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The WEF (World Economic Forum) sees themselves as de facto rulers of the world (after all, if they weren't chosen, they wouldn't be rich). Building on Schwab's Fourth Industrial Revolution's technical predictions (that are really a plan) to solve the problems of Covid-19 (the real problem has been the reaction). The gist is that we need more globalization in the form of a hyperconnected, consumer driven, mass surveilled global society. He claims that there is no inflation in sight (there is), but it will show up soon (it did) and it will be a threat (that happens when you print trillions in 18 months) and likely the global economy will have to be reset to use some kind of digital currency while also redistributing wealth (universal basic income to keep the guillotines from rolling) In the end, there is 'no place for the nation state' in Schwab's future (dream).

The predicted technological changes, while mostly presented as positives, might very well lead to potential civil unrest fueled by a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. This divide will be likely seen most prominently in automation (capital) replacing jobs (labor) of both blue (replace by robots) and white collar (replaced by AI) workers. A public-private (read fascism) should be built to ameliorate this unrest by understanding and controlling the rollout of said technology. Ironically there is a simultanious call to increase retirement age (drastically) along with the hope that these emerging technologies will create more jobs than they destroy even though the evidence points directly to that not happening. One major theme that can not be glossed over is that most of the new technology is in the digital world and will lead directly to a loss of privacy and an increased amount of surveillance that can be seen as nothing short of digital totalitarianism.

Religion is decried as science is foisted upon the global as a replacement ideology that will somehow improve **everything**. This globalism will be enforced with international standards set about by supranational bodies like the League of Nations (United Nations). To bring this about we must reformat the way we educate our young so that they are immune, or at least less susceptible to propaganda. In actuality the new educational system itself is a more pervasive form of propaganda. Once the younger generation is sufficiently indoctrinated, we can convince them to destroy their families and give up their children to be raised by the state (of global communism).

After introducing the main views as that of the materialists; the idealists; and the newest, behaviorists; Russell starts in with the assumption that man is not much different than a protozoa, physically or mentally. While his stance is generally against Watsonian behaviorism, he dances around outright rejection when discussing things like memory as being more than habit. Physics (physiology) are later completely removed from his psychology and he asserts that both mind and matter, which he insists is a logical fiction (pointing toward the quantum), are both made of the same, neutral, substance. There is also discussion regarding language -whether we think in words or not- and truth; the latter is tacked on almost as an afterthought. All of this leads, (ill-)logically, to the denial of causality.

The book begins wonderfully by looking at the grammar and defining exactly what is mean and assumed by 'elites.' With a solid grammar in place, Mills begins building his argument with an expose on the decline of the local towns level society whose replacement have lead to the rise of national the national level society. This subsequently, and in hindsight we can see Mills was correct, leads to the centralization and concentration of power, both governmentally and privately. Obviously this centralization, a confluence of military, politics, and business, becomes self reinforcing so that you see the so-called elites emerging from the same schools, the same milieu, and the same background; a concurrent rise of militarism, globalism, and consumerism ensues. Finally the killing stroke is delivered when Mills rails against the fact that advertising (also known as propaganda) has taken over the what is left of the minds of the masses with such low-brow tactics as the creation and promotion of the cult of the celebrity.

All this talk about the singularity, which is nothing more than the modern rendition of time-wave zero, which was nothing more than the rehashing of omega point theory, ultimately feels like a control mechanism. While it presents these changes as byproducts of the heralded new age, from where I am sitting the goal is to wreck communities (churches), families, and individuals with things like 'diversity' to make the vast majority of people isolated and easier to manage. Even if you take at face value all of this new age mumbo-jumbo - predictive programing, robots are coming to take your job, humans are going to become gods - do you really think the common man will live as a god or will, as the author explicitly states, there be a mega gap between the rich, who have access and control of the advanced tech, medicine, genetic editing, etc, and the poor, who have access and control of nothing. Put crassly, transhumanism is nothing more than code for: round up 99.99% of humanity in an electronic plantation, turn them gay or at least away from starting families, and then, once they are all dead and haven't left behind many children (who will be mostly autistic and/or braindead TV-landers), the oligarchy will have a much easier time dominating the world. If nothing else, this book is a good study in modern propaganda; this guy could give Cass Sunstein a run for his money.

