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.

Lives of quiet desperation

I have learned that climate change is a hoax, but a useful one. Anything that keeps people in a constant state of fear is useful to the ruling class. I grew up during the (fake) Cold War and in a state of fear, the bomb and communism being so evil. That is how they controlled us in those days. (Running out of oil was a useful scam too. I lived through two Arab boycotts, both fake. I thought they were real.)

These days it is climate change, ISIS, terrorism in general, but I noticed something else yesterday – fear of financial collapse.

Here’s something to think about: Don’t invest in the stock market. Avoid consumer debt, student loan debt, anything that puts you in a position of having to produce a sum certain every month that has to be given over to people who did not earn it.

If that means owning a smaller house than you’d like, that is reality. Drive a heap – old cars that run well are treasures. (Ours are 11 and 10 years old, Japanese, and so well-built, and paid for.)

Are you afraid of what your life will be if you don’t get that college degree? You’re better off without the degree and the debt. You’re left to your own devices. Who ever said that learning only comes from college?

This sounds like heresy, even unrealistic, but what it means is you need to do everything possible to avoid the financial grid. It is a trap. It is meant to be a trap. It is no accident that student loans are handed out like candy with no expectation of performance or even a job on the other end. They are meant to be hung around your neck to keep you in debt and under control throughout your life. Avoid them. (In a sane world college would be based on ability and performance, the tab picked up by all of us via taxes. There are remedies aplenty for slouches.)

Is there another financial collapse on the way? Of course! They are planned. A change of administration often signals the timing, though I don’t know why. With each one the most powerful people go around behind sweeping up the wreckage. The big eat the small.

But truth be told, we have an economy of people making, growing and selling things that are not nail salons or massage parlors. We are all in some form talented enough to survive. We are taught not to develop our real talents, but rather to learn to be good employees, take on massive debt, and lead lives of quiet desperation.

The answer, don’t do that, sounds trite and unworkable. But it is not if you start today. If you are already in the student loan trap, your impetus, your first step should be to shed that burden. If it were me, I would look first to convert it to a form of debt that I can walk away from if I am trapped.

Think about it. Nobody on the other end “earned” that annuity that has you strapped down. It’s all in your head.

10 monkeys

This is a fable I ran across from a man calling himself Richard Bell. He does not claim to have invented it.

It’s a fable about 10 monkeys in a cage with a door. They can get out if they want to. Somebody hangs a banana outside the cage. One monkey goes out and reaches for the banana. Suddenly, all the monkeys in the cage are sprayed with a lot of very cold water. When the monkey gets back inside the cage, another one goes out for the banana or a new banana. And the monkeys are doused again. Now, when the third monkey tries to go outside and get the banana, the other monkeys beat him up, because they don’t want to get doused with the ice water. And little by little, all the monkeys in the cage learn not to go out for the banana. And then, one by one, each monkey in the cage is replaced with a new monkey, and each new monkey tries to get a banana and is beaten up by his fellows instead. Only now, there is no ice water. It’s just a reflex. And finally the cage is entirely populated by monkeys who have no experience with the ice water. They just know that, if a monkey tries to go out and get the banana, they have to beat him up.

gary-webb-da3452d936a0be87I apply it to the field of journalism, where so many thousands of reporters at all levels all over the country intuitively know not to go near certain stories, or types of stories, and who will crush anyone in their profession who does.

Gary Webb, for instance, whose piece called “Dark Alliance,” about how CIA was behind the influx of crack cocaine into the Los Angeles area, was viciously attacked by other journalists.Webb died in 2004 at age 49, allegedly a suicide.

Playing with bad toys

Envision a small room full of children and toys. The toys are of the boring kind, plastic bats and wiffle balls, those spongy basketballs that don’t bounce very well, and plastic tables and chairs with tea sets where most of the pieces have long been lost. It’s a boring time for the kids, but they are young and so don’t know what they are missing. They can use their imaginations and somehow make fun of it all.

In a few years their imaginations will be gone. The room will wear them down, make them forget how to pretend and have fun. Then they’ll be ready to be regular people.

The kids have a room monitor to watch them all day long. They are never left alone unless they are asleep, and even then the room monitor listens in through a microphone and can peep in through a spy hole.

