January 21, 2020

Photography As A Commodity

As with any commodity people will fight over pricing. But what most people never seem to realize is that once a new product, an original product, becomes a commodity then the corporate elites have taken its uniqueness and made it dull and redundant like toilet paper. 

Why would they do something like that, aren’t they in the business of profit no matter what the cost? Well, you have to ask yourself who is the patsy here, certainly not the corporations, not the mega photo agencies, it falls on the back of the photographers giving their valuable images away for peanuts on the dollar. And actually feeling good that one of their images sold for under a dollar. How absurd is that when in the rights managed days that image would have sold in the hundreds or even thousands. 

The losers are the image creators, the winners are the agencies taking their 80% of the profits from their photographers and they didn’t have to lift a finger all they do is allow the images makers to upload their products to be sold for pennies when it cost the photographer his time and money to travel to these expensive destinations. 

In the old days some agencies would chip in the cost knowing that the image creator would come back with great material to make up for their travel expense.  Now most photographers are on his/her own.

Within our capitalistic economic system we have commodified everything and anything that can be  exploited for profit, that includes people, ideas, mother nature, services, products… anything can be traded for money. 

Water is a precious commodity and it has become an object for exploitation by putting it in a plastic bottle to sell to the consumer, we need water to survive therefore it has become a great product to sell, a billionaires dream business. 

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Below Taken From Wikipedia:

[ In Marx’s theory, a commodity is something that is bought and sold or exchanged in the market.

It has value, which represents a quantity of human labor. Because it has value, it implies that people try to economize its use. 

It has a use value because, by its intrinsic characteristics, it can satisfy some human need or want, physical and ideal.

“As the division of labour becomes more complex, a class of merchants emerges which specializes in trading commodities, buying here and selling there, without producing products themselves, and parallel to this, property owners emerge who extend credit and charge rents. This process goes together with an increased use of money, and the aim of merchants, bankers and renters becomes to gain from the trade, by acting as intermediaries between producers and consumers.”]

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As a stock photographer you are relying on your photo agency to get the best price for the image you created. Oh, that’s right that was in the old days when the agency shared the profits from the great unique imagery that their photographers submitted to them. 

Now that has changed and images are repetitive and boring to look at. They are cliches of what the money men want to project externally, a mirage of happy faces, happy kids, happy grandparents all enjoying the great economy and healthy medicines that can help you cope with the prices that drain your bank accounts, hiding the undercurrent of corruption the wealthy manipulators have over the media spewing out this heartfelt desire to help all people reach their credit card limit. 

What is your truth, your personal vision and not a repetitive mind numbing cliche spoken on tv ads manipulating your intellectual perceptions to repeat and not complete your inner journey?

To create images with depth and a powerful individual determination you need to see photography as a documentation of your life cycle. It isn’t an ad selling products. Photography is a revelation of something deep inside you that has to be expressed.

We are living shadow lives of our true selves, taken in by medias subtle manipulation of our thoughts and emotions. We need to voice our own unique impressions and not let corporate voices deter us from looking at the truth behind the stage curtain. 

The goal of wealth is to sell products by playing to your fears. Your personal information is externalized through social media and that is the mind trap you have entered. Social media knows more about you than you know of yourself. Wake up to your inner force and break free from the spider web of lies and the words that impoverish our inner thoughts to seek false witness instead of the truth.

In this new physical world of valueless compassion we end up seeking an easy answer to the swill of voices spewing hate words to rile us up to condemn innocence and exploit our conditioned minds to seek purpose through violence toward others and ourselves.

The selective use of photographs tell only a part of the story. What happened prior to the photograph being taken, what happened during the exposure of the image, did the photographer pause just long enough to capture a lie and what happened in the aftermath of the image being taken. Frankly, just like social media, I don’t trust photographers today to photograph truth. I think everyone is pitted against each other and they don’t comprehend the manipulations of their actions and voices, they just don’t see their confinement to a select script of racism.

What can we say about today’s photographer, where everything looks and feels the same? I can no longer call it image creation but snap shooting of their external life, where they go, who they are with and what they ate.

That is powerful imagery that makes you want sit and stare at a blank wall rahter than that crap!

Photography is now a means to say look at me with no underlining current of depth and individuality. 

The ease of taking pictures now diminishes the need for originality. We are creatures of habit and we copy the actions of others as if we were herded cattle. 

The new camera technology makes snap shooting so easy that one can get addicted to taking pictures of everything.  

When you are starting out this is a good thing, because you don’t know what your inner likes and dislikes are. You are just beginning to see subjects that perk your interest. The key to success is to flow with these inner intuitions and practice your compositions and your exposure to bring into the light your unique visual senses.

Everybody is a photographer and no one is a photographer. Technology is the addiction and the pictures let your ego brag about where you were and what you saw.

Well, a snap shot is not really seeing, it is taking from the scene nothing but a surface reflection of your ego. To see a subject you must immerse yourself in the scene allowing time to reveal to your inner intuition the details that will eventually become your inner image externalized.

Ego shooting doesn’t allow you a personal relationship with your subject, you feel nothing toward the subject but a few seconds of your attention and then you disappear to another subject that appears to you as too dull to even take a picture. You are missing out on the real value of photography and that is being present in your vision with the millions of possibilities you have to narrow down to integrate into your frame the image being formed.

When you come upon a scene do you feel the excitement of your intuition that informs you that there is an image present to be made.

Stop moving, just look, really look deep into the scene seeking details that are present that are inciting you to explore even deeper into the forest of your vision.

