Advertisers probe brains, raise fears

By DAVID WAHLBERG
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

When Peter Graser underwent an MRI scan at Emory University, doctors weren't looking for disease.

Instead, brain researchers flashed images -- Madonna, broccoli, sushi, a Ford truck, a golden retriever, Bill Clinton, Coca-Cola -- before the 37-year-old Marietta resident's eyes as he lay inside the coffin-like tube of the magnetic resonance imaging machine.

The scientists discovered a biological clue to what drives consumers: Whenever Graser and a dozen other study volunteers saw a picture they particularly liked, their brains showed increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex -- an area associated with preference, or sense of self.

On this Super Bowl Sunday, when advertising swells to a fever pitch, the researchers' conclusion is especially appropos: What really makes us loyal purchasers is a brand that reflects our self-image, not a product's taste, size, color or convenience.

The study, funded through the Atlanta consulting firm BrightHouse by an undisclosed Fortune 500 client, has stirred up controversy about the emerging -- and some say Orwellian -- field of "neuromarketing." Scientific tools such as MRI scanners, which allow researchers to peer into the brain and better understand depression, addiction, autism and schizophrenia, should not be used by Coca-Cola, McDonald's or Ford to entice people to buy more of their soda, french fries or sport utility vehicles, critics say.

"It's wrong to use medical technology for marketing and not for healing," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit organization that has worked to bar advertising from schools and other public areas. "We have epidemics of obesity, diabetes, alcoholism, gambling and smoking -- all tied to marketing. Any increase in the effectiveness of advertising can be devastating to the public."

...

"A lot of what motivates our behavior occurs below the level of conscious awareness," said Meaux, a neuroscientist. "We give [companies] insight into how to develop relationships with consumers."

Meaux winces at the allegation by some that BrightHouse is searching for a "buy button" in the brain.

...

Neuromarketing is a commercial offshoot of the burgeoning field of medical research known as cognitive neuroscience. Researchers are using souped-up MRI scanners and other brain-imaging machines to uncover biological explanations for mental illness -- and to elucidate why we hate, envy, love or cooperate.

...

Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has applied MRI technology to the "Pepsi Challenge." In his lab, the brains of test subjects who prefer Pepsi lit up in the region where people process feelings of reward, such as taste. But Coca-Cola lovers displayed activity of a higher order -- in the medial prefrontal cortex, the same sector revealed in the Emory experiment.

Pepsi wins many taste tests, but Coke sells better because people are subconsciously influenced by Coke's full-of-life image, Montague said. "Nobody had ever measured the neurocorrelate of it," he said.

He said he is organizing a national neuromarketing conference at Baylor this spring, to allow companies considering the technique to hash out economic and ethical issues.

...

"Big government and big companies have been trying to manipulate us since the start of time," he said. "What's different about this?"

...

http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/0204a/01brain.html

High school kids hack Diebold voting machines

from The Baltimore Sun

One guy picked the locks protecting the internal printers and memory cards. Another figured out how to vote more than once - and get away with it. Still another launched a dial-up attack, using his modem to slither through an electronic hole in the State Board of Elections software. Once inside, he could easily change vote totals that come in on Election Day.

...


http://www.sunspot.net/news/local/bal-te.md.machine30jan30,0,4050694.story?coll

...

...to understand what Shlain is saying, it is important to remember that the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain manages the left side. Attributes of the left hand, controlled by the right brain, include protectiveness, whereas the right hand, under the management of the left brain, is associated with action, such as spear throwing and reaching.

“These two mirror-image strategies, gather/nurture and hunt/kill, are combined in each of us. In society at large, there are females who manifest predominantly masculine traits, and there are males who display feminine traits. The lateralization of brain, eye and hand affects how each person perceives, manipulates, symbolizes, and, ultimately, thinks about the world. Herein lies the secret of our success. Each man has a gatherer/nurturer aspect to his personality, psyche, and mind, just as each woman has hunter/killer aspects to hers. Every individual has encased in his or her skull both a feminine brain and a masculine one. Any particular society can accentuate one or the other of these two ways of interacting with the world, depending on the demands of the environment or the shaping influences of its inventions.” (27)

Fast forward to the invention of television and what Shlain calls the “beginning of yet another massive shift in global consciousness: the combining of two ‘feminine’ influences, photography and electromagnetism” (407).

