September 2010

Old News: The USA Has Been A Police State Since 1787

Amazingly, less than a month after my most recent, there's another new post on my blog!

It starts this way:

===

Last week the FBI raided the homes of anti-war activists in multiple states simultaneously, prompting Paul Craig Roberts to write a searing column called "It Is Official: The US Is A Police State".

I caught excerpts from Roberts and comments on his work from Chris Floyd, in "Domestic Disturbance: FBI Raids Bring the Terror War Home".

I don't disagree with anything Roberts or Floyd wrote about this story, and I would recommend both columns. But neither of these very fine writers approached the idea that struck me hardest when I saw Roberts' headline.

What's new about the USA being a police state? Why is it suddenly official now?

===

You can read the rest here and/or comment below.

Good News, Bad News: My Blog Sucks And Will Continue To Do So

I've put up a new post at my personal blog, and I'd love to give you a snippet, but I must restrain myself.

However, I do invite you to read it here and/or comment below.

Alternatively, you could check out my recent additions to the mysterious series of tubes that connects us all: the main site: "Sherlock Holmes and the Alderney Street Mystery", and the data archive: "The Spy Who Knew Too Much".

newjesustimes's picture

Ahmadinejad-Google

Ahmadinejad-Google

The top results for a search of Google News on 9/23/2010 for "Ahmadinejad"

newjesustimes's picture

AFP-Google

AFP-Google

afp according to google search

newjesustimes's picture

Outrageous

This appeared today as an article attributed to 'AFP'
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hsLEdbS2mlI6XTb31GhJt...

EU condemns Ahmadinejad's 'outrageous' 9/11 stance

BRUSSELS — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's suggestion that the US government was involved in the September 11 attacks was "outrageous and unacceptable," the European Union said on Friday.

EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said that Ahmadinejad's assertions at the United Nations general assembly on Thursday "that the United States was in any way responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks or that the majority of people in the US believe this to be the case, is outrageous and unacceptable."

"It is for this reason that all representatives of the 27 nations of the EU walked out," she underlined, after Europe joined a US-led Western walkout in Manhattan.

The Iranian president said there was a theory that "some segments within the US government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East, in order also to save the Zionist regime."

Al-Qaeda hijackers flew airliners into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people nine years ago, the deadliest ever on US soil.

US President Barack Obama "found the comments to be outrageous and offensive, particularly given how close we are to Ground Zero," an official there said on condition of anonymity.

Let's see who else is covering this outrage today...

Al Qaeda: a useful enemy

Below is an excerpt from "Going Nuclear in the Middle East: in search of an European Middle East policy", a speech that took place at the French senate in January 2010. One of the speakers, Alain Chouet, a former chief of the security Intelligence Service in France, talks about Al Qaeda. I don't know this man's credentials but I found it a good read. Some parts of course made me cringe (the implicit acceptance of the 9/11 story), but the more interesting parts are about Saudi Arabia and governments that use "Al Qaeda" against their own people just like the West uses "terrorism" and "national security".

Of course to a paranoid eye like mine what's missing from this picture is false flag attacks, infiltrated secret services (ISI), and 9/11 itself. However, I long ago stopped dreaming about former chiefs of secret services openly handling such matters with a controversial edge.

The whole thing can be found there (PDF, 127 pages)

(few emphasis added)
-------------------------------

Alain CHOUET, Former Chief of the Security Intelligence Service,
French Foreign Intelligence Service - You may not all be familiar with the
French Security Intelligence Service: we are responsible for collecting
intelligence and implementing active security measures outside of our territory.
We deal with counter-criminality, counter-espionage, counter-proliferation,
counter-terrorism, amongst other things. We work abroad and obviously illegally
and it is all very secret. It gives you quite a strange specialized vision of the
world. I am not going to say ineptly what Jean-Pierre Filiu, and François
Heisbourg, are going to say much more aptly later on. I am just going to give you
the “intelligence” perspective of the issue.

