Fear and Trembling

Good Evening, Mr. Bond.

About six years ago I brought a cell phone into my life.  It was a quiet, innocent, and totally innocuous little cell phone that brought me quiet joy.  I could call my clients and my clients could call me.  If I was going to be late, I could call my wife.   Best of all, when my wife had to go to the East Coast, I never missed her call.  I so loved my little cell phone. I still have it.   I have gone through several others in the last five years, but I hung onto the original for sentimental reasons.

I had this friend, a Libertarian CAW member, who gave me hell over my innocent little cell phone.   The fact that I had a cell phone became a target of obsession with this guy.  I was a self-employed salesman at the time.   I was working 24/7, but that did not stop his obsession.  He was looking for work, and I was letting him use my computer to job hunt.  Every time he came to the house, he would drive me nuts about my cell.  First it was a leash.   When he realized that argument did not impress me and that I was deliberately carrying it for business purposes, he changed tactics.

The next argument was that the government could track me with my cell phone.  Of course I replied that I hoped they could.  He was talking about the GPS feature which allows 911 operators to locate me in case of accident.   I told him that I sincerely hoped that the government could track me with my cell phone. I would hate to pay for something that didn’t work.  Boy that took the wind out of his sails.   You should have seen the look of amazement on his face when I said that.  However, he was nothing if not determined.  His next argument threw me for a loop.

“Did you know that the government is listening to each and every cell phone call?” he asked. “You have no privacy.   They know everything you are doing!”  Have you ever been struck dumb by the stupid statements some people make?   That was where I was.  My mouth fell open so wide that flies could have used it for a hanger.  The pressure built up in my head to the point where I could not stand it anymore and I began banging my forehead against the wall.   “Do you have any idea how many cell phones there are in the United States?”  I asked him.

“Too many,” he answered.

“Millions,” I replied.   “There are millions of people with millions of cell phones making millions of cell phone calls every day.  Even if every single one of those calls are recorded and filtered through pattern recognition and word recognition programs, even the calls that are filtered are too many to be listened to by human beings.”

My ex-friend’s response was that I did not understand technology.  Here I was, building my own computer and creating my own websites, and he was telling me that I did not understand technology.  Here was a man who could not even use a computer without help, telling me about technology.  It was amazing.  To him technology was magic.  It was something out of James Bond.  He knew perfectly well that most computers used by the government and the military are obsolete, and that the cost of bringing the Fed up to date would be astronomical.  He was a retired military officer, but he still had a child-like awe of the government and acted as if the government could do anything.

This brings to mind the scene in 1984 when Winston Smith was caught cheating on his exercises by the television lens in his living room.   It was the first time in 25 years anybody had spied on him, but the very thought that it was possible was enough to scare the bejesus out of the poor guy.  Fear seems to be a more effective form of social control than actual spying.  Never mind that the claims of government spying is highly over rated.  The government would have to hire about a quarter of the population to keep the other 75% under surveillance.  The more high tech cameras and microphones and other Bondian gadgets that pops up, the more personnel that will be needed to monitor the spyware.

Of course, imaginary fears always overwhelm reasonable concern. Not only do we have to contend with illegal government wiretapping, but we have a crowd of people screaming about technology that promises the impossible. People who see conspiracies in everything from Sept. 11^th to improvements in camera technology certainly blur the line between the possible and the impossible.  How can we deal with what is really happening with a bunch of loonies afraid that the government is spying on them through traffic cameras?  It boggles the mind.  People accusing the government of doing the impossible drown out the voices of people who have legitimate concerns.  So the Bush Administration goes about its merry way without concern.   They have all these conspiracy rumors for a smoke screen.  Were I Bush, I’d be spreading these rumors myself.

We Have Our Eyes On You

If I Play Enough Videos Games, Will I Be A Real Ninja?

It Was All Goldfinger's Fault

I’ll tell you one thing, September 11^th Conspiracy theorists are a tenacious lot.  The only group of people more determined to avoid reality is Right Wing Christianoids. The conspiracy people even use the same bullying tactics and peer pressure arguments that the Christianoids use.   “Why do you believe the government’s story?” is one such accusation they throw at me.  This is reminiscent of the Christianoids telling me that if I don’t believe in Jesus, then I must be worshiping Satan.   Its a black and white thing to these people; if you do not accept their party line then you are a government dupe.   It never occurs to them that both they and the government could be full of it.

September 11^th conspiracy folk are in denial about the stupidity of the people who run this once great nation.   I can hardly blame them for that.   It is a hard thing to acknowledge that our leaders have IQs lower than our shoe sizes.   Yet look what happened to New Orleans with Katrina.  The entire Washington cabal was in denial over the situation.  They paid no attention to it.  Then they panicked after they could no longer deny the seriousness of the disaster.  Panic seems to be the constant state of the Bush Administration.  Bin Laden could not possibly have picked a better President to attack.   When the planes hit, Bush and his comic opera cohorts panicked and attacked Afghanistan.  To this day we have no idea what Bush thought he would accomplish.  It was simply a panic reaction to give the people at home the illusion that somebody competent was in charge.

