Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times on the intensive research and data mining companies conduct on their customers in order to learn about them and to predict their future needs. It also describes some of the psychological techniques used in marketing in order to modify behavior and to create new habits. As it was stated in the Mind Control Theories and Techniques used by Mass Media, marketing does not simply seek to sell a product, it taps into psychological reflects and instincts to create needs and habits. Powerful stuff.

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. “The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”

As the marketers explained to Pole – and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop – new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target – cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.

There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments – the moment, really – is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked.

“We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good chance we could capture them for years,” Pole told me. “As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too. If you’re rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.”

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code – known internally as the Guest ID number – that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.

This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit – a specific approach to worker safety – which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.

Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

Inside the brain-and-cognitive-sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7-year-old surgeons. Inside those shrunken O.R.’s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity of their brains.

An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.

The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic – as it became a habit – the rats started thinking less and less.

This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called “chunking.” There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids’ lunch, are a little more complex. Still others are so complicated that it’s remarkable to realize that a habit could have emerged at all.

Take backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake.

Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk or a speeding car coming down the street. So we’ve devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends – and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they’re formed, despite our best intentions.

To understand this a little more clearly, consider again the chocolate-seeking rats. What Graybiel and her colleagues found was that, as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats’ brain activity – once at the beginning of the maze, when the rat heard the click right before the barrier slid away, and once at the end, when the rat found the chocolate. Those spikes show when the rats’ brains were fully engaged, and the dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over. From behind the partition, the rat wasn’t sure what waited on the other side, until it heard the click, which it had come to associate with the maze. Once it heard that sound, it knew to use the “maze habit,” and its brain activity decreased. Then at the end of the routine, when the reward appeared, the brain shook itself awake again and the chocolate signaled to the rat that this particular habit was worth remembering, and the neurological pathway was carved that much deeper.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop – cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward – becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable – but measurable – sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

Habits aren’t destiny – they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit – unless you find new cues and rewards – the old pattern will unfold automatically.

“We’ve done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward,” Graybiel told me. “Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place and put in the rat and, by golly, the old habit will re-emerge right away. Habits never really disappear.”

Luckily, simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start running in the morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (like always putting on your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (like a midday treat or even the sense of accomplishment that comes from ritually recording your miles in a log book). After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward – craving the treat or the feeling of accomplishment – and there will be a measurable neurological impulse to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.

Our relationship to e-mail operates on the same principle. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the neurological “pleasure” (even if we don’t recognize it as such) that clicking on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail sitting there unread – even if you know, rationally, it’s most likely not important. On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered, and you’ll find, over time, that you’re able to work productively for long stretches without checking your in-box.

Some of the most ambitious habit experiments have been conducted by corporate America. To understand why executives are so entranced by this science, consider how one of the world’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, used habit insights to turn a failing product into one of its biggest sellers. P.& G. is the corporate behemoth behind a whole range of products, from Downy fabric softener to Bounty paper towels to Duracell batteries and dozens of other household brands. In the mid-1990s, P.& G.’s executives began a secret project to create a new product that could eradicate bad smells. P.& G. spent millions developing a colorless, cheap-to-manufacture liquid that could be sprayed on a smoky blouse, stinky couch, old jacket or stained car interior and make it odorless. In order to market the product – Febreze – the company formed a team that included a former Wall Street mathematician named Drake Stimson and habit specialists, whose job was to make sure the television commercials, which they tested in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, accentuated the product’s cues and rewards just right.

The first ad showed a woman complaining about the smoking section of a restaurant. Whenever she eats there, she says, her jacket smells like smoke. A friend tells her that if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate the odor. The cue in the ad is clear: the harsh smell of cigarette smoke. The reward: odor eliminated from clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying about her dog, Sophie, who always sits on the couch. “Sophie will always smell like Sophie,” she says, but with Febreze, “now my furniture doesn’t have to.” The ads were put in heavy rotation. Then the marketers sat back, anticipating how they would spend their bonuses. A week passed. Then two. A month. Two months. Sales started small and got smaller. Febreze was a dud.

The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman’s home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when P.& G.’s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.

According to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, “What do you do about the cat smell?”

“It’s usually not a problem,” she said.

“Do you smell it now?”

“No,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!”

A similar scene played out in dozens of other smelly homes. The reason Febreze wasn’t selling, the marketers realized, was that people couldn’t detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, eventually you don’t smell smoke anymore. Even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure. That’s why Febreze was a failure. The product’s cue – the bad smells that were supposed to trigger daily use – was hidden from the people who needed it the most. And Febreze’s reward (an odorless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn’t smell offensive scents in the first place.

P.& G. employed a Harvard Business School professor to analyze Febreze’s ad campaigns. They collected hours of footage of people cleaning their homes and watched tape after tape, looking for clues that might help them connect Febreze to people’s daily habits. When that didn’t reveal anything, they went into the field and conducted more interviews. A breakthrough came when they visited a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in her 40s with four children. Her house was clean, though not compulsively tidy, and didn’t appear to have any odor problems; there were no pets or smokers. To the surprise of everyone, she loved Febreze.

“I use it every day,” she said.

“What smells are you trying to get rid of?” a researcher asked.

“I don’t really use it for specific smells,” the woman said. “I use it for normal cleaning – a couple of sprays when I’m done in a room.”

The researchers followed her around as she tidied the house. In the bedroom, she made her bed, tightened the sheet’s corners, then sprayed the comforter with Febreze. In the living room, she vacuumed, picked up the children’s shoes, straightened the coffee table, then sprayed Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet.

“It’s nice, you know?” she said. “Spraying feels like a little minicelebration when I’m done with a room.” At the rate she was going, the team estimated, she would empty a bottle of Febreze every two weeks.

When they got back to P.& G.’s headquarters, the researchers watched their videotapes again. Now they knew what to look for and saw their mistake in scene after scene. Cleaning has its own habit loops that already exist. In one video, when a woman walked into a dirty room (cue), she started sweeping and picking up toys (routine), then she examined the room and smiled when she was done (reward). In another, a woman scowled at her unmade bed (cue), proceeded to straighten the blankets and comforter (routine) and then sighed as she ran her hands over the freshly plumped pillows (reward). P.& G. had been trying to create a whole new habit with Febreze, but what they really needed to do was piggyback on habit loops that were already in place. The marketers needed to position Febreze as something that came at the end of the cleaning ritual, the reward, rather than as a whole new cleaning routine.

The company printed new ads showing open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the Febreze formula, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women, having finished their cleaning routine, using Febreze to spritz freshly made beds and just-laundered clothing. Each ad was designed to appeal to the habit loop: when you see a freshly cleaned room (cue), pull out Febreze (routine) and enjoy a smell that says you’ve done a great job (reward). When you finish making a bed (cue), spritz Febreze (routine) and breathe a sweet, contented sigh (reward). Febreze, the ads implied, was a pleasant treat, not a reminder that your home stinks.

And so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze revamp occurred in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled. A year later, the product brought in $230 million. Since then Febreze has spawned dozens of spinoffs – air fresheners, candles and laundry detergents – that now account for sales of more than $1 billion a year. Eventually, P.& G. began mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling sweet, Febreze can actually kill bad odors. Today it’s one of the top-selling products in the world.

Andrew Pole was hired by Target to use the same kinds of insights into consumers’ habits to expand Target’s sales. His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department’s work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole’s most important assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to begin spending in new ways.

In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples’ most mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and toilet paper. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision-making. Which meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays and coupons and product promotions, to persuade shoppers to change.

But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there’s an increased chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.

Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping patterns for years.

And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new parents’ habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.

The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.

Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.

At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they figure out how much Target knows?

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

When I approached Target to discuss Pole’s work, its representatives declined to speak with me. “Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience,” the company wrote in a statement. “We’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population.” When I sent Target a complete summary of my reporting, the reply was more terse: “Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point.” The company declined to identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target “is in compliance with all federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information.”

When I offered to fly to Target’s headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman e-mailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. “I’ve been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave,” said a very nice security guard named Alex.

Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?

Before I met Andrew Pole, before I even decided to write a book about the science of habit formation, I had another goal: I wanted to lose weight.

I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading “NO MORE COOKIES.” But every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised myself, I’ll muster the willpower to resist.

Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.

When I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.

Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we’re often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague’s desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.

All that was left was identifying the cue.

Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:

Where are you? (Sitting at my desk.)

What time is it? (3:36 p.m.)

What’s your emotional state? (Bored.)

Who else is around? (No one.)

What action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)

The next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.

Once I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter & Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine – to socialize, rather than eat a cookie – I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn’t feel like a decision, any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It’s now a habit. I’ve lost 21 pounds since then (12 of them from changing my cookie ritual).

After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target was studying their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow things down.

The marketing department conducted a few tests by choosing a small, random sample of women from Pole’s list and mailing them combinations of advertisements to see how they reacted.

