#ClimateChange, Manufactured Dissent and “Foundation-funded #Doomsayers”

By James F. Tracy

The earth’s climate is changing. Sea levels are rising. We are all at risk. The role of humans in climate change is undeniable. Capitalism is to blame. Governments must fix the problem.

These are the mantras of the environmental movement on display at the People’s Climate March being held on September 21.

The talking points of foundation-funded doomsayers reverberate in unison because their financing is dependent on publicizing a specific message and agenda. The otherwise critical minds supporting what passes for rebelliousness overlook the sponsorship and tacit control wielded by powerful private interests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Autx79iHJs

Scratching the surface, one finds that the most salient proponents of the carbon-centric global warming worldview are largely dependent on such funding. For example, Bill McKibben, a principal organizer of the People’s Climate March, has built a career around the false notion that minuscule increases in carbon dioxide are a principal cause of “extreme weather” events.

[Image Credit: baltidome.wordpress.com]

As this author has noted,

McKibben’s 350.org project is the public face of his 501(c)(3) 1Sky Education Fund, which between its founding in 2007 and 2009 took in close to $5,000,000 in foundation money and “public contributions.” In 2010 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave 1Sky $200,000. The key “scientific” paper McKibben points to as support for his dire warnings on climate change, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim,” coauthored by NASA scientist James Hansen, was partially funded through Rockefeller Foundation money.[1]

Who is Behind the #IslamicState (#ISIL) #Beheadings?

Probing the SITE Intelligence Group

By James F. Tracy

image: Foley beheading video

Since mid-August 2014 major news organizations have conveyed videos allegedly found online by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Unsurprisingly the same media have failed to closely interrogate what the private company actually is and whether the material it promotes should be accepted as genuine.

[Image Credit: i24news.tv]

The Search for International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group (SITE) was co-founded by Rita Katz in 2001.

In 2003 Katz authored a book, Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America, which she published using the pseudonym, “Anonymous.”

In the book Katz explains how she took on the trappings of a Muslim woman to infiltrate the meetings of radical Muslim terrorists. The plot is unlikely, especially when one considers that such secret fundamentalist gatherings are almost always segregated along gender lines and no woman, however elaborate her costume, would be granted entry without her identity being firmly established.

SITE Intelligence Group consists of Katz and two “senior advisers,” one of whom is Bruce Hoffman, the Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and former director of the RAND’s Washington DC office.

ISIS is America’s New Terror Brand

Endless Propaganda Fuels “War on Terror”

By James F. Tracy

In the wake of World War I, erstwhile propagandist and political scientist Harold Lasswell famously defined propaganda as “the management of collective attitudes” and the “control over opinion” through “the manipulation of significant symbols.”[1] The extent to which this tradition is enthusiastically upheld in the West and the United States in particular is remarkable. 

The American public is consistently propagandized by its government and corporate news media on the most vital of contemporary issues and events.

Deception on such a scale would be of little consequence if the US were not the most powerful economic and military force on earth.
[Image Credit: Vice News]

A case in point is the hysteria Western news media are attempting to create concerning the threat posed by the mercenary-terrorist army now being promoted as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or “ISIS.”

As was the case with the US intelligence asset and bogey publicized as “Al Qaeda,” and Al Qaeda’s Syrian adjunct, “Al Nusra,” such entities are—apparently by design—inadequately investigated and defined by major news media. Absent meaningful historical context they usefully serve as another raison d’ểtre for America’s terminal “War on Terror.”

A seemingly obvious feature of such terrorist forces left unexamined by corporate media is that they are observably comprised of the same or comparable personnel unleashed elsewhere throughout the Middle East as part of a strategy proposed during the George W. Bush administration in 2007.[2]

With the above observations in mind, ISIS is well-financed, militarily proficient, and equipped with modern vehicles and weaponry. It also exhibits an uncanny degree of media savvy in terms of propagating its message in professional-looking videos and on platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. “Western intelligence services,” the New York Times reports, claim to be “worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos, ground images shot from drones, and multilingual Twitter messages.”[3]

Along these lines, ISIS even received a largely sympathetic portrayal in a five-part series produced and aired by the Rupert Murdoch-backed Vice News.[4] Indeed, Vice News’ “The Spread of the Caliphate” is reminiscent of the public relations-style reportage produced via the “embedding” of corporate news media personnel with US and allied forces during the 2003 conquest of Iraq.

