February 7, 2011

The news is horseshit


Neil Kramer lopo


02/23'08 Crossing The Rubicon: Breaking The Fake News Trance

"In terms of the awakening process, "Crossing the Rubicon" ("Alea iacta est") is a key revelatory stage when you realize, beyond any doubt, that the government is not your friend. The stark recognition that you have been living in a false paradigm created by someone else begins to sink in. It is here, at this bleak philosophical crossroads, where most people experience such a disturbing degree of cognitive dissonance, that they instinctively turn back. Too much to process and the implications are huge.
So even knowing that there is a greater truth on the horizon, they choose instead to return to the Control System, to the Village, with all its securities and comfortable certainties.
[...] They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their 'facts', they discovered that only 12 % of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn't be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these 'facts' had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12 % of the stories. The implication of those two findings is truly alarming.
Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda."

The news is horseshit. This can no longer be construed as unconventional, activist opinion anymore – it is plain, well evidenced, undeniable fact. We must seriously discipline ourselves (and those we care about) to stop being suckered by what we see on BBC and CNN, and by what we read in The Times or The Post.
A far better alternative is to seek out one's own news. Believe nothing unless you have done your own research. Use the Internet. Practice being a prudent and discerning researcher, employ equal measures of intuition and critical judgement at every turn. And remember, the Internet was not even widely available before 1994. There were no other easily accessible alternative news sources. You got your news from the TV and the paper or you got nothing. You could haul your ass down to a decent public library and spend a few days trawling through archive newspapers and microfilm. But rather unlikely. So now the Internet is here ... use it.


08/06'10 From Britain to Brazil

"Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian fantasy film "Brazil" satirized the debilitating apparatus of bureaucracy and how it completely dehumanizes the free thinking individual whilst being firmly supported by a zombified populous who absorb and repeat its disempowering memes without question.
If you're not familiar with Britain's particularly exasperating brand of totalitarianism, watch Brazil (The Directors Cut) for a crash course in pen-pushing authoritarian squalor. The film vividly illustrates Gilliam's own frustrations on a personal creative level (regarding the increasingly corporatized movie industry), whilst succeeding in portraying the cold-blooded machinations of an oppressive regime that has finally thrown off the tiresome camouflage of democracy. [...]

The modest island of Britain has been deliberately overpopulated with a combination of the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe and insensitive immigration policies that create poverty and ethnically specific ghettos that leave everyone dissatisfied. More than 70 million people are crammed within Britain's shores and it is, therefore, the perfect experimental platform for an infrastructure that is earmarked for global deployment. Nowhere in the world will you encounter more surveillance and enforcement cameras than in the green and pleasant land of Britain. Whether on foot or in the car, in the country or in the city, cameras track individual human movement.
On some motorways, driving beneath a particular camera array will see your licence plate automatically run against a criminal database and will measure your average speed over a given distance, automatically triggering the delivery of a sensationally alarming County Court Summons to your door if you fall outside the tolerance parameters.
[...] The surveillance infrastructure in Britain is not designed to keep humans safe, it is designed to keep them compliant. The inferred message behind the propaganda is clear: you can't get away with anything, so behave yourself and do as we tell you.

Disavowal of the shadow occurs when we perceive our own inauthentic actions and continue to do nothing about them. This is exasperated by surrender to the dominion of the ego, me-centric thinking and self-absorbed pleasure hunting or escape. This principle is vital to the conscious evolutionary shift that is required to overturn the old hierarchy.
The core teaching is simple: we are the shadow.
Each and every polarized negative entity that manifests in this world is our responsibility, our creation. The immutable flow from mind to matter, from consciousness to creation, does not allow us to disregard a given challenge. We cannot just let things go unresolved, try as we might. Negative energy patterns – destructive impulses concealed in dysfunction, fear and pain – cannot simply be abandoned. They must be faced and understood in order for their patterning to dissolve.
Ignoring a negative energy pattern ensures that it will return again and again. Each time it does, it gains density, it becomes harder and harder to reject, until finally it emerges as an inescapable crisis.
A single ignored negative emotional impulse may turn into a mild apathy in a relationship, which turns into discontent, which becomes dysfunction, finally resulting in separation and anguish.
This may occur over and over, until that incipient emotion is fully comprehended.

Short-circuit the escalation routine. Face the first negative impulse head on – as soon as it's identified. Whether it is embedded in one's psyche, intellect, sexuality, memory, dreams or wherever – face it and trace it to the root.
When the energy dynamic and its associated emotional patterning is understood, it will never return.

