TELEVISION: THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPON ON EARTH

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The Dangers of TV




What They Don’t Want You To Know About TV and Videos.


During their wanderings, ancient Jewry happened upon some of the most abominable practices of the pagan world, including child-sacrifice. The contrast between the world’s wanton violence and promiscuity on the one hand, and the Torah’s pristine standards and sensitivities on the other, must have been astounding. For those who had seen the dark side of polytheism and yet knew of a brighter truth, nothing could have been as repulsive as cultures of idol worship. One would think there was little danger of Jewry being drawn into pagan rituals.

God did not feel the same confidence. He saw a vulnerability through which even those who knew both paganism’s horrors and Torah’s wholesomeness could succumb: If Jewry would bring idols into their own homes, even for aesthetic enjoyment or academic study, they could corrupt Jewish sensibilities. “Do not bring an abomination into your house since you will become accursed like it,” He warned His chosen people. “You should utterly detest [an idol] and utterly abhor it, for it is an objectively cursed thing.”(1) Ancient Israel needed a commandment to detest the detestable, abhor the abhorrent, and keep it far from their homes, the Torah teaches, because once even the most crass influence passes within, it grows gradually less offensive and more acceptable.

Traditional Jews long understood that the home is not just a dorm and restaurant: It is the center of the child’s world, and it is the heart of the family. As such, it demands protection. Heart infections kill. Influences that are only offensive on the streets can be deadly in the den.

The Television Question
Following in their ancestors’ footsteps, traditional Jews guard their hearts, carefully sifting through their generation’s popular culture before allowing it through the front door. Their first question has always been, “How will this affect my children?”

In March 1975, four leading, traditional Jewish scholars issued an advisory warning about television to traditional Jewish communities.(2) Their paper was rooted entirely in Talmudic sources and contained no references to the scientific literature. Nonetheless, it cited what secular scholars would term psychological and developmental dangers. It suggested that these dangers were related to both content and medium, and it recommended that parents not expose their children to television. At the time, the warning must have seemed provincial at best to those unfamiliar with the uncanny insight of traditional Jewish wisdom.

In 1975, television research in secular, academic circles was just beginning. The entire scientific literature consisted of only about 300 research papers and a summary report issued jointly by the United States Surgeon General and the National Institute of Mental Health.(3) The summary report weakly raised the possibility of an association between television watching and aggression, but concluded, “a great deal of research remains to be done before we can have confidence in these conclusions.”

By 1980, investigators had produced 2,500 studies on the effects of watching television, and the Talmudic scholars’ early warning was beginning to look less provincial and more prophetic. In 1982, the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services contracted the leading television researchers—professors from Harvard, Stanford, the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—to summarize scientific opinion about television’s safety. Their highly critical two-volume statement(4) failed to gain much attention outside of academic circles, but it shook the world of research-psychologists and inspired a flood of further studies about the dangers of television. Thousands of subsequent investigations confirmed the early findings, and today a rich literature documents the negative outcomes of exposing children to television.

CONTENT
Most discussions focus on the deleterious effects of television content (as opposed to medium), so let us begin our review there.

Alcohol
In 1993, one out of three high school seniors, one out of four tenth-graders, and one out of seven eighth-graders got drunk at least once every two weeks.(5) Where are so many children learning to abuse alcohol?

The 1982 report of the Surgeon General revealed that alcohol is the most consumed beverage on prime time television shows. Television characters drink alcohol twice as often as they drink tea or coffee, 14 times as frequently as soft drinks, and 15 times more often than water.(6) Eighty percent of prime-time programs showed or mentioned alcohol consumption, and in half of these instances it was heavy alcohol consumption - five or more drinks.(7) In 1990, there were 8.1 drinking references or portrayals per hour on prime- time.(8) Of deep concern to the Surgeon General, “The drinkers are not the villains or the bit players; they are good, steady, likable characters,” and portrayals are entirely devoid of “indications of possible risks.”(9) When we consider that, in addition to alcohol consumption portrayed during programs, the average U.S. citizen also sees 100,000 television advertisements for alcoholic beverages before age twenty-one,(10) it seems reasonable to suspect that TV exposure might affect our children’s drinking habits.

New Zealand researchers in fact discovered a direct correlation between frequency of television viewing among 13 to 15 year olds and quantity of alcohol consumed at age 18. The more TV young teens watched, the more alcohol they drank three to five years later.(11) Researchers from the University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York replicated the New Zealand findings with a random sampling of 14 to 16-year-old U.S. teens.(12) A follow-up study concluded that it was the TV watching that produced the alcohol consumption (and not the alcohol consumption that encouraged TV watching).(13)

A team at Stanford University recently succeeded in quantifying television’s effect on teenage drinking. Studying over 1,500 ninth-grade public high school students in San Jose, California, the Stanford researchers discovered that “one extra hour of television viewing per day was associated with an average 9% increase in the risk of starting to drink over the next eighteen months; [and] similarly, one extra hour of music video [MTV] viewing per day was associated with an average 31% increase in the risk of starting to drink over the next eighteen months.”(14) These probabilities remained even after controlling for the effects of age, sex, ethnicity, and other media use. The Stanford team concluded:

The findings of this study have important health and public policy implications… The large magnitudes of the these associations between hours of television viewing and music video viewing and the subsequent onset of drinking demand that attempts to prevent adolescent alcohol abuse should address the adverse influences of alcohol use in the media.(15)

Each year, students spend $5.5 billion on alcohol—more than they spend on soft-drinks, tea, milk, juice, coffee, and books combined.(16) Alcohol is implicated in more than 40% of all academic problems and 28% of all dropouts.(17) Alcohol was found to be a factor in 60% of women who were diagnosed with certain infectious diseases.(18) On a typical weekend in America, an average of one teenager dies every two hours in a car crash involving alcohol.(19) Children who drink recreationally are 7.5 times more likely to use any illicit drug and 50 times more likely to use cocaine than children who abstain from alcohol.(20) In light of these statistics, we must consider whether we want our children to absorb TV’s messages about alcohol consumption or whether there is something more productive they could do with their time.

Violence
The earliest content-based TV research focused on violence. Between 1952 and 1992 the average number of violent acts per hour ranged from 6.2 to 32.(21)

In the early 1990a, MTV averaged 22 violent acts per hour, half of which involved major physical assaults, assaults with weapons, and threats accompanied by weapons.(22) In 1993, the most violent prime-time shows exhibited as many as 60 acts of violence per hour.(23) That year the average child living in the United States watched 10,000 murders, assaults, and other violent acts on television,(24) and by 1997 that number had climbed to 12,000(25) and was still rising.

Initially psychologists wondered whether exposure to so much media violence would affect behavior. Three early studies suggested an answer.

First, Dr. Brandon Centerwall, professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, Seattle, led a group of researchers in an electrifying cross-cultural investigation. The University of Washington project took advantage of the fact that television was introduced to North America almost thirty years before it arrived in South Africa. Dr. Centerwall and his colleagues compared white homicide rates before and after television’s arrival in the United States and Canada with white homicide rates in South Africa during the same period.

Centerwall predicted that he would find a 10 to 15-year lag between television’s arrival and spikes in U.S., Canadian, and South African murder rates:

Given that homicide is an adult activity, if television exerts its behavior-modifying effects primarily upon children, the initial “television-generation” would have had to age 10 to 15 years before they would have been old enough to affect the homicide rate.(26)

And so he discovered. Initially all three countries had nearly identical rates. However, the University of Washington team found that ten to fifteen years after television arrived in the United States and Canada, white homicide rates in both countries suddenly jumped by 92% and 93%, respectively. In contrast, in South Africa, where television had yet to arrive, rates remained consistently low throughout this period. A follow-up study conducted after television’s arrival in South Africa found that white homicide rates there followed the North American pattern, jumping 130% fourteen years after television’s introduction.(27)

The University of Washington group also analyzed when television was introduced into various United States census regions and homicide rates within those regions. They found a precise correlation between when television arrived in each U.S. census region and when its homicide rate spiked.(28) For example, television was introduced to the West South Central census region six years after it was introduced to the Middle Atlantic region, and West South Central homicide rates did not begin to ascend until 1964—exactly six years after the 1958 Middle Atlantic spike began. After successfully testing their theory against eleven falsifiable hypotheses, the University of Washington researchers concluded:

The timing of the acquisition of television predicts the timing of the subsequent increase in rates of violence… A doubling of the homicide rate after everyone is exposed to television implies that the relative risk of homicide after (prolonged) exposure to television, compared with no exposure, is approximately 2:1.(29)

Writing for the Journal of the American Medical Association, Centerwall stressed:

The epidemiological evidence indicates that if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.(30)

The second experiment to gain widespread attention in research circles was conducted by Dr. Tannis MacBeth Williams, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Until the summer of 1973, television broadcasters had been unable to reach a certain Canadian town (which Williams dubbed “Notel”), but they expected to resolve these signal reception difficulties within a year. Williams’ team got word that Notel was about to receive television and quickly identified two other Canadian towns with demographic profiles identical to Notel but which already possessed television. Researchers then began a two-year study of randomly selected first- and second-grade students in all three towns, focusing on rates of objectively measured noxious physical aggression (e.g., hitting, shoving, and biting).

