Puppet MastersS


Footprints

Why Society Doesn't Change: The System Justification Bias

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© kris krug
"Society's tendency is to maintain what has been. Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history: we have infinitely more instances of forbearance to exploitation, and submission to authority, than we have examples of revolt." (Zinn, 1968)

Have you ever wondered why society hardly ever changes? I think most of us have.

One answer is that humans have a mental bias towards maintaining the status quo. People think like this all the time. They tend to go with what they know rather than a new, unknown option.

People feel safer with the established order in the face of potential change. That's partly why people buy the same things they bought before, return to the same restaurants and keep espousing the same opinions.

This has been called the 'system justification bias' and it has some paradoxical effects (research is described in Jost et al., 2004):

V

Best of the Web: How Will the 99% Deal with the Psychopaths in the 1%?

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Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a psychopath? These individuals are either born with an emotional deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others, or they are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become this way. With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today. These people are more likely to be risk takers, opportunists motivated by self-interest and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around them through manipulative means.


Comment: Actually, their numbers are probably far higher than that. Furthermore, there are other types of humans whose behaviour indicates they are so damaged as to be practically indistinguishable from psychopaths. Please read Political Ponerology to get an idea of the sheer scale of the problem.


Last year, the Occupy Movement drew a distinction between the top 1% and the remaining 99% - as distinguished by measures of wealth and income. Of course, this breakdown is misleading, since there are many top income earners who sympathize with the plights of others and are not part of the problem. But the real defining metric reveals itself: 1% of the global population is comprised of people who exhibit psychopathic tendencies.

Comment: As Lobaczewski warned in Political Ponerology, Ignota nulla curatio morbid - "Do not attempt to cure that which you do not understand". Before we can get creative about a grand future without psychopaths (or with getting psychopathology under control), we need to realise - en masse - that psychopaths are steering humanity as a whole off a very steep cliff. Indeed, humanity's inability to acknowledge and deal with this problem before it became too late is the reason why the Living System is cleaning house on our planet at this time.

Having said that, it is refreshing to see others thinking and communicating about the root problem of injustice in the world.

psycho 6%
© SOTT.net



Attention

New York Times Admits that Virtually Every Major News Organization Allows the News to be Censored by Government Officials

Censorship
© The End of American Dream
In one of the most shocking articles that the New York Times has ever put out, a New York Times reporter has openly admitted that virtually every major mainstream news organization allows government bureaucrats and campaign officials to censor their stories.

For example, almost every major news organization in the country has agreed to submit virtually all quotes from anyone involved in the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign to gatekeepers for "quote approval" before they will be published.

If the gatekeeper in the Obama campaign does not want a certain quote to get out, the American people will not see it, and the same thing applies to the Romney campaign. The goal is to keep the campaigns as "on message" as possible and to avoid gaffes at all cost. But this kind of thing is not just happening with political campaigns. According to the New York Times, "quote approval" has become "commonplace throughout Washington".

In other words, if you see a quote in the newspaper from someone in the federal government then it is safe to say that a gatekeeper has almost certainly reviewed that quote and has approved it. This is another sign that "the free and independent media" in this country is a joke. What we get from the mainstream media is a very highly filtered form of propaganda, and that is one reason why Americans are turning away from the mainstream media in droves. People want the truth, and more Americans than ever realize that they are not getting it from the mainstream media.

The following quote comes from the recent article in the New York Times mentioned above and it is absolutely jaw dropping....
The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.

They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.

Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president's top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review.

The verdict from the campaign - an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script - is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.
This is an article that everyone needs to read. If you have not read it yet, you can find it right here.

Black Cat

Land of the free: Intense spy hunt for whistle-blowers at the FDA

The intensity and sweep of the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to spy on the communications of whistle-blowing employees suspected of leaking trade secrets to outsiders were astonishing. What started as an effort to monitor the e-mails of a single individual quickly grew to encompass five employees and their communications with other F.D.A. workers, journalists, Congressional staff members and two government offices that investigate allegations raised by whistle-blowers on what is supposed to be a confidential basis.

The surveillance began on April 22, 2010, after GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric, requested an investigation of how information that it considered a trade secret had ended up in The New York Times on March 29, 2010. That article focused primarily on allegations about unwarranted radiation risks posed by a CT machine made by General Electric to screen patients for colon cancer; it quoted two of the whistle-blowers who would later come under surveillance and be let go.

Handcuffs

Accusations of Police Misconduct Documented in Lawyers' Report on Occupy Protests

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© Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesPolice officers made arrests on Liberty Street near Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in March during an Occupy Wall Street protest.
During Occupy Wall Street protests New York police officers obstructed news reporters and legal observers, conducted frequent surveillance, wrongly limited public gatherings and enforced arbitrary rules, a group of lawyers said in a lengthy report issued on Wednesday.

The group, called the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, which included people involved with the law clinics at New York University School of Law and Fordham Law School, said that they had cataloged hundreds of instances of what they described as excessive force and other forms of police misconduct said to have taken place since September, when the Occupy Wall Street movement began.

