Tag Archives: Truth

You Will Never Hear These Truths Discussed In The Mainstream, by Brandon Smith

Brandon Smith believes a variety of obvious truths are being ignored. It’s hard to argue against the ones he cites. From Smith at alt-market.com:

The general public truly lives in two separate worlds. We have the world of the mainstream media, popular culture and political rhetoric; a world which constantly and desperately seeks to twist or destroy any legitimate measure of reality, leading people into a frenzied fog. Then, we have the world of concrete facts; an ugly, brutal world that upsets many people when they see it and leaves them with little more than the hope that the most innovative of us will perhaps reverse the disastrous course, or at least, survive to carry on a meaningful level of civilization.

The sad thing is, if a majority of the population studied and accepted the world of fact, then preparation and intelligent or aggressive action might negate any destructive outcome. Reality only grows more ugly because we continue to ignore it.

Have you ever come to a logical or practical conclusion in response to a national or global problem and waited in vain to hear it represented in the mainstream? Have you ever thought — if I can figure this out, why can’t they? And by “they,” I mean the people most commonly offered a mainstream platform. This includes so called “professional journalists,” political leaders, mainstream economists, highly paid “analysts,” etc. Well, I think more and more Americans in particular are finally considering the notion that these “professionals” are either not very smart, or they have an agenda that seeks to perpetuate the problem rather than fix the problem.

Yes, the intellectual class, the longtime gatekeepers of public thought and consent, are actually mostly morons and/or liars with a terrible purpose in mind. I understand that this does not come as a surprise to many of my readers, but remember, the masses are still trapped in a stupefying fog. The goal here is to bring just a few more of them out of the doldrums whenever possible.

To continue reading: You Will Never Hear These Truths Discussed In The Mainstream

 

“The End Of Truth” – Hayek Saw It All Coming Over 70 Years Ago, by Tyler Burden

On The Road to Serfdom, there’s an unmarked exit to the truth. Stay on the road and you’ll never reach it; in fact, it goes the other direction. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:  

The Road To Serfdom (authored by F.A. Hayek, first published in 1944)

Excerpts from Chapter 11 – The End of Truth

Annotated via Crossroad.to/heaven,

“The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.”[p.171]

Berit’s comment: Ponder that statement. It helps explain the significance of universal service-learning. Like socialist youth in Nazi (National Socialism) and Communist countries, all must embrace the new ideology. Those who don’t — the intolerable dissenters — must be silenced.

The next section elaborates:

“Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants. If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general much less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to.”[p.171]

The strategies that accomplish this mental change include numerous subtle and obvious forms of propaganda. Schools, the media, children- and youth-service teams, corporations, etc…. every source of propaganda must share the same vision. Though totalitarian, it will be designed to sound noble, compassionate and fair to all. Yet the result with be the exact opposite.

To continue reading: “The End Of Truth” – Hayek Saw It All Coming Over 70 Years Ago

He Said That? 3/20/17

From William Hazlitt (1778–1830),English writer, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher:

The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.

He Said That? 3/18/17

From Carl Sagan (1934–1996), American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences:

In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

He Said That? 3/17/17

From Marcus Aurelius (121-180),Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180, practitioner of Stoicism, Meditations:

If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.

Will Trump Lower the Cost of Speaking the Truth?, by Paul Craig Roberts

The truth is paramount. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org via lewrockwell.com:

I am fortunate that I grew up during a time when, despite the lies and disinformation, both private greed and government were checked by a sometimes honest media and an alert population. The power of the people’s votes had not yet been eclipsed by the power of campaign contributions.

Truth mattered, and those who lost their integrity were shamed.

Today’s world is different. We have no media, only a Ministry of Propaganda, except for parts of the Internet, and the Internet itself is in the hands of a few, such as Google, who are easily suborned by the oligarchic forces that run The Matrix. Now that independent Internet sites, rather than the NY Times, Washington Post, and presstitute TV, are controlling explanations, as Donald Trump’s election makes clear, the independent part of the Internet finds itself along with Trump in the crosshairs of the ruling oligarchs and their presstitute media.

It remains to be seen what Trump’s election will mean.

If I were a young man in need of a career, it is unlikely I would find one by speaking the truth.

Of all the things that are endangered in America today, truth is the most endangered. Without truth, we cannot save civil liberty, democracy, wildlife, the environment, the working class, health care and old age security, or the planet from nuclear war and environmental destruction.

The truth is the bottom line.

And in America, nothing is less respected by the ruling elite and the presstitute media than truth.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/12/paul-craig-roberts/will-trump-lower-cost-speaking-truth/

He Said That? 11/29/16

From Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Anglo-Irish writer and satirist, The Examiner No. XIV (1710):

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

How Do We Make America Strong Again? Start Telling the Truth, by Charles Hugh Smith

The US has been become a nation of liars. Here’s Charles Hugh Smith with a powerful antidote: tell the truth. From Smith at oftwonminds.com:

You want to make America strong again? The only way to do so is to start telling the truth and insisting on the truth.

“Making America Strong Again” is a potent political narrative. But what does “being strong” mean? For some, it’s a code-phrase for bullying–forcing other nations to do our bidding.

For others, it describes a re-emergence of widespread domestic economic vitality.

Another audience sees the rebuilding of a social contract and social cohesion as the essence of strength.

As laudable as some of these interpretations of strength might be, to me “being strong” boils down to one principle, and only one principle: tell the truth, however painful and unwelcome as it might be. The essence of weakness is the cowardice of avoiding the truth. We as a nation have grown accustomed to the cowardice of half-truths, half-confessions, half-apologies and a financial system that rewards fraud in all its variations of artifice, deception and lies.

What’s presented as “fact” is actually a spectrum of manipulation and lies.Does anyone with a basic grasp of the economy really believe unemployment is 5% or less? Does anyone seeking the truth believe that a person working one hour a week is equivalent to someone working 40 hours a week? Isn’t counting both of these positions as equally statistically important jobs a form of not telling the truth?

If you hold great wealth and power, and the source of your wealth and power is illegitimate, you must dissemble, fabricate, propagandize and lie to hide the illegitimacy of your power. That is the status quo of the U.S. in a nutshell. Those who earned wealth and gained power legitimately have no fear of the truth. Those whose wealth and power is illegitimate fear the truth more than anything else.

The Power Elite of the nation has purposefully co-joined “America” and “Empire,” as if the two cannot be separated. They have successfully conned much of the public into a strained belief that the U.S. isn’t an Imperial Project, that we’re just looking out for our “interests,” which just happen to extend into every nook and cranny of the entire planet.

The Power Elite has also purposefully confused bullying with strength. Bullying fails because the bullied hate the bully with every fiber of their being. True strength flows from opt-in, mutually beneficial alliances that people and nations join out of self-interest. Such opt-in relationships can only endure if telling the truth is the core principle, for truth is the foundation of trust, and trust is the foundation of durable alliances and cooperative networks.

The Power Elite of the nation has pushed the narrative that its own rising power reflects the rising power of the nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.The increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many is the source of America’s weakness, vulnerability and fragmentation.

Take a look at this chart. While GDP per person (per capita) has been rising, household income has been declining. What does that tell us about the economic growth we keep hearing about? That it’s flowing to the top and being drained from the bottom 80%.

To continue reading: How Do We Make America Strong Again? Start Telling the Truth

He Said That? 2/1/16

From H.L. Mencken, American journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic, and freethinker, A Little Book in C Major (1916):

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

He Said That? 1/31/16

From William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, painter, and printmaker, “Auguries of Innocence” (1803):

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.