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Bold Thoughts For Extraordinary Times | William Thomas Online | William Thomas

Bold Thoughts For Extraordinary Times



  Researchers have been deeply involved in developing messages aimed at changing people’s behavior to curb the coronavirus pandemic, and studying which ones work. NOAM GALAI:GETTY IMAGES

  Researchers have been deeply involved in developing messages aimed at changing people’s behavior. - Noam Galia/Getty




BOLD THOUGHTS

FOR EXTRAORDINARY TIMES

 

by William Thomas

 

 

We need to take special care right now. And I don’t mean compulsively washing our hands and masking our faces like the potential killers and victims we’re told we could become every time we venture out among other menacing strangers who used to be our neighbors.

     I’m talking about how our hypnotic preoccupation with an invisible, ever-shifting threat is plunging us into enchantment.

     Not the Disney version with castles and princesses. But the deeper, more insidious spell induced by surreal disorientation and the kind of cognitive, emotional and spiritual overload that leaves us ripe for manipulation and further self-constraint.  

     When it comes to few hundred families controlling and extorting nearly 8 billion hu-mans (“spirit people”), indefinite isolation, uncertainty and scary pictures of mass graves are just as effective as endless replays of aluminum airliners arrowing into massive buildings that suddenly pancake into toxic dust and bones, over and over again.

 

HOPEFULLY, WE’LL STOP USING THIS WORD

Turn off your screen’s incessant scream and look around.  Why do so many messages perpetuating pandemic panic invariably invoke the words “hope” and “hopefully” before cowardly concluding, “the best we can hope for”?  

     Why do we accept such hopeless incantations that habituate us in shoulder-shrugging submission to a lockdown mentality we’re endlessly informed may never end? 

     Who says so?

     And to what end?

 


FINKS & PHILOSOPHERS

Following the Panopticon playbook, paranoid persons with too much resentment on their hands are snitching on neighbors, while mindlessly mouthing that reconstituted 9/11 meme so beloved by nascent police-states everywhere:

 

“Nothing’s ever going to be the same again!”

 

     If this turns out to be true – and with cruise line bookings already up 40% for 2021, everyone changing their ways is not entirely certain – this long pandemic pause present an unprecedented opportunity to: question the presumptions that brought us to this turning… celebrate these lessons… and organize in chatrooms, phone calls, community gardens and arm’s- length backyard conversations around new and healthier priorities.

     It’s not like we don’t have the time.

 

Crowding into safe zones, Domino Park, Brooklyn -Eduardo Munoz:Reuters

Crowding into safe zones, Domino Park, Brooklyn -Eduardo Munoz/Reuters


THE PAUSE THAT RECALIBRATES

“Just as Indian residents can now see the towering peaks of the Himalayas from Punjab for the first time in thirty years, after a massive drop in pollution caused by the country’s coronavirus lockdown so, might we discover clarification when the fog of confusion that comes with the coronavirus has passed,” reflects Denis A. Conroy, an 85-year-old Aussie freelancer.

     From India to Indiana, the 99% is no longer willing to accept impoverishment to enrich a psychopathic 1%  Will we use this worldwide reset to start choosing a future without globalists and neocons?

     Our next decisions will reveal who we truly are.

     “Actually, I think, you know a lot of us are going to find that the crisis is teaching us that a lot of aspects of modern life probably were counterproductive and we’re learning a lot of things about better ways to live,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi recently suggested to Chris Martenson.

     Can we rediscover individual courage and initiative – and a collective power an awakening worldwide citizenry that far outnumbers the few hundred families pulling our strings from the top of a Ponzi pyramid we’ve been conditioned since birth to see as “normal” and the “only way” to endure meaningless indentured lives?

     “Hey maybe our society doesn’t have to be sociopathic and crazy!” Caitlin Johnstone dares to write.

     Instead of the zero-sum dead-end of extinction and collapse, can we envision a more just, multipolar world where America’s smash-and-grab ways of empire are not tolerated in the post-covid world, where converging emergencies are months or minutes away.



Covid corporate profiteers

 

A TEACHER NAMED COVID-19

The question covid asks is how long are we willing to be afraid?

     Just like those relentless replays of that steeply-banked  plane arrowing into Tower One, all these clips of mummified patients cocooned in plastic-wrap while desperately sucking on throat-scarring ventilators, mass graves, and relentlessly paraded body bags are certainly compelling.

