How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
*Pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people.
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This almost sounds like an Onion headline, but I ran across a Facebook post that said that a new study by Princeton and Northwestern found that the United States government does not represent the will of the people. We are an oligarchy, it concludes.
Zounds. No shit, Sherlock!
Continue reading “How pathocracy* takes hold”
Theirry Mayssan at Voltaire Network (Jihadism and the Petroleum Industry) goes a long way in simplifying the “ISIS” attack on Iraq, reducing it to a squabble among oil companies, primarily Exxon/Mobil (aka “Qatar”), and Aramco. The big losers in the conflict are Turkey, Britain, China, and if course, beleaguered Iraq (under unrelenting attack by the US since 1990). The winners are the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel. ISIS itself is a well-financed terrorist force under US, Saudi and French command.
Saudi Arabia claims it has increased production to make up for any shortfall in world supplies due to this conflict. They do not have that capability. The US-backed democratic kingdom, where criticism of the government results in imprisonment or decapitation, is merely fronting for ARAMCO and selling the oil stolen from Iraq on the world market. As Meyssan points out, ISIS could not market anything without cartel, that is, US support.
The goal? It has not changed since put forth by the Bush Administration in 2001, to redraw the map of the Middle East. This particular facet of the oil cartel (NeoCon) scheme involves breaking Iraq into three manageable provinces. The policy has not changed and is unaffected by three presidential elections during that time. US elections do not affect policy, and are mostly for show, a puppet-shuffling affair.
These issues remind me of the old notion of elephant sex, where there is a lot of shuffling of feet on he ground, while the real action is going on high upstairs.
Iraq is under attack again, this time ellegedly by Sunni-led forces straight off duty from terrorizing liberating Syria. National Pentagon Radio reports that Iraq “claims” to have retaken the city of Tikrit, and Iraq reports this as fact. What is true? Why do I need to know anyway?
Put a different way, what is the role of American news media? Is it to keep me informed? Or, more likely, is it to keep me uninformed?
And if their job were to keep me in the dark, how best to do that? One way would be to simply pick up the microphone and tell me to mind my own business, that these things are all above my pay grade anyway. But that would be counterproductive, as it would only stimulate my curiosity.
So the best course of action in keeping me uninformed would be to pretend to keep me informed, and to invest tons of money simply to build an image of people dedicated to reporting things that are true. As The late Johnny Carson was so fond of saying of his job, comedy, “if people buy the premise, they will buy the bit.”
So the best thing to do is to get off the American grid and seek information elsewhere. But wait a minute. American “news” reporters are quick to report to me that China’s Internet is heavily censored, and that Chinese people don’t even know it because they cannot access web sites that would tell them as much.
Them dumb Chinese. Surely Americans can access anything and everything without censorship … wait a minute. What’s wrong with this picture. Our news media lies to us all day long, but we are free to access information elsewhere on our own? This, in a fake reality environment propped up daily in every corner of our existence including movies and television programming?
I deliberately avoid American news reporting, and seek information elsewhere. Does this make me better informed, or better deluded?
This has been bugging me, and it was in the comments and not a private conversation, so I will pass it along here. A guy named Truthwillwin1 came here after I had paid a brief visit to Doug Ernst’s blog, and offered up a the following “study” he and others had done. This has to be the batshit craziest nonsense I have ever seen:
We recently did conduct a fun study to see if people are hypocritical in their views on giving and it had some interesting results. The study was conducted in 2 phases.
Phase one was to ask if all people should be covered for health care and we asked about their views on the fairness of the tax system.
Months later the same group of people (968 people) was asked a question something like this. If you received an A in this class would you be willing to reduce your grade to a B and give others in your class the points in order to help the ones that are failing pass?
The results were very interesting (a quick summary):
- 436 believed we should all have health care.
- 863 believed the top brackets should get a higher tax to support the lower income groups.
- 39 stated they would take a grade reduction to help others.
When it came to actually providing the assistance the majority was against it, yet when it would come from others they were fine with having them embrace the burden.
