President Clinton admits to mind control experiments
www.youtube.com/watch

Bill Clinton under Mind Control
www.youtube.com/watch

Howard Zinn: "On Human Nature and Aggression."
www.youtube.com/watch

They were afraid of your authentic love. Because the authentic love is beyond your control. You are possessed by it. You are not the possessor. You are the possessed. And every society wants you to be in control. The society is afraid of your wild nature. It is afraid of your naturalness. So from the very beginning it is start spreading your wings. And the most basic thing that is dangerous in you... is the possibility of love. Because if you are possessed by love you can go even against the whole world.

The above is from OSHO:
www.youtube.com/watch

Isn't this fun!! Who else wants to play?

Thank you, Shera.... princess of spiritual power!

I'm feeling great too. I got my proposals off... and had my fill of the NWO videos yesterday. I'm open to the future and it is bright! Tomorrow night we'll have a circle in the Gypsy Camp... the play ground in the forest across the street. That will be fun. It is a beautiful day here... I just gotta get off a few more proposals.

So... my sound check... or heart check, has been interesting. A couple friends are finding things challenging.... one said it is us who has the problem... and one says the new world is on the way. They are alright.

I feel the shift happening-- Slowly world-changing like plate tectonics... but then something is freed... there is an earthquake--causing a tidal wave --which will trash some souls and others will surf it.

David says "Surfs up!" :

Hi Cor...
where i live in roberts creek the subject is common talk, or so it seems to me. i frequently screen films at the local cafe about the nwo, the freemasons, the 911 conspiracy, and many similar topics, and always they receive good attendance and response. here on tribe you vcan join tribes specifically related to those subjects and get your fill quite easily. but in my day to day discussions and relations i must admit there is not much dialogue, and not much desire to do so. even on my part. for me, the situation is pretty dire, when one immerses oneself into the darkness it is not a happy place, nor a bright future.

i think you're right, that people like us tend to, and want to focus on the positive. on the solutions, the love, the community, the family, the positivity. we're talking about majick here, at its most base lebel. the dark powers are practicing majick everyday, whether they know it or not. all those freemasons who think they are just joining a lions club type organization or a fraternity of some sort, are being used. their energy in these orgs is being used for darkness, and most of them aren't even aware.

words have power, so it's no surprise that many of us instinctively, almost, do not want to talk about the darkness. not out of fear, or ignorance, or a disregard or avoidance of reality. i think we want to focus on the light, because that is our majick, and that is how we will defeat the forcers of dark. we will create our reality based on our actions and our words. based on our love, our compassion, and our commitment to love and community. this is where we have the ultimate power.

but some of us, myself, you, have many roles to play, and one is to keep the awareness level high, to keep educating those who do not know. because many still do not know. or they know but they haven't fully embraced the meaning of what it means to live in this world filled with darkness. it's a challenge for sure to carry this knowledge and spread it! but it is absolutely necessary for us to do so. but we must do it without expectations that anyone will embrace it or even understand it as fully as you or i. simply the act of spreading the news is sufficient to help dispell the damage being done. we're talking sub-atomic quantum levels here. which is conversely true as well - talking about the love creates that reality.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Source: Father of Modern Public Relations, 1928

"What is Enlightenment? When you are no longer emotionally effected, negatively or positively by what another does, says, thinks."
-J. Krishnamurti

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Speech to The Institute of Maltese Journalists

The public’s alienation from politics:
who is to blame – and what can be done about it?

Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen.

It is a delight, and an honour, to be back in Malta.

I last visited your beautiful island with colleagues from the Press Complaints Commission in October 2002 as guests of the Malta Press Club, as it was then. We debated many fascinating issues – and were treated to the most wonderful programme, including a reception from the President and a stunning tour round the harbour at Valetta. I fell in love with this island, so full of history, so hospitable, so lively.

An e mail from Carmel Bonello last summer, asking me to return to give this lecture, was exceptionally welcome. I accepted with alacrity, and it’s great to be here again.

I would also take this opportunity to praise the work of Carmel and colleagues in the Institute. I know from my previous job at the PCC – as well as my links with the Commonwealth Press Union – how the press in Malta sometimes punches well above its comparative weight. Long may you increasingly do so.

I want to talk today about the relationships between the press and politicians – and, unlike some in this often polarized debate, I think I can genuinely claim to be even-handed! This is because I have worked on both sides of the fence.

At the Press Complaints Commission, I sat in the midst of many disputes between politicians and newspapers and saw how politicians could often use their positions to bully the press, and threaten our freedoms.

