Through The Looking Glass

In one fell swoop, bin Laden is dead, torture and secret prisons are justified, the Pakistanis are villainized, the endless war is renewed, the American masses feel justified, and the Military-Industrial complex goes on raking in the Big Bux.

I don’t watch TeeVee, so I haven’t seen the images, but I can just imagine from the descriptions how asinine it must look to see the young, vacuous sheeple prancing in the pasture, celebrating The Dawn of a New Day.  Why, now when they go anywhere in public, they’ll be so grateful to have TSA shoving their hands down pants and groping little children, like Catholic priests.

You can tell this is a psy-op because there are two basic stories going around.

One, Usama was living in a boarding house, in squalor, subsisting on Doritos, like Saddam Husein in his “spider hole.”  He slipped up and used an open phone to call for pizza, and that’s when the cavalry descended on him, shooting him two times in the head and (conveniently) blowing his face off.

The second story is that Usama was living in a million-dollar mansion built just for him, surrounded by Pakistani military camps.  His location was tracked down from information gleaned years ago by torturing teen-aged shepherds and dirt farmers in secret prisons.  Usama was identified, because his wife yelled his name as he hid behind her when the lead started flying.

Both stories end with sensitive and politically-correct Special Forces conducting Islamic burial rites as they shoved Usama’s body out the helicopter door somewhere over some ocean.

And now…who cares if Obama committed multiple felonies by forging legal documents and bald-face lying to millions of people?  He got Usama!  Oh, and let’s give some credit to that other bastion of international law and order, George W. Shrub.

This is classic psy-op crap where several conflicting details/stories are released, and the elements that people swallow become the ones that are the "true" story, while the rest get brushed aside as noise from opposition elements or 'fog of war' errors.

I’m going to puke.  I won't publish and of the stories or photos, since it's all complete bunk.  Even Madeline Albright, the former US SecState, said bin Laden was dead and on ice for later propaganda use.  That was back in 2002.

Who was Usama bin Laden?  Why, let’s let Paul Craig Roberts tell it:

“How many Americans will have the wits to wonder why the "terror mastermind" ­ who defeated not merely the CIA and the FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies along with Israel's Mossad and the intelligence services of NATO, who defeated NORAD, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff, the US Air Force, and Air Traffic Control, who caused security procedures to fail four times in US airports in one hour on the same day, who caused the state-of-the-art Pentagon air defenses to fail, and who managed to fly three airliners into three buildings with pilots who did not know how to fly ­ has not pulled off any other attack in almost ten years? Do Americans really believe that a government's security system that can so totally fail when confronted with a few Saudi Arabians with box cutters can renew itself to perfection overnight?”

Now to my eyes, this is all just too blatantly obvious.  I’m sure others must see through all this garbage.  The question is, “Why?”  What’s behind this ridiculous parody of law and order, and who’s pulling the strings?

The ‘why’ part is pretty obvious.  It’s the ‘who’ that gets a little tricky.  The answer to both questions might surprise you.  It’s a lot simpler, yet far more evil, than it appears on the surface.

What’s going on is that there are two primary groups vying for global domination in the Anglo-American empire.  One group is the ‘bomb the hell out of everything and snatch the goodies.’  Let’s call them the American part of the equasion.  The other group is a little more subtle, preferring to work quietly and make other factions fight each other, thus saving precious resources for cleaning up and taking over after the dust settles.  Let’s call them the Anglos.

The Anglos have been at this empire thing for a long time and have a lot of experience.  They are master manipulators who prefer to stir up two ant piles and make them fight each other, rather than sit with a hammer and smash the little buggers one at a time.

The Anglos think that the Beijing-Moscow axis is getting too big for its own good.  They have too much financial leverage and they refuse to play in the Big Boyz Bully Club.  They won’t invade or bomb or join NATO.  The Anglos think its time to take them down a notch or two.

