Guns and Chips and Irony

I had Doctor Daniel Brown from Harvard spend 70 hours with Sirhan over almost three years [and] he comes away with this staggering, staggering evaluation. He says Sirhan was hypnoprogrammed ….. a technique of using chemicals as well as hypnosis ….. The program on him makes him forget everything within a certain time frame ….. He remembers when he gets a pinch on the neck [that] what he sees is not Senator Kennedy. It’s a paper target of a human being.

— William Pepper, 2013, speaking at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Two issues made explicit in the U.S Constitution had to do with personal protection and the creation of money. Regarding the Second Amendment, its single sentence is blunt: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” (Infringe: to limit or control) The authors, informed by history, knew that governments typically grow despotic, and that being armed provides a measure of protection for citizens against a government grown oppressive and unaccountable. In Thomas Jefferson’s words, “…. to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

Yet there is a growing call for governmental control of guns in the hands of citizens, the call coming from within the citizenry itself, and the reason is evident: Every so often in recent years an apparently deranged individual goes on a shooting spree in a school or public space. With each shooting the chorus to rein in gun ownership grows ever louder, and ever more politicians, sniffing out prevailing public sentiment, make gun control a campaign issue. Ideas range from the registration of all firearms to the outlawing of weapons that might give citizens parity with, say, a militarized police force.

But here’s an interesting question: Might devious elements within a government, intent on disarming its populace, resort to the creation of false-flag scenarios designed to frighten and to produce justification for ever-tightening control? Might it be a question of “LIHOP” (let it happen on purpose) or “MIHOP” (make it happen on purpose), to use the lingo of what CIA-tutored media figures call “conspiracy theorists”? It’s just a question. I’m not so cynical as to imagine such intent, but the notion that such could be the case definitely exists among many who are inclined to ferret out details of certain events like the sinking of the Maine, the Lusitania, Operation Northwoods, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin. Things like that.

The fact that elements of the U.S. Government have developed and refined mind control techniques, such as those apparently applied to Sirhan Sirhan, is old news. The CIA’s Program MKUltra was born more than 60 years ago, and although it was reported as having been officially terminated in the 1970s, anyone who would accept that as fact resides in the kind of comfortable mental Happy Place that seems to be an American specialty.

Shootings themselves make excellent ‘news’, as they produce an uptick in public attention (and anxiety), which is important to those with a stake in maintaining narratives and crafting prevailing public opinion. And when poignant biographies of victims are aired as news items, with touching facial photos, evocative descriptions of their generosity and good works, and how they were so beloved, the victims are transformed for viewers into something akin to neighbors, and the shootings become a viewer’s neighborhood issues. Something must be done! And so public demand for gun control continues to grow.

Would central banks jump to the rescue and offer a fully anonymous digital currency? Certainly not. Doing so would be a bonanza for criminals.

— Christine Lagarde, IMF Director, 2018, speaking at the Singapore Fintech Festival

It is Congress that was granted the power “to coin money [and] establish the value thereof”, or at least that‘s how the U.S. Constitution would have it. But times changed, as did our governors, so in 1913 the Congress and President decided, despite multiple warnings from Jefferson to Lincoln (and others in between and since) to turn that process over to a private banking interest given the grossly misleading title “Federal Reserve”.

Those whom we allowed to become the masters of our money are now herding us toward an electronic global currency. The concept has been widely discussed since at least 1988 when a cover article in The Economist predicted a single world currency by 2018 along the lines of a theoretical “Phoenix”. The stepwise route described would be at first allowing — then later encouraging — the use of some form of private-sector money to be used in addition to existing national currencies. Thereafter, over time, the public would come to prefer it on the basis of its greater convenience. While the 2018 prediction was itself a miss, cryptocurrency had by that time become all the rage in some quarters, and the concept of cryptocurrency as a global reserve currency is now being discussed.

Meanwhile, the use of credit- and debit cards continues to rise, in some European countries virtually the sole means of making purchases. Banks and credit unions are now offering incentives for their use, even as powerful governmental forces are advocating the banning of cash altogether. Follow the threads and the world that emerges is one in which our every transaction is an electronic record. Consider, though, that a personal “chip”, that dreaded item of ultimate control in the worst of all dystopian futures, needn’t be a microscopic subcutaneous transmitter. A plastic card willingly (and, in a cashless society, necessarily) produced with every exchange works perfectly for recording the where and what of each individual’s every movement.

With cash a relic of the past, there would be no place to protect savings were The Economy to require negative interest rates and “bail-ins”; accounts would be docked automatically. Anyone deemed an irritant to the government would simply have his or her “chip” turned off (It happens!) leaving the offender absolutely disabled in a cashless world. With the loss of one’s card an ever-present possibility, instinct would naturally tend toward protective self editing, and the inevitable result would be a population rendered ideal from the standpoint of an oppressive and unaccountable government: obedient and submissive.

And the irony? If governmental and social forces now in motion continue unabated and unopposed, Americans, who proclaim themselves “lovers of freedom”, will have essentially disarmed and chipped ourselves. Having been made fearful, we don’t merely allow, we insist, on governmental control of personal arms. And through a process of multigenerational social engineering, our attachment to our plastic identifiers has been so reinforced and normalized that we have failed to realize what they represent and how they can be used against us.