languages. I was there when Crow came in and started reorganizing everything, and was baffled that among the first things he did was cut funding for the liberal arts departments and increase that in R&D and the faculties that ‘make money’.
One of the biggest concerns when I was there was online privacy—we were urged as online teachers to not even use our photos, now they want you on video all the time. We were also told this would not replace in-class teaching and was meant to attract a different kind of student—the introverted ones, the ones who couldn’t make it to campus, those living in remote areas, etc. I totally fell for this. I was one of ‘those’ kind of students, LOVED learning, despised the classroom b/c it was too distracting and attracted too many students who were just there for a grade. I really thought it would be the answer for learners like me and I wanted so much for that to be true.
Now with the ‘mission creep’ I see how wrong I was. It is most certainly not about learning and not there to serve students or teachers. I wish I could turn back the clock and look at it as I see it now—just another avenue of social control and a better way of creating mindless, perpetually optimistic drones always serving the least common denominator and calling this ‘social justice’. It’s not about learning AT ALL. I was a fool, one of a great many, and I really regret it now.
A wonderful post Alison. Thank you. Your comments on John Trudell brought back a memory from one of his talks many years ago that has always stuck with me. It was about the vampire/predatory nature of our capitalist system. John’s words seemed appropriate then, so many years ago, but seem absolutely prophetic today in light of your work. John said plainly and simply: “they’re mining us.” Clearly they are in fact “mining us” indeed.
Check out that Krugman protegee — Baldwin. The cold ice water in those “economists'” veins would chill a stadium filled with mojitos.
The channels of COVID-19’s economic contagion
Globally, economies are connected by cross-border flows of:
• goods,
• services,
• knowhow,
• people,
• financial capital,
• foreign direct investment,
• international banking, and
• exchange rates
Economies are also connected – but not physically – by beliefs. All these things are also mechanism for the propagation of economic shocks, or economic contagion.
Some of these flows within nations are also likely vectors connecting the medical and economic aspects of COVID-19. Consider them in turn, starting with banks – which provide a convenient rallying point for contagion involving financial capital, beliefs, and international banking.
file:///C:/Users/Lisa/Downloads/COVID-19.pdf
Of course, these fellows and gals have always been there inside the various star chamber schools of economics, always there to determine disruptions in their shock therapy economic pogroms.
Ahh . . . .
If you set to work to believe everything,
you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind,
and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able
to believe the simplest true things.
— Lewis Carroll
And . . . .
In his 1839 “Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy or The Age of Might and the Age of Right,” one of the early Chartist activists, John Francis Bray, writes:
‘There is wanted, not a mere governmental or particular remedy, but a general remedy – one which will apply to all social wrongs and evils, great and small…they want a remedy for their poverty – they want a remedy for the misery…Knowledge is merely an accumulation of facts; and wisdom is the art of applying such knowledge to its true purpose – the promotion of human happiness.’
And, Alison knows who I am writing about here, but I have changed several substantial things to he isn’t revealed, though this teacher told me he was fine with me identifying him specifically. Another day for that. Sad, really:
Twenty Years of Teaching Science in Public School Down the Covid Drain
by Paul Haeder / January 6th, 2022
These are snooping, snitching, massive canceling, censorious times.
I just talked with a friend who is in San Francisco who has been working hard as a science teacher. He has opened up the curriculum, has worked to be in his school’s union and he has just gotten married. That’s 55, now, and he has to step down from teaching since the school teacher mandates for California are going into effect January 4 or thereabouts.
He might be against mandates because a mandate is oppressive, a dead-end to critical thinking, critical engagement. The mandates, the masking, the social distancing, the forced PCR tests, the constant fear-fear-fear. He sees what this has done to teaching, teachers, students and staff.
But the cat is out of the bag, because the National Union and his state union all are on the same sheet of Moderna-Pfizer-Fauci music. For a science nerd, someone who ended up in physics at Harvard, who has undertaken teaching high school students science, including physics, well having a one size fits all formula, without a scientific robust challenge to any theory, sticks in his craw.
Criminalizing thought, that’s what this Planned Pandemic is about: no pushback. We have talked, and I have been the liberal arts dude, with some notion that critical thinking can only be gained from liberal arts within the system of education. STEM is fine, but not in a vacuum. How we got here, today, how we are products of the history of everything, vital to our collective knowledge and how to shape social-ecological and cultural JUSTICE for all. (continued) ….
https://dissidentvoice.org/2022/01/twenty-years-of-teaching-science-in-public-school-down-the-covid-drain/
Interesting, today, over at Chronicle of Higher Education, we have this article — active learning…… versus sage on the stage….
