How Political Mind Control Works, Bill Cosby Faces Another Setback in Sexual-Assault Trial

How Political Mind Control Works - Joe Brewer Jul 21, 2016

We were told the internet age would harken in a rebirth of democracy—or the beginnings of it in places where it has never been. That the power elites of old would be overwhelmed by the self-organizing masses. That the real power of centralized hierarchies would be supplanted by the new power of emergent social movements.

And now we have millions of people in the United States rallying against the system by supporting Donald Trump. We see that a choice architecture in our elections is structured to give us one of two pro-corporate candidates who serve the status quo logic of exploitative economic policies that funnel wealth from those very same self-organized masses into the bank accounts of themselves and their crony peers....

One of the most important discoveries to come out of this large body of research (spanning fields like psychology, linguistics, evolutionary studies, neuroscience, anthropology, and computer science) is that the human mind is physically structured to conceal the meaning-making process from conscious awareness.

We look out into the world and it “just makes sense” to us. Our brains wire themselves across our lives to recognize familiar patterns—filling them in where they only partially appear....

But we don’t have conscious access to the photons hitting our retinas to deliver this visual information into our skulls. We aren’t able to feel the part of our visual cortex that detects edges and boundaries or fills in colors as this information is sent on to other parts of our brains to signify emotional significance and produce “gestalt” meanings that arise fully formed in our awareness.

This is how our minds work. We construct illusions of meaning that we then act out as meaningful things while we go about our lives. We experience the world as richly structured and meaningful because our brains and bodies evolved across millions of years to become the cultural animals we are today....

I want to make the provocative claim that the illusion of power IS a kind of real power. This is how Donald Trump as a symbolic icon (or Hillary Clinton as a cultural meme) can wield so much influence to preserve status quo arrangements of economic and political power.

Throughout the history of our species, our ancestors spent 99% 0f their time living in small hunter-gatherer societies made up of a few dozen to a few hundred people. They were almost entirely egalitarian because everyone knew everyone else and would-be dictators were kept in place through dynamic processes of shaming, incentivizing, expelling, or in rare cases executing them....

But all of this changed with the rise of large, hierarchical city states after the birth of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. As division of labor arose across the growing populations in these settlements, it became possible for a power elite to take advantage of social divisions to divide the population against itself and stay in power.

Flash forward to the time when technological advances enable us to produce vastly complicated systems of education and communication. Where we have video and audio information merged into television content and a literate population capable of thinking and acting through rich “downloads” of culture telling them who to trust, where their people came from, what is good and just about the tribe they belong to, and how other tribes are the root cause of their woes.

This kind of environment “selects” for the use of propaganda to divide and conquer a population. It enables the stories about reality to float across the minds of many people (who then repeat them reflexively each time the relevant prompts are present in their environments). This creates a situation where the illusion of power is one of the most powerful tools for social control available....

And the same power elites (who stand for corporate control of our own government as a tool of foreign exploitation of governments overseas) remain in power. They control us by letting our illusions run rampant.

Said another way, it is us who are collectively in control. But our blindness to the roles we perform unconsciously keep us from seeing it. We are the invisible energy—the life force of politics—that these elites use to become powerful.

I say enough is enough. It is time for more awakenings....
https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/the-illusion-of-power-is-a-kind-of-real-power-d0ba1dce8e9f#.2t203pkqo


Bill Cosby Faces Another Setback in Sexual-Assault Trial
A prosecutor argued Thursday that Cosby’s request to move the trial’s location is merely "delay and distraction." by Hilary Weaver January 6, 2017

Last week, Bill Cosby’s legal team filed a motion to move his upcoming trial out of its current suburban Philadelphia location, or bring in a jury from elsewhere. Cosby’s team, in filing this motion, claimed that there has been “widespread negative press coverage” surrounding his case. In legal documents filed Thursday obtained by Vanity Fair, a prosecutor stated that the comedian’s trial should remain where it is, dealing Cosby yet another blow in just the latest of a string of requests from his legal team to try to prevent a guilty verdict.

While Montgomery district attorney Kevin Steele requested in his latest filing the judge to deny the trial’s relocation, he said he wouldn’t oppose Cosby’s team’s request to bring in the jury from elsewhere in Pennsylvania. He asked that once the jury is selected, the judge bring them back to Montgomery County for the trial. Any of Steele’s requests will need to be certified by a judge before going forward.

In the documents, Steele called Cosby’s continued attempts to prolong the pre-trial process a “continued strategy of delay and distraction.” Steele noted: “He has insistently blamed everyone and everything—except himself, of course—for the situation he now finds himself in.”

The filing also stated that Cosby is a “celebrity who is alleged to have committed nearly fifty sexual assaults,” therefore “he cannot expect to find a jury venire—anywhere—that is completely oblivious to the facts surrounding the case.” Steele argued against the type of special treatment for the rich and famous Cosby appears to be requesting, stating celebrities ”would be immune to prosecution” if the court sought jury members with complete ignorance of a widely publicized case.

It was also reported this week that Steele and Cosby’s lawyers are facing off over whether or not to allow 13 of Cosby’s nearly 50 accusers to testify against him in the court case. Steele said that the mounting number of alleged incidents of sexual assault Cosby is accused of committing decreases the likelihood they were unintentional. The comedian’s attorneys argued that Steele is merely bringing the charges against Cosby because he needs a big win during his campaign for D.A.

Cosby is accused of drugging and molesting Andrea Constand, a woman he met through Temple University, in 2004. He has made several attempts to fight the charges against him in addition to the motions filed in the past two weeks....
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/01/bill-cosby-trial-location-change