Outside the small room is a town full of people, a forest full of danger and excitement. But the kids never get to see that, at least on their own. They are kids. They get in the way. We hired people to keep them in that room so we can go on about our business. They can be a nuisance, after all, so many questions, so much energy.

And the forest – don’t even think about it! Maybe the monitor will take them there on a field trip, but they will be watched closely. Grown-ups are scared in the forest too, and usually don’t go there without a gun. But the kids are curious. There is genuine excitement and danger out there. Creative impulses are set free. The games they could play in the forest are so much more intense than swinging a plastic bat or sipping fake tea from a tiny cup. They invigorate the kids, make them hard to manage.

I know, if you’ve read this far, that you think I have constructed an allegory about our school system. It does work that way. School, as we do it, destroys youth and kills imagination. As designed.

But that is not my thrust. The allegory is about our political system.

Voters are kept in a small room and only allowed to play with bad toys, these awful candidates who are insincere and won’t have any power after the election anyway. Voters are kept far away from the real action.

Voters are discouraged from exploring on their own. Even if they want to leave the system, they are always brought back to the room and told “Vote. It’s your duty. But only for one of these two. That’s your choice.” Voters are not allowed real games and candidates, or to have a real say in how their country is run.

That is all that elections are, folks – a way of keeping us out of everyone’s hair. The more we believe, the harder we debate and fight about our candidates, the better for the real leaders.

After all, we are the children. We have to stay busy doing something, and elections are the best way yet devised to soak up our energy, kill our imaginations, and keep us out of their hair.

Killing curiosity

In answer to George W. Bush’s famous query “Is our children learning?” the answer is of course … no. Someone I read or heard recently said that designing a system like ours that costs so much money and takes up so much of a child’s life while leaving him unable to think properly could only be by design. A lot of thought went into it. The kids have to believe they are getting it done while turning out as non-thinking automatons. The teachers have to believe in it too.

Perhaps the exchange below can address part of the phenomenon, since it is our brightest kids that are most likely to be drugged while in school. It’s between investigative reporter Jon Rappoport and and man who called himself Ellis Medavoy, a fake name.

Medavoy claims to have spent his career in propaganda, most of that time in the medical field selling diseases that do not even exist, among them ADD and ADHD.

Medavoy: “You need to prepare a population for propaganda. You do that through REDUCTION. You get people to want only the simplest ideas. Then you can sell them anything. ADD and ADHD are self‐fulfilling prophecies.”

Rappoport: Interesting. You want to expand on that?

Medavoy: If you look up the list of behaviors that are used to diagnose ADHD, you see that almost any child, at the right moment, can be diagnosed. We know that’s true because we already have several million kids in America who are called ADHD. And they get the drugs. Ritalin, which is an upper. It’s speed. Well, eventually, speed is going to cause what I would call “a shortening of the perspective of the mind.” I was there for part of the propaganda campaign on ADHD. I know what went on, how it was sold. It was basically an appeal “on behalf of parents” who couldn’t deal with their kids. It was sold as a deficit — your kid can’t concentrate. So after he gets the drug for a while, under the surface, the DIMENSIONALITY of his mind is reduced. He wants simpler ideas. He wants bottom lines. It’s a self‐fulfilling scam. Under the influence of the drug, his attention moves into deficit territory. You see, this is preparation for propaganda. A simpler mind takes in delusions more easily. Delusions presented as little packages. You wanted to go deeper into the Matrix. Well, here we are. REDUCE THE DIMENSIONALITY OF THE MIND. It’s hard to detect. How are you going to quantify that?

What I see around me are simple minds taking in delusions very easily. Our public hoaxes, the fake events, go down with extraordinary ease. Few know even to question their TV screens.

I don’t blame the psychiatrists in total for our current malaise, as LSD was crippling as well to my generation. Pot, as far as I can tell, makes people less intelligent, certainly less ambitious. But is seems the combination of schooling and drugging the kids plus the recreational drugs ingested in normal life have produced a passive and incurious population.

On any matter requiring thought and curiosity, they are silent, like lambs.

And now for something completely different …

Monty, down below, reminded me of something that I need to clear up – the Paul McCartney business. I thought at one time that he had indeed died, as there were album clues. Government disinfo agent Mark Lane had laid out a golden apple ripe for finding. The replacement McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills also did some really odd behavior, but was probably paid off big to shut up … about what? She apparently fears for her life, and said as much.

