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	<title>HalfassBackwards.com &#187; Food 4 Thought</title>
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		<title>How Dogmatic Ideologies Can Limit Free-Thinking and Intelligence</title>
		<link>http://halfassbackwards.com/how-dogmatic-ideologies-limit-free-thinking-and-intelligence/</link>
		<comments>http://halfassbackwards.com/how-dogmatic-ideologies-limit-free-thinking-and-intelligence/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 May 2009 15:29:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ego</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food 4 Thought]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://halfassbackwards.com/?p=446</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If you&#8217;ve been visiting my BLoG, and have scanned through my past posts, you&#8217;ve probably noticed that I like to write about controversial subjects. I think it is very important to get these topics out in the open, so that we may desensitize each other from getting so upset about the simple facts of life. [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_496" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width: 150px"> <br />
<img class="size-full wp-image-496" title="Ego's Avatar" src="http://halfassbackwards.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/ego-av.jpg" alt="Me Ego" width="140" height="128" /><br />
<p class="wp-caption-text">Me Ego</p></div>
<p>If you&#8217;ve been visiting my BLoG, and have scanned through my past posts, you&#8217;ve probably noticed that I like to write about controversial subjects. I think it is very important to get these topics out in the open, so that we may desensitize each other from getting so upset about the simple facts of life.<br />
 <br />
Everyone is born with the ability to learn and think for themselves, but during the formative years(childhood), many <em><a title="Halfass Backwards (Definition) | UrbanDictionary.com" href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=halfassbackwards">halfass backwards</a></em> ideas are introduced by what may be under-educated adults(A.k.a. the blissfully ignorant.)</p>
<p>At this point, religious dogma usually comes into play and heavily <em>skews</em> the child&#8217;s perception of the world and it&#8217;s diverse cultures. When I say &#8216;skew&#8217; I mean, the dogma leads the child&#8217;s thoughts in a direction that is favored by that particular religion. (<em>Ex. In this tribe we do things &#8216;this&#8217; way</em>)&#8230;</p>
<p>The child is no longer able to think for his/herself, in a matter of speaking&#8230;</p>
<p>I guess you can say it&#8217;s a kind of sheltered life, and sets the child up for an EPIC failure later on in life&#8230;</p>
<p>In my opinion, I view religion as a crutch for those who don&#8217;t like to investigate life for themselves&#8230;or for those that are too afraid to ponder the thought that we might be &#8216;alone&#8217; in this universe.</p>
<p><span id="more-446"></span></p>
<p>Dogmatic people live blissfully ignorant lives because they no longer have &#8216;control&#8217; of things, the creator is &#8220;responsible.&#8221; Believing in a &#8216;God&#8217; is pretty much a way of pawning off all of the worldly problems onto one supreme being, that way you have piece of mind in knowing things are &#8220;out of your hands.&#8221;<br />
Plus, it gives you &#8220;&#8216;some thing&#8221; to look to and &#8220;talk&#8221; to when in need&#8230;it also gives you a &#8220;biased-moral-compass.&#8221;</p>
<p><em>Now getting back on track</em>&#8230;many people get so set in their ways they often overlook that they are being unrealistic in their approach on life&#8230;. </p>
<p>For far too long have I encountered ignorant people who lack the proper education to hold an intelligent argument about some subject they disagree with&#8230;<em>it&#8217;s a weird feeling when you&#8217;re embarrassed for someone other than yourself!</em></p>
<p>Time and time again, I have seen people argue simply because they don&#8217;t know any better&#8230;</p>
<p>The fact remains that there are things in this world that you do not and may not ever agree with. You need to understand that not everyone perceives things like you do&#8230;nor do you perceive things the way I do.</p>
<p>It is imperative to mankind&#8217;s evolutionary progression that we learn to cast aside our cultural, ideological, and moral differences when dealing with each other. It&#8217;s great to have an opinion, but it is unintelligent to live life belittling other peoples belief&#8217;s/opinion&#8217;s, only because they do not fit with your own belief system.</p>
<p>You see, we are a very diverse world, and we need to teach tolerance, and educate others in the &#8216;art&#8217; of critical and logical reasoning. Only then can we realize that it is unnecessary to get so EMOTIONAL/HOSTILE when encountering some thing we do not agree with. Take responsibility in learning why you have such &#8216;negative/emotional&#8217; reaction. If you do not understand a subject, try to not automatically look at it from a negative point of view&#8230;analyze it and be RATIONAL. Be realistic most of all, and you will begin to see that things are not what they seem!</p>
<blockquote><p>“From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.” -<a title="John Henry Newman | Wikipedia.org" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman">John Henry Newman</a></p></blockquote>
<p><em>The quote above is an example of how narrow-minded someone can become due to their adoption of a dogmatic ideology.</em></p>
<p>Any feedback?</p>
<p>-Ego</p>
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		<item>
		<title>The Walking, Talking, Bias-Repeating Sheeple</title>
		<link>http://halfassbackwards.com/the-walking-talking-bias-repeating-sheeple/</link>
		<comments>http://halfassbackwards.com/the-walking-talking-bias-repeating-sheeple/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:00:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ego</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Conspiracy Related]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News & Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food 4 Thought]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://halfassbackwards.com/?p=93</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In keeping with my &#8216;distorted-mass-media&#8217; theme, I&#8217;ve decided to go off again and point out the halfass backward-ness of how people go around repeating things they&#8217;ve heard on television. Ok, go&#8230; It&#8217;s interesting to note the amount of people who hear something once and then repeat it to someone else as fact. What&#8217;s even more [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In keeping with my &#8216;distorted-mass-media&#8217; theme, I&#8217;ve decided to go off again and point out the halfass backward-ness of how people go around repeating things they&#8217;ve heard on television.</p>
<div id="attachment_223" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 310px"><a href="http://halfassbackwards.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/sheeple.gif"><img class="size-medium wp-image-223" title="Please Stand By" src="http://halfassbackwards.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/sheeple-300x214.gif" alt="Tune In or Be Left Out!" width="300" height="214" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Tune In or Be Left Out!</p></div>
<p>Ok, go&#8230;</p>
<p>It&#8217;s interesting to note the amount of people who hear something once and then repeat it to someone else as fact.<br />
What&#8217;s even more alarming is the amount of people who repeat things they heard on the news(television), without having researched this information for themselves.<br />
Very seldom does someone hear something and look further into it(self-education).</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em><span style="font-style: normal;"><strong>Rule of thumb</strong>: </span><br />
Just because it&#8217;s on T.V. doesn&#8217;t make it real/factual.<br />
(Just because the news reports it doesn&#8217;t make it true.)</em></p>
<p>There is a VERY closely calculated formula in News media.<br />
This is the result of years and years of research and development.<br />
The people who write the anchors&#8217; scripts use key words which have been researched/polled to capture and hold(hostage) your attention.
