Chris Hedges: The Human Cost of War

Chris Hedges: The Human Cost of War

Dividing the world into worthy and unworthy victims is a tactic used to justify our crimes and demonize our enemies. Conflicts will not be solved until all nations abide by international law and all victims are deemed worthy.

Pornographic distortions: The struggle for intimacy in the 21st Century

Pornographic distortions: The struggle for intimacy in the 21st Century

Robert Jensen is a rare and important example of a man embracing radical feministm. As radical feminist organisation, DGR encourages men to step up against patriarchy (and this neither means to be a man-hater nor a sexual prude). As Robert Jensen states below, “Our goal is the end of patriarchy by challenging the patriarchal practices that do so much damage to so many of us.”
This certainly includes pornography.

This article originally appeared on feministcurrent.

by Robert Jensen


Let’s start with the world according to pornographers:

Sex is natural. Pornography is just sex on film. Therefore, pornography is natural.

If you do not accept the obvious “logic” of that argument, you are a prude who is sex-negative.

Any questions?

But what about the intense misogyny in pornography?

You’re a prude.

But what about the explicit racism in pornography?

You’re sex-negative.

What about the physical and psychological injuries routinely suffered by women used in pornography?

You’re prudishly sex-negative.

What about the consequences of conditioning so many men’s arousal and experience of sexual pleasure to these sexist and racist images?

You’re sex-negatively prudish.

If your concerns about pornography flow from spirituality, you must be a religious nut.

If your concerns about pornography are based in feminism, you must be a man-hater.

Sadly, this is often how attempts to discuss the social problems flowing from the production and consumption of contemporary sexually explicit media play out—especially in conversations with liberal, progressive, and leftist men, and with some feminists who describe themselves as pro-porn or “sex positive.”

My goal is to mark those responses as diversions; focus on the content of pornography and its underlying ideology; examine why such material is so prevalent; and discuss why this matters for our attempts to create a truly sex-positive society that fosters meaningful autonomy for girls and women.

So, “pornographic distortions,” refers both to the ways in which pornography distorts human sexuality, and the way in which pornography’s defenders distort the views of critics. Let’s start with the latter.

Pornography’s critics

For the record, I am not a religious nut nor a man-hater.

I am a secular progressive Christian. By that, I mean that I was raised in a predominantly Christian culture, and the narratives and ethics of Christianity remain relevant in my life, even though I don’t accept all Christian doctrines and I long ago rejected the supernatural claims associated with a conventional interpretation of the faith tradition (i.e., a virgin birth and resurrection as historical facts, the possibility of miracles, the existence of a divine entity). But those stories and moral frameworks have influenced how I see the world, in conversation with many other philosophical and political traditions that I find helpful. I see no reason to ignore this aspect of my life.

I work from a radical feminist analysis of patriarchy. By that, I mean that I recognize institutionalized male dominance as morally unjust and not only an impediment to women’s freedom but to social justice more generally (that’s feminism), and central to patriarchy are men’s attempts to own or control women’s reproductive power and sexuality (that’s radical feminism). I see no reason to be afraid of that analysis.

In more than three decades of work in the feminist anti-pornography movement and the larger struggle against men’s violence and exploitation of women, I have worked with a wide range of people motivated by religion and/or feminism. I have met many lovely people, from a variety of backgrounds and with a wide range of experiences, who reject the pornography industry’s cynical approach to human sexuality and are committed to challenging the routine abuse of women in the sexual-exploitation industries. I have yet to meet someone who is a prude or sex-negative. Such people exist, of course, but they aren’t a part of the movement I am part of. Most of us in the anti-pornography movement struggle to understand the complexity of sexuality, which is true of most people I meet. Some of us in the movement have sexual histories marked by trauma, which also makes us pretty “normal,” given how routine sexual violence is in patriarchal cultures. Our goal is the end of patriarchy by challenging the patriarchal practices that do so much damage to so many of us. We struggle to make a truly sex-positive culture possible.

That’s as much time as I am willing to spend trying to persuade people that I’m not crazy or hateful. Let’s move on to the more important task of understanding how and why the pornography industry offers such a destructive picture of human sexuality.

The pornography industry

Let’s start with terminology. I used the term “sexual-exploitation industries” to include prostitution, strip clubs, massage parlors, and escort services, along with pornography and other mediated forms of commercial sex. Applying a feminist analysis, all of these enterprises are ways that men buy and sell objectified female bodies for sexual pleasure. Boys and vulnerable men are also exploited in these industries, but the majority of these businesses offer men the opportunity to buy women and girls.

Pornography is also a form of mass media. Applying a media analysis, we examine the production process, the stories being told, and audience reception. How is pornography made and who profits? What are the patterns and themes in pornographic images and stories? How do the consumers of pornography use the material in their lives and with what effects?

I’ll focus here on the content of pornography, but first let’s recognize the importance of understanding production and reception.

How is pornography made? Andrea Dworkin, the writer/activist so central to the feminist critique, always emphasized that what you see in pornography is not simulated sex. The sex acts being performed on a woman that appear to be uncomfortable or painful were done to a real woman. Did that woman choose that? In some sense yes, but under what conditions and with what other choices available? What constraints did she face in her life and what opportunities did she have? And whatever level of choice she made doesn’t change the nature of the injuries that women sustain. Before we even ask about women’s choices, we should focus on men: Why do men choose to use pornography that exploits women?

There are many different genres in pornography, but the bulk of the market is heterosexual sex marketed to heterosexual men, who use it as a masturbation facilitator. There is a long debate about the relationship of pornography use and sexual violence, a question with no simple answer. But, as advertisers have long observed, exposure to media messages can affect attitudes and attitudes shape behavior. We know that people, especially young people, are prone to imitating behaviors they see in mass media that are presented as fashionable or exciting. Consider the advice a university sex researcher offers to male students: “If you’re with somebody for the first time, don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.” Why would such advice be necessary? Those acts are routine in pornography, and pornography is the de facto sex education for many boys and young men.

Pornographic images

My focus here is on pornographic images, specifically those produced by the heterosexual pornography industry. We’ll use a simple definition for pornography: Graphic sexually explicit material that is designed to produce sexual arousal, with a focus on material produced for men, who are the majority of the consumers. While women’s use of pornography has increased in recent years, the industry still produces material that reflects the male sexual imagination in patriarchy.

A bit of history is useful in understanding these images. The pornography industry operated largely underground until the 1960s and ‘70s, when it began being more accepted in mainstream society. That led to a sharp increase in the amount of pornography produced, a trend that expanded dramatically with new media technologies, such as VCRs, DVDs, and the internet.

The industry’s desire to increase profits drove the development of new products, in this case a wider variety of sexual acts in pornographic films. The standard sexual script in pornography — little or no foreplay, oral sex (primarily performed by women on men), vaginal intercourse, and occasionally anal intercourse — expanded to keep viewers from becoming satiated and drifting away. In capitalism, competition for market share produces “innovation,” though more often than not innovation means a slightly different version of products we didn’t need in the first place. In that sense, pornography is a quintessentially capitalist business.

The first of those changes was the more routine presentation of men penetrating women anally, in increasingly rough fashion. Why anal? One longtime pornography producer whom I interviewed at an industry trade show explained it to me in explicit language, which I’ll paraphrase. Men know that most women don’t want anal sex, he said. So, when men get angry at their wives and girlfriends, they think to themselves, “I’d like to fuck her in the ass.” Because they can’t necessarily do that in real life, he said, they love it in pornography.

That man didn’t realize he was articulating, in his own crude fashion, a radical feminist critique: pornography is not just sex on film but rather sex in the context of male domination and female subordination, the central dynamic of patriarchy. The sexual experience in pornography is made more intense with sex acts that men find pleasurable but women may not want.

Where did the industry go from there? As pornographers sought to expand market share and profit, they continued to innovate. Here are several pornographic sex practices — acts that are typically not part of most people’s real-world sex lives but are common in pornography — that followed the normalizing of anal sex:

  • double penetration (two men penetrating a woman vaginally and anally at the same time);
  • double vag (two men penetrating a woman vaginally at the same time);
  • double anal (two men penetrating a woman anally at the same time);
  • gagging (oral penetration of a woman so aggressive that it makes her gag);
  • choking (men forcefully grasping a woman’s throat during intercourse, sometimes choking the woman); and
  • ATM (industry slang for ass-to-mouth, when a man removes his penis from the anus of a woman and, without visible cleaning, inserts his penis into her mouth or the mouth of another woman).

Other routine acts in pornography include slapping and spitting on women, pulling women’s hair, and ejaculating on women’s bodies (long called “the money shot”), especially on their faces (what has come to be called a “facial”).

Even pornographers acknowledge that they can’t imagine what comes after all this. One industry veteran told me that everything that could be done to a woman’s body had been filmed. “After all, how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?” he said. A director I interviewed echoed that, wondering “Where can it go besides [multiple penetrations]? Every hole is filled.” Another director worried that pornography was going too far and that porn sex increasingly resembled “circus acts.” “The thing about it is,” he told me, “there’s only but so many holes, only but so many different types of penetration that can be executed upon a woman.”

One pornographic genre that explores other forms of degradation is called “interracial,” which has expanded in the past two decades. Films in this category can feature any combination of racial groups, but virtually all employ racist stereotypes (the hot-blooded Latina, sexually animalistic black women, demure Asian “geishas” who live to serve white men, immigrant women who are easily exploited) and racist language (I’ll spare you examples of that). One of the most common interracial scenes is a white woman being penetrated by one or more black men, who are presented as being rougher and more aggressive, drawing on the racist stereotype of black men as a threat to the purity of white women, while at the same time revealing the white woman to be nothing but a slut who seeks such defilement. This racism would be denounced in any other mass media form but continues in pornography with little or no objection from most progressives.

Finally, in recent years there has been an increase in what my friend Gail Dines calls “pseudo-child pornography.” Sexually explicit material using minors is illegal and is vigorously prosecuted, and so mainstream pornography stays away from actual child pornography. But the industry uses young-looking adult women in childlike settings (the classic image is a petite woman, almost always white, in a girls’ school uniform) to create the impression that an adult man can have the high school cheerleader of his fantasy. Another popular version features stepfathers having sex with a teenage stepdaughters. This material is not marketed specifically to pedophiles but is part of the mainstream pornography market for “ordinary” guys.

Dines’ summary of contemporary pornography captures these trends: “Today’s mainstream Internet porn is brutal and cruel, with body-punishing sex acts that debase and dehumanize women.”

Radical feminist critique

For those familiar with the radical feminist critique of pornography, these trends are not surprising. If the pornography is not just the presentation of explicit sex but rather sex in the patriarchal domination/subordination dynamic, then pornographers will find it profitable to sexualize any and all forms of inequality.

This analysis, developed within the larger feminist project of challenging men’s violence against women, was first articulated clearly by Andrea Dworkin, who identified what we can call the elements of the pornographic:

  • Objectification: when “a human being, through social means, is made less than human, turned into a thing or commodity, bought and sold.”
  • Hierarchy: “a group on top (men) and a group on the bottom (women).”
  • Submission: when acts of obedience and compliance become necessary for survival, members of oppressed groups learn to anticipate the orders and desires of those who have power over them, and their compliance is then used by the dominant group to justify its dominance.
  • Violence: “systematic, endemic enough to be unremarkable and normative, usually taken as an implicit right of the one committing the violence.”

