linking to my posts

I received some feedback:

"I think you ought to consider putting each post on its own page, that way I could post the link for others to read without them feeling overwhelmed by a whole page of text."

This is a function of blogger's templates. I couldn't find one that shows the titles of the posts. The best I could do was change the archive on the left to show all the various month's archives. If anyone knows a blogger template that lists all the post titles, let me know.

If say you want to send someone a link to my post about the Pyramids, without showing the other 7 posts from January, here are 3 ways:


1) If you know what month the post is in:
- Click January on the left
- Scroll down to the title of the post on the pyramids.
- Right click on the title, and click "copy link". That link is the direct link to the post.
- Paste the link into your email.

2) Another way, if you don't know what month the old post is in, is to do a direct google search:
- "site:rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com pyramids"

3) A 3rd way is to use the search box in the upper left of the blog template:
- Type in "pyramids"
-click "search blog", and all the posts with the word "pyramids" will show.

The Truth About Obama

Many people think Obama is an outsider, an anti-war candidate, and whose rise to stardom is something for Americans to be proud of:

"Sen. Barack Obama’s amazing climb from relative obscurity to the pinnacle of American politics is something that all Americans can feel good about. It is one thing to say that any American can grow up to be president, and another to see a black man have a more than reasonable shot at doing just that."

These are all lies.

First, Obama is far from squeaky clean. He made the judicialwatch.org top ten list, along with Hillary:
http://www.judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-announces-list-washington-s-ten-most-wanted-corrupt-politicians-2007
And he's been linked to a Federal corruption trial:
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/obama-linked-federal-corruption-trial

Second, when the mass media promotes someone from zero to hero, be very suspicious. The mass media is controlled by the CFR. Any presidential candidate promoted by the corporate media - basically anyone in the media-anointed "top tier", is an insider. Obama is indeed a member of the CFR , and his wife is on the board of directors of Chicago's CCFR.

(This 1 hour video about the CFR and the corporate media is very telling:)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6632255652046262625

Third, Obama is not antiwar.

Fourth, Obama tapped Zbigniew Brzezinski as his top foreign policy adviser. Brzezinski was Henry Kissinger's protege. Kissinger was responsible for the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende in Chile for the dictator Pinochet, the extending of the Vietnam war, the bombing of Cambodia, and many, many other crimes:
http://www.counterpunch.org/carlkiss.html

In the late 90's, Brzezinski wrote a book "The Grand Chessboard". In this book Brzezinski talks about the geopolitical importance of Eurasia, and that America must dominate Eurasia to ensure its hegemony.

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” (p.30)

"The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” (pp 24-5)

"The Grand Chessboard" is eerily similar to the PNAC's 2000 document "Rebuilding America's Defenses". PNAC promotes "American hegemony" and "Full-spectrum dominance" in its own publications featured on its website.

Section V of Rebuilding America's Defenses, entitled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force", includes the sentence: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor"

In this article, Michael Rupert connects Brzezinski's book, 9-11, and the invasion of Afghanistan to make the way for an oil pipeline from the region's untapped oil deposits. 9-11 has been called "The New Pearl Harbor".

Brzezinski's other famous deed is founding the Trilateral Commission, which is the worldwide official organization for a One World Government:
http://www.augustreview.com/issues/globalization/the_trilateral_commission:_usurping_sovereignty_2007080373/

In closing, I will leave a quote from this article which summarizes Obama well:
http://moderate.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/obama-brzezinski-and-the-neolib-neocon-family-feud/

Let’s call Barack Obama what he is—a sock puppet for the ruling elite. Obama made this plainly obvious recently when he tabbed Zbigniew Brzezinski as his top foreign policy adviser. In addition to his affiliations with the Council on Foreign Relations (as director), the Trilateral Commission, and the National Endowment for Democracy, Brzezinski was the architect of Carter’s Afghanistan policy, that it to say he is responsible for killing thousands of innocents and organizing the Afghan Arabs, later to become “al-Qaeda.” It is said David Rockefeller asked Brzezinski to create the Trilateral Commission and details were hammered out at Rockefeller’s Pocantico Hills estate outside New York City. Rockefeller later introduced the idea to the Bilderberg group in Knokke, Belgium in the spring of 1972.

