Category Archives: media

Saturday Matinee: The Color of Life

Posted on by
Reply

vermillion_011

“The Color of Life” (2002) is a feature-length compilation of some of the oddest of the many odd moments from cult Japanese late night comedy/variety program “Vermilion Pleasure Night”. Recurring skits featured on the show include NSFW English language and cooking educational programs, an alien trapped on a starship resembling a Japanese studio apartment and antics of families of zombies, mannequins and human Barbie dolls. Interspersed through the film and television episodes are surrealistic musical and/or animated segments.

For English subtitles, click on the “cc” button near the bottom right corner of the video window.

Why Independent 9/11 Research and Education Still Matters

Posted on by
2

Editor’s note: This is a revised article from last year followed by recent podcasts and videos on the topic.

One of the ways corrupt people and institutions retain power is by discouraging criticism and discussions that could lead to organized opposition. A classic tactic is to vilify targets as unpatriotic, disloyal, traitorous, heretical, dangerous, crazy, etc. Think about what happened to critics of capitalism during the peak of the cold-war hysteria. George Orwell’s 1984 depicted how governments could also manipulate language, history, media and other information in order to diminish critical thought (which leads to critical speech and organizing) and to control thought. The creation of a Big Brother-style police/surveillance state is another way to create a climate of fear and foster a culture which discourages the sharing of knowledge about certain topics and prevents people from taking action.

This should be kept in mind when discussing 9/11, because those who still have complete faith in government and corporate media (an increasingly shrinking number), have been conditioned to ignore, deny or dismiss any information that would lead them to question the official story. The most common knee-jerk reaction is to defend the official story by labeling all alternative narratives “conspiracy theory”. Though this argument is not as convincing today, when political scandals and crimes are almost a daily occurrence, the association between “conspiracy theories” and negative terms such as “crazy” and “wacko” are deeply ingrained in the culture, and not by accident.

The term “conspiracy theory” was not used as an ad hominem attack until shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Documented evidence shows the CIA needed to develop new and more effective ways to attack and discredit those who dared to question the Warren Commission Report. So when one counters questions about the official narrative with “That’s just a crazy conspiracy theory” they’re actually using a psy-op attack developed by and for a conspiracy. Because of experience and greater proliferation of information through the internet, fewer people are naive enough to deny extremely wealthy and powerful people would conspire to protect their position and interests. History and hard evidence shows it would be crazier to suppose that they don’t.

Another common argument is “The government is too incompetent to pull off something of that scale and keep it a secret”. It’s true that aspects of the government are incompetent, but the incompetence is generally limited to things they care little about such as medical and educational systems, the food system, domestic infrastructure, safety, financial regulation, disaster relief, fair elections, etc. When it comes to things they prioritize such as wars, bailouts, black budgets, black ops, cronyism, crowd control, surveillance, propaganda, etc., the US government is extremely effective. And the higher up the hierarchy, the easier it is to keep secrets. All it takes is a relatively small number of people in key positions, and through division of labor, compartmentalization, formation of policies conducive to conspiring, and covert actions and communications protected under the cloak of “national security” (with help from a mass culture of conformity, credulity and fear). One should also keep in mind that governments are not monolithic and are comprised of factions with conflicting interests which can be used, manipulated and/or compromised by players involved in the conspiracy (not just within U.S. government but in foreign governments and the private sector as well).

Some simply can’t accept that individuals and factions within U.S. government could intentionally cause an attack such as 9/11 or let it happen. This speaks to the power of corporate media and establishment propaganda on different levels. It shows how a significant majority of Americans can be kept completely ignorant of decades of violent imperialist policy around the world and how false flags have been used to start wars through history. There’s also a long history of state violence against its own people and on American soil going back to the genocide of Native Americans, murders of countless slaves and people of color, multiple massacres of labor activists, assassination of leaders such as JFK, RFK, MLK, Black Panthers, and MOVE, the 93 WTC bombing, WACO, OK City bombing, etc. There’s also ample documentation proving the US government has at least considered actions not dissimilar to 9/11 such as Operation Northwoods and Project for a New American Century. What this argument presupposes is that powerful and wealthy (mostly) white men are inherently more trustworthy, empathetic, and righteous than “Muslim fanatics” or any other “enemy” most Americans have been conditioned to fear and hate.

Other attacks against independent 9/11 researchers include dismissals like “9/11 is no longer relevant” and/or “there’s more important problems to deal with so we need to move on”. I would argue that when such crimes occur that have harmed and killed vast numbers of people and is responsible for countless casualties and elimination of civil liberties more than a decade after due to policies supposedly justified by the event, we have a moral obligation to uncover who did it and why. There’s no peace without justice and no justice as long as the truth behind such nation-changing crimes remains suppressed. Of course there’s always plenty of immediate and equally important issues to address, but those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. More specifically, those who benefit most from historical events such as 9/11 are motivated to repeat it while those who only know a distorted version of history while remaining ignorant of the truth are more likely to let it happen again.

Because of the work of “conspiracy theorists” we are now more aware of the scope of government/corporate criminality and connections between government, wall street, war-profiteers, and the criminal underworld. For example, without the work of independent JFK researchers we wouldn’t be aware of Operation Northwoods which many now view as a false flag template used for 9/11. Gaining a better understanding of how and why 9/11 happened helps us put current geopolitical events in context while providing insight into how such operations work and how they can be counteracted.

There’s also the “straw man” argument which creates the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing an argument with a superficially similar yet non-equivalent proposition and refuting it without ever having refuted the original position. This is particularly easy to do with complex high profile incidents such as 9/11 and the JFK assassination, where there can be a wide array of theories and speculation due to the complexity of the narrative, widespread interest, deep secrecy and disinformation or misinformation from “useful idiots” and/or those who would benefit from keeping crucial information hidden.

Discussing controversial subjects is never easy but it’s always rewarding when people turn out to be more receptive and thoughtful than one might suspect. Though corporate media does its best to defend the official stories, more people than ever are waking up. On this 9/11 anniversary with the potential for another war on the horizon, it’s as good a day as any to talk about it, share this information and help others wake up.