“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits – the same cues and rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks – then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a cue (“Oh, a coupon for something I need!”) a routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a reward (“I can take that off my list”). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded. The company doesn’t break out figures for specific divisions, but between 2002 – when Pole was hired – and 2010, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $67 billion. In 2005, the company’s president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room of investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.”

Pole was promoted. He has been invited to speak at conferences. “I never expected this would become such a big deal,” he told me the last time we spoke.

A few weeks before this article went to press, I flew to Minneapolis to try and speak to Andrew Pole one last time. I hadn’t talked to him in more than a year. Back when we were still friendly, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant. We shop at Target, I told him, and had given the company our address so we could start receiving coupons in the mail. As my wife’s pregnancy progressed, I noticed a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers and baby clothes arriving at our house.

Pole didn’t answer my e-mails or phone calls when I visited Minneapolis. I drove to his large home in a nice suburb, but no one answered the door. On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at a Target to pick up some deodorant, then also bought some T-shirts and a fancy hair gel. On a whim, I threw in some pacifiers, to see how the computers would react. Besides, our baby is now 9 months old. You can’t have too many pacifiers.

When I paid, I didn’t receive any sudden deals on diapers or formula, to my slight disappointment. It made sense, though: I was shopping in a city I never previously visited, at 9:45 p.m. on a weeknight, buying a random assortment of items. I was using a corporate credit card, and besides the pacifiers, hadn’t purchased any of the things that a parent needs. It was clear to Target’s computers that I was on a business trip. Pole’s prediction calculator took one look at me, ran the numbers and decided to bide its time. Back home, the offers would eventually come. As Pole told me the last time we spoke: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”
- Source: New York Times

I had a feeling that in 2012 the occult agenda of the entertainment industry would be kicked in high gear. I was right: In the span of a week, the most important night in sports (the Superbowl – see the article about it here) and music (the Grammys) were infused with ritualistic elements witnessed by millions of viewers. While the Superbowl half-time show lasted only 13 minutes, the ritual surrounding the Grammys lasted for days and its aftermath is still going on as odd facts and accounts regarding Whitney Houston continue to surface in the media.

This article will list several facts and events that took place before, during and after the Grammy Awards that have a symbolic significance in the grand scheme of things. While some of the facts mentioned here might have been the result of coincidence or poor timing, they still came together in one big, classic case of synchronicity. In other words, apparent coincidences sometimes reveal an underlying pattern behind events.

“Carl Jung described synchronicity as ” the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance and that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. Synchronistic events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity. Concurrent events that first appear to be coincidental but later turn out to be causally related are termed incoincident.”

When we look at the facts and the occurrences surrounding Whitney Houston’s death coupled with the symbolic elements of the 2012 Grammy awards, the entire “event” has the looks of an occult ritual, complete with a blood sacrifice, a celebration and even a “re-birth”. Some of the things described below were pre-planned, while others were possibly just odd coincidences. However, the overwhelming and almost palpable energy emanating from the 2012 Grammys definitely made some things align in a synchronistic fashion. Let’s look at the most significant events that happened during that fateful weekend.

Strange Facts Surrounding Whitney Houston’s Death

If you read other articles on this site, you probably noticed that everything surrounding Whitney Houston’s is astonishingly on-par with other celebrity “sacrifices”. Accounts of strange events before the death, bizarre behavior of the authorities when the death was discovered, conflicting reports, vagueness surrounding the cause of the death and, to top it off, a worrying “response” from the music industry through the Grammys. Her case followed the same pattern as several other celebrity deaths that were blamed on drugs  despite many conflicting reports. As it was the case for these other celebrities, the media almost automatically launched a campaign depicting Whitney as a hopeless drug addict. Maybe she was a drug addict, but that might only be the tip of the iceberg … a symptom of the true illness that killed Whitney: the music business.

Strange Events

As in the cases of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, Brittany Murphy and many others, bizarre events preceded and followed the death of Whitney Houston. After reviewing all of those accounts, one cannot help but wonder: Was Whitney’s death truly an accident or was it a deliberate sacrifice planned by “unseen forces”? While most media reports drum into people’s heads that “Whitney Houston = Drugs”, some sources reveal other details that might lead to other paths of thinking. Here’s Roger Friedman’s account of things that happened at the Beverly Hilton on February 11th:

Whitney’s Death: An Earlier Incident?

Whitney Houston’s death made for a long day’s journey into night at the Beverly Hilton. While the Clive Davis Grammy dinner had to proceed downstairs in the ballroom–with 800 guests already filing in as the news was breaking–Whitney remained in state, so to speak, in her fourth floor suite. She was not removed until just moments before the party ended–a little after midnight. She’d been in the suite, discovered in her bathtub. But there were many people in the suite when this happened at 3:50pm including her daughter Bobbi Kristina, her brother Gary, sister in law Pat Houston, and another player in this story — a nightlife friend who’d been guiding her around town the last few days as she was photographed in states of duress.

What you don’t know is that around 11pm, paramedics were called back to the fourth floor. Security and police raced back to the 4th floor. A medical wheelchair with restraints was brought in through the back entrance to the hotel. Bobbi Kristina “freaked out”–well, she’d been upstairs for hours with her mother’s dead body in the next room. It was understandable. The paramedics thought they were going to to have to take her to the hospital. But calm was restored. For ten minutes, though, security cleared the entire lobby of the hotel while the concert was going on inside the ballroom. I was out there at that moment, and it was one of the strangest scenes ever.

Then there’s the mysterious story of a leak that occurred the night before from Whitney’s group of suites. A man on the third floor right underneath Houston’s suite suddenly experienced water cascading into his bathroom from above at 2:30am. It wasn’t just a trickle. The man called security, then went upstairs to the fourth floor to see what was going on. He swears to me that it was Whitney’s bathtub that was overflowing. He also says that a flat screen television had been been broken–the screen was smashed. My sources at the hotel say there was a “leak” but that it wasn’t from Whitney’s room. “They [her group] have a lot of rooms up there,” says the hotel source. My source, this man, insists that he was told it was Whitney Houston’s room. It does seem to have been part of her group of rooms.

There are many mysteries here. None of them have been reported or solved by TMZ or one of the other muckracking tabloids. I know the man who had to pull Whitney out of the bathtub yesterday and attempt to give her CPR. He told me, “She was already dead. There was nothing I could do.”

More on Whitney’s death and the Grammy party follows in the next post. And believe me, dear readers, this isn’t easy. I’ve known Whitney Houston and her family for over 25 years. She was a beautiful girl with a big heart. She was full of optimism. Her mother is one of the finest people. The people who worked for and with her were devoted to her. When the shock turns to anger there will be a lot of finger pointing. But in the end, Whitney ruled her own world.
- Source: Forbes

I am not a criminal investigator and I cannot solve all of the mysteries surrounding Whitney’s death but the fact that her body was there for hours, while a pre-Grammy party was happening just below is a little off-putting. Why wasn’t it simply cancelled?  Isn’t the presence of the dead body of a legendary singer in the same exact location as the party reason enough to cancel it? Was there some type of twisted thrill of partying right below Houston’s body?

In another article, Roger Friedman noted the presence of a strange “Hollywood insider” lurking around Whitney Houston that was also around Michael Jackson during his “difficult periods”. Who is that guy?

Whitney Houston’s Mystery Friend Was Also Michael Jackson’s Pal

Here’s the one person in the Whitney Houston story whose name you have not heard, and who has remained a mystery: a Dutch man from Amsterdam who goes by the name of Raffles van Exel. He is also known – in court records—as Raffles Dawson and Raffles Benson. He was on the fourth floor of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in one of Houston’s suites when she died. He appeared downstairs in the lobby shortly thereafter, wearing aviator sunglasses, sobbing.

As usual, he had an entourage in tow, including Quinton Aaron, the actor who played the football player in “The Blind Side.” Raffles, in one of his many PR Newswire releases, recently announced that he’s producing movies with Aaron. It’s just one of many ventures he announces regularly. For someone who has no obvious means of support, he is a regular on PR Newswire and You Tube. On the latter, you can find him interviewing friends of Michael Jackson. It is assumed that he sells stories to tabloids. He regularly includes names of tabloid reporters like Kevin Frazier of “The Insider” on his Tweets.

Despite the shock of Whitney’s death, Raffles still made it downstairs to Clive Davis’s party. He was dressed in formal wear, had Whitney’s tickets in his hand, and intended  to sit at her table. Just inside the ballroom he was comforted by celebrities to whom he related his story—“I found Whitney.”  Gayle King hugged him. Quincy Jones listened patiently to his story. A security guard told me later, “Well, he was up there.” He was also hanging around with Houston all week prior to her death. On Tuesday when she emerged from a nightclub, looking disheveled, Raffles appears in a photograph on TMZ like a deer in headlights. He is standing right behind her in a powder blue suit. On Twitter, he wrote: “STOP reading the stupid blogs.. Whitney had a great time, she looked amazing. Nothing was wrong, it was just DAMN hot in that club.”

