OK, I’ll talk about it: the ‘d’ word

I am going through now the flags that I placed in various passages of the Frances Stonor Saunders book The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters: The Cultural Cold War. I catch a lot  of grief about having a conspiratorial outlook … from people who just don’t know anything. They don’t begin to grasp how their attitudes and ideas, which they think are their unique brand, are really put before them to be found and copied by people who think much further ahead and in broader terms than they do.

I read the book late last year, and is my habit flagged various passages to revisit. The book looks like a cheerleaders pom pom, it has so many flags.  Right away, on page 4, I had highlighted the following

A vital constituent of this effort was ‘psychological warfare’, which was defined as ‘The planned use by a nation of propaganda and activities other than combat which communicate ideas and information intended to influence the opinions, attitudes, emotions and behavior of foreign groups in ways that will support the achievement of national aims.’ Further, the ‘most effective kind of propaganda’ was defined as the kind where ‘the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own’.

That is a passage from a National Security Council Directive from July 10, 1950 regarding the decision that was made, that the U.S. was going to be in the propaganda business, and big time. At that time CIA was prohibited from doing direct propaganda on Americans (a prohibition since discarded, and never much honored anyway). Saunders discusses how CIA invaded the world of arts and letters in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, and redefined our culture. It was a huge psy-op costing as much as $200 (?) million in 1950 dollars. CIA stole the money from the Marshall Plan – not sure of the amount. Will run across it later.

jackson-pollock-21I’ll post more as I go along, but understand something very important, just one aspect of the overall CIA effort: What we call “modern art” was a product of this propaganda effort, the purpose to remove from art the ability to offer clear and crisp criticism of power. It is Orwellian in concept, to take away our ability to communicate by substituting garbage for real art. Jackson Pollock, for example, painted shit, as seen here, but received high praise and honor from those who knew to push the cultural agenda forward by acting as opinion leaders. He was backed by CIA money. Did you know that? Hollywood, also under CIA control, made a movie to honor him. The world of modern art is like the world of wine, full of pretense and phonies. None of it is meaningful, uplifting, or informative. Thank you, CIA.

Something very similar happened in music, the  tribal drum we beat. Look around you now for cultural significance or confrontation of authority in the music world, and good luck. There was a time … but most artists that succeed today have an imprimatur from the cultural police … if you think that your love of Taylor Swift came from your own imagination, think again, and read the cited passage above again. She has lots of help.

Of course, people will not look this way or even begin to fathom that we move in directions that others desire for reasons we believe to be our own.

The world that I inhabit is simply a more interesting place with more understanding of power and the means by which the few rule the many. The criticism that I get, that I am somehow delusional, is wrong. People who say that never say why, never want to talk nuts and bolts. Odd, wouldn’t you say?

If you cannot fathom that things could be just a little different than you think, that your perceptions might just possibility be managed by others, I am simply miles ahead in understanding. I did not set out to be that way, it just happened over the decades as I read and read and read, but more importantly, allowed myself to be wrong. As it happens, I have lost ability to communicate with people running around laughing and shouting about elections or obviously managed news and staged events. I cannot help that, and I will not go back to that world. It is boring and, I am afraid, quite stupid.

Evidence of what I wrote above about art and music are to be found in passages of this very important book. Your beliefs may be at odds with that evidence. I suggest you introduce your beliefs to that evidence, and see which survives. My guess, based on experience, is that your beliefs will not be affected by any evidence.

32 thoughts on “OK, I’ll talk about it: the ‘d’ word”

  1. I’ve talked “nuts and bolts” with you, Conspiro. I’ve described quite clearly how you are delusional and many things you are delusional about. Your only response is to call me a monster. You don’t live in a special world. You live in the same one the rest of us do. That’s the point you are most delusional about. Ultimately, in truth, you’re just an old white Baby Boomer myopically in love with your own style ‘boot-strap’ argument. It isn’t that the world doesn’t know your truths; it’s that you don’t know the world.

    If you seek subversive music, then get off Buzzfeed and actually listen to music. It’s out there, and often quite popular. Start with Pearl Jam, and see where that takes you.

