Spin

Western governments increasingly use spin, lies and half truths when responding to criticism. They take care to avoid responsibility or accountability and truth is forsaken in the constantly changing sands of double-speak where nobody can be pinned down, while all the time creating an air of plausibility.

The typical spinmaster is articulate and accomplished at dispelling concerns and creating favourable illusions. They have at their disposal a wide range of marketing tools to manipulating perceptions - advertising research, polls, correct presentation, body language, facial expression, tone of voice etc.

Typically spinmasters respond patiently and calmly to any requests for substance with information gleaned from "experts", "reliable sources", or cherry-picked intelligence analysis. They use repetition, persuasion and the claims of authority to discount any objections.

However, truth is outside the concerns of the accomplished spinmaster and something to be avoided at all costs - better to paint a rosy picture than spoil things with harsh reality. The faulty basis for their rationale is never dealt with, just appeals to upholding the status quo, maintenance of commonly held myths, and a certain train of logic explained and expanded upon ad nausum which carefully side-steps the real issues.

Some of their vast array of strategies which will be instantly recognised are expanded on in the following articles.

Deciphering the spin
America’s War-Criminal M.O.
http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/mediadeception/
AmWrCrmMO.html

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it...”

— General Douglas MacArthur 1957

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

— H. L. Mencken

So this is the classic scam which all governments use to fool their idiot citizenry into blind obedience. Since the Spanish-American war of 1898 this scam has been used by the U.S. government to extort money and political support from the American people.

Whether they’re directly butchering helpless civilian people or doing it by proxy, the domestic M.O. of the war-criminal U.S. government and the corporate media is always the same:

Phase 1: Cover it up — lie and deny. Government spokespeople “have no knowledge” of the atrocities, and the corporate mass-media simply ignores the story.

This is easy enough at first. The masses of media-hypnotized Americans wouldn’t dare suspect that their fine and righteous government practices genocide as a matter of foreign policy. They don’t suspect that every day the biggest newspapers and magazines of America’s vaunted “free press” censor all the news the corporate owners want censored. The mind-controlled masses are clueless that the familiar, trusted “talking heads” on T.V. are all very highly trained, highly paid professional liars, saying only what the corporate/banking plutocracy wants them to say.

Phase 2: The hard evidence and testimony of American atrocities begins to mount as more and more witnesses and decent people cry out for justice.

Now the propaganda machinery of the U.S. government and military kicks into high gear. Government spokespeople and crooked politicians put as much PR spin as possible on all the tales of carnage. They come up with lies they know will sound credible to ignorant Americans who don’t really want to know the truth. And the corporate mass-media skilfully supports all the lies. The lies are then repeated endlessly and pervasively for weeks, months and years until they take on a life of their own.

They become so familiar and commonly accepted that honest, informed people fear to suggest publicly that “the emperor wears no clothes”. Dishonest, patriotic, flag-waving Americans eagerly believe all the lies because they are selfish, materialistic, apathetic moral-cowards.

This scam has worked spectacularly for over a hundred years. The openly racist, jingoistic journalism of yesterday was the predecessor of today’s melodramatic, pulp-fiction-like, pseudo-journalistic tripe.

The amazing modern-day success of this mass-deceit is due in no small measure to the professional skills of many highly-paid PR firms like the Rendon Group, Ruder-Finn, Hill & Knowlton, Shandwick, Burson-Marsteller and Ketchum PR. Crooked PR flacks in firms like these are the ones who actually come up with the deceitful spin on the appalling war-crimes of the U.S. military/government.

Euphamisms

A few of the more notorious euphamisms used by U.S. government spin-meisters include:

“Collateral damage” — the intentional mass-murder, by aerial bombardment, of millions of civilian people in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

“Foreign policy mistake” — the genocide of 4 million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This term was used by Vice President Al Gore.

“Freedom fighters” — the bloodthirsty, sadistic, perverted, homicidal psychopaths known as the Contras. Paid, armed and trained by the CIA.

“Humanitarian intervention” — the brutal American state terrorism of the entire civilian population of Yugoslavia — butchering over 3000 civilian men, women and children with cluster bombs and poisoning everyone and everything with carcinogenic, genetically damaging depleted uranium radiation.

“Peacekeeping” — the bloodthirsty reign of terror carried out by the Albanian KLA in Kosovo while U.S./NATO troops were ordered to stand idly by and watch.

“War on terrorism” — the American state terrorism and violent mass-murder of at least 4000 – 5000 innocent Afghan civilian men, women and children who had nothing whatsoever to do the September 11 attacks.

“Removing Iraq’s (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction”, “bringing democracy to the Iraqi people”, “liberating the Iraqi people” — by unleashing America’s evil weapons of mass destruction in Genocide 2 of the Iraqi people — half of whom are under the age of 15 years-old — in order to get control of Iraqi oil.

The PR firms that dream up the most sophisticated deceit campaigns draw on decades of psychological research. They’re experts at weaving complexes of lies and using symbols and images in the mass-media that affect the subconscious minds of brainwashed Americans

Phase 3: Finally, after several years of such relentless and pervasive fraud, most Americans have stopped paying attention even to the mass-media whitewash of the story. But the lies remain planted within their programmed minds, taking root and combining with all the other lies they’ve been programmed with all their lives. Their entertainment-saturated minds remain fast asleep within a media dreamworld from which they may never awaken.

