Why does the public go on year after year, century after century, believing so many ridiculous things? Maybe it's an illusion. Maybe each person is separately faking belief - to fool others and himself, because he'd rather "go with the flow" than draw attention to himself. There's definitely a fear factor. Constant and pervasive dishonest official stories, though of course they work like advertising, also confront trained-to-be-fearful humans like a psychological flag salute. Very few Americans have the guts not to stand for the flag salute or openly doubt things they're not supposed to doubt, and each time they fearfully salute the flag or surrender their integrity and willingly believe an absurd story, their intellectual cowardice is reinforced.
    Before discussing a few examples I just happened to think of - i.e. a few of many such stories so absurd the public couldn't possibly be fooled by them - but they are - here is Mark Twain's explanation, which you may not like, but, while P.T. Barnum only pointed out the every-minute birth of suckers, and either Hitler or Goebbels also only noted and exploited humanity's willing belief in big ENOUGH lies, it was Mark Twain who explained it, and I think his explanation nails it.

Mark Twain's willing sucker-hood principle

    In the last chapter of "Huckleberry Finn," a tale filled with cynical, seldom cited wisdom, Twain advanced, through the mouth of his blind oracle Huck, a maxim probably more important than any proposition of Descartes or Newton - the Tom Sawyer's preacher uncle's prayer meetin' sermon syndrome.
    Following Uncle Silas's mental collapse on learning that Tom is Huck and Sid is Tom and Jim is free, Huck soberly reports that the old man, "a little drunk" from confusion, "preached a prayer-meetin' sermon that night that gave him a rattlin' reputation BECAUSE (my emphasis) the oldest man in the world couldn't 'a' understood it." Get it? To put it in major philosophical principle form because it IS a major philosophical principle:

    Typical humans, comfortably accustomed to their own inability to understand much of anything very complex or profound, when confronted by the overwhelming incoherence or blatant dishonesty of politicians or con men, main-stream media, embedded reporters, preachers, "think-tank" economists, politically correct pseudo philosophers, metaphysical astronomers, or "modern" artists, rather than risk exposing their possibly unsophisticated doubts, can almost always be counted on to take the easy way, surrender their own judgement, assume (or surrender the point) that anything that doesn't make sense must be too brilliant for them to understand and meekly adopt the pose of acceptance of each successive absurd official story they are expected to accept.

Just a few typical official stories too absurd to fool anyone
but a public more willing to be fooled than to resist

    (Absurd official story #1): The regularly appearing "modern" or "impressionistic" art story is a good example to start with, because it's always so blatant (actually looking so much like a deliberately transparent joke that most involuntarily rational people secretly know is bullshit), that it may provide the loose thread I need to pull to dissolve the entire fabric of the cover people so willingly help hold over their own eyes. In fact, you already know what I'm talking about, don't you. I mean that, though people (maybe you) keep sheepishly pretending they believe the official stories that weird blobs of paint or metal or verbiage are great art, most people don't actually believe it and will be relieved to be told in good English that it's really the scam they know it is.
    It's almost funny.
    But it's not funny, not only because public officials spend public funds to disfigure parks and intersections with stupid chunks of rusty iron, and parts of every day's newspapers' entertainment sections are rendered idiotic by photos of blank canvases sprinkled with supposedly brilliantly placed polka-dots, blobs, waves or stripes, and we are bombarded with photos of supposedly artistic stunts like a boulder propped up between two concrete walls, but also BECAUSE, while few people are completely fooled, many people are so effectively and continuously confused, that it gets to be a habit.
    And that's what's important. In fact, it's my theory that the constant flow of phony art stories, even if not consciously meant to, very effectively helps keep people in practice at BEING confused and then deciding in self defense to accept big ENOUGH deceptively trivial lies, so that they are more easily and meekly willing to keep "going with the flow" of whatever more important and dangerous official lies they are also constantly and more insidiously being told to swallow.
    The same movie watcher who easily gets the joke when, in "The Passenger," Maria Schneider, explaining a Gaudi architectural "masterpiece," tells Jack Nicholson that "the man who built it was hit by a bus," when confronted by a critical barrage of vague generalities like unique, distinctive, sensuous, mystical, and etc, will be afraid he might be revealing his embarrassing naivete if he shouts back, "Yeah, yeah, but, in plain objective English, what's good about it?"
    The same art lover who, as Tom Wolfe points out in "The Painted Word," after gazing in honest rapture for an hour at paintings by the Dutch Masters in one gallery, will THEN dutifully walk through the "modernist" gallery reading the labels to find out what that stuff is supposed to be, BECAUSE he's intimidated by the pervasive official blather about it.
    And BECAUSE his habit of being intimidated pervades all his dealings with the world, he may be afraid to tell even his friends that he wants socialized medicine (even though the media never mention that option), that he's tired of his once beautiful small home town growing and he wants it to stop (even though the media keep celebrating growth), or that he wants to kill himself and sees nothing wrong with it (even though the media assure him that his attitude is a mental illness).

