Cultivate Attention and Discernment (3)

Photo by Spencer Imbrock on Unsplash

“There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore… we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

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Reading time: 20-25 mins

Fear, Superstimuli, Indoctrination

Fear is a wake-up call to pay attention and see truth. But this instinct can be easily subverted to an irrational and automatic body-mind reaction for survival and self-protection against a perceived threat. The father of propaganda Edward Bernays, the Rockefeller dynasty and their social science directives; Freud and psychoanalysis; Alfred Kinsey and his sexual revolution and the ever-present mainstreaming of occult directives have flowed through the mass mind and shaped Western societies toward a highly narrow conception of reality.

Education, mainstream media, entertainment, art, fashion, advertising, marketing, public relations – even our family unit, peer groups and working life – all reflect the above directors of an Official Culture. All are defined by consumption, commodity, image, sensation and artifice. The original source of these traditions and pursuits have lost their psycho-spiritual meaning and now float in a sea of narcissistic irrelevancy.

Instead of bringing out the true meaning of human existence – to love, learn, bond, create and commune –  our current reality is a constellation of subverted constructs which are pathological due to a predominance of psychopathic and sub-deviant human beings who have taken control of societies. They have continually re-interpreted and subverted the best of human ingenuity and innovation toward their own conscienceless, machine-like perception. This continuing psycho-materialist paradigm has been translated and mediated into so-called normative social, political and cultural structures. They continue to exist purely due to a consensus trance reinforced by cultural hypnosis, of which most people are entirely unaware.

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“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3, p. 19

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The overriding and long-term objective behind this inculcation is toward complete control of the mass mind. The Three Establishment Model via their corporate oligarchs and power-brokers are the aforementioned 4C’s alongside economic, political and sociocultural warfare using three main prongs of attack:

Cultivate Attention and Discernment (2)

“Dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we’ll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering.”

— Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

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Reading time: 10-15 mins

Cultural Hypnosis / Consensus Trance

What are we paying attention to?

21st Century culture is a pseudo or secondary reality in which we are all deeply immersed.

Although it might seem illogical, our present social and cultural constructs are birthed from a world of inductive economic and political ideas amounting to a form of hypnosis. The behavioural dynamics of this reality exist in the mass and individual mind with no proof or experience to validate it. In order to make sure that our attention never gets out of the nose-bag of fear, sex, hunger and i-phones, it is imperative that our generational rulers keep cultural hypnosis firmly in place.

According to master hypnotist Mark Anthony, this is a:  “… catch-all term that covers the mass of influence from a wide range of people, institutions and situations that each human being is affected by from the moment of conception till death within a given, definable and limited culture matrix. Less euphemistically, cultural hypnosis is aka PROGRAMMING.” ^[1]  Similarly, the consensus trance that eventuates, is defined as “normal” consciousness wholly adapted to current sociocultural constructs. Or as psychologist Charles T. Tart describes it: “… when you automatically think, behave, and feel “normally,” when the internal workings of your mind automatically echo most of the values and beliefs of your culture”. ^[2]

Cultural hypnosis leads to the induction of a consensus trance and its perceived “normality” which leads to a consensus reality. When we interface with reality through trance-like states we are not thinking for ourselves, we are not questioning that consensus – our minds are not working consciously.

We will take a generalised look at how the social dominators use various methods of cultural induction, inculcation and conditioning to induce mass hypnosis and the resulting trance in Western civillisation and in varying degrees, global populations.

Dissociation

Everyone daydreams to the point of distraction at some point during the day. Many of us experience mild dissociative episodes for much of lives and can function within the social norms of society without too many problems. Lesiure pursuits from golf to cinema allow us respite from the rigours of work and other demands on our energy so that relaxation and imagination can take over. Watching TV or sitting in front of a movie screen are good examples of temporarily suspending our relationship to consensus reality. When we relax and enter into these movie states, our conscious awareness is literally absent – we are fully running, laughing, feeling and fearing all that happens in front of us, whether we intellectualise it or not. We are hypnotised by light and sound and dissociate one part of consciousness from another. It would be a form of psychosis if certain triggers were not present. But the TV is switched off, the credits roll and the lights come up. We stretch and yawn and make our way home.

Dark Green XVI: I’ve been Gored!

By M.K. Styllinski

“… the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us, and I have invested in it but every penny that I have made I have put right into a nonprofit, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to spread awareness of why we have to take on this challenge.”

– Al Gore

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Logo of The Climate Reality Project founded by Al Gore | Source (WP:NFCC#4) (wikipedia)

With hedge funds popping up like bad sores in readiness for the carbon credit bubble it is these financial marauders who will benefit most rather than the environment or third world nations’ climate change projects. What we can be sure of is a substantial hike in the cost of living generally with special attention to electricity and manufacturing. All the while the imposition of caps is guaranteed to contribute precious little to limit carbon emissions, should the science on CO₂ even be true.

The Nobel prize-winning Al Gore has been very busy playing at eco-activism and evangelising the message of AGW for many years. He has become smoothly effective as the political vanguard of environmentalism. Gore’s legendary capitalism masquerading as left-leaning liberalism is never more clearly seen when it comes to green corporatism, his favourite plaything. Gore was one of the first to implement the corporate structure of “public-private partnerships,” where the decision-making process was quietly shifted away from the people and transferred to unelected international corporations. And what we are seeing now is how effective such structural conversions can be when married to distorted environmental fears. Al Gore has excelled at being the guru of green-back sensationalism. He is a master of the slight-of-hand. However, it is difficult to say whether he is a “useful idiot,” desperately naïve (doubtful) or an opportunist of the very worst kind. Perhaps it is a mix of all three.

The Climate Reality Project founded by Gore in 2011 is another attempt to launch a frontal attack against so-called climate deniers (when all it does is cover up good science). “Join reality” “effect change”. You can also sign on to become a “Climate Reality Leader” within the Climate Reality Leadership Corp. and bludgeon everyone into becoming like Al Gore. Gore is creating an army of the faithful to do what? To reach net zero carbon emissions” which is apparently “… the key to our collective prosperity and well-being for all.”

Unfortunately, that probably isn’t the key. Not even close.

This is all about objective reality it seems…  Yet, the “The facts” page reads like a catalogue of supposition assumption where blaming nasty old fossil fuel folks for it all appears to mask barely concealed zealotry. That’s not to say that corporatism isn’t having a ripe old time stirring the propaganda pot with equal vigour. And that is also not to say greenhouse gases aren’t causing havoc and yes, we must try to reduce our pollution. But the overall campaign and impetus is that human beings are responsible for the overall climate change which are very probably the result of complex natural cycles and even vast cosmic processes. As my hamster Ernie belts around his plastic wheel the sheer power of his little cardiac footprint is not liable to produce massive climatic weather patterns.  (I don’t have a hamster but you get the analogy).

The whole idea that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused Earth’s temperatures over the past 50 years appears erroneous. BUT that doesn’t mean greenhouse gases are benign. It doesn’t mean they do not pose a problem such as ozone depletion. The real problem is how AGW science has obfuscated the subtle connections going on between a whole host of complex factors which have been reduced down to the level of Al Gore and his slide show hotly followed by the IPCC. And that does not provide a good basis upon which to inform the public.

You CANNOT change a natural cycle. And no amount of hectoring, deception and phoney science it going to alter that fact.  It amounts to an enormous hijacking of energy that could be better used in prevention against cataclysmic change that will come regardless of whether we have paid our carbon-free credits.  But by now, if you have been reading the previous posts on this blog you either think I am a deluded devil incarnate or one of the many who are seeing behind all the noise. Perhaps I am teetering between the two.

That said, let’s continue and find out a bit more about our Al and whether he’s one arctic roll short of an ice-cap.

Al Gore (left) and promotional material for the DVD launch for An Inconvenient Truth: “the most terrifying film you will ever see.”

Gore has written over a dozen books on society, politics and environmentalism, most notably Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose. (1992) The Assault on Reason. (2007) and An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. (2006) which accompanied a film of the same name which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. The film was directed by Davis Guggenheim, who stated that after the release of the film, “Everywhere I go with him, they treat him like a rock star.” It couldn’t have been more apropos for the likes of the Club of Rome who saw in Gore the popular appeal of their designs made manifest. The message is fear, catastrophe and guilt wrapped up in emergency environmental “education.” The science didn’t matter the message was all that counted.

Having already achieved humble martyrdom in running against the villainous Bush, he was as well placed to transfer this new found sainthood into the cause of climate change and make considerable amounts of money in the process. An Inconvenient Truth was designed to educate millions of citizens about the perils of global warming using Gore as messenger who would give an in-depth slide show presentation to a rapt audience interspersed with relevant footage. It premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and opened in New York City and Los Angeles on May 24, of the same year. It became a critical and box-office success, garnering two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song. It was also commercially successful earning $49 million internationally and becoming one of the highest grossing US documentary films of all time. ^[1]

Let’s turn our attention to two aspects of Gore’s journey, that of the science in the film and the financial aspects of Gore’s AGW platform. Firstly, the science.

In May 2007, a lawsuit was launched by a group of global warming sceptics over the UK government’s distribution of the film in UK schools. Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills heard the bid for an injunction preventing the screening of the film in English schools, on the premise that the film was imbalanced, impartial and political.

On 10 October 2007, High Court Judge Mr Justice Burton did not ban the film finding that it was largely drawn from scientific fact and research even though it was also politically motivated. He ruled that An Inconvenient Truth contained “nine key scientific errors” and could only be shown in British schools with explanatory notes on the errors “to prevent political indoctrination.” The judge said that showing the film without the explanations of error would be a violation of education laws. Judge Burton also stated that errors had arisen “in the context of alarmism and exaggeration” driven by Gore’s belief in AGW. ^[2]

In the synopsis of the film given by Paramount studios, the distributor gives a flavour of the content of the film which the judge ruled amounted to an “apocalyptic vision.” In a breathless example of sensationalism it implored: “If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.” ^[3] The judge ruled that An Inconvenient Truth was “politically partisan and thus not an impartial scientific analysis of climate change.” It was, he ruled: “a political film.” ^[4]

Marketed as “… the most terrifying film you will ever see,” by online trailers, with commentary claiming audiences have been “shocked everywhere,” the dramatic images of global environmental destruction bombard the viewer with terrifying storms and even a nuclear explosion. This sets the tone for a mass-dumping of fear and danger in the younger generations and creates the antithesis of reason and constructive dialogue. Politics, alarmism and “apocalyptic visions” do little to educate children, especially when Agenda 21 is overshadowing the proceedings. While they may compel a sense of urgency and activism in the cause of “saving the planet,” if it is sourced from bad science and emotional reflex then this will play straight into the politics and the social frameworks recently discussed. It will have very little effect on the real, preventative climate change issues which could be addressed given the correct guidance. Exaggeration and alarmism merely helps to create fear and insecurity in the minds of children who are already having great difficulty processing the future. Neuroses in the young anxious about climate change, is becoming increasingly common.

Climate science journalist Björn Lomborg reviewed some startling results on this issue where “… a new survey of 500 American pre-teens, … found that one in three children, aged between six and 11, feared that the earth would not exist when they reach adulthood because of global warming and other environmental threats. An unbelievable one-third of our children believe that they don’t have a future because of scary global warming stories.” The same pattern exists in the UK with “half of young children aged between seven and 11 [whom] are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern.” ^[5]

To draw out those fears and increase the likelihood of cash injection into the climate change industry we have Gore’s slick Hollywood production which uses emotive photos of cutsie animals and advanced animations taken out of context alongside endless replays of environmental destruction to illicit guilt and alarm. For example, smoke pouring forth from chimneys and cooling towers implying extreme CO₂ production when in reality CO₂ is invisible and benign. The message here is not scientific solutions but emotional manipulation.

