The original idea

When I was first led to create Mystery Paper, I was imagining producing a few short animations to help demonstrate visually the mechanisms which are conveyed in a very confusing manner (by design) in the UCC and Bills of Exchange acts. I noticed that the same questions would keep coming up during the Inpower Movement Q+A calls and I recalled having had very similar confusions previously myself. On these calls, Cal Washington would do his best to explain on a high level what was going on (or supposed to be going on) but since the whole negotiable instrument system is so convoluted and innately ‘backwards’ from our natural instincts (e.g. people are exchanging debt obligations on paper.. not what they ordinarily consider as tokens of ‘value’ or ‘money’) I could tell people would struggle to process what Cal was saying in real time, from their current level of understanding. I had the instinct (and persistent thought) to create a kind of animated visual aid to help people wrap their head around this elaborate magic trick. While it sounds a little weird grammatically, I liked the idea of calling it Mystery Paper (as in Mystery Babylon) to reflect the mysterious papers which surround our daily lives. I asked Cal if he thought it would be a useful project, he agreed, and so I got to work.

The goal was to help people keep all of these different terms (drawer, drawee, payor, payee, bearer etc) clear in their minds while being able to watch transactions in progress. This way they could follow visually what was actually occurring or being exchanged (and what wasn’t!), and make some sense of the original intentions behind these customs and practices.

In other words, to understand how someone is cheating, you first need to understand how a system is supposed to work in the first place (even if only ostensibly). If you want to understand why and how someone is cheating at soccer – or badminton or chess, or whatever – you first need to understand the rules of that game.

The context loop

Of course, as these initial animations were completed, I realised that I should provide some context as to why we should even be paying attention to these mechanisms in the first place. That context then required more context and before I knew it I had plotted out a 20 episode series outline to really convey all the aspects that I wanted to go eventually into. As you may have noticed, these episodes had a tendency to end up longer than I anticipated as I felt led to use metaphors and various examples to help explain these concepts in more relateable ways.

Along with other factors, this expansion has resulted in some episodes doubling in length and needing to be split into two (sometimes multiple times) and at this point I would not even bother trying to say what the total number of episodes I have planned for the series. My goal is always for this content to be as engaging as possible – not always easy given the density of the subject matter – and for each episode to stand on its own as being accessible and watchable to anyone who has the ‘ears to hear’. As such, a lot of effort goes into making each episode ‘flow’ as well as possible in a self-contained piece of content that can be watched in a single sitting, whether it be 20 minutes long or 50.

Necessary ‘deviation’

While it may appear that some recent episode content (e.g. British monarchs, oaths and so on) are a deviation from the original series conceit of negotiable instruments, I would suggest that this whole ‘money’ system scam does not exist in a vacuum, nor did it arise spontaneously or ‘by accident’. For us to understand the broader purpose of this system and the higher-level rules which govern it, we need to look above the ‘money’ system itself.

As you can probably imagine, these episodes take many, many man-hours to produce and unfortunately I am just one man. While I begin each episode’s research with some ideas of what I want to explore and demonstrate (often arising from things I have previously heard from Cal or others), as the cliche goes there is often a big gap between knowing something instinctively, and being able to (in any convincing way) prove it to others.

There’s what you know, and what you can prove

To take just one example: after (several years ago) hearing Cal talk about the British Monarchs still holding power over the world system and merely pretending to hand over the reigns to ‘constitutional monarchies’, it struck me intuitively as a fascinating example of the ‘real power’ being disguised, and yet hiding in plain sight – something that most people would acknowledge is a recurring pattern in our world. In order to test and prove this assertion, however, in specific, plausible ways (both to myself and others) there is a huge amount of reading and research required.

My go-to approach these days is to take the long, boring, official documents put out by organisations and institutions, copy them to my digital tablet, and sit down for hours on end marking up the PDFs (in Foxit PDF reader) just looking out for anything that sounds suspicious or doesn’t quite make sense. Like with all PR (propaganda), there’s the headline version, and then there’s what the 100+ page document actually says when you read it – something that very few people (understandably) bother to do.

In the case of the Commonwealth Declarations document – if you read it with a critical eye – these countries are clearly bound by very oppressive regulations and the organisation is not the happy, consensual voluntary association of nations that it is presented as. Of course to read, mark up, sift, arrange, script and present this information in a logical and engaging progression takes time and effort, and that’s before I even think about music or graphics or animation.

In this way, I might read 5 documents or articles to understand the ‘official’ gist of a particular point, then read a few 50-100 page documents in detail to find the suspicious elements, then read another half-dozen documents to find out if I’m barking up the wrong tree or misunderstanding, then consult a couple of people to get their take, look down some more rabbitholes, and in the end take away a sentence or two to use in the final edit. You get the idea.

For Episode 5 which I am currently producing, I have read and annotated dozens of House of Commons Parliamentary briefing documents (which run from 50 to 150 pages at a time on all sorts of topics related to Royal and Governmental process) just to try and get to grips with the kinds of things which don’t seem to match up to the way they are presented in the mainstream. Each page here has footnotes and references which lead me off to curious articles, legislation, old treaties and so on.

No, AI does not help

As I’m sure you have guessed, AI does not (or will not) assist with any of this process. Though I already essentially knew this would be the case, I did at some point experiment with a few AI tools just to demonstrate to the AI-fans who kept telling me that I’d be silly not to leverage these ‘amazing tools.’

The value of Mystery Paper – as I see it – is that I am applying a critical eye to the official presentation of how the money (and broader control) system works and connecting dots that we have all been deliberately conditioned from birth not to connect. AI – in contrast – is designed to curate answers to all questions and effectively ram the official narrative down our throats, providing tailor-made deceptions for each individual user.

When I ask [insert LLM here] “what are the restrictive or oppressive aspects of membership to the Commonwealth?”, it will essentially parrot the party line that “the Commonwealth is a voluntary association of nations which share common values etc”. Worthless. Of course, I could spend time drilling down and demanding it recognise certain things, and might eventually get it to concede ground on certain points, but why bother? Firstly, I’d need to already know the things that I’m trying to force it to acknowledge – so what’s the point – and from there it will still do its best to lie or obfuscate any revealing material which I would want to know, but don’t even know to ask about.

