text:
Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
August 2014
Dedicated to my children, and to all young men and women
We often complain, of the world, of its unfairness, its injustices, its deprivation, its inequity, and almost always find others to blame, especially the politicians, the superman, the greedy, the conniving, those seeking primacy, and the sociopaths, the hectoring hegemons, the international bankers who fund all sides to make wars and peace, colonialism, PAX Americana, formerly PAX Britannia, and when all fails, we blame fate, karma, and of course God, that He made the Devil. The Social Darwinians among us, the secular humanists, blame it all on religion, the cause of all of mankind's failings. And the most avant-garde among us, the new age crowd, blame it on aliens, gods who continue to wage epic Hellenic battles at the expense of mankind. The hard empirical reality of course, one which is rarely spoken of, whether out loud or in silent whispers, is that the first failing, the supreme failing from which all else follows, begins at home. It is the one we purchase for ourselves.
Introduction to Co-option
Co-option – Once a former confrere wrote me the rhetorical question of all rhetorical questions: To Confront or be co-opted? This missive on the "banality of evil" explores the subject of co-option at some length by way of documenting, mainly for my progeny, what I have learnt as a student of truth. The essay also examines the fast breaking "Democracy Revolution" in Pakistan in August 2014 to illustrate by way of examples some of the key factors which both underwrite, and are the harvest of, co-option, resulting in the creation of "revolutionary times" in society. The import of "revolutionary times" was magnificently captured by the revolutionary Zionist statesman David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel, who employed it to maximum advantage to found the Jewish State in Palestine: "What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible at such great hours is not carried out – a whole world is lost." But first, the definitions.
To be "co-opted" means to accept matters in contradiction to one's moral, ethical, logical, and commonsensical assessment, and rather than confront and take a stand against it, to go along with it in silence in the name of practicality, expediency, even when at times it is against one's own self-interest and one knows it. It is a cognitive decision but many factors, including psychological forces some of which one remains unaware of, and Faustian bargains, enticement, greed, all contribute to it. The extent to which one is co-opted is a complex calculus which sociologists argue is mostly situational dependent. But as I will demonstrate here, is not psychology, selfishness, and wherewithal independent. Which means, it can be overcome at societal levels for a public raised with wherewithal and the same situation can lead to different personal responses of a public mind so groomed. Which is also why it is not permitted to happen by powers that rule societies and control the public's base level of acumen.
An example which illustrates that control perfectly is the advanced scientific society of the United States of America. Its people remain the most ignorant of all Western societies, especially in comparison to their European brethren, principally because the American psyche is groomed from the cradle to live for their "American Dream". And like the Roman public during the heyday of the Roman empire, the American public too is kept occupied between bread and circuses seven days a week as per the "Fable of the Bees" (see below). Having lived in the United States for the best part of my adult life, I speak from considerable empirical experience of this society (see the Preface of my 2003 book Prisoners of the Cave where this topic is examined in some depth, http://prisonersofthecave.org ).
Well, a different psyche can equally be developed. And it largely depends on which forces control and dominate societal values that its public live by. Today, the society is global and the forces that control values have also acquired a global reach in their on-going effort to subvert civilizations and heritages of all nations on earth, to unify, to standardize, and to homogenize the world public – just like the milk industry. It no longer matters which cows and dairy farms produce the milk – out of the milk carton or out of the milk bottle, it all tastes the same. The powers that be would like mankind to also be the same in their base values, in the expression of their base desires, and most importantly, in their base level of obedience to authority. The expression of human behavior to a situation is not independent of these control factors – or else there'd be no need to develop sophisticated psychological persuasion techniques to manipulate human behavior.
These techniques of human behavior modification have even progressed from mere soft perception management, far into the realm of hard biochemical tampering of the brain (see the long declassified top secret mind control program of the CIA known as MK ULTRA for behavior modification; and the civilian study conducted by Rick Strassman on volunteers under FDA sanction to explore the impact of DMT, known as the Spirit Molecule, on the human mind; one enslaving, the other liberating, respectively). The direction for more than half a century has been on tampering with essentially what was previously believed to be the immutable essence of man, his being. In fact, at least since the turn of the twentieth century when academic ideas in eugenics entered the realm of underwriting American policy-making, which paved the way for exploring behavior control techniques pretty openly, even inspiring the famous dystopian fable by Aldous Huxley called Brave New World in 1931, with the baton subsequently being snatched by Nazi experimentation on the undesirables caught under the jackboots of the Third Reich for accelerating "natural selection" of the master race. Today, it is being pursued with even greater vigor in both secret and open settings.
In his 1970 book Between Two Ages, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's former national security advisor (1976-80), quotes an experimenter in intelligence control who asserted, "I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain." There is an extensive bibliography on this subject and unfamiliarity with it is the problem that plagues modern college-educated professionals who wield fancy parchments as career credentials, but betray little or no understanding of the forces they live under. Brzezinski attributed this general phenomenon of mounting ignorance to knowledge explosion which, as he presented it in his book, he argued is inevitable: "In every scientific field complaints are mounting that the torrential outpouring of published reports, scientific papers, and scholarly articles and the proliferation of professional journals make it impossible for individuals to avoid becoming either narrow gauged specialists or superficial generalists." The lack of understanding of the forces that fundamentally shape human perception, and consequently human behavior, is quite orthogonal to knowledge explosion just as how much ram you have in your computer is orthogonal to understanding ideas in computer science. This flourishing ignorance has a tad more direct causal linkage to milking the "Fable of the Bees" (see below) and engineering consent from the homogenized public mind.
The phrase "banality of evil" I first encountered when I read the famous book by Hannah Arendth as assigned reading in the fall of 1979 as an undergraduate student at MIT. It was my first of several academic classes in psychology on the subject of behavior control, taught by professor Steve Chorover. The good professor is still at MIT. I have a lot to thank him for. That class serendipitously opened a fascinating window for me into the vast realm of psychological studies in which I have persisted informally out of interest throughout my life. In "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil", Hannah Arendt argued in the early 1960s that ordinary people were capable of doing extraordinary evil under the right set of circumstances. That it was not necessarily only the psychopaths and sociopaths who were capable of extraordinary evil. She observed that Adolf Eichmann, accused of killing six million Jews at the time in HolocaustTM gas chambers, was just an ordinary looking fellow, that he didn't seem to embody evil personified as the Zionist machinery had portrayed him to be. That rather shocking and against the grain observation spawned a series of psychological experiments after Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem had ended in his hanging, but obviously not in the Jews' angst which has evidently not abated for three thousand years and counting (see Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion – The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, available on the web).
From the famous Milgram Obedience Experiment at Yale University to the Stanford University's infamous Prison Experiment, all empirically confirmed that Hannah Arendt had got it right to a large measure. The latter experiment led to such shocking behavior among the most ordinary participants at Stanford, drawn principally from its student body as I recall, that the ethics of such experiments was brought into question and further academic experiments of this nature banned, or forever restricted to the classified behavior control laboratories of the Central Intelligence Agency. Stanley Milgram, the author of the first experiment at Yale, concluded the following in 1974: "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act."
This knowledge of human beings is the core principle upon which the behavior control programs run out of the many intelligence and military apparatuses of Western states that farm and harvest terrorism worldwide, is based. ( See my Report on the Mighty Wurlitzer: Architecture of Modern Propaganda for Psychological Warfare for references and citations, http://tinyurl.com/mightywurlitzer )
Since the time of these experiments, the phrase "banality of evil", meaning, the ordinariness of evil, and the commonplaceness of evil, has entered the academic vernacular. It has been used to refer to macro social evil occurring when ordinary people partake in it through either: (1) co-option, meaning refraining from stopping evil by in-action and apathy, as the German public had done by silently accepting Nazism and all its state-sponsored evil; or (2) positive action, meaning contributing to evil with positive effort under situational circumstances, as Adolf Eichmann as the Nazi chief and office holder in the Third Reich had perpetrated under the now famous excuse that he was coerced by higher authorities: "I was just following orders".
Of course, in the West, the term "banality of evil" has become relegated to merely studying the past, specifically Nazi Germany, and it is virtually never applied to themselves today as their own co-opted public, and their own criminal establishments, carry out incalculable horrors against civilians and nations in the global war on terror. Nor is it ever applied to the Jewish State forcibly implanted in Palestine by the British empire through its Balfour Declaration, and its so called "British Mandate" after World War I, and the subsequent UN decree after World War II, as the "god's chosen people" carry out the systematic resettlement of Palestine with imported European and American Ashkenazi Jewry much like the resettlement of the Americas by the European colonists at the expense of the indigenous populations. Now running into its 67th year, the world spectates silently while its intellectuals continue to study Nazi Germany!
