I'll start with this. Yes this isn't a new issue. People before the internet would play the radio or have orchestras as background noise, ambiance, I know. Yes I know people have always said "TV is ruining kids" "Radio is ruining kids" "Books are ruining kids" "The written word is ruining kids". But this time, with the internet? It's really different. Everyone who's been raised by the internet knows what I mean. Back in the day, what, you be a bookworm. You go to book clubs or the library or Barnes and Noble, you still go out and talk to people. But the internet? You don't even have to leave your house. You want music? You don't need to buy the record, you don't even need to put it on the turntable. Press a button, and it's all yours. Want to read the news? Don't need to wait for the daily paper. Don't even need to turn on the radio and wait for news. Just open up any search engine and it'll have headlines. At the press of a button. Need to do some math? Don't need to take out a pen and paper, don't even need to think. Just put in the numbers, and it'll do it. Want to translate? Don't need to learn a language or know someone that does. Take a picture, it'll automatically translate it with the press of a button.

You see what I'm getting at here? Sure things like books and television were revolutionary. But this is a whole different level, a new game. New rules. You're not bound to someone else's timetable, you don't need to leave your home. You don't even need to leave your bed. Just lay there and rot, scrolling.

Why do people scroll? Because it's addictive. It's meant to be addictive. Social Media companies hire designers that take inspiration from casinos and slot machines. Ever realize that when you drag along those infinite scroll pages, or you swipe down on the refresh? It's meant to keep you on the app, keep you scrolling, keep your attention. Everyone is trying to keep your attention. But when there's so much information available, and everyone's competing for your attention, there's not enough to go around. So your attention becomes weaker. You can't be bothered to sit through everyone's hour-long essays. Instead, you listen to the first minute. First thirty seconds. First ten seconds. If you aren't hooked, or something shinier presents itself, you leave.

Consider this. A child in the toy aisle. He sees a toy, runs over to it. But then out of the corner of his eye, he sees a different toy, so he goes to that one. Over and over, jumping from toy to toy. That's what it is. It's us being presented with an endless toy aisle. And we don't need to walk to the next toy, that's too much work. All we have to do is move our thumb. Or even just sit there and let autoplay take you.

Our minds are rotten, our attention spans drained. Why? Because we're presented with too much choice. Too many options. So what do we do? We reject these choices. This isn't some RETVRN nonsense. This is practical advice. Maybe there's a reason why so many people back then had better attention spans, because they didn't have everything available at an instant. They needed patience, they needed to wait. Their attention necessarily must be held. So what do we do? Try and emulate that. Remove all these excess choices. Turn off your YouTube watch history and recommendations, or entirely delete YouTube. Your social medias -- FaceBook, InstaGram, Twitter -- can all go. They're the same thing. Attention sinks from nothing corporations trying to sell you slop. Messaging apps like WhatsApp, SnapChat (Why are they always two words in one?) can stay, as long as you actually know the people you're messaging and don't doomscroll. But even then, just use texting where you can. Hell, a phone call is better. And what else? Well, what will you do for entertainment? Read, write, draw, listen to music -- CD or other physical, not overchoice -- and things like that. Genuine activities, not just sitting in front of this lightbox pretending there's actually a person there talking. We talk about how smart we are but we believe that a bunch of dots of light is really a person. That these electronic buzzes are words and speech. It's not.

How do you regain your attention? By not letting it get divided among ten million sources. The average person sees thousands of ads every day. Sure, a lot are in-person -- billboards, sides of buses, and so on -- but a LOT of them are online. Between every video, between pages on social media, and so on. Even the sponsored Google search results. Regain your attention span by not letting it get divded. By making sure that it stays intact, stays focused. But it's tricky. Takes months to rewire your brain, I've heard. But what choice do you have? Keep living like an impulse-driven inattentive zombie till you croak? Not a chance.

We all, presumably, know what furries are. They're the guys that dress up in the big cartoon animal costumes, the ones who write owo and uwu everywhere on the internet. Those people. They're harmless, right? Aren't they? Or are they?

Let me be crystal-clear. The furry 'fandom' is a fetish community first and foremost. Is it any wonder why so many of them display their sexuality so prominently? Either orientation or fetishes? Is it any wonder why the hotels at conventions are always trashed, with horrific stories of orgies and debauchery ever-present? Is it any wonder why the leading furry porn site, e621, has over 4.5 million posts? Is it any wonder why the subreddit r/yiff, the pornographic one, has 25% more subscribers than r/furry, the non-pornographic one? Is it any wonder why many furries are introduced into the subculture by pornography? Is it any wonder that the most iconic furry-adjacent company is Bad Dragon, a company making animal-themed sex toys? Is it any wonder that even the furry's meme subreddit, r/furry_irl, hosted an on-demand porn lookup bot in the comments, seriously what other subreddit does this? Is it any wonder, that the largest furry porn site, e621, has nearly a quarter of a million posts with characters that are clearly depicted as underage, even after the website explicitly banned such posts? Again, this number is a post-ban figure.

There is no place worse for a child than a furry community, especially a discord server. In discord in general, pedophiles are everywhere. But discord? It is a mess. If you are under eighteen, even thirteen, you will get horny messages from users en masse. Even I, when I was younger, fourteen or fifteen, was getting unprompted and explicit messages and photographs from people who were over the legal age, who undeniably knew that I was underage. I have seen things you would not believe. I have seen cults. I have seen people cutting names into their arms for the arousal. I have seen genuine mind-washing. I have seen people putting knitting needles down their urethras. I have seen people drinking their own piss. I have seen people fantasize about dismemberment and necrophilia openly and unabashedly. I have seen people defending forcible sex trafficking. I have heard of and seen proof of children being blackmailed for nude photos. I have heard and seen proof of people packing estrogen into Xanax pills, to sell in order to 'feminize' men. I have seen proof of people who physically amputate their hands to indulge in their fantasies of being helpless, and their lover's caretaker fantasy. I have seen a man who was extremely unsettling, let me describe. He enjoyed very casual sex with men and women. Extremely heavy sex, with various extreme fetishes that he went into. He also described how he had impregnated a woman, so he left her. The woman had the kid. He despises the child, as he has to pay child support and has to occasionally visit him. What does he do for work? Works at Sony, regularly does drugs with other employees. I ask him of the long term consequences, he says he doesn't plan on living past thirty. I have seen other people, for example, one person regularly talking about sleeping with his adopted children. Both of these examples, people treated them like no issue was going on. It made me feel physically ill having to talk to these people for any amount of time. Honestly even just saying all these things, it doesn't faze me. I know there's worse out there, and I know there's people with more damaging experiences than me. I've seen some of them. I know that all my experiences here are nothing, they're nothing next to some of the other things going on. They're small fish.

They hide, they spread their lies and half-truths. They claim that not every part of the fandom is sexual. Agreed. But the majority of it is. They claim that these people are in the minority. Over eighty-five per-cent of furries, when surveyed, stated that sex and sexuality plays a large or extremely-large role in the fandom, so this is demonstrably false. Go to any convention, and there are prominent areas designated as 18+, very large sections. There are even rumored private sex rooms on convention grounds, concealed by only curtains. People say furries aren't attracted to real animals. I deny that, with studies finding that between one out of five and one out of two furries report sexual attraction to animals. Some say that these depictions are humanized, anthropomorphized. I ask then, what parts of the animal do furries fetishize? It isn't their human expressions. It is the exotic animal penises. It is the paws. It is the tails and muzzles. If you are attracted to the animal features, that makes you a zoophile, like how being attracted to child-like qualities of fictional characters makes you a pedophile. They say that these characters that they fetishize pass the 'harkness test', a made up test to justify zoophilia because 'it's ok, the fictional animal is sentient'. I do not believe this is a valid defense, that a made-up test excuses the plain fact that you are attracted to animals and animal features. Even besides this, that furry porn site, e621, has well over six hundred thousand photos tagged 'feral', meaning non-anthropomorphized characters, the ones who walk on four legs and such.

And most furries are, let us be completely clear, losers. They work dead-end, unfulfilling jobs. They are stoners, junkies, druggies. They are sexual degenerates, and I mean that in the harshest light possible. I have legitimately seen people defend child pornography posession as a victimless crime, as if that makes it okay in any right. They wear a mask that decries pedophilia and zoophilia, while openly indulging in those same fantasies on large scales. They host debaucherous orgies of all desires of the flesh regularly. They are profligates of the worst degree. But what do they say to deny this?

They do not deny it. They defend it. Drug use, reprehensible desires, orgies, simulated pedophilia and zoophilia. What do they say to it? "It doesn't hurt anyone", "Let people enjoy things", and similar. They do not deny these claims, they proudly accept them, but defend it as harmless. But there is clearly harm in it. Is self-harm morally acceptable? Is it morally acceptable to cut yourself, to kill yourself? Obviously not. So the harm principle extends to yourself. But is it also acceptable to verbally berate others, to be openly racist, to bully and manipulate? Obviously not. So there is more than a physical aspect to it. There is a spiritual dimension. The people who gratify these desires, lose themselves to primal urges, abandon all higher callings or desires. These people, genuinely, become inhuman. They reject the higher function of humanity, they reject the superego, and cede to the id. They, ironically, become animalistic and instinctual, chasing pleasure like the rats pressing the dopamine lever. It is despicable

The problem is that they accept everyone, pressuring people to be tolerant. So those with nowhere to go, the rejects from every other community, they converge here. They are the sewer drain of culture. I have never seen a normal furry. They are always mentally ill, transsexual or homosexual, they are often sexual abuse victims that wallow in their misery instead of working to recover. And this could be a great opportunity to help the downtrodden and weak get back up on their feet. Rehabilitate them. But instead, what do they do? They reinforce these negative habits. They tell people to 'accept yourself'. Self love is not self love when it encourages self harm. Self love would be to quit bad habits, reofmr yourself, and become better. Self love is self improvement. Self love is not defeatism. It is spiritual narcissism.

Furries have spread their lies and deceit. For years, people did challenge furries when presented. They did call them in the open, take off their masks, label them as what they are. But now? They openly exercise their desires. They corrupt the minds and habits of the susceptible. They are a spiritual plague. The worst part? They don't even realize that they're the bad guys. They think they're just 'living my best life'. It is a horrific sight. It is, most of all, a miserable and pitiable sight. These people have given up on their dreams. They have secluded themselves from their communities. They abandoned their higher calling. Funny that the people who pretend to be animals are the ones who give up what makes them human.

For a long time, people have proposed sanctioning countries that they do not like. Russia, North Korea, China, Cuba, and so on. Historically, the more common types of sanctions have been things like naval blockades during wartime, as it serves short, immediate goals. Or the prohibition on colonists from trading with colonists of other empires, to keep the wealth in their own system -- though this one wasn't very effective and likely was damaging. But modern sanctions are of a different nature. Rather than subduing a country in the short term, or trying to undercut rivals (I will not use the word Geopolitical, it's pretentious), modern sanctions work as a form of incentive or negative reinforcement. You do something bad, so we sanction you to try and change your mind. For policies, this can be effective. For example, Poland implemented LGBT-Free zones in some parts of the country. The EU threatened to withhold funds, effectively a sanction, and Poland reversed course. Yes the situation is more complicated, but that's just the summary of it. But when it comes to countries like Cuba, Russia, and North Korea, the sanctions seek to change the country's fundamental systems. Frankly, it is a lost cause. But then what?

Let's lay down a few key theories. Most of the time, these sanctions are imposed by liberal democracies seeking to impose liberal democracy upon other nations. Not saying whether that's good or bad, but just that's what's being done. Secondly, these sanctions prevent investment, they prevent business, and they prevent trade. Thirdly, people who have more wealth want more rights. These should be self-evident.

Now, what happens when you combine these three statements? Well first, let's look at what happens when there are no sanctions. Without sanctions, money freely flows, investment occurs, leading to more and higher paying jobs. This is generally true. Naturally, when there are more jobs and more skilled jobs, the general wealth of the people increases. They can afford to be more educated, better thinkers. They become more aware of the broader social system they are in, and they then seek reform. This is why so many revolutionary ideas stem from universities, or at least, they did. Because universities were centers of wealth and education. Naturally then, when the people have more wealth, this then leads to more rights, protests and calls for democracy, calls for reforms and such. Compare the freedom index to GDP per capita, and you will see a correlation. This doesn't prove that wealth produces rights, but even if the inverse is true, that rights produce wealth, the idea is still the same. There is a link between wealth and rights.

What does this all mean? It means that if the wealth of a country increases, the people will naturally become more educated and want more of their 'fair share' of the wealth. See, for example, the union movements of the later 1800s and early 1900s in America. When wealth was generated at substantial amounts, the people naturally do seek their share of it.