[...] Demon Cameron gave a speech on Monday 7th June 2010 at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, where he warned that Britain's "whole way of life" would be disrupted for years as painful measures to cut public spending would be introduced. Specifically, pay, pensions and benefits would suffer. In other words, the reason people bother to work at all – to earn money – will become even more constrained. The problem is, that this ludicrous political battle cry of "it's time to tighten our belts for the good of the nation" doesn't work anymore. Firstly, because there is no nation to speak of. Britain is now technically a unit within the emerging European Superstate, following the obscenely undemocratic Lisbon Treaty which neuters the last vestiges of Britain's self-governance. Secondly, because no-one with more than two brain cells firing actually supports the political process anymore. It is quite simply absurd. The reason people still choose to engage with it is because they're not sure what else to do. What are the alternatives? What exactly can be done?

[...] One does not have to look very hard to see that owning luxury items and displaying fashionable brands is nothing more than psychological chicanery. A brand is a cultural accessory. It's not simply the logo and jingle of a company that is determined to create the very best 'fabric conditioner' possible. A brand is designed precisely to fit demographic profiles – appealing to a well mapped social sub-group with clearly defined income, education, age, health, ethnicity, location, political opinion and cultural expectations.
A particular fabric conditioner advertisement may be targeted at 20-40 year old mums who like Madonna, Bacardi and coke, don't read, but watch a lot of television. Everything about the branding, from the product name, the colours, the music, the lighting, the words used, the editing and the advertisement duration are chosen to trigger an inclusive social response from the target sub-group. In the end, it's all just "buying stuff you don't need, with money you don't have," as the late George Carlin liked to term it.

[...] The credit based economy collapsed a long time ago. Slickly marketed frauds like futures trading, derivatives markets, sequestering emerging third world markets, printing non-existent money with no real-world value and the perpetual fabrication of international conflicts have propped up the Capitalist machine for years.
The fake credit crunch is merely the public-facing advertisement for the unchecked centralization of political, economic and military power. Delusions of discord with North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are diversionary sideshows for the uninitiated. Regardless of politics, religion or geographical origin, all political figureheads are receiving orders from the same masters. They sit at the same table. Obama and Cameron do as they are bid, as do Ahmadinejad and Putin. Some know it, some don't, but that is quite irrelevant to the success of the grand conjuration. Even apparently independent lovable rogues like Hugo Chávez and Viktor Yushchenko, when we dig a little deeper, are either directly connected to, or controlled by Control System enforcers like the CIA, George Soros' Open Society Institute and the Bilderberg Group. Even more arcane shadow organizations lie beneath the surface. The trail is well documented and available for all to uncover. You really do have to do the homework yourself to appreciate the actuality and penetration of these entities. Ignorance of them is no longer an excuse: the data is out there.

[...] The dissonance lifts and we can focus on being who we actually are, rather than getting lost in the mouldy NWO puppet show. Ultimately, the Control System knows its influence is waning.
The grip loosens and the game nears its end. We are witnessing the final spasms of the beast.
The magnificent human spirit has been unduly suppressed over the last few millennia. Now that time is over. We ascend once more. Reject their fake media hype and stop using their corporate services. Discard their fear memes and erase their counterfeit history. Extricate yourself from their politics and laugh at their sinister melodramas. They hate that most of all – not being taken seriously. From the Control System's perspective, there is no greater fusion of terrifying characteristics in a human being than authenticity, humour, creativity, sovereignity, defiance and love."


Something fresh from "The Cleaver": 02/17'11 The Path Of One

"The world of academia does not resonate too strongly with many who walk the path of conscious and spiritual growth. [...] from a shadow perspective, it's relatively straightforward to hijack the academic edifice.
After all, if you can sequester the system, you can effectively steer all those who study under it.
In the West, the academic paradigm is still perceived as the ultimate hub for establishing scholarly credibility and continues to serve as the empirical arbitrator of accomplishment and consensus reality.
Here in the US, I have noted that there's still a great deal of fuss made about sticking Dr. in front of someone's name. Billboards, TV and radio commercials, books and business cards are plastered with such academic titles. Dr. Somebody is wheeled in as a talking head for some garish infotainment show, so as to offer an 'expert' view of politics, science, history or whatever. Many people buy it, hook, line and sinker. [...]
To put it bluntly, lots of people from many different walks of life believe that academic qualifications = authority. After all, who knows better?
Faith in the academic edifice is beginning to crack in some European countries, most notably England. [...]
Even the most serious, free-thinking and well-intended scholars will often find themselves pulled into a vortex of insularity, prejudice and separatist specialization. It is the way of things in academia, particularly if you need approved funding for your work. You have to play the game, or else risk getting sidelined or even booted out. Collectivism is rewarded over independence, compliance over distinctiveness. [...] in such a rapidly changing and disinformation-saturated world, we cannot rely on academia to assist with our knowing.
We have to do it for ourselves.

