This, I suppose, will amount to continuation of my "Things That Make My Ass Tired" essay, but it's a little more. It's a little more in that no part of the human condition holds more fascination for me than that which results in otherwise moral people being willing - eager; in fact, even driven - to justify a lie with nothing more than the fervor of their desire to further their favorite cause. Even further fascinating is the readily apparent fact that willingness grows in exponential proportion when the cause is political or religious. No one is a bigger liar than when he lies in support of his church or party, his religious faith or political ideology.
I could sight a hundred instances from national and world news, but one discovered in a recent visit to the Useless Knowledge website I once contributed to will do. The author, a man of science who ought - and most certainly does, as a matter of fact - know better, writes:
"You probably don't know that the glaciers of western Norway have been expanding and advancing. That wouldn't fit with the global warming propaganda that the media wishes to sell you.
"You probably don't know that the economy has been doing very well. That doesn't fit with the "bad Bush economy" propaganda that the media wishes to sell you.
"You probably don't know that job growth has been very good and that there are not just a lot of entry level jobs but also a lot of higher paying technical jobs available also. That doesn't fit with the unemployment propaganda that the media wants to sell you.
"Even when a newspaper reports the good news, as in this statement from the Christian Science Monitor, "This good news about the breadth of job creation comes against a backdrop of labor-market anxiety that has persisted despite the economy's solid overall footing" they go on to bemoan old bad news as if it is current and relevant.
"You probably don't know that the numbers of car bombs in Iraq has dropped off markedly in the past month or two. That would't (sic) fit with the Iraq War propaganda that the media wants to sell you.
"You probably don't know that Brad Pitt has become a henpecked suckup (sic) to Angelina Jolie and that she's already grown tired of his "sensitive New-Age guy" persona and is thinking of dumping him even before their baby is born. Oh, well, yes, you probably do know that. That fits with the media agenda of feeding you tabloid pablum (sic) and catastrophe both real and fabricated and ignoring all the good and important news of the world."
Now, in case you haven't guessed, Dr. Brooks Mick is a member of that political sect that has somehow acquired the label "Conservative." You'll pardon me if I remain a little nonplussed at that last. How in hell you can call people like that conservative is beyond me - beyond, Webster's, too, which defines the word as "desiring to preserve existing conditions, and thus opposed to radical changes" - but I assume it results from comparison with the political confusion known as "Liberal." As to a definition for THAT particular discombobulation of the reasoning processes, I confess to being at a loss (didn't want to say "nonplussed" again). Even Webster's struggles, spending twenty-six lines to do what it did in the instance of "conservative" with two. I suppose you can say that a liberal is so much so that you can't really tell what his opinions are, what he thinks, or is - you have to wait until he says it. Not that you'll have any better idea then, the reason that I almost never - certainly never by intent - listen to anything a "liberal" says.
I have noticed, however, that "Conservatives" are often very liberal when one of their number has done something reprehensible - like lie to the nation about WMDs in order to justify war, for instance; and that liberals are conservative as hell when it comes to their own sacred cows, things like observance of Supreme Court rulings such as that protecting "abortion" or gay "marriage." I do suspect that such is the reason that the further you go to the political right or left, the mendacity rate grows - the more extreme, the bigger, more daring, the liar.
Back to Dr. Mick. Now this is a circumspect, resourceful guy (he once told me - by e-mail, but I'll bet with a straight face - that President Bush didn't lie about the WMDs, because our Liar in Chief didn't know what the truth was). You're going to have a time, should you decide to corner Brooks Mick on one of his quasi-falsehoods. The doctor always leaves himself room for that same kind of rhetorical wiggle room our fearless leader repairs to so often. Check the first of his assertions up there, that having to do with the glaciers and global warming. Now, unless I'm way off base, the doctor implies there that the planet's polar glaciers are not contracting, and that no global warming exists. It is, after all, a fact that ONE of the world's glaciers is growing. What's the WHOLE truth? Well, start at the top of Google's listings in that regard:
"The growth of Norway's glaciers is unparalleled, as most of the world's glaciers are melting as a result of global warming. In the Alps, glaciers have melted to about half of their size since the 1850s." http://www.sepp.org/controv/afp.html
Then, too, we have:
"Norway's Glaciers Shrink a 4th Year on Warm Summer (Update1)
March 1 (Bloomberg) -- Norwegian glaciers shrank for a fourth consecutive year in 2004 as below-average snowfall combined with warmer summers to melt the ice.
