Marathon bombing is now settled history. What next?

Posting will be light here in the coming days, and if I write again about Boston, shoot your monitor.

The Boston Marathon bombing was a staged event, and many questions linger. But another event will be along soon, so this one needs to go on the shelf. Maybe fifty years from now some young participant will write in his memoirs how well it worked. Keep in mind Karl Rove’s* words as recounted by Ron Suskind,

…the aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

A few concluding thoughts:

Continue reading “Marathon bombing is now settled history. What next?” →

The power of suggestion

Years ago a former Washington Post editor, Ben Bagdikian, lamented that “When 50 men and women, chiefs of their corporations, control more than half the information and ideas that reach 220 million Americans, it is time for Americans to examine the institutions from which they receive their daily picture of the world.”

Today the number is more like five – Time-Warner, Viacom, Newscorp, Disney, Gannett – that’s the vast majority of our “news” dissemination process. Of course it’s not that simple but the important understanding about American news is that a handful of people have overarching influence over what we see and read.

WARNING! FAKE GORE FOLLOWS!
Continue reading “The power of suggestion” →

Free market magic in health care

magic wandImagine the following scenario: A married couple has health insurance through his employer. Having just married, she had before carried her own insurance as a private individual, but in a gesture of friendliness, his boss suggested that she be added to his policy. But his was a small company, and costs were mounting, so that the cost of his insurance was approaching $10,000 per year. In the meantime, she had a bout with melanoma, and a couple of surgeries had probably saved her life.

He is called into the executive suite one day, and told that the health insurance policy is cancelled, and that each employee now must obtain insurance in the private market. But, he says, my wife had melanoma. She can’t get a policy anymore! The company was not aware of this, but the decision was made, the results final.
Continue reading “Free market magic in health care” →

Everyone has a part to play, including you, informed citizens!

Movies routinely take us to other worlds apart from our own, and when willing suspension of disbelief is in place, offer great enjoyment. We can travel the galaxy, witness ax murders, and share beds with beautiful people. That ability, to fantasize, ought to be in place as we read and watch news.
Continue reading “Everyone has a part to play, including you, informed citizens!” →

“Something stinks in Boston: Our noses work even as our eyes cannot see

“Something stinks in Boston,” I was told. That’s a really interesting statement, as it is sensual but avoids mention of what the eyes have seen.

McLuhan, on right, in Allen's Annie Hall
McLuhan, on right, in Allen’s Annie Hall
Aside from the 1) incuriosity of journalists and 2) fear of marginalization of even curious citizens, the most distressing feature of American news reporting is the power of television. The medium owns the American mind. Dissemination of news on the Internet appears now to have the same hold, so that younger people not watching TV talking heads are demonstrating the same lack of guile in viewing the events of our times. TV news is not a description of events given to us for discussion and analysis. It is reality.
Continue reading ““Something stinks in Boston: Our noses work even as our eyes cannot see” →

Word barf

obfuscationSenator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts seems like a good head with some real concern for her voting constituents. She’s an advocate of consumer reform, and one item on her agenda is elimination of take-it-or-leave it contracts for various products and services. Most common are mobile phone and cable TV services, but checking accounts are also an issue. She calls them “word-barf” contracts, meaning that they are unnecessarily long and serve only the interest of the party who prepares the contract. Courts are lenient in these matters, but it is rare that small matters like this ever make it to court. In addition, such contracts usually insert an arbitration clause instead of court settlement.

We recently listened to a sales pitch regarding a home security contract. I had a notion there was some threat there that we needed to manage, but quickly got over the idea. But we did tentatively agree to take their service. They asked us to sign and return a contract.
Continue reading “Word barf” →

The stigmata

“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
– William Colby, former CIA director

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
– William Casey, CIA Director (in his first staff meeting, 1981)

impunityYears ago, before I met my wife, I was in a relationship that I knew could not last. A painful breakup was on the horizon, and it would fall on me to end it. I occasionally hummed words from a song by Willie Nelson, “if I were the man that you wanted, I would not be that man that I am.” The beauty of those words, I later realized, is their two edges.

4&20 now takes on the whole idea of conspiracy , referring to an essay by Jarrod Shanahan called I want to believe. I want to deal here with just snippets of the essay and comments that follow, but in the following framework: People conspire when they don’t want their activities to be discovered. The best word to describe this behavior is “conspiracy.” No small part of our criminal code deals specifically with conspiracy. The Mafia is a conspiracy, RICO laws were written to punish people at the top of conspiracies who order crimes but do not get their hands dirty. Popular lore has it that 19 Arabs controlled by a man in a cave pulled off 9/11. All of the nonsense surrounding Watergate was supposedly to uncover a conspiracy. JFK and RFK were killed as the result of … oh, wait … lone nuts.
Continue reading “The stigmata” →

Transformation

A few of us are fortunate to have transformational experiences. I have described my own as being the result of luck. Indeed happenstance had quite a bit to do with it. At the tender age of 36 I exited the formal workaday job environment and began laboring on my own account and on my own schedule. The formula for an independent CPA was to work even harder, explore leads, find new clients, market, market, market. Since I didn’t really like the work I was doing and had enough income to survive, I didn’t do any of that. On any given day when work was done, I was off running, working on the house, spending time with the kids and reading. I behaved in this manner even as I knew that I was supposed to be working that business, marketing, marketing, marketing.

All to no end, I must add. I hadn’t been much of a reader in my formal working days, at best managing a Stephen King novel or whatever was popular, even James Dobson and his barbaric ideas about child rearing. (My oldest daughter set me straight on that – a shoulder pinch is cruel and painful.) With more time on my hands, I began to scour the fiction stacks at the library, and came across a few authors I remember with fondly to this day, among them Ludlum and Lawrence Sanders. (Modern-day “Robert Ludlum” works are shit, by the way. Ignore anything written after 2001.)
Continue reading “Transformation” →

What’s up with our news media?

orionIn my brief lifetime I have witnessed four assassination attempts on members of the Kennedy family, three successful. A pilot who flew members of the JFK assassination team out of Dallas confided to a witness, Wayne January (as reported post-mortem by British author Mathew Smith), “They are not only going to kill the president, they are going to kill Robert Kennedy and any other Kennedy who gets into that position.”

Such intrigue is unfathomable to innocent Americans who imagine they are governed by people who are like them. This is the great advantage that people who seek power for power’s sake have over regular people. It is the central focus of Machiavelli’s The Prince. They understand us. We do not understand them. They can imitate us, we only imitate them in movies and TV shows, and not well. Hannibal Lechter only bears faint resemblance to a true psychopath. Dick Cheney, Zbigniew Brzezinski are the real deal.

The four Kennedy assassination attempts, John, Robert, Ted and John Jr., stand out like bright stars, and not just dots. I have not seen or read one person in our news media who has the ability (or at least admits it) to connect those dots, even as they are so bright as to hurt the eyes. All events are random. Add a host of other murders and unexplained deaths, timely scandals, even coincidences as obscure as a powerful congressman* caught in a public fountain late at night with a hooker … and perhaps it is but a matter of attrition. The good journalists go do something else. The ones we are left with, even if they do have some dot-connecting ability, are either clueless or know to shut up.

Not knowing, or knowing and keeping quiet … same difference.
Continue reading “What’s up with our news media?” →