A thought experiment

Rather than trying to explain this, I want to demonstrate it. The idea is that voting records of office holders do not matter.

Let’s take two Senators, say Tester and Daines from my former home state of Montana, one a Democrat and one a Republican. Lets assume that there are ten pieces of important legislation, and that Tester and Daines voted as indicated:

  • 1. A bill to designate certain areas of Montana wilderness. (DEFEATED 27-73) Tester votes Yeah, Daines Nay.
  • 2. A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code to index the floor over which Social Security benefits are taxed. (DEFEATED 46-54) Tester votes Y, Daines N
  • 3. A bill to release highway funds for portions of the Montana Interstate badly in need of repair. (PASSES 95-5) Tester votes Y, Daines votes N
  • 4. A bill to remove marijuana from the banned substances list. (DEFEATED 96-4) Tester voted N, Daines voted N.
  • 5. A bill to protect endangered species by re-listing wolves as a protected species. (DEFEATED 60-40) Tester voted Y, Daines voted N
  • 6. A vote to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. (Approved 67-33) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y)
  • 7. A bill to authorize funding for forest fire fighters for the coming fiscal year (PASSED 61-39) Tester voted Y, Daines voted N)
  • 8. A bill to overturn portions of the Affordable Health Care Act regarding mandatory payment of premiums to private corporations. (DEFEATED 57-43) Tester voted N, Daines voted Y
  • 9. A bill to override presidential veto of approval of the Keystone Pipeline (PASSED 67-33) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y
  • 10. A bill to approve the weapons budget for the coming year. (PASSED 98-0) Tester voted Y, Daines voted Y

Looking over the voting record, the Conservation Voters, based on votes 1, 5 and 7, gave Jon tester a 100% approval record, and Steve Daines a 0% approval rating.

Based on 8,9 and 10, the American Conservative Union gave Jon Tester a 67% approval rating, and Steve Daines a 100% rating.

AARP issues a favorable scorecard to Tester based on 2 and 8, and Daines a negative.
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Now, go back to the list above, and reverse the votes. Change every Tester Y to a N, and the same for Daines. Note that in doing this, nothing changes except two very critical bills – TPP and Keystone. On those votes, their votes would have made a difference, and they both voted with the Republican majority.

However, each will have a completely different voting record to present to voters and to the groups that tally votes.

Voting records do not matter. They can be and are tailored to suit the needs of the office holder.

  • Most votes are lopsided, so a senator can vote either way without affecting the outcome.
  • Senators agree in advance on who is allowed to be for or against certain bills, often based on election cycles.
  • Some bills, like TPP and Keystone, are supported by powerful interest groups, and so transcend parties and always receive just enough support to pass.

Tester could easily present himself as a Republican, Daines as a Democrat, without affecting the outcome of legislation, and voters would support them based on party affiliation.

Voting records are completely meaningless.

Passing thought … censorship in the US is omnipresent and ‘surprisingly effective’

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.” (Orwell, Introduction to Animal Farm)

I could write about partisan politics, as such writing is encouraged and has no impact on power. It also generates readership. Partisan blogs run up all kinds of numbers. People love to squabble back and forth about our false issues, fake division, wedge issues, false ideologies. The whole notion of “left” and “right” fades to black time and again when some issue, important to power, comes to the fore. Whether it is the Trans-Pacific Partnerships, the Keystone Pipeline, wars or selling off of the commons or refusal to regulate or punish wrongdoers, criminals and corrupt officials, the parties are one.

But on trivia, they are at each others’ throats. Thus do we enjoy the illusion of freedom from censorship.

I was just reading Orwell’s introduction to Animal Farm, which was not published with the original book. In it he’s upset that he is not allowed to criticize Russia, and that the implication that the book is about Russia has prevented its being published. His biggest complaint is what is that he found censorship in England to be largely voluntary, but still able to silence people with “surprising effectiveness.”

So too in the U.S. in 2015 – all of that prattling about partisan politics goes on because it is allowed to go on. Electing a Democrat or a Republican is a harmless activity, as each is beholden to the same powers once elected.

