You Really Should Do This to Your TV

7 things you haven’t thought of and 2 you have (probably ... and probably).

Dear readers,
Thankyou for reading this post. Since I write mainly about things that are always true (rather than topical news) earlier articles are just as relevant as they were when I first posted them. So if you would like more - don’t wait for my next post! just look at earlier ones! Clicking on the title (What Do I No) takes you to the homepage.

Like many people I like to listen to podcasts while I’m doing something else, going for a walk or driving e.g. But usually my articles seem to contain graphs or something that are important visually. Not this one. I’d listen to this one. There are some pictures and important links to further information in the written version, but nothing is really lost by listening first. The podcast version is here.

• Introduction

  • Your Deathbed

  • Gandhi

  • Immanuel Kant

  • Roald Dahl

• 1 Normality for Toddlers

• 2 “They cannot think – they only see”

• 3 “Hypnotized by it”

• 4 Entrainment and training

• 5 The Herd Instinct

• 6 “Until they’re absolutely drunk / With all that shocking ghastly junk”

• 7 “The One-eyed Babysitter”

• Seeing the Big Picture

  • Recognising the weapons

  • The Effect on Society

  • A Sinister Trend

  • What To Do With Your TV

    
    

Introduction

Your Deathbed

Imagine: you are on your deathbed. The wishful thinking now comes to an end, as you have just accepted that you have no more opportunities. That was your life. How was it? Any regrets?

Well, I don’t think that there is any point in being miserable about them: we need to forgive ourselves our shortcomings, especially if we really think we did the best we could – but learn from them. At the end, however, when there is no chance of applying lessons learned, surely for most people there will be some things that they wish they had done better?

• “I wish I had spent more time with my family” seems to be a common one.

• “I wish I had got on and done that thing I always wanted to do”, or perhaps “I wish I’d done it sooner”.

• “I wish I had been nicer to so-and-so”, or even

• “I wish I had reconciled myself to so-and-so: not talking to them for years was a ridiculous waste.”

I’m sure you can think up some more common reactions, or your own reactions. I was trying to think up plausible common reactions, but after just a moment’s reflection, I can identify, to an extent, with all those sentiments.

How about “I wish I had spent more of my life watching TV”?!

How plausible does that sound? I put it to you that no-one in their right mind is likely to think that, and nor should they. Life is limited and all too short for many people; and near-death experiences bring that home to us hard.

• “I wish I had had more opportunity to have the leisure to be able to watch TV”

I think is perfectly reasonable, but surely not “I wish I had spent more time watching TV”. To put my conclusion before my reasoning (which seems poor rhetoric) watching TV is not living life, but more ... taking a break from it.

Now I would agree that we need rest, recuperation, change - of course; and the harder and more stressful your life or day or week has been, the bigger the impetus to “take a break from it”; but I don’t think watching TV is a healthy way to do it (for reasons I shall come to). So let’s improve my phrase “taking a break from it”, with its positive connotations of leisure, to

Watching TV is not living life: it is suspending it.

Being in a coma, e.g. is not living life but suspending it. It’s time subtracted from your limited number of hours on this Earth, when you are not experiencing life. Actually even that is too good: presumably being in a coma – if it is temporary – is something your body needs to do in order to repair some damage. Anyway – I’m sure you get my drift. (OK, I am overstating it a bit. There can be a few worthwhile things in amongst the dross on TV).

Now it sounds as if I’m talking about sloth, laziness, timewasting, and I daresay that is a good point, but it’s one that you will certainly be aware of. I want to offer you some ideas that may not have occurred to you.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m as guilty as most people of wasting time – probably more than most; but we’re not all Gandhi or Immanuel Kant.

Gandhi

There was an incident in Gandhi’s later life when a woman comes to him, due to his reputation for wisdom, asking for advice about what to do about her daughter, who has some behaviour of concern, the detail of which I no longer remember. Could Gandhi perhaps talk to the daughter and try and persuade her to improve?

