Not all scams are made the same. There is the enduring plain vanilla Nigerian letter, sleight of hand corporate rackets like Enron, sophisticated Madoff-type Ponzi schemes, and then there is the gigantic globalist scam that turns reality into the hoax. The globalist scam is a made in hell, never before invention of our times, a testimony to the destructivity of creativity.

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Everyone gets scammed sometime or another but not all scams are made the same. There is the enduring plain vanilla Nigerian letter, sleight of hand corporate rackets like Enron, sophisticated Madoff-type Ponzi schemes, and then there is the gigantic globalist scam that turns reality into the hoax. The globalist scam is a made in hell, never before invention of our times, a testimony to the destructivity of creativity.

All of us have been caught agape like a shoal of fish in the dragnet of the globalist scam and flipped over en masse. Those capable of it learn our lesson and swear we won't be fooled again. Maybe not by the same, or similar, scam. What if it is a very different scam the next time? We get conned once more, smack our foreheads and tiptoe ahead with renewed caution. Only to fall flat on our faces when an all new scam swoops down out of nowhere.

And so it has gone for three decades now. Nose greets floor with the monotony of a pushups routine. Each fall teaches us something, makes us that much more savvy. Yet we haven't been able to scamproof ourselves. Normalcy has come to mean spells of staggering around in a daze punctuated by monstrous upheavals of the previous new normal in a world gone mad. Is it heroic stoicism to get up or downright stupidity to get slammed down each time? Perhaps neither.

Lincoln declared you cannot fool all the people all the time. He must have assumed there is an ageless moral Rubicon which even the most unscrupulous will not cross to swindle the trusting. Or every individual possesses a minimum self-protective gumption to see through lies at some point. He lived in different times, in a world where morality and common sense still mattered, even if they fell short of the ideal.

Nothing stands still though. People, leaders, rules and tools of politics and commerce, information, technology, borders separating nations, the zeitgeist of societies...all are in constant motion from one state to another. Our world today is not the world of Lincoln. The moral touchstones of his world are not ours. The deceptions his people confronted are not the ones we keep running into.

The morals of our world are sinking down a cesspool. The plunge began at the turn of this century with a new era of anything goes. Constitutions, democratic processes, the social contract, respect for human rights, personal integrity, code of honor, moderation in language, credibility of public institutions, checks and balances, treaties among nations, international laws, confidence in money, fairness in wealth distribution, biological identity...every important pillar of civilization has been buffeted by a series of seismic tremors that show no sign of abating. As if poised at the threshold of a future of astonishing new possibilities, our starship got hijacked by a suicide cult.

The big change for us, the leitmotif of our times, is the phenomenon of the shapeshifting global scam. Not due to globalization, as is popularly believed. Globalization has been in motion for thousands of years, ever since our first ancestor craned his neck out of his cave and stared into the eyes of his next cave neighbor. It is how civilization evolved. Our fiend is globalism, a political ideology. A long nurtured dark dream made ruthless quest of a lawless elite whose goal is to control all of humanity with a godlike power of life and death that knows no moral restraint.

Globalism came of age by subverting the digital revolution and fashioning it into a pole to pluck the forbidden fruit from the tree of greed. The revolution was launched by the arrival of the personal computer and the world wide web towards the end of the last century. It superimposed a virtual world over the physical world. An astral plane where our avatars zip around at warp speed while our physical selves plod on with their mortal coils. None of our previous generations, even their megalomaniacs, had to contend with two worlds at the same time. It was a sequential thing for them, the here and the hereafter. We by contrast are so entangled in both that it is a struggle figuring out where is here.

The blurred borders between the physical and the virtual have ripped open gaping holes in our defenses against the globalists. They create a scam in one world, sneak it through any of several digital wormholes into the other, sit back to gloat over the mayhem from their handiwork, toss smoke grenades into the confusion to ratchet things up, scoop up the spoils and bolt to their safe havens to plot the next scam. The profusion of false trails they leave behind across two worlds confounds our efforts to understand what happened. The scam is an illusion but its impacts on the scammed are all too real.

We are getting floored repeatedly because we have traded our common sense for the euphoria of our avatar experiences. It's not that we have become less intelligent. Far from it. The literacy level of our generation is clearly superior to that of our forefathers. With the world of knowledge at our fingertips, we are much better informed. We travel, share, interact, read, write, hear and watch a whole lot more with a whole lot more people. Thanks to our borderless avatars, the world is our oyster. Logically, we should be smarter, cannier, capable of protecting ourselves more easily from those who mess with our lives.

The problem is we are getting manipulated like puppets on a string by the ungodly who have reversed these very advantages against us. Technology has compressed our lives into hours and minutes compared to the days and weeks our preceding generations had to think things over. We barely take in one event before we are hit with the next, and the next. Each event sets off its own firestorm of reactions -- for, against, in between, not sure, no one knows, everyone knows, don't care, bring it on. We are forever reacting to a setup intended to keep us hopping on a razor's edge. We have little time to absorb, contemplate, proact or preempt.

