No One Has To Tell You That You Are Free

by C. A. Matthews

As the seasons change and the sun sets earlier and earlier each evening, I feel an overwhelming urge to crawl into a cocoon and go to sleep and escape from all the hubbub. It’s so tempting just to close your eyes and forget all about the latest tragedy, infamy, or insanity, isn’t it?

Alas, the world won’t let me rest. It calls to me—or rather it shouts at me—and tells me to continue to speak up, point things out, write about life, and march in the streets. The Revolution won’t happen while I’m sitting in my favorite chair with a nice hot cup of tea and a cozy ball of fluffy cat purring beside me. It just doesn’t work that way.

After I came home from giving a presentation on The Resistance History of the United States, all I could say to myself was “No one really gets it. Most Americans will never understand how important resisting our oligarchic oppressors is. They think they can just walk into a voting booth on November 3, and presto-chango magically everything instantly gets better. Maybe not perfectly better, but definitely better than before. At least they’ll be a few less annoying people to threaten their health and safety for the next four years. Well, until the people they voted for start annoying them.”

I wish I could relax and be as trusting in the power of the duopoly to do good as other Americans, but unfortunately reality kicks in—and kicks me hard in the seat of my pants. I know that it doesn’t make a bit of difference who is in the “majority” in Congress or who actually sits in the White House—or even on the Supreme Court, for that matter any more.

Web sites such as Open Secrets demonstrate how the two halves of the duopoly/uniparty both serve their donors (oligarchs) unquestionably. If a politician does as their told only by those who write the biggest checks to their campaign fund, then they’re not working in the public’s best interests, are they? They’re working for their own self-interests—and the interests of their insanely rich bosses, the oligarchs...

...Sorry to break it to my fellow Americans, but walking into a voting booth or standing on a street corner with a “Trump wears diapers!” sign isn’t going to save us from the desperate situation we find ourselves in. It can’t. It wasn’t meant to. Ever...

 

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Why I Dislike Most Celebrities (Except for Two)

 

Why I Hate Dislike Most Celebrities (Except for One Two)

by C. A. Matthews

(I was going to say “Why I Hate...” but I didn’t want the AI ‘bots reading my stuff calling me a “hater” at some point. They’ll be busy calling me antisemitic anti-cementic by then anyway.)

This past week’s ruckus over pop singer Ed Sheeran dropping his fellow performer, the rapper Macklemore, from his big stadium tour (and then consequently being dropped by his own backup band and all his opening acts) demonstrates to me that there is such a thing as poetic justice.

Justice is now being served on Sheeran as he deals with millions of fans unfollowing him on social media, being labeled a “coward” and a “zionist”, two adjectives that don’t paint a very pretty picture of him. How Ed is being treated by the public doesn’t surprise me. I truly believe some celebrities deserve a good hard kick in the arse now and then to remind them that they, too, are only human.

This is the theme of this piece: We are all human beings, and, as such, we all have human rights. One of the more important rights is the right not to be ethnically cleansed by white colonizers who stole your homeland. This is where Ed Sheeran totally dropped the ball.

Celebrities like Ed Sheeran entertain the notion that just because they’ve reached a certain level of fame or celebrityness they’ve somehow become something better than us mere mortals. They have become superhuman or superior to the rest of the struggling masses on this planet. They don’t need to consider anyone else’s feelings but their own. We see this mindset in Ed’s choice of billionaire friends, the NFL New England Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft...

 

...But there is one “celebrity” I hold a great deal of admiration for. She’s not a pop singer or a movie star, but she has been in the limelight quite a bit over the past three years. I’m talking about Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Here’s a short review of her latest book, When The World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine. (Available from Other Press.)

“When the world sleeps, it falls on us, we the people, to wake it up--and now more than ever the world needs an awakening.”

So begins Francesca’s memoir of how she became the champion of human rights we see today on the world stage. Each chapter is a story of a friend or acquaintance who has shaped her outlook on Palestine and life in general. Each person helped her to take the next step in her personal development, steps necessary to deal with the stress of working pro bono for the United Nations. Each person poses a question that we all need to answer for ourselves...

