Classic Mind Control

The following information was taken from
http://www.nigelpond.com/2008/03/29/classic-mind-control/

Classic Mind Control

I offer the following information, as some of you have expressed an interest in the subject.

Whilst travelling the subject of the relationship between NLP and mind control came up. Since I had just completed my article on Covert Hypnosis it was a logical question. I stress, NLP consists of practical mental techniques to influence people. NLP and hypnosis have an undeserved reputation of manipulation - like mind control. This is based on people over-promising and under-delivering on the magic of NLP as an influence technology. My mentor likes to say, “NLP elicits desired responses in other people,” because he feels the term “manipulative/mind control” has a negative flavour to it. I agree with this, as long as the person has no deep desire to disagree with you. In this light, I decided that I would go over the basics of classic mind control techniques in a seminar. This is based on my research of declassified CIA material and other literature on the subjects of mind control, brain washing, cult training, and psychology. I thought I would share it with you, since you may recognize some similarities with any type of intense training you may have attended. This month I will go over how to break down psychological defenses and start classic mind control techniques.

Here are the basic steps of classic mind control:

1. Isolation: You have to remove the person from his or her support group. This ith the first critical part of building the dependence necessary for breaking down psychological defenses. This is removal from family, firends, and normal support systems. The military does this in basic training. It can also be done at a resort or facility. The key is - no normal contact with support systems.
2. Control of Communications: The next thing must be control of all communications; this is a continuation of the isolation process. All communications with others will be controlled and handled by the handlers. This can be as obvious as what happens in millitary basic training, or as subtle as having breaks spread out and shortened so it is hard to make contact and communicate with anyone outside of the group. This also starts to build dependence upon the handlers. You must go through them for any communications - outside the group or inside. You see this in groups that do not allow open communications within the group and restrain communications with those outside the group. This is greatly amplified in our constant communication age. We are so used to always being in contact. Loss of this, even for a while leads to distress. Informers are set up at this stage; the insider is the one who reports back to the trainers or handlers.
3. Fatigue: Physical fatigue adds to the effect of breaking down a person’s psychological strengths and defenses. You can do this through physical exercise and training (military) or just by starting early and going late in a high energy, fast pace setting (look at the indoctrination of any cult - i.e. David Koresh at Waco). As you get tired, you are easier to handle and “go along” with ideas much more smoothly.
4. Control of Food, Water and Rest: The targeted individuals are made aware of the independence of the handlers (or trainers) for the timing of food and water breaks. Bathroom breaks can also be added to this to amplify the effect of loss of control. Timing of rest is also up to the trainers or handlers. This also leads to blood supar levels being off and it the mercy of the handlers. (in the old CIA and KGB material, tobacco was also used as means of control. For those of us who are old enough to remomber when a majority of adults smoked, the withdrawal adds to intense feelings.) It can be as simple as in a ristrictive setting like the military or jails, or subtle like an intense seminar (fire walking).
5. Using the person’s own criticism against himself: Once the person is tired and possibly hungry, he begins to doubt his own judgement, thinking maybe they (the trainers) are right, or I am wrong, or both. This is amplified if the trainers have a biography on yo uso they know something about you. This is where they begin to used it. You may remember films where they use “inside information” to help turn the person. This is the reason they try to learn as much about their target as they can - so they can use it. You may also be aware of seminars that obtain information on your goals, hopes, and dreams and use that information to manipulate you later.
6. Bypass the resistance of the conscious mind: This can be done by hypnosis - both overtly, as in a guided meditation or hypnotic induction, or covertly, with the use of metaphor and stories. Other hypnotic processes may come into play. The main one is getting a highly charged emotional response (fire walk, board breark, breaking an addiction) and linking that to a desired response. A psychological breakthrough, real or imagined, can also be used. These emotional reactions are powerful tools. If they are used at night when you’re tired (and hungry), the effect is amplified. (This is where drugs would come into play in the old CIA literature.)
7. Friendliness and helpfulness of the trainers or handlers upset a person’s ability to maintain a critical attitude: This is especially true if you voluntarily have entered the process, because you are now vested in the situation. You will defend the ideas or concepts presented for the above reasons, and now your critical factores help justify the change and give credit to the trainers or handlers (or their ideas) for what went on in the process. Although you did the work, you think, “Everything I am I owe to …” This is very powerful for the emotional breakthroughss and reactions achieved in the process.
8. Surprise - the use of unexpected events or things: A day off, a special presentation, something that throws off the sense of ritual.

The above factors lead to the following states being created in your target. They may vary in order, but will happen if given time.

1. A feeling of helplessness (in classic situations) or a sense of needing something from the trainer or handler (in social settings). This could be intensified by having the person think of the problems she would like to overcome, which she has not been able to overcome on her own (helplessness).
2. Initial reaction to surprise. This could be at the material, the trainer, or the crowd. The reaction throws of the internal equilibrium.
3. A feeling of uncertainty (of what’s expected of them in classical mind control) or uncertainty that they can do what they see the trainer do.

The uncertainty leads to:

• Dependence on hanlders or trainers.
• Loss of objectivity and a sense of doubt.
• Feeling of guilt for letting others down or not doing well.
• A questioning attitude of one’s own value systems or ideas.
• A feeling of breakdown or breakthrough.
• A sense of belonging to the new group and needded handlers’ or trainers’ approval.
• A need to defend new ideas.

Once you achieve the last two, they become self-reinforcing, so you defend the new ideas to stay in the group - you fear losing the approval of the new group, trainers or handlers.

Hypnotist Denies Involvement With Italian Bank Robber Known as the "Hypno-Thief"

Hypnotist' thief hunted in Italy

Mesmerising? The 'hypnotist' in action CCTV footage

Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.

In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: "Look into my eyes", before finding the till empty.

In the latest incident captured on CCTV, he targeted a bank at Ancona in northern Italy, then calmly walked out.

A female bank clerk reportedly handed over nearly 800 euros (£630).

The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.

CCTV from the bank showed her apparently being hypnotised by the man, according to the reports.

Italian police believe the suspect could be of Indian or North African extraction.

= = = = =

Philadelphia, PA (PRWEB) March 27, 2008 - A Philadelphia hypnotist has announced that hypnosis is most likely not a factor in a string of Italian robberies.

