The Weaponization Of Loneliness

Do you keep your opinions to yourself because you’re afraid people will reject you? Do you sign on to a cause just because everyone around you acts like it’s the right thing to do? Welcome to The Weaponization of Loneliness. Tyrants of all stripes want to tell you what to believe and how to live your life. They get away with it by using the most potent weapon at their disposal: your fear of ostracism. This book explains how dictators—from the French Revolution to the Communist Party of China to today’s globalists—aim to atomize us in order to control us. We fall for it because our need to connect with others and our fear of social rejection are so hardwired that they trigger our conformity impulse. These dynamics can even cause us to comply with evil orders. We all need a better understanding of how the merchants of loneliness—power elites in Big Tech, Big Media, Big Government, academia, Hollywood, and the corporate world— exploit our terror of social isolation. Their divide-and-conquer tactics include identity politics, political correctness, and mob agitation. Their media monopoly spawns the propaganda essential to demonization campaigns, censorship, cancel culture, snitch culture, struggle sessions, the criminalization of comedy, and the subversion of society’s most fundamental institutions. It all adds up to a machinery of loneliness. Ironically, people tend to comply with this machinery to avoid loneliness, but such compliance only isolates us further. The Weaponization of Loneliness offers a message of hope. We can resist this psychological warfare if we have strong bonds in our families, faith communities, and friendships. Let’s resolve to talk to one another openly and often, especially about the consequences of giving in to social pressures and media hype. Indeed, totalitarians always seek to destroy private life because it is the very fount of freedom.

A pioneering neuroscientist reveals the reasons for chronic loneliness--which he defines an unrecognized syndrome--and brings it out of the shadow of its cousin, depression. 12 illustrations.

At the tense intersection of biblical interpretation and contemporary politics, this book stands out as an imagined political campaign guide based on a creative deep dive into Luke’s vibrant evangelical account of Jesus’s messianic mission. It seeks to challenge any group that blithely claims Jesus’s endorsement of their partisan agendas today, but especially those trumpeting authoritarian rule. Close attention to Luke’s narrative discloses a distinctive figure who strikingly ill fits standard strongman profiles and straitjacket labels. Warning: If Luke’s Jesus doesn’t change your vote, he might well change your mind, challenge your life, and shake up your politics along the way.

Is heroism possible for everyone? Should it be? What kinds of stories do we tell when we talk about heroes and what do these stories reveal about how we view ourselves? This book takes up these questions and more by reflecting on twenty-first century American television shows. Among the shows examined are Only Murders in the Building, Game of Thrones, The Good Lord Bird, The Boys, and Severance. What we find is an entertainment landscape unsure about what a hero is or even what qualifies as heroic. In a nation uncertain about heroism, we see a dramatic rise in the popularity of the anti-hero and even in worlds without heroes. This fragmented variety highlights how the American political mind is similarly fragmented in what it believes are its highest aspirations—and its deepest anxieties. It is this fragmentation that may help us understand why twenty-first century entertainment has elevated the heroic to the supernatural while simultaneously democratizing heroism to the point where anyone may become one. A Hero in All of Us?: Heroism and American Political Thought as Seen on TV explores this multifaceted landscape to better understand how Americans view their heroes and themselves.

This is the first part of a two-volume set on Concordian economics, a new paradigm whose core completes the Aristotelian-Aquinian project of economic justice. The book delves into the history of economics and presents Concordian economics as a response to the concerns and shortcomings of mainstream economics. Demand-side economics is represented in the process of consumption—the expenditure of monetary wealth to acquire real wealth and financial wealth of a different nature. In contrast, supply-side economics is represented in the production process, the process of producing real wealth, e.g. tables, chairs and foodstuffs. Institutionalists will also welcome this book because it ties the world of real wealth to that of monetary wealth through the process of distributing the value of ownership of both monetary and real wealth as they are created. The book begins with an introduction to Concordian economics, followed by a discussion of how to restore relevance to the field of economic studies. It also presents a revision of the Keynesian model designed to gradually address the major social, economic, and political causes of discord. Moreover, the author warns against the separation of economics from the world of physical things as well as the world of legal and moral issues. Following a discussion on the measurement of real wealth, econometrics is introduced in accordance with the categories of Concordian economics. Lastly, the book develops a theory of economic justice by defining a set of economic rights and responsibilities that guide economic behavior and policy. This book appeals to scholars and students of economics and related fields, as well as anyone interested in reintegrating economics into the social context.

