Inceptions,

We spent time back in Montana on our recent trip, and had meals out with everyone we wanted to see that we had time to see again in Bozeman. Each of those meals was a trip of its own, leading to long conversations that I wished would never end. My thanks to our good friends who read this blog and spent time with us. It was really fun.

One dinner companion had an interesting observation: Most people who read this blog don’t get it. Most Americans don’t get the kind of talk that goes on here. They don’t look behind the curtain, don’t suspect that greater minds than ours are about the business of managing our perceptions. That phrase itself is an insult, as each person presumes to know his own thoughts and to be the originator of those thoughts.

Christopher Nolan
I asked one meal companion, who doesn’t come here, if he had seen the movie “Inception.” He’s a movie buff, and generally our tastes run the same way. On this movie, his reaction was negative. He hated that movie. He’s smart and patient, so it isn’t that he didn’t get it. Quite the opposite – he got it. It offended him. The very idea that anyone could plant ideas in his mind was abhorrent. He claimed, with mock self-deprecation, that he believed himself to be too smart to allow such a thing to happen.

So we all think alike, and we all think the same things, and we are all the originators of our own thoughts.

Cuban propaganda poster
In most countries, perception management isn’t much of an issue. There’s some of it going on no matter where we live – the French and Canadians and Ruskies all believe in the essential goodness of their own homelands, and all turn a blind eye to their own weaknesses, just as Americans do. That is natural, and not a result of active thought management. But certain countries have set about to manage their populations so as to keep them contained and controlled – among them are the Russians, the Cubans, North Koreans, the Chinese, and the Americans.

American propaganda poster
This is not the same as totalitarianism, where brutal thugs threaten people who go astray. It’s much easier to think for oneself in such places as Saudi Arabia or Sri Lanka, as the only requirement is to shut up about it.

But to actively manage a population that thinks itself free is a much more difficult task. So it starts early, when we are very young. Our schools teach us a version of history that probably never happened, and it becomes our backdrop. We are also taught that our form of governance is the best, and that we had forebears that were saintly and courageous. We are constantly put through rituals, such as saying the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the national anthem, to reinforce those ideas. We monitor one another to see if the open displays of patriotism are appropriate – do our neighbors take off their caps, put hand over heart?

Most importantly, after our leaders are decided for us, we decide on our leaders. It is essential that we view ourselves as self-governing.

It is usually enough to reach a person in the primary education phase. Most will go on to ordinary workaday careers, the backdrop firmly in place. Their lives will be occupied with work and bills and children and sports. Many of the poorer classes will be called upon to become soldiers and participate in attacks on other countries, and will presume to know that the cause is just, and will demand honor and repayment for their dishonorable work.

A few of us are people who Napoleon referred to as being “of noble mind.” We think further and harder, and so it is not enough that we be swathed in patriotism as young children and let go. The process has to be ongoing, reinforced in higher education, and deeply embedded by the social reward system. You might think the intellectual class of people to be the hardest to manage, but they are not. They are Orwell’s trained circus dog. They actually teach themselves to jump through the hoop without the crack of the whip of the trainer. They self-indoctrinate.

He's really, really good at it
I’ve had encounters with many of the educated class, and there is usually hubris littered about, and I usually react negatively. I’ve had run-ins with a manager of a public radio station, two newspaper editors, Budge, and many others. It is essential that the journalists serve the state, and that profession is buried under six feet of self-adulation. They are so sure that they have arrived at their own thoughts that the mere suggestion that anyone else was managing their perceptions causes them to not merely disagree, but to react with anger. Hence, our dinner companion, a genuinely nice man, did not just dislike the movie “Inception,” He “hated” it.

Not pictured: Power
Every country has an intellectual class, and these people share certain characteristics. One, they cannot stand the idea of being “ordinary”, and so they go to great lengths to separate themselves from the masses. Two, they usually hook up with power, somehow serving the interests of non-intellectuals who can give them the proper rewards for their service. So, if you are one who haunts the cable news dial, you will see that it is loaded with members of this class, each pontificating in a serious manner on why the leadership of the country is right about this or that, why our wars are just, why tax policies that punish the working classes and favor the rich are appropriate. They work for power. It can be no other way.