[...] Being an autodidact does not mean having no formal education at all. It simply means that it is not the chief source of one's learning. [...]
In my own life, I have routinely acknowledged that the most insightful people I have met have all been autodidacts. In some instances, the breadth and penetration of their knowing totally eclipses any apparently corresponding academic mindset. The opposite side of this equation has also proven true: the professors and Cambridge graduates that I have conversed with, at length, have been some of the least discerning and most blinkered folk imaginable. [...]
The great privilege of the autodidact is that they have a totally free hand to do whatever they want. [...]
No concept is too far out, no subject is taboo, no creative tangents are considered a waste of time and belief systems are often gratifyingly upgraded or even totally jettisoned. [...]
It is incumbent on the independent scholar to hone a range of skills to endow their studies with the integrity, balance and penetration required to formulate empowering knowledge. Specifically – the ability to employ critical reason and discernment. To correlate and corroborate. To weigh any given idea against the consensus reality tunnel and one's own personal reality tunnel. To use intuition. To watch how a notion moves through our belief systems and intellectual apparatus. What remains? What changes?

Another key difference between autodidacticism and academia is the value placed on direct felt experience. [...] Anyone can read books, hunch over a laptop, visit a few temples, libraries and museums. But none of this constitutes real, juiced-up, direct encounter. The autodidact naturally places a far greater emphasis on the practical application of their knowledge than the academic. After all, they're playing very different games. [...]
Ascertaining the truth of a thing is always a strange and slippery business. [...] We can overlay a thing against our inner knowing and feel the essential veracity of it, judge its usefulness as a positive tool for perceiving and articulating our own reality tunnel. To call something 'true' in this way, is simply a piece of functional shorthand.

So what happens when the trueness of a thing diminishes? When it became clear that many of Carlos Castaneda's accounts of his sorcerer's apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus were factually inaccurate and even total fabrications – it changed the nature of his work for many people. Believers were disheartened. Skeptics were delighted. When I first read his works, it was very pre-Internet, and I had no idea of any of this. I read the classic six books and thoroughly enjoyed them. They spoke deeply to me. I have re-read them many times over the years. To this day, what is remarkable about them is how full of real gnosis they are.
Despite the lo-fi anthropological value, I nevertheless find them to be truer than most other texts I've ever read. Just how the hell Castaneda came across such fabulous wisdom is still a mystery. Perhaps it was all an intentional double-bluff from the beginning, orchestrated to protect the real source of his teaching? Who knows. I'm just glad he put pen to paper, and decided to share it.

[...] The further I walk down my own path, the wider I have to set the boundaries for what is real. It works both ways. What was fantasy, becomes actual. What was solid reality, becomes incongruous fakery.
'9/11' being a textbook example. Most people don't want to seriously study the events of '9/11', because in the back of their minds, they can feel the latent domino effect of collapsing belief systems. The real story of '9/11' is so off the map, that even the solemn ramifications of prior-knowledge and high-level treachery, pale compared to the issues of wider reality manipulation. Too weird.
Certainly, as we become more conscious, we become less susceptible to illusion. Garbage constructs begin to fade and eventually dissolve altogether, with very little 'mechanical' effort from us. Even more significantly, with heightened awareness and a cleaner mental platform, we are able to channel greater resolutions of energy.
We can go deeper with our knowing. Deeper into ourselves. Deeper into the universe.

It's intriguing to watch how a thing can move from one reality filter to another with such fluidity – contravening the human boundaries of truth, belief and existence as if they didn't exist at all. As I stated in an essay from May 2009, diverting all ones energies into the question of whether a given phenomenon is authentic or fake, may be missing the point. Many of the dozens of phenomenological koans that are routinely investigated in the alternative/esoteric field, go right to the heart of our complicity in the simulated reality construct we labor under. They exist to teach us not to judge whether something is real or not – but rather how it interacts with our own consciousness. As in quantum physics, consciousness itself changes the nature of the thing perceived. We really do have to take a long hard look at the operational value of consensus, received wisdom, peer acceptance and criteria for truth. This plays to the strengths of the autodidact, unshackled as they are from the chains of academic accord or the dreary guidelines of normality.

The real discipline of the independent thinker and the spiritual warrior, lies not in their scholarly capabilities and education, nor even in the anchoring of their knowledge into felt experience – it is in their willingness to transform their own consciousness. To change. This means letting go of things that we think we need, things we have become attached to, things we suspect might even be essential parts of us. More than anything else, it is this clinging to self that prevents us from moving forward. We sometimes forget that we are not the avatar."

I highly recommend nearly everything that Mr. Kramer lets loose in written or spoken form.
02/18'11 CCA via Facebook)
A very original but as well even-keeled article: Wow, I am not a bit less impressed than I hoped I would be!
Congratulations, these are excellent observations that come with yet carefully thought-through conclusions (as they can be appreciated by my humble level of apperception of what's really going on).
Thanks anyway for sharing such sophisticated statements. *still blown away*

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