Numerous Narratives 🍁

Welcome! This site is my personal space for creative exploration. It contains atomic essays, mini-explorations, and a “digital garden” of diverse ideas where fiction and reality may intertwine. Here you’ll find reflections on a wide range of topics from... economics and politics to culture and technology ...as well as updates on my novel and nonfiction projects. Writing tools I Use: I work primarily with open-source software, including Ubuntu and ZorinOS Linux in a Gnome desktop/laptop environment, Standard Notes, Signal for communications, Manuskript app, and theQuill.app for secure writing. Disclaimer – All content on this site represents my personal views only. It is created in my personal capacity, is unrelated to my employment, and does not reflect the views of any current, past, or future employer, organization, or client. The content is for informational and creative purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice. No Liability – While I make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of the information provided, I make no warranties or representations about its completeness, reliability, or suitability for any purpose. I am not liable for any losses, damages, or consequences arising from the use of, or reliance on, any content on this site. Readers use all information at their own discretion and risk. My perspectives may change over time. Posts are a snapshot of my thinking at the time of writing, and older content may no longer reflect my current views or knowledge. - - -

@GaryArmstrong GaryArmstrong.blog

A World Led by the Illiterate: Nuclear War, a Scenario, Is A Book No One in Power Has Read, a Brutal Truth About Ignorance, Arrogance, and the Sleepwalk Toward Annihilation

October 23, 2025•443 words

“The greatest enemy of the moral life is not evil but indifference. It is the inability to see beyond the self, to recognize that the world is not a stage for our ambitions and appetites.” - Chris Hedges “The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.” - Carl Sagan “War does not determine who is right, only who is left.” - Bertrand Russell The tragedy of our age is not that we lack information, but that those in ...

Democracy in Disguise: The Sinister Reality Behind NATO’s Political Rhetoric

October 23, 2025•228 words

While reading Annie Jacobsen's book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, she mentioned NATO's protocol of promoting peace and stability and encouraging democracy, cooperation and dialogue. According to Dr. John Mearsheimer, Dr. Jeffrey Sacks, and numerous other geopolitical and economic experts, NATO is founded on peaceful dispute resolution; however, beneath this rhetoric lies a complex and sinister reality of historical political egotism in North America and Europe. Furthermore, it is not helpful for ...

Handmaidens of the Apocalypse

October 22, 2025•222 words

Prior to reading Nuclear War A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, I didn't truly understand the significance and dangers that nuclear submarines really had such apocalyptic, nuclear suicidal power. Beneath the calm, oceans move the Handmaidens of the Apocalypse. These submarines cradle within their steel hearts the quiet possibility of our extinction. These Quiet ocean killers glide unseen, anonymous, held together by discipline and chain of command. Nations speak of them as instruments of peace, emb...

Russian Unchanged Core Terms and Their Sphere of Influence

October 20, 2025•455 words

A Great Power, obeys no moral laws. It follows its own logic, spheres of influence, zones of control, and the invisible boundaries that great empires draw around their perceived security and access to wealth. Imagine for a moment if Russia or China were to build military bases on Canadian or Mexican soil. Washington would not respond with diplomacy or reason. It would respond with force. American troops would move north and south, and the CIA would weave its dark art of regime change, as it has...

China Declares “Ironclad Evidence” of NSA Cyberattack… Such Action Is Not a Surprise

October 19, 2025•399 words

On October 19, 2025, China’s Ministry of State Security declared that it possesses “ironclad evidence” of a NSA cyberattack, allegedly, and likely involving members of the Five Eyes alliance, against the National Time Service Centre in Xi’an, China. As Edward Snowden had mentioned in 2013, the NSA has been spying on, not only its own citizens in America, but has infiltrated its adversaries around the world through digital means for at least two decades! According to Chinese officials, the digi...

Nuclear Genocide

October 18, 2025•87 words

A fascinating, yet terrifying read. Sadly, as author Annie Jacobsen in her book, we are extremely close to a Nuclear War. What makes her account even more unsettling is the growing presence of generative artificial intelligence within the command structures of the world’s most powerful militaries. Many of the leading minds in AI and defense now concede a grim truth: the next great conflict may not be decided by human judgment or diplomacy, but by the cold, unblinking logic of the Ai machines w...

My Teacher Strike, Government Lockout Readings

October 18, 2025•29 words

This is my solus... I read at least 5 hours and continue to write sporadically 2 hours throughout the day, everyday of the Government/School board/district lockout of teachers. ...

