We all know fight, flee, freeze, and fawn as instinctual reactions to stress or confrontation. I believe freezing can be cultivated to become equanimity. It may even be the case that a good deal of freezing is fundamentally natural or spiritual equanimity. ABN
“The United States as a nation has been severely kidnapped by political and other forces derived from Jewish capital,” thus said Dong Manyuan, the former Vice president of CIIS, the Chinese foreign ministry’s think tank, in a TV interview on November 1, in response to the interviewer claim that Jews “manipulate and control” 70% of America’s wealth. (Dong had expressed a similar view, cast in only slightly less hostile terms, even before the war.)
In the weeks since Hamas’ October 7 assault on Israel, the People’s Republic of China has not only joined ranks with Russia and Iran in diplomatic efforts against Israel and supportive of Palestinians. That is not new. What is new is a surge on social media platforms controlled by the Chinese government of an unprecedented spate of antisemitic messaging.
A Social Media Campaign
The Chinese government’s media began in the days after October 7 to broadcast the theme of an American conspiracy hatched by Jews who control the US government. On October 9, China Central Television (CCTV) accused the US of “instigating the war” and “adding fuel to the fire” as part of a grand strategy to maintain regional hegemony and enrich its military-industrial complex. “The US is siding with the wrong side of history in Gaza,” according to the CCP Central Propaganda Department’s China Daily.
Side by side with this theme of American conspiracy came the accusation promoted on October 10 by the Propaganda Department’s front organization, the China Internet Information Center (CIIC), that the Israelis should be compared to the Nazis. On the same day, another viral post by state-run China Central Television (CCTV) tied the conflict to widespread antisemitic tropes. It read, “Jews, who account for 3% of the US population, manipulate and control 70% of the country’s wealth.” It went on to describe US presidential candidates’ obeisance to Jewish capital in an effort to explain the Biden administration’s unwavering support for Israel. Ambassador Wu concurred: “The Jewish bloc’s influence is clear to all.”
Chinese social media influencers quickly sprang into action.
“Hamas went too soft on Israel,” opined award-winning online influencer Su Lin soon after. “Isn’t Israel today a Jewish version of the Nazis?” she asked rhetorically.
“Beyond a shrinking minority in the West, her views are widely accepted,” mused Andy Mok, a frequent contributor to state broadcasters and a senior research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), China’s top “private” think-tank.
Racist cartoons, Hitler memes, swastikas, and quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are now ubiquitous in comments sections. In an ironic twist, Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the CCP mouthpiece Global Times, cautioned his followers on Weibo, “Some of us should not be influenced by public opinion dominated by Jews and Americans.” Two weeks later, Hu claimed that “there is no such thing as antisemitism in China,” adding Holocaust inversions comparing Israel to modern-day Nazis.
I like talk radio. I want to listen to NPR. Many of your topics are good. But almost all of them are heavily slanted left, anti-Trump, anti-conservative, pro-Ukraine War, etc. I want to hear your side but I also want to hear the other side. It is bad media, bad for USA, and super-boring radio to feature only one side of an issue as if there is no other side at all. Indeed, most issues have several sides all worthy of discussion. Your shows would gain listeners and respect if you provided real balance. ABN
UPDATE: A good example of how bad NPR can be happened a few days ago. I was driving and a show came on NPR about how American evangelicals were supporting Trump in large numbers. One commentator was some journo who has been reporting on religion in USA for forty years; the other was some college professor of religious studies. I forget who the host was. The entire program entailed describing how evangelicals had a psychological need to be accepted and heard and that’s why they support Trump. If I am remembering correctly the speakers implied if not stated outright that evangelicals had that need because they were uneducated and lacked sophistication. I found the program extremely irritating because all three of the supposedly educated and sophisticated speakers never onceconsidered that evangelicals might like Trump’s policies because they are good policies. My sense of those three speakers is they themselves are small-minded, incurious, and selfish in how they waste airtime by telling only one side of a potentially great story. Such a waste. It was a very good topic. Next time, get some people who are able to sympathize with evangelicals and who understand Trump’s policies as they are and not as NPR frames them all the time. To be clear, I am 100% willing to listen to all positions on all topics, including what amounts to NPR propaganda, but I really really want to hear all sides. Forty years he’s been a religion journo and many years she’s been a college religion prof and they both just cooed at each other over NPR lefty banalities the entire time. The host was no better. ABN
I’ve hidden my hand my whole life. I wear long sleeves and haven’t seen a doctor about it since I was a toddler. My right hand is completely normal. On my left hand, my pinky, ring, and middle fingers are normal. The issue is only with the thumb and index finger they are the same length and to the side.
It’s not painful or limiting physically but it’s always affected my confidence which is why I hide it.
