As Stasi Smiles

It was bad enough when the Big Box stores started bragging about all their surveillance cameras. “So much shoplifting,” they claim.

That .2% of citizens shoplift is not just the store’s problem, it’s everyone’s problem. Cameras in the airports because, terrorists. Terrorists are not the government’s problem, they are everyone’s problem. Never met one myself, not even a friend of a friend of a friend has ever been arrested for terrorism in my 50+ years on this spinning insane asylum. But, safety. Must be kept safe from the .0002% of terrorists I’ve never encountered.

No evidence cameras stop terrorism, but in they go, and the travelers abide. When I stopped abiding I was told I was, “Letting them win,” in some backwards-ass attempt at logic.

Compliance will continue to be rewarded, as Stasi smiles.
Compliance will continue to come cloaked in convenience, as Stasi smiles.
Convenience will become increasingly inconvenient, as Stasi smiles.

Demanding conformity while singing diversity.

From Wiki:
“Stasi officers as “Chekists”. The KGB used ‘low-visibility harassment'[17] in order to control the population, and repress politically incorrect people and dissidents. This could involve causing unemployment, social isolation, and inducing mental and emotional health problems.”

Now we have cameras. Cameras everywhere and still not enough.

Cameras are now ubiquitous not only in airports, Big Box stores, shopping malls, grocery stores, schools, at the intersections of every city, on the gates of private homes and doorstoops–they are now attached to trees on dirt roads.

Including on our dirt road. You’ve got to be flipping kidding me!
As Stasi smiles.

This is the county’s camera. We are not in Soviet Russia, we are in rural Texas. These are our neighbors demanding conformity and compliance from other neighbors, as if it is their right to watch every car coming down a public dirt road.

We’ve been here nearly 20 years and I’ve not seen any dumping happening, or evidence of it. Even if there was a dumping free-for-all I still would not volunteer to have a surveillance camera installed on the road. This is not because I condone dumping, or long for dumping to pollute my property or the road, it’s because the dumping is not happening on private properties, or if it is, it is up to that property owner to surveille his own property. Do what property owners have been doing for generations: get dogs, get guns, fence your property, get to know your neighbors, put a camera up on your own land. Solve your own problems people!

If it’s happening in the creeks, owned by the State, the answer is not to spy on every private citizen, but to make more accesible dumping grounds for the people, and incentivize they dump there, instead of into public creeks and waterways.

County surveillance is grooming the citizenry for the state, federal, global surveillance grid. It’s working. It’s happening all over the world–The digital panopticon.

It’s tedious, demoralizing and infuriating to be talking and writing about this for decades as it only gets worse.

When the going gets tough, I know where to find some inspiration and re-stoke the righteous fires of indignation.

Here’s one, calls her Substack Mellowkat, though she’s anything but mellow . . .

“Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/mellowkat/ Grow your own food. Invest in your home & community. Stop giving money to the corporate whores & fake philanthropists. No one is coming to save you. Get up.”

She’s so insensed with the nonsense she actually tracks people down and gives them the riot act. Now there’s some good old-fashioned modeling of righteous behavior!

She’s tracked down weather modification pilots and confronted them publicly, because she loathes the chemtrails as much as I do.

What to know what’s wrong with the weather? Look up people!

Just look at our skies yesterday, such disgusting filth, why is everyone not screaming about this?!

Well, she is screaming about it, and about the surveillance cameras everywhere.

“I spoke with our local PD about this. It turns out, it was their idea. They wanted to put some sweet grant money to use. I spoke with our local police Lt. “H.” 
She made sure to emphasize that this is for “our safety and your safety.” Hmm. Reminds me of 2020 when people chased me down with temp guns, called the police, and kicked me out of grocery stores for not wearing a mask. They had to keep me out for everyone’s “safety.” 

Folks, we’ve all come to recognize that promises like “Safe and effective,” or “it’s for your safety,” are a load of horse shit. And as you read on, I hope that if you know any naive supporters of Big Brother surveillance, you might help them finally understand how these cameras are really being used and abused around the world right now. It’s time to take a fucking stand.”

More from her latest post:
“Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.
As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.
What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.”