Gore has yet to modify any of his statements made in film and print, the most obvious examples being the internationally discredited hockey stick temperature graph and his clinging to CO₂ global temperature increases, despite the data that showed temperatures rose 400-800 years before CO₂ and drove higher CO₂ levels, a fact which had been confirmed for at least two years prior to Gore’s film. ^[6]But this was only the beginning. The following nine errors as outlined by Judge Burton include:

ERROR 1: Sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”. [Judge] agreed that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water – ‘but only after, and over, millennia’. The Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.”

ERROR 2: The film claims that low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls ‘are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming’ but the judge ruled there was no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.

ERROR 3: The documentary speaks of global warming ‘shutting down the Ocean Conveyor’ – the process by which the Gulf Stream is carried over the North Atlantic to western Europe. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the judge said that it was ‘very unlikely’ that the Ocean Conveyor, also known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation, would shut down in the future, though it might slow down.

ERROR 4: Mr Gore claims that two graphs, one plotting a rise in CO₂ and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed ‘an exact fit’. The judge said that, although there was general scientific agreement that there was a connection, ‘the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts’.

ERROR 5: Mr Gore says the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was directly attributable to global warming, but the judge ruled that it scientists have not established that the recession of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro is primarily attributable to human-induced climate change.

ERROR 6: The film contends that the drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming but the judge said there was insufficient evidence, and that ‘it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability.’

ERROR 7: Mr Gore blames Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans on global warming, but the judge ruled there was “insufficient evidence to show that”.

ERROR 8: Mr Gore cites a scientific study that shows, for the first time, that polar bears were being found after drowning from ‘swimming long distances – up to 60 miles – to find the ice’ The judge said: ‘The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.’ That was not to say there might not in future be drowning-related deaths of bears if the trend of regression of pack ice continued – ‘but it plainly does not support Mr Gore’s description’.

ERROR 9: Mr Gore said that coral reefs all over the world were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. Again citing the IPCC, the judge agreed that, if temperatures were to rise by 1-3 degrees centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and mortality, unless the coral could adapt. However, he ruled that separating the impacts of stresses due to climate change from other stresses, such as over-fishing, and pollution was difficult. ^[7]

Rather than just nine errors the Judge mentioned, there are so many serious errors in AIT that becomes much more of a concern about the film-makers understanding of the issues involved and certainly where Al Gore’s true perceptions lie. Former British MP Christopher Monckton and founding member of the Science and Public Policy Institute based in the UK found plenty more. All of the following have proven to be grossly exaggerated or simply false:

• Thermohaline circulation “stopping”
• 100 ppmv of CO₂ “melting mile-thick ice”
• Hurricane Caterina “manmade”
• Japanese typhoons “a new record”
• Hurricanes “getting stronger”
• Big storm insurances losses “increasing”
• Mumbai “flooding”
• Severe tornadoes “more frequent”
• The sun “heats the Arctic ocean”
• Arctic “warming fastest”
• Greenland ice sheet “unstable”
• Himalayan glacial melt waters “failing”
• Peruvian glaciers “disappearing”
• Mountain glaciers worldwide “disappearing”
• Sahara desert “drying”
• West Antarctic ice sheet “unstable”
• Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves “breaking up”
• Larsen B Ice Shelf “broke up because of ‘global warming’”
• Mosquitoes “climbing to higher altitudes”
• Many tropical diseases “spread through ‘global warming’”
• West Nile virus in the US “spread through ‘global warming’”
• Carbon dioxide is “pollution”
• The European heat wave of 2003 “killed 35,000”
• Gore’s bogus pictures and film footage
• The Thames Barrier “closing more frequently”
• “No fact…in dispute by anybody.” ^[8]

In A Sceptic’s Guide to Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (2007) senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) Marlo Lewis PhD, provides a meticulous analysis of the Al Gore’s book version of the film. Lewis’ Congressional Working Paper contains 324 references with extensive links to web sites for fact checking, a practice Gore would do well to emulate. Lewis’ conclusions on the book revealed:

• Wrong statements, false statements—19;
• Misleading statements—17;
• Exaggerated statements—10;
• One sided statements—25; and
• Speculative statements—28. ^[9]

Environmentalists have drawn our attention to the fact that Marlo Lewis is a friend of the fossil fuel lobby and is a corporate lackey with a clear agenda. Be that as it may, the facts he provides are correct. It is unfortunate that facts have to surface from two extremes rather than a simple quest for truth.

This photo was widely used to promote the idea that polar bears were stranded due to global warming induced ice melt. In actual fact, it was faked. See HERE for more details.

As an ex-senator, businessman, journalist, lawyer and highly articulate orator and raconteur it seems bizarre that Gore has not only chosen to ignore his “errors” but continue to perpetuate them. Even worse, he has also repeatedly refused to debate publicly on the issue and will not participate in conferences, interviews or public forums with those who take the opposing view on AGW. This is bad for science and bad for open, rational discourse which is so desperately needed.^[10] Not least, it is bad for Gore’s credibility as he clearly prefers hyperbole and rhetoric rather than scientific rigour. If he is correct and he has spent most of his life genuinely seeking to redress the balance for the Earth’s ecology then one would think he would have at least a basic understanding of the principals involved, given his position and responsibility. Yet, while he may have a nose for communication he doesn’t seem to have the first clue about truth – inconvenient or otherwise. Gore’s research has been drawn primarily from the IPCC, which offers even more cause for concern, as we shall see presently.

What of Gore’s financial interests in climate change and carbon credits? He is a partner in two hedge funds, Generation Investment Management (GIM) and Capricorn Investment Group LLC, set up to trade carbon credits. Remember the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC) in Great Britain? GIM exerts substantial influence over these firms in the following way: Having expended considerable amounts of cash to test the viability of carbon credits back in 2000, CCX has some of our well known players secreted within its membership. One begins to wonder if he has cloned himself to appear in all places and in all times but sure enough, Maurice Strong sits on the board of directors and has long since been considered as an Elder-guru to Gore. Other members who had undertaken to reduce their emissions by 2010 (some did some didn’t) are Amtrak, Ford Motor Company, Dow Corning, International Paper, Motorola, DuPont, American Electric Power and an assortment of other corporations and universities. Carbon-offset projects are also underway via “participant members.” ECX also has around 80 member companies, including Shell, Barclays, BP, Fortis, Calyon, Endesa, Morgan Stanley and … Goldman Sachs.

And here’s where come full circle back to the Goldman cartel once more.

GIM was founded by both Al Gore and Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs and financial criminal CEO, Hank Paulson. We already know that Goldman Sachs virtually owns the carbon credit markets including 10 percent of CCX shares and a stake in ECX. This is due, in part, to the fact that GIM is riddled with Goldmanites: Mark Ferguson, former co-head of GSAM pan-European research; David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) and Peter Harris, who headed GSAM international operations. Peter S. Knight, who is the designated president of GIM with strong ties to Al Gore and Bill Clinton serving under them respectively.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore speaks next to rapper Pharrell Williams during a panel session on the first day of the 45th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Jan. 21, 2015. | TIME magazine. |The World Economic Forum? Really? This is straight out of the Live Aid programming manual (It’s all right, just be happy…)

In 2008, Gore’s venture capital firm loaned $75m to Silver Spring Networks, a small Californian firm wishing to develop energy-saving technology. The company’s main production efforts go into hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. And in 2009, the US Energy Department announced a $3.4 billion boost in SMART grid grants more than $560 million going to utilities under contract to Silver Spring. ^[11]

To say that this would provide Gore with substantial profits would be an understatement. With an estimated $70 million he received for a 20 percent stake in the 2013 sale of the Current TV network, a slice of a $500 million pie paid out by Qatari-owned al-Jazeera Satellite Network, and a steady $1.2 million a year in salary and bonuses, he stands to make millions more in the long-term. Hence the media cry: “Will Gore be our first carbon billionaire?” Gore disputes this and is happy to be “putting his money where his mouth is.” A “one off investment” and “transformation of our energy infrastructure” towards energy that is free forever” is what’s needed according to Gore. He sees no hypocrisy radiating from his  green-messiah activism and Goldman Sachs plundering.

He goes on to say somewhat defensively: “Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” … “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.” ^[12]

Goldman Sachs would certainly agree.

 

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Cool it – documentary by Bjorn Lomborg

 

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Notes

[1] “Documentary 1982–present (film rankings by lifetime gross)”. Box Office Mojo.
[2] Stuart Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education & Skills”. England and Wales High Court (Administrative Court) Decisions. 2007-10-10.
[3] ‘Al Gore’s ‘nine Inconvenient Untruths’ By Sally Peck, Telegraph, 11 Oct 2007.
[4] Ibid.
[5] ‘Scared silly over climate change’ by Bjorn Lomborg, The Guardian, 15 June 2009.
[6] ‘Climate myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming’ by Catherine Brahic and Michael Le Page. New Scientist, 16 May, 2007.
[7] op. cit. Peck.
[8] ‘35 Inconvenient Truths – The errors in Al Gore’s movie’ By Christopher Monckton, http://www.scienceandpublic policy.org PDF version: http://www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/press_releases/monckton-response-to-gore-errors.pdf
[9] ‘Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Sceptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth’ Congressional Working Paper By Marlo Lewis. 01/22/07 — Competitive Enterprise Institute || http://www.cei.org.
[10] ‘Al Gore Refuses To Dignify Debate: “It’s Not A Matter Of Theory”’ Huffington Post, April 5 2009.
[11] ‘Al Gore could become world’s first carbon billionaire’ Telegraph, November 3, 2009.
[12] Ibid.

Satan’s Little Helpers IV: The Manchurian Reality (1)

By M.K. Styllinski

“I never thought about laying down my life, but maybe I laid down a lot more than my life in service to my country. My soul?”

US Air-force Service man and mind control victim

“The key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man’s personality, or creating multi-personality, with the aid of hypnotism. This is not science fiction. I have done it.”

– George Estabrooks, Harvard University graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University who hypnoprogrammed U.S. government agents during World War II.

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© infrakshun

Mind control is very much in the public consciousness, largely as a product of Hollywood. Films such as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) or The Bourne Identity (2004) paint a specific picture of secret government mind control operations all of which fascinate us, not just for their brutality but because they are drawn from easily verifiable, historical facts. Though disinformation and distortion surround the issue of mind control in the past, the questions regarding how much investment has been devoted to the development of technology for individual and mass mind control applications remain as relevant as ever. Since the private sector and outsourcing has taken over a multitude of US government departments it is only logical that experimental data which was accrued over the cold war years was simply continued within deep black projects in known and unknown R & D companies. Taking a cursory look at marketing and advertising innovations it is clear that military technology is continuing to seep into the public domain. Once the province of conspiracy mythology, mind control and behaviour modification is as powerful as it ever was. But just how far has military-intelligence come with their dreams of automated assassins?

Organised religion, cults and self-help gurus have all used various psychological techniques to assist or control the devotee’s mind for the good of the group or attached belief system. Assimilation to a cause and strength in numbers is as old as the hills. But mind control for political ends using cutting edge experimentation of behaviour modification, neuro-psychopharmacology and even the occult, is something relatively new. And for it to be part of government black operations perhaps reaching a state of unimaginable sophistication is something profoundly disturbing. But it must be addressed if we are to have a chance to counter it.

