The Metro, Weekend Edition, July 14 - 16, 2006
Page 06
The Metro, Weekend Edition, July 14 - 16, 2006
Page 06 - close up
Hi [---],
The glass is certainly half-full, and much like a great big swimming pool we can certainly enjoy splashing around and having fun in it.
I just had a nice lunch of Greek food and a coffee with a buddy, and this morning a couple of us had a wonderful meeting with an executive who says that giving our project more money isn't a problem, and that if we want more we can ask and he'll see what he can do. So, it's been a great day, and seeing great friends on the weekend made it a great weekend too.
The problem is the glass is being emptied - and a lot faster than we think, and these days it's not "in style" to discuss it - which is an excellent way to keep something from being discussed.
Hey, it is what it is.
They say "you shouldn't talk about politics or religion at a party", and I'm trying to figure out who "they" are.
I think if we discussed this stuff without getting angry (which is "in style") and in relaxed and convivial settings, we'd be able to come to grips with what's happening and support each other in dealing with it. Also, by re-learning to trust each other enough to freely trade the handfulls of half-knowledge (or pieces of the puzzle) we randomly collect with open hearts and minds, we'd probably figure a lot of stuff out too (like the puzzle).
Certain people don't want us to do any of this, and that's why ancient tactics used to foment bitter tribalism between otherwise like-minded groups (e.g. Liberal and Conservative Americans who want to peacefully break bread and if they break a leg have healthcare) are being re-invented and sold to us by the elite (as is historically usual).
This whole "talk about positive things!" mantra is being used to disguise all the negative things happening behind the scenes, and I've heard it pitched a bunch of times as a means of ensuring one has a "balanced" set of opinions. Otherwise, when you say "25% of Africa has AIDS - this is horrible - ahhh!!!" then you're clearly a "radical"; whereas if you say "but I also saw a special on Oprah about a school for the blind being built over there!" then the person you're dealing with can feel happy again, relaxed in knowing the natural order of good vs. evil is playing out just fine as usual.
The problem is it isn't, as while the Oprah special shows a group taking care of a handful of kids (if that), millions still suffer from a disease billions of dollars can't seem to cure.
This technique also gives us a false sense of stability and security that prevents most people from doing anything about it - by design, and leads to increasing feelings of powerlessness. That's why there is such a general feeling of paranoia and guilt: we know we're avoiding the truth, we know we continue to habitually consume media that lies to us, we know that the same media sources (and by extension ourselves) support an all-powerful and undeniably criminal government that lies to us, and we can't stand ourselves for it.
It's a strange paradox: knowing the world is getting worse and insisting on artificially equivocating the positives to cheer us up.
It's kind of like discussing how beautiful the chandeliers are on the sinking Titanic: well sure, I mean, I guess they're beautiful, but is this really the right time to bring it up? Do I have to mention THAT when the Titanic is sinking? Do I have to weight THAT fact equally with the "sinking"? Doesn't THAT defeat the purpose of choosing to value the "sinking" of the ship as the most important fact to deal with at the moment - making all the others superfluous?
Artificial equivocation is "in style" right now, and reinforced by the mass media: "they say this, the other side says that, it's all equal, and everyone has a right to their opinion."
It's crap.
It's just not true.
There is no "Right" and "Left", only "right and wrong".
While everyone has an "agenda": certain "agenda's" benefit "people" and their enablers; while certain others benefit "power" and their enablers.
As long as we say the "Right" and "Left" are "equal", and that both have a point, then we give to much credit to supporters of:
- Pre-emptive wars: The "supreme crime" according to The Nuremberg Tribunals after Hitler did it a bunch of times in WWII, and a great excuse to attack anyone at anytime including Iran, Syria, Venezuela and several others on the list. It's remarkable how this is STILL publicly acceptable public policy even AFTER the War in Iraq was proven to be completely based on lies!
- "Torture", "Renditions", "Disappearances" and "Secret Prisons": As advocated by Attorney General's Ashcroft and Gonzales and the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate and U.S. Military and U.S. Intelligence and The White House and a whole army of White House lawyers dedicated to preserving, centralizing and expanding the powers of the corrupt and tyrannical Executive Branch, including lead Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo, who says it's even okay to torture children if the President says so.
