Flying the flag, faking the news

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, who invented the term "public relations"

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger traces the history of propaganda to Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, who invented the term "public relations". Bernays believed in "engineering public consent" and creating "false realties" as news. Here are examples of how this works today.

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the first world war, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country”. Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations”.

Bernays to convinced women they should smoke in public.

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom”. In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation”.

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good. This was achieved by the creation of “false realities” which then became “news events”. Here are examples of how it is done these days:

False reality The last US combat troops have left Iraq “as promised, on schedule”, according to President Barack Obama. TV screens have filled with cinematic images of the “last US soldiers” silhouetted against the dawn light, crossing the border into Kuwait.

Fact They are still there. At least 50,000 troops will continue to operate from 94 bases. American air assaults are unchanged, as are special forces’ assassinations. The number of “military contractors” is currently 100,000 and rising. Most Iraqi oil is now under direct foreign control.



False reality BBC presenters and reporters have described the departing US troops as a “sort of victorious army” that has achieved “a remarkable change in [Iraq’s] fortunes”. Their commander, General David Petraeus, is a “celebrity”, “charming”, “savvy” and “remarkable”.

Fact There is no victory of any sort. There is a catastrophic disaster; and attempts to present it as otherwise are a model of Bernays’ campaign to “re-brand” the slaughter of the first world war as “necessary” and “noble”. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, running for president, re-branded the invasion of Vietnam, in which up to three million people died, as a “noble cause”, a theme taken up enthusiastically by Hollywood. Today’s Iraq war movies have a similar purging theme: the invader as both idealist and victim.

False reality It is not known how many Iraqis have died. They are “countless” or maybe “in the tens of thousands”.

Fact As a direct consequence of the Anglo-American led invasion, a million Iraqis have died. This figure from Opinion Research Business is based on peer-reviewed research led by Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, whose methods were secretly affirmed as “best practice” and “robust” by the Blair government’s chief scientific adviser, as revealed in a Freedom of Information search. This figure is rarely reported or presented to “charming” and “savvy” American generals. Neither is the dispossession of four million Iraqis, the malnourishment of most Iraqi children, the epidemic of mental illness and the poisoning of the environment.

False reality The British economy has a deficit of billions which must be reduced with cuts in public services and regressive taxation, in a spirit of “we’re all in this together”.

Fact We are not in this together. What is remarkable about this public relations triumph is that only 18 months ago the diametric opposite filled TV screens and front pages. Then, in a state of shock, truth was unavoidable, if briefly. The Wall Street and City of London financiers’ trough was on full view for the first time, along with the venality of once celebrated snouts. Billions in public money went to inept and crooked organisations known as banks, which were spared debt liability by their Labour government sponsors.

Within a year, record profits and personal bonuses were posted, and state and media propaganda had recovered its equilibrium. Suddenly, the “black hole” was no longer the responsibility of the banks, whose debt is to be paid by those not in any way responsible: the public. The received media wisdom of this “necessity” is now a chorus, from the BBC to the Sun. A masterstroke, Bernays would surely say.

False reality The former government minister Ed Miliband offers a “genuine alternative” as leader of the British Labour Party.

Fact Miliband, like his brother David, the former foreign secretary, and almost all those standing for the Labour leadership, is immersed in the effluent of New Labour. As a New Labour MP and minister, he did not refuse to serve under Blair or speak out against Labour’s persistent warmongering. He now calls the invasion of Iraq a “profound mistake”. Calling it a mistake insults the memory and the dead. It was a crime, of which the evidence is voluminous. He has nothing new to say about the other colonial wars, none of them mistakes. Neither has he demanded basic social justice: that those who caused the recession clear up the mess and that Britain’s fabulously rich corporate minority be seriously taxed, starting with Rupert Murdoch.

Of course, the good news is that false realities often fail when the public trusts its own critical intelligence, not the media. Two classified documents recently released by Wikileaks express the CIA’s concern that the populations of European countries, which oppose their governments’ war policies, are not succumbing to the usual propaganda spun through the media. For the rulers of the world, this is a conundrum, because their unaccountable power rests on the false reality that no popular resistance works. And it does.

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Gulf Loop Current Stalls from BP Oil Disaster: Global Consequences if Current Fails to Reorganize

Oceanographic satellite data now shows that as of July 28, the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico has stalled

By Sterling D. Allan
Pure Energy Systems News
Sat, 28 Aug 2010 16:13 CDT


Oceanographic satellite data now shows that as of July 28, the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico has stalled as a consequence of the BP oil spill disaster. This according to Dr. Gianluigi Zangari, an Italian theoretical physicist, and major complex and chaotic systems analyst at the Frascati National Laboratories in Italy.

This could be the most significant man-caused Earth Changes news thus far in my lifetime. This morning, Lesie Pastor informed the New Energy Congress of a report by Your Own World USA that as of July 28,

Oceanographic satellite data now shows that the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico has stalled as a consequence of the BP oil spill [volcano] disaster. This according to Dr. Gianluigi Zangari, an Italian theoretical physicist, and major complex and chaotic systems analyst at the Frascati National Laboratories in Italy.

