Tag: PsyOps

All Hail Project Troy

After World War Two the US started fighting a new war, the Cold War….and this was fought mostly on the world stage with the use of propaganda and manipulation…..1954 the CIA won a conflict in Guatemala using psychological warfare….and that brings us to the US program of propaganda and manipulation….Project Troy.

The phrase Cold War didn’t always refer to a time period. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the very years that the battle lines between the United States and the Soviet Union were being drawn, U.S. foreign-policy strategists used the phrase to invoke a specific kind of conflict, one carried out by “means short of war.” If, as NSC-68, a key document of U.S. strategy, asserted in 1950, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an ideological clash of civilizations, a battle between “slavery” and “freedom,” a victory by force would be hollow. If the United States wanted to defeat communism, it needed to do so “by the strategy of cold war,” combining political, economic, and psychological techniques. “The cold war,” NSC-68 warned, “is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”

This was a new kind of conflict requiring new kinds of weapons: psychological weapons. The question of psychological warfare preoccupied a small but influential group of foreign-policy officials during President Harry S. Truman’s second term. By the time that Truman left office in January 1953, the United States had laid the legal and institutional foundations for overt propaganda campaigns as well as covert action. During that period of experimentation leading up to the Eisenhower presidency, almost anything U.S. strategists could dream up, short of overthrowing foreign governments (that would come later), was up for discussion. Among other things, the Marshall Plan allotted $13 billion to rebuild Western Europe, Voice of America transmitted jazz and news to listeners in 46 languages in more than a hundred countries, and the CIA sent tens of thousands of balloons filled with anti-Communist pamphlets into China.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/project-troy-science-cold-war-psychological-warfare/576847/

The Cold War gave us many new techniques for fighting an enemy without firing a shot in anger……

The history lesson is over for today……

Learn Stuff!

Class Dismissed!

Closing Thought–06Apr18

Every year the military spends ba-zillions of dollars on R&D…..some of it is for new types body armor or a new rifle or a new vehicle….and then there are some research and development that just seems to be a waste of money…….found one!

The Pentagon is working on a funky new weapon that is, in the words of the estimable Popular Mechanics, “profoundly weird.” In short, military scientists aim to use lasers to create what sound like human voices that could be projected afar. These “voices” could then be used for “psychological operations, making announcements, or just plain weirding out the enemy,” writes Kyle Mizokami. The details of what’s called the Laser-Induced Plasma Effect come from a report at Defense One. One laser, called a femtolaser, creates a ball of plasma that’s hit by a second nanolaser. Tuned to a precise range of wavelengths, the laser manipulates the plasma to produce light and sound. In a video, a noise a bit like human mumbling can be heard during a second test of the device. The Pentagon thinks it can produce intelligible words in about three years.

“We’re this close to getting it to speak to us,” says David Law of the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program. A second video shows the weapon creating the sound of a stun grenade. But the plasma can also be manipulated to produce heat, as seen in one test that caused a military uniform to burn, reports Ars Technica. Potentially, this could be done from a distance of several miles, Law says, noting an 8-inch laser mirror would create the effect about three miles away. A person between the weapon and the target would be unaffected, he adds. Some other possible uses: warning (or frightening) people away from a military checkpoint or perhaps mimicking the sound of gunfire

Seriously?  It always amazes me to see just what the military will attempt to suck on the taxpayer teat.

My day is no more…..time for me to adjourn to the library for a good book and a snifter of brandy…..chuq

Governance By Gaslighting

Did anyone ever see the move “Gaslight”?  A mystery aboiut a guy that convinces his wife that she is losing her mind….Charles Boyer (?) and Ingrid Bergman (?)…….we have a leader, the president that is governing by gaslight.

Gaslighting is one of the most extreme, dangerous and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse and is mostly carried out intentionally. Gaslighting is a game of mind control and intimidation that is often used by narcissists and sociopaths as a way of controlling, confusing and debilitating someone.

The whole intention of gaslighting is to decrease someone’s self-esteem and self-confidence so they are unable to function in an independent manner. The person being gaslighted will eventually become so insecure that they will fail to trust their own judgment, their intuition and find themselves unable to make decisions.

Eventually the victim will become so unsure of what reality looks like that they become completely dependent on their abuser. The abuser will appear to the victim to be the only one to have a clear grip of their mind and also of what is going on around them.

Why do I bring all this up?