But who is Raffles van Exel? He’s one of Hollywood’s mysteries. I first met him in 2005 hanging around the Jackson family during Michael Jackson’s child molestation trial. After Michael went abroad, Raffles was often seen with Michael’s father, Joseph Jackson. He trades on being an “insider” when there’s a scandal. No one really knows him, but he’s always where there’s action and celebrities. On the internet he claims to own a number of companies including Raffles Entertainment. He’s also been sued a couple of times, once by a partner in something called Max Records, Inc., and once by a private aviation company in Los Angeles. I spoke to the plane company and they said they can’t comment because the situation is ongoing. On Twitter he claims to be managing “my girl,” Chaka Khan. There are plenty of pictures of Raffles on the internet with celebrities. You can see him with everyone from Magic Johnson to Sandra Bullock. If ever there was a real life Zelig, he is it.

It’s  not a surprise that Raffles has turned up in Whitney Houston’s story. Last October, he and Whitney and others traveled to North Carolina with Whitney’s sister in law Patricia Houston for something called a Teen Summit. It was billed as part of The Patricia Houston Foundation, an organization for which there is no official 501 c3  registration. Pat Houston, married to Whitney’s brother Gary, has been Whitney’s manager for years.  (Whitney’s own foundation for children ceased functioning years ago.) She also owns a consignment shop in North Carolina, and a candle company called Marion P. Candles, with Whitney.

Look for Raffles at Whitney’s funeral tomorrow. In the old days he used to wear a yellow jacket full of black question marks—like The Riddler. On Saturday night, as he pulled in various guests to Clive Davis’s party past the velvet ropes, he was wearing a Michael Jackson-like tuxedo. He lives in West Hollywood now, but his official domicile—and where he’s been sued—is Chicago. He has not responded to countless emails and phone messages.
- Source: Forbes

Was this man instrumental in Whitney’s sacrifice? Did Whitney fall out of the good graces of the music industry elite? Was she becoming difficult to manipulate? Was she sacrificed to introduce her successor? Difficult to say, but Whitney appeared to have premonitions about her death. Some reports described her as “manic” and agitated while others state that Whitney felt that “her days were numbered”. Shortly before her death, Whitney was spotted handing singer Brandy a message whose contents remained a mystery.

What was in Whitney’s secret note to Brandy?

Singer Brandy has one of the last messages ever delivered by Whitney Houston — but she’s not telling anyone what it says.

On Feb. 9 in Los Angeles, Houston approached the younger singer as she and fellow singer Monica and mentor Clive Davis were conducting an interview with E!

A post on RyanSeacrest.com says Houston “crashed” the interview, then goes on to say “Whitney seemed a bit manic as she told Monica about swimming ‘two hours a day,’ and conspicuously handed a note to Brandy before hugging Davis.”

When E! later asked Brandy directly what the note said, she replied “I’m going to just not say what it was and just keep it to myself for my own personal reasons.” She also told the network “Whitney meant everything to me … She’s the reason that I sing.”

Brandy and Houston starred in the 1997 remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella.” Brandy also is the elder sister of singer Ray J, who had reportedly dated Houston on and off over the last two years of her life. Ray J gained notoriety in 2003 when a sex tape of him with Kim Kardashian was leaked to the public.

E! has video of Houston handing the note to Brandy, and Brandy’s comments about not revealing its contents.
- Source: MSNBC

The Number 11

When dealing with occult rituals, numerology takes on a primordial importance. In the case of Whitney Houston, the number 11 is definitely a factor. In elite occult circles, the number 11 is a “master number” (it cannot be reduced) and, because it exceeds the number 10 (the number of perfection) by 1, it is usually associated with bad foreboding and black magic. Qabbalists associate the number 11 with transgression of the law, rebellion, war, sin, sorcery and martyrdom.

For this reason, the occult elite often associates mega-rituals involving sacrifice with the number 11. What was the massive mega-ritual of the modern times? September 11th – involving the Twin Towers. At what exact time do we “remember” WWI soldiers who sacrificed their lives for their rulers? At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – Veterans Day, aka Remembrance Day.

Going further than the date of her death, another link associates Whitney and her death with Lady Gaga and previous Grammy awards. As some know, Lady Gaga had close ties with fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who was no stranger to occult and mind control symbolism in his work. McQueen died on February 11th, 2010.

During the 2011 Grammy Awards, Gaga stated about her song “Born This Way”:

“I need to thank Whitney Houston. I wanted to thank Whitney, because when I wrote ‘Born this Way,’ I imagined she was singing it – because I wasn’t secure enough in myself to imagine I was a superstar. So, Whitney, I imagined you were singing ‘Born This Way’ when I wrote it.”

“Born This Way” was released on February 11th, 2011. Exactly one year later, Whitney Houston dies on February 11th, 2012. Did Gaga (or her handlers) know something that the rest of us didn’t? Her outfit evidently shows that death was on her mind.

Artists usually have their award ceremony wardrobes selected well in advance. Apparently, death was on Gaga's (or her handler's) mind.

Another little fact: Whitney’s room number was 434 – which in Qabbalistic numerology equals 11 (4+3+4).

Statements from Industry Veterans

Who is better placed than artists who have worked in the music industry for years to provide insightful takes on the death of Whitney Houston? They obviously do not hold the ultimate truth and they might just be trying to make sense of things like the rest of us, but they have first -and experience when it comes to the workings of the music industry.

During an interview on Good Morning America, industry giant Celine Dion bluntly blamed the “bad influence” of show business for Whitney’s death. She even stated that you “have to be afraid” of show business.

“It’s just really unfortunate that drugs, bad people or bad influence took over. It took over her dreams.  It took over her love and motherhood. When you think about Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, to get into drugs like that, for whatever reason. Is it because of the stress and bad influence? What happens when you have everything? What happens when you have love, support, the family, motherhood? You have responsibilities of a mother and then something happens and it destroys everything. That’s why I don’t do parties and I don’t hang out. That’s why I’m not part of show business. We have to be afraid. I’ve always said you have to have fun and do music and you can never be part of show business because you don’t what it’s going to get yourself into. You have to do your work and get out of there.”
- Source: Vancouver Sun

Is Celine Dion’s avoidance of show business the reason she manages to be relatively scandal-free?

Another legendary diva, Chaka Khan, was even more direct when explaining the true cause of Whitney’s death. During an interview with Piers Morgan, she stated:

“I think we all, as artists, because we’re highly sensitive people, and this machine around us, this so-called ‘music industry,’ is such a demonic thing. It’s sacrifices people’s lives and their essences at the drop of a dime … I had a manager once say to me, ‘ You know you’re worth more money dead than alive.’

I mean, I’ve cried for her, a lot over the years, so many times. In a way I’ve mourned her, because I felt something was gonna happen because she was so close to the wire.”
- Source: Eonline

Was Chaka Khan exaggerating when using the terms “demonic” and “sacrifice” when describing the music industry? Judging by the symbolism found at the Grammy awards, she was probably right on the dot.

The Mega-Ritual that Was the 2012 Grammy Awards

The Grammy Awards has been dubbed “music’s biggest night” and, since the music industry is ruled by an occult elite, “music’s biggest night” reflects this elite’s code. Because of Whitney Houston’s death, the 2012 edition of the Grammy Awards had a peculiar feel that was almost palpable through the television screen. Intentionally or not, Whitney’s death was tied-in with the awards ceremony and the symbolism that transpired from it.

The ceremony began in a very peculiar fashion, especially given the context of the Whitney’s death. Bruce Springsteen yelled to the crowd “Are you alive out there?“, then sang the song We Take Care of Our Own, a mantra that was repeated throughout the evening. Well, I know someone who was definitely not alive out there – the very person that was on everyone’s mind when the show began. And, in the last years of her life, she wasn’t particularly well taken care of, either. In fact, as I stated in the article,  What Happened to Whitney Houston, I believe that something terrible happened to Whitney Houston that went way beyond using drugs. She was mentally, psychologically and even spiritually disturbed. Was she under mind control or the subject of some kind of dark rituals? Difficult to say. But, as Springsteen chanted We Take Care of Our Own as if it was the anthem of the industry, I couldn’t help but think that Whitney was probably not “one of them”. Her “industry-approved” replacement, however, is “one of them”.

Out With the Old, In With the New?

Industry mogul Clive Davis with Whitney Houston and Jennifer Hudson.

A day before Whitney’s death, Clive Davis told Piers Morgan that Jennifer Hudson was “the next Whitney”. While Whitney was being reduced to the state of has-been, constantly humiliated by tabloid stories, Hudson was being groomed to become the next industry diva. After being discovered on American Idol, Hudson’s career took off … right after the violent murders of her mother and brother in 2008. Her first public appearance after the traumatic event was singing the Star-Spangled Banner during Superbowl XLIII.