Written by Richard Condon and published in 1958, The Manchurian Candidate is the definitive book about mind control and brainwashing. It was made into a film of the same name a few years later. The movie resonated with the public already immersed in Cold War fears and the US propaganda of brainwashing techniques by the Russian and Chinese communists.

It told the story of a US Army sergeant on active service during the Korean War, captured by the enemy and subjected to deep hypnosis. The idea was to ensure that the solider had no recollection of his actions which were buried deep behind a wall of amnesia. He is programmed to murder through carefully designed cues. On his return to the United States he kills a candidate for the Presidency and several other people who were threats to his secret mission.

Condon’s book was a work of fiction though extraordinarily accurate in all but the true pioneers of specific techniques of manipulating the human mind. Rather than the pesky “reds” who were out to brainwash the brave men and women of Uncle Sam, something more sinister was lying in wait much closer to home.

Out of print and hard to come by, Operation Mind Control (1978) by Walter Bowart exemplified the kind of investigative journalism which is so desperately needed in the mainstream media today. It remains a classic in mind control research. Using the Freedom of Information Act, a good measure of patience, tenacity and expensive payments to several researchers he managed to unearth many declassified documents and obscure government reports. He interviewed long forgotten victims for case studies drawn from mostly from Vietnam and Korean War veterans to US Army and Air-force military personnel. Bowart painstakingly cross-checked testimony of what remained in the federal archives, recording their stories in order to weave it into a polished narrative of non-fiction. After two years of research studying science reports and government documents from libraries he was able to piece together not only why it was that so many victims had amnesia but what type of behaviour had been controlled and to what end. Bowart’s research has been built upon by other researchers and victims and his findings remain just as pertinent and shocking as they did in the tumultuous 70’s.

 

Mind control had already been perfected by the late 1940s and early 1950s by the use of drugs, knowledge of Pavlovian conditioning and the behavioural science of B.F. Skinner. The latter was to be one of the pillars of an extreme materialistic social biology used to experiment on the US population in order to “psycho-civillise” it to specific objectives. The brainwashing imagery was a useful mythology held to be almost a kind of magic that would control the victim’s mind. In fact, as Bowart states: “It was … none of these things. Techniques which seemed to change the beliefs of American POWs and others behind the Iron Curtain employed no hypnosis, no drugs, no new methods for the control of the mind and certainly nothing magical.” It was a supremely effective method of “fueling a home-grown fear of the Communists upon which the Cold War so greatly depended.” ^[1]

The author informs us:

The US used classic projection to take the potential heat from themselves by inventing the idea of brainwashing which was in fact practised by America vare of nazi techniques more than any other country. “They did not use drugs or hypnosis, nor did they invent any mysterious new devices for breaking the mind and will of a man.”

“The United States government did not have to stoop to the slow and exhausting process the Chinese and Russians used. In the age of electronic brain stimulation, neuro-psychopharmacology, and advanced methods of behavior modification and hypnosis, the government certainly didn’t have to resort to methods as unsophisticated as brainwashing. The techniques of mind control developed, even by 1967, were making brainwashing seem like the metaphor it was: a washboard and scrub-bucket technique which had little use in a world where the sonic cleaner, with high” frequency sound, higher than the human ear can hear, vibrates the dirt from the very molecules of matter—or the mind. ^[2]

Brainwashing was psychological indoctrination which can be said to take place in our religious and pop-cultures on a daily basis and as an adjunct to something quite different. It was the USA who had perfected not a system of brainwashing but a comprehensive system of mind control where a person was not only broken but a new personality installed and programmed. This was much more than torture and indoctrination this was mind rape; an emptying of the essence of the individual.

At the time and for many today, the idea of hypno-programmed political assassins is still the province of pulp fiction and conspiracy lore. Yet, it is beyond question that millions of dollars were spent on breaking persons within the military and civilian life so that they might create “zombies” who were designed to be conscienceless with dual or multiple personas in order to carry the bequests of their programmers. Essentially, sociopaths – made to order.

Perhaps one of the most important points to remember from Bowart’s research is the realisation that mind control covers a multitude of domains and multidisciplinary branches operating under cover or within the public domain and with suitable fronts which accelerate the momentum of behaviour modification for the State. In much the same way as the defence or weapons industry, various levels of work take place which could be termed as benign right up to the morally dubious and criminal experimentation well beyond democratic purview. Each researcher, foundation and outsourced agency is allowed to know only what is necessary to know to accomplish the segment of research or testing which ultimately complements the whole. This now applies to technology in a way that did not during post-war America and Europe. As Bowart discovered mind control programs did not have a “single originating source, but several.” He further states:

“The operation is too widespread and complex for it to be created by a ‘cult.’ If a cult there must be, then it is a cult within a cult, in an interlocking chain of invisible minigovernments with unwritten rules, unwritten plans, and unwritten loyalties. It is the plan of a secret bureaucracy—what I call a cryptocracy—which conspires against our laws and our freedoms.

‘Cryptocracy’ is a compound of crypto, meaning ‘secret,’ and -cracy, meaning “rule, government, governing body. The cryptocracy, then, is the secret government whose identity and whereabouts have slowly and reluctantly been hinted at by the Congress through its investigations into Watergate, the CIA, and the rest of the intelligence community.” ^[3]

In other words, Cryptocracy is an outgrowth of Pathocracy.

As present events have revealed so clearly with the whistle-blower and former CIA intelligence analyst Edward Snowden the National Security Agency is far more likely to be the source of the financing and promotion of mind control operations large and small than the CIA which has traditionally been labelled the “baddie” of the intelligence underworld. Given the extraordinary depth of surveillance and snooping by the NSA and its feelers into future technology and Pentagon’s DARPA it is safe to say that only the very tip of a very cold iceberg has been revealed so far. (To that end, some may say Edward Snowden may yet prove to be a patsy in a turf war between the CIA and NSA. But that’s another story).

Whatever the case, an alliance still exists not just between factions within the NSA, CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence and subsidiaries in military intelligence, but also within the civil service, private contractors, academic institutions and corporations. Psychopaths operate by clustering together and allowing a pathogenic infection to spread. There are no borders to ponerological ascendance once it has taken hold and mind control techniques are fully embedded in the emerging Pathocracy.

The creation of Manchurian candidates or “zombies” who serve to oil the wheels of geo-political strategy or contour the mass mind to accept new laws have a particular type of personality which is best suited to such endeavours. They are usually highly suggestible, sensitive, from abusive backgrounds, with low-self-esteem and even naïve. Other types may have sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies offering further possibilities. 99 percent of these testimonies had some form of amnesia in common. Memory from early childhood was mostly if not entirely absent and recollection as to their specific “secret” work alongside their standard posting was fragmentary or missing. In the US chosen guinea pigs of the pre-and post-war era were usually drawn from the US Army and US Air-force. Special barracks and locations for training and experimentation were set up with suitable cover such as supply men or nondescript administration jobs.

Walter Bowart related numerous cases of military men following a pattern of highly disturbing dreams in which they kill a friend, family member or unknown person in a variety of ways: “In their sleep, the memories of atrocities surface to vivid awareness among the victims of mind control. Night after night terrible images, suppressed by deeply conditioned responses, emerge as terrifying nightmares. Are they mythological? The stuff of dreams? Or are they recovered memories?” ^[4]

Back in the 1940s Dr. George Estabrooks chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University helped set the hypno-programming snowball in motion. The foremost expert on hypnosis he was brought to Washington immediately after the Pearl Harbour attack as an advisor in Washington. Estabrooks was obviously in his element telling his masters that he “… could develop a uniquely dangerous army of hypnotically controlled Sixth Columnists,” if they so wished which evidently got them salivating at the prospect. ^[5] The creation of programmed assassins was about to commence and communist paranoia fed into the urgency for unquestioning mind control research and experimentation in the minds of the civil service and lower level contractors who had been taken in by the propaganda of highly advanced brainwashing techniques of the Soviets and Chinese.

Estabrooks was the first to suggest mass hypnosis experimentation on an easily accessible resource: the US Army. Numerous presentations of the power and efficacy of hypnosis were given by the Doctor as declassified and public documents attest. In one such demonstration he describes the possibility of mind controlled saboteurs already ensconced in the heart of America primed and ready to carry out their missions. In one demonstration he stated:

“Let us suppose that in a certain city there lives a group of a given foreign extraction. They are loyal Americans but still have cultural and sentimental ties to the old country. A neighborhood doctor, working secretly for a foreign power, hypnotizes those of his patients who have ties favorable to his plans. Having done this he would, of course, remove from them all knowledge of their ever having been hypnotized.

“Next comes a one-month period of indoctrination under hypnosis. By various means, including the offer of substantial rewards and educational processes designed to strengthen their ancestral loyalties, their cooperation is obtained.” […]

“All right, you say. This sounds beautiful on paper. But what about the well-known ‘psychological principle’ that no one will do anything under hypnosis that he wouldn’t do when he’s awake?” … “My experiments have shown this assumption is poppycock. It depends not so much on the attitude of the subject as on that of the operator himself … In wartime, the motivation for murder under hypnosis doesn’t have to be very strong,”… I am convinced that hypnosis is a bristling, dangerous armament which makes it doubly imperative to avoid the war of tomorrow.” ^[6] [Emphasis mine]

This was akin to saying to a bunch of waiting wolves please don’t eat these lambs they are far too delicious to ensure a sound digestion. The direction of mind control research was set.

Dr. George Estabrooks

Eastabrooks continued to feed all kinds of nightmarish scenarios which could befall America. The ultimate irony is that he assisted in making these worst case scenarios real with the emergence of the OSS, then the CIA and the National Security State several years later. In effect, mind control was institutionalised at the start. And since the intelligence and shadow government apparatus had been infected with the psychopathy of Nazi influence – the pioneers of mind control experimentation – this was like pouring kerosene on growing embers.

By the early 1950s, electro-shock treatment and drugs as an aid to hypnotic induction caused the research to take on an unstoppable momentum. Eastabrookes had suggested: “… that new drugs would be discovered which would be capable of inducing deep hypnosis in virtually any individual regardless of his degree of cooperativeness.” ^[7]

By 1953, after Dr. Albert Hoffman had discovered the hallucinogenic and mind expanding properties of LSD the CIA had invested in the drug in order to corner the market and to use it in drug experiments with animals and human beings. With the eventual rise of LSD, cocaine and other designer chemicals as the drugs of choice for the Revolution it seems that this particular experiment had fast run away from them. After all, if LSD – despite its toxic effects – proved to expand the mind and thus allow the ability to see the folly of authority in all its guises this would eventually prove to be a major problem, as indeed it did. )The massive protest movement against the Vietnam War and the corollary of social reforms was one such unforeseen effect). This is why, in part at least, the New Age and the “psychedelia” or counter-culture movement was embedded with government informants and disinformation agents in order to defang and discredit their often genuine wish to expand the awareness and freedoms of the mass population. It became not a bastion of true spiritual freedom but a quagmire of dangers for the spiritually naive.

Albert Hoffman

Now that LSD and its associations were becoming emancipatory impure heroine certainly helped reverse the trend. Once the CIA controlled the distribution and availability of drugs it was free to use it as a resource and a tool of targeted social change. LSD began to dry up and became illegal by 1966. Heroine fresh from the CIA controlled Golden Triangle in Asia took over and was pushed particularly hard in ethnic minority towns and cities across the US. The youth caught between the utopian promise of drug-based counter-culture assumed heroine would do the same. A generation of addicts were created and awareness derailed once again. Even towards the end of the 1950s think-tanks had already been suggesting that addiction was a potent way to keep societies passive and malleable. (This was already well known to PR guru Edward Bernays with his perception management techniques for encouraging acceptance for commercial cigarette use). And since heroine did not “expand consciousness” it was a doubly effective on top of the daily inducements of alcohol and consumerism.

