Marketing And Propaganda – Techniques

Propaganda Techniques

(The following is intended as a supplement to the separately posted article, “Marketing And Propaganda”, which should be read first.)

Whatever you call it – marketing or propaganda – it taught us how to actually believe all the nonsense.  Ours has become a whole society based on little more than mass narcissism, carefully nurtured by relentless marketing.  “We” have become little more than our once great, and long gone, past, but still quite happy in our many delusions.

(Of course, if you manage to accumulate enough wealth, you don’t have to buy any of the nonsense – which, for many, becomes the chief incentive for accumulating wealth.  Think about it: just escaping the nonsense can build empires!)

To the right of this page is a listing of “Recent Posts”.  Almost all of those articles discuss various iterations of propaganda which Americans have been taught to accept as fact.  Most of the propaganda simply capitalizes on faulty thinking by the target audience.  It’s amazing to me the number of Americans who write to me all using the same language, the same phrases, the same “rationale”, etc., as if they all copied that utter nonsense from the same propaganda tracts, as intellectually stimulating as Ukrainian spam.  These are very well programmed automatons indeed, with almost no grey matter between the ears, in a society worshipping, and mandating, mass conformity at the lowest common denominator among its grazing herds.  (It’s a true testimony to the women who run our public schools.)  Anyone who takes the time to read through some of the articles posted here will conclude that well over half of what most Americans believe is true is, in fact, just so much nonsense, so much a product of self-interested marketing.  In short, it’s just propaganda.

(January 2013:  There are now posted on this site the equivalent of several books of academic articles.  Most of those articles, or “book chapters”, deal with or discuss in greater depth various topics of propaganda (or marketing) advanced by a range of interest groups over the past century that have settled into the popular consciousness as “fact”.  A significant portion of that propaganda is self-serving historical and factual revisionism promulgated since around 1960 by America’s many powerful women’s lobbies.  These lobbies, with their millions of agents in our entertainment, “education”,  social “science”, government and “journalism” industries, are today the planet’s most effective propaganda (or marketing) machine due primarily to their additional status as representing America’s super-majority women’s voter bloc serving only itself.  Using the same psychological principles that drives our acquisitive consumerist economy, most of it is emotion serving “me” and “now”, with little or no logic serving “us” much less “the future”.  For a most glaring example of this, just check out “Why Are American Men So Dumb?”  Through such relentless propaganda (or marketing) ours has become an entirely “feminine” society, a childish culture existing only to serve “very special me”.)

Throughout the long “Cold” War, the huge and sophisticated Soviet communist propaganda machine, following on the very similar Nazi propaganda machine, at home and throughout their satellite states, used nearly all of the propaganda techniques below with varying degrees of frequency and success.  Interestingly, while all techniques used were partially effective, they were far more effective with their own populations than they were with foreign populations – which shows that a solid understanding of the target culture is an essential prerequisite to the most effective propaganda (or marketing).  These techniques are all used routinely today throughout our own culture to sell policies, actions, programs, ideas, concepts, products or personalities, most often employed by marketing arms of special interest lobbies and unions, but also by politician staffs, political parties, social herds, bureaucrats and businesses.  A LOT of people actually believe this stuff.

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Listed below are 48 of the most frequently used techniques of propaganda.  As the comments show, they are interchangeable with techniques of marketing.

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Ad Hominem – attacking your opponents, rather than their arguments. (“Senator Smith is a right-wing fascist who cheats on his wife, so he’ll always oppose government welfare.”)  Or, interchangeably, Kill the messenger, kill the message.  Truth is irrelevant; if you discredit the messenger, weak minds will automatically discount his message.  It’s also often used to divert attention from a more damaging truth: “Cheating? You SPIED on me?!”  See how quickly defense (the accused) is taken by offense (the accuser)?

This technique is used most often by those with a weak position of their own (or marginal intellectual capabilities).  It’s easier to attack the messenger than debate the message (unless the messenger is a woman, in which case, everything gets really complicated and very treacherous).  A very effective way for women to use ad hominem propaganda is to feign highly charged righteous indignation by taking emotional offense at the “presumption” of other side’s arrogance, while completely dodging the core issue.  This technique is quite popular among women in politics, including those in political lobbies; the emotional “offense” diverts attention from any logic involved, so that the whole subject gets lost in smoke.  Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif) employed this technique very effectively (March 2013) when asked during a televised Senate committee hearing to compare lawmakers’ right to tinker around with Second Amendment rights (arms) to their right to tinker around with First Amendment rights (speech).  (Women restrict freedom of speech in America by banning all sorts of valid criticism as “misogyny”, “harassment”, etc., far more than anyone restricts freedoms to own firearms.)  Rather than simply answer the intelligent question, she instead took offense at being asked the question, claiming that the question disparaged her knowledge and expertise and was thus beneath her standing to even be asked it.  (Translation: Since it’s against the law to disparage women, you can’t ask a question that might be so construed.)  Rather than answer the question and provide everyone a teaching moment, she attacked some imagined “insult” in it.  (“Are you serious?! ‘Constitutional’ is whatever we say it is!” – Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), incensed that a journalist would dare question the legality of laws she and her majority cohorts were pushing through Congress, implying that the reporter was just stupid for asking the valid question.)  Apparently simple logic in the message is not required of elected women representatives; to avoid a response, simply emotionally attack the messenger. “He’s an evil person for revealing that I’m a serial liar.”

Those with a predilection to rely on ad hominem are also usually quite intolerant of differing views; fascist rulers routinely employ the tactic to silence criticism, including that in the press.

There’s a definite knee-jerk predilection of those on the political left to quickly tar and feather those who voice views from the political right.  Their almost universal practice is to attack the messenger, rather than his message.  Those on the right, however, are far more likely to wade into the message first and then assign a label to its proponent.  When social scientist Jonathan Haidt, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, asked liberals and conservatives to guess how their ideological opponents would answer certain questions, he found that conservatives were much better at seeing things from the other guy’s shoes.  Kyle Smith, writing about Haidt’s findings in the New York Post in August 2014, concluded that liberals “haven’t a clue how conservatives think.” Liberals use labels like loon, nut job, crank, wing-nut, whack job, crackpot, as synonyms for “conservative,’’ apparently having decided that everyone on the Right is mentally ill, thus automatically rendering their views and values unworthy of consideration.  Liberals like to boast about their “superior powers of empathy,” and always insist on “tolerance”, and yet they “make no pretense whatsoever of understanding their ideological opposites” —or, indeed, the American people, who for 18 of the last 22 years have elected a Congress “designed to act as a stalwart check on progressivism.”  Maybe they ought to try understanding principled conservative thought, rather than responding to those who voice conservative ideas and values with school-yard insults.

But perhaps this is not possible.  Attacking the messenger rather than the message is a sure sign of a weak position, a position of those who have been taught what to think rather than how to think.  So maybe it’s not limited just to left-right politics.  Maybe it all begins in “schools” that bury logic under emotion with deft propaganda.  When all you have is emotion, it’s far more likely that you will seek “safety and security” in the herd.  Dictating to your ideological opponent from the safety of your herd rather than reasoning with them with individual intellectual analysis is a lot easier.  This is quite characteristic of the American women herd.  All that’s of relevant concern to weak minds is “me” and what “I” want; there’s no “us” in the equation.

In 2015 the national abortion company that receives federal taxpayer funding launched an ad hominem attack against a small news group that had covertly recorded on video senior company officials discussing illegal abortion activities; rather than address the illegal activities (message), the company decided to instead attack the news group (messenger) – in a nation where a free press (Fourth Estate) is as important to democratic freedom as is the Congress.  Incredibly the company was even somehow able to get the state of Texas to bring legal charges against the news group!  The message got lost while everyone focused on the messenger being hauled into court.  That’s quite a leap from the days not so long ago when the highly respected journalist Mike Wallace garnered really huge viewership for his award-winning CBS News “60 Minutes” programs that showed his crew catching people on camera while engaged in practices clearly designed to deceive and defraud the public.  Apparently the value of the messenger depends on the power of the special interest lobbies opposed to the message revealed.  In America NO power exceeds that of self-serving women.  (And it helps that Americans are no longer taught in our schools how to think.)  Always be wary of those smiling fascists who demand tolerance of my views, but not of your views.

The following explores the far greater consequences of an ad hominem argument.  (The case involves one of America’s two major political parties, but just as readily could have involved the other political party – which is why both parties blamed the messenger even though there was no proven certainty of either the messenger’s exact identity or motives; it was mostly speculation which would never stand in an American court.)  (For a fuller discussion of this topic, see “Blaming The Messenger“, posted separately.)

In 2016 the liberal American Democrat Party was very quick to blame a massive hack of its internal election campaign committee (DNC) e-mails on the Russians and then blame the Russians for attempting to “manipulate and influence an American election.”  The intent was to shift public focus to a foreign Big Bad Bogeyman and away from a far more damaging truth much closer to home on the eve of an American presidential election.  It worked.  The fact that the hacked e-mails, published on WikiLeaks, clearly revealed that ideologues within the Democrat Party had already “manipulated and influenced an American election” – by conspiring to sideline and marginalize a legitimate Democrat party candidate (Mr. Sanders) in favor of the presumptive party winner (Ms Clinton) – was lost in the subsequent propaganda hysteria.  That hysteria was even able to crowd out even more embarrassing written e-mail revelations that kept coming out on WikiLeaks for weeks thereafter (which even further damaged the reputation of the Fourth Estate press).

(The approach was designed to imply that the other candidate was in bed with “evil forces”, the Russians.  It was an ad hominem attack on the opponent, rather than on his arguments, and rather than try defending embarrassing truths revealed by the hacked e-mails.  No one bothered to demonstrate just how the Russians might benefit from “influencing” a US election with hacked internal emails concentrated almost exclusively on mostly banal domestic politics.  With nearly the entire American herd, for various ulterior reasons, now nicely programmed for the “Big Bad Russian Bogeyman” reflex hysteria, it would require a truly great leader to defy the combined “conventional wisdom” of Congress, the press, TV talking heads, the public and a range of “allies” to initiate any actually creative action that might benefit US-Russian relations and make the world safer for everyone.  And no one has ever accused any Baby Boomer politician of brilliant original thinking.  No matter which party wins the election, the Russians, like everyone else, will have to continue enduring the usual American stupidity.  But isn’t it convenient to have a nasty bogeyman handy?)

Pointing the finger at a “state-sponsored” hacker is a frequently used and effective responsibility dodge that implies, falsely, there was nothing the hacked “victim” organization could have done to protect itself against a determined entity with “unlimited government resources”.  All it really shows is a high level of arrogant stupidity.  America’s well-known global reputation in cyber-surveillance, just as much as its wealth and power, make it and its organizations the most inviting targets there are for every smart hacker in the world, including teenagers operating from mom’s basement.  (My own money is on a DNC insider upset with the party’s treatment of Bernie Sanders.)  The country that is the world’s foremost manipulator and influencer of other countries’ internal affairs by massive government hacking of everything everywhere logically should be the very first to protect its own internal communications – and no one should know this better than a former US Secretary of State who was able to make daily maximum use of such hacked communications of others, compliments of America’s vast intelligence collection apparatus.  It’s more than ironic that the same people who were praising Edward Snowden for revealing the extent of NSA’s government hacking of all Americans all the time are now condemning whoever it was who hacked the Democrat Party at election time.  Even messenger WikiLeaks suddenly went from “great” to “evil”.  Furthermore, it seems disingenuous for a government that has no reservations about hacking everyone everywhere to cry “foul!” when it gets hacked itself.  (“It’s ok for me do it to “someone else”; it’s NOT ok for “someone else” to do it to me.”)  Who “thinks” like that?

In the contemporary world every country’s most important messengers are its intelligence services and its press apparatus.  Depending on their competence and dedication, both serve The People, but the former delivers its message to the people’s appropriate governing Representatives, while the latter delivers its message directly to The People.  Note that the 2016 public release of political communications revealed previously unknown truths, including deliberate deceptions and lies, which should have been revealed to the public by the public’s own protected and favored Fourth Estate press, but were not.  The hacked communications, if nothing else, revealed that those seeking to place their political party in control of the nation’s Executive Branch are serial liars, hypocrites and frauds who will say anything to the public to secure votes even if it’s completely opposite to what they actually believe and intend.  These are people totally lacking in character who firmly believe that Americans are just stupid.  Even without getting into specifics, most impartial voters would probably grant that such broad information alone would be helpful to know before casting their votes.  The case starkly revealed that the press is not doing its proper job in a democracy.  If you as voting citizens in a democracy can’t trust your own press to do its job, if your own press has been co-opted and corrupted by the established political system and the government it runs, then whom can you trust?

The hacked communications also revealed a number of fawning “throne sniffers” among America’s most esteemed print, broadcast, cable and digital press corps.  These are people who condemn the Russian government for what they call “oppression of the press”, but you don’t need “oppression of the press” when the press is already nothing but a voluntary public relations organ of the government.  Apparently “freedom of the press” means that the press is free to deceive the people to the advantage of its chosen government politicians.  You don’t need political press censorship by the government when the press already politically censors itself.  What is alleged to influence the Russian press is not NEARLY as bad as what goes on in the American press – because the Russian people have after centuries of experience an ingrained distrust of their press, while Americans believe that their press offers god’s own truth.  Russians realistically don’t expect the truth; Americans naively believe they are getting the truth.  In a democracy, the latter is FAR more dangerous.  When it’s a super-power democracy, the danger is incalculable.  The main function of a free press in a democracy is to dig deep and tear down political bullshit and government misbehavior – aggressively and equitably, regardless of which self-serving party or special interest is doing it – on behalf of ALL the people.  Anything short of that, any herd favoritism, is press failure.  It’s just more political propaganda (or marketing) cloaked in unearned constitutional freedoms.

If the accurate message is important and the designated messenger fails, then any substitute messenger will suffice.  The government certainly has no reservations about exploiting any route possible to obtain information on citizens.  Americans used to give the highest marks to the best unbiased investigative journalism that revealed official wrong-doing; now they praise those “journalists” who promulgate the best propaganda with which they already agree.  We’ve gone from a couple of dedicated reporters looking into Watergate who eventually forced a President to resign to an entire press yawning as even the FBI right in front of the whole world gives free passes to a favored woman politician who blatantly commits serial criminal acts and repeatedly lies about it, while sending an esteemed Marine general to jail for a single incident of not telling the FBI the full truth.  (Both cases involved classified national defense information, yet the female politician believes she’s qualified to be Commander-in-Chief; she obviously isn’t qualified to shine the general’s shoes, who was trying to protect such information from unauthorized exposure.  And the Justice Department’s FBI has revealed itself to be a political police force that makes up law to serve itself and therefore can’t be trusted by the citizens it’s supposed to serve – and most especially to faithfully apply the hallowed principle, so very critical to American justice, of “all equal under the law”.  And that’s not a story worthy of Fourth Estate press attention?)  When the Fourth Estate press, the fourth column that keeps the three branches of our democratic government stable, fails in its Constitutional authority to thoroughly investigate and accurately report on the people’s government, then hackers and Wikileaks fill a very critical role.

According to legend, in 490 BC the Greek soldier Philippides was sent from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens with the message that the Greek army had managed to defeat a large Persian invasion force.  (If the message was that Marathon had been lost, then Athens had to either quickly flee or prepare secondary defenses.)  A naked Philippides ran the entire 26-mile distance without stopping, burst into the assembly to announce the victory, and then collapsed and died on the assembly floor.  The soldier’s epic run was celebrated in Greek mythology, and today, thanks to a poem written by Robert Browning 2,370 years later, is venerated in the Olympic Games every four years, much more than is the far more important Marathon military victory.  Philippides, along with such others as Woodward and Bernstein and even homing pigeons, stands tall among history’s most well-known messengers.  But there are other cases in history when a messenger was killed before completing his mission, or a ruler was so displeased by the news delivered that the messenger was killed on the spot, sometimes even before completing his delivery – with devastating consequences.

Of course, the important matter is not the messenger, but the accurate message carried and delivered reliably to decision-makers who need the information.  The recipient is then free to incorporate the information in their decision, or simply discount and ignore it, at their own risk.  And even voters in a democracy are decision-makers.  In American democracy, The People are the rulers.  The government AND the press both work for THEM.  In 2016 the hacked information showed the American People the embarrassing Truth, that their own domestic political system is thoroughly rotten, to the core, that even members of the Fourth Estate press are shirking their duty for which they are granted special freedoms under our Constitution, that ever their foremost police agency is subject to political corruption.  And THAT is The Message, for which we should THANK The Messenger, whoever it was.

Now the question is what The People will do with this very dangerous Message.

(Of course, none of this is relevant to those pathetic shells who only want to hear the “truths” they like, who demand, “I only want MY truth!”.)

Ad Nauseam – tireless repetition of an idea, especially a simple slogan, enough times until it is taken as truth, but isn’t.  (“Women are victims.” “It’s all about race.”  “We are the greatest.”  “Equal rights.” “American ingenuity.” “Government creates jobs.” “Ford tough.” “Male-dominated”.  “American justice.”  “Right of privacy.” – are all popular delusions.)  “feminine side”  – This one is just asinine.  Has anyone ever heard “masculine side”?  Apparently someone decided that it would be better to have a nation of swishy navel-contemplating girly men rather than of assertive problem-solving manly girls.  Guess who decided that.  And the result is simply a national embarrassment full of emotional emasculated twits who think “manly” is running around like the queen’s eunuchs giving our insatiably needy and “entitled” women whatever they demand (while their sons, naturally, go down the tubes and the nation goes nowhere).  After two generations of incessant propaganda, today no group on the planet can top American men in stupidity.  “Dumb men” is another of those ad nauseam marketing terms, now taken as “self-evident”.

Anecdotal Extrapolation – using isolated, even second-hand, but usually emotional stories to draw broad conclusions. (“I’ve driven my Ford truck for twenty years.” – used to infer that all Ford trucks last forever. “She can’t afford her child’s medicine.” – used to infer that higher Medicaid payments are needed for everyone.)  Unique or isolated occurences are used to infer non-existent universal conditions.  Emotional drama depicted in movies is usually the most effective way to promulgate propaganda via anecdotal extrapolation. (It plays on rather complex psychological and sociological mechanisms that derive vicarious self-identity through the experiences of others coupled with a social compulsion toward identification with a group – or herd mentality serving the self.)  Nothing is so compelling in American anecdotal extrapolation as the fictional hero rescuing the (always very attractive) woman victim from evil men; this scenario solidifies the imaginary stereotypes in the herd absolving women of their just responsibility for creating all those evil men and placing herself at their mercy while hyper-inflating the self-image of those identifying with the “hero” – to the detriment of their own sons. Emotional fiction needs heroes and villains so the consumer can obtain vicarious self-worth, but no one asks why or where it leads.  If I’m trapped in a burning building, does anyone ever imagine that a woman will come running in to rescue me?  Of course not; women are always the victims and cannot be expected to do such responsible and brave things.  It’s MY job to rescue more valuable her, even if I die trying.  (It’s “equality”.)  Now extend this basic premise to any other aspect of modern life – as the women who teach our “expendable” sons impart and instill the required “value” system for our society, according to our “birthright entitled” women.  No group on the planet is better adept at getting itself off the hook.  “I have rights; I do NOT have responsibilities!  Everyone else has the responsibility – for very special me!”

Appeal To Authority – prominent figures cited to support a position, idea, product, argument, or course of action.  (“When E. F. Hutton speaks….” “My doctor says…” “In the words of John F. Kennedy…”  “Martin Luther King said…”  “Always watch carefully how Warren Buffet invests his money…”), usually taken out of context.   There must be now in our society at least 500,000 “indisputable authoritative experts” on women and children and social issues, and they all parrot the exact same dogma serving women, while being extremely intolerant of opposing views, to the detriment of everything else in our society. No one ever asks, “If women are such undisputed and unassailable authorities on children, why are our women-dominated schools doing so poorly, and why are our boys going down the tubes by the millions?” (“To achieve perfection, you must become “me”!”)  Only an idiot would ever trust gender “data” on children provided by “authoritative” American women.  In the first place, their interests are solely self-serving, and in the second place, they know that no one is allowed to criticize them.  So they are free to generate any asinine self-serving nonsense they wish.  And most of it is purely sexist – against the easiest target in America, the only minority group without a powerful lobby to champion its best interests.  In America you can inflict any atrocity you want on boys, and no one will ever say anything.  And then later you can easily dodge responsibility by claiming, as everyone does, that boys simply “create themselves”, right there on the street corner (while girls, of course, require a “vast village” to coddle them constantly from birth through age 30).  Because these women of “authority” have never been challenged on their own deep-seated prejudices, it’s a safe bet that they’re dedicated to manufacturing mentally crippled and conflicted male clones of themselves.  “Authority”, like so much else in our society, is in the eye of the beholder; always challenge it.  Never allow “authority” to dictate.  No one gets a free pass in a democratic meritocracy, and everyone is equal under the law.

