Shutdown Solution: Opt Out of Tyranny

by David Degraw

Shutdown Solution: Opt Out of Tyranny

It’s Time For A Do-It-Ourselves Revolution

“All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances.
No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time,
in fact they are all artificial and temporary.”
– Strobe Talbott

How much longer are we going to protest and post online reports, rants, videos and launch campaigns that will hopefully raise awareness on issue after issue, problem after problem, as the situation gets worse? How much longer are we going to just keep crying about the need for change and pleading with puppet politicians in hopes that they will care about anything other than what their top campaign contributors think? At what point are we going to start acting like free and responsible citizens and stop acting like disgruntled servants waiting for our masters to save us and do the right thing?

C’mon people, let’s grow up and get real! The reformers have had their chance. For decades reformers have desperately clung to the fleeting belief that they can change the system from within. Well, after the latest government shutdown fiasco, the jury is now clearly in! We cannot allow the continued delusion and denial of reformers to prolong our suffering any longer. While reformers collect their paychecks, we are dying a slow painful death.

How many more crises will we endure before we truly act upon the fact that the government is working against our interests? How much more proof do we need? The current TWO-party oligarchy is a parasite sucking the life and wealth out of us. An organized criminal class has taken control of our government and rigged the game against us. It’s an undeniable truth. Even the propagandized masses realize this now. Poll after poll shows all-time record low approval ratings for this government. The main point of the Declaration of Independence is now more relevant than it was back in 1776; the government no longer has the consent of the governed.

As Thomas Jefferson wisely said many generations ago, “Every generation needs a new revolution.” The only reason why we haven’t evolved the government or solved any of the major problems we are confronted by is because this antiqued governmental system is now wholly corrupt! Our future has been sold to the highest bidder and is now held hostage by “special interests,” by a TWO-party oligarchy. People no longer trust the government or the corporate puppets that run it. The majority has lost faith in our political, economic and legal system.

We are toiling in a country where 50% of the population is either in poverty or “near poverty,” and 75% lives paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile, US millionaires have $50 TRILLION in wealth. The rich have never been richer, while we have an all-time record number of people in poverty and prison. There is no need for us to be struggling in such hardship. There is more than enough wealth to fix our problems and evolve society for the benefit of all. For all the problems we face, there are effective solutions. Solutions that are being held back due to corruption. How much longer are we going to keep banging our heads against this same old wall? THIS INSANITY HAS TO STOP!!

Banana Republic “Elections”

The electoral process is now completely rigged. The Supreme Court has become supremely corrupt. They consistently side with corruption, removing every last restraint on the corrupting influence of money in politics. You now need millions of dollars to even be considered for Congress. On top of that, the mainstream media will only give airtime to status quo supporting, paid off politicians. Both corrupt parties control the televised debates, so you can’t even get into the debate without bowing to the oligarchy. To sum it up, without millions of dollars, the endorsement of either wing of the oligarchy or the blessing of the mainstream media, you can’t achieve meaningful power. That’s not even mentioning the difficulty of getting on ballots in the first place, or gerrymandering.

If you somehow make it past all those barriers of corruption, good luck dealing with the fact that electronic “voting” machines produce easily hacked, unverifiable results that are tallied in secrecy. These machines are owned by private companies that are in bed with leaders of both parties and the intelligence community. If you have plans to go against the entrenched power structure, these “voting” machines will have mysterious “glitches” that make votes automatically go to one of the two puppet parties. Do you seriously think privately held “voting” machine companies and the NSA are going to let elections be won by real change-makers?

Alas, it would take a miracle for a meaningful number of candidates to ever make a serious run in the first place. Both puppet parties and the mainstream media will launch a relentless propaganda attack. Even if they could overcome that, the NSA will have enough private information on them, even if they are angels in their personal life, to blackmail or concoct false smear campaigns that will be carried out by psychological operations experts through relentless 24/7 wall-to-wall media attacks. If a critical mass of candidates somehow someway do the impossible, pull of a miracle of unprecedented proportions and break through all those barriers of corruption, then, at that point, you can be sure that there will be an assassination list with those change-making candidates’ names at the top of it.

