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Posts Tagged ‘courage’

Separate Yourselves From Those Lacking Courage, Group Yourself With The Courageous – LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2022

It is a time to recognize your elite status. It is a time to honor that in you. It is a time to separate yourself.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/01/allan-stevo/separate-yourselves-from-those-lacking-courage-group-yourself-with-the-courageous/

By Allan Stevo

It has been said that “A bad apple ruins the barrel.” When putrefaction spreads, sometimes it gets the healthy tissue too.

The Bible advises repeatedly to separate yourselves from those who are not of high standards. It says this in many different ways. Separation seems to be so important that it even advises death — the ultimate separation of a person from society — for any number of aberrations from upstanding behavior.

Do I suggest going around killing people? No. But to separate yourself from those who are not to your standards makes a whole lot of sense at this stage in the trajectory of corona communism.

The Bible, an uncountable number of times, references people who are set apart rather than people who are not set apart. Sure, I have encountered a few cowardly readers of these pages in which I am writing, but overwhelmingly courageous lions come to this place.

If you are reading this, there is a good chance that you are one set apart. It may be time to start treating yourself like that. 

You are not a social pariah, no matter what some others may believe. You are not a second class citizen, no matter what some others may claim. You are the foundation upon which a new America will be built.

Stop accepting the negative narrative from those who want to demoralize you. Stop letting those who are not set apart from speaking into your life. Stop letting the dribbles of discouragement fall upon your ears, your mind, your heart, your soul.

This discouragement can come from friend or foe alike. It may even be far easier to accept coming from a friend, though the 24-7 news cycle, social media, and streaming movie services being so central in the lives of so many make the harmful, discouraging narratives so present on the ears.

There was a time in which marketers at Coca-Cola understood that it would take about 14 “touches” to get a person to drink a Coke. Today that number is higher and a qualitative factor plays a role. The marketplace is flooded with people vying for your attention and trying to influence your thoughts and behavior. You are in the midst of a Great War for your mind. It is a war for you, your home, and your family. Your enemy knows those can be won by winning on the battlefield of your mind.

Some say China is the pivotal front line of our era. The Chinese Communist Party may be part of it, but they are a small player in it. The flesh and blood you are fighting all wave the American flag when convenient. They have their homes on US soil when convenient. They send their kids, if they have kids, to US schools when convenient. But even these people of influence I mention may be mere pawns, subject to the spiritual battle.

Our opponents in the war recognize that it can all be conquered through you. Everyone has a breaking point. Everyone. This, then, begs the question — how many “touches” does it take to discourage you? How many touches does it take to change your mind? How many touches does it take to shift your opinion? What toxins can they inject into discussion to turn your thinking toxic?

We are each guilty of it. We are each imperfect. I doubt a single person reading this is without a few moments, from time to time, in which a news story knocks him back, in which a news story gets in his head, in which a news story gets him to say, even if just for a moment, “All is lost.”

Say that, and you lose. Say that, and you become part of the other team. Even if only for a few minutes, that is who you are, then, fighting for. If you go around speaking those words to others, you are that much more fighting on the side of the enemy. To win, you need to maintain faith that this will work. Such will get you through thick and thin. This is even more true in this psychological war, than it is in a kinetic war.

There are people who can fire a gun and kill an enemy from 50 feet. Sometimes that same person cannot look in the eye of another person in a role of presumed authority while telling him what he expects from that person in order to get through his day more enjoyably and more freely. Great valor is shown in times of war, but one must recognize that great valor also happens in daily life. That valor of daily life is the valor that matters so much, and it is the valor that prevents kinetic wars from ever taking place.

When you show that valor, you shift the boundaries of possibility in life and in the world around you. This 1.) faith to believe in a virtuous outcome, alongside 2.) this valor required to walk out this faith, are two of our most powerful weapons at a time like this.

But so many do not treat them as such. Many do not recognize that those who hold those weapons and have the ability to skillfully use them are more valuable than an elite Navy Seal team. They are more valuable than a high ranking politician. They are more valuable than CEOs, bishops, and media stars.

If they are the true treasures of this era, then why do we surround ourselves with people who actively spend their time discouraging those abilities in us, dulling the edges of our swords, offering us alluring touches from the enemy that eventually catch up with us?

Why do we not see ourselves for the elite warriors that we are? 

Maybe you are planning on becoming a second class citizen. Maybe you are planning on being locked into a FEMA camp. As for me and my house, we will walk out our values, we will live in our blessings both coming in and going out, we will walk in faith and not fear.

