Consciousness, art, and psychiatry

by Jon Rappoport

January 22, 2014

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With the NSA scandals, many more people have read and heard the term “metadata.” It means “data about data.”

Well, there is also “metalife.” It means “life about life.”

Which means Art.

Art is a way of reaching life on another level.

When the first cave painter scratched an animal on a stone wall, he was undertaking a unique action. He was expressing his own consciousness beyond living his life.

He was inventing beyond his experience.

Suddenly, his experience had another use. It could be gathered up and transformed into painting, creation.

The first artist was the first alchemist.

So it is with all art. You can transmute your own past, your own experience, your own knowledge, your own emotions into works of imagination.

Art is a spiritual path.

From its dynamic perspective, everything that has ever happened to you can take on absolutely new meaning.

This also happens to be the goal of all therapies.

But with art, the goal is fulfilled.

It is no exaggeration to say that the artist can reinvent his past.

Civilizations rise and fall, come and go, and their fate is decided by untold millions of people who refrain from taking the path of the artist.

Ordinary life as we know it doesn’t resolve into a grand solution. It never has. Through alchemical persuasion, however, it can. And that alchemy is art.

Metalife.

The chain of cause and effect, threading from past into present, breaks. Instead, imagination/consciousness invents new realities and new futures, utilizing the energy of past events.

But this energy is no longer connected to those events. It’s brand new, it’s fuel for the fire.

As soon as imagination/invention/creation becomes the leading prow of action for an individual, the energy conversion and liberation begins.

Many, many artists don’t realize the power they have in their hands. They persist in seeing themselves as “entitled to be crazy” in their lives, and this undercuts their own consciousness.

Many artists are so obsessed with commercial success and fame that they’d dance at the end of a leash like a dog if they thought it would bring them recognition. This, needless to say, is debilitating.

So-called spiritual traditions tend to have a habit of depicting states of consciousness and enlightenment. They’re intent on describing the Reality behind reality.

Art makes no such claims. On its path, the artist invents many, many realities, and in doing so, he moves beyond all such descriptions.

For a culture to realize all these things, something quite different from propaganda and indoctrination would have to take place. In the meantime, metalife is an individual proposition.

It always has been.

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

In this society, psychiatrists are the primary definers of mental states. Their efforts are accepted as official science.

The Psychiatric Political State is based on myths and fairy tales about distinct and separate disorders and “good treatment.”

One of the main psychiatric mantras gaining force? “Everyone at some time in their lives will experience a mental disorder.”

But an open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 3 years, almost no one noticed.

His name is Dr. Allen Frances (twitter), and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the (then) latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”

Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”

BANG.

That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”

After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”

Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many more diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:

“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”

Translation: Patients need hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests—it’s a good thing, because patients will then believe and have hope; they’ll believe it because psychiatrists place a name on their problems…

Needless to say, this has nothing to do with science.

If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s.,” I think I’d make room on the front page.

If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear room above the fold.

If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.

I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.

I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.

And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.

Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.

And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.

Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM-IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.

Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:

acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;

life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;

brain damage.

Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:

intercranial pressure leading to blindness;

peripheral circulatory collapse;

stupor and coma.

Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:

serious impairment of cognitive function;

fainting;

restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).

Dr. Frances’ label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of toxic Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.

So what about Ritalin?

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

* Paranoid delusions
* Paranoid psychosis
* Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
* Activation of psychotic symptoms
* Toxic psychosis
* Visual hallucinations
* Auditory hallucinations
* Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
* Effects pathological thought processes
* Extreme withdrawal
* Terrified affect
* Started screaming
* Aggressiveness
* Insomnia
* Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
* Psychic dependence
* High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
* Decreased REM sleep
* When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
* Convulsions
* Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

A recent survey revealed that a high percentage of children diagnosed with bipolar had first received a diagnosis of ADHD. This is informative, because Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.”

Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern—and then produces a new diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and prescribes other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium.

In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)

This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.

Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.

And Dr. Frances is somehow let off the hook. He’s admitted in print that the whole basis of his profession is throwing darts at labels on a wall, and implies the “effort” is rather heroic—when, in fact, the effort leads to more and more poisonous drugs being dispensed to adults and children, to say nothing of the effect of being diagnosed with “a mental disorder.”

I’m not talking about “the mental-disease stigma,” the removal of which is one of Hillary Clinton’s missions in life. No, I’m talking about MOVING A HUMAN INTO THE SYSTEM, the psychiatric apparatus, where the essence of the game is trapping that person to harvest his money, his time, his energy, and of course his health—as one new diagnosis follows on another, and one new toxic treatment after another is undertaken, from cradle to grave.

The result is a severely debilitated human being (if he survives), whose major claim to fame is his list of diseases and disorders.

Thank you, Dr. Frances.

The Matrix Revealed

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)

Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent psychiatrist, on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”

PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.

BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, prevously professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid. [emphasis added]

Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows the whistle on his own profession.

So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.

These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money…but they’re still fantasies.

If I said the moon was made of green cheese, even if I were a Harvard professor, sooner or later someone would ask me to produce a sample of moon rock to be tested for “cheese qualities.” I might begin to feel nervous, I might want to tap dance around the issue, but I would have to submit the rock to a lab.

Dr. Barkley employs a corrupted version of logical analysis in his statement to the PBS Frontline interviewer. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. But if a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing—and that is absurd, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”

That logic is no logic at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.