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-the-science-of-teaching-is-often-ignored?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_3492351_nl_Academe-Today_date_20220107&cid=at&source=&sourceid=
A couple of years ago, five faculty members at Harvard University published an intriguing study. They had run an experiment in an introductory undergraduate physics course to figure out why active learning, a form of teaching that has had measurable success, often dies a slow death in the classroom.
The authors compared the effects of a traditional lecture with the effects of active learning, in which students solve problems in small groups. They found — to little surprise — that when students were taught in an active format they performed better on tests. Then they made another, more striking, discovery: Students felt like they were learning more when they sat through a lecture. In other words, though they were very engaged by the talk, it didn’t actually help them understand physics better.
Academic Twitter praised the study for its clever design and for the way it resonated with professors who had struggled with active learning. But even as it was lauded in some quarters, the study was picked apart in others. It measured the effects of single lessons, some complained. Could you really conclude, others asked, that one test was a true measure of learning? The experiment said nothing about long-term retention, still other critics pointed out. Would those differences in scores still be apparent months later
That mixed reaction illuminates a central paradox in higher education. Scholarship on teaching and learning has grown exponentially over the decades, encompassing thousands of experiments, stacks of books and journal articles, and major initiatives to bring the science of learning into the classroom. Yet many faculty members are untouched by this work, unsure how to apply it to their teaching, or skeptical of its value.
To be sure, many instructors have participated in workshops run by their campus teaching centers. And the use of some evidence-based teaching practices, such as peer learning or the use of clickers to keep students engaged in the classroom, are far more prevalent than they were a generation ago. But faculty developers, education researchers, and learning scientists say they often feel like they are speaking to a select audience: namely, each other, or the same subset of professors eager to try new practices. And what does get through to many faculty members and students is often garbled, or just one piece of the puzzle.
+–+ end quote
This, from 2013!
When billionaire club members, such as Bill Gates and right-wing donors such as Art Pope, are not directly implementing policies that defund schools, they are funding research projects that turn students into test subjects for a world that even George Orwell would have found hard to imagine. For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided a $500,000 grant to Clemson University to do a pilot study in which students would wear galvanic skin bracelets with wireless sensors that would track their physiological responses to various stimuli in the schools. A spokesperson for the foundation argues in defense of this creepy obsession with measuring students’ emotional responses by claiming that the biometric devices are a help to teachers who can measure “‘real-time’ (reflective feedback), kind of like a pedometer.”It is not the vagueness of what this type of research is trying to achieve that is the most ludicrous and ethically offensive part of this study: It is the notion that reflective feedback can be reduced to measuring emotional impulses rather than produced through engaged dialogue and communication between actual teachers and students.
How can bracelets measure why students are acting out if they are hungry, bored, fearful, sick or lack sleep because their parents might be homeless? How do such studies address larger structural issues such as the 50 million people in the United States who go hungry every night, one-third of whom are children? And how do they manage to ignore their own connection to the rise of the surveillance state and the ongoing destruction of the civil rights of children and others? Research of this kind cannot speak to the rise of a Jim Crow society in which the mass incarceration of poor minorities is having a horrible effect on children.
As Michelle Alexander points out, these are children “who have a parent or loved one, a relative, who has either spent time behind bars or who has acquired a criminal record and thus is part of the under-caste – the group of people who can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives.” And the effect of such daily struggle is deadly. She writes:
“. . . For these children, their life chances are greatly diminished. They are more likely to be raised in severe poverty; their parents are unlikely to be able to find work or housing and are often ineligible even for food stamps. For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/when-schools-become-dead-zones-of-imagination/
So much of this rests upon the Covid myth, which is why members of the “resistance” who continue to parrot the tripe about “Covid,” “variants” and the like, whether it is because they actually believe the official crap or because they are totally invested in the “bio weapon” notion/narrative or because they are attached to “luminaries” like RFK Jr and Robert Malone, are aiding and abetting this push of education and, sooner or later all aspects of life, into the online realm of total surveillance blockchain based digital ID connected cyber world.
Pledge of Allegience, Banned Book Month, National Anthem, Credit Scores, Pre-employment drug screens, Credit Checks, Prison Industrial Complex and Criminal Injustice Complex holding all people accused of a crime and/or convicted in a paper-computer file, shot records, medical records, insurance companies swapping information, forced arbitration clauses, fine-tax-triple tax-toll-code enforce-penalize-ticket-foreclose-evict-repo-default-PayDay loan economy . . . . Oh, all of that unfolding pre-Corona Crazies, Pre- Blockchain . . . . How’s that community bill of rights working for us, signing up, petitioning and even getting voters to pass measures … err laws … against herbicides from being sprayed on a single county. Yeah, that’s right — it’s all a company town, a company state, a company (a few companies) owned nation. As Derrick Jensens states — Byond Hope. https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/
Bright Green Lies . . . . https://dissidentvoice.org/2022/01/bright-green-lies-torpedoes-greens/
Sure. All triple down false flags a la faux. The myth is freedome and democracy, predating Salk and Operation Paperclip and MK Ultra and etc. etc. No?
