Reminds me a little of these, too...
rigorousintuition.ca :: "Gay Girl in Damascus" fake?
rigorousintuition.ca :: 911 Witness - "Harley Shirt Guy" - an actor?
BTW check out the guy @ 3:30: "Just standing by ... Can't say what role I'm playing?"
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by MinM » Sun Mar 11, 2012 11:17 pm
by Hugh Manatee Wins » Mon Mar 12, 2012 12:13 am
Do the research, DIA. Find the fuckers who planned 9/11. 
by MinM » Tue Oct 09, 2012 4:11 pm
by The Consul » Tue Oct 09, 2012 6:29 pm
wha? wrote:you can go ahead and ban me for this since it's the last time i'll probably post...but the more i read mr wins posts the more i'm convinced he's a total spook. and one who thinks he's a lot more clever than he actually is. or just a complete nutjob. but spook is much more likely. i just wanted someone to go ahead and say it. so there. i did. bring the banhammer.
by Luther Blissett » Sat Oct 20, 2012 3:56 pm
by Nordic » Sat Oct 20, 2012 6:33 pm
Luther Blissett wrote:What are individuals' takes on the Amber Lynn saga? The best source for the story seems to be infowars so I am reluctant to bring it up, but am curious all the same.
by Luther Blissett » Sat Oct 20, 2012 11:07 pm
by Nordic » Sun Oct 21, 2012 4:17 am
by MinM » Tue Oct 23, 2012 7:57 am
John Holliman (October 23, 1948–September 12, 1998) was an American broadcast journalist. He was a member of the original reporting corps for CNN, serving as its agriculture correspondent after serving in the same capacity for Associated Press Radio in Washington, DC. He rose to prominence as one of CNN's "Boys of Baghdad" during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 and was one of only three journalists reporting from Baghdad when allied bombing of the city began. He was later known for his coverage of space exploration...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holliman
by MinM » Fri Aug 30, 2013 12:14 am
@IntelligenceHub: CNN Caught Staging News Segments on #Syria With Actors: Anderson Cooper and CNN have been caught staging. http://intellihub.com/?p=115468
by 8bitagent » Fri Aug 30, 2013 1:29 am
by chump » Fri Mar 13, 2015 5:54 pm
Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept by their incredulity.
- Marshall McLuhan
All war is based on deception.
- Sun Tsu
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality... we'll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.
- Karl Rove
Psyops: "Psychological Operations'
Any form of communication in support of objective designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either direclly or indirectly.
- Department of Defense, US Army Field manual 33-1
There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind
― Napoleon
John Stauber, PR Watch: Academics like Alex Carey and others who have spent their lifetimes looking at how propaganda works, finds that it's actually in the opposite in western democracies and open societies where you need the most sophisticated sorts of propaganda; and since World War I, thanks to people like Ivy Lee and Eddie Bernays, propaganda has become a business - this business of public relations, or as the one of the firms that has often represented dictators - the Burston Marsteller firm, puts it: Their business is 'perception management' to manage public perception, public policy, on behalf of their clients - whoever they might be.
Years after the operation, a US Army report admitted that the toppling of Saddam's statue had been engineered by a psychological operations group. The document states, "Our TPT (or Tactical Psyop Team) saw the... statue as a target of opportunity." A week earlier another psychological operation laid the groundwork for what followed. The script was for a female rambo to do a damsel in distress to be rescued by US armed forces.
Peter Phillips of Project Censored: They waited 24 hours to get the cameras there to set up the whole thing and make this a big rescue responses that goes in and saves her, and as she becomes an instant celebrity overnight...
So, that was a PR substitute story, toppling Saddam statue, that got Chalabi's group (into power). The Rendon Group had actually formed them. The CIA paid the Rendon Group to form the Iraqi congress as counter group to Saddam Hussein, and they were based here in the US, and then they flew them over there, and shipped them into Iraq. They were the ones who were standing around the statue as a tank was used to pull it over.
The Rendon Group had been around. He worked for George W's father, and he worked for Clinton too... His firm, he (John Rendon) used to be a public relations press guy for Carter, and he created the PR firm specialized during the war.
...The head of the Rendon Group, John Rendon states, "I'm a politician, and a person who uses communication to move public policy, or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."