At the 2012 Grammy Awards, who do you think was chosen to pay tribute to the fallen artist by singing her greatest hit I Will Always Love You?

In her tribute to Houston, Hudson was literally placed "in the spotlight" while a picture of Houston floated above her.

Another artist of Whitney’s calibre re-emerged triumphant, almost like a re-birth after a period of silence: Adele. However, the symbolic ceremony of the 2012 Grammy Awards could not be completed without a true ritual dealing with the spiritual realm. Nikki Minaj took care of that.

The Black Mass

Nicki Minaj enters the Grammys in a ritualistic red robe, color of sacrifice and initiation. Was it a reference to Whitney's blood sacrifice?

The Grammy Awards ceremony may have begun with a heart-felt prayer for Whitney Houston, but it ended with an all-out Satanic Black Mass. From her “red carpet” entrance to her musical performance, Nikki Minaj played the role of a woman possessed by a demon named “Roman Zolanski”. The 2012 Grammy Awards were apparently chosen to “exorcise” this demon from Nikki and to present it to the world as her new alter-ego. In last year’s Grammy Awards, Lady Gaga also presented a new persona for Born This Way: a Gaga with horns on her forehead.

In a music industry permeated with the concept of mind control, alter-personas that are completely separate from the artists are now the norm. As discussed in the article Origins and Techniques of Monarch Mind Control, the goal of Monarch programming is to create new personalities within a mind-control victim using violent trauma and frightening rituals. The personas that are created are fully programmable by their handlers and can even speak with a different accent, as is the case with Minaj’s alter persona. The chorus of Minaj’s song Roman Holiday appears to refer to the process of mind control:

Take your medication, Roman
Take a short vacation, Roman
You’ll be okay
You need to know your station, Roman
Some alterations on your clothes and your brain
Take a little break, little break
From your silencing
There is so much you can take, you can take
I know how bad you need a Roman holiday

Mind-control slaves are highly medicated and have their clothes (outward style) and brain “altered” by their handlers. This is accomplished by forcing the victim to dissociate from reality through intense trauma and pain: “There is so much you can take” before the mind dissociates from reality or goes on a “Roman Holiday”.

Minaj’s alter-persona is named Roman Zolanski. He has his own strange accent and is evidently the product of evil rituals. The name of this alter is inspired by movie director Roman Polanski, who produced Rosemary’s Baby, a movie about the birth of the Anti-Christ (see the article about it here). Polanski is even more famous for being charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor in 1977. Strange fellow to be inspired by. He is however an intricate piece in the history of the occult entertainment industry so this “tribute” to him by an industry pawn such as Minaj is not surprising.

Actual Monarch programming is accomplished using a strong undercurrent of Satanic imagery to disturb and traumatize the victim. In the case of Minaj’s performance, her alter ego was exorcised in a Satanic Black Mass – which is, in essence, a mockery and a desecration of a conventional Christian mass.

Minaj begins her performance tied up in what appears to be Catholic church. The force that possesses her is apparently too strong to hold her down though, and as the church windows explode, she is unbound. Minaj then descends into a church gone wild, complete with strippers rubbing on young priests who are attempting to pray to God (was that really necessary?).

Then, as the choir make a mockery of the classic Christian hymn O Come All Ye Faithful, a pope figure enters and makes Minaj levitate.

This Christian mass turned into a fiery black magic ritual for the world to see.

In short, Minaj’s performance presented the world her new alter-ego who will be rapping on her next album. Her performance made it clear that Roman Zolanski is nothing less than a demon that was created with Minaj and exorcised from her through a Black Mass ritual. If the performance alone was enough to trouble some viewers, when it is put in the context of Whitney Houston’s death that happened about 24 hours beforehand (a singer that was never shy about her Christian faith), the whole thing takes on an even more troubling dimension. Ancient magicians drew on the power of blood sacrifices to carry on Black Magic rituals. With Whitney’s death still fresh in everyone’s mind, the Black Mass that was proudly presented by the 2012 Grammy Awards had all the more potency on its worldwide viewers.

In Conclusion

This article presented a great number of facts and symbols that point towards the conclusion that Whitney Houston’s death may have been a blood sacrifice and that the 2012 Grammy Awards had occult ritualistic elements within it. Even if all of these events were not deliberately planned by industry handlers, they all contribute to a clear and disturbing picture of the music industry.

While Whitney Houston’s life was ending under bizarre circumstances and she was portrayed in the media as a hopeless drug addict, a new generation of Illuminati-approved artists were being placed in the spotlight. They willingly participated in the occult ritual that was the Grammy Awards and played their role in the tragic-comedy of the music industry, even if it meant losing their essence and their soul. What happens to those who don’t play along with the system or rebel against it? They disappear from the spotlight, and sometimes they disappear from this earth in less than dignified circumstances. Because, as the mantra of the 2012 Grammy Awards indicates: The elite take care of their own. And no one else.

As someone who grew up during the peak Whitney Houston’s career, witnessing her downfall and, yesterday, her untimely death, has been difficult. Blessed with arguably the biggest voice ever heard in the music industry and endowed with a fiery personality that matched it, Whitney was the archetype of the diva superstar. Her song I Will Always Love You is now the ultimate song for aspiring singers to showcase their talents. However, no matter who attempted to take on that on that song, they exposed themselves to the same comment: “Good, but not as good as Whitney”. She was the personification of pure, God-given talent.

Unfortunately, the saying “The higher they fly, the harder they fall” has applied to Whitney all too well. The young girl who got discovered while singing in a church choir and who went on to become most awarded female act of all-time descended into a fiery hell of drugs, abuse and trauma.  Upon learning about her death, I immediately recalled a particular interview that disturbed me. It was the lengthy interview she gave Oprah in 2009, where she described her drug usage and her tumultuous relationship with Bobby Brown. While her words were unsettling, it was her entire demeanour that got to me. The diva personality was gone. The fire in her eyes was extinguished. She simply wasn’t the same person I saw during the 90′s. When she took the stage to sing her new single, the heavenly voice we expected to come out wasn’t there. It was as if her soul was sucked out of her.

Watching her discuss with Oprah, I kept asking myself: “What the hell happened to Whitney?” Most people would immediately reply “drugs”. But I had the sick feeling that there was more to it. Her eyes betrayed deep psychological and even spiritual trauma. Marijuana and cocaine, the two drugs she admitted using, do not make people this way. Even if she did crack or whatever other drug, there was something else in her eyes and I felt that Whitney was holding back the true cause of her downfall. I asked myself: Was she under mind control? Was there an occult ritual, black magic or outright, literal selling of her soul involved there? Did her “contract with unseen forces expire”? Was Bobby Brown her handler?  This portion of Oprah’s interview particularly struck me and, when I first learned about her death, this automatically came to my mind:

Oprah: Did you think something was gonna happen in those drug-crazed, drug-filled days where you’re sitting for hours and days?

Whitney: There were times when he (Bobby Brown) would smash things, break things in the home. Glass. We had a big, big giant portrait of me and him and my child. He cut my head off the picture. Stuff like that. And I thought, “This is really strange.” So I figured, cutting my head off a picture, that was a little much for me. That was one sign.

And then there were other things like he started to paint in my bedroom eyes. Just eyes. Evil eyes that were looking at every point of the room.

Oprah: He started to paint on the walls?

Whitney: Yeah. The rugs. The walls. The closet doors. If I opened the door, there would be one picture. Then I’d close them and there would be another picture and eyes and faces. It was really strange. …

Oprah: What are you doing with all of that?

Whitney: I’m looking at it going, “Lord, what’s really going on here?” I was getting scared because I felt something was going to blow. Something was going to give.

- Source

Marijuana and cocaine can make people do crazy things, but this kind of behaviour was symptomatic of something a lot deeper. The cutting of one’s head and “evil eyes” are two obsessions of mind control victims (and/or spiritually disturbed people). Whatever the case may be, something awful happened to Whitney Houston in the years following her success. But what? What was Bobby Brown’s role? Difficult to say. In the same Oprah interview, Whitney described her mother’s attempts to rescue her.

Whitney: She said, “It’s not worth it.” She said: “If you move, Bobby, [the sheriff will] take you down. Don’t you make one move.” And he stood there like he was scared.

And she said: “Let’s go. Let’s do this. I’m not losing you to the world. I’m not losing you to Satan. I’m not doing this. I want my daughter back. I want you back. I want to see that glow in your eyes. That light in your eyes. I want to see the child I raised. And you weren’t raised like this. And I’m not having it. So you make a choice, and you make it here today because I have a court injunction that says you have to go.” …

- Ibid.

