The Blah, Blah, Blob

I’m wanting to get posts out and I’m writing pretty much everyday but those two things have not quite come together. My last stack on the vagaries of transformation - which we are all in - was more of a ‘I’m still here but also still in it’ post.

And I’m still in it but that’s another essay. (I’m assuming the best time to tell a tale about a topsy-turvy plane ride is when you’re no longer in the air.)

In the meantime I watched this Mike Benz presentation last week on the coordination between the various entities that make up the Blob - including NATO, the Pentagon, Defense Department, the CIA, the NGO’s and Think Tanks used to further agendas and goals.

(Side-note: I really like ‘blob’ as a catch all name. It’s so undignified and ‘B’ movie throwbackish a term, while also suggesting that having to name them at all is barely worth the utterance-effort. ‘Blah, it’s the Blob.’)

As Benz’s explains The Atlantic Council, (seven board members are ex CIA heads) understood to be NATO’s think tank - which we fund - held a 2 day conference for journalists back in 2019 to teach them how to flag unwanted (or inconvenient) social media content as mis-information, dis-information or or mal-information in order to get it censored. (Mal-information is particularly malicious in that it’s factually true, but undermines a desired narrative.)

Yes, government funded - taxpayer funded - conferences with the focus of teaching journalists how to undermine free speech, the bedrock of a free country.

If it feels too stupid that’s because it is. You can’t make this stuff up.

The framework used - and being taught in this two day conference of idiocy and criminality - is called the four ‘D’s of misinformation: dismiss, distort, distract, dismay.

The 45 minute video is eye-opening in some respects. Especially mid-section where he detours into Ukraine and oil and what happens when leaders don’t go along with the US bullies.

Benz wants us to see our tax dollars in action, and the coordination of players that are involved in bringing down our democracy. He’s understandably outraged (also better at staying focused when he’s being interviewed). His authentic outrage is very welcome and a reassuringly human response, especially in contrast to watching robot-like ‘journalists’ going along with kindergarten-level exercises that include repeating the 4-D’s out-loud (like good girls and boys) as they are trained to nicely obey and comply with government authority. Clearly, peer-pressure is built into the formula.

But here’s the surprising thing in watching this. It’s so old school, so embarrassingly rudimentary in approach: “Repeat after me “Dismiss, distort, distract, dismay” it had the inverse effect that Benz likely intended.

Sure it’s outrageous that this is going on, more outrageous that we are paying for it, but it looks like a scene from an under-budgeted dystopian mini-series. It did not scare me - it was the opposite of scary.

Yes, we know they have lots of tools and technologies and algorithms to manipulate and steer social-media users, but if they have to do this level of convincing too - that means their tricks and tools are not working very well.

That means they are desperate.

Rather than increasing in my mind the size of the Wall of Sh*t we’re having to get over, it reduced it.

Truth outs. Slowly. Circuitously. Sometimes it takes several iterations as it shakes off the layers of lies - and those layers get more subtle and harder to discern - but out it will, in the end.

Given the absurdity on display in this video, I’d suggest we are getting close. Their control matrix isn’t holding and they have fewer and fewer options. This makes ‘them’ more dangerous short-term, but it also makes them more vulnerable.

We’ve been in a grips of a reality-story that shaped us, shaped our perceptions, was essentially writing us in as bit-players it could do with as it pleased.

It’s going to flip. Soon, those who’ve seen through that reality-story, decidedly reject it and throw it off, will start writing their own story.

And we can write the blob right into oblivion. (Or maybe keep them as ‘B’ movie characters for our entertainment?)

We’ll decide. Not the Blob.

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