What's Left Over? A Plague on Both Your Houses

"Star cross'd lovers take their life." 'Life' is singular. One life is lost when Romeo and Juliet die, because the two characters form one character in death. Romeo + Juliet (1996) prologue. (1996) © 20th Century Fox Video Source: Youtube.

The New Millennium is synonymous with the future, and if you identify with that future, you may have noticed a trend which enflames polarities, but then oddly reconciles opposites, even between right- and left-wing politics. A Millennial third way seeks the Sun (masculine), Moon (feminine), and Stars (the higher union). Or: Past, Present, and Future.

There are different routes to the third way, and not every path is positive. The future's third way may follow the current course of world politics. After a prologue in conflict, it may destroy polarities through war and conflagration. Or it may erase polarities through technological, social and biological engineering.

Whether we follow the path of war or technocracy, the course will be materialistic. There is an alternative, however, which is anti-materialist. This blog post continues my series, What's Left Over?, which reappraises Millennial politics and political culture in terms of materialism and anti-materialism. I argue that the alternative media are not alt-right so much as alt-material. Their radicalism is not grounded in outdated left-right political paradigms, as much as it is in the political connotations of living in, and with, virtual reality.

Prologue in Conflict

U.S. set to hit China with new wave of tariffs on September 1st (31 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

Paradoxically, the institution of higher, unifying principles is preceded today by a deliberate exacerbation and intensification of differences. It could be one way of bringing about the desired union in the long term. Think of a couple fighting, followed by make-up sex. This may be the long game behind mainstream propaganda which has worsened political differences and regional tensions and has left us feeling that there is no chance to negotiate in order to solve problems.

Boris Johnson suggests prorogation will help negotiate Brexit deal with EU (30 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

'Boris Johnson, shame on you': thousands protest against prorogation (31 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

Brexit. Lebanon. Kashmir. Hong Kong. Egypt. You may abhor or adore the populists and their elitist opponents, or the democratic and anti-democratic factions, or honour the aggressors or victims. But it could be that all are servants of this greater aim, this third way, whether they know it or not. They worsen conflicts which will eventually obliterate the very barriers they are erecting. And perhaps this was the aim all along, to push things so far that finally we begin to break down divisions between different perspectives and ways of living.

Hong Kong riot police seen beating protesters in clash at metro station (31 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

A transcendent third way to overcome past and present problems is a very old idea. It is evident in symbols like the Yin and Yang, the Hammer and Sickle, and the Star of David or Shatkona. All could be taken as representations of the act of sex, the union of masculine and feminine energies. Equally important in east and west, as critical for the ancients as for the moderns, the higher union or third way is a code for nothing less than the survival of our species. As such, it is a positive idea.

The Hammer and Sickle symbol goes beyond the Hegelian dialectic. It confirms the occult roots of socialism. The hammer represents masculinity, while the sickle refers to femininity in harvest and death. Both symbols imply creative and destructive aspects of gender symbolism in northern mythological traditions. Image Source: Russia Beyond.

What's Left Over? Eating, Sex and Death

From The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, directed by Peter Greenway. This is the scene in which the cook explains why some ingredients on the menu are more expensive than others. Black Foods (18 February 2014). Video Source: Youtube. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) © Palace Pictures / Miramax. Scene reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use.

Eating and sex. Sex and eating. Sex and death. Eating and death. If these primal experiences encompass our beginnings and our ends, then surely they are related, and how they are related forms the bases of whole civilizations.

Troubled Van Helsings

Eating, sex and death have been married to technology to encourage adoption of invasive interfaces such as hand chips and brain implants. If we want to retain our cognitive liberty, we need to understand the age-old archetypes onto which technology is being piggy-backed. We must learn how these archetypes really work in our societies, beyond the blindness imposed by social conditioning, politics, hoaxes and taboos.

There are a couple of challenges here. Firstly, the notion that truth-telling and whistle-blowing will free us draws us deeper into the technosphere, which is already programmed along the lines of eating (constant consumption), sex, and death. As alt-researchers post Youtube exposé after podcast revelation, they are socially conditioned to accept the idea that technology can liberate us from social conditioning. The very act of developing counter-narratives to destroy the illusion draws us deeper into said illusion. We become addicted to the expectation that technology will lead us to a higher truth, rather than deeper into lies. There's a line in the 1999 film 8mm: "When you dance with the Devil, the Devil don't change. The Devil changes you."

