Anxiety, Anguish, Anger: How It Feels to Survive a Collapse

This report was originally published by Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper

By J.G. Martinez D

Hello to all those readers interested in learning from my personal experience of surviving an economic collapse.

I decided to write this article, the first of a series of several similar that will be posted because I am experiencing these days a huge emotional mix. I am not embarrassed in any way for this, I am a normal person, I have feelings and emotions like everyone else, and until not long ago I had a home, a job, and a conventional, peaceful life like perhaps many of you are enjoying right now.

May God keep it that way!

As a former oil worker, one learns to control emotions, because being in this business, a bad decision in the field if there is danger present, could cost one’s life. Or someone else’s. This said, when we made the decision (as a family we discuss all this of course) and, once my salary stopped being useful for three weeks worth of food, we decided that was the inflection point. After 14 years in one of the most profitable industries in the world (except in Venezuela), I was left with nothing in my bank account. The hyperinflation ate away all the little money that was there. The next step, fleeing to a foreign country (yes, I had savings in hard currency) and trying to find some stability was relatively easy, as my sister-in-law and mother-in-law were already here, and they had some space. So I started a small business (mainly private lectures) just to meet the ends, and it became more or less profitable. A phone call every two days to home, to speak with my family, and long, newspaper-like emails, social networks sometimes. (We decided to not disclose my departure because of OPSEC).

Anxiety

Everything had been happening more or less in a kind of natural way. I did not realize how deeply all this has affected me on a subconscious level. After the daily struggle ended, I suddenly start to become more and more anxious and sad whenever I received photos from my friends and family. I had never been a very delicate person regarding emotions, and feelings. I had been able to have everything under relative control.

But the uncertainty and stress have started to take their toll. What motivated me to write this, was that I did not even realize it. A grown man, dressed in black leather, riding a big, loud motorcycle, and whose eyes suddenly broke in tears trying to buy some medicines for a little, sweet, granny who sells flowers in a hutch to the side of the road for a living…come on. Yes, that happened to me. Powerlessness, inability to help because I had the money, but could not find the medicines in any pharmacy I went to…it was the first episode, and I should have taken it as the first warning about something was going on back there, behind the curtains. That was a year ago. I never had a similar experience until recently. I have been exposed to a degree of anxiety, just like a normal student and worker could experience. Once one learns to deal with it, everything seems to improve.

But you know what? We have experienced a disaster like few other countries are experiencing. An earthquake is a terrible experience. But it is fast and sudden. The agony of a slow-motion collapse like the one we are having, I am deeply convinced, leaves permanent scars in the minds of everyone who is going throughout. Whenever a natural disaster is present, perhaps we took our time, but we accepted it. It was inevitable, in most instances.

But when the situation is induced, and the only reason you can find is human evil…that changes things radically. The frustration level is very high. So high, that I have found myself walking (in hilly terrain) just to calm down a little bit. The other things that have worked to calm down my anxiety are meditation, a cup of warm milk with some drops of chamomile essence, and rest.

Anguish

I never realized, until some recent events, the level of the threat we are facing. A total disruption to our former way of life. My sensitivity has been so high, that even being in the market and seeing the pet food large bags, makes a knot my throat, knowing that perhaps our furry parts of the family are not being well fed. And I start thinking about all the abandoned pets in the streets…you know how it is. I have a natural love for animals, and this affects me deeply.

After having read a little bit about the topic, I can say that the uncertainty levels are so high that it has been what has overwhelmed my self-defense mechanisms. Upon accepting this, I became aware that we were doing MUCH better than the average. I had a safety net and a parachute. A lot of people is now trying to sell their goods in an economy that is in the bottom of the tank, just to buy the bus tickets to get out of dodge!…Jeez, dude.

I have learned that the natural response of every individual is different, of course. Some face it with courage, some others just crash down, and crumble. The total impact depends on the magnitude of the threat; on how well prepared the person is to deal with it…here I had some advantages, as a family head. I had been prepping for more than 10 years now, and that helped me to overcome that incredible anxiety that has attacked me in the most unforeseen moments. With the good paying job we acquired some equipment, made some smart investments, and on time I developed some alternative income sources that allowed us to sort many obstacles. Good overall health, d a proper mindset has been extremely important for this.

One of our friends, a good fellow, in his 60s, who had enjoyed a relatively comfortable life, was not so lucky. He was the owner of several commercial locations that he had inherited from his family. The inflation rates and the food supply difficulties hurt him badly, financially speaking. He fell into a deep depressive state, and sadly he got sick and passed away some months ago. Heart disease, they told us. Had he put his guts together, asked for hard currency from his tenants, and start behaving like a prepper, maybe he would be still alive. He had properties enough to navigate through the mess by playing his cards wisely. That was a hard hit for us, and as well a close call: an improper approach in the worst of a crisis, can, and most definitely will, get people killed.

Added to the anxiety paroxysms, I have been experiencing something that could be defined as anguish. It is difficult to differentiate one from the other. This anguish is perhaps deeper and longer lasting. It comes around whenever I start thinking in the near future, instead. Not having any medical insurance now, like the full coverage we all had once, and the lack of a fixed employment with proper income is the main cause, maybe. I am sure it will mitigate once this is resolved. But it is there, and yes, the effect is noticeable.

Anger

Another emotion that I noticed is arising is anger. A gut-deep, strong, dark, powerful anger. Rage. Without any specific target. Not good. Anything that can force you to make a non-rational choice is a potential danger and must be assessed and controlled. I am working on that, though.

Something very interesting I recently read about is the perception the subject has about the crisis that generated the uncertainty state. Personality and some other factors like the age group of the individuals are important factors, too. We have to understand the need to overcome our own personal stuff, and take care of those who need us. It is extremely hard to do, but can be done for a while.

And of course, there is that support we receive when facing a crisis. It is hard to provide support when everyone´s life is a mess, too. I have received lots of support, and perhaps being lonely in a foreign place without friends, family and acquaintances is a major factor in this hard-to-overcome emotional state. And I am not exactly that kind of friendly neighbor, just a little below the average maybe (have had really abusive neighbors)…but I am a family man.

In the next article, I will write about the three crisis stages. I admit to having a denial stage until not so long ago. But the recent violent events made me wake up about just how far evil can go.

Dedication: I would like to finish dedicating this article to our friend Nelson “The happy mustache” as we called him, recently deceased, another innocent victim of this economic collapse. He was really a nice, funny guy, and had lots of good vibes to offer.

Fly high, my friend. And don´t get your mustache too wet up there in those clouds…

***

About the Author

Jose is an upper middle class professional. He is a former worker of the oil state company with a Bachelor’s degree from one of the best national Universities. He has a small 4 members family, plus two cats and a dog. An old but in good shape SUV, a good 150 square meters house in a nice neighborhood, in a small but (formerly) prosperous city with two middle size malls. Jose is a prepper and shares his eyewitness accounts and survival stories from the collapse of his beloved Venezuela. If you’d like to donate to help Jose get his family out of Venezuela, you can do so here: paypal.me/JoseM151

 

Please feel free to share any information from this article in part or in full, giving credit to the author and including a link to The Organic Prepper and the following bio.

