Johnstone on Propaganda (and dangerous stupidity)

Most Propaganda Looks Nothing Like This. Caitlin Johnstone. May 28, 2023


When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves.

Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media.

A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or babies being taken from incubators in Kuwait.

In reality, all are inaccurate understandings of what propaganda is and how it works in western society. Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.

The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.

One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.

Have you ever noticed how when you look at any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news website, you never see views from those who oppose the existence of the US-centralized empire? Or those who want to close all foreign US military bases? Or those who want to dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a thorough rollback of the creeping authoritarianism our civilization is being subjected to? You might see some quibbling about different aspects of the empire, some debate over whether we should de-escalate against Russia so we can better escalate against China, but you won’t ever see anyone calling for the complete end of the empire and its abuses altogether.

That’s propaganda. It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.

The creation of that illusion is propaganda. It’s not something solid that you can point to easily because it’s comprised of an omission of something rather than a concrete thing, but it warps people’s perspectives in ways that have immensely far-reaching consequences. It’s something that doesn’t stand out too sharply against the background, but because people are exposed to it continuously day in and day out, it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.

Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so. As political scientist Bernard Cohen famously observed way back in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”

Ever noticed how the fact that our governments are increasingly tempting nuclear war seems like it ought to be a front-page story pretty much every day of the week, but instead the news is full of stuff like the US presidential race and people arguing over what products Target should sell during Pride Month? That’s agenda-setting.

The press could easily have spent the entire Trump administration screaming about the dangerous aggressions Trump was advancing against Russia instead of calling him a Putin puppet, and mainstream liberals would have fixated on Trump’s warmongering insanity instead of calling him Putin’s cock holster. But that wouldn’t have served the interests of the empire, which had been planning to ramp up aggressions against Russia for years. They set the agenda, and the public fell in line.

Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.

The continual message we’re fed every day is that there’s nothing to rebel against and nothing to oppose, because any problems we’re perceiving are our own fault and not the fault of an abusive, exploitative system which is built to extract profit from the working class and the ecosystem at the expense of both. The system cannot be a failure, it can only be failed.

Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest because the majority are supporting the status quo.

Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes. The way pundits, politicians and reporters will talk about the Biden administration surrounding China with war machinery without also talking about how freakish and horrifying it is that we’re looking at rapidly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed countries. The way American cities are full of homeless people and it’s just treated as a normal and acceptable thing to simply let them stay homeless and push them out of wherever they try to be. The way nothing ever changes no matter who we vote for but we’re still herded into the voting booths and told to vote better.

As a character in the movie Waking Life puts it, “We all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional purely symbolic act of voting — do you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”

They don’t just tell us what to believe about the world, they tell us what to believe about ourselves. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.

Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,

• The world works more or less the way we were taught in school.
• The media have some problems but basically tell the truth.
• The status quo is working basically fine.
• Democracy is real and voting is effective.
• This is the only way things can be.
• Our government might have its problems, but it’s basically good.
• You can earn your way into happiness by working harder.
• You can consume your way into happiness with more spending.
• If you think the system is dysfunctional, you’re the dysfunctional one.
• Those who oppose the status quo are weird and untrustworthy.
• Things might get better after the next election cycle.
• Any attempt to change things is a silly waste of time.

By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped,” or “People are struggling financially right now, but it’s just because times are hard and it can’t be helped.”

All the mundane lies serve as a primer for the lies we’ll be told later, because once our worldview has been shaped by them, our basic human cognitive biases and predisposition to reject information which conflicts with our worldview will ensure that we’ll take on board the information which confirms our biases and reject any evidence against it. They construct our worldviews for us, then let our normal cognitive defense systems protect it.

Their messages don’t even need to be well-evidenced or well-argued, they only need to be repeated frequently due to a glitch in human cognition known as the illusory truth effect which causes us to mistake the feeling of having heard something before with the feeling of something being true.

Add to all this the recent development of things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the deck becomes stacked against truth even further, because someone’s odds of stumbling across information which conflicts with the propaganda they’ve been fed goes dramatically down. Even if they’re actively searching for information which conflicts the mainstream worldview, algorithms by Google and Google-owned YouTube often make it almost impossible to find.

So that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.

Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they’re ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.

Everything’s Getting Way More Dangerous And Way More Stupid. Caitlin Johnstone. May 26, 2023

Moon of Alabama has an article out on how an uncomfortable number of relatively restraint-oriented foreign policy officials have been exiting the Biden administration, while a China hawk has just been appointed the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Antiwar has an article out about how New York congressman Jerry Nadler told an Epoch Times reporter that he “wouldn’t care” if Ukraine used US-made F-16s to strike Russian territory, and doesn’t find the possibility that they might do so concerning.

This comes days after we learned that the Biden administration has signed off on Ukraine getting F-16s while also greenlighting an offensive on Crimea using US-made weapons, a nightmare scenario which greatly escalates the risks of nuclear war.

There are no adults behind the wheel of the vehicle that’s driving us toward World War Three. We’re on a bus that’s being driven straight toward a cliff, and it’s being driven by infants. If we survive this it will not be because of the experienced leadership of western governments, but completely in spite of it. ...........

Black Lives Absolutely Matter; Facts Also Matter; And Agendas Matter

There is no doubt that racism is a continuing problem.
There is no doubt that there are racist cops.
There is no doubt that black Americans have been victims of police brutality.

There is no doubt that white Americans have been victims of police brutality.
There is no doubt that there are psychopathic cops.
There is no doubt that psychopathy in American policing is a continuing problem.



Liberal Media Bias

Manipulative Media

Police Brutality and Black-on-Black Crime


What the data say about police shootings. Lynne Peeples, Nature. Sept. 4, 2019.
How do racial biases play into deadly encounters with the police? Researchers wrestle with incomplete data to reach answers.

On Tuesday 6 August, the police shot and killed a schoolteacher outside his home in Shaler Township, Pennsylvania. He had reportedly pointed a gun at the officers. In Grants Pass, Oregon, that same day, a 39-year-old man was shot and killed after an altercation with police in the state police office. And in Henderson, Nevada, that evening, an officer shot and injured a 15-year-old suspected of robbing a convenience store. The boy reportedly had an object in his hand that the police later confirmed was not a deadly weapon.

In the United States, police officers fatally shoot about three people per day on average, a number that’s close to the yearly totals for other wealthy nations. But data on these deadly encounters have been hard to come by.

A pair of high-profile killings of unarmed black men by the police pushed this reality into the headlines in summer 2014. Waves of public protests broke out after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the death by chokehold of Eric Garner in New York City.

Those cases and others raised questions about the extent to which racial biases — either implicit associations or outright racism — contribute to the use of lethal force by the police across the United States. And yet there was no source of comprehensive information to investigate the issue. Five years later, newspapers, enterprising individuals and the federal government have launched ambitious data-collection projects to fill the gaps and improve transparency and accountability over how police officers exercise their right to use deadly force.

“It is this awesome power that they have that no other profession has,” says Justin Nix, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska Omaha. “Let’s keep track of it.”

Social scientists and public-health researchers have begun to dig into these records and have produced more than 50 publications so far — up from a trickle of papers on the topic before 2015. They are mining the new numbers to address pressing questions, such as whether the police are disproportionately quick to shoot black civilians and those from other minority groups. But methods and interpretations vary greatly. A pair of high-profile papers published in the past few weeks1,2 come to seemingly opposite conclusions about the role of racial biases.

Scientists are now debating which incidents to track — from deadly shootings to all interactions with the public — and which details matter most, such as whether the victim was armed or had had previous contact with the police. They are also looking for the best way to compare activities across jurisdictions and account for misreporting. “It’s really contentious because there’s no clearly right answer,” says Seth Stoughton at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, a former police officer who now studies the regulation of law enforcement.