It would be like going to see a doctor who I already know is incentivised to continuously lie to my face, right up until the moment that I beat him in a debate with information that I have sourced myself elsewhere. What is the point of even talking to him in the first place?

Yes, the AI fans will say “oh that’s because you’re not using the right LLM, you need to get a locally-hosted unlocked build etc etc” and sure, this MIGHT be true. Unfortunately, how would I know if it was gatekeeping or withholding content from me, or not? Am I going to read through a million lines of ‘open source’ code? Would I even understand what I’m looking at? Obviously not.

And so, this is where we end up: I browse around, download the long and boring ‘official’ version of whatever is being put out to the public, sit down, and I actually read it. I highlight and annotate anything that sticks out to me as suspicious or nonsensical. I then look elsewhere for plausible explanations for these contradictions to see if they actually make sense, or if I’ve stumbled upon another example of deceptive presentation (put out in plain sight) designed to mask the real workings of the control grid we find ourselves in.

Straight from the system’s mouth

There are many people who basically just hear something online and then rehash or repeat it, without even doing the due diligence to find out where that information came from in the first place. This (likely by design) plays directly into the hands of those practicing controlled opposition or diversionary tactics, and often makes the forwarders of this material look foolish in the eyes of their ‘mainstream’ friends and so on. Many of us have been duped by this practice in the past.

When I quote ‘official’ sources, it’s not because I believe the words they are saying, but rather to make the point that this is THEIR version. This is what the ‘legitimate’ entity is claiming about their own organisation/history/whatever, and so if you would like to believe the official narrative on something, here you go.

From my point of view, it would appear that those steering (or seeming to steer) the large and powerful organisations governing the system we see around us, are obligated (spiritually, karmically, or however you want to see it) to notify us of what is really going on. Whether we take the time to understand this reality is an individual decision – basically, it’s ‘on’ us.

My approach then, is to find and collect these scattered official ‘system notififications’ – ie. where the system ‘confesses’ what it is doing and how – and connect the dots to draw a clearer picture of what I see as going on, while also providing the ‘receipts’ so you don’t need to take my word for it. You can google search and find these documents yourself – from the official entity’s own website – and check to see that what I’m showing is indeed what is being put out for public consumption.

The actual video production

This is a whole other topic which I can go into if people are actually interested, but basically I research, then create a bullet point outline, then write a voiceover script (with intended visuals), then record and lay it down on the timeline in Adobe Premiere, then fill in rough visuals as best I can with placeholder document pages or content, then work out music/pacing/sound effects, then build out proper b-roll sequences, then go back and animate the diagrams and document highlighting in After Effects, then finesse everything – mixing the audio and correcting the colour. There is a whole lot more to each step I could say but that’s the general gist.

The process evolves

My understanding of this subject matter naturally evolves over time – by necessity – as I endeavour to understand and effectively prove the conclusions that I am coming to along the way. Given this, topics that I had not previously considered sometimes arise and end up taking up large chunks of time (both production time, and final on-screen runtime) and so this project will organically meander and go where it needs to go, and at the pace that I can manage.

I have no intention of stopping, but I also can’t say how long it will take for each episode to be produced, and as such I want to be able to put out more regular content – both to preserve my own sanity but also to allow curious viewers to follow along without needing to wait 6 months (or more) between episodes.

I don’t want to just pump out bite-sized chunks of isolated content because I don’t think it would really make sense (or even be interesting) when presented out of proper context, and I also don’t want to ‘blow’ my big plot twists and run the experience of watching the full episodes as they are released.

This blog, then, is my attempt to put out more regular content in whatever form makes sense to keep people in the loop of how things are progressing while also getting some fun tidbits of the research/production process which may (or may not) end up in the final product.

Thanks for reading and please do let me know your thoughts or suggestions!

Alex

Often I’ll barely get through reading and annotating 5 pages of legislation or documentation on my tablet before the one-hour buzzer goes off and I have to get into something else. Also, the footnotes or references of those 5 pages will often lead to new suspicious documents or rabbit holes, and so the research process alone – while always interesting – can feel like it has no end in sight.

I have no intention of stopping (I feel like this is going to be something I’m working on for a long time), but I’ve been working to come up with a way to deliver some kind of content to interested people on a more regular basis, which doesn’t a) suck too much time away from me producing the actual series and b) doesn’t ‘give away’ or ruin the impact of the actual episodes as they arrive.

My current solutions are twofold:

1. I publish short somewhat-frequent blog posts of ‘interesting nuggets’ from my research process. The idea is that these are somewhat unrefined reactions/observations to things I encounter which I find to be interesting/suspicious and would ordinarily otherwise just send to a few interested friends on whatsapp or telegram. These will likely not be big bold well-researched claims, but just suspicious contradictions in the official narrative which I’ve encountered along the way. Ideally these will not be ‘spoilers’ for the major ‘plot twists’ of the eventual episodes, but rather interesting tidbits which interested viewers might appreciate in the interim between episodes.
2. I intermittently release some (very) short stand-alone videos which explain certain concepts in a share-able way. The Mystery Paper series is already somewhat modular in structure (by design) but the idea of these would be that I can script and produce some short explanatory videos (e.g. a minute or two) that might later find their way into an episode structure, but for now at least allow me to get out some more content and play with editorial and animation techniques and not be stuck for months and months in a perpetual research cycle. Content-wise I’d have to be careful about what topics I exactly focus on for these, because any seemingly small subject can always expand and connect to a million other things and become a feature-doc in their own right.