I hesitated, first of all, in accepting the invitation to take part in this type
of necromancy exercise as I think that the questions considered as Byzantine are
less Byzantine than they seem at first sight. Like many other professionals
around the world, I think on the basis of crosscutting information that al-Qaeda is
operationally dead since the Tora Bora operations in 2002. The Pakistani Secret
Services continued to make us believe that al-Qaeda was still alive between 2003
and 2008 in exchange for generosity and indulgence.

Out of the 400 active members in the organisation recorded in 2001, there
are less than 50 of them, mostly sidekicks, apart from Bin Laden and Ayman al-
Zawahiri, who are not operational, that we feel are now living hidden in
inaccessible areas and they have very rustic means of communication. There is a
very good description of terrorist networks in Marc Sageman’s book
Understanding Terror Networks. With only that skeletal head group left, how
can they organize a global-scale network of political violence? Now we had
attacks in Bali, Bombay, Sharm al-Sheikh, London, Madrid, Casablanca, Djerba
and so on. It is obvious that none of the post-September 11 terrorists ever have
had contact with the head of the organization of course. Bin Laden and Ayman
al-Zawahiri do sometimes claim that they masterminded these attacks. However,
even if they could be authenticated, there cannot be any functional or operational
links between these terrorists and the remains of the organization.

However, we still say that al-Qaeda is behind any act of violence
committed by a Muslim or when there are Muslims in the wrong place at the
wrong time. For example, when there was a chemical plant explosion in
Toulouse, or when there are attacks that do not involve Muslims like the anthrax
attacks in the US, we keep on saying that Muslims are behind all these attacks,
that al-Qaeda is behind all these attacks. I think that we are giving it strength just
by saying so. It is a bit like Amédée in the Eugène Ionesco play, who does not
exist, but you keep talking about it, and in the end you do not know how to get
rid of it.

We keep mentioning this mythical terrorist organisation, qualified as
“hyper-terrorist”; it is mythical not because it was powerful, but because it went
against the “hyperpower”. This has had some adverse and counter-productive
effects. For example, any person in the Muslim world, whatever their political
place on the spectrum, if they want to undertake a violent action, they have to say
that they are with al-Qaeda if they want to be taken seriously, to have their action
legitimated by others and recognised internationally.

In addition, all Muslim Governments around the world, they are not all
virtuous, have understood that their opponents should be labelled as belonging to
Bin Laden's network, and they sometimes get help from Western powers when
doing this. There are so-called designated, or self-designated, forces reportedly
working for al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb and
elsewhere on the Arabian peninsula.

That has been a very stupid move because the effect it has had is to
reinforce the idea that al-Qaeda is omnipresent, that all Muslims belong to al-
Qaeda and that al-Qaeda is lying in wait to attack the West, and the United States
more precisely.

That sort of vision is the result of a number of judgement and perspective
errors, and this also leads to responses that do not work. If al-Qaeda does not
exist, the Islamic political violence does exist and the West is just an indirect and
collateral victim. The ideologues of Islamist violence are not “crazy for God”:
they have some specific aims. Their objective is not to spread Islam everywhere
in the world without any intervention of the West, a bit like the approach of
Hassan Turabi in Sudan. Now, perhaps, we as Westerners will feel our ego is
weakened but we must admit that the first victims of Islamic violence and the
main and most numerous ones, are the Muslims themselves.

The epicentre of the Islamic violence is neither in Afghanistan, nor in
Iraq, it is in Saudi Arabia. It is that country that was the first target of the
“Manifesto against the Jews and Crusaders”, which was the founding text of the
Bin Laden organisation at the end of the 1990s. It also targeted the Saudi royal
family before it targeted Jews and “Crusaders” and as said by Antoine Sfeir, it is
the only country in the world with a family name.

