Thanks man, I enjoyed writing it and am glad you liked it.
I understand completely the idea of "the system", and how both parties are corrupt, however taking it out of the ideological sphere and into the practical: for the last 50 years life has been better under Democratic Presidents for more people, and on all living standard metrics. (Look it up.)
The reasons are varied and a whole separate debate, but I would argue that the Left*Liberal channels of information reflect the views of more people, and more poor people, to help apply pressure against the state on behalf of those oppressed by the state. When the complaints of those who *really* have something to complain about are heard, we all feel happier and far less guilty. There's also a trickle-up effect, where the middle-class who can't afford to completely isolate themselves will interact with a friendlier working class, and enjoying each other's company builds relationships that transcend fear and classicism. Finally, the core moral element of any social structure - helping the poor, weak, etc. is better handled under Democratic administrations - though still woefully inadequately.
You know, while he may have been a drug-running philanderer, I miss Ol' Billy Clinton a whole lot.
Enjoying Bush's huge tax cut for the richest 1% much?
Are they?
Subtle ways pay man... you don't give a po' white boy from Arkansas the title of "The First Black President!" lightly, there has to be some evidence to receive that compliment - even warmth as a person to spiritually lead the nation in good vibes.
Bush has refused for 5 straight years in a row to meet with the NAACP, the first President in history to do so, and instead went to the Indiana Black Expo which gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Now, I don't believe all black people are equal (don't start), obviously I believe they are equal with everyone else, but I think in terms of representing the community the 100 year old NAACP has earned the right over an "Expo" to meet with whomever is President at the time, and relay African-American concerns from an authoritative voice.
In fact, outside of simply respecting tradition I'll wager they had to fight pretty hard for that privilege, so for Bush to roll back the clock on that (and on evolution, abortion, abolition...) is a true slap in the face to the African-American community.
I know Clinton bombed Kosovo. I know he bombed the Sudan. Hell, I even know he bombed Oklahoma. But, whether he was a maniacal madman hiding behind his chubby charm, or merely compromising with the military-industrial complex in a way John F. Kennedy refused to, the fact is he was a better President on every metric, including Bush's specialty of war: how many unwinnable boondoggle quagmires did Clinton stick us in? How long did his military actions last? How many people were hurt? How relatively safe and prosperous did the world feel?
(How many "secret societies" that conduct satanic rituals does he belong to? Skull and Bones? Illuminati? Bohemian Grove? None that I know of, though he might, and he probably does something freaky like getting together with his boys down in Arkansas to drink Jack Daniels and shoot tin cans. Or hookers'n'blow... whatever man, he ain't making billions by blowing up Iraq like his old nemesis George Sr. is, and that makes him more okay in my book.)
The core principles of Liberalism are sounder than Conservatism, it's basically activism vs. libertarianism, including dedication to build a better society. Put it this way: we've already got a "ME" culture thoroughly ingrained (this is not a "Platonic ideal" debate), so if the system is stacked against us anyway, I'd at least like the flimsy bulwark of a Democratic President assailed from all sides while loved by the people.
Hell homie, I bet he's one of the few Presidents who can walk through Harlem untouched. After all, he's got an office there.
Think Kennedy. Think Carter. Think Clinton.
Think about a better world...
Peace, (NOW!!!)
BK
____________________
...
Black Krishna Brand
Philosophy - blackkrishna.blogspot******
Music - *****soundclick******bands*0*blackkrishna.htm
...
BONUS: Where are we going? "You say you never scared there's kids in other countries
Making jerseys, jeans, and sneakers they could never wear
Parents never there, they're busy building homes they can't afford to buy
Cars they can't afford to drive
Working jobs that don't support their life
You busy screaming gangsta, gangsta all that talk is trife
You already know you lost the fight if you don't know the cost of life
These kids is forced to fight a war they can't outrun
Ain't got no shoes but got a gun
Now where the fuck he pulled that out from?
