Is the upcoming US election going to be the first won on social media?

There is an interesting development in the race to the Whitehouse in the United States of America. The nation that prides itself as being the beacon of the free World, the bastion of democracy against a tide of extremism and dictatorship may just be about to get rather more freedom and democracy than it bargained for, and the results could be rather different than expected. In order to understand what is going on it may be worth taking a little history lesson. In US politics, as in many Western democracies there has been a tacit understanding between politicians and the media that the success or failure of a political campaign is heavily dependent on the way it is presented in the mainstream press. Political parties have invested heavily in PR agencies, spin doctors and media consultants to act as liaison between themselves and the press organisations. The backing of key media barons was seen as crucial to an election campaign. As a consequence of this the general public were to a significant extent at the mercy of the media to be guided as to where to mark that all important X on the ballot paper.

So, given this history, what makes the 2012 campaign so different? There is one phenomenon that could be a real game changer, and that is the rise and rise of social networking. The twitter feeds and facebook statuses are full of political comment ranging from the mainstream opinions parroted from the press to the most extreme of alternative views, and personal vitriol. The increase in prevalence of alternative media sources, blogs, investigative journalists and the near ubiquitous availability of the internet has meant that people have, for the first time far greater access to information that has not first been passed through the spin doctors and PR consultants and filtered by the press. The consequence of this for political groups is that they are having to find new ways to maintain control of their political message. What also needs to be considered is that this change is occurring at the same time as the worst financial crisis in American history, a time when the US is desperately in need of radical change.

The impact of social media has also been to allow previously marginalised groups to greater prominence on both sides of the political divide, and this will be am excellent opportunity to see what effect this has. It should perhaps be noted that one key area of difference between the mainstream media and social networking is in demographics. Social media trends towards an age range of twenty to forty as compared to the mainstream press which has a readership age of thirty five to sixty. This means that the most politically vibrant and socially motivated section of the electorate is the key driving force behind this change. When this is taken into consideration the rumours regarding the infiltration of Facebook by the CIA and covert political groups begins to make far more sense. Don't be at all surprised to see an increasing level of political intrigue and personal attack over the coming few weeks, as well as an increase in the number of mysteriously disappearing posts and tweets.

This is going to be an interesting election campaign and the fallout from it as people realise how their social networks are being manipulated could create the climate in which politicians finally lose the confidence of the electorate, just at the point where political instability combined with financial meltdown leads to the need to develop the single global currency and the rise of the Elite.

A great example of misinformation

News wires are heating up with another example of the ultimate non-story released today, the story of the latest release of UFO files from the UK Ministry of Defence group the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) the group that advises military and political groups on threats to British defensive capabilities. We have known about the role of DIS in administrating British UFO reports and sightings for a number of years. A former member of this group Nick Pope has been openly speaking on the UFO circuit since his retirement from the group in the 1990's and indeed the group itself closed its UFO desk in the late 1990's as far as public reports were concerned at least. I'm sure many people will be reading these news reports and getting tremendously excited about the highlights like Prime Minister Tony Blair being briefed on UFO's in much the same way that thirty years ago when a document from Winston Churchill asking to be briefed some people took it as proof of UFOs and extraterrestrials, so why have I started this article by saying that it is a non-story? Well there are a few reasons. Firstly these documents, 6,700 in number were actually released in August 2011, but have only been made available online through the National Archive today, so serious UFO researchers have been studying them for almost a year already, and there has been little if any new information of any significance.

Then we need to consider that these documents had been declassified before that point which suggests strongly that they do not relate to any threat to national security, which any genuine sightings almost certainly would. It should also be noted that although there are a huge number of documents, these are not the complete set of documents for the period. They represent approximately 78% of the total with the remainder still be too highly classified to be covered by Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. It should also be noted that these documents have been released under FoI rules which exempt many classes of official document which are considered security or commercially sensitive. Lets also look at the Tony Blair connection. The documents suggest that all Prime Ministers are briefed on UFOs but this should be expected as they are likely to be asked at public events as was the case when UFO researcher Richard D Hall posed the question of the release of information to David Cameron at a public debate. It would be extremely remiss of government advisers to leave a politician of this stature with no answer to such an obvious question. It is not evidence of UFOs per se, just a matter of expediency.

