Here are the latest reader Qs along with my answers!
Michael asks:
Thank you for writing interesting articles and commentaries. Also, for taking time to read this.
I have the chance to purchase an 2004 VW Phaeton $11,000. It has 57,000 mileage and clear record according to CARFAX. I would be paying cash for the vehicle. I’m looking to treat myself and have a luxury vechicle to drive. I would like to your opinion on the car.
My answer:
The Phaeton is an excellent car that sold poorly (and depreciated rapidly) because it was sold as a VW.
As an Audi, it would have done well – and, did. The Phaeton is kin to the Audi A8L of the same vintage. But the Audi sold because “Audi” has the status of the premium brand name while the merely “VW” Phaeton lacked the status/snob appeal needed to attract the people who could afford it and was too expensive (new) for the VW people who liked it.
So, assuming this particular car checks out (remember, all used cars are individuals and should be closely looked over by a mechanic you trust) I say – treat yourself!
The reason women are the way they are? Mass media programming and consumer indoctrination. institutional inculcation. Marketing warmongering and holocaustic murder squads to the masses.
Torches of Freedom: Women and Smoking Propaganda
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smoking-propaganda/
Edward Bernays (1891-1995) is the founder of public relations aka engineering consent, as he called it) but is not known very well outside of the marketing and advertising fields.
A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays was the first to theorize that people could be made to want things they don’t need by appealing to unconscious desires (to be free, to be successful etc.).
Bernays, and propaganda theorist Walter Lippman, were members of the U.S. Government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), which successfully convinced formally isolationist Americans to support entrance into World War I.
Hey Tor,
I remembered the name of the story correctly, but got the author wrong. It’s an Asimov story.
http://www.edn.com/electronics-news/4319939/A-perfect-fit
I had forgotten the “clockwork orange” aspect of the story.
Cheers,
Jeremy
The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. 1928. H. G. Wells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Conspiracy
H. G. Wells, in his work commissioned by the Committee of 100 families which control the UK:
Wells boldly declared this bold statement-of-intent.
Not really so bold since nobody believed Wells except the Great Superior Ones, those who were what we would call “insiders” today.
Here is an extract of what H. G. Wells proposed:
“The Open Conspiracy will appear first, I believe as a conscious organisation
of intelligent, and in some cases wealthy men, as a movement having
distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus
of political-control, or using it only as an incidental implement in stages.
A mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction, who will presently discover, with a sort of a surprise, the common-object toward which they are all moving. In all sorts of ways, they will be influencing and controlling the superficial government.
Like George Orwell’s 1984 , Wells’ account is a mass-appeal for a One World Government. It summarised the intent and purpose of the The Committee of 300 families which control the US to bring to pass the following conditions:
A One World Government and one-unit monetary-system under permanent non-elected hereditary oligarchists who self-select from among their numbers in the form of a feudal-system as it was in the Middle Ages.
In this One World entity, population will be limited by restrictions on the number of
children per family, diseases, wars, famines, until what remains are people who are useful to the ruling class. These chosen ones will live in areas which will be strictly and clearly defined, and comprise the total world population.
There will be no middle-class, only rulers and servants. All laws will be uniform under a legal-system of world-courts practising the same unified code of laws, backed up by a One World Government police-force and a One World unified-military to enforce laws in all former countries.
Firm national boundaries shall no longer exist. The system will be on the basis of a welfare state;
those who are obedient and subservient to the One World Government will be rewarded with the means to live; those who are rebellious will simply be starved to death or be declared outlaws, thus a target for anyone who wishes to kill them. Privately-owned firearms or weapons of any kind will be prohibited.
Only one religion will be allowed and that will be in the form of a One World Government Church, which has been in existence since 1920. All formerly competitive beliefs shall be uniformly adapted to serve the World State. Only these subservient congregations will be recognised as legitimate.
Though old superficial labels will persist. There will be only One World Government curricula with no dissenting private or church schools. All Christian churches have already been subverted and the original conception of Christianity will be a thing of the past in the One World Government.