If they are Republicans, they are critical of Democrats, and visa versa. When necessary, when new people take power, they switch positions, criticizing the same policies they once espoused, since that policy is now being carried out by the other party. The act of position switching, which recently happened on our resource wars in the Middle and Far East, and on budget deficits, is truly a wonder to behold.

This class is everywhere to be found in chatterland, with one exception: Anyone who eschews the two-party makeup is ostracized. Outside the two parties, you will find honest thoughts and observations, critical thought and true patriotism, which is the love of a land and people couple with a desire for the good will of others and prosperity and happiness for the entire planet.

Christopher Nolan, who wrote and directed the movie Inception, seems to be at once uniquely talented and smart enough not to openly challenge power and the perception management system. He is smuggling his message to us. Good film makers do this – David Russell with Three Kings, Barry Levinson with Wag the Dog, Stuart Rosenburg with Cool Hand Luke … the list goes on far into the night – The Wizard of Oz, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Lesser attempts that more pistol-whip than smuggle include There Will Be Blood and Avatar.

Luke emptying Boss's hole
Books can also smuggle truth, but in a non-reading culture, who cares? Movies can reach us with smuggled messages because independent thinkers in that industry are let free to do their work, and are rewarded if they make money for their sponsors. The embedded message slips right by the power structure. Ad-based television cannot do this, though the pay channels occasionally offer up good fare. But it is in movies that we find embedded messages that sometimes hit their mark. In the anger that I saw in our dinner companion, there was evidence that the movie Inception succeeds in delivering its message.

For that reason, I am going to see it today. It must be quite good.

Fear as a governing tool

Have you ever had one of those rare moments of insight where something at once seems so obvious that you break out laughing? I had one last week. We were standing at the Ted Stevens airport in Anchorage, one of those zigzag lines, and a guy going the other way in line said “Are you going to Dallas?” I said no, and he quickly shot back “Chicago?”. I did not tell him our destination, but thought that if he had asked a typical American, he’d be turned into authorities for suspicious activity.

He probably just wanted me to deliver some cocaine for him. No big deal.

And then it hit me: All of our airport security, even if it is effective, is pointless. All a ‘terrist’ A-Rab or Muslim has to do is put a bomb in a suitcase, take it to security, and blow it up right there, where all the people are. Nothing has been screened at that point, so that it could be a pipe, nuclear, fertilizer or McDonald’s grease bomb.

My dream job
And it hasn’t happened. For whatever reason, very few people on the planet want to kill civilians for its own sake. We’re safe. But our governing system since the early 1950’s has been predicated on the fact that we are a National Security State, and that we must always be afraid of something. So we are inculcated from youth in the culture of fear – crime, drugs, Communism, and now terrorism. The result is a people so easily manipulated by some archetype villain like Osama or Saddam that we readily support our government, run by sociopaths, as they plunder, attack and terrorize the globe.

It is tempting at times to simply go some place where people are both relaxed and behaved, like Canada or Costa Rica. We have talked about it at times, but family, of course, keeps us here. Neither of those countries is likely to be attacked by the U.S. any time soon, and so their people are at peace.

Sociopaths on a morning stroll
Life is always a struggle to survive, and bad things happen. There are bad dudes everywhere. Our country is run by cliques of corporate and military sociopaths who dangle images of pretty people in front of us to act as “leaders.”.
Sociopath
Sociopaths are everywhere, maybe four percent of our population, and one percent in other countries, according to Harvard’s Dr. Margaret Stout. So there is nowhere to hide from them. George W. Bush is one, as surely were Cheney and Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Nixon, and Bill Clinton, to name but a few.

You get the idea, no doubt.
But people in other lands have a more casual attitude about danger, perhaps due to the incredibly low odds of bad things happening, but most likely because they have not been subject to the intense and corrupting propaganda that enmeshes us.
These colors don't run, baby
The French have been overrun in the past by real monsters, and their country devastated by two wars in the twentieth century alone. Yet the country does not run on fear, as ours does. We make fun of them, I know, but it is we, and not them, who are the real pussies of the planet.

So please, dear Americans, take a deep breath, let it out, and then next time as you make your way through airport security, remember that you are in more danger at that point in time than at any time during your flight. And that danger is virtually nil.

