Winter Patriot Community Blog

Part 5b On Becoming a Formidable Foe (cont) (Previous part here)

The following is written in a rather didactic manner. An inevitable result, I think, of trying to pack a lot into a short essay and also trying to cater for a wide spectrum of experience and understanding amongst those that might read it. So, much of it will be redundant to many. There are a lot of opinions in these essays for which I don't give references. They come from my own experiences, some of which have been extreme. So take it as you will.

In the last Part (5a), I talked about beginning to oppose the conditioning in your life which has literally restricted you and your potential as a human being. The conditioning is all pervasive and like fish who cannot perceive the water they swim in because they have no experience of the water never being there, we cannot understand a life without this conditioning. We may imperfectly imagine it but that's all it will be unless we start making it a reality. We need faith to do this. Faith is believing in what you know to be true or can be true when it doesn't feel like it or you haven't experienced it yet, (these things unseen). And there will be times when it will feel impossible. But as many survivors of abuse, torture and addiction can tell you, it can be done. Programming can be overcome and meaningful and profound change can be brought about. You can change who you are. This is what free will is about; to allow you to become who you want to be, a free woman or man or alternatively a mental and financial slave. This is why the psychopaths spend so much time and effort undermining your sense of free will and personal authority.

To dominate you, they need to dominate your mind because they physically cannot guard and coerce you 24/7. They can only dominate your mind if you co-operate in doing that. Don't co-operate! Don't accept it!

To become a free person and to inspire others to do the same, you need character and nothing builds character like living in and pursuing the truth. And nothing destroys it so effectively as lying and acquiescing to lies. You make yourself so vulnerable psychologically to being manipulated by others when you engage in deceit. You can only blackmail someone who has been deceitful one way or another. That person, then, no longer has control over their own life. Somebody else has that control. This is the fate of so many of our politicians. They have done deals in the dark to gain power but they are no longer their own master. So what is the point? You can't do deals with the Devil and expect to win. So if you are going to run up against “the system”, you are going to need character to resist the fear and to guard against being blackmailed and manipulated one way or another. You will need a solid psychological, even spiritual, foundation and that is provided by pursuing truth in a committed manner.

We need to reduce the fear in our daily lives and increase (or take back) control before we can become part of that formidable foe of the system. This means shrinking back our lives until they are under our control and then after that advancing out into the community and engaging the system.

I am going to harp on the TeeVee again! I urge you again to remove it from your life. It is a major source of fear and helplessess. It also reinforces past deep conditioning. Research psychologists have found that survivors of torture and brainwashing still think their thoughts and concepts are their own even after they have come to accept they have been intensively brainwashed. I could talk on the reasons but the important point for us is that if you have been brainwashed by the TV, you won't realise it. But if you can get an adequate break from it, you will see it. Like a fish that spends enough time out of the water to appreciate the difference, it can now understand what the water feels like when it returns to it. Personally, I find it deeply offensive to be constantly lied to and manipulated. That's Tee Vee. And that's enough from me on TeeVee!

Shrinking your life down means seeing less people. That being the case, it makes sense to leave the shitty ones out; the contentious ones, the draining ones even if they are family. Actually, especially if they are family because they likely have a major negative influence on you because they have been around probably since childhood when the deepest conditioning went in. Don't argue with them, just be hard to reach.

If you are on a lot of committees, take a sabbatical from them. Later on after you have more control over your life you can choose which ones to pick up again. Get your finances under control. Debt is a form of slavery. Reduce your debt in any way you can. If the monetary system collapses, the less debt you have the better off you will be. Thanks to the US government's “Bail-Out”, there are now a lot of cashed up predators out there looking for (and creating) bargains, cheap assets. They intend to create a lot of hardship so as to profit from it. You don't want to have liens and mortgages hanging over you if you can help it. The ownership of your particular lending institution may pass into the hands of some real vultures looking for a short term profit which usually means cashing up the assets and that may have implications for your mortgage (if you have one, of course). At least do everything you can to minimise your debt and exposure. No sense in making it easy for them. Perhaps you could imagine you will lose your job in a month's time and start doing things from that perspective.

Buy yourself a copy of “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin. It has a very practical and complete program to follow to get control over your finances and the philosophy is in complete accord with where we want to go with all this. (Well, at least, where I want to go with this!). To become active in the community to bring about change, you will need time and energy which will likely reduce your work time and income and so you will have to reduce your need for money. Joe Dominguez retired as a less than highly paid analyst on Wall Street at the age of thirty one. He devoted the remaining thirty years of his life to working for free for community groups and charities. The book tells you how you can do the same.