Signal's Power - Elegant Simplicity and Strategic

October 17, 2025•351 words

In the game of modern communication, Signal has mastered a fundamental law, appear simple and effortless but rock solid communication privacy. The application moves fluidly across iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux, Mobile and desktop environments. The interface is clean, resembling the mainstream messaging applications people already trust, yet stripped of the parasitic infrastructure: no subscription fees gnawing at your wallet, no advertisements fragmenting your attention, no selling y...

Oct 15, Trump Declares 100% Tariffs Against China

October 16, 2025•148 words

President Trump’s latest tariffs mark a dangerous escalation in what is, in effect, a new trade war with China. This isn’t simply an argument over taxes on goods, it’s a symptom of America’s deeper economic insecurity and political dysfunction. Instead of building cooperative trade rules with supply chain management and logistics to address shared challenges like technology standards, rare resource scarcity, and generative artificial intelligence, the U.S. is reaching again for economic nation...

We Will Choose Misery Over a Happiness We Didn't Choose

October 15, 2025•438 words

“Suffering is the origin of consciousness.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky “The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.” - Nikolai Gogol “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” - Leo Tolstoy “The superfluous man is a strange being, gifted with intelligence and sensitivity, yet paralyzed by his own awareness.” - Ivan Turgenev “Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky I am r...

The Pedagogy of Violence: Netanyahu, the IDF, and the Ongoing Erasure of Palestinians

October 14, 2025•612 words

“Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics, one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference.” - Michael Ignatieff “The importance of the term ‘genocide’ for many Indigenous Peoples is that it is more than a term or an accusation; it is a word created in the wake of the Shoah in Europe to describe what happens when a people are targeted by a government for extermination …” - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz When the cameras fin...

Jumping Through Hoops

October 12, 2025•346 words

“The meritocratic ideal has become not a remedy for inequality but a justification of it. The more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility.” - Michael J. Sandel “The system is rigged not by conspiracy but by design. Its hoops are meant to be jumped through, its forms meant to weary. Those who remain are not always the best, just the most willing to stay.” - James Baldwin “Tests of endurance, when mistaken for tests of excellence...

Hamas Was Never the Real Obstacle To Peace

October 11, 2025•297 words

“Israel’s occupation is not a conflict between two equal sides; it is the subjugation of one people by another. The refusal to recognize this truth is the moral failing of our time.” - Ilan Pappé “The denial of Palestinian nationhood is not a policy failure — it is the policy itself.” - Edward Said “The great crime of the powerful is not only the violence they commit, but the lies they tell to make that violence appear virtuous.” - Chris Hedges “Those who control the narrative of violence al...

America's Bulldog: Israel, The Slaughterer

October 11, 2025•200 words

Resistance, radicalization, and the breakdown of social order are the tragically predictable results of generations of beatings, massacres, and oppression of any people, whether they are Muslim, Christian, or any other group. Due to severe intergenerational trauma and the memory of suffering, people who have experienced decades of injustice frequently react with insurgency, terrorism, or revolt. Violence breeds retaliation. A legacy of distrust and resentment is left behind as entire populations...

It's All About Intent - Was The Slaughter of Innocent Gazan Lives A Genocide or A War?

October 10, 2025•314 words

“The worst crime is not to commit murder, but to see it and do nothing.” - Jean-Paul Sartre “The law is often powerless against power. It can name crimes, but it cannot always stop them. In that sense, legality becomes a mask that hides moral catastrophe.” - Hannah Arendt “War is organized murder, and nothing else.” - Harry Patch “The difference between war and genocide is not the body count, but the purpose behind it. One seeks victory, the other annihilation.” - Samantha Power In order t...

The "Gold Standard" Protocol That Can Actually Reverse Two Decades of Cardiac Aging

October 9, 2025•629 words

So, there's this really interesting landmark study, a two-year investigation that looked at sedentary individuals right around age 50+. And what the researchers did was they split these men and women into two groups: one group got a comprehensive, structured exercise program, and the control group? They did stretching. Just stretching. Now, here's what you need to understand about what happens to our hearts as we age. The heart naturally undergoes this process where it shrinks, it actually gets...

America's "Great" Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, A DSM-5 Psychological Analysis - Rhetoric to the Military Leaders

October 7, 2025•1,014 words

This is the start or the unconscious signal to the world, America's two most powerful political men have severe mental health issues and personality disorders. To start off, the following examples of Pete's address align closely with several diagnostic concepts for Narcissistic Personality Disorder Grandiosity from the DSM-5. Examples of Grandiose and Narcissistic Themes from the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Address: The goal to create the "strongest, most powerful, most lethal and most pre...

Classroom Complexity In Alberta, Canada

October 6, 2025•722 words

The complex, human reality of teaching in the modern era, a profession that has subtly emerged as one of the most emotionally and cognitively taxing in society is reflected in classroom complexity. Teachers deal with a daily whirlwind of social, emotional, cultural, and institutional factors that no algorithm or standardized testing policy could ever fully account for. Teachers do more than just impart knowledge. Student diversity is a key component of this complexity. Children from widely dispa...