Saudi Arabia is, relatively speaking, in the same situation as France was
in the first half of the 1789. A family took power in 1926, whose legitimacy is
based on religion. They usurp the guard of holy places of Islam to their historic
guardians who belonged to the Hachemite family. This is the Saud family, who
comprises about 3000 Princes. It concentrates all power, and also concentrates in
its hands all the revenue from oil exploration of the most hydrocarbon-rich
subsoil in the world. Therefore, the Saud family has blocked the way to any
expression of democracy or pluralism in order to maintain its legitimacy faced
with any contestation. It propagates a fundamentalist type of Islam as widely as it
can in order not to be upstaged. It is simply stepping to the fore, a bit like the
Soviet Union, they did not want any enemies or any competitors, and the Saudi
family is acting in the same way.

However, oil revenues have dropped, and this has lead to the development
of trade and industry. Of course the princes could not keep their hands away
from that, and this means that the arena is now open to non-royal blood,
entrepreneurs from other countries that were of course Muslims, mostly from
Yemen, and broadly from Syria, the Levant, Lebanon, and Palestine. Some of
these entrepreneurs underscore, quite rightly, just like the bourgeoisie in 1789,
that they are the ones who are actually doing all the work and laying the ground
for the country’s future. And, therefore, they should be treated fairly and
included in the exercise of power or should also benefit from the revenue of the
oil industry, that until recently went straight into the personal pockets of the royal
family.

Now how can these claims be heard in a country where there is no
pluralist democratic speech? How can you legitimize a power that says it is in its
place by divine right? How can you exert pressure on a royal family who has
been enjoying since 1945, after the personal pact of Quincy between Ibn Saud
and Roosevelt, the political protection and the military support of the US in
exchange of the monopoly on the exploitation of their oil industry?

Opponents to this theocracy can only use a good sprinkling of
revolutionary violence and of fundamentalist escalation against the ruling power
and also external protectors of the country who avoid the power to collapse. It is
not surprising that you find amongst the most violent Muslim activists a
significant number of the children of the so-called bourgeoisie I mentioned that
cannot participate actively in governing the country but that does not lack of
money or ideas. That is how you found Bin Laden, that is how he was propelled
into violent activity, into fundamentalism, by the Saudi royal family. They
thought that it was quite expedient to have the external interests of the royal
family be defended by people outside of the royal family, instead of themselves.
That is a classical error made by social climbers.

There were many adventures, of course, and the children of this
bourgeoisie met the wrong people, came under the wrong influence, and they
came back to bite their masters on the hand. That is how in the mid-1980s this
permanent escalation of religious fundamentalism and struggle for control of the
Islamic world started between the Saud family and its rivals, or opponents,
within and outside. The Iran-Saudi Arabia conflict was largely responsible for
escalating this Muslim fundamentalist spiral.

That spiral, because there were not enough human resources, because
there were no skills in external interventions, was made possible only because
there was so much money in Saudi Arabia. That money is being squandered and
being given to lots of countries in the Islamic world and to immigrant
communities. And of course it went straight into the pockets of a structured
international terrorist organisation like the Muslim Brotherhood and its violent
arm, the Jamia Islamia. That is to say Islamist groups, of which the al-Qaeda of
Bin Laden is only one of the components.

Everywhere jihadist violence is expressed, it is always in the weaker parts
of the Muslim world, and it is always based on three components. Firstly, this
ideological and financial spiralling of the Saudi regime and of its local opponents
or rivals. Secondly, a strong local presence of the Muslim Brotherhood or the
Jamia Islamia. They profit from this spiral, they use all political and economic
and social contradictions to set public opinion against local powers and to
dissuade the Western world from supporting the country or intervening. The
Muslim world benefits from being hated from the outside world. For the third
component, we are partly to blame. It is diplomacy. Western and US diplomacy,
and intelligence services have supported, often military, the most reactionary and
religious fundamentalist regimes against the Soviet Union up to the 1990s and
there was the Iran containment policy in the 1980s.

