How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
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”
To 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,”
Observe 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.
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*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.
False leaders need to be believable, and so usually say things that are true – in fact, it does not matter if 90% of their words hit on the truth, as the 10% that is withheld is usually critical. Jane Fonda was often spot-on in her fake opposition to the Vietnam War.
If the real purpose of a false leader is to lead people down a dead-end street, the truth will serve as well as lies in getting us there. Thus do false leaders often speak the truth in service of lies and liars.
To repeat: False leaders are usually easy to spot. They 1) do not suffer consequences for their actions, and 2) receive wide mainstream publicity.
As a negative example, take Bradley Manning (now Chelsea, we are told, but who really knows? That whole transgender routine seems ginned up in order to discredit the man*). He was imprisoned, deprived of the basics of life, tortured, tried, found guilty and is still in prison. (So we are told, but have no way of knowing. Habeas corpus is a dead letter.) He serves as an example to others. The government does not tolerate true whistle blowers.
So Bradley Manning paid a price, and did not profit in any way for his actions, in fact, has suffered immensely.
Bradley Manning: The real deal.
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That is all just to lay groundwork for the next false leader I want to expose, Jenny McCarthy.
Our overlords are clever and wise, and do not reason with us. Rather, they undermine us in every way possible. The pharmaceutical industry is among the most corrupt institutions that has ever existed in human history, completely at odds with its own stated purpose. It needs to make people sick and keep them that way to ensure sale of their monopolized and overpriced products. They have invented diseases, all of which share a common characteristic: They cannot be cured. They can only be managed. And management requires daily ingestion of a pill. As I view the landscape, PhRMA will not let loose a pill for less than $10 per unit.
In addition to the psychotropic drug phenomenon we are witnessing, where between ten and twenty percent of the the population is on antidepressants and millions of normal bright kids are taking a drug to treat a disorder that does not even exist – ADD …
… it is never enough for PhRMA. They are also attacking us via the vaccine route. They are now pushing hundreds of them world wide, and as with ADD, school children are the most lucrative market segment, because using kids as a shield can induce taxpayers to foot the bill.
In so doing, they need legal protection, and so demanded and got from Congress (yes, “demand” is the proper word in our system) protection from liability should the vaccines not serve their purpose or have untoward side effects. It is a crime against humanity, and for that … they need protection on the upside from government, which they have, but also on the downside from false leaders.
Jenny McCarthy fills that role.
Jenny is compromised from the start, as she was a Playboy Bunny, and has spent more time in front of cameras naked than clothed. Who takes such a person seriously? But thrust in the role of leader of the anti-vaccination movement, she serves to discredit all behind her. Once people have it firmly in mind that Jenny McCarthy, Playboy Bunny, is leading the charge, they easily dismiss the vaccination problem as trivial.
And who takes vaccine poisoning seriously? Explore this for yourself. Ask random acquaintances about the vaccine problems like autism, brain damage, and gauge the response. It will run from clueless to “Oh, yeah, that’s that thing with the Playboy Bunny – I don’t pay much attention.”
It is no accident.
And what has become of Jenny since she took on this courageous challenge? Was she imprisoned? Tortured? Marginalized? Did her career hit the toilet? No. Not hardly. Her career has gotten important inhancements at critical points, from doing a long gig on the sitcom Two and a Half Men, having her own syndicated talk show, and now occupying a slot on The View. She has thrived.
Jenny McCarthy: False leader.
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*Think about it – are his captors going to finance such bizarre elective surgery? They might indeed cut off his penis, but would only do so for sake of recreational mutilation. Perhaps more likely, Manning has been mind-f******, and is a barely functioning human now.
I am going to continue on the path of false leaders, as it seems a rich vein to mine, offering a broad view of the degree of thought control that exists in our society. Our masters do not let the dog wander freely. We are always on the end of a leash even if we do not know it.
I emphasize that it is not an isolated phenomenon. It is pervasive, and affects every aspect of our lives from music and entertainment to art, politics, education and philosophy. We are in the grips of tyranny, and exhibit Stockholm Syndrome in historic proportion, even rivaling the people of North Korea (if our information about that country is remotely true).