Following the first Gulf War, Rendon was paid $23 million by the CIA to create anti-Saddam propaganda. Following 9/11, he was charged with public relations for the US bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon is far from alone.
bigger font:
Public relations has mushroomed into a $200 Billion dollar a year industry!
Propaganda has become the primary means by which the wealthy communicate with the rest of society. Whether selling a product, a political candidate, a law, or a war, sultans of the powerful deliver messages to the public before consulting their colleagues in the public relations industry...
Our story begins in an unlikely place... A coal mine... in Ludlow, Colorado...
Today, one of the largest PR firms in the world who specializes in the art of crisis management, Burson-Martelle holds offices in 35 countries with clients such as Phillip Morris, Union Carbide, and the Monsanto Corporation... Genocidal governments...
... In addition influencing the mind of their peers, the goal was to re-define for the home population the very concept of what it meant to be American. The New American. But, not interpretted in what Creel called a class or sexual standpoint, but rather as a unified collective. In this manner, the people could be herded into "one white mass instinct.
Patriotism is a devotion to a certain place and people, contrary to nationalism which is inseparable from lust and power
- George Orwell
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.
- Mark Twain
In October of 2001, GWB signed into law what civil libertarians characterize as an all out assault against the Bill of Rights. It was called The Patriot Act. During the Great War, similiar bills were passed: The Espionage Act of 1917, and [b]The Sedition Act passed a year later, authorized huge fines and lengthy prison terms for anyone who obstructed the military draft or encouraged what was termed disloyalty to the state. The sweeping legislation was quickly put into effect.
And first on the list were the Wobblies... (T)he Industrial Workers of the World - the IWW, which flourished in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century... set out from the beginning specifically to organize immigrants, women, African Americans, alongside white workers, in what they called one big union.
They led some of the most successful strikes... Women workers played leadership roles - something that was absolutely unheard of at the time. Their philosophy was a revolutionary philosophy known as anarcho-syndicalism...
Chomsky: ... A federated, de-centralized system of free associations incorporating economic, as well as social institutions would be anarcho-syndicalism It is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into positions of tools of cogs in the machine...
Chomsky: (President) Wilson carried out a brutal, internal repression, called the Red Scare, which is the worst in American history - far worse than McCarthy, far worse than anything than what's going on now. They arrested thousands of people and smashed the labor movement, (imposed) heavy constraints on free expression, threw lots of people in jail and expelled lots of people from the country...
What was started as a hunt against radicals, soon spread to every corner of society. Patriots were encouraged to inform on friends and neighbors who spoke out against the war, while surveillance increased dramatically, not only by the military, but by seemingly benign institutions, like the postal system.
Howard Zinn:The State flourished in time of war. The State grows stronger in time of war. The state accumulates power... The military are in halves. The forces of repression are in halves. War is an opportunity for the government to grow in power.
By the time the war ended, the total number of deaths had reached approximately 9.7 million soldiers, with millions more suffering life changing injuries and severe post traumatic stress. To what end was not clear. The massive bloodshed had not made the world safer for freedom and democracy. What it had done, was produce enormous fortunes for a handful of corporations and banks, while leaving the world-wide labor movement in disarray.
If the Great War had been a test of the Constitution, then the concept of balancing the powers by each other had failed. The United States Supreme Court established in Shenck vs United States, and Abrams vs United States, that the federal government can suspend constitutional rights when the nation faced "a clear and present danger"
Randolph Bourne: War is the health of the state."
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
- Orwell, of course
Today, Walter Lippman is known as the Dean of American Journalism; yet during the great war, he'd been chief leaflet writer and editor of the US propaganda unit. He also served as secretary of "The Inquiry", a quasi-intelligence agency...
Before dealing with Walter Lippmann's contributions to political theory, we first have to understand the forms of democracy that have characterized the United States and other western nations since the age of the Great Revolutions...
John Manley, historian: ... The initial divide in American politics... was essentially a class struggle, a class conflict. Jefferson was, in fact, a fairly radical democratic thinker in his time; and clearly the Declaration's statement that, 'We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal endowed by their creator certain inalienable rights', was a powerful Democratic statement, and although Jefferson would not have applied that to women or the Indians or the blacks, nonetheless - in all those cases - (his words) would come back to be very servicable to all those groups in pushing civil rights and civil liberties forward in the United States from where Jefferson's statement left them.