Look for other ways to shrink or simplify your life because the easier it is to maintain, the more time and mental space you will have. Most importantly, you will get to feel what it is like being in charge of your own life instead of being at someone else's beck and call, be it your dominating mother, your bank manager, your boss or the local loan-shark (not in any particular order, you understand!). You will get to feel what it is like to have time to yourself. Be mindful of who and what you tolerate in your home. Aim to turn it into a sanctuary. We are designed to have stress in our lives. We need it to to keep us sharp. But we are not designed for continual stress. Unremitting stress leads to heart attacks and their psychological equivalents, burn-outs and breakdowns. This society tries to keep you so busy and puts you on 'hurry-up' so that you don't have time to think. Without peace and time to think in your life you can't see what is happening to you. Make that time; get that peace. . . . . and plan your next move. Following are some suggestions.

After shrinking down to get control and a better perspective, it's now time to expand out. Get to know your neighbours. Invite them for dinner. Listen to them and find out their concerns. Talk politics; talk about the future and the future of your children. Look for ways to help each other. Look for ways to trade in a non-monetary way. Build community groups such as food co-ops to grow vegies and buy in bulk. Not only will this be enjoyable, it will save you money and will reinforce the benefits of co-operation over competition and community over isolation.

I have a quote for you from “Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn and a question to follow it – (I borrowed it from the front page of this website)

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

The question is, “Would these people have been so easy to pick off if they had been living in an interdependent, supportive way with their neighbours?” There's a lesson here for us today.

Start to improve you neighbourhood with community projects. Lobby the Municipal authorities or Councils for changes. Pick projects or issues to start with that you can easily win because not only will you be standing up against the Council and perhaps (probably) some vested interests, you will be standing up against your's and your friends' conditioned learned helplessness. You want to start out kicking a couple of goals to learn in an experiential way that you can win.

Liaise with other community groups to find common concerns. Nominate and support you own candidates for upcoming municipal elections. (They must have no political party affiliations or be prepared to sever them before accepting the nomination). Get behind this candidate with everything you and your fellow community members have. Repeat this process until you have taken control of the Local Council (or whatever you call it in your area). You are now in a position to root out corruption and the inevitable and equally damaging incompetence that goes with it. The resultant prosperity and energy will snowball.

When State elections are imminent, propose to the community groups and local councilors that one of the councilors be nominated to run for the State Government; that you all work for his or her election on the proviso that they vote in the legislature according to the majority vote of the council. In other word, the State member becomes the agent of the council which is, in turn, the agent of the community groups. Again, no political party affiliations are permitted (you don't want any chance of split loyalty) and the electee agrees to only one term of office before it is rotated to another councillor. You want to minimise the possibilities for corruption, and besides, dealing with scumbags becomes debilitating!

You can expect someone elected in this nature to be frozen out in terms of influence for a time by the State Government which may even attempt to penalise your municipality (much like penalising the Gazans for electing Hamas but in a much more minor way , hopefully!), but hang in there. Eventually they will have to deal with your representative and by the time they do you will have a lot of credibility. Groups from other municipalities, I would expect, will approach you once you are seen to be successful and prospering. The good people, the ordinary citizens (like you and me) greatly outnumber the corrupt and the psychopaths. I think people are just waiting for a mechanism or method to turn dreams into reality.

Political parties have shanghaied democracy. You elect a representative who then doesn't listen to you and the reason why is simple. He owes his political future to the party because without the party endorsement he is dead (politically). This happens in both parties, of course, and because the vast majority of incumbents are re-elected, why should he pay any attention at all to the voters' wishes? There is a way to get their attention, though. At the next Federal election, see if you can't organise your area to vote against the incumbent which ever party he may belong to. The two parties are just two faces of the same coin which is readily apparent to all, now, anyway. So what's it matter to anyone which party “represents” you? Not much.

You can't change the parties but you most certainly can change the faces of the representatives. A majority of incumbents hold their seats with only a few percent or less of the vote. You can swing this and remove the incumbent; you know, that snake that voted for the Patriot Act; that snake that voted for the Bail-Out. Go join the challenger's campaign whether that be Republican or Democrat (or whatever Tweedledum and Tweedledee are called in your country). Take your friends with you and tell them, “We're from the community and we're here to help you!” If they wont let you into their camp, campaign for them anyway! Make a massive impact on the snakes that have voted against your interests; that have sold you and the next generation down the river of debt. If the PTB want to make a fuss about this strategy, that's all to the good because the publicity will focus attention on the glaring fact that both parties are the enemy and not this one or that one and the idea of voting out the incumbent whoever he may be will spread. The aim of the strategy is not to get someone elected but to get someone UNELECTED. If this strategy is repeated and spread widely, then either you will get some decent representation or you will grind the system to a halt. Either way you will go a long way towards bringing the cosy two-party system down and making them paranoid about their volunteers! Sound like a plan?

