Selling Anything

While the main focus of this video is selling war, and we are in that mode right now with regard to Russia, the beginning about what we eat was on target for me starting up again my series on eating and diet. 

Why is the traditional American breakfast bacon and eggs? The answer is propaganda. 

Today it is not the bacon companies, it is the cereal companies that want you to eat a "healthy" breakfast. I am not saying that you can skip breakfast, nor am I saying you can't eat cereal. Experiment on yourself and see how you eat on days you skip breakfast, or have a smoothie, or bacon and eggs, or have cereal. What do you eat after each of these experimental breakfasts? Do you pass up or eat the office donuts? Do you go to the drive through at Starbucks for a Carmel Macchiatta? Know thyself. 

The important thing to remember is that each of us is different, and that you are being played by the advertisements you watch. Why would food companies spend billions on ads each year? The obvious answer is that the ads work. 

As we proceed on this topic, I will be offering some suggestions on how to leave the business, religious and military system I, and the Bible, calls Babylon the Great. 

When In Doubt, Quote Socrates

Why do you buy the products you buy? Or even more scary, why do you think the thoughts you think? Socrates' famous proverb that the unexamined life is not worth living is just as true today as it was when he said it millennia ago. 

We are products of our culture in ways we do not even realize. That culture is a construct of each of us, but yet we are also constructs of our culture. The "powers that be" use various techniques to influence society. Maybe I am amused easily, but I find it funny that these same "powers" are just as much a victim of their own propaganda as everyone else. That is the power of culture and of propaganda and its sister advertising. 

As the quote from Socrates shows this has always been a problem. But with modern media the problem for modern society is more acute. 

This YouTube video examines these issues by talking about the father of modern PR, Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. I will post other parts over the next few days. 

Fake Flyer?

While I am not tottally convinced either way, the preponderance of the evidence is that the flyer requiring Jewish registration in Donetsk is fake. 

Who Ya Going Blame?

One reason that Yanukovych is now the former president of the Ukraine was that snipers killed many protesters. Of course Yanukovych was responsible ... of course. When I first heard about the snipers, my first thought was not that the Ukrainian government was responsible. There is a long history of what are called false flags. 

Here is how Wikipedia describes a false flag operation:

False flag (aka Black Flag) operations are covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is flying the flag of a country other than one's own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and can be used in peace-time. 

Here is where I have discussed this before. 

So did the former Ukrainian government kill the protestors? The foreign minster of Estonia, after a trip to Ukraine, thought that the Ukrainian government was not involved in the sniping. He thinks that it was the protestors themselves. Here is the intercepted phone call: 

Was he right? I have no idea. There is in fact no way to know who killed whom. The main thing to take away from this is that we who are thousands of miles away do not know anything beyond what we are told. 

Do you believe what you are told? 

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