Although there is variation in the thousands of commercial pornographic films produced over the years, the main themes have remained consistent: (1) All women always want sex from men; (2) women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand, and; (3) any woman who resists can be aroused by force, which is rarely necessary because most of the women in pornography are the “nymphomaniacs” of men’s fantasies. While both men and women are portrayed as hypersexual, men typically are the sexual subjects, who control the action and dictate the terms of the sex. Women are the sexual objects fulfilling male desire.

The radical feminist critique demonstrates not only that almost all sexually explicit material is pornographic, in the sense of reflecting and reinforcing patriarchy’s domination/subordination dynamic, but that pop culture is increasingly pornified. Pornography is a specific genre, but those elements of the pornographic also are present in other media, including Hollywood movies, television shows, video games, and advertising.

Intimacy

Let’s ask a simple question the pornographers would prefer we ignore: What kind of intimacy is possible in a pornographic world? I don’t mean just in pornography, but in a world in which this kind of pornography is widely used and widely accepted. Let’s go back to the connection between media use and behavior, which is complex. Does repeated exposure to advertising lead us to buy products we would not otherwise buy? Do violent scenes in movies or video games lead to increased rates of violence in people with a predisposition for violence? Definitive judgments are difficult, but we know that stories have the power to shape attitudes and attitudes effect behavior. We know that orgasm is a powerful reinforcer. We have plenty of reasons to be concerned about how the sexist and racist messages in pornography might influence the attitudes and behavior of pornography consumers. And we have plenty of reasons to be concerned about how the normalizing of pornographic images throughout the culture might shape how we all relate to our own bodies and understand sexuality in ways we aren’t aware of.

That all seems obvious, but industry defenders continue to assert that pornography is just fantasy and we shouldn’t police people’s fantasies. They want us to believe that in this one realm of human life — the use of sexually explicit media as a masturbation facilitator, primarily for men — people are unaffected by the power of stories and images. Even if that implausible claim were true, we still should ask, why are these particular fantasies so popular? When pornographers entered the mainstream and faced fewer restrictions, why did they create so many fantasies around male domination and female subordination? Why did they sexualize racist fantasies? Why did they encourage adult men to fantasize about having sex with teenagers? Why are pornography’s fantasies so routinely cruel and degrading to women?

There isn’t a neat and clean separation of our imaginations and our actions, between what goes on in our heads and what we do in the world. Even if we don’t know exactly how mass-mediated stories and images — what the pornographers and their supporters want to label as “just fantasy” — affect attitudes and behavior, we have reasons to be concerned about contemporary pornography.

And following Andrea Dworkin, let’s also not forget the women used in pornography. For men to masturbate to a double-anal scene, a woman must be penetrated anally by two men at the same time. Do we care about that woman? Do we care about what ideas those men carry around in their head? Think back to the advice the sex educator gives to young men, counseling them to stop behaving the way that pornography taught them to behave. Do we care about the female partners of those men?

These are not problems of a few individuals. I’ve talked to many young women who have told me that when they were in middle school and high school, they conformed to boys’ pornographic notions of sex without realizing what was happening to them. Some of those same women have told me that they would prefer to date men who don’t use pornography but they’ve given up because such men are so hard to find. I’ve talked to many adult women who don’t want to ask their boyfriends or husbands whether they use pornography, or inquire about what kind of pornography they might use, because they are afraid of the answer. I’ve talked to gay men who say that some of the same problems exist in their community.

I’ve talked to a lot of men who defend their pornography use and are unwilling to stop. But in recent years I’ve talked with more men who realize the negative effects of using this pornography but find it hard to stop. They report compulsive, addictive-like use of pornography, sometimes to the point of being unable to function sexually with a partner. These men feel profoundly alienated from themselves, from their own bodies.

Heat and light

The radical feminist critique of the misogyny and racism in pornography isn’t about denying humans’ sexual nature. It is not about imposing a single set of sexual norms on everyone. It’s not about hatred of men. The critique of the domination/subordination dynamic in pornography is about the struggle to transcend the patriarchal sexuality of contemporary culture in search of a sexuality that connects people rather than alienates us from each other and from our own bodies.

I have no simple prescriptions for how to move forward, though I see no way forward without a radical feminist critique. We struggle for intimacy, for connection, for something that feels more authentic than the pornographic script. We can start by recognizing how we have all been socialized, whether through traditional religion or secular society or both, into patriarchal values. That’s bound to be painful — for men when we realize we’ve been trained to dominate sexually, and for women when they realize they have been trained to accept sexual subordination.

I will end with an idea I first articulated 25 years ago and continue to ponder. A common way people talk about sex in the dominant culture is in terms of heat: She’s hot, he’s a hottie, we had hot sex. In a world obsessed with hotness, we focus on appearances and technique — whether someone looks the way we are socialized to believe attractive people should look, and the mechanics of sex acts. We hope that the right look and the right moves will produce heat. Sex is all bump-and-grind — the friction produces the heat, and the heat makes the sex good.

But we should remember a phrase commonly used to describe an argument that is intense but which doesn’t really advance our understanding—we say that such an argument “produced more heat than light.”

Heat is part of life, but what if in our sexual activity, our search for intimacy and connection, we obsessed less about heat and thought more about light? What if instead of desperately seeking hot sex, we searched for a way to produce light when we touch? What if that touch could be about finding a way to generate light between people so that we could see ourselves and each other better?

If the goal is knowing ourselves and each other like that, then what we need is not really heat but light to illuminate the path. How do we touch and talk to each other to shine that light? I am hesitant to suggest strategies; there isn’t a recipe book for that, no list of sexual positions to work through so that we may reach sexual bliss. There is only the ongoing quest to touch and be touched, to be truly alive. James Baldwin, as he so often did, got to the heart of this in a comment that is often quoted and a good place to conclude:

“I think the inability to love is the central problem, because the inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And, if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And, if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.”


An edited version of this essay was recorded for presentation at the online Canadian Sexual Exploitation Summit hosted by Defend Dignity, May 6-7, 2021.

Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He collaborates with the Ecosphere Studies program at The Land Institute in Salina, KS. Jensen is the author of The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability; The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for MenPlain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet GracefullyArguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive DialogueAll My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic VoiceGetting Off: Pornography and the End of MasculinityThe Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White PrivilegeCitizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity; and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream.

Jensen is host of “Podcast from the Prairie” with Wes Jackson and associate producer of the forthcoming documentary film Prairie Prophecy: The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson. 

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Follow him on Twitter: @jensenrobertw

[The Ohio River Speaks] When History Becomes Hallucination

[The Ohio River Speaks] When History Becomes Hallucination

The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth part of Will’s journey.


On the Tidioute Bridge, where forests accompany the Ohio River through the round Pennsylvania hills, I fretted over my responsibilities as a writer to tell the truth as I experience it. So far, on my journey with the Ohio River, I had experienced beauty, but this beauty was always tempered by the horrific reality of the Ohio River’s abuse. I had experienced moments of peace, but this peace was eventually always drowned out by my anxiety over the river’s future.

Whenever I felt myself on the verge of accepting these contradictions in my experience, the words of a mildly famous environmental writer I had asked to review my book How Dams Fall about the Colorado River flashed in front of my eyes. This writer told me: “I feel your pain acutely and vividly – but it’s so overwhelming that I can’t find the countervailing balm and hope I need to write a decent endorsement.”

I didn’t want my writing about the Ohio River to overwhelm my readers to the point that they couldn’t muster the courage to act in her defense. At the same time, however, the reality of the Ohio River’s pain is overwhelming. Unable to resolve these contradictions, I asked the Ohio River for help.

Rain fell on white pine, hemlock, silver maple, and black willow trees. It dripped from leaf to leaf and branch to branch. It brushed over evergreen needles, washed over bark, seeped into soil, splashed into puddles, and blended with mud. Streams, strengthened by the rain, trickled melodically over stones, down the hills, and poured into the river. Below me, rising river currents turned over themselves and created a thousand little waves singing a thousand little tunes. The Ohio River hummed cheerfully and quickened her pace downstream.

In these sounds, I heard love songs. The forests and the Ohio River were celebrating their ancient friendship by singing ballads to each other.

As I listened, the Ohio River taught me about the role trees play in this cycle. My attention drifted across the river to where exposed tree roots clung to, and held up, the river’s banks. Like the water those trees drank from the Ohio River, my gaze was pulled up trunks, through branches and leaves, to the tree tops. As the trees sang with the rain, their breaths rose from the hills as fog to join heavy, low-hanging clouds. I followed the falling rain back to the river. And, one rotation in a cycle that’s been turning for time immemorial was complete.

Then, a truck carrying a pile of pine logs rattled over the bridge I stood on. The fragrance of freshly cut white pine competed with diesel fumes in an olfactory juxtaposition of beauty and horror. Fumes filled my lungs and scenes from the history of logging in the upper Ohio River basin filled my mind.

In the 1790s, men with muskets destroyed Seneca, Delaware, and Shawnee villages throughout the upper Ohio River basin. They slaughtered and scalped men, women, and children and burned crops and other food sources. With native warriors murdered and native governments crippled, men with saws flooded the region. Sawmills were established in the upper Ohio River basin as early as 1800. Contemporary accounts describe whole hillsides along the Ohio River stripped clean of trees. They started with the hills along the Ohio River and her tributaries’ banks because the loggers could easily drag timber into the waterways where they could be transported to distant city markets.

Words like ‘logs’ and ‘timber’ are dishonest words that fail to describe the full cruelty the Ohio River was forced to endure. These logs were the dead bodies of trees the Ohio River had helped to grow from saplings. This timber was the corpses of trees whose families the Ohio River had lived with for generations. So, not only did the Ohio River witness the murder of her friends, she was forced to carry her friends’ dead bodies away.

At first, the loggers came for the long, straight, and strong eastern white pines. When the easily accessible white pine stands were exhausted, the loggers came for the hemlocks. Hemlock bark was used in tanning leather, but the logs were often discarded and left to rot in the woods. Around 1860, railroads allowed even the most isolated timberlands to be destroyed. I found a story in the Warren Times Mirror and Observer newspaper, dated May 26, 1973, that reported:

“In 1903, the Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company installed a big steam and electrically powered band saw mill at Sheffield. It had a rated capacity of 130,000 board feet of lumber daily. But its all-time production record was on March 14, 1923, when 337,000 board feet of lumber were sawed in a ten-hour period. Between 1908 and 1941, when the C.P.L. closed down because of lack of timber, some one and a half billion board feet of lumber were sawed there.”

As I pondered this on the Tidioute Bridge, history became hallucination. Images of those I’d lived my whole life with joined me where I stood. I saw my mother’s eyes – a half shade of blue paler than mine – gleaming with the specific light that fills them when she tells me she loves me. I felt my father’s hand ­– a half shade of tan darker than mine – with the specific weight his hand carries when he tells me he’s proud of me. I heard my little sister’s laughter when we share an inside joke we’ve shared for longer than either of us remember.

I saw all the people who have helped me become the person I am today. I saw childhood playmates and grade school teachers. I saw football coaches and college professors. I saw my teammates on the University of Dayton football team. I saw old lovers and failed romances. I saw the friends who visited me in the hospital after I tried to kill myself. I saw my activist comrades struggling so hard for a better world.

Then, I saw them murdered.

Each of them.

All of them.

By men with axes, saws, knives, and machetes. Cut down, cut up, and piled in front of me by men who thought only of the price my dead friends’ bodies would fetch at market. The men who murdered my loved ones then slapped a rough harness on my back and snapped a whip over my head. But the load was too heavy to bear.