In the two years after television’s arrival in Notel, Williams’ team watched while rates of physical aggression among Notel’s students shot up 160%. Over the same period, rates of aggression in the two control towns remained unchanged. Six groups of university investigators verified that the only significant difference between Notel and the control communities was the introduction of television.(31)

The third early study to grab researchers’ attention was conducted by Drs. Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann, professors of psychology at the University of Illinois. They followed a large random sampling for 22 years, from third grade through adulthood, tracking violent behavior and a range of other habits and environmental stimuli. Eron and Huesmann discovered that the amount of television children watched at eight years old was the single most powerful predictor of violent behavior at age thirty - more than poverty, grades, a single-parent home, or even exposure to real violence.(32) Professor Eron told a Newsweek reporter:

Of course, not every youngster is affected. Not everyone who gets lung cancer smoked cigarettes, and not everyone who smokes cigarettes gets lung cancer. But nobody outside the tobacco industry denies that smoking causes lung cancer. The size of the [television watching-aggressive behavior] correlation is the same.(33)

A follow-up investigation by the University of Illinois team studied more than a thousand children in Australia, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, and Poland over a three-year period. This international sampling produced identical results: Exposure to television was the greatest determinant of aggressive behavior.(34)

These early studies stimulated an avalanche of recent research: Investigators compared the playground behavior of ordinary groups of elementary school children with experimental groups who had been shown typically violent television shows before recess.(35) Before and after exposure to prime-time and children’s programming, investigators monitored the behavior of children living in circumstances so violent that one would expect the effects of media to be overshadowed.(36) Researchers ranked preschoolers for aggressiveness and then interviewed the children’s parents to dtermine the frequency of the children’s television viewing.(37) There have been retrospective surveys, longitudinal studies, and meta-analyses. Tens of thousands of infants, children, teens and young adults have been studies in every continent for their reactions to television, and the results have all produced the same conclusion.(38)

To date, more than a thousand investigations have documented a causal link between television viewing and violent behavior, and no study has contradicted this hypothesis.(39) Looking back over decades of television research, the leader of the University of Illinois team, Professor Huesmann, observed, “At this time, it should be difficult to find any researcher who does not believe that a significant positive relation exists between viewing television violence and subsequent aggressive behavior under most conditions.”(40)

Ten years after their first report, the United States Surgeon General and National Institute of Mental Health issued an update clearly stating that the latest evidence “seems overwhelming that [watching] televised violence and [acting with] aggression are positively correlated in children.”(41) The Surgeon General’s 2001 report cited statistical links between television watching and violent behavior similar in strength to the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer.(42) Dr. Jeffrey McIntyre, legislative and federal affairs officer for the American Psychological Association, echoed these sentiments in an interview with the New York Times: “The evidence is overwhelming. To argue against it is like arguing against gravity.”(43)

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry conducted its own battery of investigation and concurred that television watching produces aggressive children.(44) The American Medical Association’s House of Delegates surveyed the burgeoning evidence and declared: “TV violence threatens the health and welfare of young Americans.”(45) An American Medical Association “special communication” proclaimed: “Children’s exposure to television and television violence should become part of the public health agenda, along with safety seats, bicycle helmets, immunizations, and good nutrition.”(46) In an editorial entitled “Exposure to Television Poses a Public Health Concern,” the Annals of Epidemiology declared, “Public health’s mandate of prevention, originally used to combat infectious disease, must now be called forth to address mass media content.”(47) As Professor Eron observed, “The scientific debate is over.”(48) Television makes children violent.

Commercialism
Why do broadcasters continue to offer alcohol-related and violent programming, given the overwhelming data testifying to the damage done by such fare? Our question stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of television’s clientele. As a writer for the Journal of the American Medical Association observed:

Cable aside, the television industry is not in the business of selling programs to audiences. It is in the business of selling audiences to advertisers. Issues of “quality” and “social responsibility” are entirely peripheral to the issue of maximizing audience size within a competitive market.(49)

Television does not exist to entertain us; it exists to sell to us. Colman McCarthy, professor at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland, explains, “It is a commercial arrangement, with the TV set a salesman permanently assigned to one house, and often two or three salesmen working different rooms.”(50) Dr. John Condry, professor of human development and family studies at Cornell University, writes, “The task of those who program television is to capture the public’s attention and to hold it long enough to advertise a product.”(51)

While this amazes some parents, it is a reality that everyone in the television industry thoroughly understands. Doug Herzog, while serving as president of Fox Entertainment, thus justified the level of alcohol, sex, and violence on his network, saying, “This is all happening because society is evolving and changing, but the bottom line is people seem to be buying it.”(52) Gene DeWitt, chairman of one of the leading firms selling television advertising time, similarly admitted, “There’s no point in moralizing whether this is a good or bad thing. Television is a business whose purpose is gathering audience.”(53)

Indeed, children see one hour of commercials for every five hours of programs they watch on commercial television.(54) This means that during calendar year 1997, when the average U.S. child watched television 25 hours a week,(55) he spent 260 full hours (or the equivalent of 6.5 weeks of 40-hour-per-week shifts) just watching commercials.

This is significant when we consider that the most essential product of the advertising industry is hunger. That is, commercials are intended to create a feeling of lack in the viewer, a deep ache that can only be assuaged by purchasing the product. As Dr. Neil Postman, chairman of the Department of Communication Arts at New York University, points out, “What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.”(56) So we hand our children over to Madison Avenue to be told, hundreds of hours a year, how hungry, bored, ugly, and unpopular they are and will continue to be until they spend (or persuade their parents to spend) a few more dollars. And then we wonder why our children feel so hungry, bored, ugly, and unpopular, and why they are so needy.

Planting the Right Seeds
Nicholas Johnson, a former commissioner of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, once said, “All television is educational. The question is, what does it teach?”(57) Violence educates. So does alcohol. So do commercials. These are seeds that television plants.

And these are only a sampling of the values and perspectives that pass directly from TV to child. Television plants other seeds too. For example, researchers at Syracuse University and State University of New York discovered that television programs almost never advocate reading books and lend the impression that one can get all the knowledge one needs from watching TV. They theorize this might be responsible for the finding that “young people who view greater amounts of television are more likely to have a decidedly low opinion of book reading as an activity.”(58) If we do not approve of television’s portrayals of alcohol and violence; if we think book reading is important; if our life goals include more altruistic principles, like kindness, integrity, commitment, faithfulness, and the like; or if the television plants other seeds incompatible with our basic values, then shouldn’t we be concerned about every minute our children spend sitting before a television absorbing its perspectives? If the programmers and advertisers are not properly educating our children, then do we really want to turn our children over to their care? If television exposes our children to influences we disapprove of, why should we bring it into our homes?

Medium
Most popular discussions of television’s downside focus entirely on television’s deleterious content, and in doing so they miss at least half the problem. Perhaps the medium itself, regardless of content, does damage.

Achievement and Intelligence Japanese researchers conducted some of the earliest research on the relationship between television and impaired academic achievement. In 1962, they published findings that reading skills declined among Japanese fifth to seventh graders as soon as their family acquired a television set.(59)

Two years later, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare conducted the first large-scale American study. The survey, covering 650,000 students in 4,000 U.S. schools, included a handful of questions about television viewing patterns. Government officials were surprised to discover that the more television students watched, the lower their achievement scores.(60) Unfortunately, these results were largely ignored by the media, and the findings were not widely known and soon forgotten.

Almost 15 years passed before research on television and impaired achievement attracted any serious attention again, but then interest in television’s cognitive effects suddenly burgeoned. Statewide assessment programs conducted in Rhode Island (1975-76), Connecticut (1978-79), and Pennsylvania (1978-79) surveyed thousands of children and came up with remarkably similar results: The more television children watched, the worse they performed in all academic areas.(61)

Also in 1979, University of New Orleans investigators extended research down to five and six year olds. Studying first-grade classrooms in the New Orleans metropolitan area, they also discovered that “first graders who watched a lot of television in their preschool years earned lower grades than those who watched less.”(62) They further demonstrated that the number of hours children watched television was the single best predictor of low grades—a better predictor than parents’ low educational achievement, insufficient time spent in school, insufficient time spent with family, and a host of other negative factors.(63)

One year later, Drs. Larry Gross and Michael Morgan, professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications, made headlines when they found that television did not just impair academic achievement, it retarded intelligence. They discovered that the more television tenth graders watched, the lower they scored on IQ tests. The inverse relationship between IQ and television watching held even after the researchers controlled for socio-economic status, sex, and family size.(64) The drop in IQ scores was large and consistent, and it could not be attributed to television attracting an abundance of children from lower socio-economic groups or crowded families. “It is extremely unlikely that the association between viewing and [low] IQ scores is spurious,” they concluded.(65)

Although data trickled in throughout the late 1970s, the dam finally burst in 1980 when the California State Board of Education became interested in the television question and decided to launch a thorough investigation. That spring it distributed a comprehensive questionnaire to more than half a million sixth and twelfth graders, evaluating writing, reading, and arithmetic skills, work habits, family profiles, and television viewing patterns. The astonishing results caught the attention not only of research psychologists, but also (for the first time since television research began) the popular press. The New York Times reported:

A California survey indicates that the more a student watches television, the worse he does in school. Wilson Riles, California schools superintendent, said Thursday that no matter how much homework the students did, how intelligent they were, or how much money their parents earned, the relationship between television and test scores was practically identical. Based on the survey, Mr. Riles concluded that, for educational purposes, television “is not an asset and it ought to be turned off.”(66)

The survey was repeated the following year, and statisticians and psychologists performed even more detailed analyses of the data. Their reports shocked parents and educators alike. Students from households with no television set in the living room earned an average reading score of 74% correct, versus 69% correct for students who had TV sets in the living room.(67) Children from upper socio-economic strata were even more negatively affected than those from the middle class or lower class.(68) Even one hour of television viewing a day reduced achievement scores, and every additional hour of viewing made things worse.(69) It made no difference whether parents discussed the programs afterward with their children,(70) whether children chose their own programs or parents chose for them,(71) or what sort of programming children watched.(72) Across the board, even small amounts of television viewing hurt academic achievement.

Five Paths to Cognitive Damage
In the wake of the California surveys, researchers began to ask why exposure to the stimulating and potentially enlightening content of television should retard achievement and IQ. Even more confusing, studies revealed that television reduced educational aspirations. These studies demonstrated that, even though TV programs portrayed an overabundance of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, the more television children watched, the less time they wanted to spend in school. The effect was especially pronounced among adolescents who, as they watched television, lowered not only their educational aspirations but also their professional hopes. The more TV a child watched, the lower status the job he eventually wanted to pursue.(73) Something about the medium seemed to undermine whatever positive content television offered. Five explanations emerged.

First, Harvard investigators confirmed that television ate up time children would otherwise have used to study or read for pleasure. They found, for instance, that children from homes with no television were 11% more likely to do homework on weekdays and 23% more likely to do homework on Sundays.(74) Professor George Comstock of Syracuse University, arguably the leading scholar in the study of television, wrote in 1999, “Learning to read is often hard work for a child, whereas television viewing is comparatively undemanding. Children are certainly tempted to watch television instead of mastering reading, and those who succumb will be permanently impaired scholastically.”(75)

In a spontaneous experiment in 1982, a New Jersey elementary school announced a “No TV Week.” According to the New York Times report of the event, “Students in every class started spending more time reading books and talking to their friends and families.”(76) Two years later the entire city of Farmington, Connecticut voluntarily gave up TV for one month. When Wall Street Journal reporters interviewed Farmington residents, both adults and children most often mentioned reading as the activity they used to fill the newly available hours.(77) Children who do not practice reading find themselves “impaired scholastically,” they do not enjoy school, and, recognizing how much preparatory schooling the elite professions demand, they scale down their aspirations.