It was only by June, 1975, that the public was able to officially confirm in the mainstream media that government that the CIA had been using the US population as a drugs laboratory and feeding behaviour-influencing drugs to ordinary citizens for more than twenty years. The Rockefeller Report of 1975 revealed at least some of the details. The report stated that the drug research: “… was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behavior. Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric shock, ultra-sound, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances.” ^[8]

The fact that Rockefeller is headlining such a report should indicate the nature of the accountability. Nothing has changed with so called reports, commissions and suitably skewed media appraisals which are largely exercises in damage control so that the public is given a bone to chew and business returns to normal. Subsequent FOI requests from journalists for documentation on the Rockefeller report certainly revealed more information which was nonetheless, heavily redacted. This was closely followed by CIA director Richard Helms departure and not before he ordered the shredding of a huge quantity of files pertaining to mind control experiments. Nevertheless, what information did remain was disturbing enough.

“In 1949 the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) undertook the analysis of foreign work on certain unconventional warfare techniques, including behavioural drugs, with an initial objective of developing a capability to resist or offset the effect of such drugs. Preliminary phases included the review of drug-related work at

institutions such as Mount Sinai Hospital, Boston Psychopathic Hospital, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Valley Forge General Hospital, Detroit Psychopathic Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and the National Institute of Health.

“This first project, code-named Project BLUEBIRD, was assigned the function of discovering means of conditioning personnel to prevent unauthorized extraction of information from them by known means. It was further assigned to investigate the possibility of control of an individual by application of special interrogation techniques, memory enhancement, and establishing defensive means for preventing interrogation of agency personnel.” ^[9]

Project Bluebird became Project ARTICHOKE which would handle most of the developments of hypno-programming and drug-enhanced behaviour modification. According to CIA documents by 1953 a cryptonym was in circulation named MKDELTA which evolved to become Project MKULTRA: “… an umbrella project for funding sensitive projects … approved by Allen Dulles on April 3, 1953. It’s remit covered: … policy and procedure for use of biochemicals in clandestine operations …” with experimentation in: “… radiation, electroshock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, harassment substances” along with “paramilitary devices and materials.” ^[10]

The compartmentalised intelligence imperative has remained the same since the 1940s to the present day. Bowart reminds us of this fact by distilling the intent behind the experimentation into three key questions which they have been asking in order to direct their research:

• Can accurate information be obtained from willing or unwilling individuals?
• Can agency personnel (or persons of interest to this agency) be conditioned to prevent any unauthorized source or enemy from obtaining information from them by any known means?
• Can we obtain control of the future activities (physical and mental) of any individual, willing or unwilling, by application of [mind-control] techniques?

If it sounds too Hollywood, this is entirely due to the diet of movies and pulp fiction we have grown up with since the late 1950s onwards. The fascination with something so insidious has always captured the public attention but only as a means of cathartic entertainment rather than an acceptance that such fictionalised accounts were based on real events, sometimes far more horrific than authors and film-makers could imagine. Yet, this is the inheritance of the Anglo-American and Conservative Establishments who welcomed the Nazi exodus and its development of the National Security State.

The military, mental institutions, hospitals, government agencies and civilians had become a vast resource of men and women who would become career-zombies for the state, often unaware of their double lives and clueless about the missions they undertook. The 1960s was positively awash with drugs and behaviour modification. Case studies in FOI requests documents reviewed in both Operation Mind Control and many other more recent literature on the subject have sourced official declassified documents. Though many of these are in the public domain still more documents were heavily redacted suggesting the advances and those responsible go much deeper.

Since many of the most sensational murders are perpetrated by psychopaths who have “broken down” and exhibit an inability to control their primitive desires, it seems the essential psychopath not only has a high degree of control in maintaining his “mask of sanity” but must remain attentive to his camouflage in all other endeavours. This includes those  employed at high level posts and those undertaking missions of a highly sensitive nature.

Since the world operates like a machine for the pathocrats, then its cogs and wheels must be finely tuned. Which is why the US Army and prisons are an ideal recruiting ground for those with a predisposition to violence and even accustomed to killing, but not necessarily psychopathic. An unpredictable, criminal psychopath was not an asset for mind control. Anti-social personality disorders and authoritarian followers with a high degree of emotional suppression are ideal since they are more likely to follow commands rather than act on impulse.

Once training is completed the individuals are selected for their particular talents, be it for assassination team-based black operations and sexpionage. Agents are often teamed together as male and female so that should the sexual urge raise its head, then each could service the other so that the mission had less chance of being compromised by the “primitive mind.”

Since the Anglo-American-Israeli nexus is the leader in such operations it brings into relief how darkly amusing International laws and treaties truly are. They are routinely flouted on a daily basis, whether it is engineering a coup, deploying PSYOPS units or engineering false-flag events in domestic or foreign settings. As is so often the case with the global state and its institutions, they serve to offer the illusion of civilisation while offering leverage to their psychopathic designers to corral the public and fatten it for the kill.

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Notes

[1] (p.45) Bowart, Walter; Operation Mind Control (1978)
[2]   Ibid. (p.54)
[3]   Ibid. (p.24)
[4]   Ibid. (p.26)
[5]   Ibid. (p.59)
[6]   Ibid. (p.60)
[7]   Ibid. (p.72)
[8]   Ibid. (p.87)
[9]   Ibid. (p.101)
[10] Ibid. (p.102)

Crowd Control II: Mixed Messages (1)

“In all the interviews I have done, I cannot remember one offender who did not admit privately to more victims than those for whom he had been caught. On the contrary, most offenders had been charged with and/or convicted of from one to three victims. In the interviews I have done, they have admitted to roughly 10 to 1,250 victims. What was truly frightening was that all the offenders had been reported before by children, and the reports had been ignored.”

― Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders

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If you’ve been following the trajectory of these posts you’ll have hopefully understood that we are dealing with a highly complex set of influences which make up the overall picture of child abuse, sex crime and our current expressions of sexuality.  None of these issues lend themselves to simplistic solutions. Aside from the activities which go on within institutions, the high profile but rare cases of violent sexual abuse and sometimes murder which have been committed in the lower income levels of society play a part in giving undue credence to such crimes, making them appear much more common than they are. ^[1]  

That doesn’t mean to say that such crimes are not a very big part of the European and American Establishment. They most certainly are. But many of these crimes often have pathways leading directly to government, banking, the church and other institutions whose initial ideological and political constructs have become something entirely different. They now offer sanctuary and protection to child rapists and other psychopaths by virtue of a Hive Mind tradition that has fused with conscienceless individuals.  They are able to stimulate the market for abuse at both the macro-social and micro social level while simultaneously hiding behind their political, religious or corporate mask. This has ultimately meant that these networks of child abusers are buffered and protected by the societal chaos encouraged through public “lone” paedophile trials, celebrity pederasts and intra-familial abuse cases, the latter of which often act as suppliers to the Elite.

Sensationalising the issue increases the “fear factor” and a parental paranoia that is leading to restrictions on natural child development. The erosion of childhood has led to “a drastic decline in children’s outdoor activity and unsupervised play…” ^[2] This is due to technology and the so-called litigation and “claims culture” which has produced so much alienation and social fragmentation in America and Europe. We are now living in a world where parents and adults alike are becoming increasingly wary of even talking to children that are not their own or tending to a minor injury in the school-ground lest they be accused of inappropriate “touching.” ^[3] The well promoted obsession with lone child molesters is out of all proportion to the cases reported.  All of which benefits the Establishment where the most serious child rapists reside.

© infraskhun

So, while we know that child abuse is serious problem let’s also take a look at the other side of the coin, and how an abuse paranoia is currently manifesting in the UK.  To this into perspective for a moment, last year over 100 children in the UK alone were killed on the roads, more than 6,000 were injured and 1,000 seriously, leaving them disfigured or disabled for life. How many children in the UK have been killed by the lone child molester in a comparable time scale? Seven.^[4]  Over 40,000 children ran away from home while the British government still insists that the traditional “family values” should be maintained without providing the support that families need. Britain also has one of the worst records of child poverty in Europe. Among 100,000 and 200,000 people under eighteen, experience homelessness each year.

A UK Home Office report from 1999 became yet another research study to be added to the growing body of respected research confirming the real risk comes from sexual abuse not from isolated child molesters but from relatives, family friends and siblings. The research also found that: “… only one in five men jailed for molesting children was likely to be caught re-offending, compared with reconviction figures of 50 percent for non-sexual offenders within two years of the original crime.” ^[5]

While the lone child molester and “stranger danger” meme gets enormous coverage in the press, the less sensationalist trend is the incidence of abuse that occurs within the family unit suggesting a hidden pathology afters years of ponerisation. Economic deprivation, the rise in narcissism and the materialism from which it is sourced is a large factor in the presence of abuse within the family. This serves as another reminder that sexual crime can always provide an infinite variety of scapegoats while ignoring the core reasons for why these offences take place. We might equally say that recognised offenders were expert in covering up their crime coupled with the fact that the age of the victim invariably ensures that the molestation is not reported adding difficulties in provision of definitive data.

According to Mary Marsh director for the National Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC): “Over the last 30 years, hundreds of children have been beaten, starved, burned, suffocated, poisoned, shaken, strangled or stabbed to death by their parents” ^[6] She believed the child abuse killings were a “national disgrace,” her belief drawn from the statistics which suggest that more children die in the home than in the street. Yet still, the lone child molester threat continues to pervade popular culture holding parental sensibilities to ransom with 63 percent of parents believing most child murders occur outside the home. ^[7]  Meanwhile, massive advertising from child charities  targeting children in the family to report on signs of abuse to the organisation, further fuelling the idea of the family as a den of corruption, already under severe socio-econommic pressures. It’s a rock and a hard place.

While the NSPCC’s had some dubious methods for raising awareness of this problem, the collected data and conclusions found were pertinent. One NSPCC poll found that 70 percent of parents were “more concerned for their children’s safety after the deaths of Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.” ^[8] Cases such as these allow newspapers to milk the fears of all parents who in turn campaign for legislation that adds to the overreaction for a predator that is statistically already within the home and more importantly, as an indirect result of individuals  found in the top echelons of our social systems and thus shaping it toward a singular psychological worldview. Perception management ensures that this is a “natural” consequence of people’s nature and the evolution of modern culture. Yet so far it seems, neglect, physical violence (and in some statistics rape) represent an overall increase far above sexual abuse. More than three children are said to die each day in America as a result of child abuse or neglect. ^[9]

© infrakshun

While statistics need to be viewed with a suitably sceptical but open mind, sufficient studies over several decades have confirmed that there is a much higher incidence of physical abuse as opposed to sexual abuse, closely followed by neglect which is seven times more prevalent than the former. Indeed, it seems the younger the child the greater the risk of murder (infanticide) for those aged under five. The US fairs no better. The number of homicides of children under age 5 has increased over the past two decades, albeit with a modest decline in the last few years, according to government figures. The number of infanticides of children age 1 and younger is also increasing since the 1990s. Infant sexual abuse (nepiophilia) is also a rising problem within the family. The effects of sexual abuse on those of pre-verbal age are relatively unknown.