My father once told me that a man who worked with him told him that his wife walked in on him in flagrante delicto with another woman and the man denied it. I said, well, what is the guy a pathological liar—you can’t deny the obvious fact. My father said he didn’t know but it somehow seemed to give the man’s wife enough to excuse, forgive, or lose herself in denial. They were still married. It was a new ontological perspective for me—a look at a nature of being that perplexed me.

Years later I learned the metaphorical expression for that sort of blatant horse puckey, gaslighting, or, Are you going to believe me or your stupid lying eyes? It was from a film with a plot that showed how a man made his wife start to believe she was crazy—she stopped trusting the facts.

https://www.laprogressive.com/trump-gaslighting/

All this is just sad that the American public is being played like a cheap drum…..the sooner they, the American people, realize it the sooner this country gets back on track.

Is This Some Sort Of Mental Torture?

I have watched the antics in Washington since the election that brought our man in DC to power….and when I say antics I mean just that.

We have had the Russia thing (will not go there) and the words and actions of those that Trump has designated as his advisers then there is his Tweet storms that are anything but cogent and on to his family with the run of the White House and finally the mental midgets that are the “voice” of the administration.

All in all it seems like something out of a PsyOps manual a form of mental torture…….lulling the population into some sort of sense of normalcy which in reality is anything but normal.

So is it a form of mental torture?

The White House occupants also remain steadfastly committed to wreaking havoc on our mental states. As Republicans pushed an insurance bill that would have done lasting damage to Americans’ mental and behavioral health well-being, clinicians reported the psychic wages of the Trump war against U.S. citizens.

Source: 5 ways Trump is mentally torturing us now

I know he, Trump, has his supporters but surely even they see some sort of mental imbalance within the confines of his administration.  Most see it but refuse to admit it.

Where is all this hectic BS going?  What does all this mean for the democracy or republic or whatever you want to call what we have in the US?

The election of Donald Trump has triggered as much wonderment abroad as it has in the United States. David Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, has written in the London Review of Books a provocative reflection on the nature of democracy in the age of Trump: “Is this how democracy ends?” There is much to praise in his essay, including his heavy qualification that we really don’t know for sure if what we are seeing is the end phase of mature Western democracies since we do not have the appropriate historical precedents to be certain.

Runciman is correct; as an admirer of Karl Popper, I believe that there is no such thing as historical determinism, either in the form of the Marxist dialectical process, or in the guise of its mirror image, the invisible hand of laissez-faire. Accordingly there is no surefire way to tell in advance whether Trump, Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders would spell the end of democracy as we have known it. History, as Popper would tell us, is an open system, full of contingency. Waterloo, the Battle of Britain and Stalingrad were all close-run things.

Source: Maybe this is how democracy ends

What if anything does the future hold?

Events as they are happening do not beam a fresh light of sanity on our politics.

The Slimy World Of PsyOps

Psy Ops or what is fondly called “brain games”……

The US is desperately searching for something that can counter ISIS/AQ techniques for recruitment of the disenfranchised…..

There is a branch in the military as well as the intel community that is tasked with dirty tricks…..one such trick recently came to light……a program of fake ISIS/AQ videos…….

It has already been well-documented that the Pentagon spent a substantial amount of money on propaganda during the occupation of Iraq, running pro-occupation commercials and also covertly getting pro-occupation news stories into the media around the region. It turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg.

It has now been revealed that there was a third program ongoing, in which a London-based PR agency was paid $540 million to make fake al-Qaeda propaganda videos for Pentagon use. The videos were intended to use existing al-Qaeda footage, and to be in RealMedia format, and burned onto CDs.

Then, during the many US military raids going on during the occupation, a few of the fake propaganda CDs were scattered around here or there in the wreckage of smashed-up houses and compounds. Officially, the goal was for al-Qaeda sympathizers to get ahold of them.

Unspoken within the reports as they’ve emerged so far, having “al-Qaeda propaganda” laying around in the wreckage of US raid targets was likely also an end unto itself, as anyone who came to investigate after the fact would see them and assume the raid was on an actual al-Qaeda target, never suspecting the US troops were planting the discs.

(antiwar.com)

Good idea?  How many of these “tapes” were found by those that had no idea about the program?  How many were turned over to the intel agencies as “actual” terrorists tapes?  How many raids were planned around faulty info?

Finally, just what did we get for the $540 million spent on this hair brain scheme?