Stephanie C's Contributions

Dear Comrade 153691:

It has come to our attention - through your loyal neighbor Comrade 156901 - that you have violated several statutes of the 2023 Tolerance and Equality Act to End All Racial Bias, Discrimination, and Disadvantage.

The stress in the air is palpable. I had actually been planning on writing an article this week on managing stress while all this craziness is going on in the world, and then I heard the sad news that Michael C. Ruppert had committed suicide. Michael C. Ruppert was a prepper, 9/11 activist, and Peak Oil proponent. He had apparently suffered from severe depression over the years, so his friends are cautioning the conspiracy-minded from concluding that he had actually been taken out.

You can listen to his last podcast here.

Taking this news at face value, I feel it is incredibly important that people are taught better coping mechanisms for dealing with the stress of everything falling apart in the world. We talk a lot about prepping financially and physically, but not much is being done to "prep" people for the mental health challenges that are sure to come up if the schnitzel really does hit the fan.

By the time you read this, God knows what will have happened with that crazy stand-off going on in Nevada , where apparently "public lands" aren't quite so public when an endangered turtle is sitting on them. Natural News, however, calls into question this so-called environmental siege, by blowing the lid off of certain crony capitalism deals involving said lands in question, energy companies, and fracking .

In case you hadn't heard, Firefox CEO Brendan Eich resigned over pressure from...get this...a dating website . The problem? Years ago, he donated to Proposition 8 in California, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. Proposition 8 passed in California, despite the Left Coast's reputation for being a pro-gay paradise.

So for having a mainstream view, this man was targeted, attacked, and ousted from his job - all thanks to the "Gaystapo."

I watched some old films recently that made me think about the nature of reality and how it is presented to us - often as lies.

The original Conan the Barbarian from 1982 is filled with brutal fight scenes. Many of these scenes involve horses not only falling, but in some cases flipping over completely. Usually, the horse would just roll right back up again and seemed just fine. In one amazing shot, a horse actually rolled down a hill through a thicket of wooden stakes, and after a few revolutions fluidly glided right back up to standing like he was some giant cat.

It's amazing to me how many people in our modern world live in massive denial. Try explaining to someone steeped in mainstream news that the United States could face a massive economic collapse . They are likely to laugh at you. I guess this denial is a direct result of having too much prosperity - you just think it will always be like that.

Walking through the SXSW crowds in downtown Austin this past Saturday, I had this brief, morbid thought about how much damage someone could do to a large group of people there, if they so chose. It seemed inevitable that eventually something bad would happen, and a few days later, it came in the form of a cowardly drunk driver who decided to plow through crowds of people rather than deal with the police . So now, instead of a drunk driving conviction, he's going to go to jail for murder.

You can't fix stupid.

I wonder how much this tragedy is going to affect the usual party atmosphere at SXSW. For one week, Austin, Texas is transformed into a mix of New Orleans and Los Angeles. It's amazing how all those entertainment billboards that are so ubiquitous in Los Angeles suddenly pop up here in Austin when the film industry comes to town. I never quite figured out the purpose of them in Los Angeles - after all, why do film industry people feel the need to advertise their own television products to themselves? But that's what Hollywood likes to do.

Do you remember when sports was just about sports? When sports news was actually about issues related to sports play, such as which player was assigned to what team?

Now sports is all about political correctness. The NFL's announcements lately have included their threat to keep the Super Bowl out of Arizona should a religious rights bill pass that would allow conservative Christians the right to refuse to bake gay wedding cakes (it was vetoed), and a new initiative by the NFL to ban "offensive" words such as the "n-word" of "f-word."

They're running scared.

They have to be. Otherwise, why would the FCC want to insert itself into newsrooms to determine who selects which stories to run?

I'm certainly frightened to hear that our government feels it is their job to monitor our newsrooms, but then it hit me: They are on the defense.

The alternative media is on the offense.

It's bad news, but it's also good news.

I'm happy to be a part of a website such as TF Metals Report that can break through the mainstream media clutter and share some unfiltered perspectives.

Lovely news to wake up to on a Saturday morning - Iran is sending warships close to United States maritime borders in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, ever. Why? From the AP report :

The Islamic Republic considers the move as a response to U.S. naval deployments near its own coastlines.

Uh-huh. Greaaat. Do doomsday scenarios of short-range nukes being used as EMPs come to mind? Or have I just been reading too much fear porn recently?

In case you missed this news on a Sunday.... From the BBC News: HSBC imposes restrictions on large cash withdrawals - "restrictions" as in, they want a reason as well as documentation regarding your intended withdrawal.

Customers of HSBC have been stopped from taking out as little as £5,000, because the bank has been requiring that depositors give them a "satisfactory explanation" of what they intend to use the money for. In order to comply, customers were told in some cases they needed a letter or other form of documentation. For example, a "Peter from Wiltshire" was told he needed to provide "booking receipts" for his travel plans.

One Wall Street adviser recently stated that actual unemployment is at 37.2% . I don't doubt this. Certainly, a lot of blame is warranted towards the top, but am I the only one who is thinking that America is just giving up on herself? Where is the spirit of entrepreneurship? Where is the can-do attitude?

It's dead in the water. People would be rather just take whatever money they can from the government than try to fix their lives or their communities.

I have noticed more and more that Americans are living in learned helplessness. They can't seem to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and many don't want to. It's not just the younger generation - I know people from my generation (X) whose main goal in life seems to be just to throw their hands up and quit trying.

I used to be skeptical of people who complained about Census workers coming to their door. What was the big deal?

Until now.

I have just received the American Community Survey, which is a highly intrusive, utterly unconstitutional questionnaire sent out to random homes in America. Supposedly the survey is to be used to help decide "where new schools, hospitals, and fire stations are needed." But why does the federal government need this information? Deciding where schools and hospitals are needed is the job of the city, county or state.

This will be short and sweet. This morning I ran across two headlines that I felt were important to share:

1) YELP critics must be identified, court rules in online landscape altering decision

I'll write a longer article at some point about privacy and the Internet, but this ruling is bad news for individuals as well as content providers. It irks me, because most of these judges and politicians who try to write rules for the Internet are clueless about the underlying technology, and I'll bet half of them can barely handle sending out an email.

I'm not trying to be unnecessarily alarmist here. And perhaps I've been keeping up too much on the latest Fukushima news. But I woke up this morning having a nightmare that another earthquake had hit Japan. While the quake in my dream was not as big as the massive temblor that initially destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it was big enough to destroy the delicate balance at the smoldering ruins, and the plant was set to blow at any moment.

Heck, the plant is teetering on the edge anyway, even without another quake. One fumble in the cleanup could cause a massive chain reaction. Things are bad. And yet, other than a handful of people covering it in the alternative media, it's as if Fukushima doesn't even exist!

The homestead here is in need of another female voice, so Turd has graciously allowed me to share some of my thoughts with all of you. Let me briefly introduce myself - and what you'll see here is only a small portion of the entirety of who I am - I have had many hats, including writer, life coach, yoga instructor and website wrangler .

Don't worry, I'm not going to regale you here with cheery self-help mantras and mindless affirmations. In fact, one of the reasons I moved away from life coaching was that I had a hard time putting on a chipper facade all the time. I would like to take the opportunity here to dig into some deep issues. There's a lot going on in the world right now.