On the other hand, discussions of unpopular issues is not allowed in mainstream publications and media outlets. We are as effectively censored as the U.S.S.R. was ever, and it is done without overt government pressure. The only noise that is allowed to escape the cage is the pointless chatter.

Orwell closes his Introduction with a chilling thought:

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

How much of our civic dialogue is about who should or should not be allowed access onto public forums, as if people cannot use their brains and judge ideas on their own merit? If a group of dedicated citizens question official truth about public assassinations or 9/11 or any other important event, so what? Why make them shut up? Why turn them away at the door? What scares power so that it cannot allow some honest dissent? Why do people go along with it, as if censorship makes them smarter?

Censorship in this country is pervasive and oppressive. I feel it. If you don’t, it can only be because you are thinking thoughts that do not trouble anyone in power.

Anyway, tomorrow I carry on as I have been. I am aware of two things: People are curious, and afraid to be known to be curious. For that, you should be ashamed.

Tyranny of the dull

In the coming days and weeks I am going to write about the important events of my times (I turn 65 this month) with an eye on details. I will write short pieces, as long pieces do not get read. (This piece is 626 words, and too long. I don’t imagine that longer equals better. Quite the opposite.)

I will try to walk and chew gum, including not only our important historical coups d’état, but current events in Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, France and Germany. We appear to be on the verge of something big. My focus will be on details, as most of what we are intended to see is a lie, and only details can help us punch through to get at truth.

Americans are encouraged to be incurious about major events. People of a more inquisitive nature have been successfully marginalized, so that we have, in effect, a tyranny of the dull. It’s an effective thought control regime, and is extremely difficult to overcome. Normal exposure to American news and entertainment media offers no incentives towards intelligence or curiosity.

Literacy by AgePNGHere are some elements of the herding effect of our news outlets:

  • FOX News has an older audience who have mostly lost their cognitive skills. Note in the breakdown by age to the left, that 2-3% of senior citizens were proficient in cognitive skills, a serious decline from the 12-13% of younger people. Natural aging might explain this, but it might also reflect years of exposure to a dumbing-down media. There is no avenue in mainstream media for maintaining higher levels of intellectual ability.
  • People who do have higher cognitive levels are more likely to get their news from NPR, PBS, or perhaps the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (which is charged with containing a smart and investment-savvy following). These audiences imagine themselves better informed than their FOX counterparts. They all absorb the same information in different formats, and are only segmented for marketing purposes.

News consumers above are effectively walled off from each other. There’s little travel between the segments.

There is more segmentation:

  • There is an Agitprop media, right-wing talk radio (and a small “left” counterpart). Audiences for these outlets, functionally illiterate and kept in a state of perpetual anger, are used as a bludgeoning force against members of the media and public officials. It’s an enormous echo chamber where people absorb only selected talking points of selected “news” events*
  • On the “left,” among more intellectually curious people, there is a court jester system in place. These are outlets like Daily Show, Bill Maher, John Oliver and the whole of the MSNBC crowd. (Oliver appears to be almost poised to say something important. He won’t, of course. Bill Maher learned that lesson in 2002.) These outlets encourage their self-imagined smart-set followers to focus on the failings of their opposites in the two-party system. (Jon Stewart made a career of ridiculing FOX, whose viewers are barely sentient.) The effect is to mute any energetic organizing by keeping people focused on the wrong targets.
  • Button02The vast majority of Americans are turned off and indifferent, only passively absorbing information in a haphazard manner from primary and secondary education and the entertainment systems. Passive exposure yields a muddled mainstream, but they are strongly encouraged to vote and imagine themselves vigilant citizens.

It is important to break free of this system. I was as much a part of it as any when a few details that did not make sense caused me to look a little deeper.
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*Thus do we see leaders of the Republican Party, who need this sector in their voting base, behaving as if they were stupid. That is only an act to satisfy the Limbaugh set. Some, like Ted Cruz, might be genuinely stupid. Most are not.

Small world

Hale Boggs
Hale Boggs
The Warren Commission, established to investigate the murder of John F. Kennedy, was comprised of men like Allen Dulles and Gerald Ford, a spook and a dullard. It did not do any investigating, but rather relied on the FBI and CIA for information, and so was (willingly) led down a garden path to a preordained conclusion.

