Friday 26th of April 2024

entertainment and propaganda...

entertainment
Like dogs, we “need something to do”. Dogs will be trained to volunteer for sheep herding and cattle mustering. 

Some dogs will be trained to hunt foxes some will go for rabbits, down the rabbit hole… It seems dogs can’t wait to be useful. Like dogs, we eat, work, shit, sleep — and repeat. As young kids we need to play and our games shape our resilience. Body and spirit have to be amused, challenged, distracted, scratched, entertained, educated, taught, "tradied", skilled… 

At some stage, entertainment becomes propaganda and propaganda becomes entertainment...

Amongst all this desire to act, lurks the desire to fart-around of do "useless things” — farniente galore. Or be sick. Chronic fatigue, torpor or extreme laziness of the mind is rampant, yet many of us fight it by keeping busy. Overall, there is no purpose to all this but to be human as part of a community where laughter, telling stories (true or not) and sharing can make us feel good — survive well — and procreate. We invent gods to explain what we don’t know.

So, in order to survive individually in a group, we need to perform tasks that will benefit the survival of the community. Or do we? Do we understand the needs and wants of the group? For this, we have to learn the meanings, the arts and techniques of communications of ideas.

We eventually sell the concept to ourselves that our truths and our propaganda are our defence against the lies and the propaganda of other “groups". We will even blame them for our own lies…

But as mentioned before, possibly too often on this site, deceit is part of our humanity... Mr Leonisky strongly believes that without deceit, we would not have evolved and the human species would have vanished for being naturally imperfect. Was this deceit a trick of nature or an accident waiting to happen in evolution? 

We self-deceive first and foremost and have to accept strange “values". We believe beyond a certain point of reactive knowledge. And we have to believe that the meanings of our knowledge are true, but we are never certain. Thus those of us who ask questions are in a mixed flux of angst and exciting adventure. It should be exhilarating but we could fall into despair and depression for seeing untruths and discovering fake signals within us or from the others.

There is the language. We have to believe that this A is the symbol for the letter A and it means something. This should appear ridiculously evident... I know or do I know? We all are at various stages of learning and forgetting. I spent some too long a time, more than 60 years ago, when my perceptions were detached from my cognition. The image of a tree had no meaning. The word "tree" had no meaning. Meaning — related meaning (relative meaning) is everything for being human.

There was this engineer in the early onset of dementia who could not read numbers. He read letters and words perfectly but he could not “understand” the symbols for numbers… 1 2 3 4 5 6 etc were as alien to him as Chinese writing. He tricked himself by using the symbol L for number one and an upside down L for number 2. Eventually the concept of one and two units vanished from his brain. This could be frightening if we know we can’t relate, but then we cannot know we can’t...

This case would seem extreme, yet when it comes to the language of mathematics, some of us can grasp it very well, while others would not have a clue what ∏ meant in a context of other symbols. AND THIS “no-clue” happens EVEN IF WE LEARN THE VALUES of the symbols. We soon forget, because "to tell the truth" WE DON’T UNDERSTAND THE MEANING of the assemblage of the values. The meanings are so abstracted we loose our sense of reality, unless we can relate the meaning to what we see.

In maths and in quantum physics, we simply cannot relate these to a concrete reality. Yet without these massively complex concepts, we would not be able to have simple smartphones. It's wunderbar!

In general, most people prefer fairy tales to the exactitude of mathematics. Mathematics have an air of artificiality while fairy tales are more like the babble of birds in a tree — especially the lorikeets, who love and gently fight, telling stories that they only understand in many screeches and whistles, in order to maintain their pecking order and first-rights to a flower. We guess this rightly or wrongly. How can the birds make sense of each sound in this day long cacophony, is a marvel of nature. We hope they do understand and entertain each others.

We love entertainment. It fills an enormous empty space in our brain. If I sit still I can see the shadows from the sun moving away from a point of reference. It’s cunning. The sun moves. It takes a giant leap of faith in sciences to understand that it’s the surface where I am that is moving. The earth rotates. It’s a concept that is obvious to us but for many years before Galileo and Copernicus was not in consideration. 

We had to be at the centre of the universe because we could believe we were top bananas. We had to be god’s chosen species as the last one of creation. We had to be the “chosen people” in search of the lost promised land, the former Eden from where god had thrown us out because of our sin. We invented the concept of sin to explain pain. Pain is real. Sometimes pain is unreal, but most of the other beliefs were DECEIT. DECEPTION.

