Mind the Shift

Bettina Arndt began her career as a vocal feminist and earned fame in her native Australia as a sex therapist. This was in the 70’s. “I celebrated the change. It was wonderful to see opportunities opening up for women.” Then feminism went too far, she thinks. Sometime after the 1980’s it has been more about advancing women at the expense of men than reaching equality. Today the culture is increasingly anti-male, in Bettina’s view. ”I think the fourth wave feminists are keen on getting vengeance for imbalances in past history.” The last few years Bettina Arndt has dedicated most of her time to fighting for the rights of unfairly treated men, especially men falsely accused of rape. She fights against the unofficial ”kangaroo” courts set up at college campuses to speed up the handling of an alleged ongoing ”rape crisis”. The goal of these tribunals is to get more convictions. ”They are stealing young men’s degrees.” Earlier this year she launched the campaign ”Mothers of Sons” to highlight the problem of falsely accused men who are denied access to their children. Arndt’s fight for fairer treatment of men has made her ”enemy no 1” in he Australian feminist  community. It was extremely important that society started to change the laws in the 60’s and 70’s to ensure the protection of women, she says. ”But it has absolutely been misused. I talk about a ’domestic violence industry’, which has become a huge cash cow for feminists. That is how they get most of their funding.” Most violence within couples is two-way, Bettina explains. In most surveys about domestic violence the question asked is who is the victim. But when the question instead is about who is the perpetrator, just as many women as men admit to being that. When violence begins, however, women are more at risk of serious injuries and death. Couple’s fights are often about the children. ”Today men are stuck, because they know that if they leave, they are going to lose their children”, says Bettina. In 2018 Bettina Arndt published ”Mentoo”, a compilation of articles about society’s ever more unfair treatment of men. It was a reaction to the metoo movement. It goes without saying that there are men who misuse their power and that it is important to stop that, she points out. But what bothered her about metoo was the alleged and displayed fragility of women. Oddly enough, it is still problematic to discuss differences in sexuality between the sexes in an unprejudiced way. ”We have a widening sexual gap between men and women, and it is increasingly because of women’s lack of desire”, says Bettina Arndt. ”Nobody talks about what it is like for a man to feel like a beggar, to grovel for sex, to feel that there is something wrong with him for wanting to have sex with his wife.” ”Women are talking ad nauseam about their wants and their needs. But this is the number one thing that men long for in their long term relationships.” Links: Bettina Arndt’s website, the book Mentoo, the book The Sex Diaries, the Mothers of Sons campaign

On October 1st 2017, Catalonia held an unofficial referendum on independence from Spain. Madrid chose to respond in the toughest possible way. Riot police raided ballot stations, and hundreds of Catalan voters were injured. The plebiscite was clearly illegal, but it has also been disputed whether Madrid’s violent reaction was in accordance with relevant laws. ”The Spanish state had other options on the table than using the criminal code”, says Tania Verge i Mestre, a professor of politics and gender at the university Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Spain could obviously have treated the referendum as an administrative violation. Or just ignored it. As an outsider, a globalist and a lover of Spain – including Catalonia – I personally was surprised, annoyed and also frustrated when I learned about the growing independence movement. Why create new borders in a world with too many borders? ”It has nothing to do with resentment towards Madrid. Half the Catalan population are born or have parents who are born in other parts of Spain”, says Verge. An opening was underway some years ago, as a matter of fact. Politicians had negotiated a compromise proposal on the division of power between Madrid and Barcelona. But it was rejected by the constitutional court in 2010. This setback created a serious legitimacy problem and triggered, together with the financial crisis, the independence movement. Today most leading Catalan politicians are either in prison or in exile. Tania Verge was herself tried in court in early March of 2021 for her participation in the referendum as an election official. She is accused of sedition and risks imprisonment. Does she then see any movement in Madrid towards a softer stance? ”The language is different when (Social Democratic) PSOE is in power. But in practice very little happens. It is like a stalemate.” Some outsiders accuse Catalan ’independentistas’ of being selfish – that they do not want to share their greater wealth with poorer parts of Spain. But Tania Verge stresses that she and many other Catalan activists are on the left wing. She is also an activist at various feminist collectives, including feminist pro-independence groups. Feminism can contribute to rethinking the nation state, according to Verge. ”Being a left-wing feminist for independence also means wanting independence from centralism, patriarchy and capitalism. It means redefining the boundaries of a state and how to design structures. The Catalan identity is a moveable identity. It must reflect all the people living there at a certain time. We should not repeat all the pitfalls of the old 19th century nation states.” Here is a link to the website of Catalan feminists for independence. Other links Tania Verge recommends are to this blog post on the subject and to the book ’Terra de Ningù’ about feminist perspectives on the repression. Note: all is in Catalan.