Also to be considered is that these documents were released initially to UFO researchers and the documents reveal that part of the role of the DIS was to maintain links between UFO research groups and government. This strongly hints at the possibility of disinformation, particularly in light of recent cases of media and police disinformation policies and the use of selected economists to present positively spun government finance figures. Whatever these documents are, in terms of evidence of British government seriousness about UFOs they are in no sense any new evidence, nor do they move the debate over whether UFOs are real or not any further forward. To date there is no evidence of UFOs, whether you chose to believe that or not, it is a statement of fact. That is not to say that such information doesn't exist, nor that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. There is every possibility that any real evidence would be kept secret as suggested under American and UK policy for dealing with UFO evidence laid out in the 1960's.

What is of interest is the way in which the media is reporting these files, and the impact that this has on how the alternative media is portrayed when viewed with a cynical eye.

More computer network issues in the UK

Following on from last weeks major network problems for the Natwest banking group and the difficulties faced by their customers over a four day weekend on lack of access to bank accounts comes the next fault. This time it is mobile telecommunications with O2 the UK network that was once a part of British Telcom with reports suggesting that thousands of customers are unable to make or receive phone calls. It appears that the problem may be even more severe than that affecting not just thousands but all O2 customers across the UK, with problems affecting making and receiving voice calls, text messages and even proprietary services like Blackberry messenger. The breadth and type of the outage, along with the intermittent nature and the UK wide effect suggests that this may not be the simple network issue that has been announced to the press but as with the bank network, something more sinister.

So why might a major telecoms company with several UK datacentres and secure disaster recovery strategies and resilience suffer an outage of this type? Anyone with an understanding of resilient datacentre construction and operation will tell you that under normal circumstances even if an entire data hall went down the operation could still be switched to an alternative so there is little possibility that this was the result of power loss, as all datacentres operate power generation facilities or Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) backup, or that it was a consequence of a software or operator error as datacentres operate a policy of automatic rollback on software changes or upgrades if instability is detected. Given the latest policies from the UK government regarding police and security services access to mobile communication data the most likely explanation is that the outage is being caused by the installation and integration of monitoring software into the core network servers.

This operation would require network shutdown for an extended period as has been seen this afternoon, followed by an extended period of 48-72 hours of intermittent service as the new software is tested and modified. Expect similar problems with Orange and Vodafone over the next two weeks in the run up to the Olympics and further issues as additional monitoring is put in place. Be careful what you say, what you text and what you message, and particularly if you are on O2, and remember, Big Brother knows where you live, what you say and pretty soon, what you think.

Fooling all of the people all of the time – A political guide

Abraham Lincoln, one of the most well known American politicians of all time once said “You may fool all of the people some of the time, you may even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” Since the quote was made this has been received wisdom and the consequence of this is that there is a tacit assumption that if you keep yourself informed, and are selective about your news sources that you can be reasonably certain that you are not being fooled. It has also been assumed that a consequence of this is that politicians are kept honest by the knowledge that at some point they will be caught out if they do try to fool the electorate too much. The question is, is there still validity in this assertion, and more importantly, do the assumptions that are being made based on the assertion still have validity? This article sets out to establish the possibility that conditions and technology are now sufficient that should a political authority wish to, it really could hoodwink everyone indefinitely.

So, how could this be achieved? Lets look at the way in which information is disseminated, particularly in the area of news reporting, and the reporting of political activity. It is reasonably well known that the mainstream media is dominated by a small cabal of media tycoons, but what is less well known is that these same groups have also been quietly buying up the majority of the the smaller region news outlets and magazines to the extent that it is extremely difficult to find a source of news that isn't part of this cabal. In addition to this there is an almost constant stream of news reports that alternative sources of news, particularly the internet based news outlets are utterly unreliable. By limiting the availability of news in this way there is an element of control that is greater today than at any point historically since the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5^th Century. This creates an ability to manage the information that the majority of people see almost completely.

Taking this ability to manage information, the next step may come as something of a surprise. The information that comes out is not necessarily universally positive in nature. In the UK in 2010 there were news stories of politicians fraudulently claiming expenses. This is not what would be expected in a managed media World, but this is the point at which it is essential to look beyond expectations at the larger picture. The consequence of theses news stories is quite instructive in the sense that it created an impression that we, the electorate had always known that politicians were corrupt, and that the media had always told us this, so clearly the media can be trusted. A similar set up was used with the reporting of the banking crisis, replacing political leaders with corporate leaders as the corrupted and corrupting influence. In reality this was all a set up to establish a mental dissonance within the general population along the lines of “You can't trust politicians, you can't trust business, you can only trust the media”. The process was completed with the breaking of the news story of the phone hacking and police corruption scandals, breaching the bond of trust built up in the media.