Meanwhile the U.S. Corporate Mafia Government is deeply involved in the latest mass-murder-for-profit campaign against helpless civilian people — and busily lying and denying it all over again.

Fighting Manipulation
Chris Lucas
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/fighting.htm

"The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a
slightly distorted truth."
--G. C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit.
For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."
-- Demosthenes, c. 384-322 BCE, Third Olynthiac

Introduction
Humans are not passive machines to be manipulated by life, but are dynamic organisms which can react in intelligent ways to the information presented to them. Our world of today spends an inordinate proportion of its resources on manipulation. This takes the form of advertising, of political spin-doctoring, of selective information and of outright lies. All these processes work against the fitness of the individual, and by implication against our societies themselves. Truth is a commodity respected in science, but increasingly not by scientists and their political or commercial masters who, in these days of personal advantage at all cost, misrepresent almost all the information available to the public.

Complete knowledge of any situation is an impossible dream, yet we can take steps to ensure that we understand the techniques of manipulation being used against us by the unscrupulous. Understanding information or facts is a key enabler to achieving what we desire, and conversely the misuse of it enables others to achieve their desires at our expense. But by better understanding we can reduce their selfish effectiveness and thus reclaim our own freedom of direction and quality of life.

Democracy in Action
Let us start with what is laughingly called democracy in our Western world, the idea that rich men (rarely women) can brainwash the population by selected propaganda in order to be elected. Once elected of course they have no further responsibility to the electorate, and having a sizeable majority of tame lackeys can renege on any promises made, steal from the electorate or blatantly deceive them in any way whatsoever without any conscience. Too strong a characterisation ? Hardly strong enough !

Spin Me A Yarn
A phenomenon of modern politics is the rise of the spin-doctor, an un-elected political hanger-on whose entire function is to lie to the electorate on behalf of their political masters. Elected members of the government who tell the truth are persecuted by these deceit merchants, suppressing unpalatable truths is the be all and end all of this sound-bite world of image-in-place-of-fact politics.

Whilst in Britain in 1999, the Labour government admitted that it has 72 official 'advisors' or 'spin-doctors' (professional-liars). http://www.anycities.com/jahtruth//illumin.htm

Smile Me A Smile
Insincerity, of the second-hand car salesman type, pervades the carefully orchestrated 'performances' of our political leaders and their PR frontmen. The ideal of substance, of genuine ideas, of depth, is subordinated to a reliance on gloss, on superficiality in all things, the cardboard cutout superstar, reflecting their insulting belief that "you can fool all the people, all of the time".

Problem, What Problem ?
God forbid that in this world any problem should be openly recognised and action taken to deal with it, instead we have the measured deceit, the reiteration of what has already been said (as if new), the smoke screen of weasel words. Ultimately it is the actions of politicians that count and not their words - and increasingly the two are totally disconnected.

Fudging Facts
Most governments spend vast amounts on data collection, statistics abound in all areas of our expanding bureaucracy. It is strange therefore that relevant data to support government claims is always missing, data that disproves the claims mysteriously has disappeared or nobody thought to collect it. The transparency of this manipulation is obvious, for if what they say is true then we have clear proof of the incompetence of our politicians and bureaucrats as managers !

Euphemisms
The tendency to obscure truth by using euphemisms, words like 'ethnic cleansing' which means genocide (prejudicial mass murder), is a political favourite. Plain speaking cannot lie, so doublespeak is necessary allowing ambiguous descriptions, words out of context, misleading analogies - all attempts to cast a better gloss on stealthy actions and hidden agendas that clearly wouldn't engender our praise or support.

The Manifesto
When buying any service, and government in a democracy is supposed to be such, we have a right to understand the terms of sale, what we are being sold. The Electron Manifesto nominally provides this political end, yet increasingly we have governments that once elected, drop or tone down their promises (especially those relating to openness and honesty !), even reversing them in their actions whilst pretending the opposite. Critical legislation is pursued (that must be forced through parliament without debate) - but which strangely omitted to find its way into the list of planned government priorities...

Its Not Important
A sense of priority is essential if we are to successfully run any enterprise, a lesson most politicians fail to demonstrate that they have learned. A concentration on trivial minority issues whilst the major infrastructure collapses reflects the shallowness of today's politicians. Rather than being the 'wise philosophers' of our Platonic myth, we nowadays seem to attract the also-rans, people without integrity or ideas, so unable to deal with real problems that they must hide behind a facade of triviality and plastic image.

Mis-using Science
Science is about simplification, but a tendency to simplify results and then extrapolate them as if they were the full picture is extensively used to 'support' or mislead the public on major policy issues. Sadly the ignorance of most politicians and the public about science allows this technique to easily hold sway - a little knowledge is a treacherous thing ! Science has no explicit values - deliberately. Thus no current science tells us how to act, that is a value judgement added (without scientific justification) by politicians.