    (Absurd official story #2): "Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe!" Or so implied a super-corny "serial" starring Buster Crabbe (and based on a comic book) that all Americans know about and, though almost none of them took it seriously, under the radar of never-addressed common consciousness, helped spread a spider-web-thin human assumption that such a conquest was possible by high-tech humans. But why? What would be the point? You may think I'm being awfully obtuse. But I'm not. You're being awfully obtuse, and so are your "intellectual" leaders, if, having dozed off during Flash Gordon, having then been willingly conned by strenuously serious film extravaganzas like "The Beginning or the End?" and New York Times con-pitch after con-pitch supposedly justifying a flood of multi-million dollar government projects (all very profitable here on Earth) that sent metal into space leading to NOTHING but a better guess about how the universe supposedly began

9-11 - the attack on Americans that obviously wasn't an attack on Americans but was so effectively hyped by embedded media as such that, then and for over SIXTEEN years since then (I have to keep upping the year-count annually), presumably the same suckers who fall for the modern art lie willingly believed and have continued to believe George Bush's near idiot lie that generic terrorists, who were terrorists just because they were terrorists (i.e. bad guys) attacked some tall American buildings - just tall American buildings because they were tall and American - motivated only by blind hatred based on jealousy of American goodness.
    Probably unnecessarily, since the general public swallowed the lie so quickly, completely, and perhaps permanently - to shield public eyes from the flock of very rational alternative versions that (in response to such an obviously false official story) immediately started circulating in all the regular talking places, a flood of embedded media ink was expended on the circumstantial drama of a few poor suckers with conveniently weird religious motives (not subject to or worthy of analysis) who'd been ordered by an evil "mastermind" to carry out their evil mission, and on a single already demonized leader who eagerly (probably falsely) embraced his chance to claim credit. And out of this further expedient official story expansion and actual serialization came a mega growth of nerd-assisted government "security" systems, spying, strip-searching, check-pointing on and of Americans, including the clearly fascist Homeland Defense sector of government and the start of a profitable series of wars.
    And for over SIXTEEN years (as of late 2017), the embedded media have kept it a secret, an impossible secret since it's so obvious, that it was NOT the "goodness" of tall American buildings or even the people in them (irrelevant to the bombers) - or even plain Americanism or the American way or even the overly large-looming American presence in the world that was targeted. It was the WTC and the Pentagon - obviously the world headquarters of a western business empire that, to keep its profits flowing, tricks and cheats everyone else of their resources, carelessly perpetuating poverty everywhere and destroying the eco-system in the process; and also the headquarters of the bloated American military deployed everywhere to protect that western business empire from its victims and rivals.
    Everything I see again and again in the various US embedded media on and about 9/11 every "anniversary" of the event sticks religiously to that comic-book-level official story and to the apparently official silence about what it was really about. And the only thing more contemptible than that deliberate strategy of lying by fairy tale and omission is the public brain vacuum into which such fraud and secrecy continually drops so easily under sight.

