Boiled Frogs and Insidious Cooks; CBDC’s Warming of the Water

You may have heard about the way to “cook a frog.”  I do not mean frog legs, or actually cooking for consumption, but cooking for the purpose of killing.  As the story goes, if you drop a frog into very hot water, it will immediately jump out of the pan and scramble away as fast and as far as possible.  BUT, if you gently set the frog down in cool water and very gradually increase the heat, it will sit there almost smiling until its heart stops beating and it dies.  Now, before PETA or other animal activists start protesting in my neighborhood, allow me to clarify, I, personally, have never done this nor witnessed it done.  Never in my house!  However, videos on YouTube (gotta watch it to the end!😉) suggest dropping the frog into boiling water will immediately kill it, and in the other case, unless the heat is VERY gradually increased, the amphibian will jump out as its thermoregulating nerves signal danger, even though it is cold-blooded.

Whether there is truth in the tales of cooking frogs, the illustration holds for the truth that gradual degradation of society is much more effective than revolution in changing what the general public believes.  Revolution may change a society’s politics or governance but will do little to change the standards of morals or beliefs of the culture.

A 23-year-old I knew in the early 80s thought the end of the world was approaching when he reported his employer would no longer issue his paychecks to him at the end of the week, but would directly deposit them into his bank account!  Old hat, we might say.  After all, that was over 40 years ago.  In fact, I remember as a child seeing the first Master Card commercials and my parents thinking “The Only Card You Will Ever Need” was pure evil!

A decade ago pressure was building to use paperless billing, and direct deposits and direct payments to various businesses was all the eco-rage.  Electronic transfers between accounts were assured to be more secure than writing checks or paying cash, and think of all the forests we could save!

Fast-forward to the current age, and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will get all the attention soon.  It will make financial record-keeping very simple; no need for cash or risk of getting mugged . . . except the thieves could steal your access card and PIN (Private Identification Number).  But the record of every transaction would be almost self-regulating.

The problems with cards are that they can be stolen, you can lose them, or they can be damaged or forgotten.  The simple solution will be a biomarker that will be unique to you, maybe a fingerprint or iris scan.  Facial ids on phones and other tech gadgets are gradually warming the water for us so that this will seem the next logical step.  Of course, then there are the stories of fingers stolen or pushing a dead man’s eye up to a scanner that make exciting theater for spy movies.

But overall, CBDCs promise is to be safe, secure and most importantly, convenient.  They will almost eliminate money-laundering once they are the most common form of currency.  They will guarantee that if your access is somehow forged (Lost another finger!? You need a new neighborhood! 😱), the government will make sure your “money” is restored.  And, easy!?  You can travel anywhere in the world, and with simplest computer access, you can reach into your account no matter where it is based.

As I type this, once the ongoing trials are over, we will see CBDC introduced in America as an option, the way the Chinese are initiating their digital yuan [¥] (or renminbi [RMB]) to several provinces.  It may take many years to make CBDC in America the “law of the land” that must be used in lieu of other media of exchange including crypto currencies and barter.  However, watching China will provide an index for how quickly the US could move as we become more dominated by an autocratic leadership, whatever party holds the White House or the Congress.

This is a major step in The Great Reset, a socialist globalist plan to transform the world economy guided by the “brains” of the World Economic Forum.

So what has this to do with our spiritual welfare and our ability to follow Jesus?  A great deal.  While Matthew Piepenburg concludes his article about the ABCs of CBDCs with several “I don’t knows” and that no one can predict the future, what he fails to see is the Biblical narrative that CBDCs are all precursors to a global monetary system to be invoked by a Man that the Apostle John referred to as “The Beast.”

2023: The ABC’s of CBDC, the Great Reset(s) & MORE Centralized Control

VERY importantly, we must recognize that no one can be secretly given The Mark of the Beast, even though it will not likely be called that, just as the Man will not be called The Beast.  He will deceive people into taking this Mark based on his economic policies and the world’s crises that will make his global policy look inviting.  But it will be only by one’s choice that they will subscribe to his system and receive his Mark.