Canon Fodder
Each constituency nominally elects a politician to represent them - an idea more followed in the breach than in the actuality. On any major issue the party line is king, which in actuality means the dictatorship of the leader. We also see regularly nowadays attempts to rig votes, either by swamping decision bodies with lackeys or by altering the rules so that the desired (undemocratic) result is made certain.

Freedom of Information
It would be thought that people who worked for us and who were paid by us would be honour bound to give us all the information we requested. Such a mentality appeals neither to bureaucrats or politicians who both conspire to keep as much secret as possible. Information should be voluntarily available to the electorate, not prised bit by reluctant bit from the hands of those paid to serve.

Advertising Utopias
Moving now to the world of the advertising agency we enter a fantasy universe that puts most virtual reality games to shame. Facts are boring things, so why not add a bit of creative thinking? Our dreams are parts of our world where logic plays no part - but in advertising these have now spilled out into the real world and threaten to destroy our sanity.

Consumption Is Happiness
No, it is not. It is work, it is waste, it is time consuming. An 'always tomorrow' land of discardable things, of continuous destruction, is not utopia, quite the reverse. Happiness today does not depend on consumption tomorrow but on satisfaction today - a state of affairs not encouraged by endless exhortations to consume more !

Social Conformance
Why do you wish to be the same as your neighbour ? You do of course, the advertisers say so - 50% of households have product X. Feel left out ? But such thinking neglects to inform you that such a product is quite useless, it is being sold for the sake of selling something . The identikit society is designed to justify the identikit production line, the profit maximising, choice minimising commercial obsession of today's business 'ethic'. Shops should primarily benefit you - not just the manufacturer - the tail wagging the economic dog.

There's No Demand
This is a common response to a request for anything different. There is a demand - you just demanded it! The unwillingness to cater for choice is another result of the big business mentality, big stores need big purchases and big suppliers. The loser is the smaller specialist supplier, but they do exist - so dump your big store (and tell them so) and seek them out - maybe on the internet !

Monopoly Pricing
We've all seen it, the three local stores all selling the same expensive item at the exact same price $199-99. Price fixing or what ? Attempts to prevent competition are rife in today's industry, whether by forcing an actual monopoly or by refusing supply to retailers that don't 'toe the line' on artificially inflated prices.

Two For the Price of One !
Wow ! This means only that they make over 100% profit normally. Rip-off normal pricing is the only way these offers can be made - you can be sure they don't make a loss even at the 'special' price. Unreasonable profit margins are again endemic in our society, some sectors do this blatantly (e.g. banks) some surreptitiously, but all are out to maximise profit, regardless of consequences.

Unverifiable Ads
70% of all cats prefer X. Do they ? Who says so ? How was the test run ? Was there bias ? Glib statements of supposed 'fact' litter the advertising world, yet in none of these ads will you find adequate answers to those questions. You are meant to take the statement as 'true' and act on it - a mindless, groundless manipulative technique that acts to bias your judgement by suggestion and not valid information.

White Coats and Experts
Dressing up in a white coat does not make you a scientist. Neither do pseudo-technical terms make a scientifically valid product. The blind-them-with-science factor acts on your ignorance and trust of 'experts', yet there are none involved here. These actors promoting 'cyclophenol enriched' product Y are promoting hot air, an illusory addition to an unnecessary product.

What They Don't Tell You
In any genuine scientific analysis, we need to take account of all the factors, not to leave out those that don't sell the product. This is one of the more pervasive aspects of the advertising industry, and one of the hardest to counter unless you are familiar with the field. If you don't ask they will keep quiet - but it isn't actually 'lying' they say !

Newer, Bigger, Better
Also dearer, poorer ingredients, more packaging, less value. Changing what works well is only justified if it improves one thing, and that of course is profit. Despite much hype, companies are not in business for the benefit of the customer but for themselves. Be suspicious and compare the small print...

Implication
We see what we want to see, and advertising agencies know this full well. Our tendency to read between the lines, to add what we would like to believe, allows them to imply their product is something that it is not, without actually being legally guilty of lying ! If a fact isn't written down explicitly it's safe to say that it doesn't exist, so don't assume it !

Fit For Purpose
Remember that purpose should be yours and not the advertisers ! Gimmicks, gizmos and so on are only of use if you want them, 'free gifts', of whatever type, are nothing of the sort. They are useless junk or already included in the price you pay. Look to substance in the product which you really, really need (compared to cost) and not the glossy merchandising and flashy paint jobs.

Time Wasting
Your time is money, so any time you have to suffer advertising it is costing you. This forced invasion of your life is perhaps most noticeable in today's habit of 'cold calling', of companies deliberately phoning you up, disturbing what you are doing, just to try to sell you unwanted goods. Tell them where to go. The same applies to doorstep salesmen and forced advertising on TV/Radio and Internet - all is spam.

Media Moguls
It would be nice to think that those areas of our society dedicated to providing information (newspapers and TV) would help us to counter the misinformation endemic in current society. Far from it. Despite a great deal of posturing about 'freedom of speech' and service to the community, we have here once more the selective misrepresentation so invasive in our deceitful world...

Biased Headlines
Attention getting they may be, but most headlines cater for the instant gratification and selling value of the shock, horror - is that really true ? It is rare that the following article is anything more than economical with the truth. Leaving out balancing facts may counter balance the political bias (that leaves out the other half !) but it does not make for sensible decision making.

