Brainwashing Is Not a Form of Personal Hygiene

BRAINWASHING IS NOT A FORM OF PERSONAL HYGIENE.

Nor is being brainwashed a guarantee of personal bliss, though it’s becoming apparent that there are many who swear by it.

It’s like reverence for innocence. Well, yes, kids sure are sweet, unsullied, open, positive, vibrant, curious. They wear their innocence well and we all envy their abandon. But we’re protecting them. So we bear all the risks and potential for endangerment. They play. We watch the playground to make sure there are no perverts, rabid dogs, or kidnappers.

As adults, it’s a different story. ‘Ignorance is bliss’ and ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you’ work for a while . . . until the axe falls. Or the bill comes due. Or the door is kicked down in the middle of the night. Being stupidly innocent as an adult can bring heartache and tragedy, in fact, typically does. While embracing wholesome open-mindedness and holistic trust, so as to not preclude learning and discovery, we are also well-advised to maintain a wary eye for the sham, the con, the manipulation, the lie, the entire range of possible mischief humans are capable of.

From what I now see reported on the news, such prudence is no longer at all possible. Evidence would suggest that a dam has been breached. A tsunami of misinformation, disinformation, fake news, deep fakes, propaganda, calculated deceptions, accompanied by a bottomless barrel of salacious scandals and mindless trivia, has flooded the once-habitable terrain of public discourse and understanding. We are drowning in bullshit.  

It shows. People are becoming confused, erratic, and increasingly desperate. We’re being constantly bombarded with bad news, rendering us numb, dumb, wary and increasingly frightened. It seems that folks are stressed out to the max. We have the firing squad of 24/7 if-it-bleeds-it-leads news coming at us from every direction. We’re surrounded by crises, personal, political, national, international. It’s beyond overwhelming.  

This makes us hunger for both relief and anything that will make sense out of the chaos.

Which renders many, if not most people, vulnerable to brainwashing.

I recently saw a compilation of talking heads relentlessly hammering home completely vaporous, frankly ridiculous but engaging, arresting, highly charged, and clearly effective memes. I presume that a majority of citizens, already reeling and punch drunk from years of propaganda, hearts and minds filled with hatred and fear, stumbling about in the house of mirrors that media has become, react to a frightening degree by buying into what these people are saying. Repetition is like kickboxing. Or like kneading dough. It’s just a matter of time before the target succumbs to persistence and becomes a subdued and unresisting lump, next to be carted off on a stretcher or put in the oven. Or in the case of the TV/smart phone-addicted public, put in a coma-like trance, a hypnotic stupor, an obedient oblivion. Cut to KFC commercial or ad for a miracle age spots remedy. Launch the cruise missiles.

Here’s the video (if you can handle epic levels of tedious repetition).

Seriously? We are fine with media messaging that’s like Chinese water torture? To have our brainwaves flat-lined by nonsensical, hyperventilating, Orwellian vapor. This is not news reporting. To think so is like mistaking a metronome for a symphony orchestra.

But that’s where we’re at.

To suggest for even a moment that somehow this state of mental paralysis came about organically, the result of societal entropy or personal devolution — as if random impulse, modernity, complexity, technology, solar flares, pollen, coronavirus, climate change, over-the-counter drugs, 5G, GMOs, aspartame, and ozone depletion, randomly interacted and the default became wholesale stupidity — is both foolhardy and extremely dangerous. It didn’t just happen. It is part of a plan. That plan is about control and oppression, gross manipulation and enslavement.

Let’s give credit where it’s due. Our manipulators, our oppressors, our autocratic puppet masters, are phenomenal at what they do. They’re organized; they’ve got the bucks; they’ve gained a total monopoly over the seats of power and the social/political levers of control; they are unencumbered by ambivalence, morals, common decency; they are merciless, ruthless, focused.

For just a single but highly representative example, read this article about how the lunatic power elite work to shape the entire narrative about the conflict in Ukraine.

Now, take that level of calculated deceit, cold manipulation, audacity, unscrupulousness, ruthlessness, arrogance, pernicious intent, disdain for we the people, and scornful sense of entitlement, then replicate it over the entire spectrum of social/political ills, crises, and dysfunction — the things we whine about and debate constantly: the economy, wealth inequality, corporate welfare, socialism for corporations and Wall Street, our deteriorating education system, our crumbling infrastructure, our fake democracy, the ruling elite-controlled two-party duopoly, Covid-19 “pandemic”, our entire shameful health care system, the destruction of labor unions, the criminalizing of dissent, the marginalization and disempowerment of minorities, the Fed, the CDC, the FDA, the FCC, censorship, citizen surveillance, our two-tier justice system, and perhaps the worst and most egregious of them all, the expanding militarization of our country and its foolhardy, suicidal pursuit of world conquest.