If you’re naïve enough to think that this is all overly cynical exaggerating, you are not paying attention. Look at the assassination plans that were created for protesters during the Occupy Movement. Before they were able to crush a peaceful protest with brutal police state force, they were ready to start gunning down protesters. Just imagine what they would do if any of those protesters became serious candidates for the highest offices in the land. Whether you want to believe it or not, this is the reality of our present situation. Our political process is controlled by a tyrannical totalitarian regime.

After analyzing all options, the only real, legitimate option we have is to organize a grassroots decentralized movement that forms new alternative, self-sufficient communities. At this time, setting up autonomous communities is a commonsense solution, and the most effective way to avoid the fallout from a corrupted collapsing system.

Opt Out of the Tyrannical Regime!

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency is great and unendurable. And oppression and robbery are organized, I say; let us not have such a machine any longer. I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”
– Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

We occupied in protest. We raised the awareness level of the 99%. We have had a significant impact on mass consciousness. Now, it’s time to step it up! As Jim Morrison sang, “They’ve got the guns, but we got the numbers.” Let’s start acting like we still live in a free society. Let’s opt out of the tyrannical regime!

The overwhelming majority falsely believes that we can’t create change, which is why we are in this mess. The mainstream media has propagandized most people into feeling like we can’t do anything to fix the problems we are confronted by. BULLSHIT!! We live in the richest, most technologically advanced society humanity has ever known. We don’t need the plastic puppet politicians anymore. They’re obsolete!

It’s time for us to evolve society by starting our own autonomous local communities. Occupy inspired thousands of autonomous camps. What if we reestablished those camps as permanent Sustainable Autonomous Zones? There are already many intentional communities and collectives that are organically growing all over the place. Let’s learn from them. We’ve dedicated our energy to working on a plan to create a decentralized network of Sustainable Autonomous Zones so we can begin creating self-sufficient communities that can model new ways of living that make present ways of living obsolete. As Buckminster Fuller brilliantly said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

There is now a critical mass of citizens who are aware and capable enough to start these self-sufficient communities. Take it upon yourself to organize people in your community. Create independent social networks to communicate and organize, MEET IN PERSON, set up communities of support in your neighborhood. Bring a community of aware and capable citizens together in your own way and figure out systems that work best for you.

We Need a Do-It-Ourselves Revolution

Thriving communities can model new ways of living and we can create a support system that enables them to proliferate widely. If autonomous communities want to organize on a larger scale, there are now ways for them to easily do so. We are living in an interconnected technological society. People throughout the world have been experimenting with more efficient forms of governance. Liquid Democracy is an example of a dynamic and effective information age style of government that sane societies would embrace over what we have now.

Out of these communities, we can organically grow new systems of governance. We don’t have to fire a single shot or let the present situation descend further into violence. We just need to create a better system on a local level. As we prove the effectiveness of our new systems, the current system, which is already in a state of collapse, will crumble. If the corrupt establishment resorts to violence and attacks us again, it will only further galvanize the masses in support of us. A marginalized critical mass of people are suffering. Once we roll up our sleeves, lead by example and begin to provide solutions, they will be on our side.

It all comes down to a simple question: Are you a servant or are you a free individual? This is the most serious and profound question you need to answer, for your own sake, for the sake of your family and your future.

For all you free, aware and critically thinking people who realize that our current government is in a state of collapse and are ready for a Do-It-Ourselves revolution, we have just begun organizing on an independent social network called EvolveSociety.org. We would love for you to join and let us know what you are doing. Many of you are already doing inspiring and effective solution-based work. Let’s learn from each other and take it to the next logical level: decentralized autonomous local communities, which will form new effective ways of living, free from tyranny.

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Shutdown Solution: Opt Out of Tyranny

Crisis: USDA Orders States to Withhold Electronic Food Stamps

 

The USDA is directing states to withhold Electronic Transfer Benefits for the month of November until further notice, setting up a potential food stamp crisis that could very easily lead to riots and widespread looting if the government shutdown drags on.

The USDA, which oversees the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), issued the order in a letter to SNAP administrators which states, “Understanding the operational issues and constraints that States face, and in the interest of preserving maximum flexibility, we are directing States to hold their November issuance files and delay transmission to State electronic benefit transfer (EBT) vendors until further notice.”

In other words, up to 47 million Americans who rely on food stamps to feed themselves face the prospect of going hungry next month.