Conflation
This means joining together two ideas that are not really connected so that the reader will assume the truth of both, given evidence of just one. This makes use of our normal mental associations and can be illustrated in the constant conjunction of 'sex and violence' in the press - they are not the same (and could be said to be opposites), one does not imply the other. This technique is often used to reinforce prejudices (e.g. 'dirty' blacks).

Using Exaggeration
Group hysteria is a powerful force, mobs are hard to resist. Stirring up hatred, in whatever form, is something dear to the heart of media manipulators. The half-truth, the exaggeration ("all French are selfish..." - so ban their products) so easily lead the gullible. Our media is full of these one-dimensional characterisations, these artificial divides or dualities. None are real - 'all X are Y' is a philosophical myth best suited to imaginary worlds.

Status-Quoism
Change upsets the apple cart, the more power you have then the more there is to lose. Protecting their power base is a another form of deceit widely employed. It takes the form of 'we are one of you', your representative, we fight your case - a selectively chosen case which is conveniently dropped as soon as it is no longer newsworthy. What is reported and what is not is highly significant, self-criticism, criticisms of their own biases are always repressed by these 'holier than thou' approaches. What is presented is carefully chosen to promote the interests of proprietors and directors and to protect their cosy world - even by harming opponents and competitors if this proves possible.

Dimensional Constraints
The follow-my-leader mentality adopted by the unimaginative leads to media products that all follow the same few limited themes. TV programs based on soap opera, medicine, police and violence litter every schedule. This closes down our perceived world into narrow manipulatable categories, reinforcing stereotypes and preventing discussion of the wider elements of our culture - scan a small encyclopaedia to realise just how many subjects just never appear in our media coverage.

Triple Charging
It should be possible either to pay a subscription for services or to get them free with advertising. For some modern companies this is far too much of an incentive to greed - why not sell satellite TV and charge both a subscription and put on double advertising ? Take it a step further and then charge for the programs also ! One monopoly obsessed supplier does...

The Phone Line Scam
One of the forms of communication deceit that has become more widespread these days is the use of Premium Rate phone lines. These innocuous looking numbers charge the caller such vast sums as to be able to give millionaire type prize incentives (from the proceeds from the many callers !). They are highly lucrative to both phone company and media organization, but not of course to the consumer. A similar scam relates to mobile phone lines, where callers from fixed phones are (without warning) charged exorbitant call rates.

Sponsorship
These salves to conscience come in many forms, a blatant attempt to sell more (often to kids - e.g. in football strips), a smokescreen to divert attention from more unsavoury company activities, indulgence of a directors pet interest (at consumers expense) or a bid to indulge in a form of personal ego trip (reputation massaging). Although the recipients may benefit, the conditions often impose exorbitant exploitation and control - in other words a sell out.

Personal Delusions
Our final category concerns us rather than them, in our ability to confuse ourselves and act out a fantasy rather than a real life.

The Helpless Machine
Despite behavioural conditioning from birth to grave, the idea that we are passive mechanisms that can only react to environmental pressures is false. We are autonomous organisms and need not acquiesce in anything we are told or shown. If under stress then we should change the manipulative environment that causes it, as animals do, not 'fix' the mechanism that is supposedly us - it was never broken !

Self Deception
Society is a fickle thing. If we act in an intuitive/unconscious way and then are called to account, most of us will invent a story to socially justify our action. It rarely has any relation to the truth. We often in fact don't know why we act as we do, but in today's social environment think that all our actions should be rational - so we make them so in retrospect ! These self-protecting fantasies then become embedded in our memory and shape our future actions, our social mythologies.

Truth Bending
We all like to get our way so have an inherent bias to be 'economical' with the truth. We reduce issues to simple yes/no decisions, ignoring valid implications (if they contradict what we wish to do). This is the region of prejudice, the bias that sees only black and white in a grey world. No meaningful decisions are that clear, there are always compromises that need to be made, different issues that need to be balanced.

Blinded By The Glitter
The real world exists and we have made it nasty. Hiding behind a shallow gloss (whether fame, isolation, small town parochialism or psychiatrists) will not make it go away. Pretending that all is right with the world merely allows the manipulators of truth to continue their work - building a world for their benefit but against ours.

Selfish Blinkers
By assuming that we can act in isolation as individuals we are never expecting our selfish actions to have any comeback - but they do. We act in a co-evolutionary world, and every negative act we execute affects other people, who remember it. They may not obviously retaliate, but they will, in their own way, in their own time - your fitness will be reduced in myriads of small ways.

Competitive Violence
One of the most pervasive ideas in our society is that competition increases benefits - it does not, at least not in the negative forms that we often employ. Competition in our world is about gaining at someone else's expense, so is destructive. Destruction is loved in our world, we worship violence in all forms, not least in the conduct of our competitive activities. Yet this form of business selfishness is even more negative in effect than is personal behaviour - it affects large groups of retaliators at once !

Thinking Is Hard
We try to avoid thought. In a complex world considering issues is hard work. The glib 'instant solution' is embraced eagerly - a godsend for the manipulator. The purveying of instant fixes is a major industry yet is always a shallow one. There are few instant solutions to life's difficulties, even money cannot purchase a solution to the inherent social ills of our misplaced beliefs about life.