For very different reasons linked to unresolved local disagreements or
badly mastered external interventions, it is that cocktail, with those three
ingredients, that produces the same effects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia,
Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb, the Sahel countries, Iraq, and the lawless areas
amongst Muslim communities in Western countries. I will not go into the details,
but you have to realise that if they all develop in the same way, it has to be
admitted that they correspond to very different local realities, and the players,
those responsible, do not really communicate between themselves. However, if
they are all agitating the same flags and claiming that they are with al-Qaeda it is
because it serves their purposes against the West and particularly the US; it
strengthens them. They are all supposed to be able to support even the most
controversial States.

Of course you might object that jihadi violence does exist, and is
spreading everywhere along the same patterns. Does it matter that it is called al-
Qaeda? This could be taken as the generic label of a globalized Jihad violence. A
certain number of more cautious journalists do not talk about al-Qaeda, they talk
about the al-Qaeda cloud, but that is very cloudy. However, it is because of that
confusion in the language that there cannot be a proper solution or response.
Of course, there are two ways of moving into political terrorist violence:
either you set up a structured political military group with agenda, objectives and
clear leadership, which is like an army with professionals. Then, of course, you
enter into pseudo-military clashes, which was the case of most revolutionary
terrorist or independent movements in Europe, in South America, and in the
Middle East, up until the end of the 20th century.

There is also the lone wolf solution, which is to say that you are both
within the mainstream and with the rebellion. You rally to your side the weakest
parts of society, you encourage people to undertake lone acts and strike where
they can, when they can, as they can, it does not matter as the act is signed and
claimed by the movement and belongs to its general strategy. The lone wolf
technique is not new, it is called lone wolf because it is well known in the US.
Mr William Pierce wrote a theory on it in his Turner Diaries, which stayed a
bestseller throughout the 1990s. It is inspirational, in fact, to most white
supremacists and Christian fundamentals. I will mention only the Atlanta and
Okalahoma City bombings, and other individual attacks that resulted in a larger
number of dead than 9/11.

That is the way of acting of several groups in the third world like the Grey
Wolves in Turkey, or the Muslim Brotherhood elsewhere. There are local acts of
violence in the Muslim world that correspond to the first model, but the second
model explains the Jihadi violence in the West and elsewhere in Arab countries.
All intelligence services know that you cannot fight the lone wolf
technique using military material means, armoured cars or increased
indiscriminate security measures. The only way you can fight the lone wolf
methodology is through targeted actions that are underpinned by political, social,
economic, educational, and cultural measures that will cut off the perpetrators of
violence from the sources that finance them and inspire them.

There have been no real serious measures that have targeted the source of
funding and ideology of Jihadi violence. Al-Qaeda was considered to be the
permanent enemy and there have only been inappropriate military and security
responses. It is a bit like using a machine gun to kill a mosquito, you miss the
mosquito but there is huge collateral damage, as can be seen in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Somalia and Yemen.

The first effect of that unproductive crusade was to boost and to provide
more credence to the terrorists, to legitimize that form of violence and to make it
the only possible frame of reference for affirmation. Let us not forget that the
Muslim world has been traumatized as Muslims are often suspected, it has been
under attack and massive, lasting and blind military occupation year after year.
For nine years now, the Western world has been attacking the tribal areas in
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, also Somalia and Palestine. Why not Yemen? Why
not Iran? For Muslims, Bin Laden is still mocking the rest of the Western world
by running free from the largest army in the world and the Islamist regime of
Saudi Arabia is still under complete protection of the US.

To conclude, and to provide my input to this panel, what is the latest with
al-Qaeda? It died sometime between 2002 and 2003, but before dying it was
reinforced and strengthened by the Westerners' mistakes and by the mistakes of
some Muslim regimes as well. It has actually disseminated. The question is
whether we will make the same mistakes again, we will feed a spiral of violence.
We hope that with partners, both Arab and Muslim, we will be able to prevent
the proliferation of rhinoceroses, to refer again to Ionesco.