 

To learn more about why I don't like most celebrities (and read the rest of the review of Francesca's book), please copy or click on the following link: 

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Chaos: The Preferred Pattern of Control

by C. A. Matthews

Sometimes life on Earth appears to be a chaotic mess. There is war and genocide here, there, and everywhere. There is discord and division around every corner. There seems to be no end in sight to global death and destruction. Nobody could possibly be in control of all this confusion.

But what if I told you there are a relatively few powerful and wealthy individuals (oligarchs) manipulating our current hellish timeline who thrive on chaos as a way to keep us under their control? Here’s an analogy to make my point clear.

Will the Hero Get There in Time?

You might have seen a scene in a film or a stage play where the hero is running upstream against the flow of traffic on a busy city sidewalk. There are literally people everywhere. The hero can barely breathe as he pushes his way through the crowd going in the opposite direction. And to make matters worse, he’s on the clock—can he get to the train station in time in order to stop the heroine from leaving town before he can tell her that he loves her? The stakes are high and the situation seems impossible. Maybe he should just give up and give in to fate and let the girl go?

But just when things seem to be at their most trying, there is a ray of sunshine. Our hero looks up and spies the heroine trying to fight her way toward him. Eventually they meet, kiss, and start their lives together. All the fighting, sweating, and swearing turned out to be worth it. They marry and live happily ever after. The end.

Now, to the untrained eye, all the chaos and the momentum of the crowd the hero is fighting against seem impossible to overcome, but the person who choreographed the scene knows better. All the pandemonium has been carefully planned out. The extras portraying crowd members have learned their “steps” or blocking well.

The extras are put into groups, and each group is directed how to act whenever they encounter the hero. “Jostle him, trip him up, block his view of the train station,” are the directions given. Behind the camera or curtains, multiple stage managers watch the action carefully and cue each group of extras as to the exact second (or beat of the song in a musical) they are to enter the street scene. More signals from the sidelines will tell the extras how fast or slow they are to make their way across the set.

There could be upward of a dozen or more extras groups in a film scene or only four or five on stage in a play or musical number—not the millions it seems to be. The chaos viewers think they see is anything but. To the trained eye, it is pure poetry in motion. And it is this “poetry of chaos” that the oligarchs who rule over us excel at.

The following are examples where this “poetry of chaos” has been used recently...

 

To read some current-event examples of this "poetry of chaos" and learn how to discern its pattern, please copy or click on the following link: 

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How To Destroy A Country

by C.A. Matthews

This isn’t something most of us thought we’d ever see in our lifetimes. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but why now?

The United States of America is being destroyed from within—on purpose by its oligarchy, apparently. There’s no need to blame any other country or “terrorists” (foreign or domestic) for its destruction. Americans are perfectly able to tear themselves apart without outside help, thank you very much. They almost succeeded in doing so about 166 years ago, and there are many who wish it had been accomplished way back then.

The funny thing is that many Americans don’t see the destruction of their country happening currently. Do you call that “woeful ignorance” or “willful ignorance” on their parts?

I’m sure once the DOA tag has been tied to their collective toes Americans will understand that the USA is dead and gone for good. Until then, they’ll happily remain blissfully bamboozled (i.e., brainwashed or propagandized). They’ll keep convincing themselves that tomorrow will be their lucky day. They’ll keep praying that they’ll never need to see a doctor before they’ve landed a job with decent private health insurance as a perk. The self-destructive elements inherent in the American capitalist system get lost in the details, in other words.

Nobody acknowledges the downside of one American having a trillion dollars to his name at the expense of 340 million other people with far less who actually have to pay taxes. Nobody thinks of how denying universal health care to all Americans creates an unhealthy underclass that has nothing left to live for except revolution. Nobody gives a flying f*** about the homeless, the mentally ill, or the disabled living on the streets—directly beside tents occupied by well-employed Millennials who still can’t afford an average rent in Silicon Valley or most large cities in the US.

Don’t agree with me that US is disintegrating? Below (on Substack) are some recent headlines illustrating how the bomb fuse of chaos has already been lit and lobbed by the ruling elites upon the Land of the Sort-of Free and the Home of the Wannabe Brave. It’s just a matter of time now until it blows up in one big Ka-BOOM! Even now you can hear the clock ticking: Tick tick tick…

 

To read some recent headlines that demonstrate what's happening to the country (and what Americans should do about it), please copy or click on the following link: 

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AI Is Not Your Friend...