One member, who was a dissident, was Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs. The name is probably not familiar, but readers, especially liberals, might know his daughter, NPR’s Cokie Roberts.

Boggs was hesitant to sign the Warren Report but was under enormous pressure. His wife Lindy said he’d wished he’d never been on the commission and wished he’d never signed the report. He told an aide that “[J Edgar] Hoover lied his eyes out to the commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the guns, you name it.”

Hale Boggs’ small airplane disappeared in Alaska in 1972 and his body was never found. It was probably murder, but with no plane and no body, there’s no case. Small planes are deadly for dissidents of all types in this country. (The Kennedy family has suffered six small plane crashes, five of them fatal.)

That’s all old news. Here’s a “cosmic coincidence,” something that simply defies imagination and explanation, but really is just a coincidence. On his fatal Alaska trip, Boggs was driven to the airport by a young future president, Bill Clinton.

A good day to die

We had some damage to our roof last year due to a hail storm, and are looking for a contractor for repairs. It reminded me how useless the search engines have become for … searching for stuff. The shills, hucksters, carnival barkers have taken over. The same companies turn up again and again in various forms because they paid for that result.

Gone are the days when a search for a business yields an honest search result.

Back a few years when I was still advertising for business, I was offered a deal where my name would appear at or near the top of page one for anyone looking for a CPA in our area. I asked how that could work when there were hundreds of others being offered the same deal. I did not get a straight answer – these are, after all, hucksters. The real answer was the search engine results are tailored to individuals, so that if I used my computer to test search their promise, my computer would yield … me. It was a scam. What’s new?

Thank you, wonderful free market, for taking the best thing to come along in our lifetime, the search engine, and turning it into crap. We finally found a list of reputable roofing contractors, and here is how we did it: We asked our insurance company to provide us with names. That was the only way to break through the clutter – we had to bypass the Internet.

Search engines stopped working once the marketing people got their busy little fingers into them.

Years ago we were all being plagued by pop-up ads, so much so that the television news people even reported on it. A TV story I saw ran down some of the ads to an agency in New York. They asked a gal working there about the annoyance factor. She said, and I quote: “Well duh! It’s our job to get your attention.”

The reporter then turned to the camera, smiled and winked at us, took out a gun and put a bullet in her brain. He was never prosecuted. Everyone realized it was the right thing to do.

(By the way, I am aware of the irony of little pop-up ads appearing in the Bill Hicks piece above. They know we hate them. They are just taunting us.)

Incuriosity versus stupidity: A distinction without a difference

brusselOn these early spring days I’ve been working in our garage while listening to Mae Brussel radio shows from the early 1970’s. She was on the air for one hour weekly for years in northern California in a time when radio stations had “public affairs” departments. That’s an oxymoron, I realize.

Brussel was an unusual woman, inquisitive and thorough. She harvested information from newspapers, magazines and news reports, maintaining cross-referenced files on people and subjects in the manner of J. Edgar Hoover, but for a better purpose. She read every book that time allowed her. In so doing, a different world unfolded before her. She was not mystical, just observant.

Today we would label such behavior an aberration, and she would be called a “conspiracy theorist.” That is part of our thought control regime, designed to keep normally curious people from straying out of bounds. These are oppressive times – we have so much information at our fingertips, and are so afraid to access it. Worse than that, people are mostly boring, smug and credulous at once, self-infused with the idea that they are somehow clever and wise for all of the things they do not know and refuse to investigate. Eeesh!

Incuriosity and indifference, even if studied, are indistinguishable from stupidity. But I digress.

I am not nostalgic. I do not believe in the ‘good old days. I listen to Brussel with an ear attuned to similarities between those times and now. There are many. Then as now, public officials were usually in some manner compromised if not overtly corrupt, and TV was a drug.

But there was a difference. Brussel’s audience was people attuned and aware of incongruities between news and reality. She was constantly fielding letters and calls from sharp listeners. It was a minority of people of course, but enough that her radio show had a large following.

