Tag Archives: mind-control

John Gatto On State-Controlled Consciousness

Posted on by

Toward the end of this video, John Taylor Gatto, the iconoclastic critic of compulsory education and state schools and ardent advocate of “unschooling,” has an especially memorable passage.
He points out that while the state can violently coerce a few people at a time (through arrest and shooting), there’s no way (outside war or genocide, I presume) to coerce large masses of people over time, except through controlling their minds.

Or more accurately, through creating the habits and attitudes that make them obedient to puppet strings in their own minds.

Compulsory schooling by the state, he argues, is a way to colonize the minds of children to make them their own police-force, eager to report other deviants.

[Preparing them to become tax snitches, as I blogged earlier, or political informants, or supporters of  biometric ID legislation].

In “Dumbing Us Down”, Gatto argues that state schooling causes the following in a child’s mind:

1) Confusion, with its jumbled ensemble of tests, memorized and then forgotten

2) Dependence on class position

3) Indifference/apathy

4) Emotional dependency

5) Intellectual dependency

6) Provisional self-esteem that needs the assurance of experts to maintain

7) Habituation to constant surveillance and the denial of privacy

Did Bethany McLean Even Break The Enron Story?

Posted on by

n “Enronathon,” Seth Mnookin of The Wall Street Journal suggests Bethany McLean wasn’t quite the first person to break the story of Enron…and that she had a good bit of unacknowledged help:

“If journalism were in the Olympics, the Enron story might well be pairs figure skating. Bethany McLean, the young Fortune writer who first wrote about Enron’s shady finances a year ago, has, of course, already been awarded the gold.

And with that have come the requisite endorsements: In the past two months, she was hired as a consultant by NBC News and shared in a $1.4 million deal to co-author a book on the scandal. But another team is also vying for top honors — amid complaints about shoddy judging.

Reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal believe their work has been unjustly ignored, with some wondering whether Pulitzer rivals like the Washington Post and the New York Times have gone out of their way to praise McLean.

Enron did not collapse under its own weight,” says Jonathan Friedland, the Journal editor who’s been in charge of much of the paper’s Enron coverage. “Without our reporting, I don’t think any of this would have happened.”

In response, McLean’s former editor at Fortune and current Time Inc. editorial director John Huey says, “Bethany was the first journalist in a widely respected national publication to suggest that the emperor at Enron had no clothes.” (Not that her own publication took much note: Fortune had to airbrush out Kenneth Lay from a November SMARTEST PEOPLE WE KNOW cover photo.) Let’s recap: In September 2000, Jonathan Weil wrote a long story for the now-defunct Texas edition of the Journal about odd accounting at various Texas-based energy traders; it included four paragraphs on Enron.

James Chanos, a well-known short-seller who was one of the first to start unloading Enron stock, says he got interested in the company after reading Weil’s piece.

Almost six months later, in March 2001, the then 30-year-old McLean (who Times columnist Maureen Dowd has suggested will be played by Alicia Silverstone in the inevitable movie) wrote her little-noticed 2,400-word story, “Is Enron Overpriced?”

Then, in October, the Journal ran a three-day series by Rebecca Smith and John Emshwiller detailing Enron’s unorthodox partnerships. Their articles are seen by many on Wall Street as ultimately sinking the company. Weil’s partisans think he should get credit for crossing the finish line first (an item, “Credit Due,” ran in “Page Six” recently).

But even Chanos says that “Bethany’s piece was the first one to raise really specific questions.”

Most of the Journal‘s brain trust, though, are plugging Smith and Emshwiller, who, of course, wrote their stories in 2001 and are thus eligible for this year’s Pulitzers. “The Fortune story basically said this is a company that nobody understands,” says Journal deputy managing editor Daniel Hertzberg. “It didn’t show what was wrong with the company. It took Becky and John to do that.” That’s the competition.

Now for the judging. In January, Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post‘s media writer, highlighted McLean as the first journalist to ask questions about Enron. Ten days later, the Times‘ Felicity Barringer wrote her profile of “the financial reporter everyone loves to lionize.” While McLean was being anointed as a journalistic sex symbol in a story hitherto dominated by a balding Kenneth Lay, folks at the Journal felt they were being robbed:

“People are trying to queer the Pulitzer pitch for the Journal,” says one editor there. That’s sour grapes, counters Kurtz: “In this case, a 31-year-old reporter beat them and the rest of the world by a considerable margin.”

In a bit of circular logic endemic to media reporters, Kurtz adds, “I must have been onto something, since after my piece appeared, she was profiled in the Times, given a contract by NBC, and offered a book deal.” As for McLean, she seems slightly embarrassed by all the attention. “I’ve told people I’ve gotten too much credit,” she says. “I did raise alarm bells, but I didn’t know the half of it.” “Read more: Enronathon http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/5756/#ixzz0dvvQZvUI

My Comment:

Please note also that the book was co-authored with Peter Elkind, who isn’t attributed in many of the stories.