Back to the local community level, start a LETS scheme. LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading Systems. If you are not familiar with what they are, you can read about them here. The ideas of LETS schemes are great and have great potential. Many, though, make the mistake of trading in a currency unit other than dollars (or whatever the national currency in their particular country is). It is much much better to have what is known as “equivalence”. The dollars of the LETS scheme equals exactly the dollar of the national currency. They are for all intents and purposes the same. It's no more that a system of IOUs then. If you use dollars and can settle up in dollars should someone wish to leave the scheme, then you will be acting exactly like a bank, creating money (and out of the same thin air that they use!), only the community will gain the benefit and there is not much the government can do about it. After all, all you are doing is extending credit to each other to be settled up at some future date. The process is no different from the corner store having customer accounts except that in the LETS scheme you will exchange that debt for goods from someone else. If the government wants to say you are acting like a bank then they have to admit what banking really is. If you are guilty of fraud, counterfeiting or acting illegally, then so are the banks.

Start out by issuing everyone with a book of blank IOU's. In other words, a cheque book. Each LETS member has an overdraft limit which can be increased over time as they demonstrate an ability to trade and thereby discharge their debts. Make this trading subject to tax. Don't try and avoid it. It's the second common mistake with many LETS schemes. Keep it legal and open. Mind you, it would be wise to keep all records and computer programs duplicated two or three times at different locations in case of a raid and seizure. You want to keep it going.

A LETS scheme could be really kicked into high gear should you and your community take charge of the local council. The council can then run it and can also guarantee the credit balances because it has a guaranteed income in the form of rates. It can accept payments through the LETS scheme for rates and in doing so giving the LETS units (dollars on credit) guaranteed value. It can avail itself of some cost free financing by paying for some services through its own LETS account. Municipal workers could be paid partly through their LETS accounts. LETS money stays in the community and so keeps going round and round rather than being flushed out every time it is spent with a corporation.

The difference between prosperity and deprivation in a community is governed by the amount of currency in circulation to pay for the goods and services being produced in the community. It is no more complicated than that. A well run LETS scheme will effectively increase that amount of currency and consequently lead to increased prosperity and well being in the community. During the Great Depression in the Thirties, the currency level (Money Supply) was deliberately reduced to one third of its 1929 level. That's what caused the deprivation. The bankers are in the process of doing it again. A LETS scheme will work directly against the banks

One of the major benefits to the psychopaths that run our societies from this economic shrinking going on is that it creates mass unemployment amongst our youth. They are then much more susceptible to being recruited into the armed services and being fed headfirst into the war machine. If you want to stop this war machine then one very effective strategy is to choke off the supply of recruits. Or if you simply don't want your children being sucked into this machine, then you are going to have to create alternative employment for them. With your now vibrant community groups, you can look to starting businesses that will employ these young people in activities that will be beneficial to all. Perhaps you could provide scholarships to students to train in skills needed in your community. A LETS scheme can help in all this, too. You could also target workers currently employed in war industries in your area.

You may think that the government will impose a draft if it can't get the soldiers it wants through economic conscription. But I doubt it very much. That system broke down disastrously in the Vietnam war era and would do so again for the same reason. The conscripts did not decide of their own free will to go to war and they were acutely aware of that. An economic conscript will more readily believe he chose freely (even though that's not the case) and so will much more likely do what he is told. Big difference.

One final suggestion is that if you are going to engage in protests or demonstrations, wear your sunglasses and perhaps a hat and take your video camera with you. Encourage others to do the same. Film the cops and anybody you suspect of being an agent provocateur. In fact, get in the habit of carrying your camera with you in the car wherever you go. I personally think demos are far less productive that other strategies. They sometimes produce injuries and often waste time subsequently with court appearances and perhaps even jail. I think it is much better spending your finite amount of time and energy in throwing the bastards out or simply going around them rather than complaining to them about their own behaviour. All appealing to Caesar about Caesar does is tell both Caesar and you that you think he has the power and you don't. You've got the power. Use it!

It has taken the psychopaths generations to maneuver us into this sorry state so it will take time, years, to turn it all around. But the sooner it starts, the sooner it will happen and maybe the easier it will be. In the meantime, you will be improving your lot and the lot of others, regardless.