Cracking The “Conspiracy Theories’” Psycholinguistic Code

The Witch Hunt against Independent Research and Analysis

By James F. Tracy

A new crusade appears to be underway to target independent research and analysis available via alternative news media. This March saw the release of “cognitive infiltration” advocate Cass Sunstein’s new book, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. In April, the confirmed federal intelligence-gathering arm, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), released a new report, “Agenda 21: The UN, Sustainability, and Right Wing Conspiracy Theory.” Most recently, Newsweek magazine carried a cover story, titled, “The Plots to Destroy America: Conspiracy Theories Are a Clear and Present Danger.”

As its discourse suggests, this propaganda campaign is using the now familiar “conspiracy theory” label, as outlined in Central Intelligence Agency Document 1035-960, the 1967 memo laying out a strategy for CIA “media assets” to counter criticism of the Warren Commission and attack independent investigators of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. At that time the targets included attorney Mark Lane and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who were routinely defamed and lampooned in major US news outlets.

Declassified government documents have proven Lane and Garrison’s allegations of CIA-involvement in the assassination largely accurate. Nevertheless, the prospect of being subject to the conspiracy theorist smear remains a potent weapon for intimidating authors, journalists, and scholars from interrogating complex events, policies, and other potentially controversial subject matter.

Endless War and the “Pictures in Our Heads”

By James F. Tracy

Over ninety years ago political analyst Walter Lippmann noted how the masses rely on independent conjectures–“the pictures in our heads,” or what he termed “stereotypes”–to make sense of the world. “The stereotype,” Edward Bernays similarly observed, “is the basis of a large part of the work of the public relations counsel.”[1]

These views mirror those of an elite class that Lippmann and Bernays were pleased to serve—an elite that, taken as a whole, now retains several thousand such minds throughout government and the private sector working under the broadly-held assumption that a long forsaken public condemned to flounder in the womb of Plato’s cave may be easily dismissed as more “qualified” parties proceed to enact realpolitik.

Along these lines, Australian propaganda researcher Alex Carey observed how among all countries in the world the United States has the greatest tendency for possessing a “Manichean” worldview—one where social and political phenomena are typically perceived as binary opposites of good-evil, sacred-satanic, and so on.[2] Such a belief system is anticipated and encouraged by the carefully-crafted propaganda and disinformation that pervades government pronouncements and corporate news reportage and commentary on both foreign and domestic affairs.

US public opinion is overall against military action against Syria. Yet this attitude obscures the fact that a similar majority doesn’t understand that the Obama administration and its allies have for over two years supported an intense guerrilla war in Syria that has killed close to one hundred thousand inhabitants and displaced over one million.

A New York Times-commissioned public opinion poll reveals that while Americans are skeptical of President Obama’s attempt to sell them a new war, with seventy-two percent wishing to refrain from inflicting “US democracy” on Syria. A subsequent question suggests the American public’s unfamiliarity with the grave situation in that country.

“Based on what you have seen or read,” the poll asks, “do you think the Syrian government probably did or probably did not use chemical weapons against Syrian civilians?” An overwhelming seventy-five percent responded that it “probably did,” ten-percent said that it “probably did not,” and the remaining fifteen-percent had no opinion.[3]

In other words, nine out of ten Americans are unmindful toward the true geopolitical underpinnings of the Syrian crisis apart from White House propaganda and its heavy reverberation via the corporate media.

