I’m so stoked to get people reading my new book that I’m sharing part of “Chapter Two: Power and Narrative Control” for free. Enjoy!
~ CJ
New Book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
"This book is my best attempt at articulating what I see as our dilemma as a species and what we can do to address it, both outwardly in the world and within ourselves."https://t.co/ZaGjf0FLrF
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 2, 2021
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In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the affairs of men are dominated by a cabal of wizards who understand the esoteric art of using language to manipulate reality in a way that advantages powerful rulers — Oh wait sorry that’s regular earth I was thinking of. That’s what happens here.
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Some conspiracy-type people say the world is messed up because we’re ruled by illuminati or reptilians, but I’m way more out there than that: I say our entire society is made of imaginary thought stories with little relation to objective reality, and some clever manipulators have figured out how to exploit this.
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The real underlying currency of our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it. Everything always comes down to this one real currency. If you look at what all these think tanks, NGOs, media outlets and grant making networks that billionaires pour their money into actually do, it ultimately boils down to controlling the dominant stories that people tell about what’s going on in their world.
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Real change won’t come until people rise up. People won’t rise up as long as they’re successfully propagandized. People will remain successfully propagandized until they evolve minds which can’t be manipulated. Our world will change when our relationship with narrative changes.
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Most of humanity’s problems boil down to an unhealthy relationship with narrative. Individually our suffering ensues from believed mental narratives about self, other and world, and collectively our destructive behaviors are driven by the propaganda narratives of the powerful.
Most people’s lives are dominated by mental story, so whoever can control those stories controls the people. The good news is that all we need to do to reclaim our world from the controllers is to reclaim our stories. The barrier between us and freedom is as thin as a fairy tale.
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The world is messed up because powerful people think in terms of narrative control, and ordinary people don’t. Change that and you change the world.
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The three most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of the human condition are (1) consciousness itself, (2) the way compulsive thought patterns shape our experience and our lives, and (3) the effects of mass media propaganda. In that order.
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The primary reason people are so vulnerable to propaganda is that hardly anyone clearly sees just how much human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative. There’s a night and day difference between reality and the stories minds tell about reality. Manipulators exploit this.
Most people assume that the mental stories in their heads are an accurate reflection of what’s happening outside their skull, and that simply isn’t the case. Manipulators know they can just feed people stories—narratives—about what’s happening and they’ll accept those narratives as reality.
Manipulators know they can trade a bunch of convincing words in exchange for all sorts of real valuables: money, sex, deals, loyalty, votes, political power. Humanity’s deluded relationship with narrative means you can get real, concrete treasures in exchange for pure illusion.
Most of the things which consume your attention are pure narrative constructs: religion, philosophy, culture, politics, the economy, even what you take to be your very self. But few ever take the time to sift these narratives apart from reality, so we’re hackable by manipulators.
The difference between what’s happening and what the babbling mind says is happening could not possibly be more different. Until our species evolves a new relationship with mental narrative which allows a real relationship with the real world, we’ll keep moving toward extinction.
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For as long as there has been language and power there have been narratives circulating to advantage the powerful. Much of our so-called “culture” is just ancient power-serving protopropaganda deliberately interwoven into our ancestors’ worldviews.
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If people truly understood the extent to which mental narrative dominates their experience of life, propaganda, advertising and all other forms of psychological manipulation would be regarded by our society similarly to physical assault or property theft.
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Propaganda is the root of all our problems; people consent to inequality and injustice because they’re manipulated into doing so. And propaganda is only effective because we’ve got an idiotic societal taboo against acknowledging that we can be fooled. That our minds are hackable.
Manipulation only works when you don’t know it’s happening. Those who think they’re too clever to be manipulated (which would be the majority of people) are the most vulnerable to manipulation. If we just made manipulation more shameful than being manipulated, this could change.
You cannot form an accurate worldview without accounting for the fact that powerful people have invested a great deal in manipulating that worldview, and that to some extent they have probably succeeded. Because being manipulated is considered shameful, most don’t look at this.