Gandhi says he would be prepared to try, but cannot manage this for a few weeks. Could the woman bring her daughter to him in three¹ weeks, and he will see what he can do. The woman is delighted: she is aware that Gandhi is busy, and promises to bring the daughter to him when he returns.

Three weeks later the mother duly does this, but is somewhat puzzled: she has seen Gandhi around over the three weeks: he wasn’t away, and didn’t even seem particularly busy. So after Gandhi’s conversation with her daughter, she asks him to satisfy her curiosity as to why he had asked her to wait three weeks. Gandhi replies that he hadn’t felt able to offer advice on something he had not completely mastered in himself.

Clearly there would be no point in me waiting to write this until I had mastered my own procrastination and time-wasting!

Kant

Immanuel Kant was someone who seemed to discover self-discipline - or convince himself of its value - so thoroughly, that he changed from being … even rather dissolute to someone who would spend his life as well as he humanly could. What that meant in his case was rising early, working at his writing for a few hours, then going to teach at university for the morning, followed by a routine including a walk, dinner with a friend and so on. Having decided what constituted the best way for him to occupy his day, he kept to it rigidly for the rest of his life, so you could set your clock by any item on his schedule.

He spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what makes something moral or immoral. And it seems it could have been the conclusion he came to about this that convinced him that wasting his time was immoral. So he simply stopped wasting any time.

I offer no opinion on this outlook, but recommend After Skool’s short video about it, which made me stop and think several times (stop the video, that is). I arrived at it by courtesy of this Substack post

Mad Maudlin Monday

from Mad Hattor’s Shop Substack, for which I have recently taken a free subscription.

I think many people would balk at doing the same thing every day: I certainly would. In Kant’s defence, however, I would say that his “ideal day” included a significant amount of leisure, variety, and time with others. I seem to be digressing, but I suspect many people – definitely including myself – would benefit from better time-tabling. In my case that would include not just variety in the day’s activities, like Kant, but variety in different days of the week, and months, seasons, and years. Nevertheless – time-tabling!

To stop watching TV to go to bed and sleep properly does require some self-discipline. I’m sure some people would benefit from getting more sleep instead of watching TV so late. That would de-stress them in two ways.

… but I’m sure you’ve thought of that.

Talking of Immanuel Kant introduces a danger of sounding dauntingly intellectual – and misleadingly so, since until a few days ago my knowledge of Kant was limited to what I had learned from Monty Python - “Bruce’s Philosophers’ Song.

Descartes - the “I think therefore I am” guy, or in Monty Python’s version, “I drink therefore I am”

So let us rebalance with Roald Dahl’s opinion.

Now, there was more to Roald Dahl than meets the eye, if that is limited to children’s books like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda”. He worked for military intelligence: he was part of the “Charm Offensive” that went over to try and persuade American politicians and influencials to change their mind and come and join in WW2.

He had this to say – admittedly through a fictional character, but like Disraeli’s “Coningsby”, it is difficult to imagine that the character is not voicing the author’s opinion.

The most important thing we’ve learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, never, NEVER let
Them lurk long near a TV set.
In almost every house we’ve been,
We’ve watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone’s place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare, and stare and sit
Until they’re hypnotized by it,
Until they’re absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don’t climb out the windowsill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink -
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL YOU’LL FIND
THEY CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
THEIR BRAINS BECOME AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
THEIR POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
THEY CANNOT THINK – THEY ONLY SEE!
“All right!” you’ll cry. “All right!” you’ll say,
“But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children?! Please explain!”
We’ll answer this by asking you,
“What used the darling ones to do?
How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?”
Have you forgotten? Don’t you know?
W’ll say it very loud and slow:
THEY … USED … TO … READ! They’d READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
TO READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read!
Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales …

I’ll omit the many examples of tales and genres he proceeds to give; until he ends …

Oh books! What books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books,
Ignoring all the dirty looks,
The screams and yells, the bites and kicks
And children hitting you with sticks:
Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do
They’ll now begin to feel the need
Of having something good to read.
And once they start – oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They’ll grow so keen
They’ll wonder what they’d ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did.