News agencies around the world are reporting that a criminal in Italy is using hypnosis in order to steal money from retail clerks and a bank teller. The thief allegedly hypnotizes his victims and then coaxes them into handing over cash. Victims report that they have no memory of the incidents.

Steve Roh, owner and operator of Center City Hypnosis in Philadelphia, says that using hypnosis does not give someone magical powers of persuasion or mind control. He says, "Hypnosis is a natural state of mind where you're open and receptive to new information. But a hypnotized person cannot be forced into doing something against their will, or something that they think is morally wrong."

Steve also says, "From the news reports about this so-called hypno-thief, it sounds more like he is just doing something to distract the clerk, in order to quietly get away with the crime. Just like a pickpocket would distract someone in order to steal a wallet. But that's not really hypnosis."

He points out that if the alleged hypnotist had superpowers, he would be better off hitting more lucrative targets than a grocery store and a small bank for a few hundred dollars. "At least that's what I would do," says Steve.

However, Steve says that there is one area where hypnosis may have played a role in these crimes. "Hypnosis can help people build self-confidence and make them resistant to fear. It takes a lot of nerve to do what this thief is doing. He may be using certain hypnosis techniques on himself to 'psych himself up' before a job, just like many athletes and performers do."

Bio - Steve Roh is owner and operator of Center City Hypnosis. Steve has been featured on the Comcast Network and KYW 1060 Newsradio as an expert on hypnosis. He has helped hundreds of Philadelphia-area residents take back control of their lives.

RemoteViewing & ESP From The Inside Out

RemoteViewing & ESP From The Inside Out
Ingo Swann is considered a preeminent psychic research subject, parapsychologist, and the acknowledged father of the ESP method known as Remote Viewing.

Referred to by many as “the scientific psychic,” Swann has participated only in controlled laboratory experiments and has never demonstrated his psychic abilities in public. Most books and articles written about parapsychology and psychic matters today refer to Swann’s work.

Analysts of science and parapsychology generally concede that his work and the high levels of official sponsorship he obtained provided positive proof of the validity of ESP and psychic abilities in all human beings.

Click
Here to Order it from Amazon.com

The Pentagon’s Pain Compliance and Mind Control Weapons

The Pentagon’s Pain Compliance and Mind Control Weapons
Published on Sunday, March 23, 2008.
Source: Infowars - Kurt Nimmo
It should come as no secret the Pentagon has an array of high-tech weapons, far ahead of their time, ready to deploy when the guys with scrambled eggs on their lapels deem necessary. One such control device — and all non-lethal weapons are control devices, submission devices, not necessarily murder devices — was recently featured on the PopSci website. Megan Miller writes:

The U.S. Defense department has tested some spooky weapons, but those involving mind control and telepathic attack may be near the top of the list. A newly declassified 1998 document released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (download the pdf here), describes potential weapons for crowd control, such as a microwave gun that could beam words directly into people’s ears, and an electromagnetic pulse that causes epilepsy-like seizures.

Some of this technology, on a far grander scale, is available to local cops. Back in 2005, the LA cops played around with a sonic device, capable of projecting sounds on targets a mile away. “There was nearly no distortion,” explains DefenseTech. “In fact, at one statute mile, we clearly listened to a Frank Sinatra record and could understand the words, hear the intonations and pitch, and even the background music! Other sounds, especially those in the higher frequency ranges like sirens and screams, were easily detected even over the noise from the 5 Freeway a short distance away.”

Now why would the police want to direct sound – more specifically, messages — at people a mile away? Stupid question. Why would the authorities in England want to install “talking cameras… in Southwark, Barking and Dagenham, in London, Reading, Harlow, Norwich, Ipswich, Plymouth, Gloucester, Derby, Northampton, Mansfield, Nottingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Wirral, Blackpool, Salford, South Tyneside and Darlington”?

Because it delivers that unique Winston Smith experience? In 1984, the telescreen watched 24/7 and even barked orders if the control freaks at their consoles far off thought it was well deserved, even necessary.

Back to PopSci:

The report also discusses a weapon that can heat a victim’s body internally, producing an artificial fever. It is unknown whether the fever-inducing technology was actually tested, but the report notes that the equipment needed “is available today” and that the resulting fever would keep a victim incapacitated for “any desired period consistent with safety.”

No doubt it “is available today,” as it was engineered decades ago, and probably ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.

Last month, a 60 Minutes reporter subjected himself to “a non-lethal weapon the Pentagon has developed,” write David Edwards and Chris Tackett for Raw Story. David Martin, acting as a corporate media guinea pig of sorts, subjected himself to the beam. “The gun is really an antenna which shoots out this very high-frequency radio beam that penetrates the skin to a depth of 1/64 of an inch, which is just deep enough to hit the nerves. And it creates this instantaneous sensation of heat which makes anyone who is hit with it try to get out of the way as fast as possible.”

CNN and the BBC reported this friendly little device — well, actually, large as it was mounted on a Humvee — back in January, 2007. “The weapon focuses non-lethal millimeter-wave radiation onto humans, raising their skin surface temperature to an uncomfortable 130 F. The goal is to make the targets drop any weapons and flee the scene. The device was apparently tested on two soldiers and a group of ten reporters, which makes me wonder how thoroughly this thing has been safety tested,” URSpider posted on the technogeek website, Slashdot.

It’s called the Active Denial System, ADS.

“A prototype Humvee-mounted ADS system could be sent to Iraq by the end of the year. A modified Stryker armored personnel carrier, equipped with a low-power version of the pain ray, a laser dazzler, and a sonic blaster, isn’t all that far behind, officials familiar with the program say,” DefenseTech noted in mid-2005.

Last December, the Arizona Daily Star reported the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was “looking to new ‘directed-energy’ technology from Tucson-based Raytheon Missile Systems as a possible addition to his department’s arsenal,” to be used against “unruly inmates,” it was explained. “The weapons, which deliver a beam of energy that feels akin to scalding hot water but leaves no injuries, have been developed for use by the Defense Department as a ‘force-protection’ tool for use on battlefields overseas.”

It will be tested here in America, as stipulated by international treaty.

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,” Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne told the Associated Press. “(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”

This willingness is predicated strictly on the need to conduct scientific experiments and field tests. It has nothing to do with rolling out the ADS Humvees on, say, food rioters or stubborn souls who refuse to turn in their guns when Black Water mercenaries come a’knocking after the next bird flu pandemic. It will be Active Denial of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by a recently returned Iraq veteran festooned in tattoos and shaved head listening to death rock on his iPod.

