Families to receive $1.5 million after Supreme Court victory over LGBT storytelling in school

Zero Hedge

A Maryland school district that lost a recent U.S. Supreme Court case will pay $1.5 million to parents who weren't allowed to opt their children out of LGBT story time, the families' attorneys said.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the plaintiffs in the landmark Mahmoud v. Taylor case, announced the settlement on Feb. 20. The defendant, the Montgomery County Board of Education — which oversees Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest school district in the state — was also ordered to comply with court orders mandating advance notice and opt-out provisions.

"Public schools nationwide are on notice: running roughshod over parents' rights and religious freedom isn't just illegal — it's costly," Eric Baxter, Becket senior counsel and the lead attorney in the case, said in a Feb. 20 statement.

"This settlement enforces the Supreme Court's ruling and ensures parents, not government bureaucrats, have the final say in how their children are raised."

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'Incredible victory': Federal judge prohibits trans-related grooming efforts in California schools

Joseph MacKinnon ) Blaze Media

Judge Roger Benitez issued a permanent injunction against policies that require educators to keep parents in the dark or indulge gender delusions.

Democrat policies proudly championed in California by Gov. Gavin Newsom have for years kept parents in the dark about their children's mental health and personal circumstances — particularly about whether their kids are masquerading as members of the opposite sex at school and undergoing a so-called "social transition" with the help of school staff.

Unwilling to lie to parents in violation of their faith and ethics, and facing the prospect of retaliation or dismissal over their dissent, Christian educators Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori West filed a lawsuit in 2023 with the help of the religious liberty group the Thomas More Society.

By October, their legal challenge targeting secretive, grooming transgender policies across the state had evolved into a class-action lawsuit involving other adversely impacted teachers as well as parents.

U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez delivered Democrat officials and other gender ideologues a big upset on Monday, ruling in favor of the plaintiffs and against the grooming regime.

Benitez noted at the outset of his 52-page ruling that long before the advent of compulsory education in the U.S., "parents have carried out their rights and responsibility to direct the general and medical care and religious upbringing of their child."

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Leaked Video: Woke Elite College Held "Disgusting" Sexual Orientation Performance

Zero Hedge

Amherst College, proudly one of America’s wokest institutions, has once again outdone itself in the name of “sexual respect.”

A group of traumatized students claim they were effectively coerced into a mandatory orientation spectacle where student performers humped under blankets, moaned theatrically, and pelted the audience with condoms “like confetti,” footage leaked to the Washington Free Beacon shows.

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See also: "Children Are NOT Experiments": House-Passes Bill Criminalizing Transgender Treatments For Minors

It's not LEFT OR RIGHT, it's all about PSYOPS : Charlie Kirk: The Crucial Learnings From his Death...and The Perpetrators Exposed

You are Being indoctrinated: How to Practice Proper Social Distancing

Corbett Report

SHOW NOTES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=35507

We are being told to flatten the curve by practicing social distancing. We are being told to quarantine shame those who break the new societal taboos. So how exactly do you introduce entirely new cultural norms across much of the world in the space of just a few weeks? Watch and learn.

CORONAVIRUS "LIVE EXERCISE", JAN 2020

OCCAM'S RAZOR ON TERROR EVENTS

Below are a number of indicators that the coronavirus is, essentially, a globally orchestrated "live exercise" in managing a pandemic (preceded in October last year by Event 201, a "pandemic tabletop exercise"). We can infer that the alleged purpose of this exercise is really a flimsy pretext for fear-mongering instigated by the global power elite in order to exercise better control - there are about 8,500 of them and 7 billion of us. The scope of social control laid bare by this pandemic is truly scary. What social controls will be implemented and how this event will be used as a pretext for blaming looming economic problems only time will tell.

