Tuesday, December 1, 2020

None Dare Call It 'Germ Warfare'


    Just over a century ago an airborne plague called the Spanish Flu swept over the world, infecting at least 500 million people and killing at least 50 million before it burned itself out in 1920.  At the time nobody knew just what it was, where it came from, or how to deal with it.  Then as now the only remotely-effective defense the experts could think of was to wear face-masks in public, and a lot of people objected to that.  Nobody had any idea how to create a vaccine for it.  Nobody considered closing schools or shutting down the economy.  Not until 1991, with the benefits of modern medical knowledge, was the source of the "Spanish Flu" identified as a variant of the H1N1-A virus -- definitely a member of the Corona virus family -- while biologists were isolating  H1N1 Swine Flu in mainland China.  The Chinese government then insisted that it had been brought into China via pigs imported from North America.  This did not prevent the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 Swine Flu in China.

    In fact, with the exception of Polio, Ebola and AIDS,  all of the major viral plagues of the 20th century -- including SARS, MERS, H1N5, H1N1, Covid-19 -- can be traced to the Corona virus family, which is permanently entrenched in China.  It's also notable that over the last 50 years China has made great efforts to capture most of the world's medical-supply industry.  

    The present pandemic, despite odd accusations from the Chinese government, originated in the city of Wuhan, in China.  Wuhan is a sizable city, which supports the University of Wuhan, which maintains the Wuhan Medical College, which administers the Virology Institute of Wuhan.  The official story is that the virus traveled from infected bats in the city's live-animal market to the rest of the city.  The story from various doctors who have defected from China is that the virus "escaped" from the Wuhan Virology Institute to the live-animal market and from there to the rest of the city.  What we do know is that as far back as December 2019 the Chinese government banned travel from Wuhan to the rest of China -- but not from Wuhan to the rest of the world.  This allowed China to celebrate its lucrative New Year holiday season without being interrupted by the epidemic.   

     By January of 2020 the virus had spread to the rest of the world, and no quarantine orders could keep it contained.  By now it's become clear that China severely "mishandled" the outbreak -- by allowing the virus to escape in the first place, by allowing widespread travel once the New Year celebrations were over, by telling the WHO initially that there was no danger of human-to-human transmission, by withholding information about the genetic structure of the virus (necessary for constructing vaccines), and initially withholding sales of medical supplies to the rest of the world.  It's also obvious how political factions have "weaponized" reactions to the virus -- particularly in the US, where Democrat officials have used lockdowns to cripple the US economy, therefore wrecking the major victory of Trump's administration.  Since Trump has been a serious opponent of China's economic warfare policies, getting him out of office could only serve China's interests.

    Since this is not the first time that various forms of Corona virus have come out of China in the past 40 years, there's some reason to wonder whether such "escapes" are accidental or not.  

    For most other countries, the chief objection to deliberately spreading plague to one's political enemies -- in other words, "germ warfare" -- is that the plague will inevitably spread to one's own population.  China is one of perhaps two countries on Earth, the other being India, which would have no problem with that.  China has the biggest population in the world -- one and a half billion people -- while India has one and a third billion.  Both countries have been trying, for generations, to cut their excessive populations down -- sometimes resorting to draconian methods that would appall the rest of the world.  Remember that the Spanish Flu killed roughly one-tenth of the people it infected, and the other Corona viruses have lethality rates much lower than that.  The government of China would not grieve if it lost a million, or ten million, or a hundred million, or even half a billion of its own people;  after all, it would still have a billion more to obey its edicts and pay its taxes.  It would certainly feel no pain if the rest of the world lost half a billion people, or more.  

    So far, the only downside to the Chinese government for allowing the Covid-19 pandemic to spread has been "loss of face" -- i.e. embarrassment -- in front of the rest of the world, and one lawsuit filed in the UN's world court by, IIRC, the governor of Missouri for "reckless endangerment".  The upside has been the weakening of its assorted enemies, economically and politically.  Motive alone is not sufficient for conviction, and there's no evidence that the Wuhan Virology Institute actually did let loose the Covid-19 virus deliberately, but there's certainly motive for it not to be too careful about its safety and containment protocols -- and history to suggest that it hasn't been too careful in the past.  Nobody is saying the words "germ warfare" in public, but I suspect that a lot of health officials and politicians in the world are thinking them.

--Leslie <;)))>< Fish           

  


   

Monday, November 23, 2020

Election Fraud and How To Stop It


    It was Stalin who famously said: "It doesn't matter how people vote;  what matters is who counts the votes."  

    Anyone who has ever lived through an election in Chicago knows that Stalin was a piker.  

    When I left college I lived for twelve years in Chicago -- all these years later, no doubt I'm still voting there -- and I saw for myself that there are many more ways to cheat than that.  As a general rule Republicans cheat by tossing people off the registration rolls (or artfully throwing ballots away) while Democrats stuff ballot-boxes, but either of them will use either method when it suits them.  Classical methods include:

    "Vote early -- and often":  In some states, counties and municipalities, voting registration clerks are remarkably tolerant about what they accept as identification for voting.  It's dismayingly easy for somebody to get several forms of ID and register several times over.