You will see none of that co-option and "banality of evil" in Project Humanbeingsfirst's work. The question of co-option and its attendant "banality of evil" is just as much current affairs today as in yesteryear, making just as much "contemporary history" today for tomorrow's generations as it did in yesteryear. On the surface, that terminology split into separate words appears to be a non sequitur, for how can it be both "contemporary" and "history" at the same time? The term "contemporary history" is a compound word to reflect the notion that one is contemporary with the times which is making future history (i.e., tomorrow's history), and as such, something can be done to alter that trajectory of future history because it has not as yet fully come to pass. While we lament yesteryear's crimes against humanity, we know that nothing can be done about it ex post facto. But we can do a great deal to stop the crimes against humanity transpiring today and forcibly interdict that vile "contemporary history" which is now in the making, and which would indeed transpire if we did nothing to alter it.
To be living through any momentous epoch of "contemporary history" can be the most exciting of times for mankind despite its villainy, for only during such epochs is the opportunity afforded to man to rise to the best of man to defeat the worst of man. That motivation does not quite exist in halcyon times. We are strengthened and evolve mainly by passing through these defining, blast-furnace epochs. And we can either evolve into heartless brutes and zombies in a social Darwinian world, or into better human beings. This essay delves into the issue of co-option, the in-action, the silent acquiescence to villainy, the apathy towards tyranny, the looking from the side while the world goes to the dogs and turns into global police-states making the rich even richer and increasing the percentage of indigent public worldwide, all in the name of liberty and freedom.
What forces contribute to co-option?
There are primarily four salient characteristics of co-option. What I examine below is what I have learnt the hard way. I have encountered every one of these different forces at one time or another and have continually been presented with the choice of to confront or be co-opted. This categorization is not mere academic theorizing. But it can surely withstand the pedantic rigor of experimental social psychology. The truth of what follows is beyond doubt. It is self-evident.
Many normal people show great empathy for fellow man, are noble, generous, chivalrous, charitable, spend of their earnings on social welfare causes, rush to give aid in disaster situations, and for their own selves want to know the truth and be truthful, all great motherhood and apple pie stuff which show the majority of mankind in its best light. But there is also a darker side to human beings. No I am not referring to those sociopaths and psychopaths who make wars and orchestrate the killing fields and commit other evil. This essay is not about actually committing evil. It is about refraining from stopping it, and how that in-action comes about given that normal human beings display all the lovely positive characteristics captured in the first sentence above.
Under specific circumstances, most human beings, in fact the same ones who display all the lovely set of characteristics that shows mankind off in its best light, tend to lose their quality of humanity, their quality of mercy, and strangely, their loss of dignity and self-respect is heralded as "success" in the public eye under the modern wisdom which relies on expediency and relativity rather than morality and absolutes in defining social and personal values.
A situation that is quite commonplace and anyone can observe it if they have eyes to see, just as I have observed it time and again and now it is the first item on my list to convey in What have I learnt as a student of truth, is that virtually no one gives a farthing's worth of damn for anyone or anything when giving that damn intersects with their stomach, career, winning accolades, opportunities to profit, and to advance in life, business, and profession. People, valiant people, and people of great conscience and moral gravitas, remain beholden to those existential matters to their very end. This leads to an incessant need for rationalizations to mitigate cognitive dissonance, often buried deep in the subconscious, which span the gamut of self-deception, from denial of reality to self-justification to reinterpretation of moral values to legitimize one's own inclinations, life's choices, and above all, one's silence and acquiescence before falsehoods, deception, tyranny. People, irrespective of their brilliance or station in life, will slog away for a lifetime in voluntary servitude when matters pertain to these existential needs.
While for those born on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, the wretched of the earth, just getting three honest meals a day remains an endless struggle even in the twenty-first century, for those born on the right side of the railroad tracks, the lucky of history, there is evidently no limit to fulfilling these needs either. It's a bottomless pit. There is always the next milestone to strive for on the ladder of "success". Working for tyrants, dictators, kings, feudal lords, corrupt bastards, dystopic systems, evil empire, is all okay so long as one is able to pursue that ladder of "success" honestly and with due diligence. The more outstanding ones take great pride in accepting titles and honors from those who have killed in large numbers under the sound of trumpet. This striving is heralded as being "practical", "wise", with "clean hands". A majority of good people in the world who exhibit those fine moral qualities captured in the lovely set of upstanding human characteristics are in this category. They purchase their slice of the existential pie with their silence, and with hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. Examples of these rationalizations for selfishly pursuing one's own self-interests abound and I will spare the reader my sampling of anecdotal cases to encourage their own hammering out on the anvil of the following famous Chinese depiction of the three wise monkeys, their own examples:
Caption The three wise monkeys: hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil (image via wikipedia)
This is the first characteristic of co-option: Self-interest purchased with silence. The end result is apathy, indifference; no desire or incentive to seek and uphold any truth which might interfere with self-interest.
In the limited cases when one finds oneself endeavoring to rise beyond these pecuniary and existential matters of self-interest and wise monkeys, one encounters intellectual warfare which is akin to a gang-rape of the sensible mind. That has been the principal topic of this book, and as the intelligent reader must have come to realize, my version of Orwell's statement trumps the novelist's easily: "In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In my version, in the age of universal deceit, to ferret out the whole truth about any matter is the bigger revolutionary act. In the course of this revolutionary act is where many a valiant intellectual, scholar, activist, and would be revolutionary, all fall for the want of perspective on primacy. These ardent harbingers of change, often moved by an inner moral compass to overcome their own "banality of evil" rather than by any desire for pecuniary gain, but too naïve to understand primacy and how it relates to the controlling powers behind the scenes making the public mind, are easily harvested as useful idiots and patsy-fodder by crafty perception managers who capture all these zealots in one trap or another by catering to all possible inclinations of this group (see my Report on the Mighty Wurlitzer, http://tinyurl.com/mightywurlitzer ).
Overcoming this externally induced perspective deficiency however, while essential, isn't sufficient. For, in the limit, one is plagued by an even more fundamental subversion which ab initio makes this externally induced perspective deficiency even possible: incestuous self-reinforcement through one's own mind. The base elements of this internal subversion which is the first cause of any crippled epistemology, and the sine qua non for the harvest of useful idiots, are:
- (1) socialization bias (nurture, social programming, learning) ;
- (2) perception bias (nature, hardware, DNA, limits imposed by the five perception senses, natural inclination, propensity, hardwired intellectual capacity to think and reflect, IQ or Intelligence Quotient, hardwired psychological bent of mind, EQ or Emotional Quotient, hardwired spiritual capacity to transcend materialism, SQ or Spiritual Quotient) ;
- (3) data availability bias (what data is used, what books one reads for instance) ;
- (4) confirmation bias (how data is used to preselect a desired outcome, narrowing the scope of data, massaging the data to confirm an a priori conclusion) ;
- (5) presuppositional bias (culturally ingrained presumptions or prejudices or affinities, loves and hates, that transcend the individual and are rooted in the value system of the civilization one grows up in, such as: Orientalism – looking down upon the East, uber alles, master race, exceptionalism, superiority complex; and its opposites: inferiority complex, house niggers, Uncle Toms, Occidentosis – East looking to the West or to the white man for solutions thinking it superior; Triumphalism – aspiring to universalize one's own values and beliefs thinking all others inferior, Capitalism, Communism, Democracy, Christianity, Islam, etc.).
All these factors underwriting incestuous self-reinforcement create an inescapable mind-fck from which escape to objectivity and impartiality remains elusive for most people. These largely un quantifiable factors contribute to the formulation of one's worldview and instinctualize the subjectivity in perspective that man is irreparably plagued with for his fundamental loves, hates, beliefs, and sense of attachment that may span the gamut from tribal to civilizational. This subjectivity is hard to transcend as it colors the cognitive mind ab initio, subliminally, subconsciously, and overcoming it is akin to performing brain-surgery upon one's own brain. A self-referential problem that requires a great deal of wherewithal to get a handle on, and to attempt to rise to some level of objectivity by creating distance from self. One of the ways to do that, as my former professor at M.I.T., Noam Chomsky, used to say, is to move to Mars and look back to study the Earthlings. Meaning, to try to look at man and his beliefs, including one's own, with some degree of emotional and intellectual detachment as if studying another species.
According to Bertrand Russell:
"What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index to his desires – desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence."
This ingrained, almost instinctual, proclivity towards socialized perspectives plays hand-in-glove with the gang-rape of the mind by perception managers who exploit that knowledge expertly for mass behavior control.
The new potent warfare on the public mind is psychological warfare, and it relies on distorting the perspective by digging deep into the human psyche to ultimately control the public behavior for the narrow interests of the few. An obvious example of this mind manipulation is the uncanny success of advertising and marketing, a multi-trillion dollar industry worldwide. A more uncomfortable example is the Mighty Wurlitzer making the public mind to "United We Stand" with the objectives of power. Nationalism, patriotism, militarism, religionism, are the more "acceptable" examples of this psychological persuasion to which the benign label of "indoctrination" is often ascribed. Soldiers killing under the sound of trumpet and returned nobly wrapped in the flag is its worst "acceptable" form. The extreme example is the manufacture of suicide bombers, the Manchurian candidates who are made to believe in their terminal mission by their intelligence handlers. Except for the latter which may rely on coercively breaking down the human being completely (physically, psychologically, spiritually) by inducing personality disorders in order to rebuild the soldier as a killing machine devoid of all empathy, and thus without a measure of their own consent, all other forms of behavior control fundamentally rely on co-opting the commonsense, humanity, compassion, and mercy of man by perspective distortion.