To do that, the Anglos need to squeeze just enough on the wind-pipe to make B-M pass out, without killing the free flow of cheap goods and labor.  If enough of China’s energy supply is cut off, or at least severely curtailed, they will have to look pretty hard at Russia’s Siberian oil fields sitting right there on the border.  This will poison the well, as it were, between Beijing and Moscow.

The American faction is a little more brash.  They are new to this empire thing and the way they see things, they need to bang into these here sovereign countries and secure those resources for later use.  They’ll just lock everything up in perpetual exploitation contracts with all the boys down at the country club.  They don’t give a damn about subtlty, because gol-durnit, if them uppity chinks and bears don’t play along, we’ll just bomb the hell outta them.

The Anglo faction is represented in US politics by the Obama group.  The American faction is represented by the Bush group.  It’s tempting to go slapping left-right labels all over everything, but that would be both misdirecting and misinterpreting what’s really going on.

You see, the world is divided up, at the upper levels, into regions.  There’s the North American Union, the South American Union, the European Union, the MENAs, the ASEANs, and the BRICS.  Think of them as football teams.  They run around playing matches and scoring wins, losses or draws.  And that’s about as far as most people ever get when they start learning about all this stuff.  But, just like football teams, behind all the glamor and glitz on the field are the owners.

And now we come to the ‘who’ part of the calculus.

The owners are a handful of folks who are so fabulously wealthy, they don’t appear in Forbes, or Lifestyles, or at Warren’s birthday parties.  These people are so wealthy, that money means nothing to them.  They could spend millions a day, and have enough for their grandchildren to continue the tradition.  In fact, they are so amazingly rich that playing football with the world is the only entertainment left for them.  If you saw a list of their names, you probably woyldn't recognize most of them.

To these people, your and my life are worthless.  We are just ants to toy with for kicks.  Everything we are seeing in our news outlets is part of their game.  They lead us around in circles and play with our patriotism and religious beliefs and our families for their amusement.  They are like the sadistic kid that would pull the legs off the daddy long-legs to watch them flail around.

How do you fight people like this?  It's amazingly simple.  They control us through media.  They can whip us into frenzies, terrorize us, play with our emotions, and confuse and confound us with the media.  As an expert on media, I can tell you how effective it is.  The best way to stop these people is turn it all off.

Stop watching TeeVee, listening to the radio and reading the papers.  Don't consume anything from AP, or broadcast or MSM of any kind.  Don't vote in their elections.  Don't buy their products.  Refuse to react to anything they say or do.

Sure, it will cause some hardship at first.  You have to go out and find local folks making things you need.  You'll have to put in your own garden and tend to it daily.  Of course, if you spent all the time in the garden feeding yourself and your family that you spend watching TeeVee, you'd be richer, healthier and happier for it.

It's called shunning.  It's a very old concept.  Catholics call it excommunication.  You cease to acknowledge that someone exists.  If millions of people around the world just stopped buying their crap, they would go into a panic.  They would shrivel and die without us chasing their string like kittens.  It would literally kill them if we stopped reacting to anything they do.

So now a man who committed a felony and presented a fraudulent legal document just last week is a major hero today for killing a man who died 10 years ago.

Through the looking glass.  Black is white.  Good is evil.  Joy is anger.  Truth is a lie.

 Time to dust off the old copy of C. S. Lewis, because that may be the only thing that can explain what we are seeing now.  Even Orwell would be amazed.  To see his nightmare come alive so completely and so vividly would stun him, I think.  But, Lewis would probably nod his head and say, "See?"

It's ALL bullshit.`


(Fun Fact: Usama bin Laden was 6'-4"/218cm tall.  Just something to remember as you see purported photos offered in the media)

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; If a clod be washed away by the sea, is Europe not the less? So therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." -- John Donne, Meditation 17

UPDATE: They're getting desperate.  Now they're trotting out the 'hero dog' to really tug on the emotional strings.  This is all such bullshit! 