    "This city is so democratic that even the dead can vote": Doting registration clerks must be sternly warned (and watched) about a lot of people signing up to vote who have the same address, differentiated only by "suite" or "apartment" numbers;  such addresses should be checked against the tax records to see if the address is truly a large apartment building, a resident hospital, or a cemetery.

    "Vote once, vote always": Despite state laws which insist that a registered voter who hasn't voted for two elections must be taken off the rolls, a lot of registration clerks somehow fail to remove such entries -- sometimes for decades -- leaving available names for other people to use with less-than-accurate ID.

    "Unfit ballots": In some states "illegible" or otherwise "marred" ballots are rejected out of hand, instead of being relegated to "provisional" status where they can be examined further.  In such states, a bit of pencil-lead tucked under a fingernail can be used to swipe across a ballot, thus "marring" it, without being spotted by a poll-watcher -- and there are other methods.  

    "The wrong box": In states where "marred" or otherwise questionable ballots must be put in the "provisional" category for further examination, it's possible to sneak perfectly good ballots into the "provisional" category -- or even the trash-basket -- if the poll-watchers aren't looking, and there are many ways to distract a poll-watcher.

    "Midnight Donation": After the polling-place closes, a vehicle pulls up to the back door, but instead of taking in boxes of ballots, it drops some off.  They've been filled out before-hand, and now they're mixed in with the ballots from the polling-place.

    "Lost in transit": Ballots on their way to a counting-center are usually packed in labeled boxes and transported by a vehicle with a driver and a witness -- but sometimes there are shortages of personnel and only one driver transports the boxes.  It's easy for a box or two to "fall off the truck", especially if the poll they're coming from has a history of getting a lot of votes for one party in particular.    

    "Too far to see": A more blatant cheat, this consists of keeping poll-watchers from the "wrong" party out of the polling-place or counting-center, or stationed too far away to see what the counters are doing.

    "Lopsided": Poll-watchers are supposed to represent all available political parties, but there's usually a preponderance of watchers from one party or another.  Quiet collusions can occur.

    With the present fad for mail-in voting the possibility of cheats increases.  New tactics can include:

    "Blizzard": In most states voters who want to vote by mail must register at their local or county registrar's office, in person, showing adequate ID, and deliberately ask for mail-in ballots.  Usually this is granted without question.  Some states require a reason, but acceptable reasons are military service, distance from a polling place, or health requirements;  avoiding a plague is definitely an adequate reason.  The problem with voting by mail is that the filled out and returned ballot contains no proof of the voter's identity except the registration number and the voter's signature on the ballot's envelope.  It's rare that any mail-in ballot that isn't "marred" or "questionable" has its voter's signature checked against the signature on the original registration application.  When mail-in ballots are broadcast to every registered voter in the book, inevitably some of them will go to addresses -- and names -- of voters no longer actually there.  Such can be used by anyone who finds them.  

    "Interception": Where there are a lot of mail-in ballots, less-than-scrupulous mail-carriers, or even local post offices, can quietly divert ballots from neighborhoods known to vote a certain way -- and a certain percentage of those ballots can even-more-quietly disappear.

    "Harvesting": When there are so many mail-in voters that the post office might be overwhelmed, there are always friendly officials willing to provide "drop-off boxes" to help out.  There's no guarantee that whoever comes to collect those drop-off boxes will deliver them to legitimate polling places.

    Ah, but the use of computers for recording and tallying votes would make Stalin wet his pants.  Consider the case of Diebold Election Systems, center of a voting scandal a few years back: 

     https://www.propublica.org/article/the-market-for-voting-machines-is-broken-this-company-has-thrived-in-it  

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy

    And then there's the parallel case of Dominion Voting Systems, which was caught "flipping" some 6000 pro-Trump votes to pro-Biden:

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/us-voting-machine-private-companies-voter-registration 

    These are the reasons why I laughed my @ss off when I heard various Democrats piously insist that there is "no evidence" of voter fraud in the 2020 election.  There are plenty of accusations -- including the "Sharpiegate" case of disqualifying ballots right here in my home county -- and all of them need to be investigated before the final decision on this election can be settled.

    So there's the problem.  Now, what can we do about it?

    First, we must stop using the damned computers.  Go back to using solid paper ballots and counting them by hand, with adequate poll-watchers -- of all political parties -- watching.  That would include Libertarians and Independents, and secure high-resolution video-cameras too.

    Second, go back to giving mail-in ballots only to voters who specifically ask for them.  

    Third, devise a third method of proving the identity of a mail-in voter on or inside the ballot's envelope;  this could be as simple as requiring a xerox copy of the driver's license, and maybe passport, along with the ballot.  

    Fourth, put secure videocams on "drop-off" boxes and inside post offices during the days when mail-in ballots are dropped off.  Also have secure cameras watching not only the polling-places themselves but their back doors and parking lots.    

    Fifth, call in the state police if necessary, but make sure that the collected ballots are never out of sight from the moment they're filled out until they arrive at the vote-counting center -- and after.  The "chain of custody" must be ironclad.  This applies to the "provisional" ballots too.