- "The Patriot Act": And "Patriot Act 2 and 3" which utterly eviscerate massive sections of The Constitution and The Bill of Rights - permanently, and they're even worse than Hitler's "The Enabling Act" laws which set up fascist Germany. Incidentally, most Germans were fine during much of WWII, and blissfully unaware of just how evil their government was acting in a fairly prosperous society. Most people at the time didn't "see" their concentration camps, whereas we've seen several pictures and videos of ours.
The "neo-cons" or "neo-fascists" have opinions and actions that fundamentally subvert the values, rights and freedoms of people around the world.
Their die-hard opponents by definition have the exact opposite set of opinions and actions: so how are they "equal"?
Why do I have to respect them at all?
I can take their propaganda seriously enough to understand it, deconstruct it, and argue against it, but I absolutely refuse to "respect" willful malice disguised as defensible public policy. None of their actions are worthy of "respect" when judged using any objective and universal standard of morality, including their hypocrisy in invoking "religion" to justify them.
Somehow they've managed to get us to demand from each other neutralizing responses designed to weaken the impact of any analysis, and further weakening the position of activists and advocates everywhere.
I've seen it dozens of times, and your email asking for "good news" is exactly my point: instead of reacting to the bad news with a desire to act on it or speak on it or challenge it or seek clarification, as a reasonable individual who generally trusts my intelligence and judgment, you merely accepted that it's probably true and requested that I provide some good news as well.
This isn't new to me, and it's just a symptom of the bigger disease.
Not having a TV for a couple of years means I haven't learned to react to horrible half-knowledge by changing the channel to something mindlessly amusing - like many of my peers have. Instead I choose better news sources that inform and educate me on what's being done to stop the descent into full-blown fascism, as opposed to quickly depressing and confusing me like CNN does.
My sources stay with topics and analyse them to the point where I actually understand what's going on - and interview those who've figured out ways to fight against it that I can either relate or emulate in some fashion. At the very least I'm happier people are fighting to preserve our freedom, while if you watch the mainstream media, they either ignore them and reinforce the idea that they don't exist, or demonize them and reinforce the idea that they're "terrorists" in some fashion.
I'm very happy and very much at peace with the world, and because of that I can handle the worst aspects of it unlike nearly everyone I know.
I mean, when one "dead white girl" in the Caribbean (or wherever) can be used by the media to scare and depress you for a few weeks every few months, then the genocide in Iraq as sold by the same people will obviously be too much to bear paying attention to. This lack of curiousity means the isolation of your government from any accountability only increases, and their actions become progressively more dangerous and less comprehensible from any position but the neo-con fascist one.
So, if you stay with the corporate media you have two choices:
1) Have them warp your values until you learn to emulate neo-con thinking, and learn to justify actions that are clearly immoral by any standard you'd apply to anyone else with any compassion.
2) As a responsible adult who obviously wants to stay "informed", you can continue watching the bare minimum of confusing and depressing news you can barely stand while the rest of the time ignoring the horrible world as much as possible.
Liberals point out corruption, that's just what we do.
Conservatives protect corruption, that's just what they do with creative arguments that use lies to defend the status quo and deny the value of looking at any opinion but theirs.
Patronizing tactics like "oh, you just don't understand how the world works!" are used to avoid engaging in honest debate and defending morally indefensible positions - e.g. "welfare moms" vs. "we have a deficit!"
When I pointed out to a Conservative friend that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's "$1200 tax credit for every child under age 6" to make up for canceling subsidized daycare actually only works out to $5/day (and how much private daycare will that buy you?), he quickly responded "see - you don't get it, the government has a massive debt..."
It's nonsense.
Conservatives brand "idealists" who transcend established norms and practices as worthless - and as if they haven't spearheaded every significant stage of humanitarian evolution in history.
As a few Liberal thinkers have noted, these neo-fascists have realized that with the power of the state and corporate media behind them they don't even have to "win" arguments anymore, they merely have to muddle the debate to the point where no one can tell who's telling the truth, e.g. "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth", "domestic surveillance vs. terror surveillance", "WMD's/Plame/Wilson/Miller/Fitzgerald/Rovegate", "enemy combatants vs. prisoners", etc., etc...
This also birthed the ludicrous idea that: "if you say something bad about Bush, then you have to say something good about Bush, because there's always another side!"
I'm afraid there's not always another side.
At least not always one that makes any sense.