Unplugging

In the second of my essays below concerning Ray McGovern's articles, I pointed out that he was playing an elaborate game with Jeffrey Goldberg who was writing equally misleading statements with the view to appeal to people on both the 'right' and on the 'left' of politics. There is a deeper level to this game apart from the rights and wrongs of the various arguing points and that is putting on a show to distract people from other areas of importance and to diminish their quality of life and thinking in the meantime through engendering fear, confusion and helplessness for the purposes of social control a.k.a. social engineering. (from Twelfth Bough - it can get heavy)

It was immediately obvious that these two writers, one a citizen of Israel and the other and 'ex'-CIA agent, were on opposite sides of a controversial issue. What was less obvious was that they were, in fact, co-operating in keeping an entirely fictitious proposition in front of the public to scare the crap out of as many people as possible for as long as possible. (this fictitious proposition was the possibility of Israel launching an attack on Iran independently of the US). They were putting on a show for the public just as two tennis players might. They appear to be in competition but from a higher perspective, they are co-operating to a much greater degree just as the tennis players are for the purposes of furthering the interests of themselves and the financiers behind the event itself. As with tennis, the reason for it all is to manipulate the emotions of the audience. It is not about the protagonists or what they are fighting or arguing over.

When this 'sporting format' is applied to social/political issues or the political process itself, it is known as the Hegelian Dialectic. To recap, it was named after the German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who proposed that history was the result of two opposing positions being taken by people on any and every issue, called 'thesis' and 'anti-thesis' or 'antithesis', and that history tended to adopt a position in between these two 'extremes'. This compromise has since been called 'synthesis' by Hegel's followers and champions of his theory. All very nice and might possibly be so in some circumstances. But the trouble for you and I is that this whole process is very easy to manipulate and manage to provide a predetermined conclusion if you can control the inputs; which is dead easy to do if you have sufficient money. The two positions, thesis and antithesis, are assumed to be at extremes to each other and all other possibilities lie between them. This, of course, is nonsense, but it is one of those great unspoken assumptions we rely on as a foundation to our social/political thinking, never-the-less.

So, in practice, two political parties will position themselves as the 'extremes' (thesis and antithesis) and political activism (including pundits, academics and activists) will position themselves somewhere on the continuum in between annunciating clearly and proudly that they stand for reality, compromise, reason and as practitioners of 'the art of the politically possible' while often apologising for an unpopular outcome saying that it is, after all, the lesser of two or more evils and all that is possible at this time, alas! Meanwhile, all the better possibilities that lie outside this deliberately limited political discourse go largely unnoticed and unmentioned. If they are ever mentioned at all, it is to disparage them as being beyond the extremes, 'beyond the pale', irresponsible and, increasingly, tantamount to 'terrorism'.

By paying for and promoting both political parties and the various political activists, commentators and academics in universities and 'think tanks' in between, the whole process devolves into nothing more complicated than a piece of scripted theatre played out in peoples' living rooms through the teevee, which is very appropriate given the 'virtual' quality of it all.

So this is how you control people. You determine what they are going to think about, first off, and then how they are going to think about that content. The latter, 'the how' is more about 'points for style' and much less important yet that is what we focus on when we are intent on uncovering manipulation and disinformation. What has far more influence on us and on history in the long run is 'the what'; the subjects that are placed before us and our engagement in them to the cost of the things that are more important and things that we might just actually be able to influence. This is controlling the curriculum. So Ray McGovern's clever dialogue is far less important than the simple fact that he is engaging us in a topic of his choosing, or his employer's choosing. So what's the gig here?

