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Why ?

PostPosted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 9:42 pm
by slimmouse
Ive reposted this from the general discussion forum - hopefully a more relaxed environment might encourage a more active discussion :D

In the interests of not hijacking the following thread ;

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... hp?t=11283

Im interested in peoples opinions as to exactly why we sit in a world that appears consumed with self destruction, and man's inhumanity to man.

It is easily demonstrable that the "profit" angle simply doesnt cut it.

Your collective thoughts ?

Why not?

PostPosted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 8:00 am
by Username
.

Hey there Slim. Looks as though your thread, by the same name above, is going to survive after all. So, if it's all the same to you, I'll just steal this one. (You can have it back if you need it later.)

I'm not even going to attempt to wrestle with your question. Astrology sounds good to me. You know, the ol' constructive/destructive principals at work.

Some years ago I was desperately wanting the answer to the question of "What the (fill-in) IS it about WAR?" and found Chris Hedges book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. It helped me to gain a much better perspective on why we fight. If you haven't already read it, Amazon has it for around $5. I was going to try to hold out for his latest book to come down in price, but couldn't and am currently reading American Fascists.

Anyway, that's not why I stole your thread either. I wanted to say WB HMW. GTSY.

and then bitch about something he said.

Quoting HMW here:

Even soldiers don't shoot at the enemy unless conditioned and desensitized at great length and still the killing act has traumatic repercussions. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's 1995 book called 'On Killing' is a must read to understand how traumatic it is to kill another human being. We just aren't like that. PTSD is inevitable.



I was pretty excited to find some references to Grossman's book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, because this was during the time mentioned above before finding Hedges.

It was March 22, 2004 at the community college here in Tacoma, Grossman was giving a lecture. Forget how much I paid (maybe $35) but there was a pretty big crowd there, over 100 people, mostly educators and counselors. Brought my book along so maybe he could sign it.

He made sure we were all aware of how important he and his work was, making appearances on Sally Jesse, Oprah and every other major talk show. I was impressed.

And he was impressive. Very energetic, knowledgable, charming, all that stuff. One of his tactics or techniques during his talk was to write things down on this large pad of paper set up on an eisel in the front and when he was done with one page he would rip it off with such... 'umph'... fanfare...vigor... idk, it was just weird.

He lectured mostly about the evils of video games and violence in movies and on TV, going into detail about the kids who were involved in columbine and other school shootings. "And don't let them tell you these kids did this because they were on medications," he stressed "because they weren't." he lied. Went on to tell us how helpful these drugs are.

Another thing he said that didn't settle well was "People in prison are not peaceful pot dealers." trying to impress us with just how dangerous and demented our 2+ million prison population is.

Well, this was maybe a 6 hour talk with a lunch break in the middle and he allowed questions at the end. The crowd was enamored. I was confused. He even seemed to have a couple of shills (is that what you call those guys who sit behind a preacher who set the mood, clapping, swaying, looking interested, etc?) implanted in the audience.

Forgetting my fear of speaking in front of crowds, I raised my hand to ask a question and when he handed me the microphone, it all came back to me real quick, so I squeaked out my question as best I could.

"Sir, you work for the military. So what you're telling us is that we shouldn't teach our children to kill, but then at age 18 you will take them and show them how to do it right?"
<on edit> "and isn't it the military who designs and funds many of the violent video games on the market?"
Well, that question didn't go over real well. In fact this shell-shocked looking vet who sat next to me (may have been one of grossman's) leaned over and warned me that I'd better not say anything else, while Grossman spun his answer saying something about how "Some people want to divide us..." and "yes he can help both sides..."

Grossman has a website. He calls his specialty "Killology". http://killology.com/

I did get another question in at the end. He was going on and on about how "This" causes violence and "That" causes violence, and he called on me and I asked, "Does fear cause violence?"

He said "Yes."

I didn't ask him to sign my book.


Anyway HMW, I don't like Grossman. So there.

Take Care,
Terry

<on edit> while I'm here on edit I wanted to tell you about the article where I first heard of Grossman. ( hehe...not surprisingly) It came out in the Winter 2003 issue of...wait for it...Paranoia Magazine (issue 31). Now just be quiet and listen up because this is a good article.

Concentration Campus
Thought Control in American Education
by Robert Guffey

In 1995 Lt. Col. Dave Grossman published a revelatory book entitled On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. The main point of the book is simple: Let to their natural instincts, soldiers in combat are unlikely to kill. During World War II, for example, only 15 to 25 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles. By the Persian Gulf War, however the shooting rate had increased to 95%. How did the military manage to raise the firing rate so dramatically within only 45 years?

In his 1978 book, War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, Peter Watson revealed the Mengele-like conditioning techniques used by the U.S. Navy to train assassins. A Naval psychiatrist, Commander Narut, explained his exact method as follows: He first exposed his subjects to "symbolic modeling: involving "films specially designed to show people being killed or injured in violent ways. By being acclimated through these films, the men were supposed to eventually become able to disassociate their emotions from such a situation [...]. The men were taught to shoot but also given a special type of Clockwork Orange training to quell any qualms they may have about killing. Men are shown a series of gruesome films, which get progressively more horrific. The trainee is forced to watch by having his head bolted in a clamp so he cannot turn away, and a special device keeps his eyelids open." (Grossman 306-07)

As you can see, Stanley Kubrick's version of these techniques is ass-backwards. In Kubrick's film the onslaught of violent images sensitized Malcolm McDowell to violence, whereas in the real world these images actually served to desensitize Narut's military subjects. Grossman expands on this point: "In Clockwork Orange such conditioning was used to develop an aversion to violence by administering a drug that caused revulsion while the violent films were shown, until the revulsion became associated with acts of violence. In Commander Narut's real-world training the nausea-creating drugs were left out, and those who were able to overcome their natural revulsion were rewarded, thereby obtaining the opposite effect of that depicted in Stanley Kubrick's movie. The U>S. government denies Commander Narut's claims, but Watson claims that he was able to obtain some outside corroboration from an individual who stated that Commander Narut had ordered violent films from him, and Narut's tale was subsequently published in the London Times." (Grossman 307)

So what does all this have to do with Ronald McDonald and Big Bird and the holes in your kid's brain? Very simple....


Later in the article he quotes John Gatto from Dumbing Us Down:
"Bells are the secret logic of schooltime...bells destroy the past and the future, rendering every interval the same as any other. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference."

(I've got to come back and read you that part about the bells.)

anyway after going to see Grossman's lecture I was left with the impression that he was more part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Such a coincidence, my new paranoia magazine arrived in the mail today. At a glance there's an article called:

America Attacks Itself
Mars Turns Retrograde in the Nation's Birth Chart
by Francis Donald Grahau

"On July 19, 2006, the Mars function of the U.S. came to a standstill as it turned retrograde by progression at 18 degrees and 42 minutes of Libra in America's 10th House. This area of America's chart symbolizes both the Office of the President and all public figures upon who the reputation, honor and international standing of America rests. It's the area of America's birt chart signifying the Nation's power, culture ideals and achievements. Mars is Nation's energy; its power, force, and ability to take action. Symbolized by this event is a critical shift of gears as the force of American poser turns inward upon itself.

Never before in the Nation's short life has its power ever been in such a retrograde situation; a situation which will last until March 27, 2086.. America is due for an 80-year period of self-examination regarding the nature of Mars, its power, force, and potential aggression. Since this event is focused in the Nation's 10th House, the whole world will watch as America undergoes this process. It would be hard to find a better phrase than the "War on Terror" to describe the Mars war function when it turns against itself, unless we called it the "War on War."


We won't go there. lol

Later,
Terry

Robert Guffey article cont.

PostPosted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:42 am
by Username
.
(continued from previous post)
Paranoia Magazine Issue 31 winter 2003

Concentration Campus
Thought Control in American Education

by Robert Guffrey


So what does all this have to do with Ronald McDonald and Big Bird and the holes in your kid's brain? Very simple...

Compulsory schooling, as with military entrainment, was born on the battlefield. In 1806 Prussia's army was defeated by Napoleon at the battle of Jena. Prussia believed that their defeat was caused by soldiers thinking for themselves in the midst of combat. Far too many soldiers were refusing to fire their weapons. The Prussian government wanted to know how to prevent such pesky inconveniences like "free will" in future generations, so they approached the brilliant psychologist Wilhelm Wundt of the University of Leipzig and asked him for advice. Wundt, the true father of experimental psychology, suggested they abolish voluntary schooling. Wundt recognized that the best way to control a population was to begin with the children.

Fragmentation was the order of the day.

Wundt began by dividing traditional school subjects into sub-sets. He shattered them into divisions--not unlike military divisions--precise regiments of lifeless facts marching through the children's porous little minds six hours a day, five days a week: History, English, Mathematics, Biology, Physical Education, etc. etc. etc. It was very important that no connections be made among these disparate subjects. Each was to stand alone, islands of isolated facts with no ties to the future or the past. The best way to ensure this fragmentation was to create specialties. Each instructor would be licensed to teach a specific subject, nothing more. If they tried to overstep their bounds they would be severely punished, ostracized from the academic world.


