By Margaret Anna Alice
Through the Looking Glass
June 10, 2024
"Never accept an inferior position to anyone. It is the strongest spirit that wins, not the most expensive sword."
-Miyamoto Musashi
The Courage to Survive
"Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision."
-Winston Churchill
Port Elizabeth, South Africa. December 18, 1994.
"Do you think she's dead?" a man asked, speaking in Afrikaans.
"No one can survive that," said his companion.
Later dubbed the Ripper Rapists, the two climbed into their victim's car, one tossing a denim shirt onto the motionless body.
Once the thrum of the car engine faded into silence, twenty-seven-year-old Alison Botha scratched the names of her assailants in the sand followed by the note, "I love Mom."
She thought those would be her last words. She lay on the ground, listening to her breaths whooshing through the stab wound in her trachea.
Suddenly, she found herself looking down at her body. She remembers being given "a choice whether to give up and be at peace or to carry on and fight to survive," YouTuber Disturban A Case Almost Too Gruesome To Mention No.3 - Alison Botha .
She decided to fight.
"There was so much I still wanted to do, so much that I still wanted to live for," Alison says.
Disemboweled, Alison used the denim shirt to hold her intestines inside her abdomen and stood up.
That's when her head almost fell off.
Her throat had been severed so deeply, she was nearly decapitated. Her vision went black after her head fell backward.
"I pulled my head forward with my free hand, and my vision returned," Alison recalls. "As I struggled forward, my sight faded in and out and I fell many times but managed to get up again until I finally reached the road."
Tiaan Eilerd, a veterinary student on holiday from Johannesburg, hit the brakes when he spotted a woman collapsed in the road.
Drawing on his vet training, Tiaan nudged Alison's thyroid back into her throat before calling for an ambulance.
The doctors couldn't believe she was still alive. They didn't expect her to last.
Alison not only survived, but she identified her attackers from her hospital bed, leading to their rapid apprehension. They would later plead guilty to eight charges in 1995, resulting in life sentences-although they were released on parole in 2023.
In Alison, the 2017 documentary about her experience, she says:
"I was abducted at knifepoint, taken to the bushes in the outskirts of the city, raped by two men, strangled, stabbed in my stomach in excess of thirty-six times, disemboweled, and had my throat cut seventeen times.
"It was horrific and scary and wrong.
"And I survived. And I think that's where the journey started.
"We actually are capable of a lot more than we allow ourselves to think."
Alison | Trailer | Available Now
Alison, whose story was also told in the 2016 book I Have Life, now works as a motivational speaker, inspiring others to overcome trauma, depression, and other challenges.
"Life can sometimes make us feel like the victim,"she says."Problems and hardships and traumas are dished out to all of us and sometimes they can be divided very unfairly."
Although she was victimized, Alison is far from a victim-she is a survivor.
"I realized my life was too valuable to let go of, and that gave me the courage to survive,"she remembers.
The wisdom she gleaned from her suffering is evocative of the Stoic focus on managing our response to adversity rather than dwelling on the adversity itself. She says,"We may not always control the circumstances that we find ourselves in, but we can always control what we do within them."
She later gave birth to two boys, widely considered miraculous given how ravaged her abdomen had been.
When her oldest was five, he asked about the scar on Alison's neck."Mommy was hurt, and sometimes when you get hurt, you get a scar afterwards,"she told him.
Scars remind us of our wounds, but they also serve as enduring emblems of our resilience. They teach us we can weather circumstances that may feel unbearable, inescapable, irreparable, or hopeless in the moment-as long as we don't allow despair to win.
"If I had not in 1927 committed 'egocide,' I would probably have yielded long ago to convention and therewith suicide of my 'only-for-all-others' initiative."
-R. Buckminster Fuller, Guinea Pig B
In 1927, thirty-two-year-old R. Buckminster Fuller perched on a cliff overlooking Lake Michigan. Destitute and unemployed, he decided his life insurance would be worth more to his wife and daughter than his life.
Just as he was preparing to jump, Bucky suddenly felt himself floating, enveloped in light. He heard a voice say:
"From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others."
Instead of choosing the cowardly escape from responsibility and vulnerability, Bucky determined to undertake"an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."
In Guinea Pig B, he shares the vow he made that was to guide the rest of his life:
"If I take oath never again to work for my own advantaging and to work only for all others for whom my experience-gained knowledge may be of benefit, I may be justified in not throwing myself away. This will, of course, mean that I will not be able to escape the pain and mortification of being an absolute failure in playing the game of life as it has been taught to me."
Having faced the prospect of annihilation, Bucky embraced his mission as if he had nothing left to lose, and in fearlessly giving life his all, Universe gave back everything he needed just at the moment it was needed.