If you hurry through life you are only living on the surface of a deeper reality. 

January 21, 2020

Royalty Free Scam

What is it about corporate investors that they have to reduce every possible business take over for only one purpose certainly not for the employees welfare but for their own profits?  Business today is not a people focus adventure to make workers lives better but a money making opportunity and that is all that matters, the bottom line of cash into their bank accounts. 

When big business/industry gets involved in any new unique selling venture opportunity it doesn’t take long for that particular business to be dismantled in order for the powers that be to funnel the majority of the profits upward and away from the workers that make the product they sell. They dismantle the core business, selling off as much as they can and leaving the employees without any new potential to get a good paying job.

We see it time and time again in the criminal behavior of corporate industry that invests in another companies business model, that was doing great, an upward arch and the original owner felt that having big money interest would help propel his company into the stratosphere.

What it did was sink into oblivion.

This wave of concentrated assimilation of other businesses into one entity is the corporate raiders  determined greed, externalized, destroying workers rights, unions and wages!  

And the stock photography market place is the latest to be undermined and destroyed by big business.

As in any take over of a business the employees are the ones that get the shaft first and in the stock photography business the photographers were the first to feel the hard slap in their face. 

Their image creation was the fuel that lifted these small photo agencies up into becoming a collaborative journey for the agency owners and the photographers. 

As in any take over the undermining of the photographers profits started slowly but then escalated into a frenzy of diminishing returns for the photographer.

This undermining our share in the profits of our own individual work, led to the inability of the stock photographer to earn a decent living in what he loved doing, creating great images, through his individual personal vision.

The big dollar pot went upstairs to the money men while the photographers got shafted.

Lets be honest stock photography had a great business model in its origin where the photo agency received 50% and the stock photographer received 50% of the sale to their clients. 

The agency and the photographer were a team working together creating images the clients needed.

It was the best of worlds back in the early 80’s until big money began buying up agency after agency in the mid 1990s, consolidating their monopoly on a mom and pop run business model. And then began shortchanging the photographer by lowering his half of the sale. 

Photographers built the stock photo business with their visual talent but through the decades that followed, as more and more people worldwide purchased their digital cameras and began snapping pictures there was an ocean swell of photographers that gave their images away mostly for free and these cheap images hurried the downfall of the Right Managed business model (where the photographer was paid well for his efforts) which ended up becoming obsolete, and evolved into the Royalty Free scam where the profits mainly go to the two giants of the stock photography world Getty Images, ShutterStock and not into the pockets of the photographer who made the image. 

You might ask what is the Royalty Free pricing strategy? Well, the photographer will get 20% and the agency will get 80%, nice isn’t it. But I believe that 20% will soon become 10% and then the photographers will just give their work away for free most do now for an ego rush!

When you think about all the images created in a single day, billions and billions of images by people taking snap shots and then sending them into RF agencies to be sold for pennies on the dollar you can see why this RF model works well for the agency but is literally stealing money from the creator of the agencies image base, the photographer.

The stock photo corporations have done the math so they claim and they state you can do pretty good financially by taking RF images. When you finally wake up from the agencies propaganda you will soon realize that there touting RF is a scam and your talents as a photographer are being used as decoys, a fantasy world of happy faces, loving embraces, as you submit the cliche images demanded, when in the past the true image creators sought to photograph the world as it is, a place of violence, pollution and racism.

As the corporate propaganda machine infiltrates your mind with receptive images of happy people not helping others but buying products and envying an ageless man and woman holding hands looking out over a vineyard with a beautiful sunset, their love assured forever. And the photographers are now part of the scam to keep the people complacent, wanting only to maintain their way of life as the poor suffer for the sins of the corporate greed for money and power.

And to ad insult to injury you discover that Rights Managed is a dying market place because most of the business community addicted to cheap labor and cheap prices for their ads that used to cost them thousands, tens of thousands of dollars for an ad. That dinosaur is on its last leg and will soon disappear from the stock photography world. 

In today's market of fast food photography even the editors are facing a losing battle to keep their jobs. Pretty soon all will be done automatically, search, find, and pay your pennies and then upload the image selected to your computer and lay out your ad and bingo it is done. 

With the death of RM you really won’t have a choice but to sell your images to the client yourself. Good luck with that, businesses today are run by greedy kids that think they’re the next bozo and they won’t pay for anything that is not dirt cheap for they have to save their boss some cash in order to get their monthly bonus!

You can’t live on the stock photography split of twenty per-cent.  You can’t feed your family, pay your rent, your utilities, kids clothes, school etc… welcome to the new age of photography. Submit your hard earned photographs to the stock house who accepts your efforts and then treats you like worker ants to get out there and shoot and shoot making money for the boss but while you live in poverty. 

The new age of photography income becoming waiting in line at a food bank to get canned food for your family.

January 13, 2020

Cambridge Analytica

My Own Interpretation In My Own Words 

Loss of Independence and Loss of Truth. 

We are pawns in a movie with actors sending us information to manipulate our mind to believe their truth and not the real truth of their evil disguise. 

This movie is an invention and is promoted and produced by psychological influences taken from your social media revelations and financial records. 

Big business knows more about you than you know about yourself.

All this information is used to create a profile of you and how you might be swayed to vote for a different candidate or buy a product that wasn’t even on your radar screen.

What you like and what you dislike are known by corporations, wealthy bankers, wealthy market gurus, the military, wealthy families desiring to control the worker ants by manipulating them to believe what this narrow band of greed can accomplish by mental manipulation of your intellect will keep you under the control of the rich as you are corralled in a mirage of existence, not living your life but someone else’s manipulation of your supposed free will working in a dead end job soon to be off shored for even cheaper labor, welcome to the 21st century of madness and mind control.