The world is better than most of us think. There is a gap between the factual global trends and what the majority who never checks the numbers but only read headlines think are the trends. (And why so many spiritual people adhere to the pessimist camp is an enigma.) Going back just a little bit in history and realizing how often we have falsely believed we have been on the brink of collapse is sobering. In this episode, I walk you through ten canceled modern-day apocalypses. (Disclaimer: The review has a shamelessly Western perspective.)

”It is a shame that scholars and academics act this way”, says independent researcher of ancient history Andrew Collins after having told that a chief archaeologist yelled at him at a site in southern Turkey: ’We don’t want your pseudoscience here’. Collins has written over a dozen books about the origins of our civilization, all with more or less alternative views to the mainstream narrative in textbooks and history books about how it all started. Like it is with many mavericks, Collins breaks new ground. Years after having scorned his ideas, some scholars have come around and adhered to Collins theories. Since the mid-1990’s, the focus of Andrew Collins’ work has been on the pivotal megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, dated to some seven thousand years before the hitherto known earliest civilization. ”The most significant thing about Göbekli Tepe is its age. And its carvings are not like anything else in southwest Asia”, Collins says. Göbekli Tepe does not resemble anything that came after it. Andrew Collins (and others) conclude that the megalithic complex was built to ward off a threat from the skies, from celestial tricksters that were interpreted as foxes, wolves and other canines but by all accounts were parts of an exploding comet. The monuments represent a fifteen hundred year old collective memory of a huge cataclysm involving enormous conflagrations and floods that may have wiped out the majority of the human population. To make sure this never happened again, it was necessary to somehow appease the celestial forces. Based on findings, Andrew Collins and Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologist who rediscovered Göbekli Tepe, think that an elite group arrived in the area from the Russian steppes and convinced the local population that they knew how to avoid a second apocalypse: by dedicating hundreds of years to building advanced monuments. The pillars and blocks bear symbolic references to the stars, thus perhaps functioning as stargates between this world and the next. But already tens of thousands of years before these events, impulses of civilization had come from Siberia and Tibet, where the recently discovered so-called Denisovans had lived for 200,000 – 300,000 years (i.e. since before the latest ice age). Gene analyses show that modern humans interbred with the Denisovans, just like they did with the Neanderthals. ”The sophistication, the technology and the art that were in the mindset of the people who created Göbekli Tepe originally came from Mongolia and Siberia. I would put my money on that”, says Andrew. He is not into the more daring theories proposed by fellow mavericks about influences from the lost civilization of Atlantis or ET’s visiting Earth in physical form to assist or manipulate humankind in various ways. But he does think it is plausible that humankind has been mentally, non physically, affected by extraterrestrial intelligence, probably since the very beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago. Collins zooms in on the origins of our civilization, but to understand how it all really began after the first push out of Africa one has to go many times further back. That is precisely the topic of his next book, where he will delve into new incredible discoveries in Israel. It would seem that there, 400,000 years ago, shamanism was invented. What are the intelligences behind all this sudden development?

