There are things we are told which are plainly obviously lies, such as magic bullets and aircraft slicing through steel buildings like a knife through butter, all utterly impossible, defying logic and physics. Yet dogged doctrinaire supporters of power demand that we pretend to believe these things to be real and undeniably true. This is the source of our cognitive dissonance, power over our perceptions, to tell us that we see one thing that is actually something else. Those of us who do not see what power tells us to see are indeed the odd ones.

I wrote that, and it is bad form to quote myself. But it does, more or less, add yellow highlighter to the center of my existence. And I’ve been kicking it around for a couple of days here as I avoid writing on the blog. If I cannot get one true thing across, what is the point?

There are degrees of acceptance of the above. For me it is easy. I simply say that if something cannot be true, then it is not true. On the far side, the other end, people like James Conner, for instance, ridicule what is obviously true as a belief in impossible conspiracy, as if saying things that are obviously true is stupid! Most people fall somewhere in between, troubled, wanting to belong to the mainstream and so filing away their doubts in a dark place. That is the definition of cognitive dissonance.

What Conner does is a manifestation of denial, of aggressive stupidity, and yet I know he is not stupid. If the dissonance resides so uncomfortably in him that he feels a need to lash out, then he is perhaps on the verge of internal harmony. Perhaps he will come around. Perhaps his isolation right now is a time during which he is confronting his own internal contradictions.

Perhaps not. His writing lately offers no hint of any forward movement.

In the meantime, there is politics. We always have politics. It does us no good; it solves no problems. It merely keeps us busy. The political system is too corrupt for mere intermittent unfocused anxiety expressed as well-intended votes to have any impact on the power behind the candidates. Perhaps, if one can admit that certain physical feats are impossible, then a clean accounting of the soul will yield yet another hard and undeniable truth: We do not live in a democracy, a republic, a democratic republic, or anything even remotely representing that kind of place. There is only one way that public opinion matters in this country, and that is when it is unified against power.

Unless some entertainer suggests on TV that we should do that, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

One of the most incomprehensible features of the Citizens United ruling by our Mullahs, our Supreme Court, was the secrecy provisions. That made no sense – even if they decreed that money should rule, even a modicum of democratic governance would indicate that we should at least know where the money comes from.

As always, it came as a revelation from someone else that made me slap my head … Of course! The secrecy provisions are in place because CU allows unfettered manipulation of political campaigns by organized crime.

We then need to understand what “organized crime” means. There’s an old meme at work that Castro kicked the mob off the island of Cuba in the early 1960’s, along with United Fruit, oil and gas and mining interests, etc. The assumption there is that there are legitimate imperialists, and there are mobsters. But take it one step further: The Mob, and not the CIA, killed JFK, say Hartmann and Waldron. That makes it more palatable.

But what if they are all one and the same? What if the mob operates under the same rules, and with the same exemptions from civil society as do Exxon, Citibank, and Chiquita Banana (once known as United Fruit).

Isn’t it then all an academic exercise? The Mob killed JFK! The CIA did! The military-industrial complex did. But I repeat myself. And the Mob/CIA/MIC obviously own some of our Mullahs, perhaps all of them. That would make them mere tools, or toys of tyrants.

This is just something I heard last week, wrote down and forgot. It’s from Gordon Duff:

Americans have been over a decade in Afghanistan, and no one has ever seen anything leave a poppy field and move out of the country to a heroin processing plant. In ten years.

The comment is sardonic, of course. The Taliban had the poppy crop under control before the Americans arrived, and since that invasion in 2001, new records are set on a regular basis. The US claims to be trying to stem the flow, but this is a lie. The US is there to protect the fields, as the drug money is an important part of covert operations for intelligence agencies. It ends up in Wall Street banks, London, you know, with the cocaine snorting set, as opposed to crack users, who often land in jail. War on drugs, you see.

Don’t kid yourself – the US is not involved in a war on drugs. Afghanistan, probably Mexico and Colombia too, are wars for drugs.

That’s your country, folks. That’s what the boys are fighting for.

The phenomenon we are seeing here is not new. The degree of self-delusion (if that is what it is) is impressive, saying “sometimes a year has passed without a single comment.” It’s deliberate isolation, the result of polarization. It’s also arrogance, but I’ve learned in my years of treading this planet that arrogance is a product of insecurity.

I have never wanted to hang out with people who only “discuss” things with people who agree with them. I have always wanted to take the fight to the enemy. In so doing, I’ve learned a lot, and have had changes of heart and mind on many topics:

• I used to believe in a thing called “peak oil,” and was wrong. I read scholarly books on the subject too, reaffirming my rightness on the topic before learning how wrong it is.
• I once bought into the notion that the Mob, acting alone, killed JFK. I was wrong. The books I read on that subject, attempting to make that case, combined were over 1200 pages. All they did was assemble selected evidence, ignoring inconvenient stuff.
• I used to think that the underclass is a victim of the upper classes. Yeah, that’s wrong too. Victimhood is overrated, and should not be enabled. (There are victims on this planet who need our help. Instead, we are bombing them, as we speak!)
• I used to have a whole lot more respect for feminists than I do now. Speaking of professional victims.
• I am looking cross-eyed at Chomsky these days, thinking perhaps I’ve stumbled on a fatal flaw. Long story, I’ll have to face that one of these mornings and write a long dreary essay on it. But my view of him is evolving.
• I find myself wondering if global warming, climate change and all of that is just another hoax. That’s why I never write about it. One, the science is beyond me, and two, it could be mere power of suggestion. I am susceptible to that, just like everyone.

These kind of attitudinal changes can only come about when people who disagree with each other stand toe-to-toe and have it out. We are all equipped with an automatic avoidance mechanism (seen above). We instead need to bore into those topics about which we have firm beliefs and not enough evidence to support them. Often enough the people with whom I disagree are right, and I am wrong.

But so what?!! Who among us gets to go through life being right all the time?

Oh yeah – Rob Natelson. He was always right, every word he wrote, and then he went into hiding. Big Swede – when the going gets tough, when you attempt to press him on a topic, Swede gets going. Out the door. And James Conner. He’s hiding. He’s afraid. He’s wrong about stuff. A lot of stuff. Like all of us. And he cannot face it. That is sad.
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PS: I do not know what kind of comments Conner has been getting that so upset him, but for the record, none have been from me. I have made no attempts to penetrate his fortress.