Daisy Luther is the author of The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide To Whole Food on a Half Price Budget.  Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

If Music gives you Goosebumps, Here’s What it may Say about your Brain

Do you ever listen to music and feel the hairs on your arm or neck standing up? Perhaps it makes you feel like crying? It may mean that you have a strong connection between specific parts of your brain.

Right now I’m listening to one of my favorite songs as I write this. I tend to get either joyous waves or chills depending on what I may be relating the song to as I listen. More on this below.

Matthew Sachs, a former undergraduate at Harvard, decided he wanted to find out why people got chills when they would listen to music and what might be triggering this feeling.

His research experiment took a look at 20 students and their feelings when listening to music. 10 students admitted to feeling chills or having goosebumps when they hear music. The other 10 did not. Brain scans were taken of all 20 students and the results were analyzed.

Of the 10 who had stated they experience strong emotional connection to music and felt ‘chills’ when listening, displayed a different brain structure than those who claimed to not experience ‘chills’ when listening to music.

The area of the brain in question here is that of the auditory cortex and those that process emotions. What was found was that those who experienced the feeling of ‘chills’ while listening to music had denser or stronger fibres connecting the areas of the brain in question. This means that the two areas can communicate better.

Sachs’s published his findings on Oxford Academic but he is quoted by Neuroscience as saying:

“The idea being that more fibers and increased efficiency between two regions means that you have more efficient processing between them.”

In audio engineering school I learned fibres, cables, or wiring is like having a thick smoothie in front of you and having different straw choices. You have a thin straw or a thick one, which one can you more easily drink the smoothie from? This is the same with audio cables sending data or sound. The same seems to be in the theory discussed above. The denser the fibre, the easier it is to send the energy, or data, from one area of the brain to the other.

What Do The Chills Mean?

While it’s not 100% clear, they may mean you have a more intense connection to feeling emotions. It may also mean that your memories linked to a certain songs may be strong.

All in all, our emotions are physical experiences triggered by something our mind believes. Often times it is a belief system or program we have associated with an experience or how to feel about it that triggers a specific emotion. Thus, different people can feel different emotions about the same experience, as it’s based on a belief about the experience.

Although Sachs’ study was very small in size, he is currently working to conduct further research to explore the brains activity when listening to songs that register certain reactions. He hopes to physically discover what causes these reactions and potentially determine treatment for psychological disorders based on these findings.

Because depression causes an inability to experience pleasure of everyday life, music can be used to help provide therapy to those suffering.

Even if you do not experience strong emotions from listening to music, the exploration into connecting to our emotions and understanding them is key. Emotions simply tell us more about ourselves inside. And while we may experience a certain emotion about something at one time, this doesn’t mean we will always experience that emotion, or any at all, about that experience.

In fact, beyond emotions is a state of peace that we sometimes can confuse for emotions. I have found that when I am feeling my absolute best, I am experiencing a state of being that is pure peace, pure love and beyond emotions. This isn’t to say I don’t feel emotions in those times, but it’s a connection into knowing what’s beyond the physical experience of an emotion.

I have always found that emotions are a reference point that allow us to experience something more deeply and intently. And when we examine what that means about ourselves, we gain a greater sense of self awareness.

Given that some of us often feel very disconnected in our lives and given how much of the population experiences depression, it’s not all that surprising that even in a small group that Sachs studied, 50% did not report experiencing that connection with music.

What would come from humanity having greater connection to our emotions and understanding them? Would they not drive us and take over as much when we did experience them? Might we be able to understand why we get angry at times and perhaps explore how to move past those triggers and lessen suffering? After all, why do some of us get mad at an experience while another doesn’t? Why do some of us feel upset at being called a name while others don’t? And do you notice those who don’t get upset rarely get called names? Do we attract the experiences that can help us learn more about ourselves?

These are all deeper questions that I believe can help move us beyond suffering induced by our lack of awareness of our emotions and why they can be triggered. That said, emotions are not a bad thing by any means, they are incredible. They allow us to enrich our experience ten fold at times. I simply feel we are being challenged to not be driven so intensely by our emotions.

The post If Music gives you Goosebumps, Here’s What it may Say about your Brain appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

The Power Of Saffron For Mental Health

Saffron is an extravagant, sweet-smelling spice commonly used in Indian, Turkish, and Persian cuisine and is closely related to turmeric. Its use in traditional health approaches has spanned thousands of years, and modern research seems to back up its commonly-reported benefits. Like any spice, saffron may be a formidable force against internal swelling and irritation in the body. For years, research has also linked this red grass-like spice with mood health, showing it could be a powerful tool against varying forms of depression.

Saffron for Mental Health: A Depression Fighter?

While it may not be a one-size-fits-all approach, saffron supplementation may be helpful for some people in regulating mood and mental health. A recent meta-analysis examining the years of saffron research has found many clinical trials suggest the spice could improve the symptoms of depression. ^[1] The exact mechanisms behind which saffron exhibits beneficial effects against mood-related disorders is largely unknown; however, it’s hypothesized that it may be due to its antioxidant content. ^[2]

Not only does saffron provide a lower risk-to-benefit ratio compared to antidepressants, saffron may also inhibit the side effects commonly experienced by antidepressants. That means, as an adjunct to conventional approaches to depression, saffron may be an ideal supplement for reducing side effects from antidepressant drugs. That’s not to say you should stop taking antidepressants–far from it. But, if you do have concerns about the medications you are taking, talk to your doctor about the types of strategies you can use to support mental health.

Saffron: Natural Support for Mental Health

There are many things you can do to protect your mood and even strengthen it without having to rely on pharmaceutical methods. While antidepressants may be necessary in some cases, you should also consider optimizing your vitamin D, exercising, and getting plenty of high-quality sleep. Don’t forget about nutrition. Omega-3 fats are excellent mood supporters, and you can get them easily from vegan sources such as chia and flax seed.

What do you do to support your mental health and mood? We’d love to hear your tips in the comments!

References:

1. Hausenblas HA, Heekin K, Mutchie HL, Anton S. A systematic review of randomized controlled trials examing the effectiveness of saffron (Crocus sativus L.) on psychological and behavioral outcomes. J Integr Med. 2015 Jul;13(4):231-40. doi: 10.1016/S2095-4964(15)60176-5.


2. Saleem S, Ahmad M, Ahmad AS, et al. Effect of Saffron (Crocus sativus) on neurobehavioral and neurochemical changes in cerebral ischemia in rats. J Med Food. 2006 Summer;9(2):246-53.

The post The Power Of Saffron For Mental Health appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Study: How Magnesium Supplementation Could Help with Depression

Sadly, depression is a common mental health condition that affects millions of people in Australia and around the world. However, there are many natural therapies for depression that give you back your power, as they are more preventive in nature and help your body to heal itself. One of these natural solutions for depression may be magnesium, as pointed out in recent research.