Mae was speaking to college students too. She was warning them that the government was tired of the activism of the sixties, the protests, teach-ins – a climate of vigilance that made the ordinary criminal activity of public officials more difficult. They wanted to dumb it all down again. She saw on the horizon a problem with drugs, and told college kids that they would be easy to come by and to avoid them. She urged her listeners to keep their minds clean and sharp.

That was prescient, I would say. Drug use has always been with us. We all know the image of the stoner and the attitude that accompanies habitual marijuana use – a mildly delirious indifference.

Pot is legal where I live, and the movement is spreading. This is not a sea change – as my son reminded me, pot has always been legal for white folks. Legalization will allow it to penetrate deeper into society. It was a huge tool in the law enforcement arsenal for harassing and imprisoning minorities, and police will have to reload their quivers with other tools. They’ll figure that out.

Legalization of marijuana is a step forward for civil liberties, for minorities anyway. But habitual use ought to be discouraged as well. A government that can stigmatize intelligence and curiosity ought to be able to attach a touch of shame to pot use. But they won’t.

Pot and stupidity go hand-in-hand. But a dumbed down public is a good doggy. Here’s a bone. Or a bong.

Anomalies, moles, patsies, sheepdipping (Part 2)

This is a continuation of this post.

Squawks: All passenger airliners have “squawk” buttons in the cockpits, one of many anti-hijacking protections. Cockpits are also sealed so that strangers cannot randomly enter, even by force. If a hijacking is attempted, the pilot merely hits the squawk button, and within six minutes a fighter jet will appear and escort the plane to a landing. On 9/11/2001 there were eight pilots, all swinging dicks with military backgrounds, but not one of them managed to hit a squawk button. In addition, it remains unexplained how purported hijackers made their way to the cockpits, which do not have swinging doors.
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The FBI catches a lot of grief among skeptics, but it is a large organization and most of its people are trying to do their job, which is investigating crime. The organization is very good at its job. Here’s an example:

In August of 2001 FBI Agent FBI Agent Kenneth Williams in Phoenix notified superiors that eight bin Laden agents were training in an Arizona flight school. The report was ignored, and later Minneapolis Agent Coleen Rowley claimed in a thirteen page letter that senior FBI officials created a “roadblock” to derail the probe. Rowley claimed that FBI agents were so frustrated by the lack of response that they directly notified the CIA. They were, of course, reprimanded for this breach of protocol, that is, for notifying the CIA.

Most would quickly write it off to bureaucratic bungling, but anyone who is remotely familiar with spooks will instantly recognize a few things:

  • Honest agents were doing their job.
  • They were intercepted and thwarted by moles, or inside agents covertly working for those who were planning 9/11.
  • The “hijackers” were being babysat, or monitored to be sure that when they were needed to take the fall for the crime, they were free and available. (It would not do, for instance, if Osama bin Laden was in jail on that day. He had to be kept free and his whereabouts known.)
  • Finally, the “hijackers,” who were in reality patsies, were being sheepdipped*.

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An anomaly here and there is to be expected, and not every oddball occurrence is significant. When they stack up, eyebrows should be raised. Of course, part of the American education process involves the shaving of eyebrows, or putting a damper on natural curiosity, but 9/11/2001 was a circus of anomalies. Thousands of people know much more than they dare say for a simple reason: They like being alive.
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*In ranching, “sheepdipping” is a process by which the animals are cleansed of lice and parasites by physically dipping them in cleansing solutions. In the spy game, sheepdipping is the word used when an innocent person is framed in advance to take the fall for a later crime. Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, and was sheepdipped and put in place to take the fall for the JFK murder, allowing the real criminals to escape. The 9/11 “hijackers” were not actually training to fly passenger airliners, but rather were being manipulated to look guilty to distract people from the real criminals, still at large.

Intermission: A reminder … basic rules of probability

Please review the following posts on critical thinking and probability before proceeding.

Critical thinking skills and conspiracies
Critical thinking skills and conspiracies (Part 2)
Critical thinking skills and conspiracies (Part 3)
The high improbability of certain events
The extreme unlikelihood of certain events happening by chance

Swede reminded me in the comments below yesterday’s post that coincidences just happen, and I should just accept that or something is wrong with my mind. Sigh.

