I was going through books yesterday, getting rid of them. Some are a little hard to part with and I hung on to one even as I knew I would not look at it again. Just by coincidence JC posted below that when they “killed” “Osama” they “found” his “last will and testament.” It was probably next to an airline ticket and “confession.” And among “his” books was Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions, an early 90s collection of lectures he gave in Canada.
I did not know it was printed in a large print terrorist edition. Langley must be the publisher.
Man, this is funny, sort of. They are just taunting us now. There is only a small segment of the public, maybe one percent of the U.S., who would even know about that book or Chomsky for that matter. The message is aimed at us? What? Quit reading? Quit thinking? Go flowwise?
It’s amusing too as Chomsky, knowingly or ceding to intimidation, is a gatekeeper. He ridicules those of us who are incredulous of official truth about JFK and 9/11. So I wonder if “Osama” believed the official story of 9/11? Hard to know. His last known public utterance he said it was news to him too. That was late 2001.
Anyway, we are flying today, and yes, I brought my copy of NI along, and yes I’ll read it on the plane. It’s been over twenty years since I glanced at it.
Along with his terrorist war [on Cuba], Kennedy imposed a trade embargo of unprecedented severity, barring any transaction involving merchandise “of Cuban origin” or that “has been located or transported from or through Cuba [or] is made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce, or manufacture of Cuba.” In the years that followed, huge resources have been devoted to monitor international commerce to ensure that the strictures are upheld …
On illustration has been provided by the treasury Department, reporting to Congress in April 2004 on the activities of its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), responsible for investigating suspicious financial transfers, a central component of the “war on terror.” OFAC informed Congress that of its 120 employees, four were assigned to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen were occupied with enforcing the embargo against Cuba. From 1990 to 2003, OFAC reported 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9,000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines. (Chomsky, introduction to Voices From the Other Side, by Keith Bolender)
In fairness to OFAC, they might well have known what the rest of us came to understand later, that by 2004 both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were dead.
Even so, it is interesting to note the vigor with which our government fights to withhold basic freedoms from little Cuba while virtually ignoring its own self-proclaimed War on Terror.
I was raised to believe in a man named “Jesus” who lived in my mind and monitored my thoughts and behaviors. Most importantly, he loved me. I was special to him.
Such thought control devices are common. When implanted in the mind of young children, they often last a lifetime. My mother, deeply lost in Alzheimer’s, still bowed her head in deep devotion as my brother invoked the name before slipping her a wafer.
Murdock
DM Murdock, author of The Christ Conspiracy and a bunch of other stuff, relieved me of much of the mystery. I had long been set free from Jesus before reading her, but she explained the origin of the symbols of Christianity – sun worship.
As with so much of mythology, the explanation is hidden in plain sight. Even so, transcending generations and language development, to this day most Americans believe in and worship the “Son.” Cue the Twilight Zone theme!
Murdock now suffers from a very aggressive cancer. She’ll soon be gone, but her body of work will long outlive her. Because this is the United States, aggressive health care to treat her aggressive cancer is unaffordable, and her friends and supporters are crowd-sourcing to finance her treatment. Good luck with that, and thanks Acharya S for living a good and useful life.
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Asch
Solomon Asch was a social psychologist who dreamed up an experiment in thought control, usually done in a classroom. Students, most in on the trick, are shown a set of lines and asked which one is longest. When those not in on the game identify the obvious choice, the group responds negatively, and later still, by group consensus, a shorter line is “voted” to be the longest.
The question is whether the subjects rebel, go along, or really get their minds right. Judging from my experience with 9/11 and other mass illusion phenomena, I am guessing that most students truly believe their perceptions are wrong and the crowd is right. We are but children, after all, and I was 38 years old before I disabused myself of that Jesus guy.
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People react to the word “propaganda” just as they do to “shit” or “thought control.” The word causes a blockage of cognitive thought processes. Propagandists know this, and so have changed their names to “public relations” and “information” agents. That’s too bad, because the field is rich with explanatory power about all that goes on around us, just as Murdock’s revelations so easily exposed the Jesus scam.
I won’t go into detail on Patrick’s work, as people who saw the fright words in the above paragraph have already quit reading. He invoked Jacques Ellul, and offers a much more refined reading of the man than I could muster.
Ellul reminded us that propaganda gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence. It is not something done to us as much as something we deeply need. It validates us, makes us morally and intellectually superior to our peers and to people in other lands. It is our raison d’être.