That’s a fine example of a diversion, a distraction designed to occupy our minds and lead us away from the obvious. In my opinion McCartney was indeed replaced around 1966, but rumors of his death … greatly exaggerated.

I can only speculate on why they did that, but venture a guess that the original McCartney quit the group. They were talented but phony, top to bottom. They were a product of British Intelligence, trained, groomed for their parts. They did not write their own music, or at least had a lot of help. They were not smart enough to lay all of the album clue nonsense out there. That was all done by handlers, like a covert operation. (The Sgt Pepper album cover is a work of art, designed to tell a story that only a few can read. There is no way the four young men could put out something so sophisticated.)

Perhaps the original McCartney got tired of being a phony. The replacement guy shamelessly pushed LSD on youth. Maybe the original had a conscience. LSD was also an intelligence operation, as it is destructive of minds. (They are still pushing it, sublimely, to this day.) It was pushed heavily during that time, handed out like candy at events like Monterey and Woodstock.

Lennon and Harrison were slipped a heavy dose by a dentist, a cruel thing to do, but apparently he was either threatened or bribed. Intelligence ops were circling all the musicians of that time, trying to mind fuck them. (This in addition to many of our American rocks stars of that era being the children of intelligence agents. Read McGowan some time about that. He flirted with it, but never quite got to the heart of it, God rest his soul.)

Who knows what happened there? The photo below is intriguing – it is genuine. It is tantalizing but not enough to explain. I have learned that people are not very good at picking up on photographic evidence, and mostly see what they are told they see. So I will just leave it hanging.

image

The paper caper, footnote

This is written just to complete the circle from a prior post on the fake whistle blower, Daniel Ellsberg.

Follow this link to Wikipedia, and then down to the section titled “Repeal.” Wiki is heavily censored but often has information hidden in broad daylight. This is such an entry. It is about the Gulf of Tonkin affair, and the resolution that was the legal justification for the Vietnam War.

Maybe you did, but I did not know until recently that Congress repealed that resolution in January of 1971. It was perhaps the last gasp of breath by Congress before the institution was taken down by CIA. Congress these days is a fake lawmaking body, rubber stamping laws written by corporate and other power centers, and quivering in its boots before the executive. It is of no use or purpose.

Note then that Daniel Ellsberg appeared on the scene with the Pentagon Papers in February of 1971. It was a distraction. The paper caper would dominate the news for months to come, only to be supplanted by Watergate. News that Tonkin was repealed, that the Vietnam War was illegal from 1971 forward, would be buried in the clutter.

That explains the paper caper, and at least in part Watergate.

Two things to note: One, if we have an event that dominates the news, like OJ or Monica or the Michael Jackson trial or Donald Trump, it is a cue to be alert for what else is going on. These events serve to cloud the landscape and distract us. Just as we do not have a real Congress, we do not have real news. It manipulates us, but does not inform.

And two, the purposes of reading are many – to enlighten, entertain, inspire, relax and to keep our minds sharp as we age. If, from reading, we are able to connect dots and gain some understanding of this crazy world, then it is worth doing for that reason alone. It is not done so that we can make lists of books we have read or have impressive book shelves.

A ghost among us

Have you ever experienced a “Duh!” Moment where you slap your forehead upon seeing something painfully obvious? I had such a moment last evening.

Go back to the year 2000, and the presidential election. Normally, the parties just take turns. The person holding the office is a ribbon cutter, not much more. Some, like Clinton and Obama, are very good at it, having good memories and stage presence being very good at making speeches. They seem presidential, and that is the only real job requirement.

Those two were groomed for the office. The fact that each changed their names at a young age is a hint that they were being prepared for big things ahead. (Oddly, Gerald Ford changed his name at a young age too.) They were on the calendar, so to speak, scheduled to burst on the scene, as if spontaneous.

George Herbert Walker Bush is a powerful man, and apparently a talented man as well. He must be a very efficient administrator, a “gets the job done” kind of guy. He served as president unofficially for eight years, and officially for four. He was then moved aside by Ross Perot to make way for Clinton. But he never lost touch, never really left the realm of power, or so it appears.