     They’re intended to be. Isn’t that the media mesmerizer’s motto: capture their eyeballs, paralyze their brains, and the rest will follow?

     Break the spell.

 

TURN IT OFF!

I found that a heart attack works wonderfully to recalibrate personal complacency. It made me get real.

     Just like COVID-19.

     Now, with every news cycle and browser click, every viewer gets to re-confront their own demise.

     Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s time we did. Who has prepared for their final departure from a wounded planet orbiting a minor G2 star? Are we overlooking another covid teaching that, once accepted, would calm our fears?

     What if we really are immortal?

     “Never allow a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Obama’s chief of staff during the financial crisis.

     The House Majority Whip calls the coronavirus crisis “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”

     “The world after Covid-19 will be different. Will it be better or worse?” asks Paul Craig Roberts. “Elites are working to make it better for them, and worse for the rest of us.”

     Happily, “The failure of leadership is an opportunity for real change.” So “it does not have to turn out this way.”

     “Instead, we can collectively recognize the massive failure everywhere of Western leadership and construct a more liveable and sustainable society.”

     “It is up to us… The greatest challenge we face is to restore the concept of community. We know what the Dystopian Wish List is. Can we come together with an anti-dystopian wish list as a mutually supportive community…”



INITIATES

"We’re passing through some kind of initiation – a crisis that defies what you knew and what you were. From the rubble of the ensuing collapse, something new is aborning into a not so brave new world,” Charles Einstein believes. The convergence of civilization-altering covid and climate shift are asking us “to inhabit a new Story of the People and a new (and ancient) relationship to the rest of life.”

     All things are one. Everything flows,” adds the always-sagacious Saker. Go with the flow, or you will end up swallowing a lot of water.


“Elder Brothers” of humanity. They are the Mamos


HERE WE ARE AT THE CROSSROADS…

The spiritual leaders in Santa Marta, Colombia view COVID-19 as “a message, a guardian, a teacher, a counselor, who offer us the opportunity to… dialogue with… Mother Earth,” reports John McMurtry. “Today, one single tiny entity is producing a huge disturbance forcing all of us to make a stop on our sacred pathway of life.”

     But, the Mamos leaders continue: “Very few have acted with a consciousness of transformation wanting to change the system”.

     As America comes ‘round “to meet itself,” most of us in the West “remains silent on the deep-system disorder,” points out the author of the author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems.

     “The system is clearly rotten to the core,” adds McMurty, who also wrote The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure.

     “Humanity and the living earth itself, say the first-people spiritual leaders, ‘are being destroyed, violated, by what is called development, civilization, modernity and which we, the Mamos, call unconsciousness’.

     “Unconsciousness is at the roots of the world disorder plaguing us.”

     Is it time to re-sacrilize the Earth and re-engage our “Spiritual intuition”?


ANYTHING’S POSSIBLE WITH ELECTROMAGNETIC BEINGS

“What we are witnessing is… a cerebral shock extended to three billion hyperconnected, simultaneously confined people. They are electromagnetic beings and their brains keep working – with possible, unforeseen political and other consequences,” writes Pepé Escobar.


Omar Sobhani & Susana Vera :  Reuters

Which is more helpful? -Omar Sobhani (L) Susana Vera (R) / Reuters


PARA- DIME SHIFT

“Suddenly we’re doing something different,” exclaims award-winning syndicated Chicago columnist, Robert C. Koehler. “And maybe, maybe, it means we are capable of dealing, collectively, with other looming disasters -disasters even larger in scope than a possible pandemic.

     “Perhaps this is the beginning of change beyond the scope of our imagination.”

     It better not be!

     “I think you have to look forward, rather than backward,” medical journalist, Dr. Bob Arnot suggested to newscaster Rick Sanchez on RT.

     “We’re gonna live in a new paradigm, aren’t we?” Sanchez asked.

     “System change is now also moving onto today’s social agenda,” agrees Richard D. Wolff, Economics Emeritus professor at the U. of Massachusetts.

     “The problem of policies aimed at returning the economy to what it was before the virus hit is that global capitalism by 2019 was itself a major cause of the collapse in 2020,” Wolff explains. “Inequalities of income and wealth reached historic highs.”