9/11/14 Update:

On the 9/3/14 episode of “Guns and Butter” Tod Fletcher uses a contextual approach to analyzing events at the Pentagon, explores origins and elements of the hijacker story (ie. telephone calls from the planes, analysis of eyewitness reports, physical debris, photo/video evidence, black boxes and FBI involvement) and investigates means, motive and opportunity.


audio http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20140903-Wed1300.mp3

This episode was followed by the 9/10/14 Guns and Butter: “9/11 and the Politics of Deception” with Christopher Bollyn.


http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20140910-Wed1300.mp3

Project Censored 9/8/14: With the anniversary of the September 11 attacks at hand, Peter and Mickey speak with Ken Jenkins, organizers of the annual 911 Film Festival in Oakland, California, about questions that still linger 13 years after the attacks. Then Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee talks about the scope and implications of the ongoing federal surveillance activities against Americans, and how to resist them. The program concludes with Robbie Martin of Media Roots, speaking about his new documentary “American Anthrax.”

https://s3.amazonaws.com/Pcradiodos/Project+Censored+090514.mp3

9/11: The Mother of All Big Lies by Stephen Lendman

9/11 Truth, Inner Consciousness, and the Public Mind by James Tracy

Thirteen Years After the September 11 Attacks, Blindness Persists by Thierry Meyssan

Into the black hole: an interview with comics author Grant Morrison

Posted on by
Reply

index

‘Annihilator,’ antiheroes, and the creation of modern myths

By Adi Robertson

Source: The Verge

More than almost anyone, Grant Morrison has plumbed the weirdness that lies at the heart of comics. Since the 1980s, he’s helped redefine the superhero genre, producing surreal, fourth-wall-breaking titles like Animal Man and Doom Patrol, as well as popular iterations of Batman and Superman and the DC Universe-wide Final Crisis storyline. The Invisibles, one of his best-known works, slowly unfurled from a straightforward story about a team of countercultural rebels into a mind-bending deconstruction of reality itself. His nonfiction book Supergods analyzed superheroes as mythological archetypes that we create and rework to express the basic elements of being human.

Morrison’s career is too long to neatly summarize, but one of its central themes is the highly permeable boundary between fiction and reality. His upcoming six-issue series, Annihilator, is no exception. Drawn by artist Frazer Irving, it’s about a screenwriter named Ray Spass struggling to write a sci-fi blockbuster about a rebel named Max Nomax, who has been exiled to the penumbra of a black hole for committing “the ultimate crime.” Soon, he’s writing not for a studio but for Nomax himself, who is simultaneously a fictional character, the ur-template for Byronic antiheroes throughout history, and a real man who gives Ray seven days to write him a past.

Devil deals and black-hole prisons notwithstanding, Annihilator doesn’t have the otherworldly trippiness of some of Morrison’s best-known work. In some places, it’s a take that to Hollywood banality; in others, it’s an attempt to distill fictional characters down to their most basic essence. With the first issue out tomorrow, we talked to Morrison about myth-making, originality, and the dark undercurrents of modern fiction.

Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Annihilator feels less packed with surreality than some of the things that I remember you for. It seems more traditionally designed and plotted.

You’re absolutely right. It was deliberately designed to seem more like a Hollywood thing, and that’s why it was the perfect project for Legendary, who are a Hollywood movie studio. So when they came to me and we talked about doing comics with Bob Schreck and Thomas Tull, this was the idea I thought was most appropriate for Legendary, because it was about filmmaking, it was about Hollywood, it was about the movies. So yeah, I mean, it’s a lot more real than some of the stuff that I write. But also it, as you’ll see, it goes into pretty bizarre areas. But I find that the mundane and the fantastic are pretty closely linked anyway, so I kind of enjoy doing both.

Ray Spass reminds me a little of the Stephen King prototype, the down-and-out writer.

The thing about Ray is that he’s not entirely down and out, he obviously has a little bit of money because he buys quite a nice house at the beginning of the book. But I think morally he’s down and out, and creatively he’s down and out. But he was based very much on a bunch of different people that I actually met in Los Angeles and found quite fascinating. People who’d live and work in Los Angeles on a pretty regular basis. So I was kind of basing it on my observations of people in the town.

You’ve talked about how Annihilator is sort of all about Los Angeles.

Absolutely. As I’ve said, obviously you start to cover similar ground, but I find the place fascinating. I’ve got a house there, and I’ve spent a lot of time there and I have a lot of friends there, and while there’s a certain softness and glamor and glitter to Los Angeles, I think what’s really interesting is what’s underneath. It’s a very dark place, and it has connections to this strange occult stuff, the whole Church of Satan and Anton LaVey, which I’ve mentioned before, or the Jack Parsons Jet Lab connection, or the Manson family, of the Doors and the Snake and the underground caverns that they used to talk about. And I think it’s got a very strange undercurrent that I find quite fascinating, because it’s completely at odds with the way most people think of Hollywood, probably.

And it’s a town of devil deals, it’s a town of people selling their souls for fame or success or money, so I think it’s got a very strange atmosphere. I tried to capture that, with Frazer [Irvine’s] help, in Annihilator.

It’s an incredibly dark comic.

At the same time, hopefully what we tried to do with it was make it funny, because I think if you’re trying to confront the dark in that sense, I think it has to at least be leavened with humanity’s great gift, which is a sense of humor. So hopefully it’ll at least give you a few laughs as well.

There were a couple of bits that were really fantastic. I loved the “cure for death” page, because it totally captured something being fantastic and then going to the next page and saying, “Wow, that’s also really overwrought and dramatic. But still great.”

That was like, the period at the end of that sentence, which sounded so full of bravado, and then you turn the page and have the sense of everything as a vast, black hole that doesn’t go away.

How do you approach creating an archetype like Max Nomax, compared to just using an actual existing character? You’re reinterpreting both, but how do you deal with them differently?

I was trying to do Ray Spass as a contemporary screenwriter who’s working in Hollywood right now,

and right now, Hollywood, as you know, is pretty obsessed with superheroic characters or, as you see, pretty archetypal characters. It’s easy to understand what Batman represents, for instance. So I was, I wanted to show that he was doing that kind of movie, that he was trying to create a hero for the 21st century, in these fraught and fretful times we live in.

So then I got to thinking about characters like Batman, and Hamlet, and that kind of high-cheekboned, Byronic, antihero character that’s kind of haunted all of our literature and so many of our movies and books and TV shows, and it was really just about going back. Because ultimately I thought that all tracks back to Milton’s Satan to be honest. So I kind of was telling a story about a devil, through the medium of science fiction. And I think the character came to me through these different angles, and then I thought about the different portrayals of that character in popular culture, so we connected them to Fantomas, you know, the early 20th-century surrealist hero who was kind of a pulp fiction character, or to characters like Diabolik from the 1970s Italian comic books, or Criminale, who was another, a character who dressed in a skull suit and went around robbing people and shooting things.

They were very dark antiheroes, and I was kind of trying to track the lineage of those guys right back to the original, and build up Nomax from basically Milton’s Satan via lots of these other portrayals of the ultimate rebel antihero poet dissident character that we’ve been haunted by.

