Updates have been few and far between on this site for quite some time. Not because I haven’t been trying to find suitable material. Basically, the problem is this: my BS-detector has matured. Scepticism at the outset is actually a good thing.

Often I come across an article or video I would like to share; people send me stuff too, written by themselves or others. Upon closer inspection, however, errors or exaggerations abound. Many times this is due to the fact that the reporter of said material is somewhat of a newbie who has come across something that just blows their mind and feels duty-bound to inform others – immediately – never bothering to check if it is actually true or not. I used to be that way myself.

I’ve been a “conspiracy theory” consumer since the early 1990s and a “conspiracy theorist” web-writer/webmaster since the year 2000. A good chunk of what I believed in the early days of my indoctrination – let’s face it, that’s exactly what it is – has turned out to be wrong. So much so, that if I went back and re-read some of the material previously consumed, I would probably cringe in disgust every second page and not be able to finish.

The basic premise is sound, however. Conspiracy is a fact of nature. Animals and humans all conspire in some manner or other. Wolves are a good example. A raiding pack will march into another’s territory in a conspiracy to topple the alpha male, killing him and the other top dogs, to gain mating rights and larger hunting grounds. Sound familiar?

On occasion humans are more sophisticated than animals. We not only conspire, we weave incredibly detailed stories about how the other guy is conspiring against us. In an effort to persuade, data is cherry picked and fitted nicely into a plausible narrative according to a preconceived notion. As long as you have certain beliefs and dislikes in common, the story will be more believable. You’ll also be less inclined to question it.

I don’t want to make this into a long essay about the mentality of “conspiracy theorists.” The academics and the so-called “journalists” have already done it ad nauseam.

The bottom line is this: any story claims to present you with certain facts. Upon closer scrutiny, they either hold water or not. The idiom the “devil is in the details,” so sayeth Wikipedia, actually derives from an earlier one – “God is in the details”: expressing “the idea that whatever one does should be done thoroughly; i.e. details are important.”

I wholeheartedly agree with this, and try my best to incorporate it into all aspects of my life.

So should you…. And maybe these guys too. (Can you spot the BS in the details?)

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How bout this for a bonking helping of conspiratainment? Prepping up for a “Legitamate … protest [against] the Illuminazis sacrafice of children before the owl of moloch.” Pure gold .

DCBureau.org editor Joe Trento interviews the author of an important new book that examines a CIA-funded mosque in Munich, Germany, that was controlled by the most extreme elements in Islam. Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Ian Johnson’s book, A Mosque In Munich, tells how the CIA deliberately went into business with the pro-Nazi Muslim Brotherhood at the height of the cold war.

A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West

Time to Look at the New Heirs ala CIA

Sibel Edmonds - July 13, 2011

There is no point in wasting too many words and space rehashing what every media outlet has been reporting and recounting on the assassination of Afghan Heroin Kingpin Ahmed Wali Karzai. The US media began reporting on the Kingpin, his heroin network and operations, his shady deals and even shadier connections over two years ago. This is how it always goes when the relationship between Kingpins like Karzai starts souring with their masters in Langley:

For years, or actually decades, while the relationships are prosperous and mutually beneficial, these Kingpins are miraculously shielded from the media; here and abroad. No matter how much evidence and legitimate reports from even more legitimate sources come available you can’t get the media to even mention Kingpins like Karzai; that is, when the Langley bosses see that their assets surpass all the negative liabilities. On the other hand, once things sour, when those liabilities begin to surpass the asset and the profits, you’ll see the media rush and begin swarming around the no-longer-a-favorite Kingpin. Then comes a short period of silence, and after that Bam: You have an assassinated, murdered, suicide-d, or disappeared Old Kingpin case. Alas; no surprise there since this is how these Kingpins ultimately meet their end- this one ‘supposedly’ by the currently fashionable enemy: the Taliban. I promise you won’t be hearing a single word about this in a few days and forever-The Langley Way.

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Edwin Black - July 15, 2011

America’s pseudo-scientific crusade (during roughly the first half of the century) to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, biologically superior “master race” was a misguided 20th-century quest called eugenics. More than 27 states joined the shameful, decades-long utopian campaign to medically engineer racial supremacy.

But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial reparations to its surviving victims. Just how much North Carolina should pay is the subject of a historically wrenching debate, even as the state grapples with its budget deficit.

Eugenics was a fraudulent theory claiming that a better society could be created by eliminating “undesirable” human bloodlines, while promoting the “desirable” types. This dark crusade was waged by blinded progressives and do-gooders seeking utopia. In Greek, the word utopia means “nowhere.”

Race science sprang to life in the convulsive first decade of the 20th century, during which Asians, Eastern and Southern Europeans, Mexicans, Native Americans, blacks, and other ethnic groups flowed into U.S. cities, creating overcrowding. The intellectual, academic, scientific, and financial elite – many of them wealthy livestock breeders – believed better humans could be cultivated using the same techniques as a farmer would to create a better herd of cattle or field of wheat: eliminate the bad stock and proliferate the good.