Indeed they do. I’ve had some crazy ones. For instance, when we lived in Bozeman our neighbors up the road, Mark and Cathy, asked if I was related to Tom Tokarski. Indeed I was, as my brother at that time lived just down the road in Livingston. But they were talking about another Tom Tokarski, one who was their neighbor in Indiana and who was a citizen activist fighting to stop the building of a road though a local undeveloped area.

What are the odds, with maybe five Tom Tokarski’s in the country, that Mark and Cathy would be neighbors with one in Indiana, and then move a thousand miles away to be neighbors with the brother of another one in Montana? Very long indeed, but just one of those things. We have all had coincidences like that in our lives.

In the posts linked above, I am not talking about that, but rather the statistical likelihood of related coincidences. When coincidences have an event or person or place in common, we can apply some basic math to determine probability. It’s the logic of the coin toss, that’s all.

Please do go read those posts if you are having trouble understanding why, for instance,

  • Charles Peirce was able to detect that a will was a forgery, or
  • Why it is extremely unlikely that FOUR hijackings would be successful on a given day, or
  • It is so unlikely that a hijacker’s passport would survive and be found in the rubble even as no parts of the plane survived, or
  • That the surveillance system at the Pentagon, along with the national air defense system, would go haywire on the very day that Vigilant Guardian, the biggest national air defense military drill of the year was running.

(I have not yet mentioned the seventeen military and civil defense drills that were running on 9/11/2001, and how they were intricately connected to the events of that day.)

In other words, if you don’t have a basic understanding of probability, this won’t register with you. If you do have that understanding, it will trouble you.

Anomalies, moles, patsies, sheepdipping

Anomaly (NOUN): something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.

Anomalies often serve as doorways for investigators, as they can lead to important information. 9/11/2001 was an anomaly circus. I will highlight a few today and tomorrow.
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Anyone who has flown on an American passenger airline knows that the flights are almost always full, or nearly so. The airlines vary the size of the aircraft and shift passengers so that they maximize occupancy on any flight. They are pretty good at it. It’s rare even to have an empty seat next to us on most flights.

However, on September 11, 2001, the four flights that were supposedly hijacked carried very few passengers. In fact, on Flight 93, the source of the famous “Let’s Roll!” fable, each passenger enjoyed a full row of seats. Here’s the occupancy for that day:

  • Flight 11: 180 seats, 76 passengers;
  • Flight 175: 180/46
  • Flight 77: 200/50
  • Flight 93: 200/26

Such a shortage of passengers on these flights is suspicious. The 9/11 Commission did not investigate the matter.
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“Short sales,” for those who are not familiar with stock market terminology, are a trading device used by investors to take advantage of a falling stock price. He “borrows” stock from a broker, sells it, and when the price falls buys it back and returns it to the broker, pocketing the difference. A “put” option is a form of shorting the market, betting that a stock will fall without actually buying and selling the stock.

Inside information is a huge part of stock market success, so the SEC monitors the Chicago Board Options Exchange for anomalies in puts and shorts.

Three stocks were heavily shorted immediately prior to 9/11/2001, United and American Airlines (whose planes were hijacked) and Morgan Stanly Dean Witter (offices in World Trade Center). There were spikes in activity on these stocks that caught the eye of investigators after 9/11. The Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, and 4,516 on American Airlines, and 12,215 on Morgan. Previous activity might have seen at most a few hundred puts on these stocks, and there was nothing in the news just indicate that their price might fall. Someone was operating on inside information.

I regard this as humorous – someone, knowing 9/11 was coming down, simply could not resist. Mendacity, treachery, and greed operated hand-in-hand. Who did these puts? We don’t know. $2.5 million in profits lay unclaimed to this day. The 9/11 Commission investigated, of course, but found that there was no connection to Osama bin Laden, its predetermined villain, and so did not do further inquires.

More to follow. Stay tuned.
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PS: This is in response to comments below: At some point in the near future I will write about the so-called “truth” movements and “truthers.” At this point the organizations with the words “…for 9/11 Truth” are Architects and Engineers, Scholars, Pilots, possibly one or two others. I avoid them, regarding them as merely part of the ongoing coverup.