I suspect that September 11^th conspiracy people are having trouble understanding the utter depths of stupidity that humanity is capable of.  The idea that utterly incompetent people are running the country scares them to death.  A conspiracy provides them with the same comfort that Jesus supplies to Christianoids.  The idea is that somebody is in charge even if that somebody is Goldfinger.   At least Goldfinger is smart.

One of the arguments that the conspiracy people keep throwing out at me is, how did the government figure out that it was bin Laden so quickly?   Well, it’s like this.  The FBI tried to warn Bush that the attack was going to happen.  The CIA tried to warn Rice that it was going to happen.  They got escorted out of her office for their their troubles.  The Mossad tried to warn Bush that the attack was going to happen.  So did French and Swiss security.   The Swiss know about it.   So after the planes hit their targets, Bush said, “duh, it must have been bin Laden”..

The most damning evidence of Bush’s stupidity is the war in Iraq.  Hey, we all knew that there was going to be a war in Iraq.  We knew that before Bush was elected.  Bill Clinton bombed Iraq to raise himself in the polls.   After he bombed Baghdad he called himself the comeback kid.  Clinton had less provocation than Bush and he came out smelling like a rose.  Bush and his buddies are so stupid that they screwed up.  If it was a conspiracy, don’t you think that the Bush Administration would have cooked up better excuses?   Even Nancy Pelosi is having trouble covering for Bush’s incompetence

September 11^th conspiracies are also an emotional outlet for a feeling of powerlessness.  It is an expression of frustration for situations that people feel helpless about.   It’s hard to admit that you lost your home and your job was outsourced to Timbuktu because the people in charge are too stupid to pound sand.   It is also an excuse not to do anything about it.   How does one fight Goldfinger? Nobody even knows where Goldfinger is.  Since unions are vilified in our current libertarian atmosphere, how does one deal with a government that does not listen?  A couple of good national strikes would get Bush’s attention, but strikes would be communist.

Were I George W. Bush, I would be hiring PR specialists by the dozen, and have them cranking out September 11^th conspiracies by the bushel. It’s the greatest thing to ever happen to the stupidest administration since Grant.  The idea of a secret cabal calling the shots certainly takes Bush off the hook.   It absolves him of responsibility for all his actions, from stealing the election to the Iraq war. Sometimes September 11^th conspiracies remind me of the Royalists during the French Revolution who insisted that the king was being manipulated by a secret cabal of Masons.  Like the Conspiracy people of today, the Royalists would do anything to avoid admitting that their king was stupid.

September 11^th theorists will do anything to avoid admitting that we are being led to destruction by morons.  One asked why bin Laden’s people went to the United States to learn to fly when bin Laden had a perfectly good flight stimulator.   Well, if I play enough video games will I become a ninja?  You actually have to get into a plane to learn to fly it.  Simulators just don’t do it for any real flying.   Another argument is that there has to be a conspiracy because the conspirators are still rich.  That argument is straight out of the Protestant Work Ethic.   Of course rich people are smarter than we are.  God made them that way.  The fact that our current crop of political howler monkeys triggered a world wide stock market crash must be part of their cunning plan. This means that the conspirators must be Blackadder and Baldric.   Nobody else could possibly be that stupid.

Bush Is A Tough Act To Follow

6.Controlled Mass Media Part one; Overview

Even Propaganda Can Be Art

Censorship is the primary tool of all dictatorships.  Be it a Communist or Capitalist dictatorship, control of the masses depends on the control of the media.  In Communism, the media is directly controlled by the state.  The Russian language even had a word for it, Pravda.  Pravda literally means “Official Truth” as opposed to real truth.  In other words, Pravda means that you know it’s a lie but you are going to make believe it’s true.  The alternative is a one-way ticket to Siberia.  In a Capitalist dictatorship, or fascism, the media is controlled by the corporations and is used to support their puppet government.  This is why we have a White House press corps which obediently tells the American public any Pravda the White House hands them.  You know that they are lying, but it is even more difficult to discover the truth than it is in a Communist dictatorship.

The Corporations discovered how dangerous a free press is when Woodward and Bernstein brought down the Nixon Administration.  That set the fascist takeover of America back by an entire decade.  From the beginning of the Reagan Administration, the corporations began a massive push to emasculate out free press, and they have succeeded.  Just look at Fox News or CNN.  That obscene example of “McNews” was made possible by the deregulation of the media.

Back in my youth, the media was regulated for the public good.  Antitrust laws prevented any single network from taking over the airwaves.  Local affiliates were required to serve their broadcast area.  They had to promote local interest broadcasts, advertise local businesses, and present opposing views to editorials. Most importantly, the free press was protected by law.  Today deregulation has reduced the media to the personal mouthpieces of the monopolistic corporations. Local affiliates are no longer independently owned thanks to the eliminations of anti-trust laws.  Local businesses stay solvent by selling Chinese-made merchandise, and the only point of view the media is required to promote are their owner’s.  This means that the press is no longer free.  The media is now exclusively the mouthpiece of the monopolies which own them.