1 Normality for Toddlers

As I said – it’s more than just sloth, laziness, timewasting … (how “worthy” that sounds nowadays, with the TV so normalised).

When we had our first child (thirty-something years ago) we got rid of the TV. My reasoning (I’m not sure about my wife’s, but we agreed … it may be that she just thought I would waste less time!) was that a child’s experience up to the age of perhaps 4, or 7, thereabouts - especially the first couple of years, is experiencing what normality is – how the World works. To mislead them, by giving them the lesson that they can sit and not interact with the world, and still be rewarded with pleasure, is to deceive them about something crucial and fundamental. Happiness (as opposed to pleasure) and success come from using one’s initiative; trying things out; failing repeatedly at something and then succeeding; from interacting with people. Being amused should come from amusing yourself or being amused by others: effort should be involved, effort which comes … effortlessly to children in fact. We all started out with curiosity about the world, and delighted in interacting with it and learning about it. All our efforts – whether apparently successful or not - were rewarded with more information about how the world works. The first blow to that initiative and curiosity is the TV (soon followed by the learned helplessness of schooling – but that’s another story).

I soon got used to a life with children and no TV, and I didn’t miss it a jot. There was an abundance of joyous activities to think up. An unexpected bonus pleasure was in replying to the BBC’s demand for a licence fee. Ah, the blissful smugness!

We did get a TV again some years later for the children to watch, so that they did not feel left out in conversation with their peers; but by then habits and attitudes had been formed, and we hardly had to impose any restrictions, as their watching was very moderate; it just wasn’t part of their usual behaviour.

“Changing Channels”

by the brilliant Bob Moran. If you never have, do check out https://www.bobmoran.co.uk/

2 “They cannot think – they only see”

Let’s consider this assertion by Roald Dahl, that you cannot think when watching TV. Well my experience indicates that is is possible, in theory - but almost everyone doesn’t do it.

I used to teach chemistry, physics and biology at various levels. Sometimes a TV programme, or clip from a programme, can show you something that otherwise would be impossible to experience in the classroom. So even I – with my admitted bias against TV (or justified reservations about it) – would frequently show short segments of programmes. However, I would ALWAYS pause the programme every time I wanted them to think - to prompt them to think about specifics, or implications, by questioning them; or to reflect on something they had seen, or to predict the outcome of something, or to consciously take in a point. Over the decades I came across a great many students: I NEVER came across one who would think whilst watching the TV. Multiplying the number of students by the large number of times I would pause the programme, and find that they had not been thinking at all, gives a huge data set.

Here’s an example. People do not naturally have a good understanding of how simple physical forces – pushes and pulls – affect objects. A surgeon I knew well – undoubtedly an intelligent and successful man, and with an education in physics (including Newtonian mechanics) up to the age of sixteen, was typical in that he went to his grave with the usual misconception that if you throw an object like a cricket ball or a stone, then over the time it is in the air, some quality (perhaps “momentum” or “force” or “impetus”) gradually dies out and the ball soon comes to a stop. That is incorrect, but close enough to reality not to cause any handicap in most situations … until quite recently in human history. (We had to wait for someone who thought as peculiarly as Isaac Newton did, before the simple facts were explained).

The reason that we have such a misconception is, I think, because we have no experience of really simple situations: of having an object experience no forces or just one, as here on Earth you can’t get away from the force of gravity and to a large extent friction. So I would show video of people doing things in a space station (in orbit) where there was no observable gravity, and (for objects suspended in the air in the space station) negligible friction. In this way I hoped to give them an intuitive idea of how forces affect things before formalising it.