The second problem is that even the most red-pilled individuals have trouble accepting the reality they see on the other side of illusions meant to corral and control us. One Youtuber, who catalogues a sub-genre of horrible revelations which I won't describe here, rambles, "I don't think I'm gonna make it. I've got thousands more photos to get through. I don't want to exist in the same reality as these beings." To accept what these alt-researchers uncover would require an overturn of the current order. It would require a revolution.

I don't think the Internet's Van Helsings are up to slaying the world's vampires. And given the first problem, who is to say these truth-seekers have not become more deeply deluded in the course of their investigations? Perhaps their rabbit holes have led them from an old school psyop into a new school psyop.

London Epstein-Style Pedo Rings Protected By Police: Ex-Cop Jon Wedger | True Crime Podcast 43 (10 September 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

What the online Van Helsings have a uncovered is a vampiristic order based on the consumption of others, mainly through draining the energy of the population in the mainstream workforce and in an underworld of human trafficking, sexual exploitation and pedophilia. You can see typical chatter of this kind in the interview with a Scotland Yard whistle-blower, Jon Wedger, above. Wedger maintains that child rape is endemic in the upper echelons of British society. He claims that decades' worth of cases have been covered up by the police. The malaise exists because there are symbolic and occult connotations around the consumption of youthful life and energy. The problem persists because the respectable middle classes refuse to consider, openly acknowledge, or act on the problem. They have too much invested in maintaining the established order as it currently exists, no matter how twisted it is.

But if people like Wedger are divulging the truth, why would the problem of pedophilia exist in the first place? Wedger alluded vaguely to the spread of paganism and Satanism, but more broadly to a general culture of exploitation of vulnerable people. This does somewhat confirm the redefinition of sex alongside the introduction of popular technology. The materialist order denies the viability of sex as a mode of reproductive renewal. Reproduction must be safely transported into the controlled confines of the lab. Sex is a non-creative act of self-pleasuring and energy consumption in the material world. The suspicion that we are all consumable or recyclable and are trapped inside a larger power structure was sparked by the 1999 film, The Matrix. In that fiction, the materialist overlords were machines who had entrapped humankind in a huge illusion.

You are only a battery to them - MATRIX (1999). Reproduced under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

Materialist Transcendence: Eating and Consumption

Even the most blue-pilled individual understands that we live in an order dominated by materialism. The primary challenge in such an order is overcoming boredom when one is denied access, internally and externally, to celestial mysteries.

The materialist order is nominally rationalist, secularist and scientifically-driven. Covertly, it seeks ways to achieve transcendence through the physical realm. Conspicuous consumption. Out-of-control spending. Kinky sex. Constructed lifestyles. But you can only buy, visit, theorize about, or sexualize so many objects before you confront a void. You can only exploit and bend the natural order of things so much before you confront gaps and failure. You can only murder to dissect so many times before you begin to wonder if there is anything more to do.

Pushing on through the darkness, the materialist resorts to finesse. He or she revisits a basic action like consumption, and wonders if it can be enhanced when paired with politics and propaganda in order to revolutionize society.

What's Left Over? Merge with the Demon

Beware the implantation of a synthetic conscience, crafted by others. Image Source: pinterest.

I have a theory that our religions mirror our levels of technology. This post continues my What's Left Over? series, which describes two contending spiritual stances - the materialist and the anti-materialist - which are appearing in response to the Technological Revolution.

Science and technology refer to ways of doing, while the arts and theology describe ways of being. Neither can exist without the other. Ideally, they are used in balance. But the burgeoning technocracy thrives on doing; it pretends to support the arts and organic freedoms, while actually discouraging them. As a result, technologists have to build simulated versions of being to make up for the shortfall. Their simulacra of moral sensibilities are poor substitutes for the true human love of nature and mystery.

Left unfettered, technocrats will construct your personality and life from the outside in. And while their creed is superficially moral and progressive, it is grossly materialist, anti-human and anti-humane.