Appeal To Emotion – gain support for an objective by burying it behind something that has universal emotional appeal or support – such as “children”, “patriotism”, “justice”, etc. When politicians use words like “children” in their rhetoric, they are bringing strong emotional appeal to slick propaganda that really is talking about women – women who exercise their “right of choice” to have children and want government to support them in their responsibilities in caring for and raising their children; they are definitely NOT talking about “boys”, and usually not even about “girls”.  Children don’t vote.  (It’s not possible to get elected in America without addressing the never-ending demands of our majority women, and over half the children born in America are born to single women exercising their “right of choice” and another quarter by divorced women also exercising their choices.  The idea is to get men to pick up the tab for the free choices women make, the elective behavior in which they engage.)  Such propaganda also brings strong emotional appeal to that humongous women-dominated industry that is K-12 “education” in America – the world’s most expensive and poorest performing, and most especially when it comes to children who are boys.  This propaganda also underpins a huge rapidly growing industry of women with guaranteed employment who are paid to care for, raise and “educate” the children of others.  The same applies to that vast woman-dominated “child development” industry, creating and advancing its own self-serving herd mentality in sociology, psychology, health and government.  With American women, it’s ALL about “me” and “my” group, and their relentless drive is to progressively shift dependency from husbands and fathers to dependency on government, which is also paid for by those hated men – who don’t have choices – the very hated men they create, “raise” and “educate” as children.  It’s all in the interest in some self-serving perverted notion of “equality”, about forcing “someone else” to take the blame, pay the bills and do the hard  stuff for “special me” – by hiding behind “children” and avoiding accountability.  It is highly debatable whether the support rendered actually benefits children, and most especially when the children are boys.  Almost all political and social marketing in the US is very heavily based on emotion, rather than on logic.  (See “Emotion” paragraph at end below.)

“Feminists” have also made “family” a very effective propaganda code word – which ironically relies heavily on that lingering but long-gone “1950s” popular image, which “feminists” have long vilified.  In US politics, “Families” = “Women” – a proven emotional vote-buying propaganda technique.  Today well over half the children born in America are born to single women, and another quarter are “raised” by divorced women, all exercising their rights and choices, so “family” obviously now has an actual definition quite different from the historical, and emotional, version for political purposes; the traditional “family” is rapidly disappearing in America, but this is still what everyone imagines when the word is used by women’s lobbies and their politicians.   The Obama Administration has even added “middle class” to “families” to further cloud the issue, especially now that women are garnering twice the university degrees as men year after year, decade after decade, even as black boys are the greatest losers in all the vote-buying fawning of our responsibility-free women.  There is no “husband” or “father” anywhere in the thinking behind the “families” propaganda trick, which is designed to shift women’s dependence instead to government.  The driving force is the same old shifting of money from men, even married fathers, to women, by having government simply confiscate and then redistribute it.  Traditional families are actually naively supporting “feminist” policies that are systematically undermining their own institution – by succumbing to very slick, carefully planned, and ably executed “feminist” propaganda.

Appeal To Fear – build support by instilling anxieties and panic in the general populace. (The “War On Terrorism” has been a bonanza for this technique, as has been the “War On Drugs” for decades.  Often used to sell security services and products, increase defense budgets, police powers, mercenary forces, erode civil rights, etc..  Tactics used when the world faced “Cold” War nuclear Armageddon paled in comparison to those used relentlessly today in the face of a few potential crazies with home-made bombs.)  In America there is something to fear lurking behind every shadow; we have become a nation of cowering effeminate lemmings paying others really enormous sums to protect us – from real life.  Providing “dumb and helpless” citizens “safety and security” from a fanned fear of others was the critical key for the success of both Nazi and Communist regimes in totally subjugating their own populations, and has proven a bonanza to contemporary politicians.   (“The purpose of society is to get “me” back in that comfortable womb.”)

Appeal To Prejudice – using loaded or emotive terms to attach value or moral goodness to a proposition, or to attach moral repugnance.  (Positive code words include “children”, “family”, “schools”, “health”, “education”, even “small business”, “middle class”; negative code words include “crook”, “predator”, “pervert”, “bully”, “red-neck” and similar labels routinely applied to males.  Almost always “for the kids” and “family” actually means “for the millions of adults, mostly women, who now make or save money with parenting responsibilities, mostly out-sourced to “schools”, health and day care facilities, and “small businesses”, especially the non-taxed variety; such linkage guarantees success since no one is ever going to be “against” children.  Now it does “take a village”, a really big village – just not for boys, who, of course, “create themselves”.)  Sometimes old prejudicial stereotypes further cloud the issues; most voters associate the “poor” and “food stamps” with urban minority racial groups, when, in fact, the rural, and usually white, poor are a greater number that no one ever mentions and who are more likely to “fall through the cracks”.  (This is due primarily to their wide dispersion, which makes it difficult to form them into a unified interest group or voting bloc.  So, in America, the greatest need gets the least support.)

(In the past, through aggressive hard work and great risk on the part of their owners, many small businesses in America grew into big companies employing many others, which in turn grew the nation’s economy, but today that’s not actually the main dynamic.  Today, fewer than 0.3% of American businesses employ 500 or more workers.  (That tiny number is equivalent to the percentage of Americans today who have military experience.  Such tiny numbers now constitute the very precarious backbone of America.)  There are about 28,000,000 small businesses in the US, and about 23,000,000 of them (82%) have no employees and no intention of growing, but are simply a way for the owners to have steady jobs as their own bosses, usually at home.  Over 80% of “small businesses” in America file their tax returns as individuals.  Typical of these static enterprises are small “art” shops, child or elderly care providers, travel agents, lawyers, “consultants”, real estate managers, bill collectors, web site designers, home cleaners, etc., run by women who used low-cost government “minority” loans to get set up, alimony as no-risk cushion income, and business expense write-offs to live well while keep taxes as low as possible.  (It’s possible to claim a wide range of “business expenses” – from office space and equipment to travel and hotels to dinners and drinks with clients – in order to reduce the taxes owed from any income realized.  Just the tax deduction for “business entertainment” alone costs tens of billions of dollars in lost tax revenue every year.)  Very many of these small businesses have blossomed as a result of the “feminist” destruction of the traditional family unit, i,.e, most of the family’s former functions have been farmed out to others, at extra cost, of course – which women naturally now want government to fund.  “Why should I be responsible for my own choices?”  Fewer than 20% of small businesses in America ever grow beyond 20 employees, and fewer that 10% of these ever succeed.  Since the vast majority of small businesses now involve women, who also happen to be the majority voting bloc, it’s no wonder that there have been no serious attempts to re-define just what constitutes a “small business” for government loan and tax purposes.  So government policies and tax laws, theoretically crafted to support the nation’s steady economic growth, continue unchanged even as their greatest function now is to increase dependency on government largesse.  “Small business” no longer means the same as it once did to America, but still manages to avoid the prejudice of reality by maintaining an illusional positive image deeply rooted in the American past now maintained only by a very tiny few.  When someone mentions “small business” in America, chances are excellent that they’re talking about a racket designed to help women avoid taxes.  Rather than stimulating economic growth, the vast majority of small businesses are just another drag on government revenue.  Despite all the benefits heaped on American women over the past half century, none has ever applied true genius and dedication while risking everything over decades to create and build a company employing more than a few dozen workers.)

Bandwagon – attempts to persuade the target audience to join in and take the course of action that “everyone else is taking.”  (“Be cool”  It’s wave action; herd mentality.)  Similar to Join The Crowd.  Especially effective in selling new hand-held “communication” toys, and an especially effective medium is internet “social networks” counting “hits” and “likes” or “trends”.  Feminists were very quick to jump on the black rights movement during the 1960s to take advantage of that legitimate “bandwagon” for their own dubious purposes and to continue building and riding their own bandwagon to go places no one at the beginning would ever have imagined.  The “feminist” bandwagon took on a life of its own and managed to steadily steamroll over literally every aspect of our culture – to best serve women, and nothing else.  Today legions of really stupid men are eager to climb on the “feminist” bandwagon – so as to steadily destroy themselves, and most especially their sons.  Everyone loves an underdog with a shot at the top, even to the point of overlooking obvious shortcomings  – until the top is achieved and everyone realizes that the emperor has no clothes.

Beautiful People – using famous, attractive or happy people to coax others into thinking that if they buy a product or adopt a certain dogma, they, too, will be happy or successful, or attractive, popular, etc.. (This is the most frequently used technique when selling beauty products, women’s clothing, movies, music, sneakers, pop culture products, etc., “fashion”, dating services, pharmaceuticals.)  In our culture, nothing can sell anything better than beautiful white women, the most “special” (and privileged) people on Earth.  Next comes sports figures, movie actors and pop singers.  It’s vicarious self-identity transfer, feeding delusions about the self.  (Hint:  Appearance trumps substance – in the superficial mind.)

The Big Lie – repeated articulation of a complex that has elements of truth that justify subsequent action.  (“No one could imagine that people would use planes as weapons; now that they have, all of us are in danger.” – as if a very remotely possible plane weapon is going to kill all 310,000,000 Americans.  “We have to sacrifice our freedoms and rights in order to be safe and secure.” – while ignoring that whole populations once welcomed both right-extremist Nazi and left-extremist communist oppression with this exact same “reasoning”.  “Women are eternal victims.”)  The most-often-used Government Lie: “These are problems that no one could have foreseen.”  People get away with this one because no one wants to believe that those in positions of responsibility could actually be THAT incompetent, stupid and irresponsible; it seeks to dissipate responsibility (and accountability) for calamity to “everyone”, i.e., you and I, who are just as incompetent, stupid and irresponsible as those throwing out the lie – even though you and I employ such people to ensure that such things do not happen.)  (See Footnote #1: The Biggest Lie Of All – “The Fifties”.)

Black-and-White Fallacy – presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the obvious better choice. ( “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.”  Often the real better choice is “neither”.  “Critics of women are misogynists.”  “If you don’t like Obama, you’re a racist.”  “Those who reject gay marriage adoptions are homophobic.”  “If you don’t bend to my will, you’re obstructionist.”   “If you don’t provide what I demand for “me” you are waging a “war on women”.)  It’s mostly self-serving bullshit ruling out equitable compromise, consideration of other factors, being held responsible for the consequences of one’s own decisions, etc., i.e., the usual “me” triumphing over “us”.  Black and white fallacies have turned us into a divided, rigid, acrimonious and extremely simple-minded society consisting of mostly brainless “us versus them” herds.

Bury The Opposition – overwhelming the media with tremendous self-serving noise in order to drown out the opposition’s message.  (Screaming, shouting, bullying, raising hell, repeating a label assigned to the opposition until it sinks in to the popular consciousness.) The bigger corporations do this to kill a competitor’s better product or idea, just as the enormously powerful shrill “feminist” machine easily silences balanced reason.  During the 1960s great mobs of spoiled young Baby Boomers took over the streets, overwhelming the “Silent Majority”.  It’s usually a case of herd emotion trumping sound logic.

The incessant ‘”victim” lobby drumbeat about the rights of minority groups and majority women very effectively buries other interests, and most especially those without such lobbies, such as boys.  The result of the cacophony is that whichever group is not part of the “rights” crusades are by default those left holding the responsibility, and the blame. The “last man standing” becomes the party responsible both for trying to deny the rights of the others and also the party responsible for ensuring that the rights of others are maintained. (Victims cannot be held responsible.)  Hate crime laws end up being hate crimes themselves, because they effectively limit those who can be prosecuted for hate crimes to only those who are not protected by hate crime laws.  We have “violence against women” laws, but no “violence against men” laws, and, even worse, “violence” is defined as physical violence at which arrested development men excel, but not psychological violence at which nearly all women excel.  And, as with hate crimes, the only people who can be ‘guilty’ under these laws, which extend “special” protections to a whole list of others, are “heterosexual white men”, which is akin to automatically holding this one minority group guilty at birth and therefore suitable only for castration.  (And if anyone thinks all this crap doesn’t affect the way ‘eternal victim’ women “raise” their sons, cripple them even as infants with no fear of accountability, they’re just delusional.  Here’s an example of default:  Every hero needs an antagonist.  For the past half century, every time Hollywood has needed a stupid moron, a sick sociopath, serial killer, psychopath, rapist, loser, pervert, predator, general all-around creepy, greedy, disgusting (etc.) Bad Guy, he’s always been (guess) a white heterosexual adult male.  Now which do you suppose came first: the chicken or the egg?  Where did you draw your role models?  Why do you suppose that only males can commit “suicide”-by-cop, the vast majority of whom have been white heterosexuals, when no woman ever has?  Obviously conscious choices were made, even by law enforcement, based on a lifetime of victim lobby propaganda, leaving one group holding the bag, by default.)  Women, gays, minorities, immigrants, etc., etc., have laws; white heterosexual males just have inherent guilt (plus all the responsibility).  (Adult members of this group constitute about 18% of the US population, so you do the math.)  It’s all about buying the votes of countless legions of “victims” with lobbies, zero logic required.  All of this, of course, is the epitome of “bury the opposition” – actual laws enacted to enshrine a range of “special” people under a Constitution that now only theoretically guarantees equality.  (Is anyone familiar with Nazi Germany’s experiment with “special” people?  How about the similar four centuries-long British nobility experiment earlier in Ireland?)

The proper way to write and pass laws under American democracy is to make an activity unlawful, period.  That prohibited activity is then equally prohibited to everyone.  All are then actually “equal under the law”.  Once you start making those laws applicable to certain identified groups of people, you enshrine “group entitlement” into law.  Those specifically protected under such laws gradually develop a sense of “entitlement” which effectively absolves them of any responsibility for their own condition, their own behavior, neatly shifting all such responsibility to others, placing themselves “above the law”, making behavior banned for others perfectly acceptable for them.  It’s a deeply flawed and self-defeating concept.  Those laws then become permanent, because no politician ever wants to be seen as someone who is “against” a particular voting group through repeal or de-funding – which is always the hysteria fanned by the beneficiaries’ special interest lobbies and their propaganda.  The permanence of such legal “entitlement” has a natural tendency to seep into other activities ever less and less related to the original activity intended.  The process creates whole castes of unassailable “special” people, privileged people existing in a democracy supposedly based on “equality”, who are devoid of responsibility for themselves and for anyone else, too.  It then becomes the responsibility of the “last man standing” to protect, defend, support, fund, and worship, the “special” people, in perpetuity.  Among whole herds of morons it eventually becomes rote habit, enforced lunacy, long after the original intent of the law has vanished into the ether.  It also fosters a deep-seated resentment of the “special” people among those who are not officially designated “special”.  Soon neither the “special” people or  the “last man standing” are making worthwhile contributions to society, for very different reasons.  All of this, in turn, constitutes a very deadly cancer, steadily destroying the society from within.  And, as usual, the only “solution” is to “treat” the symptoms, at ever greater societal cost, because the cause is “off limits”.  (Just behold all those idiots going after guns, solely to avoid examining the users, going after boys, solely to avoid contemplating their “parents”, most of whom, of course, are “special” women, assisted by the occasional spineless father.  Behold those huge majorities of women on campus so totally oblivious and self-involved as to see nothing at all improper about, and zero responsibility for, such gross imbalances; those creeps are still going after racial affirmative action polices that might deprive them of ever greater majorities, still going after boys trying to use sports to get an education after all those women-dominated schools have so miserably failed them.

There are many other examples of group entitlement already endemic to our twisted society.  I call it “truth avoidance”, because “You can’t handle the truth!”  (The only way possible to approach such discriminatory emotion-based Baby Boomer laws is on their constitutionality – in the courts – while staying as far as possible away from that one single Court ruling that enabled “special” women to kill their unborn children, as a theoretical right of “privacy”, a right not even mentioned in the Constitution.  American “feminists” will be willing to die on the cross defending their “right” to kill babies long after America has ceased to exist, has disintegrated into oblivion; to them, there is simply no more burning issue on planet Earth even possible.)

(See “Why Are American Men So Dumb?”, posted separately.)

The opposition can also be buried by other techniques, such as Labeling & Data Manipulation.  Whenever one group seems to be making some headway of its own that threatens to draw attention from women, women’s lobbies will always trot out a whole new campaign for themselves that immediately buries the other group’s message.  (Any group that is not “women” is perceived as “the opposition”.)  (See Diversionary Politics.)

Censorship Boards – These are people, either in an official or unofficial capacity, at major news publications, including TV and radio outlets, who pre-screen articles and reports for any hint of information or “slant” that could possibly be construed as “disparaging” of critical special interest groups, usually those protected groups associated with race, gender or sexual orientation.  These censors, kept constantly on guard by powerful special interest lobbies, have been very aggressive in US news publications for the past half century, so that they are now just an accepted aspect of imparting “Truth” to the public.  People employed by such organs now engage in the censorship as a matter of rote enforced habit.  Americans who take great exception to any form of censorship in other countries are totally accepting of it (or are just oblivious to it) in their own country.  (The only group that does not enjoy such protection is that 25% of the population that is comprised of white heterosexual males, and most especially if they are boys.  It is ALWAYS “open season” on this one minority group, which conveys the impression to everyone that this group alone is responsible for everything negative in American society.  This incessant drumbeat has been going on so long that very many members of this unprotected group now also by enforced habit very aggressively support the protected groups in a mostly unconscious effort to reduce the automatic tarring that now comes with their own birth – even to the far greater detriment of their own sons.)

Major news publications also affect and shape the discussion by filtering what gets included in that discussion.*  As a general rule, I know that any comment, no matter how inane, that I submit which supports the view expressed in the published on-line article is almost 100% guaranteed to actually get posted for public view.  I also know that any comment that I submit that argues against that view, or offers an alternative view, has less than a 50% chance of actually being posted.  I also know that the chance is zero if my comment does not show women in a glowing manner or attempts to point to the responsibility women have as indicated by the article’s content.  (As eternal “victims” American women have rights; they do not have responsibilities.)  The same principles apply to “letters to the editor”.  You actually have to parrot the dogma to be included in the group-think “discussion”, the manufactured herd mentality shaped by all American “mainstream” “news ” organs for the past forty years all parroting the same interest group dogma.  No censorship is so pervasive in America as that dealing with our majority women – on whom leftist politics is so dependent.  Men are just road kill for our “special” women, and they start killing them at birth.  Male “popularity” is now determined by how well they recite all the mandated lies women demand.  Over generations this pervasive censorship has totally perverted, not only “Truth”, but all of American society.  It also has given rise to whole hoards of “special” people who exist primarily to make demands of others.  (It’s not difficult to imagine what would have happened in that censored media if a supremely arrogant male Secretary of State, way out of his league, had screamed to Congress, “What difference does it at this point make?!”, after four American women had been killed on his watch due to senior level incompetence and cover-up.)  (“Peon!  How DARE you question the judgment of “superior me”, especially about nothing but the deaths of a few measly men!”  Shades of presidential celebrity wives Eva Perón, Imelda Marcos, Isabel Perón, … would-be queens drunk on unearned power, accountable to no one.)  After all, what “news” publication or outlet wants to risk being labeled as purveying “misogyny” or “racism” or “xenophobia” or “homophobia”?  Misandry, on the other hand, is very strongly encouraged; this is mostly by default since everything else is protected as “off limits”.  The word “misandry” is not even included in many contemporary dictionaries! (See Labeling.)

(*I base this statement on careful experiments I have personally conducted with “Comments” posted to news articles on web sites such as those for major opinion-shapers like the New York Times and Washington Post.  I am concerned with the rights of boys and with getting women to assume their equitable share of the responsibility.  As a rational man, I consider the majority group in my society, and especially a majority that is so overwhelmingly dominant politically and socially, to be fair and just game for analysis and criticism.  Women determine the course, and dysfunction, of my society, and their chief weapons have been enforced censorship and “educational” indoctrination beginning at birth.  Their assumption of just responsibility is LONG over-due.  Since I am not concerned with minorities, etc., I don’t focus much attention on such groups; they take most of their cues from, and are often represented by, women and their lobbies anyway.  A major part of the American women strategy has been to keep attention focused on race and immigration, so as to deflect attention from gender, their gender.)