My questions for you (if you are subscribed to the email mailing list) are:

1. Would you like to be notified by email for either of these types of updates, or only for the full episodes as they are released? I want to be sensitive to peoples’ inboxes and so I can start a new RSS feed or mailing list for these kinds of updates if that is preferable.
2. Are there any particular topics or ideas that you find confusing (either for yourself, or that you struggle to explain to others) that a short stand-alone video would be useful. I obviously can’t take requests on this but it would be useful for my reference in deciding what to focus on and put effort into. Again, my goal here is not to be providing debt relief solutions and get embroiled in peoples’ specific cases, but rather to provide material to help people understand these topics on a foundational level.

Please feel free to comment or share your thoughts or opinions via email on anything here, since it’s useful for me to know what is most interesting or valuable to people. I should note that my goal here is not to provide short term ‘financial solutions’ for those who are dealing with mortgage/debt/court concerns, but rather to produce solid and credible content that can help people build a strong base of understanding of where and who we are in the context of this system/world/whatever-it-is which we find ourselves in.

Alex

Back in the early 2010s a friend in Sydney (mid-30s, let’s call him Paul) had an awkward fall from his bicycle, which resulted in him sustaining a messy elbow fracture. As you would expect, he went to emergency, got it checked out and they sent him off to get surgery. The surgeon then opened up his arm, screwed the pieces of bone together with a metal plate, and sent him home with his arm in a sling – all thanks to the government-provided Medicare.

Though admittedly this was was a bad break and pain was to be expected, as soon as Paul got out of surgery and the drugs wore off, he already knew something was wrong. The pain was excruciating and as the days went on was not subsiding at all. His arm was stuck in a sharply bent position at the elbow, with his hand hovering near his shoulder on the same side (you can picture the cliche pose of a socialite holding a small handbag). Paul also couldn’t feel or control his hand which was perpetually numb, grey and clammy.

Despite the clear indicators of a problem, the doctors and surgeons assured him that that this is just ‘how it is’. “You totally smashed your elbow, what do you expect?” and so on, and they sent him to physiotherapy.

Physiotherapy

Paul’s first physiotherapist was “useless”, so he complained and they escalated him to a different guy who dealt with more serious cases. This therapist (who was also a martial arts instructor) happened to be interested in his case for some reason, and was willing to advocate for his cause.

Medicare originally said that Paul could only have 6 or 8 physiotherapy sessions, but the therapist said that was nowhere near enough. He was going to need at least 6 months worth of sessions at 3 times a week (ie. in the region of 72 sessions).

Fortunately he was able to pull some strings so the sessions were done at a discounted price, otherwise Medicare (Paul didn’t have private health insurance) would never have covered it.

Painkillers

The therapist told Paul that he was going to need serious painkillers, since when he pulled on his arm it was going to cause intense pain. The pain management people, however, said they couldn’t give Paul opioids for 6 months since he’d end up addicted and at that point it would be almost impossible for him to stop. As a result, after the first 1-2 weeks of opiates, they provided Paul with only Nurofen/Panadol standard headache tablets, which did essentially nothing.

From here, Paul was doing 3x excruciating physio sessions every week, and every 2 weeks he would get perhaps 5 degrees more movement out of the ‘frozen’ muscles on his ‘dead’ arm. Since there were no ‘official’ medical personnel who were able to help him, he was regularly driving out west to track down and buy blackmarket pain pills from ‘flexible’ doctors, just to get through the sessions.

Second Opinions

Even with the pain pills, Paul was still struggling to sleep at night and his life was essentially a nightmare, not knowing if things were ever going to improve.

As the weeks went on, the physiotherapist started to agree that there was something not right. Paul should have been making some improvements and not be in so much pain after all these weeks – but he was.

Paul booked appointments with the original surgeon, asking if he could remove the plate or try something else.. but was essentially just fobbed off and told to stick it out with the rehabilitation. Will it get better? Maybe, maybe not. Great.

Of course Paul contacted numerous other doctors and surgeons, attempting to get second opinions and to see if they would help. None of these people wanted to touch his case (or perhaps second guess a fellow surgeon?) so Paul would end up going back to the original surgeon who refused to do anything, and the cycle continued.

This dynamic persisted for close to a year, with Paul miserable, depressed, in constant pain, basically unable to work, and surviving on black market painkillers.

The Expert Ex-surgeon

Finally Paul managed to get referred to some big-shot retired ex-surgeon who did private consulting on special cases. Paul got $1000 cash together for his fee and drove out to the the surgeon’s rural mansion.

Paul was let into the house by the man’s wife to find him sitting at a desk holding tweezers, intensely focused on putting a ship into a bottle. Apparently these guys enjoy flaunting their fine-motor skills even when people are paying effectively thousands of dollars an hour for their time.

Anyway, Paul explained his story, and showed the surgeon his clammy, numb, useless hand, which the surgeon briefly glanced at.

“Yep, it’s f$#ked.” he said, barely looking up from the ship. “Okay, so what do I do then?” Paul asked.

The expert surgeon then told Paul he would just write a recommendation to the existing surgeon who did the procedure, suggesting that he pull the plate out.

“But that’s what I’ve been asking him to do all year” “Let’s see.”

Returning to the Original Surgeon

The next week, Paul went to another appointment with the original surgeon, and showed him the recommendation letter.

He was immediately irate, and shouting Paul down. “Why did you go talk to this guy?” “Who said you were supposed to do that?” and so on.

Paul asked what him what the difference was – and anyway was he going to take the recommendation or not? The surgeon said he’d think about it, and told Paul to come back the following week.

Paul returned the next week to find that this surgeon – in the space of mere days – had retired, and moved to Tasmania. That was it. No further details or explanations were offered.

Sitting in the office instead was a brand new young surgeon from the UK who – strangely – was only too happy to remove the plate. They booked a date for the surgery, Paul had the plate removed, and he felt better immediately – even as he walked out from the hospital.

Reflection

So what happened here?

It would appear that Paul suffered some kind of Ulna nerve damage, and the plate was impacting on that nerve, on blood flow, and causing the arm to be ‘stuck’ somehow. Nobody knew apparently, and it was ‘not common’.