An EBT system failure that occurred this past weekend led to “mini-riots” and looting at several Walmart stores. In Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana, shelves were cleared as frenzied customers tried to exploit unlimited credit balances that had temporarily been applied to their EBT cards as a result of the system glitch. Store managers also had to close a Walmart and call police in Philadelphia, Mississippi after customers began rioting when their EBT cards stopped functioning.

EBT card users responded by invoking the threat of widespread riots if the system went down again for any sustained period of time. More conspiratorial types even suggested that Saturday’s glitch was a beta test for a future total food stamp shutdown.

Imagine how millions of people living near the poverty line are going to react when they find out that their EBT cards may not be credited next month as a result of the government shutdown.

In the state of Utah alone, 100,000 people will see their benefits frozen. Richard Phillips, a homeless man who relies on food stamps, told Fox 13, “It’s going to cause problems… because then you’re going to come to find out that you’re going to have people starting to steal and do what they have to do to survive.”

Michael Savage Covers Missing Nuke Report

Top radio host Michael Savage has joined in calling for answers regarding the leaked secret transfer of nuclear weapons to South Carolina that was followed by both warnings of a nuclear strike by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and the termination of the top two US nuke commanders.

Originally reported by myself and Alex Jones back on September 3rd, a number of disturbing red flags have continued to give further evidence to the high level military intelligence source that initially exposed the transfer of the off-the-record nuclear warheads from Dyess Air Force base to South Carolina — and still, the irrelevant mega media has ultimately failed to even investigate. Once again, the real media continues to dominate along with investigative radio personalities in reporting on the news that matters.

As Savage points out, specifically speaking on my report last Friday concerning how the termination of a high level nuke commander coincided with the exact September 3rd date of the secret transfer, what we truly need is answers. And while we are already talking about an issue that is deeply concerning at a base level, what really give the secret transfer a disturbing amount of depth are the events that followed the leaked intel.

It was Senator Lindsey Graham who came out later on the same day in warning against a ‘nuclear attack’ in South Carolina if we did not take military action in Syria. Then we also consider the fact that two of the top nuke commanders in the United States were terminated for laughable reasons, and it becomes an even larger red flag scenario. What is most amazing to me, however, is the fact that the termination of the commanders was actually leaked to the Associated Press and others.

What this means is that United States government did not want us to know that the commanders were terminated — specifically that the second top commander was fired on the same day as the secret nuke transfer report.

When we look back at the ’2007 United States Air Force nuclear weapons incident’, where nukeswere reported missing from the Minot Air Force Base with no official suspect, the media went into turmoil and investigations were launched immediately. Even CNN covered the event in depth and continued to investigate what was going on. The CNN reporter even stated that “this kind of thing is not supposed to happen” in response to the event:

But where is the mainstream media now? Once again, it is up to us to get the word out and demand answers. My respect goes out to Michael Savage for demanding answers on such a pertinent and real issue.

Food stamp recipients panic as federal EBT system crashes

The outage that caused EBT card systems in 17 states to go down Saturday is fixed.

I’ve often said that 72 hours after EBT cards stop working, every U.S. city will collapse into chaos. In case you’re not familiar with the term, EBT cards are “digital food stamps.” Nearly 50 million Americans are right now using EBT cards which are automatically refilled each month with welfare money the government doesn’t have, increasing the national debt.

Under Obama, food stamp enrollees have exploded. The annual usage statistics for food stamps are found here, but you can’t see them because under the Obama administration’s contrived “shutdown theater,” the USDA.gov website has been taken offline. Note, of course, that the food stamp program itself is still online (most of the time), thereby proving there really isn’t a “government shutdown” as claimed by Obama.

If you really want to see the data, you have to go to a private website like this one that shows the annual food stamp enrollment from 1975 to 2012:
http://www.dailyjobsupdate.com/wp-content/up…

There, you can clearly see the explosion of food stamps under Obama, who has more than doubled the number of Americans on the program. That’s considered “economic growth” by democrats, by the way: the more people who subsist on government, the better the economy.

EBT system craters across 17 states

Today, the EBT system crashed hard, causing food stamp beneficiaries across 17 states to be unable to buy their cupcakes, donuts, diet sodas and other junk foods that keep them diseased and obese. (Yes, food stamp money is primarily used buy processed junk food.)