    Sixth, print no more ballots than there are registered voters in the state.  "Same day" registration must be totally outlawed.  

    Seventh, stop using "private" voting systems completely.  Elect the state's Electors early, and have the Electors themselves conduct the election.  That was the original function of the Electoral College:  to guarantee that the people who conducted an election were themselves elected, and therefore under the control of the voters.

    I doubt if this will stop absolutely all election fraud, since cheats will always find a way when the stakes are high, but it will make the frauds a lot more difficult.

--Leslie <;)))><  


      

Monday, November 16, 2020

A Conversation on Psionics


    Now for something completely difference: a discussion at a WorldCon party, a few years ago, on the subject of psychic phenomena.

    I don't remember which WorldCon it was (I've been to so many, they begin to blur together), but by some forgotten circumstances I wound up in the Con Suite, nursing a beer and nibbling some pretzels, at a table with a gritty-looking middle-aged guy who's badge wasn't visible, grousing about the lousy state of science education in the public schools.  Eventually Mr. Gritty got around to sneering at the number of college students these days who "actually believe in" psychic phenomena.  

    At that point I felt that I should chime in on the side of forgotten facts.  I didn't quote the large and growing body of established evidence, since I didn't have access to the records at the time, but instead claimed:  "Well, in my case I've got no choice;  I've not only seen it done, but I've done it myself -- several times."

    "Oh yeah?" he countered.  "So what am I thinking about right now?"  And he squeezed his eyes tight shut, concentrating.

    The answer to that was almost too easy.  "Some big long number that doesn't mean anything to me, although it... hmmm, has something to do with... avocados?"

    He snapped his eyes open, and couldn't help correcting: "Avogadro's number."

    "Still means nothing to me," I said.  "The talent doesn't make you all-knowing, and it isn't easy, and because it works through a human nervous system, it's not 100% accurate.  And even under the best of circumstances, it's hard to prove it's real to a determined skeptic.  For instance, I could tell you about incidents where information that I couldn't have gotten any other way saved my neck -- but then, you'd say I was lying, or remembering wrong.  Or I could drop into alpha-trance state, lay hands on your bare skin and tell you things about yourself that you haven't told me---"

    He jerked his bare forearm out of my reach.

    "--but then, you'd say I was just making good guesses, or must have heard something from somebody else and consciously forgotten about it.:

    He couldn't help smirking at that.

    "No, about the only psychic talent that would prove its existence is telekinesis -- moving physical objects with psychic energy alone.  And of course that's the rarest and weakest of the psychic talents."

    Oh?  Why is that?"

    Because moving matter around takes a lot more energy than transmitting information, because there's a helluva lot more energy tied up in matter.  E equals MC squared, and no matter how you slice it, C is one helluva big number.  The human brain doesn't really have much energy to play around with.  I think a brain at full gallop produces only 25 volts of energy -- or is it joules?  I forget -- and at least 7 of those are tied up in basic maintenance: things like maintaining your heartbeat, breathing, working the guts and glands -- stuff like that.  That leaves, what, 18 volts, at most?  And keeping even that much focused and aimed isn't easy."

    "But you say you can do it?"

    "Yes, but mostly on small stuff: moving a column of cigarette smoke, nudging rolling dice, little things like that."

    He broke off a piece of a pretzel, set it on the table and said: "There.  Move that."

    I tried, and managed to feel my way into the piece of pretzel, but I couldn't find enough resonance to move it.  "I can't,"  I admitted.  "It's too heavy."

    "Dice are a lot heavier."

    "I can't move a stationary die, either," I explained.  "I can only nudge them while they're in motion -- sort of like the working of a transistor: using a little energy to divert a lot.  I've learned how to feel my way into dice, though it's tough because they're made out of plastic.  Metals and crystals are a lot easier.  Plastic is like a tangle of dried spaghetti;  there's enough space between the molecules to make it sort of like a sponge, and you can fill that sponge with psychic energy the way you fill a regular sponge with water.  Again, that's easier with metals or crystals.  But anyway, once I've got the energy in there, I sort of create a mood in it;  I make the dice want to land in a certain position -- ones down, sixes up.  I call it 'tits down, teeth up'.  Then I shake the dice -- in my cupped hands or in a real cup -- until I can feel the precise instant when, if I drop the dice right then, they'll land the right way.  It works about two-thirds of the time."

    "Then why," he bristled, "Haven't you gone to Las Vegas and cleaned up at the craps tables?"

    "I did," I said.  "Last time I was passing through Las Vegas with my publishers, we stayed overnight and spent a couple hours in the casino.  I used my talent then.  And guess what I found out."

    "What?"

    "That proper, respectable, rrrrrrreputable scientists may not believe in psychic phenomena, but Las Vegas croupiers do."

    "In what way?"