Although the databases are still imperfect, they make it clear that police officers’ use of lethal force is much more common than previously thought, and that it varies significantly across the country, including the two locations where Brown and Garner lost their lives. St Louis (of which Ferguson is a suburb) has one of the highest rates of police shooting civilians per capita in the United States, whereas New York City consistently has one of the lowest, according to one database. Deciphering what practices and policies drive such differences could identify opportunities to reduce the number of shootings and deaths for both civilians and police officers, scientists say.

“We need to standardize definitions and start counting,” says Stoughton. “As the old saying goes, ‘What gets measured, gets managed.’”

Spotlight on a blind spot

In December 2014, spurred by unrest in the wake of Ferguson, then-US president, Barack Obama, created a task force to investigate policing practices. The group issued a report five months later, highlighting a need for “expanded research and data collection” (see go.nature.com/2kqoddk). The data historically collected by the federal government on fatal shootings were sorely lacking. Almost two years later, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) responded with a pilot project to create an online national database of fatal and non-fatal use of force by law-enforcement officers. The FBI director at the time, James Comey, called the lack of comprehensive national data “unacceptable” and “embarrassing”.

Full data collection started this year. But outsiders had already begun to gather the data in the interests of informing the public. The database considered to be the most complete is maintained by The Washington Post. In 2015, the newspaper began collecting information on fatal shootings from local news reports, public records and social media. Its records indicate that police officers shoot and kill around 1,000 civilians each year — about twice the number previously counted by the FBI.

Recognizing that ‘lethal force’ does not always involve a gun and doesn’t always result in death, two other media organizations expanded on this approach. In 2015 and 2016, UK newspaper The Guardian combined its original reporting with crowdsourced information to record all fatal encounters with the police in the United States, and found around 1,100 civilian deaths per year. Online news site VICE News obtained data on both fatal and non-fatal shootings from the country’s 50 largest local police departments, finding that for every person shot and killed between 2010 and 2016, officers shot at two more people who survived. Extrapolating from that, the actual number of civilians shot by the police each year is likely to be upwards of 3,000.

Unofficial national databases have also popped up outside the major news organizations. Two small-scale private efforts, Fatal Encounters and Mapping Police Violence, aggregate and verify information from other databases with added details gleaned from social media, obituaries, criminal-records databases and police reports (see ‘Shootings by police — the data’).


Sources: Map: Mapping Police Violence; Ethnic imbalance: ref. 1; Police deaths: FBI LEOKA report 2018

The results paint a picture of definite disparity when it comes to race and police shootings. Although more white people are shot in total, people from minority ethnic groups are shot at higher rates by population. One paper published in August found that a black man is 2.5 times more likely than a white man to be killed by the police during his lifetime1. The difference, albeit smaller, is also there for women. But the authors did not make any conclusions regarding racial bias of police officers, in part because not everyone has an equal chance of coming into contact with the police. Crime rates and policing practices differ across communities, as do the historical legacies that influence them. Aggressive policing over time can increase local levels of violence and contact with the police, says Frank Edwards, a sociologist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and an author on the paper. “This is inherently a multilevel problem,” he says.

Researchers have used various approaches to try to determine the best benchmarks for the data, such as looking at the arrest rates where the shootings occurred or factoring in the context of encounters that end in a shooting. Did the suspect have a weapon? Were officers or another civilian being threatened? In a 2017 study3, for example, Nix determined that black people fatally shot by the police were twice as likely as white people to be unarmed. Those findings align with many studies published since 2015 suggesting that racial biases do influence police shootings.

Some research runs counter to this conclusion. This July, authors of a study that pulled information from The Washington Post and The Guardian databases, as well as directly from police departments, said they found no evidence of biases against black or Hispanic people2. In addition to factoring in the crime rates of the communities where the shootings happened, the authors looked at the race of the officers involved.

Several scientists have taken issue with their methods, however. To sidestep some of the questions about encounter rates, the study authors started from the pool of people shot by the police and then calculated the chance that they were of a certain race. Jonathan Mummolo, a political scientist at Princeton University, New Jersey, argues that the real question to ask in order to detect racial bias is the reverse: does a citizen of a certain race face a greater chance of getting shot by the police? And answering this question requires knowing, or at least reasonably approximating, that elusive encounter rate.

The national-scale databases are inherently messy, in part as a result of disparate definitions of the ‘use of force’, as well as different police protocols and reporting requirements. Other studies have avoided some of these inconsistencies by focusing on local data.

A 2017 study of data collected from the Dallas Police Department in Texas indicated that although race was not a significant factor in decisions to pull the trigger, Dallas officers were more likely to draw their firearms on minority suspects4.

The Dallas Police Department declined to comment on the study but highlighted its officer-education efforts, including in areas of cultural diversity and implicit bias, as well as its deployment of body cameras, which many agencies have adopted as a way to improve transparency.

Some researchers say it’s important to shift the discussion to examine when — rather than whether — racial bias factors into the use of deadly force. Does it come into play when a department decides which neighbourhoods to police most heavily? Or is it when an officer first lays eyes on a civilian, or is it when they make that split-second decision to pull the trigger? Andrew Wheeler, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, says that national-level databases should at least include all levels of use of force — down to the drawing of a weapon — in order to answer questions and create change. “Collecting data in and of itself is a good mechanism to hold police agencies accountable,” he says.

Counting on the Feds

In January, after more than three years of pilot development, the FBI unveiled its official National Use-of-Force Data Collection, which covers dozens of variables including fatal and non-fatal injuries incurred through a variety of police encounters. The database, according to the FBI, aims to inform dialogue by filling the information gap. But data submission is entirely voluntary. And no data are yet available for outside review.

Nix and others doubt that all of the more than 18,000 police agencies in the United States will voluntarily report incidents. But Darrel Stephens, a retired police chief and the interim executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, is more optimistic. Growing public pressure will force agencies to participate, he says. At the same time, he adds, the increased scrutiny since Ferguson has also come at a cost. In a 2017 national survey by the Pew Research Center, 76% of police officers reported that they had become more reluctant to use force when it is appropriate. Police officers, too, face risks. An average of around 50 officers are shot and killed by civilians every year.

In other wealthy nations, where accurate tracking of shootings is generally a given, officials tend to have fewer deaths of both civilians and officers to count. Terry Goldsworthy, a criminologist at Bond University in Queensland, Australia, highlights one potential explanation for the difference: a stark contrast in the attitude towards and availability of guns. “Generally, when a police officer pulls up to a car in Australia, they don’t expect someone to be armed,” he says.

Australia keeps a tally of its approximately five civilian deaths at the hands of the police per year, using a central government database. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, an independent inquiry is initiated every time a police officer is involved in a shooting.

To encourage US law-enforcement agencies to report use-of-force information, Stoughton, who has published widely on deadly force, says officials should consider making federal grants conditional on whether departments submit use-of-force data to national collections. But he recognizes the challenges. “We’re not talking about anything that is practically difficult,” he says. “This is something that is politically difficult.”

Researchers, meanwhile, aren’t going to wait around for the FBI. Some are refining methods to better analyse the imperfect data they have; others are continually trying to improve the information collected so far. Academics are expanding the Fatal Encounters database and filling in holes, for example, by adding police-department demographics and the location of the nearest emergency department, as well as using surname and demographic information to guess at the race of someone where it isn’t identified. “I don’t think we’ve closed the book on any of this,” says Mummolo. “We’re just beginning.”