Perspective pollution, like an innocent child not being able to comprehend the reality of feline primacy, precludes understanding of reality the way reality actually is. And like the futility of a child being explained by an adult why the cat desires the beautiful but helpless fish, or why a lion tears apart the lovely wooly sheep, educating the un-awakened mind on perspective pollution can be just as futile. See Plato's parable of Simile of the Cave below. Perspective pollution always favors the superior predator, both in Darwinianism, and in the social Darwinian world order. Its momentous utility for Machiavellianly engineering consent in the aggregate is examined further in Part-II below.
Caption Perspective pollution, like an innocent child not being able to comprehend the reality of feline primacy, precludes understanding of reality the way reality actually is. (Image courtesy of Desiree L. Rover's Presentation on Vaccinations, August 1, 2009)
This is the second characteristic of co-option: Perspective-pollution. The end result is ignorance of truth. This leads to being easily harvested as useful idiot and patsy-fodder.
In the even rarer case that an outspoken revolutionary has overcome the perspective-pollution and ferreted out the truth about any matter as objectively as is possible, his and her ability to proclaim it, to bring it to the public's attention, remains a perpetual up hill battle. The limitations are imposed by the systems of power that control the narrative in the societies at large, which today is the global society. These systems of control span the gamut from denying airing to marginalizing to social ostracizing, which, in the limit, extract the ultimate price of making the revolutionary sleep with the fishes or confined to St. Elizabeth hospital (mental institution in Washington DC where American poet Ezra Pound was held as a political prisoner) for life.
Who wants to pay that price for a seemingly impractical cause which also incurs the wrath of power? So, the rationalization often goes: if I can't tell the whole truth, let me just tell half of it, or three quarters of it, or let me take on endeavors in more permissible arenas of human welfare significance but of lesser consequence to empire and thus more acceptable to the pall bearers of truth. Which, apart from its altruistic value, is very convenient as it also does not interfere with self-interest all that much. In fact, often promotes it by appearing "respectable", "responsible", "non conspiratorial", "good moral citizen". Nominations for Nobel peace prize aren't that far away. The motivations for getting along with the dominant axioms of power naturally lead to becoming adept at lying by omission when necessary, knowingly, wittingly, deliberately, until it becomes second nature, like the air we breathe, with no second thoughts given to it.
A good example of this among prominent persons of considerable wherewithal who can make a significant difference if they tell the whole truth but calculatingly don't, is former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter in his book, Palestine, Peace not Apartheid (see my deconstruction of President Carter's artful omissions, http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/introducing-palestine-peacenotapartheid.html ). I had written the former president of the United States an Open Letter on March 27, 2007, and had even bothered to fax it to him at his office in Atlanta demanding an explanation (see http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/open-letter-to-jimmy-carter.html ).
This is the third characteristic of co-option: Self-policing to pass the censors of power, which quickly mutates into self-policing for maintaining social acceptance, and thus in self-interest. The end result is silence on truth.
Those possessing the intellectual wherewithal, the Zen of understanding so to speak, the means to make a difference, and the moral courage to want to do so, who do try to escape all these restrictions and co-options as servants of truth and not its masters, are now faced with the recalcitrant public mind steeped in its own ignorance, superstitions, and deeply seated perspective-pollution such that what Plato taught in his Simile of the Cave comes true, time and again. That Simile is excerpted here from the 2500 years old book, The Republic.
I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human condition somewhat as follows:
'Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners since they were children, their legs and necks being so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain-wall has been built, like the screen at puppet shows between the operators and their audience, above which they show their puppets.'
'I see.'
'Imagine further that there are men carrying all sorts of gear along behind the curtain-wall, projecting above it and including figures of men and animals made of wood and stone and all sorts of other materials, and that some of these men, as you would expect, are talking and some not.'
'An odd picture and an odd sort of prisoner.'
'They are drawn from life', I replied. 'For, tell me, do you think our prisoners could see anything of themselves or their fellows except the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them?'
'How could they see anything else if they were prevented from moving their heads all their lives?'
'And would they see anything more of the objects carried along the road?'
'Of course not.'
'Then if they were able to talk to each other, would they not assume that the shadows they saw were the real things?'
'And if the wall of their prison opposite them reflected sound, don't you think that they would suppose, whenever one of the passers-by on the road spoke, that the voice belonged to the shadow passing before them?'
'They would be bound to think so.'
'And so in every way they would believe that the shadows of the objects we mentioned were the whole truth.'
'Yes inevitably.'
'Then think what would naturally happen to them if they were released from their bonds and cured of their delusions. Suppose one of them were let loose, and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards the fire; all these actions would be painful and he would be too dazzled to see properly the objects of which he used to see the shadows. What do you think he would say if he was told that what he used to see was so much empty nonsense and that he was now nearer reality and seeing more correctly, because he was turned towards objects that were more real, and if on top of that he were compelled to say what each of the passing objects was when it was pointed out to him? Don't you think he would be at a loss, and think that what he used to see was far truer than the objects now being pointed out to him?'
'Yes, far truer.'
'And if he were made to look directly at the light of the fire, it would hurt his eyes and he would turn back and retreat to the things which he could see properly, which he would think really clearer than the things being shown him.'
'And if,' I went on, 'he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rugged ascent and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight, the process would be a painful one, to which he would much object, and when he emerged into the light his eyes would be so dazzled by the glare of it that he wouldn't be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.'
'Certainly not at first,' he agreed.
'Because, of course, he would need to grow accustomed to the light before he could see things in the upper world outside the cave. First he would find it easiest to look at shadows, next at the reflections of men and other objects in water, and later on at the objects themselves. After that he would find it easier to observe the heavenly bodies and the sky itself at night, and to look at the light of the moon and stars rather than at the sun and its light by day.'
'Of course.'
'The thing he would be able to do last would be to look directly at the sun itself, and gaze at it without reflections in water or any other medium, but as it is in itself.'
'That must come last.'
'Later on he would come to the conclusion that it is the sun that produces the changing seasons and years and controls everything in the visible world, and is in a sense responsible for everything that he and his fellow-prisoners used to see.'
'That is the conclusion which he would obviously reach.'
'And when he thought of his first home and what passed for wisdom there, and of his fellow-prisoners, don't you think he would congratulate himself on his fortune and be sorry for them?'
'Very much so.'
'Then what do you think would happen,' I asked, 'if he went back to sit in his old seat in the cave? Wouldn't his eyes be blinded by the darkness, because he had come in suddenly out of the sunlight?'
'And if he had to discriminate between the shadows, in competition with the other prisoners, while he was still blinded and before his eyes got used to the darkness – a process that would take some time – wouldn't he be likely to make a fool of himself?
And they would say that his visit to upper world had ruined his sight, and that the ascent was not worth even attempting.
And if anyone tried to release them and lead them up, they would kill him if they could lay hands on him.'
'They certainly would.'
--- end excerpt Plato
That is the fourth characteristic of co-option: Self-policing for the want of efficacy in a hopeless public cause. The "revolutionary fatigue" syndrome, "why bother" syndrome. The end result is to give up, or greatly water-down the truth to make it more palatable to the indoctrinated public, leaving silence on whole truth once again in charge to make the public mind.
These co-options added together:
- (1) Self-interest (selfishness, apathy, cowardice, Faustian bargains);
- (2) Perspective-pollution (ignorance of truth, distorted beliefs, leading to becoming patsy-fodder);
- (3) Self-policing to pass the censors of power (accommodation to power to tell only half-truth, lying by omission);
- (4) Self-policing for the want of efficacy in telling the whole truth (a public more willing to just kill the messenger);
I have learnt are formidable Himalayan mountains in the way of flatlanders learning the whole truth about important matters so that they and their nations can wage an effective battle for their own survival against man's greatest predator, the superman.
This super predator, more intelligent and more privileged than others, feels driven to rule others because of his advantage, deems himself beyond good and evil, and like Nietzsche's superman, beyond the conventional bounds of morality, beyond the calculus of right and wrong in the name of its higher ideals, whatever the higher causes that may spring from such higher ideals be: increasing profits, raising intelligence, subverting beliefs, harnessing religion, nationalism, patriotism, militarism for world domination, world government, and beyond. Its principal morality only one: Will to Power. Its calculus only one: Primacy. Its modus operandi only one: Deceit. The mind of ordinary man simply remains unable to grasp the mind of this super predator whose morality of "will to power" confers to it the "moral obligation" for engaging in any means necessary for achieving its "noble objectives". Mass behavior control is only as difficult for it as the cat playing with a cornered mouse. Consequently, the superman and its diabolically ingenious systems of social control continue to keep mankind in chains by way of deception.
