I was ten years old. We lived on the first floor of a tenement building—my mother, my father, and I. I could see it from my bedroom, which had a window into an alleyway. A little helicoptering seed had blown over the walls and into a dirt-filled crack between two concrete blocks.
It was scarcely big enough to be called a “tree” yet, but I knew what it was, because I had seen pictures of saplings, and the tough brown stem wasn’t like the blades of grass that poked up occasionally around the Settlement.
Over three weeks I watched it sprout up. First the thin stem, then, slowly, a single leaf that uncurled hesitantly like a little tongue tasting the air.
By the end of the third week, it was gone. I watched them remove it. They came with rubber gloves and spades.
The next day I told my Educator about the tree. “What are they going to do with it?” I asked. I felt a bit sorry for the little plant, brave enough to try and grow out of doors.
“They’ll take it to a conservatory,” she said.
“What’s a conservatory?” I asked.
“It’s a special place where plants are kept,” said the Educator.
That piqued my interest. I hadn’t known that any plants were kept in the Settlement; I’d been told they were all dead for a long ways round, if any were even still alive on earth.
I wanted to see a real tree, a live tree in full growth, like in books. I wanted to go to the conservatory. I decided I wanted to be a part of the plant removal crew when I grew up.
I never did join the plant removal crew. Ultimately, it was a different path that led me back to the tree.
Thanks everyone who’s followed this blog! My book’s preorder campaign is continuing to progress, now at 9% of the total goal. That means I still need 678 people to pre-order the book in order for it to go to print. Meanwhile, I have a cool new cover design – self-illustrated, of course!
“There was only one person in this town caught in the grip of an evil cult – and that person was me.”
Please consider pre-ordering your copy of this new conservatively-minded dystopia over at www.inkshares.com/books/the-kingdom-of-heaven ! This is a story about the dangers of biotechnologies, surveillance, government control, and Malthusian environmentalism, and how they will be defeated.
As well, there is a book trailer to watch on YouTube.
Hello blog followers! I’m pleased to announce my newest project, a book that I wrote over the last year titled “The Kingdom of Heaven”. It’s a book based on dystopian concepts that I’ve had in mind for years, but with a new tonal shift. Years ago I imagined a world where all of humanity had been concentrated into one place, and totally separated from nature. It is ironic to me that the mainstream industrial idea of environmentalism involves preventing human contact with nature as much as possible, and to me this idea goes hand in hand with depopulationist and Malthusian viewpoints.
In the Settlement, mankind has been cordoned within four walls for almost five hundred years; and are ruled by a military corporation called Dynamic National Technologies, Incorporated (or DYNTEC). With no more worlds to conquer, DYNTEC has turned like an ingrown fingernail on its own citizens, branding them as Detractors if they question the goals or motives of their rulers.
Yet. For all this, the Settlement’s control is not absolute. Despite their claims to the contrary, there are still some surviving humans outside the walls of the Settlement, and it is these which our protagonist Alex is ordered to investigate when she comes to work for DYNTEC. By disguising herself as a refugee, Alex infiltrates this “primitive religious cult”, only to find they have been vastly mischaracterized by her superiors.
The Kingdom of Heaven is available to preorder here.
Pre-orders are necessary to help bring the book to publication! Please help me reach my goal of 750 copies sold (paperback or ebook). Sample chapters are also available at the link!
Tuesday at 11: A local college ministry’s student outreach luncheon has been accused of serving food to a group of hungry students on campus.
Our correspondents interviewed students, who gave statements seeming to confirm the allegations.
“We heard there was a luncheon,” said one student, a freshman who commutes over 100 miles a day. “So we came. I’m hopeful that what we’re about to eat is indeed food.”
Another student said she lacks cooking equipment in her dorm and needed something to eat between her tightly-packed classes. “This is soup,” she said, between sips of the unsalted canned bean water, puckering her lips. It’s good. Really. I’m thankful. I’d be going hungry without it.”
The ministry director was quoted as saying, “Really? We thought we had made it perfectly clear that none of what we were serving was actual food or intended to be taken as such. We’re totally innocent. I mean, if we were claiming that any of this bilge was edible, that would be an insult to starving beggars. We weren’t sent here to feed people. Just look at our budget. All of this cost $5.37, including the napkins.”
Besides the alleged soup the outreach has also served technical tacos, purported potatoes, and so-called salad, which was observed by our reporters to contain a few leaves of iceberg lettuce.
Update: Allegations that the ministry was serving food without a permit have been dropped on the grounds that they were not serving food.
A Faraday cage is a scientific concept invented by Michael Faraday in 1836. The purpose of such a “cage” is to trap radio waves by creating a literal cage around the source of the radio waves, formed by metal, which the waves cannot pass through. Depending on the size of the waves, a Faraday Cage can be made of literal bars of steel, a fine mesh, or just plain old sheet metal.
For example, aluminum foil.
