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Subject: 125, J. ROTHSCHILD III GRABS THE RAILROADS, THE SECRET WORLD GOVERNMENT, by Maj.-Gen., Count Cherep-Spiridovich
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Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 05:32:55 -0700




J. ROTHSCHILD III GRABS THE RAILROADS

"With the French July Revolution the firm entered upon a period during which
its influence and position attained a height which would have surprised
Amschel Mayer. History does not record another instance of any one private
firm holding so prominent a position, or exercising such a powerful control
over the destinies of nations, as is furnished by the Rothschild family" (J.
Reeves, p. 87).

The greatest endeavor of the XIX Century, was the construction of railroads.
The Rothschilds grabbed most of them. Read the conditions which James
Rothschild III compelled France to accept for financing its North Railroad.

The Government took upon itself the obligation to spend 100 million francs
in order to build the roadbed. James consented to spend some 60 millions in
providing the rails, cars, etc. He received during 40 years 17 millions
yearly by way of income, i.e. 620 millions in interest, plus the principal
of 60 millions. In this undertaking the Rothschilds used 60 millions of
their depositors' money for which they paid them 4% interest or 2,400,000
yearly, thus getting 14,600,000 francs per annum for their signature.

The "Journal des Debits" in order to deceive the nation stated in July,
1843, that Rothschild is "begging for the privilege to ruin himself." The
French press acted the role of agent provocateur as early as fifty years
before the scandal of Panama.

The Jews have coveted this rich prey - the railroads - at any cost. At one
time the Government passed through an interval of honesty and had the
temerity to stem their aggression. In 1838 M. Martin, from the North,
suggested to Parliament a net of railroads to be built by the State. If Mr.
Martin's plan, based on two pillars: monopoly of banking and of
transportation had been approved by Parliament the financial feudality would
have been killed in its inception. But the Rothschilds, through the press
controlled by them, found the way to acquire the railroads. In 1840, the
West and South lines were conceded to the Rothschilds and the Foulds. By
1845 all the great lines belonged to these two companies.

They ruled the Exchange and by regularly plundering the public, made 150
millions yearly. Through their press the Rothschilds excited the appetites
of the public and sold all they could at the highest point, and in 1823
began to withdraw their capital and did not reinvest it. Of course, many
banks failed and millions of individuals were ruined. * In 1825 the
Rothschilds re-bought their stocks at the lowest possible prices.

* Just as the Federal Reserve Bank acted with the farmers in 1921-22.

125

- posted by boxcarro @ 12:17 PM

 
Come Out Of Her My People
Revelation 18:4


The Doors of Perception - Why Americans Will Believe Most
Anything...




> Dear Members and Friends -
> This excellent commentary is authored by Tim O'Shea, the chiropractor who
> wrote the book, The Sanctity of Human Blood: Vaccination I$ Not Immunization.


> ============================================
> The Doors Of Perception: Why Americans Will Believe Almost Anything