Listen carefully to the spokesmen for the wealthy and you will find their mouth pieces are our elected officials bought and sold by rigging elections.

Statements made by our government are lies and exaggerations to protect their way of life, using people as their slaves and our tax dollars are funneled over to the powerful families as an inheritance for these corrupt, selfish, greedy imitations of past gods who think themselves above our constitution. 

Do we as a society have a shared understanding of truth? Do we fully understand what is happening in our own country and in other countries, where the wealthy want complacency in order to steal their land for what is underneath, oil?

We seek information to understand our particular time in history, who are the demons and who are the good guys in this mad, mad, mad world of wealth and greed that have finally been seen by the people that have been manipulated from the time this country was formed, in the beginning, the slave owners in this so called democracy, these wealthy landowners had no intention of stopping slavery, this good old USA of manipulators and rich land owners were addicted to power and greed. And to this very day nothing has changed in this country or around the world, the manipulations continue and the innocent people suffer to make the wealthy richer!

But now there is even a more destructive and sinister plot afoot where we never know truth in politics, news feeds, politicians, investors, wealthy families, bankers, corporations, for there is a new level of control being used to allow only the people that have power to know the truth while the populous know only what they have been fed, false information from their social media sites. Words, twisted and moved around, a sentence now written or spoken deceives the viewer and listener to think a different way from the known facts and are now used not to inform but to control their emotions fed with lies. 

Photographs are not documenting a reality we all share in and trust but manipulating our visual senses with propaganda to control our behavior in order for us to choose candidates and laws that will only do us more harm and destroy our democracy by shattering the ideal of freedom we were all hand fed. 

News outlets create their own version of a truth that has been rehearsed to counteract the real truth spoken by honest people that hold the truth as the foundation of any democracy.

Why manipulate citizens of your own country? Well, first off, for profit.  If you can show the wealthy corporations, the wealthy families, the wall street investors and the wealthy bankers a means of psychological warfare, a means to control perceptions of reality over a population or even a small segment of people where you could influence them to change their vote or buy something they don’t need and can’t afford, all by using information these citizens thought was fun to participate in by giving away their personal, private information to social media corporations, their personal feelings exposed, their thoughts and physical likes and dislikes displayed for programers to take and exploit that now can be combed and used to manipulate their behavior, like a Pavlov dog, by major corporations, what excitement for the social media sites to have this information they can sell to lobbyist and political campaigns that could manipulate different segments of the citizenship to vote a certain way by targeting them with false ads that can hook them in their fears, their doubts and neurotic personalities to vote or not vote at all which could sway the election as it did in 2016 by a candidate that had the backing of major corporations, wealthy Super Pacs and Cambridge Analytica.

Words, becoming sentences of lies and mental mind control creating an automatic response without study or understanding.  In todays technological destruction of personality and individuality we seem to respond not to honest facts but more to our inner feelings which are controlled by propaganda machines and bought politician that have learned how to push the right buttons and to get people to hate others for this distracts them from the true criminals that should be jailed the powerful 1%.

They have been brained washed to think and feel that differences mean unpatriotic!

With the heavy influence of social media selling our personal information we are easily trained to react according to their behavioral studies and to vote for and to protest against something that actually was for our benefit but because of the controlling information they have on our private life these criminals of destructive propaganda were able to direct ads specifically to you controlling what you felt and thought about a new law or candidate. 

People in this confusing time of technology overload are easily duped to believe a lie and not believe a truth. Who do you believe when the dis hacks are spreading lies like the wildfires down in Australia!

What benefits would the different parties in the American voting scam have to cheat and sway peoples feelings and ideas toward a vote or decision that was not in their best interests. The wealthy call these swing voters, these manipulated human beings unaware of the lies propelling them to change their minds and to vote in absence of the truth or facts “persuadalbles!”

With the right verbiage, the right keywords known to the voter, a candidate could send out a propaganda letter or a TV ad directed at a certain constituency that would be influenced to vote a different way given what they thought was the truth. But it wasn’t the truth it was a false propaganda to manipulate the psyche of the voter to vote against their best interests. 

Minds can be changed, could be convinced that something is purple when it is yellow, the truth is a lie and the lie a truth all done through information taken through social media and what guinea pigs posted concerning their private lives, their likes and dislikes.

They could even use disinformation to change the minds of people fed up with the criminal rule of law we now live in here in this United States of preposterous wealth in the hands of the few, to not vote at all, why bother if everyone is a crook only out for themselves, even those candidates that are not lying and are telling the people the truth of their predicament. 

How our freedoms and our hard earned money is going up the ladder to the wealthy as our corrupt politicians do the dirty work trying to cut money for public schools, food programs for the poor, social security and medical coverage, climate change, and investments with alternate energy proposals. 

All this is done to keep money flowing upward to the heavens of gluttony.

Through social media, everything about your life is studied and categorized to set a profile for corporations, wealthy bankers and wealthy families to buy this information and then use your personal info against you, to manipulate you through a fraud of lies to maneuver you to change your mind and vote for one of their bought politicians. America the beautiful should be changed to America the Corrupt.

All of your communications, phone, pad, writings, any post on social media, banking, investments, physical health etc.. Are known now by corporations and this info is bought to increase profits and to elect partners in crime.

Or push your mind over the line from a progressive thinker to a conservative voter but you don’t really know why you changed! 