Not that I’m all that sympathetic to the Wall Street Journal on the Enron story, since they don’t give credit to the alternative press either, and what goes around comes around. (My own experiences of plagiarism from articles and books can be found at the tab, ABOUT –  half-way down the page).

If liberal columnists steal without attribution even from liberal bloggers, can you imagine the cone of silence that descends when the victim isn’t liberal? Libertarians and conservatives get stripped clean by the vultures of the “free” (of all ethics) press.

With them, it’s never about public welfare or the good of the nation, even though that’s the standard that they like to foist on other people. Even with the global economy melting down under their noses, they’re jealous of sharing the information that activists, bloggers, and ordinary citizens give out generously for the common good.

(Again, there are honorable exceptions).

In short, they make up credit – just like the Federal Reserve.

Or they steal it – like their banker friends.

Or they collude with each other to “take-down” anyone not part of their game – just like their hedge-fund allies.

And no matter what, they always cover for each other.

Notice how other people’s personal lives are fair game for stalking, extortion, and exposes, but never theirs, as this piece on Maria Bartiromo suggests.

(Ms. McLean figures in that piece too. In fact, a brief google tells us that McLean´s had plagiarism problems and conflicts of interest more than a couple of times).

Item One. Here’s an earlier complaint about Fortune magazine plagiarism. A Fortune writer apparently used material from interviews and articles by an outfit called Annex Research, without attributing or acknowledging it. An email to Fortune got no response, either. The Fortune writer? Bethany McLean…

Item Two:  McLean at it again, swiping material from the Orange County Register Weekly

Item Three: Libertarian economist, Bill Anderson, in a piece called “The Most Dishonest ´Journalists´ In the Room,” describes how McLean was having a romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor in the Enron trial, Sean Berkowitz, before the sentencing, while she was covering the trial and getting out the government´s side of the story. Omitted in that story as well  was the disturbing fact that the prosecutor had suborned perjury in order to get a full conviction of Jeffrey Skilling.

And that´s besides Item Four….

That fetching stock-manipulation thing she had going with hedge buddies Marc Cohodes and Jim Chanos.

No wonder none of them can get the story right.

And no wonder they still won’t get it straight, not until after activists, or bloggers, or less-known writers at their own outfits or elsewhere do the hard work. Then they’ll slide in to take the credit.

Nice work.

Just as cushy and exploitative as anything on Wall Street, in its way.

Business men and real capitalists do the hard work of producing. Then the faux capitalist money-men and their shills in government rush in to cream the money off and cover themselves with glory via their mouthpieces in the shill media.

No wonder the media doesn’t understand capitalism. No wonder they love the crony capitalist bordello they call home. It’s the only one they know, the poor things.

[Again, they really ARE a minority of journalists, just a powerful minority. There are hundreds of honorable hard-working journalists who write their own stories rather than steal them off the net, whose names never get into headlines, and who wouldn’t be caught dead behaving like this].

And don’t miss the other telling details:

Enron’s Ken Lay was a Republican.

Goldman Sachs is a Democrat cash-cow, for the most part.

Jim Chanos, hedge-fund master mind, used to work at Deutsch Bank.

And Bethany McLean was once a Goldman Sachs banker….. (Maybe that explains her kid-glove treatment of Hank at Vanity Fair).….

….And her equally interesting white-washing of Spyro Contogouris, who colluded with hedge funds to attack Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial.

Honestly.  Rielle Hunter has nothing on any of these gold-diggers.

Policing Wall Street…

Posted on by

From Black Star News:

“In the 1980s there was one great stock fraud, which captured the imagination of the American public. That stock fraud involved a chain of electronics stores, which went by the name of “Crazy Eddie.”  These stores were founded by Eddie Antar (“Crazy Eddie”) of Brooklyn.  “Crazy Eddie” used radio advertising to hype his stores.  In the end the retail chain of “Crazy Eddie” went bankrupt; a $300 million fraud.

At the center of this fraud was Sam E. Antar, a cousin of “Crazy Eddie” Antar and the Chief Financial Officer of the “Crazy Eddie” retail chain. Currently Sam E. Antar has publicly stated that he has reformed and is now lecturing, without charge, on the “dangers” of crime. It is strange that Sam E. can afford this largesse because he filed for bankruptcy several years ago. He claims to be supported by the real estate interests of his wife’s family.

Recently he was the focus of an article, “Crazy like a fox,” by Aaron Elstein, which appeared in the October 4, 2009 issue of Crain’s New York Business.  Once a felon, always a felon. Yet Elstein referred to Sam Antar as “a former felon.”  That alone shows his bias and makes the reader believe that rather than an article the piece is meant to rehabilitate Antar.  A felon is someone convicted of a felony. There is no such thing as a former felon.