Here is an example from the eighteenth century of how the primacy instinct of the superman works without leaving even a hint of its existence in the common man. According to Bernard de Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees" for generating the wealth of nations:
"The economic well-being of the nation depends on the presence of a large number of men who are content to labor hard all day long. Because men are naturally lazy they will not work unless forced by necessity to do so."
These are no longer the physical chains as in antiquity past to make men work hard all day long. Goethe accurately captured the far more unbreakable chains of slavery:
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
Now they will happily slave away for their masters in voluntary servitude. Indeed, even come to love their servitude.
I have learnt that the mind control is so pervasive today that even if some intelligent people, say friends, are polite enough to hear the revolutionary out, they cannot relate to what he has to say. The revolutionary often brings a truth so jarring to the public mind that Plato understood its implication in the golden era of the Hellenic civilization that had forced Socrates to drink poison for being a revolutionary for truth. The handful of open-minds one might reach in the course of one's revolutionary stint before one succumbs to the predictable inevitability, are themselves plagued by the same co-options one overcame to get this far to bring truth to these people in the hope that they might do something with it. The end result is making no measurable impact in one's own lifetime in getting people to understand the truth, never mind to act upon it with moral courage, let alone when the calling is to put self-interest aside for a greater interest, the common cause.
I have learnt that people strive to be moral and upright so long as it does not cost them anything substantial; specifically, so long as it does not cost them the sacrificing of any significant self-interest. Minor sacrifices are palatable so long as it does not make a major dent in the scheme of things they have laid out for themselves. It is much wiser to wear the garb of morality and pretend to be virtuous by obsessing with personal piety, prayers, rituals, liturgies; or, alternately, just focussing on one's profession and career in the name of "practicality", "self-actualization", "vision", disdain for hypocrisy; even focussing on harmless charity and social welfare causes like the cosmopolitan Muslim leader Aga Khan, the Muslim humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi of Pakistan, etc., do --- none ever challenge the villainy of power, all are in fact heralded and celebrated by power, are seen to mingle with it and accept awards from it for their self-policed silence, and all echo the exact same narratives, axioms, and presuppositions of power.
Examining the Impact of Perspective-pollution
I have observed that in contrast to the small percentage of "haves" and elites who purchase the continuity of their self-interest with a surfeit of silence and rationalization, a great many useful idiots, fatal victims of perspective-pollution, most often from among the "have-nots", but also students and young idealists of every socio-economic class, also exist who are motivated to the extreme for their great cause and are easily led by the demagogue and the Machiavelli to that very end. We once again brazenly observe this trend today in all the televised "Democracy Revolutions" that the world has witnessed over the past quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, including the one occurring in Pakistan even as I write this, in August 2014. The ugly fact of the matter that these "Democracy Revolutions" are run by Western assets, stooges and mercenaries, following the script, monies, training and logistics all laid out for them by the same predators as part of their guns and butter package for the on-going rape, pillage, and subjugation of nations on the Grand Chessboard, is un apparent to these "revolutionaries". Only the methods employed by the master chess players vary depending on their whim, fancy, and objectives:
- (1) neoconservatism, meaning, using guns and F16s to "liberate" the oppressed people from hard dictatorships that they had originally foisted upon the people themselves, with the replacement "neoliberal democracy";
- (2) neoliberalism, the self-help "Democracy Revolutions", the butter, to save the people from their own installed house niggers or other fabled enemies of the West, with a new crop of house niggers who will continue to write off the sovereignty of the nation and its public commons to privatization and corporate interests, euphemistically termed "globalization", under carefully cultivated pretenses of bringing "democracy" and efficiency through electoral politics of musical chairs in a never ending game of mind-fck of nations.
The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman highlighted the relationship between these two sides of the imperial gun held to the head of nations, with the cold chutzpah that only Jewish hubris can muster in defense of the obvious truth: "That is why sustainable globalization still requires a stable, geopolitical power structure, which simply cannot be maintained without the active involvement of the United States. ... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." The Confessions of an Economic Hitman, Mr. John Perkins, a former energy consultant for the World Bank who helped rape developing nations, underscores that bold Jewish veracity of what it means to be an empire.
Both these "regime change" modus operandi for raping nations, often accompanied by the propaganda cover of "humanitarian assistance" to the local population, summed up as guns and butter, are the tried and tested techniques that have been witnessed throughout the Middle East and many parts of the world from South America to Eastern Europe to post Soviet Central Asian nations including Russia. The neoliberal looting of Russia in the 1990s after the disintegration of the Soviet Union which led to its "Democracy Revolution", was most sanguinely justified by the former chairman of the IMF in Moscow: "It was the price which Russia paid for moving forward". Debt-enslavement, privatization of public commons for a song, plundering the wealth of nations, are evidently the price of "liberty" and "moving forward" with reforms. This is openly proclaimed time and again but evidently to the short attention span public mind, it quickly disappears into the ether. Its historical precedent for those who can remember is in fact most impressive. After famously throwing that tea overboard in 1776 to seed its own successful "Democracy Revolution", the United States too was brought in line with debt-enslavement as sanguinely proclaimed by Alexander Hamilton. The founding father of the United States and her very first Secretary of the Treasury, is proudly quoted on the US Treasury website some two and half centuries later: "The United States debt, foreign and domestic, was the price of liberty."
Recent history can be a great lender of both insight and perspective for parsing current affairs when the receipts of the breaking events of the "contemporary history" in the making are often not in hand. Narrative control and secrecy make it impossible to get at the hard facts and evidence until these are revealed ex post facto when nothing can be done about the matter, which is by then, in any case, fait accompli and long lost to the pages of history. The example of the "Democracy Revolution" in Pakistan in 1977 during the tenure of prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (ZAB) in the aftermath of the national elections which the opposition parties on the right claimed was rigged and came out in massive civil disobedience street protests in a grand alliance that brought the country to a standstill, is illustrative. The following confession by the then Director of Pakistan's ISI in his memoir, should reveal to even the most die hard fanatic revolutionary of today how these "Democracy Revolutions" are covertly planned, setup on the ground, funded, mobilized, and depending on the outcome, opportunistically harvested from behind the scenes for a greater geopolitical agenda. This does not happen overnight but has forces and motivation that transcend the immediate situation:
"The US Plays its Role. According to some candid intelligence estimates, the US was fully involved in exploiting the situation by guiding and aiding the opposition political parties and ultimately getting him removed and hanged. (page 33)
It is generally believed that the US wanted ZAB to be removed from the political scene of Pakistan mainly on two counts. First, for the nuclear policy that he framed and tried to relentlessly pursue and secondly, for apprehensions that ZAB's was influencing the minds and policies of a number of Islamic and Third World countries. He posed a serious challenge to the US interests in the region. 'He had to be eliminated'.
On August 9, 1976, American Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger had a talk with ZAB, in Lahore, to dissuade him from acquiring Nuclear Reprocessing Plant from France for which the deal had already been finalized after Pakistan had agreed to all the safeguard requirements laid down by both France and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In their talks, Dr. Kissinger found ZAB inflexible and determined to go ahead with the acquisition of the Reprocessing Plant and make Pakistan a nuclear power. Incensed, he warned ZAB, "We will make a horrible example of you," adding menacingly, "When the railroad is coming, you get out of the way." But ZAB stood his ground. The US virtually mowed down ZAB. The political and economic crisis situation that started to develop during 1976-77 was fully exploited by the power broker USA. This is how they did it:-
- The Americans had successfully cultivated a number of well-placed bureaucrats, PPP stalwarts and ministers who wittingly or inadvertently served as the US agents of influence. American diplomats and CIA operators not only got most of the 'inside' information from these 'gentlemen' but also utilized their good offices to 'convey' whatever they wanted to feed or plant.
- During 1976-77 ZAB, probably working on the structured advice of these agents, continued to slip deeper and deeper into the political quagmire. They somehow convinced him that PPP must win and hold two third majority in the elections. When the agitation was moving from bad to worse, some of these men wanted weapons and chalked out plans to defeat MNA movement by force. ZAB also seriously started to consider this option.
- Some officers from USMAAG had also meaningful ingresses in the General Headquarters and not only gathered the thinking in the Services Headquarters but would also drop a 'suggestion' here and there.
- Some of the US diplomats had established direct contacts with a number of PNA leaders whom they continued to aid, support and give day-to-day line of action.
- As soon as the PNA movement gathered momentum, a large number of foreigners, particularly Americans descended on Pakistan in the garb of freelance journalists, reporters, observers, and photographers to cover the events. These men and women loaded with cameras, tape recorders and money seemed to have done their home-work well and were also being fed locally by invisible sources. They all seemed to know the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of every one who was any one in politics. It would be interesting to note that, (thanks to our days of slavery, we still have not overcome the 'white skin' phobia) most of our politicians were not only always available to these manipulators but would actually feel elated on getting a call from them and would pour out whatever they had in their minds. Every day, we in the ISI received a flood of telegrams that these journalists would send home and it was surprising to know who all they were speaking to and what information and political analysis they received.