People such as the CIA, as we know, clearly have an agenda opposite to our best interests and they want us to behave in their interests instead of ours. They achieve this through instilling fear. This is a basic mind control technique. “But he's talking reason and arguing against war, isn't he?” Not really. He is warning against a possibility that can't happen i.e. Israel launching an attack by itself on Iran. He also gives a lot of space to the arguments of his apparent opposition. He restates them for us and even uses some of the propositions. He is giving these propositions lots of 'air-time'; putting these scary scenarios in front of us to consider and be frightened by. But because he didn't write these scenarios, he is not perceived to be peddling them. But he is. There they are in the midst of his writing. So they are more effective in gaining a foot hold in our minds because we do not readily perceive them for what they are. He is apparently arguing against them but the unconscious mind does not think in negatives, only positives, the opposite to what he is saying. Our conscious minds are disarmed by the 'charm and reason' and also through the presentation of some facts we can all agree with. So we give unhindered passage to these scenarios through our conscious mind to take up residence in our unconscious and once there cause us stress and confusion and so diminish our ability to think and act in our own best interests. For a fuller explanation of this, see a previous short essay here.

An unfortunate flow on of this is that many bloggers out there repeat these scenarios in their writing not understanding what is being done to them and then what they are, in turn, doing to others. One blogger I have in mind gives live links to all the articles that give air time to the propositions he is arguing against and by doing so he is furthering the cause he is apparently fighting. This is a disinformation/propaganda technique when used deliberately and is unfortunate and misguided when used in innocence. I am presuming the particular blogger that I'm thinking of does so in innocence, though, he is very consistent in his innocence.

Often times there is only one view available on a subject and that is the establishment view. Or the establishment view is actually quite revealing; "out of their own mouths" sort of thing. These articles can be referenced profitably provided a particular quote or argument is highlighted and the point of the reference by the blogger is clear. Many progressive or 'lefty' bloggers link undiscerningly to the establishment press (New York Times, the Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post and Debka etc) and as the sole source for their stories with no specific quote to identify which part of the article they are endorsing or criticising and with no qualifying or discriminating comments! Here's an example. This article was linked to by a blogger to back the claim that the Israelis had designs on capturing the water of the Litani River in Southern Lebanon (as if this needed referencing!). But there was no quote given and no qualification given on the article in question. And there should have been because, apart from mentioning the Israelis' past attempt to capture the territory up to the Litani River, it was chock-a-block fill of disinformation. An 'ounce' of good and a pound of 'bad'. Unfortunately, the writer's motivation matters not in the effect on the audience.

The effect of this practice is to engage in an Hegelian Dialectic around the topic and the particular framing of it at the enemy's choosing. Not helpful.

Why should it matter that the topic is chosen by the 'enemy'? Because we know the enemy always lies in one way or another and their whole focus is to frame the discussion to deceive the readership for the purposes of getting us to act against our own interests. Why co-operate? They publish what is in their interests and their interests are diametrically opposed to ours and it's always fearful. They own the megaphone so if it is getting airtime, it suits their purposes. Yet we forget this all the time.

There is yet another layer to what lies behind the likes of Ray McGovern and Jeffrey Goldberg. So lets keep digging. To return to my analogy, if McGovern and Goldberg are the tennis players, who are the promoters of the 'competition', 'the event'? Previously, I said in reference to the Pentagon and NATO,

“ These two military bodies, together with Israel are ultimately controlled by bankers (through such bodies as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) -where the Generals are members-, Chatham House and Bilderbergers) and therefore they can reasonably be seen to be carrying out their agenda. And that agenda is world dominion by any and all means”.

They run much else besides the military, too, because all the top and otherwise influential people from both 'extremes' in politics and everyone in between in the media, law and business in the US, British and European societies are respectively members of one or more of these groups. This means that you are not going to get anywhere in the established order of these societies if you oppose these groups or their plans or purposes. Let's take a closer look at one of these groups.

Many in the US will be aware of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to which all US Presidents and appointed Executives such as Secretary of State for governments of both parties have belonged since the Second World War (apart from John Fitzgerald Kennedy).

This body also boasts as members the CEOs of all the teevee networks and publishing houses and, indeed, all the major corporations. Senior legal and military personnel also belong, too. And religious heads as well. This CFR was been run for decades run by a banker, David Rockefeller, and together with his banking peers they own the Federal Reserve which creates all the money in the US and beyond. They have a license to print money. They also own such bodies as the New York Stock Exchange.