“While the system is now up and running, beneficiaries in the 17 affected states continue to experience connectivity issues to access their benefits,” stated a food stamp official in an AP story. The story goes on to say, “Typically when the cards aren’t working retailers can call a backup phone number to find out how much money a customer has available in their account. But that information also was unavailable because of the outage, so customers weren’t able to use their cards.”

The feds said this was due to a “system update,” but this is of course a lie. Then again, every computer system in government that crashes — including the Healthcare.gov website — is now said to be “fully functioning” as if everybody in government is tripped out on acid.

The IT backbone of the U.S. federal empire is unraveling

Today’s failure of the EBT card system is yet more evidence that the U.S. empire is rapidly falling apart. The disastrous launch of Healthcare.gov proved yet again that the Obama administration is utterly incapable of competently managing a simple R&D development project. And rather than trying to help Americans become more independent and self-reliant, Obama has worked hard to put as many people on social welfare programs as possible, vastly expanding the role of government to the point where millions of Americans no longer have any concept of having a job or supporting themselves.

As an example of this, AP quotes a cashier named Eliza Shook who said, “It’s been terrible. It’s just been some angry folks. That’s what a lot of folks depend on.”

And that’s true. Without EBT cards, millions of Americans have no way to feed themselves. They depend entirely on government just to put food on the table. So when that government fails them, they panic.

This is why I have long held that the day America collapses into chaos is the day when EBT cards go offline and stay offline for 72 hours. Technically, that’s three days, of course, but you get my point.

The day the U.S. government collapses in default is fast approaching

Because an exponential rise in debt cannot be sustained, at some point the U.S. government will simply collapse into financial default. Soon after, Martial Law will have to be declared in every major U.S. city to quell the riots. Imagine 50 million Americans going hungry and realizing their welfare food credits aren’t going to be available anymore and you begin to get an idea of why cities will be nearly impossible to survive when the chaos hits.

The impending failure of the federal government is now obvious to everyone. Even Ron Paul is now openly talking about the coming collapse of the U.S. empire, mirroring the overnight collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, where that nation broke into twelve independent republics.

Many people now believe the U.S. is headed for a similar outcome, and that such an outcome can happen virtually overnight. The crash of EBT cards could be the tumbling domino that sets this into action. Nearly every state already has a secessionist movement calling for independence, and the Tenth Amendment Center is leading the charge on state nullification of federal tyranny. Groups like the Oath Keepers are ready to step in and help establish local law and order in the short-term chaos that would follow a dissolution of the U.S. empire.

Today, all that is left of America is a deeply-indebted welfare state run by a corrupt cabal of tyrants who have no moral authority, no faith of the People and no solutions. America has devolved into a corrupt, bankrupt, incompetent government tyranny headed for imminent collapse.

 

As Worries Over the Power Grid Rise, a Drill Will Simulate a Knockout Blow

The electric grid, as government and private experts describe it, is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary lands a knockout blow, they fear, it could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of Sept. 11.

New York City during a blackout in 2003. More than 150 companies and groups will
take part in a drill that will simulate attacks on the power grid.

This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical attacks and cyberattacks that could take down large sections of the power grid.

They will practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to participate.

“This is different from a hurricane that hits X, Y and Z counties in the Southeast and they have a loss of power for three or four days,” said the official in charge of the drill, Brian M. Harrell of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as NERC. “We really want to go beyond that.”

One goal of the drill, called GridEx II, is to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain for everyday necessities.

“If we fail at electricity, we’re going to fail miserably,” Curt Hébert, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a recent conference held by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Mr. Harrell said that previous exercises were based on the expectation that electricity “would be up and running relatively quick” after an attack.

Now, he said, the goal is to “educate the federal government on what their expectations should or shouldn’t be.” The industry held a smaller exercise two years ago in which 75 utilities, companies and agencies participated, but this one will be vastly expanded and will be carried out in a more anxious mood.

Most of the participants will join the exercise from their workplaces, with NERC, in Washington, announcing successive failures. One example, organizers say, is a substation break-in that officials initially think is an attempt to steal copper. But instead, the intruder uses a USB drive to upload a virus into a computer network.

The drill is part of a give-and-take in the past few years between the government and utilities that has exposed the difficulties of securing the electric system.