The problem with the Declaration of Independence was, how were these former colonies of Britain to be governed? Well, it led immediately to the Constututional Convention of 1787...
Peter Linebaugh, historian (from the video):.. The Americans invented the Constitution to organize the money in order to conquer further lands more to the west... But, ...the slavemasters are not going to do the fighting... They... hire the poor people to do it. But, when they didn't pay Daniel Shays, Daniel Shays takes matters into his own hands in 1787, and goes to the courts and shuts down the courts because the courts were beginning to foreclose on the grounds that Daniel Shays and the other veterans from the American War did not have the money to pay back.
John Manley: ... The Debtor Riots... were sufficiently scary from the point of view of the people with property that they had to... to protect the property interests that were in dire threat from the "people"... (This resulted in) an elitist coup d'tat... against majoritarian interests... from people who didn't have much.
The first thing they did when they got to Philadelphia in 1787 was they locked the doors. The only reason we know what happened behind those closed doors was that people like James Madison kept extensive notes...
Chomsky: The American Constitution was formulated primarily by James Madison..., and he wanted to overcome, what he called, the "tyranny of the majority"... so therefore he designed the Constitution in such a way that... "the wealth of the nation will be in charge"[/b].
... In Madison's defense, one should say that he was really pre-capitalist in his mentality. He assumed that the wealthy would be, what he called, "benevolent gentlemen" who would not be concerned with their own interests, but work for the benefit of the people.
Adam Smith, who proceeded him, was much more realistic. He pointed out that the principle architects of policy, namely the merchants and manufacturers, (would design the policy) so that their own interests are protected - no matter how grievous the effect on others -including the people of England.[/b]
It's rather interesting to compare Madison's thinking... with Aristotle's Politics. Aristotle... said that democracy has a problem, and it was the same problem that Madison noticed centuries later... If everybody had a right to vote, the poor majority would attack the property of the rich and insist that it be divided, and he also felt that was unfair. But, Madison and Aristotle had opposite solutions: Madison's solution was to restrict democracy. Aristotle's solution was to restrict inequality.
Manley: The BIll of Rights and the first ten amendments to the Constitution... were the price that the Federalists had to pay at the ratifying convention to pass the document... The Bill of Rights, was forced down their throats. It didn't come out of Philadelphia at all. It was appended in 1791 and forced down on the Constitution by the more Democratic elements in the Senate side...
Even with the Bill of Rights, we have a system that is hardly perfect from the point of view of civil rights and civil liberties...
"In the words of an Anti-federalist": ... The men of fortune will not feel for the common people. An aristocratical tyranny (will arise) in which the great will struggle for power, honor and wealth... The poor become prey to avarice, insolence and oppression. In short, my fellow citizens, it can be said to be nothing less that a nasty stride to universal empire.
Stephen M. Sachs, author, "Remembering the Circle"[/b[ (from the video): Native Americans were exceedingly democratic in the way they operated. No society is perfect, but when you make comparisons, they were sometimes small, but sometimes 30-40,000 people and more in a large confederacy, that operated on a basis of mutual respect. [b]Mutual respect that developed out of experience. If you didn't treat people equally, then they were going to give you trouble.
Societies were extremely collaborative, but also exceeding individualist. The individual was honored, but the values were collaborative - because you had to get along. Everybody was included in every decision that affected them. Elders obviously were honored: They knew more. You listened your elders, but everybody had a say. You have an extremely participatory society, and as it moves up to a great deal of de-centralization. So, if you had a large number of people, they would be in a federation. the village would decide for itself. The tribe would then decide, but the individual villages would have to decide. Then, the tribes in the federation fair representatives would meet. But, but they wouldn't decide for everyone, they'd have to have a consensus of the people. So, if there wasn't a consensus already, they'd have to go back and discuss it. So that, to the extent that there was representation, these were representatives who were truly representative. They would have to go back. They wouldn't keep their positions unless they were consulting people, and they knew that even if they had the authority to make a decision, people would go elsewhere and not keep them as leaders if they didn't listen to them and they didn't treat them right. By and large, you had a much more participatory society, and even on the larger more representative level, representatives really had to listen to their constituency.