Common Man – attempts to convince the audience that positions reflect the common sense of “the people”.  (Ford truck versus Mercedes sedan, fast food versus filet mignon)  This plays well with those who have a visceral aversion to “snobby wealth”, “elitist” ivory tower knowledge, self-serving “science”, bureaucratic “experts”, political “extremists”.   Those who pay the bills view the world differently from those who receive the benefits, especially when only half of adults, the “common man”, is paying the bills. As with many other forms of propaganda, the term itself relies on behavioral psychology wherein being included with “everyone else” in “my” group is the self-reinforcing motivation.  The “common man” is mostly a delusion quite different from reality.  Leftist politics, in fact, plays heavily on the notion that the people, the “common man”, “the masses”, are both stupid and helpless and thus need an “elitist” cadre to take care of them, mainly by taking money away from those who are not the “common man” and redistributing it to the “common man” (after taking care of themselves first).  The “common man” today is significantly different from the “common man” of just a half century ago; in many cases the leftist view of the “common man” is entirely correct, mainly because leftist politics has made them that way.  The common man in America today is actually a woman who has exercised a series of rights and choices to become a single mother – before whom everyone else must now bow, for whom everyone else now has the responsibility. (And she is very busily teaching all that “special” crap to her children, to her sons mostly through her actions, her behavior, her “entitlement”.)

Data Manipulation And Percentages  – using broad percentages in order to hide gross sub-group differences.  Special interests and lobbies habitually use broad percentages in reporting poll, survey and voting results, especially to conceal gender differences, but often also racial differences.  (How many know that over 95% of the Black-American vote in 2008 went to Obama?  Since a very large number of blacks (as with whites) did not vote, the figure you usually hear is that “over 60% of black Americans voted for Obama”.  Today the women’s vote easily swamps the men’s vote, to the point of making the latter almost irrelevant, but men still do all the bloviating while women do all the deciding.  Since really huge numbers of people do not cast a vote, it’s best to count those who do and then compare that figure to their percentage of the total population.  But most don’t bother, instead relying on premises that haven’t been valid for decades.  Women are now the majority of our population, and they are also the really big majority voter in all elections.  (Women are not only the majority of our population, but, on average, over 10,000,000 more women than men actually vote – in national elections almost always decided by only one-third that number.  60% of women voters is a far greater number of actual votes than 60% of men voters.)  Combining these two figures (majority group and majority voters, all concerned only with “me”) results in a number that is overwhelmingly dominant in all of American politics.  So their lobbies seek to hide such gross differences, while still claiming “victimhood” to those “evil” men, by using broad and deceptive percentages.  Women have had the numbers to place anyone they wished in officer since 1980, but by hiding that fact they can still whine that evil men are denying them their “fair quota” of top elective offices.

Almost all accurate statistical data can be presented to naïve audiences in ways intended to deceive, usually by omitting other relevant data or information or by burying variations and deviations in broad numbers.  These techniques are usually intended to mislead while also subtly encouraging hidden sub-groups to join the “majority” crowd.  (This is also very effective; more and more men seek to “join the crowd” and vote just like women – in a subliminal “tyranny of the majority” that is actually against their own best interests.  The same applies to polls.  Since a majority of those polled are women, who are far more likely than men to be of one mind – a consequence of a lifetime of incessant brainwashing by their lobbies -, the omission of gender data in the results is a propaganda trick designed to entice men to “join the majority” rather than being “on the outside” of the (one) group of a single mind.)  Only a fool would accept voting or polling data that does not break down the results, at the very least by gender; men just can’t seem to grasp that they are a minority target of discrimination.

Women’s lobbies have been using the line that the incomes of American women are only 77% of those of men since 1960, a propaganda figure that has remained unchanged for a half century and has even settled into the popular culture as an assumed and constant “known fact”.  That figure, however, is a totally meaningless comparison of the incomes of all women and all men, regardless of their circumstances, regardless of their respective numbers in retirement, regardless of the choices women make (such as remaining at home to raise children, frequently switching jobs at the expense of seniority, etc.). (Think about it a moment, logically.  Companies in a competitive capitalist society exist to maximize profits.  If they could save all that money by hiring “low-pay” women, why would they hire any “high-pay” men?  Obviously there is more at play here than is ever stated by women’s lobbies, including companies just trying to stay in business with an effective and reliable workforce in the real world.)  In truth, the incomes today for women without children working full time are 119%, and rising, of those of men without children working full time – a natural consequence of our women-dominated public schools ensuring university educations for twice as many women as men for decades.  (Over 56%, and steadily rising, of American women between ages 18 and 48 today have never been married and never had children.)  Anyone making the 77% claim should be required to identify a specific case to illustrate the point.  If they do provide a specific person, and can actually prove the claim, then they should be asked why that person has not filed a discrimination claim under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which – for the past half century – all employers know bans gender discrimination in the workplace (and applies equally to both genders).  If they cannot identify a specific case, they should be asked to stop spreading bogus fifty-year-old self-serving “victim” propaganda.  Besides, there must be at least a million lawyers in America, including government attorneys paid by taxpayers, who would just love to use federal and state law plus a library of legal precedent to take on any such case that would actually stand up on actual factual merit in a court of law.)

Women also tend to gravitate to jobs that are low risk, relatively secure, undemanding physically and close to home, and which offer routine working hours, comfortable working conditions and a range of extra amenities such as generous pension and health plans and child care – lucrative amenities which do not show up in salary figures.  (When more and more women gravitate to such jobs, the value of their labor in those jobs further declines, which means that vacancies can be easily filled by offering lower pay.)  The majority of such jobs, of course, are in government, which doesn’t have to compete with other employment entities, can remain in business simply by confiscating needed funds from the public, can rely on artificial politics alone to maintain stable pay scales.  Women also tend to voluntarily change jobs, to drop in and out of the labor market, more frequently than men – choices that sacrifice job seniority.  The also tend to work fewer hours than men.  Further aggravaging the situation is the fact that extremely few women ever leave such secure employment to risk it all to create other large entities employing many more workers.  Except for 1-5 person very small businesses underwritten by government programs discriminating in favor of women and minorities while offering very lucrative tax benefits, risk-averse women simply do not create growing companies offering many new jobs; they just wait until all the really hard stuff is done and then demand for themselves the most that can be extracted from companies created, built and maintained by others competing hard in the arena.  The constant need to meet affirmative action quotas in order to avoid “discrimination in hiring” lawsuits is also a major influence on pay.  (These are among dozens of social welfare programs that were enacted over a half century ago as temporary measures to assist majority women and “minorities” – which became permanently institutionalized by those losers who feed constantly at the trough of “eternal victimhood” generation after generation.)  All of these factors are products of the voluntary choices, the elective behavior, of women – NOT of any “discrimination” against women.  And they have remained constant for over a half century.  No one and no thing is forcing American women to do anything.  Nor is any one or any thing denying American women anything.

Then there are the totally absurd premises that underpin the numbers and the arguments they are used to advance – that everyone else “owes” the “special” people whatever they demand.  In 2016 another group of very attractive and very rich American women were whining that they don’t get enough good roles or good jobs in Hollywood – whatever “enough” is.  One of the women at the forefront of the whining was paid $52,000,000 the previous year to recite words on camera written by someone with actual brains.  How pathetic is that?  No one has ever denied American women anything.  If this woman isn’t happy with her “entitled” quota in companies created and run by men, she can easily risk a big chunk of her own money, create her own movie company, and award as many “entitled” quota jobs to other women for her whining women movies as she wants.  All she has to do is stop whining, get off her ass, and DO something.  If enough other rich American women follow her example, then they can award as many self-adulation trophies to each other as they wish.  Surely the women in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or even Mexico would just love to pay a week’s family income to watch privileged American women whine up there on the big screen.

American women want to have the “right” to serve in ground combat roles, but without the responsibility for all women to do so.  It’s all about bolstering self-image through the tokenism of a tiny few – for whom the entire military, naturally, must accommodate.  Even without an active draft of those registered, men who don’t register with the Selective Service System can be charged with a felony and fined up to $250,000, but women have never had to even consider such a legal responsibility (and liability).  The basis for this gender discrimination has been the fact that the military has always maintained that women were unsuitable for ground combat roles, for which the Draft exists.  Now that the military has reversed that view in response to a few women’s demands for “rights”, there is no longer a justification for a discriminatory male-only draft registration responsibility, since the primary reason for the draft is to ensure sufficient numbers of soldiers to fill ground combat roles.  We’ve all heard about polls that show ‘Americans’ are about 55% against requiring women to register for the draft and also against drafting women when required.  But the truth is that there are significant differences behind that poll number; that 55% number is used for propaganda purposes.  Men overwhelmingly favor requiring women to be treated just as men, while women overwhelmingly favor being treated as “special”.  Women want to be able, as usual, to pick and choose those rights they like, while rejecting the responsibilities they don’t.  Since women are the dominant voting block, Congress will never pass laws that women don’t want (group entitlement), so the only way possible to force equality under the law is for the Supreme Court to rule of the constitutionality issue – regardless of polls, regardless of data manipulation, regardless of what the “special” people want.

The first thing you have to do with numbers is place them in a proper context.  A key factor with numbers is the size of the sample under consideration and its relative size to other relevant populations. There is a silly tendency, for example, for people to view all countries in the same context as their own, without due regard for the size of the respective populations.  Canadians, for example, are always attributing negative traits to Americans that are way out of proportion to reality.  If some whacko in the US does something stupid that never seems to occur in Canada, and that incident typically gets a lot of play in the US “news” media, usually the sole difference is the size of the two population.  The US population is ten times larger than Canada’s.  It’s a pretty safe bet that incident occurring somewhere in the US has the same probability as the same incident occurring somewhere in ten Canadas.  (If you grouped together ten Canadas, chances are about even that the incident in the US would occur just as frequently as somewhere among those ten Canadas.)  It gets even more asinine, for example, for Finns to take a news clip of some American doing something stupid and assuming that “Americans are stupid”.  The small country of Finland would hardly qualify as even one of America’s fifty states.  If there were 65 Finlands – totaling the US population – chances are pretty good that in one of them some Finn would be doing something just as stupid.  Friends in other countries are constantly engaging me on events inside America as reported in their news media, but, because of the huge size of the US, similar events occurring in other countries are almost never carried by the US news media.  (It’s probably there somewhere, but you have to hunt for it, which due to information overload very few do.)  And, of course, everyone in other countries is an expert on America; it’s a lot safer to criticize the US than it is to focus criticism on your own country.  A key factor that always gets overlooked is that “Americans” are actually members or children of every other culture on the planet, including Canada’s, so it’s not easy for critics to escape a share of the just “blame”.

So, the trait is not “American” at all; it’s just “human” – and it can occur anywhere with about the same frequency as it happens in the US.  (And, of course, everyone everywhere, it seems, is a (willing or unwilling) recipient of the US “news” media, but far fewer are recipients of Canadian “news” media, even in Canada.  So the world is more likely to learn of the incident in the US, but not a similar incident in Canada, or even in ten Canadas.)  This tendency also works in the opposite direction; a LOT of Americans attribute admirable traits to Americans that are actually due to nothing more than the huge size of the US population, compared to most other countries.  Remove the size factor, and you realize the trait is not so unusual after all.  (That huge size allows many tens of millions who do nothing to vicariously share in the laudatory accomplishments of a very tiny few – like ground soldiers.)  So, Americans are not so “special” or “exceptional” or “different” at all; there’s just a really huge number of them.  Sometimes it’s even difficult to argue with the proposition that the US is just the “biggest bully on the block.”  (Another good example here is Russia; the US population is more than twice (2.3 times) as large as Russia’s, but Russia still manages to hold its own relative to the American behemoth, and relative to the even larger European behemoth, too.  Perhaps this is why so many in Europe and the US so often evidence what appears to be just petty jealousy of Russia.)

Here’s a common piece of tricky propaganda using numbers with strategically omitted data.  The writer (in a respected “mainstream” publication) is making a case for banning certain types of automatic rifles.  His argument starts with “in a country large enough to contain every imaginable kind of crazy” – which is an excellent point inasmuch as extreme deviations from the norm are an absolute certainty in such a huge human population of 320,000,000 even if the probability of one of those crazies acting is even infinitesimally smaller than the relatively tiny number of such extreme crazies.  But the writer concludes with, “you get more massacres than there are days in the year.”  What is NOT stated is the period of time in which those massacres occur.  The implication is that they occur over a single year, i.e., more than once a day.  But a careful reader would ask if the period under consideration is a decade, a half century, or the entire life of the United States – any one of which would dramatically alter the effect of the propaganda.  Also notice that the word “massacre” is undefined, but is generally believed to refer to single incidents in which four or more people are killed.  But does it also include incidents involving the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, 19th century Native American conflicts, the Civil War, any of many civil disturbances such as labor union battles, “family feuds”, ethnic conflicts – all of which literally fill American history?  And could these crazies act only with automatic rifles?  What about home-made bombs, an airplane, poisonous gas, a computer, a sabotaged railroad track, power plant, dam, etc.?  How many were police shootings?  How many involved criminal gangs in possession of illegal guns?  How many involved the mentally unbalanced?  Removing these three factors alone reduces the overall number by almost 90%.

(The overwhelming majority of mass shootings in the US involve Black-American and Mexican-American gang members involved in the illegal drug industry; these shootings are so common that they rarely rate news coverage, and then often with the usual “politically correct” censorship.  A few also involve the mentally ill.  However, when one of our minority free-fire targets (the 18% of us who by chance happen to have been born adult white male heterosexuals) is involved in a mass shooting, the news coverage is always enormously out of proportion to its incidence, which creates an entirely false impression – the asinine “angry white men” that a lot of morons actually believe.  This group alone is not represented by any interest group or lobby, so it can safely be subjected to literally anything without fear of organized repercussion.  In reality, by far the main uses to which this group puts guns are licensed hunting and, of course, sure-fire suicide (which account for well over half, and steadily rising, of the approximate 30,000 deaths by gunshot each year in America).  (Except for wives who know that life insurance companies won’t pay if the insured person deliberately ends their own life, no one gives a damn about this group, but others sure do like to deceptively use their suicides to pump up the numbers for their own causes.  Most are too oblivious to realize that hunting and suicide are both conducted in solitude, as an escape from all the bullshit.)  Most humans are weak beings, and all weak humans need a bogeyman to blame and hate and vilify to compensate for their own weaknesses.  It’s human nature, in the American “victim” culture.  By far the safest bogeymen to have in America are adult white male heterosexuals.  Not surprisingly, after three or four generations of this rote ritual, including very concerted efforts by supremely arrogant misandric women to re-engineer them from birth onward, most members of this group now bow to their role like pathetic lemmings; those few who still have a spine ignore it for what it is.  But it really does get tiring.  And it very effectively gets the other 82% of American society off the hook for its just share of the responsibility.)

(I’m not a fervent gun enthusiast, but do not EVER take away my ability to end it all on MY terms, quickly and surely.  It’s no one else’s business what I choose to do with my own life, least of all some bureaucrat’s.  The only people who would care about it are the losers who feel I didn’t leave them enough money and short cuts before I bowed out.  Tough!  They can get off their asses and earn what they want, in the arena, just like I did from age 12 to the end.  It’s not my fault they’ve been systematically destroying their bogeymen excuses until we’re almost gone.)

Even though it would have almost no impact on total acts of violence, if your myopic focus must be guns then a rational approach would be to aggressively use existing laws to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill (and, of course, children).  Twisted people do twisted things – any way they can.  The real question is how they got twisted – in America.  Most of it is due to nothing more than “feminism’s” relentless destruction of the traditional family unit and effective K-12 schooling benefitting everyone equally, i.e., all rights with no responsibilities.  (“Feminism” has been teaching everyone this self-involved nonsense constantly for the past 60 years.) As with most of the ills in our society, irrational violence is a consequence of the asinine notion that raising and teaching children is a “communal”, not a personal, function of those irresponsible jerks who elect to have them.  These are, of course, useless humans shifting the hard stuff to the state, to “someone else” – the ultimate in narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), willing our society to self-destruct in service to “very special me”.  Does anyone really think that boys care what pampered bureaucrats in the humongous “child development” universe think of their behavior?  (I don’t, either.)  (A 2015 Gallup poll found that 61% of Americans think it’s morally acceptable to have a baby out of wedlock.  Presumably 90% of that 61% are our “special” women who expect “someone else” (i.e., the taxpayer’s government) to assume the responsibilities and the costs of “raising” and “teaching” those many millions of fatherless children.  “American women have RIGHTS; they do NOT have responsibilities.”  The other 10% are male morons programmed by women.  For most American women, giving birth is just an excuse to whine even more than usual as they schlep that massive cross up Mount Cavalry, twice as much more if the child is male.)

Demonizing The Enemy – making individuals from the opposing side appear to be subhuman, worthless, or immoral, evil, through suggestion or false accusations. (“dumb boys”, “evil Muslims”, “Men are from Mars; women are from Venus.”, “Big Business”, “Corporate greed”, “male oppressors”, “Another right-wing hate group”, “Leftist socialist welfare-state extremists.” “Right-wing, gun-loving, immigrant-hating extremist Tea Party nuts.”)  See Labeling.  How many of us have heard the complaint that girls have difficulty learning math because some evil math teacher said they would be better at something else?  That ridiculous lie has been alive and well for a century (and assumes that all math teachers are men).  The truth is that most girls who have difficulty with math simply would prefer to apply themselves to some other topic of greater interest to them.  It’s the same with women’s competitive sports, which have for a century sought with minimal success to garner greater interest among women.  In the end, women have always made their own choices, but it’s easier and more comforting to be able to blame “someone else” (i.e., evil men) for many of those choices.  (If they want to, if it’s important to them, women can do math and compete in sports just as well as men can.  No one and no group is telling women what they can or cannot do, in anything, if they can meet the standards.  But as long as they can maintain the “victim” deception, they can avoid the responsibility, both for themselves and for anyone else, and still not incur any damage to their self-image.)  That our schools do such a poor job of teaching math to everyone has proven a bonanza for propagandists everywhere.  The same, of course, applies to logical analysis, deductive reasoning, independent investigation, etc..  Inadequately educated Americans are now sitting ducks for this stuff.

Women are far more interested in perverting men’s tough endeavors such as sports, science, business, even combat, by forcing their way in with a tiny few against the “oppressor” – which requires the entire “men’s” endeavor to bend to their will, to adjust the standards, to accommodate the tokenism.  When women wanted to fly jet fighters they claimed that evil men were denying them that right because they were women.  The truth was that tight cockpits of such planes were designed and built to accommodate pilots who fell within very strict physical size measurements, requirements which summarily excluded men who fell outside the limits.  But women kept whining about evil men until Congress authorized the money to retro-fit whole fleets of planes with new cockpits that could accommodate the generally smaller bodies of women – at truly tremendous cost.  Something that men my size had always just accepted as a fact of life was simply not acceptable to women, so the world had to adjust to their demands in order to accommodate a tiny few, at costs met by “someone else”.  Such astronomical costs have been undertaken in many hundreds of other endeavors in American society over the past half century.  No cost is too great to meet the self-involved demands of women – simply by demonizing the enemy.  Women are thus far more interested in destroying things built by “evil” men by exercising their rights than they are about building something equally worthwhile for women, and everyone else, by embracing their responsibility.  What a wonderful specter, what worthy goals, sterling role models, all that “adjustment” presents to their sons, who, learning by example, simply ask, “Why bother?  Just pervert the standards.”.  It’s a lot easier emasculating men with all your rights than it is matching them with your own creations, a lot easier “adjusting” the standards than measuring up to the standards.  “We’ll just turn all those “evil male oppressors” into whining “me”.”  Just who is the oppressor here?  It’s all about “me”; damned any other rational consideration.  Just keep “demonizing the enemy” to justify it all.

P.S.  Once the two daughters of an Air Force Chief of Staff were flying fighters in the mid-1990s, making left turns in “no-fly zones” over Iraq, he saw a way for technology that had been available to decades to better protect these “special” people – and threw the great weight and money of the entire US Air Force behind unmanned drones.  How many thousands of lives of ground soldiers could surveillance drones have saved since they were first tested in the 1950s?  Such use apparently was simply not worth the effort or the cost, especially when those soldiers were mostly drafted male cannon fodder.  Now, of course, the very safest place to be during an American war is in an Air Force uniform, a career which is very popular with the ladies, far safer even than for civilian contractors.