Most importantly, however, the power elite always give us the chance to opt out of the response they wish to instil in us. Whenever they hoax us, they always provide deliberate signs, for example, obvious signs of fakery, over-the-top ridiculousness, contradictions, different versions of the story, physical impossibilities, poor expression, grammar and spelling (beyond what might be termed "sloppy journalism"), smiling grievers, lack of explanation where it is expected, Masonic numbers and symbols, the actual truth (or distorted version of it), etc.  They are also meticulous in never faking a single piece of evidence so well that it can be used by someone who believes their story to brandish it in defence of it. See They Tell Us Clearly for examples.

As responsible citizens it is our duty to call out the power elite when we can identify a very large number of anomalies in the story they drown us in with, additionally, not a single skerrick of evidence to support it.

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California Parents Horrified At New Sex-Ed Agenda

Liberty Nation 

The debate over whether schools should teach sex education to minors has been going on for decades. But now, perhaps more than ever, many parents are horrified by what their children are being taught – especially when parents, despite their religious beliefs, have no say about the teaching materials.

In a small California community, parents and clergy were so appalled at the explicit and LGBTQ-inspired lessons, they went undercover to investigate deeper. What they discovered at a Riverside County Comprehensive Health Education meeting so horrified them, they determined to stop the curriculum.

Our Watch President Pastor Tim Thompson said:

“We don’t want our children exposed to some of these things they are showing, th(is) pornographic, sexually explicit material. It has no place in the classroom. It’s not right, and it won’t be tolerated.”

Thompson was referring to Positive Prevention Plus, the text for sex ed classes. John Andrews, parent of a student in the Murrieta School District, was sick over the explicit material depicted in the “educational” materials. He said:

“They talk about mutual masturbation. They discuss gender roles, the gender spectrum, and in the support materials … they take it even further. They discuss everything, topics like roleplaying for different genders, blood play, dental dams … fisting is mentioned. I mean, they mention it all.
“If I were to show that material to a child, I would be brought up on charges. But somehow our public schools are allowed to teach this to junior high and high school kids.”

The graphics in the instructional guides use cartoon images so detailed that many parents found them inappropriate. Wanting to discover more about what children would be learning, Thompson’s group attended meetings held by the school boards. At one particular meeting in Riverside, a woman went “undercover” and recorded the event. Thompson said he was shocked to discover some of the biggest contributors to the new sex ed curriculum included Planned Parenthood and Cardea Services, which he said is a huge advocate for the LGBT community. Another shocker was that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was on hand to explain how to excuse children from class to get abortions without parents finding out.

“We knew parents had to see for themselves or else they weren’t going to believe it,” Thompson said, referring to the video he posted.

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The Netflix Series “13 Reasons Why” Linked to a Spike in Suicide Rates

Vigilant Citizen

A study supported by the National Institute of Mental Health observed a near 30% increase in suicide rates amongst teenagers in the month following the release of “13 Reasons Why” on Netflix. 

Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry recently published a study titled Association Between the Release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why and Suicide Rates in the United States: An Interrupted Times Series Analysis and its conclusion is quite telling:

The release of 13 Reasons Why was associated with a significant increase in monthly suicide rates among U.S. youth aged 10 to 17 years. Caution regarding the exposure of children and adolescents to the series is warranted.

According to the study, 13 Reasons Why was associated with a 28.9% increase in suicide rates amongst young people directly following its release in April 2017. The number of deaths by suicide recorded during this month was greater than the number seen in any single month during the five-year period examined by the researchers.

These results confirm prior concerns regarding the show. Indeed, immediately after its release, various mental health specialists and organizations warned against the insidious effects of the show on its viewership. The main problem: Graphic depiction of suicide combined the glorification of the person committing it.

“Mental health experts describe the show as worrisome and point to how its relatable characters and graphic depiction of suicide can pose a health risk for young people already struggling with mental health issues.”
– CNN, ’13 Reasons Why’ tied to rise in suicide searches online

Shortly after the show’s premiere, a study revealed that 13 Reasons Why was linked to a rise in suicide-related web searches, notably “How to commit suicide”.

