Donald Marshall's story has correlations to aspects of our modern world and entertainment like sports and television to keep people under control and not upsetting the apple cart too much. He mentions a type of sports arenas used for torture and other depravity as a kind of sporting event for the people who attend. People are encouraged to join in on being evil and outdo each other in order to show they are not weak and not become a target of harm themselves. The threat of being harmed is a good way to try to keep people under control through fear.

We can see how pitting people against each other in rivalries is common today in the form of religions, politics and sports. These 3 areas of humanity and DM's story share the commonality of the divide and conquer method.

Donald Marshall mentions politicians and world leaders who attend and engage in perverse activities together, meanwhile they act like they are in opposition in public, keeping people divided from seeing the farce of the political game. DM specifically refers to sports arenas. Let's see how sports themselves play a part in mind control.

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Sports

Sports creates loyalties for one team or another, and people get really into it, demonstrating their loyalty. Competition is key for people to outdo each other. Domination and winning is present instead of cooperation. This plays out in sports and politics, even religious ideas where one religion is supposed to be better and the "true" religion compared to the others.

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This is also present in DM's story, where instead of people cooperating to get out of the mess and control they are in, they just keep playing the perverse depraved "game" of harming others to stay in line. The world we know operates the same way, where we cold unite apart from political rivalries to overcome the master and rulers before us in order to be more free, but we don't.

The entertainment of sports is a highly influential distraction. Rather that focus time and energy on more important things, like creating a better way of life free from being ruled (i.e. like the potential for creating anarchy), people are driven by their tribal loyalties to keep feeding the sports entertainment world. Emotions rule over many people who are attached to this form of distraction.

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If the team they support loses, they take it as a personal loss of their own, as if "they" are losing. If a player gets hurt, it's "their" player getting hurt. Some people even protest or riot when things don't or do go their way. We've seen riots and mayhem when the Montreal Canadiens won or lost the Stanley Cup.

People's identities get merged into sports teams, as they think of the team as themselves. They even dress up in imitating the symbols and colors of teams they are conditioned into assimilating as part of who they are.

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All sports events are broadcast on television now, enticing an even larger audience into collective hypnosis, mind control and escapism. Television itself acts as a mind control device, apart from the sports being featured.

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Television

"Television is an anesthetic for the pain of the modern world"
- Astrid Alauda

It's estimated the average American, starting at the young ripe age of two years old, watches more than 34 hours of television per week, plus an additional 3 hours of recorded media.

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Corporate media is mostly funded by corporations. 75% of the commercial airtime is paid for by the 100 largest corporations in the USA, with budgets into the billions for some.

When new content is created, it can attract or detract advertising and investment into the commercial side. If some content is not liked by a corporation that funds a majority of the television network, then chances are they are going to hand them a script of what to say to keep public opinion in their favor. Television is a private medium for new information to get out, where the corporations decide what commercials we see in between shows, and also get to influence what shows get to startup or continue on a network.

The more we watch TV, the more we go into alpha brainwave states, the slow and receptive pattern that accepts images and suggestion into consciousness less critically. A state of hypnosis is induced by the alpha frequency, where you are content to just sit and continue watching. Going from the beta to an alpha wave state can affect how we feel, making it pleasurable to induce an alpha wave relaxed state and watching the TV, thereby making it addictive as a habit to "veg" out. Kicking the habit seems to be hard for many people to do. For some reason, they are drawn to spend time and pay attention to the TV.

Television is a drug

In 1969, Herbert Krugman conducted experiments about human brainwaves and television:

"Krugman monitored a person through many trials and found that in less than one minute of television viewing, the person's brainwaves switched from Beta waves — brainwaves associated with active, logical thought — to primarily Alpha waves. When the subject stopped watching television and began reading a magazine, the brainwaves reverted to Beta waves."

We are in a lower mental state, less evaluative, less critical, less able to discern truth from falsity, reality from unreality. There are many ideas base don images we receive, that we would normally reject, or at least question, under normal conditions. Whereas with television this functionality is impaired. We are filled with both images of half truth and propaganda, but also images that distract and divert our attention from social realities of the world with banal, pointless, irrelevant, mind-numbing fodder and entertainment to keep us stimulated.

One thing to note however, is that CRT (cathode ray tube) television technology operated differently than current LCD technology. The effect of light frequency transmission for alpha wave state increase may be different.

Here is a summary of some of Krugman's conclusions:

• "Internal Alpha responses can be stimulated by appropriate external rhythms or frequencies."
• "The time may come when the mass media may create special programs to help people modify certain attitudes or behavior."
• "This means that passively learned material has an important 'advantage' which some have also associated with so called subliminal perception, extrasensory perception, or hypnotism."
• "For early education there may be an opportunity to accept the fact that many children fidget in class, and that this interference with their attention is not to be blamed on parents, teachers, or the child. Mild drugging of these children, or training in relaxation through Alpha driving, may be dramatically helpful to their educational achievement."
• "For public television there may be an opportunity to accept without shame the fact that it has taught violence to an entire generation. The clear store of television violence is not that a new generation is more violent but that the new generation knows more violence. The political consequences of this may yet be what some would call 'good' (e.g., pacifist)."
• "It is possible that the relaxed and successful character of passive learning can be enhanced by the artificial induction of Alpha rhythm, this with the aid of a flickering light."

The Truth About TV

Switching our attention constantly, seems addictive as well. We are drawn to short attention activity, checking our messages, notifications, looking for attention from somewhere.

Time and attention is also fractured in watching frame-breaking split second scenes and rapid temporal shifts in plots. Reality doesn't operate this way, but technology has allowed imagery to be manipulated. Images are broken up, shifting from one to the other, requiring our attention to keep up with all the constant changes, leading us to develop attention deficits (ADD, ADHD) and a need for attention grabbing visual stimulus. Reality doesn't match up, becomes too slow and boring.

"Augmented" and virtual realities (games) are more desirable as they provide a constant flux of stimulation and keep our attention occupied in small fragments of time. Games and TV both serve as an escape from the mundane slow boring reality we are conditioned to experience that way. They are our opiates, our soma from Brave New World to keep us entertained like a circus or gladiator matches, or it's our anesthetic to keep us drooling as we watch hours and hours of garbage.

The imagery we get is a mix of real, unreal and semi-real events. We are left to judge and evaluate what reality is like based on a flood of images. The events can merge, with similar variables that make them all appear real and valid.

How Television Works

As real-life experience is increasingly replaced by the mediated 'experience' of television-viewing, it becomes easy for politicians and market-researchers of all sorts to rely on a base of mediated mass experience that can be evoked by appropriate triggers.

The TV 'world' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mass mind takes shape, its participants acting according to media-derived impulses and believing them to be their own personal volition arising out of their own desires and needs. In such a situation, whoever controls the screen controls the future, the past, and the present.
- (Nelson, The Perfect Machine, p. 82)

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Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.

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