Tag Archives: Propaganda

Technology: distracting, Disturbing, Deceiving and Deluding Ourselves to Death, by Jim Quinn

Posted on January 27, 2019 | 1 comment

One way to tyrannize people is to distract them from what you’re doing. From Jim Quinn at theburningplatform.com:

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Image result for huxley amusing ourselves to death

Something as mundane as using the restroom at work sometimes ends up triggering deeper thoughts about technology – its benefits, deficiencies and danger to our culture. I’ve been using the same restroom at work for the last twelve years. They remodeled the restroom a few years ago with the latest technology – automatic flushers, automatic soap dispensers, automatic spigots, and automatic towel dispenser. This technology is supposed to make things better, but from my perspective the technology just added complexity, glitches and unnecessary complications.

First off, these technological “improvements” did not eliminate any humans from the equation. The housekeepers responsible for the restrooms continued to be employed. Prior to the remodel they would fill a metal bin with individual paper towels and fill the soap dispenser with liquid soap. Now they have to insert a roll of paper towels in the electronic dispenser and a cartridge of soap in the electronic soap dispenser.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Entertainment, Government, Media, Morality, Politics, Society, Technology

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Socialism Always Ends in Destruction, by Virginia Fidler

Posted on December 4, 2018 | Leave a comment

Taking legitimately earned money from those who produce it and “redistributing” it to those who don’t, with the government of course taking a hefty cut, is a surefire recipe for ruin, and nothing more. From Virginia Fidler at goldtelegraph.com:

Every attempt at socialism has failed miserably. Venezuela is only the latest country that has tried to implement a socialist paradise, only to inevitably crumble and crash before our eyes. Socialism, and its natural progression, communism, has caused the deaths of 100 million people since its inception 100 years ago.

Just a few decades ago, Venezuela had massive oil reserves and an abundance of other resources. It enjoyed wealth and an excellent standard of living. Today, Venezuelans have no food, no medicine, and the country is driven by corruption and fear. While a starving population is in despair, many are desperately trying to flee paradise. The army, supported by President Madero, is in the street, ready to brutalize any dissenters. Madero and the military are not starving.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Economics, Education, Government, Law, Politics, Taxes, Trade

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Inside the British Army’s secret information warfare machine, by Carl Miller

Posted on November 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

Information warfare is just propaganda with a high-tech gloss. Here is a look at how the British Army wages propaganda information warfare. From Carl Miller at wired.co.uk:

They are soldiers, but the 77th Brigade edit videos, record podcasts and write viral posts. Welcome to the age of information warfare

barbed-wire fence stretched off far to either side. A Union flag twisted in a gust of wind, and soldiers strode in and out of a squat guard’s hut in the middle of the road. Through the hut, and under a row of floodlights, I walked towards a long line of drab, low-rise brick buildings. It was the summer of 2017, and on this military base nestled among the hills of Berkshire, I was visiting a part of the British Army unlike any other. They call it the 77th Brigade. They are the troops fighting Britain’s information wars.

“If everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking,” was written in foot-high letters across a whiteboard in one of the main atriums of the base. Over to one side, there was a suite full of large, electronic sketch pads and multi-screened desktops loaded with digital editing software. The men and women of the 77th knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army’s course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Intelligence, Media, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance

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9 Years Into Common Core, Test Scores Are Down, Indoctrination Up, by Joy Pullmann

Posted on November 13, 2018 | Leave a comment

If Common Core was supposed to improve student performance, it’s been an abysmal failure. From Joy Pullman at thefederalist.com:

Common Core sucked all the energy, money, and motivation right out of desperately needed potential reforms to U.S. public schools for a decade, and for nothing.

It’s been about nine years since the Obama administration lured states into adopting Common Core sight unseen, with promises it would improve student achievement. Like President Obama’s other big promises — “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” — this one’s been proven a scam.

“If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools — your state can win a Race to the Top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential,” President Obama said in July 2009.

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Posted in Education, Government

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US Mass Shootings: Gun Issue, Mental Health Issue… War Issue? by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on November 13, 2018 | 1 comment

Constant exposure to violence begets more violence. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

Ahh, the day after a high-profile mass shooting in America: the only time Republicans will ever pretend to care about the mentally ill.