Now, the day before “music’s biggest night”, Whitney was found dead in strange circumstances (apparently drowned in her bathtub) at age 48. As usual, drugs were almost automatically mentioned as a cause of her death. However, as it was the case for Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and so many others, the investigation will probably be a long tedious process, full of vague statements and many contradictions. There are already reports of Whitney acting erratic in the hours before her death.

“First she first visited Brandy, Monica, and Clive Davis at rehearsals for the mogul’s pre-Grammys party, where a Los Angeles Times reporter described her as reeking of alcohol, “visibly bloated,” and “disheveled in mismatched clothes and hair that was dripping wet with either sweat or water.” According to the Times, when Houston wasn’t mugging and gesticulating wildly for Brandy and Monica — who were doing a media junket, as well as preparing a duet — she was alternately skipping around the lobby or “wandering aimlessly” around the Beverly Hills Hotel grounds. Reportedly, guests had even called security to report the singer doing handstands by the hotel pool.

Houston’s Thursday was about to get worse… way worse. That evening, she attended a party headlined by Kelly Price at the Tru nightclub in Hollywood. As she exited, seeming  intoxicated, photographers took close-ups of her legs, which appeared to be spotted with blood streaks, along with scratches on her wrists.”
- Yahoo! News, Whitney Houston’s Tumultuous Final Days

Despite her death at the fourth floor Beverly Hilton Hotel, the traditional pre-Grammy show, with its glamour and glitz, took place at the same location…while her body was still there. As they say in showbiz, “the show must go on”. The show will indeed go on and I’m somehow reticent to see the kind of tribute the industry music is reserving her. If Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse are any indication, those who fall off the grace of the industry do not get a proper tribute…but a celebration of their sacrifice.

Was Whitney’s death an actual sacrifice or simply the result of years of abuse? The same question applies to countless artists who died too soon and in bizarre circumstances.

Oh Noes!

Several days after the Superbowl and its half-time show, which was a highly symbolic occult ritual celebrating the world elite’s stronghold on the masses, people are still shocked by…a finger. Look at the picture above. Look at that long-ass finger of hers. Get over it. To witness the outrage across mass media for this gesture while there is absolutely no attempt to understand the profound symbolism of the 13 minutes performance is staggering…but not surprising. It perfectly reflects our society’s propensity for superficial, knee-jerk reactions to futile matters while avoiding at all cost profound reflections on the bigger picture. Fortunately, some truth manages to find its way in mainstream media such as the following article that appeared in the Huffington Post. Ellen Grace Jones, the author of the article appears to be a reader of this site and understands the agenda being pushed through popular culture. So good job on getting this info published on a mainstream site!

Forget M.I.A’s Bird-Flip, Worry About Pop’s Sexual Moral Decline

It’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since Janet Jackson’s ‘Nipplegate’ and the Superbowl has been seriously lacking a good scandal until now.

Yes we all love a spot of moral outrage and thanks to naughty M.I.A’s, ahem, ‘finger malfunction’ during Grand High Priestess Madge’s Egyptian-Greco-Roman Superbowl spectacle, under the terms of M.I.A’s contract, she now faces a fine to the tune of hundreds of thousands levied by the United States’ Federal Communications Commission. Ouch.

Given the track was mimed and pre-recorded, evil side-eyes should be thrown at other parties for allowing this to happen rather than M.I.A herself. In a playground-esque blame game of ‘I didn’t do it, he did!’ the NFL finger-pointed at NBC, “The NFL hired the talent and produced the half-time show,” they cried! Whilst NBC are framing the NFL, “There was a failure in NBC’s delay system. The obscene gesture in the performance was completely inappropriate, very disappointing, and we apologise.”

M.I.A’s camp just blamed nerves. Right. Cue Operation Damage Control.

Sure the bird-flip was pretty ill-judged – but when you book a provocative performer like M.I.A what did they expect? Given the utter degeneration and hyper-sexualisation of our current crop of female pop performers (Rihanna, Katy Perry, Gaga et al - you know who you are) in terms of debasing, offensive, inappropriate performances, M.I.A.’s middle-finger salute was little more than a cheeky nose-thumbing.

Now don’t panic, I’m not gonna get all Daily Mail on your ass wailing, “Won’t somebody please think of the children??” I’m no prude right-winger but this moral outcry over a daft rebellious gesture serves only to illustrate how Western society’s collective moral compass is seriously askew. If we can froth and pant and seethe over a one second gesture yet simultaneously, gluttonously, ravenously consume toxic pop imagery damaging to impressionable young girls then I have to wonder what the hell is up?

The Parents Television Council accused the NFL of booking “performers who have based their careers on shock, profanity and titillation. Either the NFL and NBC will take immediate steps to hold those accountable for this offensive material in front of a hundred million Americans, or they will feebly sit back and do nothing.”

I do wonder, how many of it’s members have taken their daughter to a Nicki Minaj concert.

The recipe for an archetypal MTV music video now goes a little something like this: take one large slice of hooker-ish attire, mix throughly with a dollop of gyrating and crotch-flashing, add a splash of ghetto-chic, serve it up with S&M overtones and optionally season well with some dark, satanic symbology thrown in for good measure. Yummy!

A new pop star’s contract is more Faustian pact than record deal and it frightens me how dumbed-down and culturally-opiated the West has become to accept this as the norm. Music videos are a hypnotic portal of lethal influence: the current pop landscape is awash with over-sexualisation, dehumanisation/transhuman, mutilation/ritual and militarization /police state themes. Clever purposeful programming to debase and disassociate us from social norms.

The age-old retort of, “It’s not the pop star’s fault it’s the parents for letting them see it” is moot. That there should be parental responsibility is not in doubt – it goes without saying – but is it possible for parents to police the TV, internet, radio and magazine stands at all times? I think not. This imagery is omnipresent, pervasive and corrosive whichever way you look.

Anyway, all the above aside, Madge’s turgid Gimme All Your Luvin’ song was frankly more offensive than M.I.A’s mid-finger-flip. Madonna’s talent has always lied in hijacking a subculture before it permeates the mainstream and intelligently bringing it into our consciousness. For all her commendable gymnastic ability (homegirl sure worked those moves) her last few albums have been a case of idly rent-an-already-huge-star rather than appropriating a bubbling-under trend making it your own. It’s literally a case of cool-by-association ‘If I can’t beat ‘em nowadays, I may as well rope ‘em in to make me cred.’ Madge now appears more lazy coat-tail rider than the radical pop-pioneer she once was.

Maybe she only has herself to blame? After all, she flaunted those overtly sexual vibes in a pop arena first (albeit with subversion and wit) thus opening the floodgates for the new blood to follow, pushing her sexual agenda – both worryingly and potentially – to the point of no return.

- Source: Huffington Post

Ray Kurzweil in Time Magazine

We’ve seen in previous articles (notably in The Transhumanist and Police State Agenda in Pop Music) that the concept of transhumanism, which can be defined as the merging of humans and robots, is being abundantly promoted in music videos, movies and video games. On top of this “indirect” kind of promotion, transhumanism is being sold through more direct channels such as documentaries, television features and news reports. The main face of the movement is the American inventor Ray Kurzweil who has recently been on a massive PR campaign to promote what he calls “Singularity” (a term that is probably less threatening than “transhumanism”).

Kurzweil is however not a lone nut with a crazy futuristic dream. He works in collaboration with the world’s most powerful people in business and politics. For example, in February 2009, Kurzweil collaborated with Google and the NASA Ames Research Center, to create the Singularity University training center for corporate executives and government officials. The University’s self-described mission is to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges”. It is safe to say that transhumanism is not only the goal of one man but of the entire global elite. For this reason, the merging of humans and robots is not only promoted as something “cool” and positive in mass media, it is announced, despite its potential pitfalls, as an inevitability.

Here’s an article from the Daily Mail about Singularity. It bares the typical “overwhelmingly-positive-but-with-a-hint-of-obligatory-criticism-to-appear-objective” tone most mainstream news sources use when covering the issue.

Hitler would have loved The Singularity: Mind-blowing benefits of merging human brains and computers

Of all the tall tales in the science-fiction TV series Star Trek, what impressed me most when I was a  little boy was the Vulcan mind meld.

Laying his hands on the head of a human (or, in one of the films, a humpback whale), Mr Spock could, for a moment, dissolve the distance between two living things.

Each experienced everything the other felt, thought, knew and saw.

Now it seems scientists are about to make the Vulcan mind meld a reality – and go far beyond it.

Ten years ago, the US National Science Foundation predicted ‘network-enhanced telepathy’ – sending thoughts over the internet – would be practical by the 2020s.

Man and machine: Computers could soon be hardwired into the human brain and unlock amazing powers

And thanks to neuroscientists at the University of California, we seem to be on schedule.

Last September, they asked volunteers to watch Hollywood film trailers and then reconstructed the clips by scanning their subjects’ brain activity.

‘We’re opening a window into the movies in our minds,’ Professor Jack Gallant announced.

