Do your best. Speak the truth.
Capacity building means flooding the zone with money and other assets, including humans. ‘Media literacy’ will entail articles, school courses, credentials, and (very dubious) ‘scholars’. This is a well-oiled delusion machine. It both creates and reveals the hierarchy of delusion in our society. Buddhist delusion is not just idiosyncratic stuff in your own mind. Much of it also comes from the minds of our hierarchs and is designed to control the public. ABN
There is hardly any other historical topic, about which as much information and disinformation can be found as about the Holocaust. The topic is huge, as it occurred in thousands of individual events across an entire continent, and lasted almost four years – from mid-1941 to May 1945. Accordingly, scholars specializing in the field have produced large tomes and many multi-volume collections dealing with the various aspects of this event of the past that refuses to pass.
However, for those of us not specializing in Holocaust studies – meaning for almost all of us – the information contained in those volumes and collections is usually too much information. Furthermore, it is commonly presented in a way that is not helpful for us to wrap our heads around it. Where is a concise overview explaining what exactly “the Holocaust” was, and what it was not? What major parts does it consists of? What are the main characteristics of these parts?
To answer such questions, encyclopedias are written. So far, mainstream scholars have produced four encyclopedias on this topic. In September 2023, another one has been added. We may ask: who needs a fifth door stop, when we already have four?
Those who understand covid-19 anti-science are in a position to understand how just about everything in the West works. This includes academia, mainstream media, the public face of governments, and the history of our society and all other societies. I have no expertise in the history of WW2 but welcome this encyclopedia as another offering on the road to telling something approaching the truth about whatever happened in the past. It’s an absolute offense to any civilization that any topic be banned or people who write about it or speak about it be imprisoned or fined. It’s very easy to see that happening to us today in the USA and in Europe. If even medical science can be twisted as much as covid anti-science has, we can see that nothing is sacred and nothing can be believed just because some authority figure—or even a large group of them—say it’s true. That’s how it is. From covid we also have learned that the real scientists were the ones who questioned the official bs. And what happened to them? They were banned, vilified, deplatformed, fired. We all know this, but the lesson is so valuable it bears emphasizing. Covid provides us with a very recent lived and ongoing example of mainstream government and media mind-control and harassment. The covid example applies to many other areas of immediate concern—the Ukraine War, our borders, anthropogenic climate change, our economy. all news and all history. ABN
Harlingen, Texas., Russell Lee photographer
Everyone in the world has a background like this at some time in the past, and for most of us that is the recent past or present. There is no shame in surviving on the basics and often much joy. The attitude that all poverty is horrible and must be deplored or corrected is not a healthy attitude from a Buddhist point of view. Buddhism counsels that we have compassion for those who are sick, hurt or disabled and that we help them if practicable. But poverty alone is not a reason to help an able-bodied person aside from hiring or training if good will come of it. The systemic racism stuff is all bullshit. Most whites were serfs, servants or deplored underlings until very recent times. An exception to not helping the poor is if you did something to make them poor like causing brain damage or fraud. ABN
Public semiotics are semiotics known to many people, semiotics that many people within a society or culture will respond to in similar ways.
Some examples of public semiotics are conventions in literature, film, news, customs, clothing, language use, courtship styles, and so on.
In film and literature, most viewers recognize the semiotic difference between first- and third-person narratives as well as typical plot-lines such as “the individual against the group,” “the individual who overcomes a tragedy,” or simply “good versus bad.”
Viewers responses are controlled by these narratives through expectation, emotion, and habit. Due to their short lengths, most popular films rely very heavily on a single strong emotion for narrative effect, while serious literature generally deals with more complex themes.
A recent scholarly study of US politics came to some conclusions about public semiotics and our perceptions of them that are not likely to surprise readers of this site.
The study and an interview with one of its authors can be found here: Scholar Behind Viral ‘Oligarchy’ Study Tells You What It Means.
In the interview co-author Gilens has this to say about the study:
I’d say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups — of economic elites and of organized interests. (Source: same as above. This source has the study as well as the interview.)
What this study says about public semiotics is the public does not control them. Rather, the public is controlled by them.
Interestingly, the study left out some of the main ways that public semiotics are controlled by elites. Public semiotics are not just controlled by interest groups and lobbies influencing legislation, they are also greatly controlled by:
In the linked interview, which is well-worth reading, Gilens mentions non-business lobbying groups, but does not say who they are.