- All that was being sent out by these so-called foreign journalists, who were actually CIA operators, was being beamed back on Pakistan as psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at building up a scenario of ZAB's fall.
- A number of diplomats were not only actively involved but also directed the operations against ZAB. Jan M. Gibney, Political Officer, US Consulate General, Lahore, duly assisted by a couple of Pakistanis, was extremely active and would frequently visit a number of politicians. It was Gibney who had telephoned and conveyed to Howard B. Schaffer, Chief of Political Affairs, US Embassy, Islamabad, that notorious sentence, "The party is over. Merchandise has gone." ZAB had retorted by saying, "Party is not yet over. Elephant has long ears......"
- We had reports from Karachi that exchange rate of US Dollar in the open market had considerably dropped. The market was flooded with US Dollar currency notes and too many people were trying to exchange US Dollars for Pak Rupees. Who unloaded all those US currency notes in the market, is a question not difficult to answer.
- PL-480 funds had also been released by the US. Over-night some JI workers were seen with pockets full of money and spending lavishly. ...
... The US not only aided but also directed most of the PNA activities. On July 4, 1977, PNA negotiators Mufti Mahmood, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan and Professor Gafoor had agreed on a joint formula with the PPP but suddenly Air Marshal (retired) Asghar Khan, Pir of Pigaro, Begum Nasim Wali Khan, Maulana Noorani and some other of their ilk declared that they did not endorse the agreement reached between the parties. On whose behalf these leaders sabotaged the reconciliation proceedings, is any body's guess.
Martial Law. On the night of July 4/5, 1977 General Zia-ul-Haq declared Martial Law. ...
The US Issues Black Warrant. When ZAB's trial for his alleged involvement in the murder of Nawab Muhammad Ahmad Khan was being heard in the Supreme Court, Islamabad, ... a telegraphic message from Washington [was received]. When decoded, it contained directions for the local US offices to ensure that ZAB was hanged. It also laid down instructions for arranging retirement and shifting of some of the general officers." --- Profiles of Intelligence by Brig. Syed A. I. Tirmazi, 1995, pgs. 33-38
The benefit of having some distance in time of course now also indicates that a military government in Pakistan was simply essential for an even greater geopolitical great game: to "have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war", which too did not suddenly materialize in the fall of 1979 but had strategic game-theory laced diabolical orchestration behind it. Here is another confession, ex post facto:
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
... Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire." --- Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1998 interview to French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto clearly could not have gone along with that American great game plan with global aspiration of his own as the up and coming respected statesman of the Muslim world, and had to be eliminated from the scene altogether with a more compliant, boot-licking, greedy, tin-pot military dictator who could easily be controlled. Zia-ul-Haq at the time was well known in the establishment as the most subservient lackluster general who was promoted to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff (or as the Chief of Army Staff) over other more senior generals by prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the keen expectation that the groveling general will follow orders. Well, he did, but of a different master. "Democracy Revolution" was used as the pretext for that coup d'état. And under the iron-fisted military rule of General Zia-ul-Haq, which he once demonstrated on television by slowly closing his fist, a full blown Islamic militancy operation was structured in Pakistan to recruit and train the "Mujahideen" as cannon fodder for the Afghan war. They were famously greeted as the "moral equivalent of our founding fathers" by President Ronald Reagan on their celebrated visit to the White House in 1980s. The plentiful harvest of this fabricated "militant Islam" to last many generations, is continually being "tickled", re-seeded, trained, and re-harvested, this time as the "enemy", to fuel the Global War on Terror.
The official state receipts for this new "imperial mobilization" aren't in as yet since it is still very much "contemporary history" in the making. But one can still observe the "coincidence" (sic!) that by another timely "happenstance" (sic!), yet another military general is in power in Pakistan before the launch of that second "imperial mobilization" into Afghanistan using 9/11 as the pretext. Once again, the then elected prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, who remarkably is now once again the ruler of this pawn nation for the third time, and is once again experiencing "Democracy Revolution" against him, at the start of his second tenure in 1997 aspired to become the "amir-ul-momineen" and had promoted General Pervez Musharraf over other more senior generals in the exact same expectations as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and suffered the exact same loyalty in payback. As the new iron-fisted ruler of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf immediately went on board the 9/11 steam-train and gave the entire stock-room away to assist in the second "imperial mobilization" of the United States into Afghanistan, forging a unity of command with the American military command so that nothing was left to chance. Game theory was displayed at its most effectiveness vis a vis Pakistan in both imperial mobilizations, by having military dictatorship rule Pakistan at both times to precisely follow orders of its own masters.
To even think that the Global War on Terror and its underlying pretext of the catastrophic terror event in New York was not years in the planning is to be pathetically ignorant of the reality of "imperial mobilization" --- a fate that is willingly suffered not just by the Uncle Toms and house niggers installed to run surrogate nations, but also by the support systems of domestic power comprising intellectuals, journalists, news media owners, NGOs, and the local industrial and economic elite whose bread and butter depends on compliance with the massa. ( See the section "Taking a Deeper Look into the Dynamics of Mantra Creation: Islamofascism" in my Report on the Mighty Wurlitzer, http://tinyurl.com/mightywurlitzer )
Scrutinizing that first instance of "Democracy Revolution" against ZAB with the un jaundiced eye of an analyst, one readily observes that it is almost like the layers of an onion. You peel off one motivation and you see another cleverly hidden underneath it. You unpeel that layer and you see yet another, and another... What if a noble people with some wherewithal (meaning, not dumbed down between bread and circuses), and their noble leaders (meaning, not mercenaries and mental midget Uncle Toms cunningly installed in power with pretenses of democratic elections and arguments of expediency in military coup d'état), understood the kernel motivation of the great game up front by-passing all the layers of manufactured pretexts and the concomitant cause-and-effect "happenstance" cunningly built upon each other, and made wise and moral decisions in the national interest rather than in their own narrow self-interests? The imperial covert agendas would not succeed, now would they? These agendas rely on the compliance of surrogate states to pull them off. Precisely to preempt that hurdle from ever arising despite the presence of house niggers in all positions of power, it is made so much more difficult to unravel on-going covert operations and their secret motivations while these are still current affairs. Ex post facto, it is even made known to the world with considerable gloat, knowing fully well that the dumbed down public along with their co-opted rulers and mental midget intellectuals placed in all prominent positions will not dare learn from it to preempt the next episode of "contemporary history". (See my deconstruction of the doctrine of "Plausible Deniability" as per the US National Security Directive NSC 10/2 permitting the CIA to indulge in hard covert-operations upon the enemy while permitting the political and executive leadership of the United States and its allies with deniability cover, in Anatomy of Conspiracy Theory, http://tinyurl.com/anatomy-of-conspiracy-theory )
Not to be outdone by the historical tag team combination of neoliberalism-neoconservatism to conquer nations, a new version is being added to the mix of neoconservatism as I write this. The creation of freshly armed terrorist states wielding "militant Islam", to augment the stateless terrorists wielding "militant Islam" with merely box-cutter knives against whom the perpetual World War IV is now being waged. That is this new "ISIS" phenomenon rapidly being spread in Iraq and Syria as I write this (see Understanding ISIS, http://tinyurl.com/Understanding-ISIS).
The new militant "Islamic State" with "caliphate" galore is only the manufactured progression of going from empire's own stateless antediluvian actors playing their scripted "terrorist" role, to antediluvian state actors playing their scripted "terrorist expansionist" role. Barbarians being brought to power akin to the manufacture of NAZI socialism and godless Communism, both secretly supported and funded from Wall Street to fabricate potent state enemies to wage world wars against in order to fashion a new world order from the concomitant ashes of the old world left behind. The headlines announcing the new phantasmal terror threat to Western civilization: "Islamic State 'beyond anything we've seen':
'Washington: The Islamic State poses a greater danger than conventional "terrorist group" and is pursuing a vision that could radically alter the face of the Middle East, US Defence Leader said Thursday [August 21, 2014].
The IS jihadists could be contained and eventually defeated by local forces backed by the United States, but the Sunni population in both Syria and Iraq would need to reject the group, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and General Martin Dempsey told reporters.
Hagel warned that the Islamic State is better armed, trained and funded than any recent militant threat.
"They marry ideology and a sophistication of strategy and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well funded. This is beyond anything we've seen," Hagel told a news conference.
Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the group adheres to a fanatical ideology and has "a long term vision" to take over Lebanon, Israel, and Kuwait. If they achieve that vision, it would fundamentally alter the face of the Middle East and create a security environment that would certainly threaten us in many ways," he said.
... The bombing runs and humanitarian aid to the local population [Zahir's note: the guns and butter again] have stalled the Islamic State's "momentum and enabled Iraqi and Kurdish forces to regain their footing and take the initiative".