The origins of "licensing" and academic "degrees" grew out of this authoritarian structure.. The PhD itself, based on the ideas of Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis, was created by Prussia in the early 1800s. The concept of "licensing" was later expanded upon by Andrew Carnegie in the 1890s. The purpose, according to John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbling Us Down, was to "tie the entire economy to schooling and hence to place the minds of all the children [in the hands] of a few social engineers" (Gatto Interview 15).

These social engineers, led by Wundt, knew that fragmentation was the key. Once they had divided the subjects, they then set about dividing the children by segregating them according to age groups. As Gatto has pointed out, this kind of segregation exists nowhere else, certainly not in the adult world. In what office setting do you find all the fifty-five-year-olds working in one room? Before compulsory schooling, in the era of the one-room schoolhouse, the older children were encouraged to teach the younger children. This system is known to work much better than ordering children to sit back passively and accept what their "superior" tells them like a drone.

Or like a soldier on the battlefield.

Just as a drill sergeant enjoys rattling a broomstick inside a garbage can at 4:00 in the morning in order to torture his recruits, the school system has a similar--though far more systematic--instrument of control.



The Bells, the Bells

How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells--
--Edgar Allen Poe, "The Bells"


Bells are the most basic tool of Pavlovian conditioning. As any Freshman psychology student is well aware, Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist known for his breakthrough work with the conditioned reflex. This work consisted of ringing a bell prior to feeding his dogs; he did this regularly over an extended period of time. Eventually the dogs would salivate upon hearing the bell, even when there was no food around.

In the vast laboratory known as public education, however, the experimental subjects--children in this case rather than dogs--are not conditioned to do something as trivial as salivate. No, the goal is far more sinister.

Let John Gatto, "New York State Teacher of the Year" for 1991, tell you in his own words:


"I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It's heartwarming when they do that; it impresses everyone, even me. When I'm at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class nor in any class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

"Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything: Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and the future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference." (Gatto Dumbing Us Down 6)

There is an historical precedent for the use of bells as a Pavlovian conditioner. Bear with me as we launch into another extended quote, this one from none other than Dr. Timothy Leary, whose research into psychedelics as a behavior modification tool was supported and funded by Dr. Henry Murray, chairman of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard and the head of the CIA Psychology Department. Murray was also the man who oversaw the mind-control experiments performed from the years 1958 to 1962 on a young student-volunteer at Harvard named Theodore Kaczynski, whom the FBI would later dub "the Unabomber" (Cockburn). To be fair, it's quite possible Leary's intentions were honorable, but at this late date I'm afraid it's clear that the motives of his financial backers were far from benevolent. Either way, Leary's knowledge of the history of behavioral control is extensive, which makes the following insight that much more impressive....

"Over a thousand years ago [there existed] an organization of light-wizards that controlled and programmed minds from Istanbul, Constantinople, and Greece, through Southern Europe and Northern Europe, all the way up to the British Isles. We're talking, of course, about the hyperdelic, cyberdelic, shamanic brain-fuckers centered in the Vatican. Those guys knew how to program minds.

"How'd they do it? Well, first of all, they developed the notion of a bell. If you were a peasant in Constantinople or Romania or France or wherever, the loudest sound you ever heard in your life was that bell five times a day. And where was that bell? On top of the church steeple. And the only sound you ever heard louder and stronger than that was lightning, and you know who's in charge of the lightning bolts." (Leary Lecture)


What Leary neglects to mention is the fact that the center for behavior modification shifted in the early 1800s from the Vatican to the arena of public education, which is why Dr. Henry Murray was a chairman of Harvard and not the Vatican. If a researcher like Leary had existed a thousand years ago he would have been forced to solicit funds from the Pope rather than the CIA.

A few weeks ago I was having an argument with a friend. I maintained that I had learned absolutely nothing worthwhile in high school. My friend countered with a non sequitor, insisting that kids need to graduate from high school in order to get a good job. Despite being a patently false comment (employers tend not to care about your grades in high school or college), it did inspire me to ask the following question: Since when did education devolve into a glorified trade school? It wasn't that way in Plato's day, nor was it that way before Wilhelm Wundt and the implementation of compulsory schooling.

Only while researching this article did I come across the answer. During a brilliant 1994 interview conducted by Jim Martin, the publisher of Flatland magazine, John Taylor Gatto lays out the following information: Between the years 1807 and 1819 a stream of American dignitaries travelled to Prussia to consult with Dr. Wundt. They were so impressed by his work that they immediately began advocating his system of behavioral control for American education. The sons of the American elite were shipped overseas to study at Wundt's feet, and by 1900 all the PhDs in the U.S. were being trained in Prussia.

Between 1880 and 1910 the American successors to Wundt became the heads of the Psychological Departments at all the major universities. Henry Murray was no doubt among them. Wundt's main protege, James McKeen Cattel, trained 322 PhDs who in turn set up the new discipline of educational psychology; this discipline quickly grew in influence with the help of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. Ultimately, Wundtian experimental psychology gave rise to infamous behavioral scientists such as James B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, whos work was used for the specific purpose of raising the firing rate in the U.S. military and training assassins to kill more effectively.

"The next step came when Andrew Carnegie [realized] that capitalism--free enterprise--was stone cold dead in the United States. [...] That men like himself, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Rockefeller now owned everything. They owned the government. Competition was impossible unless they allowed it. Carnegie said that this was a very dangerous situation, because eventually young people [would] become aware of this and form clandestine organizations to work against it. [...] Carnegie proposed that men of wealth re-establish a synthetic free enterprise system (since the real one was no longer possible) based on cradle-to-grave schooling. The people who advanced most successfully in the shooling that was available to everyone would be given licenses to lead profitable lives [...].

"You need to look at what occurred in the two decades following Carnegie's original proposal (1890-1910). You're talking about the realization of Carnegie's design. These licenses, which now extend to bus drivers and all sorts of people who never had to be licensed, are then tied to forms of schooling. So they've reserved that part of the work market. Through the cooperation of the government, many of the government positions have very precise schooling requirements. You can in fact control all of the economy by tying jobs to schooling, and therefore you have a motivation for people to learn what you want them to learn. (Gatto Interview 14)

(to be continued)


The bells in schools have always been obnoxiously loud and for younger children frighteningly loud. My friend who teaches tells me they have become louder still since our current "age of terror".

I feel our children, ALL CHILDREN to be a top priority in creating a better world.

It will take me a few sittings to get the entire article up here, but, it's a dandy...you're going to like it.

Please feel free to comment or discuss.

later,
terry

Robert Guffey article cont.

PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 7:08 am
by Username
(cont.)

Concentration Campus
Thought Control in American Education

by Robert Guffey


Control


Today, as the 20th Century collides with the 21st, a single bell atop a church steeple would no longer be effective as an instrument of control. The population is too large, too spread out. The instrument of fragmentation has become more sophisticated. The church bell has morphed into Hollywood. Why waste valuable time and money surreptitiously planting electrodes in people's brains when you can sell them television sets instead? The CIA's MK-ULTRA program has long been obsolete, which explains the recent explosion of books and movies and magazine articles and even comic books concerning the subject. As Marshall McLuhan liked to say, quoting James Joyce, "pastimes are past times" (McLuhan 99). Anything that's popular is 20 to 30 years out of date.

Thought control has morphed into mind control, mind control into soul control. No implants required. Just sit back and relax. Take a toke, dude, and trip out on those pointillist dots on your TV screen. Go with the flow. Accept the fragmentation.

How is it possible to develop a logical train of thought with a bell clattering in your head every forty-five minutes, as in Kurt Vonnegut's classic science fiction story "Harrison Bergeron"? Or, for that matter, every seven minutes if you're a hardcore television addict? You must recognize the fact that a commercial interruption carries with it as much of a fragmentary effect as any church bell in the Middle Ages.

All is not lost, however. Wundt was right; the best way to control a population is to begin with the children. But the opposite is true, as well. What was once fragmented can be made whole again. The primary reason kids hate school is obvious: they know, at least subconsciously, that they're being lied to. If you begin respecting them, teaching them real history, they'll wantto learn. But that would require a radical alteration, a veritable paradigm shift, in the present system. It would first require the decertification of teaching and the destabilization of institutional schools.

"Oh, no!" cries the voice from the audience, "but how will Little Johnny learn to read and write?!"

I'm glad you asked me that, ma'am.

You're living under a false assumption if you think the school system teaches reading and writing. As Gatto has pointed out:


"[...] the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for 'basic skills' practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years [...]." (Gatto Dumbing Us Down 13-14).

This same point--the relative ease with which children can learn given the right set and setting--was proven over seventy years ago by A.S. Neille, creator of an experimental live-in school called Summerhill. Influenced by the psychoanalytic work of Wilhelm Reich, Neill decided to create a school geared toward helping the "rejects" of the British school system. In the words of investigative journalist Jon Rappoport:

Neill operated on the idea that if you allowed students and faculty to participate, by vote, in the running of their own school, they would be more real, more alive. And then if you gave students, with no tricks, the license never to come to classes until they were ready to learn, they would live out their childhood fantasies to the hilt. A child might play in the fields and the mud with his companions until he was fifteen--every day--and then finally school would begin to interest him. At that point he would come to class to stay [...]. At that juncture, twelve years of education might be telescoped into two or three years, without stinting. The classrooms at Summerhill were not remarkable. There was no effort made to "interest" the child in a subject through special aids. Neill forbade this. He saw that when a child wanted to learn, the teaching became easy, and when he didn't the introduction of seduction was a cruel thing. (Rappoport 229)

A.S. Neill proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that kids learn much more efficiently when you leave them alone. Forget this "concept mapping" (otherwise known as "brainstorming" or "webbing") nonsense so prevalent in education today. That's the big thing in high schools now: forcing complete strangers to bounce ideas off each other until the "gestalt" inevitably reduces the very worst of these ideas into a form acceptable to the status quo. Teachers claim it encourages cooperation, but in reality it just instills conformity. Its sole purpose is to merge our children into a single hive mind consisting of brainless organic robotoids who drink alike, eat alike, sleep alike, and think alike. A regiment of tiny toy soldiers marching into oblivion to the same dissonant tune.