Think of airport security for what it really is: A jobs program, and as George Carlin reminded us, a way to make white people feel safe when they fly. If only … if only … Americans could know that they are safe, then the rest of the planet could relax too. We could stop the bombing, invading, occupying. .

Americans … you are safe. Now sleep … sleep, my sweet white knights of the planet. Tomorrow is a brand new day. Keep up what you are doing, and there will be no one left alive to rescue.

On the road

We have three days now where we

Pilot and Index Peaks, Wyoming
have no place we have to be, no motel reservations, no obligations of any kind. We are in Cooke City, Montana, which is not the end of the world. No Internet, no newspapers. I sit here in the parking lot of a motel where we stayed last week, as I know the password.

The web site for the Pilot-Index image is patmahan.com.

Enjoy my absence!

Group dynamics in Orwellian thought-controlled societies

Imagine that it is virtually impossible to make a call from a cell phone to the ground below from an aircraft traveling at high altitude.

As I read it, it is indeed virtually impossible. Aircraft have to be equipped with special communication equipment to achieve this feat, and hardly any are, none in 2001. And, in my routine flights here and there over the last ten years, I have tried to do so. I often made contact – that is, the phone tells me that I have a connection, but it does not complete the call. It is just dead air.These days we we can be fined, even arrested for trying to do so, and it is odd, as it does not interfere with the aircraft in the least.

Anyway, set that aside. Religious groups insist on adherence to dogma, as do political groupings. And yet, internally, most people know that group dogmas are false, that two plus two does not equal five. They internalize such dogma to achieve harmony, as it is important to belong to a group structure. So people who profess otherwise know that there was no rising from the dead or walking on water or virgin birth. They are merely submitting to group dominance.

The suppression of the knowledge that the beliefs are false is often described as “cognitive dissonance,” which is simply the ability to adhere to irreconcilable beliefs.

Some of us do not bond easily to groups, and suffer accordingly. But we learn to live on our own, without approbation. The odds of us meeting are slim, as most people meet other people via membership in various groups. But the blogs are a good way to meet outliers.

A nasty aspect of my personality is to hold in disdain those who define themselves by group membership. I rebel when groups try to bind me and force me to conform to group norms. I was never a good employee,and never happy as an employee. I was not a good Republican, and was horrible Democrat. I even found the Greens restrictive – they more than any party have a large share of nonconformists, but it was a little bit oppressive.

Cell phones work on airplanes ... got that?
What is the mechanism by which groups enforce cohesion? I think there are two elements: One is a need in each of us to belong, and the other are enforcers who patrol the fringes of groups to make sure that none leave the herd. These are self-appointed sheepdogs.

In real life, I am a nice person and indistinguishable in a crowd. I do ordinary work for ordinary pay, watch football with family on Thanksgiving, smile and joke and do all of the normal things. But on the blogs I am impatient, condescending, snippy, and even mean at times. The people who have been on the receiving end of this negative torrent are genuinely nice and caring of the people around them. But on the blogs, they too exhibit different characteristics.

Hex! Hex!
These are the sheepdogs. They patrol the edges of groups, and define what is acceptable and what is not. Or so I perceive. each of them, as I perceive them, is so caught up in group insight that they have lost track of what is real, in fact, have no desire to know what is real.

And so they literally whip people, citing grouptruth, using absurdly tedious reasoning to force reality into a square box. “It is so, as my words force it to be so.“ The act of banning is a sheepdog at work, patrolling the outer perimeters of the group. Mormons call it shunning.

Noam Chomsky (NBC file photo)
The whole of the allowed political spectrum in the U.S. is right-leaning. In such an environment, Republicans are free to explore as far into the extremities of thought on that parameter as they please. Thus we have our Beck’s and Coulter’s, each day bringing us new outrageous thoughts, never disciplined. Lefties, on the other hand, are not even seen. Noam Chomsky* is not allowed on the airwaves. But even those who we perceive to be leftist – right-leaning centrists like Ed Schultz or Paul Krugman, have to constantly watch their words and mind their manners, as jobs are lost, promotions denied … there is no easy way for even a right-leaning centrist to make it in this in mad mad city called Rightwingville.