Is 'Reverse Racism' Among Police Real? Brentin Mock. Feb. 8, 2017.

Criminologists have debated for decades whether police carry racial biases into their work—particularly the kind that leads them to kill African Americans at disproportionate rates. Much of the research in this arena suggests that yes, on balance, police officers of all races do tend to perceive African Americans as more threatening than whites. The much-revered University of California Berkeley criminology professor Paul Takagi wrote as early as 1974 that “the police have one trigger finger for whites and another for blacks,” in the Journal of Crime and Scholarly Justice.

However, a few recent studies upended the conventional wisdom on this by pointing to evidence that police might be more hesitant to use deadly force against black suspects, as opposed to white suspects. Such studies leveled up the stakes around the so-called “Ferguson Effect”: Not only were cops scaling back their policing to avoid potential public scrutiny, as this effect supposes, but they’re now being more racist towards white people, these new studies allege. 

The sheer volume of news stories over the last few years showing police using force against African Americans—both armed and unarmed—certainly suggest otherwise. After all, those stories are what propelled the Black Lives Matter movement, which continues to push for more awareness about police violence. Those stories also prompted a group of researchers to dig a little deeper into the question of whether police are biased against minorities. In a report released today, “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015,” criminal justice scholars from the University of Louisville and the University of South Carolina found an interesting way to ascertain how racial discrimination might play a role in police violence.

...

Another study, conducted by Harvard sociologist Roland Fryer last year, had similar findings. After examining over 1,300 police shootings in some of the nation’s largest cities, he found no evidence that police were more likely to shoot black suspects over whites. Wrote Fryer in the conclusion to his report: “It is plausible that racial differences in lower level uses of force are simply a distraction and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities rather than changing the behaviors of police and other external forces.”

The Truth Behind Racial Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings. Joseph Cesario, MSU. July 22, 2019.

“Until now, there’s never been a systematic, nationwide study to determine the characteristics of police involved in fatal officer-involved shootings,” said Joseph Cesario, co-author and professor of psychology at MSU. “There are so many examples of people saying that when black citizens are shot by police, it’s white officers shooting them. In fact, our findings show no support that black citizens are more likely to be shot by white officers." 

“We found that the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot," Cesario said. "If anything, black citizens are more likely to have been shot by black officers, but this is because black officers are drawn from the same population that they police. So, the more black citizens there are in a community, the more black police officers there are.”

... “Many people ask whether black or white citizens are more likely to be shot and why. We found that violent crime rates are the driving force behind fatal shootings,” Cesario said. “Our data show that the rate of crime by each racial group correlates with the likelihood of citizens from that racial group being shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of white people committing crimes, white people are more likely to be shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of black people committing crimes, black people are more likely to be shot. It is the best predictor we have of fatal police shootings.”

... There’s also something to be said for what the victims were doing when the cops shot them. Cesario points out that, “The vast majority—between 90 percent and 95 percent—of the civilians shot by officers were actively attacking police or other citizens when they were shot”—and that there were more white civilians who were committing such attacks when police killed them than were African Americans. In fact, white people were more likely to be armed when police killed them, as Cesario’s study acknowledges—“if anything, [we] found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime,” reads the study.

The Myth of Systemic Police Racism. Heather MacDonald. WSJ. June 2, 2020.
Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias.

The charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population. 

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. 

... 

This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.

Twigs on the same branch? Identifying personality profiles in police officers using psychopathic personality traits. Diana M. Falkenbach et al. Journal of Research in Personality. Oct. 2018.

Abstract
Recent high-profile incidents reignited the conversation about psychopathic traits in police officers. Psychopathy is characterized by multiple variants: primary and secondary psychopathy. There is limited research examining psychopathy in populations that may exhibit adaptive psychopathic traits. This study used model-based cluster analyses of high psychopathy scorers to investigate psychopathic subtypes in an urban police sample. Relative to the primary subtype, the secondary group displayed higher levels of Self-Centered Impulsivity, trait anxiety, covert narcissism, borderline personality disorder traits, substance use, psychiatric treatment, and aggression. These findings support the concept of successful psychopathy and the existence of psychopathy profiles in police officers, providing a useful look at how successful psychopathy may manifest as well as implications for the criminal justice system and police departments.

Is That Cop Dangerous? 4 Tips to Detect Psychopaths in Uniform

Psychopathic cops can be more dangerous than criminals. They are responsible for police brutality, unjustified shootings, false testimony, and many other forms of police misconduct. 

Every year, dozens of people who were convicted based on a cop's testimony, are released from prison because they were innocent. In three out of four homicide exonerations, official misconduct is a factor. 

Thousands of Americans have died at the hands of cops in suspicious circumstances. This kind of behaviors are, more often than not, the work of a psychopath. 

What is a Psychopath? 

One of the problems with psychopaths is that they are incapable of remorse. 

For Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, “Psychopathy is probably the most pleasant-feeling of all the mental disorders... All of the things that keep you good, morally good, are painful things: guilt, remorse, empathy.” For neuroscientist James Fallon, author of The Psychopath Inside, “Psychopaths can work very quickly, and can have an apparent IQ higher than it really is, because they’re not inhibited by moral concerns.” 

Psychopaths have cognitive empathy, they can understand what others are feeling, but they lack the ability to feel it, which is known as emotional empathy. “This all gives certain psychopaths a great advantage, because they can understand what you’re thinking, it’s just that they don’t care, so they can use you against yourself,” Fallon explains. 

In fact, research has shown that psychopaths are extremely adept at identifying vulnerability. 

Psychopaths Often Become Cops 

What happens when a person like that, someone who has zero concern for our feelings, is handed a gun and put in a position of power? 

An encounter with a psychopath in a police uniform can be a life hazard. That's why it is so important to be able to detect them. When you are in front of a psychopath, behaviors need to be altered, because normal social behaviors can trigger unexpected responses.
Research has shown that Police Officer is one of the top 10 professions chosen by psychopaths, ranking at number 7. 

As I wrote in my book - California: State of Collusion, “Power, such as we give to law enforcement, prosecutors and judges, actually attracts psychopathic personalities who want to exert violent dominance under the color of authority. Innocent people can be subjected to a power trip police encounter, can be arrested by a megalomaniacal cop, jailed by a sadist, prosecuted by a manipulative Machiavellian and judged by a sociopath on an ego trip.”

The George Floyd Protests – 20 unanswered questions

As the situation deterioates all across the nation, we need to stop and ask how we got here

Violence, looting and riots won’t solve any of the political problems in America, but will cause more. So why are they being encouraged? 

As this gets published, curfews are being introduced all across the country, national guard units are on high alert, and the media continue to pump out alarmist stories stoking the conflict. 

Who will benefit from this chaos?

The Minneapolis Putsch. CJ Hopkins. The Off-Guardian. June 1, 2020.

Things couldn’t be going better for the Resistance if they had scripted it themselves.

Actually, they did kind of script it themselves. Not the murder of poor George Floyd, of course. Racist police have been murdering Black people for as long as there have been racist police. No, the Resistance didn’t manufacture racism.

They just spent the majority of the last four years creating and promoting an official narrative which casts most Americans as “white supremacists” who literally elected Hitler president, and who want to turn the country into a racist dictatorship.

According to this official narrative, which has been relentlessly disseminated by the corporate media, the neoliberal intelligentsia, the culture industry, and countless hysterical, Trump-hating loonies, the Russians put Donald Trump in office with those DNC emails they never hacked and some division-sowing Facebook ads that supposedly hypnotized Black Americans into refusing to come out and vote for Clinton. Putin purportedly ordered this personally, as part of his plot to “destroy democracy.”