The next step in the process to get us to a global monetary system is to use CBDCs in various countries, eventually to include all 193 nations of the world.  Watch for more advanced nations to assist third world countries to do this.  Thus, accepting a CBDC in any country, even using biomarkers to access your account, will NOT be taking the Mark of the Beast.  No one can inject it into you, nor can it be administered without your knowledge.  But there are “insidious cooks” who are warming the water, whether Klaus Schwab of the WEF, Xi of China, Congress or Presidents of the USA or any financial advisors assuring you that CBDCs are “safe, secure and convenient.”

Love the Truth, both the concept of it and the Person who called Himself that, and you can rest assured that you will not be deceived.  Refuse to love Truth in any form, and it will leave you warming up to becoming a boiled frog.

Intermezzo Guest Blog: Petr Svab; Experts’ Warning

This is a rather long piece compared to my usual blogs of ~1000 words, but well worth reading.  C.S. Lewis once wrote: “A tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometime be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment without end for they do so with the approval of their conscience[s].”  Read on and pray for the USA.  This article has minor formatting and grammatical edits from the original.

Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism

The US Flag at half-mast in front of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

Concerns about the nexus of big tech, big media, and big government.
By Petr Svab  January 20, 2021; Updated: January 21, 2021

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.

While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in “the land of the free,” the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors.  Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or are not even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous.  Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?

The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed — merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, Rectenwald argues.  “Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion,” he told The Epoch Times.  The power of the regime is not yet absolute, but it is becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.

The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass.  Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult.  Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as “extremists” and potential terrorists who need to be “deprogrammed.”

While the onset of the regime appears tied to events of recent years — the presidency of Donald Trump, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, the Capitol intrusion of January  6 — its roots go back decades.

Is It Really Totalitarian?
Totalitarian regimes are commonly understood as constituting a government headed by a dictator that regiments the economy, censors the media, and quells dissent by force.  That is not the case in America, but it is also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on totalitarianism indicates.

To claim power, the regimes do not initially need to control every aspect of society through government.  Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, or through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.

Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.

Also, Hitler initially did not control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.  The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.  Dissenting media in America have not been silenced by the government directly as of yet. 

But they are stymied in other ways.  In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google.  Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.  Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.”  Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative.  Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.  Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as “false” and thus reduce the audience on its platform.  Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are ideologically aligned with Facebook.

Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon’s servers.

To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there is as yet no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly.  But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement.  Indicators go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe — both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted.  The situation may get still worse as the restrictions tied to the CCP virus see broad swaths of ordinary human behavior being considered “illegal,” opening the door to nearly universal political targeting.

“I think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,” Rectenwald said.  While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it is the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates.

Totalitarian Ideology
The element “that holds totalitarianism together as a composite of intellectual elements” is the ambition of fundamentally reimagining society — “the intention to create a ‘New Man,’” explained author Richard Shorten in Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present.

Various ideologies have framed the ambition differently, based on what they posited as the key to the transformation.  Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, viewed the control of the economy as primary, describing socialism as “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,” in Das Kapital.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, viewed race as primary.  People would become “socialized” — that is transformed and perfected — by removing Jews and other supposedly “lesser” races from society, he claimed.

The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called “critical theories,” where the perfected society is defined by “equity,” meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized.  The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present “white supremacy,” however the ideologues currently define it.

While such ideologies commonly prescribe collectivism, calling for national or even international unification behind their agenda, they are elitist and dictatorial in practice as they find mankind never “woke” enough to follow their agenda voluntarily.  In Marx’s prophecies, the revolution was supposed to occur spontaneously.  Yet it never did, leading Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the revolution will need leadership after all.

“The idea is that you have some enlightened party … who understand the problem of the proletariat better than the proletariat does and is going to shepherd them through the revolution that they need to have for the greater good,” explained James Lindsay, author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody.”

Elements of this intellectual foundation can be found in ideologies of many current political forces, from neo-nazis and anarcho-communists, through to progressives and to some extent even neoliberals and neoconservatives, Lindsay acknowledged.  “This is why you see so many people today saying that the only possible answers are a full return to classical liberalism or a complete rejection of liberalism entirely as fatally disposed to create progressivism, neoliberalism, etc.,” he said.