The Roots of "Public Opinion"

Almost everything that is "accepted" as "public opinion" is, in reality, carefully crafted propaganda.

Take Bacon and Eggs for breakfast. One would think that this is a cultural thing since antiquity. Edward Bernays, the "father of Public Relations", came up with a campaign showing survey results of doctors recommending hearty breakfasts, and came up with publicity touting bacon and eggs. This was to promote the sales of bacon.

Bernays wrote the book "Propaganda", wherein he wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

From the customer reviews in the Amazon link:

During World War I, he was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based upon.

Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To read this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the masses.

Sound familiar?

The book Trust Us We're Experts outlines the way by which media-touted "experts" push the agenda of the corporations that hire them:

Fearless investigative journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! and Mad Cow U.S.A.) are back with a gripping exposé of the public relations industry and the scientists who back their business-funded, anti-consumer-safety agendas. There are two kinds of "experts" in question--the PR spin doctors behind the scenes and the "independent" experts paraded before the public, scientists who have been hand-selected, cultivated, and paid handsomely to promote the views of corporations involved in controversial actions. Lively writing on controversial topics such as dioxin, bovine growth hormone, and genetically modified food makes this a real page-turner, shocking in its portrayal of the real and potential dangers in each of these technological innovations and of the "media pseudo-environment" created to obfuscate the risks. By financing and publicizing views that support the goals of corporate sponsors, PR campaigns have, over the course of the century, managed to suppress the dangers of lead poisoning for decades, silence the scientist who discovered that rats fed on genetically modified corn had significant organ abnormalities, squelch television and newspaper stories about the risks of bovine growth hormone, and place enough confusion and doubt in the public's mind about global warming to suppress any mobilization for action. Rampton and Stauber introduce the movers and shakers of the PR industry, from the "risk communicators" (whose job is to downplay all risks) and "outrage managers" (with their four strategies--deflect, defer, dismiss, or defeat) to those who specialize in "public policy intelligence" (spying on opponents). Evidently, these elaborate PR campaigns are created for our own good. According to public relations philosophers, the public reacts emotionally to topics related to health and safety and is incapable of holding rational discourse. Needless to say, Rampton and Stauber find these views rather antidemocratic and intend to pull back the curtain to reveal the real wizard in Oz. This is one wake-up call that's hard to resist.

From Publishers Weekly
Recent surveys show that "national experts" are the third most trusted type of public figure (after Supreme Court justices and schoolteachers). Hard-hitting investigative journalists Rampton and Stauber (Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!) ask whether that trust is misplaced. They assert that, with highly technical issues like environmental pollution and bioengineered foodstuffs, "people are encouraged to suspend their own judgment and abandon responsibility to the experts." The authors examine the opinions of many so-called experts to show how their opinions are often marred by conflicts of interest. Peering behind the curtain of decision making, they catch more than a few with blood money on their hands. From spin doctors with dubious credentials to think tanks that do everything but think and scientists who work backwards to engineer desired experimental results, Rampton and Stauber present an astonishing compendium of alleged abuses of the public's willingness to believe. Particularly sobering is their summary of the historical use of "experts" by the tobacco and mining industries, which, they reveal, have suppressed and manipulated information in order to slow industrial reform. Their allegation that industry flaks may be purposely clouding the current debates swirling around "junk science" and global warming issues should provoke readers to reexamine these matters. Rampton and Stauber's impassioned call for skepticism goes beyond rhetoricAthey also offer practical guidelines for separating propaganda from useful information. Agent, Tom Grady.

A review on books.google.com:
http://books.google.com/books?id=KWHNJwAACAAJ&dq=trust+us+we%27re+experts

Over the past decade, corporations and public-relations firms have seized upon a remarkable new way of influencing opinion called the "third-party technique." The method is simple-just put your words into the mouth of someone who appears impartial, such as a doctor, professor, watchdog group, or an "expert" of some kind. Written with biting humor and penetrating insight, Trust Us, We're Experts! exposes the current and very effective methods of opinion manipulation practiced by the corporate powers that be.

This webpage has an interesting set of videos:
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=8339

The Century of the Self: The Untold History of Controlling the Masses Through the Manipulation of Unconscious Desires

The first of four videos, "One: Happiness Machines":

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.

