USC Helps Hollywood Concoct Obamacare PSYOP: “People Learn from TV”
October 11th, 2013Here are some excerpts from related posts:
‘Clearly a Smash Hit’: Population Reduction Through ‘Long-Running Serialized Dramas’:
And if the story is right, if the narrative is correct, people will live into that narrative. And in the absence of a good narrative will default into – maybe I will call them more “primal” sort of behavior sets.
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As part of its broader efforts to counter extremism in northern Mali, the United States also underwrote a series of radio soap operas whose plot twists emphasized the dangers of extremism.
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And now…
Via: Marketplace:
Coming soon to your favorite TV shows: plot lines about the Affordable Care Act.
Hollywood Health & Society, a program with the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center got a $500,000 grant this week from The California Endowment to help TV writers tell better stories about the new health insurance law.
Why try to get your public health message into fictional story lines? People learn from TV,” says Marty Kaplan, the director of the Norman Lear Center. “Even if they know it is fiction, even if they know if writers can make stuff up, especially in the realm of medicine and public health, if a doctor says something to a patient, people tend to think that someone has checked that, that it’s true,” Kaplan says.
Kaplan’s group works to make sure that at least some of what comes out of doctors’ mouths is real, or at least real-ish. Hollywood Health & Society has worked with nearly 100 TV shows — everything from “Mad Men” to “Desperate Housewives” to “Dr. Vegas” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.” The Center has access to the megaphone that is Hollywood.
And that’s appealing to The California Endowment, which gave the $500,000 grant. Hollywood Health & Society will reach out to TV writers and editors says Daniel Zingale, Senior V.P. of Healthy California at The California Endowment. “They’ll be giving them content, storylines, information, so that people watching those programs will learn about Obamacare and useful information about how to get enrolled.”
“A Corporate Trojan Horse”: Obama Pushes Secretive TPP Trade Pact, Would Rewrite Swath of U.S. Laws
October 11th, 2013Via: Democracy Now:
As the federal government shutdown continues, Secretary of State John Kerry heads to Asia for secret talks on a sweeping new trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is often referred to by critics as “NAFTA on steroids,” and would establish a free trade zone that would stretch from Vietnam to Chile, encompassing 800 million people — about a third of world trade and nearly 40 percent of the global economy. While the text of the treaty has been largely negotiated behind closed doors and, until June, kept secret from Congress, more than 600 corporate advisers reportedly have access to the measure, including employees of Halliburton and Monsanto. “This is not mainly about trade,” says Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “It is a corporate Trojan horse. The agreement has 29 chapters, and only five of them have to do with trade. The other 24 chapters either handcuff our domestic governments, limiting food safety, environmental standards, financial regulation, energy and climate policy, or establishing new powers for corporations.”
Hopey Changey: Obama’s Efforts to Control Media Are ‘Most Aggressive’ Since Nixon
October 10th, 2013Via: Threat Level:
The President Barack Obama administration has “chilled the flow of information on issues of great public interest,” according to a Thursday report that amounts to an indictment of the president’s campaign pledge of a more open government.
The report from the Committee to Protect Journalists, a non-profit dedicated to global press freedoms, said Obama has “fallen short” on his promises of a transparent government while at the same time forging ahead with an unprecedented effort — the “most aggressive” since the President Richard M. Nixon administration — to silence government officials and the media at large.
“Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations,” said the committee’s report, prepared by Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post.
In a 2008 campaign speech, however, Obama said: “I’ll make our government open and transparent so that anyone can ensure that our business is the people’s business. No more secrecy.”
“The Story of Jesus Christ Was Invented as a System of Mind Control to Enslave the Poor”
October 10th, 2013Maybe. Maybe not. The Bible can mean anything to anyone. The flipside of what’s described in this piece is Liberation Theology:
Liberation theology is a political movement in Roman Catholic theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in relation to a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions. It has been described as “an interpretation of Christian faith through the poor’s suffering, their struggle and hope, and a critique of society and the Catholic faith and Christianity through the eyes of the poor”, and by detractors as Christianized Marxism.
Personally, I believe in outer space.
Via: Independent:
A controversial American biblical scholar is set to make his first appearance in London next week to present a discovery that he claims proves the story of Jesus Christ was invented as a system of mind control to enslave the poor.
Joseph Atwill, who is the author of a book entitled ‘Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus’, asserts that Christianity did not begin as a religion, but was actually a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.
At the ‘Covert Messiah’ conference, to be held at the Conway Hall in Holborn a week on Saturday, Mr Atwill will present his theory that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they entirely fabricated the story of Jesus Christ.
Outlining his ideas in a blog posting on his website Mr Atwill writes: “Christianity may be considered a religion, but it was actually developed and used as a system of mind control to produce slaves that believed God decreed their slavery.”