Re-Branding Terror

Have you noticed it?

We went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan to fight 'al Qaeda.'  Now, al Qaeda is our friend.  Yup, they're helping out in Libya, trying to get rid of Qaddafi, who if I remember correctly, was the mastermind of the Lockerbie mess.

Doesn't that make al Qaeda and Qaddafi best friends?

And what about bin Laden?  He was the Man of the Moment 10 years ago.  We blew up three countries (Pakistan too) trying to find him.  But, he just kept making tapes and changing his appearance.  Last time I looked, there's been about six or seven bin Ladens.  It's kind of like James Bond.  Just plug in a new one when the old one dies.

Maybe bin Laden is hiding in Libya?  He's shacked up with Qaddafi now and they're taking over the world, Pinky!  But wait!  Bin Laden was in charge of al Qaeda, right?  He was the Ace of Spades, if I remember all those stupid card monikers and color alerts.  Hell, the Number Three guy (who I guess was the Queen of Spades) in now the new Number One, and he had dinner at the Pentagon a couple of weeks after 9/11.  Really.

Maybe all this bullshit is why Judge Judy and what...a half dozen reporters now?...all start babbling on camera at some point.  They just can't keep all the cognitive dissonance at bay.  It's kind of like that scene from "Bruce Almighty," when Jim Carrey puts the hex on the anchor dude, and he starts blathering like an idiot.  Not that it's much different from normal, everyday news casting.

So, let's see if I can get this straight.  Oceania is our enemy.  Oceania has always been our enemy.  Or was it Eurasia?  I can't remember now.  I need a quick trip to the MiniTruth to get my head rebooted.

Think about it.  Al Qaeda (The Source, in case your Arabic is rusty) was our mortal enemy for a decade, and we bombed three countries into the Stone Age to get rid of them.  Then Qaddafi, who was re-branded after the Reagan Years to be mostly benign, is now re-branded again into the Boogie Man du Jour for putting down some protests, just like Obama does in front of the White House, or everyone does at G20 meetings.  So, USA, Inc. invades his country completely without provocation (under international and US law, but who pays attention to law any more), ostensibly on the side of the rebels (though really it's on the side of oil mega-corps).  Then, al Qaeda joins in on the side of the rebels, as well.  And NO ONE noticed??!!

Where are the blaring headlines, a la W. R. Hearst?
Our Enemy Is Now Our Friend!
Maybe I missed some important memo.  Understandable, of course.  I'm 12,000 miles away from the office and stone tablets ain't cheap to mail.  But come on!  Just back in January, we were drone-bombing western Pakistan to root out al Qaeda.  Did they make a payment to someone?  Did they agree to help get the oil for Daddy Warbux?  Or have I just been in a coma for ten years and missed the whole re-branding campaign?  Hell, the US is even GIVING al Qaeda guns and bullets now!

Isn't that how al Qaeda started?  The CIA armed them using the Iran Contra drug money so they would trot over and kick butt on Iran, because the US didn't like who they put in after the CIA got rid of the CIA's first implant (the shah).  Then they got blamed for 9/11, so we crashed their party.  Now, they're working for US again.

It really feels like I'm Winston Smith, banging away on my diary for some future human beings who will never exist, because the Thought Police are coming soon and Richard Burton will pop in to do a number on my brain  so that, I too, will Love Big Brother.

The next time you are watching the nightly propaganda machine and the anchor starts uttering pure gibberish, like Judge Judy and the gang, just remember...their Room 101 sessions haven't quite kicked in yet.  Give them a little time and some Victory Gin and they'll come around.

You almost need a playbook to keep up with who's shafting who these days.

We;re at war with Eastasia.  We've always been at war with Eastasia.  And choco rations have increased this month due to production increases.  Double plus good!

It's enough to make me want to find a camera and start babbling.

Twenty Eighty-Four

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!