He further notes that the effects of this stall have also begun to spread to the Gulf Stream. This is because the Loop Current is a crucial element of the Gulf Stream itself and why it is commonly referred to as the "main engine" of the Stream.

The concern now, is whether or not natural processes can re-establish the stalled Loop Current. If not, we could begin to see global crop failures as early as 2011.

Images of The Day After Tomorrow flashed in my head. The disruption of major ocean currents is no small thing. The climate ramifications are massive, worldwide.

gulf loop current© Unknown

The Gulf Loop is the current that loops up, to the right of the middle of the Gulf of Mexico then drops down to the left of Florida where it then passes below Florida into the Atlantic, where it contributes to the Gulf Stream, which passes up the east coast of the United States and Canada.

The Gulf Stream is what keeps the east coast of the U.S. as well as Britain and Europe more temperate, compared to what they would be without this warm current passing by.

After reading through the article, seeing its scientific backing, and discussion of the ramifications, I went to Google to see if this is getting mainstream press attention. A Google News search for "Loop Current" Stalled came up null. Nada, nothing.
loop current google search

"How could that be?" I wondered. This is huge, and it's something that mainstream science and the mainstream press could easily verify and report.

I then placed a call to Paul Noel, who seems to always be up on things like this. I caught him in the middle of a family vacation event at a museum, so I was only able to speak with him for a couple of minutes, but he said that he had noticed that the current had stalled. "I check the loop current periodically", he said. He also said that a new phenomenon had cropped up on the beaches. Something about a "bathtub ring" of oil residue. I didn't catch how this was new, and he had to go.

So apparently, this is a breaking development that will most likely take a while to sink in, just as the initial BP rig fire and sinking and oil volcano took a while for people to realize its significance and impact. The people still living near the Gulf may yet be in denial as to the impact of the toxic fumes coming off the slick, poisoning their rain and crops and groundwater. Now the other shoe drops. The Loop Current stalls, and now the globe will feel the impact.

The mechanism by which the oil slick could lead to something like this could have to do with the changed viscosity of the water penetrated with oil to great depths due to the Corexit dispersant; and it could have to do with the darkened water attracting more solar heat, increasing its temperature.

Here is the rest of the story from Your Own World USA

YOWUSA.COM, 01-August-10



An Open System in Trouble
Marshall Masters

The Loop Current is a clockwise flow that extends northward into the Gulf of Mexico and joins the Yucatan Current and the Florida Current to the Gulf Stream.

Although at first glance the Loop Current appears confined within the Gulf, scientists define it as an "element of an extremely complex, open system": as all other "elements" of the so-called "Earth System", are not separable from the others.

These various "elements" of the Earth System (i.e., atmosphere, landmasses and so forth) are so strongly correlated to one another that at some point, they become indivisible.

Dr. Gianluigi Zangari

Why is this important to all life on the planet? The Gulf Stream is a strong interlinked component of the Earth's global network of ocean conveyor currents, which drive the planet's weather systems.

For this reason, Zangari's concern is that should the Loop Current fail to restart, dire global consequences may ensue as a result of extreme weather changes and many other critical phenomena. The repercussions of which could trigger widespread droughts, floods, crop failures and subsequent global food shortages.

April 1986, Chernobyl disaster © Unknown

While pundits are certain to trivialize the ramifications of this event, "the real worry" says Zangari, "is that that there is no historical precedent for the sudden replacement of a natural system, with a dysfunctional man-made system. That is, except for the atomic bomb blasts and contamination as a result of nuclear waste and nuclear plant accidents, such as the April 1986, Chernobyl disaster

In what is now widely regarded by many as "Oil's Chernobyl," Americans, and particularly Gulf Coast residents are disheartened by a steady stream of bureaucratically bungled responses, which are now proving to be just as a deadly as the initial event itself.

Perhaps even more so, as this toxic brew of incompetence, greed, corruption, oil, Corexit dispersant and other chemicals has unleashed a man-made disaster in the Gulf, with frightful possibilities for the future.

The Corexit Curse

1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill corexit © Unknown

lThe use of Corexit as a dispersant was first brought to the public's attention during the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

A powerful solvent used as a dispersant for oil slicks, public knowledge about the dispersant and its long-term effects is hampered by the proprietary protections of its manufacturer, Nalco Holding Company, which is associated with British Petroleum (BP) and Exxon.

What is known, is that this petroleum-based formula is regarded as being at least four times more toxic to life, than the oil it disperses by many environmentalists.

An aircraft releases Corexit oil dispersant over the Gulf © Unknown

Officially, just over one million gallons of Corexit has been spayed in the Gulf of Mexico, but reliable sources tell Yowua.com that the actual amount could easily be twice that much.

Either way, current satellite data of the Gulf feeds tell Zangari that the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico has clearly stalled due to environmental impacts from a man-made introduction of oil, which were then compounded by other agents (Corexit and so on).