A Pew Research Center poll offers similar findings, with fifty-three percent replying that there is “clear evidence” that Bashar al-Assad’s government “used chemical weapons against civilians”, versus twenty-three percent responding that there was “not clear” evidence of such, and an amazing twenty-four percent claiming ignorance.[4]

Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry’s position that Assad is guilty of such crimes is based on doubtful evidence that initially included a photograph taken in Iraq in 2003 of a child leaping over piles of shrouded bodies.[5]

On the other hand, the “rebels” operating in Syria have clear chemical weapons capabilities. This was proven in May when members of the Al-Nusra front were caught by Turkish police preparing to deploy two kilograms of sarin gas inside Turkey and Syria.[6]

Yet such observations may be easily obscured or dismissed—particularly for the educated classes–as the guardians of proper thought deem them among the many “anti-American conspiracy theories,”[7] a term that intends to short-circuit any inquiry among those inclined think twice about conflicting information in news reports.

The experts who craft the “war on terror” propaganda recognize how truly effective publicity must be direct and unambiguous. The official narrative rests on the still broadly-held notion that that US and its allies are “the good guys.”

Proclamations concerning the triumph of genuinely independent fact-based analytical reports of the tragic situation in Syria are thus premature. Despite the cracks and fissures in the official “war on terror” narrative initiated by alternative media, it is still more or less accepted by a US populace that the western-backed Al-Qaeda mercenaries operating in Syria are indeed “protesters,” “activists,” and “rebels.”

The effectiveness of such propaganda rests in the fact that such figures are routinely depicted throughout mainstream news outlets wielding machine guns, grenade launchers, and other sophisticated weaponry while they frolic throughout the country.

9/11 and the subsequent brutal and calculated military onslaughts that have unfolded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria cannot emerge as prevailingly uncontested historical events without a citizenry relegated to the hinterlands of what passes for today’s civil society—indeed, without a mass man willing to abandon his own reason and embrace the carefully constructed pictures in his head.

Notes

[1] Mark Landler and Megan Thee-Brenan, “Survey Reveals Scant Backing for Syria Strike,” New York Times, September 10, 2013.

[2] “Public Opinion Runs Against Syrian Air Strikes,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, September 3, 2013.

[3] “’CIA Fabricated Evidence to Lure US Into War with Syria,’” RT.com, September 9, 2013; Julie Wilson, “Bombshell: Kerry Caught Using Fake Photos to Fuel Syrian War,” Infowars.com, August 30, 2013.

[4] “Turkish Police Seizes 2 kg of Sarin Gas From Al-Nusra Militants,” Voltaire.net, May 31, 2013.

[5] Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, New York: The New Press, 1997 (1922); Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, New York: Ig Publishing (1923), 115.

[6] Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty, Andrew Lohrey, ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

[7] Jon Lee Anderson, “Putin and the Syria Conspiracy Theory Problem,” The New Yorker, September 6, 2013. See also, Jamelle Bouie, “Enough Already: Syria Wasn’t A False Flag Operation,” The Daily Beast, September 10, 2013.

 

Media #Disinformation and the #Conspiracy #Panic #Phenomenon

By James F. Tracy

To posit that one’s government may be partially composed of unaccountable criminal elements is cause for serious censure in polite circles. Labeled “conspiracy theories” by a corporate media that prompt and channel emotionally-laden mass consent, such perspectives are quickly dispatched to the memory hole lest they prompt meaningful discussion of the political prerogatives and designs held by a global power elite coordinating governments and broader geopolitical configurations. 

Cultural historian Jack Bratich terms such phenomena “conspiracy panics.” Potentially fostered by the coordinated actions of government officials or agencies and major news organs to generate public suspicion and uncertainty, a conspiracy panic is a demonstrable immediate or long-term reactive thrust against rational queries toward unusual and poorly understood events. To be sure, they are also intertwined with how the given society acknowledges and preserves its own identity—through “the management and expulsion of deviance.”[1] 

In the American mass mind, government intelligence and military operations are largely seen as being directed almost solely toward manipulation or coercion of unfortunate souls in foreign lands. To suggest otherwise, as independent researchers and commentators have done with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA-Contra-crack cocaine connection, and 9/11, has been cause for sustained conspiracy panics that act to suppress inquiry into such events by professional and credentialed opinion leaders, particularly journalists and academics. 