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A Teen Vogue Video Says: “This Idea That the Body Is Either Male or Female is Totally Wrong”

Vigilant Citizen

Teen Vogue, a magazine marketed directly to young people, posted a video on YouTube where various speakers dismiss the science that differentiates the male and female sexes. It is yet another blatant example of the agenda to blur genders.

Teen Vogue recently posted a video on YouTube entitled 5 Common Misconceptions About Sex and Gender and it is … quite surreal. The YouTube description says: “7 Activists and LGBTQIA+ people debunk common misconceptions about sex and gender”. In the video, various speakers (none of them in the field of science) dismiss scientific facts about the human body to replace them with artificial constructs.

To be honest, this was difficult to watch. Because it is NOT about the right of people to live their lives in whatever way they feel happy and comfortable. It goes way beyond, into a strange territory of delusion and social engineering. It is about superseding science and replacing it with a radical and extreme agenda that denies the existence of two sexes. And this is posted by a magazine that caters to young people.

Here’s the video.

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Out of the Ashes: Clash of Civilizations Could Summon New World Religion

Daniel Taylor Old Thinker News

 

Rockefeller-backed Federal Council of Churches pushed “World government”, “Universal system of money” and “Worldwide freedom of immigration” in 1942. The council was told by Dr. William Paton, co-secretary of the World Council of Churches, that “Collectivism is coming, whether we like it or not".

 

For those paying attention, there is a discernible pattern of social engineering that is directed at the major world religions, particularly Christianity.

This is undoubtedly a very complex issue, as there are numerous belief systems and nuanced views of millions of people. What we know is that globalist financed wars and revolutions have fueled illegal immigration and stoked flames of conflict all over the world.

It can be reasonably demonstrated that key globalist organizations are following a program for re-shaping the world’s religions utilizing a tried and true technique. It is a process called the Hegelian dialectic.

Here is a simplified outline of the dialectic as applied by globalist forces:

• Thesis (problem): Religions are bigoted, feed intolerance and fuel violence. “Extreme” examples from each group are held up for the world to see.

• Antithesis (reaction): “I don’t want to be politically incorrect”. Disassociation with demonized groups ensues.

• Synthesis (solution): A “middle ground” is found and a politically correct faith is formed under the banner of global government.

The establishment has encouraged and planted the seeds of “extremism” where it suits geopolitical agendas. The consequences of this manipulation are then pointed at in the ensuing dialectical battle as evidence of a just cause against against these ideas.

A little bit of history

Before we go further, it is important to point out that the establishment has a vested interest in shaping religion. This has been true for ages. Noted historian Alexis de Tocqueville warned us in 1835 when he wrote Democracy in America that the churches were already being usurped by power elites for their own agenda. He wrote,

“…sovereigns… are using the priests influence and turning it to their own exclusive profit. They are turning clergymen into functionaries and, often, servants, and they are using the clergy to reach the deepest recesses of the individual soul.”

This influence has continued to our modern times, but with what is perhaps a more sophisticated flair. The Rockefeller family, with their vast fortune garnered from the oil baron John D. Rockefeller Sr., played a major role in re-shaping the churches in modern America.

It comes as little surprise, given their long term goal of world government, that the Rockefeller family would approve of and support a societal outlook favorable to globalism. The use of religion is one method that, in Rockefeller’s eyes, looked to be a promising means of accomplishing this goal. Early programs such as the Interchurch World Movement focused on the maintenance of harmonious relations between people in America’s growing industrial society.

Later endeavors such as the World Council of Churches would trend towards being global in nature with goals moving beyond that of simply maintaining class stability in America to elimination of national sovereignty and world governance.

As documents show, multiple attempts have been made to urge the Christian churches to get behind programs for world governance. If the attempts were not initiated by the Rockefellers, significant financial support was provided to organizations sharing their vision for the world.