Worse yet, these real-time satellite data feeds offers clear evidence to Zangari that a new artificial system has been generated in of the Gulf in a remarkably short period of time. It is this new and unnatural system which has changed the viscosity, temperature and salinity of the Gulf's seawater, thereby causing the Loop Current to stall. A system that has existed for millions of years.

Consequently, there is no possible way for scientists to predict its future evolution, though corporate spinmeisters and media pundits will no doubt be sure to offer a bevy of right-sounding predictions. Their goal as it has been throughout this ordeal, will be to deflect attention by trivializing the severity of the event with simplistic and misleading explanations.

However, researchers like Dr. Gianluigi Zangari, offer insights that transcend the politics of oil.

As a theoretical physicist, he currently holds a position as an associate member of the Research Division of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics at Frascati National Laboratories (LNF) of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Italy. A prestigious research facility focused on high-energy physics.

However, what makes Dr. Gianluigi Zangari's findings so vital to the common man, is that for over a decade, he has conducted his continuous global analysis climate research, using publicly available data. Unlike the jealously guarded formulas for Corexit, anyone can vet his research without having to run through a gauntlet of corporate lawyers.

Tracking Zangari's Data

Oceanographic Satellites © Unknown

Zangari's assessment is based on daily monitoring of real-time data oceanographic satellite public data feeds called "Real-Time Mesoscale Altimetry" from the Jason, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat, Follow-On, ERS-2 and Envisat satellites.

These satellite feeds are are captured and made publicly available by NASA, NOAA and by the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.





These CCAR data maps offer researchers like Zangari a continuous stream of markers for sea and ocean dynamics: surface height, velocity, temperature. A fourth marker that Zangari has found to be especially helpful, are chlorophyll infrared emission maps. This is because they show him real-time changes in the shape of the Gulf Stream.

In addition to changes in ocean velocity, Zangari is reporting an equally troubling analysis with sea surface temperatures. The data published by Rutgers University is from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data maps. Dr. Zangari re-elaborates and checks these data maps using his own calculus system called SHT (patented in 1999.)


© Frascati National Laboratories, NOAA and Rutgers University
Sea Surface Temperatures Acknowledgments: Frascati National Laboratories, NOAA and Rutgers University (http://marine.rutgers.edu). Analysis by Dr. Gianluigi Zangari (Frascati Labs), July 29, 2010.
Taken altogether, these four oceanographic markers began taking a turn for the worse, shortly after the Deepwater Horizon well explosion on April 20, 2010. This rapid turn of events raised Zangari's concerns about the Gulf's Loop Current, and then on July 28, 2010 the worst case imaginable happened. "The Loop Current simply stalled," Zangari noted sadly "and we have no idea if it can reorganize itself, because now we're dealing with troubling unknowns."

Velocity and Temperature Worries

At present, Admiral Thad Allen is trying to assure Americans that the worst of the disaster has passed and that the oil slicks have disappeared due to natural processes. However the markers from oceanographic satellite feeds Dr. Zangari is studying tell him an entirely different story.

The millions of gallons of Corexit sprayed in the Gulf have given BP and the US government a convenient way to mitigate public concerns by removing the threat from sight. The logic being that since the oil is disappearing, so is the crisis. However, taking oil from the surface and spreading through the water column is not a PR matter. Instead, it has become a convenient way to cover up one massive mistake, with a tragically larger one.

To help understand why, let's assume that what is really happening in the Gulf is not much different from what happens when you shake a bottle of oil and vinegar salad dressing. Leave the bottle on the shelf for a while and the oil and vinegar will naturally separate, each with it's own unique viscosity.

However, when the bottle is shaken the two are mixed. This creates a new, and overall thicker viscosity, hence the dressing pours more slowly. In very simple terms, this is what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, which begs another question. Was the Gulf of Mexico intentionally written off early on, so as to protect the Gulf Stream and America's NATO partners?

Will This Stall Spread Into the Atlantic?

The importance of the Gulf Stream was brought to the forefront in the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) where the Gulf Stream stalled, causing temperatures in New York City to plummet from sweltering to freezing in a matter of hours.

Based on real science, the film showed movie audience how the the Gulf Stream transports warm water from the equatorial regions of the Earth, along American's Eastern seaboard and then across the Atlantic to Northern Europe.

Now, current temperature measurements for the Gulf Stream on the Atlantic Front (from 76 to 47 meridian) now appears to be about 10 degrees Celsius cooler than it was this time last year. Consequently, a direct causality nexus has now been established, between the stall of the Gulf Loop Current and this new temperature drop in the Gulf Stream on the Atlantic Front.

For this reason, the focus of Zangari's research is presently centered on finding signs of a return to the former natural equilibrium of the Gulf. Again, he stresses making predictions (pessimistic or optimistic alike) because "these phenomena are unpredictable because they are ruled by strong non-linearities."



Nonetheless, we must must ponder the question: What does this new nexus portend for our future? To that, Zangari says "we can affirm that this system (the Gulf Stream) is changing in an unpredictable way, which may produce serious consequences on planetary scale."

Yowusa.com will report new developments in Dr. Zangari's research as they become available.

God help us all. This planet is in crisis.

Thanks to SOTT for the article