we're not the only ones they brainwash

[click image, much worked on daguerreotype]

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I was just reminded by Old Uncle Dave of how snippets of information you don't even think you see or hear become embedded in your consciousness anyway. We're all pretty damn good at seeing it in, say, an AP piece that has anything to do with Iran. They never fail to mention that the West believes Iran is trying to build a nuke, but very frequently fail to mention that Iran denies it, or any other intensely salient facts surrounding that outrageous bit they stick in everywhere they can. The same thing is true whenever almost anyone is talking about Putin. You almost never even see his name without his old KGB employment mentioned near it... as though this, of itself, is all the proof anyone would ever need to believe heart and soul that Putin is the devil himself, going to do bad evil every chance he gets.

Yer kid could hear somebody say that one table over at MacDonald's, catch the tone, and right there be stamped with the certainty that someone named Putin is a rat fink people like us don't want to abide. Or it might not even be a kid. It could be any one of millions of dirt ignorant Americans hearing the authority of that tone, that audible sneer at the letters K-G-B and take it into their heads that that Russian guy is evil, evil, evil. No clue who he is, what he's done, what the KGB was, none of it, but that dire tone sends the name "Putin" into enemy space in their brains... when they didn't even know they were listening!

How much the more so when, say, Barbara Walters is blathering it in the background on The View over the beauty parlor tv? Or while you're channel surfing on your car radio, looking for some goddam music between the incessant talk shows... stuff you think is shit to begin with still flows into your brain when you don't even know yer paying attention! In fact, if you were paying attention you stood a chance of recognizing it as bunk, or looking it up and thinking about it to decide if it was bunk. It's bad enough when it's coming in neutral, let alone from ANYONE who might remotely be deemed an authority figure, someone higher up the food chain than you are. For most people, this includes anyone with a job in the mainstream media... even if they are from "the other side".

You don't seem to understand that your mind is a couple bajillion times smarter than you are and sucks up information you don't even know you "know" until it is waaaaaay too late.

Same with the space lizards in Washington, D.C.

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I am very staunchly going to bed, and going to will myself to dream of Rachel Corrie's smile, just cry in my sleep for how the people aboard her namesake must be feeling as they defy the Israeli warships trailing them into Gaza. I can't stay up all night bashing my fear and loathing against every surface in my house again.

It doesn't fix anything.

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