As for FEMA camps, I have no such intentions for myself and will not speak any such fear into the world around me. When I catch myself not guarding my words and joking around about such nonsense as FEMA camps or second class citizenship — putting that toxicity into the air, I immediately stop myself. Because you know what, it can happen. Mistakes happen all the time.

But at such a moment, we look around, we realize that we are rolling in the dust with the enemy, exactly where he wants us to be, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and ask 1.)What did I do right? 2.) What did I do wrong? 3.) What can I be doing better next time? Then we do it. We grow. We demand more of ourselves. We do better next time.

You can be forgiven for mistakes, just return to the touchstones that will get you to the victorious side of this battle. More important than any mistake is your recognition that you are better than that, your recognition that you set the trajectory of your life, your recognition that you set the pace for the world around you.

Because the truth is, you are better than that. If you are a person of valor, you are a one-percenter in the world around you. You may or may not be a one-percenter in terms of money or a one-percenter in terms of global power, you may, however, possess the one percent status that actually matters at a time like this.

Under the concept of generational theory, it is in fourth turnings, like this one, that people once called “average,” end up becoming the subject of text books that children study for the next 300 years.

Do you recognize the gift you have been given to be born in the most powerful country on earth, the freest country on earth, at a time of such global tyranny, and to be able to fight a battle in your own life, that can echo out into the world around you, with global ramifications, for centuries? If you did, you might treat yourself differently. If you did, you might weigh your every action more seriously. If you did, you might treat your elite status, your elite tools, your social circle you choose a bit differently.

You may be ready for your second class citizenship status. I am not. I have been treated like a VIP in virtually every store I have walked into since corona communism began. I have made sure others saw me as one set apart. I have made sure to pick myself up as soon as I realized I was rolling in the dust with the devil. I have made sure that I was not accepting any media narrative. That mostly has meant that I unplug from the narrative and base my understanding of reality on the world around me, and when I need data about the outside world, I seek out some narrative-free quality data sources.

Many who read these pages do the same. But I do not think many who read these pages recognize that they are the elites of society, that they are the foundations of the new America. If they realized that about themselves, I think they would much more enjoyably separate themselves out from the people who really are just average. Because the net effect of surrounding yourself with the average is to dull your sword, dull your senses, dull your elite advantage.

Far from deserving a response of whining, a person close to you showing his true colors and no longer wanting anything to do with you is a gift that offers you so much benefit as a refining fire — as it clarifies the values of those around you and focuses them into agreement with your own.

Now, more than ever, is a time to be in the midst of the iron that can sharpen iron, to be in the midst of those who you barely feel worthy of being around, to be in the midst of the elite of our day as much as possible and to let them demand high standards of you, for you to demand high standards of them, and for you to elevate each other as you go through daily life.

It is a time to recognize your elite status. It is a time to honor that in you. It is a time to separate yourself.

Separate yourself. Stop the mask nonsense. Tools available to you include “Face Masks in One Lesson”  which guides readers on how to never wear a mask again, “Face Masks Hurt Kids” a book on the science of mandatory masking, these LRC articles on the same, and some excellent videos and trainings made available to everyone who signs up at RealStevo.com. 

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2020: The Year We Lost Our Common Sense, Courage and Civil Liberties — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2020

This article is locked by Facebook

For the Fortune 500 companies, however, the pandemic has translated into a windfall. Between April and September, at a time when thousands of small business were quietly getting crushed underfoot, 45 of the 50 most valuable publicly traded American companies turned a profit, according to the Washington Post.

At the same time, at least 27 of the 50 largest firms slashed their workforce this year, collectively cutting more than 100,000 workers, while at the same time distributing billions of dollars to shareholders. As just one example, Walmart distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while terminating 1,200 office staff.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/12/28/2020-the-year-we-lost-our-common-sense-courage-and-civil-liberties/

Robert Bridge

Once it became clear to the Western elite that their subjects would readily accept draconian anti-Covid measures, it encouraged them to usher in a code-red lifestyle where there will be no ‘return to normal’ in the foreseeable future and, possibly, never.

If nothing else, nobody can say we were not warned about the madness that would descend upon leap year 2020, making it one of the worst 366 days ever recorded on the Gregorian calendar.

On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted the incredibly visionary Event 201, an exercise that simulated the outbreak of a pandemic “transmitted from bats to people that eventually becomes…transmissible from person to person.”

The simulation proved to be so uncannily similar to the real thing that started just three months later – from imagining a dramatic drop in air travel and business, to breaks in the global supply chain – that Johns Hopkins eventually felt compelled to release a statement saying their exercise was not intended to be a prophecy of future events.