The sounds of the local water cycle brought me back to the present, but the music was angry. Lightning cracked across the sky with shrill staccato notes. Rumbling thunder added ominous bass notes in a minor key to the music’s low end. Where once they sang, the rain, the trees, and the Ohio River hissed.

Cold and trembling, I asked the Ohio River: “What do you need me to do?” All I heard was more hissing. So, I decided to trust the truth in my experience.

[The Ohio River Speaks] Shitting Geese, Omega-3s, and the Arithmetic of Atrocity

[The Ohio River Speaks] Shitting Geese, Omega-3s, and the Arithmetic of Atrocity

The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, and fourth part of Will’s journey.


By Will Falk / The Ohio River Speaks

Sometimes I ask the Ohio River questions. And, sometimes she asks me. West of Salamanca, New York, a few miles before the Kinzua Dam traps the Ohio River in the Allegheny Reservoir, I sat in a kayak listening. She was speaking, but I did not understand.

The water was slow. The river’s face was smooth. And, the surface reflected a blue and white mosaic created by lazy cumulus clouds drifting across the sky. She pulled me ever so gently downstream. The sensation was powerfully familiar, but I did not know why.

A mother merganser swam with her five chicks along the closest shore. I smiled at what looked like exasperation on her face as she tried to keep her children moving in the same direction. For a few moments, she anxiously eyed a space downstream where a bald eagle had disappeared into the trees. When she looked back, one duckling had gone one way and one another. The other three didn’t know who to follow.

My mind slowed to match the river’s pace. The random, anxious firing of disparate images that form my moment-to-moment consciousness throttled down until my thoughts almost disappeared entirely. They were replaced by the fullness of my experience of the river. The sun, glinting off a passing dragonfly, left a trail of turquoise light. Bugs skimmed the surface, and appeared to me like the tips of invisible pens writing disappearing messages that only the bugs could comprehend. On the edge of my vision, I saw a splash and the telltale ripples of a leaping trout.

The enchantment continued until a wedge of passing Canada geese pointed right at me. They swept low and the goose flying point shat. The shit slapped my plastic kayak – a direct hit. The honking geese laughed. And, I did, too.

***

I knew the metaphors she presented me with were meaningful. What could be more meaningful than being shit on? But, I wasn’t sure what the Ohio River was trying to communicate until a few days later.

I was listening to an interview given by agricultural critic Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization and other great books. Manning was asked about the global food shortage and whether there would be enough food to feed the world’s human population over the balance of the 21st century. Manning answered no and pointed out how we are already failing to do so “drastically.” He explained that the people who say we are not failing often assume that humans need a certain amount of calories per day (2000 is the most common number). They multiply this number by the world’s total human population. Next, they calculate the total caloric value of the planet’s corn, wheat, and other grain production. Because the total caloric value of agricultural grain production is greater than the calories they claim are needed by humans, many people declare there is no food shortage.

Manning argued, however, that 2000 calories of carbohydrates are not adequate daily nutrition. He pointed out that high carbohydrate diets are, in fact, making humans sick, and that most humans are not getting the nutrition we have evolved to need. Omega-3 fatty acids are one of the most important things missing from most human diets. Omega-3 fats are vital for brain health and, thus, for achieving human potential.

A major problem, however, is that the world is running out of this essential nutrient. Omega-3 fats primarily come from animals, especially cold-water fish. Manning mentioned a study conducted by British scientists. I found the study titled “Is the world supply of omega-3 fatty acids adequate for optimal human nutrition?” by Norman Salem, Jr. and Manfred Eggersdorfer.

Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are the most important Omega-3 fatty acids for human health. The study’s abstract stated that “EPA and DHA originate in the phytoplankton and are made available in the human food chain mainly through fish and other seafood.” However, “the fish catch is not elastic and in fact has long since reached a plateau.” These acids do occur in vegetables, but “vegetable oil-derived alpha-linolenic acid, though relatively plentiful, is converted only at a trace level in humans to DHA and not very efficiently to EPA, and so cannot fill” the gap in human need for EPA and DHA. The study “concluded that fish and vegetable oil sources will not be adequate to meet future needs, but that algal oil and terrestrial plants modified genetically to produce EPA and DHA could provide for the increased world demand.”

The realities of human nutritional needs, fish population collapses, and human population growth confronts us with a series of choices. We can attempt to provide all humans alive today with adequate nutrition. And, in the attempt, exhaust cold water fish, turn the oceans into algae farms, and violate the very DNA of terrestrial plants, while creating mutant plants to serve us. We can work to reduce human population to a point where humans and cold water fish can both thrive and exist. Or, we can do nothing. And, the most privileged among us may enjoy adequate nutrition – for a time – while more and more humans fall victim to malnutrition, while fewer and fewer of us may realize our full human potential.

I remembered the trout I saw leaping near the Allegheny Reservoir. I remembered the ripples whispering with the trout’s passing. I thought of other fish who provide Omega-3 fats: the mesmerizing schools of mackerel twirling like underwater whirlpools, the once mighty runs of red salmon who made so much noise swimming upriver you could hear them a mile away, and the hardy cod who call the deep, cold seas of the North Atlantic home.

***

While I was trying to understand the Ohio River’s message contained in these experiences, I went looking for information on her fish, specifically. I landed on the Ohio River Fish Consumption Advisory Workgroup’s website. This Workgroup is a “multi-agency workgroup consisting of representatives from the six main stem states (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia) as well as the US EPA and the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission.”

The website featured rows of photos of fishermen holding up individual fish of different species. Under each photo, text described how often each species can be eaten and the chemical reason for the advisory. Under a photo of a walleye, for example, the text read “1 meal per month – PCBs.” Under a photo of a sauger, the text read “1 meal per month – Hg.” Under a photo of a white bass, the text read “6 meals per year – PCBs.” But worst of all, under the photos of both a common carp and a channel catfish, the text read “Do not eat – PCBs.” PCBs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency “belong to a broad family of man-made organic chemicals known as chlorinated hydrocarbons.” Hg is mercury.

This made me nauseous. But, probably not as nauseous as eating a common carp or channel catfish would. I wondered how it made the fish feel. I wondered how the chemicals made other animals who eat the fish feel. Mergansers eat fish. Bald eagles do, too. Canada geese are primarily herbivores, but they occasionally eat fish. Hopefully, they observe the advisories and eat less than one meal per month or 6 meals per year.

As I thought of all these creatures, I sensed I was getting closer to understanding the Ohio River’s meaning. That’s when the familiarity I felt while floating in my kayak came back to me. The first physical sensations I ever experienced must have been those I felt floating in my mother’s womb. But, I’m not just my mother’s son. I spent the first, most formative years of my life drinking the Ohio River’s water. I am the Ohio River’s son, too.

But, that wasn’t all of it. The Ohio River pushed me on. My memory drifted farther into the past. Floating was likely our oldest ancestors’ first activity. Floating is familiar because the first motions of Life on Earth began in the movement of water. I saw the primordial oceans receding, glaciers melting, and the Ohio River being born. The Ohio River is a mother. She is also a daughter of the Earth.

Her voice became clear then. I understood what she was saying. On the kayak trip, she showed me her children – mergansers, a bald eagle, a dragonfly, and shitting geese. A few days later, she drew my attention to global problems confronting humans, fish, and her kin, the oceans. To understand these problems, I delved into studies describing the extent of global destruction and found the fish advisories. Then, as I considered the pain industrial poisons cause the Ohio River’s children, she evoked the familiar sensation of floating in a mother’s womb.

The key was the word “familiar.” The Ohio River was asking me for news of her family. She gossips with her sister, the Mississippi, when she joins her near Cairo, IL. But, the Mississippi only offers correspondence from around North America. She listens to her cousins in the global water cycle, the clouds. Clouds and rivers speak similar, but not the same, languages. Sometimes the wind brings tidings from the oceans. But, the wind talks too fast and never stays long. With access to global information at my fingertips, she wanted my help.

Her questions may have been clear all along. Perhaps, my heart prevented me from hearing.

***

The news, of course, is heartbreaking. The 2018 Living Planet Index and Zoological Society of London’s Living Planet Report found that on average the abundance of vertebrate species’ populations monitored across the globe declined by 60% between 1970 and 2014. The study’s authors explained that humans are causing this decline through overexploitation of species, agriculture, and land conversion. This means that, in just 44 years, humans have destroyed more than half the world’s vertebrates. Things are worse for global freshwater species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish which have declined by 83 percent between 1970 and 2014, equivalent to 4% per year since 1970.

This is the arithmetic of atrocity. Every year, due to human destructiveness, the Ohio River’s family grows smaller and smaller.

The 2016 version of the Living Planet Report found that almost half (48 percent) of global river volume had been altered by flow regulation, fragmentation, or both. The authors noted that completion of all dams planned or under construction would mean that natural hydrologic flows would be lost for 93 percent of all river volume.

Most of the Ohio River’s sisters, like she is, are held captive by dams.

Just like the numbers are grim for the animals who live in water, the news is gut-wrenching for the global water cycle. Water is being poisoned on a massive scale. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization states that every day 2 million tons of sewage and other effluents drain into the world’s water. Industry discharges an estimated 300-400 megatons of waste into water bodies every year. And, globally, it is likely that over 80% of wastewater is released back into the water cycle without adequate treatment.

The water forming the Ohio River’s body and the bodies of her relatives is being poisoned.

I read these statistics out loud to the Ohio River. I’m not sure how I thought she’d respond. I waited for several days. Nothing came through my dreams. Inspiration was absent. Writing about other aspects of the river failed. For the first time, the Ohio River had nothing to say to me.


Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem. He is a practicing rights of Nature attorney and a member of DGR.

Native Youth Movement Statement on Social Media

Native Youth Movement Statement on Social Media

Editor’s Note: this piece comes from the Native Youth Movement, a cross-nation warrior society for indigenous youth on Turtle Island. We do not agree with every detail of this piece, but consider it a good primer on this topic and a look at how traditionally-minded indigenous people are approaching the internet, social media, pornography, and more. Featured image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Facebook (Fed-book): the ultimate tool for intelligence and distraction.