So our behavior is tracked and this information gathered into a profile of your background and personality and job status, girlfriend, boyfriend, likes and dislikes gathered from your social media sites and then used against you to drive you in a direction that wasn’t on your radar until there is an important candidate that you thought you liked but now through this false information you can’t stand him or her. But in truth you were just lied to in order to sway and an election. 

Isn’t that what America stands for, manipulating the vote in order to get a corrupt candidate the rich like into office rather than one seeking big changes in our government! In this great country of the United States where freedom reigns supreme, and your vote counts, yeah right!

By putting out there in social media land your personal life history you now have opened pandoras box! What is a truth directed at you and what is contorted facts, lies, manipulated deceptions that seem plausible but are illusions of words forming fake news that contradict your original perception of truth. 

Power maintains lies to con the people into thinking there is a better future, there isn’t a better future if the goal of the rich is to take over the independence of human beings making them slaves to the avarice of evil selflessness. 

We are living in a bad hallucination, a delusion of freedom perpetuated by the hollow men and women of deceptions.

We live in an age of materialism, a false witness to the mirage of truth in a reality created to contort the mind for profit.

Why are you giving up your freedom of thought, your autonomy in your understanding of your truth not someone else’s? Social media is a contract of analysis to get you to buy products and now to vote for the people that will take your money and exploit your privacy. 

The wealthy, the fat cats that perfect their contortions of truth, their lies are their truth, ruthless in their dissecting of peoples fears, exaggerating the consequences of electing a certain candidate because he can’t be bought and could disrupt the cozy relationships the other candidates have with the super rich 1% ( their Super Pacs a propaganda of false witness) that have bought most of our elected officials. It makes you proud to be an American? 

Any bill that would take money from their ravaging the earth must be stopped by lies and suggestions of treason from socialists out to destroy our democracy, yeah right as if the wealthy have had nothing to do with destroying our freedom all along. 

Our freedom of speech, our individuality is being undermined by programable computers spewing out info on all of us making it easier than ever to confuse and smear the reputation of good people, undermine our freedom of speech and destroy our ability to have open elections without outside influences.

These manipulators, mind contortionists, are tracking all your intimate moments online and are then able to predict your behavior when they send you some made up facts that they know will get you all jazzed up to post your own false beliefs and on, and on, the lies flow easily into the minds of people fed up with the reality they didn’t know they were creating. 

It must come as a shock to people’s concepts of themselves when they realize they have been played since birth to believe in a capitalistic system of corruption as the path to freedom and a good life.

Up until the early 1970s our economy was certainly more fare and it gave our veterans good paying jobs and a decent family life. But that changed as the wealthy began a propaganda blitz to undermine the middle class and workers worldwide. Wages stagnated and business began buying other business and banks became greedy and invested in themselves instead of an infrastructure for our decaying inner cities desperate for housing and rent control.

Our mental foolery is being sold for profits, when you can believe false information as truth and truth as behavioral fraud.  

Social media takes your posts and sells this information after analyzing your inner mental threads, secrets and then puts them on the market place of exploitation to be used against innocent voters by campaigns that want to have a specific candidate win against another candidate that would make it almost impossible to corrupt and could end their free ride of tax brakes for a class of egotistical crooks that are already billionaires but I guess when you are addicted to greed and power you don’t see humanity you just see profits! 

What a country of ideas and vision for a better future for all of us, yeah, if you believe that I have some mountain view property to sell you in Florida.

The wealthy prey on state districts that can be controlled and flipped to the side of corruption by looking for candidates that salute the powers that be with, a yes sir, right away sir, whimpering and sucking-up to the powers that control them like a lap dog looking for table scraps.

 Through messages of fear, anger and hate for outsiders, through words that you assimilated through social media sites, through behavioral manipulations you have become the new rats in a cage exploited by words that incite in the dull mind a need to protect a system of government that is broken and now is not a government of the people for the people but a corporation for the wealthy by the wealthy and lets praise the oligarchs for their manipulation of peoples personality traits, a little mind control here and there can’t hurt anybody but our so called democracy!

This is a new war not of missiles and guns but that certainly will be present it seems for the rest of my life and my children’s but now backed by a new revelation of moral decay, weaponized information on each and every one of us whereby we can’t tell who is truthful and who is lying to us.  

This manipulation of our elections is a criminal act and should be responded too by arrests and imprisonment. But wait the people behind this fraud of an open society, open and free thoughts, are the very rich that control our congress and government right now so they have nothing to fear and won’t stop until people wake up to this mind manipulation and come together not as puppets of wealth but as human beings fighting for their lives.

We have always been commodities to the wealthy, a means of profit but now it isn’t us so much but what we expose about ourselves through the corrupt social media sites, the stores we shop at, remarks we make to friends, our beliefs,  all of this is programed into a profile of your behavior to be manipulated and we become the new cash cow for election tampering. 

If we look at social media you probably never read the terms and conditions of the site you are giving your information to. They are free to use that info anyway they please and believe me they use that info to destroy our freedom of speech and freedom of choice.

If you look at news stations today in our country it is all fluff and the obliteration of researched facts, it’s talking heads have been programed to blame the down trodden, making them an escape goat to blame for all our problems through a deliberate false analysis of the true situation and yet we take this shallow demonstration of our news media, this deceptive so called freedom of speech, as actual useful, information. 

Stop and think what are news outlets doing, they are drawing your curiosity to manipulate you to buy commercial products and to move you slyly over to a position that will eventually undermine your ability to live a life without debt, fear of wars and catastrophic climate change.  