In an interview with New Scientist, Steve Wright, a UK security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, warned that such technologies could be used for torture. “The epileptic seizure-inducing device is grossly irresponsible and should never be fielded,” He said. “We know from similar artificially-induced fits that the victim subsequently remains ‘potentiated’ and may spontaneously suffer epileptic fits again after the initial attack.”

It’s amazing, this complete lack of understanding of why these technologies were developed, as the point is to induce epileptic seizures. I guess it’s better to kill people slowly with depleted uranium.

But the device that beams “words directly into people’s ears,” that is intriguing. Imagine messages beamed into the heads of troublemakers — you know anarchists and the Timothy McVeigh types, those damn 9/11 truthers who need to be tasered, beaten to a pulp, and locked in detention camps, or so insist a few prominent members of the corporate media, that is to say their handlers and bosses. Make that a voice inside the head that argues, doubts, and disputes 24/7 and you have a pretty effective weapon, or hands-on brainwashing device.

It will have to be tested here first, naturally, before it will be used in Iraq, the “war” that will never end, as our rulers promise. And that’s why we are reading about this technology now, to get us ready for pain compliance — and telepathic compliance eventually as well.

Row over Scientology video

“Panorama” BBC :Scientology And Me"

Scientology has prepared an attack video, and they have shown the Scientology v Sweeney shouting match to anyone who would watch it. There is talk of 100,000 copies being released.

I don't know why Scientology has to respond defensively all the time. I say embrace the word "cult".What would have happened if the reporter took a "side angle" Point of View and began to say that cults are good because they help people stop thinking for themselves and free up their time to enjoy life? Then they could say that $cientology is a good cult... no a GREAT cult!

How would Co$ counter that?

$cientology needs to take on the long view of things and stop wasting it's energy on attack and counter attacks. It needs to be much more COVERT and DEVIOUS than it already is to grow (and it's already very devious).

They should buy my book "The Forbidden Book Of Getting What You Want" and read it and put it into practice.

New Book Reveals Secret Indoctrination Techniques of Rosicrucian Order

NEW YORK, March 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Pierre S. Freeman's new book, "The Prisoner of San Jose," exposes the invasive psychological methods of a secretive Rosicrucian cult based in Canada but with its American headquarters in San Jose, California. Not only does this book expose the shadowy world of the Rosicrucian order -- with its secret vows, invisible Masters and omnipotent authority, but also it sheds light on a technique of mind control Freeman calls "Remote Indoctrination."

The amazing story of Pierre S. Freeman's enslavement by a mind control cult begins in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, where Freeman was pursuing an engineering degree at the Faculte des Sciences. At this point, a star pupil, Freeman was seduced by the promises of economic freedom offered by the occult and began to invest more time in the Rosicrucian lessons than in his own engineering studies. These teachings were mostly delivered through monographs, developed by Spencer H. Lewis in the early part of the twentieth century. The monographs promised spiritual and material success when followed deliberately. Through these methods, the so-called Ancient and Mystic Order of Rosae Crucis, commonly known as AMORC, would equip the student to face the world from an elevated spiritual perspective. By entering into these teachings, Freeman would encounter severe poverty, homelessness, loss of career, family and friends.

According to the book, "The Prisoner of San Jose," the power of AMORC lay in its adherence to many mind control practices chronicled by experts like Stephen Hassan, author of "Combating Cult Mind Control" and Margaret Thaler Singer, now deceased, who wrote "Cults in Our Midst: the Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives." Although Hassan and Singer's cults were generally centers of highly aggressive in-your-face, person-to-person behavior, Pierre found, to his astonishment, the much less obvious techniques of remote indoctrination, practiced by AMORC, rendered the same kind of personality-altering conditions spoken of by both authors. Pierre found that understanding the conventional methods of cult indoctrination gave him the cues to uproot enough of his mental and emotional condition to reverse some of the psychological damage that led to his inability to let go of the cult and to allow him to begin to reverse engineer his psychological entrapment.

"The Prisoner of San Jose," subtitled "How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control," has been released this month by Wheatmark Publishing in Tucson, AZ. It is available online and at Amazon.com.

"Wear this as part of our quality (mind) control."

So you get a job in customer service, and your boss says your dealings with customers are going to be monitored for "quality." No, you won't be on CCTV -- you'll be wearing a watch-sized device on your wrist that tracks your emotions by measuring heart rate, your location, body temperature, and skin moisture levels. This device will be sending your data via bluetooth to a central database. If you get too angry or too sleepy while dealing with a customer, your boss will be alerted with a message. Too much anger, and you might be fired. It sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel, but it's actually a realistic application for a piece of technology called the BT2, released today by Exmocare.

According to the official Exmocare site:

By interpreting an information-rich, individually-tailored physiological context, we can determine the emotional state of a person wearing an Exmocare device. Emotional information, very simply, can be characterized in two dimensions.

* Arousal: How excited is the person?
* Valence: How positive is the person?

Different emotional states are revealed through patterns of these two dimensions. How? Any emotional state leads to a specific change in our body. We can detect these patterns, and to an even greater extent, differentiate between them.

Suggested uses are for medical patients who need to be monitored for health reasons. But obviously emotional monitoring extends way beyond cardiac care and blurs into the world of psychological regulation. Don't be surprised when you start seeing customer service jobs being monitored for emotional quality. Here's a picture of the monitoring window the emotional regulator gets with the BT2 device.

Notes Exmocare helpfully:

The BT2 Control Panel runs silently from your taskbar in reporter mode. In reporter mode, the software checks your physiological and emotional data for dangerous situations and sends status updates and alerts to the website automatically.

From the Evaluation Kit website, you can monitor anyone's physiological and emotional data from anywhere in the world. You can also view their full history and assign and resolve alerts.

I'm hoping to follow up on this story, and perhaps get a BT2 to test. If I get one, I'll let you know how accurately it measures my psychological state.
BT2 [Exmocare]

2nd Thoughts about The Illuminati

I'd like to share something that I HOPE will scare the shit out of you.

If it doesn't scare you then perhaps it will make you simply THINK.

For the longest time I've written about the Illuminati with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. My attitude was that it's just too damned hard for one group of people to quietly build a secret culture of power who's soul goal it to rule the world. It's just too wacky an idea to take seriously.