Indigenous People
Who are We?
We are the original people of our Lands. Some of us were born into our culture, some of us were not, some of us got taught a little, some of us got none, some of us were born in our homelands to Indian hands and greeted by the Sun, some of us where born in far away industrial war zones, slapped on the ass by a white man & put under neon lights.
So who are we now?
Although we come from different realities & have been taught different world views, deep inside we share common pre-invasion bloodlines, pre-invasion realities and pre-invasion minds.  At one time we all had the same world-view as humans–we are simply another animal species no more important than other Life forms. Life is a beautiful gift which we must not take for granted. Instead, we are to respect, care for and protect it. We are born with a basic task, the same as all Life: to continue it.
Today, we are those who have united and chosen Life over death, Land, Water and Air, over industrial waste. We have a Sacred Duty, to be Earths Army.
Our Vision?
Is to raise babies who are Independent of other humans and machines, knowing the land & water, how to sustain themselves with real skills, working with the Natural Law, Food Harvesting, Building, Healing, Protecting, Clothing, Making Fire, with good Leadership Qualities, Virtues and all the skills for living on the Land in various seasons and terrains.
Our Job. What do we want?
To Provide Life. Healthy Life! No More. No Less. We demand Healthy Life, not from other people, but from ourselves. It is our Duty as Indian Men and Women to look after ourselves and continue Life forever according to our Original Instructions.
How will we get what we want?
Building our skills, and living the Natural Law. Leaving the cities and reservations and building more villages in our Lands or join existing ones.
How did we arrive where we are?
Since the beginning, humans have had to fight off other humans attempting to invade lands and utilize the resources for their own human group.
Over 500 years ago a new kind of invasion took place in our Lands, one that had been existing over the seas for thousands of years–One that attempted to exterminate our people and way of life. These attempts continued to get advanced in their quest for resources and control. It was a War against Indigenous People. The War against the human proved unsuccessful. Many were exterminated, but many survived.
The industrial revolution changed the face of battle, from primary attacks on humans, to attacks focused on the earth that humans and all Life depend on for existence. War against humanity had expanded. Industry waged war against all Life forms.
To compliment industry, psychoanalysts used their study of human thinking to go deep into the thoughts and feelings of the survivors of Tribal people to empty the original thinking and replace it with a foreign way. Missions, Boarding & Residential schools would become the way for the white man to kill the thoughts, feeling and responsibilities of the Indigenous children by taking them away from their Lands and teachers and replacing their way of being with a white mind, and body that could now be used to contribute to the destruction of the earth. After generations, that form of forced brainwashing and fear through violence and sexual abuse was so successful they now use the public schools to continue to raise robots whose only purpose in life is to get a job contributing to the industrial machine and their own destruction in the process.
Resistance to pre-mature death is nothing new; it is a Natural Law of self-preservation. When something attacks you, you do all you can to make sure the attack is unsuccessful. Today is no different. World-wide attacks on humans and the Earth are resisted, so they must advance their methods of attack.
In comes the teck-no-logic ‘revolution’. Welcome the world of ‘social’ media, known better as advanced social monitoring.
This statement will focus on facebook, which we prefer to call by what it really is: fed-book– the world’s largest database of humans and their activities. For those who are completely part of the system the service provides insight even deeper into the colonized consumer human mind and how they can sell more products in order to expand control over them.
For those who know something is wrong and must change, fed-book serves to monitor their location, activities, friends, and psychology. From those reformist views of wanting a piece of the pie (money for our lands being exploited), and those revolutionaries who don’t want the money, but want to stop the exploitation and destruction of the land, fed-book is an intelligence tool. The greatest to date, with over 1.5 billion people (and growing) making their own profile to be monitored.
This writing will focus on why it is so great for intelligence and why we are so quick to fall for it. We will start by  looking at why we might be susceptible to social media, then the problems created by it–Physical Health, Social, Mental & Body aspects–then Movement Health. Finally, we will discuss what we are going to do from here on out to improve our current state.
Teck-No-Logic World & the Internet: The quest for more control
The Internet was created by the military, for military purposes, and it continues to be used for such. Business, military and governments, which are all intertwined, have always sought more efficient ways to monitor people & control them. Psychoanalysts are the leadership in this constant improvement of how to control people better so we can live & die in their vision and not in our true way of life. They are highly skilled, with the majority of our people uploading photos of themselves, shooing off smiling, stoic, innocent, noble savage, hard or duck lips faces Billions are contributing to self-made intelligence profiles.
Let’s look at why humans are so eager to show themselves to anybody and everybody who cares to look, even after proven detrimental consequences.
How to get us to be distracted
Sex, Food and Violence
Internal Trickster, Tricking Our-selves
Needs are: Air, Water, Food, Protection, Fire and depending on your region the ability to stay warm or cool. This is what we need to complete our job while living on Earth.
We are born from a seed like all other life, then die, and our body goes back into the earth and essence back into the universe. Extremely simple. So if humans are so smart why do we complicate things so much?
The trickster. The trickster exists in all facets of our life, not really to trick us, but to test us, & like all tests, once completed & passed you have a stronger understanding and knowledge of the subject you were tested on making you a better human being. Within all of us are internal tricksters, and they exist within our mind. Our job is to not let ourselves, trick ourselves.
Reward System and Energy Balance
Our Real Elders have taught us that our Brain is truly a Seed. All Life comes from a Seed. We literally are the same as all Life, full of Water, Vitamins, Minerals & Energy, compiled into another shape.
In our Brain we have a part called the Reward System. The job of the Reward System is to identify things that are pleasurable and good for us. When identified, dopamine’s are released in this portion of the brain, giving a temporary feeling of satisfaction & euphoria.
We also have another part of the brain which combines many structures and makes the Energy Balance System.  In a time before industrial production, refrigeration and internet  systems worked hand in hand & they complimented each other. When we encountered fresh sweet berries, fatty meat, or salty food, our reward system was triggered because we knew that we needed it for proper energy balance in our bodies.
The Earth provides naturally, the perfect amount of energy, through a process of growth and death, giving and taking, to keep the planet in balance and therefore helping us to continue orbiting in the universe how we are supposed to. On a smaller scale the Earth always provided all its animals, including humans the proper amount of energy, through food and water to keep us alive and strong.  No doubt if we looked into the minds of our ancestors they would not have found competing systems but one working unit. Some humans began to go through great efforts to change this naturally perfect system of internal cohesion and recognition between the Energy Balance and Reward System, and slowly began to only feed the Reward System.
Today we are still born hardwired to be healthy and strong life forms, but that is quickly disturbed and our brain separated by only getting offered physical and emotional things that benefit the Reward System and put us completely out of touch with Energy Balance.  At the root of the Reward System is the thought that it needs certain things to continue healthy Energy Balance.
Now, when we see sweet, salty and fatty foods our Reward System finds them hard to resist because they used to benefit our Energy Balance system & when used in moderation were what we really needed to live. For example, when people see someone of the opposite sex they are attracted, not because they crave the feeling of orgasm, but because the feeling of orgasm signals to the reward system something good is happening for energy balance; a new life is being made, which is essentially why we are all here–to help Life continue.
Today, everything is superficial and instead of having just the right amount to live in energy balance, we are forced to have too much. Excess things trick our Reward System into thinking we are doing what is right, but really we are nowhere near proper Energy Balance. Realizing we are out of balance can explain why there is more obesity, drug addicts, sex addicts, technology addicts, gambling addicts, gaming addicts, chemicals, pollution, pre-mature deaths, physical & sexual abuse, overall sickness, and more war and destruction than any time before us on the planet. It can also help explain why, today, humans are the weakest in the story of humanity. Never before have we been so physically, mentally & spiritually weak.
How can we improve that? As Hidatsa-Arirkara Michael Yellowbird says, “In order to successfully de-colonize our harmful & obstructive emotions, thoughts & behaviors we must understand this imbalance & have the courage to confront it.”
So let’s confront it.
Mental & Physical Health
Social Health
The want for social attention and recognition
White man wants us to think there is a need for social recognition, not on the same level as basic needs, but a need none the less. However, we did not think like that, and shouldn’t today. There was not a need for social recognition. A need is necessary for existence. Some may have wanted it, but social recognition is not necessary to live.
If we are equal to all creation then to call it a need is as silly as a plant needing recognition to do its job. A plant that grows from a sprout into a beautiful flower, whose petals fall off, then withers and dries, drops its babies (new seeds) into the ground to continue life, then falls and feeds the earth, eventually becoming another layer of the dirt, does not need other plants to tell it what a good job it is doing to continue and complete its job. Some plants may want it (doubt it though), but a need? I don’t think so.
The want for social recognition can only happen if a person has their basic needs met. Today, although extremely poorly, the majority of Native people think they get their needs met through government programs put in place to maintain control. Although all Native communities have a shorter life expectancy than non-native communities, some as low as 42 years old, basic day-to-day needs appear to be met, but aren’t sufficient. If they were we wouldn’t die so young. But the appearance exists, giving our people the time to begin and worry about social recognition & status in a false reality, & today, a virtual one.
A long time ago your social status had to do with your deeds, your actions and how beneficial they were to the larger group. The society you lived in would determine what actions would help you achieve social recognition.
For the white-man, the deeds of george washington won him great social recognition. His society wanted all Indians dead, he was good at massacring them, therefore granting him the highest social status in white amerikkka.
For Native People fighting to continue our way of life, the actions of Crazy Horse to defend Indigenous people against destruction and defend the Land made him a person of high social standing. So much so that many Indigenous people, even outside of the Lakota Nation, know this name. To be high status in our society was different than the white-man, it did not mean you were better than others, it meant you did great deeds, knew the story of your people since creation and had a vision of what needed to be done for the future.
Skills & Self-esteem
Today our people seek social status and recognition not because they are deserving of it, but because they have an empty void they are trying to fill; a void caused by the invasion of our lands, the murder of our people, the destruction of our resources, the systematic erasing of our knowledge of how to provide for ourselves, the rape of our woman & men, the molestation of our children, machismo and feminism, & the continued poisoning of our bodies and minds with substances & colonial mentality.
In order to escape these realities, people turn the want for recognition into false need, just like the drug addict who now thinks they ‘need’ a substance. It develops an addiction that can enter for numerous reasons all having to do with voids caused by oppression. This void cannot be filled with lots of compliments and fed-book friends, although it may feel like it. To add to the dysfunction is the fact that social recognition in a virtual reality that isn’t real. Social media is not a real life community; it is a virtual one– fake.
People have developed a low self-esteem because of inter-generational trauma. Thinking attention and social recognition can help boost our self-esteem, is a false feeling. Only skills can improve self-esteem.
Compliments and attention are a quick release of dopamine in the reward system, just like substances (drugs), it is like a hot air balloon, a false heat that will come down when hot air is gone and needs more to get you feeling good again. This leads humans to become extremely narcissistic, in other words, have extremely inflated ego’s & think they are so beautiful & great & the whole world should know this. Greatness based on what deeds? Beauty, according to whose standard? Those who are truly beautiful & great, do not think so themselves, cause as soon as they do, their beauty and greatness are gone.
Narcissism is the medical term that can explain why humans love fed-book so much. We can recognize that this is just another form & layer of colonization. Let’s look at it so we may confront and improve it.
Narcissism
Narcissist was a greek youth who fell in love with his own image and spent hours of the day staring at himself, developing a huge ego & becoming extremely selfish. He eventually died from not taking care of daily needs & just staring at himself, but to make the story sound good, they say he turned into a flower which today bears his name.
