DerekMartin.ca

The Media is also a method of “remote control”. It shows you things that give you ideas. Those ideas influence your actions; maybe not as directly as with an actual remote control, but it influences you none the less. So, the question is: Who is holding the remote control? Who controls the media? Who controls your mind?Of course you have ultimate control over your mind, but if you really want to be in control you have to stop letting the other remote controls into your life, or at least be selective about which ones you do let in. Do you trust The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, or the National Post? You shouldn’t. They’re owned by the same person — Conrad Black. (Rupert Murdoch is another big name to watch out for). How about NBC, CBS, ABC? They’re also owned by a mega-corporation. Who can you trust? Independents who do their own research. You have to find trustworthy sources, and ignore the rest — especially on controversial issues. If you find a news source that’s reporting on something none of the major networks are covering, it might be a good source. Still, you should check out their ownership chain. Is “The Independent” really independent? This is not some nut conspiracy thing. This is how things work.How? First you need to know how TV shows make money. TV is free (non-cable tv), so they don’t get paid just for broadcasting. Advertisers pay to have their commercials shown during certain TV shows. The more popular the show, the more expensive it is to show a commercial during that show (because more advertisers are competing for those spots). So - TV is about advertising, not about entertaining. It just so happens that if you have the most entertaining shows, you can charge more for your advertising (Superbowl charges the most). Radio works the same way. Magazines are a bit different. They make a little bit of money from you paying for the magazine, but not nearly enough to make it profitable. That’s why almost every page has an advertisement on it. Magazines also make their money from advertising. Whenever you see something nice, ask yourself “who is paying for this, and why?” Lets do an example, to show you how the world works:Loreal wants to sell make-up. It’s easy to sell to self-conscious & unattractive people. The problem is that only a fraction of the people in the world are self-conscious or unattractive. That limits potential profits. The best way to sell more make-up is to make more people feel self-conscious and less attractive, but how? Show commercials with the most beautiful women putting on make-up and saying “I need to cover up this tiny ‘blemish’ that makes my entire body ugly”. If that super-model needs make-up to be beautiful, and if I’m not as attractive as that super-model, then I *definitely* need it if I want to be beautiful. This is how to *create a need*. So, the method in place is: a) have a product; b) increase the perceived need for that product; c) sell more of that product. I say ‘perceived need’ because there is no *real* need for make-up. It doesn’t make you healthier. It may not even make you more beautiful. Heck, the wrong make-up can even make you uglier, but for whatever reason, you believe it makes you more beautiful. It’s your perception they are manipulating. But there’s more to it! Lets say Loreal owns a magazine, like Cosmopolitan. Lots of women read Cosmo for beauty tips. Do you think Cosmo would allow Revlon to advertise on its pages if it is owned by Loreal? Hell no! (unless Revlon & Loreal are owned by the same company) To give you a more concrete example, have you ever wondered why McDonalds only serves Coca-Cola and not Pepsi, and why Burger King only serves Pepsi and not Coca-Cola? The same company that owns McDonalds also owns Coca-Cola, but not Burger King or Pepsi. Some other big company owns them. In the marketing & advertising world everything works through corporate incest. Inter-breeding is not allowed. Do you know why you’ve never seen Bugs Bunny & Wyle E. Coyote at Disney World? Sure, they’re cuddly and cute, but they are Warner Brothers Characters, not Disney Characters — so they’re not allowed in Disney World. So, if everybody is owned by somebody, then whoeverhas the most money holds the remote control. Who has the most money & power?Global organizations & governments. I lump these two together because neither one is more powerful. Sure, the government could have corporate executives arrested, but then that corporation could pull its funding for various programs, and if that corporation is big enough it could be devastating to the local economy — Especially if that corporation makes yearly donations. What are some of the largest corporations? I’m guessing Lockheed Martin, General Electric, & Coca-Cola. What do they do? G.E. doesn’t just make dishwashers. They make light and heavy military armaments. Lockheed Martin makes fighter jets & bombers and secret weapons. Coca-Cola provides CIA agents with cover jobs at their factories in almost every country in the world, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is this: if a government or global corporation doesn’t want you to know something, all they have to do is ban the media that they own from reporting on the story. They literally *own* the media, so the media have to obey. A reporter might have the story of the decade, but if it’s on a “do not report” list, the story will never get out. You’ll never hear about it. Stories that make governments and corporations look bad are the first ones to be banned. Yesterday I told you that if you serve free food to homeless people in San Francisco you will be arrested by riot police. It shocked me, yet I had never heard of it. Why is that? Precisely *because* it would shock me. It makes the government look bad. They are spending money on weapons to defeat other nations while their own citizens are starving at home. The Ultimate Remote ControlLets have a little adventure in remote-control-land, shall we? You find a lamp out in the desert and rub it 3 times. Out pops a genie who offers you 1 wish. As the President of the Student Council, you ask to be able to do something that would normally piss off a lot of people, and always have the majority of people’s support. The genie says, “Done!