    "Well, when the guys running the table saw that I was rolling up the six-face way too often for chance, first they changed the dice on me.  Then they changed them again.  When that didn't stop me, they tried shouting at me -- 'Come on, throw already!  Quit holding up the line!  Throw!' -- in order to break my concentration.  When that didn't stop me, they sent in a spoiler disguised as an amiable drunk.  He slapped an arm around my shoulders and mumbled cheerfully: 'Hi.  I'm from St. Louis.  Where're you from?'  So I answered and shook hands and chatted politely until it came my turn to throw the dice again, and he kept his hand on my shoulder while I shook and threw the dice -- and came up with a double-six. After that he gave up.  I don't know what he signaled to the croupiers, but they called out that they were closing the table for 'maintenance', so we wandered off elsewhere.  I'd been making only one-dollar bets, so my winnings after an hour and a half of playing were all of ninety dollars;  not exactly a big score, but satisfying."

    "Do you have any witnesses for this story?"

    "Sure.  My publishers were right there at the table with me.  They're in the dealers' room right now, if you want to talk to them."

    "...Do you think you could move smaller objects?"

    "Sure," I enthused.  "I'd love to get access to a bubble-chamber, or a cloud-chamber.  I'm sure I can push atom-trails around, and that would give us conclusive proof. Say, do you know where I could get access to something like that?"

    "Maybe," he muttered.  Then he took his cup, got up and went back to the bar.  

    I didn't see him again, not through the whole convention.  I guess he lost interest in the subject.


--Leslie <;)))>< Fish  


    

          

Monday, November 9, 2020

For-Biden Planet


For those few of you who have never seen the classic movie (IMHO the best acting job that Leslie Neilson ever did), the big secret was that the aliens created a powerful machine that could turn thought into solid reality -- and it destroyed them in short order.  

As an old propagandist myself, I can tell you that, unless your statements are 99.9% factual and verified, the worst thing you can do is believe your own propaganda, and act on it.  That way lies ruin. 

Now the US' Democrat Party today controls the greatest propaganda machine ever invented -- better than the USSR's at its height, better than Red China's, better than North Korea's, better than Nazi Germany's Goebbels could even dream about.  It heavily influences or outright controls the educational system, the news media, the entertainment industry and even the communications industry.  About all that it can't influence or control is direct private communication via telephone, email, and hard-copy mail by the Post Office -- and the public library system, which it seems to have forgotten about.  It's been a long time since anyone tried to purge the books in local libraries for political incorrectitude.  

With that kind of control comes a certain laziness, an assumption that everybody just naturally believes the way you do, and there's increasingly less need to provide proof for your claims.  When questioned by one of the uncouth idiots who don't share your view, you need only make more claims, louder and faster.  This eventually leads to spiraling the drain into self-contained fantasy, which ends in ruin.

When seeing that the propaganda doesn't match reality, and a lot of the "peasants" can see it, one recourse is to create False Flags: public theater with live actors, which supports the ruling scenario and which the general propaganda machine can then echo endlessly.  This can involve creating political movements whole-cloth, or near it;  that can be risky, because the actors may outrun the director and take the play to extremes that the script-writers never intended.  In such a case, the propaganda machine must work overtime on damage control.

A classic example is the role of BLM.  Founded by a clutch of admitted Marxist women, its avowed purpose was to "transform society" -- into what soon became apparent.  The Democrats, and especially the Socialist Democrat faction, happily embraced BLM and used it to raise mass protests -- generally aimed at Trump and any of his followers.  The problem was that the "protests" soon became screens for riots, looting and burning, often organized by local criminal gangs.  Despite the best editing and excuses of the media, citizens at large saw all this and identified BLM as a threat, pure and simple.  This became a problem to the Democrats as the election approached.  In the last few weeks before the election, the Democratic National Committee clearly told BLM to tone it down, do no more "protests", and stop scaring the voters -- and BLM visibly complied.  That's also when Biden's campaign began preaching soothing messages about "ending divisiveness", "unity", "healing", and so on.  

Even so, the DNC didn't trust to its massive propaganda campaign to win the election.  There have always been frauds during elections, and some of the most entrenched are in large Democrat-led cities.  Chicago, Newark, and Baltimore are notorious for it.  The push for mail-in ballots added to the possibilities, since mail-in ballots do not require the voter to show valid identification before handing in his/her ballot.  There were complaints about election frauds and improprieties in many states well before election day, and a growing number afterward.  Despite the best excuses by the DNC's propaganda machine, these can't all be written off as sour-grapes fakes;  the DOJ is taking a lot of them seriously, and there are more than a dozen such complaints.  

It was certainly premature of Biden and friends to claim victory while there are still five more states that haven't finished counting their ballots, and four of them have outstanding investigations into vote-fraud.  Why did the DNC do it?  The only sensible answer is propaganda-pushing: claiming that now we're "back to normal", "healing", and "unity" -- behind the Democrat political agenda, which has been losing popularity.  It's also an unstated promise to the rest of the world to undo all the actions done by Trump during his administration.  This is not as popular with the electorate as the DNC would wish.

In short, what we're seeing is the DNC propaganda machine going all-out to convince the "peasants" that the election is settled and done and we're all going back to Obama-era "normalcy" right now -- and only un-American sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/Islamophobic/White supremacist Republicans will dare to complain.  