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The Dark History of the Minimum Wage

Corbett Report

TRANSCRIPT AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=27794 

There's something strange about the idea of a minimum wage. It's one of those subjects that everyone has a strong opinion about, even if they have no idea what makes actual economic sense. But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is that the minimum wage has a dirty secret that most economists don't want you to know about. Today we explore The Dark History of the Minimum Wage.

Beware Agenda 21 And Its Green New Deal: Plundering The World Under The Guise of 'Sustainable Development'

Geraldine Perry
Dissident Voice

Word to the Wise: Beware the Green New Deal!

Beware Agenda 21 and its Green New Deal!

Seemingly overnight, the Green New Deal has arrived. Given the sorry state of our environment, what possible objections could there be? In this case, plenty - and they all trace back to the Green New Deal's deeply complex and surreptitious ties to UN Agenda 21.

Those who claim that Agenda 21 amounts to little more than a right-wing rant or is somehow anti-Semitic are at best seriously misinformed. Those who buy into the carefully crafted jargon of Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, Redevelopment and the Green New Deal are similarly misinformed and need to know that the environmental movement has in fact been highjacked by the Agenda 21 plan.

First, Some Background

Journalist Thomas L. Friedman is sometimes credited with being the original source for the term "Green New Deal" because in two 2007 articles, in the New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Friedman connected FDR's "New Deal" to a new "green" economy, suggesting that this might provide an economic stimulus program that could address economic inequality and climate change at the same time. Almost prophetically, Friedman also argued in earlier writings that an "iron fist inside a velvet glove" would be needed to maintain the coming new world order.

The same year the Friedman articles came out, the Green New Deal Group was formed. By July of 2008 this group came out with its Green New Deal Report which was originally published by the New Economics Foundation. A few months later, in October of 2008, Adam Steiner, who was Executive Director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNEP), unveiled the Global Green New Deal Initiative, the objective of which was to rescue the failing global economy by creating jobs in "green" industries, "funded" of course by the big banks.

Then, following the example set by the European Greens in 2006, the United States Green Party adopted a Green New Deal platform in 2010. To its everlasting credit, the U.S. Green Party has also placed monetary reform as one of its core planks, ending the banking system's privilege of creating the nation's money (as credit or debt) and returning the monetary privilege to the government where it belongs, without which reform no other reforms are possible. Other political parties would do well to adopt this most important objective, since this is the true heart of "populism" historically. However, the vast bulk of the Green Party's Green New Deal platform bears a marked (and troubling) resemblance to the Green New Deal as set out through the United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development program.

Most recently, a twenty-nine-year-old freshman Congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has overnight managed to not only make national headlines but garner the full attention of Congress, a feat never before accomplished by one so young and so soon in office. It was her promotion of the Green New Deal that seems to have garnered her such sudden fame. But the so-called legislation she has been promoting is in reality a "draft text" that calls for a proposed addendum for House Rules: it changes the rules and creates a new process for the allocation of power, all while echoing almost verbatim United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. As a recent article in Technocracy News says, with a complete version of AOC's "bill" included: "Its scope and mandate for legislative authority amounts to a radical grant of power to Washington over Americans' lives, homes, businesses, travel, banking, and more." Dr. Naomi Wolf confirms by going over the document point by point.

The Green New Deal is in fact a part of a global sustainable development program that was officially rolled out at the "Earth Summit" held in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. Out of that summit came Agenda 21 Earth Summit: The United Nations Program of Action from Rio, a 354-page document that can be purchased at online book retailers or downloaded in pdf format from the UN website. 

