Pleiades keeps sending in these interesting articles and they do make me smile, so here's another little gem. The CIA and the (hated) Red Sox might be in bed together. Again, this is from Rense.com, so you have to take it with a table-load of table salt, but it's fun anyway.
Somehow, the Boston Red Sox and their management became reputedly an adjunct of the American CIA. And that this began quite some years ago. So it should not surprise wide-awake folks that a jet belonging to a partner of the ball playing team arranged with the CIA to use his jet to transport so-called "terrorist suspect" prisoners in U.S. custody to overseas destinations where torture of prisoners is NOT illegal, according to local customs, practices, and usages, and by local laws there, if any. The torture, by the way, resulted in almost no useful data.
The American CIA apparently arranged with the Red Sox management to have several dozen espionage operatives posing as being with the Red Sox office people. Such as purported consultants on sports activities, concession questions, sale of beverage matters, such as Coca-Cola, and similar harmless-sounding positions. Like a similar situation at now more fully-scandalized Enron, the management offices were places for "spooks" to hang their hat.
Now that's hilarious. Not only are the Red Sox helping the CIA move torturers around in the guise of team officials, they're somehow tied up with Enron. And Larry Lucchino has the gall to call the Yankees the Evil Empire! LOL! There ought to be an inquiry in to CIA tampering of last year's ALCS; clearly the Red Sox beat the Yankees with the help of the CIA and crooks from Enron and the Whitehouse... :)
Mind Virus
Here's yet another funny one from Pleiades, but it's still worth a quick scan. Memes.
A fascinating footnote to the horrors of the German experience with Nazism happened in 1969 when Ron Jones, a teacher in Palo Alto, exposed a high school history class to an intensive, five-day experience with the ideas that made up the Nazi meme. The experience of that week was originally published as "Take as Directed" in the CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ #9, p.152), and a few years ago was made into a TV movie, The Wave. Over four days, Jones introduced and drilled his students in concepts of Strength through Discipline, Community, Action, and Pride.(The fifth day was devoted to showing them how easily they had started to slip into the abyss.) The enthusiasm which most of the class adopted the memes and spread them to their friends, swelling a 40 student class to 200 in five days, made it one of the most frightening events the teacher had ever experienced. Given the track record of the Nazi meme, the mini-social movement his experiment set off is no more surprising in retrospect than the medical effects would have been if the teacher had sprayed smallpox virus on the class.
An empirical characteristic of large, long-lived religious movements or related social movements (at least in the West) is a scripture or body of written material. This may function to standardize the meme involved or at least slow its evolution as the number of people infected with it grows. From Scientology right back to the Hindu Vedas, I can think of no counterexamples. Social movements involving more than a few thousand people or lasting more than a few years may have been rare before writing came along.
I have noticed several features of social movements derived from dangerous memes. One is self-isolation of the infected group, or at least of new recruits, from the rest of society. This need not be an "intelligent" action taken by the "leaders". There may be no more thought involved than the evolution of white moths into dark ones in grimy industrial England. The "fanatic cult" memes which incorporate isolation are the ones we observe; those which do not incorporate isolation are like the light moths, gone and not observable.
Don't forget to wear your blue sunglasses lest your get infected.
- Art Neuro
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