The Scan-Tron

The purpose of school is not to teach. If you don't believe me, study an average Scan-Tron sheet--or as I like to refer to them, "Scam-Trons." In case you're not aware, a Scan-Tron is a rectangular blue-and-white slip of paper that consists of a series of multiple choice questions, each question having four possible answers. For each question the student is expected to fill in one of the available bubbles with a lead No. 2 pencil. When the student is finished, the teacher feeds these little slips into a maachine that reads the answers with a laser. With such back-breaking work, one wonders why teachers aren't paid more.

The Scam-Tron is one of the most basic examples of behavioral programming one can find in the school system. Its intent is to instill in the student the idea that there exists only a limited number of answers for any given question--a closed universe of possibilities. I have a close friend who works as a teacher in Seattle, WA. She tells me, and I know this is true from my own experiences at Torrance High about ten years ago, that all the kids prefer taking the multiple choice Scan-Trons. This is, statistically speaking, crazy. It should be obvious that an open-ended, subjective, non-linear written test in which you have to actually think of your own answer provides you with a much better chance of receiving a good grade. But this doesn't matter to the majority of high school students because they've simply forgotten how to think, if they ever knew in the first place.

My teacher-friend in Seattle recently wrote a question for her students in which she asked them to do nothing more than give their opinion. Anything at all, written even semi-coherently, would have earned them at least a passing grade. Many of the students chose to leave the question blank. When she asked them why they had done this, they replied matter-of-factly that they couldn't think of their own opinion.

Fragmentation

This is where neuro-linguistics programming comes into the picture. NLP was created by Jim Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1970s, though the basic techniques are related to the work performed from the 1940s to the 1980s by the psychologist Dr. Milton W. Erickson under the close supervision of the CIA (Bowart Chp.4, p.6). Essentially, NLP is the art of mastering the "language of the unconscious" to influence not only yourself but others as well.

to be continued...

gtg for now,
terry

Robert Guffrey article cont. (2003)

PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 5:26 pm
by Username
(cont.)

Concentration Campus
Thought Control in American Education
by Robert Guffrey


(let's backtrack a bit)

Fragmentation

This is where neuro-linguistics programming comes into the picture. NLP was created by Jim Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1970s, though the basic techiques are related to the work performed from the 1940s to the l980s by the psychologist Dr. Milton W. Erickson under the close supervision of the CIA (Bowart Chp. 4, p. 6). Essentially, NLP is the art of mastering the "language of the unconscious" to influence not only yourself but others as well. A baseball player might want to use it to improve his batting average--"creative visualization" could be used for this purpose--while a CIA agent might want to use it to coax vital information from a reluctant source. In the latter case, our hypothetical agent would try to "mirror and match" the source's physiology--sit the way he sits, getsure the way he gestures, breathe the way he breathes. In this way he could win the source's confidence within a surprisingly short period of time. But NLP doesn't rely on only gestures and body language, it also relies a great deal on words--wrods written or spoken with such precise tonality and timing that they slip into the subconscious as embedded commands.

If you think this is just a bunch of hocus-pocus, keep in mind that in 1983 Major Geneeral Stubblebine formed an inter-agency team called The Jedi Project to disseminate NLP skills throughout the U.S. Army. According to John B. Alexander, a U.S. Army Psyops Colonel, even soldiers with no prior experience firing a .45 pistol learned better and more quickly when neuro-linguistics programming was used on them (Mandelbaum 46). I NLP could enable complete amateurs to fire a standard service sidearm with even middling accuracy, what other effects could it have on human potential--or inhuman potential, for that matter?

Walter Bowart, author of Operation Mind Control and a NLP practitioner himself, calls neuro-linguistics programming the 20th century's most important technology of empowerment or enslavement. It can be used to help people--to "influence with integrity"--as with curing a serious phobia within minutes, for example; or it can be used to harm people, to persuade them to purchase your oh-so-unique brand of cigarettes or alcohol or coffee or ketchup or 36-inch television set.

My associate in Seattle has sent me numerous examples of high school exams that were purposely embedded with neuro-linguistics programming techniques. Once you're familiar with these techniques, you can detect them right off the bat. To site a basic example, a test might consist of a whole series of sentences and paragraphs that have been spelled incorrectly or have incorrect grammar, the ostensible purpose of which is for the student to correct the mistakes. Anyone familiar with NLP will tell you that this is exactly the wrong way to teach anybody anything. [username--this was used in my sons 5th grade class as part of the daily routine.] Visualization, suggestion, and positive reinforcement are the main tools of learning. Humans don't react well to negative programming--unless, of course, your goal is to teach them negative behavior.

No matter how much money you throw at your local schools, they will not improve. Because they're failing on purpose, just like that other ignoble experiment we call the War On Drugs.

Most students of NLP know that negative phrases can be used as effective embedded commands to produce the opposite effect. Most parents know, when dealing with a young child, to try a little reverse psychology. The "Jst Say NO [to Drugs]" slogan, and the billboards with a photo of a man with a gun up his nose and the slogan "Say No to Cocaine" under it, were just part of the successful PSYOP campaign which got Americans to take more drugs. It's well-known by now that the War On Drugs is a complete failure. The extent to which the cryptocracy's black funds depends upon the drug trade is also widely noted. George Bush gave the game away, many believe, during one of his televised debates with Clinton when he wiped his nose in an involuntary response after he said the cord "cocaine." (Bowart Chp. 10, pg 8 )

I would add that George Walker Bush demonstrated the same involuntary "sniffing" reactions all throughout his debates with Al Gore. Under the new, improved Bush administration I predict you'll see an unprecedented amount of money spent on the War On Drugs and the results will be just as effective as the War On Cancer and the War On Domestic Violence and the War On Guns and the War On Illiteracy and the War On Terrorism. There hasn't been a more strategically fought conflict since The Mouse That Roared.

The Strategy of Tension

Yes, the Strategy of Tension is about to get a lot more tense.

Of course, such tension serves the cryptocracy well. Mae Brussell, the late political reseacher and talk show host, recognized this fact back in the l960s whil investigationg the Kennedy assassination, realizing that most of the crazed "lone nuts" of that tumultuous decade arose from the same intelligence milieu: Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Albert DiSalvo, Sirhan Sirhan, the SLA, Charles Manson, the Zodiac Killer, Jim Jones, as well as (we now know) Ted Kaczinski. Authoritarian regimes thrive amidst chaos such as this. The populace just rolls over and allows any dingbat with a wealthy father, a charming smile, and a balled-up fist waltz into a position of power and protect them from the creeping chaos'. "Only a return to the values of the past can save us!" Unfortunately, the values of the past are the values of now. The modern day equivalent of the MK-ULTRA chaos investigated by Brussell has been the rash of school shootings sweeping the country in the past few years, Columbine being the most destructive of all. (Please refer to my article in Paranoia #25 for more information concerning the weirdness surrounding Columbine).

Which leads me to a revealing comment made by Dr. John Hagelin, a University professor and quantum physicist who ran for President on an independent ticket in 2000. At the State of the World Forum, held in San Francisco in October of 1999, Hagelin delivered a speech in which he discussed the school shootings. He identified a disturbing common denominator that tied the shootings together. According to Hagelin, many of the "lone nut" teenagers responsible for these shootings were suffering from a brain dysfunction that tends to resemble a "hole" in the brain when seen in CATSCANs. These children don't have literal "holes" in their heads, of course, merely dark spots where the neurons have ceased firing. The brain centers most affected are those in charge of emotional control and decision making; they've literally atrophied due to lack of use. Doctors who have studied this phenomenon refer to it as "cortical fragmentation." Hagelin believes that this dysfunction is directly caused by the process of education itself.

Do you begin to see the connections now? Has it become clear to you yet?

Fragmentation is the key.

Pause a moment and wrap your mind around this: The process we are currently engaged in is known as in-depth pattern recognition. Skeptics would call it "conspiracy theory." But what is conspiracy theory if not the ability to pick out patterns, like Edgar Allan Poe's resourceful fisherman who is able to free himself from a whirlpool by noticing which pieces of wreckage are ejected from the maelstrom and attaching himself to one of them? The point of Poe's classic story "A Descent into the Maelstrom" is clear. You must study the debris. Dont turn your eyes away from it just because it isn't pretty, or because it doesn't seem "relevant" to you at the moment.