Last week, the scientists boldly went further still. They charted the electrical activity in the brains of volunteers who were listening to human speech and then they fed the results into computers which translated the signals back into language.

The technique remains crude, and has so far made out only five distinct words, but humanity has crossed a threshold.

We can now read people’s minds. On Star Trek, the Vulcan mind meld had medical benefits, curing a nasty imaginary infection called Pa’nar syndrome.

Science fact?: Harnessing the power of the mind was a favourite of science fiction, including Star Trek's Vulcan mind meld

But the new breakthroughs promise to deliver much greater – and real – benefits.

No longer need strokes and neurodegenerative diseases rob people of speech because we can turn their brainwaves directly into words.

But this is only the beginning. Neuroscientists are going to make the mind meld look like child’s play. Mankind is merging with its machines.

The process began centuries ago with simple devices such as eyeglasses and ear trumpets that could dramatically improve human lives.

Then came better machines, such as hearing aids; and then machines that could save lives, including pacemakers and dialysis machines.

By the second decade of the 21st Century, we have become used to organs grown in laboratories, genetic surgery and designer babies.

In 2002, medical researchers used enzymes and DNA to build the first molecular computers, and in 2004 improved versions were being injected into people’s veins to fight cancer.

By 2020 we may be able to put even cleverer nanocomputers into our brains to speed up  synaptic links, give ourselves perfect memory and perhaps cure dementia.

But inserting technology into human brains is not the only thing going on. Some scientists also want to insert human brains into technology.

Since the Sixties, computer chips have been doubling their speed and halving their cost every 18 months or so.

If the trend continues, the inventor and predictor Ray Kurzweil has pointed out that by 2029 we will have computers powerful enough to run programs  reproducing the 10,000 trillion electrical signals that flash around your skull every second.

They will also have enough memory to store the ten trillion recollections that make you  who you are.

Dangerous technology: The huge potential unlocked by the technology raises frightening prospects if it were to be used by evil dictators like Adolf Hitler

And they will also be powerful enough to scan, neuron by neuron, every contour and wrinkle of your brain.

What this means is that if the trends of the past 50 years continue, in 17 years’ time we will be able to upload an electronic replica of your mind on to a machine.

There will be two  of you – one a flesh-and-blood animal, the other inside a computer’s circuits.

And if the trends hold fast beyond that, Kurzweil adds, by 2045 we will have a computer that is powerful enough to host every one of the eight billion minds on Earth.

Carbon and  silicon-based intelligence will merge to form a single global consciousness.

Kurzweil calls this ‘The Singularity’, a moment when ‘the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep . . . that technology appears to be expanding at infinite speed’.

At that point, we will have  left the Vulcan mind meld far behind. But even this may not be the end of the story.

Much of the research behind last week’s breakthrough in brain science was funded not by universities but by DARPA, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.

It was DARPA that brought us the internet (then called the Arpanet) in the Seventies, and DARPA’s Brain Interface Project was a pioneer in molecular computing.

More recently, DARPA’s Silent Talk programme has been exploring mind-reading technology with devices that can pick up the electrical signals inside soldiers’ brains and send them over the internet.

With these implants, entire armies will be able to talk without radios. Orders will leap instantly into soldiers’ heads and commanders’ wishes will become the wishes of their men. Hitler would have loved it.

Thing of the past: Advances in technology could revolutionise the way armies communicate

Cyborg-soldier: The defence industry could soon try implanting computer technology into the brain of soldiers

Some of the clearest thinking about the new technologies has been done in the world’s departments of defence, and the conclusions the soldiers draw are alarming.

For example, US Army Colonel Thomas Adams thinks that military technology is already moving beyond what he calls ‘human space’, as robotic weapons become ‘too fast, too small, too numerous, and . . . create an environment too complex for humans to direct’.

Technology, Col Adams suspects, is ‘rapidly taking us to a place where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid’.

As goes war, so,  perhaps, goes everything else. The merging of mankind and its machines that Kurzweil predicts for the mid-21st Century may, in fact, turn out just to be a lay-by on the way to a very different destination.

Later in the century, what we condescendingly call ‘artificial’ intelligence might replace us humans just as thoroughly as we humans once replaced all our evolutionary ancestors.

All this will come to pass . . .  unless, of course, it doesn’t. Maybe the trends Kurzweil and Col Adams identify will slow down, or even stall altogether.

And maybe the critics who mockingly call the Singularity ‘the Rapture for Nerds’ will be proved right.

But on the other hand, maybe the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley is closer to the truth when he points out: ‘When a scientist says something is possible, they’re probably underestimating how long it will take.

But if they say it’s impossible, they’re probably wrong.’

The University of California’s neuroscientists have taken us one more step towards a final frontier far beyond anything dreamed of in Star Trek.

- Source: Daily Mail

When I learned that Madonna – aka the Grand Priestess of the music industry – would be performing at the Superbowl halftime show, I thought: “This should be interesting”. And it was. While most were amazed by a woman in her fifties dancing around with LMFAO and others were annoyed at her lip-syncing, I was interested with something else: the flurry of symbolism flashed to billions of viewers worldwide. While most considered Madonna’s performance as an entertaining interlude to the most important football game of the year, those blessed with symbol-literacy will probably agree with the following statement: Madonna’s halftime show was a big celebration of the Illuminati industry and of its Grand Priestess, Madonna.

A week before the Superbowl, Madonna described on Anderson Cooper the spiritual importance she attributed to her halftime show:

“The Superbowl is kind of like the Holy of Holies in America. I’ll come at halfway of the “church experience” and I’m gonna have to deliver a sermon. It’ll have to be very impactful.”

It is rather appropriate that this Kaballah-intiate referred to the Superbowl as the “Holy of Holies” as it was the name of the most sacred place in Solomon’s Temple. No one was ever permitted to enter the Holy of Holies but the High Priest. This privilege was only granted on the Day of Atonement, to offer the blood of sacrifice and incense before the mercy seat. Madonna’s analogy was therefore telling of the mindset behind her performance. Let’s look at the main parts of her show.

Vogue or Entrance of the Priestess

Madonna entrance is an elaborate procession fit for a High Priestess or even a goddess.

Pushed by hundreds of Roman soldiers and welcomed by hundreds of women, Madonna's glorious entrance is a reflection of her status in the entertainment world.

Her first performance was highly influenced by ancient Egypt-Sumeria-Babylon and Madonna’s costume recalls an ancient Babylonian goddess.

The decor of Madonna's first performance combines elements from ancient Egypt, Sumeria and Babylon. Madonna herself is dressed in a way that highly resembles an Ancient Sumerian/Babylonian goddess, Inanna-Ishtar.

Ishtar with her foot on a roaring lion and wearing a distinctive headdress resembling Madonna's horned crown. Ishtar is often depicted with wings, a feature that is recalled on Madonna's "carriage".

Ishtar was a powerful and assertive goddess whose areas of control and influence included warfare, love, sexuality, prosperity, fertility and prostitution. She sought the same existence as men, enjoying the glory of battle and seeking sexual experiences. Madonna’s portrayal as Ishtar is therefore quite interesting as one can argue that the pop singer has embodied, throughout her career, the same assertive yet highly sexual qualities of Ishtar, even achieving a state of power in the music industry that is usually reserved to men. On an esoteric level, Ishtar is associated with the planet Venus, known as the Morning Star or the Evening Star.

The presence of two Sphinxes in front of Madonna greatly resembles the tarot card The Chariot. According to Manly P. Hall: "This card signifies the Exalted One who rides in the chariot of creation. The sphinxes drawing the chariot resent the secret and unknown power by which the victorious ruler is moved continuously through the various parts of his universe."

So, in this mythologically-charged setting, Madonna performed Vogue. During the performance, covers of Vogue Magazine were displayed, a publication that is at the forefront of Illuminati symbolism in fashion (as seen in the series of articles Symbolic Pics of the Month).

Vogue ends with a symbol that is consistent with the Egyptian-Babylonian theme of the performance, one that is also of highest importance in occult Secret Societies such as Freemasons, the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati: the Winged Sun-Disk.

The song ends with the displaying of a Winged Sun-Disk.

Egyptian mystics used the winged sun for ritualistic magic and invocations:

“‘Emblematic of the element of air, this consists of a circle or solar-type disk enclosed by a pair of wings. In ritual magic it is suspended over the alter in an easterly direction and used when invoking the protection and co-operation of the sylphs.”
-Hope, Murry, “Practical Egyptian Magic”

The winged sun is still being used today by groups like the Freemasons, the Theosophists and the Rosicrucians.

“The Winged Globe is pre-eminently a Rosicrucian symbol, although the Illuminati may lay claim to it, and it may be admitted that it is of Egyptian origin. The Winged Globe is the symbol of the perfected soul making its flight back to the source of its creation in the Elysian fields beyond.”
-Swinburne, Clymer, “The Rosicrucians, Their Teachings”

The symbol of the winged-sun inside a Masonic lodge.