The plan was always for President Hitler to embolden his white-supremacist followers into launching the “RaHoWa,” or the “Boogaloo,” after which Trump would declare martial law, dissolve the legislature, and pronounce himself Führer. Then they would start rounding up and murdering the Jews, and the Blacks, and Mexicans, and other minorities, according to this twisted liberal fantasy.

I’ve been covering the roll-out and dissemination of this official narrative since 2016, and have documented much of it in my essays, so I won’t reiterate all that here. Let’s just say, I’m not exaggerating, much.

After four years of more or less constant conditioning, millions of Americans believe this fairy tale, despite the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence whatsoever to support it. Which is not exactly a mystery or anything. It would be rather surprising if they didn’t believe it. We’re talking about the most formidable official propaganda machine in the history of official propaganda machines.

And now the propaganda is paying off. The protesting and rioting that typically follows the murder of an unarmed Black person by the cops has mushroomed into “an international uprising” cheered on by the corporate media, corporations, and the liberal establishment, who don’t normally tend to support such uprisings, but they’ve all had a sudden change of heart, or spiritual or political awakening, and are down for some serious property damage, and looting, and preventative self-defense, if that’s what it takes to bring about justice, and to restore America to the peaceful, prosperous, non-white-supremacist paradise it was until the Russians put Donald Trump in office.

In any event, the Resistance media have now dropped their breathless coverage of the non-existent Corona-Holocaust to breathlessly cover the “revolution.”

...

Look, I’m not saying the neoliberal Resistance orchestrated or staged these riots, or “denying the agency” of the folks in the streets. Whatever else is happening out there, a lot of very angry Black people are taking their frustration out on the cops, and on anyone and anything else that represents racism and injustice to them.

This happens in America from time to time. America is still a racist society. Most African-Americans are descended from slaves. Legal racial discrimination was not abolished until the 1960s, which isn’t that long ago in historical terms.

...

So I have no illusions about racism in America. But I’m not really talking about racism in America. I’m talking about how racism in America has been cynically instrumentalized, not by the Russians, but by the so-called Resistance, in order to delegitimize Trump and, more importantly, everyone who voted for him, as a bunch of white supremacists and racists.

...

OK, and this is where I have to restate (for the benefit of my partisan readers) that I’m not a fan of Donald Trump, and that I think he’s a narcissistic ass clown, and a glorified con man, and … blah blah blah, because so many people have been so polarized by insane propaganda and mass hysteria that they can’t even read or think anymore, and so just scan whatever articles they encounter to see whose “side” the author is on and then mindlessly celebrate or excoriate it.

If you’re doing that, let me help you out … whichever side you’re on, I’m not on it.

I realize that’s extremely difficult for a lot of folks to comprehend these days, which is part of the point I’ve been trying to make. I’ll try again, as plainly as I can.

America is still a racist country, but America is no more racist today than it was when Barack Obama was president. A lot of American police are brutal, but no more brutal than when Obama was president. America didn’t radically change the day Donald Trump was sworn into office.

All that has changed is the official narrative. And it will change back as soon as Trump is gone and the ruling classes have no further use for it.

And that will be the end of the War on Populism, and we will switch back to the War on Terror, or maybe the Brave New Pathologized Normal … or whatever Orwellian official narrative the folks at GloboCap have in store for us.

Seven Reasons Why Police Are Disliked. Randall Collins, The Sociological Eye. June 5, 2020.

[7] Racism among police. Some cops are racists. How many are there, and what kind of racists they are, needs better analysis. What kind? There is a difference between white supremacists of the pre-1960s period; stereotyping racists who think most black people are potential criminals; situational racists who react to black people in confrontational situations with fear and hostility; casual racists who make jokes. These aren’t insoluble questions; if ethnographers followed people around in everyday life and observed what they talked about and how they behaved in different situations, we would have a good picture.  And there still remains the further question, does one or another degree of racism explain when police violence happens? 

My estimate is that racism among police is less important a factor than the social conflicts and situational stresses outlined in points [1-6]. To put it another way, if we got rid of racist attitudes, but left [1-6] in place, how much would police violence be reduced? Very little, I would predict. 

What can be done? And how likely is it to have effects? ...

Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2020, by race. Statista.

Rush to Judgment. Norman Mailer. 1966.

War and Empire Links: December 2019 #2

The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control. Edward Curtin, off-Guardian. Dec. 15, 2019.

Today most people are, as is said, “wired,” and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists. 

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime?

The “Afghanistan Papers”: Deep State narrative management. Kit Knightly, off-Guardian. Dec. 15, 2019.

Let’s be honest, most modern “leaks” do nothing but prop-up the Establishment

The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 18, 2020.

“This goofy ass Trump letter is gonna get more outraged coverage than the bombshell report on the entire Afghanistan war being a lie and frankly I don’t know if I can handle that right now,” popular Youtube commentator Kyle Kulinski tweeted today. 

The post was just one of the many observations that Kulinski tosses into the Twitterverse every day, presented in his typical casual, offhand way without any self-significance. But if you actually pause and think about what he’s saying here, how true it is and what it says about the mass media institutions which people rely upon to form their worldviews, it’s actually a damning indictment of our entire society. 

It is a fact that far more news media energy is going into one trivial aspect of an impeachment agenda that will with absolute certainty fail to remove Trump from office than there is for the known fact that the US government fought to suppress indisputable proof that American officials have been consistently lying about an 18-year military occupation which continues to this day. This fact should, by itself, be sufficient to completely discredit the mainstream press. This one tiny piece of information, that there’s vastly more buzz about an irrelevant impeachment sideshow than there is over the Afghanistan Papers, should in and of itself cause everyone to regard the entire establishment media complex with the same amount of respect as it gives the Flat Earth Society.

The Bee Explains: Impeachment. Babylon Bee. Dec. 17 2019.

Impeachment can be confusing. But The Babylon Bee is here with an explainer so you will know how the process works and what it takes for Dems to snap their fingers together and make Trump disappear in a cloud of dust.

What is impeachment?
It's the official, constitutional method for screaming at the sky because Trump is president. 

Why is Trump being impeached?
Trump has committed some very serious offenses, from not being a Democrat to being a Republican. He also won the 2016 election, which rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. He also restored the celebration of Christmas after eight years of winter with no Christmas under Obama. This drove Dems up a wall so they drummed up some charges against him. 

Why didn't Democrats include any criminal offenses in the articles of impeachment?
There were just so many of them, it was hard to pick one. So, instead of laying out actually impeachable offenses, the Democrats summarized it all with two main articles of impeachment: 1.) Trump is president. 2.) TRUMP IS PRESIDENT. 

What does it take to remove the president from office?
Faith, trust, and pixie dust. 

Will Trump be removed from office?
Lol. 

If we believe in ourselves and try hard, and Trump is removed, Hillary Clinton becomes president, right?
Actually, Mike Pence would become president, basically making the United States into a Handmaid's Tale-style dystopia. 

What happens if Trump is impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate?
Democrats don't get the big prize, but they each get a complimentary copy of Impeachment: The Board Game. 

Once the House votes to officially impeach President Trump, what happens next?
Trump wins the 2020 election.

Obama And The War On Yemen. Daniel Larison. The American Conservative. Dec. 12, 2019.

Propaganda and the American Myth

Empire in Decline - Propaganda and the American Myth. Cognitive Dissonance. Aug. 31, 2019.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive…ourselves.” - With apologies to Sir Walter Scott.