What doesn't seem relevant now may just save your life in the future. But most people have no ability to even begin comprehending the complicated process of in-depth pattern recognition. You can't blame them. They've been systematically conditioned not to see the patterns affecting their lives due to twelve years of constant fragmentation. They're caught in a maelstrom they don't even know exists, a maelstrom imposed upon them by a vast array of authority figures beginning with their parents and continuing on up to their "elected officials" and clergymen and bosses and doctors and drill sergeants and teachers. And advertisers. Lately, however, it's been very difficult to tell the difference between those last two.

(to be continued)

coming up next...
In-School Marketing

see any misspellings? send pm, I can fix.

later,
terry

thanks Terry

PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 8:02 pm
by pitcairn
excellent article, Terry, thanks

fortunately resistance is possible!

http://tinyurl.com/2yx6gb

1939-1945: The Edelweiss Pirates


Barton Schink - Edelweiss Pirate. (image)

An account of the German anti-Nazi movement of working class youth who fought against the regime.

Hitler’s power may lay us low,
And keep us locked in chains,
But we will smash the chains one day,
We’ll be free again
We’ve got fists and we can fight,
We’ve got knives and we’ll get them out
We want freedom, don’t we boys?
We’re the fighting Navajos!


Why were the Nazis able to control Germany so easily? Why was there so little active opposition to them? Why were the old parties of the SPD and KPD unable to offer any real resistance? How could a totalitarian regime so easily contain what had been the strongest working class in Europe?

We are taught that the Nazis duped the German population and that it took the armed might of the Allies to liberate Europe from their enslavement. This article aims to show how the Nazis were able to contain the working class and to tell some of the tales of resistance that really took place.

Pictured - Barton Schink - Edelweiss Pirate. Executed aged 16 by the Nazis

Dealing with the opposition

Acting with a ruthlessness that surprised their opponents, the Nazis banned their opponents, the Social Democrats and the Communists. For the working class this was far more serious than just the destruction of two state capitalist parties. It was accompanied by the annihilation of a whole area of social life around working class communities. Many of the most confident working class militants were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

The repression was carried out legally. The SA (the Brownshirts) now acted in collaboration with the police. Their brutal activities which once had been illegal but tolerated now became part of official state activity. In some circumstances this meant simple actions like beatings. In others, SA groups moved into and took over working class pubs and centres. The effect was to isolate, intimidate and render powerless the working class.

Many workers believed that the Nazis would not remain in power forever. They believed that the next election would see them swept from power and ‘their’ parties returned. Workers only needed to bind their time. When it became clear that this was not going to happen, the myth changed. The role for oppositionists became to keep the party structures intact until such time as the Nazis were defeated. There is no doubt that even the simple act of distributing Socialist (SPD) or Communist (KPD) propaganda took an incredible degree of heroism, for the consequences of being caught were quite clear to all – beatings, torture and death. It meant that families would be left without breadwinners, subjected to police surveillance and intimidation. The result was often passivity and inaction.

As early as 1935, workers were aware of the consequences that ‘subversive’ activity would have on their families. A blacksmith in 1943 expressed the problem simply: “My wife is still alive, that’s all. It’s only for her sake that I don’t shout it right in their faces…You know these blackguards can only do all this because each of us has a wife or mother at home that he’s got to think of…people have too many things to consider. After all, you’re not alone in this world. And these SS devils exploit the fact.”

Throughout the period of Nazi rule there was industrial unrest, there were strikes and acts of disobedience and even sabotage. All these, however, attracted the attention of the Gestapo. The Gestapo had the assistance of employers and stooges in the workforce. The least a striker could expect was arrest. As a consequence, those who were politically opposed to the Nazi state kept themselves away from industrial struggle. To be arrested would have led not only to personal sacrifice, but also could have compromised the political organisations to which he or she belonged. To reinforce the message to workers, he Gestapo set up special industrial concentration camps attached to major factories.

To put the intensity of Nazi repression into context, during the period 1933-45, at least 30,000 German people were executed for opposing the state. This does not include countless others who died as a result of beatings, of their treatment in camps, or as a result of the official policy of euthanasia for those deemed mentally ill. Thousands of children were declared morally or biologically defective because they fell below the below the Aryan ‘norm’ and were murdered by doctors. This fate also befell youngsters with mental and physical disabilities as well as many who listened to the wrong kind of music.

However, Nazi domination of the working class did not rely solely on repression. Nazi industrial policy aimed to fragment the class, to replace working class solidarity with Nazi comradeship and solidarity with the state.

To start with, pay rises were forbidden. To strengthen competition, hourly rates were done away with. Piece rates became the norm. If workers wanted to earn more then they would have to produce more. Workers’ interests were to be represented by the German Workers’ Front (DAF), which they were forced to belong to and which of course represented solely the interests of the state and employers.

Unable to obtain pay rises with their employers it became common in a situation of full employment for workers to move from one factory to another in search of higher wages. On the one hand, this defeated the Nazi objectives of limiting pay; on the other hand it further weakened the bonds of solidarity between workers.

Knowing that they could not rule solely through fear, the Nazis gave ‘welfare’ concessions to the working class. Family allowances were paid for the first time; organised holidays and outings were provided at low cost. For many workers this was their first opportunity to go away on holiday. Social activities were provided through Nazi organisations.

There is little evidence that the Nazis won over the working class ideologically, nonetheless, this combination of repression and amelioration served to confuse many who would otherwise have been outright opponents.

The spectacles we have all seen of Nazi rallies, book burnings, parades and speeches are not evidence that workers were convinced of Nazi rule. It was clear to all what the consequence of not attending, of not carrying a placard or waving a flag would be. However, they must have increased the sense of isolation and powerlessness of those who would have liked to resist. As a result there was little open resistance from working class adults to the Nazis throughout their period in power.

Young People

If the Nazi policy towards adults was based on coercion, their policy towards young people was subtler. Put simply, the intention was to indoctrinate every young person, to make them a good national socialist citizen proudly upholding the ideals of the party. The means chosen to do this was the Hitler Youth (HJ).

By the end of 1933, all youth organisations outside the Hitler Youth had been banned – with the exception of those controlled by the Catholic Church that was busy cosying up to the Nazis at the time. Boys were to be organised into the Deutsches Jungvolk between the ages of 10 and 14 and the Hitler Youth proper from 14 to 18. They quickly incorporated around 40% of boys. Girls were to be enrolled into the Bund Deutsche Madel (BDM), but the Nazis were much less interested in getting them to join. The objective was to get all boys into the HJ. When this failed to take place, laws were passed gradually making it compulsory by 1939.

In the early days, being in the HJ was far from a chore. Boys got to take part in sports, go camping, hike, play competitive games – as well as being involved in drill and political indoctrination. Being in the HJ gave youngsters the chance to play one form of authority off against another. They could avoid schoolwork by claiming to be involved in HJ work. The HJ provided excuses when dealing with other authority figures – like parents and priests. On the other hand, they could also blame pressures from school in order to get out of more unpleasant Hitler Youth tasks! In some parts of the country the HJ provided the first opportunity to start a sports club, to get away from parents, to experience some independence.

As the 1930s went on, the function of the HJ and BDM changed. The objectives of the regime became more obviously military and aimed at conquest. The HJ was seen as a way recruiting and training young men into the armed forces. As war became more likely, the emphasis shifted away from leisure activities and into military training, State policy became of one of forcing all to be in the HJ. T made seemingly harmless activities, like getting together with your mates for an evening, criminal offences if they took place outside the HJ of BDM.

The HJ set up its own police squads to supervise young people. These Streifendienst patrols were made up of Hitler Youth members scarcely older than those they were meant to be policing.

By 1938, reports from Social Democrats in Germany to their leaders in exile were able to report that: “In the long run young people too are feeling increasingly irritated by the lack of freedom and the mindless drilling that is customary in the National Socialist organisations. It is therefore no wonder that symptoms of fatigue are becoming particularly apparent among their ranks…”

The outbreak of war brought the true nature of the HJ even more sharply into focus. Older HJ members were called up. More and more time was taken up with drill and political indoctrination. Bombing led to the destruction of many of the sporting facilities. The HJ became more and more obviously a means of oppression.

As the demands for fresh recruits to the armed forces became more intense, the divisions within the HJ became more acute. The German education system at the time was sharply divided along class lines. Most working class children left school at the age of 14. A few went on to secondary or grammar schools along with the children of middle class and professional families. As older HJ members were called up, the middle class school students took the place of the leaders. The rank and file was increasingly made up of young workers hardly likely to take too well to being ordered about at HJ meetings! It is not difficult to imagine the scene of a snotty doctor’s kid still in school trying to give orders to a bunch of young factory workers and having to use the threat of official punishment to get his own way. Dissatisfaction grew. Initially, the acute labour shortages of the early war years meant that the Nazis could not resort to the kind of Nazi terror tactics that they employed against other dissidents. As the war went on, many of these young people’s fathers died or were sent to the front. Many were bombed out of their own homes. The only future they could see for themselves was to wear a uniform and fight for a lost cause.

One teenager said in 1942: “Everything the HJ preaches is a fraud. I know this for certain, because everything I had to say in the HJ myself was a fraud.”

By the end of the 1930s, thousands of young people were finding ways to avoid the clutches of the Hitler Youth. They were gathering together in their own gangs and starting to enjoy themselves again. This terrified the Nazis, particularly when the teenagers started to defend their own social spaces physically. What particularly frightened the Nazis was that these young people were the products of their own education system. They had no contact with the old SPD or KPD, knew nothing of Marxism or the old labour movement. They had been educated by the Nazis in Nazi schools, their free time had been regimented by the HJ listening to Nazi propaganda and taking part in officially approved activities and sports.