I have come recently to understand that voting is a scam – that is, public opinion is herd management and nothing more. Actually counting votes would be an absurd practice. We have thousands of people who think they are part of the process every election day. With patriotic music in the background, public officials pretend that voting matters and that votes are actually counted.
Voting gives us meaning. It is the government telling each of us, individually, in a cubicle with a curtain drawn, that we matter, that our opinion counts.
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Anyway, thank you D.M. Murdock, Solomon Asch, Brian Patrick Anse, Jacques Ellul, my mother and most of all, Jesus, for helping me through this crazy fucking life. It just keeps getting more interesting.
A little thought experiment: imagine two men dropped from a helicopter into the wilderness, and left to their own devices to survive.
One man is given a saw and shovel and a pack of seeds.
The the other is given a box of $100 bills, and is a millionaire.
Who survives?
Money does not produce, think, invent, or work. Having a pile of money does not make a person smart or useful. If it did, trust babies would be our most, rather than least, important citizens.
The notion that the wealthy are necessary to our survival is nonsense. They do not create wealth. They merely harvest it from others. They can be useful in the allocation and investment process, but should be our servants and not our masters.
…no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago. (John F. Kennedy, American University Speech, June 10, 1963)
In writing a piece yesterday on my search for meaninglessness, I reflexively apologized for invocation of a Nazi analogy, saying “Not to go all Godwin on you.” I’ve been wondering why I did that. Analogies are sometimes appropriate, often not. As a class of analogy, Nazism compared to modern day United States often works.
“Godwin’s Law” is as follows:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.
Mike Godwin says he came up with the concept because Nazi analogies trivialize the holocaust.
No event, historical or allegorical, has penetrated the American consciousness more than the Holocaust. Seventy years later our movies and bookshelves are still obsessed with Nazis.
Few of us know that over twenty-four million Russians died in that war, ten million Chinese, almost six million Poles. The group that stepped forward and siezed the official mantle of victimhood is the Jews, most of whom did not fight.
Such is the power of Jewish propaganda that we are forced to step back in reverence when mention of their war deaths is raised, and this is reinforced by Mike Godwin.
Most people had to rebuild, reconstruct their lives and move forward as best they could. Jews were given Palestine, much to the chagrin of Palestinians. I had something to do with a bogus historical claim on land. So please, it was a really nice reward. Shut up now.
The object of that war was to allow the rise of post-Versailles Germany. It was rearmed, all its aggression leading up to Barbarossa forgiven. Ultimately Germany was to bring down Mother Russia. That objective was shared by Germans, certain powerful British and American factions, and Japanese. It failed.
The Russians gave the most, lost the most, and were the primary victims of fascism. A neo-Nazi government installed now on their western border naturally concerns them. This particular aspect of history, western encroachment and aggression against Russia, is ripe for analogy. I propose we dispense with Godwin and talk about it.
Jews suffered immensely and are worthy of official victim status, but please, step back, let the other far more worthy victims enjoy a little sunlight. Let’s start with the Russian people, as it appears that fire of aggressive war is relit and growing.
*I understand that the reader will be naturally suspicious of Russian sources, and only wish that in a rational world, such skepticism would be leveled at all sources of news and information.
Maybe I am at a crossroads or in a lull. All these years of reading have left me empty. This country, full of good but very dumbed down people, is run by a fascist shadow government. My questions now are merely how and when it came about. Bigger yet, is it the normal state of affairs throughout history? I suspect so.
Not to go all Godwin on the matter, but the Nazis came to power by deft criminal maneuvering. The primary tool at their disposal was murder. Once an important person is killed, and the crime goes down uninvestigated and unpunished, a cloud of intimidation sets in. All throughout the legitimate power centers there evolves unvoiced but well-understood fear. Smart and brave people who confront the hidden power source are murdered, threatened, scandalized … eventually smart and brave people exit the system, and we are left with thugs, cowards, sociopaths, and cynical manipulators. (Which reminds me, the 2016 election will be a “choice” … Clinton v Bush.) Continue reading “In search of meaninglessness”→
A certain commenter who makes the rounds is product of the age. No depth, no reading, a diet of Google and talk radio. He feigns, as most do, a deep knowledge of “current events,” whatever that means. Terms like “confirmation bias” and “anecdotal evidence” yield a revealing silence.
I’m frustrated today. I’m going to my garage. Thought control is deep and pervasive in this country. Our public dialogue is sometimes fresh and witty, and certainly strident. That it makes no difference, that we are just blowing in the wind … is lost on all.