It's Natural
Sometimes we blame our situation on natural causes - we cannot have avoided whatever happened. But usually we can, we make our world by our beliefs, we even nowadays make our natural world in the same way. Where trees are planted, where buildings replace forest, where mountains are removed (quarries) or lakes are formed (dams) is human motivated. If we don't like it we have only our collective selves to blame.

Conclusion
Here we have highlighted some (but not all) of the issues concerning fitness-reducing manipulation in our world, the constraining of our choices. We can only make valid decisions if we are free to do so and have the information, attempts to manipulate that freedom are always addressed to an unconscious level of our minds, but if we are aware we can counter them. Seeing through these social pressures requires experience, honesty and independence, the ability to see that we are important in ourselves and not just in relation to a fabricated social image, whether imposed by politicians, advertising agencies or media manipulators.

Truth is the most important aspect of making fit choices in our lives, yet it is the aspect of our society that has suffered most in recent years. Quantity of information does not however equal quality. We must sift away the dross and ask questions about what has been suppressed if we are to have a chance to be free. But most of all we must clearly and unequivocally reject the culture of deceit, lies and suppression that threatens to engulf us - and the people that promote it.

Links

http://www.uia.org/values/common97.htm

http://www.calresco.org/action.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/connect.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/economic.htm
http://www.calresco.org/ethics.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/fitness.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/freedom.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/genomic.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/global.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/natures.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/normal.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/paradox.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/qol.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/science.htm
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/value.htm

Moral philosophy and plausible deniability
Produced by Stan Correy
Sunday 24 March 2002
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s512439.htm

... I can't remember every detail of everything said...
... I don't recall...
... I may have misunderstood the question...
... It was a bad line...
... I wasn't aware...
... My information was …
... I wasn't there. It was not my responsibility...
... There was no reason to doubt the information...

Stan Correy: In Australian politics the episodes of smoky ambiguity, misinformation and maybe outright lying are mounting up. The quest for truthfulness may seem a trifle idealistic if you're a politician or a political party. But according to Sissela Bok, from Harvard University, if veracity is lost in public or private life, then societies begin to fall apart.

Sissela Bok: Trust between people, between individuals or within organisations, or between governments and citizens is absolutely crucial, and that is what is undermined. When people lie, it's not just that they hurt some particular individuals and it's not just that they hurt their own reputation, which of course they certainly do, but it really is also that they damage trust in ways that they often don't think about beforehand at all, and you know, I should mention when I was writing the book 'Lying', I spent maybe days thinking of how to end that book. My father, Gunnar Myrdal a social scientist, had always said that the last word in a book has to be very crucial to that book. And my last word was 'veracity'. But here are the last two sentences,
'Trust and integrity are precious resources easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.

http://nesara.insights2.org/Kaminski.html

What do we do? It's not just rhetoric

By John Kaminski
http://www.johnkaminski.com/

These are impossible questions, ones which I cannot answer. Perhaps one of you can.

What do we do when the very people supposed to be protecting us are actually harming us? Robbing us, poisoning us, deliberately asphyxiating us, putting things in our water that make us docile, giving us foods and medicines that make us sick, and in general preventing us from living our lives in what we believe is a normal manner.

What do we do when the society in which we live prevents us from being moral? Or from telling the truth as we see it? What do we do when our society encourages us not to question statements that we know in our hearts to be lies?

What do we do when our TV and newspapers tell us lies but insist we should regard this information as truth? What do we do when the vast majority of people in our society accepts these lies as truths and ridicules us when we call these statements lies?

What do we do when we have a legitimate grievance and can't get it redressed without bribing someone? What do we do when we can't trust our courts? How are we to respond when we learn that a private company controls all of our money? Or that the government has the right to poison your baby before you take her home from the hospital?

What do we do when the leader of our country, the occupant of the most prestigious office in the world, is a pill-popping psychopath with no discernible personality whose favorite hobby is killing large numbers of people, either by signing death warrants to execute mentally defective miscreants or ordering air strikes against innocent women and children tens of thousands of miles away? What do we do when all those around him, including the so-called political opposition, seem to agree with everything he says and does, and otherwise act as if this demented demagogue pathologically predisposed to obliterating the whole world is actually a normal human being?

It used to be the American way dictated if you didn't like the way the government worked, you could go to the polls and vote for an opposition candidate who promised to change things. What do we do when all the candidates who are running for every office are all basically saying the same thing and endorsing all the harmful things that are being done?

What do we do when the concept of one person, one vote has been completely destroyed by computerized voting machines that no one can verify, except the companies that own them, which are themselves owned by rich white men who support the man who got the votes that no independent agency is able to authenticate?

What do we do when we can't trust the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the medicines we take to make us well? How are we to regard these efforts to criminalize vitamins and other health foods when the doctors we go to prescribe medicines that are less effective than those beneficial substances they have worked so hard to ban?

What do we do when our nation decides to go into a state of permanent war, choosing hapless countries to attack and then obliterating them, then fleeces its own citizens with devious legislation that funnels billions of dollars to companies to reconstruct what we've just destroyed for reasons we later learn were transparent lies? How are we to regard such a country, such a group of men who would do such a thing to their fellow human beings?