Since 2000, psychological tests designed to detect narcissism have been done across the country, and the scores of residents of the united states have continually increased. Psychologists have linked the increase to social media. This is one of the reasons for creating social media: to get people consumed with themselves so they cannot function as normal human beings, let alone be a threat in an organized resistance to the industrial world.
Signs of narcissism are:
  • Problems in sustaining satisfying relationships
  • Lack of empathy: The capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another.
  • Problems distinguishing them self from others: others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all.
  • Hyper-sensitivity to any insults or imagined insults.
  • Feeling Shameful instead of remorseful or guilty.
  • Haughty Body Language: a physical posture which implies & puts out an air of superiority, seniority, hidden powers, mysteriousness, amused indifference, etc. The narcissist usually maintains sustained and piercing eye contact, also keeping space & posturing up.
  • Flattery towards people who admire and affirm them.
  • Detesting those who do not admire them.
  • Using other people without considering the cost of doing so. Usually the other is in a subservient position where resistance would be difficult or even impossible.
  • Pretending to be more important than they really are.
  • Bragging (Subtly but persistently) and exaggerating their achievements.
  • Claiming to be an “expert” at many things.
  • Inability to view the world from the perspective of other people.
  • Pathological lying, making false promises.
  • Lacks values; easily bored; often changes course.
  • Entitlement: Narcissists hold unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves special. Failure to comply is considered an attack on their superiority, and the perpetrator is considered a “controlling” or “difficult” person. Defiance of their will can trigger Narcissistic Rage.
  • Inability to engage emotionally with their children’s needs, often choosing their own wants over time with children.
  • Failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Narcissistic Abuse
“At the core of a narcissist is a combination of entitlement and low self-esteem. Feelings of inadequacy are projected onto the victim. If the narcissistic person is feeling unattractive they will belittle their romantic partner’s appearance. If the narcissist makes an error, this error becomes their partners. Narcissists also engage in insidious, manipulative abuse by giving subtle hints and comments that result in the victim questioning their own behavior and thoughts. Any slight criticism of the narcissistic, whether actual or perceived, often triggers narcissistic rage and full blown annihilation from the narcissistic person.
The discard phase can be swift and occurs once the narcissistic supply is obtained elsewhere.
In romantic relationships, the narcissistic supply can be acquired by having affairs. The new partner is in the idealization phase and only witnesses the ideal self; thus once again the cycle of narcissistic abuse begins. Narcissists do not take responsibility for relationship difficulties and exhibit no feeling of remorse. Instead they believe themselves to be the victim in the relationship.” Wikipedia
Fed-book & all social media is helping to increase this selfish and egotistical behavior in our people, hitting us in the deepest root of who we are…the inner self. Bringing two dysfunctional people together will contribute to dysfunctional Nations. To be Strong again, we must confront these dysfunctions & stop feeding into them. We must change them.
Trying to find yourself through Social media
Personal realization is crucial in the development of a human. But is Fed-book really helping with it, or creating an illusion about it?
Having lots of fed-book friends may help you temporarily feel good about yourself, but a study called, ‘Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control’,  (by Keith Wilcox, a professor at Columbia University & Andrew Stephen, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh) shows that fed-book also makes you fat, broke, lazy and depressed. This ego boost has an ‘unintended psychological consequence.’ Fed-bookers relax their self-control making them more likely to make purchases and over eat junk food that they know is bad for them.
“Simply browsing Facebook makes people feel better about themselves and momentarily enhances their self-esteem,” Wilcox told Today.com. “It’s that enhanced self-esteem that ultimately lowers your self-control. The loss of self-control can result in self-indulgence. When you feel good, you can rationalize ordering dessert or buying something you don’t really need. ‘I feel good today,’ you tell yourself. ‘I deserve a treat.’ “
The results of the study found that Fed-book users had a higher body-mass index (BMI) (fat), were more prone to binge eating, carried more credit card debt and had lower credit scores. Fed-book use ‘is causing people to have reduced self-control in a variety of situations.’ They believe the ‘Facebook effect’ is subtle and develops over time and only gets worse the more a person is on it.No matter how many people like your self-moulding photos, or comment on your picture or post, it will not make you a better human being. You are not a good person because you appear to be attractive by cosmopolitan standards.
Social-Media has helped contribute to sexual dysfunction and is teaching another new generation that attraction is based on appearance.
Another recent study shows that social media makes the section of the brain connected with emotions grow, but not in healthy ways. It grows uncontrollable sensitivity, overly affected by what people think about, even if they do not even know the people and had no real life interactions with them.
Effects on marriages and romantic relationships
With the ability to be turned on at every corner of the web, social media is the leading cause of break-up and divorces today.
Emotional cheating is when you allow your thoughts (usually caused by viewing images), to drift from your real life partner and family, to somebody else you may or may not know as a real human being. Emotional cheating is still cheating, and often, more times than not leads to physical cheating, even if not with the person or people the emotional cheating started with.
It open’s a Pandora’s box into the human mind & the craving to satisfy the Reward System, not to create more life, but just to feel good, without any benefit on energy balance.  The person online doesn’t contain any of the imperfections as your real life human partner. A person may feel completely attached to this idea of meeting someone perfect for them, & their real life partner is made into an evil enemy in the mind of the cheater to justify this new found ‘love’ & ‘freedom’.
When emotional cheating turns physical, most, if not all, will soon realize there is no such thing as a perfect person. They don’t exist, sorry, in case you didn’t know, you are not perfect either.
Over one third of divorce filings in 2011 contained the word “Facebook,” or “social media” according to a report from a legal services firm, Divorce Online.
Lookin’ for Love on fed-book
Divorce and break-up rates due to fed-book and other social media sites are extreme, but what about ‘meeting’ someone and creating a relationship that is based on something as shallow as appearance and not real human interaction?
When Fed-book was invented so was crush-stalking.
It’s a quiet and seemingly innocent art that everybody does, so it must be ok, right?  The silent accumulation of massive amounts of information about a person whose appearance you like, quietly plotting how you will arrange to see them again, dropping-in on the events they announced they will be at, at the same time adding more mutual Fed-book friends, eventually sending them a friend request, then start liking what they like (even if you really don’t), start commenting how great & pretty they are, then ask for their phone number & eventually set up a face-to-face meeting. Before fed-book, you met someone who may interest you, maybe talk for a couple of minutes, not long enough to ask for a number, and it’s done. There is no ability to learn about their life, interests, hobbies, favorite music, who all their friends are, where they’ve travelled, & you damn sure wouldn’t be able to view their family photos. By looking at their pictures and videos you learn their different facial expressions, moods and share in their emotion at the time and place of the photo or video.
There would be no way that a person you just briefly met or just saw in the street would give you their personal journal & give you an open door into the inner most feelings of who they are. In so many ways it would be seen as high risk, for the heart & security, if a complete stranger had all that information. Now any & all who wish, can have access to all that information, without ever having to get to know the person in real life.
In Fed-book you can be whoever you want, only exposing the positive characteristics of yourself. As your virtual personality you don’t ever look tired with bags under your eyes, you don’t shit, you don’t fart, you don’t get sick, you don’t throw up or ever have diarrhea, your perfect, & your self-esteem is skyrocketing cause everyone ‘likes’ what you have to say & everybody ‘likes’ the photos of you. You are looking at that Photoshopped version of yourself — your favorite flattering photos, your witty comments,  your epiphanies that came to you on your recent vacation — all reinforcing the version of who you want to be, having a positive but very temporary effect on your self-esteem.
You get that ego lift because you self-select the information that is included in our Fed-book profiles and posts on your wall . That skyrocketing self-esteem goes up fast and strong, but it always has to come down, and when it does the landing is never smooth. But with quick glance at the most beautiful photos of yourself, you can get that hot air balloon back up and running. But soon it will be deflated yet again, often leading to a new but real medical term, “Facebook-Depression.”
Those enormous egos may have already taken over your bodies and minds, a temporary escape from reality, & if you have access through your phone it is one you can visit all the time, even more than living in real reality.
The ability to be constantly connected means that those fragile relationship beginnings can be fast-tracked: You’ve only hung out once, but you Fed-book Chat throughout the day and like each-others uploads at a crazy pace. It’s too much, too soon, and can be addictive. Constantly chatting means that you can get to know someone seemingly faster and can quickly turn into a phase where you spend hours talking about your childhoods, families, and futures.
Then, you get stuck with a false intimacy.
Fed-book does not just confuse people about how ‘great’ they are, but looking at ‘friends’ pages, posts and updates also negatively affects the views of yourself, because like you they put only their best up & it can make people feel depressed & sad thinking others have a better life than theirs. So now to improve your feelings you gotta out do them to make yourself feel sufficient. Constantly self-modeling & announcing the newest cool things you’ve done.
In other words, the computer or cell phone it is not a healthy place to look for Love.
Sexting and Virtual Sex
Real Life Sex must happen to create more Natives. Sex is not an act for the release of dopamine’s and daily expulsion of sacred energy. When two humans, a man and woman exchange their energy it is a sacred union of these two energies: Water & Fire, Earth and Sky, Sun & Moon, pure balance that can potentially lead to a larger responsibility, a new Life.
In our pre-invasion world it was seen very different than today, very Sacred; the most Sacred of our ceremonies, the one that is universal. By exploiting sexuality, we exploit our Essence as Life forms. By colonizing & changing our sexuality they colonize our first & oldest ceremony, so sacred every man & woman had their own and it was only viewed, attended & participated in by them, an internal union of duality.
It is now controlled by the perverted minds of the colonizer. If they control what arouses people and when, through imagery, they can make a person think about sex and control the oldest part of us.
The Hind Brain is older and Stronger than any other portion of the brain. We share it with all other backboned animals. It is associated with the 5 F’s: Fighting, Feeding, Fearing, Fleeing & Fornicating; The Hind Brain Defends Territories & their husbands or wives from others who may want them. Being aggressive to protect is an important job of the Hind Brain.
“Sexual Behavior is instinctive, responses are automatic & our emotions are more stimulated, negativity & anxiety flow easily.” – Michael Yellow Bird, For Indigenous Minds Only.
When Hind brain is in charge, accessing neural networks that are responsible for compassion, self-awareness & emotional intelligence is harder. The place where our deepest Love comes from can be quickly overridden by the Hind Brain. Today most People in the industrial world function in this mental state of the five F’s. A continued state of Narcissism. Self-Modeling & sexting are perfect examples of this portion of the brain not just in charge but controlled through imagery and violent sexual trauma.
In other words, they have sexualized our world as a way to control the oldest thought process of survival.
Sexting and Pornography are eroding whole generations from birth. While sex is thought of as a curse word in public & our communities, dysfunctional sexuality is a behind closed doors addiction that is available for the whole virtual world to see. In 2012 the Internet Watch Foundation found that an “estimated 88% of self-made explicit images are stolen from their original upload location and made available on other websites, in particular porn sites collecting sexual imagery of children and young people”. When the person who originally sexted the photo finds out everyone has access to it they can go into depression & there have been many cases of suicide.
Young children are even sexting & very few adults want to talk about how wrong & against Natural Law it is because they are doing it or have done it too. We must question what is going on, not just follow the crowd because the cool kid or prettiest girl is leading the way.
Indigenous views of sexuality must be revived as a Sacred teaching to our Young ones.
We did not stare at asses, which is really the upper portion of the legs where you shit comes out of.
“Titties” are the physical tissues where food exits for the new life to eat.
Muscles are what give us form, the clay on sticks.
Sexual organs are for the exiting of turbid fluid (piss) & for exchanging seed to egg to make Life.
This shit is not funny or giggly, it is real. We all have the same bodies, with fluids, organs, tissues & energy. Smartin’ up, this is not a joke, the future of Indigenous People are at stake. Body parts were not objects, just as the human they are part of, are not objects, they are sacred Life forms that must be treated good & engaged respectfully. Physical appearance is shallow. A person’s mind must be in good health to be healthy. Looks are temporary. This did not drive the reason you are with somebody & choose to make a new Life.