That said I've read a LOT about the so-called Illuminati, most from Christian based fear mongers who seem to use the Illuminati as a tool of conversion. That has added to my skepticism.

The benefit of my studies is that I've gained a whole new way of looking into the topic of power and control.

Lately however I've been reading the works of a writer that goes by the name of “Svali” (do a google search and you'll get a lot).

Svali describes her former life in the Illuminati as a high ranking trainer who programmed other members for secrecy until she escaped and went through a religious conversion.

What she says about the Illuminati is similar to what others write. How she differs is in her first person perspective and in the details of an Illuminati insider.

The effect it had on me was to imagine it being true and the effect on the individual who went through it. As a result I believe that the Illuminati (as Svali describes it) is absolutely possible.

What Svali describes is that all Illuminati members are from long lines of Illuminati families. No one is EVER recruited into “the Order”. You can only be born into it thus it is a VERY closed culture.

From a cultural anthropology perspective this in not unheard of. The Romani (gypsy) maintain close and secretive family ties. There are also Mormon communities that insist you can only marry another Mormon or risk banishment. Combine this with the Illuminati belief that as a member of "the family" you are not just special but have an obligation to rule the world from behind the scenes.

Every member of these families must go through training from birth. “Training” amounts to torture of unimaginable extremes that are intended to create alter personalities that can keep secret the goals and ambitions of the “family”.

One of the aspects of the Illuminati that made it so unbelievable for me what the description of torture and extreme ritual abuse they would inflict on people especially young children. This was all done for the purpose of creating "alters" or different personalities withing the individual so they might better keep secrets.

It seemed so over the top that I wondered why I had never heard of it. Svali's answer is that it is an institutionalized way they treat EVERYONE in the group and it has been happening over the course of generations. It does not happen to outsiders but is a way of life for those who are born into it. Families expect their children to go through these "trainings" because they were raised going through them.

In that sense it is no different than being raised by parents who want you to live and believe as they do.

Early age trainings include witnessing a “set up” at the age of 3 or 4. In this realistic depiction the child is told someone who tried to leave The Family was caught. The traitor is then “killed” in front of them by burning alive or by some other very theatrical yet realistic means. The child is then told that every traitor is killed in this way. If the child is able to remain silent during the drama they are later told “You did very well. We're proud of you.”

What changed for me was to imagine this type of activity on a cultural level. I managed to look at this as a possibility and without the judgment that would come from the shock of these revelations. For a moment I looked at it as if I were a cultural anthropologist. When I did that it seemed only natural that a culture like the Illuminati would evolve.

The Illuminati has seemed to become more real to me.

According to Svali these people make up the most powerful "old money" families in the world. And as the money is passed down so is the ritual torture and training. They are trained to have a long view of things, not the 10 year plan that the corporate world lives by, but with plans that go a hundred years into the future.

Is the Illuminati real?
I don't know.
I still have to weigh the very sketchy evidence against reason and rational thought.

"They Live" ... a Perfect Model of Mind Control

If you want to spend your Friday evening contemplating the joys of alien-based paranoia, plus a little wrestling, then there's nothing better than a nice heaping of They Live. Released in the late 1980s, this ironic-paranoid classic was John Carpenter's giant fuck you to the Reagan Administration and social conformity of all types. Aliens have taken over, and are controlling all of the United States (and perhaps the whole world) by beaming a signal into everybody's mind that masks the true aliens, as well as the "obey" signs they've planted everywhere. In this awesome scene, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper puts on some sunglasses that allow him to see the truth. It's like the "taking the red pill" moment -- suddenly the extent of his manipulation becomes clear.

And of course, it's hilarious. Instead of spouting some speech about simulation Wachowski-Bros-style, Piper is basically dumbstruck. He finally lashes out at an old lady alien by telling her she looks like her face has "been in the cheese dip since 1957." Yup, those were the days, when high tech social control was solved with a nice wrassle and you didn't need any of them fancy computer hackers to do the job. If it were possible to force every human in the U.S. and Canada to watch this movie, I would do it. Using my MIND CONTROL BEAM.

Brain control headset for gamers

By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website, San Francisco

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

"It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer," said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv.

"It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively," she added.

The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity.

Ms Le said: "Emotiv is a neuro-engineering company and we've created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically."

Headsets which read neural activity are not new, but Ms Le said the Epoc was the first consumer device that can be used for gaming.

"This is the first headset that doesn't require a large net of electrodes, or a technician to calibrate or operate it and does require gel on the scalp," she said. "It also doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars."

This area of immersion and control could prove to be the breakthrough gaming has longed for. Darren Waters, BBC Technology editor

The use of Electroencephalography in medical practice dates back almost 100 years but it is only since the 1970s that the procedure has been used to explore brain computer interfaces.

The Epoc technology can be used to give authentic facial expressions to avatars of gamers in virtual worlds. For example, if the player smiles, winks, grimaces the headset can detect the expression and translate it to the avatar in game.

It can also read emotions of players and translate those to the virtual world. "The headset could be used to improve the realism of emotional responses of AI characters in games," said Ms Le.

"If you laughed or felt happy after killing a character in a game then your virtual buddy could admonish you for being callous," she explained.

The $299 headset has a gyroscope to detect movement and has wireless capabilities to communicate with a USB dongle plugged into a computer.

The Emotiv said the headset could detects more than 30 different expressions, emotions and actions.

The headset could be used to improve the realism of emotional responses of AI characters in games Tan Le, Emotiv

They include excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows furrowed); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate (on six different axis).

Gamers are able to move objects in the world just by thinking of the action.

Emotiv is working with IBM to develop the technology for uses in "strategic enterprise business markets and virtual worlds"

Paul Ledak, vice president, IBM Digital Convergence said brain computer interfaces, like the Epoc headset were an important component of the future 3D Internet and the future of virtual communication.