Liberals (and “progressives”) push for their R-Democrats. Hillary Clinton, for example, is just another Neocon, but these insulated morons will support her over some other Neocon as a better “choice.” The worst part is the arrogance, the presumption of moral superiority. After all, these bastions of deep thought elected a mixed race president. Now they are going to give s a woman!
Right wingers (“conservatives”) push their openly stupid (or incredibly devious) macaroons. Who cannot look at former Texas governor Rick Perry, for instance, or former Texas governor George W. Bush or Ted Cruz (what’s wrong with Texas anyway?), and not see deeply stupid men? If it’s an act, I tip my hat. An interesting phenomenon: Saying they are stupid jacks up their vote tally. Stupid likes stupid, and defends it with vigor.
Some years back a certain very dumb but very pretty actress, I’ll not name her, decided to use her fame to serve public good, and went on a “vote” campaign … “vote, vote vote, exercise your freedom” she told us all on every forum available to her. Vote for what? That was above her pay grade. It was somewhat a relief that certain people who interviewed her, like Letterman, were only mildly amused rather than enthralled.
I am often told that since I don’t vote, I have no role to play in our fake democracy. The idea that we given no choices and cannot rely on the counting system anyway … doesn’t fly. Vote, dammit.
I have long enjoyed Jon Stewart but not taken him seriously. He is a court jester – such people are important in oppressive environments. They serve as a tension relief valve and foster the illusion of free exchange of ideas.
Stewart has always stayed in bounds, pushing the line, but only so far, never really hitting home with a point. He once took it the point of absurdity. He organized the “Rally to Restore Sanity”, a go-nowhere event with no forward motion, no insight, no ground-level organization or purpose. It was just a rock concert for half-baked ideas.
But what the hell – he’s a comedian. In our country, he’s doing more journalism than our journalists can muster. So I have watched him over the years, and will miss his presence on the air.
And I watched last night as he interviewed CIA mole journalist Judith Miller.
Miller was on the front page of the New York Times during the propaganda run-up to the attack on Iraq in March of 2003. Her stories were littered with lies and agitprop. It’s common behavior for people of her ilk and the Times and other major media outlets. When the military-industrial-intelligence complex wants a war, the media falls in line. (To this day, the New York Times has not admitted that the Gulf of Tonkin was a false-flag attack. You’d think that after 51 years they could let a little honest reporting slip through, but no.)
Last night Stewart was confrontational and well-prepared. He had read both her NYT writings and her new book. He did not let her slip off the hook. He did not allow her to insult his intelligence*. He tried to paint a big picture of an administration that was intent on making a war on an innocent country against her bullshit fear-mongering techniques. He held up a photo of a New York Times front page that had Miller’s article opposite a 9/11 tribute.
Maybe he’s feeling freedom, since he’s leaving soon. He cannot be fired. Whatever it is, my hat is off to him. That was a courageous performance.
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*Said Miller, “The intelligence sources we were talking to had never really been wrong before.”
I’ve been trying to come up with a metaphor for Life in These United States, but am not creative enough to do it really well. The TV series Mad Men’s lead character, Don Draper, was raised in a whore house and is running from his true identity. The series is built around the advertising business, and this makes me wonder just how good this Mathew Weiner, the creator of the series, might be. He seems to be a conscious smuggler.
My search for a metaphor circles around the question “just how big is this thing anyway?” Way back when, watching the movie JFK in the early 90’s, Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison hits hard on two words – fascism, and coup d’état. What happened on 11/22/63 was a military takeover of our government. But the words did not sink in.
My best effort at a metaphor follows. Please supply a better one if you got it, pronto.
Imagine you are walking along one day, and trip and fall on a small hole in the ground. You pick yourself up and move on, but later go back and take a closer look. The small hole that you stumbled up is very deep, so deep, in fact, that you cannot see the bottom. You keep going back, as curiosity drives you, till eventually you put your whole body in, and look around and learn that not only is the hole very big, but that there is a whole city functioning down below us, hidden just below the surface of the ground.
I keep stumbling on things, and these are only a few ‘things:’
Anthony Weiner was scandalized out of office after raising a ruckus over health effects of 9/11.
Charlie Sheen doubted the official 9/11 story on a TV show, and lost his job on his hit TV series. Later he woke up in a hotel closet alongside a hooker, covered in cocaine.
