On The Ground

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Something also occurred to me after writing Hotel California, or Hotel Strategy from a comment that was made about it,

“Migrants are used as weaponised fodder in the process of transforming Western societies. They too, will suffer from the ‘transition’ to a more Totalitarian structure”

And something came back to me I had thought of previously, about warfare and tactics. Little things that get pieced together.

Scotland – previously hearing about the victories of Scotland, before they were plundered by rules, regulations and laws like the rest of us, but we are led to believe that back in the day (not sure exactly when), they couldn’t take Scotland because of its rugged landscape, and the inhabitants’ tendency to know the land better than the invaders, and be able to evade them, or through strategy outwit them, outlast them and the use of guerrilla tactics.

Vietnam – Same as above, keeping the enemy on the backfoot and utilising the landscape.

So, with that in mind, wouldn’t it suit a double purpose to be able to displace an awful lot of people from various regions? You get two birds with one stone, because while they are leaving their own lands and familiar territory, someone else is eyeing it up. Then they encourage you to relocate to the unfamiliar, which destabilises that area once they arrive in such large numbers, which also makes it difficult for the locals to be able to group and make the best of their area or resources. Make no mistake, we are in the biggest land grab, people grab and resources grab we have ever known, and it seems the future looks rather precarious right now, so if we leave it in the hands of those who are pulling the strings, it won’t be much of a future for any of us…

(c) K Wicks

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Hotel California or Hotel Strategy?

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It’s a very strange thing that is occurring in the UK, maybe not if you are privy to the truth of why, but to us On The Ground, it’s looking nefarious. So, i’ll go through the possible motives that I have seen discussed and what I have mulled over myself with the information at hand.

Hotels. At first, I thought it was just to stop people trying to holiday here, around the first lockdown is when I started really noticing they were doing it. Cancelling people’s events that had been booked well in advance, and then block booking the whole hotel for an extended period of time on a government contract. Weird right? Seemed a possible lifeline for some hotels though, with the lockdown and lack of tourists, so I can see why many would have jumped at the chance, but just possibly many have been forced, I don’t know.

But by booking many of the hotels up and down the country, and even more so now, it restricts the native population, and tourists from having anywhere to stay, so it minimises money being generated through those means for the rest of the local area. The figures being discussed about how much it is costing the government/tax payer to collect, feed, house, provide spending money, medical treatment, travel costs for them and family, phones and clothes etc for the people being put into the hotels is eye-watering if they are true. Which does also beg the question, why is that actually happening? When so many are struggling who have paid into the magic money pot the government keep utilising for their own ideas, why is it that people who arrive unannounced and unidentifiable are just given all of the above? That is also part of the mystery. But does seem awfully convenient if you wanted to further destabilise communities and certain areas, it’s been noted there is a distinct lack of elderly and female persons amongst the daily new arrivals, so I can see why it’s of concern. Sweden has shown us that very fast, unlimited movement of people doesn’t bode well for the destination country, with other European countries not far behind in that, especially with such a different ideology coming with them. So why is it that so many countries all offered handouts at the same time, encouraging vast numbers of people to migrate? Guilt? No, I’m not buying that. Is it the Kalergi plan? Because it really does seem like that when you read it through.

But I do sometimes wonder what of the people who have been displaced, who are then being puppeteered to displace others. Do they know they are just pawns? Or care? Do they think that a better life awaits because someone promised it and that it’s just there on a silver platter? Shattered illusions can create a very broken mentality, and one which is not always easily mended. And maybe that is where we can all be united, in disappointment, that this isn’t what anyone thought it would be…

(c) K Wicks

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Consumerism

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I’ve already pointed out how the conveyor of consumerism is now putting us as the product in my article Mark of the Beast. But I started reading an interesting book from the 50’s that was recommended to me and would like to delve further into the concept around it and the marketing of it.

The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard. He’s the author who wrote that special book I refer to a lot, The People Shapers. So thought it was about time I read this one too. It’s about marketing, more specifically the techniques and strategies used since the 50’s to convince us to buy things. Which then took on a new role for many other areas as well, helping to shape how we are today as a society. Although this book is about the US, it can be applied to here as well. I’m only two chapters in, and it’s gold. Covering the use of mass psychoanalysis to guide heavily funded research and campaigns. Within the commercial landscape initially and then increasingly in the political one. I’ll share some key phrases with you.

“What the probers are looking for, of course, are the whys of our behaviour, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favour”

Very quickly after that line, he mentions it moving from the “genial world of James Turber into the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother”. Indeed, he is correct about that, as we see around us today and especially with that particular book being mentioned a lot. But this next sentence stands out to me

“Another aspect of people’s behaviour that troubled marketers is that they are too easily satisfied with what they already have”.

They were concerned that although business was booming across the board it couldn’t be sustained unless you put more pressure on everyday Americans to consume more. In a 1955 Christianity and Crisis publication they stated

“The dynamics of an ever-expanding system require that we be ‘persuaded to consume to meet the needs of the productive process’.”