We are told that people of the Soviet Union lived under tyranny, yet look at what is apparent! They were able to change their governments and improve their lives without bloodshed. As Ricky so often said … “Lucy, ‘splain.” Because there ain’t no way that could happen here.
The vehicle of false leadership offers a portal to the other side. Today I am going to mention just one:
I asked myself that question when the movie came out, but was too deep in the matrix to begin to see the answer. Here is Miles Mathis on the subject:
It has long been clear to almost all intelligent people who study the evidence that the Warren Commission was a cover-up. Something like 80% of those polled admit they don’t believe the Warren Commission report and we must assume that the other 20% are very gullible. Some have also studied the so-called conspiracy theories — the alternate theories, that is. But it should be equally clear that then alternate theories are, in most ways, just as full of holes and just as poorly constructed as the standard theory. Like the Warren Commission report, the alternate theories also read like propaganda. …
Let me suggest to you that both sets of stories were created mainly as misdirection and disinformation. This is not to say that all alternate theorists are controlled by the government or by anyone else. It is only to suggest that alternate theories — in all forms but one – seem to be encouraged by the government and the powers that be. We have always assumed that alternate theories would be frowned upon or discouraged, and yet we have never seen much real effort at suppression. In fact, in most cases, the dissemination of alternate theories would seem to be abetted by the mainstream, not suppressed. … For the powers that be, it may not matter whether you believe there was one shooter or many, or even whether you believe that the CIA or FBI was involved. The only thing that is critical is that you believe Kennedy was assassinated that day …
The words in bold in that quote – I added the emphasis because it explains why Oliver Stone was allowed to make that movie, funded, given access to Hollywood’s best actors, and then enjoyed wide distribution. His movie, more than any other propaganda source, is responsible for the cottage industry of JFK-related books, YouTubes and lectures. He has constructed a false narrative, rewritten history, and entrapped us in the matrix.
Does Oliver Stone know his role? I believe so. He’s no fool. He’s gone on to make other movies, and did a long historical series on Showtime that glossed right over the most important fake event of our own times, 9/11. For Stone, it is a two-fer. His role in re-framing American history is writ large.
I have listened to Stone in interviews with JFK researchers. He seems short and intemperate, always needing to move on. And now I know why. He’s living a lie, like all false leaders do. It affects them all differently – some lie with ease, as did Jane Fonda, some become recluses, like Neil Armstrong, some affect idiosyncrasies, like Max Baucus’s stuttering in public.
For Stone, it is just short-tempered flirtation with honest but misguided people. He is not comfortable doing it.
Oliver Stone: False Leader.
[This is a rework of an earlier post, with a little more justification behind my contention that most of our leaders are false leaders, as real leaders are a pain in the ass.]
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Two recurring themes on this blog are the nature of power, and false leadership, or “controlled opposition.” If one wants to understand the landscape around us, a firm grasp of both are critical.
Power is the ability to cause another person to submit to your will. When a majority is governed by a minority, as we are, issues of power become critical, as the masses have to be persuaded that the minority interests are actually the “national interest.”
There are many means available, among them logical persuasion, subversion, bribery and brute force. The least effective means of bending others to our will are persuasion and brute force. For this reason, we are constantly bombarded with clever lies, manipulative advertising and staged events, all designed to influence and undermine our thinking.
Among the most effective devices in controlling our thoughts and actions is the false leader. Most often, this is a person of low character who has been bribed to behave and speak in a certain manner. False leaders are easy to spot. They usually receive large publicity, and pay no price for anti-authoritarian behavior.
I will give but a few examples, and then get on with my day:
This is fun, an easy subject for writing with a wide array of candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Fidel Castro, and the most prominent of all, Barack Obama. They arise for various reasons to achieve various ends – to mislead and undermine popular movements, to ensure that popular dissent is contained, or just to distract us while real business goes on in secret. It is all part of “full spectrum dominance,” where no matter where we turn for effective leadership, we come face-to-face with the enemy.
I’ll offer some more over time, maybe in the coming days, and hope that readers can contribute as well.
This is an embarrassing incident that happened in 2006: My wife and I went to see the remastered version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail at a local theater, I want it say in Bozeman, but the memory feels more like Billings, Montana. There were five people in the theater that night. We sat in the back, and several rows in front of us were three who, as the movie went along, were able to recite every line.