The shrinking icecaps are part of a global trend caused by global warming during the past century, Liss Marie Edvardsen, a senior engineer at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, said in a telephone interview today.
``Some glaciers have retracted at the fastest pace since measurements started at around the year 1900,'' Edvardsen said. ``It's due to a combination of two record-warm summers and less winter precipitation than normal.'' http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000102&sid=aQZc.aXPBOXc&refer=uk
Et Cetera. For several pages. The rest of the gentleman physician's points concerning MEDIA distortion of facts and conditions nationally are similarly deceptive - and "CONSERVATIVE." The economy is doing well (that one reminds me of the guy who came home to find his wife under the neighbor guy; wifey looks over the stud's shoulder to demand of her cuckolded hubby, "Well, are you going to believe me or your eyes?"). Things are so great that tens of thousands are losing their jobs, GM, Ford, and a dozen more - even Levi Strauss has gone down the tube - are closing huge factories, corporation after corporation is announcing their intentions to default on employees retirement packages, others are "outsourcing" or just leaving the country, airlines are going broke right and left (wait till the price of fuel doubles again, if you think you've seen anything yet), the price of gasoline is nearing $3.00, everybody in the house has to work - that's including the dog and the cat - to pay outrageous taxes, and . . .well, hell, I could fill pages. Who in his right mind - especially anyone who can remember Motel Six costing six bucks, a meal at MacDonald's for a dollar, new cars for less that two thousand dollars, and fifty things more like that - would say "the economy has been doing well?" To quote Dave Letterman, HOLY CRAP!
"Job growth is very good." Want to have a look-see there (the matter has so many aspects that to discuss in detail them all would require hours)?
http://www.acinet.org/acinet/oview4.asp?next=oview4&Level=Overall&optstatus=&jobfam=&id=1%2C 2C1&nodeid=6&soccode=&stfips=00&x=43&y=10
You see if YOU can figure out how my equivocating friend manages to "cook" the numbers enough to find a way to dare saying something as faux as that? Anybody observing the economic conditions I've just mentioned - things everywhere apparent - would know that with employer after employer going broke or leaving the country, job and hiring rates aren't going to be increasing. Talk about "Voodoo Economics! Or, Dr. Mick, are we counting on the effect of a new immigration law sending millions of Mexicans home?
And things are just peachy in Iraq. We buried another local guy last week, killed when shrapnel from a mortar hit him in the head. Nobody like the doctor seems to have noticed that that's been going on around here for weeks on end; and if you notice that the media didn't report any such attack last week, you're paying the kind of attention Dr. Mick and his idol George VII consider traitorous. Maybe we faked the local Marine's funeral - Cindy Sheehan types, you know. Brooks, of course, would say that REPORTS - the ones HE reads - say the number of car bombs has decreased. That's car bombs, dammit - and the reason I didn't say anything about mortars and small arms, I.E.D.s, and the rest is that only car bombs count. No car bombs, no "insurgency." Bush League statistics, no doubt.
And remember, Brooks can say that because he doesn't know the truth - just like George didn't know. So it isn't really a lie. Et, as I said, cetera. HOLY CRAP (to quote Letterman again)!
