Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): The problem that underpins most other problems in modern times is that human minds are highly hackable, and that the science of hacking them at mass scale has been advancing since Bernays over a century ago. This is what keeps people consenting to the destructive and exploitative agendas of the powerful against their own interests.
All through my life, I've had people tell me that I don't comply, that I'm not a "team player." I had a successful 7 year career as a military officer because I pretended to play the game, but I learned the second day at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that my Myers-Briggs score would get me kicked out of the academy before I really started. I don't like things like that to control what I do or where I go, so I said the right things to the "review board" to ensure my, er, "survival."
I've had a propensity to tell the CEO's I worked for and the Boards I reported to during my ensuing 43 year career in business that, with few exceptions, THEY were the problem. Since THEY were all finance or marketing people and, therefore, wanted nothing to do with manufacturing and distribution, they let it ride...and I learned how to do this and get my way with a smile on my face.
But make no mistake: I knew I was pushing a boulder uphill. I wasn't going to be anyone's CEO unless I started my own business...which I did and built it to a nine figure international concern before I sold it in 2020.
People who go along, get along. Unfortunately, they are controlled, like most of the other worker bees who have been pushed through the American educational python to become latter-day Israelites who, instead of building pyramids for the pharaohs, build iPhones and Boeing 777s for the man.
The propaganda I have had thrown at me since that second fateful day at the Academy 54 years ago has been, for the most part, incremental and passive. But it has taken hold on so many people I used to know as singular thinkers and creative minds. Now, many of them are MAGAts and QAnons, which is hard to comprehend. While many of us have seen the wealth of the lower 95% erode consistently, some of us had the balls to do something about it. But I'll tell you what: I'm tired of fighting.
Which, I think, is the point. The empire is winning, and I can't tilt at windmills any longer, with few Sancho Panzas at my side.
We need a new system of governance and, I'm afraid, the only way we're going to get it is through anarchy.
Narrative control has been going on since at least ancient Egypt. They convinced the people their leaders were gods. This lasted for thousands of years so they must have been doing a good job. This continued to work so well that it was still being practiced in the Japan of 1945 and Indonesia of 1964. Emperor worship in Thailand goes on to this day.
I'd say the big advance came not with Bernays but with the Internet. It meant that They could get immediate and accurate feedback on which lies were working and which were not. If someone made a contribution to your campaign you could trace back their web history, see what caused it, and do it more. That made the big jump I think, a huge difference.
As for use of AI, surely this is happening now in secret. Needless to say, our opinion on this practice will not be solicited. Don't like it? Tough.
It (the BS) started to accelerate in 2000 with the Bush administration when Bush, Cheney wolfowitz and rumsfeld decided that they could create their own reality. That's also when the internet really took off and was tapped by the NSA et.al. Y2K was the excuse - all the computers are going to crash with financial meltdowns , nuclear power station meltdowns, airliners are going to crash and so on. So the federal government had to Save the Day by sending programmers to "reprogram" all the code because it was obsolete. The excuse was that the code was written using only the last two digits in the years ie 2000 was saved as 00 and could be interpreted incorrectly as 1900 or vice versa. Everyone I knew at the time bought into it including 2 friends who were programmers at digital equipment Corp. I don't think there were many banks at the time running mainframe computers built in 1970. Shortly after 2000 an IT engineer came out and said that internet trunks were being tapped by the government. He quickly disappeared. Then came the Patriot act. Then came Snowden. So Y2K, 911, the Patriot act all allowed the government to read our thoughts and minds and gain ultimate control over the masses via the internet. AI does not exist yet. What is called AI is nothing more than a statistical method of reading key words and compiling them to see how people are reacting to proposals or issues in the media. Google (or Go Ogle if you prefer) has done a fantastic job of keeping tabs on us. They can keep us fighting over non issues, suppress any type of unification or dissension and create policies to maintain the status quo. If anyone becomes too dangerous they will be squashed like an insect. Marginalized at the least. "Oops your bank account disappeared? We're sorry."
But, everyone I have tried to explain this to thinks I'm a nutcase. Once you've been swimming in the cesspool long enough, you no longer smell it. Welcome to Amerika.
" Step 1 is learning that minds are very hackable, and are being hacked constantly on a mass scale.