At the same time a conspiracy panic serves a subtle yet important doctrinal function of manifesting and reproducing the apt ideational status quo of the post-Cold War, “War on Terror” era. “The

Media Coverage of the Sandy Hook School Massacre

http://www.globalresearch.ca/conspiracy-theories-and-media-coverage-of-the-sandy-hook-school-massacre-in-search-of-the-last-liberal-intellectual/5328743

“Conspiracy Theories” and Media Coverage of the Sandy Hook School Massacre: 

In Search of the Last Liberal Intellectual

By James F. Tracy

In the wake of the Sandy Hook School shooting public incredulity with the official version of events led to numerous speculations on what really happened. In short order corporate media marshaled pundits to disparage such alternative interpretations as “conspiracy theories” and the work of deranged and even malevolent Sandy Hook “truthers.”

The now-prevalent phenomenon where only the narratives authorized by law enforcement and government authorities are worthy of serious consideration suggests the unmistakable extent to which public discourse has declined. In such an ideational system journalists and academics are expected to either fall silent or perform the rearguard action of deflecting criticism from the state.

Events such as Aurora or Sandy Hook have profuse informational gaps and a multitude of questions authorities have not begun to adequately address. Regardless of political stripe journalists and academics especially should be instinctively distrustful of such momentous incidents. Unfortunately many put short term interests of preserving reputation and livelihood above the obligatory search for truth.

Today’s project of policing the public sphere for unorthodox thoughts is a form of stealth authoritarianism that combines the weight of academic or journalistic expertise with a phony liberalism (or conservatism) to confirm the often unexamined perspectives of a specific political constituency. Such a technique is most readily employed against the apparently irrational ideas, beliefs and practices of a foreign other. In this regard “conspiracy theorists” and “truthers” typically play the “straw man” role.

For example, a recent piece by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan exhibits anxiety over major media’s attention toward individuals critical of what authorities have told them to believe about Sandy Hook.[1] Nyhan is fearful that research into the Newtown massacre contradicting the government’s official narrative—what he emphatically terms “conspiracy mongering” and “obscure myths”–may be given a platform by more “prominent advocates” from the political realm. From here the dangerous notions could gain the support of the unenlightened–“credulous believers” and “new adherents who would not otherwise have been exposed to or persuaded by false claims.” Such verboten ideas, Nyhan argues, should instead be allowed to “wither and die.”

The problem with this stance is that it consciously paves the way for the official false claims and myths that powerful political entities and corporate news and entertainment media are capable of forcing upon the public mind and collective memory, be they Osama bin Laden masterminding the 9/11 attacks, babies being thrown from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals, or North Vietnamese forces firing the first shots in the Vietnam War. Such a position is not unusual from a palace court intellectual; whether it is morally sound and faithful to the liberal tenet of speaking truth to power is a matter for another day.

In reviewing other articles of those using this form of defamatory innuendo toward the Sandy Hook truth community I encountered numerous poorly reasoned arguments and claims that could not withstand serious scrutiny and amounted to a bulwark for the official narrative–indeed, arguments most appealing to those with a dangerously unexamined faith in state power and lacking the inclination to consider alternative perspectives or investigate the event for themselves.

This prompted me to contact several notable “conspiracy theory” decriers and request an interview with each of them. Instead of mere name-calling, I remain sincerely interested in better understanding why such apparently intelligent individuals have come to arrive at their conclusions and become the self-appointed guardians of legitimate public exchange. I thus set about assembling a set of questions on a wide array of “conspiracy”-related issues and phenomena.

I figured I would begin by reaching out in a collegial manner to Professor Nyhan himself. “Sorry, not interested,” he replied, rather tersely. I next contacted Ben Smith and C J Lotz, staff writers at the popular liberal website Buzzfeed.com, who wrote a piece remarkably similar to Dr. Nyhan’s titled, “Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theories Edge Toward the Mainstream.”[2] Smith and Lotz never responded to my emails.

Undeterred, I contacted the operators of the well-known liberal “fact check” website Snopes.com. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid we just can’t,” Barbara Mikkelson replied. “I fear this is the downside of having a small operation.”