They control to a large extent, if not completely, the entire economy and the political process. These people control to a large degree the information you get even if you are a discerning reader. Even the most discerning reader can't choose to view news that is not available. Though, you can often work out what is likely missing and where the information controllers want to take us through using logic and inductive and deductive reasoning. Skills rarely taught these days for some unknown reason (ahem!)

As luck would have it, recently Tony Cartalucci of Land Destroyer blog has documented all the people involved both on the stage and behind the scenes of a mini controversy being played out in the media and shows that all parties and their financial backers are members of the Council on Foreign Relations. This is a good example of a controversy that has been entirely manufactured and is being managed from start to finish. Why? Like all shows, the purpose is to distract us from reality and to 'engage' our minds and guide, determine and control what we think for a time at least and always accompanied by fear. They are clearly trying to make our lives more fearful. This mini controversy is a microcosm of what is happening to our whole society, the macrocosm, all day, every day.

This constant diet of fear, stress and disempowerment stops us from seeing the obvious in front of us. Consider this; if we stop to think for a minute, we can now see that in America, for instance, the politics, the business, the media, the military, everything really is run in accordance with the wishes and aims of the CFR. Politics is a joke. The law is a joke. The media is a joke. Freedom of individual expression is a joke. We now know that all these functions are run by the same small group of grasping people who use it all for their own ends and against ours. Their control is pervasive and pernicious.

It has been observed that they, this CFR et. al. elite, is at war with us, the general public; that they manipulate nations and ethnic and religious groups to wage war on each other through fearful propaganda and terror at times to create profits and further their physical, economic and, most importantly, psychological control over us. And I can't argue with any of it.

So why do we put any faith in any of it? Why do we listen to it at all? Ever? Why do we repeat it to our friends and relations and our fellow workers at coffee break? “I don't”, you say? Well then, when was the last time you watched teevee? Listened to the radio? Watched the news? Today? Yesterday? If you think you are not influenced by any of this 'news and information', read on. This controlled milieu we live in is so pervasive that we don't really see or understand it most of the time and it influences us without our knowing. We are like fish swimming in water yet oblivious to its presence because it is always there and always has been. It has no external reference unless it jumps out of the water. In many ways, it really is like the 'matrix' in the movie of the same name.

Understanding brainwashing - - - -

I read a study once on the effects of brainwashing on American POWs in Korea and on studies since then it all made a huge impact on me ('twas a long time ago, so no link unfortunately). The powerful bit for me was the finding that even after the subjects of the brainwashing were aware of what had happened to them, they still held to the belief that the now known implanted thoughts and ideas in their minds were still their own and presumably also held that the thinking that followed on from these thoughts was correct. It made a huge impact on me because as soon as I read it I knew the truth of it. It is very hard to appreciate the effects on mind control on yourself and this is why it is so insidious. You think you are all right when you are not. You think you know when you do not. You think you are not being affected but you most certainly are. I can't stress this enough.

I was brainwashed or programmed as a child in the 1960's by trained personnel. Some of it is recognisably the same as MKUltra programming, an aspect of which you can read about here ("Greenbaum Speech'). I have remained sane and functioning by continually testing the validity of my perceptions and those of others. It's hard work and isolating but the upshot of it all is that I can see how we are all subjected to an insidious form of programming through the teevee.

I mention all this to establish some bona fides in this area and so that when I say you are being conditioned (programmed) through your teevee, I really do have some idea of what I'm saying. Teevee is triggering for me. The brightly lit screen is in the place of the bright spotlight. The high level of background sound is like the noise that was in my right ear and the constantly repeated bullshit messages from the ads with their increased volume and the clichéd dialogue from the content shows (programs!) are similar to the contradictory and illogical programming messages repeatedly shouted in my left ear.