Have Democrats become boring?
Democrats who hold steady to party doctrine know this, and so internalize massive contradictions and acknowledge 2+2=5. To do so as well requires enormous self-persuasion and internal denial, a need to belong to a group that runs so deep that they cannot embrace the idea of not belonging.

So what has all this to do with the ability to make a cell phone from a jet aircraft? There is a mechanism in place that forces group adherence. It is accomplished by sheep dogs riding the perimeter. When you read that cell phones cannot make phone calls from airplanes, you immediately felt the pressure of the group and thought to yourself … “oh god, he’s not going there, is he?” That, my friend, is group pressure at work, the power of conformity. You just experienced it.

I don’t know what happened that day, and am missing so much information that I cannot begin to ever know what happened that day. I merely doubt the official conspiracy theory – the one about 19 Arabs.

I refuse to waste my time worrying about this, as whoever had enough power to unleash that event controls perceived reality. There’s no changing that. Essential information is missing, and will not appear in my lifetime, if ever.

Let's roll, patriots!
But inside, when I think of the official explanation of the events of that day, I sort of doubt it all. There were no phone calls, there was no “Let’s roll!” The aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania was surely shot down.

But I know nothing of demolition dynamics or the behavior of metals at high temperatures. I cannot begin to parse together the behaviors of thousands of people in utter chaos. It’s too much for me. It is madness. And compared to the crimes my own country has committed against others in response, it is minor.

My only point here is that it isn’t just me, but you too, who doubts the official version of events on 9/11, and the only difference between us is that you will never say so publicly, because you know you will be ridiculed and brought back into line by group strictures.

Life in America
I don’t cotton to sheep dogs, I guess. It is not necessarily a good thing. It is what it is. So now, at this time, group member,, your appropriate response to this post and the thought crime contained therein is … ridicule. Have at it.

________________

*PS: I hasten to add here that Professor Chomsky does not disparage the official version of events on 9/11. He is not guilty by the fact that he is mentioned here. He merely exemplifies official “shunning” as practiced in the U.S.

Homeward!

I love Alaska! We are for sure coming back. The road into Exit Glacier from Seward has little pull-offs are regular intervals specifically designed to allow a larger vehicle pull in and spend the night. No charge. The larger pull-offs, the gravel pits, the parking lots are full of campers and tents, all at no charge. The place is made for free-wheeling, away from KOA’s. Next time here, we will rent a conversion van and camping equipment, all of which is much cheaper than a rental car and motel.

This was a learning trip for us, what to do, what not to do. We loved Kenai in all its magnificence, and riding with a hungover bush pilot was a trip in its own, in addition to being a real trip. We saw the great brown bear, flew up and around a volcano, saw a pod of whales down below. There are very few airstrips up here, so when it is time to land, they look for an open stretch of gravelly beach. Quite a surprise to those of us expecting a runway.

We are on the Glenn Highway, away from the big attractions. There are some massive glaciers here, and the whole area is sculpted by glaciation in addition to ancient volcanism. But the hiking is sparse, and we were warned about bear activity, advised to stay close to people. We drove into Lake Louise, not THE Lake Louise, and there was eighteen miles of paved road leading to a small resort and some houses. The road is four years old and wavy, badly in need of repairs. The resort owner wants the state to fix it for her.

How did these fortunate few people get a million dollar highway to their (probably summer) homes?

Can’t say for sure but I’ve a hunch. Ted Stevens, the man they named the airport after, the guy who wanted to build that bridge to nowhere that Sarah belatedly opposed.

Not much time, and my reflections on what I’ve seen are like those of a mosquito on a moose. There is so much more here. Tonight we board a plane at 10:30 PM and fly to Denver. It will be 102 in Boulder tomorrow.

Seward, Alaska

We have Internet today. We are at a B&B north of Seward, on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula. We met a nice group of folks from Ohio at breakfast, and are headed out to hike up to “Lost Lake.” Since there are so few names to give lakes, they chose that one. Timber, Jewel, and Hidden were taken.

