thought-control is more than conspiracy theory

One of the new channels provided by Youtube carries Conspiracy Theories with Jesse Ventura. The doughty former Minnesota governor’s forays into X-Files territory are fun to watch but indicative of deeper suspicions that out leaders are out of control.

Brain Invaders was no different, centring on suspicions that US authorities are using microwave radiation to disrupt people’s thinking and even insert thoughts.

Somehow I doubt the programme’s thesis; yet behaviour control has been practiced since Pavlov showed he could condition dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell, despite the absence of what had originally caused salivation. Later, BF Skinner wrote about how people could live sustainably in societies where their lives were planned in meticulous detail in a book was chillingly titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

But much more useful to the Establishment is to shape the very self to their designs so that our thoughts, and therefore our behaviours, fall within the parameters they set.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a "talking cure" whereby, in conversation with a therapist, the patient gradually learns to change the way they think about themselves, which in turn transforms harmful or even pathological behaviour. It is a wonderful tool and eases much misery, but it would be naïve of the Establishment not to see its wider applications.

Through the diversity industry, individuals get messages from all around about what they can and can’t say from day one, the intention being to condition what they can and can’t think. For example, why are British people of all backgrounds being discouraged from questioning the motives of those who agitate for an end to democracy, mutilation of young girls and use of rape as colonialist policy?

So let’s apply a talking cure of our own: let’s keep talking about the growing oppression under which we labour.

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

Click for episodes of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura on YouTube

Click for text of Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner

Find out more about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy at Resilient Mindset

How does our Language shape the way we think? by Professor lera Boroditsky

"plebgate": mischief, or coup d'état?

In the "plebgate" row, the then Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell was supposed to have used the epithet after police officers refused to open the main gates of Downing Street to let him through with his bike.

Now, a Channel 4 News investigation casts the conversation into doubt. CCTV footage reveals both that a conversation of the length alleged was unlikely, and that witnesses referred to in the police log, leaked to the Telegraph, simply were not present.

An email sent to John Randall MP by a constituent also appears not only to have been fabricated but not even sent by the signatory, revealed as a serving police officer whom reporter Michael Crick described as "a very frightened man", who mentioned there were "others in the background". Ken Mackaill of the West Mercia Police Federation was shown to have reported dishonestly on a meeting with Mr Mitchell in the light of a Conservative Party Press Officer’s recording of the proceedings.

Mischief? Possibly: officers promoted under Tony Blair’s regime will be senior now, and many would jump at the chance of a senior ministerial scalp.

But what if this goes beyond mischief to the realm of conspiracy? A governmental Chief Whip arguably wields disciplinary powers second only to the Prime Minister. Anybody who can destabilise a Chief Whip could easily do the same to the Government, and a politicised senior police cadre who see the Labour Party as the king over the political waters might well have motive to do so in order to precipitate an election.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe said he hoped people would support his actions when they “hear the full story", according to BBC News: I’m sure we’re all waiting with baited breath to hear how he justifies what might just have been the opening shot of a coup d’état.

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

Andrew Mitchell 'stitched up' in plebgate row - video - 4 news

Bernard Hogan-Howe [Matropolitan Police Commisioner] on Andrew Mitchell officer arrest - BBC News

In full: Police log detailing Andrew Mitchell's 'pleb' rant - Daily Telegraph

Newton massacre: the hardest lesson

If truth is the first casualty of war, it can be no less persecuted in the search for meaning. And in the understandable quest for meaning behind Adam Lanza’s shocking gun rampage in Connecticut it’s not impossible that the press-driven quest for narrative will prove injurious.

For example, the Telegraph mentions Asperger’s and personality disorder in relation to Lanza. He may well be diagnosed with these, but it seems significant that these are the two conditions mostly used as catch-alls to hold individuals who fall between the cracks in psychiatry.

The American Psychiatric Association refers to "limited data available about this newly introduced disorder" (Asperger’s), while the diagnostic criteria in the US Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) are rather broad.

Personality disorders are a wide spectrum of conditions whose symptoms are not exclusively linked to the individual’s inner experience: DSM-IV comments that "An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior the deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual's culture", potentially stigmatising many of us and dependent upon the diagnosing clinician’s assessment not just of the individual but also of the "expectations of the individual’s culture". Does somebody on a sink estate with aspirations to succeed have a personality disorder?

Lanza owned a copy of The Catcher in the Rye which the Telegraph article calls "the classic tale of troubled youth", but over 60,000,000 copies of the book have been sold and there haven’t been 60,000,000 massacres. (I found it marginally less interesting than watching paint dry.)

Reasons can help us understand, which may be important for many Newtown residents as they grieve for the victims of this awful massacre. But, tragically, perhaps the only reason is that there was no reason and there are no lessons to be learnt, except the hardest lesson, that of carpe diem. May the victims of this atrocious crime rest in peace.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

murder by suicide: the war against moderate British Muslims continues

The inquest into the death of former British Library manager Rema Begum has been told that the former British Library manager jumped to her death after a campaign of hate by a stalker who abused her over her "western" lifestyle.

Ms Begum had been described as "happy and bubbly", but suffered personality changes apparently resulting from the stalking, becoming depressed and forming an idea that she was "impure" after person or persons unknown sent a barrage of hate-male to both her and her parents. She "calmly" jumped from the Coq d’Argent restaurant in London.