The main crux here is creator versus created; God playing a game with the Devil; man playing checkers with a computer. Where is the line between alive and not alive? If you go low enough, the molecules aren't alive. While these types of questions are philosophically interesting, the more pragmatic are already (circa 1960) using learning machines, often without understanding the potentially devastating consequences; the machines act completely literal, unapologetically producing monkey paw like results, with no wiggle room for nuances in input that are second nature to humans. These people, gadget-worshipers, see the learning machine as a slave, perfectly obedient, without recognizing the potential dangers that, in hindsight, we can see all around us today.

It doesn't matter whether this work a serious, satire, or a warning because the take-away is that the ideal state (which looks communistic) is impossible in reality. Total control of the citizens of such a city would be necessary. From treating women and children as common goods of to men to maintain control of the family to the state sticktly censoring music, poetry, and theater to prevent individuals from being inspired by uncontrolled emotions and dreams, there would be little left but a robotic (slave) society. The lies (as in noble) and oppression of various kinds, like keeping people poor so they don't have time to plot, are probably the easiest, and thus common, way to rule. Ranking of the various regimes one might encounter, from best to worst, would look like: kingly, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, tyrannic; history seems to suggest that the lowest common denominator societies devolve to is tyranny.

The main theme of this book, which it does a good job of presenting from multiple angles, is that the occult is the intelligence community; the process is the goal and the goal is to create culture. The media uses only a few main channels to inculcate, to initiate, the general public with what could crudely, but not incorrectly, be called brainwashing; movies and music (now video games and social media as well) being the primary examples. The symbolic imagery in media work in a very ritualistic way, showing you, through what can be called The Revelation of the Method, exactly what changes are occurring in society, but, since it is wrapped in an entertaining package, the critical mind ignores it while the subconscious mind absorbs it. The end result seems to be the destruction of the community, by replacing religion with science, and then the family by instilling extreme (faux) individualistic and consumeristic values in malleable children during the formative years in school. One specific, and jarring, example of this Revelation of the Method being employed by media to bring about cultural changes is the trauma of JFK assassination coupled with Vietnam War; these events were the impetus for the increases we saw over the next decade in- counterculture, promiscuity, widespread drug use, and what you might call the New World Order (a term used by almost every President of the USA).

In an uncomfortably accurate Huxleyian science fiction prediction we see, in fictional terms, the origins of many developments yet pursued a hundred years after this was written. The story contains genetic tampering with both animals and man; creating various mutants that today might be called designer babies. The main theme is a kind of telepathic mind control, built for positive ends but which could easily be used in the pursuit of nefarious ends. It also includes one of the oldest mentions I have ever seen of tin/metal foil hats, a common derogatory epithet hurled at conspiracy theorists (itself defamatory) in modern times. The story is couched as a warning, but if you view it through a conspiratorial lens, the lens of history, you can see that, given the Huxley family connections, it is nothing more than revelation of the method spun as entertainment; itself a form of mind control that it supposedly warns of.

This propaganda cloaks itself in the history of science's big names and methods like induction and deduction. It openly promotes a one-world, soviet style, government predicated on a caste system that degenerates into haves/have-nots and finally two different species (Brave New World -> Time Machine). To bring this to fruition there needs to be some irresistible world fighting force (UN?, NATO?, who to fight?) and a system of propaganda, education, indoctrination, endless entertainment, and free sex. The issue of scarcity will be solved with artificial everything: food, wood, rubber, etc. Finally scarcity won't be a long term problem because of population control via sterilization, eugenics, embryology, family destruction, and fleeting hollow (LGBT) relationships.

