Alternate reality crafted by the Kremlin? Honey, I am the Kremlin! Putin installed me into the Kremlin a la Disney’s 1999 smash hit Smart House. I am even voiced by Katey Sagal

Yes, and active measures against someone trying to Wake Up the entire population of the USA to Neil Postman's 1985 book [email protected]

::: _______________________
Russia-watcher Catherine Fitzpatrick, who documents Kremlin disinformation for InterpreterMag .com, says just as Moscow uses vague Internet laws to encourage self-censorship, trolls inhibit informed debate by using crude dialogue to change "the climate of discussion." "If you show up at The Washington Post or New Republic sites, where there's an article that's critical of Russia, and you see that there are 200 comments that sound like they were written by 12-year-olds, then you just don't bother to comment," she says. "You don't participate. It's a way of just driving discussion away completely," she adds. "Those kinds of tactics are meant to stop democratic debate, and they work." - Daisy Sindelar. August 12 2014, 11:34 AM ET

NATO / USA lost the Hybrid War that was launched in March 2013 against the World Wide Web.

1. Kremlin brags that only 1% of the manipulation Hybrid War content has been discovered and removed. NATO has entirely been unable to defend, 99% flies under the defense radar of Five Eyes (FVEY).

2. Russian military was able to completely get past USA FBI, CIA, NSA, and whatever else the Pentagon has. Competely unable to defend the population against Russian Hybrid Warfare. "For years, AIVD had access to the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. That's what de Volkskrant and Nieuwsuur have uncovered in their investigation." "the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD penetrated the computer network of a university adjacent to Red Square back in 2014, only to later realize they had tapped into APT29, aka Cozy Bear, one of the Russian government-affiliated organizations that penetrated the DNC and targeted other US government departments". "It was Dutch intelligence operatives that hacked into some of Russia's own institutions -- including their closed-circuit television cameras."

3. Putin and Surkov's "Operation Matthew 4:19" global manipulation of everyday people included turning social media consumers into Russian assets of the Hybrid Warfare who deliberately spread measles and COVID-19 virus during the pandemic. Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University validated evidence going back to year 2014.

4. Absolutely no defense has been found against this Hybrid Warfare since it was unleashed in March 2013. "At the NATO summit in Wales last week, General Philip Breedlove, the military alliance’s top commander, made a bold declaration. Russia, he said, is waging “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.” It was something of an underestimation. The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations"

In the first temptation, the Lord of Lust displayed his three beautiful daughters before the Buddha. Their names were Desire, Fulfillment, and Regrets—Future, Present, and Past. But the Buddha, who had already disengaged himself from attachment to his sensual character, was not moved.

Then the Lord of Lust turned himself into the Lord of Death and flung at the Buddha all the weapons of an army of monsters. But the Buddha had found in himself that still point within, which is of eternity, untouched by time. So again, he was not moved, and the weapons flung at him turned into flowers of worship.

Finally the Lord of Lust and Death transformed himself into the Lord of Social Duty and argued, “Young man, haven’t you read the morning papers? Don’t you know what there is to be done today?” The Buddha responded by simply touching the earth with the tips of the fingers of his right hand. Then the voice of the goddess mother of the universe was heard, like thunder rolling on the horizon, saying, “This, my beloved son, has already so given of himself to the world that there is no one here to be ordered about. Give up this nonsense.” Whereupon the elephant on which the Lord of Social Duty was riding bowed in worship of the Buddha, and the entire company of the Antagonist dissolved like a dream. That night, the Buddha achieved illumination, and for the next fifty years remained in the world as teacher of the way to the extinction of the bondages of egoism.

Now, those first two temptations—of desire and of fear—are the same that Adam and Eve are shown to have experienced in the extraordinary painting by Titian (now in the Prado), conceived when he was ninety-four years old. The tree is, of course, the mythological world axis, at the point where time and eternity, movement and rest, are at one, and around which all things revolve. It is here represented only in its temporal aspect, as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, profit and loss, desire and fear. At the right is Eve, who sees the tempter in the form of a child, offering the apple, and she is moved by desire. Adam, however, from the opposite point of view, sees the serpent-legs of the ambiguous tempter and is touched with fear. Desire and fear: these are the two emotions by which all life in the world is governed. Desire is the bait, death is the hook.

Adam and Eve were moved; the Buddha was not. Eve and Adam brought forth life and were cursed of God; the Buddha taught release from life’s fear.

MOYERS: And yet with the child—with life—come danger, fear, suffering?

CAMPBELL: Here I am now, in my eighties, and I’m writing a work that is to be of several volumes. I want very much to live until I finish this work. I want that child. So that puts me in fear of death. If I had no desire to complete that book, I wouldn’t mind dying. Now, both the Buddha and Christ found salvation beyond death, and returned from the wilderness to choose and instruct disciples, who then brought their message to the world.