Step 2 is learning that your own mind is included in this. "
Well Caitlin, I smiled while reading your post, I realized that there is something in which we who were born behind the Iron Curtain have an advantage with "Western" people who look at the world innocently with wide eyes ! :)
We grew up under the unlimited Soviet propaganda, we don't believe anything we read in the newspaper and what well-paid announcers suggest on television ! After getting to know the operation of the Western lying machine in the last thirty years, we have little or no influence on what the BBC, the Washington Post lie, or what Anne Applebaum lied in the columns of the New York Times. We look with pity at the Western citizens who have languished in prosperity, who at the cost of robbing others were kept well according to the Roman model of "Panem et Circenses" (until now!) and they believe that this is what they deserve, and it will be like this forever and ever ! I have bad news, this will end soon, and just like the obese Roman citizens, they believed that the privilege granted by God was that slaves would bring them the selected delicacies ! And if they have already lived up to their throats, they tickle their throats with peacock feathers to vomit out what they have stuffed into themselves, to fill their bottomless stomach again and again ! Well, Odoaker is already knocking on the gates of Rome, the barbarians are already coming with a huge army and powerful hatred in their hearts, because they have not forgotten what you did to their people ! And if the people of the USA were to go and see what is happening on the southern borders, they would see the people gathering there !
About month go, you said there is reason for hope simply because there are many more of us than there are of them ... although I've always thought this claim was a bit naive, I really want to be proven wrong ... so please consider making the case here on Substack sometime soon ...
And please remember that for your thesis to really have teeth, it must address these cold hard facts:
- they have the guns
- they have technology
- they make the laws
- they run the banks
- they own the media
- they shape the discourse
- they do not take prisoners
The ball is now in your court ... nobody has attempted to do this since the March 2023 lock downs were declared ... be the first on your block ...
Thank you Caitlin, you hit the nail on the head once again! If you disagree or query the lies being pumped into us, you are considered unhinged because you don't go with the flow. It has worked so well that now in the UK our voices are being stifled by laws being passed to forbid protest, and our two main political parties supporting this.
A thought: if Julian Assange had not been captured, and Wikileaks was still as strong as it was when he was at the helm, what new secrets would have been revealed?
"The problem, as is so often the case, is that mainstream westerners make the assumption that "If that's what was happening, we would have heard about it in the news." Not understanding that their "news" media is designed to advance the interests of the powerful, not to report the news."
It's important to also note that nearly 90% of all American news and social media platforms and outlets are owned by Jews and/or Zionists, thus they control what the narrative is and what news is (and isn't) reported on and ultimately published and broadcasted.
A lot of bullshit is disguised by sentimentality and partisanship. For instance, it is generally assumed that religion is coincidental with ethics and morality. But a closer examination reveals that religion and religious observances revolve around a code of behaviour related to club membership. Do this, do that, if you want to belong to the club, if you want to be accepted by club members. It is a faulty interpretation of love, which, in its shallow form is a nice feeling that makes you feel good, but might not be in others' best interests, or yours even, in the long run. That's why we have laws which, it they are good laws, treat everybody the same - my and your personal prejudices aside. Ethics and morality has to do with all of humanity, all of animal and plant life, and the health of the planet itself. And that's why being patriotic to the point of jingoism, or, "my country, right or wrong", is a very bad idea, and unethical and immoral. It's the source of most of the destructive bullshit.
This bullshit analogy seems so perfect. To continue it: The covid crimes were an attempt to extend the pipe directly into our noses, which gave many of us a clearer view!
“…..At first glance it looks like a violent and abusive apartheid system with one ethnicity receiving preferential treatment over the other, but people assume it can't be that simple, mistakenly thinking that if it was that clear-cut there wouldn't be so much debate about it — with their own government supporting the apartheid side….”
The greatest irony in the use of the word “apartheid” here, is that it’s taken from South African context. A context in which the US and its allies/vassals all uniformly designated the oppressed as terrorists while embracing the violent, nuclear-armed colonialist of European origin as “allies”.
You really couldn’t make up the absurdity of reality if you tried to.
And yet no no ever learns that these governments are evil and uninterested in democracy or freedom.
"All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea."
I want to push back on this a little. While I don’t think your analysis is wrong, I look at it from a different perspective. What you’ve described falls under 5th Generation Warfare (5GW).
I believe that 5GW is actually an insurgency of the people. The internet and its associated technologies has allowed the people to save, share, and spread the truth far faster than the State can counter it with their lies and manipulation.
They’re strategy is indeed to obfuscate the truth and make things seem more complicated in order to achieve consensus around their narrative. But this really doesn’t work on the masses. 10x as many people watch/listen to Joe Rogan than watch the top rated corporate press prime time shows.
Government and their propaganda partners in the corporate press are conducting Counter-5GW and just like their attempts at Counter-Insurgency to combat 4GW, they are failing. They’re failing because they’re trying to fight decentralized, fast, agile and adaptive forces with centralized power structures that love slow and can only counter react. They’re essentially permanently on the defensive.
This is why I have so much hope and optimism for the future. The technologies are on the side of freedom. We just need to realize and understand our own power projection against these Regimes and continue to push back.
I’ve written about this on Nostr, and specifically wrote about it there because it is a decentralized, censor resistant protocol that will become one of the main tools used for freedom.