   (Absurd official story #3): The in-a-way NEVER appearing but always pervasively implied story that nothing is happening in Latin America, an amazing lie by omission. The ABSENCE of any story of the in-fact NOW-and-for-the-last-decade - happening and vigorous rebirth of socialist/communist revolution (and thus low-level CIA war against it) in a (this time) unified Latin America is so close to being a TOTAL WHITE-OUT in official western news that most Americans don't even have much chance of being fooled or not fooled. They're just not allowed to know anything about it. The official story in this case, A STORY IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE unless the believers WANT to believe it, is that Latin America is still all Jose-Carioca land, except that Brazil's rain forest and Mardi Gras are sort of interesting and that the supposedly rogue leaders of Venezuela and Bolivia do say some crazy things and are even trying to perpetrate some evil socialist reforms on their downtrodden people that may justify an eventual NATO "liberation" invasion of Venezuela and, after that, of Cuba.
    But, in fact, one of the most important stories in the world, which has been going on for over a decade and which I first told you about in February of 2009, is that Latin America -a quarter of the globe - is NOW hopefully in the act (weakening as of 2017) of completely breaking away (or trying to break away) from Washington's ugly grip. Giant new Latin American economic blocs like ALBA and CELAC, which are cutting the US out while cutting Cuba in, while expanding to include most of Latin America and the Caribbean, are conducting important meetings, exchanges, deals. Every kind of international business is going on, but in US and other western US-sycophant media the phenomenon officially doesn't exist, so there are almost NO lines to read between.
    Well, wait a minute. There have been SOME lines to read between and at least supposedly progressive Americans SHOULD be able to figure it out and WOULD if they weren't so willingly dizzy from constantly swallowing too much freedomanddemocracy blather without thoroughly chewing it. For instance, On February 14 2014, the NY Times broke really new ground very late by very inadequately reporting (as part of their post-election compensatory cheering for THEIR new black presient, but only in about 4 paragraphs and a week after it happened) a CELAC meeting in Havana. But even with only 20 lines to read between and a picture of several Latin American presidents talking to Raul Castro (the out-going president of CELAC), SOME supposed American progressives SHOULD HAVE SNAPPED AWAKE and done SOME serious thinking. But they willingly didn't, (not even in Wikipedia) and neither did either their equally dizzy appointed leaders or the reporters Americans always foolishly count on to clarify such stuff for them.
    Just before Barack Obama was first sworn in, he was reported (without a single gasp of astonishment coming from the public - except from me) as "counting the days" until HE took over as ""leader of the free world." So three months later April '09, while bestowing his exalted presence on an OAS "summit conference" of Latin American presidents in Trinidad, it literally never occurred to him that he was walking blindly into a meeting of the real "leaders of the free world." He thought they were plantation foremen waiting for their orders. Maybe. Or maybe he thought he was Julius Caesar confronting upstarts he'd quickly put in their places. And maybe you did, too, though I suspect most Americans didn't even notice there was anything to notice.
    Western media following him like paparazzi had (or pretended to have) no clue, either; indeed most of the world (with a lot of help from embedded media) still believed the US finally had a president for the people instead of another rich insiders' puppet, and the Latin American presidents present, most of them already members of ALBA and about to form CELAC, i.e. Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Cristina Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Michelle Bachelet, Tabare Vasquez, Rafael Correa, Fernando Lugo, Leonel Fernandez, Alvaro Colom, Manuel Zelaya (soon to be knifed in the back by Obama), and Daniel Ortega had false hopes, too - but that didn't last long.
    Their illusions popped as soon as the fool opened his mouth. And by the time he'd repeated Joe Biden's idiot declaration from two weeks before in Chile that the embargo would not be lifted until the people of Cuba were "free," the case was closed. It was apparent to the Latin American presidents and to me (that was the moment when I closed my case), and it should have been apparent even to his stubbornly naive supporters, that Obama, like a clone of George Bush, was either an entrenched fascist or an impossibly hardheaded ignoramus. Anyway he didn't know or pretended he didn't know any more about the new progressive Latin American revolution than your media let you know.
    But it was happening and still is, though, as time goes by and Latin America progresses at least toward their commendable goals, thanks largely to US media silence and the willing unconsciousness of the American public, Obama's certain plan to create an excuse to invade Venezuela progresses literally under the cover of the public's willing ignorance. While I'm re-editing this article (on Feb 15 2014), US subversion and disruption is rising again in Venezuela, with Twitter playing the same role that Facebook played in the Arab Spring movement, already accompanied by a budding US media propaganda campaign aimed at you, which may well lead to serious US meddling and successfully excuse it, if you don't wake up - which I don't expect.
    Did you catch that? I don't expect you (or the majority you're not part of if you're not part of it) to wake up. It's only a matter of form that I'm advising you to get ahead of the media game by reading RIGHT NOW two websites linked from my front page, Venezuelanalysis.com, and independent research specialist Eva Golinger's site, www.chavezcode.com.
    Also, with little hope you'll do it (willing belief of official stories being so much more comfortable), I'm suggesting you watch the amazing film which has brought cheering theater audiences to their feet (I wouldn't say that if I hadn't seen it happen), The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (slow at the start but legitimately great at the end), filmed by an Irish company which, while making a documentary about Hugo Chavez in April 2002, found themselves in the middle of the scene when a dissident faction puppet-mastered by the CIA (a matter of record) staged a coup and jailed Chavez. The Lucky Irishmen grabbed their chance and filmed the whole episode as the Venezuelan poor descended en masse from their hillside shanties and forced the coup makers to free Chavez and return him to power. This film effectively deflates a myth US media worked hard to feed you at the time, so if you watch it, pay close attention to the takes of US TV talking heads then sounding EXACTLY like they will sound again when the US, as part of Barack Obama's ongoing world conquest project, tries this again, and honestly try to remember how you were taken IN in April 2002, IF you were taken in. I hope you weren't, but IF you weren't, I'm compelled to remind you that you were in the minority.
    The point here is that the media will continue easily manipulating your grasp of what's going on in Latin America as long as their truly unbelievable myth about Latin America, that the majority of Latin American poor (70-90%) are happy to be poor, hate communism, love to work for pennies for American corporations, and love their oppressors - KEEPS WORKING on a public perfectly content to keep believing such nonsense. And for that long, this will stay in the number 2 spot on this list of official stories too obviously false to fool anyone but a public more willing to be fooled than to resist.