Close to 50 years ago, psychiatry was dying out as a profession. Fewer and fewer people wanted to see a psychiatrist for help, for talk therapy. All sorts of new therapies were popping up. The competition was leaving medical psychiatry in the dust.

As Dr. Peter Breggin describes it in his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, a deal was struck. Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological/chemical fact, a gateway into the drugs. Everyone would win—except the patient.

So the studies were rolled out, and the list of mental disorders expanded. The FDA was in on the deal as well, as evidenced by their drug “safety” approvals, in the face of the obvious damage these drugs were doing.

So this is how we arrived at where we are. This was the plan, and it worked.

Under the cover story, it was all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.

Do people suffer, do they have problems, do they experience anguish and pain, do they make choices that sabotage their own interests, do they fall victim to external circumstances, do they long for relief? Of course.

But this has nothing to do with fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses.

It has to do with nutritional deficits, toxic drugs, toxic food and environmental chemicals, abuse, isolation, intimidation, and a whole host of other potential factors.

Psychiatry is trying to monopolize mental states and the understanding of the mind. It has no science, and it has no authentic conscience. It’s a pseudo-medical version of Orwellian politics, flying under the banner of a false professionalism.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

The surpassing power of imagination

The surpassing power of imagination

by Jon Rappoport

January 21, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

If you haven’t already read it, you can find the complete description of my collection, Exit From the Matrix, in my store, here.

Readers who’ve been with me for a while know I’ve written a great deal about imagination. This collection puts together more than 50 exercises and techniques for expanding the scope, range, and power of imagination.

Why? Because imagination is the quality that outdoes reality. Any kind of reality. Imagination is the infinite road.

Consciousness wants to create new consciousness, and it can. Imagination is how it does it. If there were some ultimate state of consciousness, imagination would always be able to play another card and take it further.

In any arena of life, and especially when it comes to mind, perception, power, empathy, and so on, there is always a status quo. It’s the place where a person says, “Well, that’s enough. I’ll settle for what I have. I’ll stop here.”

Sooner or later, this leads to boredom, frustration, problems, and conflict. It leads to a decline.

Imagination, which knows no bounds, is the source for the most adventurous explorations. It can have great impact on the material world, of course, but one mustn’t therefore conclude it is composed of matter or energy. Imagination is non-material. To think otherwise winds you up in using some version of physics to depict imagination—and then you are imposing limits on it. This is an error. Imagination doesn’t obey any laws of physics.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, we’ve flattered reality enough. It doesn’t need any more. Imagination creates new realities.

You can create the same thing over and over, and eventually you’ll be about as alive as a table. Inject imagination into the mix, and everything suddenly changes. You can steer that boat anywhere you want to. You can build worlds.

The lowest common denominator of consensus implies an absence of imagination. Everyone agrees; everyone is bored; everyone is obedient. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are massive floods of unique individual creation, and then that sought-after thing called abundance is as natural as the sun rising in the morning.

Exit From the Matrix

Sitting around in a cosmic bus station waiting for reality is what reality is. Everything else is imagination.

There are those who believe life is a museum. You walk through the rooms, find one painting, stroll into it and take up permanent residence. But the museum is endless. If you were a painter, you’d never decide to live inside one of your canvases forever. You’d keep on painting.

The relentless and obsessive search for all those things on which we can agree is a confession of bankruptcy.

When we re-learn to live through and by imagination, we enter and invent new space and time. But space and time aren’t superior forces. They come into being at the tap of imagination.

With imagination, one can solve a problem. More importantly, one can skip ahead of the problem and render it null and void.

There are a billion murals on a billion walls, and a person chooses one and falls down before it and devotes himself to it. He spends a thousand years trying to decipher it. So be it. This isn’t imagination.

Imagination isn’t a system. It might invent systems, but it is non-material. It’s a capacity. It feels no compulsion to imitate reality. It makes realities. Its scope is limited only by a person’s imagining of how far imagination can go.

The human race is obsessed by the question: what exists? It appears to be a far easier question than: what do you want to imagine? This comparison explains why civilizations decline.

Imagination is a path. Walking on that path long enough, you find answers to all the questions you’ve ever asked. You also find power that people dream of.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Sunday talk shows: Snowden is a Russian agent

Sunday talk shows: Snowden is a Russian agent

by Jon Rappoport

January 20, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

This is how media propaganda is done. Outlets that are supposed to be coming to their own conclusions present the same story, as one united front.

“Everybody ready? Got your lines straight? We all agree? Both sides of the aisle? Okay, go!”

In this case, the occasion was the Sunday network news-talk shows, and the target was Edward Snowden.

The shows followed on the heels of Obama’s Friday speech, in which the President defended the NSA and its “necessary actions.”

To bolster that message, the Sundays shows hit Snowden hard.

The specter of Russia was rolled out. Both Democratic and Republican legislators had their ducks in a row. They did innuendo, suggestion, “expert” inference.

Republican Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, appeared on Face the Nation (CBS) and Meet the Press (NBC).

Rogers: “Let me just say this, I believe there’s a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an FSB agent in Moscow. I don’t think that’s a coincidence…I think there are some interesting questions we have to answer that certainly would lend one to believe that the Russians had at least in some part something to do [with Snowden’s theft of NSA files].”

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, appearing on Meet the Press, remarked that Snowden “may well have had help” from Russia.