>
> Aldous Huxley's inspired 1956 essay detailed the vivid, mind-expanding,
> multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures. By altering his brain
> chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid
> world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power. With his neurosensory
> input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe
> described by every mystic and space captain in recorded history. Whether by
> hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all controls, all
> filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront
> Nature or the World or Reality first-hand - in its unpasteurized, unedited,
> unretouched, infinite rawness.
>
> Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later. We are the
> most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are
> our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very
> awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably
> erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated.
> Who cares, right?
>
> It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most
> issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public
> consciousness by a thousand media clips per day. In an effort to save time,
> I would like to provide just a little
> background on the handling of information in this country. Once the basic
> principles are illustrated about how our current system of media control
> arose historically, the reader might be more apt to question any given
> popular opinion.
>
> If everybody believes something, it's probably wrong. We call that
> Conventional Wisdom.
>
> In America, conventional wisdom that has mass acceptance is usually
> contrived: somebody paid for it.
>
>
> Examples:
> * Pharmaceuticals restore health
> * Vaccination brings immunity
> * The cure for cancer is just around the corner
> * Menopause is a disease condition
> * When a child is sick, he needs immediate antibiotics
> * When a child has a fever he needs Tylenol
> * Hospitals are safe and clean.
> * America has the best health care in the world.
> * Americans have the best health in the world.
> * Milk is a good source of calcium.
> * You never outgrow your need for milk.
> * Vitamin C is ascorbic acid.
> * Aspirin prevents heart attacks.
> * Heart drugs improve the heart.
> * Back and neck pain are the only reasons for spinal adjustment.
> * No child can get into school without being vaccinated.
> * The FDA thoroughly tests all drugs before they go on the market.
> * Pregnancy is a serious medical condition
> * Chemotherapy and radiation are effective cures for cancer
> * When your child is diagnosed with an ear infection, antibiotics should be
> given immediately 'just in case'
> * Ear tubes are for the good of the child.
> * Estrogen drugs prevent osteoporosis after menopause.
> * Pediatricians are the most highly trained of al medical specialists.
> * The purpose of the health care industry is health.
> * HIV is the cause of AIDS.
> * AZT is the cure for AIDS.
> * Without vaccines, infectious diseases will return
> * Fluoride in the city water protects your teeth
> * Flu shots prevent the flu.
> * Vaccines are thoroughly tested before being placed on the Mandated
> Schedule.
> * Doctors are certain that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh any
> possible risks.
> * There is a power shortage in California.
> * There is a meningitis epidemic in California.
> * The NASDAQ is a natural market controlled only by supply and demand.
> * Chronic pain is a natural consequence of aging.
> * Soy is your healthiest source of protein.
> * Insulin shots cure diabetes.
> * After we take out your gall bladder you can eat anything you want
> * Allergy medicine will cure allergies.
>
> This is a list of illusions, that have cost billions and billions to conjure
> up. Did you ever wonder why you never see the President speaking publicly
> unless he is reading? Or why most people in this country think generally the
> same about most of the above issues?
>
> HOW THIS WHOLE SET-UP GOT STARTED
>
> In "Trust Us; We're Experts," Stauber and Rampton pull together some
> compelling data describing the science of creating public opinion in
> America. They trace modern public influence back to the early part of the
> last century, highlighting the work of guys like Edward L. Bernays,
> the Father of Spin. From his own amazing chronicle Propaganda, we learn
> how Edward L. Bernays took the ideas of his famous uncle Sigmund Freud
> himself and applied them to the emerging science of mass persuasion.
> The only difference was that instead of using these principles to uncover
> hidden
> themes in the human unconscious, the way Freudian psychology does, Bernays
> used these same ideas to mask agendas and to create illusions that deceive
> and misrepresent, for marketing purposes.
>
> THE FATHER OF SPIN
>
> Bernays dominated the PR industry until the 1940s, and was a significant
> force for another 40 years after that. (Tye) During all that time, Bernays
> took on hundreds of diverse assignments to create a public perception about
> some idea or product. A few examples: As a neophyte with the Committee
> on Public Information, one of Bernays' first assignments was to help sell
> the
> First World War to the American public with the idea to "Make the World
> Safe for Democracy." (Ewen)
>
> A few years later, Bernays set up a stunt to popularize the notion of women
> smoking cigarettes. In organizing the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City,
> Bernays showed himself as a force to be reckoned with. He organized the
> Torches of Liberty Brigade in which suffragettes marched in the parade
> smoking cigarettes as a mark of women's liberation. Such publicity, followed
> from that one event, that from then on, women have felt secure about
> destroying
> their own lungs in public, the same way that men have always done.
>
> Bernays popularized the idea of bacon for breakfast. Not one to turn down a
> challenge, he set up the advertising format along with the AMA that lasted
> for nearly 50 years proving that cigarettes are beneficial to health. Just
> look at ads in issues of Life or Time from the 40s and 50s.
>
> During the next several decades Bernays and his colleagues evolved the
> principles by which masses of people could be generally swayed through
> messages repeated over and over hundreds of times. Once the value of media
> became apparent, other countries of the world tried to follow our lead. But
> Bernays really was the gold standard. Josef Goebbels, who was Hitler's
> minister of propaganda, studied the principles of Edward Bernays when
> Goebbels was developing the popular rationale he would use to convince the
> Germans that they had to purify their race. (Stauber)
>
> SMOKE AND MIRRORS
>
> Bernay's job was to reframe an issue; to create a desired image that would
> put a particular product or concept in a desirable light. Bernays described
> the public as a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking
> makes people "susceptible to leadership." Bernays never deviated from his
> fundamental axiom to "control the masses without their knowing it." The
> best PR happens when people are unaware that they are being manipulated.
>
> Stauber describes Bernays' rationale like this: "the scientific manipulation
> of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in a
> democratic society." Trust Us p.42
>
> These early mass persuaders postured themselves as performing a moral
> service for humanity in general - democracy was too good for people; they
> needed to be told what to think, because they were incapable of rational
> thought by themselves. Here's a paragraph from Bernays' Propaganda:
> "Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an
> invisible
> government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are
> governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely
> by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which
> our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must
> cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly
> functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere
> of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we
> are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the
> mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the