His son, George W. Bush was a clown, a man who lacked gravitas, abhorred study and had to be puffed up by PR staff to be electable. In a real world if these men, the candidates, were more than images in a TV screen, he could not have been elected constable of Podunk county. But he was chosen, and more than chosen, was forced on us. When it became apparent that Al Gore was going to win in 2000, the Supreme Court stepped in and just outright handed the office to Bush. It mattered a whole lot to some very powerful people that Bush, and not Gore, hold that fake office.

Why? Here is my “duh!” moment. It was not about electing W, but rather returning HW to power. 9/11 was on the calendar, and they wanted a man with a proven track record to manage the Oval Office end of it. The government was only a small part of the events of that day, but it required someone with brains and administrative skill to make sure that end of the operation held together. No screw ups!

George Herbert Walker Bush may be one if the most important men ever to crawl about in the alleys of power in this country. He was there for the Bay of Pigs, for JFK’s departure, for Watergate, Iran Contra,  Reagan’s departure, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq attacks. He ran the CIA while Ford was president. He was de facto president from ’80 to 88, and then for real for four years after that. And now I realize that he was there for 9/11 too.

He’s an old man now, soon to depart, and I won’t shed a tear. But I am in awe of his accomplishments. He’s been like a ghostly presence in all of the important [public] events in this country for the last fifty years or more.

Zika is currently on the back burner, but will rise again

Despite the enormous amount of electronic stimulation we have all about us, we know virtually nothing of the world. It is simply too big to grasp. So the electronic sources step in and provide a glimpse.

But the images we see could be real or fake. Imagine the power that television has, to supply images. Those images stand between us and the real world, supplying our reality.

Continue reading “Zika is currently on the back burner, but will rise again” →

The paper caper

EllsbergTo have been young, in my twenties, during the time of Watergate, was fortunate. Of course I did not understand it – very few did then, and possibly fewer now. The obvious object was removal of a president, replacement by a cardboard cutout. But the psychological aspects are far more intriguing than the outcome. For a period of two years we were hit with a barrage of false news, false hearings, liars telling liars about other liars, and the news media positioning itself as an investigative body.

It takes years to understand such mechanizations, and of course it is ever ongoing. That is why I say I was fortunate to be young.

Prior to  that time we had a distraction within a distraction, the strange episode called the “Pentagon Papers.” Has anyone read them? Of course not. Did anyone read them then? Of course not. And to do so then or now would be a waste of time. Their content was not the issue. They were lies meant to cover even bigger lies. Their existence was the issue, however. It was a wild game played by a few low-level operatives designed to distract us** from some of the more seedy goings on in Vietnam, but also to enhance the notion that we have a news media that seeks truth.

There are indeed secrets, but those secrets are kept. They are never released, even by accident. But some broomstick cowboys got to play spies. Some newspapers got to play pretend journalism. The most important man, appointed for the role, was Daniel Ellsberg. He’s a fake, top to bottom, beginning to end. He was hired as an actor to pay the part he played, and does so to this day. (His support of Edward Snowden is, in poker terms, a “tell,” alerting us that Snowden too is fake.)

How do I know this? Again, he enjoys prominence, and has paid no price for his “crime,”

Daniel_Ellsberg_psychiatrist_filing_cabinetObserve the scene, August, 1971, when five CIA operatives broke in to the office of Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Set aside for the moment the strange notion of a man of such high intellect and position needing a shrink. That was probably an invention. The important thing was the break-in. It was sloppy, meant to be discovered, and its discovery got Ellsberg off the hook. As was intended from the beginning. Like a TV sitcom, it was the last-minute wrap-up that resolved all the problems.*

Of course, one question leads to another, one spook to another, and from here we discover that other men were playing the spy game at the same time, running around to motels, using primitive photocopy technology of the day, trying against time to get these very important papers released. Did Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn believe in their cause? Were they duped? Were they, like Ellsberg, low-level operatives?

Good question.

Daniel Ellsberg, false leader.
___________________
*For those unfamiliar with the history of that era, Ellsberg was on trial and facing life imprisonment for his “crime,” and the break-in resulted in his case being tossed out of court and his being set free.

**In January of 1971, Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, removing the legal underpinnings for the Vietnam War. From that day forward, Nixon would claim the war was being fought by legitimate presidential authority alone, negating any balance of power. Since so few people know about the repeal, it might be a safe bet to suggest that the purpose of the paper caper, which commenced in February of 1971,  was to distract from the illegality of the war, which would go in for four more years.