Next I dropped Salon.com political writer and ThinkProgress assistant editor Alex Seitz-Wald a line. The youthful Seitz-Wald prides himself as being one of today’s foremost “truth” skeptics. Since early January he has written a series of articles generally disparaging Sandy Hook researchers. “I’m writing one more story on this,” he said, “but really not interested in getting back into this subject or enduring more hate mail.”

I moved on to career anti-conspiracist and former High Times editor John Foster “Chip” Berlet. Calling himself a progressive and champion of liberal democracy, Mr. Berlet wrote profusely on the resurgence of the so-called “new right” throughout the 1990s.[3] “I do not spend time with people promoting crackpot conspiracy theories,” he replied, somewhat peevishly. “It is annoying, counterproductive, and gives me a headache. Nevertheless, I support your First Amendment right to waste bandwidth and electricity.”

Just when I was about to give up hope Jonathan Kay, editor at Canada’s National Post and author of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Conspiracist Underground [4] responded favorably to my interview request. “Sure,” he said, much to my delight. Yet when I provided Kay with the questions he balked. “Just about all the answers to these questions are in my book,” he replied. I countered that very few of the questions were actually addressed in the book. “I get the sense that my perspective wouldn’t really be that meaningful to you. I’m going to pass on this.”

In the end while skilled at defending the varied machinations of our out-of-control police state by helping to confirm their immediate audiences’ prejudices, none of the foremost conspiracy cynics and debunkers opted to have a dialogue–one where they would likely be compelled to interrogate their own claims and assumptions.

Could it be that what these commentators desire in lieu of dialogue is a one-way transmission of their ideas devoid of critique or interpretation–one where the pursuit of “truth” itself is caricatured as a fool’s errand? If liberalism is based in part on a free and open exchange perhaps some of the foremost figures and media outlets touting themselves as progressive and liberal, and purporting to preserve and defend rational discourse, really aren’t so open-minded after all.

The following are the questions I was hoping my would-be interlocutors would address.

• The main thrust of John Milton’s Areopagetica is that in a fair exchange an argument based on the truth will triumph over lies and deception. Do you think that the major media’s use of terms such as “truther” or “conspiracy theorist” to designate individuals or groups with ideas and theories that differ from government and/or corporate entities is a productive part of the journey toward truth and enlightenment Milton envisioned?
• To what degree do you think citizens and the press should hold government officials accountable for momentous events such as the terror attacks of September 11, 2001?
• What characterizes a conspiracy theory? How can we distinguish between a conspiracy theory and a valid assessment of a specific phenomenon, issue, or event?
• US political leaders uniformly maintain that Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network were the sole agents behind the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 Commission’s report attributed this set of events to “a lack of imagination” in terms of government agencies’ preparation. In your view, what are the most compelling pieces of evidence to support this official explanation of the 9/11 events?
• Historian Richard Hofstadter argues in his well-known essay, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” that regardless of how much evidence the conspiratorially-minded gather and present on a topic or phenomenon they are not worthy of a hearing as their views may endanger rational political discourse and consensus. Does such a position potentially jeopardize effective and honest journalistic practice?
• In your estimation, is the tendency to entertain or proffer conspiracy theories a sign of a potential psychiatric condition? Along these lines, are at least some conspiracy theorists inherently dangerous?
• In 1977 Carl Bernstein reported that through “Operation Mockingbird” and related activities many major news organizations were infiltrated by CIA operatives or consciously aided the CIA in intelligence gathering activities and “planting” stories in the press. CIA document 1035-960 suggests how the agency went about thwarting criticism of the Warren Commission’s examination of President Kennedy’s assassination by utilizing intelligence assets in news outlets to bolster the Warren Commission’s legitimacy and labeling critics “conspiracy theorists.” In your estimation, is the intelligence community’s penetration of the press an ongoing phenomenon? Is it more widespread today or has it subsided to any significant degree?
• Political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith cites The Declaration of Independence as a conspiratorial document and asserts that the ideology of America’s founders was in many ways motivated by paranoia toward British rule. In fact, the notion of conspiracy has been a consistent theme in American politics. With this in mind, what is it about modern forms of governance that render such impulses and worldviews irrational, obsolete, and perhaps even dangerous?
• The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City brought into public consciousness the notion of “homegrown terrorism.” At the same time the event provided the pretext for laws compromising Americans’ civil liberties and paved the way for the PATRIOT Act that was enacted in the wake of 9/11. Is it reasonable for the public to conclude that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were the sole or principal agents in the bombing? Have you examined the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee’s 2001 report on the incident? If so, would you consider its findings to be sound and cause for a new judicial interrogation of the event?
• The official theory of what transpired at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012 involves 20-year-old Adam Lanza going on a murderous rampage that resulted in the deaths of 20 children and 7 adults. Major media outlets appear to have unquestioningly gone forward with this scenario. In your estimation, have law enforcement and medical authorities produced evidence sufficient to support this theory of events?
• There are a variety of public figures and websites that deem themselves as “alternative” sources of political news and analysis, such as Alex Jones and Infowars.com, and Dr. Webster Tarpley of Tarpley.net. Why do you believe such individuals are frequently held up as promoters of conspiracy theories? In your view, what is it that makes these commentators and sources of analysis less reliable than, say, CNN’s Piers Morgan, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, or the editorial and op-ed pages of a regional or national newspaper?
• Philanthropic foundations contribute large sums to a wide array of non-governmental organizations and media outlets in the United States. What role, if any, do you believe such entities play in shaping public discourse and opinion around controversial issues and events?