The Fraternal Democrats’ political platform, declared 1845:
We denounce all political and hereditary inequalities and distinctions of castes…that the earth with all its natural productions is the common property of all; we therefore denounce all infractions of this evidently just and natural law, as robbery and usurpation. We declare that the present state of society, which permits idlers and schemers to monopolise the fruits of the earth and the productions of industry, and compels the working classes to labour for inadequate rewards, and even condemns them to social slavery, destitution, and degradation, is essentially unjust.
Convinced that national prejudices have been, in all ages, taken advantage of by the people’s oppressors to set them tearing the throats of each other, when they should have been working together for their common good, this society repudiates the term ‘Foreigner,’ no matter by, or to whom applied. Our moral creed is to receive our fellow men, without regard to ‘country,’ as members of one family, the human race; and citizens of one commonwealth – the world.
Slowly getting the message out in my way Alison. Working with a small group right now who are super interested and informing everyone I come in contact with. Keeping things real amongst the craziness going on outside and inside the resistance movement. Spending my time also pulling resistance people out of scary rabbits holes. My guiding force is you and your close ones who I call THE FANTASTIC FIVE. They include: You, Stephers, Raul, Jason and John Trudell(Spirit). I am sure there are many more that I could add. My relationship with nature and salmon also helps guide my way. Stay Strong and keep your spirit high my friend!
Hello Gino! So, I am going to also use your nomenclature of THE FANTASTIC FIVE. I think its brilliant! Are you Cool to share that?
I haven’t realized the (spirit) connection to until your post. The F5 is a legit reading on current events when you factor in the Spirit.
John Trudell was, up until this point, a figure I had only been able read about and embody through teaching, so I do suppose it is important I pursue some of the YouTube offerings.
In Ventura County, where I grew up, I had been well versed into UFW/Dolores Huerta and the likes of various activist and social justice movements. But AIM was only peppered into my activist training.
Thus, it was by Providence that I was introduced to Trudell when I moved to the Pacific Northwest.
Franks Landing in Nisqually Washington, while one of the most significant locations in AIM history, was also a spot where my late Aunt Judy (1965-2015) insisted I stop to purchase cartons of cigarettes on my trips north to her and Uncle Doug’s little hideout in Ravensdale. Nisqually is flooding right now. Just because it is under an ionized sky does not make it any less unfortunate for the effected.
After I learned about the significance of Franks Landing, I considered it an homage every time I stopped there to by my Aunt’s tobacco,
Isn’t it amazing how these experiences and historical revelations open before us as we move forward?
SIDE STORY:
The only time i have EVER lost my wallet, ever, in 39 years, is at Franks Landing. $100, my ID a couple card and a few keepsakes. Coincidence? Maybe. I’m not a forgetful careless person. But in relating to the personal circumstances, karmic DEBT, and conflagrations of desires and impure thoughts, i had left the Sandy river in Oregon while entertaining fallacious desires for a woman who was not to be my wife. Technically, my wife and I were not yet engaged, but the desire was impure nonetheless. And that is what the Creator was telling me when he stole my wallet! If you do not believe in magic than this post will not resonate, but I leave you with the deduction that Magic is Real. Do not deny the voice of Magic. We should all take heed to any advice we can get right now even if it does sound like magic.
Alison,
A thought provoking, catalytic post for me. Thank you and Happy New Year!
Between you and Stephers, (and surely many more) these latest posts have moved me, against my better judgement, to create a new internet ID and get a WordPress account to join the most stimulating conversation on the Internet.
Forgive me if this first post is lengthy as I attempt to find my voice. To your other more regular readers as well, I apologize, but also, Hello and nice to meet you!
Anytime you focus your research on the public education downfalls it elicits a visceral connection as my late grandfather was an educator in the Philadelphia school system. Kensington, Mastbaum, Dobbins… I’m sure there were others.
My Aunt, the oldest of five and now retired, was also an educator. She focused on nutrition and macrobiotic cooking under the guise of ‘home economics,’ and she accomplished several neat projects and some decent program funding manipulation before she retired. But Hers is a different memoir.