> wires that control the public mind."
>
> A tad different from Thomas Jefferson's view on the subject:
> "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the
> people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise
> that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from
> them, but to inform their discretion."
>
> Inform their discretion. Bernays believed that only a few possessed the
> necessary insight into the Big Picture to be entrusted with this sacred
> task. And luckily, he saw himself as one of that few.
>
>
> HERE COMES THE MONEY
> Once the possibilities of applying Freudian psychology to mass media were
> glimpsed, Bernays soon had more corporate clients than he could handle.
> Global corporations fell all over themselves courting the new Image Makers.
> There were dozens of goods and
> services and ideas to be sold to a susceptible public. Over the years, these
> players have had the money to make their images happen.
>
> A few examples:
>
> Philip Morris Pfizer Union Carbide Allstate Monsanto
> Eli Lilly
> tobacco industry
>
> Ciba Geigy
>
> lead industry
>
> Coors
> DuPont
> Chlorox
> Shell Oil
>
> Standard Oil
>
> Procter & Gamble
>
> Boeing
> General Motors
> Dow Chemical
>
> General Mills
>
> Goodyear
>
>
> THE PLAYERS
> Dozens of PR firms have emerged to answer that demand. Among them:
>
> Burson-Marsteller Edelman
>
> Hill & Knowlton
> Kamer-Singer
> Ketchum Mongovin
>
> Biscoe
>
> Duchin BSMG Buder-Finn
>
> Though world-famous within the PR industry, these are names we don't know,
> and for good reason. The best PR goes unnoticed. For decades they have
> created the opinions that most of us were raised with, on virtually any
> issue which has the remotest commercial value, including:
>
> pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, medicine as a profession, alternative
> medicine, fluoridation of city water, chlorine, household cleaning products,
> tobacco, dioxin, global warming, leaded gasoline, cancer research and
> treatment, pollution of the oceans, forests and lumber, images of
> celebrities, including damage control crisis and disaster management,
> genetically modified foods, aspartame, food additives, processed foods,
> dental amalgams, etc.
>
>
>
> LESSON #1
> Bernays learned early on that the most effective way to create credibility
> for a product or an image was by "independent third-party" endorsement. For
> example, if General Motors were to come out and say that global warming is a
> hoax thought up by some liberal tree-huggers, people would suspect GM's
> motives, since GM's fortune is made by selling automobiles. If, however,
> some independent research institute with a very credible sounding name like the
> Global Climate Coalition comes out with a scientific report that says global
> warming is really a fiction, people begin to get confused and to have doubts
> about the original issue.
>
> So that's exactly what Bernays did. With a policy inspired by genius, he set
> up "more institutes and foundations than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined."
> (Stauber p 45)
> Quietly financed by the industries whose products were being evaluated,
> these "independent" research agencies would churn out "scientific" studies
> and press materials that could create any image their handlers wanted. Such
> front groups are given high-sounding names like:
>
> Temperature Research Foundation
> International Food Information
> Council Consumer Alert
> The Advancement of Sound Science
> Coalition Air Hygiene Foundation
> Industrial Health Federation
> International Food Information Council
> Manhattan Institute Center for Produce Quality
> Tobacco Institute Research Council
> Institute American Council on Science and Health
> Global Climate Coalition
> Alliance for Better Foods
>
>
> Sound pretty legit, don't they?
>
>
> CANNED NEWS RELEASES
> As Stauber explains, these organizations and hundreds of others like them
> are front groups whose sole mission is to advance the image of the global
> corporations who fund them, like those listed on page 2 above. This is
> accomplished in part by an endless
> stream of 'press releases' announcing "breakthrough" research to every radio
> station and newspaper in the country. (Robbins) Many of these canned reports
> read like straight news, and indeed are purposely molded in the news format.
> This saves journalists the
> trouble of researching the subjects on their own, especially on topics about
> which they know very little. Entire sections of the release or in the case
> of video news releases, the
> whole thing can be just lifted intact, with no editing, given the byline of
> the reporter
> or newspaper or TV station - and voilá! Instant news - copy and paste.
> Written by corporate PR firms.
>
>
> Does this really happen? Every single day, since the 1920s when the idea of
> the News Release was first invented by Ivy Lee. (Stauber, p 22) Sometimes as
> many as half the stories appearing in an issue of the Wall St. Journal are
> based solely on such PR press releases.. (22) These types of stories are
> mixe d right in with legitimately researched stories. Unless you have done
> the research yourself, you won't be able to tell the
> difference.
>
>
> THE LANGUAGE OF SPIN
> As 1920s spin pioneers like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays gained more
> experience, they began to formulate rules and guidelines for creating public
> opinion. They learned quickly that mob psychology must focus on emotion, not
> facts. Since the mob is incapable of
> rational thought, motivation must be based not on logic but on presentation.
> Here are some of the axioms of the new science of PR:
>
> * technology is a religion unto itself
>
> * if people are incapable of rational thought, real democracy is dangerous
>
> *important decisions should be left to experts
>
> * when reframing issues, stay away from substance; create images
>
> * never state a clearly demonstrable lie
>
>
>
>
> Words are very carefully chosen for their emotional impact. Here's an
> example. A front group called the International Food Information Council
> handles the public's natural aversion to genetically modified foods.
> Trigger words are repeated all through the text.
> Now in the case of GM foods, the public is instinctively afraid of these
> experimental new creations which have suddenly popped up on our grocery
> shelves which are said to have DNA alterations.
>
>
> The IFIC wants to reassure the public of the safety of GM foods, so it
> avoids words like:
> Frankenfoods Hitler biotech chemical DNA experiments manipulate money
> safety scientists radiation roulette gene-splicing gene gun random
>
> Instead, good PR for GM foods contains words like:
> hybrids natural order beauty choice bounty cross-breeding diversity earth
> farmer organic wholesome.
>
> It's basic Freudian/Tony Robbins word association. The fact that GM foods
> are not hybrids that have been subjected to the slow and careful scientific
> methods of real cross-breeding doesn't really matter. This is pseudoscience,
> not science. Form is everything and
> substance just a passing myth. (Trevanian)
>
>
> Who do you think funds the International Food Information Council? Take a
> wild guess. Right - Monsanto, DuPont, Frito-Lay, Coca Cola, Nutrasweet -
> those in a position to make fortunes from GM foods. (Stauber p 20)
>
>
>
> CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD PROPAGANDA
> As the science of mass control evolved, PR firms developed further
> guidelines for effective copy. Here are some of the gems:
>
> - dehumanize the attacked party by labeling and name calling
> - speak in glittering generalities using emotionally positive words
> - when covering something up, don't use plain English; stall for time;
> distract
> - get endorsements from celebrities, churches, sports figures, street
> people...anyone who has no expertise in the subject at hand
> - the 'plain folks' ruse: us billionaires are just like you
> - when minimizing outrage, don't say anything memorable
> - when minimizing outrage, point out the benefits of what just happened
> - when minimizing outrage, avoid moral issues
>
>
> Keep this list. Start watching for these techniques. Not hard to find Look
> at today's paper or tonight's TV news. See what they're doing; these guys
> are good!
>
>
> SCIENCE FOR HIRE