Nevertheless, research offers evidence that the foetus can be highly sensitive to external stimuli of a positive or negative nature so we can also surmise that the infant will be equally sensitised to the intent and physical effects of sexual abuse. A toddler’s brain has twice as many connections among its 100 billion neurons as the brain of a fully matured adult. ^[10] It is a crucial process of development within an intricate and complex system, housing neural circuits of learning that is highly almost exclusively dependent on external stimuli. The parents and the environment can directly affect whether or not the child inherits damaged circuits and the surfacing pathologies, however slight, or creative ones that lay down a healthy foundation for the future. Evidence from a recent report fro Reuters in December 2011 has even shown that: “Children exposed to family violence show the same pattern of activity in their brains as soldiers exposed to combat”.

When infants and children are exposed to unhealthy social encounters which include stress and anxiety, the brains do not wire themselves properly in the “emotional centres,” which leads to negative cognitive reactions which then become “hard-wired.” If we then take the trauma associated with infant abuse, we can imagine the damage inflicted on the neurology of a developing baby and the future generational line.

A leading expert in the field of sexual abuse of the infant child, Dr. Bruce Perry at the Baylor College of Medicine, believes the development of the cerebral cortex can be reduced by as much as 20 percent from the effects of abuse resulting in many brain structures remaining under-developed.  Instead of dense neural clusters as by-products of creative learning, there are effectively “holes” sourced from trauma, stress and anxiety. ^[11]

Perry indicates that the human brain has a variety of ways by which it can store or “recall” experience right across the board of motor, vestibular, emotional, social and cognitive applications. The body locks in these memories that, according to Perry, are non-cognitive and pre-verbal: “It is the experiences of early childhood that create the foundational organisation of neural systems that will be used for a lifetime.” ^[12] Of these neural patterns, instead of laying down stable and proper functional platforms for further learning, the imprinting shock of abuse lays down trauma and anxiety related to psychosexual development during the general mapping process. This then leads to a greater propensity for widespread damage in the biological life of an emerging infant with personality development prone to severe disruption.

With the long term effects of child abuse covering a wide range of fears, anxieties, depression, anger, hostility, inappropriate sexual behaviour, poor self-esteem, tendency toward substance abuse and difficulty with close relationships, we can tentatively conclude that the effects may be a form of emotional fall-out which not only has a very long legacy but offers a primary resource for the manipulation of the mass mind. When emotion, fear and trauma dominates, the mass mind is wide open to propaganda and perception management.

Promotional poster for “American Beauty” (1999) about the darker psycho-sexual and social tensions behind American suburbia which ultimately lead to redemption.

The 1999 multiple Oscar-winning film American Beauty portrayed middle-class suburban America as undergoing a reaction to the narcissism, sexual subversion and overall inversion of the American Dream. Themes explored included gender, maternal and paternal love, sexuality, beauty, materialism, alienation, self-liberation and redemption. Literary critic and author Wayne C. Booth described the film’s “elusive centre” and the talented mix of creative energy of all those involved that made the film so successful. Similarly, when art manages to make connections with the subconscious and speaks to underlying themes simmering below the surface there will inevitably some form of resonance.

The film explores the underlying connector as a materialist, consumer led “beauty” that has removed all possibilities for sense of the sacred and sanctity in American life. Beneath the struggle to adjust to impinging economic realities intolerance, fear and mental illness are descending upon middle America.  As such, beauty is still present in the unlikeliest of places from simple teenage eroticism to a plastic bag floating in the air currents of an urban alleyway. It shows how existential emptiness and the loss of meaning govern much of American and European daily life. These are the pathways by which sexual extremes and pathological deviancy may enter under cover of suburbia created from the norm of Establishment and institutional perceptions of reality.

Much of the youth in America and Europe are drowning in a sea of superficiality. There is an absence of proper role models and any form of integral education which is adding to the inevitable rise in gang-related crime. The pathological tendencies which have been allowed to gain a foothold in young social groupings are thus becoming gradually more fertile for subset-pathologies to be expressed. Indeed, it seems that the trend for children to be abused by their own age groups than by adults is also on the rise.

One comprehensive report analysed data between 1976 and 1994 and estimated more than 37,000 children had been murdered. ^[13] In fact, during the same period, 1 in 5 child murders were committed by a family member and 1 in 5 child victims were known to be killed by another child. Children under 18 accounted for 11 percent of all murder victims in the US in 1994. Nearly half of these 2,660 child victims were between 15 and 17. In most murders of a young child, a family member killed the child, while in most murders of an older child, age 15 to 17, the perpetrator was an acquaintance to the victim or was unknown to law enforcement authorities. Keeping to the same statistical research we also find that in family murder of a child 10 percent of victims was age 15 – 17, while in murders by strangers 67 percent of victims were in this age category.

Since the mid-1980’s the increases in the number and the rate of murder among 15-17 year-olds, particularly among black youth in this age range, outpaced changes in murder in all other age groups. ^[14]  Since 1980, there has been a 15 percent annual average increase in the number of prisoners sentenced for violent sexual assault (other than rape) which is “faster [increase] than any other category of violent crime and faster than all other categories except drug trafficking.” ^[15 The majority of these prisoners are young men.

In another survey conducted by the US Nation Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) the steady growth of child abuse over the last ten years was confirmed with the total number of reports across the US increasing by 45 percent since 1987 and the rate of child abuse fatalities similarly increasing by 39 percent since 1985.^[16 Based on data from all three years, the survey found 82 percent of children were under the age of five while 42 percent were under the age of one at the time of their death. (See Crowd Control)

Physical violence against children is more prevalent than sexual abuse yet they often they go together. Since the 1970s, the phenomenon of child abuse has been increasing and so too the limits of the extremes that surface. Regarding the instances of filicide (the killing of one’s own children) “Head trauma, strangulation and drowning were the most frequent methods of filicide (the killing of a person’s own child). Fathers tended to use more active methods, such as striking, squeezing or stabbing; mothers more often drowned, suffocated or gassed their victims.

In a study of child abuse in New York City the incidence of child abuse increased 1026 percent between 1964 and 1974 which ranged from neglect, physical violence, sexual molestation and assault to incest and emotional terrorism. ^[17] The US Department of Health, Education and Welfare stated: “An epidemic of child abuse is occurring in this country.” ^[18] Though fluctuating parallel to the number of cases investigated which has dipped of late, similar to the high incidence of missing persons, the increase was in part attributed to a growing awareness from the public and the willingness to report child abuse. Yet the number of total child maltreatment cases that were investigated by state agencies remained constant from 1986 to 1993 for example, but the percentage of cases investigated declined dramatically, suggesting a steady rise. Indeed, the instances of child abuse and neglect almost doubled in those seven years alone totalling more than 2.8 million children.^[19]

Overwhelming statistical data analyses from the US Department of Health and Services (DHHS) Administration for Children and Families Division, confirm that since 2000 – 2007 a steady but fluctuating rise in the incidence of multiple forms of maltreatment overwhelmingly came from biological parents at 79.9 percent. ^[20]  Back in the UK, 1 in 14 children have been violently assaulted by their parents, and we’re not talking about a tap on the bottom here. Incidences of being kicked, punched, choked, burnt or threatened with a knife have been listed as the common attacks within the home. Broken bones, bruising, bites, burns and head injuries were some of the results, some of which were carried out by mothers at 52 percent and with fathers at 45 percent. It is almost a given that fathers are assumed to have been responsible for carrying out the vast majority of domestic abuse cases involving children yet many surveys and studies both in the UK and the US seem to prove that this is another myth. Most sexual abuse is carried out by step-fathers and siblings for example,^[21]  with poverty and low income families most likely to harbour the abuse. ^[22]

One of the most common forms of sexual abuse is that of incest (or intra-familial abuse) remaining one of the most under-reported and least discussed crimes. This is due in part, to the lack of accurate statistics and information borne from the fear and secrecy inherent in such a crime not least the difficulty in gathering such highly sensitive information. Social and familial pressure maintains a strong taboo that is almost impenetrable. The coercion by the abuser and the feelings of guilt and shame further cement the wall of silence.

Research indicates that 46 percent of children who are raped are victims of family members. Incest is traditionally defined as “sexual intercourse between persons too closely related to marry (as between a parent and a child)” yet here too the definition has been expanded to include sexual abuse by anyone who has “authority or power over the child.” ^[23] The perpetrators of incest may include immediate or extended family members, babysitters, school teachers, scout masters, and priests.

The study of a nationally representative sample of state prisoners serving time for violent crime in 1991 revealed that 20 percent of their crimes were committed against children, and three out of four prisoners who victimized a child reported the crime took place in their own home or in the victim’s home. ^[24]  While intra-familial abuse often seems to cross over into ritual abuse there are cases that are inter-generational and “poly-incestuous” cases involving parents, grand-parents, aunts and uncles. Sometimes this can extend to over three or four generations or more.^[25] Deprived neighbourhoods with poor unemployment and a history of economic hardships also featured in a variety of studies. The “infection” naturally draws in “friends of the family” further increasing the perpetuation of abuse and the likelihood of psychopaths participating, further increasing the severity of the effects.

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Notes

[1] There is evidence that child abductions are on the rise in England and Wales: From The Independent, May 2006, ‘Indypedia’: 1985 – 102, 1990 – 208, 1995 – 355. This also includes family kidnappings and not necessarily those by strangers. 2000/01 – 546  2005/06 – 1,028.
[2] ‘Play on’ By Jenny Cunningham, January 3, 2002, spiked-online.com
[3] ‘Protection risks doing more harm than good.’ By Sandra Dick, January 18, 2005, The Scotsman.
[4] Research and Development Statistics (RDS) Home Office UK, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/
[5] ‘Home Office Report says: Most child sex attacks committed by relatives, family friends.’ Agence France Presse, 1999. BBC News, 13 October, 2002.
[6] ‘NSPCC steps up campaign on child abuse killings’ 14 October 2002, nspcc.co.uk/ The “fear-mongering” methods by which organizations like NSPCC alert the public to these dangers is also under scrutiny by some commentators, something we will look at in following posts.
[7] Child murder rate ‘a national disgrace’ BBC News, October 13, 2002.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Nation Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) 1996 Annual Fifty State Survey: […] 25 states provided the following breakdown for reported cases: 62per cent involved neglect, 25per cent physical abuse, 7 per cent sexual abuse, 3per cent emotional maltreatment and 4per cent other. For substantiated cases, 31 states gave the following breakdowns: 60per cent neglect, 23 per cent physical, 9per cent sexual, 4per cent emotional maltreatment and 5per cent other.
[10] ‘The Long Term Neurological and Developmental Effects of Sexual Abuse on Infant Children’ Mike Earl-Taylor and Lindsay Thomas, March 2003 (quoted from science in Africa.co.za )
[11] Trauma, Violence, and Abuse: A Review Journal. January 2000, by Bruce Perry Vol. 1, Number 1. Sage Publications, Inc.
[12] Ibid.
[13] US Department of Justice · Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime and Victims Statistics 1998.
[14] Statistical data from Yesican.org/
[15] US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, February 1997.
[16] Nation Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) 2000 Annual Fifty State Survey.
[17] Quoted from ‘Child Abuse in America: Slaughter of the Innocents’ By James W. Prescott, Ph.D.From Hustler, October 1977
[18] Ibid.
[19] Survey shows Dramatic Increase in Child Abuse and Neglect 1986-1993 Wednesday, Sept. 18, 1996, Michael Kharfen, US Depart. Of Health and Services, http://www.acf.dhhs.gov.
[20] Chapter 4, Perpetrator sex Child Abuse stastics, Child Maltreatment, DHHS report 2007.
[21] ‘Revealed: The Truth about Child Sex Abuse in Britain’s Families’ by Jeremy Laurance, The Independent, November 2000.
[22] “‘One in 14’ children attacked,” BBC News, 19 November, 2000.
[23] Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its After effects in Women, by Sue E. Blume, 1990, published by  John Wiley and Sons, New York, NY.
[24] The National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) ncvc.org.
[25] ‘Poly-Incestuous Families: an exploratory study’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, By K.C. Faller, 1987.