Cambridge Analytics has a name for those they target to get a Pavlov dog response and they call you the persuadalbles. Easily manipulated minds that only grasp the surface of life and not its depths. 

Through social media you are profiled to be manipulated! History is full of cultures and military states, Nazi Germany, that controlled their citizens and military by manipulating the citizens consciousness to think in terms of a herd instinct, it is better to be with others in a collared environment than to be seen alone and sent to a concentration camp.

Where are the regulations to protect citizens of the United States from this infringement on their privacy and their behavior patterns? Really, you don’t see that this country is basically a corporation that has no intention of protecting it’s citizens from selling personal information bought off the social media sites. 

Think about it, the social media sites are a multi-billion dollar companies getting free info on its citizens. This information is worth billions more, do you honestly think and expect these monsters of deception are going to stand by and allow restrictions to their criminality to protect your private information.

Remember you are the one that didn’t read the rules of the game and aloud your thoughts to spew all your personal info out into the dark black hole of information gathering. 

We should be demanding the ability to say no to advertisers taking our info and selling this information to subversives that want to manipulate your voting rights and to sell you something you can’t afford and don’t need. 

This is a war of values, a war of truth, a war of caring for each other, a war of standing strong together to fight those criminals of greed and power.

These new companies springing up peddling influence are creating a new industry of deception and criminal behavior. Not that we don’t have this now in Washington DC but now it has taken an ominous turn whereby these perpetrators of criminality are not for our country but for themselves, profits at the expense of our constitution.

Where is our government, why aren’t they protecting its citizens from these power greedy psychopaths. We need strong regulations on these media sites and controls on how they gather and distribute the secrets of our citizens. 

Right now there no restrictions on these corrupt corporations trolling your private information. How far has our democracy fallen under the power of corrupt corporations! Freedom for its citizens is the main goal of any Democracy, how far the United states has fallen since its conception. 

We are being studied, each click we make is recorded and each time we stop and read or look at images this is all put in your personal file to be used again and again to get you out there shopping for things you don’t need and voting for an idiot that has only one thing on his mind sucking up to the wealthy so he can skim a little profit of the backs of the American workers, god bless this country of corruption and vice.

They use surveillance advertising recording where you go on the web what stores you visit what products you look at and this is placed in your open file for the rich to use this info to sell you those very products you looked at or something similar, possibly more expensive.  

Wake up your privacy is being invaded. 

What will it take for people to wake up to consumer deception? This treachery of invading our privacy is against the law. We have become not a police state but that is certainly is coming but a corporate state

where anything goes, even spying on its citizens for profit. 

We are in a full service propaganda machine, our lives are under continuous scrutiny where the powers that be look for hints of a character that is needy, wants to belong, is fearful, angry, frustrated that can be fed a pipe-dream that steals your voice through word manipulation by getting you to respond in a negative way towards something or someone you don’t even know in order to get an opponent elected that is more favorable to allowing pollution, oil drilling, fracking and corrupt banks into his state not for the people but for his friends in high places to exploit the citizens.

The next big attack will be fear based slogans that will infiltrate the minds already fearful of their lifestyle braking apart by the very mouths that are creating this fear based society.

We are predictable especially by giving our private information away for free, allowing these crooks to control our behavior. We are individuals free to make our own choices, we don’t have to rely on technology that is destroying our freedom of thoughts to do it for us.

Why would we want to be controlled by thieves hacking into our minds to find ways to take money from us? We must fight for our freedom and not succumb to technologies cold, unforgiving, mesmerizing omnipotence through delivered through social media.

An estimated 68 elections around the world were manipulated by Cambridge Analytica. Their mode of operation was to instill in the people a new wave of hate and fear before their votes were made. They took pride in their undermining legal and free elections stating that fear and hate is the best way to engage voters.

We the people are under attack! Our sense of justice of an open and free elections has been destroyed by the criminals that have undermined democracy. We are in a new kind of war, a war on truth and facts to back up these truths. We are in an era of criminality that has no moral foundation and looks out for their own profits through manipulating, preying on peoples fears and these herded minds don’t even realize they are being undermined, lied to, their thoughts are known to social media and this puts a target for propaganda to be delivered to their computers insisting that their only action possible is hate and fear of those people!

Those people are human beings trying to survive just like we are trying to survive in the cunning illusion of a democracy.

If people looked at the growing wealth of the 1% and how this has been accomplished under the flag of a supposedly free country well look no further into the mind manipulations of Cambridge Analytica! You the people have been betrayed by the all American Business Ethics which is a facade built to promote trust when in fact criminal minds rule our Business World and our Industrial Military Complex, Medical Complex, Environmental Complex and on and on…

We should be an open and individualistic people but in truth we have always been played through fear and anger to blame everybody else except our own lazy thought process. With these new technologies we bypass our own intuition and look outside us for answers. Like trained monkeys we seek not our own voice but a voice of a manipulator, a proxy mediator to control our thoughts and our actions so we don’t have to think and we can go back to just playing video games!

To hide under the flag of freedom when inch by inch, tax by tax we the people are slaves to the wealthy and they purposely influence our behaviors through word manipulations to keep us distracted in fighting amongst ourselves as our corrupt government takes more and more power from us, the supposedly free society of the people by the people, yeah right!

This propaganda machine is in high speed directing the coming elections to empower the candidates that will toe the lineAnalytica and make the rich richer and the poor poorer!

