Posts Tagged ‘Perception Management’
Flight 253: please swallow whole
The FBI story keeps changing, and the whole episode smells to high heaven. Especially since the substance used needs to be ignited by a blasting cap, conspicuously absent, and the boy’s father is deeply involved in Yemeni finance at a very crucial time. Looks like a sheep stampede to me.
Modern perception management and deception really only require the complicity of a lazy media. Once the first ‘official’ story is out and followed by endless blather and speculation, no amount of real investigation or facts can stand up to the sheer weight of the emotion intentionally evoked by the staged event. It all becomes part of a mishmash until people are exhausted and ready for a new serving of manufactured fodder.
Haskell Family: FBI has changed accounts 4 times; our story is the same since day one
Update: They’ve got this sheep-stampeding down to an exact science. Ominous.
The degrading effects of terrorism fears By Glenn Greenwald
What would the White Rose have said about us?
You wouldn’t know it if you only check out the MSM, but there is a cacophany of voices crying in the wilderness of American life, desperate for their fellows to wake from their zombie state. The details, issues and complaints vary but the message is significantly similar: Wake out of your stupor and help resist the Corporate State! (that’s my version, but many are much the same)
Another growing groundswell is a near uniform rejection of science: a sad but understandable situation, since science education is nearly non-existant in the US and the scientific establishment in both academia and industry have allowed Corporate control to co-opt, corrupt and abuse them. From vaccines to climate change, many reject it all. Whatever it is, it must be a scam with profits for the Big-Boys and costs passed along to what used to be known as “the people.” This causes me some grief, but when so many untested products poison the populace and the landscape, and institutions supposed to provide oversight have been gutted and burdened with political hacks, it’s probably safer to “just say NO.”
Corporate schemers own Congress, manipulate every public debate and smother important issues in the press. They have outsourced our economy and demand billions for the right to run a casino on Wall Street.
Which brings me to the White Rose– an anti-Nazi student group in Germany during WWII. The Corporate State is the texbook definition of fascism….and that’s really where we are right now. The charge has been trivialized by many puffed-up pontificators, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
As I correspond with many who excuse current events, or give me sage advice about accepting what’s ‘possible,’ I feel much more akin to those of the White Rose, even knowing the brutal end they came to.
Alex Doherty writes about them and the parallels with those today who have seen the American Dream become a nightmare and call for us to resist:
“The White Rose group could hardly have been unaware of the cruelty of the regime they opposed and yet the group did not shy from exhorting, in fact demanding that their fellow citizens take action to against the Nazi state. They took it to be a sacred duty of all people to oppose violence and authoritarianism regardless of the personal cost:
“Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right – your moral duty – to eliminate this system?” “
Politicians now pose as managers of modern life
and they promise to protect us from nightmares………..
The Power of Nightmares assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.
This is a must watch documentary – Broadcast 11/03/04 BBC 2 – Written and produced by Adam Curtis
The Value of Nothing (Video Preview)
By Raj Patel Organic Consumer’s Assn.
Oscar Wilde observed, “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Patel’s book, The Value of Nothing, shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.
Social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world’s worth. If we don’t want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common.
Our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn’t often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.
To read the first chapter, click here: http://bit.ly/1ajaxZ. For more information on both Raj Patel and The Value of Nothing, visit http://www.rajpatel.org. Video directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy (http://www.thegardenmovie.com).
Perils of Positive Thinking
Perils of Positive Thinking: Author Ehrenreich Points out the Negative Influence of the Constantly Upbeat
Nancy R. Care2
I saw author Barbara Ehrenreich speak on Friday about her newest book, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In Ehrenreich’s view, the opposite of positive is realist.
The Mystique of “Free-Market Guy” Obama
Obama has continued most of Bush’s anti-democratic policies and flubbed any attempts at “change.” Evidently his primary purpose is to convince the American people that Corporate Rule is unassailable. It’s not the first time Democrats have pursued popular policies in ways that are Designed to Fail.
By Jeff Cohen 09/24/09 “Information Clearing House“
“……Some activists still see Obama as a brilliant political superhero who — although maddeningly slow to fight back against his opponents — always manages to win in the end … like Muhammad Ali defeating George Foreman.
Tea-party Paradox
While “we the people” are encouraged to be ever more partisan and fuss with each other, the less-than-one-percent continue to drain us all dry.
Glenn Greenwald Salon 09/14/09
Who are the undeserving “others” benefiting from expanded government actions?
“…..This is the paradox of the tea-party movement and other right-wing protests fueled by genuine citizen anger and fear. It is true that the federal government embraces redistributive policies and that middle-class income is seized in order that “someone else benefits.” But so obviously, that “someone else” who is benefiting is not the poor and lower classes — who continue to get poorer as the numbers living below the poverty line expand and the rich-poor gap grows in the U.S. to unprecedented proportions. The “someone else” that is benefiting from Washington policies are — as usual — the super-rich, the tiny number of huge corporations which literally own and control the Government. “
Frozen Scandal
A member of my email group re-sent this Dec 2008 article today. It’s well worth a read:
By Mark Danner The New York Review of Books
“Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.
…….It is not information, it is politics. If we have learned anything this past decade it is that “the people,” that vaunted repository of public good—”the people always find out”—the people are willing and able to live with quite a lot. They read, watch television, grunt a pox on all their houses, and turn back to their dinners. Thanks to the efficiency of our age of scandal we now know as never before what the public is willing to live with.”