Elstein also reported:  “Mr. Antar admits working for a short-seller before.  He did research for Barry Minkow, an investor who served prison time in the 1990s for running a fraudulent carpet cleaning service.” This is like saying “The titanic ran into an ice cube.” There are several understatements in the “article.”

Sam Antar not only worked for Barry Minkow but contributed $250,000 to Minkow’s Fraud Discovery Unit, which supposedly ferrets out false information in filings by publicly listed companies. Antar claims that this $250,000 was his wife’s money. Antar’s wife must be the most generous woman in the world- doling out $250,000 as a gift to her husband’s friend.

Here’s what happened: Minkow finds false information in SEC filings. Minkow then sells the stock short, in hopes that the stock price declines. Minkow then releases his findings. Minkow then buys back the stock after the price has declined. By that very fact alone, Minkow is not an “investor.” Minkow is a short seller.

As the reader can readily determine someone is making money from this arrangement. What’s not stated in the article is that Minkow did not just run “a fraudulent carpet cleaning service.”  Minkow’s carpet cleaning business was called ZZZZ Best, a stock fraud that defrauded the American public of hundreds of millions of dollars. Minkow served seven years in federal prison for fraud among other charges.

The article is a “white wash,” a “fix.” Minkow owes the government approximately $16 million and his salary is garnished to pay the amount owed. That is why the payment could not be made out personally to Minkow but to the Fraud Discovery Unit- the money would have been seized.

During his incarceration Minkow converted to Christianity and studied for a Divinity Degree. Currently Minkow is a pastor of a Church. I find it rather amusing when convicted felons turn to God.  It has been my experience that once a stock fraud artist- always a stock fraud artist.  The money is too good and too easy. That is why the members of Aish Kodesh in Long Island participated in the stock frauds of Maier Lehmann.

Sam E. Antar is a fraudster; as is Barry Minkow.
Both have now found God. Perhaps they have monetarized God.”

Manfredonia, a trader and whistleblower on Wall Street in the 1980s, is now on a campaign to expose corruption on the Street. Please e-mail him tips to Edward@blackstarnews.com

Maya Angelou On What People Remember

Posted on by

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Marketing saw, quoted by Maya Angelou

My Comment:

This quote led me to think of the way in which political debates these days have become entirely devoid of emotional intelligence. I’m convinced that the way we debate things is at least as important as what we debate. Maybe even more important.

There’s something fundamentally wrong with the media when it humiliates public figures, either directly and anonymously on the internet, or indirectly though misrepresentation and innuendo in print. There’s nothing funny, liberated, or “free speech” about any of it. It’s an abuse of speech… a form of violence.

Now if you cuss out someone who’s provoking and attacking you directly, that’s one thing. Turn about is fair play.

But using sexual humiliation as a tool to demonize political candidates (Sarah Palin) or feeding public voyeurism about prominent figures with no political relevance (David Letterman, John Edwards, Tiger Woods) is morally wrong and socially dangerous. It feeds a constant cycle of partisan retaliation that drives everyone but the most insanely ambitious out of politics.

Then, of course, the media turns around and complains without irony about how insanely ambitious politicians are.

Reporters are professionals. They have standards to adhere to. It’s not their job to simply supply a demand. It’s one thing to follow stories that interest people (within certain boundaries of what’s relevant to public discourse). That’s fair enough. But reporters can’t just cave in to whatever it is they think people want to talk about.

You could, after all, argue that people like watching snuff movies. Does that mean the media feeds that appetite too?

Demand doesn’t just come into being. It’s created. And that’s not a one-way thing. There’s a feedback loop. Demand feeds supply, which feeds demand. There’s an addictive element to the whole thing.

That means writers can’t just give up their own moral freedom to feed a demand for immoral things. They have to make a conscious choice to go against what’s in their (or their publisher’s) economic interest and do what’s right.

Admittedly, it’s hard.

As for the so-called hypocrisy of politicians, politicians (and entertainers) aren’t meant to be moral exemplars, so the question really shouldn’t arise at all.

Since the public expects a certain image, politicians have to conform if they want to get elected. Wanting that image to reflect reality strikes me as an example of the foolishness of the public, not of the hypocrisy of politicians.

Public figures are more and more simply the victims of mob mentality. From that perspective, John Edwards did quite right to deny the scandal until the end. It’s no business of the mob’s to know everything about a politician’s marriage and demand a standard from him that the vast majority of people don’t hold to.

Now, Edward’s team members are a different issue. They sacrificed money and time and they might naturally feel betrayed. That’s a different matter. Perhaps they should have researched him a bit more before latching onto him. That they didn’t suggests they have a problem too – mindless hero worship.