Think about this logically, then. If we want to increase the democracy of a country, what will sanctions do? It will impoverish the people by reducing jobs and trade. It will make the people resent the democracies that impose the sanctions. It will make their ideas and system be the cause of their struggles and pains. Economic sanctions only increase wealth disparity in favor of the elites and the powerful. Instead of trying to forcefully impose a regime change, a regime change must come from the will of the people, from popular sovereignty. If the main way that liberalization and democratization comes is by wealth and trade, then surely we should increase wealth and trade with countries whose systems are more restrictive. Take, for instance, North Korea. The people do not rebel and do not ask for more rights. But imagine if all sanctions were removed from North Korea. What would happen? North Korea is rich in lithium. Lithium would then, naturally, be extracted, refined, and shipped internationally. This would create much wealth and many jobs. Then what? The people who mine and refine it, they would then naturally become more educated, more wealthy, better off. They would seek democratization and would likely join movements for that end. With free trade and the removal of sanctions, a democratic state is eventually reached. The process is very slow but very certain.

And do you know what happens with long-term sanctions? Alternatives arise. For example, Amazon was pulled out of Russia. Now Russia has Ozon, essentially an alternative. This happens for many services and companies. When the large foreign one leaves for long enough, the country naturally creates an alternative by free-market principles. Sanctions that threaten to remove foreign investments or companies only work as temporary leverage, not as a permanent solution. Hosting and depending on foreign companies produces leverage that can be exerted for political pressure. But if you pull out and let alterntives arise, suddenly that pressure is lost, and can not be regained. Foreign companies are like a crowbar. Good for leverage, but push it too hard and it'll break, and no more leverage can be exerted.

What, then? Naturally, we should remove sanctions on the nations we despise. Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and so on. On the countries where sanctions are imposed for the purpose of political upheaval. The rulers will never give up their power because of economic sanctions. A poorer population is easier to rule. Less educated people will demand less rights. But by increasing trade and investment in these countries, we increase the progress of democracy.

It sounds counterintuative, but it makes sense when you think about it. The best way to remove these governments is by increasaing the wealth of the people, as the people will naturally seek more rights, more privileges, and more freedom, which all runs counter to those current autocratic governments. Sanctions only remove the wealth and deprive the people of their freedoms further..

Before NetFlix was the big streaming service, the only on-demand television you could really get was cable. You had to pay for a bunch of different services and packages to get what you want. Then when NetFlix began streaming, you could get anything you want in one convenient place. Then, after a while, all of a sudden you had Hulu, Peacock, ParamountPlus, DisneyPlus, and so on. Essentially a digital version of cable. Let's look at Uber. We had Taxis before. Uber allowed anyone to do it, controlled from an app, at a competitive price. The prices were only sustained by investor money. Taxis then began to fade out as Lyft and Uber replaced them. Now, we have a worse alternative to Taxis, where the driver is just some guy not beholden to a company with a minimal background or psychological check, at a price really not much better than a taxi now. Tech has a tendency to do this, to create a 'new' product that destroys a pre-existing industry, funded by investor hype, and then jacking up prices once the hype fades, leaving consumers with a worse position than before.

Netflix has done the same. It destroyed cable television, and now we have to pay for all sorts of different streaming services to get the shows we actually want, like before. It seemed promising at first, and then when cable was a lost cause, the streaming services diversified and increased rates.

As a result, many people have turned to the seven seas. As Gabe Newell once said, piracy is a service issue, not a pricing issue. If people have an easier time getting a pirated good than a legal good, they will go for pirated goods. Naturally, pricing is one of the aspects of service and accessibility. So some people, rather than having to subscribe to ten services, have to navigate region-locked content, or have their favorite shows taken off of a streaming service, instead choose to just pirate it. It's cheaper, it's more easily accessible, and it's never going to be taken from you. The issue isn't solely pricing, but just the hassle to view shows or movies people want to watch.

Now then, this brings us to DRM. Many games, movies, softwares, etc. have DRM policy, where your access to a product can be revoked without notice or appeal, even if you have paid for a perpetual license. This is why so many people pirate as well, to avoid these types of senseless revocations.

So then, what do we do? Should we pirate? No. Piracy is illegal. Yes there are arguments for piracy, but then argue them in a court or council to get the rule changed, don't just disregard the rule. Instead, seek DRM-Free alternatives. For example, GOG is a great alternative to Steam. Or, buy physical DVDs or CDs of movies and music. Get open-source alternatives to common software like LibreOffice, or buy old product keys for software that doesn't have DRM included in the Terms and Conditions. Things like that to actually retain rights to the things you buy, without having to break the law.

The old-web has a unique feel to it. That's why many of us are here, to try and immerse our selves back into the feeling of a time since passed. But for many, if you ask them what specifically makes the old-web feel different, they'd struggle to find an answer. I simply seek to put forward my reasons I believe are the four major aspects that separate old-web from new-web. These essentially summarize the article.

• The Lack of Pre-Made Formatting
• The Lack of High-Speed Internet
• The Lack of Corporate Money
• The Lack of Similarity Algorithms

So firstly, formatting. On FaceBook, you make an account which automatically has your friends, information, etc. on the sidebar, you have a profile photo on the top left, and your background photo as a banner. You cannot create background tiling, shift your profile photo to the center, and so on. All pages are uniform and orderly. But is this a good thing? Compare this to how old sites used to be. Assets, images, and text was placed where the creator deemed it fit, not where he was forced to. The unique, colorful, and highly personal webpages have been destroyed with hammers and replaced with identical webpages. There is no more personality, you don't get to express yourself through your webpage, but must work with what you have. Imagine if everyone had to wear the same identical outfits. People would lack individuality, they would have less ability to express their self, and would lose much autonomy over their presentation to others. Same with websites. By removing the individual's formatting, you have removed the individual. No one will ever argue that a FaceBook page is more personalized than a hand-made webpage.

But it is personal in another way, as well. Because there is a lack of formatting, all websites must be created by hand. This often results in the creator being much mroe proud of his work, proud of what he has accomplished. It is like building a table yourself versus going to Ikea, or like gardening versus going to the grocery store. The site becomes an extension of yourself and, as such, the creator grows fond of his creation. But there is another benefit as well. The creator then becomes more understanding of how computers work and process code, they are forced to learn. It is near universally agreed that it is good to learn. When making a website, a creator may want to input a certain feature, so must seek out possible ways to do this. The creator must learn to code, and the more he learns, the better his site will be. I did this myself. I started with a template I found, dissected it to find out how certain functions, inputs, and commands worked, and began to create many new parts and features based off of what I had learned from the dissection.

However, there is another part of making a website that makes the old-web different: no JavaScript. This means websites are less dynamic, interactive, and flashy. Being based on pure HTML and CSS means there is much less in terms of functionality, and so much of it feels a lot more straightforward and simple, not out of choice but out of necessity. This is one reason why old-web sites are much less flashy and visual, and rely much more on looping gifs and such.

There is another reason as well: lower internet speeds. Back then, bandwidth was much harder to come by. As such, websites needed to be more compact, more precise, more efficient. You didn't have the space for images that were dozens of megabytes. You had to use gifs that were in the kilobytes. You couldn't put in high-definition video. Because internet back then was in kilobytes per second and not megabytes, you had to make your website efficient to actually retain a user for any amount of time. Now, with modern internet speeds comes a shift. Now, pages load quickly, so there is no need for efficiency. Bad code, excessive image resolution, and flashy graphics everywhere. This has rendered much of the modern internet unusable to those with low-bandwidth internet. As well as this, websites are bloated in other ways. For example, a cooking website will have a recipe that has dozens of paragraphs of preamble. Tech and help articles will go incredibly in depth in unrelated topics before getting to the actual content of the article. Why is this? Search Engine Optimization. By putting more keywords into your website, it will show up higher on search results. More search results means more traffic and more viewers. Now think about this for a moment. If you have the money to finance developers who are experts in Search Engine Optimization, you will show up more often in search results, your ideas and opinions will be put forth more because you can afford to optimize your site for search engines. The deeper your pockets, the louder your voice. But because of the nature of Search Engine Optimization, this results undoubtedly in a worse end-user experience. Why would sites want a worse experience for more traffic? The answer should be apparent, and is the third reason for web-bloat besides internet speed and Search Engine Optimization, and it's a big one. Advertising.

Let's be honest, it's everywhere. As long as there has been trade, there has been advertising. But on the internet, there has been a change as of late. Go on any new-web website, and find one without advertisements. Hint, it's just not possible. FaceBook puts them between posts, G-Mail puts them between your e-mails. Google puts them before more relevant search results. YouTube puts them before, during, after, and over videos. News articles have them on sidebars and after the articles. They're omnipresent online. They're even embedded into some operating systems themselves. So why is advertising so prominent now? Well, believe it or not, when you stop caring about efficiency and just make websites bloated, they cost a lot of money to operate. Not only this, but running a webpage in general has become more of a business than before. Back in old-web, people would often create websites for fun, or to show off cool ideas. Now, instead of trying to give the end-user a memorable and enjoyable experience, websites are designed to be just good enough to keep scrolling through, to get more ad views. In other words, the end-user has become a profit-generating tool for large websites. Remember, Google is primarily an advertising company and generated over three hundred billion dollars in revenue in 2023. That number doesn't even sound real.

How do companies like Google even know what ads to serve? Surely a company wouldn't want to serve advertisements to just everyone. A dress company doesn't want to waste money advertising to men, and a company selling skateboards likely doesn't want to advertise to old men, or people without legs. So how do they know that their advertisements will reach their intended demographics? Fingerprinting. Google and other sites collect immense data about you, often times just handed over. Google catalogs every single search you make on the site, and processes it, dissecting it into what insights it shows about your hobbies, interests, and views. This is all openly stated information.

Imagine this. You post on FaceBook under your name John Doe that you went to Iowa recently. Then you watch a video on YouTube, with the account JD409. You share the link on FaceBook, forgetting to remove the &si= string at the end of the link. Now, Google webcrawlers associte that FaceBook account and all associated posts with you, and now Google knows you went to Iowa recently. And imagine a friend has a Google account, BD202. They click your link with your &si=, and suddenly Google now knows that you two are in contact with each other. This is just one way that Google learns about your personality, so they can better sell you products. Even if you give Google no information, but your friends click your links, and they all are into skating, now Google will likely assume that you're into skating as well.

Besides this, it has been proven incontrovertably many times that Google collects very intimate data. The microphone is always hot, always listening and adding everything it hears into its database on you. Every single voice message you send with a Google speech recognition software is sent to Google's servers for processing. Even your exact location, speed, and whether you're on foot or in a vehicle is automatically transmitted to Google. Again, this is not a conspiracy, this is just publicly available information.

And that is how they know what to advertise to you. They know you often times better than you know you. These algorithms like Google's advertising algorithm are prevalent everywhere. Every major social media site will use it to keep you scrolling. Why? More scrolling means more ad revenue. What keeps you scrolling? Content you like. There is an obvious downside to this. When you're shown only things you are proven to already like, it's a feedback loop. Imagine a music store from the 1990's. When you walked in, you were presented with everything the store had, regardless of whether or not you may like it. Now imagine YouTube Music's homepage. It'll be songs you're known to like, songs you've listened to before, songs similar sounding to that you like. Nothing new. You don't get exposed to new genres, new artists, new bands. The same goes for many other websites and the internet in general. These algorithms insulate us from seeing new ideas and content, because if we do, we may stop scrolling through advertisements.

That is all. Nothing more to be said on this topic I think. New internet is full of ads, constantly tracking you, bloated, focused on profitability, and without personality.

Luke Smith. I used to watch his content. Read all his articles. But here's the plain 411. He's a LARPer. He rails against people who don't actually do anything useful in life, while himself making videos and articles on the internet as if he's saving people. His whole video on the economy being fake is essentially just paraphrasing someone's book with no real additional insight.

His article on veganism are either misguided or outright wrong in several places. He says that domesticated animals can't survive in the wild, as if sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, horses, dogs, and cats can't do exactly that. He says how it would take essentially ten pounds of broccoli to get the same amount of protein as a pound of steak, forgetting that beans and legumes in general are extremely protein dense. He says how vegans are just starving themselves, forgetting about grains. He says how veganism is a leftist and modernist phenomenon, before later in the article bringing up a vegan sect from 3000 years ago. It's a total mess.

His article on politics is miserable. He doesn't know what politics are. When he says politics, he doesn't mean a democratic process or political theory. He just means political correctness. He says how poltics don't matter to tradesmen, despite many tradesmen being highly political. He says how you shouldn't be a revolutionary because you're submitting yourself to someone else's ideals, which is exactly what he is implicitly suggesting you should do with these articles, and even a few paragraphs later by telling you books to read and adopt, some of which are written by actual revolutionary insurrectionaries.