Video #4 of this series is called "Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering". It is about how politicians have used propaganda to appeal to the masses.


I believe all this is the root of today's consumerism which I've written about before. I also wrote that the real purpose of public education is to produce good little consumers.

More on the Compound Interest Paradox, and why Corporations are Obsessed About Growth

I found a great article:

"Is This the Beginning of a Worldwide Depression?"
by Paul Rye,

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=5751

The coming economic crisis is "due to the nature of our monetary and banking system and Government’s relation with it", and is completely foreseeable.

I wrote that because of the Compound Interest Paradox, the money supply is gradually being replaced by debt - IOW the money in circulation is owed to the banks. He says that only 3% is NOT owed. 97% of the money in circulation is OWED TO BANKS. Think about it. How many middle class people do you know have more assets than debt?

"The crux of the problem is that mathematically, credit-based money is lent into existence at interest by a fractional reserve banking system that does not create the money needed to pay the interest. All debts cannot be repaid, because not enough money is lent into existence to repay both the principal and interest. Therefore, the interest must come from the existing pool of money. No matter what the quality of the participants, there must be losers."

He touches on something I'd wanted to blog about - how the Paradox drives corporations to be obsessed about growth.

"The pressure on the losers to pay their debts makes the economy unnaturally competitive and growth-oriented, leading to excessive exploitation of natural and human resources. And, the only way to avoid an excessive number of losers is to keep increasing the total amount of debt, continually pumping more money (credit) into the system. Therefore, monetary inflation is necessary and endless.

If you do not want to be a debt slave for the rest of your life, if you do not want to see generations of people in the U.S. and the third world be debt slaves for the rest of their lives, if you do not want to see the human and natural resources of this planet squandered simply to pay interest on loans that are not even necessary to create a workable monetary system, then you need to learn about how the existing system works, who perpetuates it, and how the whole system could be re-thought and re-designed.

The article is excellent and well worth reading.

I think the word is spreading on the lies of the monetary system.

Public Schools and Propaganda

I have blogged about this before. The public school system does not teach critical thinking, and produces dumbed down masses that are "good little consumers".

John Lott in his book Freedomnomics, has a subchapter titled "Government Control of Information: From Public Schools to Television".

Public Education was actually designed to spread government-approved values. In totalitarian countries, in order to instill the proper adherence to the ruling ideology, totalitarian leaders must attach the most common locus for spreading oppositional values - the family. To weaken parental influence, the soviet union during the 1920's and again in the 1950's experimented with raising children in communal children's houses that would decrease the importance of the individual household.

This is not limited to totalitarian countries.

Take the creation of Sweden's extensive nursery school system. Declaring that "school is the spearhead of socialism", Ingvar Carlsson, Sweden's education minister from 1969 to 1973 (and later prime minister), insisted that removing children from the home through "pre-school training is essential to eliminate the social heritage of undesirable, reactionary parental views. Swedish education theorists even advocated tax and government employment policies that would "get both parents out of the home, so that children are forced out as well".

By abolishing the very concept of the family, totalitarian governments hope to create a government monopoly on the transmission of social values. The main avenue [being] the educational system. By instilling in young students the idea that the regime is legitimate and acts fairly, totalitarian governments seek to reduce potential opposition to their rule. They invest enormous resources in these endeavors for a very rational reason - evidence shows that government provided schooling reduces political opposition and predisposes students to support the government when they get older.
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While the degree of indoctrination in American schools never reached totalitarian levels, an brief history of the evolution of American public schooling reveals that public schools, in fact, did develop specifically as a method to inculcate values supported by the government.
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So what are these government values spread in the educational system? Teaching the young to believe that government policies can effectively solve problems. Teachers have a natural incentive to teach this axiom. Public high school teachers face the same incentives. They have a personal interest in perpetuating the growth of government, which is the source of their own livelihood.

Government spending on education is widely views as a positive endeavor. But public schools have been aimed at instilling government values. Thus it should not be too surprising to learn that totalitarian nations on average spend twice as much on education per student as do free countries with the same total income.

This isn't because totalitarian countries care more about their children. Totalitarian states have spent less on health care than freer countries.