A second way that the medium itself depresses achievement and IQ (and perhaps thus aspiration) is by making children sleepy. Not only do children stay up past their bedtimes watching television, a team at Brown University found that children’s sleep onset time was prolonged when they watched television anytime during the previous day or evening, producing shortened sleep duration and daytime sleepiness. The researchers suggested that at bedtime children conjure forth “excessively violent and/or stimulating” television scenes viewed in the last 24 to 48 hours. Thus, even children who went to bed on time were less alert if they had watched television the previous day.(78)

Marie Winn, a Wall Street Journal columnist, discovered another way television makes young children overtired. She writes:
Today parents do not “work” to keep the nap. Instead, with relief in sight second only to the relief they feel when their child is asleep at night, parents work on their young children to encourage them to watch television for reliable periods of time, a far easier job than working on a child to have a nap.(79)

Third, television’s quick cuts alleviate the need to concentrate. George Comstock explains, “The pacing of much television suppresses impulse control and the ability to attend to the slower pace of schooling.”(80) New York University’s Neil Postman reports that the average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, “so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see.”(81) Robert MacNeil, executive editor and co-anchor of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, writes that the idea “is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time.”(82)

In the famous 1854 debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, Douglas led off with a three-hour opening statement, which Lincoln took four hours to rebut. During the televised presidential debates of 1987, each candidate took five minutes to address questions like “What is your policy in Central America?” before his opponent launched into a sixty-second rebuttal.(83) This sort of parody is as intellectually taxing a presentation as anyone will see on television.

Since our children sit passively while the television dances, their ability to become deeply involved with books, school teachers, and other less frenetic sources of wisdom—their ability to think—atrophies. It should be no wonder that they abandon books, manifest lower intelligence quotients, fail to achieve academically, and have depressed professional aspirations.

Fourth, television impedes imagination. A study of gifted fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, included in the Surgeon General’s report, shows that watching a range of television shows - from cartoons to “educational television”—depresses the students’ subsequent creativity scores.(84) Commenting on experiments in which children went on television “diets,” researchers at the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry write:

Experience has shown that children who cease watching television do play in ways clearly suggesting the use of an imaginary world. Resuming their viewing, the children decrease this kind of play. Research findings also suggest that children who are light television viewers report significantly more imaginary playmates than those who are heavy viewers.

Harvard professors Dorothy Singer and Jerome Singer discovered at least one mechanism by which television corrodes creativity: Viewers never need to conjure up an image. “Children accustomed to heavy television viewing process both the auditory and the visual cues afforded by that medium simultaneously,” they write, “and may become lax in generating their own images” when reading or listening to a story.(85)

A fifth explanation emerged from the work of Harvard University Professor T. Berry Brazelton. Brazelton hooked newborn babies up to electroencephalographs and then exposed them to a flickering light source similar to a television but with no images. Fifteen minutes into their exposure, the babies stopped crying and produced sleep patterns on the EEG, even though their eyes were still open and observing the light.(86) Brazelton’s experiment revealed that the medium itself, with no content, acts directly on the brain to suppress mental activity. The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry confirmed Brazelton’s finding in 1982. They reported that the brain waves generated while watching even the most exciting shows were those of low attention states. The researchers found that while subjects viewed television, “output of alpha rhythms increased, indicating they were in a passive state, as if they were just sitting in the dark.”(87)

Every activity a child engages in during his busy day refines some set of skills. Reading is practice; writing is practice; sports is practice; engaging in fantasy games is practice; and interacting with people is practice. All these activities in some way help prepare a child for the challenges of adult life. Television is also practice, but not for any activity. Television is practice for inactivity. When children watch television they are practicing sleeping - often for hours every day. One does not need a Ph.D. to realize that this could have all sorts of deleterious effects on cognitive development and later aspirations.

Social Interaction
Parents sometimes justify television’s presence in their household by arguing that it creates a venue for “family time”—that is, everyone comes together to watch television “as a family.” Eleanor Maccoby, professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, investigated this theory and concluded:

It appears that the increased family contact brought about by television is not social except in the most limited sense: that of being in the same room with other people…the viewing atmosphere in most households is one of quiet absorption in the programs on the part of the family members who are present. The nature of the family social life during a program could be described as “parallel” rather than interactive, and the set does seem quite clearly to dominate family life when it is on.(88)

A mother of one child who participated in the New Jersey “No TV Week” effused, “My daughter and I rediscovered each other.” Another mother responded with shock, “My three children actually played together.” A group of elementary students who had participated confessed, “Play is more fun than TV,” and said they would never watch as much television as they had before the experiment.(89)

According to a United States government report, these anecdotes are not atypical: “Extended and frequent television viewing has been shown to decrease the time and opportunity available for social interaction within the family.”(90)

Not surprisingly, the social skills of children atrophy when they watch television instead of playing. An experiment carried out by researchers at the University of New Orleans measured the social skills of 128 first graders and then interviewed to determine the amount of time the child spent watching television every day. After controlling for a range of other variables (including sleep, time spent with peers and family, parents’ educational levels, etc.), the number one determinant of social skills was how little television the child watched. Those who watched the least television had the best social skills.(91)

Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim suggests that television retards social skills not just by depriving children of playtime, but also by accustoming them to unrealistically stimulating characters:

Children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communications coming from the TV screen, to the deep emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor.(92)

Indeed, it is not just television personalities that often outshine real people. Anything portrayed on television can be made more exciting than almost anything in real life. A 1999 commercial for a popular minivan shows a happy family on vacation, riding through stunning mountains and plains.(93) The parents are quietly absorbing the scenery. The children in the back seat are also quiet, but for a different reason. The camera zooms in to reveal the children mesmerized by individual television monitors mounted in front of them.

A similar commercial appeared in 1992.(94) The ad shows a name-brand television set sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon. On its screen appears the same panorama that forms the actual backdrop. A boy is drawn to the set, oblivious to the surrounding natural grandeur. He turns back to his parents, points to the screen, and yells, “Hey, look, it’s the Grand Canyon!” When a child has television, of what interest is Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, or anything else that’s real?

Obesity
Television makes children fat.(95) Harvard University researchers discovered that the odds of a child becoming obese rise 12 to 20% for each daily hour of television he watches.(96) Epidemiologists also agree that watching two or more hours of television daily is a global marker for high risk of pediatric hypercholesterolemia.(97) Physicians have identified four ways that television puts children at risk for obesity:

First, television displaces more active play.(98) Especially today, leisure time is limited. Every daytime hour spent in front of a television set is therefore one less hour the child has to ride a bike, play ball, join in team sports, or engage in other activities that would burn calories or raise the child’s average metabolic rate. Investigators also report that television makes children less active when they do play, although no one is yet confident exactly why this happens.(99)

Second, children love to snack while watching television. Even if these snacks were healthy, this snacking is calorie consumption that simply would not happen were the children out playing.(100)

Third, the snacks children consume while watching television are overwhelmingly high in fat, cholesterol, salt, and sugar, and low in vitamins, minerals, and fiber.(101) The U.S. Surgeon General attributes these unhealthful snacking habits to the success of television advertising. He writes that the average American child sees 2,500 commercials a year for “high-calorie, high-sugar, low nutrition products.” He also reveals that 70% of food advertisements are for foods high in fat, cholesterol, sugar, and salt, while only 3% are for fruits and vegetables.(102)

Consistent with the Surgeon General’s theory, epidemiologists at the University of Minnesota surveying children’s Saturday morning television recently discovered that 56.5% of all commercials on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and Nickelodeon advertised food products, and the most frequently advertised product was high-sugar cereal. Comparing the food products advertised on TV with the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommendations for pediatric diet, the researchers found that “the diet depicted in Saturday morning television programming is the antithesis of what is recommended for healthful eating for children.”(103) They further observed that children see a food commercial about every five minutes on Saturday morning TV, and that the main explicit messages used to sell food products are taste and the promise of a free toy. The University of Minnesota team levelled the obvious charge, “The heavy marketing of high-fat foods and foods of low nutritional value targeted to such a vulnerable group can be viewed as exploitation.”(104)

The fourth and perhaps most insidious link between television and obesity was discovered in 1993. Psychologists and epidemiologists at the University of Tennessee and Memphis State University monitored metabolic rates in eight- to twelve-year-old children under two conditions: lying down in a dark room, and sitting up watching television. In every case, the child’s metabolic rate while sitting and watching television was far lower than his metabolic rate while lying down in the dark. Watching television is worse than doing nothing.

Equally surprising, the effect of the TV session on metabolic rate persisted after the session for at least the length of time the child had watched television. That is, a 25-minute TV session depressed metabolic rate not only during television viewing but also for at least 25 minutes after viewing had ended.(105)

The Tennessee study has two astounding implications: First, since TV slows metabolism, the same child, eating the same types and quantities of food and participating in the same amount of activity, could remain healthy or become obese depending on how long he is exposed to television each day.

Second, since metabolism remains depressed even after the TV session ends, a child who watches television gains more weight from food eaten even when he is not watching television, and will have more difficulty burning off excess fat, than children who do not watch TV. The researchers conclude:

Those children who watch an excessive amount of television are more at risk for becoming obese because their resting energy expenditures are lower than if they were doing nothing at all. This finding emphasizes the potential importance of controlling the amount of television watched by children at risk for obesity.(106)

Children’s Television and “Kosher” Videos
Many parents who admit that prime-time programming contains inappropriate content instead encourage their children to watch special children’s programming (like Sesame Street, cartoons, and “kosher” videos). Here, the theory is, the content is better. Regardless of whether the content really is better (a hotly debated topic among experts in the study of television), the medium that carries children’s television is just as problematic.