Data you put up on social media is like giving away your soul, your personal self, exposing yourself to the corporations and Super Pacs as an easy target to manipulate in the upcoming election as Cambridge Analytica did in the 2016 election. Your personal information given away on Facebook is used to shape a narrative directed just for you to put doubt in your mind on the candidate you thought was worth voting for. And you will not even be aware of your minds confusion as you read and listen more closely to the lies slowly being accepted as truth. Trolls abound on all social media sites infiltrating groups and subtly expressing words that undermine the sanctity of our mental independence. 

Words describe a false protection. Instinct allows one to be independent. Your intuition is your alarm bell that something doesn’t smell right. But in todays fast paced environment of media dominance the truth is always hidden amongst the lies that get top billing. 

Where is our government in all these created lies and destruction of our supposedly open voting process, we have a right as citizens of the United State to know and be assured that our vote counts? The gerrymandering of our election process is a disgrace to this nation and is illegal and the perpetuators should be arrested and thrown in jail. 

The effects of gerrymandering is a loss of faith in democracy and a loss of good paying jobs for its citizens. Corporations own our political system and they don’t want to pay higher wages to the citizens of the America, so they try and rig the voting process to assure themselves that the politician elected is a bare faced yes man to the powerful money laundering!

Where is our government in this conflict of interest?

The government needs to be held accountable for their illicit participation in this criminal endeavor!

Gerrymandering:

[Two principal tactics are used in gerrymandering: "cracking" (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) and "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).]

[Gerrymandering has affected every one of America’s states, and while North Carolina and Michigan have been found to be some of the most glaring examples, Florida, Maryland, and Virginia have also been brought to task and accused of being less than truthful about the way they draw their districts’ lines.]

[The definition of a gerrymander is a changing of voting districts to give one party an advantage or disadvantage a group. An example of a gerrymander is a creation of a smaller voting district to take away votes from a particular candidate. Gerrymander is defined as to divide a voting area to give one political party a majority.]

Why in the heck do we allow hidden money to dictate our future in these elections. We should give the politicians a month to make their case not with outside money by the few but everyone has the same amount to make their points of changing the direction of the country to a more open, inclusive society, explaining to the people their plans to stop the influx of outside forces infiltrating our government and remove any lobbyist from the government buildings and any congressman or woman or senator found guilty of being bribed will be prosecuted and put behind bars where they belong.

We need to know who is voting for what bills and what bills are being presented and who wrote the bill and who is backing the bill. 

Our government needs to be transparent in its dealing with foreign countries and any rush to war must be stopped until the facts are presented, not by the elitist few but the whole congress that represent the people with words of truth and not a convoluted argument of misrepresentation of the facts made by another president who lies through his teeth.

We need honest people willing to fight for the people of this nation and not fight for the billionaire class of heathen robbers.

What their game plan is to polarize the people from the truth of their values, instill fear of others, to brand different races as evil and thus we are the good superior force of civilization. We are the power that controls the world!

Our new wars will be fought not with rockets and military personal but with behavioral change, an ability to flood your brain with nonsense and feed

your fears with a false scenario. You are a test rat that is being sold false truths, rumors, innuendos and you are being gullible in believing anything from social media, period.

These manipulators create scenarios that fit with the posts you made and were meticulously analyzed by computer monitoring research to present a false witness a superficial friend giving you good advice. On the web you can’t believe anything you haven’t experienced first hand.

What a country of freedom we live in! We are stooges for the rich to play with!

This information warfare, these mind control platforms of social media will suppress voter turnout in certain states and increase voter turnouts in other states.

We are giving our life away through social media, being distracting from getting off our butts and living in the real world and not on a tech site of pompous fraud and lies!

Now given the prevalence of media sites your entire life is under scrutiny and your clicks and your interests are measured and calculated. And you will have no sense of the criminal minds playing you for a fool.

All your moments online are tracked in order to get a full picture of your behavior patterns. Once that is accomplished and they have a real good profile of you and your likes and dislikes then that information goes up for sale and then the fun starts for you when you get ads in the mail and ads online you never asked for or wanted. Welcome to the real meaning of social media information gathers selling you to the highest bidder!

Your information will be sold around the world and they will use what you thought was your private moments to hook you into buying products that fit your profile.

This is not marketing we have been use to, random ads to entice you to buy their product but now specific ads directed right at you, specifically made for your personality, your likes and dislikes in order to manipulate you to buy, buy and buy some more.

We have become a country of addicts who can’t seem to stop buying things we really don’t need.

We have no autonomy now in this world of corporate manipulators, who know more about you than you do yourself.

This is the same thing the Super Pacs do in elections  in order to get you to vote for their lackey candidates.

As we leave digital traces of ourselves all over the web we are inviting propaganda and behavioral changes to happen to us without us being aware of the process we are being drawn into. We are now the commodity, the product now molded to perform like a circus monkey! These swines of technology can create a resonance with your psyche and direct you down a road you have never been before. Just a little shove here and there and pretty soon you are out protesting against your fellowman. Welcome to the new world of psyche control.

Could you be manipulated to not vote?

Are you someone that can be persuaded to go to war on an impulse, a decision made in seconds instead of hours of contemplation and warranted facts that are founded in truth not flagrant misleading rumors. 

What about our women and men who sacrifice themselves to protect this country and our way of life each and every day!

But what if the war was based on a lie? What if our men and women in uniform didn’t have to die if we had an open and honest government?

What if the killing of an important enemy was a means of distracting the people away from an impeachment?

This government for the people, by the people being told we must be ready for war. Is this real or a strategy to take the spotlight off a president who has corrupted our way of life, our belief in our country? 