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  2. Odd, I don’t recall you ever getting specific, but I will grant you that I don’t scare you as I do others. But you have cranked on philosophy and math, and I could easily see through you. You were a phony. Is that when you detailed how I was delusional? Because I gotta say, a guy who puts up false fronts like that, possibly even believes his own lies … Monty anyone? … Is …sort of … You know …delusional.

    Remember the 2015 Super Bowl, football expert? Remember how Seattle had the ball? Should have scored, called a bad play, got intercepted, lost the game? You know what that means, deep thinker? (Yeah – the game was fixed. The ’69 Super Bowl was fixed. The sport is crooked. And you do not see it.) You don’t begin to know shit about just about everything.,

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      1. You sound a lot like an American bureaucrat.

        “The average American bureaucrat has a warped perception of reality and an intense, repressed self-hatred. Their only way to vent their rage is by punishing others using bureaucratic methods. They demand absolute conformity because it is their only way to give their meaningless lives some semblance of meaning. They suppress all thoughts that might lead them to discover the true nature of their condition, because that would cause them to spiral down into outright schizophrenia.” – Sean Kerrigan http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2016/04/bureaucratic-insanity-is-yours-to-enjoy.html#more

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      2. You’re not being specific, Rob. And I have not called you a monster, but have faithfully recounted my interactions with you. I make up nothing.

        Say something specific … Some issue on which I was wrong (there are many) and you called me out on it.

        [Here is something specific you brought to me – you said that Newton’s Third Law had been suspended on 9/11, and that I did not understand it like you did because of the “v” factor, or “velocity, which people, you say, at the college you are at, still struggle with.

        That was bullshit, and I knew it. Complete and utter nonsense. But you present these fables with such gravitas, as if you believe them! You treat yourself with utter reverence even as you say the most outlandish things.

        What had happened, and I have seen it all around me, is that you tried to place your square head in the round hole of the official story of 9/11, and since it did not fit were trying to carve it down to make it fit. The Emperor’s Clothing got to you.]

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        1. No, Conspiro, you’re making stuff up again. YOU said that Newton’s Third law applied in your arguments in a manner so shallow as to be fantastically incorrect, that an aluminum structure (any aluminum structure) could not pierce a standing structure of concrete block and steel. I pointed out that you don’t understand force. You can’t get more specific than the formula for FORCE, Toke. I also brought up another V word that is part and parcel of velocity in Newton’s Third Law, and that’s Vector of intersect. (I’ll dumb it down so that you can understand – vector is the direction in which forces intersect. You stupidly think that velocity only means speed. Vector force is how you can break Obsidian with copper, or drive a plane into a building.)

          Without getting into the same argument a bean-counter such as yourself will clearly never understand, by your ‘reasoning’, such as it is, water could never cut granite. And yet it happens every single day.

          Care to bring up another ‘specific’ you’re dead wrong about, Monty?

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        2. No, Monty, you never used the word “vector,” and don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, now and then. You are a complete cardboard cutout. You spoke only of velocity, as if throwing a baseball hard enough will eventually put it through a brick wall. That does not happen, and jet aircraft cannot penetrate buildings of steel and concrete. And didn’t. Something else happened that day.

          It is true that erosional force can allow lower-mass substances like water eventually wear down rock. Now you’re come the complete circle of stupid and fake, but I’ll add one more for you: The buildings were not brought down by jet aircraft, bombs, nukes, nor by proper alignment of a fucking vector.

          They rusted away, right before our eyes. It was erosional force! You nailed it.

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          1. Good Dog, you are stupid. Of course you don’t know what I’m talking about because you are stupid concerning physics. I have used the word “vector” in my arguments many times, and you were actually dumb enough to write the words “Velocity has nothing to do with Newton’s Third Law”. You can’t have force without velocity, Dipshit, and you can’t have force without vector. Let’s us try some logic, which you also suck at. Either you are lying or you haven’t read words posted at your own fricking website. If you don’t think I’ve written it, then follow your own advice: look it up, Moral Coward. Otherwise, you are lying, which is exactly as I suspect.

            Water cutting rock happens everyday. Not rust. High pressure water jets, cutting rock. http://waterjet-cutting.blogspot.com/2011/03/water-jet-cutting-stone-cutting.html

            I repeat, Do you care to come up with another specific you are wrong about, Monty?