This was a deception used to maintain the cohesion of the group, in which the individuals HAD TO BELIEVE in the same purpose in order for the group to be unified — and toil together. At some point this deception became ritualised, and the theatrics became entertaining though part of the deceitful propaganda. Our natural inclination for deceit had gone up a notch… It was a spectacle. We believed together. AND THIS DECEIT WORKED! We felt as if our existence had a meaning and a purpose beyond the dust of our individual death.

The distance between entertainment and propaganda is less than paper thin…


Gus Leonisky

Your entertainment officer on the Ovation of the Sky.

Image at top by Gus Enterprises: see yourself as fireworks...

but which is the truth?...


Today, US President Donald Trump has claimed he wanted to “take out” Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2017 but was deterred by then-Defense Secretary James Mattis – after previously denying an assassination was even discussed.

I would have rather taken [Assad] out,” Trump told Fox & Friends on Tuesday, insisting “I had him all set,” but “Mattis didn’t want to do it.”

Really gross. But which is the truth? We know that trump has told a many porkies, many many of them, but in which direction have our legs been pulled glibfully? We even have the feeling that Trump has no idea who Assad is and what he's done...

And we know (do we?) that the Pentagon would have been happy to oblige in killing Assad, collateral damage included… or is the Pentagon a blind follower of A President’s wishes…, like a blind person follows his/her dog...

The boffins of the Pentagon did assassinate Bin Laden, didn’t they?

But they deny being in the pockets of arms manufacturers…

Army Chief of Staff General James McConville has vehemently rejected Donald Trump’s comments alleging that the military’s top commanders wish to entangle the US in as many wars as possible in order to enrich weapon manufacturers.

“I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort,” McConville, a Trump appointee, said during an online conference on Tuesday. “We take this very, very seriously in how we make our recommendations.”


The general added that many of the US commanders have sons and daughters that currently serve in the military and some of them “may be in combat right now.” The general declined to more directly respond to Trump’s allegations, saying the military should remain out of politics.

Read more: https://www.rt.com/usa/500193-general-mcconville-trump-pentagon/

This is not the IMPRESSION WE GET FROM OUR ARMCHAIRS… As soon as someone says “I can assure you…” your best guess is that some bullshit is coming your way. The military influences politics. Everywhere the Pentagon went on the planet there is a trail of crap and piles of ashes… Not good glory, but I suppose the Pentagon had its own sense of purpose. One senses a bit of planetary Pentagonal deceit and from the White House, full of dark and white lies floating about. The smell of crap is overwhelming…

Lucky we have "Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies”, a book by Edward Curtin to add to our understandings. The first chapter is: Inside America’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry of Lies. . . 

From there we travel through all the deceit that we had to absorb as truth in order for our governing bodies to stay top dog. This is what I explained in the "The Age of Deceit". America has been the most successful country because it lied the most and the best… But the lies, with a Trump at the helm of a ship of porkies, have come out of their secret harbour. This is destroying our faith in the propaganda. The Democrats prefer the propaganda of the other guy, including many of the Military because despite the bravado at the top of this comment, Trump does not want WAR… But this could be a fudge. We don’t really know, but we know the other mob is in favour of war — when “justified". Piece of cake to spin our moral compass to “justified”...

This is what we try to explain, daily, on this site in order to improve our democratic system — because humans seem to need a system of community, whether structured or not, in order to make progress and improvements. We need to relate with a bit more reality. Thus come the final chapter of "Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies” and its conclusion that Edward leaves to John Berger:

There is no question of looking away from the modern world and its practices. There is no question of a Pre-Raphaelite flight back to the Middle Ages. It is rather that Dante advances toward us. And in the specific purgatory of the modern world, created and maintained by corporate capitalism, every injustice is grounded in that unilinear view of time, for which the only relation conceivable is that between cause and effect. In contrast to this, in defiance of this, the “single synchronic act” is that of loving.

Yes. I hope I know. I hope we know… This is why we fight daily with positive anger — a loving anger — until memory becomes blancmange… and our ashes are sent sky high.

————————————

Seeking Truth in A Country of Lies is a collection of lyrical and critical essays offering keen insight into a very wide range of topics: from probing analyses related to work, the digital revolution, propaganda, the attacks of September 11, 2001, the CIA, government assassinations and wars, to spellbinding reflections on poetry, nature, time, and even silence. 