Isn’t it crazy how “social distance for two weeks so our hospitals aren’t overwhelmed” evolved into “social distance til 2022 until a vaccine is developed…”

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) April 26, 2020

“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise,” the statement read, in what just might be the creepiest caveat ever. “For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction… We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people.”

Shortly after the global elite played Nostradamus, on January 15th to be exact (the very same day, incidentally, that the Democrats presented articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in the Senate), the first Covid-positive person arrived in Seattle from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease is said to have sprung to life. From there it has been a non-stop roller-coaster ride of government-sponsored insanity.

Before continuing, it is important to remember the context with which the pandemic has been happening, that is, in the most consequential U.S. presidential election in recent memory. It should thus come as no surprise that the Democrats and Republicans would use the scourge to achieve some sort of advantage, demonstrating Machiavellian opportunism at its very best. Indeed, such is the nature of the political beast.

For example, although Trump shut down the U.S. border on January 31 to Chinese nationals, the Democrats and leftist media pounced, saying the U.S. leader responded too late to make a difference. Even Trump’s use of the term ‘Chinese virus’ was slammed by his opponents as ‘racist.’ Meanwhile, it was the Democrats themselves who were the pioneers in taking the first draconian steps of locking down society to stop the contagion.

On March 16, 2020, six counties in northern California and the city of Berkley ordered an unprecedented stay-at-home order for some 7 million Bay Area residents. This was all part of “flattening the curve” logic that would “buy time for hospitals to gear up for the onslaught…” Well, 233 days later political leaders are not only still flattening the curve, but flattening their economies as well. Today, although the survival rate for those infected with Covid-19 is reported to be in the neighborhood of 99.85 percent, harsh lockdowns continue to wreak havoc, not least of all for small businesses.

Over 100,000 restaurants have closed this year due to lockdowns, but not a penny for them in the “Covid Relief” bill?

— Cari Kelemen (@KelemenCari) December 22, 2020

Consider the situation in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom has mandated yet another ‘shelter-in-place’ order, which has shuttered, among other businesses, hair salons, barbershops, personal care services, movie theaters, wineries, bars, breweries, family entertainment centers and amusement parks. What is hard to fathom, however, is how the corporate big-box stores are considered “essential businesses,” apparently immune to the scourge, while the small business owner is trashed as expendable.

By way of example, consider the tragic plight of Angela Marsden, the owner of Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill in Los Angeles. In an effort to comply with the ever-changing anti-Covid rules, Marsden spent over $80,000 to build an outdoor patio so she could stay in business during the pandemic. With Newsom’s latest lockdown restrictions, however, city officials denied her permission to serve clients on location, even in the parking lot.

To add insult to injury, the authorities granted permission for a film company to set up a large outdoor eating area for its staff just across the road from where Marsden had built her patio.

“I’m losing everything,” she exclaimed in a video posted to Twitter that has been watched almost 10 million times. “Everything I own is being taken away from me. They have not given us money and they have shut us down. We cannot survive; my staff cannot survive…”

This is criminal. Complete BS!!! I guess this is “science”! RT @ClayTravis: Watch this video of an LA bar owner that perfectly crystallizes the absurdity of California’s absurd and ridiculous shutdown rules. pic.twitter.com/XVLmAVyy70

— Larry The Cable Guy (@GitRDoneLarry) December 5, 2020

For the Fortune 500 companies, however, the pandemic has translated into a windfall. Between April and September, at a time when thousands of small business were quietly getting crushed underfoot, 45 of the 50 most valuable publicly traded American companies turned a profit, according to the Washington Post.

At the same time, at least 27 of the 50 largest firms slashed their workforce this year, collectively cutting more than 100,000 workers, while at the same time distributing billions of dollars to shareholders. As just one example, Walmart distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while terminating 1,200 office staff.

To put these figures another way, since mid-March – when President Donald Trump declared a national emergency – America’s 614 billionaires saw their net worth explode by $931 billion in total. Jeff Bezos, for example, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, saw his private wealth go from $73.2bn since the start of the crisis to a record $186.2bn.

What’s Good For Thee Is Not Good For Me

A thread ⬇ https://t.co/42p9Yc2xY7

— Patriotic Candor (@PatrioticCandor) December 3, 2020

It would probably come as no surprise that the very individuals who helped pave the way for astronomic wealth generation among the 1 percent, are the same ones breaking their own rules. Governor Newsom and his wife, for example, attended a birthday party with a dozen friends at the French Laundry restaurant in San Francisco. Equally maddening is that Dustin Corcoran, the CEO of the California Medical Association, was also in attendance. And who could forget the photo of Nancy Pelosi walking through a California hair salon when such businesses were deemed ‘super spreaders’?