</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">For more on the manipulative-biased-media-formula read my post <a title="How To Watch The News &amp; Stay Sane | HalfassBackwards.com" href="http://www.halfassbackwards.com/archives/how-to-watch-the-news-and-stay-sane" target="_blank">HERE</a>.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t be so trusting of anything coming out of the T.V. box&#8230;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Here is an excellent post on &#8220;<a title="How To Detect Bias In News Media | Fair.org" href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=121" target="_blank">Detecting Bias In News Media</a>,&#8221; from <em>fair.org</em></p>
<p>-Ego</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>How To Watch The News and Stay Sane!</title>
		<link>http://halfassbackwards.com/how-to-watch-the-news-and-stay-sane/</link>
		<comments>http://halfassbackwards.com/how-to-watch-the-news-and-stay-sane/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:41:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ego</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Conspiracy Related]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News & Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food 4 Thought]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://halfassbackwards.com/?p=350</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Question&#8230; Why is news still regarded as &#8216;Programming?&#8221; &#8230;or better yet, why is the content broadcast on the television still regarded as &#8220;Programming?&#8221; There seems to be no &#8216;Right&#8217; or &#8216;Wrong&#8217; to watch the NEWS, but personally I think there are a few things to keep in mind when watching television news(or reading a newspaper [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;">Question&#8230;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Why is news still regarded as &#8216;Programming?&#8221;<br />
&#8230;or better yet, why is the content broadcast on the television still regarded as &#8220;Programming?&#8221;</em></p>
<div id="attachment_256" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 310px"><a title="Destroy The Ego!" href="http://www.egoterrorist.com/" target="_blank"><img class="size-full wp-image-256 " title="Television Programming" src="http://halfassbackwards.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/television-programming.gif" alt="Don't forget to purchase your digital conversion box, you might miss your 'Regularly Scheduled Programming!'" width="300" height="207" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Don&#39;t forget to purchase your digital conversion box, you might miss your &#39;Regularly Scheduled Programming!&#39;</p></div>
<p style="text-align: left;">There seems to be no &#8216;Right&#8217; or &#8216;Wrong&#8217; to watch the NEWS, but personally I think there are a few things to keep in mind when watching television news<em>(or reading a newspaper or listening to the radio)</em>, so you may emerge with logical/common-sensical information.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span id="more-350"></span></p>
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>NEWS stands to make a profit, <em>bottom line</em>.</li>
<li>The written formula of news is very carefully calculated.</li>
<li>Key words are used to capture and keep your attention.</li>
<li>Music is added for a sense of dramatic urgency(<em>Television &amp; Radio news</em>).</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: left;">A few <a title="Propaganda Techniques" href="http://library.thinkquest.org/C0111500/proptech.htm">Propaganda Techniques</a>(<em>all part of today&#8217;s news media &amp; political campaigns</em>):</p>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a title="Double Speak | SourceWatch.org" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Doublespeak">Double Speak</a> (<em>language constructed to disguise it&#8217;s meaning</em>)<strong>[?Friendly-Fire?]</strong></li>
<li><a title="Fear | SourceWatch.org" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fear">Fear</a> (<em>emotional control, most effective</em>)<strong>[?Terror?]</strong></li>
<li><a title="Name-Calling | SourceWatch.org" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Name-calling">Name-Calling</a> (<em>labeling, discrediting</em>)<strong>[?Terrorist?]</strong></li>
<li><a title="Glittering Generalities | SourceWatch.org" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Glittering_generalities">Glittering Generalities</a> (<em>vague terms w/ strong connotations</em>)<strong>[?Just Words, Just Speeches?]</strong></li>
<li><a title="Card Stacking | Wikipedia.org" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_stacking" target="_blank">Card Stacking</a> (<em>selective omission of facts</em>)<strong>[?A One Sided Perspective?]</strong></li>
<li>Band-Wagon (one side is more popular, join or be left out)<strong>[?Political &amp; Advertising Strategy?]</strong>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>The use of &#8216;surveys &amp; polls&#8217; are evidence of this(<em>not everyone participates, so they are inaccurate to begin with</em>). Same with <a title="Statistics | BBC.co.uk" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1091350">statistics</a>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Pinpointing The Enemy (<em>to over-simplify a complex situation</em>)<strong>[?The War on Terror?Al Qaeda?]</strong></li>
<li>&#8230;etc&#8230;[More here: <a title="Propaganda Techniques" href="http://library.thinkquest.org/C0111500/proptech.htm"><em>Propaganda Techniques</em></a>]</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: left;">First off, we are EMOTIONAL beings before we are RATIONAL beings.<br />
This means,  scientifically we have proven that when an individual is first confronted with any situation/information, unknown or known,  it is first processed through the emotional part of the brain. Only then can we begin the rational/logical process of sifting out the &#8216;crap&#8217; information and making sense of it all.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;"><em>From my own experience, I&#8217;ve noticed that a large majority of people blindly accept information that they hear on the news to be factual, they then repeat such information to other people.<br />
I rarely have fortune of meeting someone who actively looks under the surface of mainstream news and correlates information from multiple sources.<br />
There are always two sides to each story, yet when I hear a news organization state that, for example, they are &#8220;Fair and Balanced&#8221; it makes me want to cringe&#8230;just because THEY SAY IT doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s true.<br />
Bottom line&#8230;there are just too many things happening all at once to be able to validate everything. </em></p>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em><span style="font-style: normal;">&#8220;Think about how stupid the average person is; now realize half of them are dumber than that.&#8221;<br />
- George Carlin</span><br />
</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: left;">Back to the main point&#8230;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">When I said that most people don&#8217;t look deeper into a news story, I was not talking about looking into their favorite celebrity gossip story&#8230;that shit seems to be a distraction from the &#8216;real&#8217; issues at hand.<br />
I&#8217;m talking about reading into the issues that make society operate on the current level that it does.<br />
Issues such as economic financing, civil liberties, wars, crime, violence, technology, and education.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;"><em>Information should be free! And news information should have remained free&#8230;of manipulative writing techniques, fluff, political opinion, and products.<br />
Eh&#8230;who am I kidding?&#8230;pigs can&#8217;t fly yet&#8230;so there must be no hope of honest information&#8230;</em>