   (Absurd official story #4): The gay story that should have been the god story. They (the insidious media) relentlessly, I think deceptively on purpose, always call it JUST the gay marriage story, though it's OBVIOUSLY and much more importantly, but strenuously SECRETLY, also about an effort to carve a religious taboo into a secular constitution.
    Had it been billed that way, California's Proposition 8 could have been thrown out in one courtroom session and an American Jihad brought to a screeching halt.
    That it wasn't was a disgraceful judicial failure, virtually forced on the courts by an intense headline propaganda campaign by media that WANTED it to be about gay marriage instead, abetted as always by a willingly lulled public, an apparently self-interested gay judge, AND by the not-very-philosophically conscious gay community.
    The gay community, far more narrowly focused than their enemies (who can simultaneously hate gays, pacifists, atheists, flag abusers, communists, and unmarried couples) - the gay community, glorying on and on about their recent anointment as politically correct, wanting THEIR right to be soldiers to be more important than the ugliness of war, their right to join a church more important than the ugliness of religion, their right to march in a 4th of July parade more important than the ugliness of flag waving nationalism, their right to silence about their role in the spread of AIDS more important than the Cuban revolution, and their right to be married more important than the stagnant tyranny of church and society over personal sexuality, would not let the Proposition 8 story be about anything but them. They wanted so much to go on publicly wallowing in their suffering in what they saw as their exclusive spotlight, that they even angrily attacked their intelligent allies who tried to block the religious nuts quickly and for good by striking down the proposition on much firmer Constitutional grounds.
    Thanks to the gays and the media, the religious nuts came away from the battle unexposed as dangerous religious nuts, their over-all agenda mostly ignored but actually, subtly, legitimized by the official overlooking of its fundamental importance, and therefore unhampered on their parallel battlefronts against abortion, against secular schools, and eventually against secular government, though all of that could have been stopped, to the benefit of gays, too, by once and for all clarifying the First Amendment and STOPPING (for now) an almost Arab frenzy to turn this flawed-enough country into an even more flawed religious state under a Christian version of Sharia law.
     (Absurd official story #5): The RE-E-E-ALY big democratic election lie, starting with American elections and then spreading to all the world's imitations of American elections. In spite of the now and forever ongoing flood of "election year" stories, every fully conscious American really knows the secret truth about how American presidents are really picked. They just cooperatively pretend and pretend and go on pretending they don't. I'm personally surrounded by Californians dutifully saying to each other whatever the media tell them they're saying to each other, just as if the media's election were real, exciting, and theirs, instead of being written, produced, directed and staged by the media. But anyone, who is not an insider, who actually believes he or she has much of anything to do with the selection of American presidents is silly indeed - even if that means almost everybody.
    In 2012, I won (but refused to collect because it was too much like shooting fish in a barrel) a $50 bet (the sucker had started with $100 but chickened back) that, in spite of his 4-year failure to change much of anything, Barack Obama would be reelected as US president because I was sure his reelection had been preplanned and scripted long before. I considered this so certain that I didn't even hesitate to help the Republicans run him down, except, of course, that, unlike them, I was telling the truth.
    Of course the votes were counted (they could be miscounted in cyber-space, but they never need to be) and of course Obama mostly truly turned out to have gotten the majority of the votes. But, as you certainly know (though you may stubbornly, religiously go on pretending you don't), the rigging of American elections doesn't have to happen on election day to be an example of rigging.