I have been manipulated and fooled. So have you. It happens to all of us. There’s no shame in it. The shame belongs solely to those doing the manipulating and deceiving. Fraud is a crime for a reason, and the one they charge for that crime is not the victim, it’s the perpetrator.
Conmen will always try to convince you that it’s your fault you were conned. If they can do that, they get away with the con. This is true of all manipulators, and it’s why you should never blame the gullible. Being gullible isn’t a crime, being a conman is.
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Nobody who is being successfully manipulated is free, and our world is dominated by mass-scale manipulation. It doesn’t matter how many “rights” you have on paper, if you’ve been manipulated into supporting or consenting to the agendas of power you might as well be in a cage.
As long as the powerful are propagandizing the people, the people aren’t truly operating with free will. Anyone who’s escaped a relationship with a manipulative abuser understands that you’re not really operating with much free agency while you’re being psychologically dominated.
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Manipulation is a necessary component in long-term abusive relationships, because people don’t tend to stay in abusive situations unless they’re manipulated into it. This is true whether you’re talking about significant others or globe-spanning power structures.
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People have been manipulating each other since the invention of language and manipulating each other at mass scale since the invention of government. All that’s changed is the mass scale has gotten much larger and the manipulation much more sophisticated.
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The world would be so much better if everyone just watched people’s actions and ignored their stories about their actions. It would radically change politics, it would prevent abusive relationships, it would stifle manipulators, and it would transform human civilization.
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If you ever feel unimportant, remember that rich and powerful people are constantly pouring effort and wealth into trying to manipulate the thoughts in your head.
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Hi I’m Sleazy McPundit with WMD News. To explain why more internet censorship is needed to fight disinformation, here’s a panel of millionaires who are paid to lie to you.
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The mainstream worldview isn’t mainstream because it is more fact-based, logical, or makes better arguments than other potential worldviews, it’s mainstream because vast fortunes are poured into keeping it mainstream.
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Mainstream news is just advertising. You watch advertisements for maintaining the plutocratic status quo, then you watch advertisements between those advertisements for useless crap to make plutocrats even richer. It’s all just different layers of marketing. When I was getting my journalism degree they used to talk about journos selling their souls and going into marketing, going into PR. It’s like, bitch, you’re already doing that.
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Without extensive marketing it would never occur to you that Mountain Dew is something you should put inside your body or that endless war is something you should accept as normal.
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War is the worst thing in the world. By far. If the rank-andfile public could see past the veil of propaganda and distortion and objectively see war for the horrific thing that it is, ending it would immediately become everyone’s foremost priority. Hence all the war propaganda.
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It’s such a trip how opposition to mass-scale murder and oppression is the single most self-evidently correct position anyone could possibly take, yet so few take that position in a clear and unequivocal way. The reason is of course generations of propaganda brainwashing.
Nobody comes out of the womb demanding to go to war. Left unmolested it would never occur to a normal human brain that strangers on the other side of the planet need to have explosives dropped on them by overpriced aircraft. The problem isn’t people democratically voting for warmongers and consenting to military mass murder of their own free will, the problem is propaganda.
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People only ever think you’re wrong to reject mainstream politics and media because they have no idea how fucked things really are.
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It only takes a rudimentary understanding of human psychology to manipulate someone. Edward Bernays was recruited by the US government to study the science of modern propaganda in 1917. This science has been in research and development for over a century. Don’t underestimate its power.
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Propaganda is so advanced that rank-and-file members of the public will openly cheerlead their government’s imprisonment of Assange so that their government can continue to lie to them.
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The dawn of political insight is when you realize propaganda isn’t just something that is done by other countries and other political parties.
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To be a real journalist you must ask inconvenient questions, shine light in inconvenient directions, refuse to parrot establishment narratives, and be indifferent to the approval of the powerful. To be a rich and famous journalist, you must do the exact opposite of these things.
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Step 1: Be the billionaire class.
Step 2: Buy up all news media.
Step 3: Structure outlets to elevate voices who defend the status quo.