If we do not understand that our public semiotics come from somewhere—that many of them are created and maintained by special interest groups—we will fail to understand how we are manipulated by them.
As this study shows, voting for a very limited selection of candidates who rarely, if ever, fulfill their very limited campaign promises is an exercise in public hypnosis. It is a complex semiotic that fosters the illusion of participation where there is none.
I do not think any of this will change. But I do think it is important for individuals, and especially FIML partners, to understand where the semiotics that jostle around in their heads are coming from. As individuals, we can have great control over what we believe, value, do, and understand about human life, and need not be controlled by the self-serving agendas of others.
It is important to understand that much of what is construed as “public life” is actually a complex mix of semiotics consciously controlled by people who work to create and maintain illusions of plots and themes in the world in much the same ways that plots and themes are created and maintained in film.
UPDATE: I wrote and posted this on APRIL 23, 2014. It’s just as true today and far more obvious. Semiotics is the study of how messages are sent and received. Since language and semiotics are loosely hierarchical, control of the top levels or meta-levels of language and semiotics yields control of whole societies. This can be seen in fashion as much as politics. The real-world result is most people are following semiotic illusions behind which the real wheels of governance are being turned by, for the most part, those who control the money—the huge investment funds, central banks, the super rich. The Ukraine War has been a semiotic fantasy, as was covid and the covid government response, as was the 2020 fraudulent election, the manufactured ‘crisis’ at the border, inflation, soon to be CBDC. We are right now living in an algorithmic psyop which strictly controls the ‘information’ we are allowed to see, the topics we are allowed to address. Boiled down, that information is the dominant public semiotics proposed and furthered by the forces mentioned above. This is why if the government said it or MSM said or a choir of HoWo influencers said it, you can be sure it’s not true. ABN
Wikipedia is one of many tools used by the US liberal establishment and its allies in the intelligence community to wage “information warfare,” the site’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, has told journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Speaking on Greenwald’s ‘System Update’ podcast, Sanger lamented how the site he helped found in 2001 has become an instrument of “control” in the hands of the left-liberal establishment, among which he counts the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies.
“We do have evidence that, as early as 2008, that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” he said. “Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?”
Activity by the CIA and FBI on Wikipedia was first made public by a programming student named Virgil Griffith in 2007. Griffith developed a program called WikiScanner that could trace the location of computers used to edit Wikipedia articles, and found that the CIA, FBI, and a host of large corporations and government agencies were scrubbing the online encyclopedia of incriminating information.
“[The intelligence agencies] pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger told Greenwald.
“A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online,” he continued, “on websites like Wikipedia.”
Sen. Joni Ernst is warning that China is ‘in our house’ and calling for accountability after a warehouse in California turned out to be an illegal Chinese-run virus laboratory.
Local and federal officials raided a lab in Reedley, California, which was genetically engineering mice and experimenting with HIV, herpes and malaria.
Photos obtained by DailyMail.com via court documents show thousands of dead mice stuffed in storage bins haphazardly shoved on shelves and freezers filled to the brim with bottles of blood and plasma of origins unknown.
They also show stacks of boxes containing dangerous pathogens, including one labeled ‘malaria’ that had Chinese etched on it. Unanswered questions remain about the origins of the lab, who was running it, and whether it posed a bioterrorism threat.
Ernst, R-Iowa, is now calling for congressional action to ensure that a situation similar to the Wuhan, China, lab leak that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic will never occur in a biolabratory within the U.S.
The senator told DailyMail.com in an exclusive statement following the bombshell bust that ‘China is not just in our backyard, they are in our house, illegally conducting risky research that poses a serious public health concern.’