So, with over-production threatening, they turned their attention, not to that they might be making to much, no, it was that the people were buying too little. Funny and tragic all at once really. With billions being poured into marketing, the phrase ‘We don’t sell lipstick, we buy customers’ came about. People became a bigger commodity then I realise. But their biggest hurdle it seems at first was that after a time, most people really did have what they need. And if the products were any good, shouldn’t need replacing every year. So, what to do. They went for the idea of creating ‘psychological obsolescence’ to make people feel dissatisfied with what they have and want new. I wonder whether this is how that saying ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ came from. To encourage you to covet what someone else has, to think they have more, or better and that you too should have it. That’s really raged out of control now, hasn’t it?

We know they use whatever trick they can to get us to buy things, but it isn’t just about the bottom line, or money. It seems to be about controlling the way you think as with an awful lot these days. Bit more sinister than just ‘buy my stuff’ isn’t it?

(c) K Wicks

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The Missing Dead

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It may seem like a strange thing to think, that we have dead people, that are missing. I don’t mean living people who vanished and are, were presumed dead. I mean the ones who knowingly died, but yet they are absent from the records, or they were removed from the normal decomposition process.

We all know there will always be people unaccounted for, in natural disasters for example many are lost and never recovered, but as we are led to believe, those bodies find their own natural resting place, so do become part of the decomposition process (I’ll abbreviate this to D.C for this as I may use it a lot). Even people that are murdered and buried, although they have been stolen from the living records, they at least become part of the earthly death records as it were.

Mummies – as we all know ancient Egyptians and other civilisations in South America and China preserved lots of their dead, for what ultimate purpose we can’t be sure, but they remain, or at least did. Turns out we had a rather macabre taste in the sixteenth century – called Mummy Brown, a paint. Yes, a paint. We used mummified remains to create a ‘luxurious’ brown paint for artists, completely destroying the remains to do so (human and feline). Which it turns out, most of the artists didn’t actually know where it came from, demand creating an extra market for other corpses when the supply ran low. Slaves and criminals were used instead. Once the artists began to find out what was in this paint though, it changed. They stopped using it, making the sinister trade drop off dramatically, and eventually ‘killing it’ altogether. One famous artist apparently ceremoniously buried his tube of Mummy Brown paint once he knew of its origins, such was the feelings about it at the time.

But, aside from the interesting facts about history and art there, I realised that meant there was a huge number of bodies missing from there, and everywhere, I know we can’t possibly know where all the dead people have been buried. And lots aren’t buried, they are cremated, which I have taken into account. This is only for the ones who were meant to become of that D.C.

Fertilizer – I didn’t realise we used to use the bones of the dead in fertilizer, should have considered it as I know we use other bonemeal as such, but there were times in the not-so distant-past, that we did. Before the trade of guano became a thing in the UK, it was bones that were used to top up the soils for nutrients as the population increased and food resources were stretched. It is said that battlefields would be raided, even graves robbed for the necessary components to be obtained. So, again, lots of people missing from the record.

Now, it isn’t the fact they are missing which is the issue, as I said, many get cremated so aren’t present either, or some are never found, or completely turn to dust. It’s the fact that it means we have an even more incomplete record that I at first thought. There are so many gaps, and holes in the bigger picture we are told is all sewn up and explained. I guess I thought because we had a doomsday book, and taxes, and courts and records for over 1000 years, we knew how many, and what, and how much. But we don’t really, only fragments of the past remain, and the gaps get filled in either by our own imagination, or someone else’s.

(c) K Wicks

The Weight of Food

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We know about cutting corners and profits coming first, but a recent video of someone in a supermarket weighing food hits the nail on the head. They grab a bag of courgettes, which say 1kg. Put on the scales, nope. Potatoes, should be 1.5kg, nope. Carrots at 1kg, and three for three. Nope. Seems like just a few grams here and there, but it all adds up.

I thought about bags of pre-packaged food previously, not from a weight perspective I’ll admit, but from a wastage point of view. I don’t eat a huge amount of food, and like fresh food, so used to buy a small amount, weigh it yourself, buy what you need. Then it started changing to plastic boxes of grapes, bags of potatoes and others things bunched and pre weighed, for your ‘convenience’ and to save them money on bags, labels, wastage. All that happened for me though, is I ended up wasting more food as it wasn’t used in time. Paying more for using less, getting us into the swing of things early. Or some people may be compelled to eat more, because there is more, so as not to waste it.

Once you understand they are there to sell you as many and as much as they can, you understand why supermarkets are laid out the way they are, lit the way they are and food packaged the way it is. I am doing an article on Consumerism which touches on the techniques and means by which they have worked out how to get the ‘best out of marketing’. Unfortunately to do that, they had to change the way people think to make that happen. So, rather than tailoring the products to the needs of the people, they started changing the needs of the people to fit the product. Sad really. To change the mentality of millions of people, just because you want to make money and tell them what to do. But that technique did not stay confined to only marketing food, beauty products and homeware. It was quickly adopted by the pharmaceutical industry, education and business. So, to you it might just seem like the odd carrot, or a potato, but it isn’t, it’s continuing the lie that things are fair, prices are good and corporations care about your best interests, healthy eating and lifestyle. They don’t care, they just want you to consume as much as possible and be owned. It’s that simple.

(c) K Wicks