Category Archives: conditioning

Podcast Roundup

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A number of podcasts have been released in the past week that are extremely relevant and would be of interest to people across a diverse spectrum of worldviews.

8/29/13: A short but perceptive discussion on Syria from James Evan Pilato and James Corbett posted at MediaMonarchy.com.

8/30/13: An interview by Klint Finley and Chris Dancy with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul on the Mindful Cyborgs podcast.

9/1/13: Modern mystic Neil Kramer shares his unique and uplifting spiritual insights in a conversation with Greg Carlwood and Kyle Prindiville on The Higherside Chats.

9/2/13: The always on-point veteran Panther Larry Pinkney speaks out on Syria and what we can do to affect positive change with host Guillermo Jimenez on Traces of Reality Radio.

9/3/13: Clyde Lewis interviews former intelligence agent and whistleblower Frank G. Ford on Ground Zero.

9/4/13: Henrik Palmgren leads a discussion with independent scholars Joseph Atwill and Ryan Gilmore on the topic of religion as a psychological weapon and its connection to modern war propaganda on Red Ice Radio.

“All Wars Are Based on Deception” – Sun Tzu

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I’ve been thinking of Sun Tzu’s line from “The Art of War” a lot lately because of the blatant lies about Syria currently being pushed by U.S. government officials and the corporate media. The quote is just as true today as it was in ancient China. Another quote that applies to our current situation is “Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.” (Edmund Burke). There’s much truth to that, but it’s only part of the story. I would add that those who profit most from major historical events such as wars and stock market crashes are motivated to recreate the conditions to repeat them. And those who only learn the winner’s version of history and are ignorant of the truth are more likely to be okay with it and let it happen. That’s why I encourage everyone to read an important article by Michael Rivero called “Fake Terror – The Road to War and Dictatorship”. It outlines how lies and deception were used to start wars from 70 BC Rome to America in the 1990s (though the lying has ramped up quite a bit since then) . Even wars we think of as being “good wars” like World War 2 are not exempt, as explained in this excerpt from the article:

Roosevelt needed an enemy, and if America would not willingly attack that enemy, then one would have to be maneuvered into attacking America, much as Marcus Licinius Crassus has maneuvered Spartacus into attacking Rome.

…The first step was to place oil and steel embargoes on Japan, using Japan’s wars on the Asian mainland as a reason. This forced Japan to consider seizing the oil and mineral rich regions in Indonesia. With the European powers militarily exhausted by the war in Europe, the United States was the only power in the Pacific able to stop Japan from invading the Dutch East Indies, and by moving the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Roosevelt made a pre-emptive strike on that fleet the mandatory first step in any Japanese plan to extend its empire into the “southern resource area”.

…To enrage the American people as much as possible, Roosevelt needed the first overt attack by Japan to be as bloody as possible, appearing as a sneak attack much as the Japanese had done to the Russians. From that moment up until the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Roosevelt and his associates made sure that the commanders in Hawaii, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, were kept in the dark as much as possible about the location of the Japanese fleet and its intentions, then later scapegoated for the attack. (Congress recently exonerated both Short and Kimmel, posthumously restoring them to their former ranks).

But as the Army board had concluded at the time, and subsequent de-classified documents confirmed, Washington DC knew the attack was coming, knew exactly where the Japanese fleet was, and knew where it was headed.

On November 29th, Secretary of State Hull showed United Press reporter Joe Leib a message with the time and place of the attack, and the New York Times in its special 12/8/41 Pearl Harbor edition, on page 13, reported that the time and place of the attack had been known in advance!

The much repeated claim that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence on its way to Hawaii was a lie. Among other intercepts still held in the Archives of the NSA is the UNCODED message sent by the Japanese tanker Shirya stating, “proceeding to a position 30.00 N, 154.20 E. Expect to arrive at that point on 3 December.” (near HI)

Read the complete article here: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/index.php

Workers of the World…Relax

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Though written more than 20 years ago, this essay by Bob Black is more relevant today than ever. It is possible to find personally fulfilling and rewarding work that allows for a decent standard of living, but is far too rare and inaccessible for too many people within the current dominant system. From “The Abolition of Work” :

But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who—by any rational-technical criteria – should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as “discipline.” Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic tators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

…Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to the higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

Read the entire essay here: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm

Nationwide Active Shooter Drills

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Via: GlobalResearch.org:

The FBI has teamed up with an existing active-shooter training program —Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) — begun in Texas after the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and funded in part by the US Department of Justice. The FBI sent roughly 100 tactical instructors to ALERRT training and then placed them throughout the US to oversee mock terror exercises with local law enforcement agencies.

…Since these exercises are designed to be as realistic as possible, students, school personnel and the broader public may be unsuspectingly caught up in the contrived terror, unable distinguish whether the “actors” alongside the accompanying gunfire and explosions are real or fake. This important facet is left up to the relevant agencies to explain to the press.

Further, such events are purportedly carried out to ensure civilians’ “safety” while sharpening police officers’ skills in “real life” environments. Yet local communities and the families of frightened children might wonder why military training-style maneuvers have to be carried out with their loved ones as props, especially in light of the fact that the entire program is based on an event the public still has only limited information about.

Read the full story at :http://www.globalresearch.ca/nationwide-post-sandy-hook-terror-drills/5346612

Such “mock terror excercises” carried out in the name of “safety” and “preparedness” also serve as conditioning for increased militarization of society and is terrorism in the literal sense of the word (the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims). It wouldn’t be surprising if kids victimized in the drills suffer some form of combat shock, but that’s not a problem for authorities and pharmaceutical companies who’ll gladly hook them on SSRI drugs.

Perhaps if government was less power hungry and violent it wouldn’t have to waste valuable resources on wars, weapons, SWAT teams, prisons, active shooter drills, etc. Antoinette Tuff recently demonstrated how potentially dangerous situations can be effectively diffused non-violently. If corporations were less driven by the bottom line there would be more ethical considerations regarding the physical, mental and economic health of all citizens. This is relevant to food, mass media, education, and medicine (especially in light of correlations between SRRI use and violent behavior). With a more ethical banking system that didn’t profit from bubbles, crashes and bailouts, there would be more opportunities for fulfilling work, affordable housing and better social services which could also prevent people from cracking.

Not surprisingly, those who profit most from the current system would rather keep the status quo despite increasing problems while providing authoritarian solutions that benefit them even more.