And how are we to regard ourselves for believing and supporting such insane and inhuman policies? What do we do when the vast majority of American citizens refuses to even recognize that anything is out of whack? What do we do when government employees tinker with diseases in a laboratory, and then suddenly the whole country is stricken with a new kind of flu, one that kills children in Colorado and keeps everyone coughing indefinitely all across the nation? Why is it when you look up epidemics in history, you find that most of the recent ones occurred after vaccination campaigns? Why do you feel so uneasy when they tell you to get a flu shot? Or if you're in the military, when they tell you to get an anthrax shot?

Why does the American government seem so intent on destroying the lives of its own soldiers? Why do American soldiers seem so willing to shoot innocent women and children? Iraq or Afghanistan were never threats to America. Why do our children so eagerly shoot those people down like dogs? Is that what we really taught them to do in our humble homes? Is it? Are you absolutely sure we didn't? If we didn't, why do they?

What do we do when you can't get any public officials to comment on why there are all these strange cloud markings in the sky - some call them chemtrails - and so many people are sick with respiratory problems? Or perhaps it's the soot in the air, in increased amounts these days because air quality rules have been rolled back by the President who was elected on the basis of votes we were not allowed to recount.

What do we do when they tell us we have to rearrange our lives because of the threat of "terror"? These rearrangements, at least these days, are primarily based on the precedents set by the "terror" attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in which many thousands lost their lives in New York City and Washington, D.C. These "terrorists" have "terrorized" the world ever since, causing us to go to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Who are these "terrorists?" Why has no evidence ever been presented linking them to 9/11? Why was the Afghanistan war planned before 9/11 if it was blamed on 9/11? Why was the war in Iraq blamed on weapons of mass destruction and connection to 9/11 when it was planned long before 9/11? Why didn't the government ever catch those responsible for the anthrax attacks, especially after the trail of suspicion led right back to government employees?

Why didn't anybody in Congress read the legislation before voting for the initial Patriot Act? Why has nobody protested the nullification of our Constitutional rights? Especially when the so-called "terror" threatening our security is clearly a behind-the-scenes construction of our own intelligence agencies.

What do we do when the Vice President brings all the top oilmen in the country to his office to create a new energy policy, then they all fleece the citizens of California of billions of dollars in energy overcharges, the principal energy broker presides over the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history and is not prosecuted, a well-connected actor is elected governor of California to stop efforts to recover this stolen energy money, and the Vice President continues to draw a salary from the same company that receives billions of dollars in lucrative reconstruction contracts for rebuilding Iraq, which is the country we bombed on the basis of lies that were based on the "terror" that caused 9/11, for which they refuse to provide the evidence?

When you wave your American flag today, do you realize it means you are endorsing mass murder and exploitation all over the world? Do you realize the reasons for this demonic behavior are all lies? Do you realize America creates wars to stimulate profits, and has done this consistently for more than a hundred years?

How come so many of our own military service people are returning from Iraq to America with really strange diseases? How come we use radioactive ammunition when we know it has made thousands sick? How come we give soldiers shots to prevent diseases but we won't tell them what is in those shots? How come the military doesn't desert when they learn all these things, and how come parents can be proud when they bury their children who died in a war that fought for reasons we now know to have been lies? What's up with that? What do we do when America moves all its best jobs overseas because of the cheaper labor? What are Americans supposed to do about that? Start their own businesses and keep their products here at home? Hmmm.

What do we do when we can't trust the cops? Whom do we call for help then? When we see our president committing obvious moral and legal crimes and then lying about them, whom do we call to have him arrested? What do we do when we mention this to opposition candidates and they don't answer us?

We can no longer afford to support a government that does not support its people! But what do we do? We need to begin meeting with small groups of like-minded people who are as aghast as we are to find out how to begin processes of how to arrest and prosecute our criminal leaders. This will be very difficult.

It's not just a matter of canvassing social clubs and political parties. Both categories are largely brain dead and irrelevant, mindless flag wavers interested more in eating and drinking than in actual freedom. Nor is it productive to stage mass rallies with fractured focuses, where the main message of fading freedom is lost amid a confusing welter of conflicting passions.

No, this requires the creation of new groups, ones devoted to real education and not co-opted. Pay particularly attention to the word "co-opted," and maybe extend it to "infiltrated." This is a situation that applies to militias and politically oriented environmental groups. Both are now under extreme scrutiny by the feds, who are armed with draconian new laws that permit them to throw you in jail for the most trivial reasons.

But the need to be very careful should not stop you from trying to discern and organize people who are genuinely interested in the principles of freedom, in maintaining the attitudes that could make America what we always hoped it would be, and ending this criminal caricature that it has become. At some point very soon, we all need to address our public officials, and determine if they are going to side with the people who are being oppressed or with the oppressors who are being bribed to fleece and shackle the people.