But why didn’t the original surgeon want to fix it? Was he concerned about staying under some kind of accident quota? Was he concerned about liability? Or his insurance premiums? His reputation? Ego?

And why didn’t any other doctors or surgeons want to get involved? Was it professional courtesy to one of their fellow brothers-in-white? Did they not want to dig up a fellow surgeon’s mistake and then have to not only expose them, but also deal with the problem itself? Was it a ‘no-win’ scenario where they figured they were not going to be able to fix the problem anyway?

More importantly, why were they – along with the original surgeon – willing to let Paul spend the rest of his life in constant pain with a frozen dead arm, just to avoid whatever career inconvenience this may have caused?

Some Anecdotal Research

I haven’t gone deep into this, but I have spoken to some surgeons (overseas, not in Sydney) who claim that when they work in a hospital, it is the HOSPITAL itself which has the insurance policy, not the individual surgeons – who are all covered by that overall policy. Apparently as long as they behave within certain guidelines (which are not difficult to stay within), the surgeons don’t have to worry about being liable for any kind of harm to patients regardless of whether the patient ends up dying or whatever. How encouraging to know.

If anyone has insight into why the original surgeon (and the others) didn’t want to touch this with a ten foot pole, please email since I’d be interested to hear what mechanisms could be at play.

Closing Thoughts

For now I’ll leave this on a positive:

One thing my friend did take away from this year of physical and psychological hell, was a newfound healthily expanded distrust for the medical system – something that served him well in seeing it for what it was in the years to come.

He realised that if you don’t proactively complain or call out problems that you see in front of you, they will happily ignore you and allow you to ‘fall through the cracks’, for their own convenience. Most others around him just accepted what the doctors said at face value, to their detriment.

Paul also said that he feels extremely lucky to have gotten through this as he has, with his arm now fully functional. He believes that the proactive physiotherapist saved his life, and that ‘something’ happened. Maybe it was a guardian angel or who knows what, but something helped him get through it.

Being in debt is so commonplace – in fact it’s the norm – that many people probably don’t consider the impact it has on our mind state and thought process.

Asking someone what it feels like to be in debt – for many – is like asking what it feels like to live indoors or to eat breakfast or to have a hot shower at night. Debt is so pervasive and everpresent – it’s the water that we’re swimming in – that we rarely stop to consider what it would feel like to NOT be in debt.

Most would recognise that the feeling of being indebted is not a particularly pleasant one. If your friend has hosted you for dinner five times and you have yet to host them once, you may have some twinge of uncomfortable obligation. If a Hare Krishna or charity hawker on the street gives you a small ‘gift’, you may feel like it would be rude to not give them a minute of time to chat, and so on.

While we may be consciously aware of those small social ‘debts’, large scale debts issued by institutions may seem to be just “the way things are” – they they are just facts of life, inherent to the world we are born into.

When everyone you know works 9-to-5, Monday to Friday, it doesn’t feel so weird for you to be getting up every morning and doing the same. Likewise if all your friends are locked into 30 year debt contracts just so they can live indoors, it too can feel ‘normal’.

Despite the warnings of ancient wisdom, most of us (75% of households according to a study in Australia in 2020) have taken on debt of some kind, and – I would argue – are being impacted psychologically as a result, both consciously and subconsciously. But how?

The relative perceptive of value

You’ve probably heard of studies showing that people are much more sensitive to price variability on smaller items than on larger purchases. For example, a ten per-cent saving on a hundred dollar pair of shoes – ie. ten dollars – seems like it’s worth walking down the street for, but people would not do the same to save $10 on a $20,000 car. Why not? $10 is $10, right? Apparently not.

Similarly, people are much more open to paying (objectively) larger sums for things when they are ‘addons’ to an already substantial purchase. For example, it would seem crazy to spend $500 or $1,000 for a few pieces of plastic, unless they are cupholder upgrades to a car purchase which already runs $30,000. You get the idea.

Along these same lines, there is a certain insidious effect that arises from being committed to a long term (arguably life-time length) debt relationship. To appreciate this, we will first need to explore the contrary.

Note: please excuse the apparent childish simplicity of the following examples, but I feel like it’s necessary for logical completeness.

The independent plumber

Let’s take a (simplified) hypothetical example of a man – Peter Plumber – who earns $500 a day as an independent plumber. If he goes out and plumbs, he earns $500 that day. If instead he sits around at home reading a book, he earns $0. Whatever amount of money he accumulates over time (minus what he spends on living expenses) is what sits in his bank account.

If Peter day-to-day earns more than he spends, then his ‘savings’ will gradually increase. If he knows it costs him $5,000 a month to survive, and he can see $60,000 sitting in his account, he can have some satisfaction in knowing that he can probably sit around for close to a year before he needs to rush out and unblock some peoples’ toilets.

Conversely, he can look at that $60,000 and weigh up whether he might want to spend some of those funds on a holiday or a second-hand car or some other substantial purchase. Mentally, he is comparing the satisfaction or utility he may get from those purchases, versus the effort he spent in acquiring those funds in the first place – and the effort that will be required to re-acquire those funds in the future to replace his financial ‘safety cushion’.

He may like the idea of buying a car to cruise around on the weekend, but prefer to take a 6 month sabbatical from his work and travel the world, for example.

Let’s now compare this with the thought process of a mortgage-holder.

The employee mortgagor

Note: For our counter-example I am going to conflate two things which ARE separate, but that DO tend to go together: that of being an employee (rather than an independent contractor) and that of having a mortgage (rather than renting). Commonly speaking, it’s more difficult for independent business owners to obtain mortgages (a topic for another time) and often they choose not to in the first place, since their income may be less consistent or reliable.

That said, let’s now take Eddie Employee, a man who has a permanent position at a plumbing company, earning a salary to work at head-office sending out independent plumbers like Peter to jobs. Eddie earns a fixed annual salary (paid into his bank account every month) and he works a standard 9-to-5 40-hour week.

As long as Eddie does his job sufficiently, he gets his paycheck every month like clockwork. If he seems to be doing a good job – and the business is doing okay – he can also probably expect a payrise or promotion every now and again.