This overlooks the fact that even if one accepts the Biden campaign ballot claims, the election was a very tight horse-race, not the "blue wave" that the news media were predicting.  Almost exactly half the population didn't buy the propaganda-campaign's story, and doesn't believe it now.  As the multiple lawsuits and investigations progress, they'll believe it still less -- and all the censorship in the country won't stop the story from getting out.  The Democrats will not have the "unity" they've been trying for.  

If Biden finally wins, he'll have a resentful and divided populace to rule.  If the investigations reveal that the final accurate count gives the election to Trump, then all the "protest" riots Antifa-BLM can manage will not scare the citizens into accepting Biden.  The "divisiveness" which the DNC created it now cannot stop, and it will blow up in the Dems' faces.  

Those "monsters from the Id" will come home to roost, and not prettily.  Even the best propaganda machine in the world can't guarantee absolute power, thank all the gods in agreement.


--Leslie <;)))><         

        

 

Sunday, November 1, 2020

False Flagging: An Example

 

A "False Flag" campaign is provocateering written large, and provocateering slides over the line from "incitement to crime", to "solicitation of crime", and outright "entrapment".  

In finer detail, "incitement" is some politician or mullah standing up in public and howling "kill the Jews!" (or whoever) -- and it's considered a crime only if someone in his audience really does go out and kill some Jews.  "Solicitation" is some Mafia don telling his consigliere, "Eh Luigi, ten thousand clams to send Giuseppi to sleep with the fishes", and a corpse named Giuseppi really does wash up on the shore a couple days later.  "Entrapment" is a cop nudging and hinting to some not-too-bright street punk to go commit a crime that the punk wouldn't have thought of for himself so that the cop can then arrest him.  All of these are one step outside the legal protections of the First Amendment, and are unlawful to varying degrees.

Illegal or not, you'll find government agents -- usually undercover police -- practicing "entrapment" by provocateering.  They usually do it under the excuse that the punks involved really would have thought of the crime anyway, and the provocateer was only nudging them a little bit down a path they'd already chosen for themselves.  To prove this, the provocateer must produce some statement by the targeted punks -- witnessed, recorded or written -- which could be construed, by a sufficiently paranoid judge, at least, as intent to commit a crime.  Such statements can be as little as a chanted slogan of "Off the Pigs", or a drunken complaint of "somebody oughtta shoot that Democrat S.O.B.".  After all, the individual or group had to have said something, sometime, that brought them to the attention of the police in the first place.  The provocateer can be a single agent within a small group, or a collection of them within a large group.  In any case, the aim of the provocateer is to get the individual, or group, to do something -- or at least appear in public to do something -- that can get them arrested, or at least publicly vilified and shunned, and all their possible political associates with them.  This is especially useful when police budget-reviews or general elections are coming up.  

Police usually target an individual -- or more often, a group -- for provocateering for political reasons, no matter what the direction of the individual's or group's politics may be.  Those of us who remember marching in the streets to protest various wars can also remember that, in any group big enough to need more than a single living-room for meetings, there was always somebody -- who had joined the group well after its inception and first activities -- who seemed just a little bit "off": just a little too eager, too imaginative, too questioning, too friendly, too willing to come up with activities that pushed the boundaries of the law, and who always had plenty of money for beer and pizzas.  We can also remember that in any protest or picket-line there was always somebody who was a little too provocative toward the police, willing to literally push other marchers at the police in order to get a violent response.  We can also remember the large marches in which knots of "weirdos" showed up, literally carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, to quote John Lennon, who tried to capture the attention of the media cameras so as to make all the marchers look like foaming Communists by association.  Those were the days before the fall of the USSR, when communism was considered a serious threat.

Nowadays, when nobody even mentions the word "communist" except possibly in connection with the Chinese government, "Socialism" has become respectable enough that major candidates of major political parties happily label themselves with it.  Of course, this means that they must brand their political opponents as "right-wingers", "White Supremacists", and "Neo-Nazis", regardless of the facts, and their media and police agents have adjusted their aim accordingly.

One advantage of this modern era of massive electronic media and communications is that the agents provocateur don't necessarily have to find an already existing group of political opponents to entrap;  they can create one whole-cloth and use it as if it were real.  

For example -- I'll name no names -- there was a group of college students (majoring in Computer Science, IIRC) who invented what they considered a "right-wing nut group" out of nothing but a website they established as a joke.  On this website they posted classic Nazi quotes and slogans and propaganda cartoons, slightly updated for modern tastes, aimed at modern political figures and groups, and of course adoring President Trump.  Eventually they began getting responses, apparently from real right-wing nuts.  

Realizing that they were onto something here, the students notified the police -- particularly the FBI -- handed the website over to them, and thoroughly disassociated themselves from it, leaving the police to make use of the site and its followers.  At this point the joke became a full-fledged False Flag operation.  Soon the media began to notice the "right-wing group" and sound alarms about it.  Once the media were sufficiently excited they went after Trump, demanding that he denounce his "right-wing extremist" followers.  Trump, admitting that he didn't know anything about the group, denounced extremists of all stripes.  This didn't satisfy the media, who demanded more, whereupon Trump made his much-copied statement: "If you really are listening to me, then stand down and stand back".  Democrat political pundits claimed that this meant Trump really did command the group, and what he'd really told them was to stand by for further actions.