He makes an entire article on 'poeticism', which is his philosophy that creating things is good. He rejects hedonism and asceticism, saying hedonism is contradictory because pleasure-filled lives are short lived, and that ascetics are often porn addicts, miserable people, and are surrendering to hedonism by rejecting pleasure. He then says how the highest moral good and the best way to emulate God is by creating things, which is downright heretical. His list of things that are good under the poetic worldview are all vague except 'have kids', the first two items he lists are literally just "affecting the world" and "imrproving what is around you" as good things. None of the items are actually specific. And he acts as if most people don't just end up somewhere in the middle and not totally adopt some insane ideology.

And the last thing is his video on churning credit cards. Essentially using credit card introductory cashback offers to get free money, by spending to the introductory limits on essential goods. But he spends a large chunk of the video talking about his new DeWalt miter saw from the Home Depot as if he's some true traditionalist and based and all that nonsense. He called himself "somewhere in the high echelons of the red-pill" years before owning a miter saw, for all his constant ranting about being traditional and self-sufficient. It's miserable. Then he says how he's not doing anything wrong since this is what the credit card companies allow you to do, but then says how you shouldn't defend credit card companies because they're bad, as if Christ didn't tell us to not repay evil for evil.

Overall his articles are just a horrible experience. He's a doctorate of linguistics, ironic for a man who bashes modernity and useless degrees and elitism. He makes sure you know it, with his ten-dollar words. He'll bring up a Chinese phrase, gush about Chinese being such a good language, then immediately say that the Chinese phrase is only tangentially related. He'll bring up a word like Mystic or Poetic and then explain how actually he means it in the Ancient Greek sense, not that you plebians would know that. Like it's miserable how smug and condescending he is.

And half his website just reeks of larp. He calls people who own websites digital "Landchads", talks about the redpill and can't go a single article without saying the word traditional 10 times over.

Let's look at someone who's actually living the life that Luke LARPs about. Kenny from Mental Outlaw. He posts videos of archery and his chickens occasionally, between videos about cybersecurity and open source things. He doesn't feel the need to post a video of his chickens and gush about how based and trad he is for owning a chicken. He doesn't brag about it, he just lives it. Luke Smith could never.

Luke Smith's articles are drenched with pride and contempt and that 2018-era redpill culture. He's intentionally offensive, a far cry from being a peacemaker. He talks about how traditional he is and how he's religious, but never once really made a video explaining his faith or trying to convert people, other than saying "It's trad", which is about as far as most OrthoBros and CathTrads get. Like give me a break dude.

Honestly he just needs to take a look at his whole website, internet presence, and beleifs he holds. Reevaluate these things, figure if they're actually serving a good purpose. If not, maybe it's for the best to stop playing as some enlightened guru on the internet.

Glad you're reading this. Let's talk about social media. We all know that the elites (government, the wealthy, etc.) will try to influence your thoughts and behaviors through overt or subversive means. Operation Mockingbird is one obvious example of government intervention. As for the wealthy, things like Crisis PR firms being able to get blatantly false stories spread in major news outlets, or major publications like the Washington Post being owned by Jeff Bezos are a few little key hints. But there are more subversive means. Let's talk about somewhere most people don't know about. A little town in Florida called Eglin Air Force Base. It's a small place, a bit less than three thousand people live there. But it's also a majorly important place in terms of the government, being host to a division of the Air Force Research Laboratory. That's a more complex organization. Let's talk about them.

The Air Force Research Laboratory "provides leading-edge warfighting capabilities keeping our air, space and cyberspace forces the world's best." That's in the words of the AFRL themselves. That's an interesting one. Cyberspace? Since when was the Air Force interested in Cyberspace? And interestingly enough, Eglin Air Force Base is host to the 692nd Cyberspace Operations Squadron. I wonder what kind of things the AFRL has put out? Oh, what's this, a researcher from the AFRL, based out of Eglin AFB, put out a paper? Let's see it. Oh, that's interesting. "This work specifically aims to investigate how peer pressure from social leaders affects consensus beliefs (e.g., opinions, emotional states, purchasing decisions, political affiliation, etc.) within a social network, and how an interaction algorithm can be developed such that the group social behavior can be driven to a desired end." That's fun. And that's from a paper with an author based out of Eglin AFB, home of the 692nd Cyberspace Operations Squadron. I wonder what else Eglin AFB has done. Oh, what's this? They're the source of the most internet traffic on Reddit, the popular social media platform? That's interesting isn't it. So next time you see people saying very strange things online, keep in mind that they very well could be a government agent part of a propaganda campaign.

Let's be honest here. A lot of people nowadays don't know how to cook, and there are many reasons why. For one, those skills are often just not passed down by families anymore. As another, schools don't make home economics and cooking classes mandatory, they're optional. And finally, a lot of junk food is cheap enough for people to subsist on, so they never have a real drive nor need to learn to cook. I've seen firsthand that many poor people consume very low quality meals every day for subsistence, full of preservatives and additives. I mean chips, microwave meals, sodas, fast food, and other processed foods.

When I say processed foods, I mean ultraprocessed foods. There is a nice scale I remember seeing. For example, apples. A whole apple is a whole food, pre-sliced apples are minimally-processed foods, applesauce would be a processed food, and apple snack-cakes would be ultra-processed food. When I say processed foods, I generally will be referring to processed or ultra-processed foods.

Processed foods have a lot of very negative attributes. They are often much more calorie-dense, comprised of many simple sugars, coated in industrially-produced saturated fats, and packed with additives like preservatives, dyes, and flavor-enhancers. Many of these are directly harmful; saturated fats are directly correlated to arterial clogs and heart disease. Many of these additives are allowed in America, while being banned in Europe for carcinogenic properties. Often times, with the FDA and EPA, the companies whose chemicals are being tested for safety are the ones who are providing the laboratories, scientists, and funding for the research. As you can imagine, a company funded study has some inherent bias that may produce less-than-accurate results. Many chemicals are found to be carcinogenic in European studies, while being touted as 'safe' by the FDA, citing studies done by the corporations producing the chemical.

It is very important to note that a lot of flavors, additives, and enhancers are designed and tailored to take advantage of the human brain's chemistry to be physically addictive. Why do you think so many people become addicted to eating, but never to things like apples or whole wheat bread or salads, but to things like chips, cakes, and other highly processed foods? The food is literally designed to be addictive. Processed food is plainly a class of drugs. No wonder America is having an obesity crisis. We're making our foods calorie dense and packed with addictive chemicals.

Now let's take a look at a lot of processed foods, their prices. Potatoes are $0.78/#, while instant mashed potatoes are $3.49/#. Plain rice is $0.67/#, while instant rice is $1.50/#. Pre-cooked and chopped chicken breast is $6.14/#, while raw chicken breast is $2.67/#. This doesn't even count fast food; a McDonald's Quarter-Pounder is $6, while a burger made yourself costs about $1.27. There's quite a difference in price. And perhaps there is a subtle form of class warfare here. You wouldn't see the junk fast food places like McDonald's and KFC open in a wealthy neighborhood, they get the fancy restaurants and local businesses. But the poor neighborhoods tend to get the fast food, the stuff that kills you. Isn't that interesting?

Also another note, there are many people who say you should buy fresh only. I disagree and say that you should buy fresh or frozen, since a lot of fresh foods have been frozen at some point or another during transit. Fresh is preferable, but frozen isn't bad. Canned goods, however, are soaking in plastic liners and preservatives. They're not horrible, but should be avoided due to plastic leaching. Another note on shopping, buy generic brands when you can. Of course check the ingredients first, but some products like pasta and some over-the-counter medications are identical to the name brand products, while only half the cost. Higher price doesn't always mean higher quality. Sometimes just the implication of higher quality by virtue of a brand name is enough to make some people buy more expensive goods.

And there's an argument made that this doesn't include all the costs such as equipment and electricity and such. However, this is negligible and pays for itself over after a month or even a week. Besides, cookware is much cheaper than many people realise. A stainless steel cookware set is $25, a non-stick set is $15. It's not that bad. Speaking of cookware, let's talk about knives. Everyone totes getting a big knife block. I counter that, and I would say you only really need three knives: A chef's knife, which should be your most expensive knife; a paring knife, very useful for trimming and peeling; and a bread knife, for cutting, you know, bread. A filet knife could also be useful if you work with a lot of skin-on fish, but most people don't.

Not even for profit, but just to deliver an experience. I mean I'd still want to make a profit, but just not put it first and try to make it a career if that makes sense. The biggest thing would be delivering an experience, something memorable and unique for others. A big old sign or something that says "Cures and Curios"

So here's the scheme. Get a box truck, step van, or even a pickup truck with those swing-door tool boxes on the sides. Make it look old, like it barely runs. Normally just sell all sorts of traditional herbal remedies. Indian made stuff, salves and balms and tinctures. Maybe toss in a few old recipes from medical books, y'know home remedies. New age medicine seems to be a good market, so something like that could be a good more sustainable stream of income. But then there's people who want to know about the curios, not just the cures. I'll tell them to come back at dusk, something spooky like that.

If I have one of those big vans, I'll bring them inside, and have shelves of goods there. If it's just a truck, I'll set up tables outside it. Light it with lamps and candles for ambiance. And what would I sell? All sorts of stuff. I found places to buy wild trinkets, and authentic ones too. More normal things like rabbits' feet and crystal balls, sure. But then also, reproductions of medieval alchemy books, shrunken heads, wooden hand-carved tiki heads, genuine egyptian stone urns or perfume bottles or gold-plated statues, jars of eyeballs or hearts, exotic animal skulls, stingray barbs, mummified chicken feet, goat horns, death whistles, preserved animals, decorated skulls. All sorts of one-of-a-kind objects that you won't find in a store. Things that are good centerpieces or artifacts, conversation pieces. But also just things that even seeing for sale or having the opportunity to buy it feels like a once-in-a-lifetime type chance. It's not just about the profit, but about giving the customer some sort of magical, mystical experience.

I feel like it would be a very cool side-job. It's probably not something you can make a career out of unless you heavily lean into the traditional medicine type thing. But it would undoubtedly be interesting and get at least some sales. You'd probably want to do it at flea markets, open air markets, or try and sneak it in around town, y'know set up in a local parking lot or something. Just somewhere where people can see you and get drawn in. I dunno, it's just a fun idea to toss around.

Let's talk about terrorism. What's the definition of terrorism? I'd call it using violence for a higher goal, outside the scope of wartime activities. So for example, normal warfare isn't terrorism, and partisan warfare and guerilla warfare aren't terrorism either. Collateral damage only becomes terrorism when the one pulling the trigger does not believe there is a military target present. So if a building without military targets is blown up, it is only terrorism if the gunners knew that the building had no military targets.

However, these operations were, for the most part, outside of warfare, with a few exceptions that will be addressed first.

Operation Popeye - Undertaken during the Vietnam war, the plan was to use cloud-seeding to forcefully extend the rainy monsoon season. This was ostensibly to disrupt the flow of supplies to the North Vietnamese Army. It is often considered justified by many historians and government agencies, naturally. While this was undertaken for military purposes, consider the fact that something like the monsoon season does not target exclusively combatants. What about the civilians inside the areas that were seeded? The openly stated goals were to muddy roads and cause landslides. Is that something that only targets combatants? Obviously not. Indiscriminate targeting of areas inhabited by both civilians and militants is undoubtedly terroristic.

Operation Ranch Hand - Another Vietnam wartime operation. This one is most famous for the use of Agent Orange. It was a defoliant, meant to kill the plants used to conceal Vietnamese soldiers. While it did kill plants, this includes the agricultural products meant to sustain the people. Moreover, Agent Orange is toxic to humans. Millions of Vietnamese civilians as well as American veterans have developed various disabilities and cancers, and it often leads to defects in the children born from parents exposed to Agent Orange. Not only this, but there is much evidence that the government and the corporations producing the chemicals knew of its toxicity to humans, yet denied for decades that many servicemen's medical issues were related to exposure. Similar to the cloud-seeding, the chemical cannot distinguish between military targets or civilians. Agent Orange is color blind.

COINTELPRO - COINTELPRO was a series of broad operations undertaken by the FBI. It was mainly concerned with disrupting social movements. This included groups like the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Civil Rights Movement, Anti-Vietnam War organizers, the Nation of Islam, Brown Berets, Animal Rights and Environmentalist Movements, the KKK, National States' Rights Party, Communist Party, and so on. The tactics ranged from subversive to downright criminal. Sometimes it would be just observing or opening the mail of targets. Other times it would be joining the groups to discredit them through false-flag operations, or false reports to media outlets, or forge documents. And other times, they would falsely imprison and perjure, they would torture, kidnap, assault, and assassinate people. Many Black Panthers such as Mark Clark and Fred Hampton were assassinated under government orders, while many other leaders were imprisoned on falsified charges. Not only this, but Reagan personally stripped the Black Panthers of their right to bear arms with the Mulford Act, which prohibited open carry of firearms. This was to stop copwatching, where Black Panthers would open carry in their neighborhoods to discourage the use of excessive force by Oakland police officers. This is the reason why Reagan is regarded as a hero by mainline republicans, but villified by more niche conservatives, among other reasons.