If the facts above leave you nonplussed, it may clear things up a little to know that Ms Begum was a Muslim living a westernised life. It’s also surely not insignificant that she lived in Islington, a borough whose level of Islamisation has sunk to such depths that nine-year-old girls have been found in forced marriages there.

Rema Begum represented that which Islamism hates and fears most: a Muslim woman who had found happiness in integration.

This underlines the madness of the Establishment policy of trying to sideline patriots like the English Defence League by labelling us racists and fascists, when the freedoms of conscience, speech, association and worship we are trying to save are only meaningful if they are applied to everybody within these shores. When we struggle for these freedoms we do so not just for ourselves but for everybody, including those who came here for a better life but instead found themselves persecuted by the beard-and-burqa imperialists they sought to escape.

A country where one group of people are subject to oppression cannot call itself free. But freedom is costly: witness Rema Begum’s martyrdom in the cause of liberty. May she rest in peace in heaven – she’s been dragged through hell here.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

get rid of this scum now

It’s entirely symptomatic of modern liberal values that, days after driving a devoted mother and wife to her suicide, the two DJs who did the deed appeared on Australian TV shedding tears for themselves and trying to make the case that it wasn’t their fault because it was a joke.

Jacintha Salhana, as is now well known, killed herself after putting Mel Grieg and Michael Christian, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles, through to the nurse caring for the Duchess of Cambridge’s. Ms Saldanha no doubt belonged to the school of thought that held a nurse’s duty to her patients to be a sacred trust, and any violation of this to be an attack upon the patient and upon this trust.

I would like to say that it is incomprehensible such a stunt could have been aired, but we are talking about a station that in 2009 aired a show where a DJ hooked a 14-year old girl to a lie-detector and cajoled her into admitting to being raped at the age of twelve.

While the original, muscular liberals like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Hobbes would have demanded Grieg and Christian mount the scaffold, what is specifically symptomatic of modern liberalism is that the white bullies are receiving counselling but the Goan family has been left dangling. It’s the same situation writ large that you see in many schools: bullies get extra attention and input, while the victims are left wondering whether it was all somehow their fault.

This is not about royalty or monarchism or any of the movements opposing them: responsible republicans are just as shocked. I ask only one thing of the Australian people and their government: please do something about the scum at 2Say FM radio now.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

the n-word: is hate based on race?

I’ve only ever said the word "nigger" once, at home after having heard in primary school. My Mum had lived in the US in the early 1960s, and was probably more aware of the word’s cultural history and emotional import than the person who had used it: her face fell into such a mask of disappointment that I never said it again.

What brought this back was a debate on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 talk-show about a white man who has been cleared of using racially aggravated words or behaviour after shouting the n-word at a black man. Christopher Jones, a rap fan with more black friends than white, argued successfully that he could not be racist because the word is part of his everyday vocabulary.

On Vine’s show was Pauline Pearce, a jazz singer and radio personality who famously upbraided rioters in London. She was debating with a hip-hop fan on the acceptability of the word, and both got into a muddle because they use the word as a term of endearment with black friends, but agreed that the term is offensive when used by white people.

Then Vine read out an email from a Yitzhak Hussein, who said sometimes the n-word was acceptable, but the "p-word" never was. Jeremy’s had that debate before with similar conclusions: Pakistanis can call each other Paki – as in "Paki live TV shows" – but from whites the word is an insult.

Could it be that laws banning hate-speech are creating linguistic ghettos on the basis of the sinister and outmoded concept of race, where freedom of speech depends on the amount of melatonin in one’s skin? In that case I’m with Rowan Atkinson on his opposition to hate-speech laws: "feel free to insult me!" Just don’t take offence when I reply in kind.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click to go to the Jeremy Vine Show 5 December 2012

300 needles found: why the surprise?

The Cambridge news reports that 3,000 dirty needles have been found in a flat in the east side of Cambridge. OK, I’ll bite and point to the elephant: in our high-surveillance society, in the middle of a city infested with CCTV cameras, why is Cambridge City Council surprised at such a large find?

Cllr Paul Saunders gives assurances that one user can generate a large amount of needles, and that’s true, especially when injecting a stimulant with a short half-life. But given how hard it is to evict somebody these days, I would guess that there were numerous complaints and a fairly sizeable body of police intelligence.

I don’t talk of eviction lightly. The psychology and biology of addiction cause a person’s life to turn around what they’re addicted to, and when they get that thing the chemicals released in the brain’s reward pathway make them believe they’re happy. When somebody beats an addiction, it’s almost always because they’ve experienced how bad things can get, often more than once. The former tenant now has a goal to attain: to get back into long-term housing. I wish him or her well, and hope the neighbours have a quieter life.

The same report quotes Cllr Simon Sedgwick-Jell advocating a "shooting gallery" where addicts can safely inject. This might yet be unavoidable as part of a treatment program using drugs prescribed after individual assessment, especially as heroin and cocaine production can only be interdicted by the international community.

But while a drugs-worker, users complained to me that prisons are full of drugs, even if they weren’t, stays for possession and even supply don’t last long enough to get clean, and some homeless shelters can be full of drugs. I would add that those remaining residential rehabs are finding survival ever more difficult: and these are all problems solvable within our borders.

Gerry Dorrian 300 words