Although the report referred to some well-known events, including Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna's use of pepper spray, it also detailed specific instances of alleged misconduct that had not appeared in news reports.

Vader

US Military and Local Police Working Together on American Streets

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© n/a
The US military is being used to protect civilian events, like the 2012 Democratic and Republican Party National Conventions in Tampa, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina.

USNORTHCOM and Leon Panetta, US Secretary of Defense, has readily admitted that US armed forces will collaborate with local law enforcement "if called upon".

In fact, more than 20,000 troops were brought home and readied for deployment within the US to assist in "civil unrest and crowd control".

The US military will prop up the US Secret Service "for operational security reasons we do not discuss the numbers of military personnel and resources that are involved. Additionally, we do not share our operational plans," said U.S. Navy Lt. Cdr. William G. Lewis.

The extent of use of military forces on civilian matters, as reported by mainstream media (MSM) have included the reallocation of hundreds of military police officers being trained to "assist local authorities" in investigation, crime scene and case building.

Stormtrooper

Tehran, Moscow Blast Foreign States for Interference in Syria

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© UnknownIran's Ambassador to Russia Reza Sajjadi.
Iran and Russia lambasted the western and Arab states for their interferences in the internal affairs of Syria, and called on them to stop unconstructive acts in the Muslim country.

The issue was raised in a meeting between Iran's Ambassador to Russia Reza Sajjadi and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov in Moscow on Wednesday.

During the meeting, the two officials stressed the need to solve the current crisis in Syria through negotiations and peaceful means.

In a meeting to discuss the latest developments in Syria, the diplomats also exchanged views on bringing the Syrian case to the Security Council of the United Nations.

Sajjadi and Bogdanov also stressed the need to prevent any foreign interventions in the internal affairs of Syria urging foreign states to stop making non-constructive moves in Syria.

Oscar

SOTT Focus: Suspect 'Eyewitnesses' - From 9/11 to the Colorado Massacre

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By now most people reading this already know that there are a number of unanswered questions surrounding the Colorado theater shooting, so I just want to quickly point out a few things and maybe make a few connections along the way.

Apart from the fact that the DHS and the FBI released a memo in May this year to security and emergency services to be on the alert for a 'terrorist' attack at a movie theater; apart from the fact that on the same day as the Aurora massacre, Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine was holding an identical drill 17 miles away that simulated a shooter in a movie theater; apart from the fact that the FBI is officially known to have set up 'terror attacks' that included creating the plan, providing the weapons and equipment, preparing the location of the attack and even driving the vehicles to pull it off; APART from all that, there is the also the problem of the eyewitnesses to the Colorado shooting who stated that the gunman (James Holmes) seemed to have an accomplice.

Pistol

Obama calls for gun control deal in wake of Colorado cinema shootings

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© Skip Bolen/EPABarack Obama in New Orleans, where he pledged to seek a consensus between Democrats, Republicans and community leaders on reducing gun violence.

Barack Obama has broken the silence he has maintained on gun control since the Colorado shootings, making a plea for Democrats, Republicans and community leaders to "arrive at a consensus" on how to reduce gun violence across the United States.

At the end of a trip lasting several days that began in Aurora, Colorado, where he met with families and victims of the massacre in a cinema, the US president told an audience that such tragedies were replayed on a smaller scale in cities throughout the country on a daily basis.

"Every day and a half the number of young people we lose to violence is about the same as the number of people we lost in that movie theater," Obama said in remarks at the National Urban League Conference in New Orleans.

Comment: Surprise! Gun sales surge in US following Colorado shooting


Pistol

Best of the Web: Surprise! Gun sales surge in US following Colorado shooting

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© Gilles Mingasson/Getty ImagesGun shop in Texas: sales of firearms have soared across the US following the Colorado massacre.
Firearms sales are surging in the US in the wake of the Colorado massacre as buyers express fears that politicians may use the shootings to seek new restrictions on owning weapons.

In Colorado - the scene of Friday's shooting during the screening of a Batman film that killed 12 and injured dozens of others - gun sales jumped in the three days that followed. The state approved background checks for 2,887 people who wanted to purchase a firearm - 25% more than the average Friday to Sunday period in 2012 and 43% more than the same period the week before.

Dick Rutan, owner of Gunners Den in suburban Arvada, said requests for concealed-weapon training certification were "off the hook". His four-hour course in gun safety, required for certification for a concealed-weapons permit in Colorado, had drawn double the interest since Friday.

Comment: They have been deliberately flooding the US with affordable military-grade firearms for decades. Perhaps the deeper intention of apparently senseless acts like this horrific mass shooting is to rile gun owners into a defensive posture and thereby increase gun sales, not decrease them. As is outlined in The Controversy of Zion, the Powers That Be want global revolution, so that when it's over they can pick up the pieces and start with some new form of control. People don't realise that the 'security forces' are as expendable as civilians to the Powers That Be.

What those who constantly appeal to the US constitution's 2nd amendment don't seem to grasp is that if the government really wanted to "take away your guns" they would have done it long ago. They have deliberately allowed the mass arming of American civilians. Are we to suppose that this state of affairs happened by accident?