    The voters always apparently vote as they wish. But most of them (and that's all it takes in a democracy) always wish what they've been trained to wish. Starting long before election day, after entrenched insiders decide which candidates are to be taken seriously (come on, YOU CAN'T PRETEND YOU DON'T KNOW THAT, can you), the embedded media always STAGE a very long-running, very predictable but very slick and expensive multi-media show of irrelevantly trivial and personal but effectively relentless and pervasive propaganda - a daily, hourly, up-to-the-minute smoke cloud - that goes on for as long as it takes to effectively teach Americans every single thing they reportedly think from beginning to end, when the voters do nothing but fulfill their assigned destinies (that's an excerpt from Elections in Cuba, elsewhere on this site, which was taken in turn from a much more concise analysis my daughter gave me).

    Even the phrase election year is obvious nonsense; the election circus has been a two-year affair ever since, after a solid year of daily propaganda failed to convince Americans that they cared about Bill Clinton's sex life, the media, frantic to regain control of the public mind, started their next election "year" the very next day, a year early. Obviously, Obama's reelection had been scripted by the country's rich owners ever since they created him. Their first black puppet president, after all, had to have two terms; and, after all, he's a good enough Republicrat. Their "opposition" clown show was just to ensure Obama's win and keep their silliest partners on board. They strained to make it silly enough to ensure that no more than a very silly minority could fail to shun the #1 clown. Four more years of pseudo reform couldn't hurt the rich.
    Obama certainly didn't hurt them by NOT closing Guantanamo, NOT bringing the troops home, NOT treating "our" designated "enemies" with more respect, NOT normalizing relations with Cuba and the rest of Latin America, NOT closing the covert action side of the CIA, NOT disarming NATO or joining the UN but instead starting one unprovoked war after another and earning the "defense" industry trillions more dollars, and by NOT moving domestically for socialized medicine but forcing people instead to buy the crooked products of insurance companies and NEVER casting a sideways thought at anyone's "hope" for future social and economic equality while he was printing money to bail out the rich.
    As his reward,recent frightening reactions to his fascist military adventures in the Middle East are being sanitized by the media, while his impossible-to-embarrass supporters are being bribed to keep mimicking official silence with human interest articles about their political faith, daily surveys showing their "hopeful" man's popularity, constant front page happy photos of Michelle, and strenuous editorial silence about the failure of mere black skin in the White House to actually produce any domestic or foreign policy "change" other than that Obama bombs people with a sweeter look on his face than George Bush.