People ask me how we wearing diamonds
When there's little kids in Sierra Leone
Losing arms for crying while they mining
Probably an orphan who's momma died of AIDS
He built a coffin working often but he never paid
Forever slaving in the world that's forever cold
Becoming the man of the house at 11 years old
This reality rap, I get inside the mentality that...
Terrorize you like a cowardly act
[Hook]
I got a part to play, we going hard these days
Fuck the harder way, we doing it the harder way
To my god I pray, that's how I start my day
The bullets starts to spray the revolution starts today
I say the shit these people ain't got the heart to say
Fuck the harder way, we doing it the smarter way
To my god I pray, that's how I start my day
The bullets starts to spray the revolution starts today...."- Talib Kweli,
"Going Hard"Chiggidy-check yo'self...
Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State (2005)Evil has spread across the land. Martial Law: 9/11 Rise of the Police State exposes the high-tech control grid that is being set up across America.
Out of the ashes of the September 11th tragedy, a dark empire of war and tyranny has risen. The Constitution has been shredded and America is now a Police State. This film exposes not just who was behind the 9-11 attacks, but the roots and history of its orchestrators.
Downloaded: 4,608 times
SOURCE - http://www.archive.org/details/MartialLaw911
MARTIAL LAW 911: RISE OF THE POLICE STATE Information Resource Companion Web Site.
SOURCE - http://www.martiallaw911.info/index.htm
P.S. Here's an example of documentation from the Martial Law website...SOURCE - http://martiallaw911.info/policestate.htm
TIME ARTICLES / DOCUMENTS / WEB SITES GOOGLE SEARCH
0:05:25 Master Blaster: A New Noisemaker - MSNBC (From Newsweek July 12, 2004 issue)
0:09:32 NYC police arrest two in bomb plot - The Washington Times/UPI, August 28, 2004
0:09:33 Terror Threat Info May Be Dated - CBS News/AP, August 3, 2004
0:10:07 Blimp to provide convention coverage for police - CNN August 26, 2004
0:10:08 Fuji Blimp Plays Role in GOP Convention Security - 1010 WINS, August 30, 2004
0:10:11 Hi-tech blimp is new spy in the sky - The Times, September 13, 2003
0:10:31 Security blimp tested in Washington skies - CNN, September 29, 2004
0:10:33 COPS HAVE EYES ON X-RAY VISION - APBnews.com, June 4, 1999
0:11:15 Fuji Police Bicycles - circlecitybicycles.com
0:11:23 Eye in the Sky—and Everywhere Else: Do Biometric Technologies Violate Our Rights? - The Cato Institute, January 24, 2002
0:12:24 Helmet cams will eye GOP confab - NY Newsday.com, August 26, 2004
Please report any corrections or broken links
BONUS: You can't have your Coke and snort it too... Okay, let's get this straight: is there or is there not a conspiracy?
If there is no conspiracy that's fine: try asking a few questions. Sniff around a bit at work and see how they freak out, or check into the way a school or university is run, or anything else. Or bring up some crazy conspiracies you believe in around a bunch of people, see if they overreact in fear to prevent you from explaining it using disruptive patterns of disdain, anger or disinterest.
I guess that is the conspiracy.
It's like we've been trained to dismiss them when we should be trading them like baseball cards - and frankly on several levels we do. We all have a few we think are valuable that we pass on to a select few, we've all seen, read or heard something that someone else hasn't - so standards of proof are fairly similar, and based on our environment we all have different conspiracy theories that others will find factually obvious or factually insane.
"Factually" I think is held by all of us to be key, which means until the facts are seen no strong case can be made against a theory, only the internal logic of it's arguments. Many people think there is no connection between the House of Bush and the House of Saud, but we've seen recent pictures of Dubya and a Saudi Prince hand-in-hand gayly skipping through a field of pretty blue flowers.
(And this guy won't even talk to Cindy Sheehan.)
If pro and anti-Bush supporters can at least agree on the existence and authenticity of those pictures, perhaps they can debate the merits or harms of the relationship. Unbelievably, some will deny they exist, and furthemore deny your ability to prove they exist - leading to an expansion of anti-conspiracy thinking enveloping common sense.
