Life During Wartime
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” And here we are.
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Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA? — David Byrne
Dear Friend and Reader:
Last night, one of my clients in The Awakening series of live readings said, “I don’t trust anything anymore.”
That about sums up the total effect of the environment we are living in. Beyond the horrifying impact of specific events — the shootings, the holy wars, the nuclear threats, the sex scandals, the fires, the floods, and the frequent attacks on civic life — the effect of the total environment is to destroy trust.
By trust, I mean trust in existence, in yourself, in one another, in humanity, and in various authorities to hold society together, handle emergencies and protect people. This no longer seems to be the role of these people or entities in any form.
It’s often passed off as lack of judgment or preparation; as bad decisions or unforeseen circumstances. Critics of the response are insultingly called “Monday morning quarterbacks.”
I’ve been covering deadly corporate and government antics since I was 19-years-old. There is always foreknowledge; there is always warning; there are always studies and predictions and admissions saying exactly what will develop. There are often good plans for how to handle difficult situations. And they are usually ignored.
Very little “just happens” except maybe car accidents and individual medical emergencies — and even those have backstories.
Nearly everything that occurs in society can be avoided by the highly-paid people who are supposed to have expertise in preventing those very things — if they wanted to. I have read that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repeatedly warned the New Orleans Police that Bourbon St. could be the target of a vehicle attack.
So what did the city do? They “blocked” the top of the street with one police cruiser on New Year’s Eve, which the attacker drove his truck around, killing 14 people and injuring many others.
You could say, “That’s government work for you!” But that’s no excuse — unless you accept it as one (and don’t mind paying half your income in taxes and fees). And if you do not accept this situation, you would likely be very angry, and anger is a quick route to burnout. It’s easier to numb out and hope nothing like this happens to you, or near you.
Planned, Executed or Instigated
In our time, it seems that nearly everything that happens is planned, executed or instigated. And soon after something occurs, the financial angle manifests. There will now be a fire-sale land grab for some of the most valuable property in North America.
How did this happen? It would appear that the LA Fire Department stood down rather than increasing vigilance with 100 mph winds expected and a long history of downed power lines starting fires.
According to local news reports, fire officials deployed just five fire trucks and held back 40 others when they knew the entire region could burn.
Here in upstate New York, the Kingston Fire Department sends five trucks to the report of an ordinary gas leak. By my estimate, at least 40 trucks were sent to a recent kitchen fire at the Mohonk Mountain House. Meanwhile, emergency managers moved volunteer firefighters in from all over the region to stand by and cover the fire houses vacated by teams responding to the fire. This is basic procedure.
The LA Times on Wednesday published a scathing account of fire officials violating established procedure and squirming around with their accounts of what happened. “The plan you’re using now for the fire you should have used before the fire,” former LAFD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford told the newspaper. “It’s a known staffing tactic — a deployment model.”
Taking action before and after a fire starts are two very different things.
Prior Knowledge as Intent
Fire officials knew what was coming. They knew the conditions on the ground — the abundance of dry vegetation from the prior year, the extreme drought, and the condition of the power grid. I am surprised any of them could get to sleep at night.
“There is high confidence in a life-threatening and destructive windstorm this afternoon through Wednesday morning,” LAFD officials wrote in an internal memo detailing staffing assignments for Jan. 7, echoing the weather service, according to Los Angeles Times.
The mental state of “knew or should have known” is “constructive knowledge,” and the legal standard of intent. It’s also called duty to care. It’s about a responsibility to be informed and take action based on readily available information. But we are in a far worse situation than that with nearly everything that happens. It seems like most events involve some form of premeditation — which is a step beyond mere intent.
But I’m wondering this: The U.S. military budget is about $820 billion. There are two million active and reserve troops. Why isn’t the military being deployed to stop this fire? There are a lot of sailors in nearby San Diego doing God knows what.
Instead, the world watches helplessly on every channel — just like we did for the 2010 BP oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico. Night after night, we watched what was claimed to be a live video feed of crude oil poisoning ocean water. Nobody could do anything except dump dispersing chemicals into the sea, which you now eat every time you bite into a shrimp. Finally — three months later — BP stopped it.
The War on the People
While most people see these horror events as natural disasters, unpredictable situations or the result of a failure to connect the dots, I see them as a war on the people.
If you look closely at 9/11 for an hour (now that the work has been done), the whole narrative falls apart. The “airplanes brought down the towers” version of events is physically and logistically impossible — and the results both at home and abroad were devastating. Someone did that and we don’t know who.
After I covered 10 or 15 mass shootings (in agonizing detail, for days or weeks on end), I started to consider them part of the same ongoing assault. At some point I figured out that they could potentially be centrally coordinated attacks, separated in time by a few months and therefore more difficult to connect as such.
Then you send your kids to school where there are active shooter drills — which are every bit as insane as the duck and cover drills of the 1950s and 1960s.
At best, the school shootings were events that were allowed to happen based on various government policies, the nonexistent right to semi-automatic weapons, lobbying efforts, ignored warnings, and grossly irresponsible parenting, all connected by a diversity of circumstances (such as SSRI medications). Many had fact patterns that just did not add up, including the sacrosanct Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of 2012. That one had some extremely creepy distinctions.