What’s the difference to you between something like this, an archetype of something classic, and just a cliche?

Who knows? I think it just depends on how you deploy them. Perhaps it can easily shift into cliché — I mean, as long as I don’t feel it’s a cliché, then I’m fine with it. But I think if other people start to see that, then yeah, obviously it becomes embarrassing. So hopefully Nomax won’t be a cliché. We’ve tried to give him a personality that’s pretty strong and pretty direct, and again quite funny; he’s got a certain take on things. So I think the only way to do it is to be aware of its origins, and kind of the ubiquity of these figures, but at the same time give them enough personality that… Max Nomax is very different from the other iterations of the dark man I’ve mentioned, so hopefully he has his own personality as well.

The female characters that I’ve seen so far tend to be love interests and prostitutes. I’m wondering if that’s something that’s going to change?

It’s actually about that; there’s a character who comes in in Issue 3 who’s really central to the entire thing, and it’s kind of about the attitude of men to women in Hollywood. Again it’s something that you’ll see unfold, but actually part of the story is about the way men treat women. About how the screen treats women.

How do you do that without just replicating it? How do you depict that without it just being another part of Hollywood — talking about how men treat women but just treating them the same way?

By making the character strong, and by giving her things to do, which aren’t necessarily the traditional things that happen in stories like these. And that’s honestly what it’s all about, as you’ll see, I think. The female character who enters this story is very important to how it plays out.

Do you think these themes and myths are all something that are already set, and we’re just going back to a monomyth? Or are we still developing new archetypes, and new myths, and new ideas?

I honestly.. from having observed it, I think we keep going back to what are basically six human default personalities. We have these different characters: there’s the comedian, there’s the lover, there’s the stern judge, there’s the critic… I think people have always developed gods and ideas like that around these basic default states of the actual human personality. I think it’s just part of how we’re made up. It’s almost like the periodic table of being human. And I think no matter how modern these characters look, I’m not entirely convinced…

I think certain things like the atom bomb created a new archetype, and we saw how that appeared in fiction, and in pop culture. So yeah, there’s probably the potential for new technologies and new ideas to create their own archetypes, but I honestly think the human personality hasn’t changed much over our entire span of time. I know I live in the 21st century, so I have no idea what people felt like in the 1300s!

But that’s kind of my take on it, right or wrong, I kind of think we do go back to the same well often, because I think these are the characteristics we recognize in ourselves and others as being kind of universal.

Are there types that you wish you’d been able to write so far that you haven’t? Or that you’re interested in?

I guess as a writer you’re often drawn to characters like Nomax the rebel, because a lot of writers like to self-imagine themselves as rebels against society when in fact most of the time we’re just part of society. I’ve kind of tried to write about characters that I felt at least some connection with, but I think through my life I’ve always written about people who are slightly at right angles to society, and maybe that’s just… maybe I need to write more about kings and queens and dukes.

You were talking about Annihilator and darkness and this being a place that we are culturally right now. Do you think there’s something that follows that, something that we’re going to be moving into?

It’s hard to say, because we seem to be very enamored by darkness. Things just keep coming out like True Detective, which came out earlier in the year and was really talking about darkness and nihilism, and that obviously was inspired by a lot of the same books I read when I was working on Annihilator. But that was a great show and it really seemed timely and important and modern. I think whether it’s created by the media — because really as we know, most people are living better lives now than they have at any time in history, most people are safer, especially in the Western world, the child mortality rate has gone down, the chance of dying has lessened — so we actually live in a much better world, but our entertainment seems really very interested in the dark areas of experience. It goes all the way from the zombies to the obsession with war and violence that we have. I don’t know if it’s just because we’re so comfortable we can afford to play with these things, or if there is just something wrong with humanity.

Besides True Detective, what are you looking at right now in terms of contemporary artists, authors, etc.?

Not an awful lot of stuff. I tend to just lock myself away and work. But again a lot of stuff kind of relates to what I’m doing. I picked up a book quite recently called Luminarium by Alex Shakar, an author, and it just seemed to be talking about the same stuff that I’m talking about in Annihilator. It’s all about the abyss at the center of our lives that we try to forget about and we make stories about and we orbit around. So I’m just… I’ve been reading a lot of that, and then nihilism, like Raymond Brassier, the nihilist philosopher, and Thomas Ligotti, because I really wanted to get down into the dark areas of human experience.

If it doesn’t sound too grandiose, what kind of stuff do you think people are going to be mining your work for, and everybody else’s work for, in 40 years? The way that we’re looking back at things from the mid-20th century and reinterpreting them?

I don’t know. I think honestly it will just be more Batman. I think a lot of us will be forgotten in 40 years. I really don’t expect — my work is talking about the world I’m in, with the people that I live in the world with right now, so I never think about the future. I honestly think I’ll be forgotten in two generations, and what will be there is Sherlock Holmes and all the stuff that we’re kind of fascinated with, unless people break out of their nervous fear of the future and start to innovate again. Right now it seems like everybody’d kind of rather look backwards than forwards, because forwards seems a bit scary.

Mind control: Orwell, Huxley, and today’s reality

Posted on by
4

orwell-huxley

We are able to see the architecture – the structural patterns – of each kind of mind-control regime. This can help us recognize precursors – signs that such a future is coming our way.

by Richard K. Moore

Source: News Beacon Ireland

Dystopian predictions

In 1984, George Orwell paints a picture of a dark, gray world. People are afraid to say anything contrary to the official party line, and surveillance is universal. Even thinking contrary to the party is a crime, and thoughtcrimes may be treated by radical psychological intervention. Information is closely controlled by the party media, and the historical record is routinely edited, so as to conform to the latest party statements.

By contrast, in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a colorful, superficially pleasant world. Personal freedom of all kinds is encouraged, even to the point of being a cultural imperative. In the book a young boy is referred to a therapist, because he doesn’t want to play sex games with a girl classmate. An adult character is considered aberrant, because he is drawn toward a monogamous relationship. Drugs and distractions are readily available for mood enhancement.

Central to Huxley’s world is the abolition of the family. Sex never results in pregnancy, and embryos are grown in a production process, based on selected seed material. As part of the production process, an embryo can be fed or starved, at various stages of its development, so as to create classes of people (alphas, betas, etc) with differing levels of intelligence and skills. Quotas are set, regarding how many people of each class are going to be needed, and should therefore be produced.

Various kinds of conditioning are then used on infants in order to get them to accept their class, along with its prerogatives and restrictions, as being best for them. Children are raised on a communal basis, with no concept of parents, siblings, or family. From embryo to adulthood, the state has fine-tuned control over the development of the person, and of their thinking. In the resulting society, people behave as they were programmed to behave, and can’t imagine things being any different.