These gangs went under different names. Their favoured clothes varied from town to town, as did their badges. In Essen they were called the Farhtenstenze (Travelling Dudes), in Oberhausen and Dusseldorf the Kittelbach Pirates, in Cologne they were the Navajos. But all saw themselves as Edelweiss Pirates (named after an edelweiss flower badge many wore).

Gestapo files in Cologne contain the names of over 3,000 teenagers identified as Edelweiss Pirates. Clearly, there must have been many more and their numbers must have been even greater when taken over Germany as a whole.

Initially, their activities were in themselves pretty harmless. They hung around in parks and on street corners, creating their own social space in the way teenagers do everywhere (usually to the annoyance of adults). At weekends they would take themselves off into the countryside on hikes and camping trips in a perverse way mirroring the activities initially provided by the HJ themselves. Unlike the HJ trips, however, these expeditions comprised boys and girls together, so adding a different, more exciting and more normal dimension than provided by the HJ. Whereas the HJ had taken young people away for trips to isolate and indoctrinate them, the Edelweiss Pirates expeditions got them away from the Party and gave them the time and space to be themselves.

On their trips they would meet up with Pirates from other towns and cities. Some went as far as to travel the length and breadth of Germany doing wartime, when to travel without papers was an illegal action.

Daring to enjoy themselves on their own was a criminal act. They were supposed to be under Party control. Inevitably they came across HJ Streifendienst patrols. Instead of running, the Pirates often stood and fought. Reports sent to Gestapo officers suggest that as often as not the Edelweiss Pirates won these fights. “I therefore request that the police ensure that this riff-raff is dealt with once and for all. The HJ are taking their lives into their hands when they go out on the streets.”

The activities of the Edelweiss Pirates grew bolder as the war progressed. They engaged in pranks against the allies, fights against their enemies and moved on to small acts of sabotage. They were accused of being slackers at work and social parasites. They began to help Jews, army deserters and prisoners of war. They painted anti-Nazi slogans on walls and some started to collect Allied propaganda leaflets and shove them through people’s letterboxes.

“There is a suspicion that it is these youths who have been inscribing the walls of the pedestrian subway on the Altebbergstrasse with the slogans ‘Down with Hitler’, ‘The OKW (Military High Command) is lying’, ‘Medals for Murder’, ‘Down with Nazi Brutality’ etc. However often these inscriptions are removed within a few days new ones appear on the walls again.” (1943 Dusseldorf-Grafenberg Nazi Party report to the Gestapo).

As time went on, a few grew bolder and even more heroic. They raided army camps to obtain arms and explosives, made attacks on Nazi figures other than the HJ and took part in partisan activities. The Head of the Cologne Gestapo was one victim of the Edelweiss Pirates.

The authorities reacted with their full armoury of repressive measures. These ranged from individual warnings, round-ups and temporary detention (followed by a head shaving), to weekend imprisonment, reform school, labour camp, youth concentration camp or criminal trial. Thousands were caught up in this hunt. For many, the end was death. The so-called leaders of the Cologne Edelweiss Pirates were publicly hanged in November 1944.

However, as long as the Nazis needed workers in armament factories and soldiers for their war, they could not resort to the physical extermination of thousands of young Germans. Moreover, it is fair to say that the state was confused as to what to do with these rebels. They came from German stock, the sort of people who should have been grateful for what the Nazis gave. Unwilling to execute thousands and unable to comprehend what was happening, the state was equally unable to contain them.

Wall of Silence

So why has so little been heard of the Edelweiss Pirates? When I started researching this article, I found it extremely hard to find information about them. Most seemed to revolve around the research of the German historian Detlev Peukert, whose writings remain essential reading. Searches of the internet revealed only two articles.

A number of explanations come to mind. The post-war Allied authorities wanted to reconstruct Germany into a modern, western, democratic state. To do this, they enforced strict labour laws including compulsory work. The Edelweiss Pirates had a strong anti-work ethos, so they came into conflict with the new authorities too. A report in 1949 spoke of the “widespread phenomenon of unwillingness to work that was becoming a habit of many young people.” The prosecution of so-called ‘young idlers’ was sometimes no less rigid under Allied occupation than it was under the Nazis. A court in 1947 sent one young woman to prison for five months for ‘refusal to work’. The young became enemies of the new order too.

The political opponents of the Nazis had been either forced into exile, murdered or hid their politics. Clandestine activity had centred on keeping party structures intact. They could not afford to acknowledge that physical resistance had been alive and well and based on young people’s street gangs! To the politicians of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and SPD, the Edelweiss Pirates were just as much riff-raff as they were to the Nazis. The myth of the just war used by the allies relied heavily on the idea that all Germans had been at least silent during the Nazi period if not actively supporting the regime. To maintain this fiction the actions of ‘street hooligans’ in fighting the Nazis had to be forgotten.

Decades on, interest in the Edelweiss Pirates is beginning to resurface. More is being published on them and a film is being planned. We need to make sure that they are never forgotten again. As the producers of the film say: “the Edelweiss Pirates were no absolute heroes, but rather ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” It is precisely this that gives us hope for the future.

We march by banks of Ruhr and Rhine
And smash the Hitler Youth in twain.
Our song is freedom, love and life,
We’re the Pirates of the Edelweiss.


Interview with an Edelweiss Pirate - Walter Mayer

Transcript of a short interview with Walter Mayer, a member of the German youth anti-Nazi organisation, the Edelweiss Pirates.

Walter Mayer, Edelweiss Pirate born the Rhineland, Germany, 1927


As a youth, Walter questioned the German superiority and anti-Semitism he was taught. His father, an anti-Nazi, refused to allow Walter to enter one of the Adolf Hitler Schools, but did permit him to join the Hitler Youth. However, Walter's rebellious streak led him to hide a Jewish friend in his basement. He also formed a gang that played pranks on young Nazis and helped French prisoners of war. They called themselves Edelweiss Pirates (as did other groups of opposition youth in Germany). In 1943 Walter was caught taking shoes from a bombed-out store, arrested, and imprisoned. He was eventually deported to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp, where he was forced to work in the stone quarry. In 1945, Walter contracted tuberculosis and decided to escape before he was killed. Under cover of heavy fog, he reached a farmhouse. The farmer gave him his son's army uniform and helped him board a train home to Duesseldorf. Walter recovered after hospitalisation, and later moved to the United States.

Transcript of account in oral interview

'We had, uh, meetings generally, at least, well, generally at a cafe on Kings Avenue, which is - in Germany there are a number of streets which are well known like Fifth Avenue. Well Kings Avenue in Duesseldorf is one of the best known avenues in the world. It's gorgeous, wide, and has a river in the middle and all chestnut trees and so on. Well there was a cafe and in the back of the cafe was a pool room. Uh, we used to play pool, and we had our little meetings there and one would say, "We have a new member," and, uh, we would ask him questions, test him, and "Why do you like to join us?" and, you know, wanted to have some assurance. And, and, uh, then we, we pro..."What are we going to do next?" and maybe one would say, "You know, the Hitler Youths, they all, uh, store their, uh, equipment at such-and-such a place. Let's make it disappear." "Okay, when are we going to meet?" Such-and-such a time. And that's what we did. It became, uh, it came to the point where we became enemies and people began to look for us because we went a little too drastic, we, you know we started maybe by deflating the tires, then we made the whole bicycle disappear, so it came to the point where too many complaints.

'On April the 12th, April the 12th, 1943, I was taken to court. By trial, the state attorney--I think they call it here, district attorney - state attorney, asked for the death penalty. My father - this was first time I saw my father and my mother - uh, my mother couldn't, couldn't control herself, so she was crying. My, my father didn't quite know what to do. They had two attorneys. When he recommended the death penalty, I know they kind of jumped over and held my arm and said, "That's not the last word." Then kind of the judge and the state attorney and somebody else, some functionary, they kind of argued about whether it was looting, or whether it was theft. The idea was that the two, uh, had different consequences. And, uh, so they retired then and when he came back, the judge decided, or had decided that it was--well, before that they had an argument and the state attorney said, uh,"I would call it theft, but this man, having had intimate contact with our enemy, and being the leader of, uh, the Edelweisspiraten [Edelweiss Pirates], having destroyed, uh, state goods, state property, does not deserve any kind of consideration." Well, when the judge came back and said, on the grounds of his outstanding, uh, involvement in, in athletism, and considering, uh, the age and the circumstances, I condemn you to one to four years in prison.'

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

fast forward

PostPosted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 8:23 pm
by pitcairn
many years later, in another Reich across the sea ...

Big (Box ) Brother

Barbara Ehrenreich

http://tinyurl.com/2qwhk3

It reads like a cold war thriller: The spy follows the suspects through several countries, ending up in Guatemala City, where he takes a room across the hall from his quarry. Finally, after four days of surveillance, including some patient ear-to-the-keyhole work, he is able to report back to headquarters that he has the goods on them.

They're guilty!

