November 29, 2016

Media, Truth, and Perception

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There have been a number of people asking me what sources I use for my information. The latest was Janet, so I decided to answer in a post. When it comes to television, I watch it rarely, maybe once every couple of months. When I do, I watch Link TV with Amy Goodman. The rest of TV has been a wasteland for a long time and network TV will probably never fulfill the promise of its potential to develop and educate us. Regarding newspapers, the mainstream newspaper I still read most often is the New York Times - mostly to get a good feel for the propaganda being perpetrated on the U.S. The NYT seems to have suddenly tempered some of their reporting a tiny bit since the election, but is still very biased and still failing to report all of what is going on in a balanced way. As for radio, I no longer listen to radio or NPR at all - most of that stuff is milktoast. A side note... Since I travel to the east coast a fair amount, it is clear to me that the people in Washington DC and New York - all of whom have been lost in some very comfortable illusions for a long time - are about to experience a taste of what Detroit experienced when the Big 3 automakers suddenly found themselves ousted by Japanese carmakers...uncertainty, loss of income, abrupt expulsion from the illusion of security, a total paradigm shift, and a feeling of their world being turned upside down. My point in mentioning this is that all of the mainstream media has been totally controlled by the people in Washington DC and New York. To get an idea of what is really going on and how people think and feel outside of DC, New York, and the U.S., I visit sites like NSNBC (my favorite), InfoWars, DrudgeReport, Breitbart, Truthdig, ZeroHedge, RealistNews, NewEasternOutlook, Xinhua News Agency, Jon Rappaport, RT News, Veterans Today, Washington's Blog, Gmail News, French news, English news, Russian news, and a number of sites that are not well known at all but still provide a serious context for what is happening in the world around us. I think it would be important to say that I am not looking for "the truth" from any of these sources. I am looking at the consciousness and assessing the language that is represented by each of these outlets. I then put together a picture for myself of what people are saying, thinking, and doing here and there. I weigh all of this along with what my own inner knowing is telling me, and out of this emerges a picture of what might be called "What is." This picture of 'what is' gets sifted, sorted, added to, subtracted from, dumped, retrieved, tweaked, and re-shaped again and again over the ensuing days and weeks, eventually resulting in something much broader and deeper than any media outlet could ever present. It allows me to see what is happening and to examine all of the factors that are in play at any given time.  In other words, "the truth" is something I discern for myself, and I am never in a hurry to declare what that truth is. What most people think is true, is usually just a momentary snapshot of where they are pointing their perception and attention.