The pivotal change in our vulnerability to the mega scams of today comes from the biggest tactical switcheroo of all times. From mushroom kept in the dark and fed bull dung, we have been turned into deer caught in the headlamps to get slaughtered. A paralysis of common sense, induced by collective autism from a sensory overload beyond the processing capacity of even the best minds.

In just the last thirty years, we have fallen for several globalist scams of epic proportions. They are breathtaking in their scope and impact -- the wars on carbon dioxide, terror, money and now virus. Although each has wreaked havoc on real lives, these forever wars are waged against elusive shadows that cannot be defeated by any sensible definition of defeat.

Worse still, some scams have been so successful that many of their victims have made holy cows of them in a bizarre death wish fulfillment. They buy into the cover story, refusing to acknowledge clues to its falsehood. They even add to it through painstaking arguments using borrowed wisdom. They snarl at anyone who points out they are being duped. If the little boy who snitched on the naked emperor came by today, they wouldn't be thanking him for opening their eyes. They would string him up from the nearest lamp post for asking questions like these:

• We are fighting a gas? A gas so rare, it is a mere 0.04% of our atmosphere? Without which no life can exist on earth? Even when those who keep drumming into us fossil fuels are the enemy wage war after war to steal the same fuels from others? Why are millions fleeing these wars and practically none scrambling for high ground to escape those apocalyptic seas? Are we to believe the climate changes only in one direction and even cooling is caused by warming?
• We are fighting terror, an emotion? Why not greed, envy, cruelty, lack of compassion and the whole assortment while we are at it? How is it that all these are on naked display among the righteous leading this fight? Why is a cruise missile on a wedding party a regrettable mistake but a home-made explosive under a war machine satanic barbarism? Was it the hand of god that pulverized Building 7 on 9/11?
• We are destroying money, the lifeblood of every economy? When did it stop being a store of wealth? If it is only a medium of exchange, how come those who corner it have become filthy rich while the rest of us are licking crumbs off our thumbs? Were we utter idiots to have worked all our lives to earn something that could have been printed at will and saved us the trouble? Why are Zimbabweans and Venezuelans who thought that not living in Shangri-La-La land?
• We are fighting a microbe by taking the whole planet prisoner? Isn't it curious this virgin birth occurred in the nick of time before someone took a pin to the everything bubble? Isn't the prophecy-fulfilling appearance of locusts at the same time even more curious? From where did this virus learn such unviruslike evasive maneuvers? Why is it overworking statisticians more than doctors? Will the miracle vaccine protect us from the next not so virus and a quadrillion dollars heist? Does anyone seriously believe this is a one and done deal?

No doubt, there are people asking such questions. They are a minority though, insulted and shouted down by officialdom, media, self-declared experts, dishonest professionals, intellectuals and scientists, and those hysterical victims who have bought into the cover stories.

Professionals, intellectuals and scientists in this ensemble deserve a special mention. They betray their codes of ethics to hang a halo of respectability over scams -- for money, status, politics, publicity, hubris or sheer cussedness. They churn out voluminous reports from massaged data laypeople cannot decipher. Proffer solemn opinions that turn a scam into an article of faith. Equip trusting 'realists' with ready to go arguments and impressive copy-paste material. Unleash them on those asking inconvenient questions by slapping yellow conspiracy theorist stickers on their foreheads. Anyone with access to the internet is an instant expert. That the anyone is also the everyone getting taken for a ride makes no difference.

How do we get out of this predicament? Only by reclaiming our common sense. How to go about it? There is no one size fits all answer. It is an incremental process from thought to action. It starts by changing the way we look at things. This requires repurposing one's mind to become far more skeptical of what we are told publicly by governments, corporations, media and their paid for brains. Distrust should be the default, trust to follow only when whatever is unfolding passes the scam smell test. What's that?

Globalist shapeshifting scams are about mass mind manipulation through grand cinematic creations put together by very devious minds to overwhelm reality. Artifices aimed at suppressing reason. All such creations have three elements -- the scammer (actors), the scam (movie) and the scammed (audience). Since the scammers have become bold enough to show their faces and boast about their intentions, no great effort is needed to know who they are. So also with the ones scammed, they are pretty much 99% of the world. The key to it is spotting the scam.

Since each scam is very different from the one before, trying to figure out the exact mechanics of one is a waste of time. The details are deliberately crafted with complexity, triple blinds and cutouts to thwart us. However, all share a by now predictable pattern. See the pattern, know the beast. Know the beast, it can be beaten back.

It's like taking Ishihara's color blindness test, developed over a hundred years ago when common sense, coincidentally, was not uncommon. The aim of the test is to see through numerous dots of randomized color and size on a plate to find the path forming a number which is not apparent at first glance. For our purpose, 666 should be fitting.