But this isn't a John Le Carré novel, and the powerful institution pulling the strings wasn't the USSR or the CIA. It was Wal-Mart, and the two suspects weren't carrying plans for a shoulder-launched H-bomb. Their crime was "fraternization." One of them, James W. Lynn, a Wal-Mart factory inspection manager, was traveling with a female subordinate, with whom he allegedly enjoyed some intimate moments behind closed doors. At least the company spy reported hearing "moans and sighs" within the woman's room.

Now you may wonder why a company so famously cheap that it requires its same-sex teams to share hotel rooms while on the road would invest in international espionage to ferret out mixed-sex fraternizers. Unless, as Lynn argues, they were really after him for what is a far worse crime in Wal-Mart's books: Openly criticizing the conditions he found in Central American factories supplying Wal-Mart stores.

In fact, the cold war thriller analogy is not entirely fanciful. New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro, who related the story of Wal-Mart's stalking of Lynn and his colleague, also reports that the company's security department is staffed by former top officials of the CIA and the FBI. Along the same lines, Jeffrey Goldberg provides a chilling account of his visit to Wal-Mart's Bentonville "war room" in the April 2nd New Yorker. Although instructed not to write down anything he saw, he found a "dark, threadbare room... its walls painted battleship gray," where only two out of five of the occupants will even meet his eyes. In general, he found the Bentonville fortress "not unlike the headquarters of the National Security Agency."

We've always known that Wal-Mart is as big, in financial terms, as many sizable nations. It may even have begun to believe that it is one, complete with its own laws, security agency, and espionage system. But the illusion of state power is not confined to Wal-Mart. Justin Kenward, who worked at a Target store in Chino CA for three years, wrote to tell me about his six hour interrogation, in 2003, by the store's "Asset Protection" agents, who accused him of wrongly giving a fellow employee a discount on a video game a year earlier:

After about an hour of trying to tell them that I don't remember any thing about that day let alone that transaction, I had to use the restroom. I asked if I could and was denied. This goes on for about another hour when I say "Look I have to pee, bad, can I go to the restroom?" Once more I was told no. So I stand up and start walking out the door, and was stopped. At this point I thought to my self "They're looking to fire me!" So I start to think of ways that transaction might have came to be. I say something like "I would never give a discount unless an L.O.D. (Leader On Duty aka: a manager) or a Team Lead (aka: supervisor) told me to ......" I was interrupted and told that it sounds like I was trying to place my mistake on other people. 3 hours in to this and still needing to pee I was told that I need to write an apologetic letter to the company with the details, every detail, that we just went over and then I could use the rest room...

Kenward not only lost his job, but faced charges of theft.

My efforts to get a comment from Target were unavailing, but I did manage to track down a person who worked in security for the Chino store at the time of Kenward's detention. Because she still depends on Target for her health insurance, she asked not to be named, but she writes that Kenward's experience was not unusual:

What I know for a fact is that they took each of the twelve youngsters [Target employees] to their office separately. They locked them in an office without a telephone, would not let them phone their parents or anyone, and kept them there browbeating them for six to ten hours. They never told them they were being arrested...only that Target was disappointed in them and if they would write a letter of apology that they'd dictate they could go and all would be forgotten. None of these children knew their rights...all of them ended up writing the stupid letter. Of course this too was a lie...as soon as they had the letter in end the police were called and that person was hauled off in handcuffs and arrested.

This is the workplace dictatorship at its brass-knuckled best. When companies start imagining that they are nation-states, entitled to spy on, stalk, and imprison their own employees, , then we are well down the road to an actual, full-scale dictatorship.

As for those "moans and sighs" that issued from the hotel room in Guatemala City: Maybe Lynn and his companion were reflecting on the sweatshop conditions they encountered in a Wal-Mart subcontractor's factory. Or maybe they were aware of the man spying on them, and were mourning the decline of democracy.

Comments :


>Funny, I've been calling it Wal-Mart Nation for a couple of years now.

By: way2muchsense on March 30, 2007 at 01:17pm

>Wal-Mart, serving America with cheap goods with slave labor. Stupid human rights

By: RGrisham on March 30, 2007 at 01:35pm

>More reason to make certain we teach our children about their basic civil rights; intimidation like this only works when people don't realize they have rights. (Anyone who believes the schools are going teach this is delusional.)

By: MsWings on March 30, 2007 at 03:22pm

>"We've always known that Wal-Mart is as big, in financial terms, as many sizable nations."

I have never known that. Please list many sizeable nations that Wal-Mart is as big as, in financial terms.

By: PerryWhite on March 30, 2007 at 03:52pm

>In the late 1980's, there was so much hanky panky going on at Macintosh trade shows that Apple forced all of its employees to share rooms. They thought it would cut down on the infidelity and the ensuing problems in the workplace...

By: seamusnh on March 30, 2007 at 04:15pm

>Interrogation tactics like this depend on our basic humanity and socialization. They would disappear if more teenagers simply started urinating on their interrogators.

By: rumisouth on March 30, 2007 at 04:33pm

>So Wal-Mart thinks it's a nation? It and the big oil companies. And international investment banks. And insurance companies.

That's why we need a world government or at least a labor union with global power that will reign in these corporations and protect the rights of workers wherever they are.

By: jimmyaj on March 30, 2007 at 04:37pm

>And what an ugly decline its been.

You're so right, Barbara, that we are well on our way towards full-fledged dictatorship.

The silence of the last six years has allowed America to believe there was still some semblance of their country remaining.

Now we'll all learn just how close we've come to the abyss.

And how much work is ahead of us if we've any hope of restoring our constitution and our honor.

Because, as you've rightly concluded, we are well on our way in the wrong direction altogether.

By: Raven on March 30, 2007 at 04:48pm

>PerryWhite--

For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2006, Wal-Mart reported net income of 12.178 billion on 344.992 billion of sales revenue.

Round that up to $345 billion.

Here are the Gross National Products of the following countries for 2005 expressed in dollars:

Turkey 342 billion
Austria 304 billion
Saudi Arabia 289 billion
Indonesia 282 billion
Norway 275 billion
Poland 271 billion
Denmark 257 billion
South Africa 224 billion
Greece 218 billion
Thailand 197 billion
Finland 196 billion
Iran 187 billion
Argentina 173 billion
Portugal 171 billion

(Source: http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/info ... /PNB2.html)...

Or aren't they "sizeable" enough for you?

By: MrWonderful on March 30, 2007 at 04:48pm


>Jesus! This is horrible. Some instant Karma please!

By: WingsofCrystal on March 30, 2007 at 05:04pm


>It would seem to me that kidnapping would be an appropiate charge for being held incommunicato in a Target store.

By: Noodle on March 30, 2007 at 05:06pm

Robert Guffrey article cont.

PostPosted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 4:24 am
by Username
Not to worry pitcairn, 'Teen Screen' will weed out the delusional and/or rebellious youth prone to dissent. It's only a chemical imbalance which can be controlled with the proper medications.

That's if they ever make it to their teen years without intervention (or a mind of their own), as 11:11 pointed out in another thread posted upstairs:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=11319

(article cont.)

Concentration Campus
Thought Control in American Education

by Robert Guffey

In-School Marketing

The instruments of operant conditioning are being introduced day by day into the school environment on an ever-increasing basis. These instruments include surreptitious advertisements, pharmaceuticals, and toxic junk food smuggled onto the campuses by corporate underwriters. In September of 2000 the U.S. General Accounting Office released a significant report entitled "Commercial Activities in Schools." The report states, "In-school marketing has become a growing industry. Some marketing professionals are increasingly targeting children in school, companies are becoming known for their success in negotiating contracts between school districts and beverage companies, and both educators and corporate managers are attending conferences on how to increase revenue from in-school marketing for their schools and companies."

In the past few years high schools have become nothing more than laboratories for corporate-backed market researchers. Pfizer hands out highly addictive stimulants like candy, causing six million normal children to become speed freaks for the express purpose of reinforcing our belief in a non-existent disease some social engineer decided to call "Attention Deficit Disorder." Microsoft and Toshiba "graciously" donate computers outfitted with the appropriately-named "ZAP ME" Internet portal that bombards students with a constant stream of advertisements for its own products while also collecting data on the web-browsing habits of children. Recently, market researchers went so far as to pass out disposable cameras and 20-page booklets to elementary school students and requested they document their lives in both photographs and words so the researchers could better understand "what sparks kids these days." The booklets were titled My All About Me Journal. An "educational cable TV channel" named Noggin paid one school in New Jersey $7,500 for the privilege of butting into the students' lives.

According to Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now, even Sesame Street has gotten into the act. The show that brought us Big Bird and Kermit the Frog now hawks pharmaceuticals to kids. Traditionally, Sesame Street would end with an announcement that the episode had been sponsored by, for example, the letter P and the number 2. These days, however, you might hear instead, "Eli Lily brings parents the letter P for 'Prozac'" over the images of a parrot and children playing with a big toy letter block, essentially a 15-second commercial for an anti-depressant manufactured by Eli Lily. PBS chooses to call these segments "Enhanced Underwrited Account Announcements" rather than "commercials" (Democracy Now 9-18-00).

PBS, like the Democratic Party, is nothing more than controlled opposition--a pseudo-alternative for what the Stanford Research Institute likes to call "Societally Conscious Achievers," conformist consumers who need to believe they're actually "non-conformists" before they can, "in good conscience," part with their money (Meyer 15-20).