This may seem completely counter-intuitive, but the psychology of the situation is fascinating. The process of continuous shattering of beliefs and the lack of consistency acts to break down the psyche as postulated by Freud and Jung in the 19^th Century, and further researched under project MKULTRA as being the principal condition for brain washing and mind control. This process is by no means complete, and the next step in the process, which is already ongoing is the building up and then destroying of the alternative media. The underlying principle is that “if you tell a big enough lie often enough it becomes the truth”. Interestingly this principle and the quote is attributed to that paragon of virtue Joseph Goebbels the communications and propaganda minister for Adolf Hitlers Third Reich. The man behind the false flag burning of the Reichstag.....

Dumbing down is not just about intelligence

There is a near constant fear amongst many people, feed regularly by the media, and interest groups that we are gradually being reduced in our capacity for intellectual thought, and more particularly our critical analysis functions and our ability to reason. Regularly we read in the press about exams being made easier, about students leaving school functionally illiterate and about employers having struggling to find candidates for jobs that require intellectual capacity. This is particularly prevalent amongst the poorest sections of society and there are a number of possible causes, both overt and covert some of which have been covered in previous articles, but there is another, perhaps more insidious form of dumbing down that gets far less coverage, but is non the less linked in certain key aspects. This second form of dumbing down is the ongoing suppression of our senses, and it could potentially be far more damaging in terms of the move to subjugate the vast majority of humanity.

It has long been known that human sensory awareness is fundamentally flawed and that the way in which we interpret sensory inputs through our minds is not accurate. What we thing that we touch, taste, smell, hear and see is not reality. On average we are consciously aware of approximately fifteen percent of the sensory inputs that we receive and it is relatively easy to confuse or trick the senses. What is interesting is to compare the sensory perception of someone who has constantly lived in an urban environment, a theoretical “normal” existence in the modern western World, and someone who lives and works in a rural environment, in something more closely approaching our hunter gatherer ancestry. It is incredibly difficult to find research into this phenomenon since no-one in the science community is looking into this officially, but conversations with anthropologists, and perhaps more instructively with a community of hunters in Northern Alaska has led to the conclusion that in normal society our senses are being deliberately dampened to decrease our awareness of the World around us and how it is changing.

As an example, on a walk through a heavily forested area in Alaska on a hunting trip my guide was consistently pointing out flora and fauna that I was completely unable to perceive until they were pointed out. Over the period of a week this occurred so often that I began to analyse what was happening and it appeared that my mind was filtering information considerably more rigorously than my guide. This struck me as strange because in my normal urban environment I feel that I have to be constantly aware of my environment, traffic, people, sights, sounds, smells and so on so I would expect my ability to spot movement or hear sounds to be reasonably good, but it was in reality very poor in comparison to my guide. It could be the case that familiarity of environment has an effect, but I would anticipate that being in an unfamiliar environment would trigger greater attention to the senses rather than lesser.

So, how could our senses be dumbed down in this way? There is a strong suggestion that we are constantly bombarded by high intensity sensory inputs from television, computer, radio, billboard advertising and even modern architecture. The whole fabric of the built environment appears geared towards fooling our eyes and our mind, and making us question our senses. This gives us a pretty good clue as to where this is coming from, because you have to ask, historically who has worked most closely with architects? Which group of people have a reverence for the “Great Architect”? This concerted effort to modify the way we perceive and therefore the way we think has all the hallmarks of one of the fundamental masonic conspiracies, and is one that I will look at in more detail in an upcoming article.

Tesla and the missing designs

Nikola Tesla is a man whose reputation is of great genius marred by utter madness, but there can be little doubt that this Serbian American creative inventor, physicist and polymath was one of the greatest innovators of the late 19^th and early 20^th Century. Born in Serbia in 1856 he spent his formative years as a gifted scholar completing his four years of schooling in three years whilst being able to perform complex mathematical calculations in his head that led to accusations of cheating by his teachers. He attended University for only one term and worked as an engineer and as a telegraph engineer, but how childhood and early years were troubled by a series of illnesses, categorised by blinding flashes of light and visions often linked to words or sounds. It is thought that he probably experienced a form of synaesthesia where sounds or smells are converted into lights and colours by the brain. It is also possible that he suffered from a form of epilepsy. Whatever other conditions he had, he also suffered his first of several nervous breakdowns at the age of 22. He had an extremely rare ability to completely visualise the solution to a problem mentally before moving on to the construction phase.