These are the questions we need to ask them:

Why are there two sets of laws in this country, one for the poor that guarantees they will continue to live in poverty, and one for the rich, which assures they can get away with anything as long as they pay the right person? Why is it that our Attorney General approves of the indefinite incarceration of innocent foreigners without having to present any evidence, yet refuses to investigate charges of treason, obstruction of justice, mega grand theft and mass murder against the rich and powerful men who have seized control of what was once a free country? Who will investigate law enforcement when the law enforcers have turned criminal? Why was Dick Cheney allowed to keep secret the master plan for robbing Californians of $11 billion?

Why have all laws protecting the environment been repealed when we know the infusion of poisons into products is needlessly killing large numbers of people? Why are we deliberately fouling our air with poisonous chemtrails, and why is it no government official will say a thing about this?

Why is there a deliberate obstruction created by Ashcroft to prevent ordinary people from finding out what their government is doing to them? Why are ingredients like fluoride and aspartame permitted in what we consume when everyone knows they are poisoning us?

Why are our schools turning out children who can't spell or think for themselves? And why does our government seek to take away money from those schools and give it to self-serving, thought-limiting religious schools, especially when the Constitution that used to be in force expressly prohibits such transparent favoritism?

The police state is here. Your rights have been taken away, one by one. It is now illegal to think for yourself. Just try to examine evidence showing the Germans never willingly gassed anyone during World War II. You can be thrown in jail just for trying. And knowing that, what does that tell you about the original question? Do you see anything wrong with outlawing certain thoughts? If you don't, then you probably don't have any questions about where you went to school, or what church you go to, and you also probably don't see any purpose in any of this I've just written.

Our reliance on mass media has dulled our minds, our reliance on prepackaged foods has anesthetized our senses and atrophied our bodies, and our reliance on establishment religion has shackled our spirits, and made us cogs in a mindless a machine rather than the sensitive seeds in the soil we need to be to fulfill our human birthright.

We need to grow our own food, make our own clothes, live in our own houses. We need to break the backs of the bankers who control us with things we don't really need. What do we do with all this time our modern conveniences give us? We seek out more distractions to keep us separate from those we love. All these consumables we covet just make us hate ourselves more, because, deep down, we all know we're not doing what we're supposed to be doing.

What we're supposed to be doing is making a better world, making sure people are not suffering, making sure that we're not destroying the very things that keep us alive. We are not supposed to be increasingly alienating ourselves with false styles and transitory titillations that prevent us from nourishing the very things that nourish us. We are not supposed to be taking pills to make us feel better, we are supposed to be living lives that make us feel better.

The existing political structure in America is rotten to the core, fatally polluted by a private money supply that enables perverted patricians to retain their aristocratic power across the generations. Until this injustice is eliminated, and the power over money is returned to the people, nothing will be fixed, and the unjust wars will proliferate.

Instead of leading a more humane world into a new era of enlightenment, understanding and technological diversity, America is dragging the world backwards into a new Dark Ages where force of plunder is annihilating legitimate efforts toward reciprocal respect and cooperation.

Under present circumstances, there is no alternative to the mass dismissal and prosecution of the entire American government - the administration, the congress, the judiciary all must be indicted for criminal corruption. To do this, a massive campaign of recalibration needs to be undertaken. Starting at the local level, delegates to form a new government need to be chosen, preferably without political campaigns (and certainly without funded campaigns). These local delegates need to congeal at the state level, and begin the arduous task of reconstituting the federal government without political campaigns.

Once a temporary U.S. Senate is chosen by the states, new elections can be held for the House of Representatives, which then would choose a new Senate as a precondition for being able to hold a nationwide election for higher leadership positions. In the interim, a temporary administrative transition team would coordinate the operations of the federal government, once all the Cabinet-level leaders had been jailed. Who would be named to this team, and how it would be named, remain to be seen. Certainly political parties, military and religious leaders, unions, newspapers, bankers, lawyers and doctors should not be involved in this selection process. Or perhaps they all should. The one thing to be avoided is the dominance of any one segment of society over the entire government, as it is now by lawyers masquerading as professional politicians.

The only way to get a truly representative and functional government is to severely regulate the use of mass media in campaigning, enforce strict term limits for all offices, and to radically revise all laws governing banks. Usury must be abolished, and upper limits on income established, now that we are all certain

Unregulated capitalism is the cause of most of the world's problems. All the budgets of the world can be balanced by the simple confiscations of most of the fortunes of the world's wealthiest people, like the Rothschild, Bush and Windsor families. Relax, patricians, you'll still be able to buy your way out of trouble. We won't take it all, just most of it. Besides, many members of these families won't need their money if they're all living at Guantanamo, which should probably be renamed Camp Bush.

No more is it a question of trying to get ahead in this society. This society is broken. It is time to forge a new world, not based on domination, exploitation and war. We must stop regarding the idea of revolution as merely an abstract concept, and realize that a functioning, purposeful revolution is the only way most of us are going to survive. Otherwise, the certainty of slavery for 90 percent of the world's population is unavoidable, and that will only perpetuate the same problems that continue to afflict us.

How we can effect these necessary changes absolutely vital to our collective survival are questions that you, dear reader, must now answer. It is essential that your share your conclusions with others, and not just keep them to yourselves. If you don't see the need for any of these questions I've just posed, let me ask you this: What will you do when they come for you?