If you thought corporations and institutions were already corrupt, and rewarded the worst aspects of your nature and exploited your best instincts against you, imagine what it will be like inside the corporatist technocracy, where their externalized conscience will come from a chip, embedded in your brain and communicating with your cerebral cortex by way of a neural interlace.

This fake, mechanized, embedded chip conscience is the foundation stone of what the people at The Boiler Room podcast call the "technocratic dictatorship." Elon Musk is its leading proponent.

Musk was once Silicon Valley's space cowboy and he had a romantic heart. In a 2010 interview, his ex-first-wife Justine struggled with the loss of Musk's original visionary, who became her own "private Alexander the Great." In 2016, he wasn't completely gone. He named one of his droneships, 'Of Course I Still Love You.'

In 2014, Musk warned against the advent of artificial intelligence as "summoning the demon." Now a shadow of his former self, in July of this year he stammered out his new agenda, a brain-chip interface called Neuralink. Neuralink will allow us to merge with the demon and to "stay one step ahead" of it. This is supposedly the only way to survive the coming Singularity.

Putting a Chip in Your Brain Will Not Make You a Superhero (or a god) (7 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

See all posts in the What's Left Over? series on materialism and anti-materialism in technological advancement.

Bitcoin's Satoshi Reveal and Genetic Feudalism: I

Image Source: Kashmir Broadcasting Corporation via Ivy McLemore.

Another 'Faketoshi' debuted this week and tried to claim the mantle of the anonymous Bitcoin inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. Crypto watchers scoffed. The reveal was a hopelessly amateurish LARP. Faketoshi claimed he lost his 980,000 Bitcoins in a crashed laptop and that he deliberately uses bad English. He also does not make major decisions without checking their symbolic representations in a Chaldean numerology machine - and in the Bible.

I read Faketoshi's three-part bulletin so that you don't have to. I concluded was that this was not a Satoshi reveal at all. Beneath the blather, it seemed more sinister, a coded announcement about how Bitcoin will be used with Big Data to enslave us.

Mind you, I'm someone who concluded that Grammarly is spyware to track thoughtcrimes in writers' drafts folders.

Oh good, it's round two of "the reveal" of Faketoshi #7. First off, he's "better with code than with words" but has no clue how wallet.dat works?! pic.twitter.com/oZhsnoTpqT

— Riccardo Spagni (@fluffypony) August 19, 2019

Faketoshi stated he was a Pakistani Brit who is and was brilliant, although in truth he is and was more of a generalist who knew how to hire brilliant people. He is confidently coming forward now after a suicidal depression.

He had his hakuna matata years (warning: Disney reference) while he worked for the NHS. He spent years pretending that Bitcoin didn't exist and that he didn't invent it. But now, he's making a comeback to take Bitcoin in an exciting new direction. To do this, he has legally changed his name from Bilal Khalid to James Caan, because he is the Godfather of Bitcoin.

For someone who claims he was born in 1978, the reveal was filled with tone deaf cultural references suspiciously relevant to Baby Boomers (the reveal was dedicated to Steve Jobs?), rather than a younger generation. Faketoshi's Chaldean numerology, with its Babylonian disinformation, seemed to come straight from some Illuminati mystery sweat lodge.

Wait. Did he say he worked for the NHS?

Intermediate Range

Yesterday, the US Department of Defense tested a 500 km+ cruise missile in California (click the above image to play video). According to Defense One, this marks the end of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty (signed 1987) and the beginning of a cruise missile arms race, with the United States eyeing China and Russia:

"'China poses a much larger and more sophisticated long-term military threat than Russia,' says Elbridge Colby, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. 'Washington would benefit from having the ability to deploy survivable land-based ballistic and cruise missile systems.'

Colby and others cite China’s growing missile arsenal, most of which is conventional and falls within ranges covered by the INF Treaty. 'The fact that Beijing has such missiles,' writes Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 'puts the United States at a strategic disadvantage in any conflict with Beijing…our only possible response would be to strike China with intercontinental ballistic missiles—an unacceptable escalation.'

Their solution: toss out the INF Treaty, develop an American arsenal of ground-launched intermediate-range missiles, and deploy them to allied territory in the western Pacific. This highly visible and survivable strike option would deter China, they argue, or provide the needed flexibility to hit targets in mainland China should conflict erupt (most likely over Taiwan)."