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Maryn McKenna - July 13, 2011

A number of years ago, I was in New Delhi, at the end of an exhausting 18 hours in which I had torn around the city to watch a National Immunization Day. On those days — like a national holiday, with flags and banners and kids let out from school — tens of millions of children line up to stick out their tongues and receive the sugary drops that contain the vaccine that should protect them against polio.

The Indian government, along with the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the volunteer ground troops of Rotary International, has been organizing these days now for most of two decades, always coming closer to the goal of eradicating polio, never quite getting there. On this day, which occurred close to the end of weeks I had spent embedded with a WHO “STOP Polio” team, 135 million children were expected to queue in cities and suburbs and rich neighborhoods and slums. I spent the day with the team I had been observing, racing in a battered turquoise Tata from neighborhood to neighborhood, trying to understand where the campaign’s message was working and where its earnest persuasions had failed.

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Jeremy Scahill - July 12, 2011

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.

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Bob Adelmann - 13 July 2011

Debra Saunders complained that, because she is a woman, she wasn’t invited to the upcoming Bohemian Club meeting which begins this Thursday at the Bohemian Grove retreat center an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. Even if she were a man, she most likely still wouldn’t be invited as she is not a member of the “elite.”

Founded just after the Civil War by Henry “Harry” Edwards as a private camp where bohemians — artists and writers — could go to relax and recuperate from the rigors of the work-a-day world, over time the club’s membership evolved to include the rich and powerful, which now numbers over 2,400. The secrecy imposed about the annual meetings has led many to speculate as to the purposes and impact such a conclave might have on the nation’s affairs, especially when membership lists included every Republican President since 1923 (and some Democrats), many cabinet officials, and CEOs of large corporations including the major financial institutions. Military contractors, oil companies, banks (including the Federal Reserve) and national media all have high-ranking officials as either members or guests.

Despite the club’s motto: “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” (see club emblem, above left) plenty of business, both economic and political, has been done there. As noted in Peter Phillips’ dissertation for his doctorate in philosophy at the University of California, Davis, “The Bohemian Grove has long been a political networking point for Republicans … along with significant numbers of cabinet members and White House officials. [Dwight] Eisenhower gave a premier political address at the Grove in 1950, setting himself on the path to the presidency.”

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Mind control (also known as brainwashing, coercive persuasion, mind abuse, thought control, or thought reform) refers to a process in which a group or individual “systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person being manipulated.” The term has been applied to any tactic, psychological or otherwise, which can be seen as subverting an individual’s sense of control over their own thinking, behavior, emotions or decision making.

Theories of brainwashing and of mind control were originally developed to explain how totalitarian regimes appeared to succeed in systematically indoctrinating prisoners of war through propaganda and torture techniques. These theories were later expanded and modified, by psychologists including Margaret Singer, to explain a wider range of phenomena, especially conversions to new religious movements (NRMs). A third-generation theory proposed by Ben Zablocki focused on the utilization of mind control to retain members of NRMs and cults to convert them to a new religion. The suggestion that NRMs use mind control techniques has resulted in scientific and legal controversy. Neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Sociological Association have found any scientific merit in such theories.

Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code name for a covert, illegal CIA human research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. This official U.S. government program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects.

Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901–8 September 1967) was a twentieth-century Scottish-American psychiatrist. Cameron was involved in Project MKULTRA, United States Central Intelligence Agency’s research on torture and mind control.

Cameron lived and worked in Albany, New York, and was involved in experiments in Canada for Project MKULTRA, a United States based CIA-directed mind control program which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. He is unrelated to another CIA psychiatrist Alan Cameron, who helped pioneer psychological profiling of world leaders during the 1970s.

Naomi Klein states in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron’s research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing “a scientifically based system for extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture…Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron’s experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb’s earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture method.”

Mind control in popular culture: * The communal brainwashing of an entire model community via subliminal messages is a central theme in the 2009 novel Candor by Pam Bachorz. * In the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, the protagonist undergoes a scientific re-education process called the “Ludovico technique” in an attempt to remove his violent tendencies. * In his 1999 science fictin novel A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge introduces the themes of “mindrot” and controlled “Focus” later eplored in his 2006 novel. * In the novel Night of the Hawk by Dale Brown, the Soviets capture and brainwash U.S. Air Force Lieutenant David Luger, transforming him into the Russian scientist Ivan Ozerov. * In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949 before the popularization of the term “brainwashing”), the fictional totalitarian government of Oceania uses brainwashing-style techniques to erase nonconformist thought and rebellious personalities. * Vernor Vinge speculates on the application of technology to achieve brainwashing in his 2006 science fiction novel, Rainbows End (ISBN 0-312-85684-9), portraying separately the dangers of JITT (Just-in-time training) and the specter of YGBM (You gotta believe me).