Not only does the enemy control our feelings and emotions through screens they get us to attempt to satisfy them with material objects. No matter who we are, now they seek to make all consumers of our own colonization and destruction of the Land.
Study, Experiment & Execute- The creation of the Consumer
Today’s industrial world uses the old roman philosophy of bread & circus for control. Entertainment (Circus) & Welfare (food).
Now they’ve mashed them together making everything circus, flashy entertainment that tells us what to buy, whether it’s food, jewelry, shoes, clothes, toys, games, music devices, phones, computers, household items or whatever they can to get us to continue this perpetual cycle of buying things. Humans are now in a constant state of wanting something else, always getting the itch to buy something else. It is yet another product of low self-esteem, always trying to fill a void, one that can only be filled with Land and Water & living by Natural Law.
Turning humans into buyers of things is called Consumerism. It is another advanced form of colonization. Psychoanalysts have learned they can control people through the selling of stuff. They study the oldest desires in the Hind Brain of individuals then try to fulfill them with products. There are always new products to fulfill those desires in a better way.
Public relations are utilized to control Life in every aspect: the constant sight & sound of bright flashy things, then wanting them & getting them.
The core of white civilization is Individualism, so study groups were set up over generations to find what appeals to the individual human mind & how they can make people Narcissistic, so companies can appeal to that desire & control through products.
In the 1980’s business stopped dividing people by social class and started classifying them by what their inner psychological wants were.
Those who wanted Security & Belonging are Mainstreamers.                If they sought Status & Esteem of Others they are Aspires.
If it is Control they seek they are Succeeders,
or if it is self-esteem they are Reformers.
They market products to fill the wants of these people.
Now through social media they mine all the information they can get about people & market to them directly for their individual wants and desires. It is called Data Mining, and is the newest tool used to help advance control through buying & debt.
Data Mining is used by corporations, police and intelligence.
Wikipedia says: “With this data, companies create customer profiles that contain customer demographics and online behavior. A recent strategy has been the purchase and production of ‘network analysis software’. This software is able to sort out through the influx of social networking data for any specific company.It is used to help companies improve their sales and profitability. Facebook has been especially important to marketing strategists. Facebook’s controversial ‘Social Ads’ program gives companies access to the millions of profiles in order to tailor their ads to a Facebook user’s own interests and hobbies. However, rather than sell actual user information, Facebook sells tracked ‘social actions’. That is, they track the websites a user uses outside of Facebook through a program called Facebook Beacon.”
That shit is crazy! Data mining is the next advancement of colonization
We were not born to be data mined consumers!
Are We Stronger Social Beings because of Fed-book?
Controlling our inner most feelings, when we are hungry, sexually aroused & scared due to violence, are at the root of control.  At one time these feelings would come naturally, when needed. When our body needs more energy, it tells us, and we eat or drink, when we are alone with our partners we are in an intimate space we get sexually aroused, when some form of confrontation or violence occurs we make the decision to fight or get out of the situation somehow if we can. These are not feelings that should be turned on and off by movies, internet, images, billboards or games. By controlling our emotions & feelings, we are like a puppet or a toy that can be turned on & off at the will of the enemy.
“We strengthen our brains neural circuits of fear, anger and helplessness when we engage in negativity, faulty thinking, feeling and behavior…
Our brain changes depends on how we train our minds to engage the world…
A Healthy well balanced mind and brain are essential to engage in proactive, creative & successful decolonization activities” – Michael Yellow Bird
So are we stronger and better human beings because of fed-book. Are we socially advanced? Do we live the good stress free life of our ancestors?
When you log on you may feel like it, but that is all it is, a feeling, not real Life. Get real. Get a Real Life and Real friends who you know and trust and won’t be attracted to you because of physical appearances, what you type & false virtual status.
What type of future Adults are we raising today?
Raising Warriors
vs.
Raising Addicts, Zombies & Disease Riddled Children?
Raising Addicts & Zombies
When phones first entered our communities, elders started to see the break down of personal interaction. People no longer talked to each other face-to-face, just over the phone. Visits and social gatherings became less frequent due to the ease of the phone. Now Internet has taken over, so instead of talking, people are typing and texting, another deeper level of social breakdown with absolutely no human interaction, just writing and reading through a screen.
We have been told we are more social than ever, learning how to speak a language of typed acronyms. Social implies interaction, not typed interaction, but physical interaction.
Children are the primary targets of it all. If children can be taught from a young age, you can control them as adults.
The majority of kids and teens spend about 75% of their awake time attached to some sort of screen.
What type of human is this going to be as an adult? What skill sets will that child learn? Will any of them be applicable if there was no electricity? Will any of these children be functional without electricity?
Addiction is the continued use of a substance or continuation of a behavior despite extremely negative consequences.
Not being able to function without electricity is an extremely negative consequence, a suicidal one. In the world of cyber war, whole Nations electrical systems can be turned over with the switch. On average approximately 7.5 hours per day are spent using some form of entertainment/electrical media. Most people think they need constant audio or visual stimulation.
Doctors have recently set general guidelines recommending that children under the age of two should not watch TV or any form of screen entertainment at all, because television “can negatively affect early brain development” & that children of all ages should not have a television in their bedroom. If it’s bad for child humans in cannot be good for adult ones either.
Where there are humans there are screens, screens have quickly replaced missionaries to colonize those who are uncivilized (not of the city).  It is a world-wide disease, one that people slave in jobs to get and give to their children.
Bright flashy loud T.V. & games is how they get children’s attention; Using our instinctive sensitivity to movement and sudden changes in vision or sound. The human naturally orientates itself to screens, it is proven almost from birth: infants, when lying on their backs on the floor, will crane their necks around 180 degrees to watch TV.
Through stylistic techniques, they activate this orienting response by increasing the rate of cuts, edits, zooms, criticism, sudden noises & camera changes in the same visual scene to increase the persons physiological excitement along with attention to the screen. The content of the program is irrelevant. Screen based entertainment is the flavor enhancer of the audio-visual world, providing unnatural levels of sensory stimulation.
Research from China and Mexico identified television exposure as an independent factor in obesity. Mexico’s health ministry has reported that obesity has risen by 170 per cent in a single decade, 12 per cent higher for each hour of television watched per day. Eating when watching TV is a main factor, humans continue to salivate unnaturally in response to more and more food when normally they would not. 75 per cent of meals are eaten in front of the television.
Other studies have shown that for every hour of television watched there were an increase in attention problems. The younger and more TV watched the more serious the attention disorders become.
The latest research on communication disorders suggests that early childhood television viewing may be an important trigger for autism (communication disorder), which is steadily increasing.
Children get less sleep than previous generations had & have a harder time getting into a deep sleep.  Passive exposure to TV creates sleeping difficulties in all age groups, from infants to adults.
A 25-year study, tracking children from birth has recently concluded that television viewing in childhood and adolescence is associated with poor educational achievement by 30 years of age. Early exposure to television has long-lasting bad consequences for educational achievement and later, the socio-economic status and well-being.
Not that we are promoting the white worlds view of educational and socio-economic status, but it goes to show that screens produce a dumbing effect on the population no matter what their goals are in Life.
Watching screens together, whether TV, Computers or cell phones, is a main pastime of families in the industrial world taking up more time than any other activity but sleep and even that is getting over powered by screen time.
Toys & Games
As Indigenous children we used to play with toys designed to help us learn coordination & the skill sets necessary in our world to Provide & Protect as adults. For example, little bows & arrows, hand-woven dolls to care for as if they were babies & many others that began to teach, from a young age, the jobs we would need to learn to be a beneficial member of our Community & Nation.
After colonization, we began playing with plastic & rubber toys which had very little significance to our way of Life & the Natural world. Now, kids are playing video games, learning how to be electrical killers & consumers, undoubtedly preparing them for a robotic world, whether in War or Purchase.
Recent estimates put the number of people playing video games worldwide at around 1.2 billion. This is mostly children & teens, not including the millions of adults sitting in front of slot machine screens, also known as adult gaming. These addictions are causing children & adults to ignore their own basic necessities of Life, such as Hygiene, Health & Humanity.
Dr. David Greenfield Director of the Center for internet and technology Addiction in Connecticut says people have died or killed others because their games were taken away.
“There are people who have died of deep vein thrombosis, starvation, repetitive motion injuries, heart attacks, malnourishment, and bowel restrictions because they refuse to go to the bathroom,” he said. At a Computer Addiction Services center in Richmond, bc, excessive gaming accounts for 80% of youth counsellor’s caseloads. Overuse of social networking and gaming also makes children more susceptible to depression and anxiety.
Globally, there have been deaths caused directly by exhaustion from playing games for excessive periods of time. Again it is the release of dopamine’s in the Reward System driving these cravings & addictions in Youth. Teck-no-logic addiction through screens is the most addictive thing on Earth and the materials used to make them are causing more diseases than any plague or pandemic know to Life.
Where do screen and computers come from & what are they made of?
Each screen and computer comes from somewhere. It is a compilation of materials that come from the Earth. These materials are acquired through mining.
Mining is when they blow holes into the Earth to access rocks below the surface that contain various metals they use for products. Mining has gone on for thousands of years. The industrial revolution enabled mining to reach a whole new level. Most products around the world are derived from mining, whether for metal or oil. In the process of separating the metal from rock they use toxic and hazardous chemicals, which leak into the ground & ground water.  The metals that are mined are hazardous themselves, they are in the ground for a reason & when exposed to the surface have terrible effects on all Life.
There are over 40 individual materials that make up most electrical products, and are all toxic chemicals ranging from hazardous flame retardants such as PVC &  brominated flame retardants (BFRs), including PBDEs (tri- to deca- brominated congeners), PBBs (tetra- to deca-brominated congeners), HBCD (hexabromocyclododecane) and TBBPA (tetrabromobisphenol A) to heavy metals like lead, tin, chromium, mercury, cadmium, tantalum, tin, tungsten, niobium, gold, copper, bauxite, steel, glass, crystalline silica, phosphorous & many more.
These chemicals are linked to birth defects, impaired learning and numerous other serious health problems.
After they stop working, and they all stop working at some point, they are discarded & become electronic waste, continuing poisoning & leeching poison into Life. Literally billions of electronic products are thrown away each year & billions more are produced to continue the never ending supply & demand. But the Earth only has a limited amount of these materials, leading to very serious discussions around mining other planets and even the Moon.
What do these hazardous & toxic materials do to our Bodies?
Physically, electricity is the greatest cause of sickness around the world and in the story of humanity. It is the greatest weapon for not only monitoring humans, it is the greatest weapon of sickness & disease ever known to the Earth. It is causing millions of pre-mature deaths and making whole generations dependent on a white medical system that has no concern with healing.
The use of electrical products by children is killing whole generations earlier than ever before, starting at the core of Life, the cellular structure.