These mind manipulators do it because it works. They put all these false notions in front of you and deliver them often with sexual stimulation of one sort or another and/or fear, all designed to bypass your conscious mind and lodge the messages or images in your unconscious mind to then determine your reactions and thoughts. Too easy. The flickering screen induces a state of dissociation. Again, allowing the messages to bypass the critical thinking of the conscious mind. It is startling to hear people parroting things they have seen and heard on teevee and talking as if they understand these topics and that they are speaking their own knowledge when they wouldn't have the faintest clue.

We are physically what we eat and how we use or bodies (or not!). That's it! This is what determines our physical state.
And mentally, we are exactly the same. It's what we allow ourselves to ingest by watching, reading and listening and how we exercise our minds (or not!). This determines our mental state. We wouldn't eat garbage. So why do we watch and listen to it?

Nothing of any significance is going to change until enough people change the way they think and that is not going to happen to a large enough extent, I feel, until enough people actually unplug from their teevee sets and start teaching their kids real history, real life. You would be far better off teaching your kids poker, for instance, or chess. Or some life skills such as how to budget, how to negotiate and how to use basic logic. It's a whole lot more fun, too!

An expertise in chess would give you an appreciation of how complex situations and dominance or power imbalance is most often built up from small, seemingly innocuous, moves and an appreciation that there is very little done without an endpoint in mind. One of your family might even come up with an incisive observation such as this comment from WP

An expertise in poker would be invaluable in assessing what is going on with all the sabre rattling at Iran, for instance. Though it is (deliberately) the same noise made prior to the Iraq invasion, it is for a different purpose. In poker you might set a trap for an opponent through a whole series of moves and win. If you estimate that the opponent is not smart enough to figure out what you did, you can do it again the same way. On the other hand, if you estimate your opponent to be smart enough to realise what happened, you can do it again but reverse it. In other words, if you had the goods last time, this time you can use the set-up to bluff instead. And that is what is happening in regard to Iran and it is sucking in everybody on the 'left' and the 'right'. It's a psy-op to frighten and control the public in the West, in Israel and in Iran. It works because the consequences of war with Iran are horrendous and the fear hinders clear observation and deduction. Plus, we are not educated in the ways of the psychopaths that gravitate to positions of power in our society and invariably are the ones running this psychological warfare against us.

Unplugging the teevee gives you and your family all that time to engage in learning these life skills and having fun at the same time. What's not to like!! Unplugging the teevee and unhooking yourself from the constant programming, the constant fear, the constant control of the curriculum you think about, is the simplest and most effective revolutionary thing you can do to counter the forces of violence, exploitation and destruction in your society. The rest will follow.

George Orwell said the same about speaking the truth; that it was revolutionary. But you have to know what the truth is and how to discern it, before you can speak it? And you have to understand it before it is truth to you and worth passing on. It is so much harder to sort out what is truth and understand it if you have the constant bullshit that is teevee squawking in your ear.

Go 'cold turkey' for a few days or a week (or more if you can do it) and I guarantee you that you won't want to go back to passively presenting your mind to be fashioned by these mind controllers. Get your news online, and then when you watch teevee again see if you are aware of the gap. Strive to gather your own news. If you want to stick to 'mainstream' sources, you can.

An easy way to do it is as follows:
- go to google news.
- scan the top stories.
- think about the priorities of whoever decides these are the top stories.
- click on “World”. Notice under each headline there is a line that says "all XXX news articles >>".
- pick a story that interests you and click on that. Notice that you can read news from around the world. Try it!
- If you note something that seems interesting, open a new google search and do a search on it.
- Try searching for things together like this: "thing X + thing Y." see what pops up.
- Then click on the links and read them.

Welcome to research and independent thinking. After you do that for a few days, watch teevee news and see how you like it.

The controllers in our society need your help, your co-operation, to dominate you. They need you to be plugged in. They need your help to dominate the next generation. You don't have to co-operate in this and there's nothing they can do about it! Go on, unplug!. And have some fun with your family instead.