World Teachers' Day, October 5th

October 6, 2025•288 words

“A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning.” - Brad Henry “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” - Carl Jung “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” - William Butler Yeats One of the most important rol...

American Military Buildup In the Middle East

October 4, 2025•246 words

As of October 2025, signs of a quiet storm on the western front of North America are forming across the world’s geopolitical fault lines. The United States has begun a discreet but unmistakable military buildup stretching from the Middle East to the Asia Pacific and even into South America. Beneath the surface, this escalation is driven by mounting American and Israeli tensions with a unprovoked Iran and rest of the BRICS nations and its network of allies, a simmering confrontation that now seem...

A Limited Nuclear War, Not Possible

October 3, 2025•136 words

According to recent podcast analysis by defence and geopolitical experts, some Western countries are changing their military doctrine in anticipation of a limited strategic nuclear conflict. The goal of this strategy is to deter adversaries by establishing a proportionate and credible response to the possible limited use of a nuclear weapon, to avoid any nuclear use in the first place, rather than to fight such a war. This tactic is very confusing, though. The idea of a "winnable" or "controll...

Evil Might Be a Form of Nothingness

October 2, 2025•341 words

“Evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’” - St. Augustine “Evil denotes the privation of good. It is not an essence, but a defect of essence.” - Thomas Aquinas “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” - Friedrich Nietzsche The radical idea that evil doesn't exist at all is put forth by one of the most ancient and significant philosophical theories. The "privation theory," which was developed by St. A...

A Day Off to Reflect Truth and Reconciliation, Sept. 30

September 30, 2025•111 words

This year, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation holds a different weight for me. When I turned on the TV today, I had to turn it off. The screen was filled with the faces of Indigenous survivors recounting the trauma they lived through in residential schools. Hearing their voices brought my own family's history rushing back. I remembered my mother, aunt, and uncle talking about what happened to them. They were only small children when they were sent away. Their story is one of resilie...

The Nation-State of Collective Evil, When Normalcy Becomes Atrocity

September 30, 2025•333 words

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” - Hannah Arendt “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn It is ingrained in us to look for a face to evil. A warlord covered in blood, a tyrant, a dishonest politician. We find it satisfying to think that the epidemic of cruelty will cease if such men are eliminated. T his i...

The Eternal Recurrence of Power, Blood, and Living Without Shame in the Cycle of War

September 29, 2025•295 words

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” - George Orwell “The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.” - John Hay Nietzsche's eternal recurrence is a weapon, a mirror, and a soul-testing psychological exercise. Imagine being told that...

The Shroud of Gaza: Nuclear Illusions and the Last Days of Empire, Resistance or Extinction

September 28, 2025•450 words

I recently read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. It is a book that strips away illusions. It does not flatter, it does not comfort. It confronts us with a reality so unbearable that world leaders refuse to look or read it. Actually many of those leaders are not capable of reading such a book. The presidents and prime ministers, the military advisors and intelligence chiefs, who toy daily with the lives of billions, have not read this book. Or if they have, they have buried it under the...

Peace, In this world is Never Hopeless

September 27, 2025•62 words

Peace is not a hopeless ideal; rather, it is forged by the souls of Sudan, Ukraine, and Palestine, and by not allowing hopelessness to triumph. If it feels profound right now, it's because history is bending in favour of those who demand better, and we are experiencing a global fatigue brought on by the never-ending war. Why harbour animosity toward another person? ...

Dostoevsky Teaches Us to See the Darkness in Others and Ourselves

September 26, 2025•270 words

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” - Albert Camus Poverty and ignorance alone cannot produce a ghost of evil. It is a subconscious force that waits for the right opportunity to manifest in the human heart. It is a dangerous belief to think that society can be changed without it. 19th-century liberals held fast to this ideal. They believed that people would become more...

When Decline Masquerades as Trumpism

September 25, 2025•319 words

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” - Edward Said “The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” - Baruch Spinoza Trumpism... when a real estate salesman turne...

Rogue Imperial Dominance Disguised as Diplomacy: Trump’s UN Speech on Gaza

September 24, 2025•521 words

Trump's UN speech was more of a power play than a speech. Under the guise of peace, it was actually a reversal of reality, a magical trick designed to make the victim into the aggressor and the aggressor into the victim. He mentioned ceasefires, but he conveniently ignored the lengthy and horrific history of violent truce violations and unrelenting sieges and genocide carried out by the Israeli government, which was armed and protected by Washington, rather than Hamas. He wasn't recounting histo...