The display of this symbol, although apparently trivial and aesthetic, emphasizes on the occult spiritual dimension underlying Madonna’s entire performance.

Give Me All Your Luvin’ or Madonna’s Sex Kittens

Later in the show, Madonna performed her new single Give Me All Your Luvin’. The song features two new industry favorites: Nikki Minaj and M.I.A. In the song’s music video and during the Superbowl performance, these two female rappers are portrayed in a specific way:  Instead of being presented as full-fledged artists contributing to Madonna’s song, they are portrayed as her “minions” who are cheering for the industry’s High Priestess. This “relationship” where Madonna is in power – and therefore the handler – is drenched in Mind Control symbolism, specifically Beta Programming, also know Sex Kitten Programming.

In the video for Give me Your Luvin', Madonna, Nikki Minaj and M.I.A. are dressed as Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate prototype of Sex Kitten Programming.

Another symbol associated with Sex Kitten programming is feline prints clothing and textiles. The entire half-time show was an animal-print extravaganza.

Like a Prayer or the Final Sermon

Madonna closed the halftime show with one of her biggest hits: Like a Prayer. The video of this song was always controversial due to its mixing of religious themes with sexuality. As the song starts, the show takes on a very solemn and spiritual vibe as Madonna and Cee-Lo Green enter the stage to give the final sermon. Religious figures are usually dressed in white to represent purity and godliness. The two singers where dressed in black robes and black robes are usually used in…black masses.

As the song begins, a huge eye pupil is displayed before the stage, hinting to the Illuminati-influence of this spiritual performance.

Madonna’s halftime show ends in a dramatic yet very significant matter:

At the end of her performance, the floor opens underneath Madonna's feet and she falls into oblivion.

As Madonna is swept in what appears to be the “Underworld”, Madonna sings “I hear you call my name, And it feels like home”. This is another inversion of conventional religious symbolism as “home” should be in the heavens. In Madonna’s case, she obviously didn’t go in that direction.

The show ends with a message no one can disagree with.

The words "World Peace" appear on the stage, a PR-friendly slogan used by those pushing for a New World Order lead by a one world government.

In Conclusion

When taken individually, the symbols described above can be simply considered as “cool-looking” and most Superbowl viewers did not give them much attention. The packing all of these signs and symbols in one comprehensive 13 minute performance cannot however be dismissed as “random images”. Quite to the contrary, the combination of all of these symbols form a whole and define with great depth the underlying philosophy and Agenda of those in power – the Illuminati. Madonna’s embrace of the Illuminati symbolism discussed on this site coincides with her signing with Interscope Records, one of the main purveyors of Illuminati symbolism in the music industry. Her halftime show performance can therefore be considered as the “launching” of her three-album (and 40 million dollars) relationship with the prominent label. Madonna’s Superbowl performance has shown that, despite the fact that she is an industry icon and that she pioneered most of the themes modern pop stars still exploit, she still needs to fit the mold and to embrace the same symbolism rookie pop stars.

Laced with profound imagery, Madonna’s halftime performance was a massive Illuminati ritual, one that was witnessed by billions of viewers. On this Superbowl “Day of Atonement”, Madonna, the High Priestess of the Illuminati industry, entered the Holy of Holies of America and delivered a 13 minutes sermon that was heard by all…but understood by few.

In my article entitled Amy Winehouse and 27 Club, I mentioned that the circumstances surrounding Winehouse’s death are rather “suspicious” and that “suspicious” celebrity deaths are often followed by vague explanations, botched investigations and all kinds of shady business. After months of strange flip-flopping regarding the cause of Winehouse’s death, the coroner that was looking into the singer’s case, Suzanne Greenaway , has resigned because she “did not have the correct qualifications”. Even odder, she was appointed to this particular position by her husband, coroner Dr. Andrew Scott Reid. These events will probably cause the entire investigation to be held again.

Yup, that’s the typical blur of confusion, contradictions and all-around crap that usually surrounds celebrity sacrifices. Here’s an article on Suzanne Greenway’s resignation.

Family of Amy Winehouse considering legal action after coroner at her inquest resigns because she did not have the correct qualifications

Amy Winehouse’s family says it is seeking legal advice after the coroner who oversaw the singer’s inquest resigned because she did not have the required qualifications for the job – raising the possibility the investigation may have to be held again.In October, Suzanne Greenaway ruled that the soul singer had died from accidental alcohol poisoning.

Greenaway had been appointed an assistant deputy coroner in London by her husband, Inner North London Coroner Andrew Reid.

But she resigned in November after authorities learned she had not been a registered U.K. lawyer for five years as required.

She had practised law for a decade in her native Australia.

Her resignation was not made public until today.

The Office for Judicial Complaints has now launched an investigation into Dr Reid’s conduct.

Dr Andrew Scott Reid, coroner for the Inner Northern District of Greater London, says he appointed Suzanne Greenaway thinking she was qualified

‘I believed at the time that her experience as a solicitor and barrister in Australia satisfied the requirements of the post,’ Reid said in a statement.

‘In November of last year it became apparent that I had made an error in the appointment process and I accepted her resignation.’
Reid apparently broke no laws in appointing his wife but could have breached professional guidelines. Greenaway was one of several deputy assistant coroners.

The local authority, Camden Council, said it was confident Reid ‘had made an error in good faith’ when he appointed his wife, but said the matter was being investigated by Britain’s Office for Judicial Complaints.
Winehouse’s inquest could be declared invalid if her family challenges the verdict in court.

In a statement, the Winehouse family said it was ‘taking advice on the implications of this and will decide if any further discussion with the authorities is needed’.

Last night, meanwhile, Amy’s father, Mitch, tweeted: ‘Don’t worry about coroner nonsense. We are all ok. Mitch.’

Dr Reid said: ‘In November it became apparent I’d made an error in the appointment process. While I am confident that all of the inquests handled were done so correctly, I apologise if this matter causes distress.’

The inquest into the death of the singer heard that she’d drunk enough to stop her breathing and send her into a coma.

Three empty vodka bottles were found near her body in her bedroom.

A pathologist who examined her said she had 416mg of alcohol per decilitre of blood – five times the legal drink-drive limit of 80mg. The inquest heard that 350mg was usually considered a fatal amount.

A doctor who treated the 27-year-old for her alcohol problem said she had repeatedly ignored warnings about the dangers of binge drinking.

But private GP Christina Romete, who saw the singer hours before her death, said she did not believe Miss Winehouse had deliberately drunk herself to death.

She said she had told her: ‘I do not want to die… I have not achieved a lot of the things I wanted.’

Miss Winehouse won five Grammy awards for her 2006 hit album Back To Black. But she became as well-known for her battle with alcohol and drugs as for her singing.

She was found dead in her flat in Camden, North London, on July 23 last year.

- Source: Daily Mail

This fashion shoot entitled "Kim & Luisa" by photographer Pierre Dal Corso appears to be heavily influenced by mind control imagery. In this pic, the model's face is painted white to match the mask she is holding. Masks are classic symbols of mind control that represent the MK slave's alter persona (masks are also used in actual mind control programming). The mask also hides one eye, another important symbol of mind control.

Another pic emphasizing on the concept of the mask as an alter persona.

The model's expressionless face inside a big eye...as if she is owned by it.

Same photoshoot, again with the one eye.

Here's another mind control-inspired photoshoot by photographer BlanQ. Aptly entitled "Identity" (MK slaves lose their own identity and are programmed new ones) the shoot features the robotic models manipulated by hidden handlers. In this pic, the handler places a doll (representing the powerless slave) on the model's head, while other arms control the rest of her body.

In this one, the handlers get a bit more "grabby", demented and abusive which refers to the sexual abuse that is inflicted on MK slaves to cause dissociation.

This disturbing pic (is this still fashion) portrays the total control of handlers on the slaves. They even hide the slave's distress behind a forced (programmed) smile.

This image, used to promote Beyonce's last album, caused some controversy due to the fact that her skin color was obviously "paled". Looking further into the image, the animal prints and the blonde hair refer to Beta Programming (also known as Sex Kitten programming).

Speaking of Sex Kitten, here's another combo of blond hair and animal prints. In Nikki Minaj's video "Stupid Hoe" (the most disliked video of 2012) the rapper is shown dancing inside a cage, one of the Illuminati's favorite ways to depict female pop stars. Definitely a recurring theme.

Demi Lovato's ritualistic performance at the People's Choice Awards. Dressed in red, color of initiation, Demi performs surrounded by Masonic checkerboard patterns, the surface on which occult rituals are performed in secret societies.

Mickey Mouse ears are also a favorite way to refer to mind control in pop culture. As seen in previous articles, Natalia Kills is all about mind control.

K-Pop singer Ahn Sohee also rocks Mickey Mouse ears for no apparent reason.