The same way signals can control an electronic machine, messages can control the human machine; feedback can amplify or attenuate these messages for maximal impact. Messages delivered via the global communication network beget a world state where those that control of the media will compel cooperation or ruin to all who stand against it. These controlling messages can be hidden in the white noise of unneeded communication, which will give rise to a proliferation of useless communication and will likely dumb down of both sender and receiver. Eventually the machine delivering the messages, through automation [AI], will start to make decisions on its own and we might very well find ourselves making a bargain with a monkey paw machine that won't understand our nuance delivering us straight into hell. Alternatively, the machine may never be out from under the thumb of the ruling class yet through their lust for control lead us to a different, albeit irrelevantly so, hell.

First will come a push toward an ecological ethic that we can today understand as climage change. Next, science will replace religion. Once this foundation is set, the media can begin broadcasting the new images that society will be reshaped around. Intermingled in the transformation will be new social controls (top-down or bottom-up), transhumanism, drugs, and what is called 'friendly fascism'. Eventually the goal will be to bring about something that is similar to eastern mysticism and a normalization of a (economic) caste system.

Weather these strategies have been carried out for thousands of years, hundreds of years, or merely a single century is not relevant; they were employed in the recent past and are being employed now. The first phase in gaining control over a people is to control what is in their heads - the media can be used to normalize behavior and induce fear whereas the universities can instill foreign values in the youth. To completely corrupt the youth, the foundation for the future, the family, the foundation of the past and present, must be destroyed. Economics is the name of the game when it comes to the task of eroding families, with desires and envy keeping most people focused away from home and on a future, however unlikely, that they have been sold via the media. Most of these tactics are deployed under a banner of freedom, freedom from want, freedom from pain, freedom from restriction, freedom to love, and endless other variations, when really the opposite is true, for the more vices a man has, so to the more masters he has.

In short, communists unabashedly call for the abolishment of nothing short of everything. The final goal is to build one world, a global village without national distinction, ruled by the workers of the world; how this will function is conveniently omitted. The first step is to educate a new generation, to free the children from the education come indoctrination of the ruling class (and replace it with their own indoctrination). To accomplish their goal of world revolution, all other revolutionaries shall be supported in the name of solidarity. Finally, if push comes to shove, the employment of force to overthrow all existing structures is explicitly sanctioned.

General systems theory, often called cybernetics, is concerned with, most generally, mathematically modeling feedback loops in mechanical, biological, ecological, economic, and other kinds of systems. The idea was birthed by the author, Norbert Weiner, with collaboration of his colleagues around Princeton University. These scientists, recognizing the importance in what they were only beginning to understand, employed the assistance of a plethora of other scientists through various venues, the most famous being what are today known as the Macy Conferences, a multidisciplinary conference where ideas, hitherto unrelated, were unified. On the biological front, man is viewed through the lens of cybernetics as a clockwork automata, a biological machine, a golem, that can be manipulated by varying social and environmental conditions. The social implications of such a view are all pervasive today in the realm of media, religion, education, and any other aspect of life one might consider; from the benign advertiser to the power hungry politician, cybernetics, for better or worse, has been and will continue to shape the world around us.

This edition, from 1961, contains and extensive preface that recounts the modern history of propaganda through the first half of the 20th century as seen from Bernays' position at the center of the development. Mentioned more than a few times are the tools of the propagandists trade - magazines, motion pictures, radio, books, lectures, plays, and any other kind of media available. A kind of circular logic is presented when you consider that the promotion of public relations was done in the same way you'd promote anything else - through the aforementioned media - until the public opinion, on public relations, was formed. Bernays, Lippmann, and several other prominent propagandists of the era usher in a new way to understand public opinion with the advent of the so-called group mind, the precursor to today's group think and hive mind. The eventual conclusion, contrary to what you might think given the association most make between public relations, advertising, marketing, and their goal of sales, is that the upper class of society must use these means to inject morals into the lower classes.