This apparent predictability means Eddie can make longer term arrangements like leasing a car or getting a mortgage, because he can (somewhat) assume that he will have a certain amount of money showing up every month to cover these on-going payments.

The flipside of this ‘security’ is that Eddie loses a degree of freedom in deciding how much work he wants to do on an ongoing basis. There will be certain terms of his employment contract which determine how many days of leave he can have every year, and he will need to get the timing of that leave ‘approved’ by a superior beforehand. Of course, Eddie can always quit (probably after a month’s notice) but there is a certain gamble associated with that – what if he loses this job and can’t get anything comparable? Remember – he has monthly expenses he needs to hit, no matter what, or else bad things happen.

Where am I going with all of this?

Money as freedom ‘credits’

As mentioned previously: for Peter, $500 is a day’s work. For Eddie, however, even if he ALSO effectively earns $500 a day (ie. 20 work days = $10,000 a month) the money does not have the same practical application in the context of freedom.

While Peter can take a month off or decide to take less jobs that month, Eddie does not have that flexibility. He is essentially locked into a dynamic with two choices: you obey your boss, or you quit. When looking at older legal dictionaries, the term ’employee’ is defined as the equivalent of ‘servant’, but for operating on ships – just as ‘master’ is the land-based equivalent of the nautical ’employer’.

This is why full-time positions are referred to as ‘permanent’ – that is traditionally what they were. You took a job as a servant for someone, with the expectation that you would continue to work for them indefinitely. This is why there are BENEFITS associated with those positions, which do not extend to ‘contractor’ roles – the master is obligated to take care of his life-time servants.

Getting back on track, we can see how Eddie – by virtue of the nature of his situation – has essentially committed to the long-term servitude of his employer. Any decision Eddie makes ultimately needs to fit within the confines of the terms of the contract he has with his employer, unless he wants to branch-swing to another employer (who will likely have similar terms) or just quit and somehow try to cobble together enough cash to cover his monthly expenses.

Realistically then, given that Eddie has committed to a 30 year mortgage for a house, he is in for the long haul and has to play ball every month for the forseeable future. So, relatively speaking then, what does $500 really mean to Eddie?

Money as something else

If – practically speaking – Eddie can’t use that $500 to buy units of freedom (ie. days that he doesn’t need to go to work) what CAN he do with it?

Firstly, he can spend the money to enhance the days that he does NOT have to go to work – ie. weekends and pre-approved holidays. If he has $10,000 in savings, and he has 20 days of holiday leave per year, he can spend $500 a day living it up over the course of that trip, before coming back to the office on day 21.

Conversely, Eddie can spend those savings on items that he can enjoy WHILE at the office (clothing, jewelry, mobile phones, gadgetry) or during his downtime (large television, gym membership, yoga sessions, and so on).

You may be thinking, so what?

Well, there is another somewhat insidious aspect to Eddie’s situation, and it connects to the broader concept of debt itself.

$500 as a percentage of $1,000,000

If Eddie has a 30-year mortgage for $1,000,000, he has essentially committed to full-time employment – presumably doing the same job (or similar) that he is doing now – for the next 30 years.

Knowing that he is on the hook for a million dollars, his day-to-day decision making is no longer about WHAT he should do with his life (that is already effectively decided) but rather WHAT he should spend his money on, and what he should do with his spare time (evenings/weekends/holidays).

Remember that once you owe a million dollars, the banks make it very easy to INCREASE and tack on more debt to that existing million. This is known as the ‘smart’ way to borrow, since the interest rates are lower than credit cards or personal loans.

From Eddie’s point of view, then, if he wants a new car for $50,000 – what would be the point of scraping and saving for two years like Peter would need to do, when he could just get it now and tack the 50k onto the 1 million dollar mortgage? $1,050,000 is only 5% more than he owes now, and who cares if it takes him 31 years to pay it off instead of 30, he’ll be an old man anyway. At least he can enjoy that new car smell, and blast through a few amber lights while driving into the office that he has no choice but to go to.

Likewise if Eddie wants a new playstation, a road bike, a rolex, or whatever. It’s all miniscule compared to the scale of the debt, and he has to keep going to work indefinitely (30 years+) anyway, so might as well get some enjoyment in the cracks where he can.

Multiply this by 30 million

The obvious result of this (on a population-wide scale) is an economy made up of millions of people who are all locked into a life-path with minimal deviation, where their only real freedom of movement is through consumption. This consumption – their respite from their work – ironically increasing the debt load that is the source of their predicament in the first place.

In England in 1910 only 10% of people ‘owned’ their own homes (as opposed to renting), in 2024 it was 50% (down from a peak in the 1990s of 69%).

As we all know, nobody consumes like those who are unsatisfied with their life situation, so this has the (unintended?) flow-on effect of boosting economic activity and consumption. The mass-adoption of mortgages also creates a climate of across-the-board social compliance. If the powers-that-purport-to-be say that everyone needs to get an injection to go into the office, an people need to go to the office to get their paycheck to pay their mortgage and not default on their home… then most people are going to comply with that ‘mandate’.

Since banks penalise people for trying to pay their mortgages off faster (I wonder why that is) most people, then, will go through their life, with their behaviour, decision-making and thought processes subtly shaped by a debt burden that they never particularly thought twice about taking on.

Obviously the advertising industry leverages this dynamic continuously – doctors were used to encourage people to smoke Camel cigarettes, just as doctors today are used to sell people on neverending Covid boosters, daily amphetamines, and all manner of other lethal poisons. Since we are culturally trained through government-mandated education and 360 degree media to associate doctors with intelligence, the credulous masses perceive taking the advice of doctors (aka trusting the science) to be the ‘smart’ option.