If only life was as neat and orderly as my ancient history text book showed it to be. There it was on glossy paper, spread out across several sets of adjoining pages, maps of the ancient and modern world. Sometimes there were time lines top and bottom, along with countries helpfully outlined and identified. Underneath their modern English names were one or two older names in smaller stylized script, often including exact beginning and end dates. I remember one in particular caught my eye. “The United States of America” followed by the year 1776. But with no end date indicated, it looked like unfinished business to me. You’ve got to love those historians and their precise dates.

Of course, in reality there are no exact dates for the birth and death of city/states, other than in the historian’s mind. Children continue to be born, the old still die, and life goes on under ever changing circumstances. But you are rarely informed of the subjective nature of historical events when you’re young and impressionable, so they’re presented in the history books as cold hard facts. The last thing the reigning Imperial Empire wants is to appear uncertain about prior eons, epochs and echoes in time.

Long before we begin to read and comprehend on our own, we’re presented with the illusion of a specific beginning and end to everything, often accompanied with very clear lines of demarcation. This concept is continuously reinforced through our daily indoctrination via carefully scripted news stories, including political and social opinion presented as ironclad fact care of our modern corporate media saturated existence. Naturally, critical thinking is strictly optional and effectively discouraged.

Mix in a healthy dose of hard-core science, where you learn very early there are correct and incorrect answers to all your questions, and the pattern of modern social myth making emerges. Of course, all the important ‘correct’ answers are held for public safekeeping by our cultural high priests and authority figures, be they academic, governmental, corporate, scientific or religious. Lest you forget, cultural icons, heroes and authorities must always be revered and deferred to, so leave the difficult thinking to them.

Maybe now’s a good time to remember that most history books are written, and re-written, by those very same keepers of the public mythology. What we believe as a culture, sometimes called our public myth, is usually determined by those whose pockets are the deepest and most powerful, not by those who are the wisest and most knowledgeable.

Have you ever read a story or book written by the survivors of the vanquished, the so-called losers? I have, a number of times, and it’s usually very enlightening to see the world from the other side of the bloody divide. In their hands, our cultural myths are not treated with the same loving care and respect we afford them, nor should they be. But of course, they must be lying because they have an ax to grind.

Revisionist history is how those in power politely describe the writings of the marginalized and defeated, roadkill crushed and mangled by the leviathan in the head long rush of conquering empire. The public myth informs us the losers can do nothing but taut the victorious with their lies. Ignore them and they’ll fade away. Besides, the winners never lie about the facts, though we’re told there’s plenty of room for differences of opinion. And just about everything can be reduced to an opinion if you’re looking to malign and obscure.

Of course, one of the duties of the Empire’s leadership and servile sycophants is to distort the written record so it conforms to the public myth. This is the principle reason why recently retired or replaced holders of powerful governmental, corporate and military positions are handed (large) advances to write their memoirs and recollections. That, and to reward them with large legal payoffs for a job well done. While they are often declared ‘best sellers’ by the compliant mainstream media, it is not uncommon to find these books sitting in the remainder bin six months later selling for nickels on the dollar.

These sacred tomes of divine wisdom are quickly embraced by other propagandists as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help their Gods of propaganda. Once in their hands, the book’s cherry-picked facts, fiction and opinion-masquerading-as-fact are quickly woven into the fabric of the public myth as unimpeachable supporting documentation. Thus, another turn of the propaganda cycle is complete and ready for public dissemination and indoctrination.

Napoleon Bonaparte is alleged to have declared history as little more than a set of lies agreed upon. His assessment is not that far from the ‘truth’ from my point of view.





Belief vs. Knowing

We all possess extremely complex belief systems and world views. How they develop and evolve is greatly influenced by external information sources we rarely question or challenge. After all, these sources are our cultural authority figures, the experts, professionals and intelligentsia that form our cultural propaganda delivery and support system. These sources cannot be seriously questioned, particularly from within, without being declared a heretic. Just look at how non-conforming individuals, web sites, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are treated as an example of how heresy is handled these days.

While we may not pay much attention to mainstream media playing in the background, our unconscious mind is absorbing it all, raw and unfiltered. This information feeds into, and broadly supports, our world view with little conscious thought or scrutiny. Regardless of whether it is ‘news’, game shows, sports or soap operas, ultimately it is all programming. This is the reason why constant repetition is so vitally important to both effective propaganda and commercial advertising. It must be true since it is repeated so often, a self-confirming conclusion all positive feedback loops share. Our mind absorbs and retains everything, even when we do not consciously look or listen.

It’s shocking to realize how seldom we change our basic beliefs or understanding when confronted with critical new information that normally would propel reassessment and modification. Instead, we bend or ignore input to fit our established world view. Economist John Maynard Keynes once said “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” Sadly, most people don’t subscribe to this logical practice. Instead, confirmation bias, the desire to maintain our cognitive continuity (aka our worldview) and outright denial are some of the tools we use to manage and manipulate information to our liking.

And rest assured, there are plenty of governmental, religious, corporate and wealthy individuals and entities ready and willing to help us accomplish this through deliberate and targeted propaganda. The most common personal warning sign we may be sipping from the ‘wrong’ information straw is the emotional pain of cognitive dissonance, usually inflamed when new information is in conflict with our long established and dearly held beliefs and world view. We usually avoid this pain entirely by only watching or listening to sources of information we are in agreement with.

Rarely do we push through this emotional pain to reappraise our inventory of previously established ‘truths’ for validity or relevance. It’s so much easier to discard ugly deviations or cherry pick information that confirms our preferred vision, rather than conduct a top to bottom review that is called for when the facts change. Intellectual laziness is the polite term for this phenomenon. I think a more honest explanation is deliberate and mostly conscious denial.

However, even when I’m alert for and aware of this cognitive phenomenon, I’m still surprised how often I indulge. It’s frightening to recognize how deeply conditioned we are in the art of self-deception. The truth truly does hurts when it’s in conflict with what we believe we know. So, we employ the most powerful pain killer known to man, that of denial and self-deceit.

It’s extremely difficult to reject popular opinion and strike out on our own independent path. Group think is indoctrinated into us from birth and socially rewarded at every turn. It is emotionally safer and much more comfortable if we stay huddled near the center of the pack. The result is herd mentality in all its glory, corralled by the public myth of which we are complicit and dutiful keepers.

I often say all writers are essentially propagandists and this applies to myself as well. I’m using this forum to present information in the most compelling manner possible to make my case. In effect I’m feeding you my point of view to build a train of thought leading directly to my preferred conclusion. This is not necessarily good or bad, but simply a tool or technique of persuasion which can be used for all sorts of purposes and outcomes. Obviously, it can be used to educate or to subjugate, but either way the recipient is an active (and often willing) participant.





Check Your Premise

The most effective propaganda is one whose basic premise is slipped by the target so smoothly it is never recognized for what it truly is. Once the premise is planted and accepted, the hard work is done and the implanted meme can now be leveraged and expanded upon from there. The concept is the same regardless of whether one is teaching basic math before moving on to geometry or the virtues of ‘democracy’, which is then used as a legitimizing façade for a ruling oligarchy or corpocracy.

What’s that you say? You’re too smart to let the wool be pulled over your eyes? That you can discern truth from lies and would eventually figure it out given enough time and inclination? Honestly ask yourself, how much time and effort would you put into thoroughly examining something you already believe to be true? Most would deem it a major waste of their time and not give it another thought. Given the choice between the pleasure of confirming our beliefs and the pain of confronting them, we cognitively caged humans are quite predictable.

Most people perceive complex information as bundles of facts compiled into conclusions and truths, most of which we believe we have originated in part or in whole. We have all witnessed another person take something they heard, saw or read, then modify and embrace it before declaring it their original idea or creation. This cognitive grooming and assimilation occurs so seamlessly and naturally that many ‘honestly’ believe they came up with it on their own and would be highly insulted if we challenged their supposition.