Ironically referred to as primitive and savage, native Americans had actually created a far more democratic system of self governance than any civilized nation in history. But, their anarchic models, as well as the more limited democratic systems proposed by the anti-federalists, were incompatible with Madison's elitist vision.
In Republic and Parliamentary Democracy alike, citizens would be reduced to passive observers. They would be allowed to pick and chose which individuals make decisions on their behalf - but they would not be able to make those decisions themselves.
Returning to the period after the first world war, we find widespread support amongst intellectuals for Madison's elitist interpretation of democracy.
According to Walter Lippmann, the public's function in politics was to be "interested spectators of action", but not participants; yet Lippmann perceived a problem: New technologies in communication and transporation had awakened millions of disenfranchised people to new world outside their towns and cities... But rather than advocate structural changes in society's institutions, Lippmann suggested that propaganda readjust the public mind.[/b]
Chomsky: ... A huge public relations industry was developed at the same time. They're the people who would manage and control the marketing exercises that are polled elections in the United States... We market candidates the same way we market toothpaste, lifestyle drugs, or automobiles. Of course, it helps to have a lot of money...
Time magazine said that, "Democracy is in the worst interest of national goals... The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman in the street to interfere in its management."
A man who surely would've agreed was Edward Bernays. Like Littmann, Bernays served as a propagandist on the Creel committee; and like Littmann, he went on to fashion wartime propaganda for peacetime needs.
In his classic text, Propaganda, Bernays suggested that elites, "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." Bernays considered mass mind control so crucial that it constituted, "the very essence of the democratic process"... It would also lead to wealth on a scale never before imagined.
Sut Jhally, Media Education Foundation: The major story that advertisers tell us... is that the way to happiness is through the consumption of things...
In the 1920's, business leaders were faced with a dilemna. Overproduction of goods had exceeded demand by 12-14 times what it was in the 1860's, while the population only increased by a factor of 3.
There were several ways of solving the problem. One was to reduce working hours and raise wages so that production and consumption would reach an equilibrium. This would've led to more leisure time for workers, and a higher standard of living. The problem with this solution is that it could have entailed a decrease in profits. [b]Corporations are mandated by law to maximize profits on behalf of their shareholders - regardless of social and environmental costs.
According to business leaders, there was another problem. John Edgarton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, warned that a shorter work week would undermine the work ethic and potentially forment radicalism. If people had time to stop and think, they might also take time to rethink their position in life... "The emphasis should be put on work... More work and better work, instead of upon leisure."
... Production would no longer be about satisfying consumer needs, it would be an end in and of itself. Rather than a democracy of ideas, a democracy of non-participation, it would instead become a democracy of material goods. The citizen would be replaced by the consumer.
Sut Jhally:
The problem of capitalism is the problem of consumption, and the problem is that, after your basic needs have been met, there is no real need for consumption...
The first period of advertising... up until about the 1920's, advertising talked about the goods themselves - how they were made, what they did, how well they lasted, etc... However, starting about 1920 that changes and from that period on, advertisers... talk about the relationship of the goods to our needs.
At the center of the new strategy was Edward Bernays... The products became linked with the unconscious desires of the public. In this manner, there would be virtually no limits to either production or consumption.
Simpson:
Bernays... is regarded as the father of modern public relations - particularly in the US. His contribution, if you want to call it that, is to take propaganda techniques that had been developed for military and psychological warfare - national security type issues during WWI, and apply them in a systematic way to commercial issues.
One of his best known efforts had to do with encouraging women... to smoke. He would stage beauty pageants... and photo ops in which smoking by women was portrayed as 'womens' liberation... Women clearly wanted these things, so along comes Bernays who says, Here is how to have it!
Sut Jhally: ... there is this giant propaganda system of advertising that is perpetually telling us that the way to happiness is... through consumption... Advertising... is true to the extent that it reflects our real desires.[/b]
As bizarre as it may sound to people who dream of fantastic wealth as a cure for unhappiness, the same holds for the wealthy. Beyond a certain level of material comfort, deprivation is relative. If you have a million dollars, you want more to keep up with your social group who have two million. You never have enough.