Republican Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, showed up on ABC’s This Week: “I personally believe that he [Snowden] was cultivated by a foreign power to do what he did. I don’t think …Mr. Snowden woke up one day and had the wherewithal to do this all by himself…I believe he was cultivated.”

The Snowden-Russia media push just happened to occur on all three major network Sunday shows, and it just happened to be suggested by two Republicans and one Democrat.

And it just happened to occur two days after Obama basically defended the work of the NSA and the Surveillance State.

You can also factor in two suicide bombings in Volgograd, a video that threatens terror attacks at the upcoming Olympics in Sochi, and a hunt on in Russia for a woman (terrorist) with a scar on her face.

The Matrix Revealed

Perfect timing to roll out a Snowden-Russia connection.

The motive is clear: protect the US Surveillance State, assure the public its work is necessary to national security, and deflect criticism of the NSA.

At the same time, the State must keep trying to convince the American people that the portrait of Snowden as a lone patriot is false.

Propaganda is a battle between competing images and messages.

“No, that image is false. This image is true.”

If tomorrow, for reasons of protecting special interests and official agendas, Snowden needed to be painted as a mentally ill Tea-Party gun freak, or a homophobic green dragon with vampire fangs, there would be a gaggle of politicians and think-tank pundits ready to step forward and make the accusations, with great assurance.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Truth about the Seralini rat-tumor-GMO study explodes

Truth about the Seralini rat-tumor-GMO study explodes

by Jon Rappoport

January 19, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

Remember a researcher named Gilles-Eric Seralini, his 2012 GMO study, and the controversy that swirled around it?

He fed rats GMOs, in the form of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn, and they developed tumors. Some died. The study was published in the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology (wikipedia). Pictures of the rats were published.

A wave of biotech-industry criticism ensued. Pressure built. “Experts” said the study was grossly unscientific, its methods were unprofessional, and Seralini was biased against GMOs from the get-go. Monsanto didn’t like Seralini at all.

The journal which published the Seralini study caved in and retracted it.

Why? Not because Seralini did anything unethical, not because he plagiarized material, not because he was dishonest in any way, but because:

He used rats which (supposedly) had an inherent tendency to develop tumors (the Sprague-Dawley strain), and because he used too few rats (10). That’s it. Those were Seralini’s errors.

Well, guess what? Eight years prior to Seralini, Monsanto also did a rat-tumor-GMO study and published it in the very same journal. Monsanto’s study showed there were no tumor problems in the rats. But here’s the explosive kicker. Monsanto used the same strain of rats that Seralini did and same number of rats (10). And nobody complained about it.

Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumer’s Union, explains in an interview with Steve Curwood at loe.org (click here for the full article):

“Well, basically what Dr. Séralini did was he did the same feeding study that Monsanto did and published in the same journal eight years prior, and in that study, they [Monsanto] used the same number of rats, and the same strain of rats, and came to a conclusion there was no [tumor] problem. So all of a sudden, eight years later, when somebody [Seralini] does that same experiment, only runs it for two years rather than just 90 days, and their data suggests there are problems, [then] all of a sudden the number of rats is too small? Well, if it’s too small to show that there’s a [tumor] problem, wouldn’t it be too small to show there’s no problem? They already said there should be a larger study, and it turns out the European Commission is spending 3 million Euros to actually do that Séralini study again, run it for two years, use 50 or more rats and look at the carcinogenicity. So they’re actually going to do the full-blown cancer study, which suggests that Séralini’s work was important, because you wouldn’t follow it up with a 3 million Euro study if it was a completely worthless study.”

Boom.

I can just hear Monsanto felons gibbering: “Well, we the biotech industry people published our study. We used 10 rats and we used the Sprague-Dawley strain. And that was fine. It was especially fine because our study showed GMOs were safe. But then this guy Seralini comes along and does the same study with the same kind of rat and same number of rats, and he discovers tumors. That’s not fine. That’s very bad. He…he…used the wrong rats…yeah…and he didn’t use enough rats. He’s a faker. Well, I mean, we used the same kind of rat and same number of rats, but when we did the experiment, we were Good, and Seralini was Bad. Do you see?”

Yes, the mists are clearing and things are coming into focus.

Any comments, Monsanto? I’d be happy to pass them along to Michael Hansen.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Obama: one if by land, two if by sea, three if by metadata

Obama: one if by land, two if by sea, three if by metadata

by Jon Rappoport

January 18, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

In his Friday speech, Obama ignored the essence of the FISA Court, the secret body that’s rubber-stamped warrants to do surveillance for the past 35 years.

Most of these requests for warrants come from NSA and the FBI, and only government attorneys may appear before the Court, none of whose decisions are made public. Therefore, the Court is a de facto piece of the Executive Branch, and as such its existence violates the separation of powers principle of the Constitution.

One of Snowden’s documents revealed that FISA had approved a blanket warrant requiring Verizon to make available, to NSA, records of all daily phone calls in its system.

No, President Obama said nothing about this. Instead, he led off his speech on the NSA and national security with these words:

“At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee, born out of the Sons of Liberty, was established in Boston. And the group’s members included Paul Revere. At night, they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America’s early patriots.”

Paul Revere as a metaphor for NSA spying.

Yes, it’s not widely known that Paul was a Peeping Tom. He had a mental disorder. He was compulsively sneaking into houses of the colonists in Boston and watching them read by candlelight.