 

AI Is Not Your Friend (In a Capitalist Society)

words and original photos by C. A. Matthews

It’s pretty obvious that I don’t use a AI to write my posts online. I wouldn’t make so many typos and mistakes in grammar/punctuation if I did use an AI computer program. I like to write the old-fashioned way—on a pad of paper with a pen—or on a laptop running Linux without all the bells and whistles. It just feels more natural that way, not forced, with no artificial intelligence trying to change my words mid-sentence.

I know what I want to say and how to say it. I don’t need an AI to tell me how to think.

I’m not anti-technology (despite my advanced years). In fact, I was one of the first persons to actually own a “PC” or personal computer back in the dark ages of forty-plus years ago. I worked in a government office during that time when our case documentation was being transferred over from pen and paper to computer documents. I’ve even written code for web sites and done other computer-related things over the years. So, you can’t say that I’m adverse to artificial intelligence out of a superstitious belief that all technology is evil and should be stopped.

I don’t believe it’s the technology that’s evil. It’s the people who are using it in negative ways and exploiting it that are doing evil. (Pope Leo agrees with me.)

AI data centers are breaking out like pimples across the face of America. This demonstrates to me that artificial intelligence isn’t going to be used for the public good because these data centers are being rammed down the throats of small town and big city people alike, against their will. These AI data centers aren’t there to help the locals, but to make tech bros even richer.

Simply put, AI is not your friend—especially if you’re not a billionaire. Don’t believe me? Would you believe economists from the prestigious Wharton School of Economics?

 

To learn more what's behind the big push to build AI data centers and how they can adversely effect workers and their jobs, please copy or click on the following link: 

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This article is the 573rd blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven years. Thanks! 

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Finding the Good in the Bad

by C. A. Matthews

After a very painful week—personally painful because an old injury decided to play up and our senior cat passed away from a terminal illness—I didn’t feel like writing a weekly post. I just wanted to whine, cry, and complain, “Why me?” It’s understandable why I’m so sad and grouchy, but it doesn’t do much good for my overall attitude or help my readers. I want to enlighten and uplift others, and that doesn’t work if I don’t at least attempt to write a piece.

I searched for inspiration and found nothing until I opened up a daily email meditation. The short essay said there’s a little good in everything. Yeah, it said everything—meaning every situation and every person (and cat). You just have to look for it. Scanning my daily X and UpScrolled feeds didn’t reveal a heck of a lot of good in the world, but I decided to give it a go. I would look for the good behind some of the negative headlines this week.

So, here goes nothing—and everything at the same time.

On the US domestic front, several stories concerning the building of massive AI data centers caught my eye. There’s actually nothing new about data centers in the US. The US by far has more data centers than any other country on Earth. The thing about this topic that grabbed my attention was that the people of Utah, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, and New Jersey have taken notice of how data centers are growing ever larger and demanding more and more electricity, land, and water at the local community’s expense.

Data centers pollute the local water table and fill the surrounding air with light pollution (no stars, messes with bird/insect migrations), heat pollution (global warming anyone?), and destructive sound pollution. Yeah, data centers actually produce constant vibrations right below the sound threshold that can injure and kill both humans and animals. Data centers after they’re built don’t employ all that many local workers, either. Too many bad things about them just ain’t right...

So, what’s the good in this very bad situation? The good I find in it isn’t in the data centers themselves but in the reaction of ordinary people against the data centers. For the most part, they aren’t having them...

 

To see other examples of finding the good in the bad headlines, please copy or click on the following link: 

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Rest in Power, Elsie girl.

A lot of good can be found in a little senior kitty

 

This article is the 571st blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven years. Thanks! 

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The World According To L*go Videos

prose and poetry by C. A. Matthews

*Editor’s note: Substitute the name of a well-known brand of children’s interlocking blocks whenever you see the word “L*go”. It’s better to not use a trademarked name without the owner’s permission.

Whenever the corporate media fails to take stock
of how much the public knows already—it’s time to watch the L*go blocks.
Videos which entertain while revealing very real things
happening in the world today and the consequences they bring.

How can something as simple as children’s stacking bricks
bring about such damning revelations and make these horrors stick
in the minds of oh-so-many folks from oh-so-many backgrounds
when our Zionist masters own almost every media outlet around?

