The Big Lie

The cultural trope of the dogged reporter in rumpled suit with a large view camera and fedora with a press card tucked in the hat band is an illusion that many of us still labor under.  Somewhere in our subconscious, we link this trope to the blow-dried puffballs that read teleprompters and who haven't been in the field researching for years, if ever.

In recent months, there has been somewhat of a backlash against this kind of "news" reading, with more and more folks realizing just how manipulated the audience is.  Our perceptions of the world at large are completely controlled by massive "information" corporations, many of which share board members and shareholders.

These corporations spend little or nothing on actual research.  They depend almost entirely on wire feeds like AP or Reuters that "gather" the news and distribute "stories" to paid accounts like FOX, CNN, and any of the other alphabet outlets.  One might notice the occasional difference in which "stories" lead off the broadcasts, but overall, there is almost zero difference in content between any of the outlets.

The local affiliates do some news gathering.  They have "reporters" and cameramen who run around in satellite trucks beaming news conferences from city hall, or images of chalk outlines and crime-scene tape.  This is hardly news, but it keeps the rubes happy and buying advertisers' products.  Pays well, too, if you're a puffball.

Few people stop to consider that ALL news is fake, though.  All of it at all times in all places.  It may be reporting actual events, but there is a catch:

The second a cameraman starts recording, you are only seeing what the cameraman (and his producer/reporter) what you to see.  He cannot possibly, nor does he try, to record the entire context of the scene.  He is busily getting interesting pictures and "coverage" of the scene, but it is only his perspective - influenced by his desire to get noticed and advance up the food chain - further influenced by the producer/reporter's orders to "get this".

The producer/reporter, in turn, is looking for a certain angle that will get him or her noticed so they can move up the food chain - perhaps go to national.  So they are looking for the most sensational aspects of the "story", a hook that will get attention.

So far, two people have had direct influence over what we the audience can see and learn about the "story".

Back at the news room, the Executive Producer and Assignments Editor are using corporate guidelines to decide what stories get aired, and which angle of the story they want to show.  They give direct orders to the producer/reporter - in many cases even before they arrive at the scene - on what the Management wants to see.  Is it a crime involving drugs that would support the official narrative of the Drug War?  What races are involved in the story and can that be spun into narrative support?  What genders are involved, and can that be spun?  Even the section of town - poor vs. rich areas - influence whether and how a story gets reported.

By now, dozens of people have influenced a story, and it hasn't even gotten to editing.  At this point, the producer/reporter will scribble a few notes, being sure to get all of Management's agenda points in, and then record a stand-up.  Even for live reports, this is not necessarily done at the scene, and can even be separated by large amounts of time from the actual footage at the scene.  In some cases (that I have actually been involved with) the cameraman is the only person on the scene and the stand-up is done much later after Management decides what angle they want to show.  The producer/reporter was not even at the scene and can be manufacturing a story out of whole cloth, choosing pictures that roughly match the "story".

At this point, the editor takes over.  The footage and producer/reporter's stand-up are assembled by someone making additional choices about what looks good, cuts together well and adds to the narrative.  The "story" is given a time slop of, say, thirty seconds, so the editor must figure out how to cram as much (or little) information in the slot given.

The finished story is reviewed by the producer/reporter, who may make changes.  It is then passed by the Executive Producer, who checks the story for "relevance" and ensures that it does not violate any of the political dictates of Management.

The finished video is cured for air and a "wrap-around" narrative is written for the puffballs to read off the teleprompters.  Occasionally, the anchor puffballs may kill a story, usually just to exert their authority, because they are considered part of the Editorial Staff.

By now, clearly a great many people have influenced a "story" before we even get to the Advertisers, who exert an inordinate amount of influence over content.  Certainly, any stories that are detrimental to their products or company are killed, but they are known to influence stories touch on the corporations' political agendas, as well.

If a story has passed what is now hundreds of influencing forces, it gets aired, where the audience decides how much importance and credibility they place on the "story".  The audience reaction - whether tongue-clucking or rioting - has been carefully contrived through multiple layers of "gate-keeping". It is a science of manipulation.

Clearly, it is ALL fake news.  Any given "story" may have varying degrees of "truth" in it, but from the moment the camera starts recording until the light and sound impedes on our senses, the process of "reporting" news is designed to remove "truth" and insert "agenda".  The news we watch is no more "real" than a blockbuster superhero movie.

If we all approached the media with the understanding that it is ALL FAKE NEWS, we would be a long way down the road to protecting ourselves from manipulation science.  Of course, the best option is to turn it all off completely, but this is a rather difficult option, since the media has infused vast amounts of our lives.

Being aware of the vast pressure of agendas on every frame of video and every word of narrative will erect a wall of defense against manipulation.  Additionally, being aware that manipulation is coming from every direction all the time is another line of defense.  Even a 24/7, live-streaming webcam cannot show us truth, since it can never show what is behind the camera.

IT IS ALL FAKE NEWS.  The image at the head of this column of an ABC report faking a crime scene report is not the exception, it is the rule.

An End To End Times

 Ah, the apocalypse is finally upon us.  Been a long time in coming.  Frankly, I'm bored to tears with all the hype about December 21, and I'm ready for the whole thing to fizzle out and go away, becoming yet another cultural footnote in the long history of end-of-the-world scenarios.

Why the obsession with Earth's demise?  If we collectively put in a fraction of the effort cleaning up our nest as we do into awaiting its end, we'd have a pretty nice place to live.  In the past 150 years, it's become almost cliche to predict the final moments of our dear planet.  The number of preachers who have and continue to predict end dates based on obscure math formulae in the Book of Daniel, or the appearance of a red calf or miraculous barley, or the restart of the Mayan calendar, or various and sundry signs and wonders that have occured throughout history and will continue.