THOUGHT-CONTROLLED GAMING HEADSET Sensors respond to the electrical impulses behind different thoughts; enabling a user's brain to influence gameplay directly Conscious thoughts, facial expressions, and non-conscious emotions can all be detected Gyroscope enables a cursor or camera to be controlled by head movements The headset uses wi-fi to connect to a computer

News, features and footage from the GDC 2008 in San Francisco

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/7254078.stm

CIA Mind Control

Ex-Illuminati Leo Zagami on the Kentroversy Tapes

Ex-Illuminati Leo Zagami on the Kentroversy Tapes

March 8th, 2008 by Floyd Anderson

Link to Video 1/7

This is the second of a thirteen-part interview series on the Illuminati 2/25/2008

http://www.illuminaticonfessions.webfriend.it/

NWO Whistleblower Leo Zagami Betrayed by His Wife and Norwegian Legal Authorities

by Kentroversy

March 7, 2008

On February 23, 2008; Leo Zagami's wife left him, taking with
her, their young son. As Leo would later find out, the woman he thought
was his wife and who loved him, had turned out to have been working as
an undercover Illuminati agent all along. When she left on the 23rd of
February, she phoned Leo's mother, and told her that both she and her
son would have no trouble visiting their young son and grandson. She
has since reneged on this statement, and now forbids both her son's
father and grandmother from visiting with their young relative.

On March 5, 2008 — a man and a woman showed up on Leo's
doorstep. Working for Norwegian authorities, they were instrumental in
Leo's arrest and detention for twelve hours, where he was kept in a
Norwegian prison cell with no blanket, no pillow or mattress on his
bunk, and all food and drink had been withheld from him. Additionally,
his two computers were confiscated, as was his cell phone, and all his
notes for his work exposing this global criminal network.

Read the rest of this article »

Link to Video 2/7

Link to Video 3/7

Link to Video 4/7

Link to Video 5/7

Link to Video 6/7

Link to Video 7/7

1,000 True Fans (The 1KTF Project)

1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly. Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don't need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.

This small circle of diehard fans, which can provide you with a living, is surrounded by concentric circles of Lesser Fans. These folks will not purchase everything you do, and may not seek out direct contact, but they will buy much of what you produce. The processes you develop to feed your True Fans will also nurture Lesser Fans. As you acquire new True Fans, you can also add many more Lesser Fans. If you keep going, you may indeed end up with millions of fans and reach a hit. I don't know of any creator who is not interested in having a million fans.

But the point of this strategy is to say that you don't need a hit to survive. You don't need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

Young artists starting out in this digitally mediated world have another path other than stardom, a path made possible by the very technology that creates the long tail. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum hits, bestseller blockbusters, and celebrity status, they can aim for direct connection with 1,000 True Fans. It's a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

A few caveats. This formula - one thousand direct True Fans -- is crafted for one person, the solo artist. What happens in a duet, or quartet, or movie crew? Obviously, you'll need more fans. But the additional fans you'll need are in direct geometric proportion to the increase of your creative group. In other words, if you increase your group size by 33%, you need add only 33% more fans. This linear growth i

s in contrast to the exponential growth by which many things in the digital domain inflate. I would not be surprise to find that the value of your True Fans network follows the standard network effects rule, and increases as the square of the number of Fans. As your True Fans connect with each other, they will more readily increase their average spending on your works. So while increasing the numbers of artists involved in creation increases the number of True Fans needed, the increase does not explode, but rises gently and in proportion.

A more important caution: Not every artist is cut out, or willing, to be a nurturer of fans. Many musicians just want to play music, or photographers just want to shoot, or painters paint, and they temperamentally don't want to deal with fans, especially True Fans. For these creatives, they need a mediator, a manager, a handler, an agent, a galleryist -- someone to manage their fans. Nonetheless, they can still aim for the same middle destination of 1,000 True Fans. They are just working in a duet.

Third distinction. Direct fans are best. The number of True Fans needed to make a living indirectly inflates fast, but not infinitely. Take blogging as an example. Because fan support for a blogger routes through advertising clicks (except in the occasional tip-jar), more fans are needed for a blogger to make a living. But while this moves the destination towards the left on the long tail curve, it is still far short of blockbuster territory. Same is true in book publishing. When you have corporations involved in taking the majority of the revenue for your work, then it takes many times more True Fans to support you. To the degree an author cultivates direct contact with his/her fans, the smaller the number needed.

Lastly, the actual number may vary depending on the media. Maybe it is 500 True Fans for a painter and 5,000 True Fans for a videomaker. The numbers must surely vary around the world. But in fact the actual number is not critical, because it cannot be determined except by attempting it. Once you are in that mode, the actual number will become evident. That will be the True Fan number that works for you. My formula may be off by an order of magnitude, but even so, its far less than a million.

I've been scouring the literature for any references to the True Fan number. Suck.com co-founder Carl Steadman had theory about microcelebrities. By his count, a microcelebrity was someone famous to 1,500 people. So those fifteen hundred would rave about you. As quoted by Danny O'Brien, "One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That's enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year."

Others call this microcelebrity support micro-patronage, or distributed patronage.

In 1999 John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier published a model for this in First Monday, an online journal. They called it the Street Performer Protocol.

Using the logic of a street performer, the author goes directly to the readers before the book is published; perhaps even before the book is written. The author bypasses the publisher and makes a public statement on the order of: "When I get $100,000 in donations, I will release the next novel in this series."

Readers can go to the author's Web site, see how much money has already been donated, and donate money to the cause of getting his novel out. Note that the author doesn't care who pays to get the next chapter out; nor does he care how many people read the book that didn't pay for it. He just cares that his $100,000 pot gets filled. When it does, he publishes the next book. In this case "publish" simply means "make available," not "bind and distribute through bookstores." The book is made available, free of charge, to everyone: those who paid for it and those who did not.

In 2004 author Lawrence Watt-Evans used this model to publish his newest novel. He asked his True Fans to collectively pay $100 per month. When he got $100 he posted the next chapter of the novel. The entire book was published online for his True Fans, and then later in paper for all his fans. He is now writing a second novel this way. He gets by on an estimated 200 True Fans because he also publishes in the traditional manner -- with advances from a publisher supported by thousands of Lesser Fans. Other authors who use fans to directly support their work are Diane Duane, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and Don Sakers. Game designer Greg Stolze employed a similar True Fan model to launch two pre-financed games. Fifty of his True Fans contributed seed money for his development costs.

The genius of the True Fan model is that the fans are able to move an artist away from the edges of the long tail to a degree larger than their numbers indicate. They can do this in three ways: by purchasing more per person, by spending directly so the creator keeps more per sale, and by enabling new models of support.

