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What is, is (regardless of what we're told)
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by Mr. Chuckles, Unknown News
April 29, 2007
One of the problems we confront in making sense of
this 21st
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Century in America is that voices in the mass media tend to drown out divergent opinions and analyses that are not popular with TPTB (The Powers That Be -- they being the political parties and the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex.) We're left feeling that nearly everyone else believes things that are untrue, but in fact, a majority of people may well believe the opposite of what is disseminated as "fact" by the media.
Which is not to say that everything on TV is
false. For example, yesterday it was announced that the
U.S. captured a top Al Qaeda leader and shipped him
to Guantanamo. Also, we learned that Saudi Arabia
captured 172 would-be terrorists plotting attacks
on pipelines -- and that some were learning to fly
planes! Perhaps these stories are true.
But the key
fact is that they happened months ago.
What is
important is the propaganda value of releasing the
"news" today, perhaps to offset gains by the
Democratic Party in leading the U.S. to withdrawal
from Iraq. It isn't what they're telling us, but
why they are telling us now -- and what we are not
being told.
This leads us to the practical problem of how to
deal personally with the
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contradictions between
actual reality and the apparent consensual reality.
When is it a good thing to "fight the System" --
and when is that just being an asshole?
On the one
hand, we know that crowds of people can behave very
badly, doing things collectively that would never
be considered reasonable by the individuals in the
crowd, if they were acting alone. On the other hand,
sometimes a group seems utterly determined to
follow a certain path, and individual survival
requires "going along to get along."
An example of pathological group behavior is the
periodic episodes of Christian churches advising
their members to stock up on food and ammo because
the end of the world is approaching. In theory
Christian militias and gun-toting born-agains may
make some kind of sense in certain very
hypothetical scenarios. But in the real reality it
makes no sense, because Jesus never advocated taking
up arms against one's enemies.
Based on my personal
experience on several occasions, defusing a
conflict and protecting an "innocent" often means
being willing to take the first blow. It may happen
that you take a punch. Or not, as the other person
may decide to reconsider his course of action. Real
courage means taking the risk of damage and using
an appropriate level of violent self-defense only
as a last resort -- not pre-emptively attacking
one's enemies with lethal force. That is an article
of my faith :-)
I don't know that anything I say now can be
profitably used. Or that anything I have to say is
much different than what I've said before. We'll
see...
In the category of non-pathological crowd behaviors,
there are things like the internet, or musical
fads. Humans often seem to like doing what other
humans like, just because the other humans like
doing them. And of course, the internet phenomenon had actual
tangible benefits for many individuals.
When
"everyone" decides to do a certain thing, that
thing may actually be a good thing. Mass
production drives down prices and increases
availability. We really do benefit from doing what
other people are doing ... sometimes ... assuming that
we can actually figure out the truth, what is
really real. And assuming that we can figure out how to
apply that knowledge in our own lives.
Here is a brief excerpt from Jim Willie's latest
essay that illustrates some of the key economic
topics of our times:| |
Last week, a past article (on the PetroDollar
abused in a protection racket) was resurrected.
This week another past article "Economic Mythology" from September 2004 is resurrected,
highly relevant again. It painted a reasonable
description of the current myth in force.
The
principle argument was that in order to sustain a
fallacious economic system, whose foundation is but
shifting sands whipped by the ebb & flow of
monetary inflation, that system needs an utterly
absurd sequence of myths to be widely accepted as
ideology, promoted by a trusted harlot.
The result
is like a crowd of mindless zombies uttering
mantras like people devoid of brains, but whose
bodies move enough to cast their next order to
purchase stocks or bonds. FOREX traders do not
qualify as zombies, and therein lies a problem.
"The bankrupt dogma of this Macro Economy Myth
contains many ludicrous belief constructs, uttered
widely, containing no substance or validity, each
totally heretical, worth mentioning. We hear
childlike nonsense like 'debt is good' for the
explosive credit crack, like 'to spend is vital'
for the anti-investment consumer crack, like 'low-cost solution' for the outsourced job betrayal,
like 'house is home not investment' for the
unproductive housing crack, like 'service sector is
cleaner' for the manufacturing demise crack, like
'risk is off-loaded' for the uncontrolled derivative
crack, like 'military spending benefits the
economy' for the destructive drain crack, like
'U.S. Govt bonds offer true value' for the absent high
volume highly liquid alternative, like 'foreigners
are partners' for the credit supply hemorrhage
crack, like 'Asian finished products fairly traded
for U.S. assets' for the fraudulent payment with bad
debt paper masquerading as money, and like 'U.S. is
the global engine' for the gross global imbalances.
My viewpoint is that the current system manifests a
national liquidation of capital that is endemic to
the U.S. economy. |
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We've heard dozens of similar sorts of "myths"
(lies) from the Bush Regime about the "War on
Terror", the Iraq War, and virtually every other
major policy initiative of the last six years. Not
only do the Bushies attempt to distill every
complex problem down to a simple-minded slogan
("We're fighting them over there so that we don't
have to fight them over here"), but whenever facts
or the law get in the way, the Bush Regime
redefines the meaning of the language or changes
the symbols.
The latest blow to American jobs is
allowing Mexican trucking companies free access to
the U.S. Instead of following regulations regarding
"pilot projects", the Bush Regime is calling the
Mexican trucker invasion a "demonstration project",
so there is no need for a public comment period or
the legally mandated oversight for "pilot projects".
As individuals in the "reality-based" community we
must adapt to constantly accelerating changes --
and changes in the way we perceive things based on
incoming information. We must learn, examine,
think, plan and react.
Perhaps we have to bear up
under uncertainty. Perhaps we must discard our
dangerously rigid expectations about what "is" is.
And at the same time, we must not assume that we are
alone, that we are the only disgruntled employees
of USA, Inc. We are not alone, and we are not few.
In the end we will look back at our
past as a sequence of actions and decisions made
one day at a time. If our daily deeds are
constructive and intelligently directed, then in
the end ... we may not be happy, we might have to
settle for satisfaction, and we might not get what
we want -- but I'll betcha we get what we need.
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We've heard dozens of similar sorts of "myths" (lies) from the Bush Regime about the "War on Terror", the Iraq War, and virtually every other major policy initiative of the last six years.
Not only do the Bushies attempt to distill every complex problem down to a simple-minded slogan ("We're fighting them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here"), but whenever facts or the law get in the way, the Bush Regime redefines the meaning of the language or changes the symbols.
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