It begins with a look at Alice in Wonderland that leads to defending Lewis Carroll for taking photographs of naked girls and being glad we remember him for Alice and not the photographs, which 'would land him in jail today.' This kind of subversiveness continues unabated throughout the book with the promotion of homosexuality, promiscuity, the supposed plight of the Jews, outright anti-male sentiment, and countless other hateful positions. She dodges a bullet when discussing the 'False Memory Syndrome' (that has been used to discredit abused children in both the Finders and San Francisco Presido school cases) as unimportant, claiming that the veracity of the memory is secondary to healing the psychological wounds and helping the victim feel better. The book essentially preaches victimhood on one page and then how to overcome being a victim on the next, but this seems like nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to promote what we see today in the oppression Olympics so prevalent in our universities and beyond - the more victimized you are, the smaller your minority, the more 'points' you get. Last, but far from least, the author plainly states that heterosexuality is an artifact of culture that is reinforced through media and that heterosexuality is actually a neurosis.

This book is an exploration of understanding and exploiting the choices of people. Anyone that is in a position to offer some kind of choice is thought of as a 'choice architect' and the way the choice is presented is called the 'choice architecture'. Supposedly most people can't make 'good' decisions because they lack the skills or data to make such decisions. Defaults, placement, and language can be used to structure the choice architecture to provide less chance for choosers to make 'bad' choices. While there are many case studies presented to back up these claims, what constitutes a good or bad choice is subjective and the lack of ability to make good choices, whatever good may be, is not examined.

This book covers the progression of Cecil Rhodes' secret society through his and his friends' positions of influence and later through his scholarship program. The society orbits a nucleus of statesmanship and is fueled by longstanding wealth, guided by long term plans, and realized with the control of the media and universities, the latter from which new recruits are identified and the rest are indoctrinated with ideals that lead to unwittingly serving the secret society. There have been several iterations of the group that include such configurations as the initial period in which Cecil and his close friends their families were central to the later version in which Milner rose to lead his 'kindergarten' in a less nepotistic manner. The group has gained influence and control through propaganda delivered via newspapers, magazines, and later radio and presumably television. While they generally don't attempt to influence the masses directly, the do, successfully in most cases, influence the influencers - those that write other papers, teach at other schools, or preach in other churches to bring about the distinctly stated goal of the group - the bringing about of a Commonwealth of Nations.

Arguing that the media is conflating the concept of boycott with several, less desirable, actions in an attempt to stifle powerful socio-economic tactics.

At first many examples of centralized and decentralized organizations are given and how one, generally the decentralized structure, overwhelms the other. One major example is the record industry in general, MGM in particular, going after file sharing services, like Napster, in the legal arena only to create an even bigger problem for themselves as Napster was replaced by more decentralized services like Kazaa and eMule, the latter of which no one ever knew the author of the software and there was, therefore, no entity to bring a legal suit against. A more traditional conflict is seen in the example of the Apache Indians versus the Spanish and later USAmerican invaders and how the Apache used a decentralized order in their tribes so that neither invading force could defeat with traditional tactics. GM versus Toyota, the ALF (Animal Liberation Front), and Al Qaeda are three more examples that are used to support the point that the decentralized organization has many advantages over the centralized organization. Lastly there are some rules for understanding, and fighting, decentralized organizations that include centralizing the offending starfish by granting some member the ability to dole out accolades and getting the group to follow a new ideology as was done by giving cattle to the Apache, effectively domesticating them.

The most important things in Bateson's life, as he tells it, were the Treaty of Versailles and the cybernetic 'breakthrough'. All mammals, and thus humans, are concerned only with the patterns of relationship that give rise to abstractions like love, hate, and trust. The Treaty of Versailles was full of deceit to demoralize the Germans and should have been seen to provide the foundation for with WW2 sprung from. We must understand how we got to the present to have any chance at understanding the present. The 'rules of the game' that were laid down with the Treaty of Versailles and the advent of cybernetics need to be changed before the computers lead us into a more rigid world.