New models of support include micro-patronage. Another model is pre-financing the startup costs. Digital technology enables this fan support to take many shapes. Fundable is a web-based enterprise which allows anyone to raise a fixed amount of money for a project, while reassuring the backers the project will happen. Fundable withholds the money until the full amount is collected. They return the money if the mininum is not reached.

Here's an example from Fundable's site;

Amelia, a twenty-year-old classical soprano singer, pre-sold her first CD before entering a recording studio. "If I get $400 in pre-orders, I will be able to afford the rest [of the studio costs]," she told potential contributors. Fundable's all-or-nothing model ensured that none of her customers would lose money if she fell short of her goal. Amelia sold over $940 in albums.

A thousand dollars won't keep even a starving artist alive long, but with serious attention, a dedicated artist can do better with their True Fans. Jill Sobule, a Canadian musician who has nurtured a sizeable following over many years of touring and recording, is doing well relying on her True Fans. Recently she decided to go to her fans to finance the $75,000 professional recording fees she needed for her next album. She has raised close to $50,000 so far. By directly supporting her via their patronage, the fans gain intimacy with their artist. According to the Canadian Press:

Contributors can choose a level of pledges ranging from the $10 "unpolished rock," which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it's made, to the $10,000 "weapons-grade plutonium level," where she promises "you get to come and sing on my CD. Don't worry if you can't sing - we can fix that on our end." For a $5,000 contribution, Sobule said she'll perform a concert in the donor's house. The lower levels are more popular, where donors can earn things like an advanced copy of the CD, a mention in the liner notes and a T-shirt identifying them as a "junior executive producer" of the CD.

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty. A study as recently as 1995 showed that the accepted price of being an artist was large. Sociologist Ruth Towse surveyed artists in Britian and determined that on average they earned below poverty subsistence levels.

I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don't know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living. I'd love to hear from anyone who might have settled on such a path.

Sheeple: The New Patriot

How science could soon be manipulating our choice of food

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3422323.ece

I’m in the university town of Wageningen, about to have the least private lunch of my life, and a Dutchman is playing tricks with my mind. “Would you like coffee?” he says, all cryptically.

“No, water will be fine,” I reply, because I’m not going to be manipulated. A bottle of water turns up with four beakers, all black but different shapes. The Dutchman is smirking, barely able to contain his excitement as he waits for my next move.

If I choose the tall one, it probably means I have issues with the size of my penis. If I choose the short, stubby one, it probably means the same. I choose the one closest to me. The Dutchman nods to himself.

“What does all that mean?” I ask. “Well, you were on edge because I was smirking,” says the Dutchman, smirking at the fact that smirking was part of his test.

“And you were uncomfortable because all the beakers are black, which is the colour we associate with death. The different shapes should have no real significance they hold the same amount of water but subconsciously, you were making false assumptions about one holding more than the other. It was interesting.”

At least it had nothing to do with my penis.

Welcome to the Restaurant of the Future, a multi-million-pound experiment that could, and probably will, change the way we eat.

On the face of it, it is just another trendy office canteen, all marble surfaces, floor-to-ceiling windows and mood lighting. But looks are deceptive in Wageningen: it is in fact a laboratory masquerading as a restaurant.

Dotted across the ceiling are 27 concealed video cameras watching your every move. There’s a scale that weighs you secretly as you queue to pay. Soon there will be face-reading technology and smart spoons that measure the speed at which you are eating.

In a locked control room along the corridor, three of the 20 analysts, psychologists and technicians involved in the project sit at banks of screens, watching, watching, watching. If you don’t like your mayonnaise and chips, they will notice and understand why before you do.

From the country that gave us Big Brother, this is Big Brother run by Clever People with White Coats and Clipboards. It’s terrifying.

The Dutchman playing tricks with my mind is Rene Koster, director of the project, who is about to begin the most extensive experiment on our subconscious attitude to food. As he explains, you can’t just ask us why we eat what we eat because we simply don’t know.

Up to 80% of what we do is entirely subconscious and not even particularly rational. But if someone asks you why you made a decision, your brain gives a rational but probably inaccurate answer, often out of sheer politeness.

For example: “Why have you just scoffed three Big Macs?”

“Because I was starving.” The real reason? Because my stomach didn’t notice the nondescript flavour, because the weather was inclement, because the carpet was green, because it was a Tuesday, because Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 3 was playing as it was the last time I had a Big Mac craving. In other words, I really have no idea.

Koster and his team plan to work out the subliminal influences on food choices. With that deduced, the implications for the real restaurants of the future are enormous. They will be able to manipulate us and we won’t even know it.

I point out to Koster (who, incidentally, has chosen the long, thin water beaker) that I find that scary. “All the things you are afraid of are already happening,” he says. “Fast-food companies and supermarkets already manipulate us, although our understanding of how is still very limited.

“What we do know is that we have big problems with the way we eat. Calories are in abundance but we behave as if they are scarce, as we did when we were hunter gatherers. We can’t tell when to stop. And we can’t simply be told to stop. Diets don’t work if you are told not to eat cake, you will spend your whole time fixating on cake. If we work out what sort of labelling, presentation, mood and so forth will make you more likely to choose something other than cake, that will be far more effective.”

So mind control is the only way to make us make the right food choices, which is pretty depressing.

“You would call it control. We would call it helping people. The health implications of bad diets, the environmental implications of us throwing away 40% of the food we buy, they’re immeasurable. We have a big problem and if you can induce changes in subconscious behaviour, that is a good thing.”

Used in the right way, the Restaurant of the Future could make fat people thin. It could make children eat apples. It could make lorry drivers eat salad, rather than sleep-inducing fry-ups. Used in the wrong way, it could make us all eat three Big Macs.

It’s time for lunch. Koster and one of his head scientists, Rene de Wijk, vanish into the control room to be all Big Brotherish, leaving me to negotiate the canteen alone. It’s a Dutch canteen and, as you know, the Dutch are quite strange.

There’s a milk bar even though this is a university, not a primary school. I take some milk, then wonder if I’ve only done that because I want to assimilate. Or maybe it’s because I relish the chance to be treated like a baby again. I then begin to wonder if my mother loved me, consider paying a prostitute to change my nappy on my way back through Amsterdam, then get a grip and move on to the next food island.

Herring is an option but I know they’ll read a lot into that so I go for the safer beef taco, some bread and a milky, swirly thing in a glass. I wonder if this makes me a bad person.

