Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. (JFK, Yale graduation, 1962)

If newscaster ‘facts’ land in your lap and you uncritically accept them as true; if you find yourself siding with one or another pundit in a televised debate; if you repeat talking points; if you’ve never looked at the hard evidence of the major events of our times, accepting official explanations as true; if you have ever ridiculed someone who does not accept official truth….

You’re an American. A thought-controlled, behavior controlled, no-threat-to-anyone-in-power American.

American public opinion is under complete control of the state. You, as a Democrat, might vociferously disagree with Republicans. That’s allowed, even encouraged, and the state will even furnish the issues you are allowed to vociferously disagree about. (Abortion, gun control, etc.) Once elected, they are the same people. But if you stray beyond the bounds of party politics, you’ll be ostracized, marginalized.

Think of what they do now at political conventions: They erect fenced areas, force demonstrators inside them, and then ignore them. They are called “free speech zones.” I am not kidding about that. This is what they are called.

That’s a nice metaphor for party politics. But there are real jails too. Eugene Debs campaigned from a prison cell in 1920, and Ralph Nader was arrested when he appeared at the two-party “debate” in 2000. We are only allowed freedom within the fences. Stray outside, the gloves come off.

Once every two or four years you get to throw the bums out. It does not change anything, but validates you. That is why we have elections. Otherwise, we might have real change, real progress, which is not allowed.

If the man or woman you support enjoys wide media coverage and is welcomed at newspapers editorial board meetings for serious scrutiny by serious journalists, and gets to ride on floats and is touted as a “front-runner” … move on. You’re supporting an apparatchik. Your candidate has already been vetted and found acceptable to insiders.

American party politics is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

We are in Aspen, Colorado today. Our trip here started two days ago when we drove, late in the day, to Crested Butte, a gateway to the Maroon Bell Snowmass Wilderness. Its claim to fame is flowers. On the Crested Butte side, the glacial till provides high moisture retention and flowers grow in amazing abundance. There is an eleven-mile trail through there, over a mountain pass, to where we are now. We decided last year to book a room here and make that hike, and spend a couple of days here during their music festival.

Since we are here without a vehicle, we had to pack our street clothing and stuff in, meaning I loaded a regular backpack instead of a day pack. I haven’t done that since 2011, carried such a heavy load. The hike was long, and included a 2000 foot ascent over a pass and then a 3000 food drop into Aspen. There were a couple of stream crossings, but all told, it was not a difficult affair. Yet we were very tired. Must be that aging thing I keep hearing about.

The focal point of the area on this side are the Maroon Bells, two fourteeners that sit at the head of the valley we came down. One young man we talked to while waiting for the bus yesterday is going to climb them, both of them, later this week. It looks like a technical affair to me, as these are not walk-ups. It makes me feel old and silly for being so tired after having merely walked through the area.

Other folks we met on the trail were doing the “four pass” trek, a 20+ mile trip that, as the name says, takes them up and over four high mountain passes on a circular route starting and ending in Aspen. (I say “in Aspen,” but it is a shuttle bus trip of about ten miles to the trail heads.) That’s an overnight affair, at least a two-day trip.

As we got closer to the trail head, where the bulk of the hikers are found, we found a cacophony of languages, much like hiking in the Alps. This is always a delight.

The photos shown here are pulled off the Internet, explaining their high quality.

And then … we were so tired we just turned on the tube and vegetated last night, and were reminded once again what is being done to the American people. The programming is stupid, and the ads incessant. I don’t, can’t make myself watch “news,” as that is the source of my countrymen’s colossal ignorance. It has two effects, one to dumb them down, and two to insulate them so that they do not know its true impact. They do not know what they do not know. It’s diabolical. Merely having that thing on has got to be harmful to people, and god almighty … what about the children?

Do you ever wonder why, after the success do the movie Rocky, that there was Rocky II, III, IV, V, VI …. people eat it up, that’s why. A successful movie formula is gold, money in the bank.

Even so, I do wish that the American public were a tad less gullible. Just once. Just a tad.

Read this. And this. And get your beer. We will cry together.
_____________
*I was looking for a dead, moribund movie franchise to name this post, and remember the Police Academy movies, and then discovered that Police Academy 8 is scheduled for release in 2014! This post just writes itself! The American public will eat it up!

The U.S. has opted not to bomb Iraq at this time.

Here’s how to read that decision:

• 1. The U.S. lies about everything they do.
• 2. Ergo, they are lying about this too.

You figure the rest out! We just got back from a week in Yellowstone, sleeping with the grizzlies, walking until my feet burned like firecracker punks. Man I am tired!

Here’s some extraneous data to consider:

• 1. When they say bombing “Iraq,” they mean “ISIS, or the US/French/Turkish-run terrorists that have recently been turned out of Syria.
• 2. The U.S. rarely turns down a bombing opportunity.
• 3. Ergo, they might be bombing and not telling us about it, or might be holding back.
• 4. If they do bomb, it will not be against ISIS forces, which are allies in terror, but rather to assist ISIS forces. So if they bomb, it will be against Iraqi cities and towns, to soften the place for ISIS.
• 5. They will lie about that.
• 5. That’s because they lie about everything they do.

OK … Take it Phil.

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?

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.

In 1914 the German Army marched through Belgium on its way to France, and snipers were shooting at soldiers who had believed the stories of glory and fame. Rather than fighting a noble cause, they were falling in the mud like peasants. The German propaganda arm saw value in this, and so began to fashion a stereotype for their public of Belgians acting as barbarians. All is fair.
Continue reading “The greatest generation” →