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 See also: 

 Dark Green IX: UN Agenda 21 and US Land Grab 

 Dark Green X: UN Agenda 21 and SMART Growth

18 Statistics That Prove That America Has Become An “Idiocracy”

Michael Snyder
End Of The American Dream

What in the world has happened to us?  Once upon a time, America had the greatest system of education on the entire planet, and our people were sharp, capable and extremely well informed.  Sadly, none of those things are true anymore.  In 2006, Mike Judge made a movie entitled “Idiocracy” in which an individual of below average intelligence wakes up after being asleep for 500 years thanks to a military hibernation experiment.  When he wakes up, he quickly realizes that he is now the smartest man in America, and that is not a good thing.  The film became an instant classic, but when I originally watched it I thought that such a thing could never actually happen in this country.  Unfortunately, I was wrong.  Since 2006 our nation has been “dumbed down” at a pace that is absolutely staggering, and it is difficult to see a positive future for America if this trend continues.

The following are 18 statistics that prove that America has become an “idiocracy”…

#1 One recent survey found that 74 percent of Americans don’t even know how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights.

#2 An earlier survey discovered that 37 percent of Americans cannot name a single right protected by the First Amendment.

#3 Shockingly, only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government.

#4 During the 2016 election, more than 40 percent of Americans did not know who was running for vice-president from either of the major parties.

#5 North Carolina is considering passing a law which would “mean only scores lower than 39 percent would qualify for an F grade” in North Carolina public schools.

#6 30 years ago, the United States awarded more high school diplomas than anyone in the world.  Today, we have fallen to 36th place.

#7 According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.

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Science Is Starting to Catch Up to the Sci-Fi Film Gattaca

Truthstream Media

Sweden: Dying to Be Multicultural (2017)

TJ Singh

When we think of Sweden, we think blondes, Abba, and progressive politics. We may soon have to reconsider this image. Thanks to Europe's most generous immigration policies, the old Sweden is being replaced with a new Sweden. Based on his book Sweden - Dying to Be Multicultural, film-maker and journalist Pelle Neroth Taylor asks: Why do Swedes want a new country? What if this project fails?

Record Number Of Children Identifying As Transgender In UK

Zero Hedge

Kids as young as ten are switching gender by deed poll as record numbers of UK youngsters identify as transgender.

The Sun reports that the UK's Deed Poll ­Service has seen a sharp rise in the number of parents forking out £35 to change their child’s title from Miss to Master, or Master to Miss, in the past five years.

A quite shocking stat is that the service says one child under the age of 16 makes the change every day, often with a new first name. Louise Bowers, a senior deed poll officer, said:

“We used to issue a couple every couple of months — but now it’s seven to ten a week.
“The majority are teenagers, 14 or 15, but they go down to aged ten.”

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The Ruling Elites Love How Easily We're Distracted and Turned Against Each Other

Charles Hugh-Smith
oftwominds.com 

No wonder the ruling elites love how easily we're distracted and divided against ourselves: it's so easy to dominate a distracted, divided, blinded-by-propaganda and negative emotions populace.

Let's say you're one of the ruling elites operating the nation for the benefit of the oligarchy. What's the best way to distract the populace from your self-serving dominance in a blatantly neofeudal system?

1. Provide modern-day versions of Bread and Circuses to distract the commoners from what actually matters: "the golden age of TV" and binge-watching; a cultural obsession with glorifying oneself via selfies posted on Facebook and Instagram; tweeting outrage and indignation on Twitter; a corporate-state media which magnifies insignificant events into social crises, political "leaders" who intentionally inflame polarization and conflict and so on.

Combine all these distracting circuses into one 24/7 system-overload, and what do you get? A populace so distracted, so stressed, so emotionally dazed that they are unable to focus on the predatory exploitation of the ruling elites, much less figure out how to change the neofeudal status quo.

2. Divide the populace with calculatedly divisive cultural issues and turn the commoner class against itself: with no middle ground and no shared class identity allowed, the populace is easily sliced and diced into angry, disaffected tribes who blame whomever media propaganda has targeted as "the other" for the nation's woes.