When the programme begins fully next week, anyone using the canteen will be told they are participating in a scientific study but they will soon, Koster maintains, forget they are being watched. At first I find that hard to believe. As I sit alone at my table, I am incredibly conscious of the cameras. But the real lab rats will be watched for months, even years: it won’t take long for them to behave as if the cameras aren’t there at all.

Halfway through the strange dessert, the boffins return. I feel as if I’ve given nothing away but de Wijk declares the past 20 minutes “very interesting”. It takes two days to analyse fully the results of one meal, but in a few minutes the scientists have deduced that I was nervous, which might explain why I was atypically uninquisitive (I didn’t look around as much as they had expected of a lone eater). They had expected that I’d go for the taco because that was the high-calorie option. I had been up since 3am, I was tired, I needed comfort food.

The fact that I didn’t finish my salad didn’t surprise them. Salad is charged by the bowl, so the temptation to take more than I needed was irresistible. If the bowl had been 10% smaller, I wouldn’t have noticed and I would still have had an elegant sufficiency of salad. It’s this sort of manipulation that the restaurant will study in the coming months.

Most interestingly (for them, at any rate), I don’t eat my bread. Why would I take bread and not even try it? That is illogical. Rene II explains that anticipation is a very complex procedure. Trying to understand how I will feel about the food I choose when I actually come to eat it depends on hundreds of factors.

The team has already been asked to look at a Utrecht hospital’s catering system (the restaurant is public-private funded and, for a fee, will test out any new product or help to solve any food-related problem). The Utrecht patients were being asked to choose their meals a whole week ahead. This might have kept the costs down and limited visits by catering staff, but it was a madness.

A patient having a colectomy on Tuesday is not going to know in advance whether he will fancy the fish or the beef come Friday. If he isn’t getting the food he wants, he is less positive, his recovery is hampered and medical costs spiral. The restaurant should help to quantify all this.

Enough about Utrecht bed-hoggers. How are we going to make children eat more apples, for example? “We don’t know yet. But there is no real reason why children shouldn’t eat apples, which are sweet and taste a bit like lemonade. Perhaps children are put off by the packaging, the crunchiness, the colour or because they are being told to eat them by their parents. It is very complex, psychologically. We hope to make all that clearer.”

I leave the two Renes and the Restaurant of the Future in a daze. The questions they could answer are mind-boggling. What is the real reason why women eat less in male company? Can green lighting make us herbivores? Does an overattentive waiter make us choose cheese rather than ice-cream?

By the time I reach Schiphol airport I’m getting anxious about the future. We’ll all be eating salad without knowing why. We’ll be stick-thin and glowing. Wine will be served in thin, black glasses to trick us out of binge-drinking. We will live for ever. The prospect is so depressing that I find myself eating a Big Mac. I am eating one because I want to. At least that’s what I think.

Why We Suck at Predicting the Future

By Greta Lorge February 17, 2008 | 3:44:31 PMCategories: AAAS 2008

People are pretty bad at predicting how much they will enjoy future experiences, which tends to lead to disappointment. The reason, says Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, is that we base our expectations on previous experiences or possible alternatives, when those are totally irrelevant.

At the AAAS conference this weekend, as part of a symposium on “Imagining the Future,” Gilbert presented data from a simple study in which people were asked to predict how much they would enjoy eating potato chips under various conditions: before, after, or instead of eating chocolate or sardines. The prospect of eating something distasteful caused people to overestimate how much they'd enjoy eating the chips, while the promise of something decadent caused them to underestimate. But when it came time to eat the chips, the chocolate and sardines scenarios had zero effect on actual enjoyment.

Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, says the reason for this is that experience demands our attention, leaving us little time to ponder alternatives to it. “We think we will be thinking about the roads not taken,” says Gilbert, “but the fact is that whatever road we choose in life requires that we navigate it, and doing so limits our ability to compare that road to its alternatives.”

Get it at amazon.com

The American Stonehenge

On one of the highest hilltops in Elbert County, Georgia stands a huge granite monument. Engraved in eight different languages on the four giant stones that support the common capstone are 10 Guides, or commandments. That monument is alternately referred to as The Georgia Guidestones, or the American Stonehenge. Though relatively unknown to most people, it is an important link to the Occult Hierarchy that dominates the world in which we live.

georgia guidestone illuminati
THE MESSAGE OF THE GEORGIA GUIDESTONE
1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.
10.Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature.

Limiting the population of the earth to 500 million will require the extermination of nine-tenths of the world's people. The American Stonehenge's reference to establishing a world court foreshadows the current move to create an International Criminal Court and a world government.

What is the true significance of the American Stonehenge, and why is its covert message important? Because it confirms the fact that there was a covert group intent on

(1) Dramatically reducing the population of the world.
(2) Promoting environmentalism.
(3) Establishing a world government.
(4) Promoting a new spirituality.

Certainly the group that commissioned the Georgia Guidestones is one of many similar groups working together toward a New World Order, a new world economic system, and a new world spirituality. Behind those groups, however, are dark spiritual forces. Without understanding the nature of those dark forces it is impossible to understand the unfolding of world events.

The fact that most Americans have never heard of the Georgia Guidestones or their message to humanity reflects the degree of control that exists today over what the American people think.

The Words That Make a Winning Film Title

The Language DNA of Film Titles

February 21, 2008 @ 4:01 pm · Filed under Titles

As I sit here in Southern California awaiting the Academy Awards this weekend, a model I have been working on to better understand the language of film titles is complete. I was able to do a bunch of work on the airplane out here from New York. The model was built using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to understand what film title words are associated with winning festival awards. LSI is a natural language processing technique that is good for understanding hidden patterns in collections of text. Here is a general description of the process I wrote for a marketingprofs.com article a few years ago…

LSI maps the contextual relationships between words in terms of common usage patterns across a collection of documents called a repository. For instance, in documents about dogs (the animal), one would expect that word “dog” would be accompanied by contextually relevant words such as “collar”, “wagging”, “puppy”, or “leash.” These associations are less likely in comparable documents discussing “reptiles.” When a large number of documents are put together as repository, a statistical measure of these connections can be generated via LSI.

LSI enables an analyst to understand how words relate to one another through the creation of a similarity measure, which reveals whether a given language pattern is similarly used compared with another pattern.