> PR firms have become very sophisticated in the preparation of news releases.
> They have learned how to attach the names of famous scientists to research
> that those scientists have not even looked at. (Stauber, p 201) This is a
> common occurrence. In this way the editors of newspapers and TV news shows
> are often not even aware that an individual release is a total PR
> fabrication. Or at least they have "deniability," right?
>
>
> Stauber tells the amazing story of how leaded gas came into the picture. In
> 1922, General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline gave cars more
> horsepower. When there was some concern about safety, GM paid the Bureau of
> Mines to do some fake "testing" and publish spurious research that 'proved'
> that inhalation of lead was harmless. Enter Charles Kettering. Founder of
> the world famous Sloan-Kettering Memorial Institute for
> medical research, Charles Kettering also happened to be an executive with
> General Motors.
>
>
>
> By some strange coincidence, we soon have the Sloan Kettering institute
> issuing reports stating that lead occurs naturally in the body and that the
> body has a way of
> eliminating low level exposure. Through its association with The Industrial
> Hygiene Foundation and PR giant Hill & Knowlton, Sloane Kettering opposed
> all anti-lead research for years. (Stauber p 92). Without organized
> scientific opposition, for the next
> 60 years more and more gasoline became leaded, until by the 1970s, 90% or
> our gasoline was leaded.
>
>
> Finally it became too obvious to hide that lead was a major carcinogen, and
> leaded gas was phased out in the late 1980s. But during those 60 years, it
> is estimated that some 30
> million tons of lead were released in vapor form onto American streets and
> highways. 30 million tons.
>
>
> That is PR, my friends.
>
> JUNK SCIENCE
>
> In 1993 a guy named Peter Huber wrote a new book and coined a new term. The
> book was Galileo's Revenge and the term was junk science. Huber's shallow
> thesis was that real science supports technology, industry, and progress.
> Anything else was suddenly
> junk science. Not surprisingly, Stauber explains how Huber's book was
> supported by the industry-backed Manhattan Institute.
>
> Huber's book was generally dismissed not only because it was so poorly
> written, but because it failed to realize one fact: true scientific research
> begins with no conclusions. Real scientists are seeking the truth because
> they do not yet know what the truth is.
>
> True scientific method goes like this:
>
> 1. form a hypothesis
> 2. make predictions for that hypothesis
> 3. test the predictions
> 4. reject or revise the hypothesis based on the research findings
>
> Boston University scientist Dr. David Ozonoff explains that ideas in science
> are themselves like "living organisms, that must be nourished, supported,
> and cultivated with resources for making them grow and flourish." (Stauber pg
> 205) Great ideas that don't get
> this financial support because the commercial angles are not immediately
> obvious - these ideas wither and die.
>
>
> Another way you can often distinguish real science from phony is that real
> science points out flaws in its own research. Phony science pretends there
> were no flaws.
>
>
>
> THE REAL JUNK SCIENCE
> Contrast this with modern PR and its constant pretensions to sound science.
> Corporate sponsored research, whether it's in the area of drugs, GM foods,
> or chemistry begins with
> predetermined conclusions. It is the job of the scientists then to prove
> that these conclusions are true, because of the economic upside that proof
> will bring to the industries paying for that research. This invidious
> approach to science has shifted the entire focus of research in America
> during the past 50 years, as any true scientist is likely to admit.
>
>
> Stauber documents the increasing amount of corporate sponsorship of
> university research. (206) This has nothing to do with the pursuit of
> knowledge. Scientists lament that research has become just another
> commodity, something bought and sold. (Crossen)
>
>
> THE TWO MAIN TARGETS OF "SOUND SCIENCE"
> It is shocking when Stauber shows how the vast majority of corporate PR
> today opposes any research that seeks to protect: Public Health and The
> Environment
>
> It's a funny thing that most of the time when we see the phrase "junk
> science," it is in a context of defending something that may threaten either
> the environment or our health. This makes sense when one realizes that money
> changes hands only by selling the
> illusion of health and the illusion of environmental protection. True public
> health and real preservation of the earth's environment have very low market
> value.
>
> Stauber thinks it ironic that industry's self-proclaimed debunkers of junk
> science are usually non-scientists themselves. (255) Here again they can do
> this because the issue is not science, but the creation of images.
>
>
> THE LANGUAGE OF ATTACK
> When PR firms attack legitimate environmental groups and alternative
> medicine people, they again use special words which will carry an emotional
> punch: outraged sound science junk science sensible scaremongering
> responsible phobia hoax alarmist hysteria
>
> The next time you are reading a newspaper article about an environmental or
> health issue, note how the author shows bias by using the above terms. This
> is the result of very
> specialized training.
>
> Another standard PR tactic is to use the rhetoric of the environmentalists
> themselves to defend a dangerous and untested product that poses an actual
> threat to the environment. This we see constantly in the PR smokescreen that
> surrounds genetically modified foods. They talk about how GM foods are
> necessary to grow more food and to end world hunger, when the reality is
> that GM foods actually have lower yields per acre than natural crops.
> (Stauber p 173) The grand design sort of comes into focus once
> you realize that almost all GM foods have been created by the sellers of
> herbicides and pesticides so that those plants can withstand greater amounts
> of herbicides and pesticides. (The Magic Bean)
>
>
> THE MIRAGE OF PEER REVIEW
>
> Publish or perish is the classic dilemma of every research scientist. That
> means whoever expects funding for the next research project had better get
> the current research paper published in the best scientific journals. And we
> all know that the best scientific journals,
> like JAMA, New England Journal, British Medical Journal, etc. are
> peer-reviewed. Peer review means that any articles which actually get
> published, between all those full color drug ads and pharmaceutical
> centerfolds, have been reviewed and accepted by some really smart guys with
> a lot of credentials. The assumption is, if the article made it past peer
> review, the data and the conclusions of the research study have been
> thoroughly checked out and bear some resemblance to physical reality.
>
> But there are a few problems with this hot little set up. First off, money.
> Even though prestigious venerable medical journals pretend to be so
> objective and scientific and incorruptible, the reality is that they face
> the same type of being called to account
> that all glossy magazines must confront: don't antagonize your advertisers.
> Those full-page drug ads in the best journals cost millions, Jack. How long
> will a pharmaceutical company pay for ad space in a magazine that prints
> some very sound scientific
> research paper that attacks the safety of the drug in the centerfold? Think
> about it. The editors aren't that stupid.
>
> Another problem is the conflict of interest thing. There's a formal
> requirement for all medical journals that any financial ties between an
> author and a product manufacturer be disclosed in the article. In practice,
> it never happens. A study done in 1997 of 142 medical journals did not find
> even one such disclosure. (Wall St. Journal, 2 Feb 99)
>
> A 1998 study from the New England Journal of Medicine found that 96% of peer
> reviewed articles had financial ties to the drug they were studying.
> (Stelfox, 1998) Big shock, huh? Any disclosures? Yeah, right. This study
> should be pointed out whenever somebody starts getting too pompous about > the objectivity of peer review, like they often do.
>