Liberals accuse conservatives of being “xephophobic yahoos spewing their irate hate talk” on radio and TV talk and “news” shows, while ignoring their own matching behavior with “eco-warrior and finance district occupier nut jobs spewing their irate hate talk” on radio and TV talk and “news” shows.  And vice versa.  (It’s a “balanced” arena of equally ignorant extremist elements on both sides, just usually not nearly as “extremist” as the other side paints them; the view you espouse depends entirely on which side does your “thinking” for you.) Conservatives rely more heavily on logic, while liberals rely more heavily on emotion, to “make their point”, but it really doesn’t matter in a society taught only what to think rather than how to think.  Both sides are equally susceptible to slick propaganda.

Disinformation – creating information in, or deleting critical information from, public records, including “news” articles, for the purpose of making a false record of an event or product or the actions of a person or organization.  Often employed by both sides during the long “Cold” War.  A frequently used method is to purposefully remove relevant factors from the “edited” account, which, if included, would have led the audience to a far different conclusion.  Feminists have always focused their “history” solely on women, exclusive of context, devoid of any consideration of what else was going on, especially with men, to create a totally self-serving “truth” existing in a vacuum, which, of course, is not possible in Real Life.  Using gender-neutral terms and broad percentages in public reports to hide gross gender disparities in our schools is now a universally applied very slick disinformation propaganda technique – employed routinely by our school systems, our “education oversight” bureaucrats, our “education journalists” and our elected politicians – all dictated by self-serving women’s lobbies, teachers unions and majority women voters.  (This one merits closer attention.  See Footnote #2.)  The religious use of gender-neutral words in deliberate disinformation (except only in situations that could be beneficial to girls or women) has very effectively shielded from public knowledge and attention for the past quarter of a century the enormously higher rates that young males are from birth disadvantaged in a very wide range of social and health factors, such as autism, birth defects, suicide, drug use, learning disabilities, school drop-outs, low test scores, arrest, failure to go on to college much less be awarded scholarships, etc., than for girls.  A range of self-serving disinformation tactics has been quite successful in hiding such bigotry from public view.

Diversionary Politics – usually involves trotting out a campaign waiting “on the shelf” to quickly pull public attention away from a product or opinion opposed to, or potentially undermining, your own, in order to keep public attention honed toward your product or position, before the opposition can gain “legs”.  (Frequently employed by carbon-based energy industries, finance and insurance industry, major women’s groups, pharmaceutical and health care industries, etc.)  Keeping public focus on women’s college sports programs keeps public focus away from high school advanced placement programs where the gender disparities are incredibly greater – despite powerful civil rights law banning both.  Women’s lobbies often even champion or draw attention to race issues to keep public focus away from their own increasingly privileged position in our society.  An excellent example of this is the attention in recent years that truly pathetic women’s groups and lobbies have thrown at racial affirmative action admission policies at universities, even taking their whines all the way to the Supreme Court, so as to divert attention from enormously greater injustices on all of America’s college campuses – where women enjoy a two-to-one advantage over men, which is a direct violation of civil rights law mandating 50-50 gender balance in every aspect of American education, K through post-graduate school.  (Privileged American women are rapidly becoming the undisputed World’s Ugliest Human.)  The only nationally known women in American history – Barbara Bush – who ever spoke out loudly for a group other than her own – the poor state of boys in American schools – was totally drowned out within several days when the AAUW trotted out a major campaign against no less than the highly respected male president of Harvard, the nation’s flagship educational institution – that ended with his resignation.  That 2005 campaign sent a powerful warning to anyone who dared raise “sensitive” issues about the majority women in America, especially with regard to “education”, something that all politicians had known for decades.  Mrs. Bush’s message about boys immediately vanished into the ether, never to rise again; the successful record of such women’s lobby tactics over the previous half century remained unbroken. (This is why American politics so completely defies the rational mind; half of the discussion is censored out, silenced or diverted before it begins, so almost none of it makes logical sense.)

Another version of diversionary politics involves throwing out “shiny objects” for the intellectually challenged or those suffering with attention deficit disorder, usually close to important and tight elections.  In 2012, on the eve of a presidential election and the anniversary of the attacks of 9/11/2001, the Obama Administration threw out a “shiny object” (a very obscure internet video) to divert voter attention from the far larger events actually taking place which completely belied the administration’s narrative about the “war on terrorism”.  (Hint: Think Tet ‘68.)  Shiny objects and similar bouncing baubles are usually favored by those who, usually correctly, judge “the masses” as unwashed, helpless and stupid; they are very effective with huge herds stampeding in social media.

Periodic controversies surrounding college sports programs are usually just smoke screens designed to divert public (and student body) attention away from the nation’s far more lucrative on-campus bonanza to higher “education” – the thoroughly corrupt and incredibly profitable health system, especially that associated with universities.  For starters:  the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex, more than four times what the oil and gas complex, spends on lobbying in Washington – and for very good reason:  This is the Greatest Gravy Train ever invented by mankind, and it’s just too easy, and much of it is even exempt from taxes.  On many major college campuses, the “health” cartel dwarfs big time college sports programs almost to total insignificance.  Next to the “education” and government industries, this is the largest employer of women, and women are by far its greatest beneficiary. In hundreds of small and midsize cities, the American health care market has transformed tax-exempt “nonprofit” hospitals, including those associated with colleges and universities, into the towns’ most profitable businesses and largest employers, often presided over by the regions’ most richly compensated executives, very many of whom are women.  And in our largest cities, this Cash Cow system offers lavish paychecks even to mid-level hospital managers, very many of whom are also women.  Big salaries paid to winning college football coaches are nothing compared to these people and the huge profits they generate.  The US now spends over 20% of its entire gross domestic product on health care – more than double that spent by other very advanced countries, which provide far better care to their citizens.  The US spends more on health care than the next ten biggest spending countries combined.  Like government, which also employs a huge majority of women, the health care industry also thrives on, and profits from, money simply confiscated or extorted from “someone else”.  It’s just amazing what you can do in America to line your own pocket simply by hiding your true intentions behind altruistic Virtue Words like “children”, “health”, “education”, “research”, while using Diversionary Politics to point to bogeymen elsewhere.  It’s mostly manipulation of emotion, for Gigantic Profit (for “me”).

Euphoria – using an event that generates euphoria or happiness, or using an appealing event to boost morale, associated with your product or view.  “My team won” = “I won”.  “Mission accomplished.”  Today this is just as applicable to very serious elections and court decisions as football games, hitting the lottery, winning a government grant.  In an idle society it reduces endeavors of significant human importance to the level of two-team sports games, to “me” against “them“, to rally the herd around a shared identity, however remote and vicarious.  Many women experienced such an euphoria in 2012 when a woman golfer was admitted to a private men’s golf club – as if it were still 1962 and women had not had a century to create their own private golf clubs.  There were well over a hundred excellent top-rated all-women liberal arts colleges in America, but women were not happy until they had banished and re-made every remaining all-men’s college – and then to luxuriate in that “accomplishment”.  American women seem to achieve their greatest euphoria when destroying “the opposing side”, not from building their own, not to mention building something worthwhile for all of us.  The purpose of the propaganda is to fan the euphoria for euphoria’s sake alone, while maintaining the “eternal victim” self-identity.  (Sometimes American women even seem to evidence the same level of euphoria when they have identified a new “issue” that permits them to continue safely wallowing in their “victimhood”.)

Films and Jokes  – professional movie makers and comedians in the entertainment industry frequently use current events to make money by putting their own “spin” on those events and then presenting their spin to huge audiences via television or theaters.  If done well enough, which they often are, the manufactured versions can even enter the popular culture as “fact”.  Many millions of Americans don’t know the difference between Sarah Palin and Tina Fey – a comedienne who played Palin in one single TV skit.  This technique usually employs a variety of other propaganda techniques to present their version, including Anecdotal Extrapolation.  Presenting those versions in emotional drama has the greatest effect on targeted audiences.  Back in the 1990s, when Hillary Clinton was trying to totally re-engineer the American health system in secret, Hollywood obliged with a movie about a black man whose little daughter was denied medical care.  Many people bought into that idiocy, and still do, even though the chances of any child being denied available medical care in America is zero.  A couple of years after the start of the “War On Terrorism”, the Commandant of the US Military Academy at West Point finally had to invite the star of the TV drama series “24”, with a story line running like a fast-paced video game, full of short cuts, easy answers and quick fixes (not to mention routine violations of US law), to explain to young military cadets that the real world, including the US military, didn’t operate like that.  The ability to transmit or “share” short media “clips” via a wide range of internet communication devices ensures a wide audience, especially if the media “goes viral”.  See Media Manipulation. 

On Sunday, 30 October 1938, one brilliant young American man – Orson Welles, just 23 years old – taught the world all they needed to know about the power of drama in propaganda with just the sound of his voice on radio, and propaganda was not his objective at all.  He was interested solely in entertaining an audience as it struggled to climb out of the Great Depression only to face the prospect of war sweeping Europe.  Yet his play “War Of The Worlds’, based on a science fiction novel by H.G. Wells, managed to convince a huge portion of the American population that they were, in fact, being invaded and slaughtered by evil Martians.  Few even paused long enough to suspect that the broadcast just might be a Halloween “tick or treat”.

Among poorly educated populations, well produced film dramatizations of historical events which contain half-truths are an extremely effective propaganda technique.  Hollywood excels at such propaganda, which is always excused as “dramatic license” to create a “more compelling story.”  For example, the 2011 British film “Ironclad” is a rather interesting (and bloody) re-telling of King John’s siege of rebel-held Rochester castle in 1215 – except that the dramatic outcome is the exact opposite of what actually happened (i.e., the “good guys” did not win).  The true story of King John’s ruthlessness and duplicity, especially over the original Magna Carta, is actually a far more compelling story, so one is left to wonder why the filmmakers chose to “change history.”  The 2014 US film “Selma” is a very good re-telling of Martin Luther King’s 1965 campaign for racial equality in Alabama – except that it portrays the role of (white) President Lyndon Johnson (and white Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach) in the exact opposite of what it actually was. Johnson was a strong supporter of King’s approach even before-the-fact, was the driving force behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and sent National Guard units into Selma to protect the demonstrators.  Two years earlier Katzenbach, on live global TV, forced the way past the Governor of Alabama (Wallace) into the University of Alabama to allow the enrollment of two black students.  King knew and understoood that Johnson needed a powerful event in order to push through the Voting Rights Act, and, yes, there were an appreciable number of whites in those Selma and other marches.  While the rationale for the revisionism in “Ironclad” totally escapes me, the intent of the “Selma” revisionism is rather obvious (and despicable).  What makes “Selma” even worse is that there are still those walking among us, mostly disciples of (white) Jack Kennedy, myself included, who were actually there and know full well what truth is.  The fact that this revisionism takes place in a country that now has such a deplorable public school system makes it all the more worrisome.  Thanks to pervasive interest group propaganda perpetuating eternal victimhood, absolving one of personal responsibility, most Americans today have a very poor, and quite inaccurate, understanding of their own history.  With the technical capabilities of today’s film industry, there is enormous potential for powerful education, but an equal potential for disinformation propaganda.  (See Disinformation and Half Truths.)

Flag-waving – justify an action on the grounds that doing so will make one more patriotic, or in some way benefit a group, country, or idea.  (“Opposing the war is un-American.”  “The Patriot Act”.  Companies like Boeing, Northrup, General Dynamics and Raytheon, heavily dependent on gigantic US government defense contracts, are very effective at selling their businesses by waving the flag to generate profits and civilian employment.)  There is, of course, absolutely nothing “patriotic” about withdrawing American freedoms and rights by furthering government powers towards a police state, all in the interest of “safety and security”.  (The very title of the “Patriot” Act is itself offensive to any thinking American.  It was, after all, patriots who rebelled in violent revolution to such laws imposed on them by an all-powerful monarchy and created an America that enshrined freedoms of the people over the powers and responsibilities of the government.)  Sometimes, flag waving can have positive results, too; many Americans praise today’s serving military members like they never have in the past half century.  (But the real reasons for that praise remain foggy at best.)  Still, there is something ironic, to say the least, about Americans getting all emotional while proudly saluting their flag and singing the national anthem at entertainment events (“Land of the free, home of the brave”, etc.) even as they so cower in fear of a potential few crazies with homemade bombs that they routinely relinquish their rights and freedoms at every opportunity.

Front-loading Polls – phrasing polling questions so as to get the desired result.  Crafting poll items in carefully tailored ways is becoming an increasingly popular propaganda technique.  For example, polls show that a significant majority (about 65%) of Americans favor the death penalty in capital crimes.  But if the polls asked whether one favors life without parole or a death penalty in capital crimes, Americans are split evenly (50-50) on the issue, and probably could be easily swayed against the death penalty with relevant information.  People polled favor cutting government programs – unless those programs affect them.  The objective is to phrase poll questions in such a way as to elicit the desired response.  For example, who is ever going to say “no” to “children”, the “poor”, etc., when what is really intended is those adults employed to address the “needs” their own lifestyle choices create?  Quoting front-loaded polls has become one of the most prevalent propaganda techniques in America, especially when used in conjunction with Bandwagon and Join The Crowd.  The polled audience is also a critical factor.  For example, polls conducted at land-line residences are more likely to reach women; polls conducted at cell phone numbers are more likely to reach young people; polls conducted in urban areas are likely to omit a third of the country that resides in rural areas and small towns, etc..  Certain communities are known to contain really large majorities of women in retirement.

Guilt By Association – a logical fallacy that implies or assumes culpability by virtue of proximity, membership, race, gender, etc..  (“He’s one of them.”  “One bad cop can taint the whole force.”  Throughout most of the 1970s, due to incessant anti-war (anti-Draft) propaganda, huge numbers of Americans had no difficulty easily associating all American soldiers with “baby killers” and “insane idiots”.)  Any man can be guilty of misogyny, and most are presumed so, but, strangely, women can’t be guilty of misandry.  Go figure.  (Women are just great at ordering around men, but any man stupid enough to reciprocate needs to be institutionalized; it’s his responsibility to ensure all those rights for women.)  White heterosexual males are guilty of everything – at birth – including stupidity.

Half-truths – deceptive statement which may come in several forms and includes some element of truth.  The statement might be partly true, or totally true but only part of the whole truth, or it may use some deceptive element, such as improper punctuation, purposefully omitted relevant factors, or double meaning, especially if the intent is to deceive, evade blame or misrepresent the truth.  (This has probably always been the most effective and widely used marketing or propaganda technique.  All effective propaganda has an element of truth in it somewhere, regardless of whether it’s disseminated in a democracy or in a dictatorship, by a product manufacturer or a political/social interest group.)  The idea is to take that thin shred of truth and embellish it, twist it, pervert it, etc., to achieve a completely new “truth”.  Everyone pays homage to “equal rights”, but no one demanding such equal rights ever mentions “equal responsibility”.  (Responsibility, of course, is for “someone else”.)  Comedians and political “handlers” make very effective shorthand use of half-truths, which then enter the public consciousness.  (A joke is judged on its ability to stand alone in short concise form unencumbered by all the other relevant inconvenient factors.)  Women’s groups and labor unions do an excellent job of focusing solely on “pay” rather than on “compensation”, which cleverly shields the “benefits”, “bonuses”, “pensions”, and “subsidies”, which often exceed the “pay”, from scrutiny.  It’s somehow easy for unassailable American women, who have for decades been receiving twice as many university degrees as men, which results in women working full time nationwide now earning 119% of the incomes of men, to demand “equal pay” without including relevant factors like longevity-in-position and productivity to the pay equation, when no one is brave enough to suggest that women pay their equitable share of Social Security and Medicare premiums, and no one mentions that many women still occupy “affirmative action” positions filled due to fears of “gender discrimination” law suits.  (Women benefit from such social welfare programs twice as much as men, but pay the same premiums – which means that male workers subsidize their premiums by at least one-third.)  Half Truths are a form of Disinformation.  (See Footnote #2.)

Women use terms like “misogyny” to impart a notion of those “evil” men directing “hate speech” against women.  But over a three-week period in 2016, think tank Demos counted the number of uses of two particular words used in tweets as indicators of misogyny, and found that over half of all “misogynistic” tweets posted on Twitter come from women.  Abuse on social networks is not new and neither is the revelation that women contribute to the problem.  A 2014 study from cosmetics firm Dove found that over five million negative tweets were posted about beauty and body image.  Four out of five were sent by women.  What is one to conclude from such full truths?  Do more women hate women than men hate women?  (Does anyone keep track of “hate speech” directed against men?  It’s called misandry.)  Amazing revelation: Weak personalities don’t embrace criticism.

American debt in the form of student loans now (2012) totals a staggering $970 Billion, and over 6,700,000 (about 17%) of those borrowers are considered “seriously delinquent” in repaying them.  Next year those loans will top an incredible One Trillion Dollars.  (About 15% of student debt is held by private lenders, where more than $8 Billion is in default; the rest is held by government agencies.)  So now we have cries for enabling “student” loans to be discharged through bankruptcy, bail outs and other measures “to make student loan repayment more flexible and easier for borrowers”, etc..  But what we do not hear is that the overwhelming majority of “student” loans in default were assumed by women students.  (If they were men students, we’d never hear about a “problem” that needed government intervention except to urge police to track down all those “deadbeat dummies”.)  It’s called misrepresenting the full truth so as to deceive with half-truths.  What makes all of this even more pathetic is that only 54% of college “students” who started a four year undergraduate program in the fall of 2006 had managed to graduate, about 30% had dropped out altogether, but about 16% were still enrolled – six years later.  (Women out-number men on America’s campuses two-to-one, and because of our women-dominated K-12 schools, are far more likely than men to complete degree requirements.)  When you get to college you’re supposed to be all grown up – old enough to make your own choices, die in war, etc..  No one anywhere is forcing any college student to assume loan debts they might find difficult to pay back, so it is no one else’s fault if they pile up such debts anyway.  They can always attend a cheaper college.  No one today has to worry about being drafted into war; if they’re short of money needed to pay for college, they can easily get a job, or join the military, and save the money needed.  It’s part of the learning process – of how to become an actual adult, responsible enough to be hired for an actual job.  (But keep an informed eye on quality and field of study.  A 2015 Goldman Sachs research study found that graduates of the bottom-ranked 25% of all American universities earn less, on average, than high school graduates, regardless of the university’s cost.  That’s an incredibly pathetic result for four-to-six years of “advanced” study at unregulated institutions – one in four! – that are charging a lot of people a lot of money.  These phony feel-good scams are most definitely not the same disciplined universities your grandparents attended.)

Intentional Vagueness –  deliberate generalities enabling the audience to supply its own interpretations, usually used with audiences known to have a certain preconception or prejudice, but the most susceptible are the very young and uneducated.  Exactly what is the real intention when women today teach little children about the “men and women” who “fought the Civil War”, “built the Transcontinental Railroad”, “created the Brooklyn Bridge”?  Such intentional vagueness deliberately reduces the actual contributions of male role models in the minds of boys, while hyper-inflating the contributions of female role models in the minds of girls – in order to create a whole new self-serving version of historical fact – even though women’s actual contributions to our society were far more important elsewhere, especially in raising and educating the healthy and strong men who were willing to risk so much for such worthy women and their children.  (Anyone who thinks such women today don’t know exactly what they’re doing to children with their intentional vagueness and historical revisionism is just incredibly stupid.)

School systems routinely report inflated student test scores, which taxpayers want, without mentioning that they cherry-picked the highest performers (mostly girls) to take the tests, eliminated via expulsion or drop-out huge numbers of students (mostly boys), excluded those in vocational programs (mostly boys), and still hid the low scores of boys behind the high scores for girls under the unisex label “students” or “children”, etc..  The exclusive use of gender-neutral terms like “students” and “children” in public school performance reports is ALWAYS a very clear indication that the source is deliberately concealing gross gender differences – differences which would reveal boys at a significant disadvantage in direct violation of civil rights law.  Girls can always depend on their many powerful lobbies, the female-dominated school systems, the female-dominated social sciences, and the female-dominated “education journalism” field to scream about ANYTHING in which girls are at a disadvantage, so their deafening silence when such uni-sex terms are used is further proof of the nefarious intent of this despicable form of intentional vagueness propaganda.  Since the 1990s no US public school report intended for the public has failed to raise dozens of questions in the mind of a careful thinker – questions which no one ever asks, not even those supposed to be executing their responsibilities as privileged members of the Fourth Estate, much less those in government “oversight”.  They thus become active participants in disseminating propaganda deliberately designed to deceive the public – to the advantage of women.  Being intentionally vague is not lying, but the result is the same, especially when no one dares request further elaboration.  See Disinformation.  (See Footnote #2.)  “Boys” are newsworthy only when they do something wrong, on their own, of course. (Boys, of course, especially the bad ones, simply “create themselves”.)

