Be careful with where you get your information from!
We have to be increasingly more careful with where we get our information from these days. It seems that it becomes more and more difficult to be able to rely on the media, even the mainstream sources. A lot of people still believe that if something is reported in the media, it has to be true, and if it’s not reported, it’s probably not true. They fail to realize that the media is being used more and more to form public opinion instead of objectively informing the public. It’s being used to manipulate people into doing and thinking what those in control want them to do and think. This is largely being done by selectively reporting the news, reporting half truths, lies or just opinions that are not based on facts. Selectively reporting the news also means that there’s a lot of information that never reaches the public. It’s a form of censorship.
I’ve written about this before, and two important documentaries that you should see on this subject are “Orwell Rolls in his Grave” and “Outfoxed.” The traditional media such as TV, radio and print are slowly being taken over by a small number of corporations with just a few people at the top deciding what to report. Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp alone reaches 80% of the world population, and he’s now also taking over large websites on the Internet. Other corporations such as General Electric Capital and organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are also busy buying what remains of independent media. And then you also have corporations on the Internet such as Google who have been caught censoring information many times already. Even Microsoft and Yahoo are actively and willingly helping the Chinese government with censorship and limiting freedom of speech. And it’s still not enough, because the Chinese president wants even more control of the Internet:
CHINESE PRESIDENT Hu Jintao said that his glorious socialist government should be using the Internet to “guide public opinion”.
He wanted to see a “healthy online culture” which was dedicated to protected the government’s stability. According to the Xinhua News Agency Hu told officials at a meeting of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo that whether China could cope with the Internet affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state.
He added that the Chinese internet regulators should “use advanced technologies to better guide public opinions” and “promote online products that can represent the grand Chinese culture.”
As if he’s not been “guiding” public opinion enough already with the help of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. In this case, “guiding” is more like manipulating. It’s the same thing the Pentagon is already doing:
The Pentagon has formally declared psychological warfare on the American people by announcing it will engage in propaganda and indoctrination by using the Internet and media to “set the record straight” on the war on terror. Recent history clearly indicates this is just the latest outreach of an insipid brainwashing agenda that is totally unlawful and anathema to the U.S. Constitution.
In the past, the military or the government did not announce that they were planting surreptitious propaganda to target U.S. audiences, they did it secretly and for a very good reason – because it was and still is illegal.
…
The new program is simply another wing of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence , publicly announced after 9/11 but simply the latest incarnation of a PR brainwashing scam that spans back decades. The OSI exploited legal loopholes by planting its propaganda in foreign newspapers that would later be picked up by U.S. newswires. In today’s environment even that seems quaint, with the Pentagon openly and proudly shouting from the rooftops that they will knowingly violate the law to indoctrinate the American people.
Perhaps the most alarming case of the military’s information tentacles burrowing their influence deep into media circles in recent years was in February 2000, when another branch of the same Pentagon propaganda bureau, Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS), had placed their operatives “in the news division at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters as part of an “internship” program starting in the final days of the Kosovo War.”
FAIR speculated that the purpose was twofold, one to directly propagandize the American people via CNN and also potentially to allow the “military to conduct an intelligence-gathering mission against the network itself,” because the “military needed to find ways to “gain control” over commercial news satellites to help bring down an “informational cone of silence” over regions where special operations were taking place.”
With the knowledge that government propagandists were utilizing U.S. news network hubs at CNN to run what was described as a “vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory,” and that this took place over six years ago – just imagine how infested today’s networks and newsrooms are with paid agent provocateur propagandists whose sole job specification is to orchestrate methods of mind control over the population of the United States.
In October 2005 Government Accountability Office investigators concluded that the Bush administration’s secret policy to pay off influential journalists to plant fake news and positive spin on Bush’s policies was illegal and that the “administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.”
They’ve been doing it in Iraq too. It’s a form of mind control or manipulation. If you can control the information someone gets, you can control or manipulate his thinking and his decisions. Also check out this link.