In Orwell’s world, wrong-thought (thoughtcrime) is detected and suppressed. In Huxley’s world, wrong-thought is unlikely to arise. Orwell’s world suppresses the individual; Huxley’s world manufactures the individual. In both cases, mind control – control over what people are able to think – is the strategy of the regime, as its means of social control generally. Orwell explores a brute-force approach to mind control, while Huxley explores a scientific approach.

The novels are useful because they each take one of these basic approaches to mind control, and follow its consequences to the end. If you really want to suppress what people think, you’d need to do A, B, and C. If you really want to program people, you’ve got to start when they’re born and do X, Y, and Z. We are able to see the architecture – the structural patterns – of each kind of mind-control regime. This can help us recognize precursors – signs that such a future is coming our way.

Echoes of Orwell

Consider the world of mainstream journalists, in particular TV news anchors. There we have a world with echoes of 1984, where what is said must conform to the party line. Any thoughtcrime – such as an anchor commenting onscreen that he doesn’t buy the official story of 9/11, or he thinks Russia isn’t an aggressor – would be quickly punished by the equivalent of death – expulsion from the world of journalism.

Thus is maintained the Matrix, the story we are told about US benevolence, the existence of democracy, the sacredness of market forces, and all the rest. With control of major media in just a few hands, the party line can be always maintained, and current (or past) events can be interpreted within that framework. To do otherwise, for a news anchor, would be literally unthinkable. Huxley’s Ministry of Truth is at work in our world, but it is invisible, hiding away in the boardrooms of media conglomerates, and behind the doors of the White House press office.

The same kind thoughtcrime regime is operating in other arenas as well, where socially-sensitive topics are concerned. The peer-review process, and the editorial boards of the relevant journals, ensure that thoughtcrimes are suppressed, when it comes to concerns regarding genetic manipulation, pesticides, fracking, pharmaceuticals, radiation levels, etc. Again, the Ministry of Truth is invisible, residing high up in the chain of corporate boardrooms.

Even though our society doesn’t resemble Orwell’s dystopia, his mind control methods are operating in very critical places, where the population’s ‘information’ is generated. And of course we do have universal surveillance, courtesy of the NSA, omnipresent CATV cameras, and cell-phone tracking. Big Brother is with us, but he stays behind the scenes, he sees all, and he decides what stories we will be told about the world by the mainstream media.

Echoes of Huxley

Huxley wrote a review of 1984, where he talked about the two different future visions. He suggested that we might go through some kind of dark period, reminiscent of 1984, but he thinks such a regime would be unstable and transitional. He goes on to say that the scientific approach to mind control, based on programming people’s belief systems, would be the more sensible choice for a modern totalitarian society.

US Government research into scientific mind control began at least in the 1960’s, and has been ongoing. The first approach – the CIA’s Operation Mind Control – was heavy handed, reminiscent of 1984. This research involved giving people psychotropic drugs, along with post-hypnotic suggestions. Quite a bit could be (and has been) accomplished with these kinds of methods, along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate, but it didn’t provide a general solution: two much work was required to program people on an individual basis.

Research then shifted to cult creation. If people can be herded into cults of various kinds, cult dynamics themselves would serve the programming function. This provides a more wholesale approach to mind control, than the individual methods tried earlier. The CIA has never publicly claimed credit for this later research, but the experiments were very successful, including Reverend Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, and David Koresh and Waco.

In this kind of research, the first step is to identify a natural cult leader, who has already shown some success in gathering followers. Then the cult is given support of various kinds. Covert agents are sent in to join the cult, not only to observe and report, but also to provide organizational skills. Funds are channeled to the cult, and local police are warned off, so that the cult can grow unhampered.

In this way, researchers have been able to study how a skilled cult leader operates, how people are drawn into a cult, how loyalty is maintained, and how people can be pushed into extreme beliefs and actions. When everything had been learned that could be learned from a cult, the cult’s leader and members were then killed, so as to hide the evidence of what had really been going on in the experiment.

Cults and their uses

One of the first large-scale deployments of cult technology, informed by this research, was the creation of the Jihad movement by the CIA. The immediate purpose was to destabilize the Soviet regime, by tying it down in a quagmire in Afghanistan. This operation was quite successful. Since then, the Jihad cult movement – aka Taliban, Al Qaeda, Kosovo Liberation Army, ISIS, etc. – has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the purpose of destabilizing regimes, in pursuit of US geopolitical objectives. These destabilization operations in turn provide an excuse for direct US intervention, as we’ve seen recently in Libya and Iraq, and as we may soon see in Syria.

Cults generally have certain characteristics. There is usually a charismatic leader, who is able to inspire belief and loyalty in cult members. There is always a defining core belief system, that sets cult members off from outsiders, and which provides a strong sense of identity and purpose for members. There is typically an alleged ‘outside threat’ to the cult, which draws members together. There are actions and sacrifices required of members, which serve to bind them more tightly to the cult.  There are packaged arguments, that cult members are taught to employ, to repel attempts undermine the core belief system. These programming methods are very powerful, and typically intense deprogramming is needed to ply members away from a cult, once they have been thoroughly indoctrinated.

The society described in Brave New World is in fact a cult-based society. Each of the classes (alpha, beta, etc.) is a cult, and the programming begins at birth. No charismatic leader is needed, when so much control over programming is available. Each cult has its own core belief system, along with packaged arguments to maintain those beliefs. The required actions and sacrifices are simply the lifestyle which has been designed for each class. Such a society would tend to be stable, particularly since deprogramming efforts would be absent from the scene.

It is notable that Huxley’s world is not about a single cult, a uniform society, but rather about multiple cults. This makes for greater stability. Cult members have not only a model of what-to-be, they also have models of what-not-to-be. Each cult is more clearly defined, and drawn more into itself, by the existence of other cults. Being glad you’re not a beta is one of the reasons to be glad you are an alpha.

We see this same multi-cult dynamic operating in the US, in the divisiveness between liberals and conservatives. Liberals are kept in the fold by stories of conservative folly, and conservatives are kept in the fold by stories of liberal folly. In a propaganda-only system of control, there would be one party line for everyone. In this multi-cult system, there are two party lines, which we might characterize as CNN vs. FOX.