The next goal may be to see how much a person is willing to pay…
WTF? Giving away a grade? How about instead of that give away intelligence or good looks? I know what the mindset is behind this, that money is a symbol of success and accomplishment, in and of itself a valuable commodity rather than a device used to enable commerce. And that is the funniest thing about this study – normally they try to be clever and disguise their objectives. They did so in this study, and here is what they discovered: The people doing the study do not understand money, social structure, caring and compassion, or the health care system. They are stupid.
By the way, I pay taxes and willingly support Medicare and Social Security and assistance for those who are in true need. I would never give away an “A” I had earned in a class. That’s dumb. I told him I thought the study was more education than a survey of attitudes, and that it was contrived to boot. He got angry, commented that he’s a professional in these matters, and left in a huff. Which is OK – he’s the type with a cannot let someone else have the last word. Since I am that type too, we were doomed to tragedy, hours of painful exchange. This is not meant for bait. He’s gone and there are no links.
It’s just so freaking stupid that it needs to be highlighted. What payroll is he on? Are my taxes paying for this nonsense? This, AND we have to pay for their stupid wars? Jesus! Give a poor citizen a break. Now they’re just rubbing our faces in it.
A relative of ours was stricken with galloping cancer back when we lived in Montana, and I took him to visit doctors in his final days. While doing that he was in an agitated state, and was strident in giving me directions on how to get there, where to turn, where and how to park. It mentioned this to my wife, who is a wise woman despite her spousal choice, and she helped me understand. It was an expression of powerlessness, she said. He could not control the big things in happening to him, so he was taking charge on anything he could. He just needed some validation.
I followed a link this morning from here to here, and that brought me back to our loved one and his galloping cancer. Throughout this post from Douglas Ernst and his wide and varied responses, I am picking up on his sense of powerlessness. He must be validated in some fashion, and for that to happen, his vote has to matter, and if his vote mattered, then having the Neocon fake liberal Obama in office must be having a deleterious effect on foreign policy which must have been prescient before handed over to incompetents in 2008.
Voting matters, elections have consequences, you see. His vote is a wise one, those for Obama messed things up but good.
I left a nugget there but Douglas screens comments, so I don’t imagine it will ever see light of day.
It’s always difficult to judge intentions after the fact. ISIS was birthed and sprung on us as a grown-up and, like all events, our job is to imagine that it is somehow spontaneous and that the largest military force in human history, with scores of bases and billions in armaments in the region, with its own contrived country nearby, is just watching and hoping for the best. Our job too is to imagine all good intentions in Washington, all malevolent intent elsewhere. Our job too is to imagine cold calculated skill from Republican administrations and incompetence from Democrats. (That last job requires imagining that American elections affect changes in foreign policy, itself a job.)
It’s tough being an American. We have to form opinions without knowing anything. We do our best. Mr. Ernst, you’re making the best of it.
[He let it stand! We’ll see how long I last there. He answered me, I answered him, and then suggested he ban me. Just being proactive.]
The usual Monday morning cluttered brain here needing to unload. Instead I sat down to read for an hour or so, and it led me to a revelation that has some explanatory power – people talk about the Stalin purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution as defining events in those cultures, all with the arrogance of smugly superior civilized people watching others self-destruct.
Continue reading “Monday meanderings”
Someone called “Just a Guy” dropped a nice little nugget over at 4&20, linked here. Apparently, according to the article by Floyd Brown of Wall Street Daily, Bryan Schweitzer has used the office of governor of Montana for shakedown purposes.
There’s an expression for what he’s done: extortion. He’s used the office and his creds as governor or bully two mining companies.
Just a Guy notes the indignation at Schweitzer’s intemperate (but funny) remarks about Sen Diane Feinstein, who never met a wiretap she didn’t like until she was the object. He wonders why his real crimes pass unnoticed.
Me too.