Deregulation has utterly destroyed any semblance of a free press.  The courts have ruled that press releases can be treated as real news.  Public Relations puff pieces can be presented as fact, and there is nothing that the public can do about it.  Fox News and CNN can falsely report weapons of mass destruction in Iraq without legal consequences.  The laws that protected a free press are no longer in force. What is left is corporate Pravda.

Now that the corporations have the media just the way they want it, they need to make certain that it stays that way.  This is where the Libertarians come in.  The purpose of the Libertarian party is to protect corporate power. (More about this in a future section.) In the strangest example of double-speak that I have ever seen, the Libertarians call the laws that protect free speech censorship.  They decry the obvious censorship of Fox News and CNN while opposing any sort of regulation that would put a stop to it.

There is a certain logic to that.  The Libertarian movement serves as another source of government disinformation.  Libertarians are a source of conspiracy theories that act as a smoke screen for government misconduct.  They are a source of rumors which undermine the legal system which protects us from fascism. The Libertarian disdain for defamation laws also act as a divide and conquer tactic to split the left.

A common Libertarian tactic is to say “Do you expect the government to tell you the truth?” and then turn around and tell a bigger whopper.  Accusations of the Mossad being behind the Bush Administration, or that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt cheap steel.  The rumors about Karl Rove being indicted by a grand jury would guarantee that it would not happen.  (Such rumors undermine the grand jury process and would invalidate any such indictments. )  Holocaust denial and the return of the International Jewish Conspiracy assures that Jews will be frozen out of the left.  Thus, Libertarians are as big a tool of censorship as the Born Again Christianoids.  I will go into more detail in my next post about the Libertarian Market Place of Ideas.

No Unwed Pregnant Daughters

Who Are They?

Aren't They Part of the International Jewish Conspiracy?

They conspired with the Mossad to destroy the Twin Towers. They have conspired to poison our water with fluoride. They are conspiring to give American jobs to undocumented workers. They have conspired to destroy American freedoms through the income tax. They are like rats in the walls, working tirelessly to undermine the Constitution. Whoever they are, they are a busy bunch of bastards.

So who exactly are they? Nobody really knows who they are. Some say they are “Skull and Bones”; a Harvard student’s club. Others say that they are the International Jewish Conspiracy, and that Israel is secretly running the world. I have also heard that they are a secret cabal of Kaballah masters called the Illuminati. That last one just doesn’t make any sense. The Kaballah is a Jewish mystical discipline. So wouldn’t the Illuminati be part of the International Jewish Conspiracy? Who would I go to for an answer to that question?

Americans seem to love conspiracy theories. There are so many of them. Feminists are conspiring to destroy the American Family through abortion. Unions are conspiring to rob honest libertarians from amassing wealth. The number of conspiracies and conspirators is endless. All the ills of the world are because of some mysterious conspirators are manipulating world events for their own sinister ends.

The utter absurdity of conspiracy theories is enough to give me a migraine. Sorry, America, George W. Bush is not Lex Luthor, and Batman and Superman are not going to depose him. If Magneto was real, he would be in his 90s right now. Dr. Evil is a movie character. There are no evil magicians manipulating the world through Kaballistic Numerology. Two high level stock brokers making a deal on a golf course is not a conspiracy. Even if they did belong to Skull and Bones together, it is not a conspiracy.

Why bother doing anything about the state of the world when it’s all the Illuminati’s fault? Were I a member of the Bush misAdministration, I would be encouraging conspiracy theories as much as possible. I would be hiring on-line guerrilla marketers to post phony conspiracy evidence in chatrooms, social networks, and bulletin boards. I would be hiring ghost writers to produce books that “prove” the Mossad conspired with bin Laden, or that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel girders. There is nothing that can effectively squash the investigation of real crimes as accusations and phony evidence of false crimes.

Conspiracy theories also serve an emotional need for stability. They assure the American public that there is indeed somebody in charge of their lives. Christianoids have Jesus running their lives, and Libertarians have Thomas Jefferson as their savior. Conspiracy Theorists have the International Jewish Conspiracy to blame their failures on. Conspiracy theories assure us that somebody is in charge even if that somebody is a James Bond villain.

The fact is, we are living in a Capitalist chaos with thousands of different factions maneuvering to take advantage of each other. The big fish are out to eat the little fish, and the rest of us are only here to buy gasoline from them. The United States Constitution gives us both the power and the responsibility to put a stop to this kind of capitalist chaos. We have the constitutional power to enforce limits and reasonable laws to end the abuse in government. We are the actual government, and we are not doing our jobs. It is much easier to put another $150 into the tank of the old SUV and blame the price on those damned Illuminati.

Ultimately conspiracy theories are an excuse to continue to avoid our responsibilities to ourselves, to our nation, and to the world. Nobody conspired to have us ignore the corporate abuses happening in the Middle East right now. Nobody conspired to have us ignore the warnings about Global Warning. Nobody forced us to listen to the Capitalist bullcrap spouted by the neocons. We all know the homeless are out there, we ourselves chose to ignore them. The state of the world is our fault, and only we can fix it.

It's Not a Conspiracy, it's just Business