This study involved 126 men and women who suffered from mild to moderate depression. Sixty-two were given a supplement containing 248mg of magnesium (as magnesium chloride, not the best supplemental form) for 6 weeks, and then spent 6 weeks with no supplementation. The others first spent 6 weeks taking no magnesium, and then swapped with the first group for the second half.

All volunteers were given questionnaires to evaluate their depression and anxiety at the start of the study and every 2 weeks during treatment.

During supplementation, depression and anxiety scores improved significantly, and participants were less likely to suffer from headaches. During the control period, however, depression scores did not change and anxiety worsened.

As their symptoms showed improvement in 2 weeks, magnesium could be a rapid-acting remedy for mild and moderate depression, while offering a wide range of side benefits. And if you are worried about negative social attitudes towards depression, magnesium is indicated for so many health complaints that a supplement implies nothing.

So, Why? What Does Magnesium Do?

From energy production to the synthesis of neurotransmitters that control mood, magnesium is involved in over 300 biochemical reactions in the body. If you are deficient, and many people are, then these chemical reactions are limited.

Of course, magnesium is not the only nutrient that we need to make neurotransmitters. B vitamins, particularly B12, folate (B9), B6, and niacin (B3), are essential co-factors in neurotransmitter production.

Deficiencies do not just affect mood, but overall brain function and memory.

A balance of omega-3 and -6 essential fatty acids is also important, as they are a part of nerve cell membranes and play a role in communication between cells. Impaired communication affects things like mood, memory and function in general.

Vitamin D deficiency is another common problem, which can contribute to depression by altering gene expression and the ability to control inflammation.

Overall, the ‘chemical imbalance’ is more complex than conventional medicine tells you, and we have far more control over it too.

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You stand a higher chance of being crushed by a vending machine.

Via The Daily Bell

There’s something I’ve always found mesmerizing about watching animals in the wild.

They have the most incredible instincts, honed from countless generations of survival against constant threats.

Animals have a keen sense of danger. They know immediately when something doesn’t feel right, and they act on it without hesitation.

I saw an incredible example of this last year when I was visiting a remote wildlife reservation in Zimbabwe.

It was late in the afternoon on a hot summer day, and my friends and I were ensconced in a hidden observation bunker situated on the edge of a water hole.

The animals all began to arrive, one species at a time, to cool off before nightfall. First the elephants. Then Rhinos. Zebras. Giraffes. Baboons.

It was a playful mood; all the animals seemed to be enjoying the water, when without warning, there was a stillness. The gazelles froze. The zebras’ ears perked.

Something wasn’t right. A smell. A sound. Something.

So they got the hell out of there.

We found out later that a ravenous pack of hyenas was on the prowl nearby, so the animals’ instincts were spot-on.

Deep, deeeep down, human beings have the same highly refined instincts.

Our long-lost ancestors struggled against every imaginable danger. And those lessons are hard-coded in our DNA.

We sense threats. We can feel it when something’s wrong.

The difference between our species and animals in the wild, though, is that we humans have way too many external influences that muck it all up.

Case in point: last week was obviously a tough one for anyone with any sense of humanity.

Acts of terrorism are scary.

And hearing about completely innocent people on a popular pedestrian promenade getting mowed down like bowling pins by some madman is definitely going to cause some discomfort.

But down here in Latin America at least, there was ensuring wall-to-wall news coverage for the next several days in a way I hadn’t seen since 9/11.

It’s all we saw. Terrorism. Terrorism. Terrorism.

This really amps up the fear factor for something that is already difficult to stomach.

So it’s easy to understand why I keep hearing people say things like, “We’re living through the most dangerous times in human history.”

It’s easy to lose perspective. But on the balance we have it pretty good.

13th century Europeans faced a far greater threat with the approaching Mongol hoard.

A century later they faced an even more terrible fate with the onset of the Bubonic Plague, which ultimately wiped out around 30% of Europe’s population.

Even in more recent times, the threat of nuclear annihilation between East and West posed a constant threat.

Yes, acts of terrorism are appalling. But taken in historical and mathematical context the danger is actually quite low.

The Cato Institute published some data recently showing that the chances of dying in a terror attack are around 1 in 3 million.

Statistically speaking, you have a better chance of being crushed to death by a vending machine.

But we don’t demand that our governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars that taxpayers cannot possibly afford in order to protect us from vending machines.

That’s because deep down we sense that vending machines don’t truly pose a threat.

But with terrorism our senses are heavily manipulated until we believe that the threat is far greater than what the statistics show.

The real irony is that the manipulation works both ways.

Just as we are manipulated into being terrified of certain risks that pose no real statistical threat, we are manipulated into ignoring other risks that are far more likely.

I would raise financial markets as an obvious example.

The stock market in the United States is at an all-time high, with valuation metrics that have rarely been higher in more than 100 years of data.

Bond markets around the world have literally never been more expensive… EVER.

In order to return to levels that are more in-line with long-term historical averages, stock and bond markets would both have to suffer steep losses.

But instead of encouraging investors to independently assess these financial risks, mainstream media often dismisses such assertions as pessimistic bugaboo.

Or another obvious long-term risk– that Social Security is going to run out of money.

I write about this one frequently. The Social Security Trustees, including the Treasury Secretary of the United States, state very clearly in their annual report that Social Security’s major trust funds “will be depleted in 2034.”

Yet despite the totally predictable, unavoidable, widespread consequences to Americans’ primary source of retirement income, the public is manipulated into ignoring this threat as well.

Instead of the truth, we continue to hear the same tired mantra– “Social Security is just fine,” despite every shred of objective evidence to the contrary.

We’re also told to believe ridiculous axioms like “the US government’s debt doesn’t matter,” even though they have $20+ trillion of it and spend like drunken sailors.

But no. The experts tell us that this is not a risk worth concerning ourselves with. Angry brown people want to kill us. Focus on that instead.

Human beings have a 1 in 3,000,000 chance of suffering from a terror attack.

Yet there is currently a 100% chance that Social Security runs out of money in 2034.

Only one of these manages to find its way into the news.

Not to mention, if properly informed, people can actually DO SOMETHING about the latter. There’s plenty of time for intelligent people to prepare.

Guard Your Mind Like the Precious Resource It Is

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence.  Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.

– Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)

Something I’ve been working on personally is becoming more in control of my emotions and, more importantly, trying not  to immediately respond when something makes me angry. In order to do this, I’ve found it necessary to be conscious of the anger itself. Specifically, I’ve noticed that when we get angry we tend to move into a state of mind that is obsessively focused on the source of this anger. We dwell on how we were wronged over and over in our minds like an uncontrollable movie, which then makes us even more angry. In an attempt to stop the movie and momentarily feel better about the situation, we tend to lash out. It feels good for a second, but it almost never gets you anywhere.