(I remember an email argument a couple of years my Uncle started with me and my Dad, and really he was a smart guy in every respect save for being a staunch Bushite. After a couple back and forth he caved, basically suggesting the topic was too sensitive to discuss and could ruin our relationship, so we'd better stop. I wonder: how many heroes do I have where I would have to draw that line? Where I couldn't hear the truth because I was literally afraid of learning it and destroying my treasured myth? I'll accept that you should probably never meet your favorite rock star or actor, they'll probably turn out to be a prick and maybe a fantasy is best. But the President? A man with that much power? Out of respect I hadn't brought up the worst yet, but the few charges of ethical and criminal hypocrisy and corruption apparently raised a red flag: "I'd better stop learning stuff before I'm proven wrong". Free will and natural curiousity dictate this attitude isn't his own, but rather part of an oath of loyalty to the Party. Hmph. Sounds like a costume Party to me. Don't worry, nearly everyone's invited, just please remember to leave all your questions at the door, and that it's BYOBS - Bring Your Own Brown Shirt! ;)
I guess a conspiracy theory is any anecdotal idea that speaks truth to power and is not widely held, like people thinking fluoride in the water is bad. Like any conspiracy theory that has staying power and a varied loyal following, this theory has a tonne of evidence that begs more answers, including a staggering array of scientist and doctors that probably don't work for think tanks or drug companies, but are working to educate the rest of us on the potential and deliberately inflicted problems with our water.
Whether questions get answered or not depends on one thing: how much credibility does the conspiracy theory get? Federal investigations run for several years with millions of dollars, so it helps to grade geeks sifting through documents and blogging away on a curve when it comes to providing proof - the stuff ain't bad anyway.
Without that credibility, would we have validated whispers surrounding COINTELPRO? Three-Mile Island? Guantanamo Bay? Rovegate, and other established scandals? And unless it's pefectly packaged with smoking guns and bombshell whistleblowers, who does the groundwork to generate the heart of the story? Digs for the dirt that builds up until the pile is big enough to attract mainstream media? Or compensates when the media discover something too hot and are told to drop it? Or they fail to investigate because it's been established as folklore?
MSNBC went to investigate the "urban legend" in New York around 9/11, where people were supposedly warned not to go to work that day. They had to report that it isn't just an urban legend, but is also in fact true: they found hundreds of people warned to stay out of downtown that day, and the Israeli phone company Odigo even reported hundreds of text messages they sent warning employees of the same. What does this prove? It proves what it proves. If it does nothing for you, fine, for me it begs the question of who was warning them and no one else.
Perhaps some overreach, but then again, what's wrong with that?
If you overreach you get slapped back anyway, and tabloids do this all the time with "celebrity conspiracy thoeries" about "Brangelina" and "Bennifer 2: Ha! Take that J.Lo! I Got Knocked-Up and Get to Keep Him!!!" They expose some truth, take some lawsuits, arbitrate a lot of business in the open with a lot of press coverage and dialogue, and serve an extremely "well-informed public". It's a great system for ensuring we know some crucial up-to-date and advance information about celebrities.
Quite a while before "Dukes of Hazard 2: Man, Look What That Fag Nick Lachey is Bangin'! Dude, I Would So Bang That Chickenhead of the Sea!!!", I saw bootleg pics of a hard-body and chisel-chinny Jessica Simpson in a tabloid magazine at the grocery store, and was very glad I did - damn near bought the magazine when the line moved. It was cool to know information well in advance.
And yeah, she's hot....
But...
We got 31 days and zero notice for The Patriot Act.
We got 31 days and zero notice after 9/11 on a law curtailing rights for 10 years.
I've seen movie trailers for movies that come out a year from now...
(...)