Yes, just imagine all of this contention as the product of sociopaths and power-drunk bullies, who have no sense of duty to country, or responsibility to you and I normal everyday citizens, smug self-anointed sociopathic despots who are incapable of conceiving of, inaugurating, and promoting anything which doesn’t serve the narrow agenda of an ultra-wealthy ruling aristocratic class — truly sinister malefactors who live and breathe to humiliate and subjugate others, abuse their power and privilege, gain advantage and mount incomprehensible piles of money and affluence, regardless of the harm and suffering it causes everyone else.

Yes, imagine that!

But wait! . . . you don’t have to imagine it after all. You just have to look around you.

Because that is exactly what is going on.

This is what we end up with when WE THE PEOPLE lose control of our country.

This is what we end up with when self-serving oligarchs control the narrative.

This is what we end up with when fed a 24/7 diet of lies and propaganda.

Now the question is: What can we do?

The answer couldn’t be simpler. Or more difficult.

This is where improbable teams up with impossible. Because the only way to stop this is through individual responsibility — everyday citizens taking charge, both of their own lives and our government. The existing private and public institutions which have engineered this juggernaut of blind ignorance and social control surely are not going to change. The puppets of the oligarchy we dutifully “elect” to represent we the people know who butters their bread. They and their ruling elite sponsors reap huge rewards from keeping us dumb and misinformed. So if anything is going to reverse this disastrous course, it will be us as individuals, hopefully working collectively to provide support and reinforcement, wielding the power of ‘NO’.

Obviously, this is a very tall order, as epic in scale as apocalyptic it is to be on the present course. We have to be honest. Perhaps it’s impossible. Old habits die hard. For most of our lives, we everyday folks, busy with their personal lives and trusting by nature, have relied on what we thought were worthy, reliable government spokespersons, TV news anchors, elected representatives, thought leaders, even celebrities, for the honest scoop on the specific events going on across our nation, more generally for our broad understanding of the world out there beyond our immediate reach. But slowly, imperceptibly, they turned on us. They increasingly recited from a intentionally faulty script, designed to hide the truth and substitute a fabricated reality. This was calculated — correctly so — to make us easily manipulable, often voting and behaving against our own interests. They fooled us so many times, we lost count and became completely detached from reality. Evidence? Look at what we put up with as citizens. We are treated abysmally, our government no longer works for us, and somehow we maintain pride in a nation which regards us as some necessary evil it needs to patronize with hollow promises and fairy tales about exceptionalism and greatness.

Most Americans now are totally brainwashed. We everyday citizens have no idea that those who we were certain we could trust are now lying to us with every breath they take. Any resemblance between what we are told and reality is a coincidence, or a convenience because it just happens to fit with the web of lies which surrounds it.

That’s hard for anyone to swallow. It’s depressing, demoralizing, unsettling, infuriating. Worse, “staying informed” has always been and still is so convenient. Just flip on the News at 6, read Time or Newsweek or USA Today. Scroll through Yahoo News on a smartphone. These wonderful trusted sources look and feel as they always have. But now they’re all streams of toxic misinformation and propaganda. And most people have no clue.

So quite honestly, I’m not very optimistic.

But of one thing I’m sure. We can stop this. We know what to do.

The only question is: Will we develop the presence of mind and resolve to . . . ?

STOP DRINKING THE KOOL-AID!

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Brainwashing Is Not a Form of Personal Hygiene | John Rachel

Woke Venus de Milo

It was a tense few hours yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It wasn’t a large crowd that had gathered — 50 or 60 — but they were focused, angry, and determined to right a grotesque situation which one angry protester said “had gone on way too long.”

The object of their derision and evident nausea was the marble rendering of Venus de Milo by Alexandros of Antioch, a Greek sculptor of the Hellenistic Age.

The incensed mob, wielding ropes, pick axes, and sledgehammers fought their way past the security guards attempting to block the entrance doors, then rushed at the offending sculpture. Had not the museum’s director intervened, no question that this masterpiece, which had graced the lobby for several decades, would within minutes have been turned into a pile of over-priced gravel.

A spokesperson who might have just arrived from an Insane Clown Posse concert or an Extinction Rebellion rally shouted through a bullhorn.