Step 4: Smear non-plutocratic media who don’t protect the status quo as crazy conspiracy theorists and Russian propaganda.
Step 5: Dominate the narrative about what’s going on in the world.
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If you’re liking what you’re reading, you can buy Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by clicking here or here, or you can buy a cheap PDF by clicking here.
23 responses to “Excerpt From My New Book, Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
JIMMY CANARY, LOL, $15/hour minimum wage, $15 is what it should have been in the 60’s, today the minimum should be somewhere between $75 & $100/hour. The reason miracles aren’t possible is because then you wouldn’t need to kiss your owner’s ass, therefore you must remain blind, deaf and dumb for all eternity.
My approach to propaganda/narrative is quite similar to phone calls from numbers that I don’t recognize. I ignore them until or unless it is necessary to consider them, a rare occurrence. When it IS time for me to consider them, I begin my research with a more than healthy dose of skepticism. If an unrecognized phone number or name shows on my phone and, if it doesn’t leave a message, I consider it a scam. Without exception.
99% of of what I read and hear from the news/government/concerned citizens, etc. is probably a self-serving lie at best. If I’m at all interested in the topic, I won’t stop my research into whether or not it is worthy of consideration, one way or the other. even them. I am in opposition more often than not. the art of thinking for myself has generally served me well.
Scammers and government have proven to be much the same in that regard, as has the mainstream media and nearly everything the public holds dear. I dare say that even half or more of the popular singers are successful only because of the manipulations possible with soundboards and other manipulative equipment in studios. I’m no longer surprised to discover that a given singer can’t sing much better than a dog howling at the moon. I tend not to listen or give credence to either – just as I tend to disregard narrative and propaganda.
I had a bumper sticker years ago – which said:
WORMTONGUE LIVES !! – in the White House
Back when Obama reigned
It didn’t go over well here in liberal land
“The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.” In exact relation, “The real underlying [strength of us] is [wisdom], and the ability to [act within revealed sights].”
https://seaclearly.com/2021/04/04/infallible-proofs-as-scribed/
“At that time you will be given what to say, For it will not be you speaking.”
After my initial reaction to chapter two I was in a semi-comatose state comparing what you said to what others have said on issues tangent to your thesis; because of the harmful effects of racism, etcetera, I would like to draw your attention to what the Bushmen(considered a derogatory term, but it gets difficult) believe are positive traits, and what the forces were that molded those beliefs to those of Judaism, and the forces behind those beliefs(requires rather intensive knowledge of both current and ancient Judaism) and the necessity to discuss publicly with sensitivity, as we do with all such subjects that others might employ to shame, etcetera.
As Allen Ginsberg once said, “We are in science fiction now. All the revolutions and old methods for changing consciousness are bankrupt. We’re back to magic, to psychic life . . . all public reality is a script, anyone can write the script the way he wants. The warfare is psychic now. Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.”
They also own and run all the stuff. The water, the electricity, the food supply etc … so they (by they I mean corporations and the wealthy) use propaganda to sure up the infrastructure. They also have law enforcement, the legal system and the government on their side. We’re screwed.
Caitlin, you are right about propaganda and it power. However, like the animals in Animal Farm (by Orwell), the sheep sense that they are being manipulated, but they know all too well that any sign of resistance will end up being grilled by the leader pig. So part of the ignorance stems from fear to think! So awareness is a necessary condition, but not sufficient (mathematically speaking).
All of this is discussed thoroughly by George Orwell (esp. in “1984”), complemented by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited). Also Hannah Arendt (e.g., The Life of the Mind).
One more: notice that religion has been a fantastic brainwashing tool ever since, and if one believes in Gods and life after death would believe anything the authorities tell him/her. The church (in all religions) has been a fantastic conduit and tool of propaganda ever since, such that propaganda propagate top-down through a connected hierarchy of brainwashing and control. Notice also that the bigger the lies from above, the more physical control the government takes – from a “democracy” to a police state – e.g., the militarization of the police in the US.