The messages of the great teachers—Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed—differ greatly. But their visionary journeys are much the same. At the time of his election, Mohammed was an illiterate camel-caravan master. But every day he would leave his home in Mecca and go out to a mountain cave to meditate. One day a voice called to him, “Write!” and he listened, and we have the Koran. It’s an old, old story.

MOYERS: In each case receivers of the boon have done some rather grotesque things with their interpretation of the hero’s message.

CAMPBELL: There are some teachers who decide they won’t teach at all because of what society will do with what they’ve found.

MOYERS: What if the hero returns from his ordeal, and the world doesn’t want what he brings back?

CAMPBELL: That, of course, is a normal experience. It isn’t always so much that the world doesn’t want the gift, but that it doesn’t know how to receive it and how to institutionalize it—

MOYERS: —how to keep it, how to renew it.

CAMPBELL: Yes, how to help keep it going.

MOYERS: I’ve always liked that image of life being breathed back into the dry bones, back into the ruins and the relics.

CAMPBELL: There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valid as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated clichés. This has to be done with all traditions.

MOYERS: Why are these stories so important to the human race?

CAMPBELL: It depends on what kind of story it is. If the story represents what might be called an archetypal adventure—the story of a child becoming a youth, or the awakening to the new world that opens at adolescence—it would help to provide a model for handling this development.

MOYERS: You talk about how stories help us through crises. When I read them as a child, they all had happy endings. It was a time before I learned that life is fraught with plodding, indulgent, and cruel realities. Sometimes I think we buy a ticket to Gilbert and Sullivan, and when we go into the theater, we find the play is by Harold Pinter. Maybe fairy tales make us misfits to reality.

CAMPBELL: Fairy tales are told for entertainment. You’ve got to distinguish between the myths that have to do with the serious matter of living life in terms of the order of society and of nature, and stories with some of those same motifs that are told for entertainment. But even though there’s a happy ending for most fairy tales, on the way to the happy ending, typical mythological motifs occur—for example, the motif of being in deep trouble and then hearing a voice or having somebody come to help you out.

Fairy tales are for children. Very often they’re about a little girl who doesn’t want to grow up to be a woman. At the crisis of that threshold crossing she’s balking. So she goes to sleep until the prince comes through all the barriers and gives her a reason to think it might be nice on the other side after all. Many of the Grimm tales represent the little girl who is stuck. All of these dragon killings and threshold crossings have to do with getting past being stuck.

The rituals of primitive initiation ceremonies are all mythologically grounded and have to do with killing the infantile ego and bringing forth an adult, whether it’s the girl or the boy. It’s harder for the boy than for the girl, because life overtakes the girl. She becomes a woman whether she intends it or not, but the little boy has to intend to be a man. At the first menstruation, the girl is a woman. The next thing she knows, she’s pregnant, she’s a mother. The boy first has to disengage himself from his mother, get his energy into himself, and then start forth. That’s what the myth of “Young man, go find your father” is all about. In the Odyssey, Telemachus lives with his mother. When he’s twenty years old, Athena comes and says, “Go find your father.” That is the theme all through the stories. Sometimes it’s a mystical father, but sometimes, as here in the Odyssey, it’s the physical father.

A fairy tale is the child’s myth. There are proper myths for proper times of life. As you grow older, you need a sturdier mythology. Of course, the whole story of the crucifixion, which is a fundamental image in the Christian tradition, speaks of the coming of eternity into the field of time and space, where there is dismemberment. But it also speaks of the passage from the field of time and space into the field of eternal life. So we crucify our temporal and earthly bodies, let them be torn, and through that dismemberment enter the spiritual sphere which transcends all the pains of earth. There’s a form of the crucifix known as “Christ Triumphant,” where he is not with head bowed and blood pouring from him, but with head erect and eyes open, as though having come voluntarily to the crucifixion. St. Augustine has written somewhere that Jesus went to the cross as a bride-groom to his bride.

MOYERS: So there are truths for older age and truths for children.

CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. I remember the time Heinrich Zimmer was lecturing at Columbia on the Hindu idea that all life is as a dream or a bubble; that all is maya, illusion. ::: PDF, Edited by Joseph Campbell himself. ::: After his lecture a young woman came up to him and said, “Dr. Zimmer, that was a wonderful lecture on Indian philosophy! But maya—I don’t get it—it doesn’t speak to me.”

“Oh,” he said, “don’t be impatient! That’s not for you yet, darling.” And so it is: when you get older, and everyone you’ve known and originally lived for has passed away, and the world itself is passing, the maya myth comes in. But, for young people, the world is something yet to be met and dealt with and loved and learned from and fought with—and so, another mythology.

MOYERS: The writer Thomas Berry says that it’s all a question of story. The story is the plot we assign to life and the universe, our basic assumptions and fundamental beliefs about how things work. He says we are in trouble now “because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time —it shaped our emotional attitudes, it provided us with life’s purpose, it energized our actions, it consecrated suffering, it guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew who we were, we could answer the questions of our children. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. Now the old story is not functioning. And we have not yet learned a new.”