“How can you have such a disgusting symbol of primitive values in full sight of not just undeserving adults but the thousands of children who come here? It’s exploitative, gender rigid, misogynistic, insensitive — just plain WRONG, WRONG, WRONG on every level. How many innocent boys have been turned into haters and rapists by this sexualized carving, this symbol of moral anarchy, this overt enticement to erotic anarchy? How many young girls been body-shamed and driven to suicide by its faux submission to modesty and subliminal glorification of coquetry?”

Without having any clue what the leader of the woke mob was saying, Max Hollein, current Appointed Director of the Met, managed to calm the irate protesters down, and convince the grumbling, weeping, giggling, frantic, but mostly neutered protestors that something could be worked out, a compromise was possible. No way was Mr. Hollein going to stand by while such a masterpiece was turned into rubble.

The world-renowned museum was closed for three days. Behind the locked doors, the woke protesters went to work. There was understandably a lot of back-and-forth between the woke crowd and the staff who ignorantly still embraced a traditional world view, but eventually compromises were made, the museum re-opened, and visitors hungry for the enrichment of great art were able to fully enjoy an “acceptable”, fully PC-friendly version of the disputed sculpture, one which was pan-gender sensitive and fully inclusive.

As one of the protesters promoting the transformation of society to a higher state of woke consciousness said: “My gender is neutrois and my pronouns are xe, xem xyr. Xe think this is great! We are one step closer to a world which makes sense for everybody, not just some lascivious old white men.”

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Woke Venus de Milo | John Rachel

Looking For Change in All the Wrong Places

I know I write a lot about war and peace. That would be against war and for peace. But apparently I’m swimming upstream from the consensus.

Why would I say that?

A recent Gallup poll would suggest that Americans on the whole think our current military is pretty swell, our level of defense spending peachy, we are militarily top dogs, and that’s the way they like it, uh-huh uh-huh!

I’m still trying to reconcile this and a second report to come up with a meaningful, hopeful picture for the future of our country. One that’s not built around bullets, bombs, stealth fighters, attack drones, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, killer satellites, and the possible shrouding of the planet in a cloud of life-ending radioactive dust.

The problem is me, of course. It seems I’m allergic to chaos, destruction, death, maiming, carnage, genocide, ecocide, macho posturing, chest-beating. I don’t find war drums at all appealing, or even danceable.

Others — according to the report, it comes in at 62% of our fine citizens — find reason to implicitly celebrate all of the above, judging that the $715 billion official 2022 defense budget, proposed by President Biden, is right on the money, so to speak. In fact, 17% of those polled think we need to spend more.

Here’s the poll report. Enjoy it. Savor it. Be proud of it. Go Team America!

By the way, I specifically chose ‘official defense budget’ because that has never really been the whole story. The second report was done in 2019. It’s by the Congressional Research Service and is titled Overseas Contingency Operations Funding: Background and Status. You can view it here.

I’ll save you a lot of tedious reading. As Mandy Smithberger put it in a very recent article in TomDispatch … 

“The Congressional Research Service has estimated that such supplemental spending from September 11, 2001, to fiscal year 2019 totaled an astonishing $2 trillion above and beyond the congressionally agreed upon Pentagon budget.”

Even this is not the entire picture. Because buried in the budgets of the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, secretive funding of the CIA, the 17 major agencies of the intelligence community, and other national security related organizations, is unreported black budgeting. We can only offer educated guesses on the sums allocated to these agencies. We do know they run in the tens of billions of dollars.

So as we’re struggling to find the money — we all know it’s there but the fiscal conservatives require us to put on a show of penurious virtue signaling to slap down the MMT folks — to repair our infrastructure, address climate change, convert the U.S. economy into the right stuff for the 21st Century challenges of stability and sustainability, scramble to either put together a viable health care system or find a place to bury the bodies, address massive unemployment and underemployment, achieve solvency for Social Security and other unfunded liabilities, yes, as we scour every square inch of our great country sea-to-shining-sea with metal detectors, looking for every buried nickel and dime for all of these noble and necessary endeavors, the vast majority of citizens have decided the $1+ trillion we spend ANNUALLY to police Planet Earth, spy on our own citizens, put bases and weaponry in any country that will have us, expand NATO and increase the probability of a major war, build “more usable” nuclear weapons, deploy our fighting machinery in outer space, intimidate Russia and China, and create hostility and enemies across the globe, is money well spent.

I will credit the Deep State and MIC with a true victory here. While “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known” (George W. Bush), “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (Barack Obama), has been humiliated and/or defeated in every military conflict since World War II, the massive psyops brainwashing of the American public has been a resounding success! 

See all that money was well spent after all.

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Looking For Change in All the Wrong Places | John Rachel