He writes in Guinea Pig B:
"So we-my wife and family-have for 56 years realized a series of miracles that occur just when I need something, but not until the absolutely last second."
The BUCKMINSTER FULLER IN 3 MINUTES would go on to live another fifty-six years, dying in 1983 eleven days before his eighty-eighth birthday. He had authored twenty-eight books, filed twenty-eight patents, garnered forty-seven honorary degrees, earned a Presidential Medal of Freedom, birthed the concept of design science, and revolutionized architecture.
BUCKMINSTER FULLER IN 3 MINUTES
Bucky recognized that what he calls the"revenooers"in Critical Path stand between humanity and bountiful energy resources, projecting artificial scarcity and thwarting individual autonomy to guard their profits and power:
"A vast overabundance of this Earthian cosmic energy income is now technically impoundable and distributable to humanity by presently proven technology. We are not allowed to enjoy this primarily because taxhungry government bureaucracies and moneydrunk big business can't figure a way of putting meters between these cosmic energy sources and the Earthian passengers, so nothing is done about it."
He even exposed the fallacious Malthusian-Darwinian hybrid model that has led the cruelites to impoverish, subjugate, and depopulate the masses for their own self-preservation:
"The money-makers assume that there is nowhere nearly enough life support for all. Malthus said the majority of humans are designed to suffer and die far short of their potential life-span. Darwin's 'survival only of the fittest' dictum has combined with that of Malthus to persuade the 'haves' to be intelligently selfish and to legally fortify their 'haveness' position against the 'have-nots.'
"With legal planning of their lawyer-advised banking leaders, the 'haves' have now succeeded in cornering all the world's monetary gold as well as the preponderance of the world's petroleum sources-along with their refineries and world-around petro-delivery systems together also with acquisitions of all the atomic power-generating plants, originally paid for by the U.S. taxpayers-and thereafter in severing the monetary system from the wealth system while marking up the negotiable equity value of gold and petroleum tenfold. They also have contrived their own game of international monetary banking of international balances of trade and credit accounting."
Bucky understood that literacy-and by extension, direct access to information via the Internet today-empowers individuals to liberate themselves from the authorities who presume to dictate their thoughts:
"When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans themselves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do."
Bucky's wisdom speaks to this moment in history, charting the critical path toward our exit from tyranny:
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
Are You Ready to Fight?
"Better to fight for something than live for nothing."
—General George S. Patton
Even among the awakened, there are defeatists who have not yet escaped their lifelong programming in the illusion of their powerlessness.
I don't understand the psychology of someone who realizes we are facing the greatest threat to human existence and freedom in history but doesn't bother fighting it. These are people who are so certain of defeat, they simply flop down on the train tracks, waiting for the Amtrak to flatten them. They could be dismantling the tracks, building up obstacles, throwing wrenches into the gears—anything to try and stop it. But no, they go around moping that it's too late and blame others for not rising up sooner.
The defeatists have permitted the oppressors to define the rules of the game, and they believe there's nothing we can do to stop them from achieving their dystopian objectives.
Instead of aiming their poison darts at our mutual enemies, they target those of us fighting in whatever ways we can, nipping at our ankles, vacuuming up our time, and Len - Steal My Sunshine with their corrosive contempt, toxic tear-downing, and nihilistic negativity.
Like the propagandists, they tell us it's too late. They say we're doing it wrong, peddling hopium, or wasting our time.
By continually repeating these demoralizing messages, they have wired their brains with a negative story, and they want to rewire our brains to believe it, too.
Whether sincere or intentionally performing cognitive infiltration, these killjoys serve the same purpose: deflating our spirits in an attempt to drag us down to their level of despondent ineffectuality.
In their 2008 paper Conspiracy Theories published in the University of Chicago's Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers, Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule propose deploying cognitive infiltration tactics in online communities like ours:
"We suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such theories. They do so by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups..."Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."
Setting that contingency aside, I'll assume the defeatists I've interacted with are genuine and do share our desire to dismantle tyranny and save lives. They've just long ago given up hope of doing so and want us to join them. Defeatism loves company, after all.
To the defeatists who are convinced the cabal has won, there's no point in resisting, and we might as well give up and accept our impending enslavement, I say, Remember Alison. Remember Bucky.
Like them, you have a choice.
You can either continue serving the philanthropaths, tyrants, and kapos by conceding defeat mid-battle, or you can"carry on and fight to survive"like Alison.
As long as you have breath, you can fight.
The antidote to apathy is action.
Since you already believe there's nothing left to lose, why not stock up on slingshots and deal some fun-loving damage during the twilight of freedom?
Like the terminally ill patients Bill's idea for a movie putting in the movies for epic stunt scenes, you could culture-jam, make resistance art, or tie Goliath's shoes together.