We will induce a state where there is no individual freedom or any concept of liberty surviving, there shall be no such thing as republicanism, sovereignty or rights residing with the people.
National-pride and racial-identity shall be stamped-out and in the transition-phase it shall be subject to the severest penalties to even mention one’s racial origin.
Each person shall be fully-indoctrinated that he or she is a creature of the One World Government with an identification-number permanently affixed to their person so as to be readily-accessible. Such identifying-number shall be in the master-file of the NATO computer complex in Brussels, Belgium, subject to instant-retrieval by any agency of the One World Government at any time.
The master-files of the CIA, FBI, state and local police-agencies, IRS, FEMA, Social Security shall be vastly expanded and form the basis of personal records of all individuals in the United States.
Marriage shall be discouraged and disempowered and there shall be no family-life as we know it.
Children will be removed from their parents at an early-age and brought up by wardens as state-property. Using such protocols of the experiments carried out in East Germany under Erich Honnecker when children were taken-away from parents considered by the state to be disloyal-citizens.
Women will be degraded through the continued process of “women’s liberation” movements. Failure to comply with liberation dogma shall be punishable by severe reprisal. Abortion shall be commonplace after two children are born to a woman; records of compliance shall be contained in the personal-file of each woman in the One World Government’s regional-computers.
In China and high fertility regions, if a woman falls pregnant after she has previously given birth to two children, she shall be forcibly removed to an abortion-clinic for such an abortion and sterilisation will then be carried out.
Pornography shall be promoted, including homosexual and lesbian pornography. The use of
“recreational” drugs shall be promoted, with each person freely prescribed drugs at One World Government stores throughout the world.
Mind-control-drugs will be expanded and usage become compulsory. Such mind-control-drugs shall be added to food and/or water supplies without the knowledge and/or consent of the people. Drugs will be handed out on street corners by contractors hired by One World Government employees.
The slaveclass shall be able to spend their free-time in any mental stupor they wish. In this manner the non-elite masses will be reduced to the level and behaviour of controlled animals with
no will of their own, to be easily regimented and controlled.
The economic-system shall be based upon the ruling oligarchical class allowing just enough foods and services to be produced to keep the mass slave-labour-camps going. The illusion of wealth will be maintained by meaningless services, mass produced trinkets, and non-nutritive junk foods.
All wealth shall be aggregated in the hands of the elite members of the The Committee of 300. Each individual shall be indoctrinated to understand that he or she is totally-dependent upon the
state for survival. The world shall be ruled by Committee of 300 Executive Decrees which become instant law. Courts of punishment and not courts of justice shall exist. Industry is to be totally
destroyed along with nuclear-powered energy-systems.
Only the Committee of 300 members and their elitists shall have the right to any of the earth’s resources. Agriculture shall be solely in the hands of the The Committee of 300 with food-production strictly controlled. As these measures begin to take effect, large populations in the cities shall be forcibly-removed to remote areas and those who refuse to go shall be exterminated in the manner of the One World Government experiment carried-out by Pol Pot in Cambodia.
Euthanasia for the terminally-ill and the aged shall be compulsory. Essential-workers will be moved to other cities if the one they are in becomes overpopulated. Other non-essential workers will be chosen at random and sent to under-populated cities to fill “quotas”.
Countless “useless eaters” shall be eliminated by means of limited wars, organised epidemics of fatal rapid-acting diseases and starvation. Energy, food and water shall be kept at subsistence-levels for the non-elite, starting with the White-populations of Western Europe and
North America and then spreading to other races.
The population of Canada, Western Europe and the United States will be decimated more rapidly than on other continents, until the world’s population reaches a manageable-level, selected because they are people who have been regimented for centuries and who are accustomed to obeying authority without question.
From time to time there shall be artificially-contrived food and water shortages and medical-care to remind the masses that their very existence depends on the goodwill of the The Committee of 300.
After the destruction of housing, auto, steel and heavy-goods-industries, there shall be limited housing, and industries of any kind allowed to remain shall be under the direction of NATO’s Club of Rome as shall all scientific and space exploration development, limited to the elite under the control of the The Committee of 300. Space-weapons of all former nations shall be
destroyed along with nuclear-weapons.