Paul also hung around local meat markets swatting flies and eavesdropping on conversations.

He loitered in saloons, stood outside churches on Sundays to pick up juicy bits of gossip, steamed open letters, and quizzed blacksmiths on what their customers were jabbering about. He stole recipes for Thanksgiving dinner from Indians.

If only he’d had 30,000 employees working for him, he could have blanketed the 13 colonies.

The NSA is spying on 300 million innocent Americans. There is that difference between it and the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Just a small point.

Who’s writing the President’s speeches? Is he trying to make the coronated leader of the free world look as ridiculous as possible? And is Obama even reading the words before he steps to the podium?

“Hey, Cody, this piece about Paul Revere? I know we don’t teach history anymore in this country, but you took it way too far. It doesn’t even make sense. Oh, what the hell, who’ll notice it?”

This weekend, you’ll see pundits on the news talk shows debating whether the President proposed significant enough changes in NSA spying methods. Did he go far enough? On the other side: can American still protect itself against terror attacks?

This is the puppet presentation, framing the conversation in the wrong terms and then taking off from there to see who’s more right.

It’s like mounting a discussion on whether $700 trillion or $800 trillion should be the debt ceiling of the US government.

The Matrix Revealed

Here’s a reasonable takeaway from Obama’s speech: politicians lie, and they don’t learn how the moment they’re elected to office for the first time, because that doesn’t give them a long enough lead-in to be good at it.

They ARE liars. They know how to do it, from way back. They’re practiced. Gaining political office is just another opportunity to ply their trade.

It’s a step up. Instead of merely lying as the owner of an oil company or a baseball team, or as a lawyer in an office, or as a community organizer on the street, they can now do it on a larger stage.

Many of them feel they’re born to politics. And that’s why. They lie, and they lie about lying, and what they lie about when, for example, they move into the Oval Office is much more important.

“I thought I was telling whoppers back in Chicago (Little Rock, Whittier, Crawford), but this is really something. Now I’m not just saying black is white, I’m saying it’s glowingly, blindingly white.”

The news talk show I’d like to see this weekend would pose the following question: how would you compare, say, a king claiming God has given him a divine right to rule vs. President Obama saying we have nothing to worry about in this, the Surveillance State?

It’s important to know the ultimate rationalization politicians give themselves when they’re lying about everything all the time. It is:

“The people, the public are animals, biological machines, and they roam the countryside, and they’re very, very dangerous, and they must be controlled. They’re operating on faulty programming, and the only solution is giving them new and better programming. Meanwhile, we have to lie to them, to keep them reasonably pacified.”

Welcome to Democracy. First, for about five minutes, as the ink was drying on the freshly signed Constitution, there was a Republic. Then, men began asking, “How can I twist this thing and lie all the time?” Democracy was the consequence.

In order to make Democracy stick, we have the Surveillance State, and presidents who give it cover.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Obama speech: Miller Lite commercial: less filling, tastes great

Obama speech: Miller Lite commercial: less filling, tastes great

by Jon Rappoport

January 17, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

Obama just made a Miller Lite speech, to calm fears that NSA spying is a bother and a problem. Not so. All is well.

He’ll cut down the NSA practice of spying on people connected to people connected to people of interest. The three layers will become only two.

This is great, except that NSA is already spying on everybody. Three, two, 16? What difference does it make?

For the “tastes great” part, the President reminded us that NSA snoops are just regular folks. They’re our “friends and neighbors,” he said.

I know. That’s the point. There are cold-eyed androids among us.

For the “less filling,” Obama proposed that the all-encompassing metadata of NSA-captured phone calls shouldn’t be held by the government. That’s bad. Instead, the phone companies themselves should hold it, and then let the government look at it.

Whew. What a relief.

We all know NSA will do whatever it wants to, in order to keep spying on us. Trim their capability a little over here, they’ll go over there and do the same thing from another vector.

That’s what the Surveillance State is all about.

Obama also jammed in a sideswipe at Snowden, just to keep the traitor narrative alive. And to let us know stealing State secrets is a heinous crime.

You see, the State can steal our information, but we can’t steal its information. That’s the basic principle.

But to quote our leader from an earlier speech(es), “We’re all in this together.”

I guess it depends on what the meaning of “together” is.

NSA won’t bother parsing that. They’ll just keep on watching and compiling and collating. Being Peeping Tom Central is in their blood. “To keep us safe.”

As the pollsters go to the phones and gauge public reaction to Obama’s speech, I have a suggestion. Ask, “Do you believe the President was being forthright and honest?” And then ask, “Okay now, do you REALLY believe he was being forthright and honest?”

The Matrix Revealed

And if NSA wants to repair its public image, I have more suggestions. Since you boys are spying on everybody all the time, release the following information to the press:

Conversations involving politicians, at all levels, on the subject of hookers and underage sex targets;

Elite pedophile rings;

Communications (military, intelligence, DOJ, State Dept., White House) re what really happened in Benghazi, what really happened in the Fast&Furious Op;

Brokerage house/banker/billionaire manipulation of the stock market;

Behind the scenes lies among the high-echelon execs at Monsanto.

Just for starters.

Obviously, you have all this info. Release it now. Prove you’re on our side.

What? All those people aren’t your targets?

We are?

Oh.