For three years the US government, with the help of the US news media, sold to American people a coming major new health care program with language that seemed to be addressed to all Americans, but was actually addressed only to select interest groups which would benefit at the expense of others.  Then it turned out that language also included a whole list of unspoken qualifiers, that the full story of the program had also been hidden behind intentional vagueness propaganda.

Join The Crowd – reinforces people’s natural desire to be on the winning or larger side, such that it is an irresistible mass movement in which it is in their best interest to join. (“team player”; “the winning side”)  It’s herd mentality, used very effectively by both rising Nazism and rising Communism among their respective populations.  Unquestioning celebrity idolatry is a common contemporary example.  Percentages in polls are often used to conceal differences among sub-groups to encourage the sub-groups to join the crowd, “jump on the Bandwagon”.)  Membership in herd identity groups has become one of the strongest forces in contemporary society; any worthwhile propagandist would be negligent if they did not seek to manipulate that force, and most especially in groups created by superficial social media such as Facebook.  There is probably no greater influence on human group dynamics than the ability of groups to instill conformity among group members, to create a herd mentality, even when the mentality is just stupid, even self-destructive.  Very rarely is wisdom a characteristic of herds, but fads, “waves”, fashions, rumors, urban legends, and often even political nonsense, etc., are very heavily dependent on them.  (Do NOT believe any report on polling that does not break down the results at least by gender, age group and frequency of voting; those poll reports that don’t do this are just propaganda designed to deceive, to entice the minority to join the majority herd, even if the majority herd’s motivations are entirely self-serving – at the expense of the minority.  Almost all broad poll reports actually reflect the usual “whatever women want” nonsense, and those women are mostly privileged nobility-class white women (birthright entitled; me-ism; all rights, no responsibility; etc.).)

Labeling – a euphemism (less offensive synonym) is used when the intent is to raise the credibility, increase the perceived quality, or enhance the credence of a particular idea, person or product.  A dysphemism (more offensive synonym) is used when the intent is to discredit, diminish the perceived quality, or hurt the perceived righteousness of the target.  (A careful observer will recognize that a label usually reveals much more about those assigning the label than about those labeled.  For example, only the politically left will use terms like “right-wing”, “fascist”, etc., to describe others, which usually is quite revealing about the author of the statement.  An easy counter for the political right is to use “left-wing”, “socialist”, “communist”, etc. – terms which rarely appear in American or European mainstream newsprint, where “right-wing” and “fascist” are considered epithets for “extremists on the dark side”, i.e., Nazis.  This incessant selective labeling, especially among “mainstream” media, ensures that “conservative” remains a very dirty word in the “ideal” leftist universe, one in which conservatives have not been able to achieve rhetorical balance.  (It’s actually inexplicable, since communist extremism on the left was every bit as evil as nazi extremism was on the right.  But, obviously, conservatives need a new label to describe themselves, one that does not come with all that extra baggage liberals have succeeded in hanging on the current conservative label.  (Even though they were revolutionaries, our Founding Fathers and their Constitution all espoused conservative values.)  Liberals, after all, have been making much use of the “progressive” label, which seeks to cloud their old “socialist” and “communist” labels that grew certain negative connotations.  If liberals are for “progress”, then the implication is that conservatives are against “progress”.  That seems like a bad thing, but no one, of course, defines just what “progress” is.  The “Great Progressive”, Woodrow Wilson, after all, was a resolute elitist racist on the left side.  You can go crazy trying to figure out this stuff; it’s all deceptive propaganda designed to confuse the truth.  As another example, in our society emotional labels such as “sexist”, “homophobe”, “racist”, etc., playing on generations-old history, can be very easily employed to summarily silence even valid opposing views, i.e., to censor the discussion before it begins.  Such labels, of course, guarantee that only lies find voice, and what are lies if not propaganda?  See Name Calling and Re-Labeling.

Sometimes labels can come back and bite you in the rear.  Every proponent of a major new health care law never stopped proudly referring to it as the euphemism “Obamacare”, ad nauseam – until it was revealed to be an elaborate multi-trillion dollar scam sold by three years of lies and the greatest example of governmental incompetence in American history.  Then suddenly it became “the Affordable Health Care Act”, a dysphemism, as if by magic.  (There is nothing “affordable” about it, either.  “Affordable” is a label like that in the “Patriot’’ Act – political tongue-in-cheek irony for dummies.) See Lies.

Lies (Common and Otherwise)  – We all know this one.  It’s become a pervasive and acceptable part of our culture.  It begins when women start putting make-up masks on little girls, is taught to boys by the example set by parents, is reinforced by wide-spread cheating in school, becomes automatic while dating, is practiced to inflate résumés on job applications, gets sanctified by politicians, is willfully promulgated with a straight face by the “Fourth Estate”, is advanced every five minutes by an incredibly wide variety of interests selling literally everything, grows ever more sophisticated the higher up you go, and doesn’t stop even at the doors of the White House.  The ease and assertiveness with which people in high and influential places can now lie to Americans simply takes the breath away; perhaps this is because these people can somehow get even themselves to actually believe their own lies.  (And, of course, if you converse solely with yourself long enough, you eventually believe your own bullshit.)  “It depends on what your definition of is is.”  In most cases, the liars first determine what their chief constituencies want to hear and then tell the lie, big or small, that best fits that objective, damned what anyone else might know is truth.  It’s been over a half century, for example, since anyone has dared tell American women and minorities the truth about themselves, so lies are actually mandated in our society, required by law.  (Straight white men are required to lie to anyone who is not a straight white man, or suffer very severe consequences.  It’s now a life-long enforced habit, inculcated mandated behavior.)  And, unless you’re a member of the US military, there’s no penalty for lying; some can even lie under oath in court and send a man to prison or even death – with impunity.  Some people get so good at it that, even when faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, they can still convince themselves that their own lies are solid truths.  If the same lie is re-told often enough, even people who initially knew it was a lie will eventually accept it as “known fact”, as “popular knowledge” – which is a testament to herd power.  If you’re speaking on behalf of women, you can also bask in the comfort of knowing that no one will ever challenge you on your self-serving lies; in America, challenging women on their lies is considered “sexist”, “misogyny”, part of the “war on women”, etc.. (American women have rights; they do NOT have responsibilities, so they can toss around any lies they wish to serve their own purposes.)  Of course, in contemporary American society, truth is irrelevant; perception is everything.

Or maybe it’s just as much a case of so many Americans now being so willfully ignorant of the truth that liars risk very little with their lies.  Those in high places in the US government start with the proposition that Americans are too stupid to figure things out for themselves, so these politicians and bureaucrats can tell them any nonsense they want to tell them, and “stupid” Americans will never recognize the lies.  Lies come out of Washington almost weekly, but the biggest lie – actually an endless series of lies on the same subject – in recent decades was that which enabled “Obamacare” to become law without one single vote of support from the political opposition.  They lied through their faces daily for three years and then rammed the law right down the throats of the American people, or, more accurately, down the throats of that half of the people who actually pay taxes for all the slackers in the other half.  And the lies were all part of the plan, the calculated means to achieve their objectives of seizing control of one-sixth of the US economy.  Hooray for democracy.  And also for all those really stupid people out there.  (And, of course, the compliantly fawning “press” was a willful co-conspirator in it all.  The American “press” certainly has gone a very long way down from the Washington’s Post’s relentless pursuit of “the truth” and “the public’s right to know” concerning the Pentagon Papers and the Nixon White House involvement in the Watergate affair “regardless of politics”.  Over the forty years since then, that “press” has succeeded in making a sad joke of itself.)  (See “Obamacare Doesn’t“.)

Best advice: Never ever trust a liar.  And it only takes one lie to negate trust forever.  I personally wouldn’t trust a liar with my dog.  When lying is so common, how do you recognize truth?  How do you know whom to trust?  You don’t.

Media Manipulation – altering original media, including documents, photographs, audio and video tracts to produce forgeries intended to have a specific effect.  Altering official documents and original photographs have been propaganda techniques employed since at least the 19th century, including by both Nazi and communist propaganda machines, as well as by allied intelligence forces during World War II and communist forces during the war in Vietnam.  Political interest groups have used such tactics against opponents since before America became a nation.  Today the proliferation of sophisticated software makes this technique with all such media easily possible by almost anyone with a personal computer – and far more difficult to disprove.  Even the most recent (2012) American election campaign saw several instances of this technique used even by “mainstream” “news” media to purposefully discredit conservative candidates, usually by broadcasting very selective short video clips removed from their broader context.  But interest groups on the right are not above using the same technique against the left.  See Disinformation.  (See Footnote #2.)  Such techniques are most effective with audiences that have been taught what to think, but not how to think, and when used in conjunction with social media feeding the herd.

Name Calling – similar to labeling, used to incite fears and arouse prejudices in the audience with the intent of causing them to construct a negative opinion about a product, a group or set of beliefs or ideas.  (“He’s a fascist.”  “Guns kill.”  “That car’s a lemon.”   “He’s a hate-monger.”  “Homophobe.”  Use of such words is most often designed to invoke prejudice and bigotry in order to sway an audience, deflect criticism, silence opposition.  It’s another form of “attack the messenger, kill the message”.  Name-calling is a lazy short-hand way of “smearing” which usually cannot stand up under objective scrutiny.  It can be countered with demands for an explanation, justification or evidence of the name called.  Unfortunately, in our instant gratification culture, this takes too long, so the smearing usually leaves the accused defending himself by trying to prove a negative – which is not even allowed, for very good reasons, in American courts.  (Anyone can make accusations; proving such accusations is quite another matter.  But it’s all moot if the accusation has already settled into the popular mindset, the herd mentality.)  Similar to Labeling.

Obtain Disapproval – used to persuade a target audience to disapprove of an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated, feared, or held in contempt by the target audience.  (Timing is everything.  Reducing taxes to generate business resulting in increased government revenue was originally a successful Kennedy liberal idea.  Now it’s seen as conservative dogma “favoring the rich”, while “raising your taxes is liberal dogma.”)  Arguments directed to union members against approving a proposed union contract will usually invoke “corporate greed”.  Criticism of women’s views is “sexist”, or “misogynist”, behavior.  “Military people are knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who only know how to wield clubs.”  Effective in selling toothpaste, deodorant, soap, white teeth, etc..  It never seems to dawn on those incessantly promoting “special” people that this was the critical underpinning of Nazism and its super-people; here is where propaganda could make a contribution, but other propaganda has effectively drowned its potential.  In today’s American society, the biggest bullies are actually special interest groups and their very effective lobbies, and they can get huge herds to disapprove of anything or anyone in a heartbeat just by using brainless celebrities and clever tweets – to instruct their herds on what to think.

Oversimplification –  favorable generalities are used to provide simple answers to complex social, political, economic, or military problems. (i.e., “more troops”; “shift ‘troops’ from Iraq to Afghanistan”; “We took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan” – without mentioning the role supposedly played by all of Europe plus dozens of civilian agencies or asking why we don’t have enough of the right kind of ‘troops’ to do the job and yet the “Arab Spring” did actually begin in Baghdad.  “It’s a slam dunk!”)  Everyone has one favorite bogeyman to blame for the Great Recession that began in 2007, when, in fact, there were at least a half dozen guilty groups, including voters, bureaucrats and politicians.  Civil service labor unions, women’s lobbies, etc., speak tirelessly about “pay”, while carefully avoiding any mention of “compensation” – which omits that half of income that is received in benefits, plus work environment, job security, low risk, etc..  Naïve, pontificating civilians with no military experience have a tremendous predilection to impart capabilities, before the fact, to the US military that are entirely unrealistic; humans, including those in opposition to our military forces on the battlefield, are far more complex and unpredictable than any machines (or video games or movies), and no one knows this better than a soldier on that battlefield.  “Mission accomplished”, “slam dunk”, my ass.  (See Intentional Vagueness.)

Passive Voice  – This grammar trick is an excellent indicator of propaganda, an easy tip-off.  Whenever passive voice is used, it’s a very safe bet that deliberate deception is involved.  When used in propaganda, passive voice is used to make statements about results while leaving un-stated, but implied, the causes and conditions of those results.  (Active Voice:  “Susie told Mary that she couldn’t play under her “special” rules.”  Passive Voice:  “Mary was told that she couldn’t play.” – implying that evil boys told her, and leaving unstated that Mary wanted “special” rules as a condition.)  The tactic cleverly omits the active “perpetrator” plus a range of qualifiers.  Women’s interest groups, lobbies and mouthpieces, having perfected it relentlessly for over a century, are world champions at this trick.  There is now a whole body of “knowledge” concerning women out there that is based on nothing but passive voice propaganda.  “Women were denied this.”  “Women were denied that.”  Who denied them?  Why were they denied?  How were they denied?  When were they denied?  Where were they denied?  As a group, American women were never “denied” anything, and especially by those “evil” men and their “patriarchal” society.  (It has always been responsibilities of American men and the society they crafted to protect and defend women, whose children were critical to society’s survival.)  Rather, there always has been very considerable disagreement among women themselves about what it actually is that most women want, and what price they are willing to pay for it.  (And, yes, when a majority of them finally decided what they wanted, they DID, in fact, demand “special” rules for themselves.  And they always got whatever they wanted, simply by making demands.)  With the help of their lobbies and propaganda, American women figured out how to demand and get a million rights while leaving all the responsibility parts to “someone else”, and to keep it all running on brainless auto-pilot ad infinitum.  Nothing about “official” America ever denied women anything, nor has it ever forced women to do anything, including defending the nation that gave them so much.  (But it sure would be nice if these perpetual whiners accepted some of the responsibility for themselves, and can the self-serving lies and propaganda.  It was the easiest “revolution” in human history, requiring zero personal sacrifice, yet every year American women wallow ever more in their “eternal victimhood”.  Enough is already way too much.)

Quotes Out Of Context – Selective editing of quotes which can change meanings.  (Omitting qualifiers also spoken by the source, so that what is left looks just absurd, is a popular tactic.)  This technique has become especially popular in an age of 140-character “tweets” and ten-second sound bytes used to “inform”.  Especially effective in a poorly educated society always seeking quick fixes, short cuts and easy answers with minimum possible mental exercise.  Popular with comedians.  Extremely effective with groups already predisposed to accept the propaganda, supported by carefully selected items from the full story, as “truth”.   See Media Manipulation above.

Rationalization – using favorable generalities or vague and pleasant phrases to justify behavior or beliefs normally considered irrational, questionable or unacceptable by offering an apparently reasonable explanation.  Vietnam-era draft dodgers and deserters were great at this.  Professing to be “anti-war”, what they were really saying was, “I am “special”; YOU go to war in my place.”  After the Draft ended, “anti-war” Baby Boomers didn’t care that “someone else” now dies in bloody wars that never end – at their direction.  (And obviously others, not directly involved themselves, don’t care, either.)  Women’s lobbies continue to regard their gender as inherently “eternal victims” of inherently “evil” men and thus are automatically absolved of responsibility, accountability, for others as well as for their own condition.  Humans have a capacity to rationalize literally anything in their own favor, and propagandists are always eager to assist them.  No one ever asks questions like, “If women “experts” are solely responsible for “raising” our young, why do they raise all those “evil” men?” or “Why do we have so many millions of total loser boys “raised” by women “experts”?”  Apparently males simply “create themselves” and are thus solely responsible for their own condition, but girls need a “vast village”.  And women then get to be their perpetual victims.  There is zero logic here.  It’s ALL just shifting personal responsibility to others.  It’s all idiotic rationalization serving delusional self-image.  (Over half the children born in America are born to single women exercising their right of choice, and over half of the rest are “raised” by women who exercise their right to divorce their husbands and keep the kids.  No responsibility needed, and daughters even get to be victims of their mothers’ male creations.)  “It’s fine to use propaganda on Americans, but not ok to use propaganda on others.”  Our narcissistic society is now full of fake humans who worship their glorious navels while using twisted rationalizations to get “someone else” to take the blame, pay the bills and do the hard stuff for “special me”, and almost none of them knows how to think.  Key factors are powerful lobbies relentlessly taking full advantage of a dismal educational system that champions self-serving emotion over sound logic.  One of the most debilitating traits of narcissists is an inability to view the board from the vantage of the other side, a trait that can easily have catastrophic consequences, especially in matters of international relations.  The emotional rationalization is always, “I am right; you are wrong.”  It is not the logical conclusion, “We need to better understand each other you so that we can both move forward productively.”  Life is a 50-50 bargain, and if you don’t carry your full share, you need to know that fact.  Stupid is stupid.

An especially perverted consequence of this rationalization lunacy are those elected male politicians who eventually reveal themselves to be morally corrupt and incredibly stupid.  How did they ever get elected in the first place?  By promising women whatever they wanted?  Were those women even willing to overlook the “man’s” very deep flaws simply to get what they wanted for themselves?  With all the many powerful weapons American women have in their arsenal, it completely escapes me how these total jerks ever got as far as they did.  They definitely are not the kind of people I want representing me, in anything.

Rationalizations usually defy common sense.  The Americans bombed Libya into oblivion ostensibly to “provide humanitarian protection to innocent civilians and rebels” when its government sought to regain control over its disintegrating state, but did nothing except blame the Russians when the Ukrainian government did the exact same thing in its state.  (We support “self-determination” only when the self-determination goes in the direction WE want.)  You can’t make this stuff up, folks.  Is it any wonder that the Russians view us with a justified jaundiced eye?

Red Herring – presenting data or issues that, while compelling, are irrelevant to the argument at hand, and then claiming that it validates the argument.  (“Guns are often used by murderers, so guns kill”.  (But knives don’t?  Cars don’t?  More people die each year in the US due to traffic crashes than to gunshots, and three times as many people die every year due to medical errors than to traffic crashes, so “hospitals kill”?  Guns – 30,000, well over half due to male suicide (17,000); traffic – 33,000; medical error – 99,000.  One in 20 patients admitted to US hospitals picks up an infection they didn’t have when they arrived; those infections cause the deaths of almost 100,000 people a year.  And we need to pass a whole raft of new laws to control guns that are factors in only 14% of that number of unintended deaths?  Unintended deaths from gunshot (13,000) constitute 0.004% of the US population (310,000,000), so we need new laws also affecting the other 99.996%?  Over 53,000 people die every year in the US just from the flu!  In 2014 over 47,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, 40% of which were prescription drugs.  Over 6,000 idiots die every year from accidents suffered while they are distracted by their own “lethal weapon” cell phones!)  This country recently threw away the lives of almost 7,000 of its best citizen-soldiers in two stupidly mismanaged wars and then simply told their survivors, “Never mind.”  (The New York Times reported in December 2013 that a study by the Journal of Patient Safety found that an astounding 440,000 (not 99,000) people die as a result of preventable error in US hospitals every year – which makes people working in hospitals the third leading cause of premature death in America.)

People kill, and they use a very wide variety of tools to do so for a variety of reasons, including stupidity and incompetence.  Red herrings fill the need of the simple-minded to blame manufactured bogeymen, rather than themselves or more difficult but truer causes protected by “politically correct” censorship.  It’s a LOT easier for the intellectually challenged to focus on the guns than on the society and those in that society who create the misfits who use guns in inappropriate ways.  No one has a problem blaming boys for doing really dumb stuff, but in doing so they presume those boys created themselves, giving a free pass to the irresponsible adults who “raised” and “educated” those ‘red herring’ boys.  (It’s just the usual blame-shifting.)  Some say that the BP oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico was solely responsible for the failure of many businesses along the coast to return to full profitability, while ignoring the fact that the whole country is still struggling with the Great Recession.  Is BP being used as a red herring in order to justify more financial claims against BP?  Isn’t it … comforting, convenient … to have “someone else” to blame, to possess all those rights, with no responsibility?  (How much savings did you put away for life’s known unknowns?  How much insurance do you carry for the same eventualities?  How much does that nifty cell phone toy cost you every year?)