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    (maybe 6) The Arab "spring" that's now clearly falling. According to all embedded media, the only rebel-like thoughts the Arab rebels (that they and Facebook keep insisting YOU cheer for) EVER own up to are about dictatorship, freedom, and democracy with NEVER a hint of the kind of qualification it would take to prove those words are anything but jargon pinned to their mouths like comic strip speech balloons.
    Dictatorship, freedom, democracy. Dictatorship, freedom, democracy. Cross out every repetition of these three empty words or their synonyms in typical modern news stories about almost any political turmoil, and there's not much space left for any discussion of real issues (if you know what I mean, I chuckle). There's one new slogan ("31 years in office," "42 years in office") and, once the firing starts, there are (as throughout history) casualties on the favored side and atrocities committed by the demonized side to report. This last convention has started backfiring on US media recently as it's become impossible to cover up the apparent tendency of their (and our supposed) heroes to also "kill their own people" and commit atrocities.
    But, if the public were conscious, stuff like that wouldn't impress them, anyway. Maybe it's not obvious to everyone, but to the intellectually conscious, the relevance of anyone's time in office obviously depends entirely on what he does with his time in office. Democracy is demonstrably almost always a scam that almost inevitably empowers demagogues just like the last ones (as it has in Tunisia and Egypt and Washington). The words dictatorship, with no philosophical explanation, and freedom, with no qualifying prepositional phrase, are spectacularly empty words. ALL even half conscious people should know that, in any country, including Chicago, a big enough, disruptive enough crowd confronting cops or soldiers long enough will eventually draw fire, certainly including deadly fire. And more obviously than that, dead soldiers, collateral casualties and atrocities are part of every war. Obviously, the official story is very convincingly empty of substance, while the true story behind it, which I think I nailed on 21 March and 24 March 2011, is being kept invisible to the public by the media, which it's high time the public stopped believing.
    But since the willingly UNconscious public never learn anything on their own, with the literally relentless help of war-drum banging media, at least until very recently, the public has kept believing that the side backed by the US State Department, the embedded media owned by the rich, and the covert action side of the CIA was, just this once, the right side, though, going by history, THAT'S NOT BLOODY LIKELY, and it's now clear that it wasn't the case in Libya or Egypt or Tunisia, and it's not the case in Syria, either. But, except for a few historically informed individuals who assume that the three horsemen of deceit just listed are ALWAYS on the wrong side (and the evidence is starting to fall that way again), ordinarily uninformed people don't even try to tell who the "good guys" really are by reading between the lines of the official stories they're being fed. They just believe what they're told.
    Of course they could do a minimum amount of their OWN thinking, realize that the "good guys" (if there are any) will have benign philosophical, social, economic, ecological, and political agendas, and then, noticing with disgust that the embedded media stubbornly refuse to talk about such things, they could do some research of their own at the library and on the internet and very quickly learn that Washington and NATO are helping knock over secular governments in favor of rebels committed to religious government with religious law. They could also notice, if they tried or were capable of trying, that, besides the insidious CIA, the philosophically blank nerds at Facebook have something to do with stirring up the Arab "Spring" rebellions.
    Then, instead of inferring, with media guidance, that the rebels are the stars of a movie, the no-longer glassy-eyed public could infer that the rebels might be empty headed incoherent "Facebook generation" occupy types just tirelessly excited about being the center of attention. That would explain why, when their sponsors presented them to the UN, the Libyan rebels were not allowed to talk. Or, more obviously than that, a public not manipulated by the media could infer that the "rebels" might be Islamic fundamentalists eager to go back to stoning women - and then ask why the US and NATO support such people. Actually, the possible inferences are many and begging to be made. It's obvious, for instance, regardless of how many of "their own people" will be killed in the process, that the religious rebels in Syria are refusing to negotiate and pushing their war into previously peaceful areas because they're still waiting for NATO bombers to kill Assad and put them in power.
    But the public is too irresponsibly ignorant to draw any intelligent inferences, and, of course, too out of touch with any of the facts of contemporary history to guess (the unreported obvious) that there are cynical puppeteers behind the scenes, like the CIA and VOA, with all their regular reasons to stir up mobs with one-size-fits-all generalities they can keep the public used to and also make fit when the time is ripe to stir up a dumb mob in Cuba. Obviously, the made-to-be-fooled public are being told as little as possible by embedded media deliberately covering up real details that might tell a more alert American race than this one that they don't really like the team they're expected to cheer for and, bad as it may or may not be, might prefer the relentlessly demonized side - if they EVER knew or cared what was really going on.

I wrote (2) above weeks ago and published it just a few hours before news of the killing of the US Ambassador in Libya broke here. Now, when (if) the killers are apprehended and when (if) the new religious government of Libya moves to prosecute them, don't be surprised by the advent of huge Arab FALL demonstrations filling the streets of Libya protesting any such compromise with US imperialists (who just took Libya away from its previous secular government and gave it to the religious fundamentalists now in semi-control).

THEN, right after I posted that bold italic postscript, Al Jazeera reported that the suspect Libyan government claimed to have already caught FOUR culprits, which made me wonder if they really had, or if they were going to hang some scapegoats to mollify Washington. But since then up to now 21 Sep 2012, the captured FOUR have vanished from official storydom and been replaced, first (and also temporarily officially), by a squad of Libyan soldiers acting on their own, then by Al Qaida with some local help, and today, since selected experts have now decided the attack was probably not preplanned and was therefore probably conveniently carried out by UNCAUGHT generic "terrorists" (an idea that oddly contrasts to the original official story of the 9/ll attack in New York, which loudly proclaimed that attack to be both "terrorist" AND "masterminded)." I think this scrambling shuffle of the official story is aimed at excusing a failure to make arrests (which would prompt more anti-American uprising) and at establishing a disconnect between conveniently unknown culprits and either Libya's new government OR the US. But, in fact, the silenced real story behind all the effort to create a convenient official story is that Obama's unprovoked attack on Libya and subsequent installment of a the new religious government created the militant Muslim environment that made the murderous incident inevitable. Anyway, I hope the highly visible slight-of-hand (which nobody can pretend not to see) should help the public achieve a new level of cynicism about US media's official stories.