Operation Gladio - This was a project by the CIA, predominantly in Italy but established in some regards in other nations. It involved funding, equipping, and training right-wing paramilitaries in Italy to ensure no communists got into government. Many people, including journalists, were tortured and assassinated, and many false-flag operations were undertaken. There was an entire period of post-war Italian history called the Years of Lead, with hundreds dead and thousands injured. This was a direct result of the CIA and their support of fascist terrorists.

Operation Underworld - Speaking of Italy, the government also collaborated with the Italian Mafia during World War Two and after the war as well, to ensure no Dockworker's strikes on the East Coast, intelligence gathering in Sicily, and to guard the ports against possible U-Boat attacks. This seems like a practical move, but note that the government directly enlisted the Mafia explicitly to help prevent strikes. The Mafia didn't just ask the organizers nicely. This was a brutal act of great violence, not only sanctioned but requested by the government.

Iran-Contra Affair - This one's a big one. The government would acquire weapons for many 'normal' reasons, such as training exercises with mercenaries. These weapons would then be reassessed in value, at a higher price, and only the initial value would be returned, giving the government an excess of weapons. These guns would then be sold to the Iranian government, which was illegal. The proceeds from the gun sales would then go to terrorists fighting the reformist governments in Central America. Again, the CIA funnelled money to terrorists. The terrorists would also be protected in other aspects, as well. For example, in trafficking cocaine and other drugs like crack to America; Contras who were smuggling drugs into America for sale were protected by the CIA against the DEA, to ensure more funds got to the Contras. Not only did the CIA help establish many drug cartels, but also facilitated the crack epidemics in much of America.

Operation PBSUCCESS - Guatemala was becoming communist, clearly. They implemented a minimum wage, allowed everyone to vote, and gave unused land to landless civilians while reimbursing those who lost the land with government bonds. So many of the landowners, especially fruit companies like Dole and Chiquita, went to the government for help. The government obliged them, bombing Guatemala City, invading, and overthrowing the country. The fear of a possible full-scale American invasion compelled the Guatemalan government to surrender. The installed government then executed thousands of members sympathetic to the previous government, and the operation as a whole sparked four decades of civil war in Guatemala.

Huston Plan - This was an American plan put into place during the Vietnam War, suspending constitutional amendments to allow 'radicals', essentially just anti-war protestors, to be surveilled and burglarized. However, later parts of the plan, which were not implemented as the plan was undone within a week, called for anti-war protestors to be detained in camps. The Nixon administration was also known for other things, such as preventing leaks to the press about White House affairs, as well as punishing political opponents through burglary, unwarranted IRS investigations, and possible firebombing. Again, let me remind you, for a week or so, the constitutional amendments regarding search and seizure were effectively nullified by no act or awareness of Congress. The president circumvented due process.

Readiness Exercise 1984 Bravo - This was a training exercise that was affiliated with the Iran-Contra Affair. It involved military exercises with both mercenaries and the 82nd Airborne Divison, practicing the imposition of martial law. It also involved, at the request of the Reagan administration and the director of FEMA, the planning of turning 22 military bases into concentration camps, operated by FEMA. These camps would detain over half a million immigrants and those determined to be threats to the government. This was all part of Operation Garden Plot. The Documents for the DA Civil Disturbance Plans from 1968, 1978, and 1991 are released publicly, while the 1991 report says "This OPLAN supercedes DA Civil Disturbance Plan dated 1 March 1984". I submitted a FOIA request, we'll see how that turns out. All information is from transcripts of interviews, or newspaper articles written by journalists.

Executive Orders 10995, 10997, 10998, 10999 - These executive orders go into effect when a national emergency is declared. 10995 allows for seize control of telecommunications and radio frequencies. 10997 allows the government to seize control over natural resources, both storage, processing, and extraction. This includes energy, oil, and minerals. 10998 allows for the control of agricultural and farm implements, including machinery and fertilizer and such. 10999 allows for the seizure of forms of transportation as seen fit, whether public or private.

The Business Plot - A plan during the 1930s by Wall Street Executives to overthrow the government. They would enlist angry veterans, rallied by bribed generals. Those veterans would move on the White House, forcing the president to appoint a co-president as dictator, puppeted by Wall Street, to implement more pro-business policies. The current government was seen as communist for implementing reforms such as minimum wage, banning child labor, and social security. A congressional inquiry found that the plan did exist to overthrow the government, but nobody was punished for it.

FAMILY JEWELS - A CIA document discussing various actions undertaken by the agency that may potentially be illegal, such as kidnapping foreign defectors, wiretapping and spying on journalists, burglarlizing suspected whistleblowers, opening mail to the Soviet Union or China, behavior modification experiments, assassination plots on foreign leaders, surveillance of ten thousand Americans, and forged identification.

BLAIR MOUNTAIN - Thousands of coal miners decided to strike for better wages, conditions, and housing, many of them living in company-owned homes. The mining company hires a 'detective agency' to break the strike, along with local law enforcement. Fighting breaks out, and the military gets involved, on the side of the corporations of course. Rather than as a third party to restore order, or as a peacekeeping force. Instead they shot at the miners, and used explosives and chemical gas from bombers to subdue the workers. Over a hundred people are killed, all because a company put profit over lives.

LATAM DEATH SQUADS - Several different companies, from Coca-Cola to Banana Companies, have employed death squads against labor organizers. They have committed various atrocities, from kidnapping to torture to murder. There have been records of massacres undertaken with farm implements and chainsaws against civilians. Many people have been killed. Why? Because not killing those people is more expensive. Money is all that matters. Keep that in mind. With corporations, all is inferior to the dollar. No institution is too sacred, no moral code too strong. If it is economiclly profitable, all actions are permissible.

Dual_EC_DRBG - An encryption algorithm promoted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, International Organization for Standardization, and the American National Standards Institute to secure data. However, it turned out to be created by the NSA. The idea was that if people adopt this algorithm, with a built-in backdoor, any encrypted data can easily be decrypted by the NSA.

BULLRUN - A decryption program by the NSA, facilitated by some normal means like algorithms and collaboration, but more odd means such as intercepting data or by partnering with industry leaders. It has been successful, nearly a billion dollars invested and much encrypted data now able to be accessed plainly. The British counterpart is EDGEHILL.

RAMPART-A - A global surveillance program focused on intercepting the data passing through submarine cables, which connect regions across oceans to the internet. Over one hundred gigabytes per second of data is intercepted, from fax to VoIP to e-mail to voice calls. The British counterpart is TEMPORA.

STINGRAY - A StingRay is a small device that is able to simulate a cell tower, with nearby phones automatically connecting to it. The device is able to do many things, including intercepting text messages and phone calls, jamming connections, and locating specific devices.

DISHFIRE - A collaboration between the NSA and British counterpart, GCHQ. The program collects hundreds of millions of text messages every day, as well as names, locations, financial transactions, and border crossings.

MYSTIC - An NSA program to collect the contents of phone calls. Every phone call in entire countries are able to be recorded and held for 30 days, unless otherwise marked for archive.

DCSNET - DCSNET is a program with the ability to perform instant wiretaps of communications devices developed by the FBI. It also has many subdivisions, such as:

• DCS-1000 - Software created to monitor all internet traffic of a targeted user
• DCS-3000 - A system for collecting and processing phone calls
• DCS-5000 - A system to wiretap persons of interest
• DCS-6000 - A system to collect and index phone calls and text messages

PRISM - A program to collect internet usage data from Apple and Google, reportedly with 91% of all internet traffic acquired by the NSA being through PRISM.

MAGIC LANTERN - FBI spyware activated by clicking an e-mail attachment, with every key pressed by the user recorded and sent to the FBI. Multiple antivirus softwares have been accused of collaborating with the FBI, to exempt the spyware from being detected and removed.

ANT/TAO Catalog - A catalog of various devices and softwares, created by the NSA. Some notable items include:

• COTTONMOUTH - A keylogger that doesn't require internet connection, concealed in a USB port.
• WATERWITCH - A device allowing a user to get the precise location of a nearby mobile phone.
• TOTEGHOSTLY - Software allowing for total remote control of a Windows phone.
• SOMBERKNAVE - A software allowing total remote control of any Windows XP computer.
• RAGEMASTER - A small bug concealed in the choke of a VGA cable, allowing for the FBI to see what the user would be seeing on the screen connected to the VGA cable.
• PICASSO - Allows for a phone's location to be collected, as well as access to the phone's microphone to eavesdrop.
• MONKEYCALENDAR - Transmits a phone's location by an invisible text message.
• NIGHTSTAND - Installs exploits on Microsoft Windows wirelessly from a distance of eight miles.
• IRONCHEF - Software that embeds itself into the BIOS of a system, linked to REGIN, a highly customizable long-term surveillance software.
• HOWLERMONKEY - An RF transceiver that allows for data extraction or remote control of computers.
• DROPOUTJEEP - Spyware tailored for the iPhone to extract text messages, files, location, contact list, voicemail, and even access to the microphone and camera.
• DEITYBOUNCE - Software to install backdoors on Dell PowerEdge servers.
• IRATEMONK - Software that embeds itself on the firmware of hard drives manufactured by Seagate, Samsung, Maxtor, and Western Digital.

Machine Identification Code - A pattern of small yellow dots unique to every inkjet printer, printed on each page output by the printer. This allows for papers and printed documents to be traced to specific printers, by their serial numbers. This is the reason why inkjet printers require yellow ink, even when printing black and white, and why there's no generic brand or knock-off brand printers in stores. Usually just Xerox, Brother, HP, Epson, and Canon. It's illegal to sell printers without this software. While initially implemented to prevent counterfeiting, it can also be used to identify whistleblowers. Printers are often connected to the internet, allowing for easy locating of a specific printer.

SENTIENT - A system of spy satellites in space, with artificial intelligence and machine learning. The satellites are able to autonomously track targets, and identify which targets may be worth tracking.

CIPAV - FBI software that monitors all outbound internet traffic of a computer, as well as logging each IP address connected to. The software was used to identify a teen who sent bomb threats, but isn't this something that couldn't have happened unless the software was on the device prior to the threats being made?

SONIC SCREWDRIVER - A tool to bypass Apple's password-protection on its firmware.

WEEPING ANGEL - A type of software that uses cameras and microphones on Smart TVs for intelligence gathering.

SCRIBBLES - An invisible image on CIA documents that, when loaded, generates a request on CIA servers, alerting the CIA of who is accessing the document and from what IP. This allows for whistleblowers to be tracked down with much more ease.

OUTLAWCOUNTRY - A module for Linux 2.6 that allowed for the CIA to monitor Linux servers, and redirect outgoing traffic on Linux devices to specific sites.

DUMBO - A tool to disable webcams, microphones, and other security devices. This is done wirelessly to assist CIA agents on missions.

PEGASUS - A spyware for iPhones and Android, able to read text messages, collect passwords, track locations, listen to voice calls, access microphones and cameras, and harvest specific data from different apps.

Intel Management Engine - A software embedded on the kernel level of intel processors, able to run even when the computer is turned off. It allows for full remote control of machines and accessing of all files, as long as the computer is still plugged in.

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT - A data analysis and visualization tool used by the NSA to assist in processing the large amounts of available data.

INVESTIGATIVE DATA WAREHOUSE - A searchable database hosted by the FBI, with much classified data, as well as public and criminal records, all consolidated within one program.

STONEGHOST - A network for exchanging information between FiveEyes members.

FIVEEYES - Also called ECHELON. Five Eyes is a collective of intelligence agencies of various countries, who all collaborate and share information. They operate outside of the law, not being held to the legal standards of the countries in which they operate, including their own nations. Generally, they place their focus on monitoring communications and internet data, while also monitoring diplomats and such. Five Eyes is also a way to get around many prohobitions on agencies spying on their own citizens, as the other members can instead do the spying and then freely exchange the information. There are several different tiers of the organization, including Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes, with various levels of integration between member-states and their intelligence agencies.

INFORMATION AWARENESS OFFICE - A DARPA project to track and monitor threats, by monitoring every single person in the United States. Records would include e-mails, social media pages, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and so on. This information would then be cross-referenced and analyzed for potential threat assessment. All data would be gathered without warrants. The program also included the possibility for face recognition and such to track and identify individuals through surveillance cameras.

STARGATE - This one's very odd. It was a project by the DIA, establishing a secret Army unit to research psychic warfare. Mainly, it was focused on remote viewing, to assist in surveillance of targets of interest. Most of the viewers were frauds, but one was able to locate a downed Soviet spy plane without any assistance, a plane that was unable to be located by spy satellites. Though this was a promising lead, the program was shut down due to pressures from scientific institutions.