At one point in a video which I used in the same way for a couple of decades, the narrator would explain that astronauts tended to “eat all their food up like a good boy”, to save the bother of bagging leftover food, weighing it, then recording the weight of the food they hadn’t eaten for later analysis about diet; and all the while we watched as they bagged it, weighed it and wrote the result down. At this point I would stop the video and ask “he just said that they weighed it: how did they weigh it with no gravity”. Since they had just watched the process, shown very clearly, just two seconds earlier (almost exactly two seconds), you might expect them to be able to tell you. Never could anyone say what they had just seen, without rewatching it with the question in mind. (The answer, if you’re curious, is the “weighing” machine shook the object back and forth, feeling how difficult it was to make it change direction).

On the other hand I do know some professional film-makers who, when watching a film (“movie”) definitely do think about things like how the film is structured; and who – when you watch a film with them - do annoyingly well at predicting what will happen!

So, as I said, it is possible to think while watching TV, but normally people don’t do it. They are in a trance, an alpha-wave brain state.

So basically I agree with Roald Dahl -

“THEY CANNOT THINK – THEY ONLY SEE!”;

I notice that “They cannot think they only see” was apparently such an important line for Dahl, that he broke the rhyme pattern to put it in. It’s the only line without an adjacent rhyme.

3 Hypnotized by it

If you’ve sat around a camp fire you will have experienced this. I don’t know whether it’s the gaze on a stationary bright object, or whether it is augmented by the flickering; but it’s easy to see that the pleasurable feeling of cosiness, relaxation, and togetherness, could be a meme or behaviour with survival value for primitive man, and so persisted over evolutionary time-scales. TV has the same effect on us as the fire.

You must have noticed that trance-like state, surely - either in children or in yourself?

“They sit and stare, and stare and sit
Until they’re hypnotized by it”.

It probably could go without saying that if you are hypnotised by something you are in a very suggestible state: that is to say, that you take in, and are convinced of ideas without examining them. To put it more provocatively, you are easily indoctrinated or programmed!

During the COVID episode I attended some meetings with people who saw through the lies we were being told on the media.² At such meetings – and other chats with individuals – it could not fail to strike one that about 90% of them would describe themselves as people who did not watch TV.

Do you want your thinking to be determined by mendacious people with an agenda?

4 Entrainment and training

Entrainment

“Not thinking”; in fact “hypnotised”; in fact “entrained”: yes, it gets worse - twice more!

You need someone who knows what they are talking about here, so bring on Adam Trombly, being interviewed by Catherine Austin Fitts, on her Solari Report.

Below is a 20 minute clip of the first 25 minutes or so of their conversation (I edited out some “ums”, and sped it up slightly). But there are further gems that you will want to get by going to the original, and listening to the entire hour and a half.

The main points here are that

• a suggestible trance - or “alpha-wave” mode of thought - involves a characteristic brain wave of 12 Hz (pulses per second). Your adoption of the alpha-wave mode of thought is speeded up and strengthened by a process called “entrainment” by stimulating your brain with a signal at about that frequency - 12 Hz. Your brain then literally seems to resonate with this, i.e. adopt the same frequency, putting you in a trance.

• This stimulation can be done with sound, or microwaves (which are modulated at 12 Hz), (5G anyone?), or by flashing lights on a TV screen in a way that is imperceptible to the viewer.

… and training (I said it gets worse twice)

Using the same technology you can then be subjected to Pavlovian conditioning - by causing your brain to register distress or anger each time Trump or an “antivaxxer” appears e.g., and to register pleasure whenever coffee appears for example. Stimulus, response; stimulus, response.

Take note: their methods for indoctrinating you, without you knowing, are sophisticated and powerful!

Here is Jason Christoff on the Delingpod (2024-02-20) explaining overlapping material about brain entrainment, but also explaining how and why you are pushed so hard to consume coffee and alcohol in particular. Again – this is a must-listen: coffee, tea, Coca-cola, Red Bull, chocolate and alcohol all make you easier to move into the “herd mentality”, for reasons he explains.

Here is Dr. Michael Nehls on The HighWire also explaining entrainment, and also the effect of the last-thing-at-night news on your limited memory capacity. [You may have listened to this in my last post - “Older and Wiser?”]