The Obama Administration in 2011 used a red herring (the absence of a status of forces agreement) as a phony excuse for withdrawing all remaining US forces from Iraq.  The truth is that when your military forces have invaded and finally conquered a country, you do NOT walk away from that country until YOU are ready to do so, until you are absolutely certain that what you leave behind will not quickly render the stupendous cost in life and treasure just inconsequential waste.  Use of this incredibly stupid red herring with an ignorant voting public was a deliberate calculation that the cost of trillions of American taxpayer dollars and tens of thousands of dead and maimed American soldiers was simply of no consequence.  (The Iraq War was a determined effort to undermine the Islamic militant extremist ideology by removing a universally hated and feared dictatorship and establishing a viable better alternative smack in the middle of its Muslim support base.  A potent residual US force was needed to continue training the Iraqi military and also to impose significant pressure on the Iraqi government to live up to its responsibilities to all of Iraq’s citizens and the entire nation.  People who have never known anything except ruthless self-serving dictatorship need significant time to become comfortable with better alternatives.  When US forces were withdrawn completely, before its mission had been completed, it was inevitable that the country would descend again into sectarian rivalry and self-interest, presenting open invitations to both internal and external interference and exploitation.)  This decision with Iraq was a thousand times more stupid than a similar decision made to simply walk away from Afghanistan during the 1990s after using the mujahedin in a protracted war to eject Soviet Russian forces from the country, leaving behind an open invitation for chaos, civil war and the rise of the Taliban.  (It’s what you get when ignorant politicians and appointees with zero knowledge of military stuff run foreign policy and wars based solely to serve domestic politics.  Over the past forty years inept Baby Boomer politicians have a long and shameful record of telling the parents of dead and maimed American soldiers, after the fact, “Never mind.”)  The absence of a “SOFA” was a red herring, for dummies.

Re-labeling – giving a product or topic that has developed a negative connotation a new label that has a more positive connotation, or vice versa.  Can also be used to impart the impression of “something new”.  (“choice” versus “abortion”; “surge” versus “build-up”; “rotating disk” versus “wheel”; “stimulus” versus “spending”; “asymmetric” versus “unconventional”; “climate change” versus “global warming”; “war against women” versus “war among women”; “improvised explosive device” versus “booby-trap”; “progressive” versus “socialist”; “fine” (or “penalty” or “fee”) versus “tax”; “supplemental nutrition assistance” versus “food stamps”; “populism” versus “democracy”, “nationalism” versus “patriotism”, “porterhouse chops” versus “pork chops”; “dealing kinetically” versus “bombing” (i.e., using incredibly expensive flying-computer super-jet “fighters” as artillery pieces), etc., etc..  These are word games capitalizing on slightly different connotations – but meaning exactly the same.  This technique has experienced an explosion in popularity in recent times as more and more very average and unimaginative people, especially politicians, bureaucrats, policy wonks, etc., seek to create an impression among equally average and unimaginative others of ‘something new’ and ‘original thought’ (usually after concluding, “I got nothin’.”)  Few today know, for example, that the Ford Model-T and other early car engines were designed to run on home-brewed alcohol (not oil-based gasoline), that ethanol was used as a fuel for cars during the 1930s, that “clean coal” is inherently an oxymoron, that a perfectly safe hydrogen-powered Cadillac was in President Carter’s inaugural parade, that G.I.s used cell phones during WW II they called “walkie-talkies”, etc..  (There’s nothing new here, folks.  There’s been precious little in our society that is actually new since the stoic Greatest Generation bowed out and the “brilliant” Baby Boomers took over; we still depend on the Greatest Generation to do 90% of our thinking for us, even as the foundations of their thinking steadily vanishes beneath our feet.  So Re-labeling is now our savior!)

Dozens of DC bureaucrats built reputations during the early years of the “War On Terrorism” by taking excellent 1970s Army field manuals on unconventional warfare, relabeling a few terms, and having them re-published as their own work.  “I wrote the book.” (They didn’t write anything, nor were they qualified to write anything, either from knowledge or experience.) (Guys like generals Petraeus and McChrystal had studied the originals.)  Most of the re-labeling was a conscious and deliberate effort to avoid Vietnam-era terminology. (Vietnam was the unwise application of mostly US conventional forces and strategy in an entirely unconventional situation; except for the first two months of Iraq, the past ten years of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been exactly the same as Vietnam – with our “allies” failing miserably to make up for the tremendous shortfall in US unconventional (civil affairs, “peacekeeping”, engineers, “nation-building”, stability, etc.) personnel required by the manuals’ doctrine.  Most of such US personnel had been fired at the end of the “Cold” War.  It was the “Great Peace Dividend” – which sacrificed nearly a million “hearts-and-minds” soldiers and shifted the “savings” to domestic wants – because the end of the “Cold” War meant that “the US no longer had to be concerned with winning “hearts and minds” against a global ideology.”  In a sterling example of Baby Boomer Brilliance, less than one decade later they were engaged with a whole new global ideology.)  In the past, unconventional fighters acquired labels like “insurgent”, “freedom-fighter”, “rebel”, “guerrilla”, etc.; today the exact same type of people are all lumped under the heading “terrorist”.  (Terrorism is one of many different methods used in unconventional warfare, almost always against superior opposing forces.  The all-encompassing label “terrorist”, while attributing a very negative connotation to the other side, overlooks the fact that war itself is terror, that we and our methods represent a form of terror used against others.) Re-labeling is probably the laziest form of propaganda, but is still quite effective among ignorant or uneducated populations.  It’s another of those quick fixes, easy answers and short cuts everyone in our lazy society now just loves.

Storing data in “The Cloud” is seen today as a new idea, but it’s actually a re-labeling of a quite old idea.  The original concept of people using computers envisioned, and built, many remote workstations connected to very powerful and centrally located computers (“the cloud”) in one seamless system, which then could communicate selectively with other such systems.  This “cloud” concept was actually built into many major academic and scientific networked systems in the US and Europe, as well as in such highly advanced real world systems as the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and the highly advanced European nuclear research center.  But software and computer manufacturers in the 1970s saw greater profit in meeting a demand for the individual’s complete control and ownership of both machine and data with desktop computers (PCs), rather than showing them that far greater things were possible using and advancing the original concept (such as with Wang workstations).  (Wang, a major Boston company with great technology, software and equipment, and a leader in “cloud” technology, went out of business as the desktop computer business exploded – causing a plethora of different, expensive and redundant systems that had enormous difficulty communicating with each other, especially in government.)  So everyone had to wait thirty years for the Baby Boomers to get out of the way so their grandchildren could get on with the Greatest Generation’s original thinking.  The recent “great leap forward” is aided by transmitting data between workstation (cellphone) and computer (cloud) over radio wave (Wi-Fi) technology developed for the US military during World War II, and not being tethered to cumbersome cables.  The only thing new here is the technology facilitated by continuing to decrease the size, with a corresponding increase in the power, of computer chips and technology.  (Both concepts (workstation and Cloud) have the same vulnerabilities – including data intercept, corruption and manipulation – which require similar defenses, although the original concept, as a “closed system”, was inherently more secure.)  The release of the US military’s “internet” communication system to the world by President Reagan then facilitated a whole new world of possibilities for the original “workstation” concept – that still took another quarter of a century to get going.  (See Footnote #2 to “Smiling Faces And Purple Fingers – And Egypt“.)

A variation of the re-labeling technique involves self-serving ulterior motivations, to enhance or broaden the connotation of terms that have grown over-used or are too confining.  (“families” is now favored over “women” or “single mothers”)  The term “families” relies on the traditional image to imply the inclusion of men in the equation – which, in reality, is definitely not the intent of the propagandists at all.  (The intent of women’s lobbies using this propaganda trick is to shift women’s dependence from husbands and fathers to Big Daddy Government – and force everyone else to pay for the free choices and elective behavior of women via simple government confiscation.  Politicians buying the votes of women with other people’s money are eager participants in the cheap deception.)  As another example, most people don’t know that over 95% of the victims of pedophile priests, athletic coaches, scout leaders, etc., have been boys.  On the contrary.  This is because the gender of this victim group is always hidden behind re-labeling terms like uni-sex “child molesters”.  If a significant portion of the victims were girls, women’s lobbies and “journalists” would demand that such creeps be labeled as “rapists of little girls” and burned at the stake in the town square.  “Rapists”, of course, is exactly what they are, regardless of the gender of the victims, or the perpetrators.  So, to these self-interests, raping little boys is not such a big thing, especially since it doesn’t lend much support to the “women as eternal victim” image incessantly promulgated by the many women’s lobbies and journalists. (No lobbies are as persistent or as thorough with their propaganda as are those championing women, regardless of the consequences to any other group.  This is because the “eternal victim” label enables them to avoid responsibility for any other group while demanding and receiving preferential treatment for their own.  Women’s lobbies have been doing this so long and so well that most of their propaganda has now settled firmly into the popular consciousness, the herd mind-set.  It’s still just what it’s always been – mostly just self-serving nonsense of the self-anointed “special” people.)  The legal principle, always applied to girls and firmly established in law, is that those under age 18, regardless of gender, are legally incapable of giving consent, so any untoward act involving them is automatically non-consensual under the law.  (All laws in the US must apply to everyone equally.)  (See Footnote #2.)  A variation of this involves “tolerance”; those demanding “tolerance” from others are almost always extremely intolerant of views which differ from their own, so “tolerance” actually means “dictate”.  (This country is full of groups of self-interested noisy nazis all mandating that their own views be accepted by everyone else in the interest of “tolerance” – which, of course, demonstrates an incredible intolerance toward the views of others, while also thoroughly undermining what we are.  Tolerance has nothing to do with it; it’s mostly whiny losers simply demanding that everyone else yield to “special me”.)

Relativism – the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration.  The concept can be useful in a very wide range of examinations, both positive and negative, such as with truth, morality, ethics, history, culture, philosophy, etc..  If, for example, you view a group in isolation, you can study that group’s members, discern how they view their condition, can study their perceptions, beliefs, history, aspirations, struggles, etc., and make judgments about the group, its sub-groups and its individual members.  But you can only make such judgments internal to the group, judgments that exclude all external factors and influences; you cannot make judgments about the group in comparison to other groups, relative to the whole beyond the group.  Unfortunately, this is usually where things get murky, fluid, and self-serving.  If you view the condition of American women under the concept of relativism, for example, you don’t have to introduce a comparison of the women group to the men group, to their perceptions, beliefs, history, aspirations, struggles, etc.. “It’s only important if it’s important to ME.”  You can make all sorts of declarative statements, for example, about very many women voluntarily working in tough factory jobs during World War II, but properly, honestly, you can only make those statements relative to the other half of society – men – very many of whom were then dying in tough wartime jobs.  You need a proper frame of reference to reach truthful conclusions.  You can either include that frame of reference, or you can ignore it – and engage in propaganda that serves the group in isolation.  Those interested in the full truth in a judgmental statement should always ask, “Relative to what?”  What exactly is the frame of reference and how does the statement stand up relative to that frame of reference and relative to other statements that can also be applied to that same frame of reference?  The desert is hot; so is a stove burner; and so is the Sun – and there is an enormous difference among them.  So “hot” is a relative term and should be properly defined so that the three statements have a proper frame of reference and can be viewed in context with the whole, so that the three statements can be properly applied to the frame of reference.

Most Americans today would agree that the internment of ethnic Japanese-Americans during the Second World War was an injustice.  US authorities rounded up roughly 115,000 people (62% of whom were US citizens) on the west coast of the US (where 88% of such people resided) who met certain ethnic traits and sent them to camps further inland.  None were subjected to physical harm or dangerous conditions; they were simply held in the sparse camps until war’s end.  The matter can be argued as unfair, even racially motivated, inasmuch as the US did not do the same with those of German ethnicity on the east coast or throughout America.  But, on the other hand, the US did round up millions of other Americans and sent them to face a very high probability of death.  Those Americans were all US citizens, male, in good health and physical condition, of above average intelligence and rather high moral standing.  They were Drafted to become America’s soldiers in war – against both Germany and Japan – and over 407,000 of them died in the effort.  So, in comparison, a case can be made that what befell the Japanese-Americans actually pales in comparison; no one sent any of them off to face machineguns and bombs.  Why did the US not round up women with certain traits and send them off to engage in some uncomfortable or even deadly endeavor?  Do those American men who were drafted for very dangerous duty in war have a case of “unfairness”, of sexist motivation, to make?

A similar case of relativism can be seen in the discussion of the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which roughly 200,000 people died (including over 22,000 of the 670,000 civilian prisoners who had been imported from Korea as forced labor).  The results of those two bombs were indeed horrific, but the number of Japanese killed by the two bombs pales in comparison to the numbers of others already killed by the Japanese war machine, by those killed by constant aerial bombing in Europe, by the 1,000,000 who died in the one city of Leningrad, by those American soldiers who would have died trying to duplicate in Japan the sea invasion they had executed in Europe, the 300,000 victims of the Japanese rape of Nanjing, the lethal biological and chemical human experiments carried out by the Japanese in Manchukuo, the Japanese torture, killings and forced labor of military POWs, the enslavement of many millions of foreign civilians into deadly brutal forced labor, the earlier fire-bombing of Tokyo, the Japanese refusal to immediately comply with the US President’s mandate of “unconditional surrender”, etc..  Then there were the hundreds of thousands of dying American and allied prisoners of war being used as forced slave labor beasts of burden in barbarous work camps throughout Japan who would have been summarily killed by their captors during any invasion.  The Japanese were given a choice – something they never granted to others.  In consideration of the full picture, of all relevant facts beyond those two cities in isolation, totally evil Japanese fascism and the racist society that made it possible had fully earned treatment no less severe than that afforded German Nazism and the racist society that also made that evil possible.  Japan received, mercifully, less than it deserved.  Only those who live their entire lives in a very safe and comfy cocoon, with no regard for others, could not see that.  (If the Chinese had possessed The Bomb, it’s doubtful that the island of Japan, and its people, would still exist.)

It’s a very safe bet that those sanctimonious twits most likely to make asinine arguments condemning actions such as those authorized by President Truman are also those least likely to ever be expected to offer up their own lives in ground combat.  Among the most despicable of humans are those holier-than-thou cowards who throw their silly stones from the very safe sidelines – and especially when they are throwing their stones at the very people who bravely defend their right to do so.  There is something very sick about a society which, fifteen years later is still wailing about 3,000 souls who died in the attacks of 9/11/2001, but was able to completely dismiss the deaths of over 7,000 soldiers sent out seeking retribution in about five minutes.  (And, of course, among those who died in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a number of American POWs, mostly captured air crews, being illegally employed by their brutal captors as forced labor.)

President Lincoln unilaterally suspended many citizen and state rights during the American Civil War, actions which were actually unconstitutional, but few today fault him for doing so.  Roman philosopher Cicero (-106 to –43 BC): “In times of war, the law falls silent.” (“Inter arma enim silent leges.”)  Anyone who engages in an argument that conveniently leaves out relevant factors which would enable the part to be honestly considered in the context of the whole is engaging in the propaganda trick of relativism.

Why do American women think they can simply demand “respect”, while men are always subject to any crass insults anyone, including women, wants to toss out there?  Do women have a “right” that men do not?  What have contemporary women done to actually earn the respect they demand?  They certainly haven’t done anything for any group other than their own.  American women also talk incessantly of their right to “equality”.  But just what is their definition of that term?  From an American man’s frame of reference, in the context of the whole, it is “birthright entitlement”, with no responsibility for other groups in the equation.  American “feminism” has always been about championing the condition of women in isolation – without consideration of that condition in comparison to men, much less to any other group.  It’s a study in relativism – that always conveniently omits the responsibility parts presumed to belong to “someone else”.  There is no “special” in equal, and we are ALL in this thing together.

Today, the most frequent demand is, “I only want MY truth!”  “Feminism”, narcissism, self-serving lobbies and propagandists, etc., all contribute very heavily to this subjective demand.  “Truth is irrelevant; perception is everything.”  Very often you end up with, “Truth is whatever I want it to be.”  The concept always presents enormous problems to a society theoretically based on equality, especially in societies that do such a very poor job of teaching their young how to think, reason, analyze, research, etc., objectively, in full consideration of all relevant factors.  If the discussion is always solely about rights, for example, just who or what is responsible for ensuring all those rights?  (Hint:  It’s usually some vague “someone else” who ends up with the responsibility parts.)  If women now have a “right” to serve in ground combat roles, why then are not all women required to register for the Draft as a corresponding responsibility borne by all men?  All it would take is for one 18-year old boy to go to court, and registering for the Draft would be the first instance in American history when women would be required to do something under penalty of law.  (Under the US Constitution, there is no longer a legal basis for continuing to discriminate against men in the Draft – which is intended to ensure sufficient numbers of warm bodies for very deadly ground combat roles in time of war.)  Propagandists try to avoid such intellectual discipline, so as to exclude inconvenient parts of the full truth.  Such discipline requires first and foremost an ability to see and comprehend the board from the other’s side – a trait that grows increasingly rare every year in America, where vast legions of whiners and their lobbies are concerned only with “very special me”.

None of this is meant to imply that there is an “absolute truth”, just that there is such a thing as a “fuller truth”, which should always be the honest objective.  Always ask, “Compared to what?”

Repetition – a jingle, word or phrase repeated over and over again, thus getting it stuck in the popular subconscious.  This one has been around since the beginning of mass radio advertising (and much earlier at political party conventions), usually used to instill a brand or product name in common public awareness. “The Greatest Nation”, “Women’s Lib”  (Women’s lobbies are still making the exact same statements, quoting the exact same figures, that they used a half century ago, in the 1960s when women decided they needed to be “liberated” from “oppressive” men – who were then being drafted like lemmings for a deadly war, when half of male workers were still dying on the job, never living long enough to enter retirement.  “Male-dominated”.  The lobbies don’t seem to notice that the continued use of such repetitive propaganda simply belies the effectiveness of their own efforts for the past fifty years.  But why not keep using it?  Even if it never was all that truthful, everyone believes it now.)

Scapegoating – assigning blame to an individual or group, thus alleviating feelings of guilt from responsible parties, and/or distracting attention from the need to fix the problem for which blame is being assigned.  Also known as the ever popular ‘blame-shifting’.  Did those responsible for ensuring national security share some accountable blame for allowing the attacks of 9/11 to take place, or was it all due solely to a team of incredibly innovative fanatics pulling off the crime of the century right in the heart of the “greatest nation on Earth”?  And what responsibility is owned by those who all during the 1990s, after the end of the “Cold” War, refused to acknowledge the ever rising complaints of Western nation states keeping ruthless dictators in power throughout the Muslim World?  When Soviet communism collapsed at the end of the “Cold” War, just who decided that since the US no longer faced an opposing global ideology requiring small static “nation-building” wars, that the military could safely be divested of nearly a million soldiers who did such things – only to face the exact same situation with a whole new opposing global ideology that “suddenly materialized” just ten years later?  It’s always easier to blame military or intelligence professionals than the incompetence of civilians, including politicians and diplomats who know nothing about the military or about wars, much less about the real world out there beyond the Beltway or the cocktail party.

Who was actually responsible for the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and the dismal government response, despite many hundreds of billions of federal dollars spent for decades specifically to avert both?  Why did the Louisiana governor fail in her leadership responsibility to call up, under her direct command, her own state National Guard military forces, trained and equipped for her far in advance by the federal US Regular Army, when it became clear that local circumstances were very likely to quickly overwhelm normal civilian capabilities – all as stipulated by long-established law, agreements and regulations?  Why did the governor wait for the federal government to take early initiatives and assume responsibilities that were clearly her own?  Why were the state’s own disaster emergency procedures, posted on line for years in order to qualify for huge amounts of federal funding, not followed by state officials under the governor’s supervision, none of whom had never even tested their own procedures?  (Much of it was boilerplate bureaucratese simply copied from similar on-line plans of other states.)  Why did many billions of dollars of federal money for flood construction projects spent over decades under state supervision fail to accomplish their stated objectives even though state officials had attested that they did so?  Where had all that money over all those years actually gone? The main reason for the inevitable calamity that followed hurricane Katrina was long-institutionalized state corruption and fraud under a very long-established Democratic political machine that systematically wasted enormous amounts of federal taxpayer money, money confiscated from all Americans across the entire country for decades.  All of this, and much more, was lost in the torrent of scapegoating propaganda and buck-passing that followed the entirely predictable disaster, a disaster about which even the United Nations had long warned, and then widely disseminated for political purposes in the “Fourth Estate” “news” media.  The primary purpose of the propaganda was to divert accountability away from those actually responsible as quickly as possible in the public’s mind, to even further “muddy the waters” with an avalanche of politically-motivated scapegoating and blame-shifting.  Rational counters to such propaganda were greatly restricted by the simple fact that the governor was a woman, and thus unassailable.  (The same applied to the woman commanding National Guard MPs in Iraq who failed to ensure her subordinates executed their duties properly and avoided calamities like those at the Abu Ghraib prison.  It also applied to an incompetent affirmative action American ambassador who gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait, and thus make the Persian Gulf War necessary.  There’s a long and growing list of these “special” women in American history over the past twenty-five years who are granted immunity from accountability, much less even criticism, by their gender alone.  These women have rights; they do NOT have responsibilities, not even for themselves, much less for anyone else.  Politically correct censorship that grossly perverts truth is pervasive throughout our society.)  Except for one bone-headed white male federal emergency official who was relieved during the aftermath, no one was ever held responsible for the Katarina calamity, and there’s ever increasing evidence that the city’s administrators have since reverted to their historically traditional practices of cronyism and corruption, despite the best efforts of an effective Indian-American state governor.  Entrenched unaccountable bureaucracies remain a major problem in the state.