It's interesting to note that countries with socialized medical care usually allow much more competition between government hospitals or doctors than they allow between schools. If patients can pay to travel a long distance to see a certain doctor, they're typically allowed to do so. Students, however, can't so easily choose which public school to attend. While competition between hospitals or doctors produces better health care, competition between government schools reduces the effectiveness of government indoctrination efforts.

Ingvar Carlsson, the Swedish education minister who said "school is the spearhead of socialism", is a member of the Trilateral Commission, which is a sister group to the CFR, and a major player in the UN. The CFR and TC are pushing socialism and one world government. The UN was the world power elite's 2nd attempt at a supra-national body (the first being the League of Nations)


Aaron Russo, the Hollywood director of "Trading Places" fame, made the movie "Freedom to Fascism".

In an interview, Aaron Russo recounted his conversations with Nick Rockefeller:
"After his popular video Mad As Hell was released and he began his campaign to become Governor of Nevada, Russo was noticed by Rockefeller and introduced to him by a female attorney. Seeing Russo's passion and ability to affect change, Rockefeller set about on a subtle mission to recruit Russo into the elite.

During one conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo if he was interested in joining the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) but Russo rejected the invitation, saying he had no interest in "enslaving the people" to which Rockefeller coldly questioned why he cared about the "serfs."

In a later conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo what he thought women's liberation was about. Russo's response that he thought it was about the right to work and receive equal pay as men, just as they had won the right to vote, caused Rockefeller to laughingly retort, "You're an idiot! Let me tell you what that was about, we the Rockefeller's funded that, we funded women's lib, we're the one's who got all of the newspapers and television - the Rockefeller Foundation."

Rockefeller told Russo of two primary reasons why the elite bankrolled women's lib, one because before women's lib the bankers couldn't tax half the population and two because it allowed them to get children in school at an earlier age, enabling them to be indoctrinated into accepting the state as the primary family, breaking up the traditional family model.

This revelation dovetails previous admissions on behalf of feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem (pictured) that the CIA bankrolled Ms. Magazine as part of the same agenda of breaking up traditional family models."

The book Educating for the New World Order discusses a woman's fight with the educational system:

Copying from one of the book's Amazon reviews:

"This is the story of how Anita Hoge investigated and uncovered how the state of Pennsylvania was implementing a psychological test to measure the students' beliefs, yet calling it "educational testing" to unsuspecting students and parents. Those with the "wrong" opinion receive extra "treatment" and the field of education turned away from teaching the basics (Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic). Anita stood up to the education establishment and forced it to obey the law."

and:

I read this book in 1992. When I told my friends and relatives what was coming in education (teaching homosexuality and bestiality, global citizenship, etc.), they thought I was a kook. They're not laughing now! All American schools are now obliged to teach kids how to be a multi-cultural, non-judgmental, citizen of the world. I also recommend her book, "Cloning of the American Mind." Her books are long on details, and not real entertaining, so you're going to have to work at them -- but it's worth it. -- RustyMason.com

The educational system is responsible for the spread of "liberalism" aka socialism, and "political correctness". More on this in another blog.

The Pyramids, Food Production, and Economic Inefficiency

5,000 years ago the civilization of ancient Egypt had signs of wealth... in their pyramids, the temples, the medicine they practiced.

Civilizations arose in areas of the world where agriculture allowed farmers to feed a large number of people, freeing others to specialize in other areas such as development of technology and philosophy. Egypt for example occupied the fertile banks of the Nile river.

Jared Diamond is an evolutionary biologist with a theory of how civilizations came about and how it is that modern civilization sprung up in Eurasia. Eurasia had a combination of plant and animal life that was very conducive to agriculture.

The following is a summary of his book Guns, Germs and Steel. It is fascinating and well worth reading:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond/diamond_p1.html

One question that comes to mind is, how much more efficiently can we produce food, as compared to ancient civilizations such as Egypt? It stands to reason that if we can produce food 5x as efficiently as the Ancient Egyptians, we would need to work 1/5th as much for the essentials, if cost of the other essentials such as housing were reduced the same amount.

This webpage says 129 people, today, working 8 hours a day. (In 1960, it was 25.)

