"Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship. When you can't control people by force…you have to control what people think, and the standard way to do this is to resort to, what in more honest days used to be called propaganda, manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions, various ways of either marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion…There are two targets for propaganda: one is what's sometimes called the 'political class': there's maybe 20 percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, and they play some kind of role in decision making. Now, they are supposed to participate in social life, either as managers or cultural managers, like teachers and editors and so on. They're supposed to vote, they're supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial, they are one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there's maybe 80 percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not to think, and not to pay attention to anything. And they're the ones who usually pay the costs…The major media, we're talking primarily about the national media, those media that sort of set a general agenda that others more or less adhere to…Now, the elite media are the sort of agenda setting media, that means the New York Times, the Washington Post, and major television channels and so on. They set the general framework, local media more or less adapt to their structure. And they do this in all sorts of ways: by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict,
in order to serve the interests of dominant elite groups in the society."
- Noam Chomsky
The Inversion
A common ASSumption is that interest in asteroid impacts on Earth is similar to interest in UFOs, outer space, and even space people. Many people ASSociate asteroids with the occult, which is ironic, because this is one case where scientists think the opposite! Any geologist or planetary scientist will attest to, not only the real existing threat of asteroid disaster, but also to the inevitability of it.
- First Century Press
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