It's time to House Of Pain - Put on Your Shit Kickers .
Your depression can become a catalyst for growth.
Thanks to the magic of neuroplasticity, you can rewire your brain with a new story.
You can transform your learned helplessness into learned hopefulness.
Like No One Thought This Cat Would Walk Again | The Dodo the vet thought would never walk, you can surprise your self-sabotaging ego by regaining attitudinal mobility.
In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl reminds us we can find meaning in even the bleakest of moments:
"We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves."
Bucky, too, has some never-forget advice:
"Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person."
Apocaloptimism for the Win
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
—Robert Fulghum
Just as the false dichotomists try to make use believe we only ever have two choices—Coke or Pepsi, Democrat or Republican, Ukraine or Russia, Israel or Palestine—the mind manipulators have tricked people into thinking the only alternative to defeatism is optimism.
Optimism is as much a recipe for failure as defeatism is.
When Jim Collins interviewed Admiral James Stockdale for Good to Great about his experience as a Vietnam War POW—including seven-and-a-half years of torture and four years of solitary confinement—he asked,"Who didn't make it out?"
Stockdale said,"That's easy. The optimists."
"Collins was confused. To Collins, Stockdale sounded like an optimist. Stockdale explained the optimists were the ones who set a timeline for their release. They expected to be released, for example, by Christmas. Christmas would come and go without deliverance, and 'they died of a broken heart.'"From Stockdale's experience, Collins drew a universal lesson he called the Stockdale Paradox: 'You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.'"
Nourished by Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus, Stockdale faced the stark reality of his circumstances with wide-open eyes while unwaveringly believing he would ultimately triumph. He told Collins:
"I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."
And that's exactly what he did.
Here's the magic formula:
Confront the Brutal Facts + Stockdale Paradox = Apocaloptimism
Brownstein also references Viktor Frankl's essay "The Case for a Tragic Optimism" in which Frankl defines tragic optimism as:
"an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action."
Fellow Apocaloptimist Lauren Geertsen has written a book on how to Enjoy the Apocalypse if you want pragmatic tips on how to navigate civilizational collapse with equanimity and even joy.
Elizabeth Nickson, who consistently delivers galvanizing Apocaloptimistic missives, recently penned an epic list of victories achieved in just a single week:
Welcome to Absurdistan
Our Revulsion Has Created A New Populist Majority
If what we are undergoing is a 100+ year plot to subdue and transform humans into tightly-controlled socialist utopians run by corporations harvesting us for cash and data, welp, that plan is failing. The psychological warfare is failing. The culture cracking, carefully devised, is failing. The forcing of perverse sexual values is failing, the scam that is public education is...
Read more
16 days ago · 589 likes · 247 comments · elizabeth nickson
Elizabeth, like me, is a proud populist who sees through the cruelites' deception that We the People are a basket of unacceptable deplorables, and individuals around the world are Winston Marshall argues that populism is not a threat democracy, but rather is democracy itself 6/6 to our beautiful karass, too.
In his 2011 TEDx talk How to Topple a Dictator, Srdja Popovic calls this "people power."
Starting with analytic skills, Popovic outlines "a set of rules and skills which can be learned and taught in order to perform successful nonviolent struggle."
He says our skills are "more important than the conditions—namely, the skills of unity, planning, and maintaining nonviolent discipline."
Popovic calls nonviolent discipline "the game-changer" because:
"If you maintain nonviolent discipline, you'll exclusively win. You have 100,000 people in a nonviolent march, one idiot or agent-provocateur throwing a stone. Guess what takes all the cameras. That one guy. One single act of violence can literally destroy your movement."
To vanquish tyranny, he says we should "start small" and "pick the battles you can win." He recommends "the small tactics of dispersion."
He also describes what he calls a "very important dynamic":
"This is the dynamic between fear and apathy on the one side, and enthusiasm and humor on another side. So, it works like in a video game. You have the fear high, you have status quo. You have the enthusiasm higher, you see the fear is starting to melt."
In other words, Apocaloptimism is the winning dynamic—and humor, mockery, memes, satire, and humiliation are the most effective nonviolent weapons at our disposal for both needling the perpetrators and damaging their reputations and credibility.
Popovic explains:
"Humor is such a powerful game-changer.... There is also one big thing about humor, it really hurts. Because these guys really are taking themselves too seriously. When you start to mock them, it hurts."
This is the approach I took in my Letter to Klaus Schwab and Letter to Justin Trudeau.
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19 octobre 2022
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7 février 2022
Recently released political prisoner Brandon Fellows masterfully demonstrated this tactic during Dr. Mengelfauci's June 3 congressional testimony, pulling hilarious faces that clearly irked his target, who later asked, "What's somebody like that doing at a hearing about COVID?"