Attention Deficit Disorder
The late Dr. Dorothy Cohen, a professor at the Bank Street College of Education, was among the first secular scholars to discover the damage done by children’s television programs. Back in 1973, she reported that although Sesame Street does teach letter recognition, it also is responsible for “a decrease in imaginative play and an increase in aimless running around, non-involvement in play materials, low frustration tolerance, poor persistence, and confusion about reality and fantasy.”(107) By capturing the daily attention of 80% of America’s two to five year olds, she argued, Sesame Street was “fostering an increase in frenetic behavior and the impoverishment of play.”(108) Sesame Street, Cohen said, was creating a “literate but unteachable” generation.(109)

Shortly after Cohen’s first attack on Sesame Street, Dr. Werner Halpern, director of the Children and Youth Division of the Rochester Mental Health Center, revealed the results of his own research:

The program’s pulsating, insistent visual and auditory stimulation can act as an assault on the nervous system of young children with immature neurological and perceptual development. [In some two year olds] sensory overkill produced by the show’s overheated teaching techniques triggered pressured speech, constant movement, frantic reactions and a compulsion to recite and identify numbers and letters.(110)

Then came the report from the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center: “Sesame Street creates a psychological orientation in children that leads to a shortened attention span, a lack of reflectiveness, and an expectation of rapid change in the broader environment.”(111) The Yale researchers warned that “well intentioned parents who allow their children to watch nothing but Sesame Street…might actually be encouraging over-stimulation and frenetic behavior.”(112)

In 1979, Israeli researchers registered complaints with the creators of Sesame Street, describing how children in their country who watched the show regularly showed less perseverance on a routine task than a control group of nonviewers.(113) Although Sesame Street executives shrugged off the Israeli results as insignificant, the U.S. Surgeon General felt differently and included them in his 1982 report.(114)

Sesame Street spokesmen defended the show, saying that it really helped children focus. They provided supporting studies documenting how well children attended to the television while watching Sesame Street. Teachers on the front line were not impressed. A New York Times article detailed how “teachers report they cannot hold the attention of a kindergarten class for more than two or three minutes - the average length of a Sesame Street segment. And they say the show is to blame.”(115) Referring to the visual effects common not only on Sesame Street, but also on other “educational” children’s programs like Electric Company and Zoom, a Connecticut teacher testified before the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, “Kids today are accustomed to learning through gimmicks, but I cannot turn my body into shapes or flashlights.”(116) The educational psychologist Jane Healy wrote in American Educator, “It amazes me that so many people seem to have accepted the notion that this peripatetic carnival will somehow teach kids to read—despite the fact that the habits of mind necessary for reading are exactly those that Sesame Street does not teach.”(117) New York University’s Professor Neil Postman summarized the educators’ objection: “We now know that Sesame Street encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street”—which it is not.(118)

Violent Toddlers
In 1982, investigators at the University of Kansas reported finding that the very excitement that keeps children glued to children’s TV shows and videos also creates “a state of generalized arousal” leading to aggression.(119) Although the fast pace of shows like Sesame Street hold the children’s attention, it also frustrates them, the researchers explained. Yale University’s Professor Dorothy Singer made headlines in 1995 with parallel findings. “Even innocuous programs like the quick-cutting Sesame Street or variety and game shows were so stimulating that they prompted aggression,” she told Newsweek.(120)

Other Effects
While quick cuts and over-stimulating programming present certain unique threats, children’s television and videos also carry all the medium-related dangers of adult shows. The 1982 California Assessment Program discovered, for example, that children who watched educational (public) television once a day earned achievement scores identical to children who watched commercial TV, and both groups scored 10% lower than children who did not watch TV at all.(121) Moreover, like their commercial counterparts, educational TV and videos devour not only the time a child would otherwise be reading, writing, or practicing arithmetic; they also consume playtime, which means less opportunity for learning how to interact with others and less physical exercise. And like any TV show, educational programs increase daytime sleepiness and impede the development of independent imagination.

Why We Let Them Watch
Why, then, would any parent sit their child down in front of a television for an hour or two? There seem to be two primary reasons.

First, some parents are themselves TV addicts. According to the New York Times report, during the New Jersey “No TV Week”:
Parents seemed to have more trouble kicking the habit than their children. Several mothers were caught watching “General Hospital.” Fathers buckled during hockey and basketball games. One of the fathers furtively watched Warner Wolf’s sports report with an earplug. Another, who said he could not cheat because “I have two little detectives in my house,” taped the Rangers’ hockey games.(122)

Parents want to spend time with their children…and with the television, and the easiest compromise is to watch television with the children. This is not to imply that parents interact in any serious or deep way with their children while the set is on. Generally, they do not. However, it is time spent together; and since both parties slip into the TV trance, interpersonal difficulties are usually limited to arguments over what show to watch.

A second reason parents give in to TV is that it is such an effective babysitter. Raising good children is tough. Really tough. It demands creativity, endurance, and especially patience. It demands time and commitment, and more time. For any normal person, the challenge can be daunting. TV provides what seems to be an easy way out. Jack Gould, the New York Times’ first television critic, thus observed, “Children’s hours on television admittedly are an insidious narcotic for the parent. With the tots fanned out on the floor in front of the receiver, a strange if wonderful quiet seems at hand.”(123) With the click of a switch, our parenting responsibilities seem to drop to making meals, doing laundry, and handling bedtime.

Of course, this is an illusion. The child’s cognitive and emotional needs remain, but in a TV trance he becomes incapable of expressing them. The Wall Street Journal columnist Marie Winn laments:

Perhaps because encouraging children to watch television was so easy and pleasant when compared to the more disagreeable or difficult strategies of the past, parents overlooked the fact that those very behaviors that cause them trouble, those explorations, manipulations, and endless experiments in cause and effect, are profitable and indeed necessary activities for a small child, and that dealing with children’s difficult behaviors by eliminating them entirely via the television set is not dissimilar to suppressing a child’s natural behavior by threats of physical punishment, and surprisingly similar to drugging a child into inactivity.(124)

The Time and Newsweek columnist Peggy Noonan confesses that both of these reasons—her own addiction to TV and its magical ability to mesmerize her children—undermined her resolve to protect her children from television:

I have tried to turn off the TV in my house, I really have. Once, I shut it off for a week, and I was never, ever allowed to talk on the phone because I was never, ever alone. On the third origami paper house, I began to sob. Once, we shut it off for the night, but then I read it was the The Simpsons episode where Lisa is sent to the Ayn Rand Preschool, so I had to make an exception for that. Once, we had it seriously limited for awhile, but then Kosovo came along and Mom started hitting the network news and then CNN and then mainlining MSNBC… Well, as you can see, Mom is part of the problem.(125)

Kicking the Habit
We cannot be blamed for falling into the television and video trap. Not everyone is attuned to proclamations from traditional Jewish scholars; the secular, scientific data did not pile up until very recently; and the facts still have not garnered much attention in the mass media. Most parents have no concept of how bad television really is.

But now we know. Perhaps more than any other influence, television is the antithesis of the traditional Jewish educational ideal. It often plants cruel or self-destructive values and perspectives and builds harmful behavioral routines. We see the damage done to children all around us - the cognitive, emotional, and physical signs of too much TV. And yet we wonder whether we and our children can survive and thrive without our daily dose of television. Perhaps the time has arrived to find out.

An Addiction Test
The first step towards mitigating television’s negative influence on the family is determining which if any family members are TV addicts. Addicts of all sorts often deny that they are addicted. Many alcoholics claim that they could quit at any time but say that they “choose” to partake because they enjoy the experience. Many drug addicts say the same thing. So do those addicted to food. Often, addicts only realize that they are out of control when they are challenged to control their addiction for a month or so and realize they cannot do it.

Every family deserves a 30-day vacation from television—with all the play, reading, and family time this promises. If this can be accomplished while the TV set is physically accessible, it is a sign that family members are probably not addicted and can be casually weaned off of television’s corrosive commercials and programming. As a group, the family can voluntarily limit television watching to weekends - a move that might cut TV consumption by half or more. Making plans to spend time together as a family on weekends could further reduce consumption without introducing any further restrictions. As family members discover each other and taste more wholesome activities, interest in television might wane altogether.

A Family Detox Plan
If family members (including ourselves) discover that it is impossible to keep the TV set off for thirty days, we must be honest enough to admit that we are facing an addiction - an addiction that negatively impacts intellectual, emotional, and physical well-being. When this is the case, we need to employ the same strategies used by addictions experts.

First, parents must slowly introduce alternative activities to take over television hours. These alternatives—“TV methadone”—simultaneously reduce withdrawal symptoms and begin the weaning process. On Thursday nights the family could participate in some fun sort of charitable work in the community. Most traditional Jewish communities have volunteer groups that deliver crates of free food to the poor on Thursday nights in anticipation of the Sabbath, and family members of all ages enjoy the hustle and good spirit of these activities. After a month or so, parents might want to expand the program, dedicating Wednesday nights to a library visit.

If children are TV addicts, they probably will not immediately appreciate the pleasures of reading, and a parent will need to help them discover magazines and books dealing with the themes they find most exciting. After another month, Tuesday nights could be set aside for helping with homework and test preparation. Everyone could sit together for an hour or two, doing their own homework and assisting others with theirs. Parents will immediately appreciate that this is a perfect opportunity to get a clear picture of their children’s academic strengths and weaknesses, and even children begin to appreciate a homework night as soon as they see that it improves their grades. Further down the line, Monday nights could become arts-and-crafts night, or music night, or even Monopoly night. If Mom and Dad participate too, and the activity is well organized, everyone could have a lot of fun.

These are only sample recommendations, and creative parents will have little difficulty thinking of many activities that would be more enjoyable and worthwhile than vegetating in front of the television. (The TV Turnoff Network website at www.tvturnoff.org gives a range of alternatives to TV watching.) With commitment, parents can thus ease an addicted family off of television in about half a year.

Addicts of any sort should not be forced to choose between their addiction and its healthy replacement, and TV addicts are no different. The choice is painfully difficult and often inspires rebellion. Just as no heroin is available when addictions experts offer their subjects methadone, so too the television should magically disappear (or be disabled) in anticipation of a special family activity and magically reappear (or be re-enabled) when no replacement activities are scheduled. The TV should be moved (or disabled) when the children are not present so as to avoid creating an opportunity for conflict. Nothing need be said about the TV’s absence unless the children notice and ask, and then a brief statement is best: “We don’t need it right now, so I put it away.”

If despite these precautions, our children become very emotional when denied access to television, we must sit with them, tell them how much we love them, show affection, and calmly explain why we think it is worth trying a new activity. If, during the early stages of the weaning process, the child is very panicked about missing a particular television program, we can offer to videotape it for him so that he may view it sometime when the family has not scheduled a replacement activity. We should not display anger or frustration as we help family members progress in the detox program. Addictions experts succeed through firm patience and love.