Such incidences only served to reinforce the idea that the draconian lockdowns, the worst of which are centered on Democratic-controlled states, were specifically designed not to contain a contagion, but to foster as much anger and frustration among the general population in the most consequential presidential election in many decades. After all, unhappy people have a tendency to vote out their leaders whom they believe are responsible for such dire circumstances. And with the mainstream media almost totally in the Democratic anti-Trump camp, placing the blame on the president has proven no difficult task.

So where do we go from here? Now that we have reached the end of 2020, will the situation begin to improve? Will political leaders begin to loosen the screws and let some semblance of normality return once again? Or will people be forced to rise up and demand the return of their freedom and liberty?

At this great loggerhead in human history, there has been much talk about creating ‘freedom passes’ that will be demanded from people before they are allowed to travel or visit any sort of entertainment again.

“People who test negative for coronavirus could get a five-day freedom pass to attend big events or access public buildings, under plans being considered by public health experts running a trial program in England,” reported Bloomberg in November.

Already, five global airlines – United Airlines, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, Swiss International Air Lines and JetBlue – have announced they will observe the so-called CommonPass to passengers on some flights from December.

“The project, developed by non-profit group The Commons Project and backed by the World Economic Forum, uses a digital certificate downloaded to a mobile phone to show a passenger has tested negative for Covid-19,” according to the Financial Times. Here is the kicker: “The airlines are not making the CommonPass mandatory, but in time it will also be used to provide proof of vaccination.”

It seems rather obvious where all of this is heading: mandatory vaccination for anyone who ever wishes to board an aircraft or visit another entertainment venue again. Over time, it is not difficult to imagine a vaccine regimen extending to all human activities, including shopping and even getting a job. Yet what about the millions of people who have expressed extreme skepticism in being administered a vaccine that has been developed so quickly?

Whatever the case may be, should such a plan of action become mandatory, peoples’ lives will be entirely dominated by fears over a virus, together with an endless bureaucratic process of being tested and approved to move about. Vaccines will become a regular requirement since viruses are in a state of constant mutation, which makes them the authoritarians dream instrument of domination.

Such a system of totalitarian control, should it ever come into fruition, will have achieved in mere months what fascism could not in years: the pacification and unification of a great swath of the world’s population not by bayonet, but by syringe. In fact, today the people of London are fleeing their fair city not out of fear of the virus per se, but out of fear of the lockdown restrictions put in place by the authorities. To put it otherwise, the world gave an inch and the globalists took a mile, and a person would have to be a fool to believe it could have turned out any other way.

© 2010 – 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org.

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Courage

Posted by M. C. on December 19, 2020

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Make It Impossible To Walk Through Your Park Peacefully – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 22, 2020

Anyone who will censor seeks to attack sincerity, courage, and honesty, seeks to limit the ability of two people to communicate, seeks to limit the mutual pursuit of truth. Seeks to do the most anti-social of activities: to stop individuals in a culture from stumbling together through the hardships, joys, and lessons of this thing we call life.

That fellow human needs that truth from you. Needs that sincerity. Needs that courage.

And that courage is so contagious.

Please give it to them. You will be repaid many times over.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/allan-stevo/make-it-impossible-to-walk-through-your-park-peacefully/

By

Some time ago, I resolved to do a thing dangerous in our era.

I resolved to speak truthfully to the people I met. If they didn’t like it, I would stop, and let the conversation wrap up shortly thereafter, to allow us both to spend our time in ways we’d each prefer.

It’s not really that dangerous once you get used to it.

A few people may find contempt for you, but in all likelihood, they were never people whose admiration you would want anyway. The contempt of some can be taken as a compliment.

When you speak truthfully, you give an often welcome, much in demand, offer to a fellow human. You invite them to speak truthfully back to you, and the way that this invitation tears down walls is nearly unmatchable.

You don’t even need to speak an invitation. You don’t need to acknowledge what you are doing. You merely need to take a risk and speak a single, truthful sentence that you believe. Sometimes, you might need to speak a second, truthful sentence so that the other person has a moment to get over the shock of someone speaking truthfully to them.

You must forgive them for any hesitation to engage immediately. It can take a moment in the empire of lies, where truth is treason, to confirm for oneself that what one thinks is happening is really happening: a person is being honest and inviting the same.

Courage is contagious.

Sincerity can be too.

But then be ready. You might not have time to get a word in edgewise for a while. It might be time for you to be quiet and listen, because it may have been some time since someone sincerely wanted to communicate with that person. And that means you may be party to a special opportunity: you might hear some suppressed sincerity that has long gone unheard.

That shaken bottle might become uncorked with vigor. The more vigor, the more that person likely wanted this sincerity you were able to offer. The more the person needed this honesty.