Assessing Value

Back to this unpleasant subject again. It’s been a very long loop; I haven’t considered it much since first attempting to barter goods from the wee homestead.

It’s something we really do take for granted in our modern economy, whether one takes that as an inherent good or evil.

The good part is that it’s comfortable and I prefer it, on the surface. I hate bartering. I SO suck at it. I suck at it for reasons that are so deeply-seated (seeded?) that no logic can ever possibly be applied.

On travels to some countries barter was the norm and I was told to keep practicing as I’d get better at it. Some seem to enjoy it. These sorts always baffled me. They say, “Treat it like a game!” But that is really stupid, isn’t it, because I did not go out shopping in order to play a game. I already don’t like shopping much, to think I’d like it more by making it game-like is to make it ever closer to hellish.

So while it may not sound like it, this is the good side of money. It took me a long time to learn that. Not until I had to consider such exchanges as, which was of better or equal value, the handcrafted Top bar beehive, or the wormy, bossy, but still a good milker, Summer, a 7-year old goat?

Money, in partnership with “the Market”, make such exchanges far more simple. Since none of us has a crystal ball, and I have no idea how long Summer will live and there are no guarantees, and my friend has no idea if she’ll enjoy beekeeping, or be able to keep bees alive in our chemskies and YoYo climate, our exchange is made more simple by imagining what would be the ‘market value’ of each of our offerings.

The dark side of money it seems to me relates quite easily to the dark side of most things—like religion, or science, or even education—it provides, by its very nature, an endless potential for ‘middlemen’. It becomes a profession, then a vast sea of professions, then an institution, then an institution ‘too big to fail’.

It’s convenient and comfortable, no doubt about it. It’s easy enough for a child to use, but complex enough to build empires upon. Try to imagine living without it.

Do we really consider how we, as individuals, would place value upon goods and services anymore?

What about once money is replaced with tokens. It’s pretty much the same thing already, right? Tokens as a medium of value exchange—your massage is worth 2 dozen yard eggs. Right?

Well, the market value of your massage today is 20 tokens, but the value of my eggs is 10 tokens, today, and 15 tokens last week, and is projected to be 25 tokens tomorrow. That’s the real problem with the market, right? For you and I, as individuals deciding value between us, the eggs and massage exchange didn’t fluctuate vastly over a matter of days, or even weeks. It’s pretty steady, really. You use 2 dozen eggs per week, I like 1 massage per week, stable value exchange.

But I’ll bet you 5 economists in the room with us would tell us 50 ways it’s not really a stable value exchange. And, why be stable at all if there might be a profit to make? Then a dozen lawyers will tell us why those economists are right. And a nation full of universities will continue to produce a fat muffin top of middlemen to stuff between every simple interpersonal transaction in every tiny hamlet around the world.

I’m bothering to restate the obvious at this moment because I’m trying to re-assess the value of technology in my life. It started with the recurring headaches of social media many years ago, then moved to Smart phones, and lately it’s WordPress.

Then a cyber-friend shared a dream, which caused this spark of inquiry.

“Imagine if we could create an Agrarian world again, using technology as a tool to help us,  but not control or surveil us.” 

Can we make a more agrarian life through technology? Which I understand as, can technology help us to get back to basics? And by basics we mean an understanding of nature, an appreciation of its organic processes, a “re-enchantment” as I’ve heard it lovingly expressed, with the natural world. Working with our hands again, I presume, creating items of value to exchange with one another. A slower life perhaps, where we have the great luxury of time to enjoy our lives and our nature world to a greater degree than afforded to most in the modern world.

A ‘re-enchantment’ with nature, I like the sound of that.

An ‘agora’ that’s not corrupted by fiat, usury, taxes, violence and coercion, perhaps?

Technology in our private life here on the wee homestead has benefitted us in a few crucial ways—helping us to learn new skills has been the most significant. But keeping us from feeling terribly remote and unconnected and uninformed has also been very important. I’ve made a few good friends thanks to the internet and I’m very grateful for that. Feelings of isolation and loneliness can be significant spiritual hurdles for some of us living rural for the first time.