I stopped to ponder this observance, realizing that I had never thought of photography as a feminine influence and writing as a masculine practice. Am I able to believe what the author is saying, I asked myself. Give him the benefit, I decided. “Hear” him out.

“Comprehending television required an entirely different hemispheric strategy than that used in reading. Viewers called forth their pattern-recognition skills to decipher the screen’s low-definition flickering mosaic mesh. The retina’s cones need bright light to scan a static page of print, but television brings the eye’s rods into play. They see best in dim surroundings and can detect the slightest movements. As people watched more and more television, the supremacy of the left hemisphere dimmed as the right’s use increased. For 750,000 years families had gathered around lit hearths whose flames supplied warmth, illuminated darkness, encouraged camaraderie, and encouraged storytelling. Campfires had been an essential ingredient for the evolution of oral epics. In 1950, a new kind of fire replaced the hearth; and it encouraged a different set of social qualities.” (407-408)

Television, he says, reversed the solitary endeavors of reading and writing. This is interesting to think about because it relates to theories advanced by Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy and by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation. We are using long-established mediums, in this case, oral storytelling, to create the new media community.

Television also modified our biological information processors, says Shlain, noting that electroencephalogram (EEG) brain wave patterns of readers differ significantly from those of television viewers. Viewing television, he explains, creates identical slow alpha and theta waves, which denote a passive, receptive and meditative state of mind while reading a book generates beta waves, which are those created when a person is concentrating.

“Corroborating evidence concerning the perceptual differences between these two modes comes from sophisticated brain PET (position emission tomography) scanners that demonstrate the circuits in the left hemisphere lighting up when the subject is reading (while the right hemisphere remains relatively dark). When the subject looks up from his or her book and begins to watch television, the right hemisphere switches on and the left begins to idle. Task-oriented beta waves activate the hunter/killer side of the brain as alpha and theta waves emanate more from the gatherer/nurturer side. Perhaps Western civilization has for far too long been stuck in a beta mode due to literacy, and striking a balance with a little more alpha and theta, regardless of the source, will serve to sooth humankind’s savage beast.” (408)

...

http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:www.christinegoldbeck.com/rightbrain.htm+%22theta+waves%22+television&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Original (pre-Orwellian) Definition of the Word "Terrorism"

from Funk and Wagnalls New Practical Standard Dictionary (1946)

Slavery doesn't have to involve shackles and bullwhips in this day and age. It's control over the human animal's mind. Their fears, insecurities, their built-in will to survive. If that makes no sense, then tell me why you constantly work for a fucking paycheck, just to survive on long enough to collect the next paycheck down the road. It's an endless struggle that amounts to nothing in the end.

But they have you jumping thru hoops, 9 to 5, then from 5 to 9 you have all your time to go out and get drunk, and fill the rest of that day with stupid distractions so you aren't caught sitting alone trying to figure out just why it is you do the same damn thing every day of your life. Oh and while you're doing this little dance, you're keeping your economy in business, you're keeping the machine running, and people wonder why they feel so empty in their daily routine. Why their lives always seem to miss something, so then come the advertisers who will tell you that a certain product will fill that hole. That emptyness. So they have your mind, your fears, your insecurities.

They have you. And if material objects dont cure you, PILLS WILL! They tell you that your depression is a mental disorder, not a byproduct of your meaningless existance. So there's another answer to all your problems. It sounds out there, I know, but when I was little we lived on a farm. We grew our own food, raised our own beef, and took care of our own place. There's something fulfilling and satisfying about that. At the end of the day no matter how much you worked in the fields, you felt whole. You knew what it was you worked so hard for and you felt better for it. You cannot get that same feeling from a paycheck.

Life today is nothing but meaningless work that keeps the machine running and your masters in power as well as nothing but distractions to keep you in self-denial of the truth that what you do each day is slowly driving you out of your mind.
_________________

c0balt.com forum administrator
"Zerstören Sie das System!"

http://forum.c0balt.com/viewtopic.php?t=624

Evropská unie bude nominována na letošní Nobelovu cenu míru. Doplní tak v seznamu možných oceněných institucí a osob mimo jiné amerického prezidenta George W. Bushe a britského premiéra Tonyho Blaira. Napsal to v pondělí internetový server euobserver.com s odvoláním na francouzskou tiskovou agenturu AFP.