“The body conducts electricity that enters it. When this happens, the body’s electrical processes are disturbed, & cell functioning is disrupted. The electricity in electrical wiring and appliances changes the atomic structure of the cell and breaks the bonds that exist in and between cells. This triggers changes in blood chemistry, induces free radicals, disrupts the cells ability to control  PH levels, enzyme activity, cell reproduction, synthesis, functioning and energy transfer. A healthy and permeable cell membrane wall is needed for effective communication and coordination of activity between cells, tissues, organs and nerves. When exposed, to EMFS, the protein in the cell membrane wall is weakened and the cells react as though threatened by an invader and elicits a state of emergency (fight or flight response) in the body. In this state of emergency, non-vital processes are delayed, and blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar levels increase.  The cell enters into a state of emergency. Besides impaired communication and coordination, the reduced membrane permeability also makes it difficult for nutrients to enter and for toxins to exit. As a consequence, the body does not benefit from nutrients and healing therapies as it should, When the cell is in a state of emergency, instead of producing water and carbon dioxide, the cell produces hydrogen peroxide and carbon monoxide. In short, the cell begins to ferment. The state of emergency behavior is passed on to each subsequent generation of cells.”- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
VLF (Very Low Frequency) & ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) & EMF (Electric Magnetic Frequency) are emitted from all electronics. They cause what scientist call PEMR (Pulsed Electro Magnetic Radiation) which disturbs the balance of living cells. PEMR exist around all screens & continue shooting out of them even when turned off and unplugged. Magnetic Radiation travels through absolutely everything, walls, metals, flesh, screen filters…everything.
Magnetic Radiation creates electric smog which is everywhere, affecting all Life & doing irreversible harm to all, especially those who are around it all the time. Those who keep cellphones in their pockets, talk or text on them, watch TV or spend time on computers are the most affected.
Magnetic Radiation affects the whole body. The Pineal Gland is the organ most impaired by EMF exposure. This organ produces hormones and neurotransmitters that tune and regulate the hypothalamus, central nervous system, and immune system. EMF exposure suppresses the pineal gland activity leading to the reduction of two important chemical messengers: Melatonin and Serotonin. Both are involved in regulating numerous processes and functions in the body. Serotonin has enormous influence over many brain functions. Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant needed to keep the body healthy and strong.
Melatonin Deficiency can cause: insomnia; sleep disorders; endometriosis; fibroids; fibrocystic breasts; menstrual disturbances; prostate cancer; PMS; immune disturbances; cancer; high cholesterol; blood pressure abnormalities; depression; bipolar disorder; Alzheimer’s; autism; epilepsy; sudden infant death; diabetes; anxiety; heart arrhythmia; cataracts; and scoliosis.
Serotonin Deficiency can cause: insomnia; memory and learning disorders; mood disorders; eating disorders; depression; obesity; panic attacks; alcoholism; headaches; ADD; aggression; fibromyalgia; PMS; deficits schizophrenia and deficits in executive, fibromyalgia, schizophrenia, anxiety, memory and learning disorders, and impairments in functions that are collectively known as executive functions.
Our body has sixty trillion cells. Each cell is a tiny organism and can easily be damaged by the action of electromagnetic wave lengths which interfere with your body & reproductive abilities, menstrual cycles. For example, sperm & egg count are greatly affected by electrical products.
Obviously electrical products are not a good for health, but putting laptops, i-pads cellphones or any screen product on your lap is even worse. Some people do it daily, all day.
Watch out Narcissists, it’s not just what is inside that is affected, computers also cause wrinkles in the skin and premature aging. What about close to your head? It’s no coincidence cell phone are called cell phones, they affect the cells & when put close to the head all the time cause Cellular Death.
Cellular Death
Your cell phone emits and receives signals. There is an electromagnetic field around each cell phone, damaging memory, endocrine secretions, sexual abilities; gout & can cause dementia, depression, Parkinson’s disease & severe neurological diseases & tumors. Scientists admit there is a direct relationship between brain cancer and cell phone use. Brain cancer tumor risk has been steadily increasing over the last 10 years- particularly among the 20 -29 year olds.
What will it be like in the next 10 years with more & more children having i-pods & cell phones? Some scientists believe whole generation to come will be crazy in the head & brain tumors will be common in teenagers. Before you decide to allow your kids to have or even touch cell phones, look at the dangers involved.
Radiation in general & radiation from cell phones in particular penetrate much deeper into the tender skulls of kids than into adults. Tissues in their brains and limbs are still growing and their cells are rapidly dividing. Without a doubt it will decrease their life span. Once it penetrates your kids’ heads, it enters their brain and eyes at an absorption rate far greater than it does in adults. Up to 9 times higher. What does it mean for your kids? It means that their risks for cancer & mental sickness are far greater.
Cell phones for kids are death traps, ensuring them an unhealthy Life. They may seem normal only because we live in this time of worldwide radiation & really do not know what normal health is. Damage to the genetic material in kids’ growing cells can result in disruption of cellular functions, cell death, development of tumors, and damage to the immune functions and the nervous systems.
Many nations around the world have banned cell phone use to children. For Indigenous People, our children are everything & we should do the same. Also beware of all electronics near babies & children. Most baby monitors use digital wireless technology that produce more powerful EMF’s than living near a cell phone tower.
When EMF exposure is reduced, healing energies flow freely & the body begins to heal itself & get stronger. The nervous system & acupuncture meridians are unblocked. Our Natural flow begins again, the pineal gland increases production of hormones & chemicals that control & effect mental, emotional & physical functioning. Clarity, concentration, understanding and calmness set in. There is control of impulses & increased Energy.
Social Media: A scary place of Strangers, Predators & Perverts
Besides the effects on the body itself, children are at the greatest risk from social networking. Social Media is the perfect place for predators to hide.
Would you send your young children into the middle of a populated prison yard unattended? Or a busy city full of every kind of weirdo known to man-kind? Knowing full well that perverts & predators are lurking all around just waiting to find prey to abuse? Hell No. So why would you allow them to have any social media accounts? This is essentially what parents are allowing by allowing their children to make accounts online. Just because “everybody is doing it,” it has become normalized, much like the gas chambers & smallpox blankets humans are blindly following with no thought of what it is they are doing. It is absolutely crazy! Protect your babies by keeping them off social media & away from sickos.
Building a Society of Cyborgs
Many walk around constantly looking at a screen like zombies, having no situational awareness & knowledge of what is happening around them. Go anywhere with large human populations, whether on the street, a city bus or shopping mall & you will observe the majority of everyone constantly looking down at their cell phones, or as we prefer to call them, little poisonous electrical boxes. But why look down all the time? Why not just have it as a part of your body? That makes more sense, right?
Cyborgs may sound sci-fi, but they are actually real & gaining in popularity.
Cyborg, short for “cybernetic organism” is a being with both organic and artificial parts. They are currently making cyborgs for all sectors of industrial society, humans that are not full humans, full of electrical chips with the ability to stay constantly connected to the internet.  Some cyborgs have their eyeglasses implanted into their head with screens on in their glasses so they can always see their social media sites. Even better, some have fake eyes with cameras & screens built into them.
Cyborgs are a part of the movement to replace humans with robots. Militaries are at the most advanced stages of robotics, some planning to have up to 1/3 of military vehicles unmanned within the next few years.
Constant cell phone & social media updating may seem innocent enough but it is normalizing the constant presence of technology which is leading to the normalcy of cyborgs & all robotics, or TI (Teck-No-Logic Intelligence).
Movement Health
“The most important thing was security. What you knew you held in your heart.” – Companaero Raul, EZLN Warrior
“Everything was for security.”
“Above all we had to be discreet about things.”-  Commandante Abraham, EZLN Warrior
“In the first place, we learned Security measures without Security you can’t do anything”…
“As the work grew, we had even more security”
“…We always put security first” – Companero Gerardo, EZLN Warrior
“He was also very strict about security…” – Capitan Lucio, EZLN Warrior, speaking about subcommandante Pedro
“They were told how to be careful because everything was underground” – Major Moises, EZLN Warrior
Security Effects of fed-book
Making Gathering Intelligence Easy & More Efficient
Social media is an intelligence operation, which has completely changed the jobs of intelligence groups. Before social media, spies had to put much more effort into gathering information about those they want information from, and it would take an extensive amount of time to put complete profiles together on targets.
Today, everybody gives them all the personal and group information they need on their own, and all the intelligence community has to do is monitor and organize the information. Social Media use, combined with cell-phone conversations and text are enabling oppressive regimes around the world to monitor people more than ever, maintaining & gaining more control in every way.
Everything you do on social media stays on social media, regardless of your security settings, or if you can still see it or not. Whatever you post is somewhere, forever. There is no such thing as deleting your account– all info can be recovered at any time.
With over 2 billion people (and growing daily) on some sort of social media site it is the best known surveillance technology that has ever existed. For an intelligence organization, the most difficult & time consuming job is the collection and organization of data. With social media people make their own intelligence profile and update it constantly, sometimes multiple times a day.
Social media makes us think that record keeping and documentation of our lives & locations is normal. We have begun to normalize surveillance and even make excuses why it is ok.
People give government and business access to information that they would never have the time or resources to get on their own. There is no controversy about surveillance because the targets of it are not only the ones producing the information they are also distributing it.
Fed-books privacy policy states: “We may share your info in response to a legal request if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so…we may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity…” What the hell is a “good faith belief”?
Fed-book gives a trail of information on people from physiological wants and valuable information about the reading, listening, viewing & buying habits & attractions of its users.
In 2006, Newsweek reported that myspace had nearly 800 agencies and a 24-7 law enforcement team helping surf the site and monitor its users, their activities, and locations. In 2 years of launching the site it was contributing to 150 investigations a month. “Under Justice Department guidelines anything posted is fair game,” according to myspace vice president Jason Feffer. And that was years ago. myspace was shut down and made way for dozens of social media sites, and ever improving law enforcement monitoring and investigations.
The US Department of Justice uses social media to, “Reveal personal communications, establish motives & personal relationships, provide location information, prove & disprove alibis, and establish crime or criminal enterprises.” In the same Justice Department, documents say their purpose is to go undercover on fed-book and other social media sites to “communicate with suspects/targets, gain access to non-public info & map social relationships/networks.”
A department of Homeland Security memo states, “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of friends link to their page and many of these people accept ‘cyber friends’ that they do not even know… Once a user posts online they create a public record & timeline of their activities.”
Every year (since 2009) law enforcement has a gathering called SMILE-Social Media Internet & Law Enforcement. The gathering is held to “emphasize the relationship between Law enforcement, social activist and traditional media.” They also teach & share techniques regarding “maintaining public order & mass surveillance in an open source world”.
Infiltration into movements depends on believability of the informant. With social media you just have to type the right words your targets want to hear, post pics & videos they will like. They can just simply like the posts of their targets & gain enough trust to start engaging targets in typed conversations and if they really want to get close, soon enough they can get a phone number from target and start to have phone conversations, which can lead to face to face meetings. Profiles & posts offer law enforcement all the information they would ever need to pose a recruit or real member of the targeted organization.
The number of social media sites & users give the impression that there are too many people to keep track of. In reality, law enforcement is becoming better than ever at dealing with massive amounts of information. The NYPD (New York Pig Department) said they plan to “mine social media sites like facebook, twitter, myspace, linked in, in order to find criminals bragging about a crime they’ve committed or planning to commit.” Data mining is not just limited to policing. The CIA follows up to 5 million tweets a day. Analysts then cross-reference the data with other available intelligence and create reports for the white house.
Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal says, “The illusion of privacy is simply self-delusion on the part of young people.” Fed-book uses facial recognition software that automatically identifies people in photos. Opting out does not keep them from gathering data and recognizing your face- it just keeps people from tagging you. A person does not even need to be a Fed-book user to be identified.
There are over 90 billion (and counting) photos that fed-book hosts have access to, which they can then give to anybody they have “a good faith belief” should have it.
The US Army states that one of the ‘key tasks of counterinsurgency are to understand how members of a targeted population interact with each other’. The FBI can now instantly compile thorough dossiers/profiles (a collection of documents about a particular person, event, or subject.) on u.s. citizens tying together surveillance outside a drug store, credit card transactions, cell-phone call records, texts, emails, airplane travel info  & web-search information.