So, the system doesn't work as it stands, and the bubble of information under the surface on the internet is massive. In studying it recently, it provides quite simply what is most important: peer corroboration. While people are more cynical than ever, the character and track record of those speaking truth to power sometimes seems far more reasonable than what they're saying at first, and even guys like Seymour Hersh and Noam Chomsky will fall into that category with their unbelievable indictments of American foreign policy hypocrisy.
Once trust is established in their sincerity - which happens for a lot of them repeatedly proving themselves correct, arguments, evidence and belief catch up to a comfortable level: it's not a religion, and most people even treat belief in their religion as flexible, so that's what I do with conspirary theories.
It's cool, the logic of looking at a world where "normal" stress, over-work, smog, violence, poverty, and many other issues pissing all of us off have traceable responsibility for redress seems reasonable.
Plus, it just take a couple and some common sense to see a pattern of these throughout every level of society, after all any two people planning to do something illegal or immoral are involved in a conspiracy, and that's a lot of people. Factor in all of them gambling on not getting caught, see who has the most to gain, the most to lose, and the most control over their story, and everything loosens up a bit as the classic latin "qui bono" or "who profits" comes casually into play; as does the other latino classic "deus ex machina" or "God in the machine", as the invisible hand of the "state" pats us on the bum and tells us to "keep movin' folks, nothin' to see here".
(And quibble-thee-not about my use of "state", it ain't just for Fascists anymore. When the Brit-cops can just say "we've got to shoot to kill even with no evidence" to add to the world's police brutality; and when all "states" pass policy despite overwhelming opposition from their electorates, you can see the power of the "state" arbritrarily against its own people in the "civilized" world. And the bastards universally are damned secretive for "public servants", nasty habit that.)
Currently being established en masse on the web is the idea that real, honest, normal people are working really hard to get us key information, analysis and context, stuff the corporate media often avoids or soft-pedals. The difference between the reception of conspiracy theory as a drunken argument in a bar to a more enlightened and curious one is happening now:
Alright, I call, show me your cards.
Conspiracy theorists have to make their information digestable and interesting, although they are certainly not monolithic in their views or their audience - some stuff is for those with more and less specific knowledge, like in any other circle. This also works in translating conspiracy theories to non-believers, as without a certain base of specific knowledge it's often impossible for anyone to be convinced of certain possibilities. But, all it takes is either another source or something they know as truth themselves to form an inevitable crack in the impermeability of disbelief, and as new corroboration is planted the chances of growing a real tree of knowledge increase exponentially.
Much like any other independent group of disparate origins and similar interest, even within a school of thought there is wide disagreement and debate within the accepted premise, and the common ground forged is stronger through voting on the dialectic of true individuals from radically different backgrounds absent external political agendas. Some may be more aggressively going for theirs, but their info is still good and those intentions are fairly transparent if there, far better than most sanitized public relations information smoothed of any edge with a legal lathe.
Historians debate theories concerning the Civil War, establishing characters and evidence and then creating logical narratives; conspiracy theories do this with "now", providing crucial information on people in the same "historical" roles of leadership and power that changed society at the time, and is a far better objective use of time if a judgment is to be made on practical grounds. They take established facts, and beyond just playing around with them they keep digging for stories that impact the world today.
I think most conspiracy theorists obviously know how frowned upon they are by a society that schizophrenically trusts and berates the mass media in general, and often takes additional unfair hits for the failures of the corporate media eroding trust in anyone who suggests they have the truth. This doesn't make any sense, but when the mass media fails and conspiracy theories are available, we'll use their availability to paradoxically increase our faith in the mass media: we all know lies are out there, so the bigger the news organization and more popular the information the better we can trust it - despite the fact that same thinking previously ended in failure and is the source of our distrust.
Basically we're in a Groundhog Day scenario that - unlike Bill Murray, we fail to learn from. Frankly, it's a really simple fix: I'll stop wasting my time watching my favourite sports teams if I think any are not playing hard, and I've done the same for my old favorite news teams. It's worked out well, and I never look back save to check in for variety, nostalgia, to see how they're calling the fight. On a pure news-as-entertainment level, going back is also going from the corporate box back to the cheap seats: sure we're just lurking in the corporate box chatrooms, but we've got a decent few of the game, and we steal some shrimp when they're not looking.