And I have seen promising shifts over the years. Homesteading is clearly a bonafide cultural movement at this time, I think primarily thanks to technology, as oxymoronic as that sounds. Herbalism has become more appealing as Pig Pharma breathes heavier down our necks. Pockets of interest and learning are all over the cyber world, every craft, trade or skill imaginable is available somewhere with a few clicks, I’m sure.

But I have seen and heard some really concerning trends lately, which makes me realize that the time to be re-assessing the value of the tech in our lives is reaching a crescendo.

For example, the young entrepreneurial types who are coming in to fill the needs of the rural communities with essentials like raw milk, homegrown veggies at the farmer’s market, small service businesses and the like, well they aren’t like us in some really fundamental ways.

They trust The Science, for the most part, evident in their willingness to vaccinate, medicate, use the latest supplements and vitamins, and not question any of it. They also love the tech and fully embrace the insane trifecta of the Global Grid: Surveillance cameras, Smart phones and digital payment systems.

How is that value assessed? Who is benefitting more?

My guess would be, more often than not, the middlemen. Like any pyramid scheme a few must be making good for anyone else to follow. For a while.

Seems to me these young entrepreneurs are setting themselves up for certain failure. I met one of these ambitious young women last week on my quest for raw milk, now that my goats are mostly gone. I really miss making cheese. The price of raw milk, not even organic, has gone through the roof as demand has perked up—$11/gallon around here. It’s too much for us to afford.

What did I learn from this experience? Her surveillance cameras everywhere tell me she doesn’t trust her customers or neighbors. Her vaccination schedule tells me she does not do her due diligence in caring for her animals. Her price and her preferred payment by QR code tells me she prefers dealing with middlemen over direct transactions and getting to know her clientele.

I will not be doing any business with her, that’s for sure.

So, while I still have a lot to learn about assessing value, there is a point to this rather rambling post: The goat is dead, no bees have yet to make that hive a home—but no one else profited or lost from that private exchange—and our relationship stayed in tact to trade another day despite these apparent failures. I think nations have gone to war for less.

And that’s something so far social media, Smart phones, WordPress, and indeed money, all fail to assess a proper value.

I’d love to hear any thoughts or ramblings about my cyber-friend’s dream, what do y’all think, is it possible? Would you want such a world?

“Imagine if we could create an Agrarian world again, using technology as a tool to help us,  but not control or surveil us.” 

How long before this field gets paved over for yet another Vape Shop, or Dollar Store, or Walgreens? Is it considered an improvement if it’s a Smart Farm run from Brussels by robots?

The Real World

So, I was at the laundromat again on Friday learning about life.  I’m happy we’ll finally be getting our new washer this month, after a taxing but novel summer of informative observations.

I’m actually a bit thankful our last washing machine was such a complete piece of crap.  That ‘Made in America’ logo on the side should be designed with far less pride, seems to me.

People-watching at the laundromat, located in the small city nearest us, population less than 19,000, is not like people-watching somewhere like the airport or the train station, or in a big city.  There’s no bustling around, no stressed out complaining, no strained glances at watches and clocks.

I found myself thinking repeatedly, “Are these the nicest folk you could ever meet?  Or just average folk?”

Because, when watching the media—whether the news or series or movies—one is often led to believe there’s a good deal of multicultural strife in lower income environments in this country.

This last time I was the only white person there, besides the owner.  Several women were chatting away in Spanish.  One black man, Nigerian I believe, judging by his dress, car and manners, stopped what he was doing twice in order to open the door for me.  Another gentlemen, Mexican, offered me his dryer, which was still piping hot with six minutes left on the timer. I happily accepted.

A few small kids were annoying, but that’s to be expected anywhere.

I like to go to the Mexican restaurant across the street afterward.  It started off as a taqueria with a line around the building just a few years ago, and has slowly expanded into a real restaurant, a hopping hot spot that seems to have a new addition built every month.  It’s run by a very pleasant and hard-working Mexican family and is full of gringos and immigrants alike, often sitting together.