</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;"><em>Instead, our facts are diluted by personal prejudices, faith, opinions, misinformation, culture, and a bunch of emotional hog-wash.</em></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;"><em>Having said that, I view the news as a carefully constructed formula that&#8217;s been in the making for years and &#8216;is&#8217; constantly being refined and re-worked.</em></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;"><em>&#8230;Just as a theater &#8216;is&#8217; meant to sell seats, the news media&#8217;s main function seems to be the filling of commercial spots!</em></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">You see, the News is NOT <em>news</em>&#8230;it is ENTERTAINMENT!<br />
Ask any industry insider and they will say that very same FACT! Knowing this you can then begin to see how biased it is on a number of levels.<em>(if you don&#8217;t already)</em><br />
When you add the carefully calculated formula of manipulative writing, use of certain &#8216;key&#8217; words, dramatic music, into the thick of it all, it begins to stray from the original main purpose&#8230;<em>to inform the people</em>.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">I&#8217;m certain that if the news media were about being fair and balanced, then they would go the non-profit route.<br />
(<em>W</em><em>e know from experience/history that even non-profits are not entirely trustworthy</em>&#8230;*<em>churches*</em>)
</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Moving on&#8230;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">I&#8217;ve asked many news reporters this question, &#8220;Do you think that the average viewer remembers you based on your unbiased, investigative research techniques, or do they remember you because of your face/looks and/or personality?&#8221;<br />
Needless to say that all of them had the same answer, their &#8220;face &amp; personality.&#8221;<br />
<em>Hmmmm&#8230;.makes you think&#8230;(I hope!)</em></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>I&#8217;m sure that 95% of news anchors &amp; reporters do not &#8216;report&#8217; the news because they care deeply about the issues of which they speak.<br />
I am almost certain they do it for the pay check&#8230;bottom line. A Job is a job! </em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em><strong>What&#8217;s fun about scaring people to death with non-stop team coverage of world-wide violence, war, &amp; economic turmoil???</strong><br />
</em>
</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">So one question I have is, do most viewers even give a &#8220;rat&#8217;s ass&#8221; about where the information they are &#8216;ingesting&#8217; came from? <em>(I&#8217;m sure some of them do&#8230;)<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></em></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">At this stage in my life I&#8217;m beginning to think that the average &#8216;American&#8217; mindset is, &#8220;O0o0h, they&#8217;re on T.V&#8230;.must be true!&#8230;T.V. &#8216;is&#8217; neutral.&#8221;(most sheeple anyways&#8230;)</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: left;"><em>Remember to always question, and except no one thing as fact, because the only person you can trust is yourself!</em></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>NOTE</strong>: I understand that it is nearly impossible to look at every issue clearly, or with an unbiased approach. I do realize that not everyone has the time, money, or means to travel and investigate for themselves. What I do know, is that we can all help each other see through the &#8216;DOG&#8217; shit by building up a mental tool box full of useful methods of filtering out all the manipulative/propagandist sludge that pollutes the news media&#8230;<em>and life</em>.<br />
<em>Nothing wrong with thinking for yourself, right?</em></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em><strong>Fair &amp; Balanced&#8230;</strong></em><br />
I&#8217;m NOT an advocate of NEWS MEDIA regulation, because I as an individual as well as others have the right to NOT watch, tune in, read, or pay attention.<br />
<em>Hell, </em><strong><em>I HATE CENSORSHIP</em></strong><em> and anyone who likes it!!!</em><br />
What I AM advocating is the education of the individual, young and old, rich or poor, black, white, brown, or blue.<br />
I want people to think for themselves and pull the wool off from over their own eyes.<br />
The only way to do this is through common-sensical education&#8230;and we can&#8217;t always look to the school system for that!
</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">&#8220;You can lead a horse to water, but you can&#8217;t make him drink&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Oh yeah, REMINDER&#8230;do not give up your civil liberties for freedom.<br />
They are one in the same silly!</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">-Ego</p>
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		<title>Brainwashing, Education, and How You&#039;ve Come This Far</title>
		<link>http://halfassbackwards.com/231/</link>
		<comments>http://halfassbackwards.com/231/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:01:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ego</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Blog]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://halfassbackwards.com/?p=231</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Today I found this great read on the subject of brainwashing and how it occurs in life, both naturally and unnaturally. It sheds great light on how we as &#8216;humans&#8217; come to form our basic survival circuits based on Timothy F. Leary&#8216;s famous 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness. Before we move on I&#8217;d like to say [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Today I found this great read on the subject of brainwashing and how it occurs in life, both naturally and unnaturally.</p>
<p>It sheds great light on how we as &#8216;humans&#8217; come to form our basic survival circuits based on <strong>Timothy F. Leary</strong>&#8216;s famous <a title="8-Circuit Model of Consciousness | Wikipedia.org" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-Circuit_Model_of_Consciousness">8-Circuit Model of Consciousness</a>.</p>
<p>Before we move on I&#8217;d like to say how much I as well as other&#8217;s appreciate the life works of Timothy Leary. If it were not for Leary and the likes of others, today&#8217;s society may not be as &#8220;open-minded.&#8221;  </p>
<p>Unfortunately, do to the highly controversial subject of his research, and there being many misconceptions and a ton of false information, Leary&#8217;s ideas and findings are not entirely well known.</p>
<p>Now, on to the good stuff&#8230;</p>
<p><span id="more-231"></span></p>
<p>Before reading this, do me a favor and cast the politics aside.<br />
Approach this with a &#8220;free-forming&#8221; point of view and just absorb the core idea, then reflect on what you&#8217;ve read.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The following appears to be an excerpt from <em>Neuropolitique<strong> <span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">by </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Timothy F. Leary</span><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> and </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Robert Anton Wilson</span><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> [</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://rawilson.wordpress.com/2007/09/06/how-to-wash-brains/">Source</a></span><span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">]:</span></strong></em></p>
<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8211;</p>
<h2 style="text-align: center;"><strong>&#8220;How To Wash A Brain&#8221;</strong></h2>
<p><strong><br />
</strong></p>
<p>The fight for Patty Hearst’s mind is symptomatic of the world-wide battle for<br />
the control of consciousness.</p>