Sarah Palin is very popular up here, it seems. And our Ohio breakfast companions spent quite a bit of time in Wasilla trying to find her house. She’s kind of a phenomenon, a showgirl kind of appearance, full of folksy wisdom. It will be interesting to see if money actually backs her up in a run for president. In my view it is unlikely, as she cannot be controlled on stage, and at times her ignorance is painfully obvious even to supporters. Money tends to like the Reagan/Obama type – handsome, well-spoken, and easily managed.

Off and running. Hi David.

Homer, Alaska

The view out our window is simply stunning – a long string of mountains across Cook Inlet. Take the view of the Tetons across Jackson Lake, multiply if by five, add the massive Grewingk Glacier, and that is what we see.

Homer proper
We aren’t paying very much for this view. It’s expensive to be here, but more money does not buy more view. It’s all the same up and down the streets of this town, the whole peninsula, in fact. Everyone gets a piece of it.

I did not bring the cord that allows me to upload pictures from the camera, so someone else took these photos. Our motel room is a square box facing the inlet, simple and functional. The only thing interfering with the few is another set of boxes like ours fifty yards away.

Grewingk Glacier
We are animal-starved. We’ve been up and down the highway looking for moose and bear with no luck. We hiked in a nature preserve yesterday with no sign of bear – no scat, no tree scratches. The brown bear only occasionally wander through and are rarely seen, but black bear are common – to everyone but us. And moose – you’d think they’d offer up one lousy moose.

The drive up the other sided of the peninsula last “night” was uneventful. The area is one suburb, Alaska-style, with houses on five and ten and thirty acres lots instead of quarter-acres. We went sixteen miles, and in all those miles did not see one convenience store. The area is a rain forest with houses every few hundred yards. It covers an area perhaps the size of Spokane, but with only a small fraction the number of people.

The houses are all functional, no McMansions. The essential businesses are located in the little town that started this place. People drive many miles for a quart of milk. The roads are good, and the winters mild by Alaska standards, we are told. It’s an idyllic life, on the surface, but there’s a veneer of faux wealth over the poverty of the area. You can see it in the old cars and in the businesses that have not done a face-lift in decades. Occasionally there is a 20×20 box-style two-story house, and a few people living on buses. The only industries are fishing and tourism, both tough ways to make a living. There isn’t much prosperity here.

We were to fly over the inlet to see some brown bear yesterday, but everything was socked in. They said they would call if it opened up, but cell phones only work in town proper, and we weren’t about to sit around waiting for it to ring. So we headed out to see some country on foot. And, sure enough, around 4PM they called telling us to come on down and hop a flight. But we didn’t get the message until 5PM. So we are set to go Wednesday morning, our last chance at seeing the famous brown bear before we head north to Seward Wednesday afternoon.

We did go on a short flight out and back yesterday – the pilot, Scooter, from Boulder, CO, was just checking to see if he could land across the inlet. It was only my second time on a small plane, and exciting. In the next life … gonna get me a plane. A friend in Bozeman owns, or owned, a small plane. He could not afford to keep it post-retirement. It is expensive, and if you do not turn those machines into cash flow, they will consume your IRA in a hurry.

Oh yeah – the “Spit” – a five mile landing strip jutting out into the inlet. It’s in the photo above. There’s a large marina, and maybe a hundred little businesses, mostly fishing-related. There’s the usual gift shops, and all of those bear things – watch chains and statuettes that are made in China and sold in every part of the country that has a bear. Nothing is fancy here, but everything is expensive. We paid $22 for a cheese pizza out there. It’s a tiny building. We paid downstairs and then went up a flight of stairs outside the building to a small sun room overlooking the Inlet. Very nice.

Two days ago we went down to the ‘beach’ below our motel room. It’s rough and unwalkable, made of rough rocks and littered with natural debris. There’s a makeshift hut up a few hundred yards, and nearer us were two young boys who had ridden their motorcycle and ATV down there and built a fire. They were friendly, but talked about how “punks” and “hippies” come down there at night and build bonfires and drink beer. I told them that every beach in the world is a magnet for young people to build fires and have parties. But they only know this beach, and are already developing a redneck attitude. But the boys were tan and muscular specimens for twelve-year olds. They are Alaskans, through and through.