5 The Herd Instinct

If you have found your way to this podcast it’s likely you have come across Matthias Desmet and his observations about the “mass formation” during Covid.

Humans and their closest extant relatives - chimpanzees - live in tribes (disregarding a few exceptions in the trivial last few hundred years). When a human or chimpanzee is under threat it has the very reasonable instinct to make sure it is not separate from the group, but very much part of it – physically … and socially. There’s strength in numbers. The mechanism of that instinct involves diverting resources away from the modern part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex, where reasoning goes on. When threatened by a predator, or neighbouring tribe e.g., the tribe will respond in a more co-ordinated fashion if it responds jointly, taking cues from the leader. So those are the behaviours which are selected to make up this “emergency mode” of behaviour –

• paying attention to a leader,

• not going in for slow pondering, which is expensive in time and energy, but reacting quickly and simply.

• not thinking independently,

• hostility to those who are, rather than behaving as if there is a serious threat.

These simple ideas explain, for those still puzzled, the experience of coming across unfortunate orthodox people who seemed oblivious to reason, and who were hostile to others showing a heterodox reaction to what “the leader” was saying. Those were people who had moved into the “herd” mentality; they were frightened.

Those who have been in war are often struck by the “esprit de corps”, the intense feeling of togetherness that you and your team have: it’s group mentality, under stress.

I forget the details now – perhaps someone can point me in the right direction – but I remember hearing years ago someone describing how an insider - a whistleblower - had explained to them that (early in the twentieth century) there was going to be a big expansion in sports, like football and rugby, with lots of people doing it full-time, professionally; that they would appear on television and it would be treated as if it were a serious matter. Since this was before that took place, at a time when sport was local, and playing – i.e. something intrinsically trivial, unserious, the listener’s reaction was surprise, scepticism and puzzlement. (The whistleblower told him various other things, which made him resolve never to have a TV, if I remember correctly).

I do wonder whether Roald Dahl’s attitude to TV was influenced by some inside information, rather than merely the prejudice of an author of books!

If you want to keep a society in a state of “herd mentality”, i.e. not good at rational thought, and attentive to their leader, then a simple way to do it would be to put on TV lots of war films and sport – which is essentially a scaled-down version of war. That is exactly the mindset you adopt when watching “your team” … or your protagonist – under threat and on his own (away from the herd)! The more time you spend in that mindset, the less opportunity you have for paying attention to what your owners are doing with you (as George Carlin would say - audio below).

I would guess that it’s not just a question of how much of your day is in a stress-induced “herd mindset”, but also practising, rehearsing, facilitating the process would make it a state you can be moved into more readily.

How easily we are manipulated without us noticing.

[Warning for those not familiar with George Carlin: he uses graphic language and imagery].

6 “Until they’re absolutely drunk / With all that shocking ghastly junk”

Now clearly “drunk” is a metaphor: you may be less good at cerebrating when you are (or have been?) watching TV, but not drunk literally: it doesn’t impair your co-ordination much … except in that you weren’t out practising tennis or the piano or something. Any other similarities? Well … some people get addicted to alcohol, don’t they?

Is TV addictive? My guess is that – like alcohol - that depends on your personality and circumstances. I suppose the way to find out is to see how hard it is to stop. I once read a book about helping people to stop smoking, and his strategy was to anticipate ALL the rationalisations that smokers would come up with for continuing or failing. Humans are VERY GOOD at that sort of rationalisation. So if you find yourself coming up with reasons why you shouldn’t get rid of your TV, try and examine the underlying motives carefully!

Karl Marx once described religion as “the opium of the people”. I think that by that he meant that it fulfilled a similar function of providing escape and solace from life’s strains and stresses. I don’t suppose he was referring to the addictive quality of opium. I have long thought of TV as today’s “opium of the people”, and for the same reason, and described it as that in a recent post. So I was amused to see this meme.