When National Guard units under the governor’s command were finally activated after the fact, many of those manning helicopters on humanitarian missions in New Orleans gave blatant preference to assisting trapped white people over similarly distressed black people.  One black ex-US Marine finally figured it out after four days by placing only whites among his 250 charges on his large apartment building roof so they could be seen by the helicopters – which quickly delivered life-sustaining food and water.  For this and many other life-saving exploits over a week of life-or-death desperation, US Recon Marine Lance Corporal John Keller, a combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War and a marine biology graduate of the Catholic Xavier University of Louisiana, was a far greater and real leader than the woman governor could ever possibly aspire.

Slogans – brief, striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping.  Although slogans may be enlisted to support reasoned ideas, in practice they tend to act only as emotional appeals. “Right to Choose.” “Right To Life”  “Right-wing hate mongers”   Probably the most effective slogan is “male-dominated”, a brain-dead “negative” cliché that dates back over a half century and is thus based on a premise that is no longer valid; its effectiveness derives solely from mindless habit taught by generations of incessant marketing.  You never hear about all those very critical industries that are now overwhelmingly “female-dominated”, such as “education”, child “development”, social “sciences”, “journalism”, “marketing”, government bureaucracies at all levels, etc., i.e., industries that even shape who and what we become, all according to superior “me” naturally.  Other female-dominated industries include government and health care, dependent on mountains of money simply confiscated from taxpayers, and finance.  Many federal agencies “Inside The Beltway” have been dominated, and run, by women for decades, yet those women still enjoy monthly hand-holding social gatherings at taxpayer expense intended to help women succeed in a “male-dominated” world – all while those evil male oppressors fill in for them in their absence.  The “male-dominated” tag should invoke loud laughter, but it’s so deeply ingrained in the national psyche that it is now just a stupid lie accepted as unassailable fact – by morons.  (Has anyone ever heard any women whining about the “male-dominated” infantry?  How about “male-dominated” ditch-diggers?)  It’s only “male-dominated” when women want their unearned birthright quota of the good stuff.  Once it becomes “female-dominated”, it’s a just “right” and “proper”, not worthy of mention (i.e., censored out of the discussion), no longer a matter of “equality”.

For decades feminist groups used the “Breast Cancer” slogan as a universal rally cry and unifier for all women victims of everything – much to the consternation of doctors.  So very effective was this slogan campaign that it resulted in seven times the public funding going into breast cancer research and publicity as into prostate cancer research and publicity (equally devastating to men).  It also succeeded in getting almost all women to falsely believe that breast cancer was the greatest threat to their health – when, in fact, it has always been heart disease (as all doctors have always known).  (Women are eight times more likely to die of heart disease than breast cancer, but men are even more likely to die of heart disease, so heart disease doesn’t ring nearly as well emotionally with women’s “eternal victim” dogma.)  To try to correct their own damage, the feminist campaign now underway blames “insensitive” male doctors for not giving enough attention to heart disease among women!  (See Scapegoating.)  Women’s lobbies can trot these things out like hand grenades and bombs from their huge arsenal; there’s always a dozen or more fully packaged campaigns and slogans waiting “on the shelf”, ever ready to be lobbed and fanned by women’s groups, including those in academia and “journalism”.  Breast cancer is by far the largest funded disease in the entire disease inventory, nearly matched only by that going into AIDS – both of which money machines clearly show the very real power of interest group lobbies in America.  American breast cancer is the richest disease on Earth.

Some slogans have been used so long that few even know where they came from.  How many Americans know that the “In God We Trust” slogan that appears on their money dates all the way back to 17th century fundamentalist theocratic Puritan dictatorship in England and was used by the Church of England to wage religious genocidal oppression against Ireland?  (It was mainly a matter of whose god we trust and which group using the slogan had the greatest wealth and military might to impose its god on others.)  Militant Islamic extremism or militant Puritan extremism – it’s all the same tyranny of religious fanatics.  Tyranny can indeed take many forms.

Spin – used extensively in politics to make things seem different from what is apparent.  A good example of this technique can be seen throughout “journalism” by comparing original reports provided by straight news services (original sources) like Associated Press, Reuters and United Press International with what appears in retail outlets like newspapers and television based on the original reporting.  A little tweaking here and there of the basic facts, and voila!, a whole different story, complete with new labels, omitted details, and the desired inferences.  (Tweaking of gender data is the most frequently employed trick.)  The most influential politicians are those with staffs that excel at “spin”.  The same applies to labor unions and other special interest groups.  But nearly all “mainstream” media now plays the same game.  (I’m beginning to believe that many of them do so simply out of mindless habit – adhering to broadly accepted “truths”, that are not.)  (See Footnote #2.)

Stereotyping – attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the campaign as something the target audience fears, hates, loathes, or finds undesirable.  (“military storm troopers”, “terrorism”, “misogynist”, “drunken sailor”, “fighting Irish”, “right-wing” fascists”)  In Europe the political “center” is considerably left of the center in the US, so Europeans have a natural predilection to view American conservatives as “right-wing extremists”, whom it is perfectly acceptable to hate.  Presidents Reagan and Bush II both suffered under this stereotyping even before they took office; once they went after the “Cold” War and “Terrorism”, respectively, anyone in Europe would have thought that Hitler himself had risen from the grave.  (The same stereotyping was applied to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, as British, did not enjoy nearly as much “special” protection as do American women with their plethora of rights without responsibilities; Ms Thatcher was “Ms Hitler”.)  Much of this is due to the fact that Europeans never had much of a gripe against communism and its socialist “economics”, just against the Soviet Russian (Stalin) version of communism.  (“We actually love communism; we just don’t want to have it imposed on us.”)  Make no mistake about it: communism remains very alive and well in many places in Europe and America, including in the US Congress; it has just undergone some deft Re-labeling.  (Of course, there are also some who worship at the opposite alter, too, but they haven’t re-labeled nazism, yet.)  When learning that I am a professional soldier, most Americans automatically assume that I am a half-crazed Neanderthal with an IQ of around 60 who is paid to kill people and die stupidly in the process of protecting all those special “me” people back home – the typical self-serving “troop” stereotype, too stupid to question orders from above.  (Part of this stereotype is probably due to the fact that most soldiers either confine themselves to “safe” topics or just keep their mouths shut, even in the face of abject civilian ignorance or stupidity.  In fact, I have always been paid first and foremost to use my brains, and usually far outside the box, and today after a half century in the toughest arena there is, one of the hardest things for me is finding others who can engage me intellectually and still keep me interested.  I make no apology to anyone for anything that accurately describes me as the honorable male professional American soldier I am; on the contrary.  Furthermore, there are a lot more like me looking hard for similar others who can measure up, knowing that less than 20% of young Americans today can.  And none of us is some elitist’s or monarch’s “troop”.)  After a lifetime of exploring planet Earth and its inhabitants, of studying how societies and cultures function, I know that stereotypes, like labels, usually say far more about those assigning them than they do about those so assigned.

Testimonial – quotations, in or out of context, cited to support or reject a given policy, action, program, product or personality, by exploiting the reputation or the role (an expert, respected public figure, doctor, etc.) of the individual giving the statement.  (You can even use popular actors or other unqualified celebrities to recite and promulgate the dogma, but more often it is someone with an established reputation of “expertise”.)  Aging Senator John McCain and Senator John Kerry, both Navy guys, are often testimonial voices on military matters, especially given the fact that so very few others in Congress now have any military experience, but often they both seem to be either slightly off-kilter or speaking with ulterior motives, playing to interest groups that are not military at all.  But who’s to know?  And everyone forgets that Kerry was so “anti-war” that he threw his medals over the White House fence for the cameras, and McCain never stepped foot in South Vietnam but spent the war treated like a rat in a filthy North Vietnamese prison cell.  As a life-long professional ground soldier, I happen to view the credentials of both men very differently than do most Americans, but I am a member of a very tiny minority.  Just what kind of expertise are we talking about here?  Does it matter?  It matters a great deal to those who today wear Army and Marine uniforms in new wars, who can pay with their lives for the mistakes of ignorant others, or those with ulterior motives.

A critical point of departure with such testimonials is their regarding today’s Russia with its rather small conventional military forces as a “threat” equivalent to Soviet Russia’s Red Army of 1980, at the expense of focus on the far greater, and enormously more difficult, real threat posed by the entirely unconventional Islamic militant extremist ideology of today.  Militaries crafted for conventional warfare are greatly dependent on machines; militaries crafted for unconventional warfare are greatly dependent on personnel – and each require vastly different approaches.  If you can’t accurately identify the threat and its priority, and craft an intelligent strategy to address it, you end up putting the lion’s share of your resources and assets where they are not needed – and then seeking excuses to use them, often for no greater rationale than to justify their existence.  And if you incessantly poke and prod Russia with sticks for a quarter of a century, why would you be surprised that they finally just give you the finger?  (Or was that you primary objective all along – to re-create the bogeyman needed to justify that silly “NATO” bureaucracy?)

And then there is the matter of a President’s ability to commit US forces to wars of little or no direct consequence to the national security of the United States without the full prior approval of the people’s representatives in Congress.  The Founding Fathers never intended for a President to have unilateral authority to commit the country to elective wars that do not defend the nation.  Court-decided constitutional law, not “expert testimonial”, should always be the critical factor.  The other side can always present testimonial to counter your testimonial.  American soldiers die defending their country; they do not die defending someone’s emotional cause of the moment.  If your cause is that important to you, then go hire your own mercenaries to advance it, with your own money.  The main thing that a single super-power status does for those who own and manage it is obviate the need for them to think, and that is inherently very dangerous.

Transfer (or “Association“) – projecting the positive or negative qualities of one person, entity, object, or value onto another to make the second more acceptable or to discredit it.  Often highly visual, it evokes an emotional response.  (People closely associated with a successful candidate for President very often reap considerable rewards from subsequent endeavors by having been associated with a candidate who won, even though that association may bear no resemblance to their own capabilities.  Wives typically benefit as candidates from their husband’s accomplishments, primarily because all women like to imagine that he never would have amounted to anything without her pushing and coaching him from behind.  In most cases, a wife is actually a politician’s most hindering consideration, but one he needs to project the required “image”.)  Conversely, those not enamored with an office holder tend to attach similar negative qualities to those associated with the office holder.  Who can name members of the Nixon Administration staff or cabinet?  For decades American soldiers, including draftees, suffered in the public eye for having been associated with the very unpopular war in Vietnam.  Not so subliminal visceral hatred, or jealousy, of American soldiers lingers even today among large segments of our society.)  Some transfer practices are designed to engender empathy for others by experiencing what they experience.  (Empathy events such as stupid men wearing women’s high-heel shoes was wide-spread on college campuses as long as fifty years ago, even though, even then, no man would ever think of dictating which silly shoes women wore; it’s usually displays like this that show why American men easily win the annual “dumbest animal on the planet” award, and why American women’s lobbies are always so quick to exploit that stupidity.  Women wear whatever they want to wear, including stupid shoes, and an incredible 124,000 American women show up every year in hospitals with injuries sustained while trying to “walk” in those things.  Has anyone seen any campaigns to get women to walk around in an infantryman’s or a logger’s or fireman’s boots or wear that universal dark suit uniform with its colorful leash tied tightly around the neck?  Men’s “fashion” hasn’t changed for a century, but at least it’s a lot cheaper than “fashion” for women, with which women can impress other women and blame men for the cost.)  The use of the royal “we” when discussing the accomplishments of a tiny few others are also a form or transfer; it’s usually accomplished by associating oneself with those who do remarkable things, most especially on the battlefield, or coasting on the truly great accomplishments of long-gone ancestors.  “We are the greatest.”  It’s essentially vicarious self-worth.  (See Beautiful People.)

Unstated Assumption – used when the concept intended to be conveyed would seem less credible if explicitly stated.  The concept is instead repeatedly assumed or implied.  (“women are an oppressed minority” – once an assumption with some basis, now a totally absurd presumption – that still functions as the unstated premise.  The trick is to never state the assumption, which would reveal that the empress has no clothes.)  “Everyone knows that boys are just stupid” is a very pervasive unstated assumption today.  How often do we hear statements like, “We should just (militarily) force that country to be nice.”  What is NOT stated is that there is no real “we” in the equation at all.  What is really being said is that “someone else”, some dumb morons who we pay to die, should go do the really hard stuff that “we” are far too “special” to do in order to pump up “our” self-esteem and rearrange the world according to “me”.  It’s a lot easier using your own hired thugs to achieve your imperial will.  It also assumes that no one or no state or no organization in the world has a similar responsibility, and that the US military, despite having only enough soldiers for 1.5 medium-sized wars plus 100 or so smaller commitments around the world at once, has finite capabilities due to Congressional and taxpayer imposed restrictions.  And finally, it overlooks the fact that the US military exists to defend the US Constitution, which all military members equate to “defending the nation”; they do NOT view their role in life as “world cop” or some brainless mercenary group that runs around imposing on others the will of sideline elitists back home.  Whenever the imperial “we” is used, the first thing an actually rational person wants to know, or should want to know, is exactly who is this “we“.  (See Oversimplification.)

Using the passive voice is an excellent way to convey an unstated assumption: “Women were denied the right to vote.”  Who denied them the right?  When?  Why?  Where?  Which women?  The trick is to imply a premise that is just false; the statement is used to imply that those evil men denied women the right to vote, and it wasn’t until the US Constitution was amended that women overcame that “male oppression”.  Despite the never-ending claims otherwise, the US Constitution did NOT “deny” women the right to vote (or anything else).  The drafters of the Constitution, far more concerned about getting slave states to sign on to the Constitution, to a “united states”, left it to the states to decide voter qualifications in their own states.  When enough states had enacted voting rights for women, based on what the women of those states wanted, the Constitution was amended to make it universal; by then the matter of slavery had been settled (although some states were still wrestling with the voting issue over former slaves).  Women had the right to vote in tough rural Montana long before Montana even became a state and was the first state to send a woman representative to Congress (a century ago, in 1917).  On the local level, the ‘battle’ over women’s voting right was far more among women than with men – since many women were not eager to assume all the responsibilities that burdened men along with their rights – including working in very tough and dangerous jobs until death for family income, dying in wars, providing shelter and food and safety for families, etc..  American women have been very adept over the past century at garnering ever more rights – without ever mentioning responsibilities; responsibilities apparently are for “someone else”.  American men as a group, or as an institution, never “denied” women anything; neither did the Constitution.  It was always a matter of getting enough women to decide among themselves just what they wanted, and what they didn’t want.  A century of this “evil men” propaganda is enough; just who is left to assume the responsibility?  It is not just about “whatever women want”; it is about what we all as one nation need.

Using Once-Valid Premise – starting from a position that assumes a certain prior premise, without examining whether or not that premise is actually valid.  (“It’s a Japanese car.”  while omitting that it’s now a superior product made in America by Americans – according to high Japanese standards.  “Men have all the power.” – even though majority women voters have decided who wins elections and which laws get passed since 1980.  “Men and women vote the same way with equal weight”, which is just not true; there are very significant and large differences in the way these two groups vote.)  Our society now runs on a wide range of premises that ceased being valid long ago, but have been kept going ad nauseam solely by self-interested “marketing”.   See Unstated Assumption.

Verbal Sleight Of Hand – The use of words in such a way so as to seem to imply one thing when the intention is just the opposite.  What does it really mean when one “accepts responsibility”, but does not accept accountability?  Nothing; it’s just a ploy that plays on words so as to make the words appear meaningful to the simple-minded.  It says ,“I am responsible if everything goes well, but “someone else” is to blame if anything goes wrong.”  (That doesn’t work so well in the military.  In the US Navy, for example, huge aircraft carriers routinely have an enlisted man (or woman) at the helm, but the captain is summarily relieved of command if the ship has a collision.  In the US military, accountability is rightly inherent to responsibility.)  Responsibility minus accountability = zero.  What does it really mean to “apologize if anyone was offended”?  Nothing; it’s just a slick trick that shifts any blame for the affront to the victim.  (There would be no need to apologize if the intention was not to offend the victim; if the affront was unintentional, then the apology should be for being ignorant.)  American women are true masters at such verbal sleight of hand.  It’s a variation on what magicians do with their hands, to trick and deceive, and amaze, natural-born suckers.  Consider this simple verbal trick: “Planned Parenthood, the women’s tax-supported health organization, this week announced it would no longer accept reimbursements for fetal tissue and body parts donated to medical researchers.”  If you are reimbursed for donations, then you are not donating; you are selling.  And, in this case, you are selling the product of abortions – which makes the whole process of women’s personal irresponsibility a sickening profit-making business supported by American taxpayers.  There are now a wide variety of such clever blame-shifting tricks in our culture, so common anymore that few recognize them for what they are.  And, given the way that women now “raise” and “teach” our boys, American men are quickly divided into two groups: those who quickly learn the verbal slight-of-hand tricks themselves, or those who are too stupid to recognize them.  (It’s also problematic when women, as eternal victims, cannot be held responsible anyway. That’s why they remain self-anointed victims.  When you really pick these things apart, you begin to realize that many high-sounding words have two meanings – one for men, and one for women.)  Such mushy nonsense becomes increasingly prevalent in a society based ever more on self-serving emotion, a society in which citizens understand next to nothing of simple logic.

Special Case Definition:  Leadership.  “She’s a leader.”  The title is indeed impressive, but just what does it mean to be a “leader” of a group in America?  Is it someone who occupies a position which they seized that enables them to dictate to others, as was, say, Hitler, Stalin, Gaddafi, Saddam, who then ruled for their own self-interests?  Is it someone who was simply appointed to a function of high standing, probably to pay back political favors or to fill demanded quotas?  Or is it someone who actually earned the position by getting large numbers across a wide spectrum to actually follow their example in the trenches for the best interests of the entire group and all of its many sub-groups?  In America we have a very tenuous notion of “leader”, one that usually assigns a positive connotation based on the assumption that the position was gained honorably and for altruistic purposes far above the self.  But how accurate is that assumption?  Men have always been elected to such positions by championing the majority women and minority groups for the best interests of those groups, not their own interests, but women have championed those same elements of our society to win election, i.e., they win elections by championing themselves.  When men gain such positions, I, as a man, can take some slight comfort that at least the male “leader” might view the world as I do, far beyond the self, despite what politics requires him to do on behalf of others.  At least I know that he is at least slightly bound by commonly accepted definitions of responsibility and accountability for all of us.  But since no women in any position has even given a thought to me or my group, in fact has always blamed me and my group for everything, how can I regard a women as a similar “leader”?  If they were an actual leader, they would have been out there on the front lines for the past thirty years screaming about what all those women-dominated schools have been doing to our boys, her sons.  They would have been demanding an equal right to be required to register for the Draft and serve as combat infantrymen on the front lines of wars for the past dozen years, and sharing equally in the 98% of combat casualties those men incur.  They would be out there laying literally everything on the line to champion some group other than their own.  Etc..  And what of women who are simply appointed to high position with almost no demonstrated ability to actually earn such positions on their own merit for decades from the bottom up?  Are these women “leaders”, or are they just figureheads serving the interests of themselves and their own group?  Did she get the position as another of a half century of “affirmative actions”, of filling quotas, of avoiding lawsuits, to gain votes via tokenism?  Does she have the same responsibility, the same accountability, as would a man in the same position?  When you start trying to explain words like “leader” in America, you end up with a range of definitions, depending on which groups are actually being served, and not on which groups are actually being led.  So you end up with “She occupies a position with the title “leader”, but she certainly does not lead me or my group, much less serve us, and never has.”  And just what does that mean?  Does it mean women doing what they do best – dictating to the other half?  It’s best to let slide the verbal sleight of hand and not look too closely.  “She’s a leader” (in her own mind); I am her perpetual “enemy”.  Actual leadership is not part of the equation at all.  (For the record:  I would never follow her across the street, knowing full well that she would just be setting me up to become splatter on the pavement.  And I would still get the clean-up bill.)