That would suggest that if one's economic output were roughly equivalent to a farmer, one would need to spend less than 1% of their time (if working 8 hours a day), working in order to pay for food. That number probably does not include the cost of a farmer's machines and land; let's just pretend for a very rough calculation that the cost of a farmer's labor in food production is 30%; that would still suggest that 3% of a person's economic output would be needed to pay for food.

Let's look at the other essentials - shelter and clothing.

It took one guy 9 weeks to build a 1200 sq ft log home:
http://www.loghomebuilders.org/faq/56#56n43
Out of 40 weeks per year and 40 years, that's not even 1% of a person's economic output. Let's just assume that that cost is doubled by the cost of tool rental. That's still less than 2%.

Clothing is probably less expensive than food and shelter.

So if food is 3%, housing is 2%, and clothing is say 1%, that brings the total to 6%. Let's just say medical care will cost the same as food, and energy, the same as housing. The total is 11%. This pie in the sky calculation says that the basic necessities of life can be purchased by working less than an hour a day. Let's pretend there is a taxation rate of 50% in a socialistic society. That's still only 2 hours a day. Or, put another way, with today's technology, we should be able to get the basic necessities just working 60 days a year. Anything over that should just be fluff.

Let's say the Ancient Egyptians worked 8 hours a day 300 days a year. Today the average worker works 8 hours a day, something like 220 - 240 days a year. Has 5,000 years of technology only allowed us to work 25% less??? Or, why have we not benefited from technology in the form of reduced workloads?

The answer I believe is incredible economic inefficiency today. There is much waste. Think of all the people in industries that really are parasites on society. Everyone's favorite example is lawyers. Think of nuisance lawsuits. Think of how much economic output is wasted not only by lawyer's fees, but also by the time spent by jurors. Another example are the tax accountants. They are being paid to do a job simply because the tax code is onerous and byzantine.

In many ways, wealth is destroyed simply by wasting people's time that could have been spent being productive - basically when people have to take time off from work in order to do things such as going to court for a traffic ticket.

The largest wastage of economic productivity is government. In the example above I used a tax rate of 50%. However, taxes are probably much higher. The average Federal income tax rate is 25%, but Social Security and Medicare is another 15%, and in some states, the state income tax is 5%. Then there is regulatory compliance cost of 16% of GDP. That brings the total to 66%. Some may say "but those costs are for some necessary services". Government is incredibly inefficient at spending money to provide services. They simply have no motivation to spend money wisely, unlike the free market. FSK has said that the resulting total tax is even greater than 66%.

There is another parasite that is living off of the middle class. These are the beneficiaries of the corrupt monetary system. The tax they foist on the middle class is in the form of interest payments on debt, and inflation because of the central banking system. Note also that the income tax pays for interest on the loans made by central banks to government, using money created out of nothing.

Even if my calculations are off, the reasoning stands. A heck of a lot of wealth is confiscated or destroyed by government and by debt.

Psychopaths, Corporations, and Government

In the book "Snakes in Suits", the authors claim that the corporate world attracts psychopaths because the corporate structure rewards ruthless behavior. 1% of the general population are psychopaths. It is mostly genetic, like dyslexia.

Contrary to popular belief, most psychopaths don't become serial killers, as they don't necessarily enjoy killing.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

[Psychopaths are not] burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.
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This is where you're likely to find such people as Ebbers, Fastow, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. We put several big-name CEOs through the checklist, and they scored as "moderately psychopathic"
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There are certainly more people in the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension than in the general population. You'll find them in any organization where, by the nature of one's position, you have power and control over other people and the opportunity to get something."
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Indeed the 2003 documentary The Corporation, corporations are "sociopathic" (a synonym for "psychopathic") because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish interests -- "shareholder value" -- without regard for the harms they cause to others, such as environmental damage.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people's feelings. This makes it easier for them to "play" us.

If corporations attract psychopaths, then by extension government attracts psychopaths.

When one rises above a certain level in a large corporation, one rubs elbows with government and enter the "revolving door" between the corporate world and government.


One of the ways people "debunk" a conspiracy theory is, "why would these people want more money and power than they already have?" Well, there's the answer, they are psychopaths.