“Smart people trust experts” is the subtext flowing underneath mainstream narratives across all mediums, along with the corollary: “stupid people think they know better than experts”. Unfortunately these ‘experts’ are in fact locked into obeying special interest groups through their educational debt and obligations to licensing bodies, living in constant fear of losing their job, prestige, and defaulting on their mortgage. Deciding to ‘trust’ someone who is contractually not allowed to tell you the truth is akin to trusting the answers coming from someone with a literal gun to their head. “Is everything okay?” (nods) “Okay cool…”

Back to our theme: you will notice that hypnotists routinely tell their audiences that SMART people are actually MORE easily HYPNOTISED than a person of average intelligence. Is that really true? Or is it perhaps the case that people are more COMPLIANT if they think that complying is a mark of sophistication and likely to earn them prestige and social credit?

Since people fear being considered stupid, they tend to gravitate towards options that they feel are rubber-stamped by authority, in the hope that they will not be set aside from the group and criticised for their stupidity. Ironically their attempt to not APPEAR stupid actually leads them to taking a stupid action: ie. trusting the people who are deliberately abusing this mechanism.

‘Smart’ people (supposedly) do the ‘responsible’ thing and pay exhorbitant monthly rates for health insurance plans, which coincidentally narrow their range of healthcare options to three choices: surgery, radiation and pharmaceutical drugs. You can cut, you can burn, or you can poison – which would you prefer?

We are now being told that the SMART thing to do, is to embrace AI – that the SMART people who will BENEFIT from AI are those who learn how to use and become experts in incorporating these tools into their work and businesses. The tech billionaires who tell us this – we are told – are extremely smart and extremely rich (they got rich because they are so smart, presumably).

The character Elon Musk has been slow-dripping the idea that AI is going to replace everything and the only people who will stand a chance of survival are those who deliberately MERGE with this AI – by putting a chip in their head and allowing this foreign influence to effectively ‘co-pilot’ our own thoughts.

Does this sound like a smart idea? Have you ever looked at your phone or kindle automatically updating and force-installing an undesirable new feature despite you telling it not to, and thought – wouldn’t it be great if this technology was INSIDE my head, dictating my thoughts?

The REAL smart guys – so we hear – are embracing AGENTIC AI.. ie. AI that you entrust to go off and do things for you autonomously and unsupervised. You will note that this is a similar dynamic to trusting a real estate agent or an accountant or lawyer – it’s not that it is inherently a bad idea, but it is entirely contingent on that party having YOUR best interests at heart. Surprise surprise, this is not usually the case – though most people are too brainwashed to even see or understand how that may be the case.

Lawyers – as a general rule – prioritise their own wallets over their clients’ interests, doctors prioritise their financial incentives over their patients’ health, and accountants prioritise their own regulatory obligations to the government (their real client) over the ‘tax-avoision’ priorities of the people who are mandated to pay for these accountancy services – ie. you.

For anyone even remotely paying attention, it is clear that the primary attributes of SMART cities – a compressed grid covered in 5G towers, cameras, AI, digital currency and automation – are coincidentally the same things that would be necessary for a full-spectrum digital prison.

In fact, you can pretty much draw a direct line between anything that advertises itself as ‘SMART’… and the resulting reduction of human competency, self-reliance and personal freedom. If any of these initiatives and devices actually WERE in our interest, they wouldn’t need to tell you that you were clever for using them.

So what’s the catch? Well I was told by the partner of a high-level executive in an international bank that these expat packages are not merely designed to attract ‘top talent’, but are specifically engineered with one key goal in mind – to create leverage over their new hires.

You may be aware that international schools in key Asian international cities are prohibitively expensive – think $40,000 USD per child, per year, before debentures, capital levies and so on. One reason these schools are so expensive that is that the big banks and multinationals routinely pre-buy blocks of slots every year in order to distribute to the families of their expat employees.

The management technique, then, goes like this: HR brings a guy – let’s call him Ken – over from the US with his wife and kids. They get the local work visa approved, and they get Ken all settled into the big apartment – all covered under their housing allowance. A couple of months in, Ken’s wife is making friends at the yacht club, she’s got the domestic helper all trained up on the grocery shopping, and the kids are all in school. By the time 6 months have passed, his wife has a healthy social calendar, the kids friends’ parents are also her friends, and most importantly: the kids have stopped complaining incessantly about going back home, because they’ve finally started to make some good friends at school. This is when Ken’s boss first asks him to come into the office on a Saturday.

As soon as this happens, Ken intuitively knows he’s screwed. He knows this isn’t a one-off.. it’s not a favour to a mate.. he’s getting punked out in the prison shower.

What’s he going to say – no? If he loses this job, he knows there’s no way he’s going to be able to find a replacement position with that kind of salary and benefit package. Will his wife want to run back home to the US with their tails between their legs? They’ve just spent the last half a year humble-bragging on facebook about how lucky they are to have a domestic helper and a personal driver in this tropical paradise.

It is possible that if he really hustles, Ken may be able to find some kind of replacement role at another firm with a workable salary, but there would need to be serious cutbacks. He may be able to convince the wife to move into a smaller apartment, he could let go of his driver, sell his car, give up his yacht club membership, cut down on the restaurants and start riding the subway.

A cost-saving measure he likely will NOT be able to pull off, is convincing his wife to get his kids – now that they’ve all finally settled into a foreign country and made some friends – to leave their hyper-expensive international school, and transfer to a cheap local one where they won’t even be able to speak the language.

Every other perk and luxury, he could theoretically decide to ditch. Ultimately these things are really just luxuries for him, and – practically speaking – not worth the cost. The ‘cost’ of course, being the burden of 24/7 slavery to upper management who have full knowledge that they have you directly in their pocket.

The genius of the package’s complimentary ‘high-end’ schooling, is that the school slots are not HIS perk to give up. Ken’s dilemma, then, is to either rip the kids out of school and create a domestic nightmare for himself, or to be financially destroyed trying to pay the absurd ‘market rates’ for kids’ schooling which – ironically – he used to get for ‘free’.

For these reasons, when Ken’s boss casually asks him on Friday morning if he minds coming in on Saturday – he already has a pretty good idea what that answer is going to be.