Yup, almost, but like you say narrative control, so when they, the brainwashed, experience something that they’ve been told all their lives is impossible, they refuse to believe their own senses. They are like Toby the Robot that shorts itself out when given the command to destroy what it knows is its creator in another form. Like ghost hunters who run for their lives when they finally find the ghost that they’ve been looking for. So, of course I feel so sorry for people who have no God, because they are so naked and so insecure that they often lapse into sociopath and psychopathy.
To complete the picture (if it can ever be complete), here is an excerpt from
Erich Fromm – Afterword To George Orwell’s 1984, (written in 1961)
https://www.scribd.com/doc/195275626/Erich-Fromm-Afterword-to-George-Orwell-s-1984
“The contribution of Orwell which is most immediately relevant for the year 1961 and for the next five to fifteen years is the connection he makes between the dictatorial society of 1984 and atomic war. Atomic wars had first appeared as early as the forties; a large-scale atomic war broke out about ten years later, and some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centers in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America. After this war, the governments of all countries became convinced that the, continuation of the war would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. For these reasons no more bombs were dropped, and the three existing big power blocs “merely continued to produce atomic bombs and stored them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later.” It remains the aim of the ruling party to discover how “to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.” Orwell wrote 1984 before the discovery of thermonuclear Weapons,
and it is only a historical footnote to say that in the fifties the very aim which was just mentioned had already been reached. The atomic bomb which was dropped on the Japanese cities seems small and ineffective when compared with the mass slaughter which can be achieved by thermonuclear weapons with the capacity to wipe out 90 per cent or 100 per cent of a country’s population within minutes.
The importance of Orwell’s concept of war lies in a number of very keen observations.
First of all, he shows the economic significance of continuous arms production, without which the economic system cannot function. Furthermore, he gives an impressive picture of how a society must develop which is constantly preparing for war, constantly afraid of being attacked, and preparing to find the means of complete annihilation of its opponents. Orwell’s picture is so pertinent because it offers a telling argument against the popular idea that we can save freedom and democracy by continuing the arms race
and finding a “stable” deterrent. This soothing picture ignores the fact that with increasing technical “progress” (which creates entirely new weapons about every 5 years, and will soon permit the development of 100 or 1000 instead of 10 megaton bombs), the whole society will be forced to live, underground, but that the, destructive strength of thermonuclear bombs will always remain greater than the depth of the caves, that the military will become dominant (in fact, if not in law), that fright and hatred of a possible
aggressor will destroy the basic attitudes of a democratic, humanistic society. In other words, the continued arms race, even if it would not lead to the outbreak of a thermonuclear war, would lead to the destruction of any of those qualities of our society which can be called “democratic,” “free,” or “in the American tradition.” Orwell demonstrates the illusion of the assumption that democracy can continue to exist in a
world preparing for nuclear war, and he does so imaginatively and brilliantly.
Another important aspect is Orwell’s description of the nature of truth, which on the surface is a picture of Stalin’s treatment of truth, especially in the thirties. But anyone who sees in Orwell’s description only another denunciation of Stalinism is missing an essential element of Orwell’s analysis. He is actually talking about a development which is taking place in the western industrial countries also, only at a slower pace than it is taking place in Russia and China. The basic question which Orwell raises is whether there is any such thing as “truth.” “Reality,” so the ruling party holds, “is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else … whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.” If this is so, then by controlling men’s minds, the Party controls truth. In a dramatic conversation between the protagonist of the Party and the beaten rebel, a conversation which is a worthy analogy to Dostoyevsky’s conversation between the Inquisitor and Jesus, the basic principles of the Party are explained. In contrast to the Inquisitor, however, the leaders of the Party do not even pretend that their system is intended to make man happier, because men, being frail and cowardly creatures, want to escape freedom and are unable to face the truth. The leaders are aware of, the fact that they themselves have only one aim, and that is power. To them “power is not a means; it is an end. And power means the capacity to inflict unlimited pain and suffering to another
human being”[3]. Power, then, for them creates reality, it creates truth. The position which Orwell attributes here to the power elite can be said to be an extreme form of philosophical idealism, but it is more to the point to recognize that the concept of truth and reality which exists in 1984 is an extreme form of pragmatism in which truth becomes subordinated to the Party. An American writer, Alan Harrington, who in Life in the Crystal Palace [4] gives a subtle and penetrating picture of life in a big American corporation, has coined an excellent expression for the contemporary concept of truth: “mobile truth.” If I work for a big corporation which claims that its product is better than that of all competitors, the question whether this claim is justified or not in terms of ascertainable reality becomes irrelevant. What matters is that as long as I serve this particular corporation, this claim becomes “my” truth, and I decline to examine whether it is an objectively valid truth. In fact, if I change my job and move over to the corporation which was until now “my” competitor, I shall accept the new truth, that its product is the best, and subjectively speaking, this new truth will be as true as the old one. It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality more and more into something relative to his own interests and functions. Truth is proven by the consensus of millions; to the slogan “how can millions be wrong” is added “and how can a minority of one be right.” Orwell shows quite clearly that in a system in which the concept of truth as an objective judgment concerning reality is abolished, anyone who is a minority of one must be convinced that he is insane.