Ultimately, whether it is the meshiach, the 12th imam or the second coming, billions of people are hellbent both on doing nothing to prevent the perceived events and everything they can to help them along.  The complete incongruity of this line of thought is a perfect example of Orwell's 'doublethink,' where a person can hold completely contradictory beliefs without seeing the foundational illogic of it.  Talk about cognitive dissonance.

What it all boils down to is this: many religions are morally questionable and internally inconsistent.  There is a Creator who gives life and wants love, and even commands that we not kill, while at the same time ordering the wholesale slaughter of people on deeply questionable grounds.

These religions have no qualms about undervaluing the lives of non-believers while proclaiming to worship a live-affirming belief system.  Can there be any more screwed up thing than that?

Simply put, the moral codes of these religions are so inconsistent that they must appeal to a final judgement to vindicate their immorality.  In other words, the ends justify the means.  This core contradiction in the major religions of the world can only be explained one way...they are control mechanisms established by elites to both divide humanity and thus weaken the masses, and to make us compliant with their agendas.

It is axiomatic that there is strength in numbers.  As individuals, we might be tempted to fight a single intruder in our house at 3am, but seven of them could be out of the question.  However, if we can get the seven intruders fighting amongst themselves, we have a good chance of success by making them expend their energy and concentration on each other.

We can see that strategy at work in the world today.  Certain self-appointed elites keep 7 billion people in line by simply agitating pre-installed antagonistic groups.  What's more absurd is that these fighting groups have hardly an iota's worth of difference between them.  Most current religions are monotheistic, share a similar code of conduct, and in several cases, have the same roots.  But because this group folds its hands to pray and that one opens them, we feel compelled to slaughter each other, and in so doing, ignore the real issues facing us.

In addition to this strangeness, a lot of these religions are based on personal revelations that cannot be proved and require adherents to take a 'leap of faith' if they want to follow along.  For the most part, people who hear voices are considered to be mentally compromised, but in the case of religion, those voices are the foundation of entire cultures.  We can never know what, if anything, they really heard, and in some cases we can't be sure the person hearing the voices even existed in the first place.

Suppose a charismatic leader stepped forward with a bunch of followers and some old manuscripts claiming that Nova Scotia was their ancestral home given to them by a bearded old man in the sky who only appeared and spoke to the leader.  Would you support their claim to the island?  Yet that is precisely what billions of Jews and Christians have done with a place called Israel (though thankfully the tide appears to be turning on that little fiasco).

Christians have been completely snowed into supporting this claim because they have been told that the existence of this country is a prerequisite for the second coming and final justification.  Not only does this neutralize any complaint about the murderous behavior of that 'nation', Christians actually support and encourage it in order to get their final justification.

The plot is pure genius, if it weren't so evil.

What it boils down to is that a significant number of people have been conned into actively supporting actions and events they earnestly believe will lead to the destruction of the Earth and the ultimate justification of their beliefs.  Does anyone else find this just a little disturbing?

On top of that, the belief in the violent end of civilization is based solely on the visions of some guy named John hanging out on an island a couple of thousand years ago.  There is absolutely no other proof or justification for these visions, other than John's claim (and the churches' support) that these visions were a personal message from god.

This brings us around to a calendar and December 21st.  A Meso-American culture called the Mayans (destroyed by Christians, by the way) devised a rather advanced and interesting circular calendar.  It is composed of 13 baktuns together spanning several thousand years.  Based solely on the supposition/theory that the 13th baktun ends on December 21st, an entire industry has sprung up promoting the idea that the world will come to a crashing halt this month.

Almost from the moment that Y2K passed uneventfully, the 2012 cult caught fire.  Despite the fact the creators of the calendar made no claim of end times in all their writings, billions of dollars have changed hands promoting this idea.  And no one seems to know where this idea originated.  It seems to have exploded whole cloth into the popular culture, complete with 'experts' and 'mystics' to back it up.

It's almost as if our civilization has had a self-destruct button built into it as a means to restart things if we humans get too out of hand.  One can perceive a hidden agenda to collapse our civilization if we get too close to achieving our full potential.  It's so effective that a great many humans believe whole-heartedly in some form of end-time scenario.  At the same time, this self-destruct feature includes ways to keep us divided and quibbling amongst ourselves so that we never achieve our potential.

It's so insidious, so diabolical and so effective that it can only be by design.  It's hard to conceive of any other way to explain it.

The worst part of all this is that it is so ingrained in our collective psyche that it is nearly impossible to extract.  If thousand-year-old prophesies of end times aren't enough, we manufacture new scenarios out of old calendars and cave paintings.  One way or another, we seem hell-bent on some form of destructive convulsion and we derive a strange pleasure from the idea.  It's the ultimate in collective masochism, which in itself implies some sadist feeding our peculiar bent.

It would be nice to think that on December 22nd, we could put all this stupidity behind us and move on, but that's unlikely.  More likely is that a new form of psychosis will rise up and take its place.  Whether it be meteors or aliens or holy men riding in on clouds, we don't seem to be able to look to the future with any sort of positive viewpoint.

Perhaps on December 22nd, we could start of movement to end all end times speculation and start focusing on cleaning up our nest.  Maybe we could see the follies of our ways, acknowledge the absurdity of desiring our destruction, and work towards extracting these unproductive memes from our cultures.

I'm not holding my breath.