When afterwards I worked as Press Secretary to Michael Howard, the Leader of the Conservative Party in the run up to the British General Election last year, I saw at first hand how inaccurate or intrusive newspaper reports could be intensely damaging. But I also saw how – for the great majority of the time – newspapers went out of their way to be accurate and to abide by the ethical code that I had in my previous job policed.

And now I am actually working in the newspaper industry as Corporate Affairs Director at the Telegraph Group, which owns Britain’s leading quality newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. That has been a fascinating experience – and it is a privilege working for such a powerful brand with a long tradition of serious journalism.

So I have seen from all sides and in real life how difficult the relationships between press, politicians and regulators can be.

The aspect of it I want to address today is a specific one about whether the friction in this relationship is one of the causes of waning public apathy in politics and disenchantment with the political process, and (in many countries) declining turnout in elections.

I have no doubt that across Europe the level of public cynicism about traditional political debate and structures, and public antipathy towards the political classes, is unprecedented.

I should clarify at once that I don’t think the public is turned off politics in the sense that it cares about issues. Public concern and action about the environment, about drugs and crime, about wide ranging international issues from Guantanamo Bay to famine in Africa, and about public services is as deep as ever. Many organisations outside the established political structures thrive, and as pressure or lobbying groups are incredibly and increasingly powerful. But that is not being channelled into the existing political architecture, which has serious long-term implications for the health of all our democracies.

Let me take the example of the United Kingdom first, which is perhaps the starkest. Turnout at elections has been sinking for a decade – if it wasn’t for extensive postal voting in 2005, turnout would probably have sunk below the derisory levels even of 2001. The activist base of all the political parties is rapidly contracting. Interest in broadcast news and current affairs is slumping – one of the net results of the last election was that TV news broadcasts lost 400,000 viewers. And readership of many newspapers – particularly tabloids - has been in long term decline. Focus groups run by opinion pollsters find that politicians are frequently equated with liars by the public – although I have to admit that the reputation of the media is sometimes little better.

All these trends are relatively recent. In the 1992 election, the Conservative Party won more votes than any party in history on a very high turnout. And in 1997 Tony Blair’s “new” Labour Government was swept into office on a heady tidal wave of public enthusiasm. But how distant that now seems.

That is not confined to the UK. Even lower turnouts have been registered recently in national elections in Finland, the Republic of Ireland, France and Portugal – although I appreciate that there are some fortunate countries, such as here in Malta, where turnouts have held up well.

But would they hold so well now that both parties are in agreement with Malta being a member of the EU?

In Europe, disenchantment with the European Parliament and the EU itself is also very marked, and is I think another symptom of this phenomenon. In the UK, barely one third of voters vote in elections for the European Parliament. Turnout is lower still in the Netherlands and Portugal. “No” votes on the EU Constitution in both France – where, in the most pro European of countries, the 55:45 vote was crushing – and Holland, made crystal clear that the plans of the EU establishment are out of step with the feelings of voters. It wasn’t just those two countries either: opinion polls in Denmark, the Czech Republic, the UK, Ireland and Sweden suggested those countries would reject the Constitution in a referendum. Here in Malta, the November 2004 Eurobarometer poll found fewer than a third of respondents in favour of the EU constitution, making Malta one of the five most Eurosceptic EU states. That may, of course, have changed since then – and I should be grateful for an update!

A steep decline in membership of political parties is also very much in evidence across Europe. As I noted above, in the UK aggregate membership of political parties has fallen from 3.5 million Britons in the 1950s to only half a million now. Even more dramatic falls have been registered in France and Italy. Will Malta remain immune to these developments in Europe?

How will the Maltese rate their EU experience in 3, 10 or 15 years’ time? Will they evaluate Membership as not a good decision because, overall, it has not delivered what was promised by politicians of one side? Or will they consider it a better experience than the pessimists on the other side suggested? Will the Maltese continue supporting their respective traditional political parties so overwhelmingly, at least at election times?

So what is the reality in Europe? Whether it be at an EU level, or national level, there is growing evidence that the public is being gripped by increasing levels of apathy, manifested in low turnouts, lack of interest in political programmes and reporting, and in declining participation in political parties.

What has gone wrong? Are the politicians to blame for the plummeting interest in them, and their appalling reputation? Has the “spin culture” created it? Or is it because people don’t think they can believe what they read in the media? Could politicians in Malta learn from this experience and avoid the pitfalls?

