Customer Reviews

You Are STILL Being Lied To: The NEW Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths (Disinformation Guides)

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This is a remixed version of a previously published book, containing articles on a wide variety of topics that will not be covered in the mainstream media. There is something here to upset or offend nearly everyone.

Howard Zinn talks about the real Christopher Columbus. Alex Jones talks about the coming North American Union. There is a piece on John McCain and his attempts to cover up the POW issue from the Vietnam War. R. Crumb contributes a graphic novel piece on the religious experience of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Jim Marrs explores the reasons behind the attempts by the Iraqi Government to ban Blackwater. There is a piece on getting high by licking toads, along with a piece on the unconscious roots of the Drug War. Other contributions in this book reassess the "official" version of the Oklahoma City bombing, along with the cover-up of the murder of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The titles of some of these articles are pretty self-explanatory. For instance, there is AA Lies (all about Alcoholics Anonymous); Amnesia in America; The Information Arms Race; The Truth About Corporations; Cheap, Crappy Food = A Fat Population; Chemicals Are Killing You; Drug War Mythology; We Were Silenced by the Drums of War; NutraFear and NutraLoathing in Augusta, Georgia; Pharmaceutical Crimes and Misdemeanors; The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV and Fear and Lying in 2012-Land.

Like I said, there is something here for everyone. It does a really good job at exposing the reader to a number of different subjects. For anyone who wants to get past the mass media version of how the world works, and get the "real" story, start right here. It is highly recommended.

We live in an age of perpetual 'spin'. Information given bias by the agendas of those who produce and/or communicate it. In "You Are Still Being Lied To: The Remixed Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths", editor Russ Kick has compiled reports, contributions, and commentaries by investigative reporters, political dissidents, academics, media watchdogs, scientist-philosophers, social critics, and independent scholars to reveal the true and underlying stories that have been commonly suppressed, distorted, and ignored by the mainstream media, the political establishment, and the culturally conservative. Enhanced with informed and informative essays by Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, Sydney Schanberg; Gary Webb, R. Crumb; Howard Zinn; Graham Hancock; Michael Parenti; Rian Eisler, Jim Marrs, Howard Bloom, and others, "You Are Still Being Lied To" is a remarkable and seminal compendium that should be a part of every academic and community library Social Issues, American History, and Political Science reference collection and personal reading list.

IMO, you have to cull all of these types of books for what is true and what is over the top conspiracy theory nut material. However, in this book they have brought together a number of respected writers who present their theories in a coherent and cohesive manner. For that reason, I place it head and shoulders above most books in this category.

The book is a collection of about 50 chapters, each written by a different author, the thing that they have in common, is they nearly all seem to be conspiracy buffs. Some of the chapters are quite believable, containing things that I agree with, but after seeing them in the book, I will have to go back and fact check them. A number of the chapters put forward some of the common conspiracy theories that are found in great plenitude on the internet today. The evidence presented is compelling, and the argument is often very logical, but a few minutes searching on the web checking reliable websites, not the conspiracy ones, reveals that the authors have omitted key facts, altered details and reported made up stories as fact. In short, every conspiracy theory that I fact checked, came apart so fast doing an internet search, that I should have been using a stop watch and holding a "conspiracy rodeo" to see which one would hold up the longest. Even with a slow dial-up connection, most of the conspiracy theories hit the dust in minutes. I was totally shocked at how poor the research was, didn't any of these guys know how to use the internet?, and that was when the revelation hit me, most of the articles were written before the internet became the information source it is today.

Nearly every chapter is written by someone selling his theory which often includes you buying his newest book. What I learned from this book, is each conspiracy author is like a con man selling you something, and he will often lie to make the sale. All of those conspiracy theories running around out there are someone's business idea, their little intellectual money making machines. They craft the pieces so that they fit together, wind them up and set them free to follow their programmed course out in the world and send back money to their creator. Every conspiracy contains a piece that could be titled "conspirators' motivation module" which attempts to explain why some large group of people are all motivated to work together with the precision of Swiss watch in some convoluted plan that often appears to be against their best interests, and it occurred to me that it would be far easier and far more believable to explain the motivation of the author in making the whole thing up ($).

Some of the conspiracy authors are probably very sincere and honestly believe in their theory, and maybe they are right or just plain nuts. I didn't have time to fact check them all, so there could even be a diamond or so mixed in among all the nonsense. In fact, I did find a number of the chapters very insightful, but they are buried underneath the nonsense in the other chapters, stuff like this;

"Researchers claim that they can't figure out what causes breast cancer" p. 99

"There have been ongoing arguments over who was behind the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, as well as the truth of what really happened in Waco and Oklahoma City and many more recent events." p.201

"The evidence I've put together in my book indicates that parents have little or no long-term effect on their children's personality, intelligence, or mental health." p.215

"Compulsory schooling is a tyranny. . . . "a worldwide soul-shredder that junks the majority and burdens an elite to govern it."" p.252

"Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians," p.320

"This internalized industrial fascism, this proscription, causes drug problems, in the same way that violent sexual Puritanism causes sexual problems." p. 338

"The temperate, tolerant Western European republics are handing themselves over to what has proved the leading progenitor of war, slavery, and civilization disaster of the past fourteen centuries: Islam." p 340

"The data show conclusively that "HIV" is not sexually transmitted," p. 380

"error of walking into Augusta's NutraSweet plant "Without a `space suit'" . . . dropped dead." p.383

"archaeologists have found abundant evidence showing that human beings like ourselves have existed for hundreds of millions of years." p.388

"The Earth is expanding and we don`t know why" p. 395

"Ten Strikes Against the Big Bang" p. 398

Maybe some of the above is actually true, or maybe it is all nonsense. Perhaps that is the appeal of a book like this, it shows the importance of not believing everything you hear, which is what the book is all about.

The book does have a great chapter debunking "The Bible Code" which is shown to just be a math trick and one debunking the 2012 Maya end of the world prophecy. So the book does have a number of powerfully good chapters, you just have to get past the bad ones and know how to tell the difference, which is harder than you think, I am still undecided on a few of them and will have to do some more online fact checking.