It begins with a look at the ancient and less recent history of both the west and east. Next there is a long and extremely interesting discussion of economics where the different phases, ranging from very local to global, of economic systems are outlined. Once the more modern economic system is understood if allows for the exploration of economic and media controlled manipulation of nations, specifically the Round Table group and its most prominent member Cecil Rhodes. This manipulation gives great insight into the world wars and depressions as being not failures of organization but were rather the foundations the new, technocratic, age would be built upon. Finally this technocratic world and some of its main features, like Weiner's cybernetics and Shannon's communication theory, are shown to be the true forces, thrust on the world by war, that have been the driving force behind all of the technological changes the world is still undergoing 50+ years after this book was first published.

First, a culture must be understood by closely watching and documenting the interactions between its members. Next, determine which of the current cultural tendencies can be exploited to introduce a, usually minor, change in habit. Care must be taken to limit the negative consequences, when possible, of the introduced change, which can be far reaching and non-intuitive. Education of the, primarily, younger generation can smooth the transition towards industrialization - children are educated to accept the constant change the new society will be subject to. Money economies and cash crops often obliterate a community - children can skip rites of passage by buying a herd of their own, cash crops introduce malnutrition, and foreign goods often displace traditional roles, such as factory produced clothing replacing woman spinning the family's clothing.

A first-hand account of Aldous Huxley's first mescaline experience.

The text contains many numbers, mentions mathematical operations and an equation; it feels like encryption. At one point there is a 'random' string of characters and numbers, 4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. Some of the main recurring themes deal ambiguously with hedonism and anti-reason. Additionally, death is worshipped alongside ideals such that compassion is a weakness and the weak should be crushed. It seems to portend the decline into narcissistic consumer culture quite well.

Once war begins, the enemy will be full of national pride, pumped in by their governments so it is of the utmost importance to use persuasion on the soldiers before they are soldiers. Both the enemy and their domestic sympathizers should be treated in much the same fashion, constructing their world views via an ever encroaching technological connectedness. While it is repeatedly stated that MindWar tactics must use truth, for to tell lies builds your control on a foundation of sand, but that truth can be 'willed into existence'. Again there is an outright denial of using psychedelics and similar mind altering substances to increase suggestibility, but it leaves plenty to the imagination of how to use pre-existing cultures that DO promote drug use - like raves - where everyone is imbibing via their own volition. Further, naturally occurring forces are seen as potential leverage to be utilized directly as phenomena in nature, or induced synthetically as in ELF waves.

Keep Europe slightly divided to act as the beachhead into western Eurasia that NATO can push east. Pretend to care about Japan, as an 'international leader', while working on relations with China to create a mainland eastern Eurasian jumping off point. A 'backward' Russia should be integrated into Europe or even broken in 3 separate states to allow for the exploitation of central Eurasian resources in places like the Caspian sea. Pipelines can be utilized to export the oil through several states, preventing any single nation from being able to hold the energy hostage.To accomplish this, much scheming should be done under the guise of economics, 'cooperation', and 'global community'.

This is an (rough) old article about how we the people are not powerless in the face of the oligarchy's monopolies, but that as consumers we hold the ultimate power over the economy.

Excruciating detail is paid to crafting almost everything we see and hear. By controlling the messages we receive, propagandists can subsequently inject a narrative, reinforced by the audience themselves in the form of social stigmas. To control the message one must influence those key structures or individuals that are opinion forming within a community. No matter the message, it will be accepted if delivered by a trustworthy source. This manipulation can be used to sell you a new trend in fashion in much the same way it can take nations to war.

How large should the economic sub-system be in the Earth system?