Anger and fear are two emotions that serve important evolutionary purposes and certainly have their place, but I’ve found neither to be productive when it comes to solutions to serious problems, or to establishing better relationships with those you care about. When one is angry or fearful the instinctual response is to do whatever might make you feel better in the moment. Allowing oneself to react from a state of fear or anger will almost always lead to poor decision making, unless you are actually in a situation that requires such a response.

I discussed this concept in May’s post, Do Ends Justify the Means?

I think many people will quickly answer the question “do the ends justify the means” without putting enough thought into it. The question is meant to be considered when it comes to premeditated voluntary actions of questionable ethics taken with a defined objective in mind. It has nothing to do with matters of self-defense, or anything in that category. For example, if someone is coming at your family with an intent to inflict harm, the ethical decision might be to harm the aggressor to protect your family despite the fact that harming another person in itself is an immoral act. Pretty much everyone can agree with this, so it doesn’t add anything to the argument of whether the ends justify the means.

What about if you’re walking down the street and you see someone come from behind an old lady, hit her on the head and then struggle with her on the ground in an attempt to take her purse. You aren’t being directly attacked, so should you intervene with violence if necessary against the perpetrator to help an innocent bystander? Again, I think the right and ethical decision here is to step in to try to help the victim if possible.

In both these cases the negative “means” of violence you might be required to use against violent aggressors do indeed justify the ends — in the first instance the protection of your family, and in the second a vulnerable old lady. Given these examples, one might be led to believe that the ends can often justify the means, but I would argue that this only holds true in extreme examples such as the ones described above, and that for a principled person, the ends almost never justify the means.

When people seriously consider whether the ends of a particular action justify the means, it’s almost never in relation to scenarios like the ones described above for two reasons. First, those are extremely rare situations that many people (in the developed world at least) will only experience a few of times in the course of a lifetime, if that. On the other hand, many of us face constant but often overlooked ethical dilemmas on a daily or weekly basis. We all face situations where we are confronted with the choice to do something we know is wrong, but perhaps do it anyway either for instant gratification or in the pursuit of a larger goal.

The point is that most of us (at least here in the U.S.) rarely find ourselves in situations where the proper course of action would be to respond instinctually from a state of fear or anger. For most of us, the best course of action is to become aware of our anger and acknowledge that it is a normal response, but to also then recognize that this state of mind must be transcended in order to come up with conscious and productive ways to overcome the root problem. This is the wisdom the spiritual masters of all faiths throughout history have taught us. Easier said than done for sure, but that doesn’t make it any less true or important.

This is part of what it means to be more conscious, or aware. It means you’ve learned to acknowledge the constant presence of the crazy “monkey mind” which tends to dominate human thought. Recognizing it is the crucial first step, taming it is a whole other ballgame, and one I am only beginning to work on.

For the purposes of this piece, the key thing I want to hammer home is that people are much more easily manipulated when they don’t realize they’re being manipulated. Moreover, the easiest way to manipulate someone is to ensure they get in, and stay in, a state of either fear or angry, preferably both. Whether intentional or not, the media seems to be professionals at creating such an environment, which  is why it’s so important to tune from 90% of the nonsense they publish. It’s quite literally brain cancer.

It’s not just the corporate media though. I’m seeing it across the political spectrum, whether from “new right” pundits, or anti-free speech leftists advocating violence. Becoming your enemy to fight your enemy has become a new rallying cry for the unconscious across the political spectrum. “But they’re doing it, so now we’re gonna do it.” Is this political discourse, or toddlers throwing sand at each other in the playground?

The bottom line is if you ever hear anyone advocating such tactics run away from them as fast as you can. These people are poison.

Some people are actively trying to lower your consciousness, while others are trying to raise it.

Discard the former, embrace the latter.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) August 16, 2017

Only conscious people can help create a better world, unconscious people never will.

If Student Loans Were Honest

Hey, a lot, and enough beer and good jokes will purchase you pussy, but i"m paying my student loans off steadily and quickly and will be done before age 30 (much earlier if i stop being lazy). My car will be paid in a year and a half, got it half a year ago unlike these 72 month idiots, and it"s a fast german one.

I grew up with basically no money (worked as a dishwasher at age 16 which is the minimum here and even that was killer). $7 an hour and even then i knew how stupid the fkin minimum wage was. My parents paid a very small fraction of my college cost. This is definitely NOT to excuse our moneyprinting communist satanic NWO overlords for roping 18 year olds with IQ"s equal to their age in years into $100k loans, just saying that some people can leverage loans properly, even in a bullshit fed-induced bubble climate. They can distort the market, but we are smarter (especially here at ZH!).

BTW Manthong, you are one of the best posters on here, and i"m in agreement with you here. Just felt like riffing off what you were saying.

Dilbert's Scott Adams Explains "How To Know You're In A Mass Hysteria Bubble"

Authored by Scott Adams via Dilbert blog,

History is full of examples of Mass Hysterias. They happen fairly often. The cool thing about mass hysterias is that you don’t know when you are in one. But sometimes the people who are not experiencing the mass hysteria can recognize when others are experiencing one, if they know what to look for.

I’ll teach you what to look for.

A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.

But if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play.

If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble.

If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.

Here are some signs of mass hysteria. This is my own take on it, but I welcome you to fact-check it with experts on mass hysteria.

1. The trigger event for cognitive dissonance

On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.

Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events.

2. The Ridiculousness of it 

One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.

If you think those examples don’t sound crazy – regardless of the reality – you are probably inside the mass hysteria bubble.

3. The Confirmation Bias

If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, you probably interpreted President Trump’s initial statement on Charlottesville – which was politically imperfect to say the least – as proof-positive he is a damned racist.

If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble you might have noticed that President Trump never campaigned to be our moral leader. He presented himself as – in his own words “no angel” – with a set of skills he offered to use in the public’s interest. He was big on law and order, and equal justice under the law. But he never offered moral leadership. Voters elected him with that knowledge. Evidently, Republicans don’t depend on politicians for moral leadership. That’s probably a good call.

When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse. That’s probably why he never described his moral leadership as an asset when running for office. We observe that he has never been shy about any other skill he brings to the job, so it probably isn’t an accident when he avoids mentioning any ambitions for moral leadership. If he wanted us to know he would provide that service, I think he would have mentioned it by now.

If you already believed President Trump is a racist, his weak statement about Charlottesville seems like confirmation. But if you believe he never offered moral leadership, only equal treatment under the law, that’s what you saw instead. And you made up your own mind about the morality. 

The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:

1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.

or…

2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.

or…

3. A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.

or…

4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.

One of those narratives is less crazy-sounding than the others. That doesn’t mean the less-crazy one has to be true. But normal stuff happens far more often than crazy stuff. And critics will frame normal stuff as crazy whenever they get a chance.

4. The Oversized Reaction

It would be hard to overreact to a Nazi murder, or to racists marching in the streets with torches. That stuff demands a strong reaction. But if a Republican agrees with you that Nazis are the worst, and you threaten to punch that Republican for not agreeing with you exactly the right way, that might be an oversized reaction. 