Notes

[1] Brendan Nyhan, “Boosting the Sandy Hook Truther Myth,” Columbia Journalism Review, January 22, 2013. Dr. Nyhan speaks dismissively of this author yet it is difficult to find a conventional article addressing independent Sandy Hook analysis that does not. I chose this piece to aid in analyzing its argument and a specific sociocultural tendency rather than its author. CJR seeks “to encourage excellence in journalism in the service of a free society” and its “major funders” include George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Family Fund.

[2] Ben Smith and C J Lotz, “Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theories Edge Toward the Mainstream,” Buzzfeed.com, January 22, 2013.

[3] For example, see the barely concealed political tracts Chip Berlet (editor), Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash, Boston and Somerville MA: Political Research Associates and South End Press, 1995, and the quasi-academic Too Close for Comfort: Right Wing Populism in America, New York: Guilford Press, 2000.

[4] Jonathan Kay, Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Conspiracist Underground, New York: Harper Collins, 2011. 

False Flags, Fake Media Reporting

http://www.globalresearch.ca/false-flags-fake-media-reporting-deceiving-the-public-social-engineering-and-the-21st-century-truth-emergency/5325982

False Flags, Fake Media Reporting, Deceiving the Public: 

Social Engineering and the 21st Century “Truth Emergency”

By James F. Tracy

On March 9, 1995 Edward Bernays died at the age of 103. His professional endeavors involved seeking to change popular attitudes and behavior by fundamentally altering social reality.[1] Since he laid the modern groundwork for deceiving the public we are for better or worse living out his legacy today.

Several years ago Project Censored directors Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff identified and explained the “truth emergency” that is among the greatest threats to civil society and human existence. This crisis is manifest in flawed (or non-existent) investigations into 9/11 and other potential false flag events, fraudulent elections, and illegal wars vis-à-vis a corporate-controlled news media that fail to adequately inform the public on such matters. While neglecting or obscuring inquiry into such events and phenomena major media disparage independent and often uncredentialed researchers as “conspiracy theorists” or, more revealingly, “truthers.”[2]

The truth emergency continues today, and social engineers like Bernays long understood the significance of undermining the use of reason, for it is only through reason that truth may be determined and evaluated. To be sure, individuals and institutions that have successfully achieved legitimacy in the public mind are recognized as having a monopoly on the capacity to reason and are thus perceived as the foremost bearers of truth and knowledge. Through the endorsement of “experts”—figures perceived as authoritative in their field—the public could easily be persuaded on anything from tobacco use and water fluoridation to military intervention abroad.