While the two party lines have many differences, in order to keep the two cults separated, they in fact share basic essentials in common. They both sustain the myth that state policy is a response to public sentiment, and they blame the other cult for providing support for the ‘bad’ policies. In fact US policy is made outside of government, by financial elites, and the state aims to control public sentiment, not respond to it. In this way we can see CNN and FOX as collaborators, sharing the common goal of hiding this fundamental truth from the people. The Democratic and Republican parties collaborate toward this same goal, using Congress as a stage, where they carry on a theater of divisiveness, providing the appearance of a democratic decision-making process.

The Barack Obama phenomenon provides an excellent example of cult tactics in action. Obama himself is obviously a natural cult leader, articulate and charismatic. He came onto the scene offering an inspiring core belief in deep reform, “The ground of politics has changed; Yes we Can!”. The dramatic effect was intense, as if we were witnessing the Second Coming. Campaign volunteers became the core of the budding Obama cult, and they were given lots of work to do, binding their identity to Obama and his professed mission. The McCain campaign was orchestrated to look like a dangerous threat by a rival cult, binding Obama supporters even more tightly.

The success of this mind-control operation was truly amazing. Obama in fact proceeded to carry on and expand everything Bush had been doing; the ground of politics hadn’t changed at all. But the cult binding was so strong that his support continued, by the very people who had hated Bush because of the same policies. Packaged arguments were put forward, to keep people in the cult, blaming Obama’s performance on Republican opposition – the standard divisiveness tactic. Even today there remain legions of Obama loyalists. Once bound to a cult, leaving becomes psychologically difficult.

Another example of mind control by means of cults is provided by global-warming hysteria. Al Gore played the role, at least temporarily, of cult leader, when he presented the core belief in CO2-caused climate crisis in his scientifically fraudulent, but very popular film,  An Inconvenient Truth. The growth of the cult was ensured by the fact that it then became a thoughtcrime in mainstream media and climate journals to question these core beliefs. Cult members are given things to do and sacrifices to make, like riding a bicycle and buying a Prius. They are given a packaged argument, that contrary views are nothing but the propaganda of an outside-threat: the evil petroleum industry.

This kind of mind control operation is much more effective than propaganda on its own. It’s not just that cult members believe in CO2-caused climate crisis, they believe they are fighting a battle against an enemy. They have been fully immunized against counter arguments to their core beliefs, and their only concern is to ‘save the planet’ by supporting anything that looks like it will reduce carbon emissions. Thus they are being led willingly down the garden path to a micro-managed society, as outlined in Agenda 21.

The ‘conspiracy theory’ meme

State control of public schools and mainstream media goes a long way towards programming people’s minds. But it is not enough, particularly in the era of the Internet. There are many sources available that thoroughly debunk mainstream propaganda, and by using those sources a large number of people have escaped, at least in part, from the mind-control regime. In Orwell’s world, the Internet would be banned. In our world, which is developing more along Huxley’s lines, other ways have been found to limit the ability of the Internet to undermine the mainstream narratives.

The ‘conspiracy theory’ meme was launched by the CIA in the wake of the JFK assassination. The official story was so full of holes that more and more people were beginning to doubt it. While the Warren Commission was busy writing its cover-up document, the public began to learn about the existence of ‘conspiracy theorists’. These are people, the story goes, who suffer from paranoid delusions, and sane people should pay no attention to anything they say. If someone even looks at any of those ideas, their own mental stability comes into question.

This mind-control tactic was very effective in marginalizing research into the truth behind the JFK assassination. Anyone who presented evidence contrary to the official story was automatically seen as ‘conspiracy theorist’. By scoffing at such evidence, without looking at it, you could demonstrate that you were mentally balanced. Thus logic and reasoning are banished from the scenario. Either you believe the official story, or your mental health is called into question.

Since then, the conspiracy-theory meme has been carefully nurtured and expanded by the mainstream party lines. This mind-control campaign has been very successful in immunizing the majority of the population against the revelations available on the Internet. Any story not appearing in the mainstream media must by definition be a conspiracy theory, and anything that sounds like a conspiracy theory should be scoffed at and ignored.

Thus for the majority of the population we have a tightly controlled, two-tier, mind-control regime. The thoughtcrime dynamic governs what the media says, and the conspiracy-theory dynamic immunizes people against other views. For the majority, the party line (either CNN or FOX) is ‘truth’, as in Orwell’s world, but without the need for Big Brother’s extreme methods.

By these mind-control methods, a bubble has been created, in which the majority does their thinking. Inside the bubble are the two party-line narratives, and outside the bubble the real world proceeds, invisible to those inside the bubble. It’s a very effective system. The more outrageous the real actions of the state, the more quickly the majority rejects revelations of those actions, as being outrageous conspiracy theories.

In some cases the FOX party line includes accurate revelations which would be thoughtcrimes in the CNN world. In such cases, the CNN world responds by classifying those revelations as  ‘right wing’ conspiracy theories. Unlike a propaganda-only system, where state crimes are always hidden, this multi-cult system enables the state to document its own crimes on conservative media, and know that the information will be disbelieved by the liberal cult. This system allows the truth to be hidden from some, through the act of revealing it to others. Very clever.

Mind control outside the bubble

While the majority may be inside the bubble, there is a large and growing number of people who don’t have faith in any mainstream party line, and who are open to considering the various ideas they find from Internet sources. The phrase ‘waking up’ is frequently used to describe the process of escaping from the bubble. More and more people are ‘waking up’ to the reality of false-flag events, routine government lies, the deep corruption of politics and the media, and the sociopathic central bankers who exercise the reins of power from behind the scenes.

However, the Internet is not being ignored by the state, and mind-control operations are underway there as well – designed for those who have ‘woken up’. Such operations are not aimed at moving people back into the bubble, rather they embrace the ‘awake’ ideas, aikido style, and then seek to direct the energy of the ‘awoken’ in ways that serve the state and its objectives.

An example of one of these outside-the-bubble mind-control operations, of the cult variety, is provided by the Zeitgeist Movement – which claims to be the “largest grassroots movement in the world with chapters in over 60 countries”. Peter Joseph is the charismatic leader of this cult, and he offers his set of core beliefs, backed up by persuasive evidence and arguments, in Zeitgeist: The Movie.

For those who are ‘awake’, the film is very powerful. It presents the essential truths about the world, without pulling punches, in a dramatic and compelling way. The film has gone through several versions over time, and the very first version went viral on the Internet as soon as it was released. To the ‘awoken’, it was a film of liberation, with the potential to wake everyone up and transform the world.

After the film was released, and after it gained a massive and enthusiastic audience, the Zeitgeist Movement was launched. Fans of the film flocked to join the movement, eager to ‘spread the gospel of truth’, and help ‘wake up the world’. They were joining an urgently-needed messianic cause, and this bound them to the movement, in the way cults always bind members. Peter Joseph was seen as a prophet figure, the articulator of the gospel, and the one who could lead the way to liberation – and this is more or less the textbook definition of a cult leader.