02.02. 12:17
BRUSEL - EU na prestižní cenu navrhl bývalý norský premiér Thorbjoern Jagland, a to za stabilizaci poměrů v Evropě. Nobelu cenu míru si organizace údajně zaslouží za historické sjednocení východní a západní části kontinentu.

Podle AFP však Unie nemá příliš šancí v závěrečném klání uspět. Dva z pěti porotců pocházejí z norského parlamentu (přání Alfreda Nobela) a tato instituce je známa svými nepříliš pozitivními postoji k EU.

V neprospěch Bruselu hraje také skutečnost, že Norové v minulosti opakovaně přidružení k sjednocující se Evropě odmítli.

Euobserver.com navíc připomíná, že samotná nominace nemusí být nutně spojena s nejhodnotnějšími mozky a činy lidské civilizace. V minulosti se mezi navrženými osobnostmi ocitli také mj. Adolf Hitler, Slobodan Miloševič atd.

Konečný seznam nominovaných osob, institucí bude znám 2. března. Slavnostní ceremoniál s vyhlášením oceněných proběhne v prosinci.

...

Fifteen months before Dean said he would seek the presidency, however, the former Vermont governor spoke at a conference in Pittsburgh co-sponsored by smart-card firm Wave Systems where he called for state drivers' licenses to be transformed into a kind of standardized national ID card for Americans. Embedding smart cards into uniform IDs was necessary to thwart "cyberterrorism" and identity theft, Dean claimed. "We must move to smarter license cards that carry secure digital information that can be universally read at vital checkpoints," Dean said in March 2002, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. "Issuing such a card would have little effect on the privacy of Americans."

Dean also suggested that computer makers such as Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway and Sony should be required to include an ID card reader in PCs--and Americans would have to insert their uniform IDs into the reader before they could log on. "One state's smart-card driver's license must be identifiable by another state's card reader," Dean said. "It must also be easily commercialized by the private sector and included in all PCs over time--making the Internet safer and more secure."

The presidential hopeful offered few details about his radical proposal. "On the Internet, this card will confirm all the information required to gain access to a state (government) network--while also barring anyone who isn't legal age from entering an adult chat room, making the Internet safer for our children, or prevent adults from entering a children's chat room and preying on our kids...Many new computer systems are being created with card reader technology. Older computers can add this feature for very little money," Dean said.

...

http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5146863.html

JAXXE --- --- 11.16:17 2.2.2004
to je ulet :)) k tomu se snad neda nic rict ;]


Je to postup podobný jako u někdejší Warrenovy komise, která vedla desetiměsíční vyšetřování a dospěla v roce 1964 k závěru, že vraždu prezidenta J. F. Kennedyho spáchal jen Lee Harvey Oswald.

U.S._intelligence_received_warnings of_terrorist_attacks_from_Randy_Glass


A fascinating video relating to an important unheeded warning of the 9/11 attacks was shown on WPTV, an NBC TV station in Florida on October 7, 2002. This video has been overlooked and forgotten until now.

What did Senator Bob Graham (left) and US intelligence know about the warning from Randy Glass (right) before 9/11?

In this video, Randy Glass, a private US citizen working as an undercover agent in a government sting operation, discusses how he learned about a threat to the World Trade Center and tried to warn various officials in government before 9/11. Florida State Senator Ron Klein and US Senator Bob Graham admit being given a warning by Randy Glass in the months before 9/11. What was the warning, who else knew about it, and why wasn't it acted upon?

Though the video doesn't discuss it, the sting operation Glass was part of recorded agents working for Pakistan's secret service, the ISI, say on more than one occasion before 9/11 that the World Trade Center was "coming down."

...

video:

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/Glass-Graham.html

Is staged Osama capture next?

Associated Press 2004 01 29:

KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. military is "sure" it will catch Osama bin Laden this year, a spokesman said Thursday, but he declined to comment on where the al-Qaida leader may be hiding. . . .

Spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said the military now believed it could seize him within months.
. . .

Hilferty declined to comment on where exactly bin Laden or Mullah Omar might be hiding, but his optimism coincides with comments from U.S. officials in Washington that the military is planning a spring offensive.

Alex Jones reported in August 2002 that White House sources had told him OBL was dead and on ice, waiting for the election. Last month, former Secretary of State of Madeline Albight said she thought OBL was being hidden by the Bush Administration.

...


http://www.libertythink.com/2004_01_25_archives.html#107557097629828752


---------------

Albright thinks Bush hiding bin Laden

World Net Daily

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Fox News Channel analyst Morton Kondracke yesterday she suspects President Bush knows the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and is simply waiting for the most politically expedient moment to announce his capture.

Kondracke made the announcement about what Albright told him backstage before an appearance on another Fox show on "Special Report With Brit Hume."
Kondracke was incredulous that a former secretary of state could believe something like that about a U.S. administration.

"She was not smiling when she said this," offered Kondracke, who believes Albright is serious about the conspiracy theory.

Albright is on a media tour to promote her new book, "Madam Secretary, A Memoir."

She was mildly critical of Bush administration policy in Iraq on camera in later appearances on "The O'Reilly Factor" and on MSNBC's "Hardball With Chris Matthews."

"I'm one of these people that said I understood the 'why' of the war, but I didn't understand the 'why now' or the 'what next,'" she told O'Reilly. "I still have a lot of questions. And I think that we don't know, frankly, what the effect of Saddam's capture is on the general situation in Iraq. President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld have, in fact, warned about violence still going on, and the effect within the rest of the Middle East of a prolonged trial or an execution or generally how he is treated."

...

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36182

PIRMASENS, Germany (Reuters) - German computer experts are working
round the clock to unlock the truth behind an unexplained surge in
financial transactions made just before two hijacked planes crashed
into New York's World Trade Center on September 11.

Were criminals responsible for the sharp rise in credit card
transactions that moved through some computer systems at the WTC
shortly before the planes hit the twin towers?

Or was it coincidence that unusually large sums of money, perhaps
more than $100 million, were rushed through the computers as the
disaster unfolded?

...

The reconstructed data was given by CONVAR to the FBI. The FBI was held by law to investigate, based on the reconstructed data, who placed the inside transactions.
The FBI is doing no such thing.


...

GFP would like to inform, that in June 2002, Ontrack/Convar was aquired by Kroll Inc. (Kroll O'gara Eisenhardt), which has strong with the US Government. One of their former employees, Jerome Hauer, organised a security job for ex-FBI anti-terror chief John O'Neill in the Twin Towers, where he died on Sep11th

...

One partner of Kroll, Cable & Wireless provides training in Counter-Terrorism and Urban Warfare in Saudi Arabia. In August 2001, former Kroll employee, Jerome Hauer, arranged a security job in the Twin Towers for FBI Agent John O’Neill. At the time, O’Neill had been investigating ENRON’s business deals with the Taliban and was subsequently pulled from that investigation. Neither Kroll nor Hauer was asked to testify about this coincidence.

...

http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_crime&Number=1245955&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1&t=1#Post1245955

U.S. officials fear 'dirty bombs' on airliners

Intelligence indicates terrorists want to smuggle device in cargo, use bio-chem weapons


Posted: February 1, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern


© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

Al-Qaida terrorists want to release a chemical or biological weapon aboard an airliner, or transport a radiological device inside a piece of luggage, according to intelligence cited by senior Bush administration officials.

The threat information doesn't indicate a specific method to bring down a plane or spread an illness but U.S. intelligence officials have been concerned for some time that al-Qaida is trying to bring unconventional weapons aboard an airliner, a U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CNN.

According to the Washington Post, the possibilities, as described by three intelligence officials, include releasing an undetectable biological agent, such as smallpox virus or anthrax spores, aboard a plane, releasing a chemical agent inside the cabin so the plane can be hijacked, and sneaking a radiological device into cargo.

The new intelligence was among the factors that prompted British Airways and Air France to ground several flights to the United States.