Pornucopia: The Cult of the Body II

“Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and super patriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.”

― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

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Author and psychologist Marnia Robinson thinks that Internet porn is “an extreme superstimulus.” This is due to massive changes in our environment which has left the “reward circuitry” and mammalian brain lagging behind. Bingeing on food and sex evolved as a response to when these opportunities were scarce. Now there is an endless stream of superstimuli which play havoc with our reward circuitry which can lead to withdrawal symptoms, cravings and compulsions for more stimulation, and sometimes more permanent brain changes. ^[1]

Sounds like the foundation upon which Official Culture thrives …

The cycles of stimulus and withdrawal are caused by peaks and crashes of dopamine making a return to normalcy extremely difficult. Moreover, the genetically-driven push to focus on the object of our evolutionary desires is not necessarily a guarantee that it’s worth our attention or that our mammalian brains have got it right. And usually, it hasn’t.

Urban environments often ensure that we become addicts to a greater or lesser degree placing our attention away from things that offer stability and quality in the long term but do not always deliver the dopamine kick that takes us out of the inevitable melancholy that we face when trapped in these cycles. Dopamine does not necessarily have any connection with the liking or the end result of the “chase” but it is very much linked to the process of wanting. With constant superstimulus soaking the young brains of teenage boys with unnatural quantities of dopamine, this sets up and consolidates the neuronal connections responsible for the various cravings and associated compulsive behaviours that internet porn users become habituated. This leads to massive “re-wiring” of certain images into the pleasure centres of the brain. When these images do not elicit the same level of dopamine response, then more “hardcore” images are needed to do the job.

The final result is a re-shaping of the brain as psychiatrist Norman Doidge observes: “Pornographers promise healthy pleasure and relief from sexual tension, but what they often deliver is addiction, tolerance [the need for more extreme stimulation], and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn’t like it.” ^[2]

Referring to young male adult porn addicts Robinson describes the addiction in these terms: “There was always another enticing image just a click away, and their mammalian brains were determined to leave no picture unfertilized. Their issue wasn’t shame; it was addiction. When they tried to unhook themselves, they faced intense withdrawal symptoms that fluctuated in intensity for weeks.” ^[3]

As we will see as a recurrent theme in these posts, the side effects of frequent “supranormal stimulation” means that normal pleasures atrophy and slowly lose their capacity to please us. It is then that we face a progressive habituation to pathology that is caused by a change in our perceptions. It also increases the likelihood of “cross-tolerance” where other forms of addiction are drawn into the sphere of overstimulation. This is one of new and potent addictions characterising Official Culture. If that is so, what effects will this have on the societies in the near future?

Robinson tells us:

A recent study showed that mere exposure to images of sexy females could cause a man to devalue his real-life partner. He rated her lower not only on attractiveness, but also on warmth and intelligence… Other experiments show that porn causes men to devalue marital fidelity and makes them more likely to believe that women like rough sex…These shifts set off a downward spiral, making partners less likely to engage in the generous affection that actually bonds them and lets them enjoy each other. ^[4]

Children will mimic and experiment with what they see at an early age representing a natural stage in child development that is often colloquially labelled “doctors and nurses.” However, the easy availability of sex and violence on the internet and T.V. with “jolting” images disconnected from context have its effects on the psyche of the child. There are cases which reflect the premature absorption of programming that “forces” children to partially act out certain scenarios for sexual experimentation that will be beyond the emotional maturity needed for such adult explorations. In many cases progressive and habitual exposure to pornography has played a key role in influencing this experimentation.^[5] Though it may not be a primary factor in every case, both in minor offences and criminal felonies, pornography is invariably present as an indirect or direct influence, particularly with rapists and child molesters, as we shall see presently. ^[6]

London is the official porn capital of Europe and with over £31.1 billion slice of the $57.0 billion global market; ^[7] pornography is becoming so acceptable that teenage girls are beginning to see it as a valid career choice. In “porn-speak” this acceptability starts from “glamour” as it is now named. It is this glamour industry ideal that is attractive to over 63 percent of 1,000 girls questioned in a British survey 25 percent preferred the idea of lap dancing. ^[8] The mobile phone has also been taken over by instant messaging porn. Now you can get aroused during a coffee break or in rush-hour traffic.

As far back as 1999, Internet tracking company Forrester Research, estimated that $1bn of the $7.8bn spent online went on pornography. It has since doubled. Private Media Group, On Command Corp. and Metro Global Media and Vivid Entertainment are just some of the porn corporations listed on NASDAQ. Wall Street knows that selling sex is immensely profitable which is why AT&T, MCI, Time-Warner, Comcast, Echo Star Communications, GM’s DirecTV, Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, Radisson, VISA, MasterCard and American Express, as a brief sample, are all involved in receiving enormous revenues from the porn industry. They are understandably coy about revealing this side of their financial interests.

The first cable company to offer hard-core adult movies to subscribers was Adelphia Communications Corp. who had also donated large sums of money to some of the most right wing members of Congress. Some of the hotel chains such as Marriott and Hilton earn about $190 million per year from in-room pay-per-view porn videos while AT&T and MCI WorldCom are leading the 1-900 phone-sex market, generating almost $1 billion per year. ^[9]

Adult toys chain Castle Superstores Corp operates outlets in 11 Wal-Mart stores in the Mid-West of the US, while Europe too is getting in on the act. In the late nineties German bank Commerzbank acted as financial advisor for Beate Uhse, a German sex merchandise firm that floated on the Neuer Market. It was not the first flotation to tempt the family bank. In fact, it has taken part in many of Europe’s biggest porn-related, corporate deals. ^[10] Due to the accessibility of internet porn there is undoubtedly a rise in children and teenagers becoming addicted to images which distort an otherwise healthy sexual self, leading to young people objectifying both sexes in their quest for peer approval. Sex and love are terminally confused in the world of the adult, let alone the emerging adolescent. There appears to be a deficit of accessible examples of healthy loving relationships, though there are more than enough instances of sex as the primary channel by which young adults can find their identity – minus the emotional know-how to go with it. For young males especially, porn offers and instance release of tension and an easy access to endless images catering to equally endless hormones.

In one researcher’s words, boys are: “consuming porn literally every day since they were 14. Our sexual cues and desires are learnt during adolescence, and . . . these young men were regularly viewing bestiality and group sex”. Many researchers agree that the average age of exposure to pornography begins at around eleven years old, though 90 percent of children are exposed to some form of pornography from the ages of eight – sixteen, often while doing their homework. ^[11]

Assuming we are even online at all, how familiar are we with what is out there on the wonderful world of the internet? Carry out a search using the keyword “porn” and you will find over 130 million hits alone with well over 260 million pornography related internet pages.^[12] Some of the easily accessible websites include links to a variety of other sites which include hard-core porn categories which make up by far, the biggest market. This may be categorised variously as “interracial sex”, “S&M”, “Fetish”, “Anal”, “Rape” “Mature” “Transsexual”, “Rough” “Extreme” “Bi,” “Lesbian”, “Gay” “Bestiality”, “Teen,” “Hirsute”, “Ebony,” “Latino,” “Blonde”, etc. in an almost endless stream of titles to cater for soft porn to extreme deviancy. All the above categories have sub-titles with endless networked sites that create revenue from DVD sales, sex toys and one off monthly, quarterly and yearly subscriptions.

Although some sites have an adult password age verification warnings, the former can easily be obtained, while the latter is ignored by any hormonally compromised school boy. All, or most of these websites will include free samples of movies and clips of both soft and hard core sex acts from playboy models to Japanese-schoolgirl-sadomasochistic bondage; foot-loving fetish to farm-yard animal exploits. All is accessible on your friendly family search engine if parental controls are not observed.

Do-it-yourself-porn is also online with a vengeance. Webcams are hosted by either company backed porn starlets or individual “amateur teens” branching out into their own blog with “pay-to-view” live-cam experiences. We can be sure that the internet is providing an expansion of both amateur and professional porn entrepreneurialism. The internet is merely reflecting the next phase of “market need” that is appearing within the technology-savvy living rooms of our “American beauty” suburbia. ^[13] Dating websites have the technological capability to meet your every sexual need it seems… A variety of spin off porn-come-dating sites have sprung up where you find the partner of your dreams or just have “no strings attached” (NSA) fun. Sexsearch, Adultfriendfinder, Be Naughty and countless others have millions of members between them. Via online instant messaging linked with a webcam you can obtain your “quickie” and get a good eye-full of what lies in store.

Most however, discover that the majority of these potential dates are either those looking to exercise their online fantasies without ever leaving their home and others who are merely “scammers” looking to earn an extra income by stripping off. Most of these women are from 18 to 30 the average age being 21. Theses entrepreneurs  use dating websites to hook potential clients from the “chat” system eventually asking for payment for a nude show from the individual’s mobile or an online payment system. Obviously the dating websites are none too pleased but attempts to stem the flood of such young lucrative exhibitionism is an uphill struggle. Young men and women are also getting in on the act by creating subscription webcams with a variety of carrots to retain their followers.  There are also websites which allow you to submit your own amateur porn to a communities of ardent hedonists.  Blogging platforms such as Tumblr are particuarly awash with closely networked hetero and gay subject matter which spans artistic erotica to simulated rape.

All of which is accessible to your average young teen – if they aren’t getting in on the act themselves that is.

The porn industry is proving to be highly lucrative. Web-cams or digital videos, the do-it-yourself amateur porn business is booming with “self-help” books teaching you “how to get rich quick.” A cursory peruse around internet book stores offer such titles as Adult Website Money: How to Build, Start, and Market an Adult Website Business for Little to No Cost in 30 Days! Or, How To Use Your Computer Internet Skills To Get a Date or Have Sex with a Video Porn Star, Stripper, Escort or Model. Then there is the feverish title of Adult Video Business: How You Can Find Attractive Women to Star in Your Own Adult Films, Make Money, and Quit Work in 7 Weeks. They are beginning to appear more frequently each year. And as the author of one popular paperback claims: “She lives happily on the beach in Malibu with her Jack Russell terrier, Arpy.” ^[14]

With such a glowing endorsement of well-adjusted porn stars with their contented pooches it seems there is no need to worry, the porn business is comfortably seating itself into the mainstream. That being the case, one piece of research urges caution over what they consider to be a “porn myth” as regards online saturation of pornography websites. In a study conducted by Dr. Steve Lawrence and Dr. C. Lee Giles for the NEC Research Institute they found that only 1.5 percent of Web sites contain pornographic content. This is more understandable when “the Web contains about 800 million pages encompassing about 15 terabytes of data and about 180 million images.” And further: ‘The sex sites were much less than you would have thought,’ Lawrence said.” Their findings also confirm that it is not so much pornography that has taken over the web but corporations and their commercial websites that make up 83 percent of internet with only 6 percent containing scientific or educational content. ^[15]

© infrakshun

Nevertheless, there is much more the search engines cannot access or index which logically amounts to millions and millions of sites. Yet half of the porn sites (though not the most popular with US surfers) are hosted outside the US, so American-based legislation will continue to be ignored. This is both good in terms of censorship and bad in terms of those underage. Possibilities for blocking are available, assuming that parents are sufficiently able to monitor their offspring which is unlikely. Moreover, whether there are only 10 million, 20 million or 260 million, if a child punches into a search engine an overtly sexual term – which they will – it does not matter the precise number if websites that will instantly appear offering hardcore images to view. The pages are there. And pornography of even 15 years ago has transformed into the cyber porn of the 21^st century which bears no resemblance at all to its former top shelf days. Playboy and Penthouse are like the soft whispers of a tabloid angel compared to the material any school boy can access.