Advertisers and politicians know this and purposely cloak their true intent behind a facade of being "Societally Conscious." McDonalds, for example, established Ronald McDonald House to treat children with cancer, a disease no doubt contracted from their own McToad burgers. Vice-President Al Gore--who, by the way, studied neuro-linguistics programming under none other than Col. John Alexander back in 1983 (Bowart Chp. 31, p. 12)--professes to be an environmentalist while not mentioning the fact that he's as much of an oil man as George W. Bush.

In the 9-25-00 edition of the Los Angeles Times Michael O'Hanlon reported the following:

"Most tellingly, the budget proposals of [George W. Bush and Al Gore] differ by less than 2%. Remarkably, for perhaps the first time since the 1960s, it is the Democratic candidate who proposes spending more on the country's defense. Gore proposes allocating $100 billion of the ten-year surplus, or about $10 billion per year, to the armed forces. Bush's budget plan would provide the Pentagon about half as large a real dollar increase. Either way, defense spending would remain about $300 billion a year. That is as much as the world's next ten military powers spend in aggregate."

Bush and Gore's budgets differed by less than 2%. What, then, were those two idiots debating about on television? Answer: nothing. They don't need to debate anything, just so long as they keep their lips moving. The content of the media doesn't matter. Marshall McLuhan was the first to point this out in Understanding Media, and it's a good bet The Powers That Be are well aware of this. There's a reason why the NSA regularly consults McLuhan's book The Laws of Media and uses his theory of the Tetrad to manage would affairs (Dobbs). The future of humanity can be predicted by studying the future of its technology. Control technology and you control humanity.

When Tipper Gore and Senator Joe Lieberman complain about the Hollywood film industry--the very same industry that provided a significant chunk of the financial backing for the Gore/Lieberman presidential campaign--you never hear them mention the fact that the very same ultra-violent virtual reality video games that so offend their delicate sensibilities were specifically created by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to entrain American soldiers to kill on the battlefield without hesitation (Steinberg 5).

The reason you won't hear Lieberman bring up that particular tasty tidbit is simple: He's as much of a warhawk as Dick Cheney or George W. Bush. As he's so proudly stated on more than one occasion during the 2000 campaign, Lieberman was the first Democrat to express his support for the Persian Gulf War on the floor of the Senate. Progressives should be happy that Bush stole the election from Gore. It's better to know the killers are coming rather than open the gates for a Trojan Horse. Remember: In a dictatorship you have only one choice, in a democracy you have two choices, and in a cryptocracy you have one choice disguised as two.

The ultimate point is this: The techniques of modern day public education were specifically created, via behaviorist entrainment and Ericksonian negative neuro-linguistics programming, to discourage no-linear thinking among our nation's school children and encourage fragmentation.

We see the fragmentation all around us, from our most brilliant theoretical physicists who have been submerged in unprovable claims for a hundred years, wading through a sea of elementary particles in search of the ultimate irreducible integer of matter...from our major political institutions, bickering amongst themselves, incapable of even stealing an election properly anymore (things have certainly decayed since Kennedy's day)...all the way down to that nice old lady over there, your kid's second grade school teacher whose body cells are now dividing uncontrollably from years of cigarettes sold to her forty years before by a bombardment of television, radio, and magazine ads in that long-lost Golden Era when Journal of the American Medical Association claimed smoking was actually good for women...down to that kid standing in front of you right now, the cute one with the hole in his brain and the gun in his hand. He's pointing it directly at your face. His finger is tightening on the trigger. Do you recognize that emotionless look in his eyes? You should. After all, he's your son.

Think fast, daddy.

___________________________________________

Robert Guffey is currently (2003) teaching English at California State University at Long Beach. He can be contacted at rguffey@hotmail.com.

Endnotes

(1) This process continues in modern times. Witness the harassment suffered by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a psychologist, when he dared to enter the field of biology; or the similar treatment showered upon Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, a physician, when he dared to propose a new theory of planetary evolution.

(2) In high school I knew a guy named Bill who would coat the edge of the sheet with Vaseline. Someow the Vaseline had a kind of mirror-like effect and would screw up the laser, causing the machine to interpret all of his answers as correct. Eventually he grew more clever and dabbed the Vaseline on only some of the answers, so the results would be more believable. Word to the unwise.

Special thanks to Randy Koppang for his invaluable research assistance.


Works Cited

Bowart, Walter. Operation Mind Control. Ft. Bragg: Flatland Editions, 1994.

Cockburn, Alexander. "We're Reaping Tragic Legacy From Drugs." 6 July 1999, www.latimes.com

Democracy Now. Pacifica Radio. KPFK, Los Angeles. 18 Sep. 2000.

Dobbs, Robert. Dave Porter Interview. Genesis of a Music. Pacifica Radio. KPFK, Los Angeles. 24 Sep. 1994.

Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992.

Gatto, John Taylor. Jim Martin Interview. Flatland 11 (1994): 6-15.

Grossman, Lt. Col. Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995.


Hagelin, John. Lecture. State of the World Forum. The Fairmont Hotel. San Francisco, Oct. 1999.

Leary, Timothy. Lecture. Millenium Madness Conference. Scottish Rite Temple. Los Angeles, 29 May 1993.

Mandelbaum, W. Adam. The Psychic Battlefield: A History of the Military-Occult Complex. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

McLuhan, Marshall and Wilfred Wilson. From Cliche to Archetype. New York: Viking Press, 1970.


Meyers, William. The Image Makers. New York: Times Books, 1984.

Rappoport, Jon. The Secret Behind Secret Societies. San Diego: Truth Seeker Books, 1998.

Steinberg, Jeffrey. "The Creation of the 'Littleton' Culture." The New Federalist 30 Aug. 1999: American Almanac pp. 5-7.


The End

Your Fragmented Friend,
Terry

down to us, then

PostPosted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 1:47 pm
by pitcairn
Not to worry pitcairn, 'Teen Screen' will weed out the delusional and/or rebellious youth prone to dissent. It's only a chemical imbalance which can be controlled with the proper medications.

That's if they ever make it to their teen years without intervention (or a mind of their own), as 11:11 pointed out in another thread posted upstairs:



well then, it's down to us, isn't it?

us girls, that is, lol

boys, you can come, too, if your hearts are true

The only response to absolute tyranny is fraternity

- Andre Malraux


fraternity and sorority, that is

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/sistersinresistance/

SISTERS IN RESISTANCE shares the story of four French women of uncommon courage who, in their teens and twenties, risked their lives to fight the Nazi occupation of their country. Neither Jews nor Communists, they were in no danger of arrest before they joined the Resistance. They could have remained safe at home. But they chose to resist. Within two years all four were arrested by the Gestapo and deported as political prisoners to the hell of Ravensbruck concentration camp, where they helped one another survive. Today, elderly but still very active, they continue to push forward as social activists and intellectual leaders in their fields. The film captures their amazing lives, and reveals an uncommon, intense bond of friendship that survives to this day.

let's not be afraid, shall we?

PostPosted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 12:10 am
by tsoldrin
Why indeed. My personal opinion is that by a quirk in evolution, we humans are living in a completely different environment/society than we have evolved for. It just shouldn't be like this (waving arms around at cities). We're not ready for it... at least, at this stage. Living the way we do in the word of today creates the psycopaths that have become our overlords. They've just managed to adjust and are exerting influence on the broken system. THAT itself is evolution in action. A broken system creating broken people to populate it. It could sort out two different ways... people can adapt to the fuckered up way the world is now or they can learn and change the world to be something better.

It's certainly within our grasp, but will we reach?

PostPosted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 12:39 am
by pitcairn
http://tinyurl.com/282h43

March 20, 2007
Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior
By NICHOLAS WADE

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.

The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book “Sociobiology” that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress.

Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, “Primates and Philosophers,” the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.

Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped.

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Dr. de Waal’s views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates, starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject.

He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality.

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors.

Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.

These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.
Dr. de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal’s view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.”

As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders. “The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare,” he writes. “The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter.”

Dr. de Waal has faced down many critics in evolutionary biology and psychology in developing his views. The evolutionary biologist George Williams dismissed morality as merely an accidental byproduct of evolution, and psychologists objected to attributing any emotional state to animals. Dr. de Waal convinced his colleagues over many years that the ban on inferring emotional states was an unreasonable restriction, given the expected evolutionary continuity between humans and other primates.

His latest audience is moral philosophers, many of whom are interested in his work and that of other biologists. “In departments of philosophy, an increasing number of people are influenced by what they have to say,” said Gilbert Harman, a Princeton University philosopher.

Dr. Philip Kitcher, a philosopher at Columbia University, likes Dr. de Waal’s empirical approach. “I have no doubt there are patterns of behavior we share with our primate relatives that are relevant to our ethical decisions,” he said. “Philosophers have always been beguiled by the dream of a system of ethics which is complete and finished, like mathematics. I don’t think it’s like that at all.”

But human ethics are considerably more complicated than the sympathy Dr. de Waal has described in chimps. “Sympathy is the raw material out of which a more complicated set of ethics may get fashioned,” he said. “In the actual world, we are confronted with different people who might be targets of our sympathy. And the business of ethics is deciding who to help and why and when.”