Given that I have relatively limited time I will try to answer that question initially with reference mainly to the UK where this phenomenon has been most marked, although the principles apply far more widely.

In my view, the root of the problem is to be found in “spin” – an art form that radically changed the relationship between press, public and politicians in the UK and the USA, and a number of other countries, in the 1990s.

What is spin? In my view it is not just a new name for political propaganda, or ethical public relations. It is a different type of PR in which those deploying it construct a public image or statement based not on facts and reality – but on what they think the audience would like to hear. Statistics get ignored or distorted. Unhelpful facts are airbrushed out. Quotations are used selectively. And things are invented. That is so different from traditional ethical PR which tries to explain the world as it is – not as “spin doctors” want it to be.

To understand why that is the case, I think we need to look back over the history of political public relations to work out how things changed, why they did – and what the practical consequences of that have been for the relationship between governors, governed and media.

The reason why a brief retrospective is worthwhile is that while voter apathy and the alienation of the electorate from the political process is a very recent development, manipulation of the means of communication by politicians and public figures is nothing new.

Indeed, there has been a generic name for political PR – “propaganda” - since the 17th century when the Vatican established a “Congregatio de propaganda” to “deal with each and every concern for the spread of faith throughout the world” as a counter to the global spread of Protestantism.

As I set out in more detail in the paper that will accompany this talk, the roots of political propaganda go back even further. Plato’s Republic set out an early form of what PR people now call “rebranding”. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were accomplished propagandists who paid huge attention to protecting their reputation – not just among their contemporaries but for the generations yet to come. Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War are far less military history than vindication for posterity, as Churchill’s History of the Second World War, did similarly two millennia later.

In time people began to understand too the power of visual images. In the Dark Ages, those spreading Christianity realised how images and above all symbols could be used to sell complex doctrine to a mass of largely ignorant and illiterate individuals. And in the Middle Ages, of course, we have the first record of a visual image being used explicitly for propaganda – the Tapestry commission by Bishop Odo for his new Cathedral at Bayeux in northern France, which tells the story of the Battle of Hastings specifically from the Norman point of view.

With the development of the printing press, propaganda developed further and perhaps one of the first great written propagandists was Martin Luther. What more remarkable act of PR could there have been than when he pinned his 95 Theses onto the Church in Witenburg in 1517 calling for the reform of the Catholic Church? That hugely symbolic action launched a war for the hearts and minds of people across our continent that utilised all the media of persuasion then available – books, papers, and sermons from the pulpit.

Through the Reformation, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War, politicians and statesmen perfected the art of political public relations – and also began to understand how important the press was to that. “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets”, said Napoleon : and how right he was.

In the 20th century, of course, the art of propaganda was all too often attuned to the needs of “total war” when states used it both to trumpet their own cause – and to undermine that of the enemies.

Even Pope John XXIII’s doctrine of “Avoidance of War” – that is war as a last resort – was side-stepped to promote instead, in 1994, a reworked formulation of “Just War”. It was in that year that an unnamed Papal aide, when referring to the conflict in the Balkans, said that the Vatican would support a “precise and proportionate” military action but such intervention would have to respect the Catholic Church’s teaching on “Just War”. No political power is immune to propaganda!

Throughout that long history of the development of propaganda, there was one fairly constant feature: its secrecy.

Let me explain what I mean by reference to what is perhaps the key ground breaking book on public relations in the 20th century – Propaganda by the new York businessman Edward Bernays. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he called “the engineering of consent.” In his seminal work, he defined propaganda as:

“the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses .. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of the country. We are governed, our minds moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

And that, in my view, is the essence of the matter: that for thousands of year those who did the manipulation remained obscured from view – and, in turn, so did the manipulation.

Things began to change after the Second World War – slowly at first from the 1950s to the 1970s, then more rapidly from 1980 onwards – and it is in the root of that change, I suspect, that we find the seeds of alienation.

So what were those changes?

I think three things happened. First of all, the media changed more rapidly than at any time in the previous few centuries. Second, the political process itself changed. And thirdly, the “spin” culture developed, elbowing real news aside, and becoming the news story itself.

Let me look briefly at each of those in turn.

First, changes to the media – where I think three factors have over the past thirty years been at play.