Today reason is defined one dimensionally; its relationship to truth largely taken-for-granted. Yet as Leibniz observed, reason marks our humanity, suggesting a portion of the soul capable of a priori recognition of truth. With this in mind the modern individual in the mass has been rendered at least partially soulless through her everyday deferral to the powerfully persuasive notion and representation of expertise. However narrowly focused, under the guise of objectivity the institutionally-affiliated journalist, academic, bureaucrat, and corporate spokesperson have become the portals of reason through which the public is summoned to observe “truth.”

These agents of reason are largely bereft of emotion, moderate in temperament, and speak or write in an unsurprisingly formulaic tone. The narratives they relate and play out present tragedy with the expectation of certain closure. And with a century of commercial media programming the mass mind has come to not only accept but anticipate such regulation and control under the regime of institutionally-sanctioned expertise.

The selection and arrangement of experts by corporate media guarantees a continued monopoly on “truth,” particularly when presented to an uninquisitive and politically dormant public. Yet this phenomenon extends to ostensibly more trustworthy media outlets such as public broadcasting, where a heightened utilization of credentialed expertise is required to ensure the consensus of those who perceive themselves as more refined than the Average Joe.

This preservation of what passes for reason and truth cannot be sustained without a frequent dialectical struggle with unreason and falsity. Since many individuals have unconsciously placed their genuine reasoning faculties in abeyance and often lack a valid knowledge of politics and history, their unspoken faith in government and the broader political economy to protect and further their interests is groundless. Against this milieu those genuinely capable of utilizing their reasoning capacities in the pursuit of truth are often held up as heretical for their failure to accept what is presented as reality, with the requisite “conspiracy theory” label wielded in Orwellian fashion to denote such abnormal intellectual activity.

Lacking the autonomous use of reason to recognize truth, form often trumps substance. For example, a seemingly obscure news website with unconventional graphics or an emotional news presenter purporting to discuss the day’s affairs is typically perceived as untrustworthy and illegitimate by a public conditioned to accept forms of news and information where objectivity and professionalism often camouflage disinformation.

In 2013 the truth emergency is greater than ever, and in the era of seemingly never-ending pseudo-events and Potemkin villages presented by major media as the reality with which we must contend, the application of independent reason in pursuit of truth has all too frequently been replaced with an unthinking obeisance toward the smokescreen of expertise disguising corporate power and control.

Notes

[1] Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Truth Emergency and Media Reform,” Daily Censored, March 31, 2009.

[2] “Edward Bernays, ‘Father of Public Relations’ and Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103,” New York Times, March 10, 1995. 

#Chemtrails. The Realities of #Geoengineering and #Weather #Modification

By Prof. James F. Tracy

Over the past decade evidence has increasingly emerged indicating how geoengineering and weather modification programs designed to inflict major impacts on the atmosphere and environment are fully operational.

Despite such developments the CO2-specific anthropogenic theory of global warming touted by foundation-funded environmental groups and public relations dominates much of popular discourse and the prevailing worldview of intellectuals.

[…]

According to the report, in 1964 the National Science Foundation formed a Special Commission on Weather Modification. Thereafter, weather weapons in the form of cloud seeding were used to flood North Vietnamese supply lines during the Vietnam War.[5] More recent documentation points to private and government bodies’ active pursuit of weather modification, including the US Department of Homeland Security’s Hurricane Aerosol and Microphysics Program.[6] And in mid-2012 scientists proposed a $5 billion geoengineering plan to potentially unleash one million tons of particulates in the upper atmosphere each year to “cut world greenhouse gas emissions.”[7]

Since this is such an open program—taking place in plain sight directly over our heads—why is there almost complete silence about it in academic circles as well as mainstream and “alternative” progressive media outlets, particularly if one is to conclude that academe and the press are where disinterested inquiry and the dissemination of information and ideas in the public interest are allegedly anticipated and guaranteed? Indeed, geoengineering and weather manipulation are “a scientific taboo,” 

To continue reading: 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/chemtrails-the-realities-of-geoengineering-and-weather-modification/5311079