Rise of the Beast Platform
Starve this beast like it’s a vampire hunting down your blood!
Starve this beast like it’s a vampire hunting down your blood.
— Dr. Joseph Mercola
I apologize that I've been relatively quiet for a bit, but honestly, I’ve kind of been stunned to silence! More on that in a moment, but suffice it to say I'm back with a vengeance and a passion.
But first, a quick congratulations to Kim in Georgia, who won my Pearl Harbor Day book giveaway. Your copy of The Plum Blooms in Winter is on its way, Kim!
Revelation 13 tells us that the story of our age will lead to the most totalitarian system ever devised. I’m convinced we’re watching that system emerge.
I wrote all the way back in December 2020 about how the proposed vaccine passports represented the first creepy tentacles of the technology platform that will implement the Mark of the Beast (Revelation 13).
I sincerely hope I'm not the only one warning you now, as the beast system is being unveiled before our eyes! No, the beast has not yet been revealed. But we are absolutely seeing the dots of his platform connect, and the rough shape of his rearing head. It is a horrific sight indeed.
This very quick—just five tweets—snapshot of technocratic totalitarianism in China will sock you in the gut. Especially when you consider that China is host to one of the fastest-growing churches in the world, and that nearly 100 million of our Christian brethren bear up under severe persecution there.
Coming Soon to a Venue Very Near You
Please give heed to the message below from a Silicon Valley insider. He warns of the emerging face of government surveillance and compulsion. And how well the invisible groundwork for the technocratic surveillance state has already been laid.
Yes, even here in the West.
Would you be surprised to learn that:
Per capita, there are more cameras in the US than anywhere else in the world—including China—with 50 million “tethered cameras” here, fully accessible to the internet and hence to AI surveillance
…Which rises to 20 billion cameras if you include cell phones, “ring cameras” installed for home security, cameras in cars, and other smart appliances
By the end of 2022, more than 1 billion data-collecting surveillance cameras will be in place worldwide, tethered and connected to AI
London is already the third most surveilled city in the world, with 73 cameras per 1000 people
By 2025 $2 trillion will have been spent to build out the surveillance infrastructure for the “smart cities” of the future
Many computer apps already track your very eye movements when you’re in front of a screen
As the guest, Aman Jabbi, points out:
They’re busy building out an “internet of eyes.”
Aimed, 1984-style, at each and every one of us.
That and much more here:
And he [the beast] causes all, the small and the great, the rich and the poor, and the free and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, and he decrees that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name. (Rev 13:16-17)
If we accept the push toward vaccine passports and digital identity based on facial recognition, we’ll each wind up handcuffed to a “social credit score” system—like the one in China—that dictates every detail of our lives. Yes, even whether and what we can buy and sell.
One issue I had with the interview is that, despite the interviewer’s best efforts to wrap up with a call to action, I was left with a sense of futility—in human terms, anyway.
The juggernaut is in motion. What in the world can anyone but God Almighty do about it?
Thankfully, Dr. Joseph Mercola has provided a compelling summary of this interview. His article does a great job of distilling some key areas for resistance.
The international vaccine passport… is THE key to the entire effort to get everyone into the digital ID system. So, preventing the adoption of vaccine passports is a central component of resistance to the digital prison system in its entirety….
AI is an absolutely crucial component for the success of the digital prison…. The answer then, is to starve the beast, and we do this by withholding our data….
We won’t be able to avoid them all…. But there are many we can avoid, such as smart watches, fitness trackers, smart thermostats, smart TVs, AI assistants and Ring surveillance cameras just to name a few.
We can also fight, on a local level, to prevent the expansion of facial recognition cameras and 5G, and we can refuse the coming vaccine passport, and the push toward virtual reality…. It’s important to understand why [the push toward virtual reality] is done. It’s to force you deeper into the digital prison system.
(Dr. Mercola originally published his article here on Substack, and on his own site, with this thought-provoking title: An Invisible Prison Has Been Built Just for You. That version of the article is behind a paywall now—but I will say that his content is well worth following! Free subscribers get access to all the new articles for 48 hours. If you subscribe via his own site you get a daily summary rather than individual emails.)