Rarely do we recognize that many of the truths we hold as impeccable are based upon long lines of previously assimilated information provided by others and embraced as our own. If at any point some of this information is proven false or misleading, the entire sequence is suspect along with our own impeccable truth. Consider a long string of numbers to be added together. Make a mistake at any point in the line and the final sum, or ‘truth’, is incorrect to some degree or another.

How we view our world is based upon many preconceived notions and beliefs. Change just one small piece we previously thought correct and everything changes to some extent, no matter how small. Change two or three and suddenly we have a crisis of confidence and a cognitive dissonance. Yet when we feel that pain, how often do we reboot and re-examine everything? And why would we re-examine what we ‘know’ to be correct, particularly when most everyone else in our section of the herd remains in agreement? Peer pressure and conditioning are hard to resist, even in the privacy of our own head.

“We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe





Deadly Debt

My basic premise, and the basis for this article, is that the American Empire is in decline. From my point of view, it’s become readily apparent the so called “American Experiment” has peaked and is now deteriorating. While I can’t produce an exact date for this change, it doesn’t diminish my argument in the least. I’d be hard pressed to give you the specific date for the decline of the Roman Empire, but clearly it followed the same trajectory. Did Rome’s downward spiral start when the capital was moved to Constantinople in 330 AD or when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD? It matters little at this point, except to the propagandists and historians.

Actually, I would argue that while a succession of Empires has come and gone, the culture of human exploitation and destruction we call civilization has grown exponentially in efficiency and lethality over the last several hundred years. We Americans now stand proudly at the pinnacle of the insanity, picking up where the Greeks, Romans, Asians and Europeans left off. I’ll leave that thought for another day, but I think you get the picture.

America as a social and financial entity ceased to function with any semblance of efficacy or fairness decades ago. This reversal in trajectory is the primary reason behind the massive increase in financial engineering used to paper over fundamental socioeconomic problems and extract the last of the profits. To argue over this or that detail is to be in denial of the obvious. In fact, I consider the official bickering over these details as a deliberate attempt to distort and distract while the final looting and rape occurs.

Negative interest rates, now common in Europe and Japan (and coming soon to the US) are a perfect example of the financial wheels coming off the socioeconomic cart. When all incentive for prudence, precaution and personal responsibility are explicitly discouraged, even penalized, the decline and fall of civil society is a foregone conclusion. For example, prudence in the form of saving money is discouraged with near zero interest paid on any sums saved, while the use of ever more debt is encouraged with zero down and zero interest rates charged on the amount borrowed. Negative interest rates will only serve to fan the flames of the already raging fire.

Can you imagine the consumer feeding frenzy negative interest rates will ignite when a manufacturer of (for example) automobiles or trucks informs you they will pay you 1%, 2% or more of the outstanding balance on the ‘loan’ each year just to buy their vehicles? You would wind up paying less than the amount you borrowed. Of course, this isn’t really free money since the manufacturer will simply jack up the original price to compensate themselves and their finance partners for paying you to buy from them. Imagine the inflationary spiral this will create.

The unofficial socioeconomic policy is to delay the inevitable as long as possible, while promising the plebs ‘the authorities’ are on it and all will be well. Just fork over more money, power and control and everything will be right as rain. Unfortunately, perverse financial, cultural and political incentives dictate it’s in practically no one’s best interest to confront systemic socioeconomic issues and arrest the fall simply because great pain will come long before any gain is ever realized.

Those who already possess substantial wealth demand they not only maintain it, but expand it. This elite group controls ninety five percent of the global wealth and ninety-nine percent of the political power, but at best represents one percent of the global population. The entire middle class, decimated by decades of inflation without a corresponding increase in wages, desperately clings to what little they have remaining. Ultimately, for the vast majority, as it now stands this is a losing battle. So, we dither, delay and deny while remaining drunk on cheap credit and consumer pleasures.

And then there are the poor, aka the expendables, globally the largest group by far, powerless in every sense of the word and focused solely on day to day survival. With the middle class increasingly squeezed lower into their already tight quarters, the only place left for them is further down and out.

Those who can, won’t. Those who might, deny. Those who can’t, suffer.





Plausible Deniability and False Hope
Using so-called “experts” to push misleading information and outright propaganda along with other targeted psychological operations, our leaders are pushed, prodded, threatened and empowered by the elite one percent to outright lie about economic conditions both here in America and globally. The rest of the first and second world nations follow suit for their own political survival and personal economic enrichment.

They disseminate lies, half-truths and fake news; not because they expect them to withstand close scrutiny, but rather to enable those who wish to believe the lie a plausible excuse to do so while daring those who don’t to contest their power to do and say as they please. Remember our conditioning; when in doubt, defer to authority and suspend disbelief. This is quite similar to ‘gaslighting’, a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or entity seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and even their sanity.

A classic sales technique is the assumed consent close. Rather than directly ask you to purchase the new car, it is assumed you will purchase. The sales person goes in for the kill by asking closing questions. “Do you prefer the red four door we first looked at or the blue convertible with the leather interior? What is the maximum monthly payment you are comfortable with? Will one or both of you be applying for credit? Do you want the satellite navigation registration in your name or your husbands? May I have the keys to your car so we can determine your trade-in value?” You’d be surprised how many new automobiles, rooms of household furniture, whole life insurance, investment packages and pieces of expensive jewelry are sold in this manner.

Something similar to this technique is used by the mass media to sell us things we already want to buy. Only they aren’t selling the death of America, but rather America’s supposed remarkable resilience and miraculous comeback from near financial death in 2008, a blatant falsehood people only now are beginning to recognize. We’re being sold false hope with outright lies and opinion disguised as factual news and official declarations.

False hope binds us to impossible situations and debilitating conditions.

As long as we believe there is residual value in keeping America on life support, meaning we believe our personal financial situation hasn’t deteriorated significantly enough to push the panic button, we will continue to support this mess rather than clear the smoking debris, remove the leadership and much of the autocracy and start over again. As long as those in power can at least partially shield the majority from major financial reverberations and dislocations, meaning “We the People” slowly degrade rather than explode, we will take a path that best preserves our own personal interests.

As Mrs. Cog likes to say, it’s a recession when it crashes into someone else and a depression when is crashes into you and me. As long as we can defer to authority and demand someone else do something about ‘it’ while also maintaining our own status quo, we will do nothing to confront our fundamental socioeconomic problems. Throughout ancient and modern history, this is the usual path taken by the majority until it is far too late to do much more than sweep up the pieces and bemoan the loss of several generations to devastating financial, social and political distress. Because the nation’s wealth was looted long before the fall, there is little capital and resources to work with in order to rebuild. Thus, the reason for the loss of several generations.

This is the primary purpose of the constant propaganda messaging, to assure those who wish to remain safely within their fox holes (after all, ignorance is bliss) that they can indeed remain hidden in their fox holes. Desperate people do desperate things. The puppet masters do everything in their power to convince people it is best to duck and cower rather than stand up and push back. This is their leverage, as it has been for thousands of years of global history. Those who rule keep the population confused, divided and afraid (and lately, sick) but not so much that doing so reduces our productivity, thereby diminishing their power and wealth.







Wolves Among the Sheep

And the truly frightening realization, something I suspect most of us know deep down in our hearts but don’t actually acknowledge, is that the majority of people in positions of power and/or wealth are either sociopaths or harbor strong sociopath tendencies. Which means they do not think in terms of civic duty and public service, but rather about personal gain and ever more power. As conditions continue to deteriorate, less and less sane and well-meaning people will be willing to step up and attempt to lead, creating an even larger power vacuum the sociopaths are more than willing to fill.

