“[The Cherokee] would go down to the water early in the morning, wade out waist deep, take the water of the river and throw it up over his head, and say, ‘Wash away any thoughts or feelings that may hinder me from being closer to my God. Take away any thoughts or feelings that may hinder me from being closer to all my brothers and sisters on the earth, and the animals of the earth.’ And they would wash themselves and cleanse themselves every morning, and they would walk out of the water.” [Adapted from Freeman Owle, “Going to Water.”]

Those words are posted on an information sign on the Oconaluftee River near Cherokee, outside Great Smoky Mountain National Park. I found them moving.

In comments below the previous post we were discussing the propaganda that we swim in daily here in the land of the blind, and I remember Jacques Ellul wrote about the “illusion of progress.” We have this notion that life is getting better. We have better aircraft, phones, Internet, interstate Highways, GPS systems, all due to the Department of Defense, an Orwellian euphemism. That government agency controls our technology, and for so long as that technology gives them an advantage over enemies, real and make believe, it is kept under wraps. When the advantage is gone it is given over to the private sector.

War is progress.

That image of a man wading into a river, cleansing his body and mind in preparation for a new day – we have surely regressed. What more is there to life than to exist in peace and in nature and among our fellow humans?

I said something nasty to Polish Wolf the other day, and that’s OK because he’s nasty to me in turn. The only way to avoid nastiness with him is to give him the respect he thinks he’s due. He’s young and has many years to ripen, so for now I’ll just repeat the nasty statement: “There seems to be a high degree of correlation in this country between self-proclaimed expertise and incuriosity.”

This came to mind last night when I again said something I regret, this time to my son. I immediately took my comment down off of Facebook, but too late. It went out over the tubes. He is young too and has many years to ripen, and him I like quite a bit. So the comment sticks in my craw as a piece of advice that I could have used (but been too dense to grasp) at any time in my life. Wish I’d just shut up.

He put up brief comment about the events in the Ukraine, and there followed another comment from a young friend of his who talked about how awful that the Soviets were invading. I chimed in that it appeared to me that Ukraine had been invaded by the EU. The friend advised me that there were no EU uniforms there. I said oops – my bad. I did not know that invaders always wore uniforms. And my son said that it was off-topic anyway, and that there is lots of stuff there that can’t be knowed. And that’s when I dropped the rich morsel on him. I said “You could try being curious.”

Everything there is knowable. Everything going on now in Egypt and Venezuela is knowable. It’s just history playing out. CIA, MI6, NATO and Mossad have unimaginable resources and can make large events happen, and our incurious news media reports all of it as if it is what it appears to be. But it’s not. Ukraine is what it always has been – a buffer for the Russians against invading western forces. The whole of the World War II played out as just another invasion of Russia. Had not Neville Chamberlain and certain British and American factions wanted that invasion, a certain angry maniacal Austrian would have been stopped early in his tracks.

Ukraine is a breadbasket, and a strategically located country from which force can be projected. Whichever imperial power controls Ukraine has hegemonic power over other places, most notably, the Balkans. It’s part of the great game, and sad for them that lives there to be in a place that imperial powers are concerned about. Like the poor schmucks in Afghanistan.

How do I know this? How can this not be known? I don’t want to brag, but I have many years of curiosity behind me, and these questions are long answered in my mind. These events are easy to understand. It doesn’t do me any good to be the only one I know* who understands them, so all my years of burrowing amount to no useful purpose. That’s why this blog is taking a different tack, on to more important things.

I just wish I knew what those things were.
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*Oops! SK, SW – just poor wording. There are at least three of us.

Advertising has gotten totally out of hand on this blog, and I have decided to upgrade to get rid of it. I don’t know the details but assume that with purchase of the domain, readers will automatically be linked from the old address.

Bill Hicks summed it up nicely. Lizard first showed me this performance, Dead-on. Google has gotten so bad that I don’t use it anymore – I cannot get past the paid links. And it’s funny, as each one who pays is guaranteed front page visibility, which cannot be.

In regular venues, I cannot move the cursor over the screen without the annoying pop-ups. They have gotten around pop-up blocking by making them part of the web page. Perhaps the worst is the pre-roll where we are forced to sit through an ad before seeing a video. The worst I ever saw was at a Cincinnati Reds site where a man with a baton backed by noise appeared from the left and danced across the screen hawking cars. That was a browser closer.

The Internet started out a quiet place. Advertisers have done everything in their power to destroy it. They first hit us with pop-ups. Then pre-rolls, and now embedded pop-ups. Spyware tracks our buying behavior. Parasite software sneaks on and asks you to buy their product in our lower right screens, without us even knowing how they got there. I have spent now over two hours removing parasite ads from this computer, a new one. Most recent was a box saying it was time to upgrade my “real player” at one time a real product. It wasn’t that at all. It was parasite programs, and it took a long time to get the bastards off.

Most recently, a bar full of ads appears on this blog screen at the bottom with the slightest maneuver of the mouse on the screen. That was my last straw.

They are ruining the Internet just as they ruined commercial TV and AM radio. What’s that you say? Without the ads we don’t get the content? I DON’T CARE. Without the ad-supported content, something better will come along. PBS and NPR, for all their amazing crap news, offer cultural programming that has few rivals. (Our NPR outlet down here in Denver, by the way, runs advertising all day long. They just don’t call it that.)

Advertising is the curse of modern life. Advertisers have to be annoying and intrusive, subversive, loud and repetitive. They have to get our attention.

Thank you, free market, for destroying our serenity, privacy and sanity with your ads. You really, really suck.

The United States is the only industrialized country to award diplomatic posts as political spoils, often to wealthy campaign contributors in an outmoded system that rivals the patronage practices of banana republics, dictatorships and two-bit monarchies.” (See link below.)

Interesting article here about the circus that the Obama ambassador appointment regime has become. Luxembourg, Hungary, Norway and other countries have been graced with ambassadors whose only qualification has been bundling contributions to get Obama’s sorry ass elected.

Max Baucus, ambassador now to China, gets off lightly in this article even as he knows nothing about China. (Many have interpreted his public stammering as a Cantonese dialect – that might have played a part in the appointment.) But the idea that he is somehow fit to be ambassador to such an important country is nonsense. He was chosen to get him out of the senate to make room for John Walsh, the top-down “choice” of a Montana Democrats to take Baucus’ seat this fall. (The new Senator from Montana will be Rep Steve Daines. He’s a Republican, a fitting senator for this mostly Republican state whose Republican Party leadership has for too long conceded the senate seat to Baucus with only token opposite because … Baucus is a cloaked Republican.)

The article notes how Obama, who pledged to limit the abuse of the ambassador-appointment process, has instead abused it beyond any before him in modern politics. It’s just one more piece of evidence Obama is, as Nader described him, nothing but a “con man.”
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PS: Most readers, politically in-astute, will interpret this article to conclude that I am a Republican, that I support Daines. Not true. I simply conclude that of our two choices (only) for public office, Democrats somehow manage to consistently top Republicans in sleaze.

Pain makes people grow up faster, makes them smarter, stronger.