… but it’s too bad that’s what you wished for. You can do that without magic. Here’s how…” Lets start simple. You want a new pop machine in the cafeteria and a new stereo for yourself, but you need all the votes of student council to agree before the motion to buy a new pop machine will pass, and Jim won’t agree because he’s a health-nut. Plus you’re broke and can’t afford a stereo. How can you get what you want? First, you need to CREATE A PROBLEM (that doesn’t exist in reality) — Take the pop machine money and tell the students that there will be no new pop machine because someone broke into the Student Council Piggybank and took all the bills. After a day or two, tell everyone that you received an anonymous note from a math student who saw an auto mechanics student about six feet tall with red hair come out of the nurse’s room on the day of the crime (the nurse’s room doubles as the Student Council Chambers after school). This gets people mad at the auto mechanics students, who no one really understands anyway. Plus, math students are so precise that they couldn’t be wrong, right? Did I forget to mention that Jim is a tall auto mechanics student with red hair? Review: 1) Have a hidden desire (you want a new pop machine for the cafeteria, but you also want a new stereo for yourself) 2) Create a problem (take the money for the pop machine and buy a stereo, then report that the money you had to buy the pop machine was stolen) 3) Get the reaction you want (by implicating the auto mechanics students). Students are mad, cause they want pop! Students will voice their anger and demand to know what YOU are going to do about it. 4) Now YOU get to provide the solution to the problem YOU created, and that dumb patsy Jim takes the blame. 1) You kick Jim off the student council for stealing. 2) You add a $1 levy for each student to replace the money lost. 3) You get all the votes you need and install the new pop machine. Plus you have that nice new stereo you bought with the original pop machine money. Let me do a more relevant example:You are the President of the USA and you want to control the world’s oil supply, but that would require a pipeline from Afghanistan to a port in Iraq. The problem is that your business associates (The Bin Laden Family) don’t want to give you a pipeline to their oil fields, and Iraq is still kind of mad at you from the last time you bombed them, PLUS because Iraq has not done anything bad to you lately, your citizens see no reason to be at war with them. Fortunately, now that we know this method, that doesn’t matter! Step 1) Create a problem that no one will blame on you, and that will result in everyone being happy when we attack Iraq. What could possibly make Americans happy to attack Iraq? What if they were angry at Iraq for something? That’d probably do it. What could make all Americans in every state really angry, instantly? A disaster of some sort would probably do it. Since we want the Afghan pipeline, lets have some Afghanis destroy a symbol of American Power — the Trade Towers. Yeah! That’ll piss everyone off, and once they’re convinced that some Arabs want to hurt us, it’ll be easy to convince them that the Iraqis want to hurt us too. I mean, they’re the ones who tried to kill my Daddy! This will give us the free bonus prize of being able to take away everyone’s civil liberties in the name of “increased security”. PLUS if we declare this a global neverending war on terrorism, we can avoid ever giving back those liberties. Did you catch that? We’re removing your civil liberties to ensure your freedom. Step 2) Get the reaction you want. You own the media, so tell them to promote stories demanding war, or some violent reaction. Promote the stories that will outrage & infuriated people, so that they will demand action! Step 3) Offer a Solution to their demands — 1) we can be wimps and beef up our missile shield and they can attack us and other less powerful nations forever more; or 2) we can launch a war on terrorism and be the heroes of the world while at the same time getting revenge! Yes! Lets start with the capture of the Afghani Terrorists (and their oil), and moving on to any related terrorists (say, anyone else who’s Arabic or even vaguely suspicious looking). This is what you wanted to do in the first place, and now the American people are demanding that you do it. Think I’m crazy? Click on and read the links in this next bit of text. There is evidence that The President and others knew in advance about what was going to happen. President Bush told the press that “I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower — the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there’s one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn’t have much time to think about it. And I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my Chief of Staff, who is sitting over here, walked in and said, “A second plane has hit the tower, America is under attack” (official whitehouse transcript). First of all we’d expect a much bigger reaction, and secondly *there was no live footage of the first plane hitting*. It was only recovered later from people with camcorders who just happened to be filming when disaster struck. Why would he have continued reading to the children at the school when he knew a national tragedy had just occurred. Why is Bush lying to us about the chain of events, and why wasn’t he surprised? Also, why was a FEMA Team (Federal Emergency Management Agency) dispatched to New York and put on standy the night before? And why did many government officials cancel flights for September 11th just the night before? And why did a building *across* the street from the Trade Towers collapse straight down only minutes after the disaster when it had sustained NO structural damage? I don’t think it was luck that the planes hit before most people had gotten to work. I think that was planned, because although the American Government was willing to sacrifice a few thousand people, it wasn’t willing to sacrifice the full complement of those Twin Towers — thank God. Anyway, that’s the basic “PROBLEM-REACTION-SOLUTION” method for mass remote control. Interesting, eh? > “We ought not to forget that wars are a purely manufactured evil and are made according to a definite technique. A campaign for war is made upon as definite lines as a campaign for any other purpose. First, the people are worked upon. By clever takes the people’s suspicions are aroused toward the nation against whom war is desired. Make the nation suspicious; make the other nation suspicious. All you need for this is a few agents with some cleverness and no conscience and a press whose interest is locked up with the interests that will be benefitted by war.” — Henry Ford