And I'm afraid there's nothing good to say about this administration.
No really, absolutely nothing.
They're secretive liars who force us to do most of the work for them in justifying their decisions, and in getting us to make their imperial ambitions and domestic insanity seem rational.
Hitler's media did the same thing, and Germans happily endorsed the protection of their "homeland" and attacks on their growing list of "enemies" abroad under the spectre of "fear".
Some Germans resisted, but obviously not enough.
There are certain "battleground" states where your rights are being taken away - just like in the civil rights era when they were being won, including:
* New Orleans
The City was federalized a few years ago, and all that talk about the mayor and governor being slow to respond to Katrina was bunk - it was always a Federal responsibility. They also passed a law saying they have a right to search homes for weapons without probable cause, it made a huge ripple in "legal" circles but not in the mainstream press. I caught a local paper's article on it at infowars.com, and it's among the biggest legal decisions in history which resulted in 3 am visits by police and soldiers working together to break down the doors of suburban homes. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act states that using the military for domestic law enforcement illegal - and with damn good reason, especially since a cursory view of history shows it leads to tyranny. But, since Reagan in 1980 started using the Army and Navy in the (fake) war on drugs (see: Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News for the "fact" it's "fake") it's been a full-court press, and the military and our police forces are being steadily integrated into one unit.
* New Jersey
Eminent domain is being used by the U.S. government to confiscate private homes and farms and businesses for far less than their commercial value, and to keep open the option of selling them to real estate developers as opposed to using the property for the public good. New Jersey is of particular interest as that's where they're waging this particular attack on Americans and their "property" rights, but much like New Orleans it's merely to establish "legal" precedents for future actions nationwide. Here's a link to articles with a video clip showing a family asking everyone to get together and pitch their tents and trailers on the family farm which has been in their family for 80 years, and which the government took away on July 10th.
http://www.infowars.com/articles/ps/eminent_domain_family_protests_over_eviction.htm
There are dozens of other examples of being attacked by the government, and if you look carefully you'll even see die-hard conservatives in the mainstream media (there are no liberals) are getting scared: CNN's Lou Dobbs is now doing numerous reports on voter fraud and the unreliability of the new machines involved; the lies about open borders and using illegal immigrants as an endless supply of soldiers and/or to drive down wages and destroy the economy; and the plan to unify North America into one super-state run by Washington.
I hope this clears up my problem for you, and why I can't just answer your request in a linear way: that's part of the problem.
Still, my "good news" is another highly respected and qualified 9/11 whistleblower has come forward, the article on Daniel Ellsberg is at:
http://www.infowars.com/articles/terror/pentagon_papers_author_gov_maybe_did_911.htm
There was even an article on the movie "Loose Change" and it's filmmakers in Vanity Fair recently. You can watch it on Google Video as well, and apparently it's been downloaded over 10 million times.
More "good news" is that they bad guys have made this problem incredibly easy to solve: 9/11 is their foundational event, and all we have to do is prove to everyone (especially police and soldiers) that it was an inside job and their rushed neo-con agenda will crumble.
The "bad news" is the more we rush to prove it the more they rush to change laws (e.g. "free speech zones") and render us unable to get the information out there, or even dissent in general.
So, we're in a bit of a race against time here, and in this information war (which is what the military calls their attack on "us") we can't turn to conventional sources like the law or Bush's Supreme Court, we can't turn to violence because the Government has bigger and better guns, and we can't turn to the media because they're either bought or scared.
It appears we have to turn to each other for help, and that's not such a bad idea... ;)
Cheers,
BK
P.S. I've attached a scanned close-up picture of the small news story that I'd mentioned in my last email, and in the same daily "free" mini-newspaper there are 5 - 10 full pages of fluff...
The Metro, Weekend Edition, July 14 - 16, 2006
Page 34
The Metro, Weekend Edition, July 14 - 16, 2006
Page 35
Peace by pissing on the press, playing with each other, and playing to win...
BK
______________________
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Black Krishna Brand
Philosophy - http://blackkrishna.blogspot.com/
Music - http://www.soundclick.com/bands/0/blackkrishna.htm
...
P.S. Watch "TerrorStorm" on Google Video!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5948263607579389947
P.P.S. Check this out too while you still can!
Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet's First Amendment -- a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you -- based on what site pays them the most. If the public doesn't speak up now, our elected officials will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