All pharmaceutical-products, doctors, dentists and health-care workers will be registered in the central-computer databank and no medicine or medical-care will be prescribed without express
permission of regional-controllers responsible for each city, town and village.
The United States will be flooded by peoples of alien cultures who will eventually overwhelm White America; people with no concept of what the United States Constitution stands for and who will, in consequence, do nothing to defend it, and in whose minds the concept of liberty and justice is
so weak as to matter little. FOOD and shelter shall be the main concern.
No central bank except the Bank of International Settlement and the World Bank shall be allowed to operate. Private banks will be outlawed.
Remuneration for work-performed shall be under a uniform predetermined scale throughout the One World Government. There shall be no wage disputes allowed, nor any diversion from the standard uniform scales of pay laid-down by the One World Government. Those who break the law will be severely punished.
There shall be no cash or coinage in the hands of the non-elite. Only debt scrip for purchase of mass produced trinkets and junk food. All transactions shall be carried out by means of a debit-card which shall bear the identification-number of the holder. Any person who in any way infringes
the rules and regulations of the Committee of 300 shall have the use of his or her card suspended for varying times according to the nature and severity of the infringement.
Such persons will find, when they go to make purchases, that their card is blacklisted and they will not be able to obtain services of any kind. Attempts to trade “old” coins, that is to say silver coins of previous and now defunct nations, shall be treated as a capital-crime. All such coinage shall be required to be surrendered within a given time along with guns, rifles, explosives and automobiles.
Only the elite and One World Government high-ranking functionaries will be allowed private transport, weapons, coinage and automobiles.
If the offence is a serious-one, the card will be seized at the checking-point where it is presented. Thereafter that person shall not be able to obtain food, water, shelter and employment medical-services, and shall be officially-listed as an outlaw. Large bands of outlaws will thus be created and
they will live in regions that best afford subsistence, subject to being hunted-down and shot on sight.
Persons assisting outlaws in any way whatsoever, shall likewise be shot. Outlaws who fail to surrender to the police or military after a declared period of time, shall have a former family member selected at random to serve prison-terms in their stead.
Rival factions and groups such as Arabs and Jews and African tribes shall have differences magnified and be allowed to wage wars-of-extermination against each other, under the eyes of NATO and U.N. observers.
The same tactics will be used in Central and South America. These wars-of-attrition shall take place BEFORE the take-over of the One World Government and shall be engineered on every continent where large groups of people with ethnic and religious differences live, such as the Sikhs, Moslem Pakistanis and the Hindu Indians.
Ethnic and religious differences shall be magnified and exacerbated and violent conflict as a means of “settling” their differences shall be encouraged and fostered.
All information-services and print-media shall be under the control of the One World Government. Regular brainwashing-control-measures shall be passed-off as “entertainment” in the manner in which it was practised and became a fine-art in the United States.
Youths removed from “disloyal parents”, shall receive special-education designed to brutalise them. Youth of both sexes shall receive training to qualify as prison-guards for the One World labour-camp system.
It is obvious from the foregoing that much work remains to be done before the dawning of the New World Order can occur. We the Committee of 300 have long-ago perfected plans to destabilise
civilisation as we know it, this concludes merely the latest iteration of Committee of 300 plans to tame man, also known as “THE ENEMY”.
As was said at the height of the Red Terror when millions of Russians were being murdered: “Why should I concern myself with how many die? Even the Christian Bible says what is man that God should be mindful of him? For me men are nothing but a brain at one end and a shitfactory
at the other.”
Hey Tor,
“There shall be no cash or coinage in the hands of the non-elite. Only debt scrip for purchase of mass produced trinkets and junk food. All transactions shall be carried out by means of a debit-card which shall bear the identification-number of the holder. Any person who in any way infringes
the rules and regulations of the Committee of 300 shall have the use of his or her card suspended for varying times according to the nature and severity of the infringement.”