CAMPBELL: I’m in partial agreement with that—partial because there is an old story that is still good, and that is the story of the spiritual quest. The quest to find the inward thing that you basically are is the story that I tried to render in that little book of mine written forty-odd years ago—The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The relationship of myths to cosmology and sociology has got to wait for man to become used to the new world that he is in. The world is different today from what it was fifty years ago. But the inward life of man is exactly the same. So if you put aside for a while the myth of the origin of the world—scientists will tell you what that is, anyway—and go back to the myth of what is the human quest, what are its stages of realization, what are the trials of the transition from childhood to maturity and what does maturity mean, the story is there, as it is in all the religions.

The story of Jesus, for example—there’s a universally valid hero deed represented in the story of Jesus. First he goes to the edge of the consciousness of his time when he goes to John the Baptist to be baptized. Then he goes past the threshold into the desert for forty days. In the Jewish tradition the number forty is mythologically significant. The children of Israel spent forty years in the wilderness, Jesus spent forty days in the desert. In the desert, Jesus underwent three temptations. First there was the economic temptation, where the Devil comes to him and says, “You look hungry, young man! Why not change these stones to bread?” And Jesus replies, “Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word out of the mouth of God.” And then next we have the political temptation. Jesus is taken to the top of a mountain and shown the nations of the world, and the Devil says to him, “You can control all these if you’ll bow down to me,” which is a lesson, not well enough made known today, of what it takes to be a successful politician. Jesus refuses. Finally the Devil says, “And so now, you’re so spiritual, let’s go up to the top of Herod’s Temple and let me see you cast yourself down. God will bear you up, and you won’t even be bruised.” This is what is known as spiritual inflation. I’m so spiritual, I’m above concerns of the flesh and this earth. But Jesus is incarnate, is he not? So he says, “You shall not tempt the Lord, your God.” Those are the three temptations of Christ, and they are as relevant today as they were in the year A.D. 30.

The Buddha, too, goes into the forest and has conferences there with the leading gurus of his day. Then he goes past them and, after a season of trials and search, comes to the bo tree, the tree of illumination, where he, likewise, undergoes three temptations. The first is of lust, the second of fear, and the third of submission to public opinion, doing as told.

We need to make a conscious effort, painful conscious effort, to come together in democracy.

"thirdly, of course, there is the individual who rises above these and becomes the conscious choice maker. Less you think this kind of person has a wonderful time all the time... let me assure you that it is a very difficult path. Why?" "And to be conscious hurts, it hurts like heck, I might even say it hurts like Hell." - Dr. Stephan A Hoeller ... https://youtu.be/08R1kPdfrHA?t=4265

If not us, than who?

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves." - Carl Sagan

If not us, than who?

Nobody is gong to save us from our own selves. We exploded our population to 8 billion people and we are almost all able to connect, hope is people can see good common ground instead of where we are heading at the moment hate each other as common ground.

There are good signals and leadership, people have to favor it. [email protected]

[email protected] Lemmy community.

CounterSurkov subreddit

Bluesky Hashtag "Counter Surkov Reading List"

Mastodon Hashtag "Counter Surkov Reading List" https://mastodon.social/tags/CounterSurkovReadingList

Deeper yet, www.WakeIndra.com and Lemmy community [email protected]

Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday, also referred to as Holy Thursday, or Thursday of the Lord's Supper, among other names, is a Christian feast during Holy Week that marks the beginning of the Paschal Triduum, and commemorates the Washing of the Feet (Maundy) and Last Supper of Jesus Christ with the Apostles, as described in the canonical gospels.

I don't recall ever having a ritual experience of this. Is that my brain damage or indeed a virgin opportunity?

I am overdue on toenail clipping...

You are in no position to lecture me on morality.

I'm not lecturing you on it. I'd rather you go away and stop commenting to me.

The morality problem is global. People can not tell "good from bad", which is the meaning of the word "morality".

People think ELon Musk's ideas about empathy are good, for example.

You clearly can’t see the hypocrisy.

You believe that Lemmy conveys what I understand and see. You have a media ecology literacy problem. I suggest you study Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. [email protected] community on Lemmy for that.

Preaching to the choir here. We have a world full of Wikipedia and we could put every HowTo on a Wiki, but we rather suck down Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk bullshit, "Trickle Down Garbage" from Disney. Wealth televangelism networks.

“Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed. That is how Jefferson understood it, how Horace Mann understood it, how John Dewey understood it, and in fact, there is no other way to understand it. The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.” ― Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, 1995

"Language doesn't bind you down to defining things" - Joycean Jean Erdman

“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of sings (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?” ― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Linux community arrogance is to deny the device driver issues and think Apple is fine, when the reason Apple thrives is because they don't have open hardware like Linux, BSD, Windows...

Hardware companies are rarely held account for their absent support of Linux - some campaigns have come and gone, but in the end Linux users tend to arrogantly say it's trivial to switch and embrace dishonesty. I guess they figure Microsoft is dishonest, so they normalize it.