<p>“Mom, Dad. — I’m OK. I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they washed them up, and they’re getting OK…I heard that Mom is really upset and that everybody was at home, and I hope this puts you a little bit at ease… I want to get out of here, but the only way I’m going to do it is if we do it their way… I just want to get out of here and see everyone again and be back with Steve.” February 12,1974.</p>
<p>The speaker is Patty Hearst. Although she has been held prisoner by the Symbionese Liberation Army guerrillas for eight days, she sounds relatively normal, and the tape is reassuring to her parents. A second tape is released by the S.LA. 49 days later, and everything changes. A new voice, that of a stranger named Tania, is speaking and the words are hostile…</p>
<p>“I know for sure yours and Mom’s interests are never the interests of the people. You, a corporate liar, of course, will say that you don’t know what I’m talking about, but I ask you then to prove it. Tell the poor and oppressed people of this nation what the corporate state is about to do. Warn black and poor people that they are about to be murdered down to the last man, woman and child.”</p>
<p>This tape is accompanied by the famous photo of Tania holding a Tommy gun, standing before the Symbionese seven-headed cobra.</p>
<p>There is no escape from our robothood unless and until we first recognize the fact. Only then can we learn to take control of our nervous systems and to reprogram our individual realities.<br />
Randolph Hearst, Father of the Year and top manager of a mass-media propaganda machine that has helped domesticate millions of minds during the past century, comes before the TV cameras and says, unconvincingly, “We had her 20 years; they’ve only had her 60 days. I don’t believe she’s going to change her philosophy that quickly and that permanently.” Two weeks later, Tania is photographed robbing a bank with her new comrades, and the third tape, even more vehement, describes the parents she had wanted to see again as “pigs” and Steve Weed, the lover she had wanted to return to, as “a clown” and a “sexist pig.” Tania would live to change her mind again, but obviously she would never again be the original Patty Hearst.</p>
<p>During the trial of Lieutenant William Calley, it was obvious to millions all over the world that the U.S. Army was seeking to disguise its own guilt by making a scapegoat out of a singularly naive young man. It was not obvious to Calley, however. “I’m for the Army all the way,” he told reporters. “I’m behind it, a member of it. The Army comes first. No matter how much I could help my own defense, I won’t make any derogatory statement about the Army.”</p>
<p>Rusty Calley was, before induction, an unattached, marginally employed drifter — a bellhop, a dishwasher, a pieceworker until he underwent the brain-changing ordeal of infantry basic training. Today he dutifully defends his brainwashers as robotically as Tania once defended hers, and he justifies mass murder in the jargon of the true believer.</p>
<p>Between the time of her arrest for pointing a gun at Gerald Ford last summer and her conviction last November, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme did nothing to aid her own defense and everything to broadcast the philosophy of Charlie Manson, in whose commune she had been brainwashed. Nothing said by the judge or by her own lawyer could make Fromme’s legal situation real or<br />
important to her. All that she cared about was having the attention of the media in order to broadcast Manson’s message.</p>
<p>There is nothing to indicate any special weakness in Patty or Rusty or Squeaky. They were quite normal young Americans until they came into the ambience of, respectively, the S.L.A., the U.S. Army and the Manson family.</p>
<p>This is the first lesson we must UNDERSTAND. The four survival brains are progressively bleached out and re-imprinted in the relatively simple mechanical process called brainwashing. Brainwashing, like malaria, is a disease of exposure. Put people in a malarial environment and most of them will get malaria. Put them in a brainwashing institution and most of them will get brainwashed. The concept of “washing” is, of course, unscientific and crude. The brain is not a dirty garment but a bio-electric computer — a living network of over 110 billion nerve cells capable of 10^2783000 interconnections, a number higher than the total of all the atoms in the universe. In this elegant, micro miniaturized computer, more than 100,000,000 processes are programmed every minute.</p>
<p>The brain and the nervous system, like the rest of the body, are designed and programmed by the genetic code. The human being, like all other life forms, is primarily “a giant robot created by DNA to make more DNA,” as Nobel geneticist Herman J. Muller has observed. We are all neurogenetic robots. And, however unpleasant it may be for Christian theologians or sentimental humanists to acknowledge this, there is no escape from our robothood unless and until we first recognize the fact. Only then can we learn to take control of our nervous systems and to reprogram our individual programs.</p>
<p>A basic example of brain programming, which helps us to understand Rusty, Squeaky, Patty and ourselves, concerns the newborn giraffe whose mother was shot by hunters. The baby giraffe — in accordance with its genetic program — imprinted the first large moving object it saw, which happened to be the hunters’ jeep. It followed, vocalized to, tried to suckle and eventually to mate with the unresponsive vehicle. The giraffe’s survival instincts were hooked to that jeep. The human being also imprints — or hooks its neural equipment to — external objects.</p>
<p>Among humans, these imprints come in four stages:</p>
<p>1. The infant biosurvival circuit, concerned with safety-danger signals here and now.<br />
2. The older-infant (toddler) circuit, or ego; concerned with motion and emotion;<br />
3. The student, verbal-symbolic circuit, or mind; concerned with language and knowledge; 4. The adult sociosexual circuit, or personality; concerned with domestic behavior.</p>
<p>These four circuits are the four brains that are progressively bleached out and reimprinted in the relatively simple mechanical process called brainwashing. The process is simple, because the original imprinting of these circuits was also relatively simple.</p>
<p>Throughout human life, when the biosurvival brain flashes clanger, all other mental activities cease. To create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., firstbrain vulnerability.</p>
<p>The first circuit, or biosurvival brain, is activated at birth. Its function is to seek food, air, warmth, comfort and to retreat from what is toxic, harsh, or dangerous. The biosurvival circuit of the animal nervous system is DNA programmed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a mother is not present, the closest substitute in the environment will be chosen. For the newborn giraffe, a four-wheel jeep was fixated. In one of Konrad Lorenz’s ethological studies, a gosling that could not find the rounded white body of a goose to fixate imprinted a round, white ping-pong ball. Throughout human life, when the biosurvival brain flashes danger, all other mental activities cease. This is of key importance in brain programming: to create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., first-brain vulnerability.</p>
<p>The initial step in this process is isolation of the victim. A small, dark room is ideal, since the social, emotional and mental techniques that formerly ensured survival will not work there. The longer the person is isolated in such a state, the more vulnerable to new imprint he or she becomes. As Dr. John C. Lilly has pointed out, it takes only a few minutes of true isolation before anxiety appears and only a few hours before hallucinations begin, and the victim is ready to be imprinted with a new protective, maternal object. It is no paradox that even the captor who is imposing this brainwashing on the unwilling subject can be the one imprinted. The victim is forced by instincts — biochemical programs — many millions of years old to seek this imprint and to hook it to whatever external entity comes closest to the mother archetype. For a human prisoner, any two-legged being who brings food will serve.</p>