The entrepreneur, speaker, writer and life coach Daniel Mendoza had a challenging childhood and adolescence, to say the least. His family fled from his native Uruguay in the seventies, and after having hopped between a few countries they ended up in Sweden. The human environment in Daniel’s early life was soiled with lovelessness. His father was violent. Daniel got into fights all the time. But he never wanted to hurt people. He was blessed with a pure heart and an inner belief that there is hope. ”Tomorrow is going to be a better day”, he said to himself. A human encounter in his early twenties turned out to be pivotal. It was an epiphany. It showed Daniel how much good there is within us humans. He made a u-turn and decided to choose a positive path. He decided to study economics. That didn’t quite resonate with Daniel, but it propelled him to the next chapter in his life: the creation of a very special newspaper, Good News Magazine. This journalistic product prompts me, the former journalist, to ask questions about the reasons why one should publish positively focused news. Is the mainstream media telling a falsely negative story about the world and humankind? Or is the world such a problematic place that we need to tell the positive stories as well, so that we can get the strength to find the solutions? Daniel and I have an interesting discussion about these things. At one point Daniel employed a person who was openly neo-nazi and who insulted him every day for two years. ”I knew that this guy needed trust”, says Daniel. ”And I needed to start by listening to him. I knew there was a reason why he said the things he said.” This is the way Daniel Mendoza sees people. ”What if we can leave every child with a feeling that it is possible to solve our problems?” he says. Early in life Daniel realized he had to face the problems in order to solve them. This began with him ending up in fights. But it transformed into a drive, a desire, to focus on the positive, on the solutions. ”I will never forgive the things my parents did, but I will not be angry with them. We judge the person, but we cannot blame the person, we have to understand what lies behind. There is good in everyone.”

Few fields of research offer more insights into what we really are and why we are conscious about things at all than the study of near death experiences. It is also one of few areas where science truly spans the perceived borderline with spirituality. That is why cardiologist Pim van Lommel has made such a tremendous contribution by conducting large, longitudinal studies on hundreds of people who have suffered cardiac arrest and have been declared clinically dead but later resuscitated. Many of these patients experience being clearly conscious during the period of clinical death. Around four percent of those who have had a flatlined EEG report some kind of experience of enhanced consciousness in another realm, despite the fact that their brains have not been functioning ”To me the brain has a facilitating function, not a producing function. It is like a computer connected to the internet. When you turn it off, the internet is still there”, says Pim van Lommel. ”Consciousness is like gravity. We can not measure gravity, we can only measure its physical effects. It is the same with consciousness, we can only measure the effects.” Van Lommel started out as a hard-nosed physicalist himself, but an encounter in 1969 with a resuscitated patient, who was very disappointed that he had been revived, had a profound impact on him. In 1986 he read George Ritchie’s book ”Return from Tomorrow” about a profound NDE, which made him even more intrigued. Van Lommel started to ask resuscitated patients about their experiences, and to his big surprise, 12 out of 50 patients he asked gave accounts about NDE’s. That was when he decided to kick off a large study, which lasted for more than a decade. The results were published in The Lancet in 2001. The article gained much attention, as did van Lommels book ”Consciousness Beyond Life”, which came out in its first edition six years later. Much has happened since then. More studies have been made, notably by Bruce Greyson at the university of Virginia. Science is slowly embracing the nonphysical. But there is still a hard core of physicalist skeptics. The Wikipedia page about Pim van Lommel has for instance been hijacked by skeptics. ”They are frightened, because this threatens their world view”, says van Lommel. This also goes for many active scientists. ”If they said consciousness is not in the brain, they would lose their research money. Some professors have told me privately that they agree with me, but openly they will say that my conclusions are nonsense. Until they retire…”