Of course, television is not the only threat to our children’s development. It is but one especially noxious example of the sort of danger we are now capable of identifying and avoiding. We might also detect problematic aspects of Walkmans, Gameboys, and computer games. Even media like the internet take on a different appearance when viewed from this perspective. Each of these educational challenges demands our attention.

Now, our job is to muster the willpower—and the love—to take a courageous stand for our own sake and for the sake of our children.
 
Okay,, this is a super long read!! We're going to have to read our way outta this DREAM STATE OF MIND or SNAP OUTTA THIS TRANCE!!! That's it!!!




7 Ways Our Children Are Being Brainwashed


From birth, virtually all of us have been brainwashed through various outlets that encourage materialism, ego, subservience, control and conformity. But where do the origins of mind control begin, how is it affecting our children, and what can we do about it?

7 Ways Our Children Are Being Brainwashed

1. Religion
As children, the brainwashing begins in the church when we are baptized. Many parents do not question baptism or the origins of it and blindly have their children baptized as the church welcomes them into the community in the name of Jesus Christ. The Jesus story, alone, isn’t questioned by enough Christians who blindly believe anything they are told in the name of “faith”.
I’d like to believe there is a Santa Claus and an Easter Bunny, too. These holidays both have Pagan origins, yet Christians never question these either. It’s all part of the lie propagated to us by religion.

Many Christians will argue that their church does good things for others while the bible provides good morals and values.

A counter-argument is that you don’t need a church to do good things for others or a bible to be a morally sound person. Additionally, the bible also teaches hatred and fear such as when God allegedly kills everyone with the “Great Flood”, except Noah and his family.

These are the horror stories our children learn in Sunday school. Not only that, but the messages are often convoluted and ambiguous. What kind of message are we sending our children?

While the bible provides nice parables to learn from, they are not necessary, especially with all of the other negative content provided by religion.

And we haven’t even touched all of the unnecessary deaths through inquisitions and crusades which continue today. Killing innocent people seems to have a common theme in religion and is carried on to our children as they become toddlers.

With the idea planted that it is alright to kill in the name of God, our children begin to emulate these preconceived ideas through the games they play.

2. Ridiculous role models
Boys play with cork guns and cap guns and begin to play “Cowboys and Indians” at a young age. Think about how appalling this is, not only to indigenous people but also teaching a child to kill as a “game”.

They also are bought G.I. Joe action figures and pretend to kill opposing troops. Plastic figurines of soldiers in combat are sold to children, some of which prominently display ethnicity, which plays into the divide and conquer mentality that is seeded at this age.


Most girls have played with a Barbie doll at some point in their life. The Barbie doll sets the stage for materialistic attitudes as well as buying into the Cosmo girl image. It also dictates the role and expectations of what a woman should look like while dividing our children in stereotyped roles for the rest of their lives.

3. Money, ego and materialism
We often ask our children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Rarely does a child say, “A healer” or “A yoga instructor”. Often, a parent will help to persuade a child into a lucrative job role such becoming a doctor or lawyer.

The need for money is further enhanced through board games such as Monopoly and Life, where our children learn greed through bankrupting their friends. While there are some positive attributes of these games, the bottom line is how they support a positive view of the banksters who have corrupted this planet while emphasizing materialism and greed.

What are kids really learning in the game of Life?



4. Divide and conquer techniques
Our children are taught how to play sports and the importance of winning. While sports provide exercise and promote physical dexterity and good health, they also play into the “divide and conquer” mentality that our children will carry with them for the rest of their lives.


How many asinine arguments have you seen between two grown men arguing whose team or player is better than the other? First of all, it’s not “their” team unless they have physical ownership of it. Secondly, the two players they’re arguing about probably could care less about their argument. Lastly, these two people are too blind to see how they’re still buying into the divide and conquer mentality that was ingrained within them since they began playing “Cowboys and Indians” at a young age.

The game is blatantly being played before our own eyes, yet many of us fail to see it. For example, if the Dallas Cowboys were to play the Kansas City Chiefs (or Washington Redskins), then you have your classic “Cowboys vs. Indians” matchup. It’s all about “My tribe” is better than “Your Tribe” which keeps us separated as people.



5. Television
Many of us grew up watching television which can be a humorous outlet or an opportunity to actually learn something, but for the most part, it gets us accustomed and hypnotized into subservience once our brains enter the alpha state of conditioning. How many times have you sat through a commercial, knowing fully how much you despise the commercial without changing the channel?



Albert Bandura has a theory of modeling where the child will emulate the parent’s behavior. This is why “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. In the absence of the parent(s), the child will be influenced by what he or she sees on television, further influencing their materialistic and ego-ladened views of society, while accepting television as a normal part of their daily routine.

The entire main stream media (radio, television, magazines, book publishers, etc…) are owned by 6 corporations who greatly influence our children through programming. Even the word “programming” should be questioned, because this is exactly what brainwashing does… it programs our minds and especially, the minds of children who are easily influenced.

6. Education
Our educational systems encourage conformity and competition while suppressing or ignoring any special abilities a child may have, such as the ability to have an out of body experience. In addition, our children are not learning the true history of our origin while being forced to learn a propaganda filled view of what history looks like through biased eyes.

Also see: What If Everything You Were Taught Was A Lie?

The textbooks our children read are printed by companies who, ultimately, are Zionist owned. What are the chances that a Zionist view would differ from the view of a Palestinian or someone who opposes Zionism?

7. Health
In a recent article entitled, “The HIDDEN History Of Fluoride” the addition to fluoride in our water supply as well as in chemtrails has helped to dumb down the population in order to make us more subservient and controllable.

Part of the hidden history of fluoride includes the following:

1940 Soviet concentration camps maintained by fluoride administration to inmates to decrease resistance to authority and induce physical deteriorization.

1950 Soviets add fluoride to water in prison system to maintain subservience in the inmate population.

1954 C.E.Perkins, I.G.Farben chemist, admits fluoride is to reduce resistance in people to authority.

Robert Carton, PhD formerly President of the union of Government Scientists working at the US Environmental Protection Agency said: “Water fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century, if not of all time.”

If fluoride has been proven to create subservience in prison and concentration camps, then what is it doing to our children who refuse to question authority figures or any official government position that is against the best interests of humanity?

One must also question the insurmountable number of vaccines our children receive. There is NO amount of mercury that is acceptable in the human body, so one must ask how ANY mercury will affect our newborn children? With the incresing number of vaccines our children receive, we also see a correlation to the number of deaths due to vaccinations as well as an exponential rise in autism.

What can I do about this?
1. Realize that as long as there is money, we are ALL economic slaves.

It all happens by the age of 12-14. One thing we don’t teach our children is how accumulated wealth is a delusional idea which inconspicuously facilitates status, security and happiness, all of which are inherent without money, yet we have been engrained in this illusion that separates us as a global society while maintaining barbaric divide and conquer principles in a capitalist society masquerading as a democracy.

At what point is enough, “enough”?

2. Ask questions… a lot of them!

Our children should be encouraged to ask questions as often as possible instead of regurgitating the state-sponsored propaganda that our schools teach.

For example, because of corporate greed, we are creating an unsustainable society. The use of “fossil fuels” is a ridiculous proposition within itself to assume that all of the world’s oil came from decomposed dinosaurs, but it’s even more asinine to assume we even need oil for fuel when hydro technologies are available, such as the water powered car invented by Stanley Meyer or Tesla’s free energy system.

Innovators, such as Meyer, are “rewarded” by threats and execution by those who fear the loss of power. The simplest answer is to open source all inventions, including suppressed technologies.

Our children never learn these truths in school because according to our economic slave masters, innovation only comes at the expense of need, not conformity.

Our children should be encouraged to be the innovators of the future who work in the best interests of humanity instead of CEO’s and business executives who are pillaging our planet at the expense of the 99% who are enslaved beneath them.

2. Ask questions... a lot of them!

3. Think outside the box

Our educational system does not encourage creative thinking and the majority of what our children learn is all left-hemisphere thinking, which is mathematical and logic based, instead of right hemisphered, which is artistic and creative. By doing so, our children are essentially being trained to work either inside a cubicle or at a fast food restaurant because they never learned the tools of creativity and how to follow their life purpose versus being forced into the corporate world of economic subservience until they are 65 years old.



4. STOP WATCHING (STATE SPONSORED PROPAGANDA) TELEVISION!!!

7 Ways Our Children Are Being Brainwashed

Watching TV is arguably the #1 brainwashing tool of the corporate elite as the television will tell you what to wear and how to think while taking away your own ability to think critically for yourself.

The news programs are designed to keep us living in perpetual fear because when we live in fear, we move further away from our true spiritual essence. The use of fear also makes us more controllable as a population where we eventually give up our civil rights in exchange for perceived security.

The commercials are just as bad as any “programming”. Most TV commercials show extroverts who are specifically dressed in a certain way with clothing that appeals to your senses in subliminal ways.

5. Try to eliminate as much fluoride from your daily routine.

Not only does fluoride help to contribute to a more subservient population, it also calcifies your pineal gland, otherwise known as the “3rd eye“. Your pineal gland is a gateway to other dimensions, so if it is calcified, then you will be limiting your utmost ability for creative thought and expression as well as dimming your spiritual connection to Creator and your higher self.

The further you move away from spirituality, the easier it is for you to be controlled.

6. Research the detriments of vaccinations.

Please keep in mind that there is NO amount of mercury that is good for anyone, especially children!

7. Do NOT ingest any genetically modified foods (or processed foods)

There have been NO longitudinal studies on the effect of GMO’s on our bodies, so we are all literally guinea pigs being tested.

One thing you might want to consider is the poison that is built into specific foods, such as GMO corn. When a bug eats GMO corn, it explodes from the inside out because the BT Toxin is not in the husk of the corn, but it the corn, itself. Imagine what this corn is doing to you and your children?

Try to buy organic food or grow your own with organic heirloom seeds. When shopping at the grocery store, avoid just about all products in the middle aisles as they are generally all processed foods.

Do You Know Someone Who Is Hiding Their Spirituality?

8. Teach your children how to meditate.

Meditation has the potential to literally transform the world. In 1978, what is known as the “Maharishi Effect” a group of 7000 individuals over the course of 3 weeks were meditating in hopes of positively effecting the surrounding city. They were able to literally transform the collective energy of the city which reduced global crime rates, violence, and casualties during the times of their meditation by an average of 16%. Suicide rates and automobile accidents also were reduced with all variables accounted for. In fact, there was a 72% reduction in terrorist activity during the times at which this group was meditation.