Following in the path of such earlier celebrated essayists as Thoreau and John Berger, Curtin’s critique is at once political, social, cultural, and deeply personal. Constructed over a broad swath of time, these essays address some of the most significant events in world history, shining shafts of brilliant light on abhorrent matters long unspeakable.

Reading Curtin is akin to taking a walk in the woods with a good friend who gradually unrolls a stunning life-changing revelation, where, having started out with a particular destination in mind, one is then lured ever onwards into diverging paths another after another, until, as the compass finally turns one gently back toward home, that sanctuary no longer looks the same. A restless wonderment has been aroused, dots are connected, and a comprehensive picture emerges.

Here’s but a taste:

“The morning star welcomed me. The sun rose majesti­cally. And across my window three early flies jitterbug in the first light. The whole earth is conspiring to explode with life and seeking our assent.”

“Most suicides die of natural causes, slowly and in silence.”

"Rub Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, the right way and the CIA emerges into the light."

"A few slices from the bread of truth is essential to conceal the lies.."


and his acerbic twist updating Robert Frost to contemporary context:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one to the mall.”

The power of Curtin’s essays lies in their capacity to evoke in the reader the exhilaration and passion for truth that the writer felt when writing them, that the writer hoped would be carried into the world as rebellion against propaganda, war, and injustice.  They contain multitudes of trajectories, not least a celebration of the beauty of life and the hope that a better world is possible.

https://www.amazon.com/Seeking-Truth-Country-Edward-Curtin/dp/1949762262
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Cheers. GL.


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Not in each others pockets:war


sticks in the spokes...

[2017]

David Brock is considered to be one of the masters of agit-prop (agitation & propaganda) in the 21st century. A personality devoid of scruples, he is able to defend a cause as well as destroy it, according to the needs of his employer. He is at the head of an empire of mass manipulation.

 

The campaign waged against the new President of the United States by the sponsors of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the destruction of the Greater Middle East is on-going. After the Womens’ March on 22 January [2017], a March for Science is scheduled to be held not only in the USA, but also throughout the Western world on 22 April [2017]. It’s goal is to show that Donald Trump is not only a misogynist, but also an obscurantist.

The fact that he is the ex-organiser of the Miss Universe pageant, and that his third wedding was to a model, is apparently enough to prove that he holds women in contempt. The fact that the President contests the rôle played by Barack Obama in the creation of the Chicago Climate Exchange (a long time before his Presidency) and rejects the idea that climatic disturbances are caused by the expulsion of carbon into the atmosphere attest to the fact that he understands nothing about science.

In order to convince US public opinion of the President’s insanity – a man who says that he hopes for peace with his enemies, and wants to collaborate with them in universal economic prosperity - one of the greatest specialists of agit-prop (agitation & propaganda), David Brock, set up an impressive system even before Trump’s investiture.

At the time when he was working for the Republicans, Brock launched a campaign against President Bill Clinton which would eventually become Troopergate, the Whitewater affair, and the Lewinsky affair. Having changed his colours, he is today in the service of Hillary Clinton, for whom he has already organised not only the demolition of Mitt Romney’s candidacy but also her riposte in the affair of the assassination of the US ambassador in Benghazi. During the first round of primaries, it was Brock who directed the attacks against Bernie Sanders. The National Reviewqualified Brock as «a right-wing assassin who has become a left-wing assassin».

It is important to remember that the two procedures of destitution of a serving President initiated since the Second World War were set in motion for the benefit of the deep state, and not at all for the benefit of democracy. So Watergate was entirely managed by a certgain «Deep Throat» who, 33 years later, was revealed to be Mark Felt, the assistant of J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI. As for the Lewinsky affair, it was simply a way of forcing Bill Clinton to accept the war against Yugoslavia.

The current campaign is organised in secret by four associations:

- Media Matters is tasked with picking up on Donald Trump’s mistakes. You read his bulletin every day in your newspapers – the President can’t be trusted, he got this or that point wrong.

- American Bridge 21st Century has collected more than 2,000 hours of videos showing Donald Trump over the years, and more than 18,000 hours of other videos of the members of his cabinet. It has at its disposition sophisticated technological equipment designed for the Department of Defense – allegedly not in working order – which enables it to look for contradictions between their older declarations and their current positions. It should be extending its work to 1,200 of the new President’s collaborators.

- Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — CREWis a firm of high level lawyers tasked with tracking anything that could create a scandal in the Trump administration. Most of the lawyers in this association work pro bono, for the cause. These are the people who prepared the case for Bob Ferguson, the Chief Prosecutor of the state of Washington, against the immigration decree (Executive Order 13769).