When no "actions" happened, the website exhorted its followers to go to a pro-Trump rally to "show support for Trump" and to "protect Americans" from expected Antifa and BLM protesters.  The police then prepared for a jolly brawl at the rally, planning to round up all the "right-wing extremists" in a big showy bust.  Preparations included having lots of undercover agents in the crowd, dressed to look like possible "extremists" so as to blend with the expected crowd.  

Well, the only "confrontation" was caused by the Antifa/BLM protesters, whom the local police quickly rounded up.  The "right-wing extremist" crowd was remarkably small, and when the police swooped down on the supposed Nazis they found one -- exactly one -- admitted member of the group, and he was a certified schizophrenic who had gone off his meds.  All the rest of the supposed "right-wing extremists" were undercover cops.  Every last one.  The lone psycho was gently escorted to the nearest hospital, and the whole incident was quietly buried by the media.  

This is the drawback to using invented opposition groups for "False Flag" operations;  when pushed to action, they just might collapse like a soap-bubble, leaving nobody to arrest or use as a scarecrow.  Actually existing political groups can be exaggerated and slandered with better results, and not just by local police and politicians but even by foreign agents -- unless the group's members are smart enough to see what's happening and fight back.

A classic example of this is the case of the "Proud Boys", a group of moderate-right Republicans who were annoyed by the antics of Antifa/BLM, and made a point of counter-protesting Antifa/BLM protests by, if you please, getting proper permits and then sitting down in the streets and praying.  When asked by the police to get up and move, they would obligingly get up and move.  This made it difficult for police to arrest them, or for the media to get videos that would make them look dangerous.  Nonetheless, the media advertised the group as "right-wing extremists" and of course "White supremacists".  This claim was partly punctured on the Internet, where it was revealed that the "Proud Boys" are multi-racial, and their president/founder is a Black ex-Cuban.

Nonetheless, a group of foreign hackers with no love for Trump decided to make use of the Proud Boys.  The hackers obtained names, addresses, and email addresses of voters in a largely Democrat-registered neighborhood -- no great feat, since voter registration rolls are public records anyway -- and sent them mass-produced letters, threatening them with mayhem if they didn't vote for Trump, in the name of the Proud Boys organization.  Of course the media picked up the story and responded with the expected outrage.  This trick, a classic False Flag tactic, was intended to panic other voters into casting their ballots against Trump and his supposed "right-wing extremist base"

Ah, but the Proud Boys, unlike a lot of right-trending groups, were no fools.  As soon as they learned what was happening, they got copies of those emails and went hollering to every federal police-force they could reach -- election tampering being a federal crime -- insisted that they had nothing to do with this, they were being slandered, and the cops should go catch the real criminals.  The FBI, DOJ and State Department took them seriously, and investigated promptly.  What they discovered was that the emails originated with a bunch of government-sanctioned hackers -- in Iran.  

With all the uproar, and all those federal agencies involved, the story couldn't be smothered.  The Proud Boys were publicly exonerated -- though a few die-hard Democrats kept insisting that the PBs simply had to be some sort of "right-wing extremists" -- and the voters saw that Iran doesn't want Trump re-elected, and that they shouldn't be too quick to believe political scandal stories without verification.  The trick backfired, and the term "False Flag" has become commonly known.

This is all to the good, since a cynical electorate is not so easy to fool.  Let's see what the final effect is when the votes are counted, since the only poll that really matters is the one where people vote.

--Leslie <;)))>< Fish  

         

       

    

                

Friday, October 23, 2020

The Limits of Propaganda, Part Two


Everyone knows that the concept of The Big Lie was invented by the Nazis in the 1930s, and its basic theory is that if you repeat a lie often enough, from as many different directions as possible, then people will blindly believe it without question.  At about the same time various neuropsychologists discovered a phenomenon called "extinction of the signal", which means that the same sensory input, repeated often enough, eventually fades into the background and becomes ignored.  The Nazis chose to believe the first theory and ignore the second. 

Another theory they chose to ignore is that nothing teaches quite as well as personal experience.  As Will Rogers once put it, "There are three kinds of people: those who can learn from reading or hearing about something, those that can learn from seeing something done, and the rest of us -- who have to learn by pissing on the electric fence for ourselves."  What he didn't need to mention is that if you ever do piss on an electric fence, you'll remember the lesson no matter what the media, your politicians, or your neighbors tell you.  The single worst enemy of propaganda is the unavoidable truth.  

Totalitarian countries like Nazi Germany, the USSR, and North Korea have used the Big Lie to a fare-thee-well, but their people eventually pissed on the electric fence of reality and stopped believing.  The official propaganda faded into the background, and people concentrated on their own survival regardless of what their governments preached.  In every case, those governments neglected to learn from being shown;  they only increased the propaganda in hopes that it would somehow keep working when piled higher and deeper.

