The Panopticon

Dear Comrade 153691:

It has come to our attention - through your loyal neighbor Comrade 156901 - that you have violated several statutes of the 2023 Tolerance and Equality Act to End All Racial Bias, Discrimination, and Disadvantage.

The stress in the air is palpable. I had actually been planning on writing an article this week on managing stress while all this craziness is going on in the world, and then I heard the sad news that Michael C. Ruppert had committed suicide. Michael C. Ruppert was a prepper, 9/11 activist, and Peak Oil proponent. He had apparently suffered from severe depression over the years, so his friends are cautioning the conspiracy-minded from concluding that he had actually been taken out.

You can listen to his last podcast here.

Taking this news at face value, I feel it is incredibly important that people are taught better coping mechanisms for dealing with the stress of everything falling apart in the world. We talk a lot about prepping financially and physically, but not much is being done to "prep" people for the mental health challenges that are sure to come up if the schnitzel really does hit the fan.

By the time you read this, God knows what will have happened with that crazy stand-off going on in Nevada , where apparently "public lands" aren't quite so public when an endangered turtle is sitting on them. Natural News, however, calls into question this so-called environmental siege, by blowing the lid off of certain crony capitalism deals involving said lands in question, energy companies, and fracking .

In case you hadn't heard, Firefox CEO Brendan Eich resigned over pressure from...get this...a dating website . The problem? Years ago, he donated to Proposition 8 in California, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. Proposition 8 passed in California, despite the Left Coast's reputation for being a pro-gay paradise.

So for having a mainstream view, this man was targeted, attacked, and ousted from his job - all thanks to the "Gaystapo."

I watched some old films recently that made me think about the nature of reality and how it is presented to us - often as lies.

The original Conan the Barbarian from 1982 is filled with brutal fight scenes. Many of these scenes involve horses not only falling, but in some cases flipping over completely. Usually, the horse would just roll right back up again and seemed just fine. In one amazing shot, a horse actually rolled down a hill through a thicket of wooden stakes, and after a few revolutions fluidly glided right back up to standing like he was some giant cat.

It's amazing to me how many people in our modern world live in massive denial. Try explaining to someone steeped in mainstream news that the United States could face a massive economic collapse . They are likely to laugh at you. I guess this denial is a direct result of having too much prosperity - you just think it will always be like that.

Walking through the SXSW crowds in downtown Austin this past Saturday, I had this brief, morbid thought about how much damage someone could do to a large group of people there, if they so chose. It seemed inevitable that eventually something bad would happen, and a few days later, it came in the form of a cowardly drunk driver who decided to plow through crowds of people rather than deal with the police . So now, instead of a drunk driving conviction, he's going to go to jail for murder.

You can't fix stupid.

I wonder how much this tragedy is going to affect the usual party atmosphere at SXSW. For one week, Austin, Texas is transformed into a mix of New Orleans and Los Angeles. It's amazing how all those entertainment billboards that are so ubiquitous in Los Angeles suddenly pop up here in Austin when the film industry comes to town. I never quite figured out the purpose of them in Los Angeles - after all, why do film industry people feel the need to advertise their own television products to themselves? But that's what Hollywood likes to do.

Do you remember when sports was just about sports? When sports news was actually about issues related to sports play, such as which player was assigned to what team?

Now sports is all about political correctness. The NFL's announcements lately have included their threat to keep the Super Bowl out of Arizona should a religious rights bill pass that would allow conservative Christians the right to refuse to bake gay wedding cakes (it was vetoed), and a new initiative by the NFL to ban "offensive" words such as the "n-word" of "f-word."

They're running scared.

They have to be. Otherwise, why would the FCC want to insert itself into newsrooms to determine who selects which stories to run?

I'm certainly frightened to hear that our government feels it is their job to monitor our newsrooms, but then it hit me: They are on the defense.

The alternative media is on the offense.

It's bad news, but it's also good news.

I'm happy to be a part of a website such as TF Metals Report that can break through the mainstream media clutter and share some unfiltered perspectives.

Lovely news to wake up to on a Saturday morning - Iran is sending warships close to United States maritime borders in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, ever. Why? From the AP report :

The Islamic Republic considers the move as a response to U.S. naval deployments near its own coastlines.

Uh-huh. Greaaat. Do doomsday scenarios of short-range nukes being used as EMPs come to mind? Or have I just been reading too much fear porn recently?