It is very difficult in a fake democracy to understand events as they unfold. “News” is reported to us by Orwell’s trained circus dogs. (Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.)
On 9/11 I was utterly amazed that such a gigantic and nefarious plot could pulled off, but also had a sense of dissonance that our intelligence community, which could not prevent it, knew almost instantly who did it and where it originated.
So the scenario repeated with the underpants bomber. Intelligence officials knew about him, had been warned about him. His behavior was unusual – paying cash for a one-way ticket, no luggage … if only he could ignite his underwear as I can mine, we would have had a midair explosion. And instantly we know who he is, where his bomb was made, and who supervised his activities.
It might be that it is easier to track backward through events than to project forward. So it might seem logical that our news media, fed by the government, is relaying the truth to us about the Nigerian underwear situation.
That could well be. The news media might be serving a legitimate news function. The question is, why would they start now?
The Bush Administration, like that of Clinton before it, wanted to attack Iraq. Before 9/11, it just wasn’t plausible. After 9/11, anything was plausible. Some have taken the high correlation between post 9/11 activities and pre-9/11 desires, and intuited that 9/11 was a staged event. The problem with that scenario is that the government after 9/11 pointed us at Afghanistan, and only later did they attack Iraq, almost as if it were an afterthought. So I think it logical to conclude that they merely took advantage of public rage brought about by an event not of their making. One must never underestimate the potential for stupidity in high places.
Stupidity, yes, but also high intelligence. It’s a volatile cocktail. We are being shepherded by intelligent forces, though within those forces exists great hubris. I see in the underpants bombing three possibilities (or more – I am no more omniscient than anyone who reads this):
1) A fake scenario where a young man, whose father claimed was recently radicalized, was manipulated into the appearance of attempting to blow up an aircraft, not understanding that he had no chance of success. This staged event was then used as fodder to incite public opinion to allow our government to attack yet another country, this time, Yemen.
2) “Al Qaeda” operatives, being highly stupid themselves, wanted to give further credibility to the forces within our government who like attacking Arab countries. They like irritating the great beast.
3) Our government lies in wait, wanting to pounce, and only needing an event of any kind to justify predetermined activities.
It’s very hard to know, and we won’t know for weeks, months, years – if ever. What I conclude from these events is a little more abstract:
1) There have been no substantive changes in our ruling coalitions, even after the great groundswell of November, 2008. The same forces that propelled the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq are still there, and they are still ambitious;
2) News is not really news. It serves some other purpose, and there is a high correlation between the ambitions of the ruling coalition who sit behind our elected officials and the news that we are fed.
Therefore, the coalition has power over both elected officials and the news media. Picture a triangle of powerful forces – private wealth, government, and the news media. Most of us want to place the government atop that triangle, with power over the other two. Rotate the triangle so that private wealth sits atop both government and the media. To me, events make more sense if we remove the possibility of democratic governance from the picture.
If they are focusing our attention on Yemen, something is going on in Yemen unrelated to a plane that took off from Amsterdam on Christmas Day.
That’s the best that I can do without any real information at hand.
Piece of Mindful 
William of Occam. Has this razor. Give it a try.
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Lacking information, as we both do, it could be any of the above scenarios, or others. If truth were that easy to come by, it woudl fall in our lap with the morning paper. But it never has before, so why now? Isn’t that Occam too?
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Allow me to use this analogy, Charley. I think this is what Mark is trying to say ….
Inside a proton, in the incredibly small space between the quarks that make up a proton, is 100% is empty space. This space is the purest, emptiest space in the universe – it is the definition of “nothing”.
And, it accounts for 90% of the mass of the proton.
Yes, absolutely nothing accounts for 90% of the mass of a proton.
Since you are made of protons, when you weigh yourself, 90% of your mass is a consequence of nothing. Look at yourself in a mirror. 90% that makes up you is nothing. Think about that for awhile after a few beer.
But how is that possible?
Quantum mechanics tells us that within empty space, devoid of all energy and matter, virtual particles appear and disappear faster than anything in the universe can measure them.
So how do we know they exist, if we cannot see them, or directly measure them?
Because of their influence on the rest of the matter around them.
In fact, their existence can be calculated to a precision of 8 decimal places – one of the most exact measurements in our physical world.
So, we can measure nothing and its mass more accurately then nearly anything else in our quantum world.
So, taking that analogy into this conversation.
Because Mark (and I, as well) does not know what “covert” things may or may not be happening in Yemen, or what geopolitical adventure is underway – he and I probably know nothing specific of these things – but that doesn’t matter at all.
I know and can calculate very well their consequences and their influences of things around them.
I do not need to directly see the “thing” that influences the world to figure out -based on such influences and its consequences on the people, events and outcomes around it- what this thing itself, is.
…….. My ‘guess’
One needs only to see on the map where Yemen sits. Strategic mouth of the Red Sea moving into the Arabian Sea. He who controls Yemen controls the Red Sea, controls the Suez canal, controls the Mediterranean.
No surprise this backwards little country is now a target of interest in the great geopolitical game of the Middle East.
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Mark, our infinite debate….
“Rotate the triangle so that private wealth sits atop both government and the media”
No, sir.
Without legal violence, private wealth is only money, and media is only entertainment.
Government at the top – seizing and controlling both the money and the message.