Asked if the US would hit the militants in neighboring Syria, Hagel did not rule out the option but did not indicate strikes there were imminent.' --- AFP, Friday August 22, 2014, via Dawn.com
The local public often just join the burgeoning crowds in these revolution-fevers that are brought to their door-steps out of their own frustrations, disenfranchisement, misplaced sense of patriotism, nationalism, liberation, or religionism, not to neglect paid participants on the endless dollar payroll, and those coerced into attending who'd rather just be sitting at home with their family. The real social problems affecting ordinary peoples are all fabricated to start with as part of the Hegelian Dialectic strategy in the way the territory is administered as a surrogate state by rulers, dictators, plunderers, all pathetic house niggers, some wearing the garb of "democracy" and constitutional electoral mandate if that more agreeable format is in vogue when a state has seen some "liberation". There is, of course, always the "real" "Democracy Revolution" waiting in the wings for even greater "liberation". The public's natural reaction to their social, political and economic discontents is suitably amplified with specific slogans at the national scale and cunningly fertilized for advancing "revolutionary times" by making it all appear organic. It is not organic. It is synthetic. But its basis is in the hard reality of discontent. Sometimes that discontent is synthetically induced, as was the Hindu-Muslim discontent after the failed rebellion of 1857. After that combined Hindu-Muslim effort to get rid of the British empire, the white man decided to ensure that the two people should forever remain at loggerheads, leading to the blood-drenched partition of the Indian sub-continent when the British finally withdrew 90 years later (see my Sacred Cow series: Allama Iqbal - marde-momin or superman?, which examines the role of the principal local architect of that orchestrated separation in his service to the British Empire, http://tinyurl.com/Allama-Iqbal-ubermensch ).
I have learnt that it is virtually impossible to explain any of this to these overzealous "democracy" and anti-government protesters, their sympathizers, and even to their antagonists, including the "Islam" flag bearers of any flavor driving for caliphates among the Sunni fanatical Muslims and "revolutionary Islam" among the Shia fanatical Muslims, that these "revolutionary times" are synthetic and people are being taken for a ride for quite a different endgame. I have tried it --- no one is even willing to read the script of "How to Start a Revolution", "From Dictatorship to Democracy", freely available on the internet, to adjudicate for themselves what kind of script the latest two circus clowns of "Democracy Revolution", Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri, are following in Islamabad.
Both are Uncle Toms of empire not much different from their opponents whom they want to dislodge from power in their version of the "real" "Democracy Revolution". Both eat at the same globalist's table with the massa, like their opponents. Both echo the same core narratives of empire, like their opponents. And they both make coordinated maximalist political demands in their "Democracy Revolution" which are designed ab initio never to be fulfilled, but to principally disrupt the state's functioning at the expense of increasing public anger at nothing functioning, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy with more state repression, more dysfunction, more public anger, the theory being that this will topple the regime – "regime change".
Behold the two house niggers of Pakistan now championing "revolution" and "change", seated comfortably at the massa's table at the Western financial super elite's World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 27, 2011. (For the definition of the term house nigger see my FAQ What is an Intellectual Negro?, http://tinyurl.com/faq-intellectual-negro )
Caption Pakistani house niggers Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri seated at the massa's table at the Western financial super elite's World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 27, 2011. What are they doing there? Would it be rude to suggest that they are each being rewarded for the following facts: (a) selling the "moderate Islam" part of Hegelian Dialectic (both Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri) ; (b) the 600-page Fatwa on Terrorism against "militant Islam" to reinforce the Hegelian Dialectic with some theology backing one side and condemning the other (Tahir ul Qadri) ; (c) for both parroting the core axioms and narratives of massa on its Global War on Terror ; (d) for both demonstrating to the massa that although the massa knows that the "Price of a Pakistani oscillates between a free trip to the US and a bottle of whisky." (see Profiles of Intelligence by Brig. Syed A. I. Tirmazi, 1995, pg. 45), and that as in yesteryear, even today all mercenaries from Pakistan are as willing and able to play its diabolical games to fck their own peoples, but that these two are the more promising of the current crop as prospective political and religious national leaders of "moderate Islam" in Pakistan with an ideological following of mostly young people and women fed up with both the status quo of corrupt political parties and with "militant Islam", and thus offering them the gentle mix between slightly secular to "moderate Islam" to ensure that this large demographic group too is also led to the same "United We Stand" pastures by the devils the massa knows and supports, and consequently, that they are also worthy of being noticed and backed as their new horses among the massa's many other horses. The massa evidently agreed, and even rewarded them with participation and global visibility on the massa's table. Imran Khan needed the massa's backing, because without it no one can come to power in their surrogate states, but he already had the national visibility, and has already been partaking of the crumbs that fall off the British Establishment's table. While Tahir ul Qadri has been more dependent on the massa's full spectrum support for his sudden meteoric rise to national prominence in Pakistan. The two house niggers, as different as they are in their personality and profession, coordinating their scripted "Democracy Revolution" protests in Islamabad is therefore no surprise. (Image source from my response to Dr. Tahir-ul Qadri on his Fatwa in 2010: Response to the Fatwa on Terrorism in the Service of Empire, http://tinyurl.com/Tahir-ul-Qadri-Fatwa-Terrorism )
Well, one such green colored "Democracy Revolution" was foiled by the Iranian government in 2009 with great foresight and understanding of the devil before them. Other nations have been less successful. Pakistan is the most pathetic --- ruled entirely by house nigger class across the board, both in and out of uniform. The recipe is all laid out in the script known as "FDTD" for disrupting an existing governance system by making it more and more difficult to govern. The pretense for take-down of course is "liberation from tyranny", with a promise of better "democracy" --- otherwise only fools would fall for it. Now even intelligent people are deceived by the "honey trap" of platitudes for the want of realistic perspective on primacy, for the want of intimacy with the mind of sociopaths who play with nations like pawns on the grand chessboard, and due to immersive permanent bondage to adept global perception managers.
Few who fall for these "revolution" scams in fact ever want to understand that all this is manufactured, synthetic, run by Western assets and stooges. Perspective-pollution is the ultimate patsy-maker creating an abundance of useful idiots out of the handful of "jihadis" and "idealists" willing to put aside self-interest for a greater cause. These patsies are trained into the mechanisms of "Democracy Revolution" and they seed the large flag-waving crowds which are formed in herds by the victims of discontent spanning the gamut from disenfranchisement to poverty to joblessness to lack of security to just wishing change from living under the jackboots of tyranny. A study of such crowds would surely reveal that these are populated more by genuine people with real discontents than by mercenaries, hired hands, and those conscripted to attend, even though there is never any shortages of the latter set. Genuine disaffection is fundamentally necessary for this recipe to be sustained for any length of time and through its trials and tribulations.
Such disaffection is not always the result of any one single corrupt government's limited tenure. It is often an accumulation of the same common state policies of serfdom over many years and many changing uniforms and shalwar kameez on the lucrative throne of a nation like Pakistan. This has made her national cancer systemic. Even so, smart crooks in power, whether military, civilian, autocratic, despotic or tyrannical, should at least be politically astute enough to know whether these "Democracy Revolutions" are foreign funded and orchestrated or not, by being intimately familiar with the script being played out. Evidently, unlike the Iranian governance system manned by learned well-read intellectuals who suffer a great deal of national interest with modesty and honesty of purpose despite nearly four decades of international sanctions and marginalizing, the Pakistani government, like the Pakistani nation, suffering from a severe drought of intellectuals and run by fools and mercenaries many of whom even purchase fake college degrees to become elected, all seeking personal payback with compound interest after purchasing their meal ticket to elected statehood for hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece, appear to be entirely unfamiliar with the script. Well, by the law of nature, those who live by the hand of the devil are forced out by the same hand.
It is, however, not that there is anything more profound in these political recipes for bringing about "revolutions" against tyranny than is contained, for instance, in the nearly 600 years old Discourse on Voluntary Servitude written by the young French idealist and revolutionary, Etienne de La Boétie. This fellow straightforwardly argued the following most obvious moral commonsense for genuine liberation which could still never come to pass on its own despite the vista of six centuries of experimentation to verify its efficacy: "obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement. ... [Therefore:] Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
There is indeed a very extensive bibliography on non-violence resistance, including yesteryear examples in Nelson Mandela and his resistance to Apartheid South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi and his Satyagraha resistance to support the Quit India movement, etc. The standard academic text for Westerners, especially Americans, is of course the classic by one of their own, Henry David Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience and other related essays.