British Airways canceled a flight from London's Heathrow Airport to Dulles International Airport outside Washington on Sunday and Monday, as well as the return flights.The airline also scrapped a flight from London's Heathrow to Florida's Miami International Airport on Sunday.

Air France canceled two Paris-to-Washington flights for security reasons, the airline said.

...

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36878

A Sensor That Knows How You Feel... ...And can tell you -- or your boss -- when you're getting too tired to function effectively, coming soon from Sandia Labs

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/02/01/5227446

http://zpravy.idnes.cz/zpravy_irak.asp?r=zpravy_irak&c=A040202_075438_zpravy_irak_ton&t=A040202_075438_zpravy_irak_ton&r2=zpravy_irak

Tím, že Bush nařídí ustavení nezávislé komise, bude mít větší kontrolu nad jejím složením a úkoly.

Lord Hutton to whitewash the Whitehouse.

Written by Robert Carey

"George Bush was absolutely justified to invade Iraq. I'll take my cheque now".
In another desperate election ploy, George W. Bush's advisors have invited Lord Hutton to present a report on the US administration's justification for the invasion of Iraq.

Just when George W. Bush and his cronies seem to have run out of credible excuses for causing the needless deaths of hundreds of US servicemen and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, it was thought that Lord Hutton, after he massacred the truth in the Tony Blair affair, would present a similar whitewash for George Bush.

It is becoming increasingly evident that Mr Bush, who announces impossible election promises on a daily basis, is getting scared about the possibility of being ejected from the Whitehouse and he is looking to Lord Hutton to bolster his lack of credibility with the US electorate.

It seems that John Kerry, who actually did wear a soldier's uniform and saw real action in Viet Nam, unlike George Bush, is increasingly likely to replace Bush in the Oval Office and if that were the case, the skeletons in the cupboards of the Bush administration would really come back to haunt them. So the administration is pulling out all stops in an effort to convince the electorate that Bush is a president worth re-electing.

It is rumoured that Lord Hutton has been offerred US$20 million for the whitewash job.

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s2i1962

The secret society that ties Bush and Kerry

London Telegraph

Revelations that leading candidates for the US presidency were "Skull and Bones" members have provoked claims of elitism. Charles Laurence reports from New York

The "tomb" stands dark and hulking at the heart of the Yale University campus, almost windowless, and shuttered and padlocked in the thick snow of winter storms.

Built to mimic a Greco-Egyptian temple, it is the headquarters of the Order of the Skull and Bones, America's most elite and elusive secret society - and it has become the unlikely focus of this year's presidential election. It turns out that four leading contestants for the White House in November's election were 1960s undergraduates at Yale: President Bush and Democratic rivals Governor Howard Dean, Sen John Kerry and Sen Joseph Lieberman.

What is more, two are "Bonesmen". Both Sen Kerry, now the Democrat front runner, and President Bush belong to the 172-year-old society, which aims to get its members into positions of power.

...

The Skull and Bones is the most exclusive organisation on campus. Members have ranged from President William Taft to Henry Luce, the founder of the Time-Life magazine empire, and from Averill Harriman, the businessman and diplomat, to the first President George Bush.

Alexandra Robbins, a Yale graduate and author of a book on the Skull and Bones, Secrets of the Tomb, said: "It is staggering that so many of the candidates are from Yale, and even more so that we are looking at a presidential face-off between two members of the Skull and Bones. It is a tiny club with only 800 living members and 15 new members a year.

"But there has always been a sentiment at Yale to push students into public service, an ethos of the elite making their way through the corridors of power - and the sole purpose of the Bones is power."

...

http://www.propagandamatrix.com/010204secretsociety.html

;) war is peace

OSLO, JANUARY 30: President George W. Bush and British PM Tony Blair are among nominees for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize before a Sunday deadline for nominations despite failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

‘‘Nominations are pouring in,’’ said Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Among nominees are Pope John Paul, the Salvation Army, former Czech President Vaclav Havel and Chinese dissidents.

...

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=40151

jaxxe: na tu nalezenou prirucku "jak pilotovat letadlo" a "jak se stat teroristou", na to si vzpominam :) to bylo takove ehm prokazatelne prokazane :]