<p>The second circuit, the emotional brain, or ego, is initially imprinted when the child begins to use muscle power to crawl, walk, master gravity, overcome physical obstacles and manipulate others politically. The muscles that perform these functions are very quickly imprinted with what become chronic, lifelong reflexes. Depending on the accidents of environment, this imprint will make for either a strong, dominating ego or a weak, fearful ego. Status in the pack or the tribe is assigned on the basis of an unconscious signaling system in which these muscle reflexes are crucial. All of the emotional games or cons, listed in the popular game-manuals of Dr. Eric Berne and the transactional analysts, are second-brain imprints, or standard mammalian politics.</p>
<p>To re-create second-brain imprint vulnerability in an adult, the subject must be made to feel like a clumsy infant. The subject’s neurological Scoreboard must clearly register the message, “I am one foot tall, ignorant, inept, frightened and wrong. They are six feet tall, wise, clever, powerful and right.”</p>
<p>Helplessness can be escalated to panic by means of terror tactics. In Costa-Gavras’ film The Confession, the Communist brainwashers take the subject from his cell, put a noose around his neck and lead him to a place where he expects to be hanged; some African tribes take candidates for “initiation” and bury them alive for hours. Basic imprint vulnerability occurs when the subject comes to believe, “I have no choice; they can do anything they want with me.” At this point, the emotional brain hooks into the victim internalizes a rank in the pecking order under the protection of the most powerful figure available.</p>
<p>The third brain, or rational mind, is imprinted when the child begins to use artifacts and to ask questions. The imprint sites are the nine laryngeal muscles that are used in speech and a neural feed-back loop between the right hand and the left cortex, which is used in examining, classifying and rearranging the objects of the environment. The entire edifice of science, art and knowledge is built on this foundation.</p>
<p>The quickest way to re-imprint the third brain is to detach the victim from those who share the same language, symbols and doctrines by placing the victim in a situation where his usual verbal skills and physical dexterity won’t work, where he has to imprint new signals and skills in order to survive. For example, it is well known that the best way to learn a foreign language is by living with those who speak that language only: Hook the first-circuit survival needs (food, shelter) and the second-circuit status needs (security, recognition) to the third-circuit necessity of mastering the new tongue.</p>
<p>Conversely, the proverbial Englishman who dressed for dinner every night in his lonely tropical hut was no fool. He was keeping an English bubble around him by constantly reaffirming an English reality, and so avoiding being engulfed in the reality of the natives. It is not unusual for a man to become a Communist when he lives with Communists, or a convict when he lives with convicts. In fact, it requires delicate neurological engineering to remain oneself under such conditions.</p>
<p>The fourth brain, or personality, is activated and imprinted at adolescence, when the DNA signal awakens the sexual apparatus. The teenager becomes the bewildered possessor of a new body and a new neural circuit hooked to orgasm and sperm-egg fusion. The pubescent human, like any other mammal, lurches about in a state of mating frenzy, every neuron gasping for the sex object. Imprint vulnerability is acute, and the first sexual cues to turn on the adolescent nervous system remain fixed for life and forever define the individual’s sexual reality. We should not be surprised, therefore, at the various fetishes that are so easily acquired at these sensitive moments. In fact, we can tell precisely at what period in time a person was imprinted by noting which fetishes continue to turn him on: black garters, booze, cool jazz and crewcuts define one whole generational imprint group, just as sleeping bags, Mick Jagger, grass and tight jeans define another. When Sinatra sings at Las Vegas, the menopausal fan ignores his wrinkles and double chin and the neurons kick over in reflex rapture. The younger generation is amused and bored: “What’s that balding old man got to do with sex?” No group ever understands the fetishes of another sexual-imprint group.</p>
<p>It is important for the brainwasher to understand that sexual behavior is intensely influenced by social-domestic morals. The tribe always surrounds sperm-egg exchange with fierce threats and violent taboos — to the degree that most people don’t even know that the word morals refers to anything other than sexual no-nos. Everywhere, in every society, the sexual brain is ruthlessly domesticated, channeled into tribal productivity. Socially approved orgasm is directed toward monogamous procreation; pleasure directed orgasm is denounced and the practitioners are often persecuted. Rewiring the sexual circuits, then, breaks the domestic bond, fissions the domesticated personality and allows for the creation of a new bond to a different subculture and to its heretical sexual value system. Such re-imprinting of the erotic brain can be a most effective mind-washing technique but only as an adjunct to the basic bleaching out of the first-and second-brain circuits of security and ego status. For example, if Cinque had raped Patty Hearst the first night of her captivity, a strong revulsion on her part would probably have occurred. However, after the subject has come to look to the brainwasher for biosecurity, physical support, emotional reality definition, then a sexual seduction can imprint a new erotic field.</p>
<p>In order to maintain one’s reality bubble, it is necessary to surround oneself with tribal reassurance. Most human communication is embarrassingly primitive, consisting of endless variations on “I’m still here. Are you still there?” (hive solidarity) and “Nothing has really changed” (hive business as usual).</p>
<p>Isolation, the first step in brainwashing, removes this protective bubble. When the subject no longer receives feedback — “We’re all still here; nothing has changed” — the imprints begin to fade. Explorers and shipwrecked sailors who have survived prolonged isolation, Dr. Lilly has<br />
noted, are quite shy after being rescued. They are literally afraid of human conversation — sometimes for weeks — because they know that what they will say might sound insane to the domesticated ordinary adult; their imprints have faded and they are in the unconditioned free-floating world of the yogi or the mystic. It takes many days, at least, to re-imprint their social bubble.</p>
<p>Similar imprint vulnerability and return to infancy occurs in many cases of prolonged hospitalization, an ominous fact that many medical technicians do not understand. Some patients are literally brainwashed into becoming lifelong invalids — a classic case of second-brain helplessness — and are accused by the staff of being malingerers, a label that shifts the blame from the incompetent technicians to the helpless victim.</p>
<p>It is the function of the nervous system to focus, to select, to narrow down, to choose, from an infinity of possibilities, the biochemical imprints which determine the tactics and strategies that ensure survival in one place, status in one tribe. The infant is genetically prepared to learn any language, master any skill, play any sex role; in a very short time, however, he becomes rigidly fixated to accept, follow and mimic the limited offerings of his social and cultural environment. In this process, each of us pays a heavy price. Survival and status mean forfeiting the infinite possibilities of unconditioned consciousness. The domesticated personality inside the social bubble is a trivial fragment of the potentials for experience and intelligence innate in the 110-billion-cell human biocomputer. We have literally been robbed blind; we have literally taken leave of our senses; we are literally only slightly more conscious than any other herd animal.</p>