What these eager cult members fail to realize is that the very thing that attracts them to the movement also guarantees that the movement could never succeed in ‘waking up the world’. The core beliefs that are so liberating to the members are all seen as outrageous conspiracy theories inside the mainstream bubble. While members think they are pursuing a messianic cause, they are in fact a choir singing to itself, with Peter Joseph setting the tune.

The real purpose behind the cult is revealed in a press release on the movement website, entitled, ‘The Zeitgeist Movement defined: realizing a new train of thought’. Here Joseph expands the gospel, going beyond ‘revealing the truth’, and venturing into envisioning the transformed world that the movement aims to help create. Here are three key points from Prophet Joseph’s vision, with emphasis added:

2): The Scientific Worldview: The essay explores how the development of the scientific method has altered human perception and the critical importance of its recognition and larger order application, specifically with respect to the social system.
(5): The Case for Human Unity: This essay explores the reasoning for a unified global society along with tracing the source of national divisions and propensities for conflict. A relevant point is made regarding the advancement of technological warfare and how the dangers of keeping biased economic boundaries as we have could lead to rapid destruction as time moves forward.
(9): Market Efficiency vs Technical Efficiency: This essay argues the difference between true scientific (or technical) efficiency and the business practice of “market efficiency,” showing how the latter actually works against true economic optimization.

This is a prescription for a micro-managed global technocracy, under the control of a one-world government. Both the social system and the economic system are to be ‘scientifically optimized’ – which in fact means a world organized along whatever lines are set down by some technocratic bureaucracy, under the control of an enthroned global elite. In other words, Prophet Joseph is creating an enthusiastic constituency in support of the central bankers’ long-desired New World Order.

The Zeitgeist cult is an aikido masterstroke. It begins with the revelation that ‘evil bankers’ run the world, blending with the energy of the ‘awoken’, and then shifts that energy in a direction that serves the interests of those same ‘evil bankers’. Again, I must say very clever, very clever indeed.

Zeitgeist is only one example of a mind-control operation aimed at those who have achieved one degree or another of ‘awakening’. Numerous movements have been created, characterized by well-designed websites that tell some version of the truth, drawing in audiences with some specific focus of concerns, and which lead those audiences into useless or counter-productive activities.

In Huxley’s world, we see a scientifically designed society, tightly controlled by a full-spectrum mind-control regime, based on conditioning and cult dynamics. In today’s world, we see cult dynamics being used in a variety of mind-control operations, with cults customized for various constituencies both inside and outside the mainstream bubble. Huxley’s world has achieved stabilization by such means; in our world those means are being used to facilitate a transition – to a brave new world order that is likely to resemble Huxley’s in many of its essential features.

The demise of the family?

If the state can achieve full control over the raising of children, without parental interference, then quite obviously that would give the state the power to achieve a full-spectrum mind-control regime. Not only could the state design the society’s culture, it could tune that culture over time, by updating the conditioning process. If full-spectrum mind-control is the goal, then eliminating the family becomes a primary intermediate objective.

If eliminating the family is indeed an objective of the New World Order project, then it is by no means an easy objective to achieve. One would be hard-pressed to imagine an institution that would be more fiercely defended than the family, or to imagine a more painful experience than being separated from ones children or parents. Any campaign to achieve that objective would need to fly under false colors, not advertised as a campaign to eliminate the family, but rather as a campaign aimed at protecting the rights and welfare of the child.

It is in this light, I suggest, that we consider the many revelations that have emerged in recent years regarding child sexual abuse, and the existence of pedophile rings. In many of these cases we learn that the abusive activity have been going on for many, many years, as we see in the case of pedophile priests. Why is it that these longstanding activities have only recently been ‘discovered’?

If there is to be a strong campaign for the ‘rights and welfare of children’, there needs to be first a strong impression that their rights and welfare need protecting. Exposés of child sexual abuse serve that purpose very well. When you see a police drama, where abused children are rescued by noble cops from drug-addicted parents, you are are getting images of a benevolent state, and a social milieu that requires intervention. It becomes a template that can be expanded on as time goes on. And of course there are the interminable ads, where a neglected child sits alone at home (black and white film for effect), fearful and hungry, and you can donate $3 to some child-protection agency.

I don’t recall the link, but I came across a webpage from a UN agency, promoting the virtues of children raised ‘alternatively’. These are children raised as a group, sans parents, reminiscent of Huxley’s scenario. Supposedly these children were ‘more creative’, and showed other positive signs. How very nice. Another good-intention-stone along the garden path to the demise of the family.

Last year, 2013, in both Ireland and New Zealand, constitutional amendments were adopted, declaring that the rights and welfare of the child are paramount, trumping any rights that might be claimed by a child’s parents. In Ireland, a court challenge was immediately launched, based on the fact that the government had illegally campaigned for the referendum that approved the amendment, when by law the government should have been neutral. The challenge was, not surprisingly, rejected by the courts. There is no specific formula in these amendments as to what defines the rights and welfare of children, leaving it up to the discretion of the state, as to when intervention in the family might be appropriate.

As economic conditions worsen, under the screws of austerity, privatization, and eliminated social services, it will become a struggle for an increasing number of parents to feed, clothe, and house their families. It would be all too easy for the state to mandate a ‘minimum level of acceptable conditions’, and take children wholesale into care, based on ‘economic profiling’. That’s just one possible scenario, but it’s the kind of scenario it seems we are being prepared for.

Getting Inside the Mind of Mainstream Media

Posted on by
Reply

Is this the next step of the information war?

By Bernie Suarez

Source: TruthandArtTV.com

Mainstream media lies, deceit, and propaganda are being dramatically exposed in real-time at an alarming rate. Anyone following alternative media knows what I’m talking about. Is it me or does it seem like the MH17 false flag happened years ago? We can see that false flags that are quickly exposed and blown wide open end up dropping to the bottom of mainstream media news. We’re seeing the pattern over and over again, so isn’t it time we sharpen our skills and start predicting the mainstream media lies and propaganda before it happens? For those of us fully awakened, we have to be scratching our heads wondering, what else. What can we do to change and turbo-boost this information war for the better? What creative thing can we do to throw a monkey wrench into the globalist plans? Is it even possible? Let’s examine some ideas.