Correspondent Jonathan Twombly recently posted a description of this divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling elites:

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Why Young Lives are Losing Meaning and Purpose (I)

M.K. Styllinksi
Infrakshun

The crisis of meaning and purpose is something many of us are grappling with today. Girls and boys and young adults in particular are not succeeding in this battle. The path which defines our lives up to middle and retirement age is for the majority, mostly a constellation of conditioned responses encouraged by Official Culture. It replaces true meaning with a role that serves the technosphere as opposed to our true calling. Not always, but all too frequently. Then we are back to that existential crisis of youth where something deep inside knows that to find true creative balance takes a life time of struggle against forces that oppose any kind of spiritual liberation. Unless that is, we have the support to explore the transformation that comes knocking at the door of consciousness at various stages of our lives. To even have the awareness to heed that call requires a very different society than we have now.

Life is extremely complicated for young people these days, whether they are in Western, Asian, African or Middle Eastern societies. The predisposition of tyranny from our hierarchical institutions and social systems means that such a danger will always be there, even when there is momentum toward autopoietic * social innovations. The imbalance inherent within state authority and the unceasing drive of so many to live outside it's influence is growing. This is a welcome, if as yet, ad hoc reaction against the finite and unsustainable nature of cartel capitalism and rampant state-sponsored crimes against humanity. We haven't yet found that crucial tension, that balance that provides a psychological inoculation against psychopathic infiltration which so often turns civilisations into crucibles of centralised control. Such intense focus on hierarchical power always fails and amid the rubble there are always young folks who act as literal and symbolic precursors to that descent, usually by embodying those ills and thereby showing us what long term or immediate future lies ahead. Each epoch manifests that see-saw between managed chaos and mass creativity which eventually bursts forth in destructive ways, sweeping away everything that went before.  Children and young adults are the tuning fork of future generations in this regard. Nonetheless, there is has been a very wide historical berth when it comes to defining how our youth interact with the world. The older generations have a distinct challenge to make sure our younger generations are correctly tuned to that which offers hope, spiritual strength and resilience to face what is certain to be an unpredictable and challenging future.

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Neuro-Hacking the Mass Mind

Comment: For those who don't know Lucien Cerise's work (especially French speakers) here is the link to a two-part article I wrote last year on Cerise's book 'Neuro-Hackers: Reflections on Social Engineering'.

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M.K. Styllinski
Infrakshun.wordpress.com

[...]   One man who has explored the many-headed hydra of mass mind control is French author Lucien Cerise his essays of which have appeared predominantly on Alan Soral’s Égalité & Réconciliation website which offers a fusion of left-right politics and activism. (Remember Dieudonne M’bala M’bala?) These essays have been collated, updated and arranged by Cerise into a book Neuro-Hackers: Reflections on Social Engineering (2016) (Neuro-Pirates Reflexions Sur L’Ingenierie Sociale) published by Kontre Kulture.  He notes that “it is not really a collection, but rather a book written over four years [between 2012 and 2015] and in successive layers”. 

Obviously much of the book draws from a French perspective and how social engineering operates in the French culture. The author provides rich and detailed insights, both philosophical and dialectical, into the causes and effects of our mass mind paralysis in the face of a predominantly Western-backed “soft” totalitarianism.  Thus whether you are an American or a European, the revealed dynamics apply across all cultures. In this book you will read about the widespread and systemic use of cognitive infiltration or more appropriately, “neuro-hacking” which describes the institutionalised colonisation of our minds by pathological constructs designed to engineer conformity and compliance to social, cultural and geo-political directives.