When the Chinese start smoking Opium, as opposed to the usual medicinal swallowing it as a solution in alcohol – known as laudanum – it was much more addictive, because being taken in through the large surface of the lungs, the “hit” had more impact, being bigger, faster, more sudden.

Britain (or the East India Company) devastated Chinese society by imposing the opium they grew in India upon it in the “opium wars” in the 1840s and ‘50s. Addiction permeated first the rich, then spread to the poor. China’s productivity crashed. They were no longer a competitor to Britain and her East India Company.

A Chinese Opium Den

The habit soon spread to Western society, again, starting with the wealthy:

“A New Vice – smoking opium in Paris”

“ They loll and slop and lounge about,”

Certainly there are similarities in the urge to watch TV or to smoke opium. You have just finished a hard and stressful day or week; all you want to do is relax and escape the pressures for a while; to switch the brain off for a pleasurable spell. How much harm can it do? Are we talking about TV or opium? Is TV “A New Vice”, one which is going to have (or has had) an effect on society, like opium did on the Chinese, only more slowly? You decide for yourself. I’m pretty sure I know what Kant would have thought!

I’m reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s description - in “Two Hundred Years Together” - of the pitiable state of hungry Russian peasants, who, at the end of their hard week when their resistance was at its lowest and the escapist urge at its strongest, would go and spend their entire meagre week’s wages in the drinking houses, leaving nothing for food.

7 “The One-eyed Babysitter”

… as the TV is sometimes called. “Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,” is not what I’m referring to here, but the camera in many modern TV’s ... (and laptops, phones, cars, security systems … ) looking at you. You were introduced to the idea that TV’s can contain a camera pointing at you when the fad came along for TV games involving large motions by you, which were mirrored on the game icon on the screen, i.e. you control the motion on the screen with your own large motions. So you can e.g. play an ersatz version of tennis (with considerably less motion than on an actual court). See here, here, here, here and here, if you want to see what I’m refering to.

If there’s something that you think that you’d rather the government or security agencies didn’t know, then don’t say it in the presence of any of those devices. No, there probably isn’t a person listening to you (unless you are under suspicion of something by the police), but automatic recording of what you’re saying just in case they want to retrieve it later can and does happen; to what extent I don’t know.

With that camera on your phone especially, they can know your emotional reaction to what you are seeing on the screen better than you do, since they can monitor the behaviour of the iris, opening the pupil wide suddenly, when you see that … whatever. Making a record of the strength of your reaction would be a simple thing to automate. It would be an easy way to identify blackmailable paedophiles, or useful psychopaths, who find the sight of people hurting themselves funny. “Data is the new oil”, remember, as the Rockefellers told you in the 1980s. The cameras on my phones and laptops are normally blocked with sticky tape.

Remember Michael Hastings … the reporter who reported on goings on in Afghanistan resulting in General Stanley McChrystal getting fired? Hastings was working on a profile of CIA director John Brennan, whilst Brennan was working on cracking down on investigative journalists. He died, aged 33, at night alone on an empty road, when his almost new, expensive car accelerated into a tree and burst into flames.

Concerning that incident, Richard Clarke (former US National Co-ordinator for Security, Infra-structure Protection, and Counter-terrorism) said “There is reason to believe that security agencies for major powers – including the US – know how to remotely seize control of a car. … What has been revealed as a result of some research at universities is that it’s relatively easy to hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when the driver doesn’t want acceleration; to throw on brakes, when the driver doesn’t want the brakes on, to launch an airbag. You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it’s not that hard. So if there were a cyber attack on the car – and I’m not saying there was – I think whoever did it would probably get away with it.

… In the case of Michael Hastings, what evidence is available publicly is consistent with a car cyber attack … ARE YOU LISTENING, OTHER INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS?”

No – obviously he didn’t say that last question … out loud, that is. He didn’t need to: they can’t miss the message - “don’t think you can check up on the Director of the CIA: he checks up on YOU!”