In all my writings I assert that we have an information and survival battle that is best described as ‘humanity versus the globalists’ or the ‘humanity versus the new world order’ (or other names such as the Illuminati or global elite). We can also call it humanity against the control system. Call it what you want, but understand that if you are not part of the control system, you are part of humanity. Humanity is everyone. We are human, we are on earth and we are not trying to control anyone. We are the pure expression of the species on earth innocently going about our daily lives trying to survive and make the most of it. The globalist control system however, lives and operates for a very different reason. The depth of this truth is gripping when you fully understand it. Imagine for a minute, there is actually a species amongst us who wishes to control you, inflict suffering on you and wishes to diminish or even eliminate your existence.

Many Libertarians and freedom lovers can appreciate this reality. It’s been said, there are two kinds of people on earth; those who want to control you and those who simply want to be left alone. This simple view of life is a very accurate portrayal of reality. Never before have we seen this manifest itself so clearly as it is now. Do you realize that the mainstream media globalist mouthpiece can just as easily encourage humanity, call for peace, reward truth, and honor integrity and what is right? They could do this every day if they wanted to. Even the thought of this seems to all of us as a pipe dream. Instead they (the mass media) take orders from their CFR/CIA masters, they lie, deceive, spread propaganda to promote more wars and condone war crimes in the name of a certain flag or political agenda. And yes, they do this every single day, meaning someone is brainstorming every day on new ways to enslave humanity and keep it oppressed. Think about this. Anyone who runs a website, like I do, knows how much work goes into generating new content every day. It takes work and resources.

These decisions (and the work required) are then being carried out every single day at mainstream media. In real-time the controlled media system gives the final stamp of approval on one lie after another. They say, so what if this next story will pave the road for more wars; So what if this next story is not true and perpetuates an idea that will justify mass murder and war crimes. The soldiers of the western mainstream media lying machine march on into a new day with new ideas on how to sabotage humanity and create more fear and hate. Try to picture their thought process as they implement their lies daily. Let’s get inside their mind for a second.

Is it possible for the rest of humanity to truly grasp the mindset behind this deliberate disinformation system which single-handedly is keeping humanity in slavery? Or is this too far-out of a concept for us to grasp? What if we could actually predict mainstream media narratives before they happen and post them online in a proper predictive forum? Will the so called truth/freedom movement or alternative media ever get to this point? Can we give it a shot?

Last week (from the time of this article) I correctly predicted that the mainstream media would spin the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri as a racial shooting rather than a police state brutality shooting, and I was 100 percent correct. Here’s the thing, I have no background as a psychic or fortune teller. The mainstream media predictably played the race card, so I thought, what if we could do this more often? Naturally we often don’t have a way of predicting what new narrative they are going to spin on the American public (who saw MH370 or MH70 coming?) but we do have a few tools to consider:

a. When a story actually exposes the new world order gangsters, we can observe that the government-media complex often create a new story (or simply shift the attention to) elsewhere to get the attention off of the story that exposes their agenda. Identifying this classic diversion technique can become an effective tool if we focus on what is being said. Many truth seekers are already familiar with this tactic.

b. When something unusual happens (like the downing of MH17) which is related to a crime, we can expect the early formation of accusations and engineered evidence. The accusations will point to the next enemy that the United States wants to bring down, or a small group of villains usually if not always created by the U.S. government and it’s allies. These two scenarios alone account for almost every false mainstream media narrative thrown at the American people over the last 14 plus years (if not 100+ years). Many of us committed to truth and awakening are very familiar with the now common term ‘false flag’ operation. Thankfully over the last few years people all around the world have seen so many false flag examples that the term is known to most people now.

c. The third scenario or tool used by mainstream media is the ‘Wag the dog’ scenario where they suggest ‘preview-like’ accusations that are setting the stage for a future false flag or a future implementation of an agenda. Often they employ CIA “experts” who are invited to all the mainstream media channels to offer their “expert” intelligence advice.

These “experts” are quietly playing a vital role in the (now LEGAL) propaganda being spread by mainstream media and government. Notably, no one is challenging these “experts” and grilling them to expose their link back to CIA or even demonstrate to the world that they in fact are NOT experts at all. Just because someone writes a book doesn’t automatically make them an expert. Yet the status of “author” has been used by the CIA’s mainstream media as the mark of unquestioned “expertise” in almost every issue we can think of.

I’ve written about this specific issue before and many Americans especially conservatives, don’t realize how they are being bamboozled daily by so called “experts” which are nothing more than CIA operatives. These same Americans refuse to connect the dots and realize that CIA took over mainstream media news since at least the late 1940’s (Operation Mockingbird). They fail to realize that mass media was one of the most important things the control system felt it needed to control in order for them to have control of the people.

So while one segment of Americans live in a dream state, not putting thought into these easily verified mechanisms of control and the entities behind it, the other segment, those of us awake and watchful to the new world order plans, have a decent challenge in front of us based on what we know. What if we could predict each narrative the mainstream media puts out, before it actually happens? Yes, this is already happening, but what if we can find a way to make this more known, more glamorized, and more marketable in such a way that we can get inside the mind of mainstream media? What if you could call out a narrative, perhaps wage money on it and make a living guessing right? Would a ‘mainstream media lies prediction’ casino get everyone’s attention? (Pun intended) Okay, perhaps this is not realistic but you get the point. Truth seekers could still come up with a unique, entertaining and convincing platform for predicting mainstream media lies before they are generated.

In the end we’re reminded that we are caught in a dangerous and now predictable information war. The U.S./global government is now trying to exterminate the lives of billions of people world wide and launch World War 3 against Russia. They want to control all the resources on the planet by geoengineering every aspect of life to convert it into profit. From Ebola to GMO’s to chemtrails and engineered drought, they want it all. They also need we-the-people divided and they will do whatever it takes to divide us. (eg… Travon Martin, Ferguson, Bundy Ranch)

Until they get it all, we can expect more synthetic sectarian gangs to be created. The creation of these gangs will always be a secret and a mystery, but the agenda and the chase to terminate them won’t. Whether its Al Qaeda, ISIS or whoever the next group they will create, the process will always be the same- problem, reaction, solution. The solution will always be more war, more murders, more secret prisons and more illegal invasions. OMG, we get it! The script has played itself out too many times and humanity as a whole is primed to get inside the mind of mainstream media because we can.

The CIA/CFR and it’s mainstream media have likely run out of scenarios to fool humanity with. Let’s see this as an opportunity and instead of celebrating victory too soon, let’s see if we can come up with a new idea that involves the embarrassingly easy prediction of mainstream media news. Just an idea I wanted to share with other truth seekers. Do not put limitations on what we (humanity) are capable of. The predictions can be based on not only what we know about what really happened but most importantly based on what we know about how they think and about what their final goals are. It’s the manifestation of true information war. Let’s use all forms of media to play with them.

