Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Perception Management

Not Spilling Beans,

President Donald "thinks he knows who was behind the 9/11 attacks", and "it wasn't Iraq". 
OK, now what? Is that the end? He can't really say who did it, can he?

Caitlin Johnstone (Reminds me of Carl Rove, here...)
​ ​In the movie The Matrix, the film’s hero is plugged into a digital simulation and asks his guide, “This… this isn’t real?”
​ ​“What is real?” the guide replies. “How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
​ ​In exactly the same way, what we take to be “real” about world events is information that we have taken into our senses and assessed as true. We’ll often put as much faith in these beliefs as we do in what we’ve seen, heard and touched for ourselves, but understandings of world events are made of narrative, and narrative can be manipulated in the interests of the powerful.
​ ​Those who engage in narrative management are not merely guilty of diddling with a few stories; they are actively controlling people’s experience of reality. As far as human experience is concerned, perception is reality. The most talented manipulators among us are fully aware of this and understand that, by controlling people’s perceptions, they can in a very real way control their reality.
​ ​What happens when you can control people’s experience of reality? Well, in a world of social creatures who build their society based on dominant consensuses about circumstances and events, you can to an extent control reality itself. You can create a reality where all resources are funneled toward you, your allies and your lackeys.


​The View From Abroad, America as Others See It​, from Eleni, in Athens

 President Trump wasn't thrilled by this morning's selloff in the euro, and for the first time, is lashing out at ECB chief Mario Draghi, accusing him in a tweet of intentionally manipulating the value of the shared currency with his stimulus talk.
Earlier, Mario Draghi sent the euro tumbling and German yields to record lows when he said that rate cuts or more asset purchases could be part of the central bank's toolkit for fending off a recession.
 Update: Trump isn't letting this go, and is now attacking Draghi because European stock markets rallied on Draghi's stimulus remarks, which isn't "fair" for the US.
 

"America has enough uranium to power it for 100 years" (Perfect! What could go wrong?.) 
American Association of Petroleum Geologists in San Antonio. The report assessed that the U.S. has more uranium than we would need to fuel hundreds of years of nuclear power generation, even if nuclear power was being relied on as a much more significant source of energy in the U.S. This is great news for nuclear supporters in the United States, though historically the country has not mined its own uranium but imported the radioactive metal from other countries--and there’s a reason for that.As Forbes reports: “Since the 1990s, mostly from other countries like Canada and Australia. This is a good thing, as the uranium ores in these countries are much higher grade than ours and requires a lot less mining and refining to get the same amount of energy into the fuel. And, except for Russia, most of these countries are our allies.”

 Over the next several weeks, our planet will have a close encounter with the Taurid meteor swarm.  It will be the closest that we have been to the center of the meteor swarm since 1975, and we won’t have an encounter this close again until 2032.  So for astronomers, this is a really big deal.  And hopefully there will be no danger to Earth during this pass, but some scientists are absolutely convinced that the Tunguska explosion of 1908 which flattened 80 million trees in Russia was caused by an object from the Taurid meteor swarm. 

​Celestial Shotgun​

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