Friday, November 20, 2009

Media Literacy

The trend is alarming - the media is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands every day it seems. And the owners are the same big guys who chum around on boards and in secret clubs with the big money industries that get all the favorable press coverage.

The influence on our information consumption is ghastly. And we have to wake up to that.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Media Literacy.

Well, maybe for you this report will be old news. I have the distinct impression that you who listen to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head are not unconscious consumers of media. You look around, you seek out the alternative views, you pay attention to dissident points of view and you don't buy in to the bill of goods they're trying to sell us in what passes for most news coverage these days.

But maybe there'll still be some statistics here to surprise you. I hope so anyway, because I believe that this issue of media influence, like political influence, being driven by the most powerful lobby groups and the dominant profit makers in our savagely capitalistic world, is one of the fundamental issues of our time.

However, media criticism is as thick as the blackflies a Lake Manitou in Northern Ontario. And anyone with any capacity for independent thought knows enough to be somewhat wary. Still I don't think many people know the enormity of the problem yet. And here again, Dr. Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy can provide an insightful and in-depth analysis.

I was explaining in a recent teleclass how North America is a perfect breeding ground for the vast expansion of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex, which has taken root so strongly in no small part because of substantial spreading of its message by a mercenary and controlled media. The entrenchment of this destructive joint cartel has been possible in North America and around the world in varying degrees because of a psychological condition called "exteriorization."

And this means the tendency to see our problems outside. If our disease comes from germs, we need the drug companies, who prey on that fear to make outrageous profits and sell vaccines and drugs by the ton. If the problem is terrorists, we need huge military spending to protect ourselves from those fanatics lurking behind every closed door. So we North Americans are a perfect market for selling things to protect us from the outside.

Keppe's work is truly psychological in returning the human being to the true source of our difficulties and solutions: inside the psychological life of the human being. And by doing that, our society begins to change, too, and reflects this more mature interiorized wisdom.

This, I can assure you, is being understood here in Brazil better than in any philosophical or spiritual or psychological orientation in the world today. As always, I'm available to steer you in the right direction if you'd like to learn more. rich@richjonesvoice.com for your comments and questions.

Today, media professional Susan Berkley joins me from New York to improve our media literacy.

Click here to listen to this episode.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Controlling our Food

It should be a sacred thing. And indeed, our food philosophy used to be closer to common sense in the past. My parents, already a generation closer to nature than mine, taught me that the best thing you could put in your body was something you washed the dirt off before putting it in your mouth.

But, oh my, how things have changed! Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Controlling our Food.

It should be a no-brainer. The food we eat should be the closest thing to nature we can get. The whole alimentation industry should be based on that premise. But it's a long way from it. Now we've god hormones to make the birds and cows grow faster and with more meat. We've got pesticides and chemical fertilizers to the point where it's advisable to peel the apples before eating to avoid the greatest concentrations of these toxic substances. We've got additives for this, enriched minerals for that, our food is fortified and treated. We're surrounded by toxins and belly full of food whose nutritional value is highly suspect.

There are many factors at play. We've built enormous industries of chemicals that make substantial profits for huge corporations. The fact that many of them are based on tycoons wanting to find uses for their industrial waste is not well understood by us. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry was established on the waste products from the oil and coal industries, which is why Rockefeller and Carnegie were so keenly interested in Pasteur's Germ Theory. They figured if they could get that theory accepted in the top medical schools in the land they'd have another almost endless source of profit. Heck, if every disease has a specific germ responsible for it, then you need a specific medicine for each germ - plus all the R&D industry to go along with it.

So they commissioned Abraham Flexner to do an exhaustive analysis of the medical education system in Canada and the U.S., and his Flexner Report changed totally how medicine was taught and perceived. Of course, the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations threw money at any medical research facility that focused on finding the germs responsible for a multitude of diseases old and new. And if these medical centers could dedicate themselves to creating a drug, a pharmaceutical medicine that could be created with coal and oil waste, well, here's more money for you! And quickly, medical education began to change.

That was Mr. Pasteur who influenced that. But he caused a lot of damage in the food business, too. His introduction of paranoia into medicine led to the creation of artificial food - including plastic and chemical additives and processes that would ensure us we never got infected with any of those evil little bacteria. Monsanto was created in 1901 with exactly that intention, and they haven't stopped infecting our lives with beastly products and practices since.

All of this is explained in Norberto Keppe's work of Analytical Trilogy, which is the science of showing us the source of our problems within, not without. And it is very valuable work to explore. rich@richjonesvoice.com if you'd like more information about any of Keppe's work.

This Pasteurian craziness is at the basis of the Codex Alimentarius, too - a U.N. led attempt to categorize and control all foodstuffs. This gives a lot of preference to treated and genetically modified food over natural food, and this is very dangerous. Medical doctor and infectious diseases specialist, Dr. Roberto Giraldo, joins me today to discuss this theory.

Click here to listen to this episode.