Brainwashing became a common trope of films, television and games in the late twentieth century. It was a convenient means of introducing changes in the behavior of characters and a device for raising tension and audience uncertainty in the climate of Cold War and outbreaks of terrorism. * The film Brazil, depicts a fascist government similar to that in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The government controls a totalitarian society subconsciously by manipulation, intending to remain in control of the population. * Derren Brown: Mind Control (1999-2000), a television show on Channel 4

Rand Clifford - July 6, 2011

What are America’s powerful elite afraid of most? At or near the top of the list we might find: hemp, peace, freedom, and democracy. Mainstream rhetoric insists otherwise—especially regarding peace, freedom, and democracy (hemp is kind of that family secret), but how often does mainstream rhetoric have much, if anything, to do with truth?

In the most general sense, it could be truth that scares elite the most; however, listed above are four things offering simpler and more specific details—and let’s save hemp for last since its prohibition cuts so deeply into the other three.

Democracy

Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest. But that was simply elite window dressing from a long line of strategic liars.

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Number Six | 29 June 2011

As Eric Blair put it, in order for one to understand present events, those of yesteryear must be spelled out. Daily, the populace is bombarded with revisionist propaganda and so citizens must frequently instill themselves with past truths, so as not to forget.

Seeds of 19th Century Internationalism

What is called “globalism” today emanated from “internationalism” a century prior. The dictionary defines the latter as “principle cooperation among nations, for the promotion of their common good”. It is dated back to 1850 and culturally defined as accepting the arbitration of nation states by supranational international organizations.[1]

The best step toward unification of nation states has always been the legal advance: the arbitration of and submission to an international court. 17th century writer Émeric Crucé drew up the principal proposal. There are two general approaches to the unification of nations (regionalism): through force or by peace. Henry IV wanted to use force, just as Hitler, to unify Europe. Legalism is the slow, peaceful method (as witnessed in the European unification process, commencing in the 1940s). The 1899 Hague Conference was one of the early moves in setting up such a system.

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Esther Inglis-Arkell - Jul 1, 2011

Communes once dotted the United States. Their occupants believed that if we just gave up sexual prudery and practice free love, the world would be better. Others abhorred the use of animals as servants and tried to live without animal products or labor. Others fell in love with the concept of socialism. Yes, it was a crazy time in our nation’s history known as . . . the nineteenth century.
Is there a more alluring concept than a perfect world? There are thousands of fictional stories of perfect worlds emerging from destruction, perfect worlds that come to destruction, perfect worlds that are not all they seem, and perfect worlds looking in on less perfect ones. Utopia is the ultimate futuristic concept, which is strange because it’s been around as long as there have been societies. Sometimes, when science, opportunity, and morality are just right, people don’t just tell stories about utopia, they try to build it. There are eras full of such attempts. The nearest one to us right now was the fabled sixties, when people roamed the cities and countryside trying to use peace, love, and Nehru jackets to make the world a perfect place. Turns out, that had all been done before. The greatest age of American utopianism was in the 1800s. Communities and colonies sprang up all over the land, trying to make a model society. If any of them had worked out, we’d be perfect by now.

Fourier: The Socialist Leader of His Day

Charles Fourier was a Socialist before it was cool. He was also socialist after it was cool. Born in 1772, in France, he lived through the French Revolution and its after-effects, and emerged as a socialist writer in the early 1800s. Some of his more radical social ideas have only caught on recently, key among them being a defense of homosexuality and women’s rights. His economic ones, however, spread like wildfire in America right away. He believed that people should split into primarily-agrarian, self-sufficient communities, or ‘phalanxes,’ in which work was voluntary and all productions were the property of the entire group.

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Who Controls Who with What

Sibel Edmonds - July 01, 2011

The mega billionaires of the mega corporations directly influence and control the mega public servants – think from presidents down to presidents’ appointees. Some aptly refer to these ‘megas’ collectively as the shadow government. The mega billionaires of the mega corporations set up mega foundations to channel, centralize and control grassroots dissent and activism in order to shield and protect their mega interests. The little watchdogs turned lapdogs and activists turned puppets run the nitty gritty errands, and do their dirty work under the pretense of activism and watchdog-ism for their mega masters while they dream of becoming mega NGOs. If we get past the illusions, all that pretense, and the entire smoke and mirrors settings, we see a mega country ruled and run by these mega elites and their errand boys making mega profits and with every passing day becoming even more mega. But that is a big ‘if.’ Because the mega tentacles of these megas have also wrapped themselves tightly around educational channels and media outlets – coercing them into producing mega lies and more illusions.

Have you had enough mega? I have. I am sick and tired of fighting megas everywhere and feeling like Don Quixote day in and day out. Whether it is elected representatives being bought out by the megas, thus mainly representing the megas, or, mini megas down the ladder in the media pumping more smoke into the atmosphere already filled with smoke and mirrors, I am sick of megas. So let’s put megas in general aside for a while and discuss a few specific examples. Since our series deals with self-proclaimed transparency and government whistleblowers NGOs funded primarily by a handful of megas, let’s talk about these megas, their tentacles in the government and wrapped around these NGOs. Let’s talk about Project on Government Oversight (POGO)

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