I sometimes go to the grocery store too, also in this fairly diverse neighborhood.  I see lots of friendly smiles and neighborly encounters and a generally good mood among folks.  Sometimes this is surprising, because I can see that many are quite visibly ill, and a good many more are obviously terminally unhealthy.  The line at the pharmacy counter is usually the longest one.  They’re actively promoting the flu shot at the moment.

As I wait in the checkout line, and watch, I wonder:

What if they knew our “Smart Grid Space Fence Lockdown Surveillance System Police State Mega-Regions” will be toxic hellholes of farmed humans, by design?!

Remarkably (not), the newer the immigrant the healthier they look.  I often find myself wondering, had they known the truth about this country, and not just the daily variety show of propaganda our media exports worldwide, would they still choose to come here?

If they knew the vaccines are toxic and soon to be mandatory nationwide.
If they knew medical experimentation was justified from the highest levels and Disaster Corporatism the new and accepted normal.
If they knew the government and global corporations run everything hand-in-glove, just like a mafia, and the individual is powerless against them.
Would they still covet the ‘American Dream’?

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If they saw what I see, what many of us see, actually—that we are a country at war with the world, and with nature, and presumably between classes and races, but most especially within our own minds, our own realities—would they still choose to bloody their hands and souls in our epic global messes?

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A Futile Effort to End War and the Violent Insanity of the State https://kurtnimmo.blog/2019/11/01/a-futile-effort-to-end-war-and-the-violent-insanity-of-the-state/

“I began to realize in 1970, as did millions of other eighteen-year-old American males, that the government considered me little more than a dispensable body to be kidnapped and turned into a bullet-stopping slave.”

“The Pentagon devised a new tactic. Instead of drafting middle-class kids, they made “military service” “voluntary,” in other words only the desperately poor—and those brainwashed by lies and “patriotism”—are sucked into the war machine.”

“The American people are irrevocably brainwashed. The state has distracted and divided them into mutually antagonistic groups. Instead of focusing on the US-spawned horror of forever war—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria—and economic warfare against an ever-growing roster of nations not submitting to neoliberal economic suicide (Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua), the people are distracted by celebrity pabulum, sports, television shows pushing identity and sexual politics and, recently arrived on the scene, a corrosive and vile partisan war that has since the election of Donald Trump resulted in riots, looting, violence, and death. It is now common to hear people demand the assassination of the president and the incarceration of his wife and children.”

I know a few readers who will likely protest.  “Of course they’d still come here! Look where they come from, crazy woman, there’s many dozens of shittier countries out there!”  

And you’d be absolutely right in pointing that out.

But, those countries know they’re shitty.  That’s the critical difference.  They admit it openly.  I’ve yet to meet a Nigerian who believes he comes from the greatest country on Earth.

Personally, I’d have a lot more pride in my country if we could be that authentic.  Instead of our motto claiming we are: ‘The land of the free and the home of the brave’ we could admit instead we are: ‘The land of illusions and the home of sorcerers.’

It’s the fact that we’re expected here to have pride in our shittiness that I find so unbearably insulting.

Perhaps, instead of The Star Spangled Banner as our country’s marching theme song, we could consider this one, in the spirit of authenticity?

Real American Heroes

There are tears fogging my eyes and my jaw is on the floor listening to this monumental speech from this heroic Austrian-American woman.

She saw what National Socialism and Hitler’s rise to power did to her native country.  She saw him voted into power by a nearly unanimous population, watched as he took over the education system, the healthcare system, established an intricate bureaucracy over all the farmers and business owners, forced registration of the guns and then confiscated them, and exert his tyranny over every aspect of life and death in the country.

You don’t have to be in the Tea Party or a devout Jesus worshiper to see she knows what she’s talking about.  Of course when you search her online you get loads of slander about her coming up first, go figure.

What are her wise words of advice to us all from this octogenarian?  Make sure you have plenty of ammo!  Yes, m’aam!

This speech should be played in every classroom, boardroom, civic center, mall, warehouse across this entire country!

https://youtu.be/pl0neCR_k3I

Not So Wise Women

I did some travel writing during a decade of constant travel and my favorite part was having an excuse to talk to elderly ladies.  Someday I will dig up more of these photos and interviews.  It was sheer enjoyment and curiosity that drove me to them.