I mentioned the other day that Reddit has small subs that can be intellectually stimulating. The post linked above, including many of its comments, shows what the title says. One conclusion from this is that the shame and self-induced ‘need’ to hide that shame has wide applications across all stigmatisms and psychological conditions, which often are reified as stigmatisms. By hiding shame or stigmatism we give it an overblown life of its own. By not hiding it, we remove its power to shame us. A physical stigma is simply the luck of the draw and, while someone may be to blame for it, in the end you have to live with it. Psychological abuse or trauma is not so different. At the end of the day, it’s your cross to bear. If FIML is done with this in mind, both partners can use the FIML method to gradually bite off small pieces of whatever shame or trauma or confusion they are experiencing. Doing this repeatedly, over months and years, will slowly reveal the trauma to both partners. And this will provide a wondrous level of freedom. Psychological trauma always leaves evidence in the mind much as physical abnormalities can rarely be fully corrected. Nonetheless, both conditions benefit greatly from exposure to the sunlight of objective consciousness. And this can lead to a state of unperturbedness as the stoics say or enlightenment/ nirvana as the Buddhists say. ABN
Free speech is now our most important right. 2A is not going to stop totalitarian mind-control. They already search and seize whatever they want. So far, though, we still have a fundamental right to free speech even if we can be isolated by algorithms. We want and need more but at least we have what we have. Eva has a prominent voice and is using it well. I urge everyone to use your freedom of speech. Say what you think not just online but to your friends and family, your neighbors. Wide-open toleration of strong opinions is the bloodstream of a free society, a real civilization. ABN
Another former Bush administration official is exposing the elites’ fear of the upcoming geophysical event on Tucker Carlson’s show.
She says much of the stolen black budget money ended up being used to build underground doomsday bunkers and infrastructure.
Watch this segment about what the elite is afraid of, and why we should start preparing too—because they’re not going to tell you what’s coming. Follow this thread for more information!
She says ‘solar minimum,’ but what she really means is the Grand Solar Minimum. They are afraid of the Grand Solar Minimum, when the Sun becomes less active and its magnetic field weakens. Combined with the decreasing strength of Earth’s magnetic field, this will expose us to increased cosmic rays and radiation from outside the solar system.
There are studies indicating that the Sun will enter a ‘Grand Solar Minimum’ sometime between 2030 and 2040. So that is why you are hearing a lot about the year 2030.
The revelation that University of Zurich researchers secretly deployed AI bots to manipulate Reddit users’ opinions should chill anyone who values authentic human discourse.
These weren’t merely passive observers—they were digital persuaders that analyzed users’ personal histories, fabricated identities, and crafted arguments specifically designed to change minds.
Most troubling?
They succeeded spectacularly—achieving persuasion rates six times higher than normal human interactions.
This experiment crossed critical ethical lines.
Without consent or disclosure, researchers unleashed bots that claimed to be rape victims, misrepresented religious teachings, and spread misinformation about controversial topics.
These digital ghosts generated over 1,500 comments, each precisely calibrated to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities of their human targets.
We’ve long worried about social media’s echo chambers.
But what happens when those chambers are deliberately infiltrated by increasingly sophisticated AI systems trained on the very platforms they’re manipulating?
Reddit’s recent data-sharing deal with OpenAI suggests we’re actively providing the training material for ever more persuasive digital manipulators.
Reddit moderators rightly condemned this unauthorized experiment, but their discovery came months after the damage was done.
How many other digital conversations are currently being shaped by invisible algorithmic hands?
I view Reddit fairly often. Started using it when it had very few users and you could easily get a post on the front page. AskScience was glorious back then as conversations would go on and on and there was very little bs. That was a long time ago. Today’s Reddit is mind-control totalitarian thought-slavery on virtually all major subjects. However, if you go to small subreddits, you can find very interesting material; subreddits on narcissism and other personality disorders; on aspects of culture such as parenting or marriage customs. I highly appreciate hearing authentic voices from around the world on topics like those and many more. That said, another thing you can see on Reddit is what looks to me like spontaneous hive-mind formation. These look real to me because they can form very quickly in subs that have nothing to do with politics. Tooafraidtoask is one example where this can happen. I encourage everyone to support free-speech on all platforms and use your free-speech yourself, use it often. Keep pushing the envelope wherever you are because widespread free-speech that people use is probably our only defense against a looming and probable computerized totalitarian nightmare. ABN
Spain says hot weather caused the power outage on the Iberian Peninsula; Space Weather News says it was caused by sudden shift in earth’s magnetic field which allowed a solar storm to strike Gibraltar; a third opinion is days after cancelling an arms sale to Israel, Spain’s power grid went down. As The World Turns. ABN
American Buddhist Net 