Thank goodness cars now have computers in them eh? What would we do without them? Add “remote control” to the list of drawbacks of having cars dependent on electronics now. (You can’t fix them yourself; they’re expensive; you can only get them from the manufacturer; they’re susceptible to electrical surge damage from lightning or EMP …)

With programmable money (CBDC) proposed to come in (i.e. someone else can decide whether you’re allowed to spend that money on that item) I’m inclined to do all I can to keep my human right to privacy. Just sayin’.

Seeing the Big Picture

Recognising the weapons

Psychological weapons are much more easily avoided if you know how to recognise them. There is a standard set of weapons used in brainwashing people³, for example when integrating them into a cult. ICURE is the mnemonic. See if you recognise any of these from the Covid episode.

I for Isolation. The instinct when danger threatens is to be part of the tribe. So forcing people to isolate themselves increases their stress enormously, since they cannot follow their instinct, forming a vicious spiral of stress and fear. Simply removing you from familiar patterns of life will add to the effect.

C for Control. Control what they perceive, think and do. They are in an “emergency or herd mentality”, so they will want a leader to tell them what is going on, what to think, and what to do. You could measure and reinforce the effect “this is what everybody is doing” by getting people to perform some visible signal of their compliance, like going to their front door and applauding (the NHS) every Thursday evening; or wearing a mask.

U for Uncertainty. All those ridiculous rules (about what you were allowed to do, to wear, where you could go) that kept changing, and never made any rational sense, were not the product of stupidity or incompetence, as your first reaction would normally be. It was quite deliberate, to increase the sense of unease and things being out of your control. In the UK, the psychological experts recommending more fear, and this sort of measure were SAGE and the army’s psychological warfare section.

R for Repetition. How many slogans can you remember? “We’re in this together”. What a comforting message when you’re feeling isolated: we’re all part of one big group, where you feel safe. Remind me of others, please: I wasn’t listening. Can you explain why that slogan was effective? Here’s George W Bush (who was literally a cheer-leader in his college days) …

Yes, for the “Truth”^TM to sink in.

E for Emotions. To train you to behave as they wish, they associate ideas with positive or negative emotions. So the vaccines get positive emotions; dastardly, independent-thinking “antivaxxers” – negative emotions. After listening to Adam Trombly and Jason Christoff, you now know that it wasn’t only the spoken word that they used to effect this, but imperceptible, more direct electromagnetic effects, using your TV.

Recognise those simple tools, and break out of the cult!

The Effect on Society

I mentioned that with the introduction of opium, resulting in many people spending hours lounging around doing nothing, achieving nothing, Chinese productivity plummeted. The economy crashed. Chinese society received a grievous blow.

Does TV have a similar effect on “Western” society? What about on your own life? Would you be more productive without a TV?

Suppose you wanted to bring a society or civilisation down, or radically reform it … a “Great Reset” perhaps: would promoting TV for 70 years assist that?

A Sinister Trend

Is it just around here, or are massive TV screens popping up everywhere around you – on roadsides, by the till in shops, in shopping malls?

What To Do With Your TV

So – what do I think you should do with “That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!”? Well I agree wholeheartedly with Roald Dahl -

“So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,”

… or you could sell it to some other sucker, if you have fewer moral scruples; or give it to some worthy charity (if you can find a small, independent, local one).

I am serious: give it some thought. You can always watch films on your laptop! The news? You should look for decent independent journalists, especially on Substack and Telegram, which still seem to be uncensored, for now!

1. Obviously I don’t remember the exact number of weeks.

2. For example “children are not in danger from the virus”, quite true – but bizarrely ... “therefore they all need to be injected against it”!; or “the vaccine stops the spread of the virus” – which of course was among the many things not tested for, so was unknown; and patently it did not stop the spread of the virus … that was done by the arbitrary administrative borders, indicating that it was the different measures taken by different authorities which made the difference).

3. I learned from “Brain Washing: The science of thought control” by Kathleen Taylor.