But there you have the reason, the real, at-the-heart-of-it reason, we're in so damned much trouble. When you're being eaten by a dog and you can tell yourself things are great because it isn't a bear, you're in trouble. The looney-tunes at either extreme of the nation's faltering - stunned - rationality have somehow come to run things. In this Lewis Carroll, Mutt and Jeff scenario, we get first one clown congress in power and giving away the farm by "liberal" means, then you get the other group of candidates for the rubber room giving it away "conservatively." In this, what surely must be the biggest asylum for the insane in history, the fact that we are going deeper and deeper in debt, mortgaging or children and their children's live, means "the economy is good." HOLY . . . -oh, I said that. When that farm I spoke of is gone, Mutt and Jeff "Liberal" and "Conservative" will each blame the another, while we, the dispossessed farmers, will sit there looking at one another in stupefied wonder. We all went broke in a booming economy. HOLY - oh, never mind . . .
Enough of that. A number of people have written to ask about the chapbook series I wrote a couple of decades ago (almost - 1987), the "Citizen's Power Series." Several actually wanted to know why the citizen no longer has any real power to control his government. He can vote, he can protest, and he can sign a petition. We all know what all that comes to. One Jack Abramoff, and everybody's vote means zilch. For the next three years, King George the Seventh does whatever the hell he pleases, the Congress postures fecklessly and dithers, while George sends our sons and daughters to die for his place in history, and we sit and wait for the suicide bombers who've been pouring over the border to attack. If every man, woman, and child in the country filled the streets to demonstrate, and signed three hundred million petitions, nothing would change - George has his orders from the corporate powers that own him. He talks to god, too, you know . . .
Two or three people want to know about citizen's arrest. How about the Grand Jury? Why doesn't somebody sue? Sorry, folks - I can't offer much encouragement. I beat the feds and their pit bull, the IRS, because I had the goods on a wh-o-o-ole bunch of fat cats high in government. I did, indeed, have hold the power of citizen's arrest, because I had direct, first hand and incontrovertible evidence that a heinous felony crime been committed - I'd seen and heard it happen. That gave me - still does, in two instance - the power to enlist the aid of any and as many citizens as necessary to make my arrest. That could mean a militia, and I was instrumental at the time in forming what became the Colorado Militia. That was then, this is now.
That's true in more ways than one. We have, you see, pissed away all our sacred freedoms. Too soft, too fat, too cowardly, and too surfeited with material things. Too smug with the freedoms and the wealth our parents and grandparents left us. The Grand Jury is now nothing more than a tool of the state. Where once the Grand Jury stood between the citizen and his government, a guard posted against official abuse, it is now the case that when the police and prosecutor have no evidence and can't get any by legal means - more and more "means" being provided them daily - the prosecutor summons a grand jury. And, as one famed attorney noted, "I can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich!"
The situation with the Petit Jury is worse. Where once John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court instructed a jury "Gentlemen you have the right to determine the law as well as the facts in controversy;" and Thomas Jefferson said of the jury's function "If the question relates to any point of public liberty, or it be one of those in which the judges be suspected of bias, the jury undertakes to decide both law and fact," the jury of one's peers is now controlled entirely by the government's court - a flat contradiction. That, by the way, came about as early as 1895, when in the case of Aparf and Hanse v. the U.S., the Supreme Court terminated the jury's power to nullify the law. It was, where an essential freedom is concerned, a lethal stroke.
Which brings up an interesting point, one I've made here at least a couple of times. The Supreme Court - and no court - has no power to do that. Supreme Court rulings have to do with the U.S. Constitution, a law that controls government - NOT JURIES! Think! In the United States of American, a jury by definition is a body of persons made up of the accused citizen's "peers." They are not the government. More, the rulings of the Supreme Court are opinions only, not law. Law is the enactment of people empowered to make law - a legislature. Supreme Court opinions are binding upon the government, and have no force against the people or its juries at all. In fact, the law in question remains in effect until it is repealed by the legislature who passed it originally; the state simply enforces it no longer.