In describing the kind of thinking which is dominant in 1984, Orwell has coined a word which has already become part of the modern vocabulary: “doublethink.” “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … This process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision. But it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.” It is precisely the unconscious aspect of doublethink which will seduce many a reader of 1984 into believing that the method of doublethink is
employed by the Russians and the Chinese, while it is something quite foreign to himself. This, however, is an illusion, as a few examples can demonstrate. We in the West speak of the “free world,” in which we include not only systems like those of the United States and England, which are based on free elections and freedom of expression, but we include also South American dictatorships (at least we did as long as they existed); we also include various forms of dictatorship like those of Franco and Salazar, and those in South Africa, Pakistan and Abyssinia. While we speak about the free world, we actually mean all those states which are against Russia and China and not at all, as the words would indicate, states which have political freedom. Another contemporary example of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting them can, be found in our discussion about armament. We spend a considerable part of our
income and energy in building thermonuclear weapons, and close our minds to the fact that they might go off and destroy one third or one half or most of our population (and that of the enemy). Some go even further; thus Herman Kahn, one of the most influential writers on atomic strategy today, states, “… in other words, war is horrible, there is no question about it, but so is peace, and it is proper with the kind of calculations we are making today to compare the horror of war and the horror of peace, and see how much
worse it is” [5].
Kahn assumes that thermonuclear war might mean the destruction of sixty million Americans, and yet he finds that even in such a case “the country would recover rather rapidly and effectively,” [6] and that “normal and happy lives for the, majority of the survivors and their descendants” [7] would not be precluded by the tragedy of thermonuclear war. This view holds: a) that we prepare for war in order to preserve peace, b) that even if war breaks out and the Russians kill one third of our population and we do
the same to them (and if we can, of course, more) still, people will live happy lives afterwards, c) that not only war but also peace is horrible, and it is necessary to examine how much more horrible war is than peace. People who accept this kind of reasoning are called “sober”; those who doubt that if two million or sixty million died it would leave America essentially untouched are not “sober”; those who point to the political and psychological and moral consequences of such destruction are called “unrealistic.”
While this is not the place for a lengthy discussion on the problem of disarmament, these examples most be given in order to make the point which is essential for the understanding of Orwell’s book, namely that”doublethink” is already with us, and not merely something which will happen in the future, and in dictatorships.