The grid is essential for almost everything, but it is mostly controlled by investor-owned companies or municipal or regional agencies. Ninety-nine percent of military facilities rely on commercial power, according to the White House.

The utilities play down their abilities, in comparison with the government’s. “They have the intelligence operation, the standing army, the three-letter agencies,” said Scott Aaronson, senior director of national security policy at the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association of investor-owned utilities. “We have the grid operations expertise.”

That expertise involves running 5,800 major power plants and 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, monitored and controlled by a staggering mix of devices installed over decades. Some utilities use their own antique computer protocols and are probably safe from hacking — what the industry calls “security through obscurity.”

But others rely on Windows-based control systems that are common to many industries. Some of them run on in-house networks, but computer security experts say they are not confident that all the connections to the public Internet have been discovered and secured. Many may be vulnerable to software — known as malware — that can disable the systems or destroy their ability to communicate, leaving their human operators blind about the positions of switches, the flows of current and other critical parameters. Experts say a sophisticated hacker could also damage hard-to-replace equipment.

In an effort to draw utilities and the government closer, the industry recently established the Electricity Sub-Sector Coordinating Council, made up of high-level executives, to meet with federal officials. The first session is next month.

Preparation for the November drill comes as Congress is debating laws that could impose new standards to protect the grid from cyberattacks, but many in the industry, some of whom would like such rules, doubt that they can pass.

The drill is also being planned as conferences, studies and even works of fiction are raising near-apocalyptic visions of catastrophes involving the grid.

A National Academy of Sciences report last year said that terrorists could cause broad hardship for months with physical attacks on hard-to-replace components. An emerging effort led in part by R. James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is gearing up to pressure state legislatures to force utilities to protect equipment against an electromagnetic pulse, which could come from solar activity or be caused by small nuclear weapons exploded at low altitude, frying crucial components.

An attack using an electromagnetic pulse is laid out in extensive detail in the novel “One Second After,” published in 2009 and endorsed by Newt Gingrich. In another novel,“Gridlock,” published this summer and co-written by Byron L. Dorgan, the former senator from North Dakota, a rogue Russian agent working for Venezuela and Iran helps hackers threaten the grid. In the preface, Mr. Dorgan says such an attack could cause 10,000 times as much devastation as the terrorists’ strikes on Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite the growing anxiety, the government and the private sector have had trouble coordinating their grid protection efforts. The utility industry argues that the government has extensive information on threats but keeps it classified. Government officials concede the problem, and they have suggested that some utility executives get security clearances. But with hundreds of utilities and thousands of executives, it cannot issue such clearances fast enough. And the industry would like to be instantly warned when the government identifies Internet servers that are known to be sources of malware.

Another problem is that the electric system is so tightly integrated that a collapse in one spot, whether by error or intent, can set off a cascade, as happened in August 2003, when a power failure took a few moments to spread from Detroit to New York.

Sometimes utility engineers and law enforcement officials also seem to speak different languages. In his book “Protecting Industrial Control Systems From Electronic Threats,” Joseph Weiss, an engineer and cybersecurity expert, recounted a meeting between electrical engineers and the F.B.I. in 2008. When an F.B.I. official spoke at length about I.E.D.’s, he was referring to improvised explosive devices, but to the engineers the abbreviation meant intelligent electronic devices.

And experts fear government-sponsored hacking. Michael V. Hayden, another former C.I.A. director, speaking at the Bipartisan Policy Center conference, said that the Stuxnet virus, which disabled some of Iran’s centrifuges for enriching uranium, might invite retaliation.

“In a time of peace, someone just used a cyberweapon to destroy another nation’s critical infrastructure,” he said. “Ouch.”

Also read:

• The Ultimate False Flag Event

 

Is a Currency Collapse Being Embedded in the 11/13 Blackout?

 

In this era of mistrust in which Obama enjoys only a 9% approval rating, what would happen across the country if on a Friday, Ben Bernanke announced that the banking system had collapsed, but would reopen on Monday? If bank customers did not have access to their full bank accounts on the following Monday, DHS might have to use some of that 2.2 billion rounds of ammunition that they have acquired in the past several months in order to restore order.The elite would like to avoid this kind of a confrontation at this point in time.