5. The Insult without supporting argument

When people have actual reasons for disagreeing with you, they offer those reasons without hesitation. Strangers on social media will cheerfully check your facts, your logic, and your assumptions. But when you start seeing ad hominem attacks that offer no reasons at all, that might be a sign that people in the mass hysteria bubble don’t understand what is wrong with your point of view except that it sounds more sensible than their own. 

For the past two days I have been disavowing Nazis on Twitter. The most common response from the people who agree with me is that my comic strip sucks and I am ugly.

*  *  *

The mass hysteria signals I described here are not settled science, or anything like it. This is only my take on the topic, based on personal observation and years of experience with hypnosis and other forms of persuasion.

I present this filter on the situation as the first step in dissolving the mass hysteria. It isn’t enough, but more persuasion is coming.

If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble, you might see what I am doing in this blog as a valuable public service.

If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, I look like a Nazi collaborator.

How do I look to you?

*  *  *

Adams wrote a book about how to persuade yourself to success. Based on reader comments, it is working. His upcoming book, Win Bigly, tells you how to persuade others. (For good.) That comes out October 31st.

America Is On Its Way To Divorce Court

Authored by Marc Thiessen via PennLive.com,

There is a place for contempt in our public discourse.

We should have contempt for a regime in North Korea that brutalized a young American student named Otto Warmbier. We should have contempt for a regime in Syria that uses poison gas to massacre innocent men, women and children. We should have contempt for Islamic State terrorists who behead Americans, burn people alive in cages and systematically rape Yazidi girls.

But we should not have contempt for each other.

Yet, we do. Our politics today is descending into a bitter spiral of contempt. And we saw the consequences in the attempted assassination of Republican members of Congress on a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, last week.

Back when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was shot in 2011, many on the left were quick to blame conservative political rhetoric - falsely it turned out. But the attack on Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and his colleagues was politically motivated. The assassin volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called President Trump a "traitor" on social media and, according to witnesses, asked if the players were Republicans before opening fire.

No one is responsible except the would-be assassin. But his actions should serve as a wake-up call that the demonization of our fellow Americans who disagree with us has gone too far. The culture of contempt permeating our politics has now had near-fatal consequences. We need to put on the brakes and learn how to distinguish once again between our opponents and our enemies.

Case in point: A few weeks before the Alexandria shooting, Hillary Clinton gave a commencement speech at Wellesley College where she declared that Trump"s budget is "an attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us, the youngest, the oldest, the poorest." No, it is not. Using nerve agent on the innocent is "an attack of unimaginable cruelty." Putting a hapless college student into a coma is an "attack of unimaginable cruelty." Reducing the growth of government spending is not.

Think for a moment what Clinton was saying: It"s not simply that Democrats and Republicans have an honest disagreement about how best to help the most vulnerable among us. In Clinton"s telling, Republicans are waging war on the vulnerable. That is toxic.

No doubt, Trump has contributed mightily to our descent into the culture of contempt. (For example, the media is not the "enemy of the American people," Mr. President). But since Trump"s election, the scope and scale of political contempt on the left have reached unprecedented heights. Just a few months ago, when President Barack Obama was in office, it would have been unimaginable for a comedian to proudly pose for a photo holding up the president"s bloody, severed head.

Worst of all, we are in the process of cementing these attitudes in the next generation. On college campuses, students are being taught that it is acceptable to treat with contempt those with different ideas. We saw this phenomenon on display when Charles Murray - a distinguished conservative scholar - was shouted down and assaulted at Middlebury College in a riot that sent a professor to the hospital. Not a single student suffered any real consequences. Similar incidents are taking place on campuses across the country. Young Americans are learning that people they disagree with are not to be listened to respectfully and debated; they are to be silenced and driven out of the public square.

This is not to suggest that there is no role for righteous anger in political discourse. Conservatives felt anger about many of Obama"s policies, and liberals have every right to be angry about Trump"s policies they find objectionable. And they have every right to fight like hell to stop them.

But it wasn"t so long ago that, despite bitter differences over policies, Republicans and Democrats still found ways to work together. President Bill Clinton and Republicans in Congress worked together to pass NAFTA and welfare reform. George W. Bush and congressional Democrats cooperated to pass tax cuts and education reform. Today, that kind of cooperation is unimaginable.

And the reason is simple: When anger transforms into contempt, permanent damage takes place. As American Enterprise Institute President Arthur C. Brooks points out, a marriage can recover from anger. But when couples become contemptuous of each other, they will almost certainly end up in divorce court. That is where our country is headed today.

Liberals need to understand: When they show contempt for Trump, they are expressing contempt for the millions of Americans who voted for him - including millions who twice voted for Obama. These Americans felt that the establishments of both parties were ignoring them and wanted to send Washington a message. The response they are receiving could not be clearer: We have contempt for the man you elected, and we have contempt for all of you who put him into office. They will never forget it.

We need to pull back from this spiral of contempt before it is too late. North Korea is our enemy. Our fellow Americans who disagree with us are not. It"s time we learn the difference - before someone gets killed.

"Tone Policing" And The Left's Anger Privelege

Authored by Daniel Greenfield via CanadaFreePress.com,

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger...

There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t.

James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black and angry about the police, your anger is celebrated. If you’re white and angry about the Terror travel ban, the Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or any leftist cause, you’re on the side of the angry angels. But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that you just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is unacceptable.

If you’re an angry leftist, your party leader, Tom Perez will scream and curse into a microphone, and your aspiring presidential candidate, Kirsten Gillibrand, will curse along, to channel the anger of the base. But if you’re an angry conservative, then Trump channeling your anger is “dangerous” because you aren’t allowed to be angry.

Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.

Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s linguistically whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous”. Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous”. Angry left-wing protesters “call out”, angry right-wing protesters “threaten”. Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.

Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are invariably left-wing.

Left-wing anger over the elections of Bush and Trump was sanctified. Right-wing outrage over Obama’s victory was demonized. Now that left-wing anger led a Bernie Sanders volunteer to open fire at a Republican charity baseball practice outing. And the media reluctantly concedes that maybe both sides should moderate their rhetoric. Before listing examples that lean to the right like “Lock her up”.

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded

Why were chants of “Lock her up” immoderate, but not Bush era cries of “Jail to the chief”?

Why were Tea Party rallies “ominous” but the latest We Hate Trump march is “courageous”?

Why is killing Trump on stage the hottest thing to hit Shakespeare while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask was hounded by everyone from the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri to the NAACP?

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.

It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that makes it good or bad.

And that is why the left so easily slips into violence. All its ideological ends are good. Therefore its means, from mass starvation to gulags to riots and tyranny, must be good. If I slash your tires because of your Obama bumper sticker, I’m a monster. But if you key my car because of my Trump bumper sticker, you’re fighting racism and fascism. Your tactics might be in error, but your viewpoint isn’t.

There are no universal standards of behavior. Civility, like everything else, is ideologically limited.

Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while the frustration of their victims is suppressed

Intersectionality frowns on expecting civil behavior from “oppressed” protesters. Asking that shrieking campus crybully not to scream threats in your face is “tone policing”. An African-American millionaire’s child at Yale is fighting for her “existence”, unlike the Pennsylvania coal miner, the Baltimore police officer and the Christian florist whose existences really are threatened.

Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while the frustration of their victims is suppressed. The existence of tone policing as a specific term to protect displays of left-wing anger shows the collapse of civility into anger privilege. Civility has been replaced by a political entitlement to anger.

The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority (“When they go low, we go high”) reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has become incapable of controlling its angry outbursts. The national tantrum after Trump’s victory has all but shut down the government, turned every media outlet into a non-stop feed of conspiracy theories and set off protests that quickly escalated into street violence.

But Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger. The media dresses up the seething rage so that the left never has to look at its inner Hodgkinson in the mirror.

The angry left has gained a great deal of power

The left is as angry as ever. Campus riots and assassinations of Republican politicians are nothing new. What is changing is that its opponents are beginning to match its anger. The left still clings to the same anger it had when it was a theoretical movement with plans, but little impact on the country. The outrage at the left is no longer ideological. There are millions of people whose health care was destroyed by ObamaCare, whose First Amendment rights were taken away, whose land was seized, whose children were turned against them and whose livelihoods were destroyed.

The angry left has gained a great deal of power. It has used that power to wreck lives. It is feverishly plotting to deprive nearly 63 million Americans of their vote by using its entrenched power in the government, the media and the non-profit sector. And it is too blinded by its own anger over the results of the election to realize the anger over its wholesale abuses of power and privileged tantrums.

But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free society, both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms on which to debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and refuses to control its anger. The only settlement it will accept is absolute power. If an election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the results. If someone offends it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.

The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute righteousness of its anger as the basis for its power. This anger privilege, like tone policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed groups. But its anger isn’t in defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of oppression.

Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal policies and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are cultural, not political. The entertainment industry and the media can enforce anger privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears can’t stop the consequences of the collapse of civility in public life. There are no monopolies on emotion.

James Hodgkinson absorbed all this. The left fed his anger. And eventually he snapped

When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop with Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders. That’s what the left found out in the last election. Its phony pearl clutching was a reaction to the consequences of its destruction of civility. Its reaction to that show of anger by conservatives and independents was to escalate the conflict. Instead of being the opposition, the left became the “resistance”. Trump was simultaneously Hitler and a traitor. Republicans were evil beasts.

James Hodgkinson absorbed all this. The left fed his anger. And eventually he snapped.

Anger has to go somewhere.

The left likes to think that its anger is good anger because it’s angry over the plight of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, transgender bathrooms, the lack of abortion in South Carolina, the minimum wage at Taco Bell, budget cuts, tax cuts, police arrests, drone strikes and all the other ways in which reality differs from its utopia. But all that anger isn’t the road to a better world, but to hate and violence.

Millions of leftists, just like Hodgkinson, are told every day that Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with their lives, the country and the planet. Despite everything they do, all the petitions they sign, the marches they attend, the donations, the angry letters, the social media rants, Republicans continue to exist and even be elected to public office. Where does that anger go?

Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other election

Either we have a political system based on existing laws and norms of civility. Or we have one based on coups and populist leftist anger. And there are already a whole bunch of those south of the border.

Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other election. Its choice is to try to understand the rest of the country or to intimidate, censor, oppress and eventually kill them.

James Hodgkinson took the latter course. His personal leftist revolution ended, as all leftist revolutions do, in blood and violence. The left can check its anger privilege and examine its entitlement.

Or his violence will be our future.

98% Of Greeks Consider Their Economic Situation As "Bad", Survey Says

Nearly a decade after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, economic spirits are reviving, a PEW survey found. Economic spirits reviving everywhere? No. Not everywhere. Greeks remain pessimistic. No wonder about that, as they see no present and no future.

As KeepTalkingGreece,com reports, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, many Europeans, Japanese and Americans feel better today about their economies than they did before the financial crisis. More broadly, in 11 of 18 countries from across the globe that were surveyed in both 2016 and 2017, publics feel more positive about their economy than they did a year ago.

The Dutch, Germans, Swedes and Indians see their national economies in the most positive light. While global publics are increasingly upbeat about economic conditions, the overall view of the economy is still in negative territory in many countries. Overall, a median of only 46% in the 32 nations surveyed this year say their current economy is doing well.

But as the table below illustrates, a staggering 98% of Greeks view their current economic situation as "bad."

At the same time, many are concerned about the future: A median of just 41% believe that a child in their country today will grow up to be better off financially than their parents. The most pessimistic about prospects for the next generation are the French, Japanese and Greeks.

People in advanced economies are quite pessimistic about young people’s financial prospects, just 34% believe they will be better off than the current generation.

Such despair is particularly strong in Greece, Japan, France, Australia, Canada, Spain and the UK, where roughly seven-in-ten people say today’s children will be worse off.

How to Be Alert to Risks but Not Engulfed by Fear

Via The Daily Bell

If you are flying a jet, and approaching a thunderstorm, is it better to go through the thunderstorm, or to fly above it, safely out of range? The thunderstorm exists, and is dangerous; you cannot change that. But what you can change is how you interact with that storm, and therefore how it affects you. Avoiding the danger still requires recognizing the storm, to understand it’s scope, and trajectory.

Last week The Daily Bell posted three articles about fear. Some readers may have mistook this for promoting fear; did The Daily Bell jump on the the mainstream media “be afraid” bandwagon? But take a closer look, and you will see that two of the articles were actually calling out the use of fear as a tool for control, and the third was alerting you to a real concern.

You could say two were trying to stop the mainstream media from dragging you into the thunderstorm, an the third was trying to help you recognize the nature of the storm, in order to avoid it.

Warning: The Media is Trying to Kill You certainly sounds like it would be promoting fear. But the article was actually about the influence the media has on humanity to the extent that their reporting on things like suicide and murder can actually increase suicides and murders. It was a warning about the amount of power the media can exert over people through their reporting. The article actually warned not to let the media scare you into taking the action they want (being engulfed in the thunderclouds).

Another article was sarcastically titled, 3 Exciting New Ways to Destroy Humanity That Everyone is Talking About. In it, we were actually pointing out how ridiculous the three scenarios were that the media was promoting as possible extinction events for humanity. We assumed the title would be understood as a joke; as if it was exciting and popular to discuss the end of humanity. The scenarios discussed, while possible, had no basis in reality. The point was despite their unlikelihood, that didn’t stop the media from reporting them in a way which spreads fear of those events, even giving absurd percentage chance of the extinction events occurring, making them seem like a plausible threat (the fear of lightning striking you at any moment).

But a third article was actually warning about something that should be on your radar. What Everyone Should Know About the New Quarantine Regulation, was meant to inform you about a threat to your rights. The government has granted itself the power to ignore due process under certain circumstances, when they deem the public health to outweigh your individual rights (recognizing the storm gathering around a supposed epidemic).