All through my life, I've had people tell me that I don't comply, that I'm not a "team player." I had a successful 7 year career as a military officer because I pretended to play the game, but I learned the second day at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that my Myers-Briggs score would get me kicked out of the academy before I really started. I don't like things like that to control what I do or where I go, so I said the right things to the "review board" to ensure my, er, "survival."
I've had a propensity to tell the CEO's I worked for and the Boards I reported to during my ensuing 43 year career in business that, with few exceptions, THEY were the problem. Since THEY were all finance or marketing people and, therefore, wanted nothing to do with manufacturing and distribution, they let it ride...and I learned how to do this and get my way with a smile on my face.
But make no mistake: I knew I was pushing a boulder uphill. I wasn't going to be anyone's CEO unless I started my own business...which I did and built it to a nine figure international concern before I sold it in 2020.
People who go along, get along. Unfortunately, they are controlled, like most of the other worker bees who have been pushed through the American educational python to become latter-day Israelites who, instead of building pyramids for the pharaohs, build iPhones and Boeing 777s for the man.
The propaganda I have had thrown at me since that second fateful day at the Academy 54 years ago has been, for the most part, incremental and passive. But it has taken hold on so many people I used to know as singular thinkers and creative minds. Now, many of them are MAGAts and QAnons, which is hard to comprehend. While many of us have seen the wealth of the lower 95% erode consistently, some of us had the balls to do something about it. But I'll tell you what: I'm tired of fighting.
Which, I think, is the point. The empire is winning, and I can't tilt at windmills any longer, with few Sancho Panzas at my side.
We need a new system of governance and, I'm afraid, the only way we're going to get it is through anarchy.
Narrative control has been going on since at least ancient Egypt. They convinced the people their leaders were gods. This lasted for thousands of years so they must have been doing a good job. This continued to work so well that it was still being practiced in the Japan of 1945 and Indonesia of 1964. Emperor worship in Thailand goes on to this day.
I'd say the big advance came not with Bernays but with the Internet. It meant that They could get immediate and accurate feedback on which lies were working and which were not. If someone made a contribution to your campaign you could trace back their web history, see what caused it, and do it more. That made the big jump I think, a huge difference.
As for use of AI, surely this is happening now in secret. Needless to say, our opinion on this practice will not be solicited. Don't like it? Tough.
It (the BS) started to accelerate in 2000 with the Bush administration when Bush, Cheney wolfowitz and rumsfeld decided that they could create their own reality. That's also when the internet really took off and was tapped by the NSA et.al. Y2K was the excuse - all the computers are going to crash with financial meltdowns , nuclear power station meltdowns, airliners are going to crash and so on. So the federal government had to Save the Day by sending programmers to "reprogram" all the code because it was obsolete. The excuse was that the code was written using only the last two digits in the years ie 2000 was saved as 00 and could be interpreted incorrectly as 1900 or vice versa. Everyone I knew at the time bought into it including 2 friends who were programmers at digital equipment Corp. I don't think there were many banks at the time running mainframe computers built in 1970. Shortly after 2000 an IT engineer came out and said that internet trunks were being tapped by the government. He quickly disappeared. Then came the Patriot act. Then came Snowden. So Y2K, 911, the Patriot act all allowed the government to read our thoughts and minds and gain ultimate control over the masses via the internet. AI does not exist yet. What is called AI is nothing more than a statistical method of reading key words and compiling them to see how people are reacting to proposals or issues in the media. Google (or Go Ogle if you prefer) has done a fantastic job of keeping tabs on us. They can keep us fighting over non issues, suppress any type of unification or dissension and create policies to maintain the status quo. If anyone becomes too dangerous they will be squashed like an insect. Marginalized at the least. "Oops your bank account disappeared? We're sorry."
But, everyone I have tried to explain this to thinks I'm a nutcase. Once you've been swimming in the cesspool long enough, you no longer smell it. Welcome to Amerika.
" Step 1 is learning that minds are very hackable, and are being hacked constantly on a mass scale.
Step 2 is learning that your own mind is included in this. "
Well Caitlin, I smiled while reading your post, I realized that there is something in which we who were born behind the Iron Curtain have an advantage with "Western" people who look at the world innocently with wide eyes ! :)
We grew up under the unlimited Soviet propaganda, we don't believe anything we read in the newspaper and what well-paid announcers suggest on television ! After getting to know the operation of the Western lying machine in the last thirty years, we have little or no influence on what the BBC, the Washington Post lie, or what Anne Applebaum lied in the columns of the New York Times. We look with pity at the Western citizens who have languished in prosperity, who at the cost of robbing others were kept well according to the Roman model of "Panem et Circenses" (until now!) and they believe that this is what they deserve, and it will be like this forever and ever ! I have bad news, this will end soon, and just like the obese Roman citizens, they believed that the privilege granted by God was that slaves would bring them the selected delicacies ! And if they have already lived up to their throats, they tickle their throats with peacock feathers to vomit out what they have stuffed into themselves, to fill their bottomless stomach again and again ! Well, Odoaker is already knocking on the gates of Rome, the barbarians are already coming with a huge army and powerful hatred in their hearts, because they have not forgotten what you did to their people ! And if the people of the USA were to go and see what is happening on the southern borders, they would see the people gathering there !
