• Americans get their opinions from television, and younger ones rely more on Internet but use the same sources.
• Any image can supply only a tiny fraction of a larger whole.
• The voices that accompany images are authoritative sounding, and encourage us to imagine all that we cannot see.
• So in essence, we see perhaps less than 1%, and imagine the other 99%.
• So the key to opinion management is to influence our imaginations to fill in the other 99% as our leaders want it filled in.
• That’s easy. It’s done via suggestion.

So, they showed you a guy in a wheel chair with his legs missing. Fill in the blanks! You did. It never occurred to you to question the photo, because it was right there on your screen.

That’s how it’s done. That’s why public opinion does not matter in our society. It’s easily managed.

So we are sitting in a brew pub in Squamish, BC, and I look around at the crowd. I see polite young people speaking quietly, even as music in background is very loud. All are trim and fit. There are five TV sets, and at the head of the room is a huge one showing a hockey game. But of the hundred or so people there, not one is watching hockey!

I ask the waitress her opinion. I said that my stereotype of Canadians was that hockey was very, very big. She said that these were not Canadians, but rather Americans, up for the weekend from Washington. Over at the bar, she said pointing, are the few Canadians in the place, and they were intently absorbed in the game.

So many preconceptions messed up and affirmed at once!

But this one is affirmed: There is hardly any police presence up here, and people are left alone to mind their affairs. Clerks are friendly and chatty, probably the result of security. They have access to education and health care, and a high minimum wage protects them, as do unemployment benefits. Ordinary people have good lives!

The result: A relaxed country with a healthy distribution of income. The average Canadian household is wealthier than its southern counterpart. Worries are few.

British Columbia had a strong presence by the Conservative Party, but it’s agenda of intolerance of dissent and arrogant know-what’s-best-so-shut-up attitude rankled people. The recent election results: Zero seats for Conservatives. Zero! The party doesn’t exist in this province.

That, folks, is a responsive political system! Voting matters here! In the States people get frustrated with one party, turn to the other and get the same soup with a different label.

Check this out.

“Something stinks in Boston,” I was told. That’s a really interesting statement, as it is sensual but avoids mention of what the eyes have seen.

Aside from the 1) incuriosity of journalists and 2) fear of marginalization of even curious citizens, the most distressing feature of American news reporting is the power of television. The medium owns the American mind. Dissemination of news on the Internet appears now to have the same hold, so that younger people not watching TV talking heads are demonstrating the same lack of guile in viewing the events of our times. TV news is not a description of events given to us for discussion and analysis. It is reality.
Continue reading ““Something stinks in Boston: Our noses work even as our eyes cannot see” →

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts seems like a good head with some real concern for her voting constituents. She’s an advocate of consumer reform, and one item on her agenda is elimination of take-it-or-leave it contracts for various products and services. Most common are mobile phone and cable TV services, but checking accounts are also an issue. She calls them “word-barf” contracts, meaning that they are unnecessarily long and serve only the interest of the party who prepares the contract. Courts are lenient in these matters, but it is rare that small matters like this ever make it to court. In addition, such contracts usually insert an arbitration clause instead of court settlement.

We recently listened to a sales pitch regarding a home security contract. I had a notion there was some threat there that we needed to manage, but quickly got over the idea. But we did tentatively agree to take their service. They asked us to sign and return a contract.
Continue reading “Word barf” →

A few of us are fortunate to have transformational experiences. I have described my own as being the result of luck. Indeed happenstance had quite a bit to do with it. At the tender age of 36 I exited the formal workaday job environment and began laboring on my own account and on my own schedule. The formula for an independent CPA was to work even harder, explore leads, find new clients, market, market, market. Since I didn’t really like the work I was doing and had enough income to survive, I didn’t do any of that. On any given day when work was done, I was off running, working on the house, spending time with the kids and reading. I behaved in this manner even as I knew that I was supposed to be working that business, marketing, marketing, marketing.

All to no end, I must add. I hadn’t been much of a reader in my formal working days, at best managing a Stephen King novel or whatever was popular, even James Dobson and his barbaric ideas about child rearing. (My oldest daughter set me straight on that – a shoulder pinch is cruel and painful.) With more time on my hands, I began to scour the fiction stacks at the library, and came across a few authors I remember with fondly to this day, among them Ludlum and Lawrence Sanders. (Modern-day “Robert Ludlum” works are shit, by the way. Ignore anything written after 2001.)
Continue reading “Transformation” →

The scene in Boston was played out for a purpose, and since we are not privy to the intentions of its planners, we are left to speculation. In that situation, we are each prone to impose our own view of reality on that scene. For most of the American public, already convinced that there are Muslim terrorists about who want to inflict harm without motive or concern for innocent people, it is very easy to impose the narrative already supplied by leadership.

I don’t buy that narrative. In the wake of the “death” of Osama, I regard Boston as nothing more than a booster shot.

If Osama was so useful in this regard, why kill him off? Why the need for a booster shot? I can only speculate that our opinion managers had sensed that Osama had lost his punch as boogeyman. Since an election was on the horizon, his death could serve a dual purpose – to clear the way for new monsters, and reelect Obama. Please note that I do not imagine that Obama has an active role in these matters. He’s a pawn, or maybe a knight or bishop, but not the hand that moves the players about.