This appears to have been a real lab in California. But this news story veers off into comparing it to the virology lab in Wuhan China. Is this propaganda, ginning up war with China? Did the writer just free associate? Or was this connection a deliberate hypnotic plant to make readers associate nasty labs with Chinese malfeasance, thus subliminally strengthening the China-alone did covid theory? (Which is not likely given the Western response to covid and its history of funding the Wuhan lab.) ABN
This meme appeared about two years ago. By now, it’s all just sad, so many harmed by the vax. The derision in this meme is not directed at people simply because they took the vax or even supported it. It was directed at those who were self-righteous in the face of counterevidence and who acted like members of a cult. A few of them still remain, but most have had the decency to admit the whole story was based on lies, exaggerations, and fairly sophisticated military-grade mind-control. The elitists will try again but I am hopeful many more of us will quickly see through their next wave of propaganda and preprogramming. When it happens, remember Monkeypox and how simply ignoring it, not being afraid, made them drop it. Simply not buying Bud Light has been a huge win for our side. ABN
…These riots are a product of deliberate malice brought to fruition by more than a decade of covert and overt influence operations seeking to transform France’s black and brown criminal population into a permanent Jewish-American imperial foothold.
One of the earliest records of this intelligence operation is a series of classified US embassy cables from 2010 publicized by Wikileaks. In these memos, the Hollywood Jewish mogul Charles Rivkin, then appointed ambassador to France by the Obama administration, outlines a seven-point plan for mobilizing blacks and Maghrebis in France as a political cudgel against their hosts.
In the nefarious memo, Rivkin laments that French institutions are “overwhelmingly white” and draws up a plan to build State Department backed parallel media outlets, NGOs and educational entities to undermine and replace the established order. In pursuit of the goal of de-Europeanizing France, the Jewish ambassador calls for mobilizing US influence to “intensify our work with French museums and educators to reform the history curriculum taught in French schools,” using “new media” to indoctrinate non-white youth in France, and “support, train and engage media and political activists who share our values.” The cable summarizes the agenda by instructing Washington’s agents to “build on the expansive Public Diplomacy programs already in place at post, and develop creative, additional means to influence the youth of France, employing new media, corporate partnerships, nationwide competitions, targeted outreach events, especially invited U.S. guests” to “identify” and “influence future French leaders.”
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Twitter has agreed to comply with tough new EU laws on fake news, Russian propaganda and online crime after a team of officials from the European Commission entered its headquarters to stress test its capacity to operate legally in Europe.
The move came just weeks after Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, quit the bloc’s voluntary code of practice on disinformation.
In the first exercise of its kind, EU officials were allowed into the company’s headquarters on Thursday to carry out a mock exercise with Twitter staff to test its controls on Russian propaganda, fake news and criminal activity including child sexual exploitation.
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More mind-control. ABN
If anyone sincerely and fully apologizes, I think we should accept their apologies and let it go. The burden of guilt is bigger on celebrities and even bigger on medical professionals and government officials. A full Buddhist apology includes making amends with no excuses, though an honest explanation is good. How we scale this can be objective to a point. Depending on the person’s reach and what they said or did, their corrective statements and behaviors should be commensurate. I am not going to chase it down but I remember a weak apology from Arnold, saying something like I am sorry for my words. No, Arnie, much more than that is necessary especially when we consider how many were medically harmed by your words. Not only were these people wrong and stupid, they were totalitarian slave boys doing the bidding of their masters for their own profit at the expense of others. ABN
What he is talking about are meta-cognitive and meta-linguistic categories that control meaning within all cultures. As mentioned many times, controlling and defining these categories is a central technique of mass mind-control. Basically, this is what government and MSM do all day long every day. ABN
Boy, is there ever a loaded dump truck of potential discussion points in this subject area.
First, Google via YouTube is reversing its position and allowing content that challenges the results of the 2020 election.
[Per Axios] “In a reversal of its election integrity policy, YouTube will leave up content that says fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 presidential election and other U.S. elections, the company confirmed to Axios Friday.”
After removing “tens of thousands of videos” (their admission) previously containing content that challenged the 2020 election results, suddenly that conversation is permitted.
“Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today’s changed landscape,” YouTube said in a statement.
So, according to the script, the “threat to democracy” has suddenly diminished as the 2024 election cycle starts to become a topic of increased discussion? Yeah, right.
I read this Google change two ways: (1) This reads like a “mission accomplished and we don’t need this anymore” kind of policy switch; and (2) There’s that probability of Donald Trump winning the 2024 election and they need to be able to question election results again.
Google and DHS are simpatico, which is to say the psychological use of the intelligence apparatus to manipulate public opinion is about to swing back into high gear. Only this time there are even more minds with immunity from the DHS control virus, and things could get very sketchy from a perspective of social cohesion.
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American Buddhist Net 