Tesla is best known for his work in electromagnetism, electricity, radio and gravity and flight, working closely with both Edison and Marconi and almost certainly being at least in part an inspiration to both men. He certainly produced an enormous number of patents for a vast range of devices, but here we see the first interesting discrepancy between Teslas own notes and the records handed down through official sources. Many of the ideas and solutions that he espoused in his notes and articles, for which it would appear that we should expect patent applications, those applications appear not to have been filed. Now it could certainly be the case that given Teslas propensity for working largely mentally that he never got around to filing these missing patents, but this doesn't fit with the suggestion that he may have suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and was a ferocious organiser of his own notes, ideas and designs. This discrepancy has led some to suggest that many of his inventions were indeed patented but that these patents were for inventions with strong military applications and were immediately classified as secret by the US Government.

It is interesting to note at this point that having become a US citizen, and having moved to work in the states there appears to be rather more work missing than was previously the case. From the evidence that we do have, it would appear that not only did Tesla create alternating current (AC) electricity, but he also made innovative breakthroughs in wireless energy transmission, a technology that is still not fully developed today as far as the general public are aware. In his later years Tesla became increasingly withdrawn and reclusive, in part because of his lack of success in comparison to Edison and Marconi, but also it appears because much of his work was forced to remain hidden by successive US governments who understood the weapon potential of many of his ideas. Of particular note as far as this blog is concerned are two of his later designs. The first is an oscillating frictionless motor designed by means of transfer of momentum from a small weight, to trigger building collapse and potentially earthquakes, and the second, the use of extremely high voltage electricity generation and wireless transmission to modify weather. Some of Teslas notes for which there are no filed patents suggest strongly that designs that Tesla invented are currently in use as part of the US HAARP weather modification programme.

There can be little doubt that Tesla was a genius, if a rather flawed one, but we can only hope that one day the missing pieces of his work, along with the missing designs are finally revealed and todays scientists can have the opportunity to fully explore some of his more extreme ideas. It may be an ineffective hope given the level of secrecy surrounding his work but it is likely that there could be World changing designs hidden away that could prove very useful. We will have to wait and see.

The deployment of UCAV and other military units in the UK

As part of the preparations for the London 2012 Olympics there has been consistent liaison between UK security forces and a number of countries competing at the games. It is reasonably well established that in addition to UK military personnel there are contingents from Germany, France, Russia, China, Japan and perhaps most interestingly from the US. The US force comes in three part, the first arriving two months ago in the form of new staff at the US embassy ostensibly communication specialists but in reality members of the SIS and CIA specialist reconnaissance and surveillance unit with special Presidential orders that supersede UK laws on monitoring and surveillance. This group has been working closely with MI6 and the metropolitan police to engage in counter-terrorist operations across London, targeting known terror cells and monitoring activity through known bank accounts and on e-mail and mobile phone communications. As part of this programme Research in Motion (RIM) the makers of the blackberry phones have been issued with UK court orders to provide the decryption technology required to analyse Blackberry Messenger communication data. This is something that RIM have strenuously refused to do previously, even in the case of last summers looting incidents. The US units have also brought with them the latest acoustic and monitoring equipment both static and vehicle based and are currently engaged deploying this against key strategic targets.

The second group is a counter-hijacking and personal protection trained platoon combining US Rangers, Seals and Marines. These units are based just outside London and are operating under the direct command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and authorised to use live ammunition in defence of US citizens on UK soil. This is the first time since World War II that this order has been mandated beyond American military bases, these being a separate subject area as they are technically American soil, and therefore operate subject to American laws. The US military units are working in co-operation with UK special forces and are specifically focused on preventing hostage situations, and directly engaging any terrorist threat. Part of this programme is also the embedding of special forces operatives with the G4S security programme for the games as well as being embedded in American commercial flight crews travelling to and from the games. The first waves of these troops are already on station and reinforcements are due over the next week or so.

The third aspect is probably the most contentious as it involves the use of two types of aircraft that have not operated officially in UK airspace prior to this point. These are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) the former being used as reconnaissance drones, the latter as remotely controlled armed combat vehicles. The deployment of UCAV in combat theatres has been a contentious issue for some time with reports of strikes against civilian targets coming particularly from the Kandahar region of Afghanistan. The idea of weaponised unmanned drones being deployed over the Capital city of a major developed country is frankly terrifying, yet this is the price of hosting one of the biggest events in terms of global audience. Whether these preparations are necessary, or whether the mere fact of them will be enough to deter terrorists will have to decided once the games are over, but for now, watch out for strangers on your street and keep watching the skies for some pretty unusual looking aerial vehices over the next month.