Another important point in Orwell’s discussion is closely related to “doublethink,” namely that in a successful manipulation of the mind the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks, but he thinks the opposite of what is true. Thus, for instance, if he has surrendered his independence and his integrity completely, if he experiences himself as a thing which belongs either to the state, the party or the corporation, then two plus two are five, or “Slavery is Freedom,” and he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood. Specifically this applies to ideologies. Just as the Inquisitors who tortured their prisoners believed that they acted in the name of Christian love, the Party “rejects and vilifies every principle for which the socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of socialism.” Its content is reversed into its opposite, and yet people believe that the ideology means what it says. In this respect Orwell quite obviously refers to the falsification of socialism by Russian communism, but it must be added that the West is also guilty of a similar falsification. We present our society as being one of free initiative, individualism and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial industrial society, of an essentially bureaucratic nature, and motivated by a materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns. Related to this is another example of “doublethink,” namely that few writers, discussing atomic strategy, stumble over the fact that killing, from a Christian standpoint, is as evil or more evil than
being killed. The reader will find many other features of our present Western society in Orwell’s description in 1984, provided he can overcome enough of his own “doublethink.”
“
True.
I watch the media to be amused. Probably why I ignore the news that doesn’t shed any light on the facts (or any fiction that argues for the latest woke trends.
How do you know which facts are the good facts and which are the bad facts? Also, where do you find media that are amusing, besides old Quentin Crisp videos?
I don’t always agree with WHAT you write but I always love HOW you write. Don’t stop..
As a prison guard once said, “There isn’t a rat’s ass worth of difference between the rats that live in the alleyways and the rats that build them. Garbage in, garbage out, I don’t see where people even exist; they should all go back to the garbage universe that they came; if the only thing that they can believe in is, ‘survival of the fittest, then they’ve totally missed the whole point of their very existence, and therefore, they don’t exist. Other than that, I agree with you completely.
Black Hawk Statue at Lowden State Park | Enjoy Illinois
y Wakefield’s account, the US troops at Bad Axe “shrank not from their duty. They all joined in the work of death for death it was. We were by this time fast getting rid of those demons in human shape…the Ruler of the Universe, He who takes vengeance on the guilty, did not design those guilty wretches to escape His vengeance…” It was an unsettling read.
The top “demon in human shape” — “chief” Black Hawk — escaped death and lived six years beyond the “war” (slaughter) that bore his name. He was sent to a US reservation in Iowa after US President Andrew Jackson (himself a famous and prolific Indian-killer) had Black Hawk paraded across Eastern cities as a celebrity freak and war booty — an exotic savage held up to gawking white crowds as proof of the United States military’s alleged prowess in defeating barbarian brutes.
The “Black Hawk War” was a lopsided campaign of ethnic cleansing that pushed all northern Illinois’ surviving original inhabitants west of the Mississippi.
READ MORE Lying is as American as Cherry Pie
https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Lying-is-as-American-as-Ch-by-Paul-Street-American-Hegemony_Lying-Lies-Prevarication-210406-816.html
LOL, yes, I know that one, they bragged how they shot drowned infants as they tried to escape across the Mississippi. The funniest part of it all is that as all these little white settlements sprung up afterward, they would write that the land was vacant, only the whites were capable of appreciating its potential, and therefore, insinuated, that they had found land that no one else wanted. Pretty much exactly what is going on in the Middle East today. 5000 years of recorded history proves that no one but Zionists ever lived there before them, including the Pharoahs, the Babylonians, etc., etc..
“…fair to re-examine Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that “Propaganda actually constitutes the substance of politics”
https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/The-Plague-of-Historical-A-by-Henry-Giroux-Antifa_Democracy_Fascism_History-210406-210.html
Pandemic as Metaphor
The grim reaper who revealed grim truths about our society. (Part two of the misinformation trifecta). READ MORE https://zeynep.substack.com/p/pandemic-as-metaphor
Why does this matter, besides being infuriated by the smugness of that anti-science attorney harassing individuals? Because it’s part of a big pattern. I have a few Twitter threads where I’ve provided examples of people being shamed, scolded, facing hostility and even being trampled by horses for just being on the beach or ata park. There have been many stories of superspreading, outbreaks and surges that are illustrated by pictures of beaches and parks.