Over the course of dealing with hundreds of these applications, they have observed some clear trends in the family makeup of these individuals:

One: The parents of children who have ‘decided’ to have no gender, are predominately (70%+) academics or medical professionals.

Two: If a teen wears a nose ring, it’s a safe bet that the father doesn’t live at home.

He noted that this was the first time in the last 25 years – since he was 5 years old – that he had not been actively studying and preparing for some kind of exam. Of course he will have no shortage of future hoops to jump through, in order to maintain his medical status, licensing, and insurance, but that’s for another article.

This mild yet persistent mental torture which he has experienced over this last quarter century is only a slightly more extreme version of something that we all deal with in our modern civilised, industrialised society – that is, from a young age we are brainwashed into unknowing compliance through an on-going decades-long near-relentless process known as ‘testing’.

While school is sold to us broadly as ‘learning’ – and while we may walk away with some practical skills like writing and basic arithmetic – it is this procedure of regular examination which serves and the primary driver of behaviour and compliance throughout the schooling process.

Testing = Training

Just as a dog is given instructions, and then either rewarded or punished based on its response and compliance, so too is the student in our modern schooling system – all the way from kindergarten to university, through to masters degrees and beyond.

Instead of a dog treat, students get colourful stickers, praise from adults, status over peers, approval from parents, and ultimately access to ‘better’ universities and therefore (theoretically) access to higher-status, better-paid and more rewarding jobs… all in the corporate world of course.

Testing is the on-going mechanism used to extract compliance – and ensure that the Government-issued curriculum being pushed in the classroom is mentally retained and obeyed, rather than ignored and immediately forgotten as useless or irrelevant information.

But aren’t tests merit-based? Aren’t they a record of your performance, ability, preparation, aptitude, accuracy and correctness? Well, maybe.

What’s wrong with rewarding the ‘correct’ answer?

In some cases – setting aside implied fundamental biases for now – this can be legitimate. Two plus two, according to the agreed-upon rules of our mathematical system is four, and answers of ‘four’ should ordinarily be rewarded.

Unfortunately, even with such a seemingly clear-cut example, this is not always the case. As ‘Common Core’ mathematics is implemented in US schools, other aspects such as ‘group cohesion’ are factored into account when assigning marks. For example, if three students are assigned to calculate 2+2, and one boy writes ‘4’, while the other two write ‘5’, the former can be marked down for not ‘co-operating’ properly with his group mates.

Outside of mathematics, things get even trickier.

If the curriculum says Columbus first discovered America, then that’s the ‘answer’. Any other answer is not correct, regardless of the truth or ‘reality’ of the situation. If the curriculum this year says that men can fall pregnant – for example – and you say that they can’t, then that’s a zero for you… and maybe a free session with a mental health counsellor. Now, repeat this exercise ad nauseam for any single point of contention in biology, history, geography, culture, public policy, economic theory and so on.

Given this, exams are only really an aptitude test in the sense that they test the student’s ability – and willingness – to accurately repeat what was previously told to them by an authority figure as ‘the answer’. The most faithful regurgitation performed gets the most ticks, the most points, and ultimately the most ‘opportunities’ to rise up through the education system. This leads to more exams and tests in other institutions, where they can further prove their ability to comply, in evermore sophisticated ways.

Professional regurgitators

Consider the reams of information that a medical student needs to retain over the course of their years of study – drug names, drug protocols, ‘safe’ dosages, medical procedures, hospital policies, and so on. A medical student who can regularly process, retain and appropriately regurgitate such a quantity of information over such a long period – especially while dealing with chronic sleep deprivation – is especially suited to working in a hospital setting where the institution specifically wants tireless and compliant operators.

The hospital doesn’t value cowboys and rule-breaking renegades ‘who get results’, despite what television shows may suggest. What hospitals do want, are technicians who will reliably conform to exact procedures and specified ‘standards of care’. These ‘standards of care’, it just so happens, are laid out by pharmaceutical company donors and are – just coincidentally – also required by the policies of all large insurance companies.

A short tangent on insurance

This practical reality is that doctors are covered by their insurance policies as long as they slavishly follow these pharmaceutical-company devised protocols (ie. ‘standards of care’), regardless of how many people happen to die on their watch. The riskiest thing a doctor can do professionally, then, is deviate from those protocols, even if their behaviour was intended to – and even literally results in – saving a patient’s life.

As a generalised illustrative example: if a protocol dictated that a certain drug should be administered at a certain frequency and at a certain dosage – even if the doctor suspected that the drug was indeed killing that patient – they could safely (legally speaking) continue to administer the drug to a patient until death, without fear of financial penalty. If the same doctor instead had a pang of conscience and decided to stop administering the drug – even if that action directly resulted in the patient surviving – that doctor could now be personally liable for medical injuries that patient had suffered thus far.

These are perverse incentives indeed, and contribute to reinforcing the entrained mindset and behaviour of these thoroughly ‘tested’ professionals.

It’s spreading!

This dynamic of procedural control of course applies to all sorts of key industries throughout modern society – affecting the roles that just so happen to be so well paid and desirable as to be almost universally encouraged by conservatively-aspirational parents. Accountants, lawyers, engineers, finance and so on. In this way, large numbers of people in key functional roles are conditioned to behave very consistently without needing to be reminded – precisely because they are the ones who got into those positions, by successfully demonstrating a high level of capability to obey.

So what’s the problem? Isn’t this a good thing? Don’t we want our accountants and airline pilots and skyscraper engineers to be following the rules? Doesn’t that make us… safer?

The down-side

Where was this army of exam-acing scientists and experts while all these poisonous and dangerous products were being developed, tested and foisted on the public? Oh.. that’s right.. they were obeying. And why wouldn’t they? That strategy of blind obedience had already served them so well so far. Obeying had paid for cars, houses, holidays and even private school educations for their virtuoso children to follow in their acquiescent footsteps.

The problem with these learned intellectuals, then, is that at no point during the process of their development, were the fundamental presumptions of their ‘knowledge’, ever properly questioned.

