The Miseducation of America

Let me start my comments by saying I don’t think this extremely sharp woman is lying. I am sure that she did find, read, and disseminate the information claimed and that there is some truth to the plan of dumbing down the populace of not just the U.S. but the world.

But…

This is produced by Alex Jones and InforWars.com and I have serious misgivings about trusting the editing done to fairly represent the information as she actually gave it in the interview. If you want to know why you should probably take anything AJ releases with a healthy dose of skepticism, look up Michael Rupert’s video on YouTube about his lying.

Now, as a man born in 1980 I was one of the first cohorts of students to go K-12 with computers. Unless Mrs. Thompson is under the impression that there is some buried software that works below conscious levels none, zero, not one piece of software I used in school ever followed a model of Pavlovian conditioning. Before I even started school I was using a Commodore Vic-20 computer (my father was a computer hobbyist) and I helped my Kindergarten teacher set up our first Apple II computers in class because they didn’t know how. I showed them how to run games and software. What software? Through school I can list all of the software I ever had experience with except on piece of scientific instrumentation software we used for physics and recording data from pressure sensors.

Orgeon Trail, Carmen SanDiego (USA, WORLD, TIME), Logo Writer, Some Frog dissection “simulator”, Mavis Beacon, The Print Shop, Claris Works, Aldus Super Paint, Hyper Card, Mac OS 7 – 9, Netscape, Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM, Internet Explorer, A Japanese flash card program, Microsoft Encarta, 3D Studio Max, Some Astronomy / Physics simulator for planetary bodies.

I graduated High School in 1998 from a school that had a top of the line computer lab, full T-1 internet access, and multiple computers in every class. Unless Apple, Claris, MS, Broderbund, and a host of other vendors were installing subliminal messages in their software none of the software I ever came in contact with at school could possibly have been construed in the way Mrs. Thompson describes in this video which, in her defense, may be because of the editing done. I haven’t read her book.

Is it possible it has changed since then? Sure. But I watched as both my sister-in-laws went from Junior High through High School and were provided extremely tightly controlled MacBooks for use that had little to no software beyond MS Office and the installed OS. Where is all this mind control software? Where is the evidence? Is it an East Coast thing? When my nephews play Reader Rabbit or a game like Math Blasters or Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 40, how can you say they are not thinking or are not engaged? Doesn’t it take the same mental skills to add, subtract, multiply, and divide on paper as on screen? It can’t be that the concerted effort to push for cybernating schools is to do away with costly, heavy, easily damaged, and quickly out of date books. (Especially books for science and recent history like encyclopedias…) No. It must be something sinister.

And here I am not at all under the spell of this plan to corrupt my mind having gone right through its prime years. I mean holy crap man think! My generation was taught to use a card catalog and then had to use them for only two year because technology is moving so quickly and they were gone. If they wanted us completely dumb and servile why did I have to learn boolean search techniques in 1994 to get what I needed to write research papers? You don’t teach people how to find information and then have to un-train them to not use it – it just isn’t efficient.

Enough on education let us talk now about the “NWO”

I have heard that the NWO started brainwashing kids with public education since public education was created. Here Mrs. Thompson and Alex Jones would have us believe that it didn’t start (conveniently) until after their childhood and that pre-1950 or so everything was perfect with children getting their values from Church and parents alone. I am sorry but this is simply not true. We have all seen videos of 1940s, 50s, and 60s propaganda films shown in classrooms deliberately misleading children into believing marijuana will make up a rapist and that you can survive a direct nuclear attack by ducking and covering under a sheet of newsprint.

It is just a fact that since the deliberate creation of the modern consumer mindset thanks to the likes of Edward Bernays that the values of the U.S. have been shifting. Alex Jones and the Infowars.com crew seem to think that there was some kind of golden period of history where everything in America was just clean and happy with great family values. It wasn’t. America, like any entity has been in a state of constant change and flux since it was founded.

Let me ask a question to any NWO theory supporters out there… Why would “they” want to institute a system of communism where the state is responsible for providing for its people (however meagerly) when with corporatism we have to fight for the means to provide for ourselves? Moreover, why would they have allowed Russia to fall apart if communism was their dream? What possible benefit do they gain from having a world public that is uniformly stuck under the same outwardly oppressive system when right now we are stuck under the discrete and much more heinous debt based system? How does that quote go now? “With traditional slavery you have to feed and house your slaves. With economic slavery the slaves feed and house themselves.”

I don’t disagree that wars are created on purpose. I don’t disagree that there is top level collusion to consolidate power and to reap huge profits. But if there is any NWO it is already here and has been for a long time through the move toward a consumption based economy that requires infinite growth or very hard “resets” through wars and depressions to survive. Unifying people under one Marxist, communist, socialist, UN controlled super state is just way too much work and complication when “they” already have all the power they need to do whatever “they” want. But Alex Jones is wrong in thinking there was some golden era that we need to “get back to.”

A dumbed down populace goes to work, watches crap TV, goes out and shops too much on credit, and helps drive the wheels of the false economy along. It does what it is told already and because it does the leaders are now scrambling not to implement an NWO but to hold on to the power they have wrested from us all up to now. Go read “The End of Work” by Jeremy Rifkin. Look into the trends and predictions made by Technocracy, Inc, R. Buckminster Fuller, and others. These changes we are seeing have been on the horizon for decades. Thanks to our ever advancing collective knowledge and profit motive based industry they are now on the cusp of flowing over in a runaway cycle of Technological Unemployment. Because “we” already do what we are told by media, the consumer mindset has primed industry for this fall because industry must maintain profitability and profitability comes through capital investment in automation. But this sword is double edged and eventually drives down purchasing power as more and more labor is displaced by machines. The world and industry elites know this and they have just been playing a game to try to head it off by adding layer after layer of complexity to the system through economics, war, and media control. Their tool box is nearly empty.

It is this viewer’s humble opinion, after years of looking at and trying to process this stuff, that The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement offer the most sane ideas for a better society. Stop worrying about the supposed NWO. Stop pining after some dream of what America was and look forward to what the world really is. One Earth. One humanity. One really big set of problems.

Peace

Damn I missed one more point I wanted to comment on… “Upward mobility” I know there is either an RSA Animate video or a TED talk (tired now and can’t recall who presented it) that dispels the idea that we really have much social mobility at all. Either way, at the half way point through this documentary I have to stop watching. The idea that we can all make something of ourselves in America if we just work hard enough has been trounced enough times out there by people who are professionals studying this stuff. Simply put society moves up or down in the standard of living generation over generation. Todays poor live better than many kings of the past, but we still consider them poor. Additionally, relatively few individuals in any one generation move up or down the socio-economic ladder. The idea that there is a plan to restrict our ability to “make it” is false because most of us never have or ever had the opportunity to “make it.” Social stratification is built in and doesn’t require a communist-socialist-marxist plan contrived in secret meetings.