Kyoto inside out: August 2016

This blog has examined a couple of CIA pseudo-culture frauds created out of whole cloth by the network of media outlets controlled by the CIA et al. Such was the case with Sean Lotman, whose purported status as a literary figure was no more than a fabrication by CIA officer and Japan Times columnist Kris Kosaka.

Such false emanations from the media have been referred to as “pseudo-events” by Pulitzer Prize winning historian and social theorist Daniel J. Boorstin (ダニエル・J・ブーアスティン) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Boorstin) in his book The Image (幻影(イメジ)の時代―マスコミが製造する事実) which is in its 12th printing in Japanese, enabling me to expand the reach of this blog starting with this post. Like the abortive would-have-been literary figure Lotman, Adelstein’s notoriety as a pseudo-cultural figure is a product of the CIA’s covert operations using the mass media. The CIA was more successful in foisting the pseudo-crime fighting reporter persona of Adelstein onto civil society, furthering the CIA’s agenda of subverting civil society through undermining the production of culture by authentic cultural figures, etc.

The amount of disinformation flotsam and jetsam about Adelstein is formidable, however, so this exegesis of yet another suspected covert CIA pseudo-cultural figure will be broken down into several posts, this being the “INTRO”. I have more important things to deal with, like the appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court, so the timing of subsequent installments is something that will be worked out in that context.

Before even delving into the urban-sprawl-like sea of plasticine refuse littering the Internet about Adelstein, suffice it to say that, along the line of some of the other individuals examined on this blog and/or named in the lawsuit (e.g., Jeff Berglund), he was basically portrayed as a serendipitous idiot savant that landed in Japan and proceeded to obtain fame and fortune in a largely inscrutable manner. The marketing schema itself can be revealed—in all its CIA glory—by explicating the series of events (pseudo and otherwise) through which Adelstein was lofted into orbit as a mass-media celebrity, with two events that were fundamental in that they enabled the production of the pseudo-events.

Boorstin proffers the following cursory sketch of the characteristics of pseudo-events:

A pseudo-event, then, is a happening that possesses the following characteristics:

(1) It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.
(2) It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media. Its success is measured by how widely it is reported. Time relations in it are commonly fictitious or factitious; the announcement is given out in advance "for future release" and written as if the event had occurred in the past. The question, "Is it real?" is less important than, "Is it newsworthy?"
(3) Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Its interest arises largely from this very ambiguity. Concerning a pseudo-event the question, "What does it mean?" has a new dimension. While the news interest in a train wreck is in what happened and in the real consequences, the interest in an interview is always, in a sense, in whether it really happened and in what might have been the motives. Did the statement really mean what it said? Without some of this ambiguity a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting.
(4) Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the reasons it is necessary to discuss Lotman in this context is that his case is more representative of that defined under item (4), and in terms of “the announcement is given out in advance "for future release" and written as if the event had occurred in the past” in item (2), because he had yet to obtain celebrity status before that CIA pseudo-event was shot down on this blog.

As mentioned above, there were two events that the CIA used to artificially loft Adelstein into the mass-media celebrity orbit. Both of those events were actual events that established the conditions of the possibility for Adelstein to be imparted with mass-media celebrity status, as will be shown in the subsequent installments.