I remember a Heinlein short story that I read years ago that dealt with this issue. It was about a man convicted of theft who was punished by losing access to his money because his card was no longer valid. Cash had been outlawed and access to credit could only be obtained through what we would now recognize as an ATM. I think the title was “A Perfect Fit”. But, I can’t find it on the web.
Do you remember such a story?
Cheers,
Jeremy
I looked but couldn’t find it. Can you give me more to go on?
If I had $1500 I’d buy his complete works including letters and everything from Amazon, and look in there.
If anyone hasn’t read him, Farmer In The Sky is a great start.
http://www.saeedhassan.com/freelibrary/index.php?Robert%20A.%20Heinlein%20-%20Farmer%20In%20The%20Sky.pdf
Hi Tor,
I just read “A Perfect Fit” again, and found it interesting. However, Asimov was a New Deal Democrat, reflexive statist and naive progressive utopian. Heinlein’s individualism and understanding of coercive power, put him on a different philosophical level than Asimov.
Also, if someone can be judged by those they inspire, Asimov doesn’t fare so well.
“In his 1996 book To Renew America, U. S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote how he was influenced by reading the Foundation trilogy in high school.
Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, credits the Foundation series with turning his mind to economics, as the closest existing science to psychohistory.
Businessman and entrepreneur Elon Musk counts the series among the inspirations for his career.”
Jeremy
I too enjoy Asimov in a different light. What I do is just ignore and mentally delete all cloverisms. Much in the way I am totally oblivious to ads on a webpage. I probably only look at ads one in a thousand times when reading something.
Ad Block and Script Safe are algorithms you can adopt biologically in your mind with just a little effort. This adaptation is especially useful when you live with lots of women who are not in any way like minded to you.
Last night I had to sit through some scripted reality thing called Big Brother. Something just dripping with obvious propaganda, but I mentally block it all out, and its like I never even saw any of the “bad stuff.”
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Q6P-uJeOESk/maxresdefault.jpg
You can’t live the NAP without tolerance IMO. Especially when we are such a minuscule minority.
https://www.brainyquote.com/photos/a/aristotle100584.jpg
We will win out as we diverge and develop our own Heinleinian Speedtalk. We can already sense the Gulf. And the divide is only going to get deeper and wider as we interbreed and progress.
http://livskunskap.dyndns.org/veidos/english/literary/GULF.pdf
Asimov and Musk are bad. But Spielberg and Bezos are two that are far worse, not mentioned here because no Automobile connection as of yet.
I see Heinlein’s shilling for Big Tobacco as a good thing. It’s up to the individual readers to have independent minds to resist advertising pressure.
The noticeable thing about Asimov Musk and company is they’re staunch anti-smokers. Demonizers to use Eric’s parlance. I would say this demonization is nothing more than a new way of shilling for government or other kind of institutional control.
While mass production may have some degradating effects. The degradation of self-imposed mass-scarcities are far more inhuman and destructive at least in my opinion.
Hi Tor,
“The noticeable thing about Asimov Musk and company is they’re staunch anti-smokers. Demonizers to use Eric’s parlance. I would say this demonization is nothing more than a new way of shilling for government or other kind of institutional control.”
“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” –
Neitzsche
Jeremy
I think you’ve honed in to the keystone of their Open Conspiracy…
“The world shall be ruled by the Ruling Families of America (Committee of 300) Executive Decrees which become instant law. Courts of punishment and not courts of justice shall exist. Industry is to be totally destroyed along with nuclear-powered energy-systems.
All laws will be uniform under a legal-system of world-courts practising the same unified code of laws, backed up by a One World Government police-force and a One World unified-military to enforce laws in all former countries.”
H G Wells’ The Open Conspiracy (aka What Are We To Do With Our Lives?)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._G._Wells#The_Open_Conspiracy_.28aka_What_Are_We_To_Do_With_Our_Lives.3F.29_.281928.29
It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us.
These people I imagined would say first, “We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough.”
Then they would say, “What are we to do with our lives?”
And then, “Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.”
2006-ish VW Phaeton – Top Gear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm2swohEtYM