When you meditate, you look within for answers instead of relying on other people’s opinions, whether religious, political or educational. The truth is ALWAYS within. Anything you have ever been taught has been something that was regurgitated by someone else. Look within and you will find the answers you are looking for.

Can you envision world without money?
If you can’t envision a world without money, then you will probably have a difficult time understanding the future, especially if you watch a lot of television.

In the future, when a child is asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” they will answer, “Me” and will have a concrete idea who “me” is versus the children who have been raised to worship the almighty dollar as they blindly follow the flock ahead of them through religious and educational institutions.

We have been brainwashed for ove

Real shit too much emphasis placed on outside influences

And not enough inner growth

Teaching your children to meditate

Could never be overstated...


Awesome post again roots

You know most of this info we passing on

Is for future generations

Too many of this current generation is gone

They eat any narrative the mass media gives them..

They put ketchup on that bitch and ask for seconds.....
 
Real shit too much emphasis placed on outside influences

And not enough inner growth

Teaching your children to meditate

Could never be overstated...


Awesome post again roots

You know most of this info we passing on

Is for future generations

Too many of this current generation is gone

They eat any narrative the mass media gives them..

They put ketchup on that bitch and ask for seconds.....

Haha, your right!! They can't get enuf of the mainstream narrative!! Then get mad if you question them!! Unbelievable
 
SIGNS OF TV ADDICTION


As with anything we do routinely, if left unchecked can turn into an addiction. People who become addicts did not start out to become an addict. No one who drinks sets a goal of becoming a professional drunk. If we start something which is detrimental to our Christian walk, even on a small scale, Satan will make an attempt to intensify the drive or desire to bring this action into its ultimate state which is a strong hold in our life. 2 Corinthians 10:4 warns us:

(2 Cor 10:4 KJV) (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)

The words "strong hold" may also be translated "fortress or castle." This warns us that Satan can create a hold on our life with an addiction to sin. A TV addict believes they must watch every show, and with every show they watch it intensifies their desire to watch another. This is a vicious cycle which is only broken by God’s power. Are you a TV addict or are you on the way to becoming one? Check to see if any of these 32 principles of TV addiction are present in your life. If they are, then you may have a satanic stronghold in your life.

1) You call someone to videotape TV shows that are on the same time the one you are watching and videotaping.

2) You watch a program with the anticipation of seeing a sinful act.

3) You enjoy the sinful scenes on the show.

4) You eat your dinner in front of the TV.

5) You neglect your spouse or family for a TV show.

6) You look forward to a TV show. (desirous anticipation) Do you look forward to next week’s church service?

7) You miss Sunday Night services or Wednesday evening prayer meeting for TV.

8) You begin to role play the parts you see on TV on a serious basis.

9) Your conversation is replete with TV reviews and anecdotes.

10) TV replaces your Bible reading or devotion time.

11) The family altar has been replaced by a TV program.

12) You know more about TV than Scripture.

13) No one is allowed to speak while the TV is on.

14) You begin to start empathizing with the characters the actors are portraying.

15) You rush home so you will not miss a program.

16) You watch TV late into the night consistently.

17) When company visits, the TV remains on.

18) You disturb others on the job by discussing a TV show.

19) You yell at the TV when a certain scene unfolds.

20) You become angry when "there aint nothing good on TV tonight."

21) You let TV do your thinking for you.

22) The only book you read is TV guide.

23) You turn the TV on the moment you enter a room.

24) The TV is on when you are doing your chores.

25) You do not want people to visit when your programs are scheduled to come on.

26) When people visit, you wish they would leave so you could watch your programs.

27) You laugh at the very sin which sent Christ to the cross.

28) You have every premium cable channel like HBO, Cinemax, etc.

29) You constantly flip channels with your remote control.

30) You begin to adopt ideas and attitudes contrary to Scripture. (Remember change agents)

31) You find more pleasure watching TV than being with God’s people.

32) You go nowhere but have become a couch potato.

Some Consequences of being a Teleholic

Loneliness

Staying home and watching TV isolates you from other people. God created us to be social creatures requiring human interaction. Loss of human contact will cause extreme loneliness.

Depression

Excessive TV watching may cause depression because night after night you continually soak up the world’s idea of what success and value is. We begin to believe our lives, when compared with those exciting ones we see on TV, are really valueless and this type of thinking, when drilled into us daily, will lead into depression.

Physical Disease

Our bodies were made for motion, not to sit in one place for hours daily. Our muscles and the rest of our body need exercise for proper fitness and clear minds. One can become obese, because incessant TV watching leads to incessant eating.

Fantasy Lifestyle

This happens when we watch so much TV that we have trouble separating reality from fantasy. TV can cause us to live an imaginary lifestyle, like believing illicit sex without consequences, social drinking is mandatory, you must drive an expensive car, etc. An imitation of a TV lifestyle can ruin a life.

Acceptance of Sinful Principles

TV shows are not written with obedience to God in mind. As we are bombarded daily with sinful principles, we begin to accept the methods Hollywood teaches. You claim you do not accept sinful principles! Then why do you watch the same show each week. If you keep watching it, you are endorsing it. Soon you will be found opposing the principles of Scripture and even rebuking those who bring the truth and this will sow discord among the brethren and will sow confusion in the life of a young believer.

Suicide

When a person believes they have no value, no friends, and that they do not measure up to the fantasy lifestyle they impose on themselves, they see no reason for living. They do not realize a satanic deception has taken place. If there was such a group as Teleholics Anonymous, their meetings would be packed more than Alcoholics Anonymous.
 
Mass Media Indoctrination


What is this about? Mass Media can be defined as any way of media which approaches a broad audience. Indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology. It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned. So basically, I will question and critically examine the ideas, attitude and methodology projected by the mass media.


Mass Mind Control


Many people are not aware that while they are watching the television they are being hypnotized. This is such a way that they accept everything which they see without critical thinking or even questioning it.

The television is actually a constant flow of images which is flickering. Tough we do not see it consciously. If you think of it you will remember that one time someone filmed the TV while on the video you didn’t see properly because it was constantly flickering. This repetition of flickering images creates a state of mind that is similar to hypnosis. The researcher Herbert Krugman has shown that within 30 seconds of television viewing, brain waves switch from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention. The brain's left hemisphere, which processes information logically and analytically, tunes out while the person is watching TV, while the right hemisphere of the brain, which processes information emotionally and non-critically, is allowed to function without hindrance. Due to this phenomenon, television transmits information, which is not actively thought about at the time of exposure, much like hypnosis. When viewing television, we do not consciously rationalize the information resonating within our unconscious depths at the time of transmission and the viewer becomes more open and suggestible.

This causes that it is an powerful tool used to control minds of the mass. In recent years, a number of investigations and exposes have revealed that the major media companies silences independent voices and investigations, discourage journalism that interferes with the agendas of their special interests, and eliminate diversity in the information they provide. Because of the control that these companies have over the information that most people receive on a daily basis, these criticisms and revelations are never known by most of the American public.

These media giants work hand in hand with the federal government as well as many multinational corporations to disseminate carefully planned messages. Through the television and other forms of media, they tell you what to think about, what to worry about, what to smile about, and what to be scared of. They have sold the public on the idea of the newscaster being an trustworthy person who presents information which is true and accurate. In 2008, the pentagon spent more than $2 billion compensating major media outlets for spreading public relations messages. These messages are delivered to the television viewer as news produced by the television station, not as paid and produced by the pentagon. In the same year, pharmaceutical companies paid television outlets more than $4 billion for advertising, which included Video News Releases (VNR), specially tailored pieces that appear within the nightly news disguised as researched and reported by the local stations. You will also see this back in the newspapers. If you have noticed it looks like to every article there is an researched linked saying it has been conducted by an university. While the university is being paid by the multinationals to give these results for their own purposes.

And yet while all this has been happening behind the scenes, the mass public has been duped into staking all their trust in select major media outlets as they express brand loyalty in television stations, newspapers, and magazines. Many people have been tricked into believing that the mainstream media reports only objective news while any information delivered from outside the mainstream is to always be questioned. Somehow the public has bought into the idea that the TV wouldn't lie to them. Many people will not pay any regard to information that is not covered by the major media. If the people did not hear about it on the nightly news then they simply don't care. This is the mindset that the major media companies want us to have, as we are willfully ignorant and obedient to their every direction. Our unanalytical and loyal viewership is in their best interest.

Major media news networks continually bombard us with the possibility of an endless amount of scenarios, which produce fear and then shape our reactions to real situations. This is predictive programming, which gets us familiar with an idea so that when it happens we expect it and do not react and question. Although most people refer to television programming as the shows that are aired on television, it can also refer to the programming of the people that occurs on a daily basis. Most people believe they are just simply being entertained, but they never realize that their way of life is being shaped for them and their thoughts are actually being given to them. They are being familiarized with ideas, concepts, and fear so they won't question certain interventions in the future. TV gives us what messages must be imprinted in our minds, gives us what button to push in what sequence, and if it's done the right way with the right production and the right propaganda then the public will react and do exactly as they've been programmed to do.

When one continually controls the information, one controls the people absorbing the information. The manufactured and controlled information on TV can be referred to as the signal and that constant signal is what shapes and guides the masses to their conclusions. Once we come to the conclusion that the media is intentionally deceiving us we can take our minds back. By turning off your TV you will realize the world that you're living in is suddenly very unfamiliar to you. You will see that news of no importance is constantly debated and analyzed, and as you listen to the conversations of people around you, you realize they're talking robots just repeating what they've heard on the news. Then you will understand and see them as people who are unable to reason or think for themselves. They'll only be able to parrot the information they've been given on the previous night's news.

We should all help each other to recognize this before mind control changes in total control. This is because this mass media is taking a problem by either creating it or allowing it to happen and presenting it to the population. It could be terrorism, molestation, extra terrestrials etc. These topics create fear and no one in their right mind would support terrorism or crime. If the media is being bombarded with problems the public will ask for an solution. This solution will practically be more security. Tough at the same time it also means indirectly less freedom and less privacy. Everywhere are cameras being installed, for safety reasons. Fingerprints of everyone is being put in a database, for safety reasons. You have to show who you are at every second of the day, for safety reasons. Someone who is conscious of critical thinking will question this. Everyone can see that this will end up in total control of the government. Seeing what we are doing, listening what we are talking about and even in the future knowing where and when we are going somewhere. Guess what happens if they notice something which they don’t like of someone or which could be an obstacle for them. Accuse him of something false and put them in jail or blocking his paths so his life will become miserable and even maybe kill him. This is not something new and has already happened numerous time.