Speaking to Case Parks in this episode is a bit like having a relaxed conversation with a dear friend over a coffee or a glass of beer. And we don’t talk about the weather. We talk about humanity, the soul and how to heal. Case is probably one of the coolest dudes in the spiritual community. In his early middle age (whatever that is) he discovered that he had access to healing frequencies. Today he is a healing practitioner and also a spiritual guide with a popular website and a Youtube channel with the beautiful name Everyday Masters (and the subtitle ”Everyday people awakening to their own mastery”). ”If you would have told me fifteen years ago everything that was going to happen in my life, I would have thought you smoked crack”, says the former golf pro. ”I can honestly say I don’t remember one single moment in my life when I said I wanted to become a healer. The universe has been leaving these breadcrumbs to follow, and I just follow them.” He had a spiritual core early on but he didn’t really develop it. Then one day he came across a video with a healer floating his hands across people. It was Eric Pearl. Case bought Pearl’s book ”The Reconnection”. ”Two chapters into that book I felt my hands were like magnets. It was like my hands had this two foot sphere around them. I could literally feel the field that connects us all. And I instantly knew that this was what I had been waiting for my whole life”, Case says. What he discovered was that he was able to help people reconnect to their higher self, which in most cases has an instant soothing effect on the psyche and enables self-healing. ”It’s so natural and easy to do this for me that I can only imagine that I have done this in many lifetimes. It’s like breathing.” Four fifths of Case Parks’ clients are at a distance when he has his sessions, and, interestingly enough, those are often the sessions with the most profound results, he says. ”You don't really need your hands. I’m not doing it. It’s the universe that's doing it. I see myself as the spiritual cable guy.” Case Parks sees the earth as a place to learn and grow. Physical lIfe is to be likened with a game or a stage play. ”My job is to repair the connection between you and your higher self when the remote control to the game is glitchy. Once it’s repaired, you have your own connection. Sometimes it's completely repaired in one session, sometimes it isn't.” Case gives us a little crash course in how to start feeling the frequencies that flow through all of us but most of us never sense. ”I can't understand why everybody doesn't feel it,'' he laughs. His next project is a tv series. And a children's book.

Disasters happen when hazard meets vulnerability. You can either reduce the hazard, which can be difficult, or reduce vulnerability. ”We have been good at doing that, actually”, says Johan von Schreeb, professor in global disaster medicine at Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden. The way Bangladesh has handled its vulnerability to floods is an excellent example. Johan was one of the founders of the Swedish section of Doctors without Borders. His engagement has taken him to places like Haiti, West Africa, Iraq, Ukraine and Yemen. Last fall he was deployed in Lebanon by WHO as a coordinator. He soon learned that when disaster strikes, the help from the outside world is often irrational. International medical teams are deployed in disaster areas without really understanding the context. Countries send field hospitals more as a knee-jerk reaction than as a well-thought-out measure. After the bomb blast in Lebanon in August last year it quickly became clear that there was no need for trauma care. ”But an Italian military field hospital arrived a whole month after the blast, ready to treat trauma patients. It was almost an insult”, says Johan. Some disasters are more ”popular” than others in the eyes of outside helpers. After earthquakes aid organizations are lining up. After violence in the Central African Republic or outbreaks of disease in Sub-Saharan Africa, not so much. The pandemic has been a complex mixed bag of rational and irrational measures, knee-jerk reactions and psychology. Sweden’s ”softer” strategy has been debated. ”I don’t think we understand the degree of liberty we have been able to maintain here in Sweden, not having to meet a policeman on the street corner issuing a fine of 1,000 euros because you’re out walking”, says von Schreeb. ”I guess it relates back to trust.” We’ve had pandemics before but never this kind of harsh measures. Why now? ”Because China started”, concludes Johan von Schreeb. ”They contained it and they were quick, and to go against what the Chinese did would have been very difficult for a lot of countries. The politicians wanted to do something. And people were scared. Even in a country like France, where people often protest, people seemed to accept these measures.” ”There are opportunities to control populations by using this type of fear, and that is the scary part. You can justify these kinds of measures. Especially in countries where we have had riots for political reasons. I saw that in Lebanon.” However, except for a few countries, we have managed to expand the health care system to cope, says Johan von Schreeb. ”Like in Sweden: we never needed to use the emergency field hospitals that were set up.” The strict covid measures have arguably been more detrimental to public health than the coronavirus itself in parts of Africa. On that continent, only health workers and the vulnerable should be vaccinated, Johan says. ”But the rest … vaccinating children in Africa would not be the wisest thing to do. For the young this is not a major issue. If all are vaccinated there is no money left, and there is so much else to do in the health system.”