<p>The brainwasher’s job is simple, then, because it consists only of substituting one set of robotic circuits for another set. Once the subject looks to the reprogrammer for biosecurity and ego support, just as the infant looks to its parents, any third-brain ideology can be impressed on the vulnerable neurons. Because we are all imprinted by our own social bubbles, it isn’t generally recognized that each reality map held by humans — however eccentric and paranoid — makes nearly as much sense as any other. People are vegetarians or nudists or Communists or snake worshipers for the same reasons that other people are Catholics or Republicans or liberals or Nazis. During imprint vulnerability, anybody can be switched from one system to another. We can easily be induced to go from intoning “Hare Krishna” to “Jesus died for our sins” to “Kill the pigs,” and to find meaning in each of the implied ideologies. The next step is for the brainwashers to persuade us that anybody who doesn’t see the world according to a particular reality map is wicked, or stupid, or insane. After programming a third-brain bubble around the subject, a complete brain-washing procedure must then reimprint sexual drives and taboo systems. It is here that governmental brainwashers are amusingly inept, as compared with outlaw bands.</p>
<p>Governments are prudish, uptight and sexually cold, because domestication depends on directing genital passions away from individual gratification and into the nuclear family — or, in modern insectoid socialisms, away from the individual and the family, and into collective hive productivity.</p>
<p>Sexual reprogramming can imprint either a new sex role (as when the Mau Mau insisted that would-be members perform an act of homosexuality, in order to sever themselves from family-oriented sex) or a sex-avoidance role (as with nuns, who become brides of Christ and convert sexual charges into religious tingles). The military and the prison systems, after isolating people from ordinary social reality, allow and tacitly approve asocial sexual imprints, whether heterosexual or homosexual; a year’s worth of sperm on cell or barracks sheets is a year’s programming in anti-domesticity.</p>
<p>Similarly, everybody knows that the classic attraction of military life has been the opportunity for socially approved sexual license, including whorehouse adventures and the rape of enemy women — an enticing program to a young male primate. (The great mystery that puzzled and irritated the menopausal males who ruled America in the Sixties — why weren’t young males eager for the adventure of Vietnam? — is easily answered in a neurological context: The new sexual imprints of the marijuana revolution made it unnecessary and unaesthetic to go to Saigon to get righteously laid.)</p>
<p>Continual follow-up is necessary to reinforce any new reality imprint. The ironic truth is that our concept of reality is so fragile that it collapses in a matter of days if we do not have continual spot announcements reminding us of who we are and that our reality is still there.</p>
<p>The military accordingly constructs a military-reality island for its personnel. Every successful brainwasher, whether Synanon, a Jesus cult, a Hindu swami movement, a Manson-type family, or a militant terrorist group, creates a similar reality island; once a person joins, he is in all the way, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Similarly, revolutionary governments dare not relax censorship or permit free communications in their drive to wash out the old imprints and reinforce new ones. Foreign or dissenting signals cannot, therefore, be tolerated. This reality-island context helps us to appreciate the ease with which the Army brainwashed Calley.</p>
<p>A confused, ineffective youth joins the Army; during basic training, he is isolated from civilian society and all reinforcers of domesticated-herd imprints; his food, clothing and shelter are provided by the Army; and new authority figures make him feel helpless and inferior. Once Rusty has been reduced to an infant state and made totally dependent on the new father figures, he is allowed to work his way up in the new pecking order and to become one of the elect. After a few weeks of being made to feel one foot tall, helpless and clumsy, he is given weekend leave to explore the new soldier morality of easy camaraderie and socially approved casual sex. (And where else in straight America is casual sex so enthusiastically approved?)</p>
<p>Day after day, Rusty’s third brain is being programmed with military jargon, military concepts, military reality. When he encounters civilians on the street during weekend leaves, they seem alien. Rusty has now been fully incorporated into the Army reality bubble. When his superior officer, Medina, shouts “Kill!,” Calley will not ask about the Articles of War, the Nuremberg precedents, the ethics of Sunday school — they belong to other reality islands. He kills. The whole function of the reimprinting in basic training has been to ensure that Calley will obey in such situations.</p>
<p>The robotization of Squeaky Fromme by Charles Manson was just as simple, although the source of Manson’s powers has been misunderstood. It is insufficient, first of all, to say that Manson — and his powers over the family members — was a product of the drug culture. The hippie movement, with its estimated 35,000,000 pot smokers, can, in fact, be viewed as an enormous, mostly amateurish experiment in self-induced brain change. Neurotransmitter drugs perform the same function as isolation, as they weaken or suspend the users’ old imprints.</p>
<p>This is exactly why conservatives dread dope: They do not want the younger half of the population experimenting with consciousness alteration, ego change, mind metamorphoses and sex-role roulette. If the military had pioneered the use of grass as an adjunct to imprinting military obedience, social attitudes would probably have been reversed. Conservatives would have defended Cannabis with the same pragmatism that they brought to the dropping of napalm bombs, and radical dissidents would have dreaded Cannabis as much as they fear wire tapping.</p>
<p>Manson used drugs as but one brainwashing tool, and he did so for ends<br />
alien to the drug culture. While other gurus of the sixties used drugs to<br />
rewire their followers for the peace-love-ecology trip, Manson used the same<br />
drugs to imprint his family for fascism, racism, sexism. Manson could have<br />
become a platoon sergeant in the Green Berets.</p>
<p>In Helter Skelter, prosecutor Bugliosi lists the programs Sergeant Manson<br />
employed with his drugs: first-brain fear and isolation from straight society;<br />
second-brain communal status and rote-repetition of emotional phrases from<br />
the ever-convenient Bible; third-brain occult teachings; fourth-brain guiltfree<br />
sex. In The Family, Ed Sanders adds that female members were usually<br />
initiated with an LSD trip, during which Charlie performed oral sex on them<br />
several times. Of course, Manson’s hypnotic power also derived from the<br />
pathetic fact that he was the most brainwashed robot of them all; Manson<br />
not only followed but believed in the blood-drenched script of the book of<br />
Revelations — the great beast, the war between good and evil, the last<br />
judgment. Instant apocalypse defined Manson’s third-brain reality bubble;<br />
prison taught him how to enforce it.</p>
<p>Manson spent 17 of his first 32 years in prison; isolation behind walls and<br />
bars reinfantized his survival brain; competing gangs of cons and guards<br />
impressed the most violent mammalian politics on his emotional brain; a<br />
weird variety of fundamentalist and racist ideologies was fed to his symbolic<br />