Private advertising companies have a better record of success, simply because their goals are more modest: to promote sales of goods and services rather than whole factions and policies.  To that end, it's often enough just to make the public generally aware that the product exists, along with a simple statement of "it's good", and broadcasting the ad as far and wide and fast as possible.  Of course, to avoid rapid onset of boredom/extinction of the signal, the simple positive message must be altered slightly -- "tasty", "long-lasting", "improved", etc. -- and rebroadcast often, usually accompanied by visual images of smiling children or handsome adults.  Unless the product being sold fails noticeably in public, the propaganda campaign can succeed for a long while.  Firestone Tires lasted longer than the Nazi empire.          

The flip side of The Big Lie is that its perpetrators have to somehow keep their victims from getting any other information.  This requires total censorship, which is ultimately impossible.  You can censor the newspapers, the broadcast news, the mail, large entertainment companies and even -- today -- the Internet, but contradictory news always leaks through.  If nothing else, there's always word of mouth.  "Rumors" can spread with amazing speed through households, neighborhoods, cities, and even prisons -- and once a "rumor" is proven true, there's no stopping it.

This is why, to remain effective, propaganda has to be minimal.  It should stick to the truth as much as possible, repeat itself as little as possible, and not censor opposing arguments but be content with ignoring, belittling, or counter-arguing them.  

Fortunately, professional propagandists -- whether government agents or advertising companies -- can never resist trying to do more, and more, until they saturate the listening market and become unbelieved background noise.  The Big Lie is ultimately self-destructive, yet political factions -- the more fanatical, the more willing -- insist on playing with it.  

Perhaps this is because the chief appeal of fanaticism is the promise of superiority over the "other", which includes superior intelligence;  the fanatic assumes that his/her targeted victim is too stupid to see through the propaganda under any circumstances.  This is particularly true when your faction includes the operators of the educational system.  After all, it should be "obvious" that someone with a Ph.D. in Oppression Studies from Harvard is mentally superior to some knuckle-dragging mechanic who studied Engineering in some farming-county community college, right?  This attitude makes it easy to seduce academics into fanaticism.

It also contributes mightily to class resentment and class warfare, since a less-than-elite education does not aromatically equal stupidity-- and remember that electric fence of experience.  Some laborer's kid who joined the military, served a term in Iraq, used his/her GI Bill to fund his/her way through police academy, and rises to the rank of sergeant is likely to have had experiences that counter the claims of the popular media.  This could explain the Democrats' total astonishment that the working class -- of whatever color -- voted for Trump in the last election.  The very arrogance that feeds fanaticism blinds the fanatics to the competence of their victims.

The best propaganda engine in the world can't guarantee power.  Lincoln understood this thoroughly when he made his famous statement: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time."

--Leslie <;)))>< Fish         

            

Saturday, October 17, 2020

The Limits of Propaganda, Part One


 The Wikipedia entry under "Agent Provocateur" includes the following paragraph:  "In jurisdictions in which conspiracy is a serious crime in itself, it can be sufficient for the agent provocateur to entrap the target into discussing and planning an illegal act.  It is not necessary for the illegal act to be carried out or even prepared."  Keep that in mind.    

Wikipedia also defines "False Flag" as "an act committed with the intention of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on a second party."  Keep that in mind too.

Provocateur operations work best when linked to False Flag campaigns, if only because it looks better on police records if they can round up a group of gullible fools rather than just one or two.  The combination is also politically useful -- especially at budget-review time, during social upheaval, or in an election year.  In the last two centuries. as both democratic systems and literacy have increased, Provocateur/False Flag operations have depended heavily on propaganda structures to persuade the majority of the population.  This is why fashions in political propaganda are good predictors of showy crimes -- and resulting severe punishments -- yet to come.  Examples include Stalin's show-trials in the USSR, the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany, and the Cultural Revolution in Mao's China.  

I observed such a case many years ago, here in Phoenix.  This was during a Democratic national administration, wherein the Democrat policy of pushing gun-control laws had suffered a setback;  the Supreme Court had recently declared the Second Amendment an individual right, several states had loosened their restrictions on firearms ownership and public carry, the numbers of firearms sales and concealed-carry permits had jumped, the violent-crime rate had dropped, and the Democratic National Committee was still sore over it.  

I was living with some Science-Fiction fans who were also part of a gamer's club of about a dozen members.  Every Saturday the club would gather at our house, where half the members would disappear into the computer room to play computer games, and the other half would settle in the living-room with books and dice and character-sheets to play variations on a theme of Dungeons and Dragons.  On Sunday the less sedentary members (which didn't include me) would drive out to undeveloped county wilderness land and do live-action roleplaying.  This often involved homemade costumes, target-shooting with .22 rifles and tin cans, or exploding cans with firecrackers, and ended with dinner and beer and brief club business at a local saloon.  The club was too informal to have a permanent name, and consisted of middle-aged fans with generally lower-middleclass jobs.  None of us had any criminal history but years-earlier misdemeanor charges for marching in picket-lines in support of strikes or civil rights laws.

About then the TV news/opinion shows began mentioning "the threat of right-wing militia groups", which we discounted because we didn't know of any.  That should have been warning, but we didn't realize it at the time.  Another thing we didn't notice was that government Budget Review Time was coming up, when all the departments -- including various police -- would have to justify the money to be spent on them. 