Cruelty Directed Toward Civilians
The war involves any form of the government turning its cruelty on the civilian population, which includes all of the police killings of civilians we hear about so often. It involves any form of not helping when something goes wrong.
The entire “covid” operation was an act of war, whether you think there was a virus called “SARS-CoV-2” or not. It was both economic warfare and medical warfare — involving the largest redistribution of wealth in history. Nearly all of that wealth came from us and went in the direction of the pharmaceutical and big tech giants, from Zoom to Amazon to the rest of them.
For two years, we were told 100 times a day we might kill grandma and kill one another merely by breathing. This tortured children and shredded many relationships within families and among friends, which translates to the shredding of trust — in anything and everything, especially our bodies.
And then every time one of these events is reported, my first task is to determine as best I can whether it’s real. This is evocative of an extreme trust problem. Thankfully I have a background as reporter of scientific fraud and government, and I have astrology to give me a look behind the scenes. The one form of trust I have is in myself to do this work properly.
World War Digital — and the War on the Body
Marshall McLuhan said that with every major new advance in technology comes a major war. They are induced by people being destabilized, as well as economic and geopolitical reorganization on a massive scale. For example, nobody wants to think of World War II being the result of radio, but the mental conditions leading to it are easy to see if you know where to look.
World War I arrived as the telephone and electric light flooded the landscape. The Civil War (and the ongoing War Between the Sexes) of the mid-19th century were instigated by the telegraph. It takes some study and reflection (and letting go of commonly held political beliefs and fake history) to see connections — and when you do, it’s breathtaking.
Few would think of “covid,” the school shootings, the LA fires, the massive floods and police killings of civilians and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine as part of the same thing. My theory is that they are all “the war.”
What war? That would be World War Digital. The escalating state of violence and instability (cultural and individual), the massive wealth moving upward, the ability to brainwash people on a scale previously unimaginable — all are the result of digital technology soaking into everything and everyone. And we have only just begun.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution or the Great Reset
The story of Trump 2.0 will be the story of Web 3.0, which means the takeover of existence by the blockchain, Digital ID, robots of various kinds, and the increasing use of artificial thought to make major decisions (the humans such as those in the LA Fire Department are showing evidence of being too stupid, so it’s appealing).
This is sometimes called the 4th Industrial Revolution or the Great Reset. The “covid” operation, 100% the product of digital and AI technology, was demonstrably a major front in this war. Remember, that happened on Trump’s watch.
And the digital environment itself is a battle ground. Back in 1970, McLuhan said, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” And here we are.
A generation later, Marshall’s son Eric wrote, “The body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning and significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed and distorted.”
The effects we are seeing are all about the assault on the body, which is the assault on consciousness and one’s sense of being: one’s sense of existence and trust in existence.
That assault, which I call digital disembodiment, is the insanity you feel bubbling up or creeping closer for no apparent reason (other than, say, seeing 100 images of LA burning or Asheville flooding). It’s the mental chaos you may experience. It’s the sense of wondering when something horrible is going to happen; your feeling of living at the edge all the time even if your life is relatively stable.
The final effect is living in a world without trust, which is rapidly becoming a world without love (most of what we call love is rightly trust; without trust, there is no love).
Waiting for the Messiah
It seems that many people will do anything they can to project the notion of trust outside themselves onto people or things they do not know. This is part of the obsession with glamour, politics and with celebrity.
We’re about to experience a messianic frenzy in the form of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance being sworn into the presidency and vice presidency. Trump especially is being treated with almost mystical awe.
This is no different than any other form of waiting for the messiah — for the external figure to save us from ourselves, and from the worst deeds of the darkest actors. Many believe he’s going to straighten it all out. Others believe he is Satan himself.
Here, we are in a dangerous zone. This condition is the result of a form of mysticism and mystical longing brought on by suppressing basic life force — starving the senses of ordinary sensual pleasures; the turning of sexual feelings into a criminal act; people eating chemicals instead of food; and suppressing the instinct toward companionship and mutual support.
Part of the mysticism that emerges in response to deprivation is the constant obsession with “maybe nothing is real” and “maybe that lie is true.” The Earth is flat, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were brainwashing campaigns, Michelle Obama is a man, and on and on and on — you’ve heard of some of this.
None of it would be interesting if we loved and cared for one another. All of it ruins our relationship with the natural world and the world of human-created beauty. We don’t need these things; we need to be alive, and feel alive — and the sleek, glowing, futuristic digital world is merely a substitute.
As Wilhelm Reich once wrote, “I know that what you call ‘God’ really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.”
I would add: God, an inner experience, is a form of intelligence.
As A Course in Miracles teaches, “God’s voice is as loud as your willingness to listen.” That can only happen by your own personal choice.
With love,
Your faithful astrologer,
Eric, it felt good reading that.
Fabulous, insightful, erudite article! Thank you for saying all the shadowy, niggling concerns in my subconscious out loud. And always with the trademark Eric loving path out of the darkness if one chooses to do something besides freeze in fear or rant in rage.