HTLINGUAL - Opening the mail destined for foreign nations such as the Soviet Union and China, and of domestic activists and influential persons such as Bobby Fischer, Martin Luther King Jr., Bella Abzug, Hubert Humphrey, and John Steinbeck. Tens of millions of letters were examined.

PROJECT SHAMROCK - Surveillance and monitoring of all outbound telegraph communications in America, beginning in 1945, with cooperation from telegraph companies. Over one hundred thousand messages were analyzed monthly.

Tuskegee Study - The Tuskegee Study was a scientific study conducted by the CDC, to see the effect of syphilis when left untreated. Four hundred black men were subjects, with a quarter of them dying as a result of the syphilis. The men were promised medical care and administered either fake or experimental treatments. The men were also told the program would last six months, while it actually lasted forty years. The men were promised treatment that never came, and were ultimately abandoned. As it was a study on the effects of syphilis untreated, there was never going to be any treatment.

Montreal Experiments - A series of experiments initially devised to treat schizophrenia, discovered to be a part of MKULTRA. The methods involved attempting to erase thoughts and change memories, using 'psychic-driving', electrocution, inducing comas, drugs, and sensory deprivation. The comas could and did last for months at a time, with occasional injections of psychadelics and playing of audio clips into the ears of the unconscious patients. Those undergoing sensory deprivation were blindfolded and had their ears stopped, as well as not being restricted on food, water, and oxygen, and injected with paralytics. Psychic driving was a method that involved playing hundreds of thousands of messages into the ears of patients for sixteen hours a day for weeks, initially a over a week of positive messages, then negative, then positive, back and forth. If patients grew anxious, they were injected with sedatives. None of them were aware of what they were signing up for. Many patients became amnesiac and had to relearn basic life skills. Some were reduced to childlike mental states and lost bladder control. One woman became an emotionless husk who would sit in the dark, writing codes on the walls of her room for hours at a time. Most of the evidence is in court reports and patient files, as much of the information was either destroyed or is currently classified.

MKULTRA - This one is too big to cover in short order. To put it in brief, the CIA attempted to create interrogation methods that forced subjects to tell the truth, as well as sleeper agents. Many of the experiments involved drugging unwitting subjects, torture of both physical and mental varieties, hypnosis, sexual abuse, electroshocks, and so on. One mental patient was kept on a high dose of LSD for about six months. Soldiers who were forced to be subjects were threatened with court-martial for whistleblowing. One man was assassinated for resigning from the project. Detention camps were also opened, where the CIA tortured and experimented on people, outside the jurisdiction of the law. When the news broke, the CIA ordered all documents destroyed. Only one cache of 20,000 pages survived, as it was incorrectly filed under finances rather than the program.

OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD - A CIA program in which various journalists and news agencies would directly collaborate with and publish stories from the CIA. Essentially, this would turn prominent news outlets into state media. This included hundreds of journalists in publications such as the New York Times and Time Magazine.

ATRAZINE - A chemical herbicide used to treat lawns and crops. A scientist discovered that there were various negative health effects to Atrazine; It turned male tadpoles female. It was also an extremely common pollutant in drinking water, the primary one in America by 2001. The scientist who discovered the effect on frogs was then harrassed and ridiculed, with forgeries made against him; all this revealed by internal company memos from the very company making the chemical. The company also conducted several studies that showed their chemical to be safe, which the EPA then published as conclusive evidence. To this day, the scientist still is punished for speaking the truth; Tyrone Hayes.

THINK TANKS - There are many think tanks in existence. Various political or social organizations, who publish studies and conduct research that just so happens to always agree with their stated goals. Let me be absolutely clear. There is no such thing as a think tank. It is privately funded propaganda, an outlet for the wealthy and influential to pass their money through, a more credible voice to speak through. They are not scientists, they are not objective, they are inherently biased towards the views of their sponsors or donors. Don't trust a word they say, even if you agree with it, especially if you agree with it.

Operation Pacifier - This was an FBI operation that was riddled with controversy. A website distributing CSAM was seized by the FBI, but continued to operate for weeks, while the FBI collected the data and location of all users entering the site. While this did lead to the arrest of many people, it is important to note that this means that the FBI distributed CSAM for weeks, with some users reporting how all of a sudden the site was loading much faster and smoother. It is one of those situations that beg the question, do the ends justify the means? But as one man put it, "The ends can never justify the means; nothing ever ends". Tactics like this are, while effective, morally dubious at best, and don't conclusively solve the issue of CSAM distribution. These tactics only cut one outlet.

HINCKLEY, OSWALD, AND GEORGE H.W. BUSH - John Hinckley was the man who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan during Bush's vice-presidency. Here's a little excerpt from a NYT article: "The eldest Hinckley child, Scott, 30, is the vice president of the his [sic] father's company and a friend of Neil Bush, the son of Vice President Bush. Scott Hinckley and a date had been invited to dinner at the young Bushes' home last night". Now that's odd. Here's another odd fact, Hinckley attempted the shooting to get the attention of an actress, Jodie Foster. Reagan was also formerly an actor, possibly with connections. Another odd note is that Bush was the director of the CIA, who oversaw the security in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated. Very strange coincidence.

1209 NORTH ORANGE STREET - A small building in Delaware, where hundreds of thousands of companies have their registered agent. This small little building allows corporations to avoid billions in taxes, due to Delaware's loose tax laws and softness towards corporations. In fact, some Delaware towns have even attempted motions to allow corporations to cast votes in local elections, as if they were people. In other words, a vote now costs $200.

CEVERIT - Ceverit is a type of glass developed in East Germany during the Cold War. It was designed to be unbreakable if dropped, and many of these glasses are still in regular use in bars in East Germany. The product was proposed to glassware companies in the west, but was unilaterally rejected by the companies. It would essentially kill their main business of selling replacement glasses. In other words, despite a superior quality product existing, inferior products are still used because they break more often, generating more sales.

GOOGLE - Back in the day, the CIA had attempted to assemble profiles of every American citizen. This was stopped by other parts of the government. A while later, Google suddenly comes out. Google assembles a 'fingerprint' of each user, based on every single search they perform, email they send, video they watch, things they say around their microphones, and so on. And coincidentally, the founders of Google have CIA ties and Google was partially created with grant money from the CIA?

ARPANET - And speaking of tech things, the internet itself was created by DARPA as a project in 1969. Even the internet is a government project, so it should really be no surprise that the internet is not secure.

PINK INDEX CARDS - A notorious child predator and child pornography producer's warehouse was raided, John David Norman. About 4 tons of film were seized, as well as over one hundred thousand index cards with contacts of clients. These included federal officials and public figures. The lieutenant who discovered this then forwarded the index cards to the State Department. The State Department then declared that the cards were irrelevant to any passport fraud cases, and so destroyed them.

MICHAEL AQUINO - A colonel in the Army. One of the developers of psychological warfare in Vietnam and popularized the term Psyop. Involved with the Iran-Contra Affair. He was also a member of the Church of Satan, until he left because the group was too moderate. Instead he founded the Temple of Set, which had actual sacrifice and ritual and theistic Satan worship. He was also a notorious child molester, but all of the evidence was coincidentally destroyed in two house fires. The ATF even said it was suspicious. The case was dismissed, and coincidentally the DA of California at the time was a friend of Aquino, through mutual involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair.

THE FINDERS - A cult contracted and protected by the CIA for security purposes. The group was also involved with kidnapping and brainwashing children. Additionally, material was produced by them involving children in chains or nude, and sacrifices. All charges were dropped.

FACT CHECKERS HAVE FOUND THIS INFORMATION TO BE FALSE - Have you ever noticed a very odd trend with fact-checking? Many times there will be a claim made, and fact-checkers will swarm to it. They will create an adjacent claim to the original, and debunk it. Now, the entire concept as a whole has been 'debunked' as false, despite the original claim being true. Essentially strawmanning on a larger scale.

LITTLE ST. JAMES - We all know it. Epstein's island. Epstein was an influential finance guy, involved with rich people's assets. He also ran an island full of child molestation with girls as young as six, and a plane with underage stewardesses called the Lolita Express. This eventually is all exposed, and the flight logs show many, many influential people visiting the island, including members of the British royal family and the Clinton family. Before Epstein could testify, he was found hanged in his cell. The cell's cameras were turned off and the guards were not watching. It was officially labeled a suicide. Remember, elites being pedophiles is nothing new. Is it any surprise that the people who pursue power over others in politics or business also pursue power over others through more carnal ways?

BILDERBERG MEETINGS - An annual meeting between industrial leaders, politicians, major journalists, and the wealthy and influential elites. All meetings are secretive and protected by police. Generally speaking, major things happen after Bilderberg meetings. People like Merkel and Obama shot up to candidacy for head of state after attending meetings. The 2008 recession and the associated bailouts for bankers happened after Bilderberg meetings. These meetings. Extremely suspicious.

BOHEMIAN GROVE - The Bohemian Grove is another secretive meeting between artists, businessmen, and politicians such as Reagan and Nixon. It takes place in a seccret grove in California, with a large owl statue and water features. The pamphlets feature demonic imagery. The whole meeting concludes with a ritual by cloaked men in which they burn an effigy under the owl statue, with the effigy delivered by a boatman painted as if he is death itself. There is footage secretly captured of the entire affair by Alex Jones, one of his first pieces he ever made. Highly worth a watch. Side note, I believe Alex Jones was onto some things but eventually became one of the elites, and blew the theories and speech out of proportion to discredit it. He went from aware to a psyop producer.

ROCKEFELLER AND THE UNITED NATIONS - Did you know that the United Nations Headquarters was built on land donated by the Rockefellers? And the Rockefellers have always had a hand in government. It took Roosevelt to help start breaking them up. Roosevelt only got into his position because the current president died. Roosevelt wasn't on the ballot, because the industrialists viewed him as a threat, so they made him the Vice President as it's a mostly worthless position. Politics have always been controlled by the wealthy. Here's a couple interesting quotes from David Rockefeller: "The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries", "Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it". These are the words of someone trustworthy? And believe it or not, Rockefeller had ties with several CIA agents.

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS - Another organization prominently featuring politicians and wealthy elites, and this time with intelligence agencies too. It hosts these individuals to, again, discuss policy moving forward. It is another one of those organizations in which after meetings occur, major events happen. Believe it or not, David Rockefeller was the president of it at one point. Some journalists have even said that it's the closest thing to a ruling establishment that America has had.

TRILATERAL COMMISSION - This one's meant to guide policy cooperation between East Asia, North America, and Western Europe. Deeper integration of nations. Again, members are influential figures in business, politics, media, and academia. This one was founded by David Rockefeller himself. It's another one of those very influential policy-guiding organizations, like the CFR, Bilderbergs, and Bohemian Grove.

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM - Another policy-guiding organization. This one's based in Switzerland and again an annual meeting. This one's the source of a lot of problems. 'The Great Reset', an overhaul of the fundamental economic structure of the world after COVID-19 was something that originated from this site. Same with the idea of 'You'll own nothing and be happy', where urban citizens would own no appliances or vehicles, and instead simply rent them all temporarily. Very odd ideas.

WARREN BUFFET - Here's a quote. "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Now, I'd like to bring up a Tucker Carlson segment. It is surprisingly accurate for a state media piece. The wealthy have always sought to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor. Keep the poor man down. But how do you keep them down? If they know what's going on, they rebel. They did it back in the day, with Bacon's rebellion. So what do they do? Divide the poors on racial lines. Create inequitable laws, create propaganda. And now, all of a sudden, the poor people are at each other's throats, not paying attention to the bigger picture.

POLYESTER AND LED - Why are so many clothes nowadays made from plastics? Polyester, acrylic, spandex, elastics, nylons. It's miserable. These materials are bad for the health, unsustainable, and one of the largest causes for pollution and microplastics. Here's a fun experiment. Go to the store, and find me a pair of wool socks. 100% wool. I've never been able to do it. Same with normal socks, find a 100% cotton pair. You can find pairs that are 100% polyester, but not 100% cotton. It's so odd. And LED lights. It's now illegal to manufacture general incandescent lights. And to sell them. Why? It's 'energy-inefficient'? So what next, ban leaving the fridge open? Ban having the air conditioner running too long? Why are we going after incandescent lights of all things, why not go after the actual energy consumers? It's a useless gesture, given how little lighting actually affects total energy consumption. But LED lights? Did you know that LED lights are germicidal? They damage cells. They often have coatings, but these coatings are weak and permeable and often come apart in short order. The more time you spend around LEDs (ligthbulbs, screens, TVs, etc), the more damage to your skin you will experience. But incandescent lights? They give off UVB rays, like the sun. It is good for the skin and stimulates vitamin D production. LED lights damage the body, while incandescents promote better health. Isn't that interesting? Forcing an unhealthier product on people, with reasoning that is inconsequential and ineffective. Again, seriously look at this. Of all the energy waste, lighting? Not vampire drain, not leaving electronics running, not idling engines, not air conditioning, but lighting? Nearly 50% of power usage is from air conditioning, space heating, and water heating. But lighting is more important, I guess. Nonsensical. Just another passive way to damage the American people. And of course the LED illuminated screens are filled with apps made to be addictive.