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          2. No, you have not used the word vector. You are asserting a lie with all the force you can muster, that’s all you’re doing. Not that I care, mind you, as you are putting your dull square head in that round hole, as the Emperor demands. It does not matter! Planes did not crash into buildings, and even had they, would not have produced the phenomena we witnessed. They would have done some damage, caused some deaths and bending of columns, fires quickly exhausted or extinguished, and debris all over the ground below. You are so incredibly full of shit, and all you are doing here is upping the ante. I call your fucking bluff, phony. I’ve met a lot of winkheads, dullards, phonies, trolls, poseurs, and stupid people who are too stupid to know they are stupid, but you are head of the class.

            So your physics is phony and fucked up. Next, let’s explore your math.

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            2. No, you don’t get the math. You’re bluffing, you phony fuck. And just like with the Monty ploy, you know you’re a phony, I know it too, and you don’t care as long as people,outside this debate don’t get it. How do you sleep at night?

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  3. For the record, you are the idiot who posted about art and music being in service to the Illuminati. Do you care to discuss that, Conspiro? Pearl Jam? Green Day? Disturbed? Maya Angelou? Stephen King? Toni Morrison? Something tells me you are not the art type. You’ll bloviate about it, but you really only take someone else’s word. You don’t participate, do you?

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    1. Absolutely we should discuss this. First, so we are on common ground, read the book Cultural Cold War, and understand that the woman who wrote it was doing a limited hangout, and not a true expose’.

      I don’t imagine you’ve read a book in a few decades, but that is the requirement for entry into this debate. Try not to move your lips.

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      1. So, entry into your debate requires that one pass your test, of which you are the only judge. You are a fine conservative, Conspiro, a true worshiper in the church of Trump. I don’t care what you imagine, Conspiro. I want to know what you know about the real world, not what a book told you. Have you read poetry? Have you read fiction? Have you listened to music? Have you listened to the greatest scientists of our age? No, of course you haven’t. You’ve had someone spoonfeed you an idea you think makes you important. You are false, from beginning to end.

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      3. All I asked is that you read a book so we are on common ground, and I knew, let’s not pretend, that you don’t read books.

        I see through you! I know you! This is not poker anymore. It is a game of spoons, and you have slow wit and hands.

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        1. And all I ask is that you actually experience the parts of life you’re such a blowhard about before handing them to Illuminati control. You don’t know shit, Tokarski. I guess we’re at an impasse.

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          1. I doubt it, Kitten. I proof what I claim. You never do. You just, as has been noted, become a complete asshole and expect that people MUST agree with you. Here’s a few yes or no questions for you, you fake. Can high pressure water cut rock? Can a car damage a concrete building? Can wind drive wood threw concrete? Have you ever listened to Green Day? Have you ever read Toni Morrison? Have you read Stephen King? Have you ever read Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or heard him speak? What evidence do you have that any one of those people is a CIA construct?

            You got nuthin’, you phony shit.

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          2. You ‘proofed’ nothing. Ever. But this is fun.

            Can high pressure water cut rock? Yes. Is that what happened on 9/11? Flying power washers? It’s all about nozzles?

            Can a car damage a concrete building? Yes. But car suffers most. Newton’s 3rd Law.

            Can wind drive wood through concrete? No. Here you are confused. Those effects are due to electrical fields, and not the power of wind. Think Tesla.

            Have I ever listened to Green Day? Yes. The ‘green’ in their name is for pot. And right now I am having the time of my life.

            Have I ever read Toni Morrison? No.

            Have I ever read Stephen King? Yes. the Stand, It, pretty freaky. He’s good.

            Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Yea. I listen to his podcast regularly. He is the new Sagan, popular face of science. Ho hum Dee hum. I am not in his camp.

            No, I am sure none of these are CIA “agents.” Tyson is suspect, however, of being a physics mole, selling bad science, as Sagan did. I don’t buy his schtick.

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          3. So, in other words, you have absolutely no evidence for any of your claims. A small mass of water can cut rock. Aluminum can break concrete. You’re dead wrong, just as I said, about wind. Tornadoes drive 2x4s through concrete all the time. You lie about listening to Green Day, save one song. You certainly haven’t listened to Bad Religion, Pearl Jam or STP except what appeared on the radio. All popular, but you have no evidence of CIA involvement in their efforts, do you? Since you are a Baby Boomer, enraptured with your own generational fuckwittery, how about Rush? Jethro Tull? CIA plants? You haven’t read the Dark Tower series or most of King’s more subversive works. And you surmise that DeGrasse Tyson serves the Illuminati for no other reason than it serves your mythology. You don’t buy his ‘schtick’, Beancounter, because you don’t know anything of science. You haven’t even encountered Toni Morrison.