Satoshi in the Holy Sepulchre

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520-1522) by Hans Holbein the Younger. Image Source: pinterest.

I have a new blog post up at Vocal Media, concerning the three-day Christ-like reveal of Satoshi Nakomoto on a New York City PR firm's Website:

Egomania, Anonymity, and Bitcoin's Satoshi Reveal

Today, tomorrow, and the day after, Bitcoin's inventor is supposedly revealing his identity here and here. Lo, But I Have Seen This Satoshi Nakamoto and He Cannot Write. His statement opens:

"I always believed in freedom and liberation of the common man and that’s the reason I began my Bitcoin journey but it’s ironic that I got trapped into something which I’d to set myself free from and it took me 8/9 years to understand and get the courage to fight myself and come-out without this erroneous notion that what would the world think about the truth, as truth is always stranger than fiction."

Satoshi! You have 980,000 Bitcoins! You can afford to hire an editor! The reveal is full of suspicious Illuminati-type numerology. As the reveal unfolds, I will remark on how this online mischief, along with the Epstein-scandal-as-psyop, may relate to the coming economic downturn.

- See my earlier post on Craig Wright's Satoshi reveal, here.

Jeffrey Epstein: You'll Find a God in Every Golden Cloister

Notice that in this cross-dressing portrait, Bill Clinton has six fingers on his right hand (close up). Parsing Bill by Australian-American artist, Petrina Ryan-Kleid. The painting sits in Epstein's Manhattan mansion. Image Source: Daily Mail.

Coverage of Jeffrey Epstein's demise reminds me of the disappearance of Flight MH370 (see my posts here and here). This is a moment, as I put it, when everyday reality "goes off script" and we begin to perceive a gross drama, a terrible, epic story that serves as a backdrop to, and drives, our little lives.

Which of these stories contains the real truth? One is the mundane truth of small individuals. Voltaire celebrated this reality at the end of Candide (1759). You could venture out into the tempestuous world and encounter imperial intrigues, the fall of princes, natural disasters. But at the end, you would be lucky to sit at your front door, grow flowers and eat strawberries, candied citron and pistachios:

"You are perfectly right, said Pangloss; for when man was put into the garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum [to serve him], so that he should work it; this proves that man was not born to take his ease. —Let’s work without speculating, said Martin; it’s the only way of rendering life bearable. The whole little group entered into this laudable scheme; each one began to exercise his talents. The little plot yielded fine crops . . . and Pangloss sometimes used to say to Candide: —All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; for, after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunégonde, if you hadn’t been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. —That is very well put, said Candide, but we must go and work our garden."

Night (7 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube. See other videos of Epstein's islands by Rusty Shackleford, here. See Epstein's fake ambulance, revealed in drone footage, here; possibly related to trafficking.

The other truth is one of murderous and hungry golden gods. It is an inconvenient truth about the world's politicians, celebrities, academics, scientists, and philanthropists, best described in the lyrics from One Night in Bangkok, sung in 1984 by Murray Head, written by Tim Rice and Björn Ulvaeus:

Time flies doesn't seem a minute
Since the Tirolean spa had the chess boys in it
All change don't you know that when you
Play at this level there's no ordinary venue

It's Iceland or the Philippines or Hastings or
Or this place!

One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster
The bars are temples but the pearls ain't free
You'll find a god in every golden cloister
And if you're lucky then the god's a she
I can feel an angel sliding up to me ...

Tea, girls, warm, sweet
Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite ...

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble
Not much between despair and ecstasy
One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble
Can't be too careful with your company
I can feel the devil walking next to me

Siam's gonna be the witness
To the ultimate test of cerebral fitness
This grips me more than would a
Muddy old river or reclining Buddha
And thank God I'm only watching the game controlling it

I don't see you guys rating
The kind of mate I'm contemplating
I'd let you watch, I would invite you
But the queens we use would not excite you

So you better go back to your bars, your temples
Your massage parlours

One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster
The bars are temples but the pearls ain't free
You'll find a god in every golden cloister
A little flesh, a little history
I can feel an angel sliding up to me

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble
Not much between despair and ecstasy
One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble
Can't be too careful with your company
I can feel the devil walking next to me

Basically: Hoffenberg was Epstein's mentor and business partner, and the two of them joined forces in the mid-1980s. But then in 1993 everything fell apart when it turned out Hoffenberg's company was actually just a half-billion dollar Ponzi scheme.