Finally, I assert that grasping the meaning of life comes from understanding the reality that surrounds us. This reality of the mainstream media and it’s overall goals, intentions, and agenda is as powerful a platform for anyone to focus on and get inside their mind. That is, get inside the mind of the control system if you want to call it that, and correctly predict every move they make in such a way that it waters down the intent of their stories and de-legitimizes everything they say.

I admit it, to some degree all of this is already happening. The information war rages on and as many people realize, truth is winning! Let’s remember, they are not mysterious, their script is limited, they lack creativity, and their agenda is against nature and humanity. That alone gives us an edge over them. Remember, no one ever “wakes up” to the mainstream media narratives but people regularly “wake up” to their lies. This is a function of human nature and everyone should realize that. We (truth seekers of humanity) have nature on our side! At this point in history we have all the weapons of human intuition, awareness, creativity, intelligence and survival instinct we need to get inside the mind of mainstream media predictable lying machine. The question is, can we shift our thinking to view this as a useful and effective paradigm? I can see it that way, is anyone with me?

Remember To Use Your Forgettery To Forget All the Trivia Meant To Divert Your Attention from Important Matters

Posted on by
1

yndwy

By Edward Curtin

Source: OpEdNews.com

What is the explanation for the brainwashing of so many Americans when it involves the nefarious, unspeakable deeds of their government? Why are so many so easily duped time and again? Why is there such a vast ignorance of the truth behind national and international affairs?

I would suggest that the answer lies not just with the specific issues themselves and the lies and propaganda used to befuddle the American people, but with the cultural and social background that frames Americans’ thinking. The latter serves to cut to the root people’s belief in their own power to think freely and clearly about the former. Invade people’s minds over many years with an ongoing series of interconnected memes, occupy their minds with alleged facts that induce a frenzied depression, and then fooling them on specific issues — e.g. Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, etc. – becomes much easier.

I am a sociology professor, and my students always laugh when during a discussion of memory, social and personal, I ask them about their forgetties (the actual word is forgetteries, but the shorter rhyme gets more laughs). They think I’m joking. Maybe you do, too. I’m not. But when I suggest that if they “possess” the faculty to remember, then they must “possess” the faculty to forget, they are astonished. You can’t forget, they reply, you just don’t remember; you can’t retrieve the memories that are stored in your brain. In other words, there are no forgottens, just temporarily unavailable memories. From there we are onto a discussion of retrieving (I think of dogs), processing (their word for thinking and mine for making American cheese), and all the computer lingo that has been the surround of their lives. Like fish in water, the mechanistic computer memes have been their environment since birth. They are shocked at the suggestion that there might be more outside the cultural water, and that they could go there.

And they have a lot of company.

This may sound flippant, but it’s crucial for understanding why so many Americans can’t comprehend and pay attention to the ways their minds are scrambled and confused about life and death issues, how their country has fallen victim to the military-industrial-intelligence apparatus that operates deep in the shadows, and oftentimes right in the open.

If we examine the social and cultural context of the last twenty-five years, we can see a number of issues that have dominated Americans’ “thinking.” These issues have been promulgated and repeated ad infinitum by the corporate media, professional classes, and schools at all levels. We have been swimming in these issues for years. I suggest the following five are key: the inability to concentrate or pay attention (ADD/ADHD), memory/forgetting (dementia, Alzheimer’s, technological memory devices), people’s lack of time and constant busyness (a recent email I received from a publisher read: “crazy-busy? use our power-point decks”), drugs legal or illegal as problems or solutions (over 4 billion prescriptions written in the U.S.A. yearly), and technology as our savior.

Together with shopping and the weather, these five topics have been the stuff of endless conversations and media chatter over the years.

When people are questioned about major issues of war and peace; political assassinations, such as those of JFK, MLK, or RFK; the alleged war on terror; the downing of Malaysian airlines; the overthrow of elected governments in the Ukraine or Egypt; the events of 9/11; government spying; economic robbery by the elites — the list is long, it’s common for people to echo the government/corporate media, or, if pressed, to say, I don’t know, I can’t remember, no one knows for sure, it’s impossible to know, we’ll never know, etc.. The confused responses are replete with an unacknowledged despair at ever arriving at clear and certain conclusions, not to say being able to do anything about them. On many issues they bounce between the twin absurdities of Democratic and Republican talking points, thinking they are being perceptive.

Why?

If we set aside the substantive issues, and examine the aforementioned cultural memes, the answers are not hard to find. Here most people speak as if they are certain. “Of course there isn’t a forgettery.” “Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance.” “Memories are all stored in the brain.” “I really am so busy all the time.” “Facts are just opinions.” Americans have internalized the ethos presented to them by the elites. At the core of this is the propaganda of scientific materialism and biological determinism that we are not free but are victims of our genes, neurotransmitters, brain/computers and chemicals, technology, etc. Having lost our minds and fixated on our brains, we have been taught to be determined to be determined, not free. And whether consciously or unconsciously, most have obliged. The linkages between memory, attention, distraction, drugs, technology all point to the brain and the obsessive cultural discussion of brain matters. We have been told interminably that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world.

For years we have been fed philosophical presuppositions smuggled in as fact. It’s an old trick, ever young. Tell people over and over and over again that life is in essence a mindless material/biological trap and over time they will believe it. Of course there are unspoken exceptions — those who are the masters of this con-game, the few, the elite, those who make and reinforce the case. And even some of them are too ignorant to comprehend their questionable presuppositions. They hoist themselves by their own petards while cashing in at the bank.

My students can’t forget because they don’t believe in it. But they can’t remember either. They don’t know why. So, like the older generation, they fall into the careless habit of inaccuracy, to turn Oscar Wilde on his head. They have downloaded their memories, uploaded their trifles, and been tranquilized by trivia.

As the great American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote over fifty years ago, “Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.” That is truer today than then. A sense of entrapment and determinism pervades our culture. And it extends to public issues as well. We are told either to accept official explanations for public events or be dismissed as crazies.

I would suggest that for people to break through to a true understanding of the important public events of our time, they must also come to understand the false memes of their culture, the way they have been mindwashed to believe that at the most rudimentary level they are not free.

Maybe the first best step toward free thought and out of the propaganda trap would to accept that you “possess” a forgettery . Listen to the American philosopher Paul Simon sing, “When I think back to all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” Use your forgettery and forget the crap. Make haste slowly to question everything. Remember that the corporate media works hand in glove with the ruling elites on two levels of propaganda — cultural and political, and it is necessary to understand how they are intertwined. Freedom is indivisible.

That’s worth remembering.