And why would they be? As we all know, there are no smiley-face-stickers or 98% exam scores or scholarships or internships or medical residencies or corner desk promotions getting handed out to the people who question the foundational premises of the gravy train that everyone around them is riding on.

And even if they wanted to.. when would these people have the time? Any precious bandwidth spent trying to research alternative theories, interpretations or realities… is time that could otherwise be spent memorising the ‘correct’ answer… an answer that could be relied on to lead to social approval, money, apartments, boats and so on. Large institutions aren’t in the business of handing out rewards – financial or otherwise – to people who prove them wrong.

As a result, we exist today in a world managed by millions of obedient administrators, their belief systems predictably moulded by a hierarchical network of ‘credible’ institutions.

The ideas which fill their minds do not arise from an organic ‘peer-reviewed’ process, but rather originate from a tiny number of compromised men, of which the recipients will likely barely even know the names.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

But how is this possible?

‘Educational’ leverage

The printing press – along with the enforcement dimension of testing – allows for the written words of a few, to be foisted on the many.

As is standard practice through medical education: a single medical reference textbook which is studied by millions may be written by only a couple of dozen doctors, with the writing of each chapter attributed to just two names: a pair of supposed subject matter ‘experts’ in their particular narrow field. That is presuming that those doctors even wrote those chapters themselves in the first place, and didn’t have the material provided to them by a publishing agency working on behalf of a pharmaceutical company, along with a fee for their ‘participation’.

To see how this same principle of leverage works in the entertainment (ie. propaganda) world: we can start with a single book – seemingly written by one man, which tells the supposed origin story of Mark Zuckerberg. This book then gets adapted into a screenplay by a famous screenwriter, then produced as a hit film by an A-list director, which is then watched and ultimately believed by… millions. And why wouldn’t they? The movie is based on a book, isn’t it? And it’s a ‘true story’, right?

And there we have, the broadly accepted ‘canonical’ version of the Zuckerberg story, created through movie magic.

Mass consensus

In this way – with sufficient funds and control over institutions of education – a perceived mass consensus of ‘truth’ can be engineered on essentially any topic.

From here – with the ‘correct answers’ having now been established across the board – the mechanism of mass testing can apply its immense and universal pressure on students to take up and absorb these ideas – if only ‘temporarily’ and for the purposes of passing a test.

Over time then, we see the generation of millions of predictably-behaving automatons who aren’t even aware of – let alone interested in questioning – the limitations and boundaries of their own understanding.

And why would they be? These people are very successful and earn good money, because – in their own minds – they ‘work hard’, they are ‘capable’, and they ‘are smart’.

Do you think a millionaire doctor would like to sit down and listen to ideas coming from a man or woman who did not go through the traumatic near-decade-long process which they had to endure, in order to attain their current expert status?

Do you think they’d be interested to look at results or entertain evidence which demonstrated that the practices that they make a living from, are useless or perhaps even harmful?

Ancient wisdom

Of course, this system of hierarchical hypnotic mind-control is nothing new. Kings, emperors and dynasties going back into antiquity have known that longevity of power required a systematically trained hierarchy of subordinates who wouldn’t even think to change the game or make a run for the throne.

We know these people as ‘eunuchs’, and non-aristocratic parents were only too happy to have their childrens’ genitals removed in order for them to rise up the ranks and perhaps one day achieve some kind of servantile job in the court or palace. Imagine the kind of bragging a poverty-stricken parent could do, knowing that their neutered offspring was working in close proximity to royalty.

Today, our system is much more humane. It’s considered a mark of social progress for a population to be so well-trained that brutalism no longer required. When muslim countries successfully eradicate the practice of theft – such that the hands of pick-pockets no longer need to be lopped off with a sword, that marks a level of sophistication for their governance. It demonstrates that the carrot and stick has already been embedded – subliminally – in the minds of the populace.

Likewise, when millions of lawyers, doctors, accountants and engineers can spend entire multi-decade careers not even considering the falsehood of their state-trained presumptions – our control system too, can celebrate a job well-done.

Today, we don’t have literal eunuchs walking around corporate boardrooms, municipal governments and hospital advisory boards – we have mental eunuchs. Though they may not consciously recognise what they are – which is actually an added benefit – the successful among them do know intuitively what their behaviours and opinions should be, without needing to be reminded.

The best servant is one who knows exactly what its master wants without needing to be told, and just as the ancient monarchs the world over knew only too well, eunuchs make fabulous administrators.

Don’t put anything on your skin, that you wouldn’t put in your mouth

Does that sound like an extreme statement?

It isn’t really. Your skin is actually your largest organ, and it’s pretty permeable. Most people realise that when they sweat there are substances (salt, toxins etc) leaving the body, but it’s important to remember that the skin is actually two-way membrane.

There are many drugs which are adminstered ‘transdermally’ (through the skin) – from steroids to Ritalin to opiates to antidepressants to contraceptives to nicotine. These normally use ‘patches’ with either a reservoir of the substance or the drug being contained in the adhesive.

So it looks like a bunch of stuff is managing to pass through that skin barrier, doesn’t it?

On the positive side, epsom salt foot baths, for example, are relaxing because your body absorbs the magnesium content through your the skin on your feet, which then is used throughout your body. I use a magnesium spray which works similarly.

Also, a crude way to determine iodine deficiency is to apply some liquid iodine (e.g. lugol’s iodine) to the skin and time how long it takes for the body to absorb the red liquid.

With all this now in mind, would you drink sun cream?

A bunch of these ingredients are not even FDA approved. Remember that aspartame – which was found to cause brain-tumours in rats – is approved. So that gives you some idea of how bad these things are. I’m not even going to bother doing a breakdown of which ingredients are bad or good – it’s like doing a breakdown of what to should avoid on the McDonalds menu. Just put a t-shirt and hat on.

What about your moisturiser lotion? Or your make up? Cosmetics are one of the main ways women are exposed to heavy metals – those shiny colours do look great though.