Many philosophers believe that conscious reasoning plays a large part in governing human ethical behavior and are therefore unwilling to let everything proceed from emotions, like sympathy, which may be evident in chimpanzees. The impartial element of morality comes from a capacity to reason, writes Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton, in “Primates and Philosophers.” He says, “Reason is like an escalator — once we step on it, we cannot get off until we have gone where it takes us.”

That was the view of Immanuel Kant, Dr. Singer noted, who believed morality must be based on reason, whereas the Scottish philosopher David Hume, followed by Dr. de Waal, argued that moral judgments proceed from the emotions.

But biologists like Dr. de Waal believe reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached. They argue that morality evolved at a time when people lived in small foraging societies and often had to make instant life-or-death decisions, with no time for conscious evaluation of moral choices. The reasoning came afterward as a post hoc justification. “Human behavior derives above all from fast, automated, emotional judgments, and only secondarily from slower conscious processes,” Dr. de Waal writes.

However much we may celebrate rationality, emotions are our compass, probably because they have been shaped by evolution, in Dr. de Waal’s view. For example, he says: “People object to moral solutions that involve hands-on harm to one another. This may be because hands-on violence has been subject to natural selection whereas utilitarian deliberations have not.”

Philosophers have another reason biologists cannot, in their view, reach to the heart of morality, and that is that biological analyses cannot cross the gap between “is” and “ought,” between the description of some behavior and the issue of why it is right or wrong. “You can identify some value we hold, and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it,” said Sharon Street, a moral philosopher at New York University. “That’s not to discount the importance of what biologists are doing, but it does show why centuries of moral philosophy are incredibly relevant, too.”

Biologists are allowed an even smaller piece of the action by Jesse Prinz,
a philosopher at the University of North Carolina. He believes morality developed after human evolution was finished and that moral sentiments are shaped by culture, not genetics. “It would be a fallacy to assume a single true morality could be identified by what we do instinctively, rather than by what we ought to do,” he said. “One of the principles that might guide a single true morality might be recognition of equal dignity for all human beings, and that seems to be unprecedented in the animal world.”

Dr. de Waal does not accept the philosophers’ view that biologists cannot step from “is” to “ought.” “I’m not sure how realistic the distinction is,” he said. “Animals do have ‘oughts.’ If a juvenile is in a fight, the mother must get up and defend her. Or in food sharing, animals do put pressure on each other, which is the first kind of ‘ought’ situation.”

Dr. de Waal’s definition of morality is more down to earth than Dr. Prinz’s. Morality, he writes, is “a sense of right and wrong that is born out of groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values.” The building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental and social capacities for constructing societies “in which shared values constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval.” By this definition chimpanzees in his view do possess some of the behavioral capacities built in our moral systems.

“Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are,” Dr. de Waal wrote in his 1996 book “Good Natured.” Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities.

But this is a fallacy, in Dr. de Waal’s view. Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in “Primates and Philosophers,” with “a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.”

"down to us," lol i like that.

PostPosted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 4:29 am
by Username
*


pitcairn said

well then, it's down to us, isn't it?

us girls, that is, lol

boys, you can come, too, if your hearts are true

The only response to absolute tyranny is fraternity

- Andre Malraux

fraternity and sorority, that is

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/sistersinresistance/

SISTERS IN RESISTANCE shares the story of four French women of uncommon courage who, in their teens and twenties, risked their lives to fight the Nazi occupation of their country. Neither Jews nor Communists, they were in no danger of arrest before they joined the Resistance. They could have remained safe at home. But they chose to resist. Within two years all four were arrested by the Gestapo and deported as political prisoners to the hell of Ravensbruck concentration camp, where they helped one another survive. Today, elderly but still very active, they continue to push forward as social activists and intellectual leaders in their fields. The film captures their amazing lives, and reveals an uncommon, intense bond of friendship that survives to this day.

let's not be afraid, shall we?



lol pitcairn, you rabblerouser you (lol, just kidding)

The last time I consulted the I Ching, it mentioned something about it being a good time to lay low. Something about "dark forces" on the rise and "abysses" and stuff like that and...idk, sounded like pretty good advice at the time. Maybe I should ask again?

None-the-less I think it's a pretty good time to talk about what can be done about the government/corporate takeover of our schools and what they're doing to our children. Those bells have got to go. (just so long as they're not replaced by chips)

A good time to look at the processing and programming we endured growing up and maybe do a little bit of repair work on some of the holes it left behind. I have a couple theories, but no time atm to go into it.

I was half-watching C-Span earlier today and Mueller was being questioned by a Senate committee about 'violations of the patriot act by the FBI.' I believe this meeting took place on Tues (3/27). In one of his responses to the accusation of the misuse of wiretapping, he justified this particular violation because of the uprise in "gang activity." That there are "35,000 gangs with 800,000 gang members" ...and I thought of your articles about the 'Edelweiss Pirates'...then I even heard him say something about being "...in 'lockstep' with the local police and law enforcement" to work together to solve this problem.

These "sweeps" being conducted by law enforcement agencies are not right. Makes you wonder how many swept up 'illegal' aliens and gang members are being swept right up into the armed services. 800,000 ...that's alot of recruits. And if we continue to allow this to go on it won't be long before they're sweeping up the conspiracy theorists.

Thanks for your input.

I'm glad you like the article.

T
e
r
r
y

tsoldrin's idea

PostPosted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 1:27 pm
by pitcairn
occurred to these people also:

http://www.workingpsychology.com/mindfl.html

Mindfulness and Mindlessness


Richard Petty & John Cacioppo, at Ohio State University, have described what is to date one of the most fundamental differences in receptivity to an influence attempt: the target will respond either centrally or peripherally. Shelly Chaiken's research is similar (New York University), although she uses different terms: she says subjects will respond systematically or heuristically. In a sentence, this means that the target of influence will respond either mindfully or mindlessly.

Human brains are vastly underpowered to deal with the pace of modern living. Thinking is their job, but they don't really want to do it (reminding me of some employees I've had). You see, you are the owner of a hunter-gatherer brain, which was just the machine for the job of hunting and gathering, which we humans did to survive thousands of years ago.

But now, you must use that same model brain to set your VCR, create a computer spreadsheet, read a map, and figure out how to set your watch once you land at the London airport. You might even call on it to speak a foreign language, take a course in biology, perform a math calculation, or repair an electronic circuit. It's like using an old Apple II computer--one of the first widely-available home computers--to perform handwriting and voice recognition! Your geriatric Apple II wouldn't like that task any more than your brain likes deliberating over which brand of laundry detergent to buy as you rush through the supermarket. Hence, humans are cognitive misers, to borrow a term from the noted influence researcher Ellen Langer. We humans conserve cognitive energy whenever we can.

Considerable evidence has amassed showing that humans don't like to think. Here's an example. Cognitive scientists were interested in the types of brain waves emitted by a person who was thinking hard-- as when a person attempts to solve a math problem. They found that, under such conditions, humans emitted a distinctive pattern of brain waves. Those waves were nearly duplicated by asking subjects to thrust their hands in buckets of ice water. Your brain has a similar response to thinking hard as it does to physical pain! Your brain doesn't like to do it, and avoids it when it can.

:shock: lol, more at link above

rabblerousing

PostPosted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 2:39 pm
by pitcairn
well, Terry, is rabble rousing cost effecient, lol?

that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?

such thoughts make a Dane melancholy, but may take a Frenchwoman to the guillotine or asylum:

Olympe de Gouge lost her head

http://womenshistory.about.com/library/ ... 071099.htm

Theroigne de Mericourt lost her mind

http://www.jazzbabies.com/home/mericourt.htm

The "Beautiful Amazon" of the French Revolution

"Fellow women citizens, why should we not enter into rivalry with the men? Do they alone lay claim to have rights to glory; no, no . . . And we too would wish to earn a civic crown and court the honor of dying for a liberty which is dearer perhaps to us than it is to them, since the effects of despotism weigh still more heavily upon our heads than upon theirs. . . . let us open a list of French Amazons; and let all who truly love their Fatherland write their names there."
-- Théroigne de Méricourt

...
Always in the forefront of the crowd, she made a number of public speeches urging her fellow Citizenesses to arm themselves and join the men on the battlements. She also organized a women's club dedicated to the proposition that women should have the vote in the new Republic, and be equal to the men. This was viewed as a problem by many of the male leaders. In many opinions, revolutionary women still belonged in the kitchen cooking for their brave men. Théroigne refused to be silent, and as a result, was marginalized. She was imprisoned twice (by different parties), and once had to flee back to Belgium. But she kept right on -- writing when it was not safe to speak publicly.

...

In 1792, as the revolutionaries began to turn on each other, she aligned herself with the relatively moderate Girondins. Big mistake. In May of 1793, the Girondists were thrown out. Théroigne was cornered by a mob of Jacobin women who beat her and stripped her naked. She never recovered from this blow. Some biographers state that the humiliation broke her mind.

...

She was eventually committed to an insane asylum, and stayed there for the rest of her life. Historians often used her life as a metaphor for the revolution, because it began so brightly and burned itself out so completely.

of course, she did not "burn herself out," she was set aflame ... by people very much like us, perhaps

PostPosted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:38 pm
by Username
*


hmmmm...perhaps some inspiring tales of the revolutionaries who 'lived to tell about it' (coherently).

let's not lose our heads over this.

tired of being the martyr,
terry