Creating in fighting amongst the people so he can exploit under the guise of truth more cash from the governments tax base.

Corporations are in the business of exploiting people and mother nature. Are we really mentally present in seeing our government for what it has become?

Business has taken over our American freedoms, it has begun the commodification of our democracy by standardizing and reducing our personal data as a commodity to be sold, and they price our data according to who is buying our personal information and how much they need.

Fearing life is a means of control and the powers that be are expert in creating scenarios that make citizens scared of what they have been told concerning immigrants labeled as terrorists but in fact they are trying to escape terror in their own countries that the United States has supported for oil and other profit motives!

We know politicians lie, some more than others. But why would you allow a candidate to lie to the citizens of America through Facebook as they allowed in the 2016 elections and are gearing up to allow lying in the upcoming 2020 elections. Is that really what our forefathers wanted? Is it really necessary to lie in order to win elections? Well, the main reason of course is money but also the foreshadowing of the collapse of our open society and a government for the rich and not the people. 

Lies to corrupt voters decisions is not free speech. It is a criminal action and it should be stopped by arresting the perpetrators of the fraud of our election process.

Sometimes I feel we are living in a third world country where our government is run by a dictator with no morals values. Oh, wait we are living that now in America!

The golden rule now in this corrupted economy of vice is profit over people. The wealthy don’t care about the citizens of this country they use and abuse because they feel they are above the law. It seems nothing much has changed in this country over the centuries except now it is more established, more brazen, stealing and manipulating its citizens without them necessarily knowing it.

We no longer have the protection of the law in our favor.  We are sitting ducks to be exploited and driven to poverty in a blink of an eye from the actions that belongs to some ego maniac investor thinking he is a new god of supreme corruption.

Without prosecution of these wealthy crooks that have bought and sold our politicians we are not going to be able to have a decent life and decent wages to live a good life here in this nation run be an oligarchy.

There is no longer a need for transparency for if the people open their minds they can easily detect the direction of our world governments. Oligarchs now rule this world. Without a firm belief in justice and equality we are lost as a civilization. 

Without transparency in government we are heading toward dictatorship.

Without regulations, laws, and honest judges we are doomed to be taken advantage of without a means of restitution we are doomed to a life of misery and distrust.

We need laws that are strict and enforced, this corruption of our government makes it harder and harder for people to believe in justice and equality for all.

The propaganda machine is in full force exploiting the naivety of people to believe that even now the united States stands for justice for all, BS, it stands now for no justice at all the only exception is for the criminal behavior of the few.

Sources For This Post

Facebook is a Crime Scene: “The Great Hack” has been shortlisted for an academy Award, co-directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim

Emma Briant, visiting research associate in human rights at Bard College who specializes in researching propaganda. Her upcoming book is titled Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry.

Brittany Kaiser a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who is featured in the documentary The Great Hack. Her book is titled Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again.

January 5, 2020

Photography Blog

At the height of photography as an established visual art form, the photographers had insight into new subjects and unique compositions, the ability to stay their course of vision by making images of the ordinary and making them a revelation of the extraordinary. 

The street photographers were the first to understand that images of the real America, the good, the bad and the ugly were what was needed to make a statement about our society and the inherent racism and exploitation of the poor that has exited for centuries and still does!

These images inspired the young photographers to push through their fears of making photographs of the common place and just be themselves and use their visionary intuition. 

Photography is more than just documenting your life, it is a way to express your life through your image creations. You have a chance to give the world a glimpse of your inner self, your inner world through creating images of purpose and sincerity.

Now, in this twenty-first century there is no originality in image creation but redundant visual content that doesn’t give us any clues into the creators unique perspective. They are more interested in taking pics of themselves than exploring their own inner vision becoming externalized. 

The viewer of images today need more and more explosive controversial imagery of sex and violence to get their visual motor running. And of course how can we pass up images of stupidity. But these images are mostly surface images without depth, feeling or purpose except to make fun of someone else’s half-baked performance.

More times than not the current viewers of photographs are easily bored looking at the same lighting, the same expressions, same street scenes, the sameness of composition, and they ask themselves where have all the unique vibrant images with insight and character gone to. They are still present but they get lost amongst the surface glitter of color enhanced nature, landscape images, people images, nighttime images, really the majority of image created today for publication are redundant copies of subjects made from the masters years ago! 

What we have here isn’t real image creation but image redundancy, and image manipulation! By making the digital cameras basically take pictures for the person we have undermined the quality of image creation and the necessary focus needed to see beyond the shallow surface, and made photography a commodity just like buying baked beans. Except in photography most people give their images away for free without thinking twice to social media. 

Now I don’t want the reader to think that image manipulation is a bad thing for if the artist sees in the image something more powerful by using color enhancement or a textured surface to bring out his inner vision than so be it. It is the photographers job to express his inner intuition anyway possible to get the external world to take a deeper look at his image creations.

Images of the external world are reflections of your reality, a reality in constant flux. To capture these moments you must have a heighten sense of the behavioral flow moving around you. Look through your own eyes for originality and an expressive image that reflects your inner person. And not a snap shot taken while being distracted by life and the swift flow of time. When you are in your moments time seizes to exist and you are in immediate contact with your subject and the composition and light that will reveal it to you. And after you are done making images and you look at the time you can’t believe the hours that went by and they felt like seconds! 

Our lives have been broken apart in the addiction to follow instead of lead. 