To begin with, the media in most countries – even in France, home to draconian privacy laws - has become far less deferential to politicians than it used to be, and far less believing of what it is being told. Up to the 1950s, politicians and their advisers could manipulate the news by ringing up newspaper publishers. Take an example from Britain of Jock Colville, Churchill’s faithful private secretary, who wrote this of the moment the Prime Minister had a stroke in 1953:

“I wrote urgently and in manuscript to three particular friends of Churchill, Lords Camrose, Beaverbook and Bracken, and sent the letter to London by dispatch rider. All three immediately came to Chartwell .. They achieved the … success of gagging Fleet Street … Not a word of the Prime Minister’s stroke was published until he himself casually mentioned it in a speech in the House of Commons a year later”.

That extraordinary feat could never happen now – which I have to say is a very good thing! But as a result of this breakdown in deference politicians have had to find new ways, essentially, to cover up bad news. All too often, that has involved misleading the media – as I discovered at first hand when I was at the centre of a dispute at the Press Complaints Commission about the role Prime Minister played in the arrangements for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Downing Street claimed that reports that the Prime Minister had “muscled into” the arrangements were incorrect, but the official at the House of Lords known as Black Rod confirmed that it had been so.

Secondly, the media has become much more competitive. Again this has happened across Europe, but most markedly in the UK where exclusive stories – often including so-called intrusive “kiss n’ tell” stories – became far more important in the circulation wars of the 1980s that followed Rupert Murdoch’s busting of the unions. Politicians responded to this by realizing for the first time that they could now manipulate the media by controlling sources of, and access to, information.

Thirdly, the 1990s saw the birth of 24 hour news and the gradual shift in TV news away from merely reporting on news, to commenting on it. The psychological effect of television telling us what’s really going on, and doing so 24 hours a day, is probably the major communicative contribution to the development of politics and its newly allied spin culture over the past two decades. That 24 hour news revolution meant that a new form of political manipulation needed to be developed. Spin-doctors no longer needed to write speeches; they needed to write sound-bites.

At the same time as those changes were happening to the media, there were changes in the 1990s to the political process. The first was a mechanical one – the decline in the activist base. In previous decades, politicians across Europe had been able to rely on armies of activists to transmit propaganda to the electorate. In the UK for instance, in its heyday the Young Conservatives alone had nearly a million members. But activism has declined and all the parties put together can barely muster half a million – often elderly – foot soldiers. So politicians have had to look to other ways to get information to the electorate – and that, allied to the changes I mentioned just now, meant manipulating TV.

If that was a mechanical change to the political process, the other was an ideological one. For fifty years after the end of the Second World War, voters across the western world were faced with very clear ideological choices. That ideological divide melted away in the 1990s as the Cold War ended, and everyone decided they wanted to be tough on criminals and run low tax enterprise economies. The invention of “spin” was one of the answers to that ideological vacuum – if there is no difference between the parties, you can create a difference by the way you present yourselves and your opponents. Images, labelling and branding, and not the political issue or content per se, became crucial to the political process.

And one of the aspects of that is that those in charge of propaganda wanted to become visible – with the press very happy to oblige in that process. Whether it was Michael Deaver for President Reagan, James Carville and Dick Morris, the manipulative inventor of the strategy of triangulation, in the Clinton White House, or Alastair Campbell in Downing Street after 1997, “spin doctors” wanted their trade to be known about and written about. Bernays’ “invisible hands” in other words burst deliberately into the open. In my view, the suggestion implicit in that was that politicians were more interested in the presentation of policy than the substance of it.

Worse than that, the “spin” technique – including selective quotation, selective use of facts, “non-denial denials” and presentation of arguments based on unproven truths - soon became synonymous with deceit, manipulation and cover-up, the climax of this trend probably being first the British spin doctor who injudiciously wrote to her colleague telling them that 9/11 2001 was a “good day to bury bad news” and then the appalling catalogue of fabricated intelligence presented to the various publics about Iraq’s non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

But it’s not just a British phenomenon. Scanning the Maltese press I found many references to how “spinners” had covered up the truth on topics ranging from the publication of tax receipts to EU concessions on the purchase of property. In many cases, this was equated directly or indirectly with lying.

I suspect – although I am no expert on the subject – that the same set of issues has been present in the debate about the EU, leading to disenchantment among European voters about the direction of the European Union. In so many countries – particularly those of a more Euro-sceptic nature – the divergence between the rhetoric of sovereign Member States, and the reality of “ever closer union”, was brought home by the draft EU Constitution, and the fault blamed in many cases on “spin”.

It is this – in short – that I think is at the root of so much apathy and disenchantment: the belief that politicians are not interested in the issues, but only in the politics and the presentation; and that to further that aim, politicians will resort to manipulation and (for want of a better word) fraud in the interests of winning power. In such circumstances, why bother to vote? Why bother to join a political party? Why become involved in traditional politics?