This all brings up an interesting point: when should we report things which should be kept on your radar, without going too far to end up promoting fear, and keeping you pinned down by the storm?

Media “Fear Porn”

When the mainstream media makes up a percentages for the likelihood of different cataclysmic events wiping out humanity, that is what is called “fear porn” as at least one commenter put it. Some people, apparently, get a rise out of the doom and gloom. They love a good thunderstorm.

Another mainstream article I would classify as “fear porn” is an article from Bloomberg called Fears Grow of Terror in U.S. With Weaponized Civilian Drones.

(Like this one!)

Does the article ever give evidence of these supposedly growing fears? No, not unless you think the opinion of the Deputy Director of the National Counter-terrorism Center is a good indicator of U.S. fears. He is the only person the article talks about being fearful of private drones being used in terrorist attacks.

And why is he fearful of this? Of course one possibility is that he is not fearful of this, he simply wants everyone else to be fearful of it. But another possibility is that because he has been involved in the U.S. effort to spread fear and terror via drone bombings, he sees this as a threat. He is in the midst of the storm. It’s like how power-hungry people who nefariously undermine their opponents are paranoid that they will be targeted in the same way.

Clearly the government wants you to be scared of personal drone attacks, even though it has never happened inside the U.S. before. But why?

And here is where the line becomes blurred between rejecting all fear mongering and making sure we stay abreast of their tactics for control.

We should be aware that when the government starts to promote fear of a certain event, they themselves may be planning to exploit those fears for more power. Do they want people to clamor for more regulation of private drones? Do they want the public to be primed for a false flag carried out with a personal drone?

This is like yet another article we have recently published called Another DHS “Exercise” Planned: The Risk of Terrorism Drills Becoming Reality. If we can recognize patterns seen in government, we can stop the events we fear from happening. We are not trying to spread fear of possible false flag attacks from government, rather recognize the danger in order to prevent them. If we see the storm on the horizon, we can fly over or around it, rather than through it.

Government fear plays into their goals; get citizens to accept their protection and safety net in order to maintain power and control.

Unless you think The Daily Bell is part of a government PSYOP (which apparently some readers do believe) then anything we share that seems fearful is only intended to warn of actual dangers, and not attempted to influence your behavior to run to the government for salvation. I don’t think that would work on the healthy skeptics who read The Daily Bell.

I think Daily Bell readers are far past the point of allowing the government to scare them into certain behaviors, so this probably wouldn’t be the most efficient use of CIA resources.

Nefarious Conclusion

I think the behavior most at risk of being induced among The Daily Bell readers is a paranoia about just how much control the government has, which can paralyze any productive action that would give power back to the individual.

Sometimes if we feel overwhelmed by the evil powers that supposedly dominate the earth, we may become depressed, and give up all hope of progress.

Keep in mind how incompetent the government is in almost any area. Do we really think they excel when it comes to the total control many fear they have, coupled with their uncanny ability to keep it under wraps?

In reality, the government probably wants us to think they have more control than they really do. It is like the South Park episode where Bush wants people to think he carried out 9/11 so that they will fear him, giving him more power, when in reality (in the South Park episode) he had nothing to do with it.

So remember that: among our demographics, the government may benefit more from the fear that they are all powerful megalomaniacs bent on world domination, even if such is not entirely the case (or even if their world dominance is more segmented and less organized than we are sometimes led to believe).

So the real question is, to what extent should we inform you of actual threats, and at what point does this have the opposite effect of promoting the fear we want to avoid influencing behavior?

We want to help you fly above the storm, which requires alerting you to where lightning is striking, and in what direction the storm is moving. And we want to alert you to these dangers without dragging you into the thick of the turbulence.

We try to strike a balance, but sometimes we miss. Let’s have a discussion in the comments below. Tell me what you think is the proper scope of reporting on fear, versus avoiding fear mongering.

What is your subconscious telling you about your surroundings? Intuition is real.

If you are flying a jet, and approaching a thunderstorm, is it better to go through the thunderstorm, or to fly above it, safely out of range? The thunderstorm exists, and is dangerous; you cannot change that. But what you can change is how you interact with that storm, and therefore how it affects you. Avoiding the danger still requires recognizing the storm, to understand it’s scope, and trajectory.

Last week The Daily Bell posted three articles about fear. Some readers may have mistook this for promoting fear; did The Daily Bell jump on the the mainstream media “be afraid” bandwagon? But take a closer look, and you will see that two of the articles were actually calling out the use of fear as a tool for control, and the third was alerting you to a real concern.

You could say two were trying to stop the mainstream media from dragging you into the thunderstorm, an the third was trying to help you recognize the nature of the storm, in order to avoid it.

Warning: The Media is Trying to Kill You certainly sounds like it would be promoting fear. But the article was actually about the influence the media has on humanity to the extent that their reporting on things like suicide and murder can actually increase suicides and murders. It was a warning about the amount of power the media can exert over people through their reporting. The article actually warned not to let the media scare you into taking the action they want (being engulfed in the thunderclouds).

Another article was sarcastically titled, 3 Exciting New Ways to Destroy Humanity That Everyone is Talking About. In it, we were actually pointing out how ridiculous the three scenarios were that the media was promoting as possible extinction events for humanity. We assumed the title would be understood as a joke; as if it was exciting and popular to discuss the end of humanity. The scenarios discussed, while possible, had no basis in reality. The point was despite their unlikelihood, that didn’t stop the media from reporting them in a way which spreads fear of those events, even giving absurd percentage chance of the extinction events occurring, making them seem like a plausible threat (the fear of lightning striking you at any moment).

But a third article was actually warning about something that should be on your radar. What Everyone Should Know About the New Quarantine Regulation, was meant to inform you about a threat to your rights. The government has granted itself the power to ignore due process under certain circumstances, when they deem the public health to outweigh your individual rights (recognizing the storm gathering around a supposed epidemic).

This all brings up an interesting point: when should we report things which should be kept on your radar, without going too far to end up promoting fear, and keeping you pinned down by the storm?

Media “Fear Porn”

When the mainstream media makes up a percentages for the likelihood of different cataclysmic events wiping out humanity, that is what is called “fear porn” as at least one commenter put it. Some people, apparently, get a rise out of the doom and gloom. They love a good thunderstorm.

Another mainstream article I would classify as “fear porn” is an article from Bloomberg called Fears Grow of Terror in U.S. With Weaponized Civilian Drones.

(Like this one!)

Does the article ever give evidence of these supposedly growing fears? No, not unless you think the opinion of the Deputy Director of the National Counter-terrorism Center is a good indicator of U.S. fears. He is the only person the article talks about being fearful of private drones being used in terrorist attacks.

And why is he fearful of this? Of course one possibility is that he is not fearful of this, he simply wants everyone else to be fearful of it. But another possibility is that because he has been involved in the U.S. effort to spread fear and terror via drone bombings, he sees this as a threat. He is in the midst of the storm. It’s like how power-hungry people who nefariously undermine their opponents are paranoid that they will be targeted in the same way.