That is not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.  The roadmap could be summarized as follows:

1. There is something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality.
2. There is a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in.
3. People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it.
4. People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will.
5. People who will not accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society.

“I think that is the general thrust,” Lindsay said. “We can make the world the way we want it to be if we all just get on the same page and same project. It is a disaster, frankly.”

Points Four and Five Now Appear To Be In Progress.
Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as “violent extremism,” which social media companies should eradicate the same way they countered online recruitment content from the ISIS terrorist group.  The “core issue,” he said, “is that we have given a lot of leeway, both in traditional media and on social media, to people to have a very broad range of political views” and this has led to the emergence of “more and more radical” alternative media like OAN and Newsmax.

Stamos then mused about how to reform Americans who have tuned into the dissenters.  “How do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensus reality?” he asked in a CNN interview.
“And can you? Is that possible?” CNN host Brian Stelter added.

The logic goes as follows: Trump claimed the election was stolen through fraud and other illegalities.  That has not been proven in court and is thus false.  People who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and managed to break inside and disrupt the electoral vote counting did so because they believed the election was stolen.  Therefore, anybody who questions the legitimacy of the election results is an extremist and potentially a terrorist.

With tens of thousands of troops assembled to guard the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) recently told CNN that all guard members who voted for Trump belong to a “suspect group” that “might want to do something,” alluding to past leaders of other countries who were “killed by their own people.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recently said the Republican party needs to be “burned down or changed.”

“They want a one party state,” commented conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in a recent podcast.  “That is not to say they do not want an opposition.  They want a token opposition.  They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is okay.”

Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of “white supremacy.”

“Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.  She was referring to the Republican lawmakers who raised objections on Jan. 6 to election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.  Their objections were voted down.

“Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror?” Daily Beast’s Jeff Stein asked in a recent headline, concluding that a call for “secret police” to sniff out “extremist” Americans “may well get renewed attention.”  Under the regime, allegations of election fraud — de facto questioning the legitimacy of the leader — have become incitement of terrorism.  YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, and Twitter have either banned content that claims the election was rigged or are furnishing it with warning labels.  Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was recently recorded as saying that banning the president’s account was just the beginning.  This approach closely mirrors that of the Chinese communist regime, which commonly targets dissidents for “subverting” the state or “spreading rumors.”

What Is The Alternative?
If calls for radically reorganizing the world are inherently totalitarian, how is the world to avoid them?  The question appears to be its own answer.  If totalitarianism inherently requires allegiance to its ideology, it cannot exist in a society with a lack of such allegiance.

The United States were founded on the idea that individual rights are God-given and unalienable.  The idea, rooted in traditional beliefs that human morality is of divine origin, stands a bulwark against any attempt to assail people’s rights even for their own good.

“If you are not a believer in actual God, you can posit a God’s ideal on the matter … We have to posit some arbiter who is above and beyond our own prejudices and biases in order to ensure these kinds of rights. … Because otherwise you have this infinitely malleable situation in which people with power and coercive potential can eliminate and rationalize the elimination of rights willy-nilly,” Rectenwald said.

Two Hands: One Black, One White

On one hand, someone once said, “If everyone woke up at 6:00am and found we were all the same color, the same religion, and the same nationality, by noon we would have found something to incite our prejudices.”  Prejudice, the ignorant, unreasonable, thoughtless and uninformed formation of an unfavorable view of someone before that person has done anything to warrant such a low opinion, is as constant as the sun.

On the other hand, the manipulation of perceived prejudice to gain personal advantage over someone else is just as constant, and often constitutes a “reverse prejudice” against innocents who differ only in that they resemble those who have expressed prejudice.

On these issues I see two conflicting perspectives, both of which hold some truth.  The difficulty will be in balancing these, especially in a public forum where emotions often can run high and thoughtful dialog can become difficult.  Politicians, police officers, city council members, or anyone publicly addressing racial conflicts must be at the top of their game for any such confrontations or presentations.  It is not enough to spout maxims for the media nor to post tweets or clips on social platforms.  We need serious and thoughtful dialog whenever it will be allowed.