It helps to remember that our impressions of events and the events themselves may only incidentally overlap. Most Americans have only seen the intended images, and have reacted rationally. The images are brutal, gruesome, cruel shots of people willfully dismembered, a wanton attack on innocent folks minding their own business. This induces rage. As with all hoaxes of this nature, the underlying reality might be staged or real. It is only the effect that matters. That the actors are real or fake is incidental. Their being fake can be a transformative realization for many people. So it is important for novices to the game of opinion management and thought control to see that they are actors. A new world view results.

Since the intent of Boston is to induce rage, the questions then become “At who? About what?” The use of Chechen nationals as patsies is a curve ball. There does not seem to be a specific target. However, the rage was created for a purpose, so our task is to understand that purpose.

I’ll leave it there with a few words from Lippmann:

We are not equipped to deal with …subtlety, … variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we are to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.

No matter our views of events, we must all – those with standard outlooks and me with my more conspiratorial one – realize that we may be living on the coast of Bohemia. From the beginning of my writings on 9/11, leaving the respected mainstream, I have been asked to supply my alternative reality since mine is so at odds with accepted wisdom. So I speculate, as people demand to know things that cannot be known at any given time. For me it is enough to know that what we see is not real. The details fill in gradually over time. It’s not immediately satisfying, but is the only way that we can, from our limited horizon looking up at reality out of a foxhole, begin to come to a better understanding of that objective reality.

That in mind, in the not-too-distant future I want to tackle the biggest hurdle that exists in my mind: media complicity in the hoaxes before our eyes. It’s confounding, but it is there, so an attempt, no matter how flawed, must be made. It will only be a start, but with that start, refinement over time is allowed.

The spirit moves me this morning. I will describe to the best of my abilities the manner in which the hoax called the Boston Marathon bombing was pulled off. It’s futile, of course, to describe such an event to people who will refuse to believe that anything other than what they are told by authority figures can be true. After all, it was on TV. If it’s on TV and labeled as news, it’s true.

American television news owns the minds of American television viewers. It’s a parent-child relationship, the parent understanding that the mind of a child cannot grasp complex reality, and so supplying convenient mythology to satisfy curiosity. Thus is born the stork, and the Muslim terrorist.
Continue reading “The Boston Marathon Bombing and other practice drills “flipped live”” →

The Turkey/Syria border has been rocked with explosions killing innocent civilians, the work of terrorists. The idea that the Assad government would do these things is absurd to the nth degree. That regime is not comprised of angels. Quite the opposite. They are just not that stupid. Why, when already under covert attack, would Assad go to such great lengths to justify the attack? It’s almost as if he’s begging for a military invasion.

History is littered with false-flag attacks. Some time, when perusing American history, find out what a young congressman named Lincoln was trying to do in introducing the “Spot Resolutions.”

Graham Greene wrote the book “The Quiet American” about his Vietnam experience in the early 1950’s. On January 9, 1952 a bomb exploded in Saigon, killing ten people with dozens more injured. The terrorist act was immediately, and without evidence, blamed on two Chechen brothers the Viet Minh, later referred to for demonization purposes as the “Viet Cong,” or simply “Cong.” Vietnamese Catholics later uncovered the man suspected to be the real terrorist, an American military officer named Scott, who resided quietly in the background. His purpose was to exacerbate the already-inflamed tensions between Vietnamese Buddhists and Catholics.

The weapon used in the Saigon explosion was a plastic explosive known only to the CIA. A small amount, perhaps the size of a Tic Tac box, created the massacre.

Here’s a critical aspect that bears on the events of our current day: When the bomb went off, a Life Magazine photographer was perfectly positioned to capture the immediate aftermath. (I would guess, given Henry Luce’s participation in Operation Mockingbird*, that it was no coincidence.) One of his photos, a man with his legs blown off, was published in the magazine along with the conclusion that Viet Minh were responsible. That photo (beneath the fold) served to demonize the Viet Minh for the American public. Good and evil were reversed in the public mind.

Boston was nothing new, and what’s going on now in the coordinated attack on Syria is a formula that has been in use at least since 1952, probably as long ago as 1952 BCE.
__________
*My apologies for Wiki link, notably unreliable when it comes to information regarding the National Security State. Since it names names and explicitly states the purpose of the domestic covert operation, even as it surely omits the really juicy stuff, it has in my view the credibility of a hostile witness.
Continue reading “Americans are quiet for now” →

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and one of the founders of what came to be known as “Reaganomics.” Although he has apparently not done much reading about all of the details to emerge about 9/11, he did cross that line, expressing skepticism, and never retreated.

… Every time I write a column that is the truth or the truth as I am able to discover it, instead of hawking the propaganda line, I move up on the list of those who are persona non grata in the Empire.

Consequently, the words below are posted on the English language version of a French blog, and nowhere in The US.

Not too long ago a writer or reporter for the Huffington Post discovered to his surprise that Pat Buchanan and I disagreed with all the wars that had been launched to protect us from terrorism. He asked me for an interview, and I agreed.
Continue reading “Dan Froomkin, American journalist, comes perilously close to committing thoughtcrime, recovers in time” →