Books, platitudes, and moral commonsense however don't bring "revolutions" or overthrow tyranny. Otherwise, the world's great religions would have been sufficient to end all tyranny for all times. Today, it is the singular fact that big money, strategies, tactics, logistics, trainers and handlers, media and support systems, are all deployed together on a vast scale to make these "Democracy Revolutions" happen as a means of creating "revolutionary times" for agendas that have little to do with freeing the people from their serfdom. Endless piles of big money and sophisticated logistics planning are deployed by front-men of the financial oligarchy operating through tax-exempt charitable foundations and other non-profit organizations (NGOs) in conjunction with the intelligence apparatuses of Western nations. The bibliography on this subject of covert subversion of nations by the superpower is quite extensive. Even a little study of freely available web resources will quickly take one to names like the financial speculations wizard George Soros and his behind the scenes funding of the multi-colored "Democracy Revolution"; to the CIA manufacturing local agents and assets who are deployed to seed the "Democracy Revolution" from the Left to the Right, or to furnish other "revolutionary times" on demand such as Operation Gladio style terrorism blamed on patsies; etc. Not to forget to mention that the former head of Pakistan's ISI openly admitted in his memoir that the superpower "master" even installs "CIA agents as presidents, prime ministers, ministers, generals and senior advisors, etc." (Profiles of Intelligence by Brig. Syed A. I. Tirmazi, 1995, pgs. 20-22). The massa holds its house niggers in such utter contempt that the head of ISI further quoted the chutzpah of the US Counsel General at Lahore: "Price of a Pakistani oscillates between a free trip to the US and a bottle of whisky." (Ibid. pg. 45, quoting Dr. Andrew V. Corry, US Counsel General at Lahore).
The Pakistani spook chief went on to confirm the reality of that trite American observation of its surrogate state: "He may not be too far wrong. We did observe some highly placed Pakistanis selling their conscience, prestige, dignity and self-respect for a small price." (Ibid. pg. 45) And then, surprisingly for an establishmentarian insider and spook chief of a spy agency that is itself fed by the United States, the most candid of all questions is asked: "The nation has the right to know and ask the leaders how far has the situation changed and have we developed enough muscles and guts to get rid of the old masters and their agents? That is the question." (Ibid. pg. 23) Indeed. It is still the question. Matters have only worsened today. More and more agents, mercenaries, stooges, patsies and dupes have been planted in all significant positions of power and influence across Pakistan for obediently continuing Pakistan's manufactured front-line role as "Terror Central" in the Global War on Terror (see my 2007 report: Saving Pakistan from Synthetic 'Terror Central', http://tinyurl.com/saving-pakistan-2007 ).
This reality-check and especially the previously discussed example of Pakistan's first "Democracy Revolution" of 1977 where the religious Right was mobilized with suitcase full of US dollars, should convince even the most obdurate mind by now to be at least a tad more skeptical of these new generation of holier than thou puppetshows of "Democracy Revolution".
Who is funding Tahir ul Qadri's and Imran Khan's "Democracy Revolution" mania today? Both their crowds appear to be well-trained, dedicated, armed with heavy cranes and air-conditioned shipping containers (a first not just for Pakistan but not seen in any "Democracy Revolution" before), and for all the claims of theirs being two independent protests just coincidentally united by happenstance on the same occasion, seem rather well coordinated. As of Saturday, August 30, 2014, intense violence has erupted against the protesters with Islamabad being turned into a war zone by the state security apparatus. The Muslim on Muslim violence that has characterized the Global Zone of Percolating Violence that Brzezinski outlined on page 53 of his 1996 book The Grand Chessboard, the hallmark of fourth generation warfare to demoralize nations from within, has achieved its intent in every nation visited by it, including Pakistan. What a mind-fck that the quest to get rid of the military from governance in 2007 with "go Musharraf go" sloganeering is now transformed into the question on most Pakistani lips: why is the military not intervening? As of Monday, September 1, 2014, the Pakistani newsmedia is awash with revelations made by the elected president of Imran Khan's political party who left the protest site in disagreement, that Imran Khan is following a "script". Duh! Its complete unraveling someday promises to be the unpeeling of the onion of several layers of covert motivations each one compartmentalized and staged by its own handlers.
Where is all this going? If history is a worthy teacher, clearly to some staging of next pawn moves on the grand chessboard. A Gordian knot has been tied on Pakistan the extrication from which, without a real throwing of tea overboard, is impossible. The carefully cultivated house niggers, agents, assets, and mercenaries in and out of uniform ensure that the primacy interests of the massa will always remain the first priority in Pakistan. Perspective-pollution will continue to enfeeble and co-opt her public. The causal chain of national liberation then is to transcend perspective-pollution first, the godhead of all co-option for any brave people willing to rise beyond their own narrow self-interests. All else will naturally follow. But without it, the chances of being harvested as useful idiots and patsy-fodder with the right set of "doctrinal motivation" implanted in every partisan group, is virtually one hundred percent. This modus operandi of making the public mind should be self-evident. Just look at how Tahir ul Qadri provides a different set of "doctrinal motivation" to his flock of revolutionaries in contrast to Imran Khan, but both group of protesters are coordinated towards the same mobilization. The perpetual rich harvest of useful idiots at the hands of demagogues is the principal reason I have devoted so much space here to this matter of Machiavellian social engineering so that the motivated and well-intentioned minority willing to put their good life on the line to bring change in the greater public interest, can also overcome their stupidity first, just like they overcame their apathy.
An insightful and brilliantly oratorical statement attributed to the ancient Roman statesman and orator, student of law and justice, Marcus Tullius Cicero, made several decades before the birth of Christ during the zenith and rapaciousness of Pax Romana on its way to pernicious decay, captures a fundamental truth: "It is not freedom that permits Trojan Horse to be wheeled within the gates." Cicero went on to plead his case before the Roman Senate in words that appear to be timeless commonsense, but lost to any civilization in decay:
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the carrier of the plague. You have unbarred the gates of Rome to him." --- Cicero's speech to the Roman Senate, appears in Cicero's Prognosis, 1965, by Millard F. Caldwell, Justice, Supreme Court Florida (source AAPS, aapsonline.org)
I have however observed that fools are indispensable to the fifth columnists of modern times. The traitor in our intensely Machiavellian times cannot generally be very effective in his subversion without the plentiful harvest of useful idiots, stooges, patsies and dupes, all fervently believing in their divine mission while executing the superman's script, often written several degrees of separation removed from the scene. The traitor answers to alien masters.
These manufactured "Democracy Revolutions" are not the harbinger of any meaningful and substantive changes for the betterment of the people. Indeed, anyone with even a tiny bit of intellectual capacity to reason can easily ascertain from empirical evidence that at best, it merely changes the shape and form, sometimes the uniforms, sometimes the flag.
But nothing fundamental changes, except for the worse.
It is of course all couched in Orwellian Newspeak to convince a gullible public of the absurd, and the reprehensible. But behind the fancy tunes of propaganda, their resources are still plundered regardless of who's brought into power under which pretext; they are still kept in debt to international lending agencies led by the World Bank which is controlled by private internationalist bankers who seek global governance at the expense of eroding national sovereignty with the diabolical tricks of their trade; their economies are still transformed into MNC economies by the WB-IMF debt trap; their own once thriving domestic industries are shut down in obedience to IMF restructuring and privatization mandates as temporary relief in the debt-trap, making it prohibitive for local industries to compete and the country and its vast resources are easily bought out for a song; their social spendings are continually siphoned off in debt-servicing for loans incurred for frivolous and military pursuits; and they remain vassals and surrogates of empire with merely a different set of house niggers in the ceremonial seats, sometimes in uniform, sometimes out of uniform.
These observations are entirely empirical. Anyone can observe this state of affairs as it isn't a classified state-secret.
In fact, this is so patently obvious to anyone with an iota of intelligence that for any public to be continually taken for a ride on the "horse of democracy" with election frenzy and revolution mania, its mind must be really really foolish. Or really really controlled. Which one is yours?
I have learnt that this is as much a great game among satiated predators who just play with nations and gullible public to see who can fck them more, as it is a strategy of destabilization with "regime changes" to achieve the objectives of fourth generation warfare on the Grand Chessboard. The demoralization of a people is complete even after a few such episodes of guns and butter liberation, imagine endless ones lasting a lifetime, multiple generations, in which kids are born and die young knowing no other existence! The ultimate prize sought: one-world.
What I wonder about though, and it is not something I have figured out yet, is what happens afterwards? It would become awfully boring for the sociopaths and predators once they control every living being and system on earth. What new games would they then have to devise to entertain themselves, to exercise their lust for power --- go back to child-like competing and warring nation-states to restart the great game all over again? Or look for new frontiers in outerspace for exercising primacy as the fledgling United Earth Federation?
And that, all that, dear reader, is the tortuous reality of the matter and the path mankind has been deliberately put on without our consent or knowledge. The sociopaths creating major wars, the social Darwinians deciding who lives and who dies, the controllers creating perspective-pollution, and the narrow self-interests of even the best of people, always win out in the end. To this effect, my greatest of all disappointments is to finally accept the empirical fact that even the most profound world religions teaching lofty moral virtues have failed equally miserably in getting the public mind to transcend self-interest.
This fact is now compounded by the high degree of perspective-pollution across the board which, integrated over time and space, throughout history and mythology, has come to divide mankind into us vs. them ad infinitum on narrow differentiation more than uniting it as human beings first. It is not merely that people have taken religion as an opiate --- the disturbing and readily observable fact is that the public mind everywhere, in every nation on earth, appears to not be capable of anything different from what socialization teaches it, the needs of existentialism compel it, and the stages of co-option entice it. Spiritual gratification when sought is found in prayer. Intellectual thirst when lighted is quenched in career. Ego is satiated in awards and accolades and feel-goods. The super ego lies dead. The age of Solon is long past. That age 3000 years ago when the Athenian lawgiver had decreed good governance: "That city where those who have not been injured take up the cause of one who has, and prosecute the case as earnestly as if the wrong had been done to themselves." That age was short lived as well and vanished after its lawgiver.