“Surveillance Capitalists” (e.g. Facebook) Must See Nothing But Our Turned Backs
The first thing I ever published here was about “cancel culture,” free speech, and why I’ve ‘divorced’ Facebook:
…but I’m learning now that the insidious web Big Tech is weaving is way more subtle and far-reaching than I realized. And the end game is downright sinister—nothing more nor less than the mark-of-the-beast system, the digital prison described above.
This documentary featuring Harvard professor Dr. Shoshana Zuboff is another eye-opener, especially when coupled with the information above:
Once again, I’m indebted to Dr. Mercola for his summary (which is unfortunately behind a paywall now).
You might not care that Google knows you bought a particular kind of shoe, or a particular book. However, the information we freely hand over is the least important of the personal information actually being gathered about us, Zuboff notes.
Tech companies tell us the data collected is being used to improve services, and indeed, some of it is. But it is also being used to model human behavior by analyzing the patterns of behavior of hundreds of millions of people. Once you have a large enough training model, you can begin to accurately predict how different types of individuals will behave over time.
The data gathered is also being used to predict a whole host of individual attributes about you, such as personality quirks, sexual orientation, political orientation — "a whole range of things we never ever intended to disclose," Zuboff says….
Your face is being used without your knowledge or consent to train facial recognition software, and none of us is told how that software is intended to be used.
As just one example, the Chinese government is using facial recognition software to track and monitor minority groups and advocates for democracy, and that could happen elsewhere as well, at any time.
So that photo you uploaded of yourself at a party provides a range of valuable information — from the types of people you're most likely to spend your time with and where you're likely to go to have a good time, to information about how the muscles in your face move and alter the shape of your features when you're in a good mood.
By gathering a staggering amount of data points on each person, minute by minute, Big Data can make very accurate predictions about human behavior, and these predictions are then “sold to business customers who want to maximize our value to their business,” Zuboff says.
Your entire existence — even your shifting moods, deciphered by facial recognition software — has become a source of revenue for many tech corporations. You might think you have free will but, in reality, you're being cleverly maneuvered and funneled into doing (and typically buying) or thinking something you may not have done, bought or thought otherwise. And, “our ignorance is their bliss,” Zuboff says.
The video quotes Chris Wylie, the whistleblower who flagged Cambridge Analytica’s abuses of private data provided by Facebook in 2018:
We knew so much about so many individuals that we could understand their inner demons, and we could figure out how to target those demons. How to target their fear. How to target their anger. How to target their paranoia.
And with those targets we could trigger those emotions. And by triggering those emotions we could then manipulate them into clicking on a website. Joining a group. Telling them what kind of things to read. Telling them what kind of people to hang out with. Even telling them who to vote for.
—Chris Wylie
While Dr. Zuboff may see the end game as largely commercial—selling out our privacy and self-determination for profit—if you couple this with the observations from the Silicon Valley insider featured above, you see at once that it’s worse than that. It’s ultimately about luring us into a digital prison and capturing us for the beast’s system.
All of this shadow operation will remain hidden, because you will not ask questions, because you're so busy being entertained….
—Dr. Shoshana Zuboff
Stunned Into Silence
Circling back to what I said early on about being stunned to silence by rampant evil… (It’s a shift in topics, but not entirely…) Honestly, I was momentarily undone by the midterm elections.
As an Arizona resident, I join probably hundreds of millions of others in believing the conservative vote was suppressed, and that our election was stolen in front of us. Here in Arizona, we witnessed a silent coup.