Twitter avatar for @zeynep
zeynep tufekci
@zeynep
I’m beginning to wonder if I’m being personally-trolled here, as an experiment. This is by CNN, bringing you the important news about the pandemic with visuals that highlight the acute problem. h/t @PatrickFIanagan
I agree completely and enthusiastically with everything I just read – with one exception:
The deepest root of the problem is our failure to properly educate our offspring from the earliest possible time, a mistake that (1) impairs their IQ throughout life, which would otherwise be *far* higher (check out Boris Sidis & son William in Wikipedia and elsewhere online), and (2) wastes the time when Nature would have them building a well-structured worldview in which everything connects to everything else in logical cause-effect fashion.
#(2) makes most of us vulnerable to the logical contradictions that now dominate most worldviews and are manipulated by our rulers, and
#(1) means that most of us lack the talent and the will to challenge these logical inconsistencies.
My personal experience (from the inside) and history provide me with at least 2 documentable data points to support what Boris had to say about this: First, my 160 IQ following being taught to read by age 3, second, my GRE scores, with a huge difference between my 50-raw-points-above 99th %ile in verbal, but only ranking 93rd %ile in quantitative, as I didn’t even learn about reading numbers or using them until twice age 3. Perfectly in line with what Sidis said about the rapid diminution of learning ability with aqe in our youth, before we even get to formal schooling.
WE CAN DO BETTER!!!
Examples, examples, quotes, quotes, all desperately needed to expose the narrative matrix, beef up a compelling, competing vision of reality, and set the hooks of memory in the reader’s consciousness. Edward Bernays, George Orwell, P.T. Barnum, Joseph Goebbels, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Vince McMahon, Coke, Pepsi, Marlboro, Right Guard, Noam Chomsky, Doctor Strangelove, the Warren Report, the 9-11 Commission, War of the Worlds, WMDs, Russiagate – real meat, not just passing references – tons of low-hanging fruit crying to add spice and color to your amazing insights and make them come alive. Hoping for more.
Hi Caitlin, would it be difficult for you to have a Canada outlet? Shipping + duty from US is harsh.
right, cait. and here is the counter attack: dump income tax, install asset tax. provide free healthcare, free edu., BMI for 2,000 for everyone over 18 per month. cut SOS by 20% per year. put the airforce in mothballs. and the outmoded navy. reform all police in Amerd-i-caca.
go to $15 minimum wage IF we can agree time and 1/2 starts after 4 day week, 6 hour dayz. Use tariffs vs. too cheap labor–we should not support or subsidize starvation wages anywhere–esp. by US based corpos.
we might have to attack some of these places although i realize it all begins and ends in Swiss banks: NAURU, Cayman Island, Vanuatu, SanMarino, Banamas, Andora. Monaco, and so many more it’s hard to remember. we might have to confiscate some places and things. like patents on vaccines. VAX is nada if the whole wold does not get it. we need like 70% humanity vaxed…and that might still be too late due to new variants rising up….Moderna only lasts 3-6 months. wait and see. they have barely been in existence that long…so this proves –along w/ebola–that we humans need world wide free health care. thus being a doctor is not a path to filthy fame and riches. just comfortable and respected.
that’s enough for now. if we can even get this far, we shall see the world cool down down most likely….our own DODis the worst heater and polluter and enemy killer of the people.
in the US if we cannot get DC statehood, we got to combine N. & S, Dakota, with Montana and Wyoming. them add in Puerto Rico. Probably merge Iowa and Nebraska. then CA into two states since we have 40 million people and Wyoming with 1/2 million and 3 electoral votes: a whole CA should have 3 X 80 = 240 electoral college votes. CA now has only 58.
CA has 6th largest economy more or less, in the world. And would be on the 6th largest population in EU. 5th if UK leaves. Compare all stats: North America to EU for balance. Sweden, e.g., could fit it’s 10 million pop. inside Los Angeles. LA Metro = all of Scandinavia.
Plus, we have a varied mix of all cultures, languages, and religions. EU cities are like tiny islands of homogeneity. see and study worldometer. please.
Buyer beware , two for the price of one is cheaper than just one ! i only need one…no consume more & add to your fly buy’s have you not a fly buy’s card ? Raised eyebrow look given .
Surveillance Capitalism. Data is Control