Because they've got to work more than twice as hard with less than half as much exposure, cash, credibility, etc., some "culpability" theoriests standards of proof are much higher in many cases than the average reporter copying off a newswire feed, especially those who've established a substantial following. Multiple articles are sourced, including several lonely nuggest of truth from the mainstream media - adding to the idea that something important "could" be a big story, it's just not.
Some are slackers and some are really out there, but really, in many fields of information we allow the rhetorical existence of possibilities fairly easily, and while the news has certainly been burned by this, so have the people for its absence. We've clearly seen in our lifetimes anything is possible, and once historical patterns create a character indictment of an institution - which they inevitably do, establishing belief in the rest is easy. Widespread adoption of this open mindset is key, both as a simple tool of tacit pressure to help react calmly to fear-mongering; and then to focus thinking on demanding clearer answers than the ones that make us paranoid.
(How come nobody has been charged with anything since 9/11? They even tried and convicted Osama in absentia for the 1998 bombings in Sudan, but nothing this time around. The London 7/7 bombings too, 50 people killed and no arrests or suspects since the scary muslim pictures they showed early in the story. Odd, ennit?)
My consigliori informed me the other day that there are 200 wars going on in the world right now.
Unreal.
Wait, I'm going to Google it...
(...)
Okay, it quickly came up as 200 wars from 1899 to 2001.
I don't know how many there are today.
But still...
I mean seriously, he's just a buddy and not an expert making a formal presentation, and he heard something that may have been wrong or he repeated incorrectly, but is it better that homeboy told me what he thought he knew or not? Is it better that the likely answer to questions posed today can take 0.31 seconds to find with a hi-speed internet connection? Is that a licence to ask freely?
When he first said it I told him it didn't matter anyway, I mean, anyway you slice it it's incomprehensibly insane. He could've said there are "20" wars going on right now instead of "200" and I would've been just as freaked out: we're not exactly on top of the situation. Once evidence of massive irresponsibility when it comes to sharing critical information is revealed, I'll indulge any anti-government gossip until I'm sure it's not true, the paradigm needs to be flipped anyway. Through a draining of the swamp of spin the truth will surface as seen by all, and conspiracy theories are a corrosive agent against rusted hinges on the doors of perception.
We've also had a pretty bloody history as is, one we're blind to in being taught that we've been in a relative "era of peace and prosperity" since WWII. This shows that, as Sy Hersh put it: "Democracy - you know as great as democracies are they have a pretty bloody history too, democracy certainly doesn't mean an end to war."
So we can't buy what they're selling, especially if somone else is yelling to put out the firesale of propaganda razing our common sense.
There probably are 200 wars going on right now, or there are 20, or there are whatever, and I guess that's the point: crazy stuff IS happening, the stuff IS crazy, and when stuff is brought up no one can afford to arrogantly, boastfully and willfully ignorantly dismiss it and deny its value - nor the value of the people finding it.
Power trips against honest sincere people are the work of bullies, cowards on a false fleeting artificial high of bringing the peer pressure of state propaganda down on hapless victims of social marginalization. It's a rush, one of the few times confidently stressing sheer ignorance can be used to discredit someone, and one of the few times knowledge can be trumped this way. Whether done out of loyalty, fear or hatred, this is among the oldest and cheapest mob rules of intimidation in the book:
"She's a witch I tell you!"
"Damn that Arundathi Roy!"
"Damn that Cindy Sheehan!"
"Burn her!!! Burn her!!!" You can't have your Coke and snort it too, and you can't tell me Coke can't possibly be responsible for the union leaders assasinated their bottling plants in Colombia.
Please, wake up, and step yo' trust-in-people game up...
No harm no foul,
Half-truths plague this nite owl,
See me in a Batman cowl,
Jackin' anthrax, from Colin Powell... Peace by piece...
BK