Big Swede dropped a comment below linking to a Daily Beast article on how a 27-year old sociopath named Hillary D. Rodham got a rapist off, later laughing (her now-trademark cackle?) laugh on tape about how he passed a lie detector test even as she knew he was guilty.
The rape victim, then 12, has had a less-than-charmed life since Hillary Clinton got her assailant off, and now wonders how such a liar is qualified to be president. She obviously does not follow American politics.
Are you as confused as I am about the expanding conflict as US-backed terrorist forces advance on Baghdad, while the Iraqi government seeks help from the US? What is ISIS? What is IEIL? Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Here’s a clue:
Baghdadi fought in some capacity with Sunni militant groups after the U.S. invasion of Iraq but was arrested in 2005 and interred by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca, the main U.S. detention facility after the closing of Abu Ghraib. He wasn’t considered much of a threat and was released in 2009.
Translation: He was trained by the US over the period 2005 and then put into action in 2009. You gotta know how to read this stuff – the US prisons at Guantanamo, Bucca, Abu Ghraib are not in any sense prisons, but serve two purposes: Torture facilities, and terrorist training centers.(Did you really think they were keeping Gitmo open all these years to hold some ragtags they picked up in Afghanistan in 2001? Those poor souls have to be mere window dressing to disguise the true purpose of the place.)
That’s just a side note, and yes, I am confused as you, dear reader. Understand that, according to Voltaire, IEIL (ISIS) is overseen by French, American and Saudi officers. The object has to be the breakup of Iraq, which in the wake of the US defeat and withdrawal in 2011, has been considered a client state of Iran. So expect Iran to get involved in this dangerous, explosive situation.
Here’s some briefs from Voltaire, here, here and here. Moon of Alabama is doing its usual good work too. Do avoid American news, unless you are analyzing it for lie content. That is the only thing those moving lips indicate.
Of course, distrusting American news and government pronouncements does not convey truth-telling status on any other news source. As with everything else in this world, we are handed a bag of puzzle pieces. Our job is to find the ones that fit and see if a picture forms before our eyes. Confusion is the normal starting point.
The degree of self-delusion required to be a journalist in our American empire of lies is difficult to conceptualize, like imagining the space between stars.
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First, a brief stop by our newest court jester, John Oliver, and his new HBO program, Last Week Tonight. I’ve seen a couple of the programs, and he’s got some good writers and an unusual delivery style, almost as if he is as surprised by what he says as we are. It makes him very entertaining.
In an empire of lies, however, court jesters are only allowed to go so far, and must adhere to the big lies with the same blind incuriosity as regular journalists. So while Oliver did an excellent job taking on the FCC and net neutrality, Obama’s latest broken campaign pledge, he was rigidly in line as he viciously attacked first Syrian President Assad, and then the Chinese government. The Chinese crime, as I gather, is not being transparent about the events of June 4, 1989, known in American propaganda as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Continue reading “An American journalist travels abroad”
“Between 50 and 55 million people have died around the world as a result of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism since the end of World War II as a direct result of wars initiated by the West, pro-Western military coups and other conflicts. … Hundreds of millions have died indirectly, in absolute misery, and silently. … [Just in the last few years] six to ten million people have been killed in the DR Congo, approximately as many as killed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Belgian King Leopoldo II. Although it is Rwanda, Uganda and their proxies who are murdering millions of innocent people, behind them are always Western geopolitical and economic interests.”(Novelist, filmmaker, journalist, photographer and playwright Andre Vltchek, compiled from his soon-to-be-released movie, On Western Terrorism, from Hiroshima to Drone Warfare.)
The “Cold War” war was largely an illusion, a cover story that the US used when it attacked various countries in the post-war period. The Russians, like all powerful states, vigorously defend their borders, but were never an imperialist force. Every action on that side during that period is easily seen to be, instead of action, response. Khrushchev’s near-fatal gambit, putting missiles in Cuba, is easily understood when we realize that the US had missiles in Turkey.
Quid pro quo, Clarice.
Continue reading “The road to self-encirclement”
Piece of Mindful 