Film Review -"The Innocence of Islam": Since a man who had nothing to do with it died for it, IF a film about Muhammad that supposedly slandered the prophet DID provoke his murder, I watched the film and here's my critique: On the plus side, there are some very pretty unveiled girls in it. Also, the cinematography is surprisingly good but that's also bad, because, as a combination of technical expertise with near complete communication failure, it typifies a (to me) extremely offensive contemporary trend. On the totally down side, its awful incoherence (ironically) SAYS more about the producers' foolishness than it does about what Muslims foolishly believe. However, the film should prompt anyone to wonder if an alert reading of the Koran would show the Muslim god figure to be as ugly as the Bible shows the Judeo-Christian god figure to be.

    (maybe 7) The two-party system. Since it's related to the current flood of election blather, the first official story (hiding a secret truth) on my list was the myth of the virtue of the two-party system. Americans who are willingly treated and willingly behave like mushrooms have been convinced forever by embedded information sources that the two-party system just IS (with no explanation needed) a holy ideal they're very very very lucky to have, but that's another example of obvious mushroom food, which is obviously not good for those who swallow it because it's obviously not true.
    While multi-party systems with run-offs in most of the rest of the world allow some evolution, either forward or backward, and the excellent one-party system in Cuba admirably locks out capitalism, America's two-party system locks in the status quo and prevents escape from capitalism, because just enough Americans are winners in America's obviously win-or-lose system, with too much to willingly lose by compromising even to the extent of accepting a slow socialist transition to civilization at last... I say, just enough Americans are in that probably envied position to dominate the power structures of just two historically inert parties and, with the help of constant propaganda, keep progressives from gaining a significant foothold within those two parties. Obviously, this is deliberate and getting more arrogantly deliberate. The media used to run one or two stories during the election "year" about alternative parties which they openly sneered at and declared irrelevant. Now they don't even do that. They give you, instead, the "Occupy" children, a gang too confused and purposeless to disrupt the media's elections. So it's become super official that there are only two parties, which every half conscious person knows are nearly identical.
    Most Americans who actually know they aren't among the winners (maybe 25% - maybe not), who know that "the rich get rich and the poor get poorer" and that "THE economy" isn't their economy, confronted by the stone wall of the two-party system backed by the media, have lost hope for progressive change and surrendered (as great a contemporary propaganda victory as was won in the 1930's and 40's by the Nazis) and resigned themselves to "go with the flow" of everything, including the two-party system. Right now, after all (and it's always right now), they're forced by the two-party format to vote again for a person they don't want to avoid getting the much stupider and much more dangerous alternative - the only alternative they have.
    They even put it that way. You can hear people in any coffee shop declaring their ideal of going with the flow as if, under the circumstances, apathy were an admirable intellectual stand. And since the media have helped them by keeping it an official secret, although they KNOW about the possibility, they let the media have their way and help keep it a secret from themselves that, obviously, with a multiparty system and mandatory run-offs, at least a third of Americans might jump ship at last and put a progressive alternative party into a run-off against one of the inert parties. That's all it finally took in EIGHT BIG South American countries during the last decade to at least start them all moving "Castro's way," which is another elephant sized story the media are keeping secret from the willingly hoodwinked public. See 20 February '09: Latin American cover up.
    You didn't know about it? Well, as I keep telling you, American brain space is dominated by embedded media that lie so effectively that Americans don't know much of anything about what's happening outside their borders. That you didn't know it is proof of the thesis underlying this list of 10 obviously false official stories willingly accepted by the public.

     Still to come: (maybe 7 but probably 10) the flashy story of virtually useless space research justified by grant-paid scientists whose pseudo-mathematical, actually metaphysical rationalizations about "casting light on the origin of the universe" and etc. won't translate into logical philosophy. Sorry, Stephen Hawking, but that's the truth. (Maybe 8 or 9), the daily lie that health insurance is health care, a damned lie so obvious that most of the public is still not swallowing it. (Or maybe instead), the insanity plea concept, along with the corollary acceptance of courtroom psychiatry, and (maybe 10 or 9) The belief that the value of money and the prices of products are determined by some natural force over which nobody has any control.

-Glen Roberts

See also On Human Intelligence

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