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Byron Shire
March 29, 2024

Mind manipulation

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Not all ‘news’ is new or true. This doesn’t mean it’s all old or false – as one correspondent said in order to attack me for saying it – a common form of fallacious argument. But the raw, immediate truth can cause significant cognitive dissonance. So, sometimes the truth is hidden under lies or revealed slowly.

An example of old ‘news’ is the ABC’s May report of a UFO sighting in January. This included film footage, and the pilots’ conversation about it. The excuse for the delay in reporting it was that the military had not released it. And the report included, ‘They are not a threat to national security’. How could the ABC know that?

Is this real news, or fake? About UFOs – it’s not easy to tell.

Decades of reports show that they outmanoeuvre our fastest jets, neutralise nuclear missiles, monitor our space missions, and are impossible to understand.

But we can’t prove any of that; which suppresses the massive cognitive dissonance that would occur if we could. No government wants us to know that we are not alone, cannot control our own airspace, and are more akin to monkeys in a zoo than free intelligent beings. And so, the ‘news’ is not always new and not always true.


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6 COMMENTS

  1. As the unfortunate residents of the Soviet Union used to say of their two major Communist Party-controlled newspapers, Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“News,”) “There’s no truth in the news and no news in the truth.”
    These days, of course, in Vladimir Putins new, improved Russia, the situation has fortunately been reversed!

  2. ET ‘phones home’. It’s not on. Now every-one
    will know he lives happily in The Rivers. See,
    it’s Good News Week… somewhere.

  3. John, I say, ‘ Is this real news, or fake? About UFOs – it’s not easy to tell.’
    And you say the ABC report shows that I’m not alone. How does it do that when we don’t know whether it’s real or fake?
    And you ask if I’m waiting for ET to phone home. Whatever do you mean? I’m not waiting for anything.
    And Stefanie thinks, ‘everyone will know he lives happily in The Rivers’ . How could anyone know anything about ET from one unverified ABC report of uncertain truth value?
    Ridiculing whatever isn’t in one’s reality paradigm is a popular way of avoiding it. When the wright brothers flew the first plane many people refused to look, ‘If God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings’
    they argued. When Galileo invented a telescope, many people would not look through it. They knew it was not possible to see distance things close up. It’s a contradiction. When Bell invented the telephone one business man in London said, ‘We don’t need such devices, we have plenty of messenger boys’

  4. Hey, okay. There’s ‘fakery & fake-news’ all around.
    No one’s saying there isn’t. The brutality on our so
    -called social media ain’t social most of the time &
    due to the lies [whoppers] I’m not on any of them.
    Murdoch’s news is off the charts for ‘mind-bend’
    surgery. If you have an answer on how to get rid
    of fakes please let me know. Re; the ABC’s held
    back is – I’d say – true. The military presence is
    Orwellian in 2020. And that’s the cold warring
    fact we’ve got to live with unless there’s a
    revolution for ‘TRUTH’.

  5. In war, truth is the first casualty. eg, ‘They have weapons of mass-destruction’ said President Bush in the Iraq war; and, ‘God told me to attack Iraq’.
    What if ScoMo’s God tells him to attack China?
    And it doesn’t even need a war for politicians to propagate a lie, eg ‘I did not have sex with that woman’ said President Clinton. True only on one narrow definition of sex. But I’ll bet he enjoyed it.
    Yes, we need a revolution – from lying head trips to a loving heart, in my opinion.
    Maybe we’ll make it there before self-destructing. or maybe not.

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