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Miscellany
I had a bit of time on our trip home to listen to podcasts and review Thoreau’s thoughts on civil disobedience. People are calling for Edward Snowden’s head due to “treason,” but I don’t see it. What he disclosed is already known. It’s “legal” in the sense that a congress with a gun at its head passed it in a mindless time. That was part of the intent of the 9/11 attack. We need, at this time, not some spook coming out from the shadows to tell us what vigilant citizens already know, but rather a popular movement to remove the people from office who gave us USAPATRIOT and the people behind them who gave us 9/11, and that is not going to happen. Rather, we move forward.
Continue reading “Miscellany”
Obama send me no more drones …
It’s hard to keep up with events while traveling the Interstate and being NPR-dependent. We do get some BBC, and while Official Secrets prevents BBC from reporting on Britain, they do a better job reporting on the US than American news media.
That in mind, it appears that the Executive is diverting news attention to Syria and away from NSA spying. BBC says that US believes Syria has crossed the “Red Line,” a perception management device that will be used to justify full-scale attack on Syria. It’s only been a matter of creating a false-flag incident that doesn’t cause the rest of the world to gag laughing. But BBC says that Americans will only be sending “small arms.” Since Americans are already doing that and god only knows what else, it is safe, I think, to conclude that this is a mere attention-diversion tactic.
They still have to solve the Russian problem in Syria. Since Syria must be removed from Israel’s northern flank before an attack can be unleashed in Iran, it is safe to say that we are at peace for one more day. It’s a good thing. Americans are famous for bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan. Our daughter is getting married tomorrow. We don’t want no stinkin’ Obama drone attacks.
Thought control in a free society
- Americans get their opinions from television, and younger ones rely more on Internet but use the same sources.
- Any image can supply only a tiny fraction of a larger whole.
- The voices that accompany images are authoritative sounding, and encourage us to imagine all that we cannot see.
- So in essence, we see perhaps less than 1%, and imagine the other 99%.
- So the key to opinion management is to influence our imaginations to fill in the other 99% as our leaders want it filled in.
- That’s easy. It’s done via suggestion.
So, they showed you a guy in a wheel chair with his legs missing. Fill in the blanks! You did. It never occurred to you to question the photo, because it was right there on your screen.
That’s how it’s done. That’s why public opinion does not matter in our society. It’s easily managed.
Rats on the alert
- Very suspicious! Edward Snowdon is a low-clearance guy with access to very highly secret documents.
- Hiding in plain sight? I sort of get this, that by telling everyone where he is at, he can’t be secretly killed.
- Good timing! In the wake of the Boston hoax, people are in a high state of tension, angry and scared. This spying system will not be dismantled.
It smells like a PSYOP to me, the National Security State telling is that we are being watched. They have emerged from the shadows, the velvet gloves taken off. It’s a little bit warmer now in our pot of water.
There are no “terrorists” of any note outside of FBI, Langley, Military Intelligence, Mossad and MI5 and 6. If they were worried about terrorism, they’d bomb Washington, Tel Aviv and London, do Hari Kari, make honorable exits, leave us alone, stop scaring the shit out of us.
It’s about us. We are the enemy. It is the people who smell a rat that the rat is watching.
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Russia is “ready to consider” offering Snowdon asylum, according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary. That’s one notch on the “this could be real” side.
Glenn Greenwald tweets “We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months.”
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If anyone is wondering why NSA is doing this, it is simple: They can. No one stopped them after 9/11, and now no one can. Even if we have some mass organizing movement to put a halt to this, how can we ever be sure. Everyone one is vulnerable now. No one has looked specifically at your or my information, but it is accessible. That’s the whole point, a gun that can be loaded at any time.
Imagine if they can store and access information on millions of us, how easy it is for them to corner a few hundred members of congress their staffs, media personalities like Anderson Cooper or even your local talking head. Information is power. Then perhaps you can understand why William Colby can say that “the Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Owning did not necessarily come about by purchase.
Take it a step further – how did we Learn that Anthony Weiner was sexting? How did we learn about John Edwards’ affair? Every one of them are being watched, and most have something – an extramarital affair, drug habit, “secret” bank account. Even if they are clean, they can be framed easily enough.
There’s nothing that can be done. It happened right under our noses because of 9/11, a false flag attack done specifically for this purpose. We did not investigate it, we believed the lies, we allowed them to pass and keep USAPATRIOT. The republic was already stressed, not having had a worthwhile president since JFK, so it’s hard to point at 9/11 as a red line. If there was a time that brought about the repression we now live under, it would be the ‘1960’s’, or that period from 1965-75 when we had information, organization, freedom of expression, movement politics. That scared the shit out of the overlords, and it has been downhill since. We’ve been dumbed down, kids are saddled with inescapable debt, jobs are now prisons and even essential to get access to health care.
The word gets bandied about, but people do not know what it means: “Freedom.” We cannot have it without fighting for it, and Americans long ago forgot what it was and how to fight. There will be no uproar over this, certainly no uprising. We’re too scared.
If anyone knows a way out of this problem, keep it to yourself or write it down on a piece of paper. Otherwise, your information is being shared with the National Security State.
It goes back to the Powell Memo. Worth a read.
Stereotypes
So we are sitting in a brew pub in Squamish, BC, and I look around at the crowd. I see polite young people speaking quietly, even as music in background is very loud. All are trim and fit. There are five TV sets, and at the head of the room is a huge one showing a hockey game. But of the hundred or so people there, not one is watching hockey!
I ask the waitress her opinion. I said that my stereotype of Canadians was that hockey was very, very big. She said that these were not Canadians, but rather Americans, up for the weekend from Washington. Over at the bar, she said pointing, are the few Canadians in the place, and they were intently absorbed in the game.
So many preconceptions messed up and affirmed at once!
But this one is affirmed: There is hardly any police presence up here, and people are left alone to mind their affairs. Clerks are friendly and chatty, probably the result of security. They have access to education and health care, and a high minimum wage protects them, as do unemployment benefits. Ordinary people have good lives!
The result: A relaxed country with a healthy distribution of income. The average Canadian household is wealthier than its southern counterpart. Worries are few.
British Columbia had a strong presence by the Conservative Party, but it’s agenda of intolerance of dissent and arrogant know-what’s-best-so-shut-up attitude rankled people. The recent election results: Zero seats for Conservatives. Zero! The party doesn’t exist in this province.
That, folks, is a responsive political system! Voting matters here! In the States people get frustrated with one party, turn to the other and get the same soup with a different label.
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”
New word for the day: Farrago
Free market magic in health care
Imagine 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.
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Piece of Mindful 