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I really had no agenda and I’d been advised to steer clear of politics, but sometimes I’d ask about the ‘communist’ takeover, quickly followed by the Soviet occupation, though it was probably still too early to discuss such recent wounds in polite company in the 1990s. So, sometimes I’d seek out un-polite company.

It always stuck with me how often I hear a lady say some version of: “We had no idea what they were capable of!”  I believed them.  “Of course, how could you possibly have known, so tragic,” is what I’d be thinking.

Now that I’ve grown I’ve gotten a different take on this well-worn phrase.  Now I think, well, why the hell not?  Had you not gotten the news of their atrocities in Poland and Hungary and East Germany and so on? These are your neighbors, after all. 

But, of course they had, these were not peasants in the countryside usually, they were worldly elderly women living in Prague, most of them still working into their 70s, because that’s what happens when the government ‘collectivizes’ all your family properties, businesses and homes.  That’s what they called it, collectivized, because it sounds so much nicer than confiscated.

They had a suspicion of ‘volunteers’ that was completely unknown to me previously and was actually the hardest thing for me to overcome in the beginning, since part of the time I was living there I was a Peace Corps volunteer.  Now I get it.  It’s the ‘Trojan Horse’ thing, and the fact that volunteering was forced on them by the government as part of their ‘civic duties’ along with voting in sham elections and showing up for cheesy government-sponsored parades and celebrations.

I would do dumb touristy things without a second thought, like photograph folks’ houses I found lovely.  One time a horrified middle-aged lady ran out of her front door in her robe to scream at me: “No taking pictures here!  Are you healthy?!”

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Me in Slovakia 1995

That line stuck with me for years.  “Are you healthy?”  What in the world did she mean by that, like, I looked sick or something?  I was very healthy indeed, her house was so beautiful and I so admired it I was doing what was completely natural for me to do, take a picture, duh!

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Belarus 1999

Then many years later I realized she must have meant ‘healthy in the head’ because the paranoia in these folks ran really deep.  Though apparently they adopted it too late to save themselves from the real enemy.

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The Soviet tanks rolling into other major Eastern European cities was in the papers.  They knew.  They just thought, “Oh, but that could never happen here!”

I would not have pressed further back then and I took these ladies at face value.  Now I would press, because what I think was really at play was what I see all around me today in this country: denial, suppression, wishful thinking, neglect, misdirected hostility, and so on.

They are showing you what they are capable of, right now, Americans: police state, mass surveillance, technocratic overlords, end of private property, mandatory vaccinations, end of free speech, and the very long list goes on.

Thanks very much to Decker, Dispatches from the Asylum for this brief sampling of the day on the capabilities and intentions of our current overlords:

“Check out the latest of these shitards and their latest, choicest f**kery:”
First wireless insect-size robot takes flight – via roboticsnews.com

That Sign Telling You How Fast You’re Driving May Be Spying – via technocracy.news

Your Volvo Will Soon Call The Cops On You If It Thinks You’ve Been Drinking – via zerohedge.com

Finger Vein Vending Machines And A Global Biometric Police Database – via activistpost.com

NYC subway denies using ‘real-time face recognition screens’ in Times Square – via theverge.com

Police in Canada Are Tracking People’s ‘Negative’ Behavior In a ‘Risk’ Database– via vice.com

MAIN CORE: GOVT “THREAT LIST” NAMES AT LEAST 8 MILLION AMERICANS WHO WILL BE DETAINED WHEN MARTIAL LAW IS IMPOSED – via amg-news.com

DARPA Seeks FAA Approval For Military Drones Over American Cities – via technocracy.news

AT&T Creates FirstNet For Law Enforcement Surveillance – viatechnocracy.news

Homeland Security To Scan Your Face At 20 Top Airports – via technocracy.news

Law enforcement taps Google’s Sensorvault for location data, report – viacnet.com

Snitch Switch: Smart Assistants With “Moral AI” Could Call Police on Owners Who Break Law – via thenewamerican.com

Take a good, hard look, because I really don’t want to have to say, “I told you so!”on my death bed.

But, of course, if it comes to that, I certainly will.

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Me in Prague, Czech Republic 1994