A man, pictured above, killed twelve people with a gun at a California bar yesterday, then turned the gun on himself bringing the total number of dead to thirteen. Like a disproportionately high number of mass shooters in the US, he served in the military. He reportedly suffered from PTSD as a result of his experiences in Afghanistan with the US Marines. America’s war in Afghanistan is the longest war in US history.

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Posted in Crime, Culture, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Medicine, Military, Politics, Psychology, War

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Deepfakes And Political Manipulation, by Leonid Savin

Posted on November 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

The government is constantly working on new and better ways to lie to us. From Leonid Savin at orientalreview.com:

Not a day seems to go by without the American media writing about Russia’s Internet meddling in the US elections. Major international and specialist publications headquartered in the US are routinely regurgitating the myth about “Russian trolls” and “GRU hackers” without a single shred of evidence besides unsubstantiated accusations. Actually, evidence has been provided by a private company, but this evidence points to the contrary. As one Google project so convincingly shows, for example, for just $100 you can create the illusion that a Russian company is trying to influence public opinion within America. All you need to do is buy a mobile phone and a few SIM cards in Panama, choose a common Russian name and surname and use it to set up a Yandex account, then indicate your IP address is in Saint Petersburg using NordVPN. You can then set up an account with AdWords, pay for advertising using the details of a legally registered company, and place political content on the Internet that could be regarded as inflammatory. This was what was done by US citizens from Google and they didn’t hesitate to report on it. So what is stopping the NSA, the CIA, or some Russophobe fanatics familiar with hacking techniques from doing exactly the same thing, regardless of whether they belong to a political party or not? Common sense suggests that this is exactly what is being done to create the appearance of Russian interference, but no one is able to provide any real evidence, of course.

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Posted in Government, Intelligence, Media, Military, Technology

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The Real Reason Why We’re So Crazy and Miserable All the Time, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on October 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

Maybe we’re not the crazy ones. From Caitlin Johnstone at theantimedia.org:

We are surrounded by screens full of voices that are always lying to us, and experts wonder why we’re so crazy and miserable all the time.

The screens tell us, “This is a perfectly normal and sane way of doing things. It is perfectly normal and sane to strip the earth bare and poison the air and the water in an economic system which requires infinite growth on a finite planet. People who say otherwise are raving lunatics!” And the social engineers wonder why there’s increasing disaffection and alienation among the populace.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Culture, Government, Horseshit, Media, Morality, Politics, Society

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Truth & Bullshit in the Digital Advertising Age, by Doug “Uncola” Lynn

Posted on July 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

Truth usually wins in the end, but it has to fight its share of epic battles. From Doug “Uncola” Lynn at theburningplatform.com:

In sales and advertising it’s always a numbers game.  That is to say the more people are impressed upon with a certain pitch, or spiel as it were, the larger the response will be during any given campaign or promotional event.

In advertising, “points” measure percentages of given populations and can be targeted to select demographics (called Target Rating Points) or even subjective measurements (called Index Rating Points) like the propensity to purchase in any given market.

Furthermore “Gross Impressions” quantify the approximate number and cost per thousands of duplicate people reached within a certain demographic; whereas “Reach” and “Frequency” represent math equations based upon algorithms involving unduplicated people impressed upon within a certain demographic and how many times they were imprinted with any given ad or message.

The points are these:  There is a mathematical science behind motivatingpeople located in markets (i.e. regions) into action; and this is why companies like Nike and Pepsi will pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually to athletes and movie stars alike to promote their products.  It is because advertising works.

Now let’s compare companies and strategies.

Suppose there was a monopolistic international entity by the name of Military Industrial Company Incorporated (MICI) selling a product called “Bullshit” and competing against an aggressive start-up by the name of Wild Web Worldwide (WWW) who had a better product trademarked under the name of “Truth”.

Obviously, Truth was the superior commodity, but MICI did not own the rights.  Therefore, MICI knew its Bullshit couldn’t compete with Truth on a direct basis, so it would have to utilize its superior assets to advertise Bullshit to the masses while, at the same time, suppressing WWW’s ability to deliver Truth to the people throughout various regions; specifically, within the United States Designated Market Area (DMA).