brain; and anything except domesticated reproductive sex programmed his<br />
erotic brain. The reality bubble Manson later created at the Spahn Movie<br />
Ranch near Los Angeles was the stereophonic 3-D dream of every pimpdoper-<br />
convict.</p>
<p>The S.LA. hideout of general field marshal Cinque, another graduate of the<br />
California archipelago, was the Marxist version of the same convict fantasy:<br />
guns, stolen cars, girls, obedience, senseless killings. S.L.A. kidnapers<br />
merely applied to Patty Hearst the standard brainwashing techniques learned<br />
by Cinque in the brain-change prisons of California: first, the physical shock<br />
of kidnap, the disorientation of the cartrunk ride and confinement in a small,<br />
dark room. Then came Cinque’s visits to the isolation cell, and the<br />
transformation in his role from that of captor into that of the source of Patty’s<br />
biological survival. The motherlike Cinque brought food and drink; the<br />
fatherlike Cinque told her sternly that her survival depended on his whims.<br />
Patty is reduced to the status of a suckling infant, one foot tall in a six-foottall<br />
world. Throughout life, when the first brain flashes danger, all other<br />
mental activities cease.</p>
<p>Once Patty had imprinted Cinque in place of her distant parents and<br />
unavailable lover, he introduced the new symbol system, the new reality<br />
bubble. His powerful laryngeal muscles filled the air of the tiny room with<br />
the sonorous, poetic rhetoric of the ghetto, the prison and the underworld,<br />
strengthened by Marxist apocalyptical theology. The same mindwashing has<br />
been experienced by thousands of runaways and dropouts who, during the<br />
past decade, found themselves in the crowded, womb-warren pads of<br />
Haight-Ashbury or the East Village, vulnerable to a new, hip version of the<br />
ancient anarchist, outlaw symbolism. (The importance of funk cannot be<br />
overestimated in these cases. The brain of the baby — and of the reinfantized<br />
adult — craves warmth, texture, skin smell, sloppymoist contact. The<br />
newborn correctly equates dirt and smell with survival, and so does the<br />
hairy, aromatic hippie who thrives on incense, candlelight, sleeping bags,<br />
crash pads. Domesticated moralists who denounce this rank way of life do<br />
not realize that, to the reinfantized brain, funk means survival bliss.)</p>
<p>The culmination of Patty Hearst’s reprogramming was the new sexual reality<br />
imposed on her fourth brain. In a curiously naive account of Patty’s<br />
captivity, an anonymous S.L.A. member has unwittingly outlined the<br />
brainwashing procedure:</p>
<p>“There are many people who still cannot comprehend Tania’s swift evolution<br />
from sheltered bourgeois to freedom fighter. We wish to end all<br />
metaphysical speculation around brainwashing and sexual enslavement.”<br />
With this disclaimer, the S.L.A. account found in the Harris’ San Francisco<br />
hideout proceeds to describe classic brainwashing techniques.<br />
“In the beginning, we provided for Tania’s basic needs: shelter, food,<br />
clothing, medical attention and news from the outside. Although we<br />
considered sex a basic human need, our commitment to not exploit her<br />
sexually, coupled with her over-all status as a P.O.W., denied Tania the<br />
freedom to have sex with another person. But later on…as she became more<br />
integrated into the day-to-day aspects of cell life, we tried to treat Tania as<br />
an equal. It was only natural that with increased personal interaction…these<br />
relations would develop sexually.”</p>
<p>Tania’s S.LA. imprints, reinforced by 24-hours-a-day immersion in the new<br />
tribe’s reality, seem to have remained durable until the Los Angeles shootout.<br />
Jack Scott’s description of Tania in the subsequent months of crosscountry<br />
flight, however, reveals a restless, irritable, unsettled person. The<br />
chief programmer, Cinque, was gone and Patty/Tania eventually returned,<br />
with the instincts of a migratory bird, to San Francisco, the locale of her two<br />
birthplaces.</p>
<p>After arrest, a campaign to reprogram Patty yet again was initiated by her<br />
captors. Again her biosurvival needs were satisfied by her<br />
captors; her ego status depended on pleasing them, and ceaseless effort was<br />
made to induce her to verbalize anew the symbol system of her parents. The<br />
only deficiency in the new program was its lack of attention to Tania’s<br />
liberated sexual imprints.</p>
<p>The hope for Patty Hearst — as for the rest of us brainwash victims — is to<br />
realize how robot-imprinting works, to exult in joyous insight and to start<br />
choosing our own imprints.</p>
<p>Was Rusty Calley, the Florida drifter, guilty of murder? No. The crimes<br />
were committed by Lieutenant Calley, a brainwashed robot programmed by<br />
the Army to kill on command. Was Lynette Alice Fromme guilty of<br />
attempted assassination? No. The Sacramento gun was carried by Squeaky<br />
Fromme, a brainwashed robot from Charles Manson’s zombie platoon. Was<br />
Patty Hearst guilty of any crime? No. Tania is a brain-changed product of<br />
the neurotechnology of Drill Instructor Cinque.</p>
<p>But let us pursue the neurology of guilt a few steps farther. Who taught<br />
Charles Manson and Cinque the techniques of brain change, as well as their<br />
philosophies of violence? The prison system did. And who supports the<br />
prisons that robotized Manson and Cinque, along with the Army that<br />
mechanized Calley? Taxpaying citizens.</p>
<p>Our purpose here is not to provoke another round of liberal we’re-all-guilty<br />
handwringing. Guilt, innocence, morality and will power<br />
have nothing to do with the neurological situation, which, in brief, is that we<br />
are all automatons responding automatically to imprinted realities of an<br />
embarrassingly arbitrary nature. The motivations of criminality and lawabiding<br />
virtue, of violence and love, of domestication and deviance, of<br />
laziness and industry, promiscuity and prudery, stupidity and cleverness, are<br />
always random neurological imprints. What impresses the neurons during<br />
imprint vulnerability is what gets imprinted. Guilt, innocence, punishment,<br />
forgiveness, law and order, rehabilitation — all constitute the mythology that<br />
masks the simple reality of badly wired robots bumping into one another.<br />
Most agonizing and supposedly intractable social problems are caused solely<br />
by our ignorance of the brain’s capacity for rote repetition and abrupt<br />
change.</p>
<p>Brainwashing is happening to all of us all of the time. Knowledge of brain<br />
function is our only protection against it. The solutions to our predicament<br />
are neurological. We must assume responsibility for our nervous systems.<br />
Our robothood can remain static if we endlessly repeat the imprints of<br />
infancy to adolescence, or it can be drastically altered by brainwashers<br />
without our consent, or we can take control of our nervous systems. If we<br />
don’t assume this personal responsibility, somebody else will; if we do take<br />
over the control board, we can each be any person we want to be.</p>
<p>………. December 1975<br />
………. San Diego Federal Prison</p>
<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8211;</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Thanks for reading! </p>
<p>-Ego</p>
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		<title>Forgetting the Past &amp; Stepping Blindly Into the Future!</title>
		<link>http://halfassbackwards.com/forgetting-the-past-stepping-blindly-into-the-future/</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:23:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ego</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Welcome&#8230; Today&#8217;s post appears to be about wild pigs&#8230;er&#8230;actually it&#8217;s about catching wild pigs. Or for those who will read the story and completely miss the point&#8230;It might be about governmental conditioning of it&#8217;s citizens, or about how we get used to the way things are and blindly keep accepting.  The story that follows requires [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Welcome&#8230;</p>