Mr Atwill says that acts of insurrection by Jewish sects, who were awaiting the arrival of a so-called ‘warrior Messiah’ in Palestine, were a perpetual problem for the Roman Empire and that after the Empire had exhausted all traditional means of dealing with the problem they resorted to psychological warfare.
“They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system,” Atwill told PRWeb.com
“That’s when the ‘peaceful’ Messiah story was invented.
Book: Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus by Joseph Atwill
In Russia, 110 people Own 35% of Wealth
October 10th, 2013Via: Los Angeles Times:
Global wealth levels have set records, but in Russia, the explosion in wealth has given way to the highest income inequality level, a new report showed.
In Russia, just 110 people own 35% of the country’s wealth, according to a report released Wednesday by Credit Suisse.
The country (population 139 million) has the highest wealth inequality in the world, save for a few Caribbean islands, the report said.
South Dakota: Early Blizzard Killed 75,000 Cattle
October 10th, 2013Via: NBC:
An unusually early and enormous snowstorm over the weekend caught South Dakota ranchers and farmers unprepared, killing tens of thousands of cattle and ravaging the state’s $7 billion industry — an industry left without assistance because of the federal government shutdown.
As many as 75,000 cattle have perished since the storm slammed the western part of the state Thursday through Saturday with snowfall that set records for the entire month of October in just three days, state and industry officials said.
Blacklisted News Supports Cryptogon
October 9th, 2013Thanks to blacklistednews.com for sending $100 in October, and for all of their support over the years.
Japan Finally Seeks International Help with Fukushima Crisis
October 9th, 2013Via: CBS:
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan is open to receiving overseas help to contain widening radioactive water leaks at the crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima, with leaks and mishaps reported almost daily.
Abe made the comments Sunday in a speech at an international science forum in Kyoto in western Japan.
“We are wide open to receive the most advanced knowledge from overseas to contain the problem,” Abe said in his English speech to open the conference on energy and environment.
“My country needs your knowledge and expertise,” he said.
Despite Abe’s reassurances to the International Olympic Committee last month that the leaks were “under control,” many Japanese believe he was glossing over problems at the plant.
Abe did not say whether he still thinks the leaks are under control, or give any specifics about foreign participation.
His comments come just days after the plant’s operator acknowledged that highly contaminated water spilled from a storage tank as workers tried to fill it to the top.
Officials have acknowledged that the groundwater contaminated with radioactive leaks has been seeping into the Pacific since soon after meltdowns following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Recent leaks from storage tanks have added to public concerns.
Japan has been criticized for its perceived reluctance in accepting foreign assistance to fight the problems at the plant, where the ongoing water leaks are hampering decommissioning work that is expected to last decades.
GE and AT&T Partner to Make Engines, Trains and Turbines Cellular-Capable
October 9th, 2013What could possibly go wrong?
Via: All Things D:
General Electric is announcing a partnership with AT&T on Wednesday to add wireless capabilities to a wide range of the company’s industrial machines.
The deal — an expansion of the existing partnership between the two companies — is designed to equip millions of jet engines, locomotives, turbines and medical devices with wireless capabilities.
“Imagine a world where an airline, for example, can remotely monitor, diagnose and resolve issues with its fleet engines virtually anywhere in the world,” AT&T Business Solutions unit chief Andy Geisse said in a statement.
With nearly everyone in the world having a cellphone these days, equipping cars, appliances and other machines with cellular connections is seen as a key growth area for wireless carriers in the coming years. AT&T said it has seen a 38 percent increase in the number of machine-to-machine customers in the last year, with more than 15.2 million such devices already on its network.
Report: Foxconn Using Forced Student Labor to Build Sony’s PS4
October 9th, 2013Via: Games in Asia:
If reports in the Chinese press are to be believed, Sony’s next-gen games console may be being assembled using some very outdated labor practices. According to Hong Kong’s Oriental Daily, thousands of students from an IT engineering program at the Xi’an Institute of Technology are being forced to work at Foxconn’s Yantai plant assembling the Sony Playstation 4. Students have been told if they refuse to participate, they lose six course credits, which effectively means they will not be able to graduate.
Officially, the program is considered an “internship” and it is publicly recognized and promoted by the school. But students have said that once they got to Foxconn, they were assigned to jobs that had no relation whatsoever to their fields of study, including grunt work like distribution and shipping. One student, for example, majored in finance and accounting but has been assigned to a job that entails glueing together parts of Sony’s Playstation 4. Another was assigned to a job that entails peeling of the PS4?s protective plastic and putting stickers on it. Still another, a computer science major, puts the PS4?s various cords and the instruction manual into the console’s box. Moreover, students say that their working hours are exactly the same as regular workers. The only difference is that unlike the workers, the students aren’t being paid.