The only way to stop this is by becoming aware and conscious of what is going on. More over letting others now. So they don’t do, think, say and follow what is being told to them but start making their own conclusions.
 
More Than Mind Control

Mind Control is an effective weapon, but your garden-variety brainwashing or hypnosis is too mundane for some viewers, too predictable for some plots, too weak for some heroes, and too unambitious for some villains. Also, outright controlling someone's mind tends to require either magic or technology, and depending on the nature of the story, the villain might not have access to either of those.

To that end, mind control in some cases requires a lot of foreplay, independent of magic influence, on the part of the villain. You can't force someone to reject The Power of Friendship until you pick away at their jealousy and convince them they want to turn on their friends. You can't overcome the Power of Trust until you get them to doubt their own perception of reality and make them want to believe you're the Only Sane Man. You can't erase someone's memories until you talk them through the most painful ones and convince them they want to forget everything. You can't make someone join you without convincing them their current life is worthless and they don't want to continue with it. It's essentially mind control, yes, but it's more than mind control.

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What makes this "more than mind control" rather than simple manipulation is that this can still be assisted by magic or technology. Magic forces may be at work, but it's really the despair, trickery, lies, and sometimes even carefully-selected truths, that are thrown in that successfully break the victim's spirit. Instead of the villain forcing a victim to do something against their will, the villain changes the victim's will. It's Deal with the Devil meets Break Them by Talking. This can even be justified depending on the setting; a very common limitation on mind control across many different works (for example Vampire: The Masquerade) is that the would-be-controller simply cannot induce an idea or a command into the victim that is either completely alien to their mind or goes against their base instincts. Much like a body's immune system will fight against a virus or a bacteria, the mind in-question will recognize the thought as a foreign object and will resist or even completely reject it.

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So, if you have to talk someone into mind control, what's the point of using magic or high tech at all? Creating illusions can help make your case. Isolation is key, so magically cutting them off from support is effective. Maybe science or sorcery is just needed to accelerate the effects. In extreme cases, outright Mind Rape is utilized. This type of brainwashing, called Stockholm Syndrome in the real world, supposedly requires a minimum of 72 hours, but with a sci-fi or sorcerous catalyst, it can be achieved in less than 72 seconds.

Also, it can overlap directly with actual mind control. In many instances, More Than Mind Control is simply a method of making the process of the takeover easier, because by removing their resistance to your ideas, you remove the struggle in taking control of their thoughts. By having them submit to you, they essentially hand their free will over to you, making your spell or device much more effective on them. It also makes it harder for them to revert, because they now have an active resistance towards their own original beliefs.

More Than Mind Control requires charisma, finesse, and a lot of patience, but villains usually don't mind because they find it so much more satisfying. They also get a great deal of amusement out of telling the victim's friends, "I didn't force him to do anything he didn't want to do." It's also more resistant to the powers of friendship and love. Plus, it's just a lot cooler to watch. Villains don't even necessarily need special powers to do it, if they can goad the hero into doing something they'll regret by pushing the right buttons. The Corrupter in particular is a master of the art.

Sometimes, the villain will try this on the whole team at once; they're usually saved by the Badass Normal, The Chick / The Heart, or the All-Loving Hero, who will point out the ways that the villain is distorting the truth. Usually accompanied by a Kirk Summation to the culprit, or something more violent.

This is a favorite technique of Manipulative Bastards. Victims may or may not exhibit Mind-Control Eyes. It also frequently comes with a creepy voice change, which is probably as a Shout-Out to Darth Vader of Star Wars.

It's popular with anime villains and in the West, too. Indeed, it's been around much longer than television. This form of mind manipulation was, for example, a standard talent of personifications of despair in Renaissance British literature like The Faerie Queene and Pilgrim's Progress.

Occasionally, the victim's friends will have a standard counterspell, anti-psionic technique, or other fantastic means of quickly canceling vanilla mind control common to the setting. Expect them to try it on the More Than Mind Controlled character, only to react in dismay as they realize: "He's acting of his own free will!"

This is an example of Truth in Television, because real-life hypnosis requires that the person subconsciously want to do whatever they're doing. Even more so in that there does not appear to be any true mind control that works in real life, only more and more extreme versions of More Than Mind Control that can in extreme cases appear like straight brainwashing to third parties. The general term for this is coercive persuasion, and it is used by most cults, including the Church of Happyology. Svengali mentors will use this. Psychopaths, or at least the intelligent ones, are also very good at using this in real life to make their way up in the world and get girls. Social Engineering is a milder (but no less nefarious) form often employed by shady types like con artists and spies in persuading their victims to turn over passwords or sensitive information, to trick them into paying for fraudulent goods or services, or even gain access to restricted areas. Oftentimes this takes the form of phishing, a real life tactic used by cyber-criminals to gain access to the computers and accounts of unwitting victims by convincing them to install spyware or computer viruses, or even to suck their bank accounts dry by participating in costly scams.

Compare The Heartless, Face–Heel Turn, Being Tortured Makes You Evil. Overlaps with Jedi Mind Trick and Brainwashing for the Greater Good. Contrast Fighting from the Inside, though it can happen after More Than Mind Control if it's rushed or botched. May overlap with Living Doll Collector and Glamour. It usually takes hard core Deprogramming to remove, unless the controller asks the wrong thing.
 
5 reasons to throw out the TV from your house



I always seem to forget how television is popular. I ditched TV, cold turkey, 8 years ago. I never miss it in any way. It was one of the best decisions in my life. When I hang out with friends and they seem to talk about stuff that are going on there. I don’t watch news, I don’t watch reality shows either and yea, I don’t watch TV commercials!
I can’t seem to grasp the concept, call me tech geek, but I can’t consume information passively anymore, if I could ever. Era of old school media is living it’s last days and new era of self publishing is emerging. Many people asked me how will I know what’s going on in the world (and often I am clueless). So let’s look into the benefits of not having the television in your house:
Better communication in your house

When your TV is off, you will find out new ways of communicating with your family members. There won’t be constant influx of negative energy coming from news channels and violence from action movies. Everything is calm when black box is off. By not staring at the black box, you will actually start to see that you have your family members or roommates in your house.
You will save money

How much money you’ve spent in last 1o years on television? Thousands of dollars are spent each year or new models, year after year! It’s economic turmoil and every penny counts! Beside money spent on the device itself, we are covering also the cost of cable networks. Cable networks are scoring the lowest percentage of customer satisfaction. And on top of it all, they are the ones always telling us what to do. Cut your cable bill and stick only to internet. I guarantee you won’t regret it.
You are going to be happier

You will feel way much better when you don’t listen to the bad news. You won’t be constantly exposed to television violence and media brainwashing. Don’t worry, you will survive without knowing what’s going on in Libya and Japan. Plus you won’t stress much. Less stress, means living longer. I saw my father actually stressing and worrying about nuclear meltdown crisis in Japan. That’s a lot of fear, but he would be way better of, without thinking about it at all. Yes it’s horrible that such shameful tragedy happened to Japan, but if you are concerned about your personal productivity and happiness, you will know what to do.
Rediscovering your forgotten passion

That time gap will need to be fulfilled somehow and no better thing than doing the things you loved. Maybe it was painting, maybe it was cooking or arranging your garden. Thrust me, anything is better than passively lying in your couch watching stuff you don’t like. Don’t be one of those people aimlessly going trough channels. With all the free time at your disposal options are limitless.
You will think different

People who are watching television have similar thought patterns. They are serve same content over and over again, and they are getting imprints of advertising programming. If you think this is bullshit, than why are companies spending billions of dollars on advertising. Not only that we are being reprogrammed by ads themselves, the television content is “an advertisment” itself. This is by far the biggest advantage of not watching tv. You will create critical thinking easily. Lots of information we gather from television is taken for granted. It’s easy mass media manipulation, and the good news is, You can OPT OUT
Start the walk on the bright side of your brilliant mind. Live your life, shut TV down!
 
IT'S 2020 1/2... AKA TELEVISION IS A... DISTRACTOR, DIVIDER, DECEPTION INDOCTRINATION MACHINE.. FILL WITH INFLUENERS KNOWN AS ACTORS-MUSICIANS-SPORTS-POLITICIANS-NEWS REPORTERS- MILLIONAIRES- BILLIONAIRES!!!

BUT AS USUAL, AINT NOBODY LISTENING!! SO THE TRANCE/DREAM/ILLUSION GOES ON AND ON!!
 
Interesting

The art of social engineering: Are you being conditioned?