Unfortunately for WWW, MICI also owned the world’s premier advertising agency called The Mainstream Media International (TMMI).  Now TMMI was definitely not a typical advertising agency.  Not at all.  What made TMMI so special was that it actually owned 90% of the television stations, newspapers, and radio networks throughout the entire United States DMA.

Of course, this presented a problem for those working over at WWW because they knew they could never compete in delivering Truth to the people against the powerful Military Industrial Company Incorporated (MICI); especially given The Mainstream Media International’s (TMMI) near-monopoly on advertising, and selling, Bullshit.

To continue reading: Truth & Bullshit in the Digital Advertising Age

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Posted in Collapse, Cronyism, Government, Intelligence, Media, Morality, Politics

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Psychoanalysing NATO: Projection, by Patrick Armstrong

Posted on July 5, 2018 | 2 comments

Everything NATO accuses its adversaries of doing, especially Russia, is just a projection of things NATO has done. From Patrick Armstrong at strategic-culture.org:

“NATO” can be a rather elusive concept: Libya was a NATO operation, even though Germany kept out of it. Somalia was not a NATO operation even though Germany was in it. Canada, a founding NATO member, was in Afghanistan but not in Iraq. Some interventions are NATO, others aren’t. But it doesn’t really mean much because NATO is only a box of spare parts out of which Washington assembles “coalitions of the willing”. So it’s easier for me to write “NATO” than “Washington plus/minus these or those minions”.

We are told – incessantly – that Putin is “Winning the Information War“, “We have no counterattack to Russia’s information warfare“. Nonsense. The real information war is being conducted by the British Army’s “77th Brigade“, the soldiers of Fort Bragg, NATO’s Centre of Excellence in Tallinn. Or by the BBC, RFE/RL, Deutsch Welle, AFP et al; each of whose budgets is many multiples of RT’s. They manipulate; they dominate; they predate; Moscow is a minor newcomer.

I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist or any other kind of psychist, but I cannot fail to notice the projection and gaslighting practised by Washington and its minions. They accuse Russia of doing things that they actually do – projection – and they manipulate our perception of reality – gaslighting. I will discuss gaslighting in the next essay.

Wikipedia defines projection as

Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually intolerant may constantly accuse other people of being intolerant. It incorporates blame shifting.

Another source calls it a “defence mechanism”:

Psychological projection involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings.

To continue reading: Psychoanalysing NATO: Projection

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, War

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Wikipedia Is An Establishment Psyop, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on May 21, 2018 | 1 comment

If you use Wikipedia as a source of information on political events or history, you soon notice it’s slanted towards the government and intelligence agencies’ versions of events. Caitlin Johnstone explores how it’s done, from medium.com:

If you haven’t been living in a hole in a cave with both fingers plugged into your ears, you may have noticed that an awful lot of fuss gets made about Russian propaganda and disinformation these days. Mainstream media outlets are now speaking openly about the need for governments to fight an “information war” against Russia, with headlines containing that peculiar phrase now turning up on an almost daily basis.

Here’s one published today titled “Border guards detain Russian over ‘information war’ on Poland“, about a woman who is to be expelled from that country on the grounds that she “worked to consolidate pro-Russian groups in Poland in order to challenge Polish government policy on historical issues and replace it with a Russian narrative” in order to “destabilize Polish society and politics.”

Here’s one published yesterday titled “Marines get new information warfare leader“, about a US Major General’s appointment to a new leadership position created “to better compete in a 21st century world.”

Here’s one from the day before titled “Here’s how Sweden is preparing for an information war ahead of its general election“, about how the Swedish Security Service and Civil Contingencies Agency are “gearing up their efforts to prevent disinformation during the election campaigns.”

This notion that the US and its allies are fighting against Russian “hybrid warfare” (by which they typically mean hackers and disinformation campaigns) has taken such deep root among think tanks, DC elites and intelligence/defense circles that it often gets unquestioningly passed on as fact by mass media establishment stenographers who are immersed in and chummy with those groups. The notion that these things present a real threat to the public is taken for granted to such an extent that they seldom bother to even attempt to explain to their audiences why we’re meant to be so worried about this new threat and what makes it a threat in the first place.

To continue reading: Wikipedia Is An Establishment Psyop

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