PFAS - PFAS and its derivatives are a type of chemical nicknamed forever chemicals due to their inability to decompose naturally. These chemicals are carcinogenic and produce birth defects. 97-98% of people have PFAS in their blood. It contaminates rainwater as it stays in the air, it seeps into the soil and contaminates groundwater. One of the only ways to prevent it from infecting you is by reverse osmosis. How did they become so prevalent? Chemical Companies. They produced them for many household goods, like nonstick pans. The companies, in internal memos, recognized that the chemicals would have horrible effects on the human body, even observing the pregnant women working and their health. They knew the risk. They continued to dump the chemicals in waterways and suppress scientists. They knew and did nothing until they were forced to admit it. Like usual, companies will kill people if it's convenient.

WATER FLUORIDATION - We know fluoride is good for the teeth. We knew this for decades before it was introduced into water supplies. During World War Two and the Cold War, we needed a lot of fluoride for sulfur hexafluoride, to extract and process uranium. Once nuclear production slowed down, chemical companies suddenly had tons of fluoride they couldn't use, and it is very costly to dispose of. So what do they do? Run campaigns and lobbying to fluoridate public water, calling it dental health. Now they don't have to pay to dispose of it, but get paid to dispose of it. Sure, it does help our teeth. But we already have fluoride in toothpaste, don't we? And in mouthwash? Why do we need to ingest it too? Why do we need to bathe in it? Soak our dishes in it? Is that right? But what's the big deal, it's just fluoride. Yeah. Fluoride is a neurotoxin like lead. Fluoridated drinking water has been linked to lowered IQ, stunted bone growth, and so on. It is a toxic chemical that is put into public water because that was more convenient for chemical companies. Why do you think your toothpaste and your mouthwash tell you to not swallow it? Fluoride is toxic. And because of chemical companies needing to increase profits, it's infested the public drinking water.

MICROPLASTICS - Microplastics are in every human. In our blood, our semen, our breast milk. Everything is infected with microplastics. A typical human ingests enough plastic in two weeks to create a credit card. Go to a restaurant, you get plastic bowls and plastic silverware and plastic cups, but don't worry, the straws are paper (and lined with plastic). It's in the fish and meat that we eat, it's got microplastics. It causes various different ailments, from muscle problems to cancers. It is truly inescapable. Why did this happen? Pollution and the constant use of plastics that are frankly unnecessary. Plastics are good, yes, because they are durable, long-lasting, and flexible. So do not use them on single-use items, is this that crazy? People act like plastics are irreplacable. How did we function before plastics? We didn't use plastic bags, we used paper bags. We didn't use plastic straws, we drank from the cup. We didn't use cling film, we used aluminum foil or butcher's paper or wax paper. We didn't use packing peanuts, we used straw or paper shreddings. We didn't use plastic bottles, we used glass or metal. We didn't use plastic car parts, we used aluminum. We do not need plastics in everything we own.

GIVE BLOOD - Many people know that their bodies are infested with toxins. Chemicals, agents and reagents, plastics, synthetics. Horrible things. How do you manage this? Your kidneys can only do so much. Donate blood. When you donate blood, your body must create new blood, but your body does not create new toxins. You essentially dilute your body's toxins in your bloodstream. Imagine if you had 100 grams of toxins and four pints of blood. 25 grams per pint. You give a pint of blood, and that includes the proportional 25g of toxins in your bloodstream. Then your body regenerates that liter, and you now have 4 pints but only 75 grams of toxins, about 19 grams per pint. Simple as. Donate blood.

So, what is the Selfish-Clown angle? It is, in essence, the view that there is no collaboration. The people in power are those who have that desire, innate or imparted, to seek and gain power by any means, legal or illegal. This means that corporations and executives and government actors are scheming against each other, undercutting each other, making backroom deals, and so on. The only collaboration that occurs is fully with the belief that it is an unfair deal in their own favor, on both sides. A truly free market and country for the major players, not beholden to any moral codes nor laws unless enforcing those laws would strengthen the position of the government agents executing them.

What is the evidence of this? Well, let's start with something simple. Two brands everyone knows: Lays and Oreos. This may sound silly, but bear with me. Have you seen the chip aisle at your local grocer? A Wal-Mart for example. Mine contains the big four flavors: classic, barbecue, salt and vinegar, and sour cream and onion. It also had lime, cheddar and sour cream, honey barbecue, sweet southern heat barbecue, hickory barbecue, flamin' hot, chile lime, sweet and spicy honey, dill pickle, masala, cajun spice, jalapeno, IHOP strawberry pancake with bacon and syrup, Funyuns, and honey habenaro.

Let's consider Oreo, as well, though it occurs to a lesser extent. Original Oreos, double stuf Oreos, toffee crunch Oreos, Oreo thins, pumpkin spice Oreos, golden Oreos, chocolate cream Oreos, birthday cake Oreos, peanut butter creme Oreos, Oreo cakesters, chocolate peanut butter pie Oreos, mega stuf Oreos, dark chocolate Oreos, dirt cake Oreos, mint chocolate chips Oreos, holiday red creme Oreos, white fudge covered Oreos, mint Oreos, lemon Oreos, java chip Oreos, strawberry frosted donut Oreos, and ice cream cake Oreos.

Genuinely, why do all these flavors exist? Are the people at Nabisco and Pepsi-Frito-Lay just lunatics? Why do they feel a constant need to push out new varieties and flavors, one-off runs and exotic flavor combinations. They know that these are not going to stick. Nobody at Nabisco genuinely thinks that Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie Oreos are going to replace Original Oreos. Nobody at Lays think that IHOP Strawberry Pancake with Syrup and Bacon flavored Lays will become as much of a staple as Barbecue or Salt and Vinegar. They just need to look like they're expanding, growing, and innovating. Even if it comes at the long-term cost of pulling focus away from their core product line. They absolutely should be content with simply resting on the fact that they have made their billions of dollars, and will continue to make their billions. Mondelez International, the owner of Nabisco, pulled in thirteen billion dollars of gross profit in 2023. PepsiCo, the owner of Frito-Lays, pulled in forty-nine billion dollars of gross profit in 2023. (Numbers are presented as gross profit and not income net of expenses other than cost of goods sold, as this argument is solely focused on the sales figures on their brand and not the actual financial well-being of the company). Now, do these corporations really seem like they need to innovate and make derivative product lines, given these numbers? And let's be honest, these aren't new products, they're derivatives. Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie Oreos are not a new product, they are simply a derivative of Oreos. Now I'm sure that some market researcher and flavor-ologists worked really hard on this product, and I'm sure they're proud of it. I'm not discounting their work, but I'm saying that there is no reason why they really needed to do that work in the first place. Was it fruitless? No. Was it pointless? Yes.

Now let's shift to a different topic: logos. We all know that corporations change logos over time to suit with what styles are 'in'. But these come at ridiculous costs. British Petroleum went to their iconic logo, the strange flower-like symbol made of diamonds. How much did that logo design cost? Two hundred million dollars. Maybe if they hadn't spent two hundred million dollars on a new logo twenty-five years ago, they could be paying their cashiers more than an average of ten dollars an hour. What about Tropicana's redesign, the horrible design of their box that they reverted from? Thirty-five million. And a lot of these companies nowadays are redesigning their logos in worse ways. Removing depth, removing color, removing fonts, removing everything that makes those brands unique. And for what? To look sleek and modern, so they can redesign these logos thirty years down the line again? Nonsensical. But again, why do they do it? They need to appear like they are innovating, like they are ahead of the curve, like they are growing. They must appear to be making great strides and gains, even if it harms their long-term prospects by diverting money that could be used on investing in infrastructure, raising wages (higher paid workers perform better, just look at CostCo (21/hr) vs. Walmart (15/hr) cashiers and stockers), or even just putting the money into bonds or money-market accounts. But no, they must innovate and grow. Heck, even Burger King's app allegedly cost half a billion dollars to develop, for a mobile app.

Now let's look at another example. Sears. Sears has always been a bulwark of American retail, a titan of the industry. Essentially the pre-internet Amazon, with the Sear's catalogs. And their products and brands were known to last, too. Made in the U.S.A., high quality construction. Many of these tools are used to this very day. There's a reason why the decades-old vintage Craftsman tool sets are worth hundreds. They're just better. So what happened to Sear's? Now they're bankrupt, Craftman is a shadow of its former self, how did this happen?

Growth and innovation. You see, Sears did have a niche. High quality products. Some speciality goods as well. But then what happened? Wal-Mart began to grow, selling low cost goods at an even lower quality. People began to shop at Wal-Mart for their occasional goods. So what did Sear's do? Sabotage themselves. Cut down on quality so they can cut down on cost and be appealing to consumers. This relies on the assumption that Sear's and Walmart should compete. A high-quality and low-quality goods retailer do not compete directly, but in parallel. They attract different buyers of the same products. Take, for example, CostCo and Wal-Mart, versus Target and Wal-Mart. Target competes directly as a department store, while CostCo competes in parallel as a wholesale retailer. Though they target the same products, they target different types of buyers. Sear's sought to switch from a parallel to a direct form of competition. This was doomed from the start. Sear's could never beat Wal-Mart at its own game. To do so would require lowering your quality and costs even lower than Wal-Mart, which could never happen in the model of Sear's.

So what happened? They began to fail. How did they react? Bringing in a new CEO who stripped important and recognizable brands from Sear's, selling them to his own financial company who then sold them off to other retailers who would manufacture different products overseas under the same name. Let me emphasize this again. The CEO of Sear's, Eddit Lampert, sold vital brands to his own financial group. This is one of the more blatant displays of sacrificing long-term viability for short-term gains and profits on the balance sheet. But perhaps Sear's was already doomed at that point, and he was merely a vulture, picking at the corpse for what he could scrounge.

Want another example of companies seeking short-term gains over long-term viability? Look no further than the cities along the Rust Belt. Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Bethesda, Buffalo, Philadelphia, the list goes on. These cities were absolute behemoths of manufacturing and output, they carried the nation through the Civil War and the World Wars. The raw output of these regions was unparalleled. Then what? They were stabbed in the back and left for dead. Vultures at work again.

Let's look at some numbers. How much steel did America produce in 1969? One hundred and fifteen million tons. And how much did we make in 2023? Eighty million tons. A thirty per-cent decline.

Let's talk about why this happened. It's the same reason as always. Short-term profits at long-term costs. People want cheaper goods. Companies can save on labor costs by going overseas. This increases their profits, and makes their products more attractive. So, off the jobs go. Why manufacture domestically when we can simply import? Why hire American workers with quality material and production standards, when we can pay a Laotian eight year old five cents an hour to work sixteen hours weaving shirts? And when the first company left, the genie was out of the bottle, with no way to put it back in.

Companies did begin to realize that they had a great opportunity to increase profits here. They took it. But the fickle thing about economies is that they're cyclical. There's two methods to calculate GDP. One by adding up the amount of money from consumption, from sles, from investment, and so on. But the other is made up by totalling wages, rent incomes, interest, and profits. These two add up to the same number. So naturally, when the jobs leave the country, unemployment rises. When unemployment rises, there becomes a sudden drop in the amount of freely-available capital for people to spend at stores. When there is less capital, there is less consumption. When there is less consumption, there is less profit for business. Ford saw the inverse of this back in the olden days; by raising wages and making more jobs, the workers could buy the very cars they were assembling, allowing Ford to grow even larger and increase sales.

So then, companies were faced with a dilemma. They had already shut down the factories to open new ones overseas. They couldn't just shut down the overseas ones, cut their losses, and go back to the original model. That's admitting defeat. Instead, the manufacturing will stay overseas, and they will instead create jobs domestically. Not in manufacturing, but in service.

Nowadays, eighty-five per-cent of Americans are employed in some sort of service industry. Burger flippers, cashiers, stockers, baristas, consultants, accountants, advertising agents, real-estate agents. These people are not really producing anything, let's be completely honest here. An accountant facilitates what? Guidance of a company's future. An accountant can improve efficiency, yes, but an accountant does not directly produce the goods that are sold. Real-estate agents, what do they produce? Nothing. They facilitate transactions, yes, but they themselves do not create the land nor improve the land. A cashier, what does a cashier really produce? Nothing. They facilitate transactions between retailers and consumers. Stockers, what do they produce? Nothing, they facilitate the transport of goods to the consumer. These jobs facilitate and improve upon the capacities for manufacturing and goods, but themselves do not produce goods. They lead to higher quality or easier access to goods, but themselves are not responsible for producing the goods; they are auxiliary, and each middle-man between producer and consumer takes their cut out of the chain, raising costs for the consumer. Again, let's look at PepsiCo's financials. PepsiCo, in 2023, had a net revenue of ninety-one billion dollars, but a cost of sales of only forty-one billion. In other words, a bottle of Pepsi sold for two dollars costs less than a dollar to actually make. Where does all that extra cost come in? Paying the salaries of the workers, sure, but also paying the salaries of the executives, the marketers, the advertisers, the inspectors, the accountants, the lawyers, the tax experts, dividends to shareholders, phone and internet for the corporate offices, the office vending machines stocked with Pepsi, and so on. In essence, many costs imparted upon the consumers have no real need to exist, and are just another check down the line for the cost for consumers.