-Winston Smith, Nineteen Eighty-Four

In some ways, my blog is like Winston's diary. I'm not sure if I'm writing to the world I knew as a child, or the to world my daughter will inherit.

Certainly, it's for the reader, a way of connecting with strangers across the globe, who hopefully find in my words a solidarity of thought or experience. It's a way to clarify my own thinking and test drive ideas: kick some philosophical tires, as it were.

Today, I wax introspective. Why? Well...one, it's Sunday, and my Sunday musings usually stray far afield. Two...my colleagues Clif High, over at HalfPasHuman, his faithful henchman Igor (EYE-gor) and George over at UrbanSurvival have jointly been predicting and speculating about some Earth-shaking event(s) that will commence at roughly 6pm Jakarta time and will reverberate through January, with particular attention on the date of January 7th.

What is it? Heck, I don't know. I'm not qualified to speculate on the nature of future events, but I have a pretty clear bead on the past. I do know, from about ten years' worth of experience that Clif's webbots have been spectacularly right about many things. From 9/11 to large-scale blackouts, from the Columbia shuttle explosion to Banda Aceh, from Katrina to Chinese wedding quakes, the bots have been eerily right again and again.

Whatever the event(s) turn out to be, the effects will appear in history books in the year 2084. Our progeny will read with the dispassion of those long separated from horrific events about whatever IT is that the bots have been harping on for better than two years now.

What can we do to prepare? Well, like any normal, red-blooded Texan, I armed myself, bought some farm land up in the mountains, loaded in water and food, seeds, gold and a generator. The salient point that I take away from all this, though, is it is NOT what you do to prepare, but how you react after the fact. As Douglas Adams might have said, DON"T PANIC!

We know from experience that fascists always use crisis to advance their control structures. That's a given. They will put up Judas goats who will make pseudo-logical and impassioned pleas to follow the Party line. They will point the panicked sheep to Onkel's waiting breast, where he will suckle us and nurture us through this difficult time -- for a price, of course: your immortal soul.

I hear so many folks talk big. "I'll never go down quiet," they boast. "I'll give up my gun when they pry my cold, dead fingers off the trigger," they growl. Fact is, most people don't know how they'll react under severe stress. When something so horrible presents itself to your eyes, most people shut down reason and start acting on pure instinct. I've seen it dozens of times. They talk big, but they don't look deep inside and find the trigger of their panic, and corral that sucker.

Furthermore, we have all been trained and conditioned by mass media to turn to "authorities." We can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, we must seek out the proverbial gurus at the tops of corporate/government mountains to give us sage advice and thoughtful direction.

Bullshit!

There is only one authority that I trust with my life and the lives of my family: me. My mother will tell you, when there was a crisis, I was the one you could count on not to panic. Even as a kid. Maybe I have my great-aunt Tish's genes. In 1910, during the Halley's comet panic, she was 12 years old. Her mother told her to get on her knees and plea to the God of Our Fathers to spare the Earth from the comet's deadly effects. Tish's answer? "If we're all going to die, why do we need to pray?" (She arrived in Texas in 1899 in a covered wagon...I loved that woman)

At the tender age of 13, I gashed my forearm down to the artery. Sure, I cried, but I calmly wrapped my arm while my dad nearly went into orbit, not to mention damn near killed all of us on the way to the hospital. A 18, I saw a Canadian man have a heart-attack in the Gare-de-Nord in Paris. His wife was, well...hysterical and there were about 50 gawkers all standing around watching him die. I doffed my pack and applied CPR and kept him alive until the ambulance arrived. Several years ago, the neighbor's kid broke both his radius and ulna, so that his forearm had a new elbow. I set the bones and slung the arm while his mother looked like a loose balloon. In Guatemala a while back, I was on a bus when a woman went into labor. Half the bus was stunned into statue-like indecision, while the other half were in complete panic. Since I had done a video on childbirth, I had a pretty good idea what to expect, and so delivered the baby somewhere near San Isidro. I wasn't prepared to go blind, but when it happened, I began to make a mental list of things I could still do, rather than focus on what I couldn't do. It all boils down to one thing:

DON'T PANIC!