The math is brutal, but the result are always interesting. The top 50 title words (a natural breaking point) that are associated with award winning festival are:

1. war
2. country
3. love
4. mother
5. happy
6. son
7. blue
8. broken
9. now
10. princess
11. everything
12. body
13. day
14. black
15. story
16. up
17. park
18. pool
19. wild
20. daily
21. cant
22. la
23. run
24. high
25. innocent
26. requiem
27. august
28. night
29. amour
30. crazy
31. four
32. hope
33. dark
34. daughter
35. trouble
36. bell
37. color
38. full
39. dance
40. it
41. dust
42. want
43. super
44. eye
45. sex
46. hotel
47. go
48. legacy
49. she
50. river

Recruit Colbert into the Illuminati!

http://episkoposcain.blogspot.com/2008/02/recruit-colbert-into-illuminati.html

A project that was started by Professor Cramulus on PD.com which seems to be gaining a lot of interest and has the potential for a lot of fun. I'll cross-post his two posts from the Verwirrung directly here, because I'm too lazy to paraphrase:

Check out one of OMGASM’s current projects: COLBERTGASM

This is an oldskool Discordian jake which involves sending tons of snail mail.

Mission Statement During the week of February 17th-23rd, 2008, we will send Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as much mail as possible. Letters to Colbert will invite him into the Illuminati. Letters to Stewart will invite him into the Discordian Society. In order to gain entry, on March 5th they must explicitly use a Discordian or Illuminati “code word” (of their choosing) on the air.

Buzz week is going on RIGHT NOW, so get on it! Check out the website for mailing addresses and sample letters. We hope everyone will mail at least 20 letters (about eight bucks worth of stamps) - but consider mailing more!

As usual, check out the GASM mission feed under “colbertgasm” to find more links relevant to this project, and more Golden Apple Seed Missions in general.

If you don’t send letters, and they use a codeword on the air on March 5th, you’ll wish you had participated. And if you play along, you’ll be able to fondly reference that time that Discordians pranked the media and you were there at ground zero.

Now get off your ass and DO IT!

New sample letters have been uploaded to the Colbertgasm wiki.

Discord Letter 1

Discord Letter 2

AISB Letter 1

AISB Letter 2

AISB Letter 3

Mail ‘em in. And help spread the word.

Mind Control Movies That Make You Scream

Welcome back to Horrorhead, a column where we explore the intersection of horror and science fiction. Something about the mid-twentieth century got people really spooked about mind control. Maybe it was the Cold War, with all its brainwashy propaganda; maybe it was the prominence of social cleansing pundits like Fredric Wertham, who went on a successful crusade to stamp out "youth destroying" comic books and nearly destroyed the comics industry in the process. Whatever the cause, people started mainlining movies about the horrors of mind control in the 1950s and never stopped.

Some of the early standouts in the horror-scifi genre are Donovan's Brain (1955), about a scientist whose mind is taken over by the brain he's keeping alive in a tank, and The Tingler (1959), about a parasite that lives in everyone's spines and controls their ability to feel fear. The beasts are fine as long as they stay inside you, slowly sucking up all your fear chemicals. But if they get out -- they will kill! Movies like these set the tone for later mind-control flicks, which all seem to contain a certain amount of surreal goofiness. In 1960, Village of the Damned played gave us those iconic blonde, glowing-eyed children who are all born mysteriously after everybody in town conks out for an hour. A cross between pod people and devils, the kids can use their mental powers to control people's actions and of course MUST BE STOPPED.

During the 60s, however, the horror of mind control took a decided turn for the political. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), full of trippy drug sequences, combines the idea of government conspiracy with brainwashing, suggesting that the Cold War is really a battle to control people's wills rather than geographical territory. Those who remember the original flick -- way better than the 2004 remake -- know that it's the harrowing tale of a soldier brainwashed by commies to become an assassin. (Plus Frank Sinatra joins the fun as another brainwashee.) Or was he brainwashed by somebody else? In 1987, era of corporate mania, poor Robocop gets mind-controlled by a giant corporation, rather than the government. Company geeks program him with a secret behavioral modification called the "fourth law" which prevents him from doing any violence to employees of the corporation that made him -- even when they are breaking the law or threatening somebody's life.

The upcoming Russian flick Inhabited Island, based on a 1970s novel, is another political mind control tale. It's set on a planet that's clearly meant to be the USSR, and everyone is completely obedient because they're being controlled by signals sent from giant towers all over town. (No, they're not cell towers, but you can bet that if the novel had been written in 2008 they would be.) This political brainwashing is of course presaged in one of the ultimate scifi mind control tales, 1984, published just as World War II was coming to an end. Countless movie versions of the novel seem to bend to reflect the political tenor of the times. A 1954 film version makes it obvious that Big Brother is an evil commie (something that the book suggests too). An Apple commercial (pictured above) makes Big Brother out to be IBM. And a 1984 film version, while clearly about fears of fascist commies, is also obsessed with the way television manipulates and mind-controls the masses. Big Brother is a baddie here, but so is television itself. And television has continued to be a mind-controlling nasty, inspiring one of the best and weirdest of the mind-control movies: Videodrome (1982). This classic, directed by freaky brainfarm David Cronenberg, is about a television signal that turns people into the puppets of a shady media conglomerate. It also makes them have kinky sex with Debbie Harry, but I suspect that's just the side-effect of being in a Cronenberg movie. Creepy-funny flick The Signal, hitting theaters next week, is a direct inheritor of Videodrome's mantle. Residents of a city which is clearly intended to be Atlanta are turned into ultra-violent psycho killers by a strange signal broadcast on all televisions, radios, and cell phones.

The mind-controlled mob of psychos, of course, is an old chestnut in movieland. You'll find it in everything from Re-Animator (1987) -- where a mad doctor wants to create an army of mind-controlled zombies -- to Batman Begins (2005) -- where the Scarecrow releases drugs into the water supply that turn Gotham City into a town of dangerous maniacs.

But for sheer mind-control weirdness, I'll bet you can't beat 1977's Empire of the Ants. It's the only example I know of where an insect controls the minds of humans. A town overrun by giant ants becomes enslaved the the ant queen, who is controlling their minds to make them help the hive. The ant-controlled townspeople keep bringing more humans in so the ants will have more slaves -- and possibly human food!