Gotta go. My refrigerator just told me the toaster said I put hemp butter on my toast this morning. It’s an indicator I could have two tons of pot in my garage.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

NY State Senator says: psych eval for all little children

NY state senator says: psych eval for all little children

by Jon Rappoport

January 17, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

It’s Senate Bill A8186-2013.

It’s been referred to the education committee twice, most recently a week ago. NY State Senator Margaret Markey (wikipedia) introduced it in 2013.

Previously, Markey won a few minutes of fame for introducing a bill that would stop all restaurants from using salt in their meals.

A8186 requires all public schoolchildren in NY to have two health examinations in elementary grades and two in secondary grades. These exams must include a psychological evaluation, which certifies “that the child is mentally fit to permit attendance at [public] school.”

No certificate, no school.

Aside from the fact that this psych exam is invasive and potentially disturbing to a child as young as five, and aside from the fact that it violates privacy considerations, it’s bogus down to its core, because psychology isn’t a science and never was.

Psychology is, to put it politely, a bunch of morons deciding what mental health is all about.

Using high-sounding terminology, these professionals label patients with conditions, none of which are based on defining physical tests. No blood, urine, or saliva tests. No genetic tests. No brain scans.

“Mental health” itself is a linguistic artifact, and bears no relation to life, energy, curiosity, creativity. It’s a phantasmagorical standard, designed to draw in patients.

Attaching psychologists to schools is about as useful as attaching barnacles and mold to a ship.

Historically, as the concept of sin weakened its hold on the population, “new scientists” stepped into the breach with categories of “mental disorders.”

“You’re not bad, you’re ill.”

Here’s the sticking point. Psychologists aren’t entirely stupid. They rely on mental-disorder labels that, to a certain extent, mirror human behavior. For example, a child who is sad and lonely is slapped with a diagnosis of “clinical depression.”

The fact is, the child is lonely and sad, and the possible reasons are many. But none of them implies a Condition called clinical depression. There is no Condition.

Researchers, allied with pharmaceutical interests, have trotted out a catch-all term to explain so-called mental disorders: “chemical imbalance” in the brain. The drug companies then supply the drugs that are said to correct the imbalance. Profits soar.

This is non-scientific lying compounded. Researchers have never proved there is a normal baseline for brain chemistry. How then could they have established what an imbalance is?

Can a child have problems? Can he be in trouble? Can he be trouble to other children? Of course. Any reasonably intelligent adult can spot these things. But again, this has nothing to do with a Condition.

And a psych eval conducted by a psychologist on a five-year old, to determine whether the child will be allowed to go to school? Absurd.

You would be much closer to the truth saying a psychologist who is part of that system is crazy, than saying a little boy or girl has a Condition.

The Matrix Revealed

So what’s going on with politicians who are trying to impose psychology and psychiatry on children (and adults)? Most politicians are merely ill-informed, and they’re putting their faith in this pseudoscience in the same way that people put their faith in a self-appointed priest class that claims it is the worshiper’s only connection to God.

Politicians, of course, always look for answers that make government larger and more intrusive, because it is government to which a politician is ultimately loyal.

But there are other political animals who are more aware. They understand that the real issue is control. They want to be able to hijack freedom and place populations under the gun.

They want the right to say a dissident, a rebel, an outsider, a critic, someone “who is different” is a threat. And they want to back that up with treatment. Which means re-education, indoctrination, and debilitating drugs.

A kinder, gentler face on the old Soviet psychiatric system.

“…in the disputes between the East and West concerning the Russian opponents of the Soviet regime… [m]any dissidents went to lunatic asylums and were treated as mentally sick. Western doctors and the press accused Soviet doctors of being blind instruments of the regime and of having broken the solemn oath of their calling. The Russian doctors thought the West had gone mad in reproaching their behavior. For them, anyone who opposed such an efficient police power must be mentally disturbed. In their view, only those who had what Seneca called Libido morienti (the death wish) would dare to provoke the State. The Russian doctors were convinced that they were undertaking a humanitarian mission by placing the opponents of the regime in asylums and thereby reducing their aggression–the only hope for their survival. To reduce the outstanding to mediocrity was always a medical and human duty in a state where mediocrity had the better chance of survival.” — “Man: The Fallen Ape” by Branko Bokun

Why wait until adulthood to impose that system? Why not start early, with a five-year old, whose mind can be tinkered with by professionals?

Understand, if it isn’t clear already, that the government, through licensing, enables and certifies a monopoly on the mind, by stating that psychology and psychiatry are officially approved methods.

What right does government have to make that claim? It has no right.

It has no rational reason to be in that business.

But a politician abandons rationality as soon as he gets a whiff of the power that government affords.

It’s how a nobody immediately becomes a somebody.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Snowden and the final purpose of the Surveillance State

by Jon Rappoport

January 16, 2014

(To join our email list, click here.)

I’ve written much about Edward Snowden, his back-story, and the questions that surround him (full archive here). But here, I want to discuss the aftermath, because no matter how you view Snowden and what he has done, he is now being used as a symbol.

Take a hero who has broken through the veil of secrecy, who’s stolen the golden eggs from the goose’s eyrie, who’s escaped…

And put him through the meat grinder of the press.

Raise him up, put him down, praise him, excoriate him, threaten him, isolate him, adore him, and sooner or later he begins to fade from view.

His profile, his public persona has been chopped up so many different ways into so many disparate pieces that, eventually, the symbol of him no longer carries any real force.