<p>Today&#8217;s post appears to be about wild pigs&#8230;<em>er</em>&#8230;actually it&#8217;s about catching wild pigs. Or for those who will read the story and completely miss the point&#8230;It might be about governmental conditioning of it&#8217;s citizens, or about how we get used to the way things are and blindly keep accepting. </p>
<p>The story that follows requires you to read &#8220;between&#8221; the lines&#8230;<br />
Read it, Apply it, but don&#8217;t look too deep, after all it&#8217;s just a story =)&#8230;</p>
<p><span id="more-202"></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Catching A Wild Pig</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">by an Anonymous/Unidentified Source</p>
<p>A chemistry professor at a large college had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Professor noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country&#8217;s government and install a new communist government.</p>
<p>In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, &#8216;Do you know how to catch wild pigs?&#8217; The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said this was no joke. &#8216;You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again.</p>
<p>You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat; you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught.</p>
<p>Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.</p>
<p>The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America. The government keeps pushing us toward socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. While we continually lose our freedoms &#8212; just a little at a time.</p>
<p>One should always remember: There is no such thing as a free lunch! Also, a politician will never provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.</p>
<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-</p>
<p>The story above is a more condensed &#8220;cheaper&#8221; of the original that can be found <a title="The Wild and Free Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp | GeoffMetcalf.com" href="http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/790.html">HERE</a>.</p>
<p>Wake up in the morning and question everything, accept nothing as truth and begin to be an individual. Be smart, logical, and &#8216;common-sense-ical&#8217;&#8230;I know you have it in you, we all do&#8230;we just can&#8217;t see the light.</p>
<p>GRRRRrrrrr&#8230;.Bite the hand that feeds!</p>
<p>-Ego</p>
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		<title>Thought Exercise: Eliminating the Word &quot;is&quot;</title>
		<link>http://halfassbackwards.com/thought-exercise-elimintating-is/</link>
		<comments>http://halfassbackwards.com/thought-exercise-elimintating-is/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:35:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ego</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food 4 Thought]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Robert Anton Wilson]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://halfassbackwards.com/?p=192</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[For anyone who stumbles upon this BLoG, I have a little exercise for you. Try going through one day without using the word &#8220;is,&#8221; and instead replacing it with &#8220;it appears to me&#8221; or &#8220;it seems to me.&#8221; It&#8217;s called E-Prime, and you can read more about it HERE via Wikipedia. This is something I first [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>For anyone who stumbles upon this BLoG, I have a little exercise for you.</p>
<p>Try going through one day without using the word &#8220;is,&#8221; and instead replacing it with &#8220;it appears to me&#8221; or &#8220;it seems to me.&#8221;</p>
<p>It&#8217;s called E-Prime, and you can read more about it <a title="E-Prime | Wikipedia.org" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-prime">HERE</a> via Wikipedia. <em>This is something I first learned about by watching a YouTube video with Robert Anton Wilson.</em></p>
<p>Now, this may be very hard for some people to do(at first), but if you try it, you will start to notice a change in the way you analyze things in this world.</p>
<p>How can you prove that something really &#8220;is?&#8221; Something may appear to you in one way, but to someone other than yourself it could seem completely different.</p>
<p><span id="more-192"></span></p>
<p><em>Example</em>&#8230;You might happen to like the music of The Beatles, while a friend of yours really admires 50 Cent.</p>
<p>It would be unintelligent to say: &#8220;The Beatles music &#8216;is&#8217; better than that of 50 cent&#8217;s&#8221; or vice-versa.</p>
<p><em>Instead</em>&#8230;you should try saying &#8220;The Beatles&#8217; music &#8216;appears to me&#8217; to be better than that of 50 Cent&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
<p>It seems to be difficult but, if you try it you will start to notice that your pre-programmed prejudices start to undue themselves.<br />
<strong> Warning</strong>, this will hurt your ego&#8230;but in a good way. =)</p>
<p><strong><em>**Applying this to other subjects*</em></strong>*</p>
<p>In this seemingly <a title="Halfass Backwards (Definition) | UrbanDictionary.com" href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Halfass%20Backwards" target="_blank">Halfass Backwards</a> world, a lot of people blindly put their foot down and believe that something simply &#8220;is&#8221; without having any &#8220;real&#8221; knowledge on something or actual proof.</p>
<p><em>&#8230;On the subject of &#8220;GOD&#8221;</em></p>
<p><em>Example<span style="font-style: normal;">&#8230;</span><span style="font-style: normal;">How many people have you encountered that believe that there &#8220;is&#8221; a &#8220;GOD?&#8221;<br />
<strong>Answer:</strong> Far too many!!!<br />
<em>Alternatively&#8230;</em> How many people have you met that have &#8216;concrete&#8217; proof/evidence that &#8220;GOD&#8221; exists?(</span><span style="font-style: normal;">The Bible</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> doesn&#8217;t count)<br />
<strong>Answer:</strong> ZERO! NONE! ZILCH! NADA! (yet people still naively/blindly believe.) </span></em></p>
<p>How could you comfortably believe something that you cannot prove? Just because your parents/teachers/peers fill your head with unproven ideas, does not necessarily make them true.</p>
<p><em>What say you?</em></p>
<div id="attachment_198" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 472px"><img class="size-full wp-image-198 " title="Believe Nothing" src="http://halfassbackwards.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/believetitle.jpg" alt="Everything You Know Is Halfass Backwards!" width="462" height="273" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Everything You Know &quot;is&quot; Halfass Backwards!</p></div>
<p>One last thing that really applies to today&#8217;s society&#8230;<br />
In America, where I live, I decided to start asking friends &amp; co-workers what they think about Middle Eastern people(seems how we are in a &#8220;War ON Terror&#8221; or &#8220;War OF Terror&#8221;).<br />
The answers I got were perplexing, let alone down right shocking! Every single person I asked had a strong view point about Middle Eastern people as a whole.<br />
Then, I followed up with the questions, &#8220;Have you ever been to the middle east? Do you know anyone from the middle east?&#8221;<br />
Everyone I asked said the same thing, &#8220;NO.&#8221;</p>
<p>So, I wonder how these people have come to form such a warped/uneducated/broad opinion on a subject they have no first hand knowledge of? Seems</p>
<p>Do they form their opinions by repeating what they heard on television? or read on the Internet?</p>
<p>Blah&#8230;</p>
<p>-Ego</p>
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