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More evidence government sits at top of your pyramid.
EPA doesn’t protect consumers – it legalizes poisoning.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/03/AR2010010302110.html?nav=hcmodule
Of the 84,000 chemicals in commercial use in the United States — from flame retardants in furniture to household cleaners — nearly 20 percent are secret, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, their names and physical properties guarded from consumers and virtually all public officials under a little-known federal provision.
The policy was designed 33 years ago to protect trade secrets in a highly competitive industry.
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That was pretty good – beyond my analogy capability. Well done.
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Back to the triangle. What if it is a spinning horizontal triangle of interdependent points, with no top, bottom, or sides? That way, we may be less disappointed when we finally reach the summit, topple the government (top) and find no lasting peace or relief. Why discriminate against any one element of a system?
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Ladybug,
We must realize this concept to the depths of our soul and being:
“Suffering has no cure.”
The Universe does not allow us to solve the problem of suffering. The best we can do is solve some suffering.
Transferring suffering from one person and on to another who does not deserve it does not solve suffering.
Transferring suffering can only occur two ways:
– voluntarily; I accept your suffering on to me by my own desire – that is, I accept it, and take it away from you. I take my earnings, and give it to you – who did not earn it – so to relieve you of your suffering. I call my act “charity”.
– by force; I am forced, by use or threat of violence, to take on your suffering, whether or not I can carry it. Someone else – often the man with a gun – decides whether I can carry it or not, or decides that my suffering is ‘deserved’ by some irrelevant action somewhere else. This is called ‘government force’.
Now, neither solves suffering.
But only one of these methods is evil.
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Look, I don’t doubt that the pyramid is as you say. We live in a society where class and economic power matter tremendously. We also have a government that is more incompetent than malicious, in my experience, and I’ve been litigating against one department or another for most of my legal career.
Military intelligence believed for years that in Fouad al Rabia they were holding a guy who’d been a major funder of Al Qaeda. They didn’t believe this because corporations and their owners wield tremendous power in Congress — although they do — but because some poor schmoe figured out that he could get what he wanted by telling an interrogator that he say FAR give a suitcase full of cash to OBL, and military intelligence was desperate to believe that it was true. (One of my clients was arrested with FAR, and coerced [that’s the charitable description] into corroborating the liars). When FAR’s case came to court, though, the judge threw out the statements of the liars, and of my client, as utterly unreliable, and inconsistent with objective evidence, and even tossed the statements of FAR himself as having been obtained by torture — torture in which the US officials spoon fed him the answers they wanted and abused him til he gave them.
One of the Saudi guys released from GTMO was apparently promising to visit violence on Americans whenever he could get a chance. This guy wasn’t released because powerful corporations wanted it. He was released because the US needed the Saudis, and Bush didn’t have the balls to confront the Prince in charge of the rehabilitation program. They released over 90% of Saudi prisoners, and fewer than 20% of the Yemenis, although anyone with any knowledge of either country, or the composition of the prison population can see that this is exactly backwards.
We just lost a CIA team in Afghanistan — and this will prove to have been a serious strategic setback, because of the way it will be perceived there — because they failed to follow Tradecraft 101. Was this at the behest of some darker powers in Washington or Wall Street? Or, rather, is it because the mission is so ridiculously improbable, that our men were forced to what amounts to desperate measures (plus having some bad luck)?
Are the people calling the shots in our government (and, if you insist, standing behind them) Clever Masters of the Universe, or Greedy Morons?
Over the past five years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time with the products of our intelligence apparatus. Can they find their asses with both hands? With luck, sometimes. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time with the press. Is it as bad as you say? Worse.
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No one is talking about “masters of the universe”. It is much more basic than that – the idea that there is enormous stupidity there is not at all new.
The basic idea is this: The American public is never told what is going on or why, so it is left to us to figure it out. To believe what we are told or what is relayed to us via the the media is foolish. So people like us any many many others try to connect the dots.
If you are suggesting that what is handed us on our daily platter is good enough, I disagree.
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I agree with your second paragraph, and do not think we are given adequate information. My disagreement with you has to do with the substance of your dot-connecting, not with the need to connect dots.
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http://www.truthout.org/1050912
I don’t know if you saw this.
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http://www.truthout.org/010710Worthington
This one is good too. Despite my positive feeling for Ms. Bumiller — her son and mine were Cub Scouts together — my regard for the press really could barely be lower.
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Charley – there is no reason why we cannot have propaganda, stupidity, hubris, and planning all wrapped up in one ball. In fact, I think we do.
For instance, the attack on Iraq, in my view, was a long term goal finally pushed through in the aftermath of 9/11 because the event allowed it. There was, in that attack, supreme stupidity, propaganda, hubris, unintended consequences, but in the end, success. We now own that country.
The American public is oblivious too all of this because we have no journalism, as your truthout articles point out. We have thousands of people working in the media,but they don’t do a good job.
Again, it is many things, but the top reason is that there is no reward for doing their job, as foreign policy and the media serve the same interests. So the selection process for journalists tends to favor those who internalize the propaganda system.
In other words, we don’t really disagree that much.
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We have thousands of people working in
the mediaentertainmentLikeLike
There is that, I’ll grant you. But I am referring to people who really think they are journalists, like, say, for instance, Tom Brokaw or David Gregory.
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