Meanwhile, the NSA and the Surveillance State continue on. They weather the storm. Despite the exploding scandal and the fall-out, and even though certain modes of collecting information may be reduced, new strategies emerge.

Therefore, the Surveillance State becomes even more powerful than it was.

Snowden rocked the boat, but the boat has been repaired. It sails on with even greater assurance.

And regardless of how the public responds to Snowden and the NSA, it is only a partial response, because the true aims of the Surveillance State are a mystery to most people.

Surveillance is coming at us from all angles. Chips, drones, TSA checkpoints, smart meters, back-doored electronic products, video cameras, spying home appliances; our phone calls and emails and keystrokes and product purchases are recorded.

The government and its allied corporations will know whatever they want to know about us.

What then?

What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?

Smart meters give us one clue. Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.

Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.

National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans require every citizen to be assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.

Surveillance inevitably leads to placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”

As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”

Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”

Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.

This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.

As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.

In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and them.

We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We see (planned) famine. We are told about desperate shortages and a frying Earth. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.

The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.

On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only humane and acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.

Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.

This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.

The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.

Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.

An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.

Surveillance; planning; control.

The surveillance is expanded, not because we are constantly under threat and must be protected from terrorists, but because we can then be labeled and entered on to 10 billion squares of the game board, to be moved around or held in place.

This is the vision.

It isn’t ours. It never was. But we are not consulted.

The Matrix Revealed

Instead we are made witness to watershed events: the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the 2001 assault on the Trade Center and the Pentagon. These ops paralleled the unleashing of better and more far-ranging methods of surveillance.

We are profiled down to the threads on our clothing and DNA in our cells. But what is our profile of the technocrats and their bosses?

They are divorced from human life. They live in a vacuum. They take pleasure from that vacuum.

In 1982, I interviewed Bill Perry, who had just left his job as PR chief at Lawrence Livermore Labs, where scientists design nuclear weapons. Perry had been given the kind of job PR people long for. But one day, when he passed the desk of a researcher and listened to his complaints about budget limitations, Perry said, “Listen, America already has the means to blow up the whole planet eight times. What more do you need?”

The researcher looked up at him with a genuinely puzzled expression. He said, “You don’t understand, Bill. This is a problem in physics.”

In the same detached sense, the technocrats who want to calculate and direct our future, move by move, minute by minute, see us as components of a complex and very interesting problem.

Yes, they indeed expect to exercise power and control. But they also live in an abstraction. They deal their answers from that realm. They exercise cool passion. They see, for example, that not every single twitch of thought of every person on earth is yet mapped, so they want to finish constructing the means by which they can chart those “missing elements.” They want to complete the formula.

They view their research as a wholly natural implication of the mathematics they can manipulate. They swim in technology and they want to extend its architecture. To abandon the program would be tantamount to denying their own intelligence. They climb the mountain because it is there.

Exit From the Matrix

They do perceive that one factor does not fit their algorithms: the free individual. It’s the wild card.

Therefore, they are compelled to analyze freedom and break it down into DNA functions and brain processes. They assume, because they must, that the free individual is an illusory idea that flows from some older configuration of synaptic transmission, at a time in our evolution when we needed it. But now, they suppose, the engineering of human activity and thought has superseded such quaint notions. Now we all can be tracked, traced, and studied on a different and wider scale. Now we can be seen for what we really are: a hive.

Therefore, we must be instructed, within tight limits, about our various functions.

I’m reminded of a statement attributed to Nobel Laureate, Alfred Szent-Giorgi: “In my search for the secret of life, I have ended up with atoms and electrons, which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am retracing my steps…”

Today’s technocrats will admit no such disappointment or existential crisis. They flourish with great optimism as they design the future world and its single society. If they run out of pieces of their puzzle to study, they’ll try to track the motion of every atom and electron and quark in the universe. They’ll delight in it.

Knowing all this, we know the terms of the war we are in.

The Central Planners have an equation: “free=uncontrolled=dangerous.”

By the gross terms of that equation, they lump us in with thugs and murderers and terrorists. They even see the normal functioning of the brain as a threat, as an intrinsically defective process, and they have long since decided that organ must be corrected with drugs and electromagnetic interventions.

We, on the other hand, must assert, in every way possible, that freedom is real and inviolable, and we must back that up with our actions.

When individual freedom is no longer discussed in great depth by people who should know better, when it is left to wither on the vine, many programs and structures are built to take its place. But if freedom seems like a weak response to the Surveillance State and its goals, remember this: all the State power I’ve been enumerating is organized to curtail freedom, stop it, end it, make it obsolete. That enormous effort wouldn’t be necessary if freedom were merely a passing fancy. It isn’t. It’s an eternal force.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

The 36 mysterious days of Edward Snowden

The 36 mysterious days of Edward Snowden

by Jon Rappoport

January 15, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

First, a comment about the number of documents Snowden took from the NSA. Estimates have ranged from 20,000 to 1.2 million. Snowden explicitly stated he had vetted all of them, to make sure their release would aid transparency, his goal, rather than harm individuals.

Whether the number is 20,000 or 1.2 million, it’s impossible to accept that Snowden carefully perused each doc. If you want to test this out, go to your local library and read 20,000 pages of anything. Never mind making notes. Just get to the end of it.

All right, let’s move on to the timeline of Snowden’s mysterious 36 days and explore what it means for the NSA, the smartest, largest, richest spy agency in the world. (The source for this timeline is The Guardian.)