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

I'm still looking for the attorney supposedly murdered in 1997, but I found a different attorney who was murdered in 1985 and Les Wexner was linked to his death somehow, and also to the mob. https://t.co/NR8M3YXnjH pic.twitter.com/P2bLhFlaQg

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to securities fraud and spent 20 years in prison, while Epstein pleaded guilty to... conspiring to steal Treasury checks from residential mailboxes and got 5 years probation. pic.twitter.com/mLticXckDq

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

Oh shit y'all, I almost gave up, but I finally found it! I now know who Hoffenberg thinks Epstein killed: Wexler's attorney, who tried to blackmail Epstein and Wexler in 1997 for child sex trafficking.

No, I have no idea if said attorney actually existed, or if he was murdered. pic.twitter.com/BsnYrx1lpj

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

As part of his sentence, Hoffenberg was ordered to pay $475M in restitution. While there was little hope of him paying back that amount from prison, Hoffenberg seems convinced that Epstein still has that money somewhere -- and he's still trying to collect it from Epstein today. pic.twitter.com/r6ZpZYfg13

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

But the whole Hoffenberg arc does cast a light on @thedailybeast's story from yesterday, on what Acosta told the Trump transition team when he was being vetted. Acosta claimed he'd agreed to the lenient NPA because he'd gotten orders to do so – Epstein was some kind of informant. pic.twitter.com/lwPIUjKB2j

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

Arthur Shapiro homicide investigation (1985-1990). Image Source: 4chan. Click to enlarge.

Epstein was set up as a billionaire. He got much of his money managing the fortune of Leslie Wexner (owner of Victoria's Secret, among other companies and foundations, also a noted philanthropist), who is connected to the 1985 murder of attorney Arthur Shapiro. Online bloggers and reporters now suspect Epstein's involvement in the 1997 murder of Wexner's attorney. Epstein was rumoured to be an intelligence agent, whether for the CIA, MI6 or Mossad (see here, here and here). He lured state leaders and societies' leading lights into compromising positions with trafficked underaged sex workers. He then blackmailed his associates. He also cleared their financial debts.

Image Source: 4chan.

Jeffrey Epstein - Palm Beach House Raid Police Video (10-20-2005) (14 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

The Epstein case reveals how whole societies can be manipulated through the exploitation of their leaders' shadow sides. These are the burdens of power: sadistic sex, drug addictions, cult fetishes, secret obsessions. We know that there is still decency left, because these people fear exposure, and have blind spots, although they probably believe that decency is for the suckers on Main Street. Everything depends on deceit. The whole MSM is tasked with convincing the public that their top stratum is sane.

Epstein May Be Just One Part of an Intricate Network of Sex and Power (15 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube. For journalist Whitney Webb's research on this network, go here; her Epstein series: part 1, part 2, part 3.

QTR #139 - Whitney Webb Goes Deep: Blowing Open The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal (15 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

In 1985, Les Wexner's attorney was murdered in broad daylight before he supposed to testify about tax evasion and offsh banking. A suppressed police report implicated him in his death.

Soon after, Epstein began fixing Wexner's "tangled finances." Coincidence? https://t.co/CqFlsk1OW0

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) August 16, 2019

Watch my latest interview w Consortium News for the latest on my Epstein research and a sneak peek at Part 4 of my series on the case. https://t.co/5jccEyCxiy

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) August 16, 2019

any researchers knowledgeable about money laundering, currency manipulation and institutions like deutsche bank and financial institutions that are intel front companies, please get in touch w me. i think i may know why epstein was arrested in july out of nowhere after all.

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) August 16, 2019

Slowing people are realizing Epstein flew for Khashoggi in Iran/Contra.
Oct 23rd, 2018 Epstein Flew Mujahadeen For Khashoggi's Barrick Gold, Deripaska Is Drug Runner Nowhttps://t.co/57d0sWYS9D

— TruthLeaks (@GeorgWebb) August 16, 2019

This week, Epstein's friend, associate and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell appeared in Los Angeles while reading a book about CIA agents, implying that Epstein was part of the system that supposedly protects us. In other words, we are the sheep who need herding and we - not they - are unknowing hypocrites when we draw a line between our leaders and ourselves.