The club's only brush with illegality was one Sunday when the Live Action Role-Players ran into a poacher out in the woods.  They could tell he was a poacher because he was wearing wood-land camouflage, carrying a scoped .30-caliber deer rifle, and it wasn't hunting season (yes, it can be possible to tell a person's intention by the model and caliber of gun he carries).  They scolded him severely, told him to get out of there or they'd call the cops, and succeeded in chasing him off.

A couple weeks later a newcomer arrived at the club.  He knew quite a bit about fantasy role-playing games, but seemed to be mostly interested in the contemporary war-games.  When he learned about the Sunday LARP games, he couldn't wait to go join them.  He was an enthusiastic player, and he certainly did know a lot about military tactics, but the LARPers soon found that he was a little... odd.  For one thing, he didn't seem to know where fantasy left off and real life began.  He was always trying to apply the game to modern urban settings, talked about "revolution" a lot, and kept asking if anyone was interested in attacking fortified buildings -- such as police stations.  The LARPers decided that he was a possibly dangerous nut-case, and considered booting him out, but because he did such a good job of bookkeeping for the group's funds (never more than a couple hundred dollars), they decided to let him stay on.

Then the local economy took a downturn.  Gas prices rose, and it was no longer cheap or easy to drive out to the wilderness area every Sunday.  The LARPing division of the club began losing members, at which the oddball newcomer was visibly upset.  When their numbers were down to half a dozen, the LARPers decided to stop outdoor gaming completely until autumn, at least, and they celebrated their farewell dinner at a pizza joint.

A few days later a large contingent of local police, FBI in SWAT suits, local sheriff's deputies and a few state troopers -- accompanied by national TV-news camera teams -- raided the homes of the LARPers, arrested them all (except, of course, for the oddball newcomer, who was nowhere to be found), ransacked their homes, cars, businesses, storage-units and relatives' homes, and trumpeted to the world that they'd caught a "dangerous right-wing militia group".  The "group" originally had no name, but in searching the homes the FBI had come across a shoulder-patch with the words "Team Viper" on it, so thereafter they referred to "the Viper Militia".  They stopped short of calling the LARPers "neo-Nazis", probably because two of them were Jewish and one was Native American, and didn't mention the LARPers' politics in detail, probably because three of them were registered Democrats.  They also claimed to have confiscated "a hoard of firearms, including machine-guns", because one of the members was a gun-collector and owned a reconstructed (non-functional) classic Gatling gun.  The story became a nation-wide sensation, with the usual news-media editorials about the horrors of gun ownership and the danger of "citizen militias".  

The rest of the gamer club, understandably amazed at all this, tried to contact the LARPers and find out what was going on.  We soon learned that they were being held incommunicado in separate jails -- in fact, in different counties and different states -- and their cases had been separated too so that each member had to hire his own separate lawyer.  When we managed to reach the lawyers, we learned that the LARPers were being pressured to plead guilty to a charge of "conspiracy to teach military techniques for purposes of civil insurrection".  When we asked how "conspiracy to teach" could be a crime, we were told that "The FBI can find a way."  When we asked how the FBI intended to prove "purposes of civil insurrection", we learned that the odd-ball newcomer had secretly recorded the LARPers at their games, and had picked up some juicy -- and out of context -- quotes, some of which had already made it into the news.

The "pressure" applied to the LARPers included threats that "you'll  never work in this country again."  One member who held out for a trial, claiming that he could always go work in Canada, was told that his retired parents would lose their Social Security payments.  Eventually only one member, whose parents were safely dead and who owned his own business, held out for a jury trial.  The FBI saw to it that he got a judge whose first pronouncement was that he would "hear no argument based on the Constitution".  That alone would have been grounds for an appeal, but the cost of fighting  in court drained the man's resources so that he lost his savings and his business, and couldn't meet the price of an appeal.  Also, because he had fought the charge, he was given a longer sentence than the other LARPers who had given in and signed the confessions.  

Later we learned that when defending its budget requests to Congress the FBI had quoted extensively from the "Viper Militia case".  Yes, the FBI got the budget increase it had asked for.  

The LARPers, after finishing their 3-5 year sentences, took years to recover their former economic situations, and some of them never did.  The rest of the club eventually scattered, took up other interests, or died.  The "militia" and "survivalist" movements changed their names to "preppers" and kept on preparing for assorted disasters, a few of which actually arrived.  The FBI continued to increase its funding, but kept "the threat of right-wing militias" on the back burner.  With changing federal administrations the media came up with various new targets, but always kept the threat of "right-wing" something handy.  In time, those of us who had seen the original "Viper Militia" incident learned to tell when a media "threat" build-up presaged some related police or political action.

I've been thinking of that a lot recently as the election day approaches and the media "scandals" are falling thick and fast;  no sooner is one of them disproved than two more take its place.  What's remarkable about the current media-storm is that it has resulted in so few actual arrests made or new laws passed.  Historically, false-flag/provocateur/propaganda campaigns have operated to keep the ruling establishment in power, but in our current case there seems to be more smoke than fire.  Is it all, really, just to sell newspapers and win an election?

--Leslie <;)))><