Look at TEMU. Do you know why it is so cheap? Because when you buy from the manufacturer directly, you avoid all those middlemen along the way, you cut them from the chain. And speaking of buying from manufacturers, as a side note, bulk discounts. On small scales it makes sense. Yes, a larger box does cost less in packaging than a small one with respect to the ratio between surface-area and volume. But when you get to the large-scale, really step back and look at this. A bulk discount on, say, cardboard boxes. Does it really matter whether you're buying one or ten pallets of boxes? What true effect does it have on the cost for the manufacturer? None. But the more you buy, the more of a discount you get. This is to attract the larger buyers, the big spenders. But think about the effect that has on the manufacturers. The larger manufacturers can afford the higher-quantity products with the larger bulk discounts, while the smaller manufacturers cannot. This directly saves costs for the larger manufacturer, it helps their bottom line. In other words, the large businesses can leverage this to increase their profit margins, while the smaller business cannot. It is another way to ensure that the rich get even richer. I doubt this is intentional by the distributors, but a very unfortunate coincidence.

Enough with that tangent. Let's go back to what we were discussing. Jobs in America, and the American economy in general, has made a fundamental shift called de-industrialization. We used to manufacture goods at large quantities. We used to leverage the military, not for conquest, but to simply open up other countries' markets for American goods. But now, most jobs are simply those to facilitate manufacture of goods, and not the goods themselves.

So, let's get back to it. The companies that exported the jobs did it for short-term gains. They then shot themselves in the foot by not returning the jobs and instead creating useless jobs in the value chain. That's partially why there's so many new variants and derivates of brands, these fundamentally pointless jobs need to justify their own existence. So now? Large sectors of the manufacturing industry have completely collapsed, leaving towns abandoned. Manufacturing supply chains have collapsed, and this is a danger for many reasons. Despite the American GDP being ten times higher than Russia's, Russian artillery shell manufacturing is at a quarter million per month, while the American manufacturing capacity is hoping to be at a tenth of a million per month by 2025. Though the GDP is large, much of the economy is not actually productive economically, and instead is just facilitative. As such, when the mask is pulled away, the American economy is much weaker than initially thought, and more propped up by a circular flow of service jobs.

All in all, my point is this. A corporation is run by greed. Even if it means long-term catastrophe, it isn't off the table if it means short-term gain. This could either be individual, like with Sear's, or systemic, like with the whole of deindustrialization. The corporations are all fighting amongst each other to maximize their profits. They will write up bad deals, they will cheat and betray their country to create more wealth for themselves. The consumer is a means to generate profits, to appease the shareholders. As the dictator Ion Antonescu once said, 'people don't matter, only what they represent.' And for these companies, the people represent profit. So they will hold no loyalty to anything except their own greed. Destroy American manufacturing? It'll save on costs. Weaken our core product? It'll look good on the quarterly earnings.

There is another angle. Perhaps the corporations and businessmen do not fight each other. After all, they do have many interests in common. Perhaps working together would be more profitable. But working together for what? Well, what's the largest obstacle to corporate dominion over the nation? The government already in place. And perhaps, this fight is already over. Don't believe me? Let's look at the facts.

There's many examples of corporations doing whatever they can to gain power. Firstly, let's talk about labor. Organized labor has been a thorn in the side of business, or even an equal opponent, at many times. Especially in the late 1800's and early 1900's in the USA, unions would gain much ground against corporate dominance, giving people things like 'enough money to support their families' and 'a work day less than sixteen hours'. Obviously, these things harm the bottom line. So corporations go after them through extralegal means.

We all know murder is illegal. Or, is it? Coca-Cola and many fruit companies have operations in Central America. There have been many, many recorded instances, with some companies even being found to have done these things in American courts, of death squads. What do I mean by this? I mean that these corporations, in their great wealth, have funded paramilitaries to kidnap, torture, murder, and massacre labor leaders and unionizing workers. Let that really click in your mind, they have paid mercenaries to massacre civilians with chainsaws, because they wanted safer conditions. This really happened. Corporations will do these things freely. But it isn't corporations doing it. Corporations aren't a thing. It's free associations of men. Take their masks off. The individuals who conspired, funded, and ordered these killings, did they ever see the inside of a prison? No.

Want something more explicit? The Ludlow massacre. Coal miners went on strike because they had some demands. These demands were a recognizing of the union as an entity to bargain with, pay for coal mined to be based on every 2,000 pounds and not every 2,200 pounds, an eight-hour work day, payment for work like cutting trees or laying railroad tracks, third-party inspection of company scales, the right to use doctors and stores not owned by the company, and for the company to follow the already existing labor laws. These demands were obviously outrageous. Rockefeller's company hired Baldwin-Felts, known for their aggression. The company brought in armored cars with mounted machine guns, militias with automatic weapons, and snipers to attack not just the strikers, but their families as well. By the end of the battle, dozens of women and children were killed, along with many strikers. Did Rockefeller go to prison for this? Did Baldwin-Felts receive penalty? No, the strike failed. Hundreds were arrested and the strike's leader was convicted of murder. The mercenaries were not.

What about Blair Mountain? More coal miners went on strike. What did the company do? Send in Baldwin-Felts. What happened? Fighting broke out. Bullets started to fly. The army came in again, but this time they backed up the company. The army used explosives and chemical-gas bombs, dropped from airplanes, against the strikers. By the end of it, over a million bullets were fired and over a hundred were dead.

And the battle of Matewan? This time, the law was on the side of the miners. Baldwin-Felts evicted several families of miners, before trying to leave the town. They were intercepted by the police chief and mayor, who presented warrants for their arrests. The detectives then countered by producing a warrant for the police chief's arrest, the mayor pointing it out as fraud. Then fighting broke out, the mayor was shot to death by the detectives. Later, as some men and their wives came to testify about the incident, they were assassinated by more detectives on the stairs of the courthouse. The assassins weren't arrested.

Let these stories be clear, corporations will kill people if it means saving money. And don't think that all this stopped. When the manufacturing went overseas, so did the labor violence. Labor organizers overseas are still murdered to this very day by corporations who know they will never be punished. Even some of the ones in America are still under threat. Remember those Boeing whistleblowers?

And let's talk about another time that corporations used extreme violence to enforce their rule. PBSuccess. Workers in Guatemala democratically elected reformist presidents. What reforms did he enact? Things like a minimum wage, built hospitals, and so on. This made the corporations very nervous. Then, he did something extreme. He took various 65-acre sections of company land that sat unused and uninhabited, seized it and paid the company for the value of the land with government bonds, and gave that land to the peasants who didn't own any land for farming. Obviously, this would not be good. So, the corporations got in touch with the government, calling it communism. So, the CIA comes in and overthrows the government with an attempted coup with naval and air support, and the threat of a full-scale American invasion forces the Guatemalan army to back down. A dictator is installed, who begins to torture and execute the members of the previous presidency. But he's business friendly, so the corporations are happy. This led to forty years of civil war, and a hatred for America in these people. Dole, Chiquita, all of them did this. People are dead because these companies found it to be profitable.

But they would never try it here, right? Wrong. The Business Plot was a scheme cooked up on Wall Street back in the 1930s. Essentially, FDR was too communist, with his banning of child labor and his social security. So what do they do? Organize a plan to trick half a million veterans into marching on Washington DC, storming the White House, and forcing FDR at gunpoint to appoint a dictator who would be much more business friendly. This would all be funded and supplied by Wall Street companies. The plan failed when the military man reached out to to lead the veterans turned out to be loyal to his country, reporting the plot to Congress. The media decried it as a hoax, until Congress found that the plot very well did exist. But don't worry, the people on Wall Street never actually were punished for it. Coincidentally, people like the DuPonts and the Morgans (Of J.P. Morgan) who largely orchestrated the scheme, were of families linked to the Roosevelts by marriage. Also, the man who had propositioned the military man about the plan initially, died five weeks after the committee's report, at 37. And also after the report's findings, which did not call for testimony of those implicated, recommend further action, and omitting much information, the senator responsible went on to lead a very, very successful political career.

And let's talk about that for a second. Seriously, look at a lot of these successful businessmen, these 'wonder stories' of 'self-made men'. Rockefeller's dad was a literal snake oil salesman. Steve Jobs' father was a welathy Syrian. Bill Gates' dad was a Lawyer, and his mother was on the board of directors at multiple banking firms. Elon Musk's father was a real estate developer, emerald salesman, consultant, and many other things. Jeff Bezos' biological parents were poor. But his adoptive father? Rich. Bezos was given a quarter million dollars for a six per-cent stake in Amazon by his parents. These people do not come from destitute backgrounds. Nikola Tesla is proof that having a good idea isn't enough to make you rich. Edison is proof that you need business connections as well.

And what else about these families? You know how I mentioned how the Roosevelts were related to the DuPonts and Morgans? Here's a helpful, explanatory chart.

Reminds me of the old Hapsburg monarchies, marrying into each other. Many of these families married their first cousins. The net isn't exhaustive, and I'm sure this pattern continues with other old-money families like the Rothschilds and such. The Rockefeller family itself is barely explored. But from what we can see, these families do keep to themselves, they keep the power to themselves. Like a feudal aristocracy, these families are interlinked and connected very intimately. So perhaps that would lend credence to the idea that they're working together. But we need more proof.

The proof is self evident. Do corporations give orders to the government? Yes, duh. Back in the 1800s, corporations would directly bankroll politicians. Senators and Representatives paid directly to shill for the companies. But now? That's illegal, it's bribery. Now we have lobbying. Instead, a 'political action committee' funded by billionaires and wealthy corporations will instead be the ones giving them luxurious gifts and financing their political campaigns. Remember, spending money is free speech, and corporations are people whom the Bill of Rights apply to.

And let's not forget who controls the candidates. Teddy Roosevelt was a very popular man. But he wasn't the nominee. He was appointed as vice-president, a largely ceremonial role, by the political establishment that was coincidentally funded by wealthy businessmen. And only when the president died did he actually enact reforms. He was a greatly popular man. He wanted to run for reelection. The party refused. They could have easily secured a victory with a massively popular candidate, but instead chose someone else. So the vote was split. Roosevelt, running under a third party, got over twenty-seven per-cent of the votes. Let this show that he was extremely popular. So why didn't the party approve of him? Because their corporate donors did not approve of him. In other words, the corporations don't need to rig elections when they can just rig candidates. It's called controlled opposition, and it was practiced even with early Oilmen's Unions opposing Rockefeller, led by Rockefeller's close allies.

Even many supposedly grassroots campaigns are entirely manufactured. Manufactured opposition. Just Stop Oil, for example. The group that performs ridiculous stunts like blocking roads, gluing themselves to roads, sabotaging (cooking) oil railroad cars, and so on. They're often ridiculed by corporate media organizations, called out for being stupid. And you know who funds Just Stop Oil? Oil billionaires. It's a psy-op to discredit environmentalist organizations publicly.

What other signs are there of meddling and collaboration between corporate and political interests? Look no further than the many, many societies and organizations. The Club at Rome, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, the Bohemian Grove, and the Bilderberg Meetings, just to name a few. Important, influential businessmen, politicians, artists, and public figures all meet together to organize and coordinate on policy going forward. There isn't really much more explanation needed than this.

But oh yes there is. The Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller, who created it essentially as a Bilderberg Group that included Japan. He was also associated with the Clintons and Carnegies, he was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations. His father donated the land that the United Nations headquarters was founded on. Here's a couple quotes from him: "Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it", and "The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries". Is this a man worth trusting? Because he was one of the wealthiest men alive, from one of the most influential families.

What other types of benefits do corporations get from their control and influence over the government? Well here's a few of the financial ones. Firstly, taxes. Let's look at how tax rates have changed over time.

And more about taxes, the automotive workers on the assembly lines at Ford and General Motors are paying fifteen percent in taxes on their paychecks. What about Ford and General Motors themselves? General Motors paid six per-cent. Ford paid negative nine per-cent. Ford got so many tax credits that they can get money back on taxes. How do they do this? A legion of tax lawyers and accountants. We could do it too, if we had the money to fund that many professionals. And we don't. Another example of the snowblling of wealth

Want another example? Look at 2008. Seven hundred billion dollars of bailout money to banks and investors, who were failing. Banks like Goldman-Sachs, who made over two billion dollars in profit in 2008. And what did they receive? One hundred billion dollars of bailout money. What did they do? Cut checks for five billion as bonuses to the corporate suits on top.