Image Source: 4chan.

Maxwell seemed to be saying: Jeffrey was Everyman. He was Everyone. He was 'one of us.' This is a fallacy which helps murderers sleep at night. Contrary to what our leaders think, they are not indispensable, nor is the order they have created. Their corruption, hidden by compromised individuals, ruined institutions, proxies, shell companies, and a theatre of philanthropic (or terraforming) virtue, are not necessary conditions for our collective survival.

Not fiction, not fake news: Keyser Soze is real, and 'committed suicide' last week. Keyser Soze (The Story) (24 July 2007). From The Usual Suspects (1995) © Gramercy Films/Spelling Films. Directed by Bryan Singer, who has been accused several times of underage sexual assault in Hollywood. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use for educational purposes. Video Source: Youtube.

This is a world of pleasure, exploitation, corruption, private islands, tax evasion and silenced victims. Obsessed with protecting their positive reputations, these Pinhead Hellraisers have a strange sense of regret and sadness. They lament over their debts and the constant need to maintain fake public personas. You can hear it in songs like Adele's Skyfall.

Image Source: 4chan. This New York Post story inspired this trans-person-versus-Epstein legal case in 2008.

Their twisted dream is dying, although they feel like they are on the verge of victory. Their narcissistic lies have begun to dissolve. Their rotten materialism is failing them; fewer and fewer people want to buy into their illusions. Karma and Justice are coming for them. They are living on borrowed money and borrowed time.

How Jeffrey Epstein became the richest pedophile in the world | CDAN Ep. 284 (9 July 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

Bereavement and Responsibility

Angel of Death (1881) by Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919). Sometimes identified with the angel Azrael, the angel of destruction and renewal. Image Source: Wiki.

To my dear readers, my posts have been thin on the ground since March, when my father went into the hospital for heart surgery. He died on 19 June 2019. I wrote about his thoughts on death in the 2013 post, Zero Scrap Value. Two posts inspired by conversations with my father are A Sad Story and The Banality of Evil. A post with reflections on my father's generation of Angry Young Men is The Silent Generation's Separate Peace. In honour of his love of Bach:

Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Performed by the Chimei Symphony Orchestra in Taipei, Taiwan in 2005; conducted by Naoki Tokuoka. Video Source: Youtube.

It has been difficult for me to maintain my regular writing schedule, since I visited my father nearly every day in the intensive care unit for four months. My forthcoming non-fiction collection, Inside the Potemkin Village, will include my reflections on this experience and other essays on how we deal with death and inheritances; these pieces will also build on posts I wrote here, such as The Death Rites of the Toraja.

I am deeply grateful to those who knew what was happening and extended their love and support to me and my family. In the blogosphere, I especially want to thank Dia Sobin of Trans-D Digital Art. In the vlogosphere, I was incredibly touched by a message from Luke Slytalker, who covered the Dark Overlord hack in January 2019. Thank you so much to Luke and his followers for prayers and well wishes. He wrote:

"Larissa is a great researcher and one of the hardest working, most dedicated people I have talked to. She is an example of perseverance, passion, and how to soldier the F up and do what needs to be done, even in the hardest of times. I’ve taken notes. I’m very sorry for your loss. Prepare for silver linings and the universe to open up to you in the most miraculous of ways."

Good vibes and prayers for Larissa (19 June 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

Everyone who works in the alt media can confirm that it can be a lonely experience, akin to staring into a distorted mirror. Blogging and vlogging constitute a new civic responsibility to identify and explain how the world is changing and to maintain creative, critical, and constructive voices inside the technocracy. I am so glad to know Luke and share that responsibility with him.

Members of the alt media are easy targets because we saw the writing on the wall early on, and voluntarily abandoned the established architecture that presides over public opinion. We are now being censored, our work arbitrarily erased by Thoughtcrime bots and programs. We are ridiculed and censured by the mainstream media as sources of disinformation and Fake News. Nonetheless, we labour here so that in the future, no one can say that everyone ignored the signs, and sleepwalked into a global tech-totalitarianism. This is a civic responsibility instilled in me by my father, and my work written in that spirit is dedicated to him.