The first indicator of a shapeshifting scam is there is always a kernel of truth, however tiny, that can expose the scam. Think of shadows. The object that casts a shadow can be very small but it can project a much larger shadow if it is close enough to the source of light. The same with a scam. So long as it is held close to the chest of the one spinning the lie around it, the truth does not have to be large. It is the holy grail for the persistent to chase after, the hushed whisper that infuriates, the trust me smile that is a smirk...vibrating silently like a quartz crystal deep inside a clock while the lie gets on with the show.

Second, the little nugget of truth is elevated to the unreachability of the divine and spirited away to a sanctum sanctorum. All attempts to locate it are brushed off, ridiculed, disappeared into a black hole. Even if the truth gives the slip to its guardians somehow and struts around the street stark naked, there's nothing to see, move on. Harold Pinter said it best in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in reference to the war on terror: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

Third, the engine of the scam is the 'blinding lie'. The lie is lit up with the celestial brilliance of the sun by ceaseless repetition, reinforcement, fine tuning and amplification. It has a firebombing mission in the finest traditions of Dresden, Tokyo, Pyongyang, Hanoi and Baghdad. The complete obliteration of reality through shock and awe, such that not a blade of fact survives. What gives it away is the immediate consensus on the central story line, at times even before the scam is triggered. And the uncanny synchronization of script as it gets written. Get it from a couple of mainstream sources, no need to seek them all. The narrative is near-identical across the spectrum except for cosmetic variations for local audience appeal.

Fourth, fear is the key, as Alistair MacLean aptly titled his vintage page turner. Fear and love are the most powerful human emotions. Honest, godfearing people often wonder why the world is not filled with love, why rulers prefer to rule by fear rather than love. Love takes time to strike roots. Love at first sight is the myth of romantics and poets, lust at first sight is the norm. Fear, on the other hand, is instantaneous. It can freeze even the strongest person on the spot in a split second and leave him/her shaken for a long time. It is the natural choice to seed the blinding lie with. Every one of the global wars against shadows invokes fear to bedazzle people and paralyze their capacity to think. The whole planet blowing up, suitcase nukes going off in our midst, banks with our life's savings going belly up, a virus stalking us on the streets and knocking on our doors like the grim reaper.

Fifth, the scam thrives by dividing people, not uniting them. There is danger in unity for the scammer as it can launch revolts, insurrections, even revolutions. Fear fits right in. It unlocks all the base emotions people are capable of -- anger, envy, suspicion, distrust, hostility, hatred. Graffiti-adorned us versus them banners of all color and size are mass-produced by ripping up the social fabric. Get the victims hypercharged to rage against one another, keep them distracted while the scam is under way. By the time they come to their senses, it's all over and done.

Sixth, there is one final piece, a detonator to arm the scam before it is triggered. Up till this point the scam is still a shadow without substance. People may wake up to it sooner or later. They need one or more live fire demonstrations to convince them the shadow has teeth. Some well-timed forest arson, mysteriously beached whale swarms, a couple of planes slamming into iconic structures, tens of millions suddenly made jobless, a plague snuffing out a few hundred thousand lives...you get the idea. We must remember these are 21^st century cinematic creations using state of the art technology and techniques, and morals. Villains can step off the screen, stroll down the aisles, cut some purses, slit a few throats, eat a couple of babies and vanish to the horror and outrage of the audience. The price of the detonator is called conscience, considered trivial relative to the expected gains.

Last, the scam always, without fail, ends in a transfer of wealth and power from the bottom to the top. The size of the plunder is in proportion to the fear quotient of the lie. The duration of the scam is subject to the law of diminishing returns. At some point, the offtake becomes unprofitable or not worth the effort needed to keep up the scam. It is quietly retired and replaced by another. Others are left to simmer, so long as they bring in a yield above the breakeven point. Some might get upgrades without altering the story line if they have acquired a self-sustaining momentum.

If we had any common sense, we would not get chronically bamboozled by globalist scams which share the same pattern while putting on a different face each time. Getting fooled twice should have been the red line for us. But here we are, off once again on a roller coaster death ride, screaming our heads off in blunderland for the fourth world class scam in thirty years. If we keep going this way, there will be no one left to scam or scream. All of us will have been either brainwashed into slavery for the scammers or capitulated in dejection. It is one way to end our misery.

The other way is to upend a bucket of ice cold water on one's head and sober up. Stop resisting the resistance. Tell our avatars to cease and desist their frog-like leaps from one planted provocation to another as if prodded by electrodes. Ask them to hover over the forest instead of squabbling over leaves and twigs under the trees.

We do not have to become the new Luddites. That would be self-defeating. The digital revolution has brought us a host of benefits, most crucially a growing global community of disparate cultures, resources, skills, intellects and knowledge. It is our revolution, not theirs. We need to eject the globalists from our cockpit into the great void and regain control of our starship. It has light years to go to discover a myriad truths waiting for us out there. If we can liberate the truth on our home planet first.

Authors Bio:

Economist and retired UN staff, disillusioned equally with the corruption of economics as a profession and the impotence of the UN in preventing the supreme crime of war.