In The Psychology of Revolution, Gustave Le Bon explains why mockery is so effective at disintegrating authoritarianism:
"The importance of the event [the storming of the Bastille] lay simply in the psychological fact that for the first time the people received an obvious proof of the weakness of an authority which had lately been formidable."When the principle of authority is injured in the public mind it dissolves very rapidly. What might not one demand of a king who could not defend his principal fortress against popular attacks? The master regarded as all-powerful had ceased to be so.
"The taking of the Bastille was the beginning of one of those phenomena of mental contagion which abound in the history of the Revolution. The foreign mercenary troops, although they could scarcely be interested in the movement, began to show symptoms of mutiny."
What Does Winning Mean?
"Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."
—General George S. Patton
From the moment we depart the warmth of the womb, we are inundated with messages about what it means to be a Little Miss Sunshine Opening versus a loser.
The television tells us this product will make us successful, desirable, happy, or loved. Another will wipe away our sadness, loneliness, awkwardness, or boredom.
The indoctrination system teaches us to chase grades, approval, popularity, and virtue-signaling points. We learn to obey authorities, trust the rubber-stamped experts, believe in collective myths, and go along to get along.
The corporations and organizations we are The Godfathers - Birth, School, Work, Death into after graduation cement these lessons, threatening loss of income and security if we fail to comply, recite the ideological catechisms, and sublimate our individuality to the collective.
Dopamine-firing TikTok Is Worse Than You Thought condition us to inhale celebrity gossip, political entertainment, and circus bread in eight-second intervals, diminishing our ability to read, think critically, assess information, and ask questions.
But we can shatter the telescreen. We can escape the Matrix. We can hop off that escalator ride to Totalitaria.
We can start by no longer accepting our opponents' definition of winning.
Winning doesn't mean seizing the reigns of power and replacing the cruelites with our own leaders. Someone called Robespierre tried that once, and it didn't exactly work out.
It doesn't mean repairing a few rotting beams while keeping the termite-infested system in place.
It doesn't even mean a clear-cut, speedy victory in which the perpetrators are tried and executed for crimes against humanity, as appealing as that sounds.
Winning means we stop playing their game.
Winning means making our own rules.
Winning means saying "NO!" Rage Against The Machine - Killing In the Name (Official HD Video) .
Winning means forging a better way that, like Bucky says, renders the old model obsolete.
Winning means â« Super Freak â« - Little Miss Sunshine (2006) on the stage together and no longer caring about their poxy beauty contest.
Winning means not letting them break us.
Winning means loving despite all their efforts to make us hate.
Winning means living not by lies.
Most importantly, winning means courageously defending our integrity, values, minds, and hearts against those brandishing trillions of dollars, oceans of propaganda, a global influence network, and tyrannical measures to coerce us into betraying our selves and humanity.
By my definitions of winning and losing, we've already won, and they've already lost.
According to game theory, all we have to do is not lose.
That means not backing down in the face of mounting pressures. That means DO NOT COMPLY with digital ID, central bank digital currency, mandates, biosurveillance, or any other tyrannical edict that spells irreversible enslavement or deadly injections.
As long as we hold the line, our numbers will continue swelling. The more brazen the totalitarians become, the more visible the brick wall at the back of the theater becomes to the rest of the populace.
We have the strategic advantage when it comes to numbers, truth, and love. The laws of physics favor us because the Great Resetters are trying to fight gravity, inertia, human nature, and reality.
Memes by Themes #11: Resistance
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1 mai
The cruelites comprise a minuscule fraction of the population.
They've proven themselves liars, fraudsters, manipulators, and murderers, and trust in their propagandists is at an all-time low. Once trust is damaged, it's nearly impossible to restore it, especially when the perpetrators display zero remorse.
They must enact GINORMOUS infrastructure changes at a global level to accomplish their goals. Remember the Y2K panic over having to add two numbers to the year in software applications around the world? Imagine that times several billion.
If we practice nonviolent resistance and don't allow them to bait us so they can frame us as radical extremists, they will either be forced to resort to flagrant lies that will later be exposed as such à la January 6, or they will have to drop the democracy act and go to full-blown kinetic warfare against the citizens, which will only win more hearts and minds over to our side.
Such a move would cause catastrophic chaos, interrupting their mind control transmissions via standard communication channels. In America especially, where the Second Amendment has enshrined our right to defend ourselves against this very sort of tyranny, colluders would realize it's not worth risking their lives defending tyrannizers against their fellow citizens, and members of the military, police, and other frontline forces would likely join our ranks.
It's time to flip the board.
This Derrick Jensen - Endgame (complete lecture in one file) is ours to win.
All it takes is becoming ungovernable and firmly, resolutely, and persistently saying NO.
© Margaret Anna Alice, LLC