People can have extraordinary talents but it doesn’t follow they’re perfect human beings, and there’s something deeply troubling about the urge to demand perfection from mere human beings…. and then attack them when they can’t supply it.

If I were Edwards, I would have banged the door on reporters who hounded me, a long time back. I would have turned the tables and started asking them a few questions about their private lives.

I suppose that’s why I have a degree of sympathy for people who’ve played the game back at reporters, like CEO Mark Cuban..and lately, Patrick Byrne.

Cuban has used Web 2.0 to his advantage against regulators as well.

A New York Times article in 2007 described how John Mack Mackey of Whole Foods and even disgraced and convicted financier Conrad Black of Hollinger International posted anonymously on message boards to counter negative posts about their companies. [The articles noted that they ran the risk of violating securities laws, especially if they disclosed company business in their posts].

Perhaps that’s where the problem lies. We have laws to stop CEO’s of companies defending themselves against attacks, but none for the people who do the attacking, even if they have a financial motive for it and even if their attacks are founded on semi-truths and lies indistinguishable by casual readers.

Mack Mackey used the handle rahodeb, an acronym of Deborah, his wife’s name, and he even commented on how cute he looked with a new hair-cut.  Byrne, on the other hand, has used a pseudonym Hannibal (the ruler of Carthage, not the star of “Silence of the Lambs”), but always signs his name underneath. Both took up the pen to counter attacks on their companies by anonymous internet posters.

It seems to have become a real problem.

In 2008 Apple CEO  Steve Jobs finally had enough of the rumor-mongering about his health and called Joe Nocera of the New York Times a juicy epithet I will chastely refrain from repeating.

[Since I’ve begun contributing to Deep Capture and enjoy a degree of bloggeraderie with them, I’m refraining from commenting directly on Byrne’s running battle with the media, about which I’ve written before. I will just admit to being on their side versus Goldman and the short-raiders. I think they tell it like it is. But any obscene rants at reporters’ expense don’t earn brownie points with me. And I maintain a neutral rating on Overstock, since I just don’t know enough about that end of things].

Either journalists act like a responsible press, or they are paparazzi, in which case they should expect to be hounded and harassed in turn. If reporters want access to the highest levels of business and government, if they want to report on subjects that are socially and politically important, then they should show some respect for their jobs, qualify themselves, adhere to professional standards of behavior, and avoid tormenting other human beings just to make their names.

Remember these are the same reporters who failed to report accurately or in time on one of the biggest stories in a hundred years. And why was that? Because (with honorable exceptions) they were either too comfortable with Wall Street, too lazy to do the research, too ignorant to know where to look, too provincial to read the people who could tell them, and too venal to go against their interests…. or all of the above..

This kind of public exposure we subject people to is not a one-time business. There is a record of the Edwards saga for ever on the net, visible to the whole globe….every little painful detail. What kind of sensitivity to a sick woman does that show, just to take one angle.

Or consider their children..

Isn’t it a kind of torture?
And doesn’t it make us, as it makes any kind of torturer, bestial?
Meanwhile, the victims never forget…..

Army Suicide Level Rises to “Epidemic Levels”

Posted on by

Jason Ditz at Antiwar via Christian Peacenik:

“Calling 2009 a “painful year,” the US Army announced today that it faced a record number of suicides among Army personnel, with 160 active-duty soldiers taking their own lives.”

Christian Peacenik goes on to comment:

“This surpassed the previous record of 140 in 2008, and the previous record before that was 115 in 2007. The Army has been keeping track of suicides since 1980, with the level suddenly rising to epidemic levels in recent years.”

In an attempt to cope, many soldiers turn to drugs and alcohol, and many others, as Friday’s AP story reminds us, end up killing themselves. Needless to say, the effects of this psychological destruction remain even after one leaves the service. As Dahr Jamail points out, “A 2008 court case in California revealed a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) email that revealed 1,000 veterans who are receiving care from the VA are attempting suicide every single month, and 18 veterans kill themselves daily.”

But again, the American idiocracy, with all its meaningless symbols and gestures, doesn’t want to hear any of this. Which is why we need to bring this to the idiocracy’s attention and explain why it’s yet another reason to bring our troops home.”

The Mental Gulag Is Here (Update)

Posted on by

Mind-reading passengers for terrorist potential – (note, potential) i.e. “thought crimes” – is here, folks, and seriously being batted about by Homeland Security:

“The aim of one company that blends high technology and behavioral psychology is hinted at in its name, WeCU — as in “We See You.”
The system that Israeli-based WeCU Technologies has devised and is testing in Israel projects images onto airport screens, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize, said company CEO Ehud Givon. Continue reading →