Today I am going to show you how to make a simple, portable faraday cage for your phone! There are many reasons why you might want such a thing. For generations people have been using faraday cages to protect their electronics from the possibility of an EMP attack; for example, this is how big companies protect their server rooms.
In the case of the average person’s phone, there are more imminent threats. For example, government and corporate tracking, and malware/hackers. We know you can turn the location settings off, but who today doesn’t suspect malfeasance on the part of big tech? Scary. This case made of aluminum foil can keep your phone from receiving radio waves, GPS, Wifi, and Bluetooth. That means your phone cannot ping off cell towers, send or receive data to anyone, connect to anyone else’s device via bluetooth, or be located with GPS. In fact, your phone might as well not exist. (Just keep in mind, if you use it, that you won’t know about your missed calls.)
I thought about making and selling these, but I quickly realized there wasn’t time. Everyone needs one of these as soon as possible, and I am not a giant factory. So for free I am going to give out the steps that I use to make them. You will need to purchase only 1 item that is not usually found in your house.
Make a small box like this, about the size of your phone, by cutting out two corners of the cereal box. It should be open at one end and closed at the other, like this.
Unroll aluminum foil, (you can use a craft knife to cut it down the middle, but leave a half inch buffer or so) and roll tightly so that it has 8 or more layers on all four sides.
Wrap in the bottom like a present and secure with tape. Secure all edges with tape.
Also tuck the top into the box. This example box only has 3 layers as you can see
Next make a small cardboard shape like this and secure with tape. This is the lid of your case and it is shaped like a cigarette case.
Cover it with 6-8 layers of aluminum foil on the inside. The width should be slightly larger than your box, but less than 1/2 inch wider so it is tight after the foil is added to both.
Next get out that faraday tape. It is sticky on both sides but the bottom side is more sticky
Cut and fold the edges of the tape in.
There is your case! It should open and shut like a cigarette case and be easy to take your phone in and out of. Be sure to test it manually by calling your phone on both cellular and Wifi. Wifi is the strongest signal and most difficult to block, so if the case can block wifi signal, you know that it will block weaker signals such as GPS and Bluetooth. Now remember to take it with you events like:
Church
Peaceful protests
Any gathering if contact tracing is installed on your phone
Any time you want to be off grid
I do not recommend to try and get this past the TSA; however, I can tell you from experience that you can fly with a faraday bag in your luggage if it is pressed flat.
Thank you for reading and please share with all privacy and liberty minded folks. The trap on government surveillance is being sprung as we speak and there will be records of everything you do. This is not a substitute for going into your phone’s settings and checking location permissions.
I’m jumping into my first post with a copy from my other blog.
Let me reveal why I was up until 2:30 am researching horror tropes last night. I’ve been preparing to pop off about the whole mask thing. You guys already know what I said about mask mandates, ableism, and HIPAA. We already know that masks don’t work. I’m just saying the same thing Anthony Fauci said before he changed his mind suddenly. And nothing about the science changed. It’s not like those previous studies were invalidated. So the question is why mandate the things? And most importantly, why keep mandating the things? We had theorized it was about making people uncomfortable until the election. And yet they persist.
At this point I think another explanation is required. Now, I hate masks by default disposition. They rub up against my clothing sensitivities, my anxiety, my claustrophobia. Same for many people. But even when I find one that doesn’t upset one of these issues, I still hate them.
Because it makes me feel like some kind of faceless corporate drone. It was that line of thinking that got me to really understand what this is all about.
Masks dehumanize people. Of course, all government-mandated uniforms dehumanize and depersonalize people to some extent, as has been pointed out by critics of school uniforms and plain-color hospital gowns. But how much more so a “uniform” that covers your face?
It’s not like there aren’t a large number of existing studies focused on facial expressions and people’s ability to feel empathy for other people. Studies have shown that people are more likely to do things they find embarrassing or wouldn’t normally do when wearing sunglasses. A study from 2013 showed that medical masks reduce empathy and understanding in the doctor-patient relationship. Just placing something over your face increases a sense of social anonymity, which encourages antisocial behavior.
We already know this. There’s a reason why masks in history and throughout literature have symbolized loss of identity, anonymity, and being forced to hide one’s true feelings/identity, repression, conformity. (Somehow the punk crowd instantly forgot that masks were a symbol of conformity and repression.)
We know this even in the character design field, as characters without visible faces are harder to empathize with and can either seem distant and mysterious or can be killed without eliciting sympathy.
So. In an age when people are already about as distanced from each other as it’s possible to be, family structures are damaged or broken, all interaction is done over the internet (see the G.I.F.T., a similar principle) and are not allowed to socialize or gather, we are feeling less empathy for each other than ever before. And now, even when you go on your weekly outing to the grocery store, you’re not even allowed to see another human being’s face.
They want us to hate each other. That much is obvious from the last year’s rhetoric. Through masks, they even want the average person to dampen their feeling for their neighbors beyond even the damage that’s already been done. What could come of this?
The Word Came With Power 