Ever see those corporations who say that raising wages will drive up costs? Know what else drives up costs? Yearly multi-million dollar bonuses to executives.

Wages also haven't really increased much over time, but corporate compensation has. You know how much the average worker's hourly wage has raised since 1965, adjusted for inflation? Ten ccents. Ten cents in nearly eighty years. You know how much the average hourly wage for an executive has risen? Around five thousand dollars. Worker's wages increased by zero-point-five per-cent. Executive's wages have risen? Eleven-hundred per-cent. No wonder companies are needing bailouts. Seems like they need to 'curtail workforce redundancies'.

What is all this trying to say? Corporations work together, their families are interlinked. They will use violent, horrible means to maintain this power, with no morals or institutions more sacred than the dollar. They would kill you if it saved them money. They bankroll and bribe the politicians through shell PACs, they control which candidates are up for election, they host the debates and conventions, they collude at closed-doors meetings. The government was set up to protect the people from foreign invasion, from crime, all physical and violent threats. The government never has had the capacity to deal with threats not only existential and internal in nature, but of a purely economic source. Unless push comes to shove and people can't be bought, the corporations conquer through backroom deals and finances. The government never stood a chance. By the time they realized what was happening, it was far too late. America has been sold for centuries. All we can do is hope. What, will someone run claiming to kick money out of politics? Good luck appearing for interviews, getting the candidacy, getting campaign financing. The best chance is a subverter from the inside who wishes to break the cycle. But what real incentive would an insider have to reform the system, truly? None.

But is that really all true? I mean, let's be honest here. That's a compeletely defeatist angle. No issue, no matter how systemic, is unchangeable. The Catholic rule over Europe fell with the Reformation. Slavery, a system as old as humanity, has been prohibited in the free world. Systems can change, with time, awareness, and dedication.

The government hasn't been entirely bought out yet. I mentioned many labor movements. After the Ludlow massacre, much of the population and government did shift attitudes towards labor. FDR, part of the powerful Roosevelt family, was the one who implemented labor reforms, banning child labor and implementing minimum wage, even implementing social security. Theodore Roosevelt broke up monopolies, which though ineffective, was at least an attempt. Even now, there have been and are lawsuits against firms as giant as Google and Microsoft.

And local, regular-guy politicians do often get elected, not always, but it is a reason to do some campaigning, organizing, and genuine grassroots politics. There are proper procedures where people can get onto the ballot, even if not endorsed by mainstream parties. For example, 1924, Follette ran as a third party, even won a state, getting over sixteen per-cent of the vote. And in 2016, the Libertarian party won over three per-cent of the vote. In the early 1900s, plenty of large cities like Milwaukee have elected socialists. Many people from the Green or Libertarian party often win seats in cities and such, and local electors do still hold much sway over policy in cities.

And also, organizations like the FDA and EPA, while often bought out by large companies, do sometimes perform their duties. A glaring example is the rejection of Thalidomide by the FDA, even after being approved in Europe.

There is still hope.

So then, is the first lens correct? Perhaps not. The second lens isn't correct, but neither is the first. Perhaps there are two unseen entities fighting for control, striving for dominance. Not in open conflict, but through legalism and economics. The federal government, and the corporate hegemony, both united in one purpose and goal, each attempting to control and sway each other.

Isn't that a large accusation, though? That these entities, corporations are all united? How can companies like Wal-Mart and Target be united, when they're obviously competitors. Companies like Wal-Mart aren't old money, centuries old companies. Same with many technology firms. Aren't they in competition? They are. For what? Money. Not just from customers and income, but from investors. Why do they feel that desperate urge to innovate and grow constantly? That tendency mentioned earlier to pursue short-term gains over long-term viability? Because better statements now mean more investment, more reward from Wall Street.

So it's the investment banks that are really the ones competing then? Each vying for control over corporate America? Nope. Let's look at some asset management companies. The institutions that hold the shares of other companies. We'll only be looking at the publicly traded ones, even multi-trillion dollar ones like Fidelity and Vanguard are private and so don't need to disclose their holders. Additionally, all percentages are rough, rounded to the nearest percentage, and most other numbers are rounded as well. As a brief overview, the per-cent held by institutions means how much of the company is owned (and therefore controlled) by institutions, other investment corporations, banks, and so on. Insiders would be people like CEOs who would have leverage and insider information. Let's say fifty-one per-cent of a company's shares are held by an institution, and forty-nine are held by individuals. As all voting systems, even if every person was united, they would not have enough voting power to overrule the institution. Keep that in mind.

Again, many large firms like Fidelity and Vanguard, who themselves manage a respective 14.1 Trillion and 9.3 Trillion in assets. These companies are simply not public.

Now, realize what this means. If a company does not own itself, it is beholden to the interests of its own shareholders. With investment firms, this means that each investment firm is beholden to the interests of each other investment firm. In essence, they all act in unison, as one, large, interwoven company. Not as individual firms in competition.

So what kind of influence do they have? Here's a little list.

Retailers

Social Media

News Agencies

Food and Agriculture

Any company that's public and even reasonably large is bought by institutions.

The stock market, frankly is just owned by institutions. If it exists, they own it. So, what does this mean? The entire financial power of the United States, all of our corporations and manufacturers and banks, they're in control of the investment firms, the body that formed from them all. The Black Swan. They own the stores, they own the news, they own the farms. If it can be bought, they own it.

You know who else they own? Fact Checkers. Those fact-checking people you see on Facebook and Google, where do you think their paychecks come from? Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck, they are funded by billionaires, by Google and Facebook, ironically the same companies that use their fact checking.

They're all part of a group called the Trusted News Initiative. Remember when fact-checkers pushed very hard against 'vaccine disinformation'? Interestingly enough, the head of the TNI was on the board of directors at Pfizer. And now, a lot of researchers and whistleblowers are leaking that much of the Pfizer studies on the vaccine didn't follow up with patients, log side effects, or really do much of the actual scientific process.

Even other 'independent' news sources like Reuters, look into their history. From the beginning, Reuters was funded by the Rothschilds, an extremely wealthy banker family that for a long while was the wealthiest family in the world. And other news outlets, like the Washington Post, are just directly owned by billionaires. A lot of what you read in the news is fearmongering, propaganda, misleading. Objective news outlets are frankly dead. Why do you think there are so many anti-government media pieces ran, but so few anti-corporations-in-media pieces ran?

And besides the news, they have other propaganda outlets. For example, think tanks. Really think about them, what are they? Do they ever put out findings or research against their own agenda? Obviously not. Who funds them? Wealthy billioinaires or corporations. What are they, when you pull off the mask? Corporate propaganda spouts.

As much as it pains me to say this, the government is the only real counterbalance to corporate power. Like the saying goes, the west was so afraid of strong government that now there's no government, only financial power. Ever hear of affluenza? A man in 2013 drove drunk and killed four people. A psychologist argued that he had affluenza, a mental condition from having too much money, that he couldn't comprehend the consquences of his actions. In other words, the man was too rich for laws to register with him, so he shouldn't be held to as strict a standard. Bluntly, the law is only for poor people. And what about tickets, huh? Tickets and citations, really, what are they? A poor man can't afford a four hundred dollar ticket. But a wealthy businessman can. When the punishment is purely financial, the rich are released from the law.

There are three agents. The government, the people, and the corporations. The government and the corporations push their propaganda to vie for the people's support. Without the support of the people, neither can exist. If everyone stopped paying their taxes, what would happen? The government would arrest them? With what police, without money? And if everyone stopped buying from certain corporations? They would go out of business. Naturally, the people are what the two other agents fight over. Only through unity of the people against both, or a delicate balance between the two other agents, can some modicum of peace and sensibility be established. But for now, the government is on the back foot, struggling against the powers of finance through the mess of bureaucracy that had attempted to prevent strong government when it was unnecessary.

This will be very brief. Let me be clear -- we do not live in a democracy. The power should be in the hands of the people. It should be crystal-clear by now that the power lies in the hands of the wealthy elites, who intermarry to keep that power within their own families. Even supposed self-made men like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs come from families of wealthy businessmen, merchants, politicians, and estatesmen.

So what can be done about it? Well, there's always trying to start revolutions, bombing campaigns, assassinations. After all, no matter how much money you have, you're still human. Walking around made of flesh and blood, you still need to eat, you still need to cross the street. A bullet or poison would do the trick, surely. Ted Kaczynski tried it, and it proved that no matter how hard you believe, violence turns the public against your cause. Look at Martin Luther King Jr.. Do you think he would have been successful if he tried using violence? Do you think all his followers would be willing to lay down their lives, or would most scatter? Simply put, violence doesn't enact change. It just shifts around the power dynamics without actual effect. Just look at the French or Russian revolutions. The power structures don't change, only the men inhabiting them.

There are two forms of conquest: martial and economic. Of course, you can try to overthrow a country and try to enforce your rule. But why do that when you can simply own that country? You can indebt the government to you, threaten to collect, sign outrageous leases and legally ratified documents. You can rule them, while tricking them into believing they're free. Not all military conquests are sustainable. Look at Austro-Hungary's occupation of Northern Italy. Look at the overextension of the Roman Empire. But economic conquest? Extremely sustainable. Just look at how well Russia works Kazakhstan, how well China works Russia and much of Africa and South Asia. Look at how well America works Canada or Puerto-Rico. This is also why things like economic sanctions don't work. Tighter integration and more investment leads to more control over that country's internal affairs.

Obviously, we are not countries. But something similar can be done with us. Let's say a corporation's CEO gets shot, a warehouse gets burned down, whatever. They elect a new CEO, they build a new warehouse, they collect insurance. They can only sustain this until their funds dry up. But let's say a boycott is enacted, such as the one on Target. The corporation quickly backpedals, because funds are affected. A company does not have blood, it has capital. Remove the capital, and the company will collapse. A company can only be sustained by investors for so long before the investors see the writing on the wall and pull out. Then? That company gets shorted and becomes the sacrifical lamb for Wall Street, allowing institutions to rake in profits. But what happens when all of their lambs die?

What am I proposing? It is simple. Don't buy from publicly traded companies, or companies of which the board of directors are wealthy individuals. For example, Fidelity is private but still interlinked with other Wall Street firms. But chains like Aldi? Ferrero? Mars? Beretta? Private, family operated. You're still enriching a rich family, yes, but it's more contained in scope.

How do you avoid enriching the rich? Buy local. Local artisans, local brands, local chains, local grocers, local farmers. Local, local, local. You are no longer supporting global corporate chains when you shop local, you are supporting the guy next door. You are supporting local communities that reinvest in other local communities. Why do to McDonald's to spend $10 for a burger, when you can go to a local burger joint and spend $12, and keep that money in the community? Audit brands, and remember which ones are safe.

Of course, there will always be exceptions, things you cannot buy from local brands. Look for other small dealers, maybe online, ones that aren't corporate shells. Assess if you really need the item you want. If you do need it and there's no alternative, go ahead and buy from a chain. Do not do this lightly, but do not feel guilt. If the system you are placed in has truly given you no opportunity, do not hesitate. But do not do this carelessly, or this entire piece has been for naught. Try to buy something made in America, to at least support domestic production rather than overseas exploitation and slave-labor. If you need a speciality item you cannot find otherwise, buy it from a corporate store, but keep your purchase quick and deliberate, do not wander or browse. Remember that the corporation is not your friend, no matter how many people they pay to tell you that. They would kill you if it meant saving a dime. It's just usually more profitable to keep us alive.

Thank you for listening to this piece. Hopefully it's been worth your time and opened your eyes to some odd happenings. Even if you do not believe any of the three angles that I have presented, the reasoning behind them is not something that is able to be doubted, it is not something up for consideration.

Finally, a large thanks to WelcomeToTheMachine, FleshSimulator, WhyFiles, CompanyMan, and Wendigoon for much of the inspiration and research for this piece, all are highly recommended to look into. This work is mostly a synthesis of their work, but some work has been done in both research and connecting links on the chain by myself. Just do not take this all as my own individual research and uncoverings. I could not do this myself.

Suggestions for some non-institutional businesses to shop at. Obviously, any non-chain, family owned business is good. Here are some examples of other more major businesses that are also family-owned and private. Also, buying secondhand from local thrift stores allows you to still get goods that are new to you, often antiques or old ones that can't be found in stores anymore, at a low price, and without supporting corporations.

Grocery

• Aldi
• Most Latin or Ethnic food stores and markets

Home Improvement

• Menard's

Guns

• Springfield Armory
• Beretta
• Mossberg

Gasoline

• Kwik Trip
• Wawa
• Buc-ee's