One time I went to visit, she invited me into her classroom, a sort of reverse fieldtrip for me that I quite enjoyed. It was 2004. I was a 20-something dreadlocked wannabe ‘Rasta’ from California. Suddenly, after passing through metal detectors and security wands, I found myself introduced to at least thirty kids as “Chef Sean” and was leading a cooking class, teaching ‘Blue Mountain Skillet’ (rebranded for a distinct local connection) to a class of 11th and 12th graders at Kensington High School. My aunt gave me a fancy, extra tall chef’s hat to hide my dreadlocks so the kids could focus on the lesson and not the cultural oddity from the West Coast.
We purchased all the ingredients in advance from the local co-op my aunt still belongs too. She didn’t always buy the extra ingredients for her lessons, but she went all-out for this one. Organic veggies. Pastured pork. This was 2004 so she was WAY ahead of her time. New Jersey is still a Garden State if you know how to find it.
She bought three colors of bell peppers for the rainbow effect. A handful of jalapenos and just a few serrano peppers to keep it spicy. Onions, garlic, shallots for base flavor. Bacon for fat and crispy snacks. Potatoes for carbs and well, you know, that stuff that sticks to your ribs when you go camping.
We got to school early that day. My Aunt re-seasoned all the cast iron skillets. They hadn’t been used in ages. But they were in surprisingly good shape. We rubbed olive oil all over and salted them with course grained kosher sea salt, then baked them at 200 degrees for an hour before the kids came in.
It was magnificent! Nerves quickly subsided to excitement. The class was so entranced they barely minded crying and slicing five pounds of onions. A couple kids even burned their eyes after slicing up the hot peppers and accidently rubbing their face. Everyone thought it was funny, even the kids who burned their eyes!
Then, we started to really get cooking! Bacon first to get the grease going. Remove the bacon when it’s done and set aside to snack on. Start the sauté with the onions, garlic, and shallots. On the other side get the big water pots boiling so we can par boil the potatoes (red potatoes, washed but unskinned, cut into rough cut chucks about 1-2”). Now the peppers. Keep stirring. Ok in the other skillet throw the potatoes in now that they are drained. Yup… everything is soft and sizzling, okay… Stir it all together… even some of that bacon fat, that’s right kids!
Ok, I’m not going to lie… ketchup was involved in the final product, but these kids ate everything! They loved it! My Aunt says it was one of the most successful menus in all her years. And It remains single handedly one of the most important experiences in my life.
The point of telling this story is, as you already know, these experiences are going away. I treasure this experience as a keepsake because future generations will most likely not know about Blue Mountain Skillet with Rasta Sean from California.
So, now what? What are the solutions? As you conclude in your piece: “We need parents who are willing to grow a backbone and say no to their proposed cyborg future” I ponder DAILY what my actions should be.
I have a 3-year-old and my wife is five months pregnant. We chose to get pregnant knowing full well what the future holds and the challenges before us.
We chose to procreate because WE CAN! With the knowledge of what we know due in large part to the work of the FANTASTIC FIVE, I consider having a child in the age of geoengineered transhumanism a radical act of defiance. It’s almost an obligation. We are the keepers of natural life.
Many people in the truth community have expressed doubts or resentments regarding procreation in this time. I see posts often asserting “I couldn’t imagine having a kid right now.” But I think it is an imperative for truthers to continue organic life. What do you all think? And if we do continue organic life, then how? What will our system and society start to look like as we move forward?
There is another dilemma as well… as it pertains to children. That I am having hard time addressing/processing as the future unfolds. Because we KNOW what is happening. What is to be done with the foster children? The orphans and those already in full state custody?
Those of us who have found or will find a way to exist with the future system, outside of that system (homesteading, homeschooling, etc., paraphrasing here, but we are all finding it in different ways right now) sure, that is great. We can avoid relative conformism. Whooptie frieking doo! There are those among us who will know how to ‘exist’ outside the onslaught, how to survive. But what of those who have no custodians? Innocent children already caught up in bad situations pre-covid narrative.
Even if a person like you or me WANTED to steward a less fortunate, and say foster a child, now we are barred from even entertaining custodianship through tyrannical segregations and state policies?
A new level of Grief is easily obtainable almost every day as we progress through the simulacrum.
Bu what level of participation, even if a form of self-masochism, might be accepted amongst the truth community if we could say, establish a well-funded center for foster children to rescue just a few from the clutches of technofascist experimentation? Would the truth community even accept a person who is contemplating participation in the test-trace matrix? I won’t participate. But what about a sacrificial lamb? Where does the kamikaze aspect fit into the dialogue regarding the future of our children?
Do you get what I am trying to say here? We are all self-preservationists. But at what point do some of us start considering a sacrifice, a martyrdom role, to save the children? To save more children. Children that aren’t even our own.