A good photographer looks at the world not as a place to ignore with the pressing duties of work and the loss of time. Photographers when they are in the moment of visualizing their subject through contemplative awareness time is nowhere present, time vanishes and the photographer is in a new dimension of perceptive reality through an internal vision.

We don’t have to look far back into the past to find the culprit of the beginning and end to photography as an art form.

We just have to see the evolution of content beginning to degrade as more and more people took up the digital camera, phone cameras and overwhelmed their senses with trivia and bad compositions! 

Lighting a scene was too much work. Composing a scene with originality was to frustrating and time consuming. Digging deeper into the landscape or cityscape became just too boring for the snap shooters, this new generation of shooters demand instant gratification from anything they do! 

Everything should come easily to me for I am a known entity on social media and anything I touch or shoot becomes an important item to be displayed for my high brow followers to ooh and awe over.

And what did the art world get from the ease of taking pics in the mid twentieth century, they got a slap across the face and a loss of revenue as photography became a cliche a way to copy and not originate your own uniqueness.

If you over think your visual purpose with lighting, lenses to use, filters, and special effects then you have too much equipment holding you back to just be present and take in the beauty of mother nature as it is and not try to force upon the landscape your ego or your intellect.

Ego will get you pushing the lines of vanity and your intellect will get you in a mechanical response to the beauty before you. Both will undermine any chance of creating a worth while image.

By seeing only meter readings, f/stops, shutter speeds you have lost your connection with the scene present before you. 

By moving quickly to set up your equipment you have lost the composition that was slowly revealing itself to you. 

Yes, you will have to determine these important elements when you have found your intuitive composition but for now just enjoy the show before you. Be grateful that you are present in such beauty. 

Sometimes when you come upon a scene and the light is breaking through with a magnificent sunset you must step forward and quickly set up and make your photographs. But you are not overthinking natures gift, you are instinctively reacting to an external beauty and taken advantage of your timing by reaching your destination at the peak of morning/evening light! 

We each have our own way of seeing the world. This can be good or bad. But as a photographer it is your responsibility to show your inner truth through imagery that reflects the integrity of your visual realism.

Our external presence seen objectively by others as just another camera buff clicking away at some god forsaken subject no one else could possible be interested in is the very definition of conditioned responses. 

Those people only see a limiting value in crossing the street to the other side. The crowd keeps its eyes forward never looking around at the beauty and uniqueness of details that they are missing. 

Our lives have been suspended, broken apart in our seemingly addictive natures to follow instead of lead.

We are under powerful forces of greed and criminality which instills in us a lessened truth, a forgetting of oneself as his own truth in the hectic pace of life just to make a living as the prices rise and we the people are undermined by exploitive corporate criminals.

In making photographs listen to your instinct, your intuition. Sometimes all that is necessary is patience to be present in your awareness of the scene that surrounds you. And by being ready as the light changes, you had an inkling that something was happening behind you and not in the scene present before you. And as you looked around behind you, you saw the beautiful sunlight warming the multicolored flowers in a landscape you placed yourself in with anticipation.

As a photographer you never know for sure where your instincts of nature’s light will take you but you must be ready to find a space that gives you an opportunity to change directions in a moments notice.

A good photograph expresses the personality of the photographer.

We are at a crossroads with how to reclaim photography as an art form. Photography has become a commodity, a comedy act with no other purpose than entertainment. Photography used to reveal the beauty of this world and the ugliness in this world. Photographers gave their lives to photograph the wars and the corruption that now exists in corporate America. Where are the photographers covering these explosive issues? They are present doing their best but corporate media doesn’t show these images of truth for then the sleepwalking people might awaken to the oligarchs that have now taken over this globe.

It does take awhile to get what photography is all about. It is not about the image but what the image say’s about the photographer that took that photograph. It is his inner subjective nature we see in the great images that are created with a purpose.

The images taken in today’s society are snap shots of life without depth of character. The people of the world are changing and ignoring the underlying condition of our democracies. Snap shots are frivolous moments that keep one sedated without having to use your mind to see the truth of media’s dominance of our consciousness not to empathize with others and to always seek the truth of words spoken by political criminals. We seek fluff over substance. Fluff with no depth for we don’t want to know the truthful ending of this ride we are on. We see but don’t react. We feel but we don’t express our feelings. We assume a point of view (our safety zone in the herd) and laugh at the truth hidden under the graves of the innocent.

The images snapped now are meaningless, a crossword puzzle without the ability to create an image that is visually significant.

The images taken today are boring, fruitless expressions of surface conformity without a visual identity, a real significant purpose.

Our visual senses have been dulled to ignore any photographer that tries to disrupt our pleasant valley sunday drive of shallowness.

Think about the billions of images taken daily that have no purpose, have no story to tell! These images have no expression of depth in the scene or a deep conscious expression of a person’s life.

We have become objects ourselves, objectified through the camera lens to be a stick figure, an external facade with no depth, a laughing face with closed eyes. There is no longer a meaning in image creation, what we have now is a creation of distractions from the truth we are living. We are slowly being corralled into a tight uncomfortable overcrowded coral that will eventually be demanded to give allegiance to a class of wealth that will rule over all of us with military discipline.

Our lives are now uploaded onto social media sites. But in truth these pics are not our lives it is our ego’s demanding attention as this world hurdles further and further away from our own inner revelations and values. We are becoming silent to our purpose as the power of wealth determines this planets future and ours.

Lets all pose for the camera.  Lets show our addiction to happiness when a camera is presented for a group snap shot. Our fixation on self propaganda where a pose is more important than a subjective truth.