While the political machine has declared Soros-funded Democrat Katie Hobbs our new governor, her opponent Kari Lake is fighting it in the courts. Time will tell what kind of success the Lord grants her. Maybe, with her 70-page lawsuit laying out her evidence that Maricopa was every bit as rigged as it looked, Kari Lake will prove to be the persistently strident woman even the callous judge can’t ignore! (Luke 18:4-5)
But I won’t belabor that, cuz…
Here’s the Bottom Line on All This
The night before the election, I got up at one a.m. to watch the blood moon. I can’t help it! They fascinate me. The ordered dance of the heavens that makes an eclipse possible has always spoken to me of our God’s indescribable power and authority. Not to mention the fact that, just as He has appointed the paces of that majestic dance, He has also appointed the times for the events of human history.
(As an aside, I wrote a deeply heart-felt post about this here…)
“He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation.” (Acts 17:26)
Whether duly elected according to our system or not, it is God who appoints rulers.
On the eve of the election, as I watched the Earth’s shadow cross the moon then morph to a deep amber, I had to work hard to shake the feeling that I was witnessing some kind of portent.
In 2017, my husband woke in the early morning hours with what he was convinced was a word from the Lord. Here’s what he received:
Judgment has been decreed.
We believe we have seen the outpouring of that judgment against our nation in the years since, and that it has accelerated under the current administration. In fact, it vexes our souls to witness an unsettling rise of lawlessness, seemingly in every direction we look.
You know the scene in the movie The Fellowship of the Ring, at the entrance to the Mines of Moria, where ripples along the edge of the water signaled a horror lurking in the deep?
Well, friends, in my estimation that’s about where we stand. Assuredly, a horror does lurk in the deep!
The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. (Rev 12:18-13:1)
Oh, I’m not saying we’re literally in the midst of the Tribulation. But I’m convinced that the lawlessness we’re witnessing is the forerunner of the Lawless One—his advance guard, if you will.
But here’s the other thing. Even as the beast and his many minions stretch out their claws to squeeze our necks, we know our big, majestic God has a bigger plan—for our salvation, and for His glory.
He who sits in the heavens laughs,
The Lord scoffs at them.
Then He will speak to them in His anger
And terrify them in His fury, saying,
“But as for Me, I have installed My King
Upon Zion, My holy mountain.” (Psalm 2:4-6)They band themselves together against the life of the righteous
And condemn the innocent to death.
But the Lord has been my refuge,
And my God the rock of my refuge.
He has brought back their injustice upon them,
And He will destroy them in their evil;
The Lord our God will destroy them. (Psalm 94:21-23)
I prayed oh-so-hard for the election outcome I thought—and still think—would be best. I watched with horror as the election-day debacle in Maricopa County (which represents 60% of the vote in the state) unfolded. I lived for days with my eyes glued to the vote totals as the count proceeded oh-so-slowly.
But what I came to realize as I prayed is that I was busy dictating to God exactly how to save us—by causing my favored political candidates to win their elections. My God has saved us, and will save us, but not necessarily via the means I expect.
I have to allow my God to be bigger than my own perspective on my situation.
It made me think of Daniel’s young friends:
“…Our God whom we serve is able to rescue us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods nor worship the golden statue that you have set up.” (Dan 3:17-18)
I’m sure in that moment they would have preferred the rescue! But they gave God room to be God, and to work their situation out in His time, as He saw fit, for His greater glory. They refused to comply with Nebuchadnezzar’s soul-twisting demand.
They refused to comply with Nebuchadnezzar’s soul-twisting demand. And if it meant their fiery deaths—well, even death is not the end.
As we endure through these “perilous times,” that’s a stance we may all be called to adopt. But while we need to be wise to the enemy's devices, be encouraged: there's no need to be filled with fear.
We know how this epic ends--with a conquering army headed by the King of King and Lord of Lords!
If you’ve never opened God’s free gift of salvation through Jesus (Rom 3:23, 6:23), please please please be persuaded to do it now! It’s simple. Just tell God from your heart that you admit you’re a sinner that needs a Savior (“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Rom 3:23), that you’re done running your own life, and that you’re ready to make Jesus Lord of your life.
If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved. For with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed.” (Rom 10:9-11)
The decision that saves you is that simple!
Simple… But no one said living it out will be easy. Especially now.