            You have no evidence of anything, save a book you read that convinces you, evidence free, that you are a special snowflake for believing bullshit. You’re nothing but an old white Boomer, out of touch and gullible beyond belief.

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            1. I love King’s Dark Tower series. I used to get shit for bringing up its importance in my poetry workshop because King is considered by literary snobs to be “popular fiction” and not “literature”. of course I also got shit from other college radio djs for playing Tom Petty for similar reasons.

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            2. A brief cultural education list for Conspiro:

              Stephen King: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (You’d like it. It deals with Baseball themes.) Rose Madder. From A Buick Eight. Bag of Bones. Hearts in Atlantis. Cell. The Gunslinger and the series at least up to at least the Wastelands. Delores Claiborne.

              Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Paradise.

              Tyson: Cosmic Horizons, Astronomy at the cutting Edge. One Universe, at Home In The Cosmos. Space Chronicles, Facing the Ultimate Frontier.

              I’ve read all those, Conspiro. You claim I don’t read. Do you? Have you read any of them? No? Didn’t think so.

              Music.

              Green Day: The Entire American Idiot Album.
              Pearl Jam: Daughter, Alive, Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town, Better Man.

              The list could go on forever, Conspiro, because you’re willing to swallow whatever any asshole puts in a book that feeds your conspiracy theories. You’re not living. You’re worshiping your God, which is nothing more than you.

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          4. No, Monty, and perhaps this tosses you: I’ve read many books, where you have read none. But I do get that you have spent many a night high or boozed up listening to these groups. I listened to an interview with the Green Day crew where they said yes, green is marijuana. I don’t care about them. Since you don’t read, you don’t know about McGowan or Laurel Canyon, and stuff I will put out about the Beatles will surprise you. I won’t argue about erosional force or the power of a stream of water to cut through rock, as that has no bearing on anything, unless the fake planes had power washers on the front, really fucking powerful ones, DARPA strength.

            Aluminum can break concrete? No. And don’t forget the steel part, you know, the beams. You’re square head is making it’s way into the Emperor’s ass.

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            1. Your understanding of Newton’s Third Law: Water can’t cut rock any more than aluminum can pierce concrete, (or soft lead can pierce steel which also happens all the time with bullets.). You contradict yourself, Stupid. You don’t know what you’re even talking about anymore.

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            2. Your specialty, the I see, dissemination into incomprehensibity. Aluminum Aircraft, not apparent that day, even if present, could not pierce steel/concrete uninhibited. Something else happened. What, I do not know. The buildings were destroyed by directed energy and molecular disassociation. Of this I am certain.

              All the other stuff, your power washer stuff, is nonsense. Of course things like that happen. You don’t grasp tornadoes, what happens in electrical fields, this much is obvious. So vector this, victor: you’re full of shit, a complete fake. You’ve done you best to make Shinola of shit, but you don’t fool me.,

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    1. Music was considered too important to be left to chance, so CIA got its people out ahead to lead, as is always the case with Intelligence. McGowan’s work, which itself did not go far enough, exposed much of this, but not enough.

      I am currently knee-deep in a piece on the Beatles and their role. Having to sit on it though as better heads are going to expand on it.

      And Jim Morrison, son of the Commander of US forces during the Gulf of Tonkin, who did not know a lick of music, most likely completed his assignment and took on a new identity. That would be my guess.

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  5. Mark, did you know that dogs work for the CIA?

    A guy is driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house: ‘Talking Dog For Sale ‘He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.

    The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever sitting there.

    ‘You talk?’ he asks.

    ‘Yep,’ the Lab replies.

    After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says ‘So, what’s your story?’

    The Lab looks up and says, ‘Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so… I told the CIA. In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.’

    ‘I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running… But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.’

    ‘I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.’
    The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.

    ‘Ten dollars,’ the guy says.

    ‘Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?’

    ‘Because he’s a Bullshitter. He’s never been out of the yard’

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