Well, you and I know that truth is truth and nothing else can shock
we genocide-hardened influencers who’ve been working ‘round the clock
exposing the oligarchs’ control of oil fields and wanting us all dead
because we recognize their evil greed and want their profit margins turned red.

So, it’s time to watch another video—one that makes those bastards sick
because we make good fun of them by transforming them into L*go brick
while we tell everyone around the world that it’s not too hard on our part
to build tyrants out of plastic blocks because both have nothing close to a heart.

The moral of this story then isn’t something you can mock
if you know our world works only for those who own tons of corporate stock
as well as every prince and president and their infernal war machines, too
because the world according to L*go bricks was always built for them—not you.

I really enjoy watching these trending videos populated with L*go brick characters who are instantly recognizable by their well-known traits and actions. Long ago, I was a film student, and I wrote a paper on how the moving image was first used successfully as a propaganda medium during World War I. Little did I know then that the moving image (now in the form of short AI-animated videos) would become such an effective way to spread an anti-war message worldwide.

Explosive Media was the first L*go animation group I came across, but there are several others. The history of how they began sharing political ideas in this manner is explained in How Lego Won The War: How Explosive Media Started the Iran Rap Trend.

These videos are possibly the best method ever devised to reach Americans/Westerners at a level that most can understand—and yet they don’t talk down to their audience. Their powerful images and very singable songs get to the heart of the matter while opening the mind to the possibility that everything we’ve been taught about our society is wrong, totally wrong.

Amazingly, these short L*go animations expose the evils of the capitalist system and its endless war machine that generate profits for our ruling masters (a.k.a. billionaires or oligarchs), and they do so in a way that is both enlightening and frightening. They reveal what’s been going on behind the scenes for decades (if not centuries) in regard to how our rulers really see us, the workers, the peasants or peons. It’s scary how much the super-wealthy don’t give a sh*t about how their actions are destroying our planet and our children’s futures.

I like these L*go videos (and other related videos) so much that I started a page of video links for ease of sharing. Here are a rundown of a few of my favorite videos and the lessons they can teach us...

 

To read more about (and find the links to) these great L*go videos, please copy or click on the following link: 

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This article is the 568th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven years. Thanks! 

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The Time For Revolution Is Now

The Time For Revolution Is Now (No More Waiting/Burn It Down)

by C. A. Matthews

I just had to smile.

What was I smiling at? This: A person was arrested Friday after throwing a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco.

Molotov cocktail? Thrown at the home of a Big Tech CEO (who was charged with sexually abusing his sister in January 2025)? Could this mean? Really, could this be the start of…?

Only the day before this sentence on X grabbed me: An unhappy employee started this fire at the Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario, California.

A massive 1.2 million foot warehouse full of paper products went up in flames. The unhappy employee was reported as saying, “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” (The next day a shopping mall in Ontario, California was set on fire. Good ideas catch on fast.)

Less than 24 hours later I read that a warehouse in Queens, NY was burning in a four alarm fire. And the day after that I spied an X post about another warehouse (full of lumber) burning in Wayne County, Ohio.

And then there’s this recent headline: ‘Everyone is Replaceable’: Death Rattles Oregon Amazon Facility about how an employee dropped over dead and management told workers “to look away” rather than stop and resuscitate him.

Add these fiery actions and lack of respect for workers to the massive flood of conscientious objector calls to national hotlines due to the illegal war in Iran—as well as Luigi Mangione’s “protest” against the CEO of United Healthcare for their high rate of denying health insurance claims—and I’m starting to see a pattern.

Could it actually be that Americans have had enough? Are they ready for Revolution?

I’m not talking about the so-called “American Revolution” of 250 years ago, either. That was tame by comparison to what could be happening here. 

In 1776, we allowed a bunch of rich, white males tell the rest of us that they were tired of paying taxes to the crown and wanted to form their own style of monarchy—an oligarchy—instead. Forget that quaint little “tea party” in Boston Harbor. The “American Revolution” didn’t free enslaved persons, women, or the working poor, and it certainly didn’t recognize the right of the Native American peoples to live peacefully and have control over their own lands...

 

To find out what a Revolution really should be like, please copy or click on the following link: 

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This article is the 566th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven years. Thanks! 

Feel free to make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps. Thank you.