     “Neither private capitalism nor the US government performed a most basic duty of any economic system: to protect and maintain public health and safety.

     Nevertheless…

     “Mainstream policies aim to re-establish pre-virus capitalism. Even if they ‘succeed’, that will return us to a capitalist system whose accumulated vulnerabilities will soon collapse again from yet another trigger.”

     “Capitalism often pursues profit at the expense of more urgent social needs and values… This pandemic is now bringing that truth home to people.


Covid street mural in Africa -Reuters

 Covid street mural, Africa -Reuters



PANDEMIC RESETS

“Pandemics… have shaped civilization, and there are even arguments that they have ushered in positive change,” John Authers reminds us.

     “As the Black Death scythed through Europe in 1348 and 1349, workers across the continent discovered that they had power for the first time in their lives. Textile workers in St. Omer in northern France asked for and received three successive wage rises within a year of the Great Plague’s passing. Many workers’ guilds struck for higher pay and shorter hours.”

     A Distant Mirror, plague years historian Barbara Tuchman declares, “The Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”

     “Figures on the political right are already alarmed that the coronavirus era will lead to a ‘collectivist temptation’ and a rise in the appeal of left-wing and socialist political movements,” Authers notes.

     “More alarming is the potential for disorder and unrest. A common thread of pandemics has been an attempt to blame outsiders and foreigners.”



50 Trillion Dollars Note


HOW ABOUT COMPLETE FINANCIAL COLLAPSE?

If this pandemic shutdown continues for more than three months, look for a complete economic system failure,” Escobar anticipates. “As system failures go, nothing remotely approaches the possibility of a quadrillion dollar derivative implosion.”

     Say what?

     “US. Banks can now create unlimited credit from their base and that sets up the US for potential hyperinflation if the money supply grows non-stop and production collapses, as it is collapsing right now because the economy is in shutdown mode.”

     Ohoh…

     “New York business circles are absolutely terrified,” Escobar reports. “If these possibly quadrillions of dollars of derivatives start to rapidly implode, the economic crises that will unfold will create a collapse of the magnitude of which has not been witnessed in history, with incalculable consequences.”

     And opportunities to either see a cashless, digitally-determined dystopia imposed… “Or perhaps this will be just the larger-than-life spark to start a new economy.”

 

Birmingham restaurant shuttered amid coronavirus lockdowns orders, via MSN



WHEN IT'S OVER, WILL WE BE THE SAME?

No way these Fourth Turning crisis will be “over” in anyone’s lifetime. “You can’t go home again,” says Patrick Buchanan. “The shattering events of March, followed by what is coming in April and May, will have lasting impacts on the hearts and minds of this generation.”

     Think so? Just wait another 18 months.

     “The bad news is, we won't be getting ‘back to normal,’ writes Daisy Luther. “The good news is, we won't be getting ‘back to normal’.”

     “We’ve barely begun living in our current state of purgatory and this will continue (and most likely worsen) for quite some time… So if you’re seeing this as a little break after which you’ll pick up with your life exactly where you left off… You need to adapt now because if you don’t, the future is going to be very hard on you mentally.

     “Use this time to think about the changes you can make to meet the needs of your family. Learn new skills, practice old ones, and get your head in the game. The supply chain may never be the same.

     “The virus will be back for another wave… This isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s the start of a completely different way of life.

     “We’re going to be looking at an entirely different world, one full of six-foot distances, immunity passports, and dystopian tracking methods using our phones… Think about how to mitigate these changes.”

     After all…

     “We live in an age in which intersecting crises are being lifted to a global scale,” writes World Health Organization researcher Arthur Wyns, “with unseen levels of inequality, environmental degradation and climate destabilization, as well as new surges in populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting public health threats. All are crises that are slowly tipping the balance, questioning our business-as-usual economic model of the past decades, and requiring us to rethink our next steps.”

     “In all of these cases, the enemy is… our own greed, ignorance and self-denial,” Koehler comments.

     Our allies are the life-force flowing within us, our will and each other.

 

couple sunbathes next to a closed restaurant in the Dutch city of Maastricht, March 16, 2020, © Reuters : Francois Lenoir

 Outside a closed restaurant in Maastricht, Holland Mar. 16, 2020 -Francois Lenoir/Reuters

 

WFREE ASSANGE   发件人     William Thomas 2023