May 20, 2013: Snowden arrives in Hong Kong from Hawaii. He’s just taken medical leave from the NSA. This is not troubling to his employer, despite the fact that, as AFP now reports, Snowden worked briefly at the US Embassy in New Delhi (2010) and abruptly left India, citing medical problems on that occasion as well.

Both times, Snowden didn’t seek medical help in the country in which he was employed.

June 1, 2013: Three reporters connected with The Guardian—Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras—fly from New York to Hong Kong, and begin their week-long interview of Snowden. If this raises red flags, it doesn’t lead to intercepting Snowden.

June 5, 2013: The Guardian publishes its first article containing NSA leaks. The next three days see more NSA revelations, but there is no mention of Snowden.

June 9: The Guardian goes public about Snowden for the first time. According to Reuters, the NSA started an “urgent search” for Snowden several days before June 9—perhaps as early as June 1.

June 10: Snowden checks out of his hotel, but remains in Hong Kong. The US intelligence apparatus still can’t find him.

June 12: The South China Post publishes an interview with Snowden, who says he’ll stay in Hong Kong until he’s told he has to go.

June 14: The UK Home Office orders airlines to deny passage to Snowden, if he tries to come to the UK.

June 20, 21: The Guardian publishes more top-secret documents from the Snowden cache.

June 23: Free and unencumbered, Snowden flies to Moscow with Wikileaks’ Sarah Harrison.

During this entire period (May 20-June23), the NSA, and other agencies of the US government, have been unable to locate Snowden?

They’ve been unable to get hold of, or disable, his famous four laptops, which presumably contain all the documents he took from the NSA? Instead, Snowden transfers the documents to Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong, hides out successfully, and makes his flight to Moscow.

The Matrix Revealed

You can attribute all this, if you want to, to the sheer incompetence and stupidity of the entire US intelligence community.

There are other possibilities, if you take into account the fact that all intelligence personnel are trained to lie and deceive. It’s their staple.

Perhaps the NSA was aware of Snowden, as he was taking the documents, and they embedded a host of false trails and lies in his cache.

Perhaps some greater and more damaging revelations about the NSA were on the verge of exploding, and Snowden’s leaks functioned to conceal much deeper harm to NSA.

Perhaps the CIA, Snowden’s former employer, was still his employer, in their ongoing turf war with the NSA. And the CIA helped protect Snowden between May 20 and June 23, when he flew to Moscow.

In any case, believing that the NSA and other US intelligence operatives were unable to find Snowden in Hong Kong is like trying to eat metal.

It just doesn’t go down.

Snowden’s mysterious 36 days of freedom, as well as other elements of Snowden’s questionable bio, which I’ve covered in previous articles (see [ref1], [ref2], [ref3], [ref4], [ref5], [ref6], [ref7], and [ref8]), suggests the NSA-Snowden saga is more than it seems to be.

And don’t forget, despite the uproar about Snowden’s revelations, so far the NSA and the Surveillance State remain fully functional. The NSA’s reputation may have taken a large hit, but their work goes on unabated.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

The virtual world is being built: refining the Matrix

The virtual society is being built: refining the Matrix

by Jon Rappoport

January 14, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

Research on simulating the human brain is marching forward. Corporations are attempting to build devices that talk to their users in a “realistic” fashion.

These computers would continuously update profiles of their owners, seeking to read their emotional states and preferences and respond to them.

The old phrase, “the machine age,” takes on new meaning. Sellers are betting that consumers want machines that understand them. This bet has a corollary: human to human interaction is just too complicated and unpredictable.

Instead, machines can be programmed to reflect their users. Narcissism wins.

“I’m your machine. I’m not here to criticize you or challenge you. I’m here to be like you and serve your needs. I’m here to talk to you in ways you understand and appreciate.”

This is a far cry from the robotic telephone operator who puts you on hold for 20 minutes. This is friendship. This is happiness.

There’s one major stumbling block. The emotional range of an alive and alert human is too wide, too subtle, and too varied to embed in a machine that is supposed to stand in as a friend and companion.

The response to that problem is: reduce the range of the human user.

This campaign has been underway for some time. Watch movies, watch television shows and video games, listen to popular music, listen to politicians. It’s all about reduction. Simplification. Lowest common denominators.

Observe the slogans of social movements. If you have the stomach for it, go into a public school and watch what teachers are doing to your children.

Check out New Age-type spiritual movements. Notice how they tend to sell oversimplified slogans and encourage focusing on empty generalizations.

You see, the individual is too complex for this new machine age. His range of feeling and thought must be diminished.

Eventually, he’ll interact with a sophisticated talking computer and feel right at home. He’ll believe his emotions are being mirrored and appreciated.

Reduction. Never proliferation.

If you’ve ever studied infomercials, you know the whole business is based on back-end sales. It’s not the product you buy for $19.95, it’s the products they can hook you into after you spend the $19.95.

So it is with Google Glass. It’s all about the apps that’ll be attached.

Glass gives the wearer short-hand reality as he taps in. That’s what it’s for. The user is “on the go.” If he’s driving his Lexus and suddenly thinks about Plato, he’s not going to download the full text of The Republic to mull while he’s crashing into big trucks on the Jersey Turnpike. He’s going to take a shorthand summary. A few lines.

People want boiled-down info while they’re on the move. Reduction. The “essentials.”