The embarrassment is that we went to see a movie whose time had long passed, the importance and humor of which was exaggerated in my mind.
I imagine that others had a similar experience as the movie Atlas Shrugged played to immense empty houses in 2011.
Which reminds me: A certain man I know, let’s call him Bob Bilby, made a profound life choice in 2007. Bob is an engineer, and helped design and build bridges and tunnels. Fed up with what he called “leeches and bums” feeding off of his enormous wealth output, Bob decided to “go Galt,” and retire to a cabin in the mountains at an undisclosed location.
He began to notice something from his cabin retreat – bridges and tunnels were still being built and widely used. And … no one was looking for him.
In 2009, Bob Bilby quietly rejoined society, and now authors a blog.
I make fun of Rand and Randians. A post from years ago, “Was Ayn Rand a Sociopath?,” still draws readers and comments. But I am familiar with a certain element within our ranks – people who live off of the output of others. They are called “children,” “disabled,” “students,” and to a smaller degree, trust babies and lazy bums.
Our output is enormous, large enough to support all of them, so we do not have a problem with stretched resources. Distribution of those resources is a problem, as by luck and happenstance a large percentage of our wealth ends up in a few hands.
Those who enjoy good fortune and are able to amass a fortune often imagine that luck and happenstance had nothing to do with it. They imagine themselves not just more talented, but immensely so, and not lucky, but rather entitled.
Sometimes they go Bob Bilby on us. I imagine once retired to their cabin in the woods, they begin to grow in depth and humanity, and become the anti-Rand versions of themselves, humbler, more welcoming and accepting of people as we are. They begin to realize that we’re all part of one being, all in various stages of development, many in need of a reboot.
Then they start their own blogs.
We got an ice storm late yesterday and I was curious about road conditions. I turned on the TV – here in Denver there are usually three or four local news shows going at once. What caught my eye was the sight of a beautiful young woman standing in a green screen shot of I70 up by Vail, a sheet of ice. She referred to herself as a “meteorologist.”
I had to laugh. I did not know that the University of Phoenix even offered that degree.
I used to watch a TV show called “House” because I thought the lead character, a complete Asperger’s manifesto named Dr. Gregory House, was interesting. But I had to quit the show because it insulted my intelligence. Every “doctor” was gorgeous and had near genius IQ. Just like the old TV show ER, where one of the lead characters was played by the gorgeous gay actor George Clooney … it was the realm of fantasy.
It does not work that way. Go to your local clinic or any hospital and check out the people. They are like people everywhere, mostly ordinary, aging, fighting bulges and losing hair. Only occasionally is there one of exceptional good looks, usually occupying a low-demand slot like receptionist. And chewing gum.
There is a reason for that. Most good looking people find they do not have to work as hard as regular people to succeed, and so don’t. They do not gravitate to professions like doctor and nurse, scientist or engineer because those fields require extreme effort and intelligence for success. High school cheerleaders and star quarterbacks already know at a young age that doors will open for them without much effort.
So it is no surprise that good looking people end up in acting, or as pharmaceutical sales reps, real estate agents, or as news readers and “meteorologists” on TV. Or, they marry successful people, become arm candy and social managers. It goes both ways, but predominately (and throughout recorded history) it is the beautiful woman who is married to the successful man of ordinary appearance. (Right, Melania?)
So remember, if you are one who uses television news to define your reality, that the people who read that news to you got there not because they are smart or insightful, but rather because they are good looking. They will read anything they are told to read, and are even dumb enough to believe what they read.
Are you?
In a discussion of “mental illness” below, I neglected to highlight the work of a woman (linked to the right here) with first-hand experience in the field, a former beauty queen and pharmaceutical rep (and the two are not coincidentally related), Gwen Olsen. I highly recommend her book, Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher, as a primer. It opens the door to the seedy world of PhRMA, ineffective and overpriced drugs, and a corrupt culture taken over by rent seekers whose only objective is to create dependency on pills to make cash flow.