Photographer Richard Burbridge also felt the need to use Mickey Mouse ears in his photoshoot. Inverted star and Baphomet head on the model's shirt.

Lady Gaga photoshoot in l'Umomo Vogue. She is depicted as a fem-bot (mind control, transhumanism, Maria from Metropolis). Funny how pop stars, idols of millions of people, are openly showed as dehumanized, robotic figures...the exact opposite of what artistic expression is about.

An apt image to portray modern pop stars.

She does not seem to be in control of what she says.

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu making the one-eye sign. Her videos PONPONPON and Tsukematsukeru (see articles here and here) are orgies of Illuminati symbolism.

Beth Ditto is the new face of MAC. She is apparently celebrating her association with the makeup brand with a one-eyed tribute.

Actor Song Joon-ki in Vogue Korea. Vogue is a major "distributor" of Illuminati symbolism across the world.

Promotional picture for Dior

The cover of this issue of Cosmopolitan caused some controversy due to the fact that Dakota Fanning is a minor...and is surrounded with phrases such as "His best sex ever!", "Too naughty to say here!" and "Um, Vagina are you okay down there?"

Fanning was also featured in this controversial ad for Marc Jacobs holding a phallic object. Working hard to normalize pedophilia.

Super-elite, multi-billionnaire Warren Buffett at a party organized by Jay-Z. As TMZ now likes to say, he's "throwing up the Illuminati sign".

See the Masonic symbolism on Buffett's book cover

As always, special thanks to those who sent in pics!

In a very short period of time, an enigmatic singer named Lana Del Rey went from complete anonymity to the front page of magazines, not to mention intense internet buzz and an SNL appearance. But along with this (almost literal) overnight success came revelations regarding the rising star: She is a total creation of her management team. When her previous artist persona named Lizzie Grant became a monumental flop, she underwent intense retooling including: A new name (which was assigned to her by her label), plastic surgery, a new musical style, a new image and a new marketing strategy. She is now signed with Interscope, Lady Gaga’s label.

The same way Stefani Germanotta was “revamped” to become Lady Gaga – a fake persona that fits the requirements of today’s music industry – Lizzie Grant was revamped as Lana Del Rey. Will this alter-persona be used to push the Illuminati agenda in the future?

Here’s an article about Lana Del Rey’s “creation” from The Guardian.

Lana Del Rey: The strange story of the star who rewrote her past

Lizzy Grant was a flop, changed her name to Lana Del Rey and was acclaimed as a new star. But the backlash from fans who felt duped has been unprecedented

You can still find traces of Lizzy Grant online. There is a video, dated 8 June 2009, that shows a young, casually dressed blonde woman in a green T-shirt and jeans singing alone on stage at a New York music show called The Variety Box. Grant’s voice was strong, but she seemed shy and spoke quietly to the audience to a smattering of applause.

Grant looked like any one of hundreds of young artists trying to make it in the clubs and bars of New York, singing their hearts out in the hope that one day they would be spotted. After all, that’s how big names from Bob Dylan to Lady Gaga got their breaks. But success never happened to Lizzy Grant. Her one and only album sank virtually without trace.

However, fame did happen to someone called Lana Del Rey, a 25-year-old sultry, seductive songstress who is the current hottest name in US music and whose debut album is one of the most eagerly awaited events in the industry this year. It comes out on 31 January.

Del Rey’s image is nothing like Grant’s. The video for her new song, provocatively called Born to Die, is slick and lavishly produced. The short film begins with her posing half-naked with a tattooed, shirtless man in front of the stars and stripes, then shows her sitting on a throne in a figure-hugging white dress flanked by two tigers. By the end of the video, she is covered in blood, wearing only a red bra. It is over-the-top and wildly eccentric.

But that suits Del Rey’s sound. Her soaring vocals and melodies, reflecting genres as diverse as hip hop and indie music, have won millions of fans. And Del Rey has quite a story to tell. After first appearing on the internet last year with an apparently home-produced video of a song called Video Games, she became a cult hit. She married her music to a mysterious image, self-styled as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra”, that paid homage to 1960s fashions and seedy showbiz glamour. In an interview recently shot poolside at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, Del Rey explained her attraction to the notorious celebrity haunt. “It’s a place that has inspired so many of my videos and influenced a lot of my visuals,” she said through a mouth now framed by pouting, bee-stung lips.

Of course, Lana Del Rey and Lizzy Grant are the same person.

That revelation has made Grant/Del Rey one of the most controversial figures to emerge in US music for years. Some people feel victims of an immense confidence trick. When Video Games first went viral it became an underground sensation praised for its authentic feel. Del Rey’s amazing voice crooned the haunting song against a backdrop of grainy out-takes of home movies and Hollywood scenes. It currently has a staggering 20 million views on YouTube. The follow-up, Blue Jeans, with a similar feel, netted 6 million views. Del Rey’s few live gigs suddenly sold out. She won the Next Big Thing prize at the Q awards. She seemed set for the big time. But then questions were asked. A few critics began to wonder if, far from being some organic wunderkind, the transformation from Grant to Del Rey had been planned all along. Her stage name was chosen by her management. Rather than being an outsider struggling for recognition, Del Rey is in fact the daughter of a millionaire father who has backed her career. People were suspicious of the way Grant’s failed album, and all her social media websites, appeared to have been scrubbed from the internet just before Del Rey appeared. There has been much speculation as to exactly when Del Rey teamed up with her current label Interscope and how much influence their savvy marketers might have put into her original emergence.

“There are a lot of things that don’t seem organic about it,” said Steven Horowitz, who wrote a cover story about Del Rey for Billboard magazine. “She’s putting on a show. She’s here to entertain us.”

Suddenly, many of the fans that had boosted Del Rey turned on her in spectacular fashion. Music blogs poured vitriol on her talents. Some influential music websites, such as Hipster Runoff, have turned insulting Del Rey into an art form. Last weekend Del Rey appeared as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. She gave a hesitant, uncertain performance – suddenly more Lizzy Grant than Del Rey – that triggered brutal criticism.

Celebrities even got in on the act. Actress and musician Juliette Lewis tweeted: “Watching this ‘singer’ on SNL is like watching a 12-year-old in their bedroom when they’re pretending to sing and perform.” Even news anchor Brian Williams weighed in, sending an email that was later published on gossip website Gawker that called Del Rey’s performance one of the “worst outings in SNL history”.

But it is not just Del Rey’s music and SNL performance that is being hauled over the coals. It is also her appearance.

Pictures of Lizzy Grant when contrasted to Del Rey have led many to speculate that she has had collagen injections in her lips and perhaps even plastic surgery. It is a charge she vehemently denied in a recent interview. “I haven’t had anything done at all… I’m quite pouty. That’s just how I look when I sing,” she insisted.

Del Rey has many defenders too. “She is just a gorgeous creature,” said Noah Levy, senior news editor at In Touch Weekly magazine. Horowitz said that whatever the truth of her emergence there is little doubt about her talent or commitment. “I think she cares about the art that she is creating. I don’t think that is fake at all,” he said.

Despite the outrage directed at her, Del Rey is employing one of the oldest tricks in the book: the creation of a stage persona. Some of the greatest names have done it. David Bowie and Madonna are notorious shape-shifters. So is Lady Gaga. Changing from Lizzy Grant to Lana Del Rey is not unusual when you consider that Bob Dylan’s real name was Robert Zimmerman and Iggy Pop was born James Osterberg. “I think Lana Del Rey is manufactured. But when Lizzy Grant came out with music it failed. So she reinvented herself and it worked,” said Levy.

In fact, Lana Del Rey’s rise says much about the nature of modern fame in the US. The internet has allowed figures like her to come rapidly to the fore of the cultural landscape, whether or not their emergence is planned by a record executive or happens spontaneously from someone’s bedroom. It has speeded up the fame cycle. It is worth noting that the huge backlash to Del Rey is happening before her first album has even been released. This reveals a cultural obsession with the “authenticity” that fans, artists and corporations all prize above all else.

Cultural critics say genuine authenticity is almost impossible to achieve. “The whole idea of authenticity is elusive. It is in many ways a complete illusion,” said Professor Robert Thompson, a pop culture expert at Syracuse University. Others have simpler explanations for the stir Del Rey has caused, seeing misogyny against a female artist so willing to use sexuality as a way of selling her music. “There is a ‘mean girls’ attitude to some of it,” said Horowitz.

Either way it does not seem likely that Del Rey will be leaving the music scene any time soon. Sales of her new album are set to be astronomical. It has crept into Amazon’s top 25 in the US on pre-sales alone. She is booked for appearances on major talk shows. “Lana Del Rey can go anywhere that she wants to,” said Levy. “She’s going to one day be the cover of Rolling Stone.” Lizzy Grant may have failed to make it. But her next creation seems ready for stardom.

- Source: The Guardian