Solon's distant progeny Plato subsequently decreed the "Philosopher-king" abstraction for that reason of good governance of the Republic, of having truthful intelligent thinkers seeking high moral ideals become the leaders of a Republic because deceitful super-intelligent amoral thinkers will only put the public mind in chains. Fools will only run them aground or be shepherded themselves from behind the scenes. With the world all but co-opted by the superman, what then is left behind to interdict the superman's dystopia now in the making?
What I have learnt in my journey as the student of truth does not paint a very flattering picture of man as it exists today, and as it has existed from time immemorial --- his inability to break the bonds of servitude. Back then it was involuntary servitude under the jackboots of kings who ruled in the name of god, often as gods themselves. Today it is by creating systems of social control that induce voluntary servitude under the pretenses of liberty, fraternity, equality, democracy, elections, getting man to accept his own servitude, and to even love it. Sadly, only the forms and formats of mass behavior control have changed, from physical chains of antiquity to mental chains of modernity, but the objective remains the same – primacy!
There is always a new tomorrow though. A better painting beckons.
In my detailed examination of the "Fable of the Bees" in the essay: Seduction of Science and Technology Corrupting the Intellect and the Soul ( http://tinyurl.com/Fable-of-the-Bees ), I examined the rather rare disease of morbid infection by cheeky conscience in the brilliant supercat who decided to go for "Hajj" after eating 900 mice. The infection is usually short lived, but in the following case died holily in bed.
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Few men of science, technology, and industry ever grapple with any of these issues or dare to go there when they are in the prime of their careers heartily pursuing it. Usually, a handful only venture there after the fact, ex post facto, after the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back in. Like M.I.T.'s own former president Jerome B. Wiesner (1971-1980), who, after presiding over the buildup of the same militarized society, upon retirement from his top academic post in the most militarized country on earth, thought it most conscionable to make the following banal statement of moral clarity:
"This irrational behavior is only possible because we, the citizens of the nation, permit it. It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture." — The United States: A militarized society, Jerome B. Wiesner, president emeritus MIT, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Aug. 1985, pg. 104
This is the outline of Jerome B. Wiesner's own militarized career according to wikipedia:
"Jerome B. Wiesner (May 30, 1915 – October 21, 1994), was associated with MIT for most of his career, joining the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1942 and working on radar development. He worked briefly at Los Alamos, returned to become a professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and worked at and ultimately became director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (RLE). He became Dean of the School of Science in 1964, Provost in 1966, and President from 1971 to 1980. He was also elected a life member of the MIT Corporation."
These much noted pangs of belated conscience evidently make zero impact on the dystopian forces which they unleashed in their heyday, or, as one often wonders, upon their own decrypt soul as they "died holily in their beds." (from MacBeth 5:1:47-49 "Yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds.") Perhaps this is why it is respectable to make [these lofty moral proclamations only] upon retirement.
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This essay, summarizing what I have learnt of the minefield of co-option in my journey as a student of truth, is humbly dedicated to the young generation, of every era, and to my children. It is my profound hope that instead of merely giving importance to these matters towards the tail end of one's professional journey, like American scientist and M.I.T. president Jerome B. Wiesner, like myself, an M.I.T. hammered engineer who also contributed his own two dry straws worth of mind and hand during his "youth" in building the Technetronic dystopia now upon the world (see Zahir Ebrahim's response to IEEE Spectrum's Special Report: 25 Microchips That Shook the World. May 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ieeespectrum-25microchips-2009 ), or remaining indifferent, they might engage with reality more forthrightly at the launch of theirs. As Winston Smith, working tirelessly at The Ministry of Truth in London, quietly wrote in his diary in George Orwell's depiction of today's dystopia in his prescient fable Nineteen eighty-four, feeling that he was setting forth an important axiom:
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
The older generations worldwide have veritably been co-opted to accept the dystopic arithmetic of two plus make five, now being taught ubiquitously by today's version of The Ministry of Truth. Which is why we live in the absurd dark age of War on Terror, the full blown global terror network of the Goldstein of our age in the making. Phantasmally divided today between "al-Qaeda" and "IS", previously between "al-Qaeda" and "Sadaam's WMD", covertly armed, aided and abetted as surrogate armies of empire cast in the role of "bad guys" to wage endless wars against, and none harboring lofty moral gravitas in noble Oceania fighting for the cause of liberty against the barbarians, is able to call a spade a spade.
The young generations are the only hope that they learn to navigate the corrupting seas of co-option, self-interest, perspective-pollution, with some degree of wherewithal from the very inception of their professional lives. For only then shall they find the courage to do basic arithmetic correctly. All else will follow. Without it, they will remain caught between self-interest and useful idiots in every era, stupidly chasing "hope", "revolution" and "democracy" as the mirages of "change". All evil naturally beckons. This is the empirical truth.
Youth need not be wasted on the young.
Source URL: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-have-i-learnt-zahir-ebrahim.html
Faith-Politico URL: http://faith-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-art-and-science-of-co-option.html
Source PDF: http://sites.google.com/site/humanbeingsfirst/download-pdf/what-have-i-learnt-zahir-ebrahim.pdf
First Published Sunday August 31, 2014 | Last Updated August 29, 2015 12:00 pm 15400
Zahir Ebrahim: What Have I Learnt as a Student of Truth? The Art and Science of Co-option


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Whether it is a snow day, a scheduled absence for a conference or something more serious, it is important to have a plan for recovering lost class time. This resource outlines steps that can be used to identify which course content needs to be replaced and how to create and deliver the material using different tools, including Canvas, Kaltura, and Zoom.
A resource to help users get started using the Kaltura Media Space Go Mobile App for Android and Google phones.
A resource to help users get started using the Kaltura Media Space Go Mobile App for iPhone.
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Do you have videos, images, or audio files to share with students? Learn how to share your media using Kaltura, Penn State's new media management and streaming service in this one-hour demonstration session. Explore Kaltura's key features and capabilities within Canvas, discuss ways video is being used in higher education, and discover which Kaltura tools are best suited for your needs.
During this session, participants will learn about their options for uploading and sharing media, and collaborating on media or media collections within Penn State's Media management and streaming service, Kaltura MediaSpace. Participants will learn about how to share individual items to be worked on collaboratively with others and how to create channels for a variety of audiences.
A resource to help students get started using Kaltura in their Canvas courses.
Innovate your teaching by integrating Kaltura media and tools into your courses. Integrating the Kaltura learning tools allows students and instructors to create and share media content within Canvas. During this 90-minute hands-on session, participants will learn how to add the Kaltura learning tools to their courses, build a Media Gallery to support learning, and explore how to update content and assignments by adding Kaltura media components.

subset: commoncrawl


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Your Online Guide To The Crafty & Clever
This website began as a way for me to organize all the creative homemaking tips, crafts and projects I have collected over time. For the 6 plus years that this site has been online, it has grown to feature all the cool ideas and projects that I've discovered on the internet (one of the most popular features readers enjoy).
How to use the site: Simply click on the category header you are interested in (the blue menu bar above) and have fun browsing through all the goodies!
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do you find all your tips? I've been collecting vintage homemaking magazines, books/cookbooks and craft patterns for over 20 years, I love this stuff! The internet has given me an opportunity to compile all this information into a handy resource that anyone can review.
Are you legit or just someone seeking to be a big blog celebrity? I'm a pretty private person and don't publish photos of myself or my personal information...if I was trying to "fake it till I make it" so I can be a "celebrity", I'm doing a pretty poor job of things ;). I'm genuinely legit and am content to share tips and tricks, keeping that the sole focus here. In other words, no I am not trying to become the next Martha Stewart or Heloise or big name blogger.
How did you come up with the idea for this website? At the time I started, there really wasn't anything like it. There were a small number of craft blogs that featured projects occasionally and a few recipe blogs, but nothing that did both plus creative homemaking tips (cleaning, gardening, household, etc.). Initially I wanted a place where I could organize my collection of information but soon saw an opportunity to share all the nifty things I found online. This allows me to extend a bit of goodwill and support to other bloggers plus give readers something fun to check out...win win for everyone!
The setup here is unusual...Is this a blog or a website or what? I consider it a hybrid of both. It started out as a daily blog but over the years things got a tad messy and overwhelming. What's the use in having a site full of tips if they're scattered all over the place? I've been working for over a year now to condense the site into fewer pages so that you're viewing all the like-tips on a single page whenever possible. Give me another year to finish cleaning up and I think I'll have the most organized, visitor-friendly tips/crafty site on the web!
How many people write here? Just me, that's it. You can read more on my About page here.