Self-reliance and self-trust is a lost art. The media have been used for decades now to implant deep in our minds the profound distrust of our own abilities and to seek the all-knowing, all-seeing counsel of "experts" and "authorities." I mean, just watch the news. How many reporters do you see anymore that give you thoughtful analysis of their own. Most are incapable of such mental legerdomain. Instead, they act nervous, concerned and near-panicked, and immediately turn to some "authority" to give us an idea what is happening and what to do about it.

Us? HA! We're just little helpless babes that can't make an informed decision without the guidance of our "betters." You watch. IF this 'thing' happens today, what will be your first reaction. Pay close attention to your thoughts the second you hear about it. Do you panic and start trying to figure out which "authority" will give you the best instrustions? Will you run for the SuperDome and beg your maters for deliverance? Or will you take immediate steps to protect your own first. Will you gather you bug-out pag by the door, arm yourself and get into a defensive posture before turning to media for more information on the situation (not instruction, mind you...big difference).

The key to Life, the Universe and Everything is how you react. That is closely related to how you prepare, and preparation is 90% mental. Think about how the military, police and other "authorities" are trained. They are given repeated preparation to act and react in a particular fashion so that under stress, it becomes automatic. They don't have to think (which shows). You job is to prepare your mind so that in a stess situation, you react automatically, but the trick is, don't turn off your mind. Always think and always listen to your gut. Your gut will tell you the right thing, if you've been careful to filter out the subliminal training you've been getting lo these 60 years of TeeVee.

Remember that telegraph from the future, called "Nineteen Eighty-Four?" The US is at war with Russia. The US has always been at war with Russia. No, wait! The US is at war with China. The US has always been at war with China. Oceania, EurAsia, East Asia...we live in the tri-lateral world of Winston Smith. You are now, and have been trained for your whole life to love Big Brother. The question now is can you uninstall the buttons before 'whatever-it-is' happens today?

What if the bots are wrong? Good! Can't wait to think that. I don't seek out disaster, I just don't panic when it comes. Do I believe the bots? No. Not one bit. They are just like all other predictors: you make enough predictions, some are bound to be right. So what good are they? They are thought experiments. They present scenarios which I use to mull around possible reacts, so that if a situation presents itself, I'm not surprised or panicked, but simply begin to execute the plan.

So why have I prepared for 'whatever-it-is?' Simple, being armed is a natual state for a Texan. I'd feel naked without tools of defense. Farmland is useful for generating income, building a retirement palace and having a weekend escape from the big city. Extra food and water? Well, there's earthquakes, storms and volcanoes here, not to mention utilities in Indonesia are, well...unreliable. A bug-out bag? Ever since I started living on my own at the tender age of 17, I've had a bag of necessities within easy reach. Just plain prudent, and has come in handy on more than one occasion. I haven't done anything to prepare that I wouldn't do on a warm, sunny day in the Texas hill country. It's just a case of ant and grasshopper.

And so I send this out to the people of the past, or the people of the future. The message from this time is, "DON"T PANIC!"

In the end, you're either Ford Prefect or Winston Smint. I'll take Ford any day. Have towel, will travel.

Clif, George, Igor...no one has any idea what thing is coming at us tonight/tomorrow. I certainly don't. Reading the bot output, to me, is like reading Revelations in the Bible. Makes no sense but has some cool images. I'm watching the news to spot when the moment arrives, though according to Clif, the show-shine boy up the alley will be talking about it. I'm curious though...what is this thing that has been sitting like a dead elephant in the middle of the predictive output for better than two years, and is bigger than 9/11 in orders of magnitude? All Clif and George can come up with, besides a dozen scenarios, is that the world will change profoundly next week.

Well, shucks! That happened when my daughter was born.

Next?!