> Then there's the outright purchase of space. A drug company may simply pay
> $100,000 to a journal to have a favorable article printed. (Stauber, pg 204)
> Fraud in peer review journals is nothing new. In 1987, the New England
> Journal ran an article that followed the research of R. Slutsky MD over a
> seven year period. During that time, Dr. Slutsky
> had published 137 articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals. NEJM found
> that in at least 60 of these 137, there was evidence of major scientific
> fraud and misrepresentation,
> including:
> * reporting data for experiments that were never done
> * reporting measurements that were never made
>
> * reporting statistical analyses that were never done (Engler)
>
> Dean Black PhD, describes what he the calls the "Babel Effect" that results
> when this very common and frequently undetected scientific fraudulent data
> in peer-reviewed journals are quoted by other researchers, who are in turn
> re-quoted by still others, and so
> on.
>
>
> Want to see something that sort of re-frames this whole discussion? Check
> out the McDonald's ads which often appear in the Journal of the American
> Medical Association. Then keep in mind that this is the same publication
> that for almost 50 years ran
> cigarette ads proclaiming the health benefits of tobacco. (Robbins)
>
> Very scientific, oh yes.
>
>
> KILL YOUR TV?
> Hope this chapter has given you a hint to start reading newspaper and
> magazine articles a little differently, and perhaps start watching TV news
> shows with a slightly different
> attitude than you had before. Always ask, what are they selling here, and
> who's
> selling it? And if you actually follow up on Stauber & Rampton's book and
> check out some of the other resources below, you might even glimpse the
> possibility of advancing your life one quantum simply by ceasing to subject
> your brain to mass media. That's right
> - no more newspapers, no more TV news, no more Time magazine or Newsweek.
> You could actually do that. Just think what you could do with the extra time
> alone.
>
> Really feel like you need to "relax" or find out "what's going on in the
> world" for a few hours every day? Think about the news of the past couple of
> years for a minute. Do you really suppose the major stories that have
> dominated headlines and TV news have been
> "what is going on in the world?" Do you actually think there's been nothing
> going on besides the contrived tech slump, the contrived power shortages,
> the re-filtered accounts of foreign violence and disaster, and all the other
> non-stories that the puppeteers dangle
> before us every day? What about when they get a big one, like with OJ or
> Monica Lewinsky or the Oklahoma city bombing? Do we really need to know all
> that detail, day after day? Do we have any way of verifying all that detail,
> even if we wanted to? What is the purpose of news? To inform the public?
> Hardly. The sole purpose of news is to keep the public in a state of fear
> and uncertainty so that they'll watch again tomorrow and be subjected to the
> same advertising.
>
> Oversimplification? Of course. That's the mark of mass media mastery -
> simplicity. The invisible hand. Like Edward Bernays said, the people must be
> controlled without
> them knowing it.
>
> Consider this: what was really going on in the world all that time they were
> distracting us with all that stupid vexatious daily smokescreen? Fear and
> uncertainty -- that's what
> keeps people coming back for more.
>
> If this seems like a radical outlook, let's take it one step further: What
> would you lose from your life if you stopped watching TV and stopped reading
> newspapers altogether?
>
> Would your life really suffer any financial, moral, intellectual or academic
> loss from such a decision?
>
>
> Do you really need to have your family continually absorbing the illiterate,
> amoral, phony, uncultivated, desperately brainless values of the people
> featured in the average nightly TV program? Are these fake, programmed
> robots "normal"? Do you need to have your life values constantly spoon-fed
> to you? Are those shows really amusing, or just a necessary distraction to
> keep you from looking at reality, or trying to figure things out
> yourself by doing a little independent reading?
>
>
> Name one example of how your life is improved by watching TV news and
> reading the evening paper. What measurable gain is there for you?
>
>
> PLANET OF THE APES?
> There's no question that as a nation, we're getting dumber year by year.
> Look at the presidents we've been choosing lately. Ever notice the blatant
> grammar mistakes so ubiquitous in today's advertising and billboards?
> Literacy is marginal in most American
> secondary schools. Three-fourths of California high school seniors can't
> read well enough to pass their exit exams. ( SJ Mercury 20 Jul 01) If you
> think other parts of the country are smarter, try this one: hand any high
> school senior a book by Dumas or Jane Austen, and ask them to open to any
> random page and just read one paragraph out loud. Go ahead, do it. SAT
> scales are arbitrarily shifted lower and lower to disguise how dumb kids are
> getting year by year. (ADD: A Designer Disease) At least 10% have documented
> "learning disabilities," which are reinforced and rewarded by special
> treatment and special drugs. Ever hear of anyone failing a grade any more?
>
> Or observe the intellectual level of the average movie which these days may
> only last one or two weeks in the theatres, especially if it has
> insufficient explosions, chase scenes, silicone, fake martial arts, and
> cretinesque dialogue. Radio? Consider the low mental
> qualifications of the falsely animated corporate simians hired as DJs --
> seems like they're only allowed to have 50 thoughts, which they just repeat
> at random. And at what point did popular music cease to require the study of
> any musical instrument or theory
> whatsoever, not to mention lyric? Perhaps we just don't understand this
> emerging art form, right? The Darwinism of MTV - apes descended from man.
>
> Ever notice how most articles in any of the glossy magazines sound like they
> were all written by the same guy? And this writer just graduated from junior
> college? And yet has all the correct opinions on social issues, no original
> ideas, and that shallow, smug, homogenized corporate omniscience, to assure
> us that everything is going to be fine...
>
> Yes, everything is fine.
>
> All this is great news for the PR industry - makes their job that much
> easier. Not only are very few paying attention to the process of
> conditioning; fewer are capable of understanding it even if somebody
> explained it to them.
>
>
> TEA IN THE CAFETERIA
> Let's say you're in a crowded cafeteria, and you buy a cup of tea. And as
> you're about to sit down you see your friend way across the room. So you put
> the tea down and walk across the room and talk to your friend for a few
> minutes. Now, coming back to your tea, are you just going to pick it up and
> drink it? Remember, this is a crowded place and you've just left your tea
> unattended for several minutes. You've given anybody in that room access to
> your tea.
>
> Why should your mind be any different? Turning on the TV, or uncritically
> absorbing mass publications every day - these activities allow access to our
> minds by "just anyone" - anyone who has an agenda, anyone with the resources
> to create a public image via popular media. As we've seen above, just
> because we read something or see something on TV doesn't mean it's true or
> worth knowing. So the idea here is, like the tea, the mind is also worth
> guarding, worth limiting access to it.
>
> This is the only life we get. Time is our total capital. Why waste it
> allowing our potential, our personality, our values to be shaped, crafted,
> and limited according to the whims of the mass panderers? There are many
> truly important decisions that are crucial to our physical, mental, and
> spiritual well-being, decisions which require information and research. If
> it's an issue where money is involved, objective data won't be so easy to
> obtain. Remember, if everybody knows something, that image has been bought
> and paid for.
>
> Real knowledge takes a little effort, a little excavation down at least one
> level below what "everybody knows."
>