”Our leaders are so bad at organizing common solutions to our problems”, says Ester Barinaga, a professor in Economics who has done extensive research into social entrepreneurship and the power of bottom-up initiatives. She began her work in the suburb of Kista in northern Stockholm, which at the time was a major tech hub. She saw a divided society. The tech people had this vision of connecting humanity, but they lived in a different world than the service people of that same suburb, who in fact came from all over the world. ”The information society that promised to bring us together was actually the reason why we perpetuated division”, says Barinaga. She saw the same structure in Silicon Valley, and even the IT cluster in India had its ”ins” and ”outs”. So she began to study how cities could become more inclusive. Ester Barinaga zoomed in on alternative money systems. There are two types: crypto currencies and community currencies. They both want to rethink the current top-down system, but whereas crypto aims at creating a new standardized system, community currencies are purely local and aim at integrating economic thinking with social dynamics. There are several problems with the current money system, according to Barinaga: It is supposed to fulfill contradictory functions using the same centralized currency. As a medium of exchange money has to be spent, and as a store of value it has to be saved. Plus: most of the monetary mass is created by private banks issuing loans for private homes. ”The banks give loans to those they deem credit worthy, with a profit motive, which reinforces inequality. But they have not created the interest, so for you to be able to pay that you have to take it from somebody else. So it ties up people.” After the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 there was an explosion of community currencies all over the Western world: In the US, France, Spain, Germany, Italy. People thought: ”We may have a crisis, and I may be unemployed, but I still have my skills. I can still paint houses. Let’s create our own currency and continue our lives as we did before.” And they did. Like the gita, the choquito or the común in Spain and the wir in Switzerland (which is much older, actually). Or the amazing lixo coin in Campolide in central Lisbon, which you earn from recycling waste and can then  use to buy local produce. There is nothing wrong with a transnational currency like the euro, points out Ester Barinaga. The thing is that we need a hierarchy of currencies. ”We need a transnational currency for transnational trade, perhaps even a global currency. But we also need currencies on other levels, for other purposes, to serve the needs of regional economies with their specific properties.” ”Globalized and localized at the same time!” Like many others who have had the opportunity to compare ”leaders” with ”ordinary people”, Ester Barinaga feels that hope grows in the grassroots. ”When I look at the people, there are so many initiatives and so much knowledge. The solutions are here. That’s when I am an optimist.”

In 2012 a group called OPPT took legal action to lawfully foreclose what was deemed the ”corporatized” governments of the world. No government was able to rebut the foreclosure, which, according to the initiators, meant that the deposited documents were validated and became global law – and are so today. The general purpose of this action has been to remind us humans that we are at a point in history when the millennia-old matrix of top-down government no longer serves us. Thus it is part of a global awakening. But according to OPPT (One People’s Public Trust), the judicial action is in no way a gimmick or some kind of symbolic act, but fully legal and correct. ”The war is over”, says the Italian artist and researcher Barbara Banco, one of the people behind this initiative. ”What we see now are only ghost governments. They continue to act because people don’t know what has happened.” Yes, this is a somewhat mind blowing action, and no, you didn’t see that one coming. But however skeptical you might be to the notion that it is possible to dismantle governments in this seemingly formal way, it is a fascinating and bold story. Since Barbara Banco speaks only Italian, her words are translated in this episode by Erika Dolci, and some of the back-and-forth translations have been edited out. Joining us is also Marco Missinato, an earlier guest on the podcast, who is also engaged in the OPPT initiative. On this website you can read more about OPPT and the foreclosure of governments. You can access the relevant documents, also in English.