Communications, along with public data like Facebook profiles, GPS location information, tax data, and other commercial data, were used to create “sophisticated graphs of some american’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions, and other personal information,” said The New York Times. 
In addition to phone records and email logs, the National Security Agency (NSA) uses Facebook and other social media profiles to create maps of social connections. A policy change in November 2010 gave the NSA the ‘legal’ right to chain together info on targets, and discover & track connections from all other intelligence services. Julian Asange, founder of whistleblower wiki-leaks says, “Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies, and building this database for them,”
Find ‘Em, Fix ‘Em, Flank ’em, Fuck ’em is a common military term used when engaging an enemy.
With social media we lead to our own demise.
We get found every time we log in, and you’re always found if you stay logged in. Your location is always picked up.
We are fixed, because they know our attention is on a screen in specific location.
We can get flanked at any time we are in a virtual world because we never see them coming.
We get fucked whenever they want, or better yet they let us fuck ourselves by giving us an open line to incriminate ourselves by thinking we have some form of freedom.
Building your house on the sand.
Organizing through fed-book-the illusion of being organized.
“People in the movement are falling for that shit?”
-Wolverine, Secwepemc Warrior, response when told about Fed-book.
Being involved in any Movement or Organization you must have strong ties. Connections & trust is of the utmost importance. Fed-book & social media in general promotes weak ties, the weakest possible, so weak that people accept support from anybody who types the right words; they could be cops, intelligence analysts, rapists, molesters, crazies or just everyday pieces of shit.
Some people promote that the social movement is more organized than ever before, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
There has never been a time in our story that we have been so un-organized.
Making connections around the world at the click of a friend confirmation is so fake it’s a bad joke. You do not know them, they are not your friend, ally or supporter, you cannot confirm or deny anything substantial about the people you connect with on social media, only thing that you know for sure is that you don’t really know them, or even really know if it is the person whose pictures you are looking at. Some think they can learn about the supposed person they are friending by checking out their photos, friends & posts, but learning about anybody through a screen is impossible.
Virtual reality is just that, it is virtually real, but it isn’t really real. Our Movement for the Liberation of our Lands and People is Real, not virtual, so we cannot claim to be part of this Movement through a virtual reality, it’s fake, a figment of imagination. Let’s get real.
Are you Fed-book Down or Really Down? The rise of the Internet Warrior
“There is no excuse for weakness.” – Sakej, Mik’Mak Warrior
Narcissism not only plagues the average fed-book user but it is what contributes to the continuing exposing & monitoring of so-called ‘movement’ members & organizers. Many think they are so beautiful, but the only real beauty is for Intelligence & police, through social media they make themselves a beautifully easy target for monitoring & surveillance.
Being a celebrity & well-known is promoted by society, even in Indigenous Movements that are supposed to be fighting for Land & Water. There are constantly people who are seeking to be fed-book famous, using the fight for the Land as a way to get attention to try to boost that low self-esteem. There is now an enormous amount of people, who are ‘down’ with the cause online, but they’re real Life actions & lifestyle is everything but down; just another unhealthy consumer contributing daily to the destruction of the Earth.
Celebrities are not Leaders. Leaders lead humans through example & influence. We must revive our real teachings & do away with pre-madonna celebrities craving attention who have no real life skills. Posting & posing are not skills, sorry.
A Lakota War Leader constantly reminds his Warriors that “the most important time to be a Warrior is when nobody is looking.” Fed-book is the opposite. People just play Warrior when they think people are looking. That’s all they are doing, playing. But this game is real Life & real Struggle involving real Life consequences too.
Educating people about current situations is great, but there are far better, more secure & less self-incriminating ways than social media to do it. In the current teck-no-logic world many may have forgotten how to really organize with humans, or for the younger ones they were most likely never taught.
Internet defenders often bring up the Zapatistas as a ‘great’ example of how effective the internet can be. To a certain extent, they are right. But, the Zapatistas spent 10 years organizing secretly, meeting with real humans, building a Movement from the ground up, and never informing intelligence services or the world about their organizing or their plans. They did not exist in the virtual world until they chose to & they did not choose to until they had a strong enough force to take over 7 cities & 650 ranches all while maintaining their home bases & villages. They did not organize their Movement through internet & damn sure not through social media (monitoring) if they did we would have never heard of them cause they wouldn’t exist anymore– they would have never even been able to get started.
“…The fact that people see social media as a tool for social change is more a triumph of marketing than the result of some digital revolution. Social media is a powerful tool for the very institutions that we are at war with, the people that seek to exploit & oppress us. Embracing it has resulted in our willing participation in a process of surveillance that we should be actively resisting”
-Evan Tucker, ‘Who needs the NSA when we have facebook’ Life During Wartime: Resisting Counter Insurgency
Reactionary Mentality vs. Pro-Active Thinking
We have been strategically raised to only address symptoms and not causes. To look at the pain & not the source of the pain. When we have a skin rash, we get a topical cream to put over it, never stopping to ask, what caused the rash, if we have a cough, we get something to sooth the cough, not addressing what caused the cough. When have no more food we go to a store. Before industrialization we were pro-active, we would go & harvest more food while we still had food, so we would never risk having none. They need our mind to react to situations & conditions they’ve created & not proactively work on fixing them.
Campaigning & protesting are reactionary actions. This is a mind-state promoted by the system, being a reactionary. We must get out of the campaign mentality. Protesting & freedom of speech are legal for a reason, because they produce no genuine change to the destruction of Mother Earth. While some campaigns may be successful in stalling some projects or achieving some legal legislation in colonial governments, no campaign has ever stopped this beast from swallowing the Earth, Water, Air & Universe. Even if they stop for a while, you can guarantee they will be back at some point to get the resources.
Social Media campaigns are a perfect way to keep those who could be potential in the building of a real Movement distracted with Narcissistic Celebrity views of getting known by ‘fighting’ the corporate world. They are in fact not really fighting but becoming another hindrance to real substantial Movement that led the Zapatistas to have a Land Base with clean Water to operate & Live from.
This industrial world does not limit their mind to single projects–industrial projects are a small part of how they keep this society functioning. The systems thinking & vision are very large; ours must be as well. The more we get caught into a campaign to campaign, or event to event mentality, the less we are thinking about the big picture, which may include stopping these projects, but cannot be limited to it. Projects and campaigns to stop them are the symptoms that arises out of industrialization. It’s not the cause. In an organized movement if we want real change we must address the root cause of the problem, a false man-made way of life based on mining, oil, electricity & greed.
Now people are virtually protesting, letting off steam through comments & posts, having even less effect than previous generations, thinking the Movement is in the latest image and movie. Instead of being on the Land protecting the Earth, many are concerned with getting the newest camera & computer to help get their word out. Everybody is a producer & photographer in the digital age. Technology has become a great excuse for in-action & building a real Movement with actual humans.
In order to fight industry, first we must not need industry, or else it’s called suicide. To fight mining we cannot live mining. To fight oil, we must not live oil. To fight industry, we must not need industry. How can we not need industry? By replacing it with Indigenous ways of living. They replaced our ways with white ones & they do not work. Now we will replace white ones with ours again.
Time & Energy is all we have while on Earth, we must spend it wisely, every breath that we spend on fedbook, twitter or linked-In, is one we cannot get back. It is wasted time. We must use our time being productive for the real world we live in & the one we want to create. Use your time to learn how to provide for yourself in every part of living, this is the biggest fight of all, this is the Movement, being a Real Indigenous Person.
Whatever english term you prefer, Indigenous, Indian, Native or Original these are just english words to describe those who still live on the Land without Industry. If you do not live this way, you are not really Indigenous. Right?  All humans were people of the Land at one time, even in europe. Can europeans claim Indigenous Identity because they’re ancestors used to live with the Land? Is Indigenous just having ancestors that lived with the land? That would mean the world was Indigenous, right?
But the world is not. To use the term Indigenous you must recognize your Responsibilities to continue Life with Natural Law & Live by them. Does that mean a white hippy in north amerikkka can say they are Indigenous? We’re not saying that. But what we are saying is that we cannot just continue to be consumers & slave to the white-man’s possessions. We must recognize our Duties & work hard to fulfill them. Fed-book makes Life seem easier, less work. But is less work good? Does it make you Stronger? Does it make you a better Human?
As Bruce Lee says, “Do not pray for an easy Life, pray for the Strength to endure a difficult one”
Where do we go from here without Social Media?
“…if we’re going to be revolutionaries we have to be revolutionary to the last, because if one doesn’t accept the full consequences or abandons the people, it’s no good…
If you say you have to Struggle, you have to go through till the end.” –Major Moises, Zapatista Warrior
So what can we learn from all of this? Well for one thing, social media is not advancing us in our daily lives to be better humans, it is not helping our families become better families, it is not helping our bodies become stronger & it is not helping our Movements for Land & Water. So what should we do about it? We can start by unplugging.
Deactivate your social media accounts. Take it as a loss while you still can.
Malcolm X says it best: “Once you change your philosophy you change your thought pattern, once you change your thought pattern you change your attitude, once you change your attitude it changes your behavior pattern & then you go into some action.”
Before neuroscience recognized the brains ability to change according to thoughts & experiences we have, Malcolm knew it through his own experience. Today they call it Neuro-plasticity. Knowing our brain has the ability to change its destructive thoughts, feelings, memories & narcissistic behaviors is the first step to getting strong real Life people. Only real Indigenous Men & Woman will make real change for the future. No change or strength lies in the virtual world, just confusion, weakness & disease.
We must not hold other humans up as the standard we strive to be like. Things are not ok because ‘respected’ people do them. We must think critically, examine what is going on around you, question it & if need be, change it. As long has we’re breathing it’s never too late.
Remember Tecumseh was just a Man & Lozen was just a Woman, with the same Organs & Bodily Fluids, Tissues & Energy as all of us. What made them different? First it was their Mind, how they thought & then their training. Because they thought different, they acted different, they trained hard to survive and Live in a Strong way. We too have the same potential to be like them, not just the same potential, but we have a Sacred Duty to be like them, they must be our standard, we must all be like Crazy Horse & Geronimo.
Next time you feel that temptation of weakness creeping in just ask yourself what would Tecumseh & Geronimo do? What would they think of social media & making our own intelligence profile for the enemies of the Earth?
A Movement is comprised of many individuals who in order to be successful must have a common vision and a plan on how to make that vision come to fruition. If our vision is re-building our Indigenous Nations, then we must have strong families to do this. When a man and a women make babies they have now knowingly or unknowingly engaged in a Sacred responsibility to care for these new lives, to guide them & protect them to the best of their ability regardless of the consequence. No matter what prior dreams and thoughts a person had as an individual with no children, the primary job now is to feed, cloth, protect and keep those new lives warm in cold and cool in hot. The child needs teaching & knowledge of the Land & Universe to be Strong, not screen time. We must Raise Warriors not addicts.
Get your mind out of screens. Come back to reality. If you were never in it, come & join us.
Real Warriors don’t sext, text, message, post, like, friend, comment, poke or any of the other slave talk in social media, they don’t were skinny jeans or self-model, they live and die according to Natural Law and walk the Lands in every part of the World.
Take Courage, be humble, this fight did not start with us & will not end with us, it is a Generational Struggle, our Duty is to continue Natural Law by Any Means Necessary. Love Life. It is Beautiful.
Remember our Warrior Virtues:
Honor-Streangth-Courage-Duty-Dicipline-Loyalty-Integrity-Willpower-Wisdom-Self-Sacrifice.
We will Continue Forever! Raise Warriors! Don’t Talk About it, Be About it!
Earths Army Unite!
From the Mountains of the Northwest Western Hemisphere
Native Youth Movement-Society of Warriors