- posted by boxcarro @ 12:05 AM

 




Pynchon and Crunch: Heroes of the Underworld Wide Web
by Ron Rosenbaum



There’s a lot of loneliness and frustration in the writing life, and sometimes it can seem to outweigh the pleasures and rewards. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I spend a little time dwelling on one of the real sustaining satisfactions I’ve had from it all: being present at the creation, being part of the creation of a true American hero, a genuine—and, I think, genuinely significant—mythic American icon. I’m speaking, of course, of Captain Crunch.

Well, not just Crunch, but the whole crew of phone phreaks, proto-hackers and blind boy-electronic-geniuses who created outlaw cyber culture. The whole crew whose existence first became known to the world in one of the first magazine stories I ever wrote, a story called “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” in the October 1971 Esquire.

The whole crew, yes, but especially Captain Crunch, pseudonym of the first hacker superhero. I’m not writing this to claim credit for their achievements, for their creation of a genuinely subversive rebellion against (and critique of) techno-totalizing culture—an Underworld Wide Web, you might say. In fact, one reason I’m writing this is to share credit with someone else—with another writer, whose prophetic novel about an underground web of subversive communicants shaped the way I wrote about the phone phreaks and the proto-hackers. I’m speaking of Thomas Pynchon and his 1965 ­novel, The Crying of Lot 49.

I was reminded of the Pynchon connection when a British documentary producer came to New York to tape an interview with me for Channel Four in London, which (in conjunction with the Learning Channel here) is doing a documentary about the origins of hacker culture. His name was Ralph Lee, and he seemed like an extraordinarily energetic and intelligent reporter, someone who really got the sensibility of the phone phreaks and hackers; it gave one hope that the documentary might be the first to ­really do justice to the subject the way feature films have so far failed to.

Mr. Lee had been retracing the steps I’d taken on my initial odyssey into the phone-phreak underworld, relocating certain key characters in my story, including Crunch; “Mark Bernay” (a.k.a. the Midnight Skulker); and Joe Engressia, the original blind boy-genius. And certain other individuals whose lives had been changed by the story, such as Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs.

I’d read elsewhere that the Wozniak-Jobs partnership had been forged when, as teenagers, they’d read my “Blue Box” ­story and decided to try to manufacture the illicit cell-phone-sized free-call “ blue box” devices in their parents’ garage. While they apparently weren’t too successful at making a profit, they did make a connection: to the pioneers of cyber-hacker culture such as Captain Crunch, and to the rebel ­sensibility that (for a while) inspired Apple. My story inspired many other kindred spirits to become phreaks and hackers, forging alliances of isolated local networks into an Underworld Wide Web of techno rebels.

Forgive me if I take a paternal pride in characters like Crunch, Bernay and Engressia. As I said, I want to share paternity with someone else. If my story helped father hacker culture, Thomas Pynchon is, at the very least, its ghostly godfather.