Instead, if a “blackout” were to occur which supposedly destroyed bank records in a bogus EMP attack, the banks would “collapse”, and the collapse would hardly be noticed in the immediate aftermath. And make no mistake about it, the banks will not truly collapse, they will come to a soft landing. Your resources will be the only ones that will be collapsed as this will be the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the planet and this event will make the bailouts seem miniscule by comparison.

A blackout and the ensuing chaos would be the perfect time to pretend to collapse the banks and not risk incurring the wrath of the public. Amid the extreme social unrest accompanying a massive blackout, the banking issue would be secondary in importance by comparison because people would be on the streets looking for food by the third day following the blackout. Looting, rioting and starvation would rule the day. The amount of computer digits in one’s bank account, would become a very secondary issue.

In the midst of the chaos and the violence, martial law would imposed and America would never be the same.

New Matt Damon Movie Reveals Mankind’s Trans-humanist Destiny

In 2009 upstart South African director Neill Blomkamp showed Hollywood a thing or two when his $30m sci-fi thriller District 9 took more than $200m at the box office with a compelling tale of aliens as victims as opposed to predators. Four years on he’s back with a bigger budget – $115m – plus A-list stars Matt Damon and Jodie Foster for a another dystopian tale – this time the cosseted rich versus the vulnerable poor – set against a global canvas.

Elysium, a new movie starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, depicts what many futurists have long predicted is mankind’s ultimate destiny – the division of the human race into two new class systems – a transhumanist elite that centralizes technological progress to achieve utopia, and a massive underclass left to rot on a dying planet ruled by robotic drones.  It’s 2154 and earth is one big polluted ghetto, a sun-seared hell where big cities – specifically Los Angeles – have broken down into favelas housing the dispossessed and those lucky enough get back-breaking work in factories run by faceless corporations.

The trailer for the movie, set to be released on August 9 in the US, begins by depicting an army of robot drones in control of policing that shake down and beat citizens for trivial “violations”. The year is 2154. When Damon’s character expresses anger at his treatment, he is offered a pill to calm him by a robotic bureaucrat. Any form of dissent is treated as “abusive”.

“Humanity is divided between two worlds,” reads the caption, explaining that most of humanity is left to reside on an overpopulated, collapsing earth while the super elite have developed a gargantuan and luxurious off-planet space habitat called Elysium where war, poverty, hunger and disease are non-existent.

Damon’s character is forced to undergo cybernetic enhancements before he can lead a mission to Elysium in order to find a cure for a cancer virus he has contracted. The movie is also clearly designed to be a political jibe at anti-immigration activists.

However, many of the themes of Elysium are clearly lifted from the work of futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines predicted the body scanner depicted in the trailer which eliminates cancer cells.

Kurzweil’s 1999 book, which successfully foresaw the invention of the iPhone, the iPad, Google Glass, iTunes, You Tube and on demand services like Netflix as well as the Kindle, predicts that by 2029 the vast majority of humans will have augmented their bodies with cybernetic implants and those who refuse or are unable to do so will form a “human underclass” that is not productively engaged in the economy.

The wider trend of the elite seeing humans as completely expendable as their roles are taken up by machines unfolds after 2029 when, “There is almost no human employment in production, agriculture, and transportation,” writes Kurzweil.

By 2099, the entire planet is run by artificially intelligent computer systems which are smarter than the entire human race combined – similar to the Skynet system fictionalized in the Terminator franchise.

Humans who resist the pressure to alter their bodies by becoming part-cyborg will be ostracized from society.

“Even among those human intelligences still using carbon-based neurons, there is ubiquitous use of neural implant technology, which provides enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities. Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do,” writes Kurzweil.

One of the most prescient voices of dissent against this future – despite his murderous actions – was Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who is widely quoted by futurists like Kurzweil and Bill Joy as sagely outlining the dangers posed to the general public by the elite’s drive for technological singularity, as depicted in the Elysium movie.

“Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite,” wrote Kaczynski in his manifesto.

Alice Braga portrays the standard love interest as a childhood friend turned honourable nurse but it is Damon who provides the rich focus, a quietely determined good guy who has never been able to accept the literal gap (about 20 minutes in a space shuttle) between rich and poor.

In a disappointing season of bloated blockbusters, Elysium stands tall, a first-rate sci-fi thriller given extra heft by a heartening moral core.