Wendy Burlingame, daughter of the pilot of the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon, died in a fire, trapped in an apartment.
But it did not start with 9/11.
Dorothy Kilgallen, TV personality and journalist, interviewed Jack Ruby and swore publicly she would blow the lid off the JFK conspiracy. Drug overdose.
Freddy Prinze was a popular star in the 1970’s, and wanted to do a Hollywood benefit to raise public awareness about the JFK murder. Suicide.
Bill Hicks was an up-and-coming comic who used to make fun of the Warren Commission and offical truth in his act. Galloping cancer, age 32.
Those damned independent thought alarms. We’re taught to ignore them.
I’m slowly reading the book Votescam, written in the early 1990’s, about Florida elections in the early 1970’s, specifically Dade County, where Janet Reno was the State Attorney. The Collier brothers, Ken and Jim, stumbled on an oddity, that local TV stations in Florida “called” all of the elections when all they had in their possession was a readout from one voting machine.
They are persistent. I am at a point now they have learned that in “training” election volunteers, officials got their signatures and later used them to “certify” results without volunteer knowledge. The boys have assembled an impressive pile of evidence, and are taking it to major newspapers and the FBI. That’s a huge mistake, but they are not yet deep enough in the hole to see that. They find that the FBI is indifferent. The media is actually hostile.
The book opened with an odd passage that caught my eye:
This book also contends that the theft of your vote, or Votescam, is part of a supposedly patriotic “collaboration” between federal officials and the news media that began shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, when “responsible” American press was persuaded by American intelligence services to hide from the American people the actual implications of the Kennedy murder.”
Implications of the Kennedy assassination? The two words from that movie come to mind.
It’s not a few. I have seen hundreds of suspicious deaths, and a news media that is either forcefully silenced or peopled by automatons. I see people who use their minds properly silenced by intense ridicule by their peers. I see people with deadened brains imagining that lack of curiosity is a smart thing about them.
I know the power of suggestion. I know the power of group think.
We spent time in Nepal in 2013, right in that area that is close to the epicenter of the earthquake. That is no big deal, of course. Right now, with disaster in chaos everywhere, there are 300,000 tourists there. That we were in a place that is now in a disaster … it just brings it closer to our hearts.
We tried to contact our guides, Pramod and Demar, but of course there is no electricity. Both live in Kathmandu, but odds are this time of year they are out doing their jobs. We can only hope they and their loved ones are survivors.
We caught a bus ride in Kathmandu to Pokhora, where we started our trek through the Annapurna massif. The road was terrible, and every other vehicle was a bus. On the trip we had three flat tires. The passengers, mostly locals, laughed. This is just part of their routine.
Ombry
The people … I tell my wife that we are seeing the “tourist interface,” and the friendliness is part of their need to bring in money. I don’t believe that people are much different anywhere we go. But the smiles register with us, and are are part of our permanent memory.
Kathmandu – we only saw a little of it. Poverty is extreme, roads are dirt, traffic is chaos. Streets are lined with buildings and dark doorways and people sitting minding stores. Plumbing is scant, odors abound. There are no “lanes” on roads and vehicles form clusters, and passing is routine. Cows, sacred in parts of this world, wander the roads. Beggars are common, and we are told to ignore them, as most are paid by entrepreneurs, a form of chattel slavery. The free market works!
We lived mostly without hot showers and with holes in the ground as toilets. I stopped drinking coffee and learned to eat sparsely, having lemon tea and porridge for breakfast, Ramen noodles for lunch and the same for dinner with a slice of bread. It’s really all I needed. I lost five pounds, and felt good.
So now that chaos has had disaster visited on it. What to do to salve our consciences? Life is so good for us, less so for them. The Nepalese government is cash-strapped and not much good most of the time. I don’t trust the Red Cross. I don’t trust the United States or its military to truly want to do anything worthwhile [unless cameras are present]. The Indian government is very good with disasters, highly efficient. I suppose we could send $$$ that way, but it for us to feel good more than anything we could possible do for them. It is not enough.
So we are just like everyone else, watching in dismay and hoping these very tough people can pull together once again and make their lives livable. The smiles are real.
I was going through books yesterday, getting rid of them. Some are a little hard to part with and I hung on to one even as I knew I would not look at it again. Just by coincidence JC posted below that when they “killed” “Osama” they “found” his “last will and testament.” It was probably next to an airline ticket and “confession.” And among “his” books was Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions, an early 90s collection of lectures he gave in Canada.