As a final part of this talk – and there are so many other issues I wish I had time to cover – I want to look briefly to the future. Can these relationships be repaired? Can trust in politics be restored? And what role has the media to play in that?

The short answer is that I think it can.

I think, to some extent, the tables are already beginning to turn. The British – and to a lesser extent American – Governments have realised that they cannot again try to manipulate opinion in the way they did in the run up to the Iraq war. They are having to clean up their acts, and make the business of Government – especially where it concerns intelligence – more transparent, for instance by giving more on the record briefings and press conferences.

At an EU level, I think similar lessons were learned by the defeat of the European Constitution – and Member States, as well as the Commission, are already working on how to re-connect the EU with voters.

The media – which for a long time was taken in by “spin” – is now far less tolerant of bullying and deception, and is in many ways starting to bite back.

Above all, I think the spread of the Internet – much of it driven by newspaper websites, nationally and internationally – will do much to empower those who have felt helpless. Spin withers when it is subjected to close and constant scrutiny – and a more robust media, combined with an age when any voter can access sources directly to check the veracity of what politicians are saying – is likely to provide that check.

The press has a key role to play in that process. Newspapers have always been at their best when exposing corruption in high places, or deceit, or hypocrisy. In future we will have to continue to play our role in exposing deceit in the manner in which Governments – and opposition parties – present facts and statements to the electorate. And we will be able to use the plethora of new, digital technologies available to us to do it.

Your Excellency, [Mrs Fenech], ladies and gentlemen. In the paper accompanying this speech I will go into some of these issues in more detail – so forgive me for picking perhaps just a few of them in the twenty minutes or so allotted to me. As a newspaperman, as a former regulator, and as a former political Press Secretary, I have a passionate concern for the health of democracy. It is my belief that at the root of some of the issues of alienation and disenchantment which many democracies are facing is the manner in which some Governments have changed the nature of political propaganda. Those changes have exposed the wiring of political public relations, and led many to believe that politics is – in words I have heard so often in listening to focus groups – “just about the spin.” But this is one area where the genie can be put back into the bottle – and it is incumbent on us, as newspaper-people, to assist in that process.

Thank you for your attention.
--
L-etika gurnalistika – etika specjali?

Joe Friggieri

I had decided some time ago to just shut up for awhile, as I realized what a know-it-all blowhard blabbermouth I have been acting as. But this discussion has piqued my interest, so close to where I am exploring right now.

Knowing ourselves---yes, the sweetest thing on earth. Yet, so few of us actually do. We are wound in phsycic hypnosis, thinking we need to get things to be happy, thinking that it is others who hurt us and not ourselves. We create our own little identities and then go through all sorts of contortions to protect those entities.

Someone tells us "youre an idiot" and we pour all kinds of emotional energy into being hurt over it, being angry and perpetuating the illusion that we did NOT act like an idiot.

As we begin to Know our true Selves we can accept that yes, we did act like an idiot, but that does nothing to damage our true Self. Knowing ourselves can be very painful at first as we discover how we hurt ourselves with our own thoughts. But without discovering our true nature, our True Kingdom of Heaven within, we continue to suffer, unconsciously.

Knowing ourselves begins as we make a committment to just watch ourselves, non judgementally, detached even. Watching ourselves as we get angry, hurt or happy....we discover some amazing things. the first of which is how easily we go back to sleep and forget that we meant to watch our own inner workings.

Watching ourselves is not just to discover how asleep we really have been, but to discover how we have been acting as our false illusory selves with all their false identities, habits and thoughts. Our ego. In order to discover the truth. The Truth.

Mystics have been telling us to get rid of the ego, and we in our pshycic sleep try to fight it and destroy it. The only thing that works is to discover for ourselves that it is really made of nothing but false ideas from a sleeping mind. Not to fight it, but to just discover that it is not our true self.

As the ego disappears we discover our real self, our kingdom of heaven within. They key is in simply observing ourselves, not fighting with our minds, not trying to change anything.

Just self observation--which allows us to effortlessly change for the better as we discover our own errors. Then our own light shines naturally as it always has, only we have been too asleep to be aware of it.

Everything else is just words. Religions have been built around the words but with the true understanding religion has nothing to offer. It is so not about worshipping something outside of ourselves.

Waking up is available to anyone.
That point of awareness that allows us to watch ourselves is just the tip of what we actually are.

www.anewlife.org/html/introduction.html