What reminded me of the debt I owe (we all owe) to Pynchon—as a prophet who tells us more about the deep structure of contemporary culture than any other artist or political theorist I know of—was a single three-word phrase: “the lawyer Metzger.”

The lawyer Metzger: It came up when Ralph Lee asked me how I’d come upon the phone-phreak underground in the first place. It was something I couldn’t reveal in my original story because of security constraints. It’s something that time—and the statute of limitations—permit me to disclose here. It involved a daring plan by an outlaw “blue-box” entrepreneur to bring the phone company—then the undivided, all-smothering Ma Bell—to its knees with a devastating coup … of which I was to be the chosen instrument.

See, this lawyer named Metzger had reached out to Harold Hayes, the legendary Esquire editor, through his ­protégé, Craig Karpel, and said he had a client who was very, very angry with the phone company—primarily for getting him busted for selling illicit “blue boxes” to Las Vegas organized-crime figures. “Blue boxes” permitted the user to make unlimited, untraceable free phone calls all over the world—often an asset to gamblers, dealers and others who preferred anonymity and free long distance. Blue boxes were, ironically enough, invented and popularized by a network of mostly blind whiz kids who used them not for profit, but to create their own Web-like community in the worm holes they found in Ma Bell’s etheric net.

Anyway, the lawyer Metzger said his client was so incensed at the Darth Vaders of the phone company’s security division that he wanted to strike back at the Evil Empire in a devastating way. What this fellow—whom I’ve never named, and whose name I’ve since forgotten (although I’d love to hear from him)—wanted Esquire to do was to include, bound in the issue that carried my story, a vinyl disc, a 45 r.p.m. record that contained the secret codes that comprised internal phone-company signaling tones. So that everybody in America could make a blue box and bankrupt Ma Bell.

You could, if you were charitable, see this as an anticipation of the “open source” movement in contemporary cyber culture. But you could also look at it—as I believe Esquire’s lawyers did when they nixed the idea—as opening oneself up to a charge of criminal conspiracy. But by introducing me, and thus the world, to the existence of an illicit underground communications network, he accomplished something more far- reachingly subversive.

He was the first to tell me about the then-embryonic field of computer hacking—demonstrating to me how to modem into a mainframe (this was 1971) and search out the passwords.

It was this guy (the lawyer Metzger’s client), who introduced me to Joe Engressia, the blind phone-phreak adept who was, I believe, the first to discover the secret utility to the Cap’n Crunch whistle. The Cap’n Crunch whistle, a little cheap plastic job, was a key icon (or maybe an iconic key) to the phone-phreak underground: It was the key that unlocked Ma Bell’s treasures. The makers of Cap’n Crunch cereal had no idea (I think) of what they were doing when they decided to include the little “bosun whistle” (in keeping with the nautical theme) in the cereal box, much like the prize found in Cracker Jacks. But Engressia, who was gifted with perfect pitch, discovered that the whistle produced a perfect 2,600-­cycle-per-second tone, a high-pitched note that was the entry signal to the phone company’s electronic switching system. The tone that, in the hands of a skilled hacker-phreak, allowed unlimited, untraceable access to the long-distance lines—and through a modem, to the innards of computers.

I’d never actually seen one of the Cap’n Crunch whistles (which were quickly taken off the market), but the enterprising Ralph Lee had unearthed one, which he showed me when I arrived for the taping. I felt the kind of thrill archaeologists must have gotten when they first came upon the Rosetta Stone. Anyway, it was this device that gave the name to phone-phreak superhero Captain Crunch. What a guy: a kind of Bizarro-world Thomas Edison, or Alexander Graham Bell, the myth of the American inventor merged with the myth of the American outlaw and the attitude of a comic-book superhero; Gyro Gearloose crossed with the Phantom. Faster than a speeding bullet, he’d travel the freeways of America, ducking into a phone booth (just like Superman) and transform himself by hooking up his famous computerized unit, thus making the phone booth a kind of transporter that beamed him up into the world wide web of the telephone system. He’d zap his voice around the globe before disappearing, Phantom-like, into the ether.

I only met Captain Crunch in person once, although he shadowed me throughout my phone-phreak odyssey, peppering me with phone calls, building his own self-mythology. Our meeting was in a McDonald’s in San Jose, Calif., a few months after my story came out, at which time he seemed grateful for the (well-­deserved) iconic stature I’d endowed him with and the vast new network of admirers he’d acquired, although I know he’s had mixed feelings since about some of the consequences.

Crunch was the real star of the story (which is reprinted in my new nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune); he was the one who became the icon, but his flamboyance perhaps unfairly overshadowed an equally influential proto-­hacker—Mark Bernay, a.k.a. the ­Midnight Skulker. It was Bernay who acted as the Johnny Appleseed of phone phreakdom, traveling up and down the West Coast in the late 60’s pasting little stickers in phone booths that gave the numbers for “toll-free looparounds,” AT&T tech-check connections that permitted nationwide free conference calls, the primitive proto-Internet of the blind phone phreaks and hackers. And it was Bernay who sketched out for me the Manichaean, metaphysical pleasures of computer hacking: the cat-and-mouse games with security, the intellectual game-playing that holds the appeal for the most advanced hackers. (Bernay would often tell security how to detect the Midnight Skulker just to raise the game to another level.)

I think it was Bernay’s phone-booth stickering that first evoked a Pynchon vibe in me when I was reporting the story. Because, as a youthful fan of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, I’d done some stickering myself; I used to sticker phone booths with the sign of the muted post horn, the symbol of the Trystero, the shadowy conspiratorial network in Pynchon’s novel. (See illustration.)

