How to Produce a Disoriented Citizen

Oriented or Disoriented?

by Mike Booth

In case you were wondering, here’s how to produce a thoroughly disoriented citizen:

  • Tell him he’s superior to people from other countries, colors, religions, ideas.
  • Put a gun in his hand.
  • Flag-wave him to death.
  • Repeat more, louder lies.
  • Distract him with hard-core consumption.
  • Make money his measure of all things.
  • Make false promises.
  • Bribe him.
  • Frighten him.
  • Stuff him full of nationalism and patriotism.
  • Jail him.
  • Shoot him.
  • Isolate him.
  • Sanctify his greed.
  • Banalize him.
  • Send his children to war.
  • Re-engineer the electoral process so as to install low men in high places.
  • Tell him torture is necessary.
  • Feed him false philosophy, white-trash values.
  • Offer him venal role models.
  • Convince him that speculation is “business.”
  • Convince him that if he’s not rich there’s something wrong with him.
  • Fill him up with that old-time religion.
  • Imprison him.
  • Under educate him.
  • Steal his constitutional rights.

That should do it.

Read the whole story in my ebook, The Turncoat Chronicles.

 

Thanks for commenting and sharing.

Who Are the Bad Guys?

bad-guysby Mike Booth

What If We Got It All Backwards?

The most illustrious, most powerful men and women of the U.S. political classes have always been fond of telling us who the Bad Guys were. According to them we’re surrounded by them, have been for a long time. In the 50’s and 60’s it was the Russians. Remember them? They had recently contributed 20 million dead to help us win the Second World War, but we immediately felt we had to be their enemies. Churchill, who was miffed for being sidelined by Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, actually advocated “neutralizing” the Russians as soon as the war was over.

The Russian Communists were our pretext for a lot of vile and truculent shenanigans in the name of national security: the cold war, the McCarthy witch hunt, the nuclear arms race, and the tragic destruction of a minuscule South Asian country which was about to push over the first piece in a series of deadly “dominoes” which would take the Red Menace to the American heartland via the port of San Francisco. Continue reading “Who Are the Bad Guys?”

What Can We Know?

the-thinker-6

The Bottom Line

With all the news, counter news, fake news and post-truth flying around out there, what can we know for sure? For sure? Very little, we have to rely on educated guesses. But what do you base your guesses on? Where do you start? One thing is certainly true. You have to figure it out for yourself.

A Disclaimer

I realize that it’s practically impossible to change people’s minds. Our basic values and criteria are etched, if not on our DNA, at least on our brains. We’re all victims of the lies we were told when we were children. Almost nobody escapes, perhaps a few who are lucky enough to be influenced by a great teacher when their minds are still malleable. Continue reading “What Can We Know?”

NATO is Scraping the Bottom of the Tank

think-tank
Septic think tank diagram.

Can We Properly Call This “Thinking?”

Scraping the bottom of the think tank, that is. According to an article published in The Guardian on January 22, 2008, five of the West’s most senior military officers and strategists got together to affirm that “the west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the ‘imminent’ spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.”They recommend this extreme measure in order to “tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world.”

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Continue reading “NATO is Scraping the Bottom of the Tank”

Yo, United Statesians, Listen Up!

by Mike Booth.

A Lesson in Linguistic Geography for the People of the United States

Map of North and South AmericaThe land mass properly called “America” extends from the northern tip of Greenland to Cape Horn (properly Cabo de Hornos) at the southern tip of Chile and covers two continents. Besides the United States and its territories, Greenland, and Chile, it includes Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Clipperton Island, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, Mexico, The Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Panama, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Falkland Islands, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Continue reading “Yo, United Statesians, Listen Up!”

With All Due Respect–2/2

by Mike Booth
.

iraq_invasion

.

Petroleum Money Changes Everything

Petroleum was discovered on the Arabian peninsula by the California Arabian Standard Oil Company in early 1938 and the Mideast plot thickened considerably. The 1938 strike turned out to be the first in what were to become the richest oil fields in the world. Oil meant money, both for oil companies and for Ibn Saud, the warlord who had proclaimed himself king of Arabia just six years earlier.

It is that Saudi windfall that has permitted us to see just how abject is the Western World’s slavish reverence for money. The Saudi regime, clearly the most retrograde in the Muslim world, has carte blanche in any Western capital, thanks exclusively to its gargantuan economic presence. Their egregious domestic human rights abuses are the least of it. What is more serious is how they sponsor Islamic terrorism so universally and so blatantly with every Western government looking bovinely the other way while giving top priority to their “defense” contracts. Continue reading “With All Due Respect–2/2”

With All Due Respect—1/2

by Mike Booth

Crusades1

There Was a Time…

There was a time—though nobody’s quite sure of when that was—when the culture clash between Christians and Muslims might have been avoided through mutually respectful conversations and compromises. But that time has passed and no amount of talking now will yield a quick solution. The issues are too encysted, the offenses too damaging, the retributions too exaggerated, the players too polarized. That said, something has to be done at least to try to begin some sort of détente with the Muslim world. The only alternative—an upward spiraling permanent war—would be infinitely worse.

Could some concessions to the Muslims, starting with an acknowledgment of and apology for the high-handed treatment the Christian West has always dispensed to them, serve to improve relations, if only marginally? President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo looked like a tentative step in that direction but was soon buried under the pressure of military expediency. Continue reading “With All Due Respect—1/2”

Sex, Money, Power, Nonsense and Killer Euphemisms

unleash_the_dogs

It doesn’t have to make sense, unleash the dogs of war!

Many things in this world, some of them of great consequence, don’t make sense. That’s because the world doesn’t run on sense. It runs on greed and lust. It runs on envy and revenge. It runs on ambition. And let’s not forget cynicism and falsehood.  That said, a minuscule part of the world is actually driven by love and loyalty, truth and sincerity, altruism and generosity. Say Iceland…

For most of the rest it’s half-truths and false appearances, vested interests, bribery and chicanery. (Want to know how it works? Read John Perkins’s book in PDF here.) Cravings for fame abound, along with hidden agendas and false-flag operations. Pride and obstinance coexist at the highest levels. Good God, I can’t believe I almost forgot sex, money and power, the aristocrats in this senseless world. I was tempted to include examples of all these sins, but I decided not to. It’s not necessary. Examples abound. Choose your own. Continue reading “Sex, Money, Power, Nonsense and Killer Euphemisms”

I Was Surprised by Visions of the “Old”

Study the Art of Ageing

I wanted to write a piece on aging and the first thing I did was go to Google to check out images of old age. I was dazzled by what I found. More of the old people in the photographs looked more vital, interesting, engaging and actually beautiful than miserable for being old.

See if you don’t agree. Continue reading “I Was Surprised by Visions of the “Old””

It’s High Noon for the United States

Charlottesville Has Upset the Applecart

By Mike Booth

Confederate Monuments Protest

How Much of a Threat Is the Right to Bear Arms?

I’ve been following for most of my life, as I suppose most of us have, the debate/controversy/conflict over Americans’ second amendment right “to bear arms.” In the end I decided to shelve the issue along with cholesterol, transgenders in the military and monosodium glutamate in everything. It seemed to me, frankly, something of a tempest in a teapot. Sure, the odd teenager raised on Prozac would shoot his entire family and liquor stores would have to reinforce their security measures, but I couldn’t conceive of gun-toting Americans posing a life-or-death threat to their own country. Continue reading “It’s High Noon for the United States”