So today we aging punk-hippies are going to walk the beach – maybe get ten slow meandering miles in. We can’t drink beer, as we might stumble and fall and break something. We didn’t come here to fish or hunt – just to see the place and walk some trails. But the forest here is very thick, and trails are a rarity. Not that we care – we would walk the highway just to feel the breeze and smell the flowers and trees and salt air. This is Alaska!

Flying up here, looking out over the Canadian Rockies, was reassuring. As far as I could see was nothing but snowy peaks jutting through the clouds. No one lives there! May it always be so.

Forecast: Dumb and dumber

Here’s a post by “HoHo Mustachio” over at LITW excoriating Rep Dennis Rehberg for missing three votes to tend to personal business. The margins for the votes in question: 360-26; 264-114; 379-0.

This is, to date, the dumbest post they have ever put up over there.

Here’s a little dose of realpolitik: Most votes in the House and senate are lopsided and foreordained. Members of either party are free to vote either way without affecting the outcome. They can thereby manufacture voting records to please their various constituencies.

I do remember one very important vote on an national forest issue that was up in the Senate some years back. I was still active in Montana Wilderness Association. It was very close, so close that the deciding vote would be cast by Sen Max Baucus, who was away on business. So they held the vote back until his return. John Gatchell of MWA was sure that Max would come down on the environmental side of the issue. I was equally sure that he would not. I do wish I could remember more than this.

Anyway, Max voted Nay, killed the bill, I was right, Gatchell wrong. Truth. And more than that, I imagine that Baucus was really pissed at being exposed like that. Normally he would have been able to cast a cosmetic “Yea” that did not affect the outcome of the bill.

I am sometimes amazed that the transparent theater of politics is not obvious to those who take a sincere interest in issues. HoHo Mustachio, I hope, learns something today. Just sayin’.

Bribe, thy name be “research paper”

Scott McInnis: A disguised bribe?
Here in Colorado we are having quite a kerfuffle over “plagiarism” involving Scott McInnis, Republican candidate for governor. It seems that a while back a private foundation run by the Hasan family paid him $300,000 to write a policy paper on water issues. He gave back “Musings on Water.” It turns out that his musings were actually the musings of other people, notably a sitting judge. He lifted not a passage or two, but whole pages of material.

When exposed, McInnis said that he had depended on a paid researcher, and that this researcher was the real plagiarizer, and not him. Today the assistant said (Denver Post) that the McInnis people had crafted a letter having him take responsibility for the whole mess, but that he had refused to sign it. So now we have McInnis not only plagiarizing, but also pissing downhill. What a guy!

Hickenlooper
McInnis is toast. His likely opponent in November, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, is no prize himself. It’s not like we are faced with momentous choices. As so often happens in this country, our choice is one of method of screwing: Do we prefer Phillips, or standard screws?

Something far more interesting and revealing happened here. McInnis’s “Musings on Water” is not an important document, and was read only by a few people and then filed away. Because we live in the Google age, someone was able to nail him for the passage lifts. Stuff like that goes on everywhere. Scott’s lesson to the rest of the political class is they need to be more careful in the art of disguised bribery.

Buying politicians?
Far more important is this: McInnis was a fair-haired boy, no towering intellect, but a man seen with statewide potential for higher office. The Hasan Family Foundation was not buying “research” from him. They didn’t care about his ideas on water policy. Surely they were smart enough to see that he was no policy wonk. They were buying him. They were buying influence, maybe even lodging themselves as his own personal closet skeleton.

Three hundred thousand dollars! It is not peanuts, and it was not for research. It was a disguised bribe.

Scott McInnis is nothing, was nothing, and will be a well-paid something in the future, just not holding public office. In the meantime, there are quite a few Colorado politicians of “both” parties hitting the Ambien at night as they try to keep their minds off the payments they received for fake work done for people who have an unseen interests in public policy.

This whole affair reminds me that while we need campaign finance reform, corruption will not ever be easily undone.
______________________________

By the way, this train of thought was triggered by a few words from a much smarter guy than me, David Sirota, who wondered about the bribery aspect this on AM760 this morning. It is a very confusing set of circumstances until put in that framework. Did not mean to pull a McInnis on Sirota.