Anyway, entering the phone-phreak underground was like entering the Trystero underground. Among many things that make The Crying of Lot 49 perhaps the great American visionary work of the past century (a novel that ranks in my pantheon with Pale Fire) is its imagination of an alternate communication system, a Web uniting the disaffected, the disillusioned and the just plain disgruntled in America. The outsiders who no longer trusted their private dreams and longings to the official public channels of communication (like the post office and the phone company). A fantasied conspiracy-as-communion that took the form of an underground postal system. A vision that took as its sign and symbol “the muted posthorn,” the symbol of Thurn and Taxis, the ancient European private postal service—with a mute silencing it.

Curiously, “mute” was the phone-phreak term for one of their key artifacts, a skeleton-key device to generate the 2,600-cycle-per-second tone that put the phone company’s long-distance signaling system at their command. Coincidence? Were the phone phreaks life imitating (Pynchon’s) art? Or was Pynchon’s art anticipating, prophesizing life? I don’t think it’s just me seeing things through the lens of Pynchon; I think it’s Pynchon foreseeing things. Foreseeing, as he put it in the novel, “a network by which x number of Americans are truly communicating … among a web of telephone wires … searching ceaselessly among the dial’s ten million possibilities for that magical Other who will reveal herself out of the roar of relays.” Sound familiar?

But there was one particularly spooky foresight or foreshadowing that floored me: “the lawyer Metzger.” As I was talking to the documentary producer about the origin of my odyssey in a lawyer named Metzger, it suddenly struck me: Wait a minute, wasn’t there a lawyer named Metzger in The Crying of Lot 49?

I raced home and dug out my copy of the novel. There it was, on page 17: Oedipa Maas, Pynchon’s heroine, receives a summons from the estate of a deceased lover, Pierce Inverarity. She is to be the executrix of his tangled last will and testament, a labyrinthine legacy embedded, encoded in the circuit board of the new American landscape.

She checks into the Echo Court motel in the San Francisco suburb of San Narciso, and “That night the lawyer Metzger showed up.” Her guide. I won’t dwell much further on the fictional lawyer Metzger himself, or the fact that he turns out to be the former child actor Baby Igor, or on one of the all-time great seduction scenes in American literature (one that also serves as a metaphor for the veiling and unveiling of Truth!), the one that ensues when Metzger and Oedipa watch a Baby ­Igor movie on the motel-room TV. Except to say that, in very much the same way that a lawyer named Metzger was my connection to the underworld realm, “the lawyer Metzger” is the one who connects Pynchon’s heroine to the shadowy Trystero underground. Coincidence?

One of the persistent concerns of The Crying of Lot 49 is the nature of coincidence. How does one distinguish accident and chance from pattern and plan, signal from noise, order from randomness, conspiracy from paranoia—in physics, in history, in human consciousness?

I won’t detain you with any further meditations on this subject (not now, anyway), but the coincidence of the fictional and factual “lawyer Metzger” both serving as Vergilian guides to an underworld labyrinth is (as I believe Martin Heidegger put it in his famous Marburg seminar on Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics) “pretty freaky, dude.”

But I do want to talk about the vision of The Crying of Lot 49 and its embodiment in the ideals of enlightened phreaks and hackers as a political vision. I’d contend they are the true opposition party in American culture, or at least the smartest one. They have a far more knowing and savvy critique of technological totalism than postmodernists,post-Marxistsand ­cultural-studies savants, all of whom are in thrall to totalizing ideological systems even as they purport to critique such systems.

They—my guys, the Pynchonian underground—are the ultimate opposition to systemization. But theirs is not, I repeat, not a Luddite critique. These guys love the possibilities of technology; they love systems and they love to fuck with systems. (Fuck with them like lovers.) They know that systems tend to become stagnant, oppressive and totalitarian unless they’re fucked with. That they only evolve under the pressure that punctures their self-confidence.

But I would argue that my party, the Pynchon-Crunch opposition, are more than political—they’re also a philosophical opposition. Although Captain Crunch may not immediately strike one as a philosopher in the mode of Aristotle or Kant, the cyber-­hackers can be seen as descendants of the Skeptics, the ones who ­refute the pretenses of the overconfident system-builders.

Perhaps (like all great lifelong passions) my predilection for cyber skeptics can be traced back to high school. It was in high school that I read Pynchon, and it was in high school that I was engaged in a friendly rivalry with a tech-minded classmate named Bob Metcalfe, who later went on to become a legendary cyber-world system-builder and theorist: He invented Ethernet and “Metcalfe’s Law” (“the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network”—is this a real law of science or a clever Ethernet promotion?). Mr. Metcalfe is a terrifically good-natured techno-optimist of the George Gilder school, and I have great respect for his achievements. But after high school we went our separate ways, and I cast my lot with the anti-system skeptics—the losers, the left-out, the lost causes, the disillusioned and the disappointed, the doomed Romantic visionaries. But we’ve got Captain Crunch and Thomas Pynchon on our side.



Endnote: It occurred to me that this is what I was getting at a few months ago when I announced the formation of The Edgy Alliance: a Trystero-like linkage of kindred spirits. And so I’d like to open the membership rolls again and ask any who want to join the nearly 300 Edgy Allies to whom I’ve already sent membership cards, to send their name and address (and also suggested column topics) to The Edgy Alliance, Box 105, 577 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y.


- posted by boxcarro @ 1:27 PM