In Asia, many Japanese men feel threatened by the growing sophistication of women in their country and are therefore turning to the fantasy of prostitutes dressed up as school-girls. “Image Clubs” as they are called cater for every paedophilia fantasy for a price tag of over $170 an hour. As it is legal for men to have sex with children older than 12 and with no specific child pornography laws, porn involving minors is regularly and widely consumed. Japan is drenched with paedophilia imagery from Manga comics to coffee adverts.

Prosecutions of hard core contraband have actually decreased as popularity for more extreme versions of porn have increased which include bestiality, sadomasochism, necrophilia, rape and incest. In the early 1980s, European and American pornographic video tapes were the most prevalent form of contraband seized by Japanese custom agents from travellers returning from aboard. One researcher illustrates the level of the American exporting of porn has now been normalized abroad: “These materials were routinely confiscated. Now such tapes are locally produced and readily available in Japanese shops. They often contain actors or actresses that are still legal minors.” ^[16]

The spear-heading of the new Capitalistic-Communist phenomenon that is the Republic of China has the sex industry generally at the forefront of its economic drive. The country now provides 70 percent of the world’s sex toys. Plastic vaginas, red bondage outfits and all shapes and sizes of vibrators are part of the new boom industry.^[17]

China’s youth is also becoming more promiscuous with increasing cases of Triad-run prostitution rackets. A lack of sex education is being filled by porn, violent computer games and conformity to the state. To ease the transition from one form of Pathocracy to another; a communist paucity to a capitalist excess is now fusing together.

The interactive possibilities of cyber-porn has corporations salivating at the prospect of finally and literally plugging in our senses to a virtual world of soft, seductive fantasy. This is still far from reaching the dizzy heights talked of in cyber magazines and net journals. However, imagine that you can eventually install an “in-game body” to act just like your biological body, where your brain is disconnected from your biological senses and connected to synthetic ones?

Somehow, I don’t think this will end well …

 

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Notes

[1] p.136; Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships by Marnia Robinson. Published by North Atlantic Books,U.S.  2009. / ISBN-10: 1556438095.
[2] Ibid. (p.149)
[3] Ibid. (p.143)
[4] Ibid. (p.146)
[5] ‘Hamilton School Children Imitating TV and Internet Porn in Sexual “Experiments”’ April 5, 2004 LifeSiteNews.com
[6] W. L. Marshall, ‘The Use of Sexually Explicit Stimuli by Rapists, Child Molesters, and Non-offenders,’ The Journal of Sex Research 25, no.2 (May 1988): 267-88. This study reported that 53 per cent of child molesters deliberately used the stimuli of pornography as they prepared to offend.
[7] N2h2.com survey from http://www.securecomputing.com
[8] ‘Mummy, I want to be a porn star’ by Kira Cochrane, The Sunday Times September 18, 2005.
[9] ‘Wall Street Meets Pornography’ by Timothy Egan, New York Times, October 23, 2000.
[10] ‘Selling sex: A Beate Uhse store’ by Edward Helmore, The Observer, September 12, 1999.
[11] p.58; Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families by Pamela Paul. Published by St. Martin’s Griffin; Reprint edition, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0805081321.
[12] N2h2.com survey from securecomputing.com (data from 2003).
[13] ‘Officers discover sex-slave cult’ BBC News, 19 May 2006 “Durham Police discovered the bizarre sect after raiding a home in the area, after receiving complaints that a woman was being held against her will. But a spokesman said the Canadian was a willing participant and the other people involved were consenting adults. The group, called Kaotians, follow the Chronicles of Gor novels which depict a society where women are dominated. The 29-year-old woman is said to have voluntarily attended the sect after finding out about it over the internet.
[14] 1-2-3 Be a Porn Star! A Step-By-Step Guide to the Adult Sex Industry by Ana Lori
[15] ‘Why is the Web like an iceberg?’ By Joel Deane, ZDNet News, July 6, 1999.
[16] ‘Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan’ International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22(1): 1-22. 1999.
[17]  ‘Sex is China’s latest boom industry’ by Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, June 25, 2005.

Pornucopia: The Cult of the Body I

By M.K. Styllinski

“Lying is the native language of porn stars because they can’t afford to tell you the truth. Not only would it ruin the fantasy for their fans but more importantly, it would ruin the amount of their paychecks.”

– Shelly Lubben, ex-top porn-star

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Even though responsible cosmetic surgeons insist that their clients must be 18 to have surgery, many girls (who are now mature much more quickly) will be seen by the surgeon if accompanied by an adult such as a parent. It is the army of advertisers, television makeover shows, obsessive celebrities and film stars which create the demand for the booming global business of cosmetic surgery. ^[1]

A recent study found that by the age of 12, three-quarters of girls disliked something about their appearance and by 16, one in four were considering cosmetic surgery. ^[2] In the US, cosmetic surgery is another symptom of a growing number of insecure girls and women. Americans spent just under $12.5 billion on cosmetic procedures in 2004. ^[3] Some of the most popular treatments include liposuction, tummy tucks, breast enlargements, eyelid surgery, face lifts, lip implants, and rhinoplasty. Non-surgical cosmetic procedures are also rocketing with Botox and collagen fat injections, chemical peels, micro-dermabrasion, haylauronic acid and laser hair removal, all up by large percentages, hyaluronic acid being the most significant at a whopping 659 percent. ^[4] Or perhaps you want a: “… booty like J-Lo’s? With buttock-boosting surgery, it can be yours!” In nearly every US state plastic surgeons are being inundated with requests from patients to provide them gluteal implants, the latest rage among young and not so young, American women. ^[5] In 2004, the upward trend in popularity for cosmetic surgery continued to almost 11.9 million surgical cases. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) this represents a colossal 465 percent increase in the total number of cosmetic procedures.^[6] Once again, the onus on women to change is represented by a total of 90 percent of all the surgery with men at only 8 percent. The most common procedures for age 18-and-under were: laser hair removal, chemical peel, microdermabrasion, rhinoplasty, and laser skin resurfacing.

The number of teens who choose to get plastic surgery is also on the rise. 335,000 people 18 years and younger had plastic surgery in 2003, up from about 306,000 in 2000. Although much of this includes procedures that could be considered necessary such as scarring, facial or body abnormalities, or where individuals suffer from severe psychological stress, equally appears to result from children’s distorted attitudes to their bodies. Consequently, the most common procedures teens choose include nose reshaping, ear reshaping, acne treatment, and breast reduction/enlargement.

In Scotland, UK, under the influence of ever more available pornography and glamour rags hundreds of teenagers have had National Health Service (NHS) funded cosmetic surgery, including breast enlargement, some of them in a desperate bid to escape being bullied at school. ^[7] While across the Atlantic, a rise in breast enlargements for teens in California stem mainly from peer pressure and the quest to find the perfect image for graduation. One surgeon commented on the latest influx of 16-18 year olds who regarded the surgery: “as having your hair done or getting a new watch.” ^[8] Or, as another surgeon expressed it, breasts are indeed a “fashion item.” And with prices for breast augmentation starting at just under $4,000 to $10,000 this is definitely a nouveau-riche teen market that ultimately plays havoc with girls’ transition to womanhood and their place in a male dominated world.

As in the US, Australia’s Gold Coast graduates are taking on jobs to fund their wish for bigger breasts or smaller noses.  Singapore’s recent boom in cosmetic surgery includes a surgical makeover package “the trendy new thing to do in a wealthy city-state, where girls as young as 15 have their features altered or enhanced.”^[9] Or if you tire of the dangers of silicon perhaps you would like to grow your own breasts via stem cell research, currently the rage in Russia? ^[10] There appears to be no limit to the lengths to which our body sense is forced into new synthetic designs and no limit to the number of surgeons willing to line their pockets to do so.

As a major symptom of our narcissistic culture we are seeing a rising tide of body-centrism manifesting through the highly lucrative worlds of entertainment. Voyeurism is a standard mechanism of T.V. and cinema. Our desire for  “reality T.V.” and “true life” drama veers dangerously close to feeding off and “getting off” on the cruel and degenerate, the salacious and gratuitous, to which we are now all accustomed to believing is somehow “entertaining.” The task of entertaining (or entraining) the new generations of children has been taken on by what has been called the “pimp and whore” culture of the pop world, where role models appear to be celebrating the underbelly of human trafficking and prostitution that befall millions of girls and young women worldwide.

Pop icons such as Christina Aguilera, or Rhianna fresh from the factory line of “made-to-order-music” simulate endless videos of choreographed “orgies,” while scores of Beyoncé’s and Britney’s writhe around their male dancers creating “doggy-style” dance poses, pouting cynically while their managers and accountants salivate. They are curious ambassadors for a kind of soft porn consciousness for emerging teenagers. School girls think that this is worthy of their aspirations in order to be liked and loved adding to the burgeoning pressure to conform and perhaps even contributing to a rise in the early onset of puberty. ^[11]

X-factor, American Idol and Big brother reality shows are the mainstay of weekend television. Programmes such as Dutch reality TV show “Pimp my life” is a case in point and representative of an extreme but increasingly common trend. Tramps are plucked off the street, given a state of the high-life then sent out to get a job within a certain timescale. The cable Music channel MTV’s “Pimp my Ride” that showcases new talent all normalise and popularise the jargon of the underworld. This creates the idea that prostitution and exclusive sex are cool and hip. They become role models and legitimate aims of the young, tied as they are into fashion and entertainment that are so much a part of youth consciousness. When such images are partnered with multi-million dollar advertising campaigns the emptiness of this programming only reinforces insecurity and self-esteem problems. To be liked, one must be thin; to be accepted one must be wearing the latest Nike trainers; to be desired one must be, above all super-sexual. Too bad that these are purely tried and tested marketing ploys aimed at tapping the freshly rushing hormones of youth in order to provide maximum dividends for the old.

Sex, not least pornography, has settled easily into the mainstream flow. It is not a question of playing a puritanical card or being prudish concerning the nature of human sexuality, rather, the mainstreaming of the sex industry as a relatively marginal influence has come to occupy a strategic and central position in the development of international capitalism and sociocultural mores. We see the continuing “prostitution” meme manifesting in implicit and explicit terms. Entertainment is the residual leftover of this toxic economy in human misery.

With adulthood effectively being sold to kids of a younger and younger age, there is now a kind of caste snobbery in the classroom where children judge each other by their branding and their wealth. Teens now aspire to be twenty-something’s in a manner more desperate than even ten years ago. Look at glossy magazines and the almost pre-pubescent girls on many advertising campaigns appear to cater for the pederast within the fashion industry than the ordinary buyer.  You may also find it difficult to correctly age teenagers now as we walk in the high street. This has ramifications for sexual misdemeanours and alleged felonies when 14 year olds look 6 to 7 years older due to biological factors, peer pressure and the associated influences of the entertainment and media industry that demand their brand of “perfection.” The two influences may not be unconnected.

The Miley Cyrus entertainment puppet who introduced the “twerking” phenomenon as another variant of simulated sex. An updating of the Madonna school of programming. And of course, this is merely another form of female emancipation. Or is it just the whore archetype projected as role model?