Those who claim “They would never do that” are hopelessly and dangerously deluded, mesmerized by the great American myth or just hopelessly deep in denial. For crying out loud, of course they’d do ‘that’, just as you and I are capable of doing just about anything when subjected to great stress and pressure. The difference is that in the grand scope of things, whatever we might do would harm mostly ourselves and maybe those nearest to us, while ‘they’ can and will harm thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, to maintain their status quo and position of power.

We don’t wish to face the stark reality we as a nation are in way over our heads. As long as we are not forced to look too closely at the terrible condition this country is in and where it’s headed, we are all too willing to do our part and avoid critical thinking. Like an old bull unknowingly led to slaughter because he thinks he’s off to mount the next cow, we’re desperately trying to keep alive the magical American myth of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness while shielding our eyes from the rotting corpse it is rapidly becoming.

That assessment is probably too harsh for the average American’s sensibilities. But let’s ask ourselves a few questions in an effort to discover the truth, or at least something approaching the truth as we know it. First, let me be clear on something before I get flamed for my harsh tongue. I’m not America bashing in the least; I am America myth bashing. The American myth of exceptionalism is enabling our self-destruction as we stand idly by, applauding and supporting the mythical facade our leaders and media display 24/7.

As long as we cling to the hope that all America needs is a tune up and some minor repairs, we’re condemned to a long and painful death spiral. We’re being told exactly what we want to hear because we’re desperate to hear it. To claim otherwise is to lie to ourselves and to each other.

America is crumbling from the foundation up, and yet all we talk about is a fresh paint job and a new screen door (both bought on credit) while handing our grandchildren a bill they’ll never be able to pay. The only way we can live with this lie, while handing suffocating debt to our own future family members, is to deny it’s even happening.

The big lie, one we must continue to tell ourselves, has taken on a life of its own and is consuming everyone and everything in its path. We are addicted to our own public myth. And to sustain the lie we must ignore the truth or face the cognitive consequences, a fate worse than death for a nation incapable of telling itself the truth.

The only way to break through the lie is to go back through decades of propaganda and myth and recognize these lies and our core self-deceit. Since this is too painful, both individually and as a society, we distort reality as quickly as we change channels or YouTube streams. Can you say cute cat videos?

It’s not just our leaders who are corrupt, but us as well. We all know something is seriously wrong, even if we don’t know precisely what is broken or how to fix it. And yet there we are, whistling through the graveyard under the guise of minding our own business…. as if America is none of our business. We think “Just leave me alone and let me live my life in peace” without acknowledging that doing so perpetuates the very system that is slowing suffocating us.

Contrary to popular belief, the fish doesn’t rot from the head down, but rather from everywhere and all at the same time. We comfort ourselves by saying it’s our leaders who lie to us, but the only way a long-term confidence game can succeed is for the ‘victim’ to fully participate. No one forces the victim to be conned… at least not yet.

The conman’s baited hook is the great America myth; you work hard, keep your nose clean, live a good life and retire sitting pretty. While some of the baby boomers are actually living the dream all the way to the end, this is occurring less and less these days and the future looks particularly bleak. Have you noticed how many elderly folks are working at McDonalds and Walmart? Do you ever wonder why this is?





Petulant Children

We have become cowardly, unwilling to commit to the difficult path of setting aside even a minimum of today’s self-gratification in order to assure our grandchildren a functioning society to live and prosper in tomorrow. This is the ultimate act of selfishness, compounded by the fact we self-righteously declare we’ve been hijacked by our leaders. The sad fact is our leaders are doing exactly what we want them to do, to continue perpetuating the lie while telling us it’s the truth.

“Daddy, tell me everything is going to be OK.”

“Everything’s going to be just fine honey bunny.”

“I love you daddy.”

Did we really think we could put our country’s toys, tools and war machines on the national charge card and not worry about the bill, just because some politicians said we could? What are we, 5-year old children, pointing our finger elsewhere when asked who broke the mirror? Even if we personally follow the path of fiscal prudence, we all swim in the same piranha-infested swamp. Therefore, as infuriating as it may be for some to read the following, we all share some responsibility, however small, for the present state of affairs. The only question now is, what do we do about it? Citizenship is about individual responsibility to ourselves and to our fellow citizen, something we’ve been avoiding for quite a while now; at least since we started collectively calling ourselves consumers.

Endless propaganda is used to lull us into a drugged stupor so we don’t dwell on what we’re doing to our children’s children. American flags wave in the background as chiseled men and sultry women expound on how wonderful we are for loving this great nation of ours. The great American love story, brought to you daily via TV and streaming soap operas. This is where the bad guys always loose, men are virile and women sexual objects to lust after. Watch closely children, this is the American dream.

And why wouldn’t we love America the myth? It’s everything we are told we want without the pain of actually creating and maintaining it. Nationalism is our unifying religion, an increasingly fatal addiction to our public myth that enables us to fiddle while America burns. Alas, the carnival ride is breaking down with increasing frequency. More drugs over here doctor, the patient is waking up.

Desperate for relief, we seek refuge with fellow like-minded herd dwelling walking wounded, a perceived safe haven inside occupied territory for the psychically-damaged and emotionally-demoralized, in the deluded belief hiding is an effective emotional pain reliever. Surrounded by lies and deceit, we are indoctrinated to such an extent we still speak the language of defeat and denial without even realizing it. One cannot become clean immersed in filthy shared bathwater, just less dirty than the one behind us and dirtier than the one in front.

So how do we deal with this, and what does this have to do with you and me specifically? After all, aren’t we all just ‘victims’ in a long line of walking wounded, exhausted from moving in and out of various stages of loss and grief? One moment we’re angry with zombie friends, family and neighbors, imploring them to wake up and see the insanity. The next we’re filled with self-righteous indignation as another patsy’s head is placed on the public pike, sated temporarily by the public flogging and bloodletting.

In my opinion we have no choice but to start at the beginning. While we must speak truth to power, first and foremost we must speak truth to ourselves, to talk openly and honestly about what has happened and where we are going. A significant component of the seduction of denial is the avoidance of personal responsibility. This must stop, thus my declaration we are all responsible for this mess. I have no doubt America can stop its decline, but the process begins with you and me, not they and them. Contrary to popular opinion political leaders do not lead, but rather follow the strongest stench coming from the biggest wallet.





Step One….

How do we as individuals tackle this seemingly huge and insurmountable problem? As a former financial planner and stock broker who still runs personal money, I try to use a modified version of my own trading rules in my personal life. They are as follows.

One; know ourselves, particularly our strengths and weaknesses. This is admittedly much easier said than done, simply because the disassembly (and reassembly) of our interlocking myths, beliefs and illusions is NOT a one-time event, but rather a long and laborious process. One or two particular insights or kernels of awareness are not sufficient to reveal the huge tangled mess. In fact, to believe it is a one-and-done event is actually more destructive than doing nothing, since we change very little about ourselves yet believe we have. Similar to Russian nesting dolls, where several more a hidden inside the first, the rabbit hole runs deep.

Two; understand this is far more about perspective than it is about facts, truth or knowledge, three words often used interchangeably and incorrectly. Facts are rarely more than pieces of information which may or may not be correct, truth is almost entirely based upon a point of view often (but not always) derived from arranging facts in a particular order. And knowledge is the inner awareness and acceptance that facts and truth are little more than moving parts in a general consensus reality. Meaning two people can use the same set of facts, yet claim different truths based upon those facts, while a third person, relying upon a large body of knowledge, understands facts and truth are at best subjective and at worst enslaving.