Hey Caitlin ...
About month go, you said there is reason for hope simply because there are many more of us than there are of them ... although I've always thought this claim was a bit naive, I really want to be proven wrong ... so please consider making the case here on Substack sometime soon ...
And please remember that for your thesis to really have teeth, it must address these cold hard facts:
- they have the guns
- they have technology
- they make the laws
- they run the banks
- they own the media
- they shape the discourse
- they do not take prisoners
The ball is now in your court ... nobody has attempted to do this since the March 2023 lock downs were declared ... be the first on your block ...
Thank you Caitlin, you hit the nail on the head once again! If you disagree or query the lies being pumped into us, you are considered unhinged because you don't go with the flow. It has worked so well that now in the UK our voices are being stifled by laws being passed to forbid protest, and our two main political parties supporting this.
It is as if the 20th century never happened.
Fascism is the default ideology for leaders lacking the virtue, discipline, and humanism the practice of democracy requires.
A thought: if Julian Assange had not been captured, and Wikileaks was still as strong as it was when he was at the helm, what new secrets would have been revealed?
"The problem, as is so often the case, is that mainstream westerners make the assumption that "If that's what was happening, we would have heard about it in the news." Not understanding that their "news" media is designed to advance the interests of the powerful, not to report the news."
It's important to also note that nearly 90% of all American news and social media platforms and outlets are owned by Jews and/or Zionists, thus they control what the narrative is and what news is (and isn't) reported on and ultimately published and broadcasted.
A lot of bullshit is disguised by sentimentality and partisanship. For instance, it is generally assumed that religion is coincidental with ethics and morality. But a closer examination reveals that religion and religious observances revolve around a code of behaviour related to club membership. Do this, do that, if you want to belong to the club, if you want to be accepted by club members. It is a faulty interpretation of love, which, in its shallow form is a nice feeling that makes you feel good, but might not be in others' best interests, or yours even, in the long run. That's why we have laws which, it they are good laws, treat everybody the same - my and your personal prejudices aside. Ethics and morality has to do with all of humanity, all of animal and plant life, and the health of the planet itself. And that's why being patriotic to the point of jingoism, or, "my country, right or wrong", is a very bad idea, and unethical and immoral. It's the source of most of the destructive bullshit.
This bullshit analogy seems so perfect. To continue it: The covid crimes were an attempt to extend the pipe directly into our noses, which gave many of us a clearer view!
Spot on!
“…..At first glance it looks like a violent and abusive apartheid system with one ethnicity receiving preferential treatment over the other, but people assume it can't be that simple, mistakenly thinking that if it was that clear-cut there wouldn't be so much debate about it — with their own government supporting the apartheid side….”
The greatest irony in the use of the word “apartheid” here, is that it’s taken from South African context. A context in which the US and its allies/vassals all uniformly designated the oppressed as terrorists while embracing the violent, nuclear-armed colonialist of European origin as “allies”.
You really couldn’t make up the absurdity of reality if you tried to.
And yet no no ever learns that these governments are evil and uninterested in democracy or freedom.
"All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea."
― George Lucas
I want to push back on this a little. While I don’t think your analysis is wrong, I look at it from a different perspective. What you’ve described falls under 5th Generation Warfare (5GW).
I believe that 5GW is actually an insurgency of the people. The internet and its associated technologies has allowed the people to save, share, and spread the truth far faster than the State can counter it with their lies and manipulation.
They’re strategy is indeed to obfuscate the truth and make things seem more complicated in order to achieve consensus around their narrative. But this really doesn’t work on the masses. 10x as many people watch/listen to Joe Rogan than watch the top rated corporate press prime time shows.
Government and their propaganda partners in the corporate press are conducting Counter-5GW and just like their attempts at Counter-Insurgency to combat 4GW, they are failing. They’re failing because they’re trying to fight decentralized, fast, agile and adaptive forces with centralized power structures that love slow and can only counter react. They’re essentially permanently on the defensive.
This is why I have so much hope and optimism for the future. The technologies are on the side of freedom. We just need to realize and understand our own power projection against these Regimes and continue to push back.
I’ve written about this on Nostr, and specifically wrote about it there because it is a decentralized, censor resistant protocol that will become one of the main tools used for freedom.
Please check out my Notes on 5GW!
https://damus.io/note1pgk4g9v4xmvlsax70tfdgnkjmldfrruqpujkcrlv383yatsezn7srlaszz
The imperial machine can go march its dumb ass right off the edge of the flat earth.