So - the next time you watch TV, read a magazine, or listen to the radio — ask who’s paying for it, and what the goal of the advertisement is. Is it to sell a product? To cover something up? Or to make you feel inadequate? To see a more graphic representation of how this might all work, rent the movie “Wag the Dog” starring Dustin Hoffman. It’s spectacular. Another good one, along the same lines, is “Arlington Road” starring Jeff Bridges. Make no mistake, we ARE living in The Matrix, but it’s not controlled by death machines. It’s controlled by corporations. We don’t live in a computer simulation of the real world, but we do live in a world that’s absolutely covered in advertisements and false media. > The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. — Edmund Burke (1729?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú1797), Irish philosopher, statesman.

Anyway, this is why I love Michael Moore. He draws attention to the evil things that other media outlets are unable to report. He is a one-man news organization. It’s a wonder that he hasn’t been killed just to shut him up. What other media sources seem to be trustworthy? Well, Michael Moore recommends a few on his website. They include: Alternet.org, ZMag.org, CounterPunch.com, Utne.com, Guerilla News Network, IndyMedia.org, WhatReallyHappened.comWhat media sources do you trust & recommend?

Comments from my old blog:

derek said: Oh, if you want to try out the anti-spam email service that I use, you can now get a free account at Mailblocks.com. If you have hotmail, don’t worry - it can check your hotmail and filter out all the spam :) Yippee! The free account can only hold 5 meg of email, but that’s more than twice as much as Hotmail can hold anyway :) at 2004-01-09 10:39:24

derek said: also, this device is THE BOMB! at 2004-01-09 10:47:30

derek said: Comments are fixed now! Weird error. Had something to do with that last comment being the 255th comment on my blog. Apparently an integer auto_increment field needs to be more than 3 characters wide if you have more than 255 comments. Weeeeird. It should have been fine up to 999.

“The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself.” — George. W. Bush, Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29, 2003 at 2004-01-12 10:18:23

mom said: no offence, but i am glad the comment problem was at your end, because if it was from my end, that would have been the end. what i was going to say was that they used the edmund burke quote on 7th heaven one night and its so true, but i also heard this one recently and loved it. grandpa tells grandson that we each have 2 wolves inside of ourselves, they are constantly at war fighting each other. one is nasty, vindictive, angry, and evil, the other is kind, loving, nurturing and goodness. the frightened little boy asks, but grandpa, which one will win. he replies, thats easy son, the one you feed the most. love mom at 2004-01-12 11:23:15

(James Trott (UK))[http://www.wildhog.co.uk] said: Derek, the reason that it capped out at 254 is likely that the system stores digits in HEXADECIMAL, so a three digit maximum (FFFFFF) is the equivalent of 255 (or 254 including 0) hence fourth, to go beyond 3 digits, you need to increase the number of digits so you get a second pairing in the hex conversion, sounds like a bug in the auto_incrementation to me though! at 2004-01-12 11:42:17