Three; always consider the possibility there is far more to learn about a subject (and ourselves) than we are aware of. The art of propaganda and manipulation is the leveraging of our own biases and assumptions, of nudging and sliding us one way or another. We dismiss the notion we are influenced by these forces because we believe we would recognize them when we see or hear them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Look intently, critically and repeatedly for gaps and weakness in our thinking, especially if we believe nothing is wrong with our thinking. I force myself to read/watch/listen to information I think is contrary to my settled opinions, and I’m always amazed to discover something new-to-me every time I do so.

Four; from time to time, mentally clear our minds from the 10,000 daily distractions that bombard us via every glowing screen we own…or more accurately, every glowing screen that owns us. Yes, I understand this is nearly impossible since so much of our necessary daily activity requires screen interaction. I still manage personal money, which means I must remain plugged in nearly all the time. The weekends are less hectic and afford better opportunities to at least attempt some decoupling from the matrix. Audio books concerning deep dive subjects we’ve always wanted to explore are a perfect alternative to the jibber-jabber intrusions of daily life and can be listened to while doing chores, driving and so on.

Five; trust our instincts and inner knowing more so than our heart and mind. My most shocking early revelation was that my mind lies to me and my heart (emotion) confuses and deceives me. This is not surprising since a lifetime of conditioning and programming instructs us to believe knowledge, truth and wisdom are found externally and only from official sources and authorities. This deliberately narrowed point of view has dulled, if not completely switched off, any intuitive connection we might have with our inner knowing self.

Since we are never taught to consult, let alone trust, our inner knowing, we have all been successfully subjugated to one degree or another by external forces. Worse, we consider this ‘condition’ to be completely natural and normal. Because our cognitive box is the only reality we’ve ever known, it is nearly impossible to ‘think’ outside of it. The more firmly we are chained to the existing reality, the more difficult it is to imagine any other. Therefore, we must attempt to disconnect as completely and often as we can.

These practices slowly develop (re-awaken might be more accurate) a clear-eyed view and a deeper understanding of ourselves, our fellow man and the real world, not as we wish to see it, but as it really is. Unfortunately, we still engage in wishful thinking way too often, constantly pushing the hope ‘dope’ button for increasingly meager superficial rewards. Considering the direction our world is headed, it’s going to be more difficult to think clearly unless we begin to make personal changes now. Old habits die hard because we desperately cling to them for emotional support. Understanding why we do this will go a long way to helping us jettison our old baggage. Even if we are trapped on the crazy train to hell, just because we can’t get off doesn’t mean we must fully participate in the insanity.



08-31-2019

Cognitive Dissonance

Have I mentioned before the Caitlin Johnstone is the best?

You Are Fighting In The Most Important Battle Of All Time. Caitlin Johnstone. June 24, 2019.

If you are reading this, it’s most likely the result of a series of events in your life which have drawn your interest and attention to the fact that our world is quite a bit different from what we’ve been told by our school teachers, by the news media, by Hollywood, and by politicians.

At some point, for whatever reason, you’ve come to realize that the consensus narratives in our society about what’s going on are false. The tools that people are taught to use to inform themselves about their government, their nation and their world are not just full of inaccuracies, but deliberate distortions, ranging from the reasons we’re given for why wars are started, to the way our political systems work, to where real power and authority actually lies, to the way nations and governments actually behave in the world.

This awareness has come with a degree of alienation. Not buying into the same consensus narratives about the world as your friends, loved ones and peers comes with an inability to relate to them on some levels, which can cause you to feel a lack of intimacy in those areas. You may have also found yourself the odd one out in conversations about politics or other controversial issues, maybe even lost old friends over it.

But you kept going anyway. For some of us, it’s more important to be true to the truth than it is to fit in. You’re one of those people.

So, I just want to say thank you. Sincerely. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’m on-my-knees grateful to anyone who sets about untangling themselves and their species from the deceitful narratives which pervade our society. It is the most important battle that can possibly be fought. The most important battle that has ever been fought.

There is nothing more important than this fight. Our species is on a sure trajectory toward Orwellian dystopia if climate collapse or nuclear war don’t send us the way of the dinosaur first, and the only thing that has the power to steer us out of that trajectory is the people using the strength of their numbers to force an end to the oppressive, ecocidal, omnicidal status quo.

But they don’t. The people don’t use the strength of their numbers to force an end to the oppressive, ecocidal, omnicidal status quo, because they aren’t interested in doing so. Why aren’t they interested in doing so? Because their minds are being manipulated on a mass scale by the same people who have been granted immense power and wealth by the existence of that status quo.

All of mankind’s biggest dilemmas are ultimately due to the fact that propaganda is far more ubiquitous and far more advanced than most people realize.

And it’s not their fault. Not really. Nobody teaches you in school that throughout your entire life your plutocratic overlords will be working to control the thoughts in your head using a highly sophisticated arsenal of psychological operations funneled into your mind via their near-total control of the media. Nobody warns you as a kid that if you ever really want to grow up, you’ll first have to extricate the vast network of lies which have been deliberately sewn into your consciousness since birth.

But their tricks didn’t work on you. You found your way out of that matrix of deception. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t comfortable, but you did it. And now you’re ready to fight.

And fight you have. You have already been doing what you can to share information which counters the disinformation, doing your best to throw sand in the gears of the propaganda machine and show people the little gaps in the code of the matrix in the hope that some light sleeper might spot it and begin waking up from the dream. You don’t need me to tell you to do this, because it’s obvious to anyone who’s seen through the illusion. You’re doing it already.

And you’re going to keep doing it. And you’re going to get better at it.

You’re going to get better at it because you’re going to keep learning and gaining a better and better understanding of how the oppression machine operates, so that you can describe it more lucidly to others.

You’re going to get better at it because you’re going to keep practicing your craft: attacking the propaganda matrix at its weakest and most vulnerable points at every opportunity. Practice makes perfect, and the more you keep at it the more skillful you’ll get at spotting gaps in its armor and firing the most damaging truth bombs straight into them.

You’re going to get better at it because you’re going to keep doing your own inner work to expunge all lies from your system, from the most surface-level propaganda narratives all the way down to your most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality itself. You understand that only turkeys are done, and that it will always be possible to get a little bit clearer inside every day. The less your vision is impeded by falsehood, the better you’ll be able to see on the battlefield.

You’re going to get better at fighting, and you’re going to keep fighting no matter what. Not because it’s an easy war, nor even because it’s a winnable war, but because you have made truth your highest value, and untruth is therefore intolerable to you. You will keep attacking the lie factory at every turn until it collapses into its own foundations beyond any possibility of repair. You will keep driving your sword through until you see it come out the other side.

And others will join you, because they have awakened to what’s going on too. And then there will be more of them. And more. And more.

There is no more important fight than this. The survival and wellbeing of our entire species depends upon it. The oligarchs and their government agency allies cannot be defeated as long as their propaganda machine is killing off all desire to defeat them.

You are already engaged in this fight, so my purpose here is only to thank you and to encourage you, and to urge you to redouble your efforts. Never doubt that your energy poured into this effort is well-spent. Never let anyone shame you into silence or make you believe that your efforts are in vain. Never doubt that you’re on the right path.

Your edge is your agility and your access to inspiration. No amount of social engineering can move as fast or shine as bright as the truth. You have everything you need to win, and there are more signs than ever that the win is on the horizon. What once seemed impossible now seems inevitable.

I love you.

Keep pushing.



Have I mentioned before that Caitlin Johnstone is the best?
see all her writing that I've linked to here.