This same approach has already been used for “marketing” by a few corporations. A while ago NVidia was caught hiring people to post positive remarks about their products on message boards. These people had to post 50-100 messages on various boards in an hour. Their job was to first earn the trust of visitors on those boards, and then go on to promote NVidia’s products to them. Recently Sony also launched a blog to promote their portable gaming device, the PSP, making it look like someone else was running it and later had to admit they were behind it. So even when you’re reading blogs, comments on blogs, message boards and product reviews on websites like Amazon.com, you have to be very careful with trusting that information. Here’s an example of a review on Amazon.com, supposedly done by an 11 year old:
Reviewer: White Tiger “Tiger”
Wow, this toy is great! I am eleven years old and I think you should buy this! I will write about it in the following.First of all, this toy is PURE FUN! I love how it never gets boring because there is SO MUCH STUFF IT CAN DO! I love having it guard the hallway, and then having it tell me how many times that there was an intruder. And its walking isn’t bad at all, I use my robot on carpet and it works great for me! The only thing is walking backwards, it barely moves when it walks backwards. I give this toy 5 stars for “fun”!
This toy has a great educational value. There is so much stuff to learn and get the hang of, like what shift buttons to press and which combos to do. Also, programming it is very educational. This toy gets 5 stars for “educational value”!
For a robot, this thing is pretty durable. It is sturdy and doesn’t break when it falls or bumps into something. I gave “durability” 4 stars because of his head. His head seems to be very fragile and is knocked around easily!
Now, some things to take note of:
When (if) you purchase this toy, be sure to make sure that you have a pretty BIG ROOM for it that doesn’t have alot of LARGE OBJECTS. This is because on “free roam” mode, the robot can bump into things easily (but his sensors touch the surface and then he goes around the object).
Make sure that the room(s) you decide to use RoboSapien V2 in have exebtionally GOOD LIGHTING. In my family room, I have an overveiw light and lamps, I prefer the lamps and the robot works great with both. Just use the thing you like the most (lighting wise) and see if RSV2 works in it. You will beable to tell if he can’t because he will say “lighting to low…”
One more thing. This guy takes alot of EXPENSIVE BATTERIES. 6 D’s and 7 AAA’s. Be aware of that. He has a 4-6 hour lifespan, so batteries will be used up quite a bit.
I just told you about the cons of this toy. BUT, don’t be sad that the toy has cons because it only has THREE CONS. It has over ONE HUNDRED PROS!!!
I totally recommend this toy all in all! Enjoy!
Does that sound like an 11 year old? I have my doubts. There seem to be companies that are specialized in this kind of “marketing” and who knows how many corporations they are now working for.
From my IT background, I know that there are three important things that are needed in order for information to be useful:
- It first of all has to be correct
- It has to be complete
- It has to be timely
The first one is pretty obvious. If information is not correct, you’re going to be making the wrong assumptions and decisions based on that information. This would be the case when you’re just being lied to and are being fed wrong information on purpose. The second one is also not hard to understand. If you get information that is not complete, even though it is correct, you’ll still be making wrong assumptions and decisions because they would be based on an incomplete understanding of things. This would be the case when you have selective news reporting and are being fed information based on a specific point of view. This information might be true, but you don’t get the other side of the story or even the complete picture of the one side, and are being manipulated into having certain opinions about things. And finally, information has to reach people on time in order for it to be useful. If people find out about things too late, they won’t be able to act on it at all, or not as effectively as they could have if they received that information on time.
It seems you have to be really careful with where you get your news and information from and have to be really paranoid about the sources. You also have to go out and look for alternative news and information as well to get the other side of the story and make sure you’re not getting a distorted view of things. Usually you would expect to be able to rely on the media to do this for you, but as you can see, that won’t happen very often anymore. It can take a lot of time to do your own research, but even if you have the time, it will still get more difficult to find certain information because of all the manipulation and censorship going on. It’s good to be aware of all of this, and I want to highly recommend visiting the links above to my previous posts on this subject.
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