On the one side is the obvious injustice too often suffered by people of color, such as Ahmaud Arbery, Travis Miller and George Floyd experienced.

Anecdotally, a strong young black man who often serves as a day-nurse for a handicapped neighbor was sitting in his car in front of my home.  He had arrived 45 minutes early and was dozing in his very nice new Toyota at 8:15am.  Someone in my neighborhood called the police!!  When the officers kindly knocked on his window and woke him up, he was as professional as he always is and explained clearly his reason for being there.  He even showed them his nurse’s id and driver’s license, a courtesy on his part not required by law.  I have to wonder if an unknown white guy had been dozing in the car, would the police have been called, or might the neighbor have knocked on the window to see if he was all right?

Condoleeza Rice speaks of the racism she encountered (and overcame) growing up in the South.  Just Mercy is an excellent movie portrayal of the difficulty in minorities getting justice as recently as the 1990’s.  And of course, the more recent crimes against blacks in Alabama, Kentucky, and Minnesota simply aggravate a perception of white carelessness.

However, on the other side the BLM “movement” lacks validity based on its origins in Marxist philosophy and socialist intentions (https://thefederalist.com/2016/09/28/black-lives-matter-bringing-back-traditional-marxism/).  While it is true that black lives matter, why does the movement not address black-on-black crime that accounts for many more deaths than white-on-black violence?  Why is there no mention of one of the greatest civil rights leaders  in history in any of the speeches by BLM speakers?

“You can’t blame [these crimes] on a police officer, you can’t say this is about criminal justice reform.  This is about people carrying weapons who shot up a car with an eight-year-old baby in the car.  We’ve got to stop this.  We are doing each other more harm than any police officer on this force.  We’ve had over 75 shootings in the city over the past several weeks.  You can’t blame that on Atlanta’s Police Department.” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms, July 6, 2020.

A Facebook post that I copied for a guest blog (June 16, 2020) details a black police officer’s lament, “I realized that most in the African-American community refuse to look at solving the bigger problem that I see and deal with every day, which is black-on-black crime taking hundreds of innocent black lives each year, and instead focus on the nine questionable deaths of black men, where some were in the act of committing crimes.”

 

Jay Stalien , along with Lexington Kentucky’s Police Chief Weathers, as well as men like Travis Miller, stand as heroes in my book.  We have had a black president and blacks have access to opportunity more than at any point in our history.  Black men and women have ably competed for seats of power in CEO positions, as governors, mayors; in almost every area of authority.  We must not let “white guilt” for crimes committed by ancestors excuse illegal and unjust actions that hurt black and white communities, nor allow “victim mentality” to rule our black communities.  The issue must not be devolved into demanding equal outcomes.

Furthermore what separates us in skin color is so insignificant, one source put it at 0.01 % of our DNA!  It is simply that more or less melanin is most easily identifiable to the ignorant who insist on seeing us as “different races” instead of recognizing we are all the human race with insignificant differences in melanin.  As Vodde Baucham, a black minister at a predominantly white church says, “We are all actually the same color . . . from our melanin; we’re just different shades of the same color.  Just because you don’t have as much melanin as I do, don’t you DARE think God does not love you as much as he loves me, because He gave me more!”

In Mother to Son Jasmine Holmes writes poignantly about “the talk” black mothers must have with their sons, not about the birds and bees like white moms, but about how to act when in driving downtown or across country and the additional dangers he will face just for having more melanin in his skin.  She offers us a window to see what black boys face as they grow into men in America. By giving voice to the perspectives of their mothers, Holmes offers Christ-followers a way forward toward racial unity and understanding.

She explains how one of the most difficult challenges faced by black Christian mothers is helping these children strike the right balance between their blackness and their Christianity.  She makes us wonder if white Christians feel this same conflict?  Do white mothers instruct their children to subject their cultural whiteness to Christianity?

She admits that it has been hard to drive this point home with a black son.  She stresses he must reject media that might be culturally affirmed but violates faith values.  Bitterness, resentment, and hostility — though culturally justified — cannot be embraced by young disciples of Christ, and that is true no matter how much or little melanin you have, whether your hand is black or white.