Now its time for your question: if I had the government by the balls like that, why didn't I squeeze - or tear them off? The answer is "Because I am one guy only, and the people I had the goods on started shooting." More, they had thousands of characters like my friend Dr. Mick on their side. The police radio said I was a bad guy, and suddenly the streets were full of "patriots" willing to believe anything their government, the radio or the record said. Think about that - does it remind you of anything, any ONE? The story's in my book, but the answer to your question is the same as the answer to the question how in the hell did we get in this fix as a nation? The answer is that I couldn't get anyone to help me make the arrests. The media caved, too. Had I had a militia behind me, and had they told the truth, I would have brought the IRS tyranny to an end. A U.S. District Court said so: "....to do otherwise would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States," that after I had sued under FOI for records that would prove many more people in government knew about the crime in question, and were covering for the criminals. The U.S. Attorney General's argument was that my records were a matter of national security - does THAT remind you of anything? - and exempted under the Freedom of Information Act.
The woman who had been raped, by the way, left the country - taking the limit on my last credit card with her. She would otherwise have been murdered. This isn't the country you, or the befuddled Dr Mick, think it is. And you made it the way it is by doing just exactly what the good doctor does continually on: http://www.useless-knowledge.com Go have a look.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." (Edmond Burke).
Exerpt from the novel, "Jonatha's Truth."
The FBI Hostage Rescue Team is something more than its name suggests. Created in 1978, the “Hurt Team,” as they are pointedly referred to by their law enforcement brethren, do indeed, train ostensibly to rescue from their captors persons being held against their will. “Ostensibly”: training to rescue hostages is in fact training to do a lot of things that are similar on the surface. As someone apparently knowledgeable about things similar once said, “the devil is in the details.
Special Weapons And Tactics operations, to use the civilian soldier–police title, are in fact done by men who have shown themselves able – and willing - to kill. The 1957 brainchild of an eighteen-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant, the S.W.A.T. concept drew nothing but scorn and ridicule from superiors in both the military and civilian professions. Until 1967. That year, 96 minutes of carnage inflicted from a tower on the campus at the University of Texas by a brain-tumor demented rifleman named Charles Whitman brought rationality. Within a year, one Darryl F. Gates of the Los Angeles Police Department had formed a special operations team based on the concept 2nd Lt. Harland Lübbert originally dubbed “The Mongoose Tactic.” No credit for the idea was ever afforded the youthful soldier, of course. “Any idea,” someone observed, “must go through four stages – ridicule, tolerance, acceptance, and theft.”
Fundamental to the Mongoose Tactic and method are “surprise, speed, and “extreme violence of action.” Like the firearms they employ, special operations teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and FBI HRT are designed, organized, and intended to kill instantly, so suddenly that their victims literally never know what hit them.
That much anyone with interest enough to visit the library or access the Internet can learn. Beyond that, the devil, again, is in the details. Men who do “ops” for a command structure like those of NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, and the federal bureaucracy in general, are controlled by tactics that prevent by means of enforced ignorance their breach of “mission security.” Directed, for instance, from what is called “Strategic Operations Center” on the fifth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., FBI HRT and SpecOps troopers generally know nothing of their mission or objectives except what they themselves call “shootin’ ‘n’ lootin’, hoppin’ ‘n’ poppin’.” They are truly little more, in other words, than a very lethal weapon in the hands, scrupled or otherwise, of a superior or superiors. Weapons are not killers; weapons are used by killers.
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Howdy, jke,
I note with much interest and good humor that you completely misstate my positions in order to disagree with them.
1) I haven't said to ignore global warming--I said to study what's going on so we will know what's going on. The anthropogenic global warming hypothesis has not been proven. Indeed, we may be coming to the end of a quite natural sun-cycle of warming and we may be entering a global cooling phase soon. If you have to fabricate my position to be able to disparage it, it suggests that my true position might be too tough for you to debate.
2) Same with the George Bush statement re "lying." What I said was that it isn't lying if you believe it when you say it. It may be a mistake, true, but an error is not a lie. The term "lying" has been so overused and misused that it is now meaningless. I give about as much weight to the user of the "liar" epithet as I do to one who calls his opponent a "nazi."
3) Ditto with other citations. If you can't quote your opponent in a debate correctly, you are either incapable of reading comprehension or attempting disingenuousness.
--Brooks A. Mick, M.D.
Posted by: Brooks A. Mick, M.D. | December 10, 2006 at 04:52 PM