Consider Representative Pelosi, one of the most powerful women in the world, labeling as “absurd” and suggestion that a very senior woman in government, responsible as head of a really humongous bureaucracy for placing a major new government program in place, should resign over her demonstrated incompetence to achieve even a modicum of success with the most fundamental parts of that program – over a four year period at a cost of a half a billion taxpayer dollars.  Absurd?  Leadership with “responsibility” but without accountability is zero; it’s just a lofty title, signifying nothing.  It’s true meaning is just cheap dictatorship.

Hint:  It will never be possible to fix our badly broken schools, our bloated national debt, our uncontrolled immigration policies, our ever-rising social welfare needs, our nearly bankrupt Social Security and Medicare programs, our steadily lowering standards, our ballooning prison population, etc., until our society has grown up enough to address the critical role now played directly by women in creating all of these problems.  Any woman claiming any “leadership” role simply cannot escape such simple truths when proposing fixes.  Unfortunately it’s much more likely that we will continue to bury our heads in the sand until there is no America left.  I call it “the perfect storm” of myopic self-interests (smart women) and abject cowardice (dumb men) leading straight to catastrophe under relentless and pervasive propaganda (or, as they prefer to call it, “marketing”).  See “Why Are American Men So Dumb?”, posted separately.

Virtue Words – words in the value system of the target audience which tend to produce a positive image when attached to a person or issue.  (Peace, happiness, security, love, wise, leadership, freedom, compassion, safety, jobs, “The Truth”, children, mother, etc..)  The world of marketing in politics has produced a whole range of code words that are intended to draw support from a wider audience than would be possible with more specific descriptors.  For example, we often hear politicians talk about various programs intended to provide support for “families” (virtue word), when in fact, “families” in the actual context of a wide range of government services is almost always actually referring to “single mothers”.  (While some voters may have reservations about supporting fatherless “families”, apparently everyone is in favor of “families”.)  The word “women” is still automatically associated with a “worthy cause” for assistance due to its automatic association with “mothers”, when, in fact, women have long been the dominant political group in America with truly great power, and a large majority of them are not “mothers” (virtue word) but still enjoy gratis all the benefits their grandmothers actually earned.  The surest virtue word in American English is “children”, but few ever ask just what is really meant.  (The term “children” is used almost exclusively to benefit women, to have government and charities assist them in meeting the responsibilities of their own free choices, their own elective behavior, their own rights.  Any benefit that accrues to children is then determined by women, through their own self-serving lens.  And those children who are boys are not the same as those children who are girls.)

Emotion.  This special topic is included here because in the US, regardless of the specific marketing or propaganda technique employed, emotion is now fundamental to them all.  Primarily as a consequence of the way our women-dominated public schools “teach”, emotion, at the near total expense of logic, now decides almost all “discussions”.  And the underlying focus of such emotion is “me” and “now”.  (See separate article, “Why Are American Men So Dumb?”.)  For example, after years of futility, the Canadians (in March 2013) have given up trying to sell the Keystone pipeline to Americans with intelligent logic and reason.  Their government has decided, as a matter of official policy, to shift to something that Americans readily buy into – feel-good emotional fantasy nonsense.  So, expect future Canadian efforts to support the pipeline to reflect “a can-do pioneering spirit of rugged individualists conquering the vast wilderness “out there” while fighting all the elements against insurmountable odds with the help of all sorts of mad scientists and other assorted crazies”, etc..  The Canadian “tar sands” oil development actually has been a major government-industry partnership project for decades using the most advanced science and machinery available on the planet, at a cost of many billions of dollars, all under close governmental oversight and regulation.  It has been undertaken also at significant cost to the Canadian taxpayer, secure in the knowledge that the pay-back would eventually come from its own oil independence and from the ravenous US market next door.  It also has been heavily supported by American oil companies because it meshed perfectly with the US government’s decades-long mission of freeing the US from dependence on oil from unstable states, primarily in the Mid-East, with all those extortion prices, wars and dead soldiers and all.  It was thus always a “no-brainer”, on all sides.  Now it isn’t.  Now it’s all emotion.  After decades of really huge Canadian government and business investment and effort, the Americans, as they so often do even with wars, have decided to say, “Never mind.”  Now, while the Americans dither for years on approving the pipeline’s construction for its own logical economic and political interests, the Canadians have built up a huge sea of crude just waiting to start flowing through pipelines that far exceeds their own capacity.  Because markets know that vast reserve is sitting there, the price of bitumen oil has been steadily dropping for months.  Logic-based minds will soon begin speculating that the Americans have been dithering just to grab up that stuff at rock bottom prices – and drive the Canadian partnership, and Canadian taxpayers, to bankruptcy. (Already Canadian losses are estimated at $70,000,000 a day.  So as much of that oil as possible is now moving by far more dangerous and costly rail.)  It’s all just incredibly stupid, and characteristically “American”.

Another example of emotional fantasy nonsense comes at the same time from the finance minister of Finland commenting on a plan to take money from private bank accounts to pay off government debt on Cyprus, an idea supported by many American “experts”.  “I think it’s fair and right, and also part of a normal market economy, that owners of a bank, investors, and biggest depositors – who can be seen as investors – take their own responsibility, in one way or another,” he said.  It’s “fair and right’ to his “thinking”, and “normal market economics”, too.  “Who can be seen” – by whom?!  This guy is a raving lunatic.  You put your money in a bank for SAFEKEEPING, because government laws and regulation and oversight have guaranteed that safety.  If you’re a big depositor, you do so, even when inflation will erode its value, simply because there are no other safe places to park or invest the money for greater and reasonably secure profit – usually because of idiotic government policies elsewhere.  What this jerk is saying is that there is no safe place for money, because government will “re-distribute wealth” anyway it wants to – even if it decides to steal it from you in a bank vault while the bank’s doors are closed to you.  If you managed to save some money and put it in a bank, where government guaranteed its safety, it’s now fair game for confiscation by that same government. (This is very different from a program that insures deposits, up to a certain known limit, against losses resulting from a bank’s dumb practices while government watched.)  Here we have a case where the government lured you in with favorable rules – just so it could rob you blind, after it taxed any interest your money may have earned.  Here is government using its own incompetence and negligence to justify its thievery.  Now that’s just brilliant – and certain to destroy the whole concept of banking everywhere.  Why bother to even save money?  Why bother to even work to earn it?  Why risk what you do have if government is just going to steal any success you manage to realize?  (Government certainly isn’t going to reimburse you for what you lose if you fail.)  Why not just copy the government, and go into bank robbery?  Do you suppose it might be smarter to invest your money in, say, Canadian oil extraction?  For a lot of people, logic is just an inconvenient irritant, and a very good reason why the country has gone nowhere but backwards for the past forty Baby Boomer years.

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Marketing is propaganda.

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Truth is irrelevant; perception is everything.

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P.S.  I could go on for another 3-400 pages, but you get the idea.  When you step back and take it all in at once, it looks pretty much like a loony-bin, a dying society that was never taught how to use its brains, taught instead to focus only on the bouncing “me” baubles in front of its eyes, and thus allowed emotion to smother logic, to its own detriment.  Everyone is concerned only with their own little part, with the tactical, and incapable of contemplating the whole, the strategic – the ALL of us, including those who have to inherit the colossal mess we leave to them.  Well over 60% of what Americans believe is true is just manufactured bullshit.  Ours is pretty much a whole society based on little more than emotional thin air.  This is mainly a consequence of arrogant women and cowardly men screwing those who have to follow them into the society they pissed away and destroyed.  I’m convinced that most of it comes out of the public schools that women use to “educate” boys with their own self-serving emotional dogma to create legions of really dumb men.  That sweet womanly smile, gentlemen, is a perfected passive-aggressive smile, barely concealing intense hatred originally born in jealousy, all while you sit there sucking your thumb.  Remember Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”?  Consider yourself duly “lobotomized”, by smarter others systematically carrying out their misandry.

Do not believe anything.  Do your own thinking.  And then DO something!

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>  See also “On Bullshit“, by Princeton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Harry G. Frankfurt, Princeton University Press, 2005, for a brief dissertation on a variation of the self-serving propaganda and marketing theme.

Nothing in America has ever been subjected to such a concerted propaganda campaign, using almost every technique possible, as has the government’s new “health care” law, popularly known as “Obamacare”, over the past three years.  This is the case even though the government now (in 2014) claims that it has not yet even begun its major “marketing” campaign designed to get healthy responsible young men to sign up for very expensive policies that underwrite the costs of the elective behavior of others, such as irresponsibly promiscuous single women and homosexuals, drug addicts, and the 38% of the population that is now classified as obese.  Much of the propaganda is hidden behind the deceptive claim that the new program “gets the young to pay for the elderly”.  Since the elderly are already covered under Medicare, this bogus claim is used to conceal much more specific intent – to significantly benefit our majority women and the voluntary choices they make, including unmarried overweight women who elect to have or adopt children they can’t adequately care for and the willfully negligent behavior of similar high-risk and high-cost others, at the expense of those who make responsible choices.  (Just don’t ever try to apply the same rationale to their behavior as they demand be applied to the behavior of smokers. Smokers, like boys and young men, don’t have lobbies and thus make easy targets for exploitation.)  A really huge portion of incessantly demanding American women obviously would prefer to marry Big Daddy Government than rely on a lowly man for their guaranteed dependence, to have “someone else” absurdly take responsibility for their right to make lifestyle choices, to assume the risk and subsidize the cost of the free choices made by our “special” people.

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Footnote #1:  Probably the Biggest Lie Of All is that involving “The Fifties” – when “women were treated like chattel”, presumably by men.  This lie began to germinate during the 1970s under Baby Boomer “feminist” orchestration and has grown ever since to achieve near mythical proportions.  It is 100% pure unadulterated bullshit, total nonsense.  Anyone listening to the herd hysteria about “The 50s” today would think it was something akin to the 70-year Victorian period in 19th century England, rather than the blink of an eye that was nothing more than Baby Boomer adolescence.  The 50s included adult things like the war in Korea, the construction of the Interstate Highway System, the very real fear of global nuclear Armageddon, and was also when the super-spoiled Baby Boomer kids had nothing better to do than incessantly whine about nothing, except being handed everything on a silver platter.  There were nut jobs running loose during the 1950s, but with a US population half as large as today’s, the number of those nut jobs was half what they are today.  That’s just the way things work among humans.

Women of the “Fifties” – a period of time much briefer than the current “war on terrorism”, not even a blink in time – were Greatest Generation women, the mothers of Baby Boomers.  The Fifties were a period of truly monumental change in the American landscape, the first period of relative peace and economic stability of the century, when most Americans were feeling the result of incredible improvements in their daily lives every week.  Every year was a significant improvement over the previous.  These Greatest Generation women were far more substantial than women of today, and they accomplished far more than their daughters ever even approached.  No one was forcing those women to do anything; their biggest problem was in choosing from so many new options and new opportunities being created in their society every day.  About 45% of them were in the work force, right along with men.  Another 20% of them were in school, including universities and trade schools.  Regardless of what else they were doing, a majority of them, completely on their own, with no government help at all, were having and raising the largest, healthiest and best educated generation of children in human history.  Greatest Generation women were every bit as smart and educated and gifted and capable as women of today.  (Based on the relative quality of their educations, they were probably much more so, probably about four years of solid education ahead of today’s women.)  And they were “treated” far better than women of today simply because they actually earned respect rather than, as today, simply mandating “respect” as another birthright entitlement for “special” me” – for doing nothing “special” at all.  And Greatest Generation men of The Fifties for the most part were happy to devote their lives to giving such women and their children all they could possibly want; over 60% of those men still died on the job, never even reaching retirement age.

For the vast majority of Americans, with the single gross exception of black Americans still struggling with Real inequities and True injustice, the Fifties were actually the best time in American history, a truly wonderful time to be alive, for men and women, especially considering all the global calamity and misery that had taken place in the previous forty years, for the entire period of their youth.  Every month was a whole new education in itself.  Later “feminist” propaganda succeeded in manufacturing a whole alternate reality that had almost zero basis in truth.  Today you can even read about that completely manufactured lie in American school text books.  If it weren’t so very scary, “The Fifties Lie” would be the “Biggest Joke In American History”, the first big step of “history’s” venture into the fantasy world of Never-Never Land.  (The incredible success of this asinine propaganda campaign is more a testimony to the stupidity and ignorance of American men than anything else.)

Most of the daily conveniences we take for granted today were created and manufactured by men during the 1950s to make life easier for women, to make “home” an enormously more enjoyable place to go than it had been in the past, to give women more free time to do whatever they wanted to do.  And the more free time they had, the more they didn’t know what they wanted to do with it.  So some of them grew unhappy, and they infected their daughters with even greater unhappiness.  To understand this lie you need only consider that the super-spoiled Baby Boomer women advancing it were referring to a period in their own lives when they were teenagers.  These women were, and remain, so incredibly self-involved that they never considered that the teenage years are difficult and confusing years for all humans, in all times, for boys as well as girls.  And now suddenly options were exploding everywhere for everyone, and it was very difficult for young people to decide which option to choose.  American “feminists” used “the Fifties” as a “jumping off point” – to convince other women that that ten year “epoch” was simply terrible, that women were being sold as slaves, chained to kitchen stoves, burned as witches on every other street corner on Thursdays, etc., etc., so that they would never want to “return” to such “awful” times, never again embrace “traditional” roles, etc..  The trick was to never consider all the very rapid monumental human achievement that had preceded their own miraculous arrival on the scene, to focus solely on “me” and “now”, solely on rights, and never even mention responsibilities.  “Feminists” didn’t have to make an equitable contribution to society, didn’t even have to defend it, fund it; all they had to do was demand that men assume all the responsibility, mainly of ensuring women all the rights that women demanded.  As the years went by, the constant “feminist” drumbeat of “The Fifties Lie” sort of snow-balled of its own volition, settling into the popular consciousness as “fact”.  In reality, it’s best to consider the simple reality that “The Fifties” were actually “When Spoiled Baby Boomer Feminists Were Teenie-boppers“.  The Fifties Lie succeeded mainly in changing American women as a group from Doers to Whiners.

The best story ever told about the 1950s was the movie “The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit” (USA 1956), in which, ten years after the war, Greatest Generation men were still trying to justify all the demands and responsibilities placed on them by privileged American women whose greatest talent, already, was complaining.

American Baby Boomer women just never out-grew their teenaged neurotic narcissism, and no one and no thing, not even Real Life beyond themselves, ever forced them to.  All they had to do was stand there and stamp their foot and make demands, the easiest and cheapest “revolution according to me” in the history of humanity. (American men have always been far too accommodating of their women.)   In the process they created their very own alternate universe and spent the rest of their lives trying to force everyone and everything else into it.  The very notion of a John Singer was totally beyond not only their interest, but their comprehension, too (Carson McCullers, “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter”, 1940).  Women were able to create The Fifties Lie, first in their own minds, by refusing to ever see the board from the other side, to never consider what men were faced with, or what their parents had gone through to get them where they were.  They remained frozen as spoiled teenaged neurotics.  Since then, American women have never bothered to look beyond “me” and “now”.  American “feminism” thus represents the ultimate in myopic self-involvement, totally devoid of relativity.  It was never about “equality”; it was all about privilege.  A half century later they are still whining the exact same adolescent song, as if nothing has changed, running on mindless auto-pilot.  You can see the results in the “men” they shape, in their own image, from birth onward.

Footnote #2:   Soldier’s Rule Number One:

“Anyone in America today speaking only in uni-sex terms about our schools is deliberately hiding ugly truths about males, usually boys, as well as their own bigotry, in a conscious effort to subvert federal civil rights law.”

Use of gender-neutral terms, i.e., not “boys” and “girls”, but rather “students” and “children”, is a special type of propaganda that employs elements of Disinformation, Half Truth, Intentional Vagueness, Media Manipulation, Re-labeling and Spin.  Long used throughout American “education” to purposefully deceive the public, it has now become endemic in all social reporting in the US – in “news” stories written almost exclusively by white middle-class women – slick propagandists (“marketing” experts) whose “group think” holds that it’s critical to champion “my” group at the expense of everything else.  This self-serving dogma mandates that whenever it’s possible to “score points” in the public’s mind for girls and women, the specific gender is always cited in “news” articles, while in all other cases the opposite truth is always hidden or clouded in ambiguity by using only gender-neutral words and intentional vagueness.  This technique has long been used to hide, for example, the extremely low performance of boys in women-dominated public schools beneath the very high performance of girls – in direct violation of US civil rights law.  (Schools, responding to the group think demands of women’s lobbies and women-dominated teachers unions, teach to girls, not to boys, and boys are expected to adapt, or fail.  Most fail to realize their potential.)

But a recent major Labor Department study, the first such study in fifty years, showed incredibly that almost a third of American males are arrested by age 23, and thus begin adulthood with an almost insurmountable disadvantage.  All “news” reporting on that study carefully avoided even mentioning boys, and instead many dozens of stories about the study left the clear impression in the public’s mind that arrest rates for both genders are equal.  (The truth is that about 95% of those young Americans arrested, tens of millions, are the males whom women are theoretically responsible for raising and educating – as the now dominant “experts” in “child development”, health, psychology, social “sciences”, social services, etc., not to mention as “long suffering” mothers.  Quite obviously, these “experts” have been totally failing the other half of us as they focus all their “expertise” solely on themselves, even to the despicable extent of trying to turn boys into girls.)

Since boys have no lobby to help balance the reporting, money and attention, this tactic is very effective in keeping the trainloads of other people’s money flooding in so that millions of women can continue to study their navels under the same pretext of “victimhood” that has kept those mountains of money, attention and sympathy flowing to them for over a half century.  It is in their self-interests to ensure that none of that money and attention and sympathy is diverted away from them and to our enormously endangered boys (tomorrow’s “men”).  As such, this is quite simply women professionals using propaganda to “advance” themselves over the purposefully neglected minds and lives of boys.  It is the ultimate of self-indulgent “Me-ism” – at which privileged American women “victims”, possessors of a thousand rights unencumbered by responsibility, have long been the undisputed world champions.

Women’s propaganda techniques have even become an integral part of how the US Congress deceives its own electorate, not just with political spin, half truths, disinformation and intentional vagueness, but even in the “marketing” titles of bills that become law ruling all of us.   Some of those titles are even the epitome of in-your-face Nancy Pelosi arrogance.   The “Patriot” Act is an excellent example, lacking as it does anything even resembling patriotism.   Another is the “Affordable” Health Care Act.   There is, of course, nothing at all affordable about this monster law; all it does is buy women’s votes by increasing benefits and broaden coverage for hypochondriac “me” by getting “someone else” to pay for it, regardless of whether or not that “someone else” can even afford it, regardless of how it will negatively impact the nation’s economy and the future of its children.  This has long been the most common approach of the nation’s self-interested voting majority – just another example of how women’s lobbies and their elected puppets systematically exchange women’s dependency on husbands and fathers for dependency on Big Daddy Government.  And that is “equality”?  It’s birthright entitled nobility serving itself.

Chief among the organizations using such techniques in promulgating their nonsense are the National Organization of Women (NOW), the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the National Association of University Women (NAUW).  These are some of the same organizations that advance the totally absurd proposition that it is possible to create advanced scientists in physical sciences, technology and math – well after students arrive in college, that universities are at fault for failing to place just as many women in such fields as men, that the women-dominated K-12 system plays no role at all.  I often wonder how far the NFL and the NBA would get trying to advance such utter nonsense.  Such stars have to be nurtured for many years, beginning all the way back in grade school, and the key element in their development is pushing their limits in very tough competition in the arena over many hard years.  Stardom in such fields, whether sports or advanced science, is NOT just another birthright.  (A complicating factor always overlooked in such silly arguments is that these organizations are comparing numbers of American women in those fields against male numbers – without mentioning that most of those males were schooled in foreign countries long before they made it to the university level, that most of them are not American males.  The pathetic truth is that US women-dominated K-12 schools fail BOTH genders in such fields, and most especially boys, who have a much greater interest in them.)

American boys have been in blatant deep trouble for decades.  Have you ever heard a politician of either gender say anything about it?  Of course not.   It’s far smarter for politicians to keep kissing the asses of women, because that’s where the votes are.  And women certainly aren’t going to complain, much less do the right thing, either.  Boys don’t vote, and their fathers achieve far more fake machismo by championing perpetually whining women instead.

Any man who fails to call out these scheming “uni-sex” creeps in public forfeits his presumption to call himself a “man” and automatically designates himself as just another worthless mass of flesh taking up valuable space best occupied by humans possessing actually functioning brains.

And don’t bother to present your hand; I’d greatly prefer to shake hands with your son, who deserves much better.