This is perfectly in line with the codes of the culture. Ads, quick-hitter seminars, headlines, two-sentence summaries, ratings for products, news with no context. Stripped-down.

Well, here is a look into right now. A student at Stanford is developing a Google app that “reads other people.”

From SFGate, 8/26, “Google Glass being designed to read emotions”: “The [emotion-recognition] tools can analyze facial expressions and vocal patterns for signs of specific emotions: Happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, and more.” (the SFGate article is also here with videos and images). (and on WIRED Magazine here).

This is the work of Catalin Voss (twitter), an 18-year-old student at Stanford and his start-up company, Sension.

“So you’re wearing Google Glass at a meeting and it checks out the guy across the table who has an empty expression on his mug and, above your right eye, you see the word ‘neutral.’ Now he smiles, and the word ‘happy’ appears.”

This information is supposed to guide you in your communication. The number of things that can go wrong? Count the ways, if you’re able. I’m personally looking forward to that guy across the table saying, “Hey, you, schmuck with the Glass, what is your app saying about me now? Angry?” That should certainly enhance the communication.

Or a husband, just back from his 12-mile morning bike ride, enters his Palo Alto home, wearing Glass, of course, and as he looks at his wife, who is sitting at the kitchen table reading a book, he sees the word “sad” appear above his eye. “Honey,” he says, recalling the skills he picked up in a 26-minute webinar, “have you been pursuing a negative line of thinking?”

She slowly gazes up at the goggle-eyed monster in his spandex and grasshopper helmet, rises from her chair and tosses a plate of hot eggs in his face. YouTube, please!

But wait. There’s more. The Glass app is also being heralded as a step forward in “machine-human relationships.” With recognition services like Google Now and Siri, when computers and human users talk to each other, the computers will be able to respond not only to the content of the user’s words, but also to his tone, his feelings.

This should be a real marvel. The emotion-recognition tool is all about reduction. It shrinks human feelings to simplistic labels. Therefore, what machines say back to humans will be something to behold.

Machine version of NLP, anyone?

The astonishing thing about this new app is that many tech people are so on-board with it. In other words, they believe that human feelings can be broken down and worked with on an androidal basis, with no loss incurred. These people are already boiled down, cartoonized.

You think you’ve observed predictive programing in movies? That’s nothing. The use of apps like this one will help bring about a greater willingness on the part of humans to reduce their own thoughts and feelings to…FIT THE SPECS OF THE MACHINES AND THE SOFTWARE.

Count on it.

This isn’t really about machines acting more like humans. It’s about humans acting like machines.

The potential range of human emotions is extraordinary. Our language, when used with imagination, actually extends that range. It’s something called art.

Exit From the Matrix

No matter how subtle the machines and their emotion-recognition algorithms become, there will always be a wide, wide gap between what they produce and the expression of humans.

The most profound kind of mind control seeks to eliminate that gap by encouraging us to mimic technology. That means people will think and feel less, and what they think and feel will mean less.

The machines won’t say, “I’m sorry, I can’t identify that emotion, it’s too complex.” They’ll say “sad” or “happy” or “upset” or whatever they have to say to give the appearance that they’re on top of the human condition.

The Matrix Revealed

Eventually, significant numbers of people will tailor their self-awareness to what the machines point to, name, label, declare.

Thus, inventing reality.

The wolf becomes a lamb, the lamb becomes a flea.

And peace prevails. You can wear it and see with it.

Eventually, realizing that Glass is too obvious and obnoxious and bulky, companies will develop something they might call Third Eye, a chip the size of half a grain of rice, made flat, and inserted under the skin of the forehead.

Perfect. Invisible. Of course, cops will have them. And talk to them.

“I’m parked at the corner of Wilshire and Westwood. Suspicious male standing outside the Harmon Building.”

“I see him. Searching relevant data.”

Which means any past arrests, race, conditions noted in his medical records, tax status, questionable statements he’s made in public or private, significant known associates, group affiliations, etc. And present state of mind.

The cop: “Recommendation?”

“Passive-aggressive, right now he’s peaking at 3.2 on the Hoover Bipolar scale. Bring subject into custody for general questioning.”

“Will do.”

No one will wonder why, because such analysis resonates with the vastly reduced general perception of what reality is all about.

People mimic how machines see them and adjust their human thinking accordingly.

Hand and glove, key and lock. Wonderful.

As the cop is transporting the suspect to the station, Third Eye intercedes: “Sorry, Officer Crane, it took me a minute to dig further. Suspect is an important business associate of (REDACTED). This is a catch and release. Repeat, catch and release. Printing out four backstage passes to Third Memorial Rolling Stones concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Apologize profusely, give subject the tickets, and release him immediately.”

“I copy.”

“This arrest and attendant communication is being deleted…now.”

Here is another long-term trend that’s conspired to produce humans who want to interact with machines in a virtual world: child-entitlement.

Give a child what he wants when he wants it. Every time. Become a slave to your child’s immediate needs. (And when you’re exhausted from that routine, just set him up in front of the television set, where he can experience fast-cutting shows that entrain his brain to accept a shortened attention span. More reduction.)

It’s easy. And 30 years from now, a child won’t even want his parents, because his companion, friend, and guide, his personal machine, a little cube he carries around with him, will understand him so much better.

“Good morning, Jimmy. It’s me again, your friend Oz. How are you feeling? Happy, sad? Let me do a quick scan. I see you’re a little sad…”

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com