Clearly the government wants you to be scared of personal drone attacks, even though it has never happened inside the U.S. before. But why?

And here is where the line becomes blurred between rejecting all fear mongering and making sure we stay abreast of their tactics for control.

We should be aware that when the government starts to promote fear of a certain event, they themselves may be planning to exploit those fears for more power. Do they want people to clamor for more regulation of private drones? Do they want the public to be primed for a false flag carried out with a personal drone?

This is like yet another article we have recently published called Another DHS “Exercise” Planned: The Risk of Terrorism Drills Becoming Reality. If we can recognize patterns seen in government, we can stop the events we fear from happening. We are not trying to spread fear of possible false flag attacks from government, rather recognize the danger in order to prevent them. If we see the storm on the horizon, we can fly over or around it, rather than through it.

Government fear plays into their goals; get citizens to accept their protection and safety net in order to maintain power and control.

Unless you think The Daily Bell is part of a government PSYOP (which apparently some readers do believe) then anything we share that seems fearful is only intended to warn of actual dangers, and not attempted to influence your behavior to run to the government for salvation. I don’t think that would work on the healthy skeptics who read The Daily Bell.

I think Daily Bell readers are far past the point of allowing the government to scare them into certain behaviors, so this probably wouldn’t be the most efficient use of CIA resources.

Nefarious Conclusion

I think the behavior most at risk of being induced among The Daily Bell readers is a paranoia about just how much control the government has, which can paralyze any productive action that would give power back to the individual.

Sometimes if we feel overwhelmed by the evil powers that supposedly dominate the earth, we may become depressed, and give up all hope of progress.

Keep in mind how incompetent the government is in almost any area. Do we really think they excel when it comes to the total control many fear they have, coupled with their uncanny ability to keep it under wraps?

In reality, the government probably wants us to think they have more control than they really do. It is like the South Park episode where Bush wants people to think he carried out 9/11 so that they will fear him, giving him more power, when in reality (in the South Park episode) he had nothing to do with it.

So remember that: among our demographics, the government may benefit more from the fear that they are all powerful megalomaniacs bent on world domination, even if such is not entirely the case (or even if their world dominance is more segmented and less organized than we are sometimes led to believe).

So the real question is, to what extent should we inform you of actual threats, and at what point does this have the opposite effect of promoting the fear we want to avoid influencing behavior?

We want to help you fly above the storm, which requires alerting you to where lightning is striking, and in what direction the storm is moving. And we want to alert you to these dangers without dragging you into the thick of the turbulence.

We try to strike a balance, but sometimes we miss. Let’s have a discussion in the comments below. Tell me what you think is the proper scope of reporting on fear, versus avoiding fear mongering.

What is your subconscious telling you about your surroundings? Intuition is real.

Riots, Fear, Anger Predicted By AI: Simulation “Detects Your Emotions Under Stress”

It is true that how you react to a situation will determine whether or not you achieve a successful outcome.

During an emergency, the strength and resolve of your mindset, and of your psychological state, will ultimately be the driving factor in whether you become a survivor or a victim. Your supplies and plans will be secondary to that. During a large scale breakdown, keeping calm under stress and resisting crowd forces to join into mayhem will be among the most valued traits.

If the animal over takes rational man, the battle is lost. Society will immediately devolve into the worst behaviors, and people will get hurt before order is restored.

Now, a new generation of artificial intelligence is using a facial recognition feed of users’ features to detect emotional states during a major crisis scenario (while immersed in a VR simulation). While the software hasn’t evolved to a stable level yet, it is determining the threshold for which violence, chaos and absolute unrest sets in. Experts believe that AI now understands when a person is upset enough to resort to rioting, and may be directing people to keep their calm instead.

via the London Guardian:

An immersive film project is attempting to understand how people react in stressful situations by using artificial intelligence (AI), film and gaming technologies to place participants inside a simulated riot and then detecting their emotions in real time.

[…]

Riot was inspired by global unrest, and was specifically inspired by [immersive filmmaker Karen] Palmer’s experience of watching live footage of the Ferguson protests in 2015. “I felt a big sense of frustration, anger and helplessness. I needed to create a piece of work that would encourage dialogue around these types of social issues. Riots all over the world now seem to be [the] last form of [community] expression,” she said.

[…]

Designed as an immersive social digital experience, the objective is to get through a simulated riot alive. This is achieved through interacting with a variety of characters who can help you reach home. The video narrative is controlled by the emotional state of the user, which is monitored through AI software in real time.

[…] We see looters, anarchists and police playing their parts and “interacting” directly with us . What happens next is up to us: our reactions and responses determine the story, and as the screen is not enclosed in a headset, but open for others to see, it also creates a public narrative.

Currently,Riot’s pilot interface can recognise three emotional states: fear, anger and calm.

Is there ultimately something we can learn about ourselves in simulations of how we would react under stress, and to the harsh environments of an unstable society during which some actors will resort to ugly extremes?

The emotional state is directly influenced by physiological reactions by the body under stress – and the ultimatum fight or flight response kicks in. As Lizzie Bennett wrote:

The Physiological Basics

Pupils dilate to take in as much light as possible
Blood-glucose levels increase
Veins in the skin contract allowing extra blood flow to the muscles
Smooth muscle relaxes to allow extra oxygen for the lungs
Heart rate increases
Blood pressure increases
Non-essential systems shut down (digestion for example)
The only focus is the task in hand

Such information may be useful to training, and indeed, a computer-fed feedback loop could help an individual doing repeated simulations to learn to keep calm, maintaining such factors as blood pressure and heart rate under thresholds for calm and sober reactions.

Awareness of these factors may increase your control over them, to aid in your advantage.

The other side of the coin is predictive behavior, real time surveillance analysis of the population, and the programming of artificial stimuli to make people react. Now they know what makes them tick – and they know what type of event, real or manufactured, might make them react.

“We have been doing research in emotion detection from facial expression, voice, body gesture, EEG, etc for many years,” said Meng. He hopes the project’s success will make people see the benefits of AI, leading to the development of smart homes, building and cities.

The only question is whether they want to provoke a crowd into riots (maybe to demonize the opposition) or whether they want to calm and pacify the crowds (maybe to keep people from caring about the effects of oppressive laws or bad policy).

The near-future now promises to regulate our lives this way – this technology will be used to direct people in real-life living environments, with inputs from smart devices nudging your behavior, socially engineering your meaningful activities, and perhaps your thinking.

How will you prepare for a future of tracking and behavior monitoring? Will it alter your preps, change your thinking or lead you to alternate strategies?

Read more:

Understanding The Stress Response: It Can Buy You Valuable Seconds

The Prepper’s Blueprint: Be Ready, Body, Mind and Soul

Selco On Riots: Do Not Go Out: “You Do Not Prepare to Be a Hero… You Prepare to Survive”

Character Traits And Skills That Are Hard To Find During A Crisis

The Survival Mom Teaches You How To Prepare More, Panic Less