In the late 1990s up to 2003 Magazines such as “Nuts,” “Zoo,” “Bizarre,” “Loaded” “Guts” and many others were filling a marketable gap between soft and hard porn with accompanying stereotypical images, often positioned next to violence and death depicted from all four corners of the world. However, their appeal has waned, not perhaps due to their content, rather to the notion of accessibility: why buy a magazine when you can view it on your i-pad free? If we remember the previous summary of neurology and visual imagery contouring certain neural fields, we can see that this could be considered an important factor in the distortion of developing emotions and the emerging world views of children, notwithstanding the chemical components of addiction and early negative stereotyping.

The connection between abuse and the drastic change in accessibility of porn and its gradual mainstreaming into prime-time viewing is not necessarily the cause but it can be seen as an underlying shift in perception whereby children are encouraged to step into the cross-hairs of a premature, precocious sexuality. The role models both in fashion and MTV-Pop lifestyle offer a mix of what one writer bluntly called: “The Empowered Whore Archetype,”^[1] and a stick-thin drug-chic lauded in the fashion industry. And on other hand we have the gym-pumped male who wears eye-liner, the uniform of gelled-hair and tattoos while seeking to emulate the myths of Don Juan promiscuity to match the new low standards that girls are encouraged to aspire.

Veteran journalist and feminist Joan Bakewell expressed her disquiet on this issue in a recent article:

“So what is there to complain about? It is the availability – indeed, the marketing – of such raunchy videos to the young and impressionable that disturbs me. Something has shifted in our culture to bring sub-teens within the orbit of suggestive sexual activity. T-shirts with cheeky, even lewd slogans – jokes that only adults can understand – are designed and sold to the under-10s. Children can hunt on a multitude of television channels for something that looks vaguely adult and vaguely transgressive. Can it be good for them?”

Set against a narcissistic culture, increasing abuse and acceptance of what is essentially, a psychopathic world-view – the answer has to be no. As Bakewell eloquently states, she was certainly at the forefront of sexual liberation in the 1960s, yet while this cultural shift pushed the boundaries of adult sexuality it bears little resemblance to the level of sexual imagery which bombards children and young adults on a daily basis. This amounts to an induction of pathologies where “traditional values” (without the baggage of conservative or religious connotations) are seen as “quaint” or passé.

The transition of Miley Cyrus as actress and girl-next-door role model, to the pop star-whore archetype is a particularly graphic example of the music industry’s manipulation of soft porn sensibilities marketed to the younger generation. Whether Ms. Cyrus thinks she is striking a blow for feminism or simply believes that this is indeed a suitable marketing coup to rake in the dollars, is anybody’s guess. For such a transformation to take place her producer (or pimp)  has clearly taken advantage of the emerging womanhood of Cyrus and exploited it to its fullest extent. The music standing on its own merit seems lost in yet another new phenomena of “twerking.”

Sex and music have always been joined at the hip. This time however, the sophistication of technology, has made it highly accessible (not least, musical content and often occult imagery – but that’s another subject ) which means that the lowest common denominator of instinct and gratuity is assimilated into the highly impressionable and emotional minds of the young 24/7.  Official Culture demands it. With no role models available to mitigate this onslaught and fused with so many other subtle addictions tweens and teens are exposed to highly charged imagery flooding the fives senses. Not only is this way too early but it is gratuitous to the point of complete saturation.

Alongside all this sexual hoopla and no doubt following on from trail of gratuitous-porn-gore-violence-set-to-motown-music so beloved of film director Quentin Tarantino, we have the massive popularity of the US TV drama series Dexter currently cleaning up on ratings and book sales. It tells the story of a forensic scientist by day and psychopathic killer by night, hacking and bludgeoning his way through various unsavoury characters who “deserve to die” no doubt acting as an entertaining catharsis for the millions who tune in. Of course, the character is sexy, funny, ostensibly caring and intelligent. He could be anyone of us. Is it merely the same re-enactment of serial killer voyeurism, or is there now an acceptance of the psychopath as somehow human and honourable if he takes out the dregs of humanity? And what message does this send to kids unconsciously grappling with the very real effects of psychopathy in our culture at large?

This inverted super-hero rides on the back of a glut of vampire, demons and werewolf movies and books aimed at teens and young adults. Evil hasn’t become just an anti-hero but the hero or heroine to root for.  The “good and evil” duality has all but disappeared to be replaced with “evil vs. evil” along with all the seductive trappings of black leather, buxom babes and steely-jawed sensitive males. The film Underworld (2003) about a beautiful gun-toting vampire who falls in love with a werewolf has the promotional catchphrase: “Which side will you choose?” The choice has become like so many elections the world over a choice between “the lesser of two evils” which in fact, is no choice at all.

So many disenfranchised youth on the streets of American cities are not finding meaning and purpose in the standard representation of family life plagued by socio-economic factors as well as the inevitable psychological dislocation which results. Instead many children and young adults gravitate towards gang culture which provides meaning and emotional belonging. However, many gangs require initiation tests of brutal violence and sometimes murder. Indeed, gang violence is one of the most pressing problems in both the UK, the US and Latin America. It indicates a spiritual vacuum in our youths that goes to the heart of Official Culture. Mixed messages in the representation of sexuality, emotions and the incessant focus on self-image and celebrity shapes the developing minds and bodies of the young. In turn, this will have a direct influence on their notion of morality, ethics and how they eventually perceive the world and their place in it.

Viewing explicit sexual imagery literally charges the blood. It is a bio-chemical “opiate”. After all, these are the chemicals that flow through our bodies that create liaisons, affairs, unions and marriages. The latter rituals are naturally very often doomed to failure precisely because of this false chemical romance. A frequent, early exposure to such visual stimulation in the child may in some cases a desensitisation which means a greater threshold of stimulation is required causing the desire to seek out material of a harder or more extreme quality. Increasing stimulation can lead to addiction whether child or adult. The former however, is more vulnerable to the power of such images due to the level of emotional immaturity and hormonal influences. The net result is an atrophying of the finer emotions and the ability to love in deference to power of instinct.

Former porn actress Shelley Lubben is an expert on the reality of the multi-billion dollar business. She even wrote a book about it called The Truth about the Fantasy Behind Porn – The Greatest Illusion on Earth which shatters the myth of glamour and sexual liberation that the industry and their models try to promote. Lubben believes that the porn industry frequently destroys lives and she is someone that is in the position to know.  She states: “I used to brag endlessly to fans and pornographers about how I loved making porn movies. I lied 100 percent of the time to 100 percent of the people.” ^[2]

Lubben has carefully researched some interesting statistics about the world of porn that has become so normalised in the 21^st Century. On her website and her book we learn that:

• 36 porn stars died that we know of from HIV, suicide, homicide and drugs between 2007 and 2010.
• 66percent of porn performers have Herpes, a non-curable disease.
• 2,396 cases of Chlamydia and 1,389 cases of Gonorrhea reported among performers since 2004.
• Over 100 straight and gay performers died from AIDS.
• 26 cases of HIV reported by Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (AIM), since 2004.
• 70percent of sexually transmitted infections in the porn industry occur in females according to County of Los Angeles Public Health.
• Chlamydia and Gonorrhea among performers is 10x greater than that of LA County 20-24 year olds.
• The largest group viewing online pornography is ages 12 to 17.
• More than 11 million teens regularly view porn online.
• There are 4.2 million pornographic websites, 420 million pornographic web pages, and 68 million daily search engine requests. ^[3]

A more lengthy extract from Lubben’s book is worth including here in case the reader is under any illusion at all as to the nature of the industry. Here, from the horse’s mouth:

“Many believe the widespread fairy-tale that women enjoy making porn movies but the truth is there are no happy endings for the women of porn. Women do NOT enjoy making porn movies and a closer behind-the-scenes look will show you several reasons why.

In the world of hardcore sex, an average day on the set for a porn actress is a long and tedious process. Women are told to come in around 8 am for makeup but it’s only to make sure porn actresses arrive on time to work. Porn stars have a nasty habit of arriving late because they’re often hung over from drugs or alcohol from the night before.

After make-up, porn actresses usually wait around long hours until it’s their turn to do their scene. Some scenes take an hour and some take several hours to film. It really depends if the male actor in the first scene could “perform” or not. It also depends if female actresses have to stop the clock because they can’t handle the pain of a hardcore sex scene.

While waiting around, jaded porn performers usually end up in the rest rooms with bottles of alcohol and lines of speed or outside in their cars for a heroin fix or gathered in the back yard with other actors to smoke marijuana.

To add to the mind-numbing process, women are never able to experience sexual pleasure because of the continuous cutting during sex scenes. In the background the director constantly yells, “cut” and the flow of action is interrupted in order to get a better shot, adjust lighting or to wipe up bodily fluids. Repeatedly pornographers stop scenes and ask actors to “freeze” in position during very hardcore sex acts, which causes great physical and emotional pain for porn actresses.

I speak from personal experience when I say to be in the middle of a hardcore sex act with several actors at the same time and told to “freeze” in position for several minutes while lighting or cameras are adjusted is extremely painful and degrading. It’s also very humiliating when scenes are stopped in order to wipe up bodily fluids such as semen, feces and blood.

Despite the fact women do not enjoy making porn movies, they continue to lie to their fans and proudly insist they enjoy making porn movies. Of course they do. They get paid hundreds and thousands of dollars to lie because this is their occupation. Porn stars are paid professional liars who know how to “act” and they do it well. In fact, because porn stars spend a great deal time in front of the camera and never step out of character, they usually have greater acting abilities than mainstream Hollywood actors.

I used to brag endlessly to fans and pornographers about my extreme “Italian” sex drive and how I loved making porn movies. I would go on and on about how I needed more and more to fulfill my insatiable appetite. I lied 100 percent of the time to 100 percent of the people. Lying is the native language of porn stars because they can’t afford to tell you the truth. Not only would it ruin the fantasy for their fans but more importantly, it would ruin the amount of their paychecks. Don’t believe porn actresses when they proudly proclaim they enjoy making porn movies. They’re ACTING.” ^[4]

Suicide Squad? Porn Stars Who Died Under Vague Circumstances

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Notes

[1] ‘Makeover shows ‘increase desire for surgery’ Reuters, July 13 2006.
[2] Quoted in ‘Teens max out on plastic’ Phil Bartsch, Courier Mail, May 01, 2006.
[3] Cosmetic Plastic Surgery Research Statistics and Trends for 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004.
[4] Hyaluronic acid (also called Hyaluronan) is a component of connective tissue whose function is to cushion and lubricate. It has since been synthesized and marketed on this basis as a sort of “key to the fountain of Youth” and a remedy for premature ageing. The resultant gel is injected into the face to smooth lines, wrinkles, and scars on the skin.
[5] ‘Want a booty like J. Lo’s? With buttock-boosting surgery, it can be yours’ By E.J. Mundell, MSNBC Feb. 18, 2004.
[6] US physicians and surgeons survey by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 2004 (ASAPS).
[7] ‘Teenagers go under knife to beat bullies’ By Richard Gray, Scotland on Sunday, July 9, 2006.
[8] ‘Teens Getting Breast Implants for Graduation’ By Susan Kreimer, Women’s eNews. June 30, 2004.
[9] ‘Plastic surgery booms in Singapore’IOL South Africa, April 25 2006.
[10] Grow-your-own breast implants on the way’ by Sophie Goodchild, The Independent, March 28, 2005.[11] ‘Stress “fuelling early puberty’ BBC News, 7 February, 2006. “Children’s bodies are maturing faster unhealthy lifestyles and unstable family environments may be contributing to a fall in the age that girls reach puberty, research suggests.”
[11] ‘The “Empowered” Whore Archetype Destroying the Feminine’ by Thomas Sheridan thomassheridanarts.blogspot.com Sat, 22 Oct 2011.
[12] http://www.shellylubben.com
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.