I have translated key passages from the foreword  so that readers can gain an introductory flavour of his work.  It might be as well to start with the back cover which provides a synopsis of the contents:

“The first question that runs through this collection of texts is: ‘How to hack a brain?’ The second, essential question then immediately follows: “How to protect it?” This is because brain-hacking through social engineering and other processes is already a reality, and hackers are our brains. This ‘neuro-hacking’ can involve acting on the hardware, that is to say, on the biological and genetic substrate of the brain, but it can also involve acting on the software, that is to say, on the communication code that we learn from society. This code of epigenetic origin – this language, or software – comes to us from the socio-cultural bath into which we are plunged since childhood, imprinting on the brain its neuronal architecture. The study of social groups, their mode of construction and the links which structure them has allowed those who want to control crowds to act on its members, to modify their behaviour or even destroy them as individuals and groups – the ones most dependent on others. For individuals disconnected from any group, hierarchy, representation, or stereotype can only survive by developing symptoms of psychosis. By attacking the natural links, Oedipal ties of the masculine / feminine differentiation, but also of the parent / child hierarchy, by abolishing the notion of limits, whose overcoming in psychology is called perversion, it is society as a whole that is attacked. Destructured and made malleable – one can speak of a ‘liquid society’ – it will then be the plaything of a small oligarchy which will have nothing more to fear from the people whose souls it has appropriated.”

The author takes his inspiration from Neuro-Slaves, by Palo Cioni and Marco Della Luna, a work of cognitive science and social psychology which reviews the various methods of reducing a population to slavery by targeting the brain and bypassing its defence mechanisms.  From a macro-social perspective, one of the most importance principles he believes will counter the present directives of social engineering is the maintenance of a healthy, balanced national self-interest since a national health cannot be secured if we are at the behest of globalist visions, their economic warfare and all that comes with it. In fact, any individual, business or grouping that wishes to maintain a healthy psycho immunological system and to keep alive its spiritual and cultural traditions needs to develop true autonomy, sovereignty and self-determination before it can reach out and engage in the ideal of an “international altruism,” and indeed to allow an emergence of true community at home. In effect, without this independence of mind and natural political pragmatism we are prey to a continual hacking of our neurology, a psycho-virus that seeks to subvert, disinform and hijack constructive forms of perception which would otherwise, quite naturally lead to activities that would denote a rise in public awareness and critical thinking.

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Tipping point for large-scale social change

Comment:  And it surely depends entirely on the quality and nature of that "tipping point". Social change is rooted in the quality of knowledge and perception - how well a group has read objective reality. The closer it is to truth the more probable it is these adopted "new norms" promote true freedom and emancipation.  Otherwise, it's just a tipping point for more social engineering which simply masks ideological subversion under the guise of "progress." 

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Science Daily

When organizations turn a blind eye to sexual harassment in the workplace, how many people need to take a stand before the behavior is no longer seen as normal?

According to a new paper published in Science, there is a quantifiable answer: Roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before large-scale social change occurs. This idea of a social tipping point applies to standards in the workplace and any type of movement or initiative.

Online, people develop norms about everything from what type of content is acceptable to post on social media, to how civil or uncivil to be in their language. We have recently seen how public attitudes can and do shift on issues like gay marriage, gun laws, or race and gender equality, as well as what beliefs are or aren't publicly acceptable to voice.

During the past 50 years, many studies of organizations and community change have attempted to identify the critical size needed for a tipping point, purely based on observation. These studies have speculated that tipping points can range anywhere between 10 and 40%.

The problem for scientists has been that real-world social dynamics are complicated, and it isn't possible to replay history in precisely the same way to accurately measure how outcomes would have been different if an activist group had been larger or smaller.

"What we were able to do in this study was to develop a theoretical model that would predict the size of the critical mass needed to shift group norms, and then test it experimentally," says lead author Damon Centola, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Drawing on more than a decade of experimental work, Centola has developed an online method to test how large-scale social dynamics can be changed.

In this study, "Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention," co-authored by Joshua Becker, Ph.D., Devon Brackbill, Ph.D., and Andrea Baronchelli, Ph.D., 10 groups of 20 participants each were given a financial incentive to agree on a linguistic norm. Once a norm had been established, a group of confederates -- a coalition of activists that varied in size -- then pushed for a change to the norm.

When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the majority of the population adopted the new norm. In one trial, a single person accounted for the difference between success and failure.

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