And if life gets tough, don’t be surprised if they come looking for you again. If life gets complex, don’t be surprised if they come asking. Don’t be surprised if they just need someone sincere to honestly share their view of the world with.

Humans need sincerity. Humans need honesty. Humans need courage. Without those, humans cannot come to know truth, cannot come to engage reality, will not be able to reconcile a life that is anything more than a fairy tale, that they are expected to be entertained through, and to have no explanation for why that fairy tale did not bring them fulfillment.

American culture is particularly susceptible to this.

The lies are wound tight. The structures against what is permissible to say, share, or think are thick.

As Dante wrote in the unfinished Convivio (The Banquet), those lacking guidance from their elders early in life are more easily lost to the whims of the world.

We live in an era where the elder generations, have overwhelmingly abrogated the duty of passing on wisdom from the past to those in the generations that succeed them.

This does not affect all, of course, but this is a difficult-to-miss trend that affects so many, and across multiple generations.

The wisdom cannot be passed by pop culture. It is passed down one-on-one, one trusted person at a time. This is not to be mistaken for the guru of eastern tradition, that leads a man along a set path throughout life. This is the path of the westerner: where needed wisdom can be found at various points on one’s individual journey, except the people who today line that journey – parents, clergy, instructors, family, neighbors – have not done the work to gain the wisdom, and don’t willingly share what little wisdom they have.

We are often left to our equally lost peers to sort this mess out, stumbling through the darkness together, grasping at the slightest hints of truth, vowing to never let the succeeding generation feel so lost, so cut adrift by their elders.

The most vital inheritance handed down from the previous generation is not monetary, and neither is the most vital inheritance handed down to the next generation monetary. Yet, the imperative of our era is increasingly to speak only the trite, the inoffensive, the intentionally bland-to-the-point-of-being-dishonest statements.

Political correctness is a political attack on sincerity, in hopes of stopping people from speaking that with which the censor disagrees. All censorship, in all ages, is an attempt to silence truth. There’s no need to silence lies. Lies can be easily laughed off. Fake news leaves the fake news source incredible.

Anyone who will censor seeks to attack sincerity, courage, and honesty, seeks to limit the ability of two people to communicate, seeks to limit the mutual pursuit of truth. Seeks to do the most anti-social of activities: to stop individuals in a culture from stumbling together through the hardships, joys, and lessons of this thing we call life.

It is the exact opposite of a debate. It is the exact opposite of shared exploration. It is the exact opposite of love. It is the exact opposite of reveling in what it is like to be a human.

It is a dirty trick, played on what so many fundamentally want, probably what every one of us, in our healthiest of moments, fundamentally wants: to know at least as much truth as needed to negotiate life as well as possible.

You refuse to let that attack on the social take place when you speak a truthful sentence to a stranger.

You announce your sincerity.

You allow them to join you there.

And in this very tense time in human existence, a time that barely feels real, you do your fellow human a great service by showing a little courage and speaking a true statement.

So many live lives in which they feel they could collapse under the weight of the neglected reality, under the weight of the lies.

Don’t be surprised if in a situation like that, a person reacts sharply to your invitation to sincerity, perhaps even finds themselves crying – in sorrow, in relief, in anger, in joy, in some combination.

Do not be surprised, either, if a daily habit of honesty with those you encounter, will, days or weeks from now, build into a ministry of honesty.

In some places, in the midst of the lockdown, the parks, the grocery stores, the sidewalks are the only places where people might even come into each other’s orbit, with even that being prohibited in many jurisdictions.

If you continue bravely in such a moment and do the natural thing, deep down, the natural thing for a human, and take a risk to connect honestly with this stranger, who probably laughs a lot like you, and probably hurts a lot like you too – then you will be so richly rewarded.

In a moment of crisis like the one we are in, you will barely be able to walk through the park peacefully.

But it will be a blissful walk through the park.

The people who run into you will stop you. Be the most honest voice in their lives, and you will be surprised at how many times each day, you hear that a person had been hoping to run into you, especially in a moment of crisis – personal, or global, like the one we face.

So many lies are poured onto a person each day. So many taboos seek to prevent them from reacting with honesty. So much pressure and manipulation surrounds them.

The people around you – those known to you and those unknown to you – need your courage, want your sincerity, long for someone with honesty, who they can be honest back to. This is a sharp contrast to the way in which many go through each day: being seen as an annoying object, whose truth needs silencing, no matter what manipulations and contortions it takes to silence that truth.

That fellow human needs that truth from you. Needs that sincerity. Needs that courage.

And that courage is so contagious.

Please give it to them. You will be repaid many times over.

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