•5 min read

As we get better at securing our computer systems, we are discovering that the weakest line of defense is, in fact, the human being. Social engineering is the dark art of manipulating people. Social hackers might want access to a building, to get hold of information they aren’t supposed to have, or simply to increase their status in society.
Social hackers have been glorified in movies like Catch Me If You Can and Six Degrees of Separation, and the same charm that gives them the capabilities to manipulate victims can be turned to make them stars for an adulatory public.
Social hacking can come in many forms, such as telephone and email scams, deliberately exploitative marriages, or entire fake identities that are maintained over decades.
But how do they do this? And how can we protect ourselves from people who have a gift for getting everyone around them to drop their guard?
1) There is a lot of information about you on the internet
In a tactic called pretexting, the hacker will invent a pretext for contacting you, through phone or email or in person. Often this will mean doing tremendous research about your background, your education, your work, and even the devices you own. The attackers might surprise you with what seems like insider information, perhaps by knowing your IP address or university ID. They might leverage information that you offered voluntarily somewhere else on the internet, then forgot about.
Pretexting is often used to gain more information from a target and is sometimes phrased as “confirming” information. It can be used to trick the user into performing security sensitive tasks, such as downloading software, disabling firewalls, or bypassing security mechanisms.
Another tactic is a diversion technique. This is when an attacker convinces you to make a payment to another account, or send your shipment to a different address. Often enough this tactic is about diverting communications or encryption keys. Someone might call you, pretending to be the representative of a bank or email provider, then give you a helpful heads-up regarding a warning message. The person may tell you to “safely ignore” the warnings. Similarly, you may be asked to start communicating with someone “from a different department” or be given an alternative encryption key to use with your account.
2) You are a kind and honest person
Most people enjoy helping others in some way and do not suspect an attack behind every request. And of course we shouldn’t substitute our helpfulness with insufferable paranoia.
It is difficult to maintain a healthy balance, and often any signs of paranoia are met with ridicule.
We are less suspicious when good things happen to us. An expensive USB stick you find on the floor might turn out to contain malware, or the fluffy teddy bear sent to your office might contain a camera or tracking device. This tactic is known as baiting, and in extreme cases, the attackers may go so far as to say they’ve “fallen in love with you,” or offer grand prizes for competitions you don’t recall entering.
By not exercising caution and verifying the identity of people reaching out to us, attackers are able to establish authority over us. In a large organization it can be hard to know exactly who is higher up the chain of command, and new employees are particularly vulnerable to this type of scam. A corporation might be more susceptible to these kinds of attacks after management changes or restructuring.
Social hackers might even exploit your kindness much more bluntly, simply by asking for something. In a rough working environment, stressed employees often respond very positively to kind requests. In fact, most people will either respond to kindness or authority.
3) You reveal more about you than you think
You may not know whether you are the kind of person who responds better to authority or to kindness, but a skilled attacker might quickly find out by reading subtle signs in your facial expressions or hand gestures.
Victor Lustig, the master con artist who tricked a scrap metal dealer into believing he bought the Eiffel Tower, explains:
  • Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con man his coups).
  • Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
  • Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.
  • Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other person shows a strong interest.
  • Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.
  • Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (the target will tell you all eventually).
  • Never boast—just let your importance be quietly obvious.
More targeted and efficient can be a phishing attack. In its most common form, you receive an email from your bank with a request to log in to your account. But instead of being directed to your bank’s website, you are sent to an identical site owned by the attackers. This attack can even circumvent two-factor authentication. When the attackers try to log in to your real account, you may receive a text message with a security code from your bank. They will obtain this, simply by asking you to enter it on their fake site.
4) Your mind easily jumps to conclusions
We hate to admit when we don’t recognize people who claim to know us. Especially if they seem to know intimate details about ourselves. In fact we are much more likely to trick ourselves into thinking that we must know the person, rather than risk a confrontation to clarify the nature of our relationship. This is exploited in countless telephone scams, where people are tricked into believing their distant relatives are calling and are in need of financial help.
William Thompson, who lived in New York City in the 1840s, convinced random strangers not only that they knew him, but also that they could trust him with taking care of their valuable possessions. He quickly became known all over the country as “the confidence man.”
5) You are inclined to believe others are like you
You have no evil intentions, so why would others? It’s hard for us to imagine that sometimes seemingly ordinary people want to harm you.
You know about evil hackers, but they only attack nation-states and civil rights activists, right? Why would someone go through the effort of trying to hack you? You have no cases of money or trade secrets to steal. So why would people want to do you harm?
In reality, you and your data are probably a lot more valuable than you think, and you may already be under attack in one way or another. It may be an automated attack or it may just be a coincidence, but you are wise to not trust lucky coincidences blindly. Be wary of the sudden appearance of an old acquaintance or any strange request that comes over the phone.
 
They're not listening.
That's too much info for most non-believers to be willing to devote time to.
You're gonna have to feed in small doses; 5 minute vids and such.
 
It's going to take about 5+ mins to read.. But that's kool!!


The Harmful Effects of Watching Television

TV SUCKS. At least for the most part, and here you’re going to find out exactly why.
In a culture where most people are obsessed with watching television, I can’t help but point out the negative effects of watching too much television.
Don’t get me wrong, television certainly has much to offer, and without a doubt is a great innovation, but when it comes to relying on it, whether to be informed or entertained, it can certainly affect you negatively.
So what are the main harmful effects of watching television that you should keep in mind before tuning into your favorite TV shows?
Keep scrolling and I’ll show you.
Television is bad for your health
I’m pretty sure you know that watching television means physical inactivity. But did you know that inactivity has been linked to obesity and heart disease?
In case you didn’t, now you do.
So ask yourself this: Is it merely a coincidence that in the West — where people are spending enormous amount of time watching television — the rates of obesity and heart disease in people of all ages are rapidly increasing?
Indeed, more and more studies reveal the adverse health effects of watching television.
A study conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health indicates that watching too much television can significantly increase the risk of developing obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Another study carried out at the University of Rhode Island found that prolonged television watching decreases viewers’ sense of self-efficacy in maintaining personal health.
And these are just a couple of studies among dozens.
As you can understand, the side effects of watching a lot of TV on your health can be pretty damaging. So perhaps you’d be better off if you limited the time you spend keeping your body immobile staring at an electronic screen, don’t you agree?
Television feeds you false information
TV is ruining your health, which is pretty bad in itself. But other than ruining your health, it’s also ruining your perception.
One of the most harmful effects of watching television is that TV appears to portray or report reality, when in fact it just allows us to get a small glimpse of what’s really going on. This particularly happens while watching TV newscasts. When we watch a 30-minute newscast, we usually believe that what it’s showing us is all there is to see. After all, if there was more to see, wouldn’t television show us more?
Unfortunately most people accept whatever television is feeding them, without ever casting a doubt on its truthfulness. Perhaps the reason why we do so is that we prefer ignorance over knowledge, because, as the saying goes, “ignorance is bliss.”
The harsh reality is that searching to find out the truth requires effort, and so we prefer to let the evening news do all the search for us. In this way, we don’t need to do anything: No effort, nothing to worry about. We choose the easy way, but a serious disadvantage of doing so is that we also choose to accept a distorted view of reality.
Television kills your self-esteem
When you watch an hour of TV, you’re exposed to about 15 minutes of commercials whose sole purpose is to persuade you to buy stuff.
How exactly do they achieve that? Firstly, by making you feel bad about yourself. Once they do so, they sell you products and services with the promise that they’ll improve your self-esteem.
In other words, commercials are emotionally manipulating you, and most of the time you aren’t even aware of it. The result? Spending your hard-earned money purchasing stuff you don’t really need and that will sooner or later leave you disappointed and sad. In addition, by constantly consuming things, you’re creating immense material waste that is messing up with our planet’s well-being.

Television makes you dumb
Another dangerously bad effect of excessively watching television is the fact it can hinder our ability to think.
Having talking heads continuously giving us quick information, opinion, analysis and criticism for just about everything, slowly leads us to stop using our own critical thinking skills. As a consequence, we can be easily misinformed and manipulated.
That’s why it’s especially important for parents and school teachers to help children and students understand the ill effects of spending too much time in front of a TV screen. Children are much more vulnerable to the messages TV is sending, and so they need to be taught from an early age how to protect themselves from them.
Of course, there are a few programs on TV that are educational and thought-provoking (in other words, that have a good, positive impact on our intelligence), but let’s admit it: The majority of television programs are just trash.
Indeed, we rarely find a program on TV that requires us to think. In fact, television programming is designed in such a way to match our attention spam. This perfectly explains why almost all programs are 30 to 60 minutes long. It also explains why television programs rarely dedicate the entire program to a single topic.
Therefore, not only can’t television programs provide us with any decent thought to stimulate discussion, but they present information in such a way that we can’t digest it properly. As a result, we can easily form opinions without allowing the information to first be filtered through our minds, and while we might think that we become more knowledgeable, in reality we become dumb.
Television wastes your time
Life is short, but we choose to spend it watching television.
Just think of how many hours of our day most of us waste watching television. Believe it or not, surveys reveal that people in the Western world spend 5-10 hours a day watching television!
Instead of living our life to the fullest, we sit in front of a dead though “entertaining” device, which we have chosen as a substitute for true living.
Instead of going out to play soccer, we are so obsessed with watching soccer games and admiring our favorite sportspeople, as if they are some kind of heroes.
Instead of going to the kitchen and cook a healthy meal, we prefer to sit in the sofa, watching special cooking shows where people are savoring all kinds of delicious food, while we’re filling our bodies with junk.
Instead of going out to meet people, converse with them and have fun, we choose to be all alone confined within four walls, so as to watch with full attention adventure movies, reality shows, and soap operas.
But I am asking you, is this living?
A time will come when your physical and mental energy will be dissipated, and you’ll realize that you have not yet actually lived. But then it will be too late, and you’ll be filled with regrets.
 
I forgot to tell you this roots69, props on using that OutKast classic in your sig, over 20+ years old and still relevant today.:cool:
 
Hmm??? Y'all still ain't buying it??? One-day folks will figure out this colony is f&ckin with our subconscious mind thru that damn television!! Watch
 
Used to be television, now it's the Internet. Use that shit to your advantage. Shit's a gold mine out here. :money:

Your right, the net is a gold mind.. Everything they have been trying to hide, with a little searching you can find it all!! There's a lot of folks that have been screwed over and spilling the beans on just about everything!!

As far as the TV goes, our folks are the largest group of people that watch our tv!! That means our folks subconscious mind is getting flooded with too much useless information. And you can't remove that shit they are putting on folks subconscious mind.. If we unplug from it, it would change the way we see this bullshit!!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to bump heads with you!!
 
Your right, the net is a gold mind.. Everything they have been trying to hide, with a little searching you can find it all!! There's a lot of folks that have been screwed over and spilling the beans on just about everything!!

As far as the TV goes, our folks are the largest group of people that watch our tv!! That means our folks subconscious mind is getting flooded with too much useless information. And you can't remove that shit they are putting on folks subconscious mind.. If we unplug from it, it would change the way we see this bullshit!!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to bump heads with you!!
Problem is most people lack critical thinking skills. Those skills aren't taught in school. People get degrees and don't have critical thinking school. So while the Internet provides a wealth of info, most people don't use it that way.

Politicians prey on the overall lack of critical thinking skills displayed by the masses.

I agree. Stepping away from the television would help most people. In this day and age though, stepping outside of Internet bubbles would help even more. Since people lack critical thinking skills, different opinions frighten them. They don't know how to deal.
 
Problem is most people lack critical thinking skills. Those skills aren't taught in school. People get degrees and don't have critical thinking school. So while the Internet provides a wealth of info, most people don't use it that way.

Politicians prey on the overall lack of critical thinking skills displayed by the masses.

I agree. Stepping away from the television would help most people. In this day and age though, stepping outside of Internet bubbles would help even more. Since people lack critical thinking skills, different opinions frighten them. They don't know how to deal.

Good points, bruh!! Your spot on about those politicians banking on folks not have critical thinking skills!! We're in sum strange azz dayz!!
 
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