Noelle-Newmann's classic on public opinion as a form of social control was originally published in German in 1980 and first published in English in 1984. This revised edition adds three new chapters to summarize ongoing research, new findings, and new developments. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Big Intel recounts the dramatic story of the rise and Cold War heroics of the CIA and the American intelligence apparatus followed by its unfortunate slide into Marxist-influenced Deep State dysfunction as BIG INTEL became BAD INTEL. How the Left Subverted the CIA and FBI Once upon a time, the FBI and the CIA fought America’s enemies at home and abroad. Now they are tools of a growing police state, attacking the left’s political enemies and spying on ordinary American citizens—even parents who push back against radical public schools. How did we get here? In this revealing and thoroughly documented book, a former CIA operative traces the origins of Big Intel to a loose network of Marxist academic agitators known as the Frankfurt School. Their ideology appealed to the Ivy League elites populating the CIA, but the subversion of the FBI took longer, impeded for a time by the bureau’s staunchly anti-Communist director, J. Edgar Hoover. Eventually both institutions succumbed, and today Big Intel is controlled by the cultural Marxists. Chronicling the parasitic infiltration of the CIA and FBI, Big Intel shows how normal intelligence functions have given way to political correctness and never-ending “pride” propaganda, trap- ping agents in the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” house of mirrors. Most chilling of all is the emergence of the leftist security state. Big Intel has become Bad Intel. There are hard times ahead, but if Americans remember what freedom once was, we can still defang Big Intel and return our intelligence services to the service of democracy.

During World War II, the Japanese military extended Japan’s civilian licensing regime for domestic brothels to those next to its overseas bases. It did so for a simple reason: to impose the strenuous health standards necessary to control the venereal disease that had debilitated its troops in earlier wars. In turn, these brothels (dubbed "comfort stations") recruited prostitutes through variations on the standard indenture contracts used by licensed brothels in both Korea and Japan. The party line in Western academia, though, is that these “comfort women” were dragooned into sex slavery at bayonet point by Japanese infantry. But, as the authors of this book show, that narrative originated as a hoax perpetrated by a Japanese communist writer in the 1980s. It was then spread by a South Korean organization with close ties to the Communist North. Ramseyer and Morgan discuss how these women really came to be in Japanese military comfort stations. Some took the jobs because they were tricked by fraudulent recruiters. Some were under pressure from abusive parents. But the rest of the women seem to have been driven by the same motivation as most prostitutes throughout history: want of money. Indeed, the notion that these “comfort women” became prostitutes by any other means has no basis in documentary history. Serious intellectuals of all political perspectives in both South Korea and Japan have understood this for years. Ramseyer and Morgan’s findings caused a firestorm in Japanese Studies academia. For explaining that the women became prostitutes of their own volition, both authors of this book found themselves “cancelled.” In this book, the authors detail both the history of the comfort women and their own persecution by academic peers. Only in the West—and only through brutal stratagems of censorship and ostracism—has the myth of bayonet-point conscription survived.

Confronting taboos and misunderstandings about sexuality and aging, Couple Sexuality After 60: Intimate, Pleasurable, and Satisfying motivates couples to embrace sex and sexuality in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. The book busts two extreme myths—that people over 60 cannot and should not be sexual and that the best way to be sexual is to emphasize eroticism, using sex toys, and "kinky sex". Using a variable, flexible approach to couple sexuality based on the Good Enough Sex (GES) model, this book places the essence of sexuality in pleasure-oriented touching, not individual sex performance. Barry and Emily McCarthy introduce a new sexual mantra of "desire/pleasure/eroticism/satisfaction" with the goal of presenting a healthy model of sexuality to replace the traditional double standard that couples learn in young adulthood. Specific chapters focus on important areas like coming to terms with the new normal, female–male sexual equity, satisfaction being about more than intercourse and orgasm, valuing synchronous and asynchronous sexuality, psychobiosocial approaches to sexuality, and more. In addition to aging heterosexual couples, single individuals and queer couples will find this book interesting. Additionally, sexual health clinicians and sex therapists with clients over the age of 60 will find this a fascinating read.

A "marvelous" (Lauren Groff) and "gentle, mysterious and profound” (Marina Abramović) novel about a woman who has come undone. A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio. In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas. What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos. White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.