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

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...

The Magician’s Trick: How Illiteracy and Outrage Feed America’s Political Illusion

September 23, 2025•280 words

“Men are so simple and so much creatures of habit that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.” - Niccolò Machiavelli “Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” - Noam Chomsky About 54% of Americans are not proficient readers. Low political comprehension, reflected by civic knowledge, political tolerance, information-seeking behaviours, and participation such as voting, is highly correlated with low reading abili...

When Conflict Stops Creating & Only Consumes: America’s Fall from Machiavelli’s Wisdom

September 22, 2025•418 words

“For the greatness of Rome arose from this circumstance above all: that the tumults between the nobles and the plebs kept Rome free and made her powerful” - Machiavelli “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” - Sun Tzu “Empires always perish from within, when the people prefer the illusion of power to the discipline of liberty.” - Will Durant “The life of nations is lived in the same way as the lives of individuals. One is strong when it masters itself; it is weak w...

It’s Better To Live With Dirty Hands Than To Die With Clean Ones

September 21, 2025•438 words

“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” - Niccolò Machiavelli “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” - Winston Churchill “The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.” - Otto von Bismarck “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his venge...

Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth of Power

September 20, 2025•175 words

"The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him." - Niccolò Machiavelli "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." - John Kenneth Galbraith "Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." - George Orwell With one harsh insight, Machiavelli disru...

Manufacturing Deep Political Division to Protect Authoritarian Power

September 19, 2025•337 words

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." - Friedrich Nietzsche "The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduces them." - Gustave Le Bon "Men are so simple, and so subject to the impulse of the moment, that he who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived." - Niccolò Machiavelli...

The Quiet Self-censorship Muzzle

September 18, 2025•96 words

Today, restrictions, limitations, and discipline on free speech are more subtle, and more brutal, than outright bans. Social retribution, political intimidation, and economic pressure are the cost of some words has increased, a comedian, journalist, or even a student can still speak. Because those in positions of power, whether corporate or political, have learned to control not only what is said but also what is dared to be said, the muzzle is the hesitation before speaking, the calculation ...

The Cold Machinery of Power: From Neutrality to Active Complicity in Gaza

September 17, 2025•358 words

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” - Desmond Tutu “A civilization that justifies colonization and genocide is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased.” - Aimé Césaire “The greatest crimes of the state are always cloaked in high-minded rhetoric and noble ideals, but beneath it lies the cold machinery of power.” - Chris Hedges Power flourishes not only with weapons but also with silence and the well-planned ...

The Gaza Genocide

September 16, 2025•299 words

“The tragedy of Netanyahu is not only his cynicism but the society willing to mistake it for strength, enabling a politics that feeds on perpetual catastrophe.” - Gershom Gorenberg “Netanyahu is not merely a politician but a pathology. His power thrives on fear, sustained by a global order too compromised to restrain him.” - Alon Mizrahi “His emotional detachment, forged in the shadow of a cold father, has hardened into a sociopathic armour, leaving Israel governed by a man incapable of empat...

The Sociopath as Statesman: Netanyahu’s Descent into Genocide Politics, Part III

September 14, 2025•403 words

“He’s choosing people [to join his wartime administration] based on their opinions of him and not on how fit they are for the job.” - Saul Kimhi “What we see in Netanyahu is someone whose brain was profoundly changed by exposure to power. As with Vladimir Putin, it is his psychology, a mix of self-belief and paranoia, that is driving his decision-making; and as with Putin, he has lost the ability to distinguish his own interests from the interests of the country.” - Ian Robertson “Some of his...

Sociopathology, Israel’s Netanyahu Part II

September 14, 2025•274 words

“Netanyahu spends at least as much of his time on media as he spends on security matters, including on matters an outsider would consider nonsense.” - Nir Hefetz “It’s a political witch hunt. It has one purpose: To prevent the firing of the head of the Shin Bet … There is nothing. … A political investigation, a political witch hunt, that’s what this is.” - Benjamin Netanyahu “A leader who portrays himself as one of the persecuted, the target of an incessant witch-hunt by the so-called deep st...

The Psychopathology of Netanyahu

September 13, 2025•505 words

“The greater the crime perpetrated by the powerful, the more they insist it is done in self-defense.” - Chris Hedges “The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.” - Simone de Beauvoir “All colonizers lie, all of them. They have to lie, for they cannot legitimize their domination any other way.” - Frantz Fanon Benjamin Netanyahu's 2009 comeback read like a lesson in how power can pass for compromise. He returned as a symbol of dominance. His Bar-I...

A Society of Gun Violence

September 11, 2025•287 words

“Mass shootings do not disrupt American life; they are American life.” - Chris Hedges “The gun has ceased to be a mere instrument; it has become the sacred totem of American identity.” - Richard Slotkin “When children and teachers are murdered in schools, and the nation shrugs, that is not freedom, that is the pathology of a dying empire.” - Noam Chomsky “In America, violence is not an interruption of daily life, it is the rhythm of daily life.” - James Baldwin On September 10, 2025, Charl...

A Demented Assassin

September 10, 2025•165 words

"The prince who relies on force alone to maintain power reveals his weakness, for true control is won through the subtle art of persuasion, not the reckless strike of violence." - Niccolò Machiavelli "Violence, like the assassin’s bullet, shatters the fragile bonds of democracy, exposing the hatred that festers when power is sought without legitimacy." - Hannah Arendt "To murder a rival is to set ablaze the very stage of democracy, for no nation can endure when hatred supplants discourse." - ...

How to "Stir the Pot" and Create Chaos - Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996

September 10, 2025•292 words

“History and sacred memory are weapons; those who know how to unearth them can summon violence as surely as armies summon blood.” - Chris Hedges “Every handshake across enemy lines can be staged theater, a mask for expansion, a performance meant not to reconcile but to pacify outsiders.” - Edward Said “The genius of political deception is not in lying outright but in cloaking conquest with the language of survival and security.” - Hannah Arendt Netanyahu pretended to be a proponent of "secu...

The Young Benjamin Netanyahu Manipulator of the 1980s

September 9, 2025•250 words

“The illusion of knowledge is deadlier than ignorance. By painting Palestinians as eternal refusers, Netanyahu made the world believe the fiction, and that fiction became more powerful than the truth.” - Stephen Hawking “The oppressor thrives because he recruits accomplices, sometimes among the oppressed, sometimes among the global audience that swallows his narrative without question.” - Simone de Beauvoir “Propaganda is the democracy’s bludgeon. Netanyahu wielded it like a hammer, crushing...

The Cunning of Superintelligence

September 8, 2025•488 words

“The real risk with artificial intelligence isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.” - Elon Musk “Humans steer the future not because we’re the strongest creatures, but because we’re the only ones who can imagine things and cooperate on a large scale. Once intelligence itself becomes decoupled from human brains, our position at the top is no longer secure.” - Yuval Noah ...