... Vance Packard uses the phrase, [b]Merchants of Discontent, to describe "a deliberate strategy by advertisers of targeting the less affluent with status symbol messages. For someone with little chance of changing their status in life, consumerism offers a quick fix that allows people to feel as though they are allowed to climb the social hierarchy, but in fact they are standing still.[/b] "We're not wealthy, we just look it." ...It was called, The American Dream... Happiness was just one possession away...
Michael Parenti:Throughout history, the rich have always argued that the poor are the authors of their own poverty - because they're stupid, or disreputable, or hopeless.
People are poor because they're paid less than the value they produce...
... Poverty is neccesary if you're going to have wealth. Rich slave owners... (got wealthy) by having slaves who worked from the crack of dawn down into the night... That's creating the poverty of the slave... so that the slaveholder, or the feudal lord, or the plutocrat, or the capitalist can really accumulate wealth.
Sut Jhally: When Confucius was asked what he would do if he ruled the planet, the legendary philosopher simply replied that he would "rectify the language." In other words, let me control the media. If you can control the stories, you don't need to have soldiers on the street corner to control the people, you can control them in their own heads and own imagination...
... Capitalism is built like a house of cards, because it has to be constantly held together. We have to be told every single day what this story is, and they have to do it everyday because it's so unnatural. If it was natural, they wouldn't have to do it. And if they stop, they know it will fall apart. That is the great hope for me. The amount of time they have to spend convincing us about the value of this society is what gives me hope that there is an alternative just below the surface, and that alternative is much more human, much more compassionate, much more connected to concern for other people, there's much more concern for the planet; and it's being held down by this incredible and relentless propaganda system.
Chomsky: ...if people can actually participate in social planning, then they will presumably do so in terms of their own interest. Now, that's why Madison and Whitman and Bernays, and a whole host of others, have argued that we cannot permit the population to participate - because if they do - they will pursue their own interests and not the interests of the wealth of the nation... If you have centralized power, they'll use it for their own interest. You don't have to read that in a complicated textbook... This should be understandable to a ten year child, but not by the educated people, though they have it driven out of their own heads by various illusions replacing self serving illusions. If the population are participating, they'll serve their own interests...
Manley: ...In order for political power to be equal, economic power also has to be equal - and that was the last thing {the oligarchs) wanted, so they saw clearly that behind political democracy was economic democracy, behind political equality was economic equality, and they did everything they could to block it.
Simpson: The claims of mind control are based on the belief that human beings are powerless, or relatively powerless, when they become targets of psychological operations and propaganda. Yeah, media control has its impact on public opinion. Without a doubt, it has an impact on the assumptions that people bring to try and figure out what to do in their lives. It's powerful, but it's not the same as mind control.
I think the best way to stop propaganda is for people to better understand what it is and how it works... There are always going to be people who exploit freedom of speech for their own ends, but propaganda loses it's effectiveness if people understand what is going on. A very thing that can be done to reduce the power of propaganda is to force the players to the surface so that where you have campaigns, political campaigns, product campaigns, cultural campaigns that are organized by the good propaganda agencies (and) public relations agencies, then part of the task for the people who are observing this going on is to make this public, make it understandable to others that what's appearing on the front page... is really a propaganda or public relations campaign that's coming from a particular faction of society, that we're paying for it, and that they have names!
John Stauber, PR Watch: ...unlike Edward Bernays, I would say that what we need is more information, more freedom, more transparency, and more information about who's manipulating public opinion and the public mind.
Edward Bernays believed that, fundamentally, people were unable to govern themselves in a democracy because most of us were just too dumb to figure it out, and so he used that to justify his practice that exalted managing and manipulating public opinion... What we need is more exposure as to how the public opinion is managed and manipulated, so that we have a citizenry that can actually function and be critical decision makers and govern themselves in a democracy.
As long as you can manage public opinion... you can control public behavior and policy. That's what Eddie Bernays knew, that's what he was saying when he talked about engineering consent...
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 1995 01:24:57 -0400 (EDT)
Title: The corporate war against democracy
Review of Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Propaganda in the US and Australia
(University of NSW Press, 1995. 214 pp., $19.95)
Reviewed by Alex McCutcheon in Green Left Weekly
As Alex Carey sees it, "The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy''.
by Elvis » Fri Mar 13, 2015 8:29 pm
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