- Shareblue is an electronic army which has already connected with 162 million internauts in the USA. It’s job is to spread pre-ordained themes, for example: 
• Trump is authoritarian and a thief. 
• Trump is under the influence of Vladimir Putin. 
• Trump is a weak and quick-tempered personality, he’s a manic-depressive. 
• Trump was not elected by the majority of US citizens, and is therefore illegitimate. 
• His Vice-President, Mike Pence, is a fascist. 
• Trump is a billionaire who will constantly be faced with conflicts of interest between his personal affairs and those of state. 
• Trump is a puppet of the Koch brothers, who are famous for sponsoring the extreme right. 
• Trump is a white supremacist and a threat to minorities. 
• Anti-Trump opposition just keeps growing outside Washington. 
• To save democracy, let’s support the democrataic parliamentarians who are attacking Trump, and let’s demolish those who are co-operating with him. 
• Overthrowing Trump will take time, so don’t let’s weaken in our resolve.

This association will produce the newsletters and 30-second videos. It will base itself on two other groups – a company which makes documentary videos, The American Independent, and a statistical unit, Benchmark Politics.

The whole of this system – which was set up during the transitional period, that is to say before Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House – already employed more than 300 specialists to which should be added numerous voluteer workers. Its annual budget, initially calculated at 35 million dollars, was increased to the level of about 100 million dollars.

Destroying the image – and thus the authority – of the President of the United States, before he has had the time to do anything at all, can have serious consequences. By eliminating Saddam Hussein and Mouamar Kadhafi, the CIA plunged their two countries into a long period of chaos, and the «land of Liberty» itself may suffer severe damage from such an operation. This type of mass manipulation technique has never before been levelled at a head of state in the Western world.

For the moment, the plan is working – no political leader in the world has dared to celebrate the election of Donald Trump, with the exception of Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 
Pete Kimberley


Source
Zero Hedge (USA)

Read more:https://www.voltairenet.org/article195455.html

Read also:

[2020]
The USA on the brink of civil war

by Thierry Meyssan

In this article, the author seeks to draw our attention to a fact that is difficult for Westerners to conceive of: the American people are experiencing a crisis of civilization. They are so deeply divided that the presidential election is not just about electing a leader, but about determining what the country (empire or nation?) should be. Neither side is capable of accepting to lose, so much so that each could resort to violence to impose its point of view.

Read more:https://www.voltairenet.org/article210807.html#nb1

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meanwhile, joe is gone...

Wow: Joe Biden’s staff won’t even let him do a “spontaneous” Q&A session without a script. Is he really that far gone?

Obsessive scripting is the only explanation for what happened at last week’s Biden question-and-answer session with AFL-CIO union members, when the candidate responded to a young barista’s query with the non sequitur, “Move it up here” — then paused.

Anyone who’s been following Biden’s travails recognizes those words as a cue to his aides to jog the teleprompter, as he’s done time and again in recent weeks. (Why an experienced politician with a top-notch staff keeps having this trouble is also worrisome.)

Anyway, after the pause, Joe launched into his “off the cuff” response — which was utter boilerplate: “You know, there used to be a basic bargain in this country, that workers shared in the wealth they helped create.” It’s beyond appalling that Biden would need reminding of that trope.

His aides won’t even discuss the elephant in the room.

After the AFL-CIO footage made the rounds, Fox News’ Bret Baier put the obvious question to TJ Ducklo, the campaign’s national press secretary: “Has Joe Biden ever used a teleprompter during local interviews or to answer Q&As with supporters?”

Ducklo ducked the question — repeatedly, before finally saying, “I am not going to allow the Trump campaign to funnel their questions through Fox News and get me to respond to that.”

There’s your answer.

Time and again, teleprompter troubles have exposed the fact that Biden is just reading his lines in what his campaign pretends are real conversations with supporters, like Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf.

He’s not even answering reporters’ questions off the cuff: “Look, Venezuela topline message is . . .” he told an NBC Miami reporter — obviously just reading the talking points he was handed in advance. He’s also given multiple interviews with his eyes down, clearly relying on prepared notes in his lap.

This simply is not the Joe Biden of decades past, who might put his foot in his mouth but never needed a script to say what he thinks. If he can no longer answer even softball questions without the aid of his overseers, who will really be calling the shots if he wins the White House?

 

Read more;

https://nypost.com/2020/09/13/biden-cant-answer-without-a-script-how-can-he-run-the-country/

 

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