John Kaminski is the author of "America's Autopsy Report," a collection of his Internet essays.

http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Slavery and the eight veils
Don Harkins
proliberty.com/observer/20011212.htm

From the December 2001 Idaho Observer:

Over the last several years I have evolved and discarded several theories in an attempt to explain why it is that most people cannot see truth -- even when it smacks them in the face. Those of us who can see “the conspiracy” have participated in countless conversations amongst ourselves that address the frustration of most peoples' inability to comprehend the extremely well-documented arguments which we use to describe the process of our collective enslavement and exploitation. The most common explanation to be arrived at is that most people just “don't want to see” what is really going on.

Extremely evil men and women who make up the world's power-elite have cleverly cultivated a virtual pasture so grass green that few people seldom, if ever, bother to look up from where they are grazing long enough to notice the brightly colored tags stapled to their ears.

The same people who cannot see their enslavement for the pasture grass have a tendency to view as insane “conspiracy theorists” those of us who can see the past the farm and into the parlor of his feudal lordship's castle.

Finally, I understand why.

It's not that those who don't see that their freedom is vanishing under the leadership of the power-elite “don't want to see it” -- they simply can't see what is happening to them because of the unpierced veils that block their view.

All human endeavors are a filtration process. Sports is one of the best examples. We play specific sports until we get kicked off the playground. The pro athletes we pay big bucks to watch just never got kicked off the playground. Where millions of kids play little league each spring, they are filtered out until there are about 50 guys who go to the World Series in October.

Behind the first veil: There are over six billion people on the planet. Most of them live and die without having seriously contemplated anything other than what it takes to keep their lives together. Ninety percent of all humanity will live and die without having pierced the first veil.

The first veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the first veil and find the world of politics. We will vote, be active and have an opinion. Our opinions are shaped by the physical world around us; we have a tendency to accept that government officials, network media personalities and other “experts” are voices of authority. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the second veil.

The second veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the second veil to explore the world of history, the relationship between man and government and the meaning of self-government through constitutional and common law. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the third veil.

The third veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the third veil to find that the resources of the world, including people, are controlled by extremely wealthy and powerful families whose incorporated old world assets have, with modern extortion strategies, become the foundation upon which the world's economy is currently indebted. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the fourth veil.

The fourth veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the fourth veil to discover the Illuminati, Freemasonry and the other secret societies. These societies use symbols and perform ceremonies that perpetuate the generational transfers of arcane knowledge that is used to keep the ordinary people in political, economic and spiritual bondage to the oldest bloodlines on earth. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the fifth veil.

The fifth veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the fifth veil to learn that the secret societies are so far advanced technologically that time travel and interstellar communications have no boundaries and controlling the actions of people is what their members do as offhandedly as we tell our children when they must go to bed. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the sixth veil.

The sixth veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the sixth veil where the dragons and lizards and aliens we thought were the fictional monsters of childhood literature are real and are the controlling forces behind the secret societies. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without piercing the seventh veil.

The seventh veil: I do not know what is behind the seventh veil. I think it is where your soul is evolved to the point you can exist on earth and be the man Ghandi was, or the woman Peace Pilgrim was - people so enlightened they brighten the world around them no matter what.

The eighth veil? Piercing the eighth veil probably reveals God and the pure energy that is the life force in all living things - which are, I think, one and the same.

If my math is accurate there are only about 60,000 people on the planet who have pierced the sixth veil. The irony here is too incredible: Those who are stuck behind veils one through five have little choice but to view the people who have pierced the veils beyond them as insane. With each veil pierced, exponentially shrinking numbers of increasingly enlightened people are deemed insane by exponentially increasing masses of decreasingly enlightened people.

Adding to the irony, the harder a “sixth or better veiler” tries to explain what he is able to see to those who can't, the more insane he appears to them.

Our enemy, the state

Behind the first two veils we find the great majority of people on the planet. They are tools of the state: Second veilers are the gullible voters whose ignorance justify the actions of politicians who send first veilers off to die in foreign lands as cannon fodder -- their combined stations in life are to believe that the self-serving machinations of the power-elite are matters of national security worth dying for.

Third, fourth, fifth and sixth veilers are of increasing liability to the state because of their decreasing ability to be used as tools to consolidate power and wealth of the many into the hands of the power-elite. It is common for these people to sacrifice more of their relationships with friends and family, their professional careers and personal freedom with each veil they pierce.

Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), author of “Our Enemy, the State” (1935), explained what happens to those who find the seventh and eighth veils: “What was the best that the state could find to do with an actual Socrates and an actual Jesus when it had them? Merely to poison one and crucify the other, for no reason but that they were too intolerably embarrassing to be allowed to live any longer.”

Conclusions

And so now we know that it's not that our countrymen are so committed to their lives that, “they don't want to see,” the mechanisms of their enslavement and exploitation. They simply “can't see” it as surely as I cannot see what's on the other side of a closed curtain.

The purpose of this essay is threefold: To help the handful of people in the latter veils to understand why the masses have little choice but to interpret their clarity as insanity; 2. To help people behind the first two veils understand that living, breathing and thinking are just the beginning and; 3. Show people that the greatest adventure of our life is behind the next veil because that is just one less veil between ourselves and God.