They actually spend their time creating diseases to justify the pills, and schmoozing and bribing the psychiatric professionals (who seem unable to resist) to prescribe them. It is utterly corrupt. As Olsen says,
The most frightening aspects of our pill culture are the unknown interactions of various drugs when taken at once, or even taken serially, as their half-lives allow them to linger in our systems as the shrinks jump from one prescription to another looking for one that might actually work.
Ms. Olsen is doing her best. Heed her warning:
WARNING/DISCLAIMER:
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WITHDRAW FROM ANY PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATION ABRUPTLY, AS THIS COULD EXACERBATE SEVERE AND LIFE-THREATENING SYMPTOMS!It may require a period of weeks or months to successfully discontinue your medication. I am not a licensed practitioner and cannot make diagnoses and/or medical treatment recommendations as such. Please consult a qualified doctor before adjusting or discontinuing any medication regimens.
This link at her website has an (unfortunately) limited list of resources to assist people who are hooked on benzodiazepines, antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs.
The idea of a President Trump does not scare me. The whole field is made up of buffoons fronting for hidden oligarchs. None of them have the ability to work with Congress or foreign leaders or to be effective economic or military strategists.
But who cares? It is not in the job description, which merely calls for an actor, and effective speaker, a ribbon cuttter and baby kisser. Presidents who wield power effectively and command more than fake respect … we haven’t had one of those since Nixon … not that I admired the man, but he did seem to have genuine talent.
Certain words grate on me – they are used to avoid using using other words. It is part of how we process things, I suppose, a way of denying reality.
For example, on NPR and I suppose elsewhere too, they do not use the word “advertising.” They say “message.” They don’t even say “commercial message,” just “message”, as in “Car Talk follows after this “message.”
When I purchased a Kindle, I wanted one free of advertising, and said that to the Amazon.com gal on the phone. She corrected me, and said “you mean messages.” I said “no, advertising” and she corrected me again. So this is a conscious policy, like “support the troops” or “drill baby drill,” a PR way of undermining our thought processes. Advertising is an intrusive and subversive pain in the ass. Call it what it is.
It is like saying “mental illness” rather than “people who are suffering.”
Yes, the is that other phrase that annoys me, “mental illness.” “People who are suffering” places the blame for the pain that people endure correctly on outside influences. These would be things like advertising, agitation propaganda, alcohol and drugs (including the legal ones like antidepressants), fake news, and financial stress. They all interrelate.
Advertising is a huge negative influence, for instance, creating pent-up demand and unhappiness with current stuff, causing us to spend too much. Advertising works because it makes us unhappy. It also leads to credit card debt, a source of stress.
Agitprop was very properly described by NATO during Operation Gladio as a “strategy of tension.” These days they run fake shooting events (it used to be fake serial killers) and false flag events like 911, Boston, Paris. San Bernardino and now Brussels to keep us in a state of anxiety. Fear is a governing tool. It is how they control our thoughts and more importantly, draw support for their never-ending wars of aggression.
“Mental illness” implies an internal source for our pain, a brain defect, normally fixed by pills. But oddly, we don’t find mental illness in primitive societies. To me, this lays the problem not on us, but on our culture and our leadership. Left to our own devices, free of advertising and agitprop and bankers and the tax man, drug free and sober, we tend to be happy and well adjusted. Virtually all of us.
Of course now and then we will find someone truly off-center, someone unable to cope due to bad wiring, but it is rare. Very rare. And we have the social outliers – people who suffer alienation due to things like very high IQs or homosexuality – they don’t fit. But in a healthy society, outliers are not condemned or mistreated. Rather, they are accepted and treated with respect.
So what to do about “mental illness?” That is clever misdirection. It leads to more pills, interventions, more nanny state stuff. Merely asking the question in a different manner produces a different result.
How do we control the outside influences that are making us angry and agitated? It is not our fault. It is our leadership. It is the TV, the movies, the spooks, the financial predators (now selling “reverse mortgages,” one of the most abusive financial tools ever invented.) How do we break free?
I got lectured earlier this week about mental illness, told I am a fool who just promotes the whole “just tough it out” thing. It is as if I am blind to people in agony or the need for intervention during crisis to save lives. I am not blind, but dammit, if you blame people for their troubles when the causes of the suffering almost all external, nothing will ever be solved.
Of course we are witnessing more and more people in pain and suffering. We need to discuss why.
