1
A former acquaintance (“academic activist”) posted this, recently, on Twitter, and I marveled at his *apparent* naïveté regarding A) Bernie B) The System.
“how is it that in the whole country there is only one
@BernieSanders who dares to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy like this? Of all the ivy league-educated establishment with all their smart critical acumen, no-one dares to speak truth to power, though the people long for it.”
Because credible (uncompromised) speakers of Truth-to-Power are never allowed unfiltered access to national platforms; anyone with constant access to such platforms is, logically, suspect. Pinning hopes for change on Bernie is exactly like pinning it on Clinton, in ’92, and Obama in 2008… both of those candidates used the “truth to power” shtick, combined with oratorical talent, to galvanize desperate fans… and each previous candidate turned out to be exactly what they always were and what Bernie is: an employee of the (corporate) Power they are supposedly speaking Truth to. Supposedly-speaking-Truth-to-Power has been a must-have accessory for *any* candidate, for both parties, since forever. In practise, this cosmetic attribute translates into zero effective difference. Did Bill Clinton turn out to be the opposite of (his mentor) Daddy Bush? Some of us didn’t need to see a high-five-ing Willy touring various NATO disaster opportunities with his adopted brother Dubya in order to answer that question with a “nope”.
Now, my old “academic activist” chum surely knows all this, but he also knows that speaking Truth to Twitter is no way to grow a young fan base. So he’s selling a Fantasy (beware the PhD who uses the term “the people”), instead. As above, so below…
It’s the Saviors you always really need to keep an eye on.
2
Ah, there you are, busy with your quaint little plans, wholly absorbed in the spitty/sweaty scrum of your well-oiled Existence, which is a humble thing but it is yours, happily, just minding your own business, when TFIC* shake up the gameboard again (as they will, cyclically) with yet another Utterly Bullshit Scam of Global Dimensions. Time for another Daily-Life-Distorting Panic, I guess.
Let’s just give this kind of fraudulent thing and its attached group-hysteria a generic label like “WMD,” if you know what I mean, and contemplate the fact that even TFIC are on a learning curve. The Social Engineering goals they once tried to score with Black Boogiemen, Commies, Mansonite Hippies, Turrists, AIDs, Global Warming and Bath Salts (you forgot that one, didn’t you?) they now realize they can achieve much more effectively with the threat of a nice Pandemic.
Think about it: to get people shitting their pants and go knee-knockingly obedient (and so distracted they don’t notice what TFIC are really up to, which is always some form of crypto-Feudal Control), using mere “Turrists” as the scare-prop, TFIC have to go to the trouble of staging (surprisingly low-quality, right, Ms. Geller?) “beheading” vids and give a bunch of white AMC trucks to a bunch of extras in “scary” black cloaks in the desert and all that. Which is do-able, sure, but time-consuming, easy to see through (which is why they “warned” the general public not to look at the “beheading” videos) and has a surprisingly short shelf-life… even when they were finally forced to fund and train actual psychos to do bad shit and film that to keep the panic ramped. Yawn.
If the supposed events during which people were supposedly massacred by Turrists on “our” own Western Hemisphere’s gold-paved soil really worked as they were meant to (ie: scaring people shitless for years) TFIC would be doing them a lot more frequently and amping that highly-profitable hysteria. But, no, it doesn’t really work, because: Turrists are too tangible, real or not, and they can’t be everywhere at once, real or not, and people get back to their normal lives using the fatalistic logic of considering the statistical likelihood of being beheaded in Omaha by a Turrist (as opposed to one’s stepmother) versus the likelihood of dying from cancer. People shrug and move on. Dammit! AIDs was very nearly a fix for the instability-of-Turrist-inspired-Fear but, see, all you had to do to avoid AIDs, pretty much, was avoid sharing heroin spikes and avoid fucking: Middle American sigh of relief! They weren’t fucking in The (middle class part of the) Flyover that much anyway! So Life went on in the AIDs “plague” years. No quarantines, no curfews, no martial law. Foiled again.
Ah, but what if they managed to combine the intangible panic potential aura of AIDs with the near-unavoidability of an airborne flu-like (or really just fucking actually the Flu) virus? Problem solved! Cue: ’50s horror-flick screams…
Something like 60k a year die in the US, alone, of the Flu (a stat that strangely never managed to trigger a panic… probably because Media/ Soc Media are the keys to spreading Panic and they chose not to, in the Flu’s case?). There is no one-stop, one-day test for concrete evidence of the presence of the Terrifying New Airborne China-Associated Threat in anyone suffering flu-like symptoms, so, you know: add these flu-sufferers to the pile of near-dead to beef up the panic-inducing tally! And if a quarantine is announced, it makes it all seem so much more real, no? All you need is a dodgy unstable and shady-subordinate gov like, uh… Italy’s…. to play along.
No hoax beheading or school massacre or brown polar bear vids necessary. The standard yearly death-toll from ambiguous Flu-like health problems will do most of the work for TFIC… meanwhile they get to experiment with all kinds of Drastic Control Measures like quarantines and travel bans and every flavor of martial law (that curfew they declared in Boston, way back when, over the crisis-actor amputee marathon-go-boom nonsense**, was peanuts, folks), the dark powers which TFIC rather petulantly believe are naturally theirs to exercise; it must irk them, on some level, to have to hide behind a Virus.
Question: why can’t they just declare shit and make it so, like the Kings of yore?
Answer: Too Many Serfs. But they’re working on that problem, too, and from both ends: demonizing Heterosexual Intercourse is just one “fix” for that problem).
Pubic-access hand-sanitizers are springing up all over the place to provide a detailed and repetitive ritual (like taking a communion wafer) in order to bolster, hypnotically, The Belief in the latest ineffable terror-incarnation of Zika/ H1N1/ Ebola/ SARS et al. Just like the airport’s TSA liquid-surrendering-rituals bolstered our belief in Imaginary Turrists. Ignore the contradiction inherent in the fact that thousands of people are touching these hand-sanitizer plungers per day, eh? It’s Religion, after all, not Science.
Remember: FEAR is the most potent Political Energy available (corollary rule: the bigger the stick they use, the smaller the carrots they need).
FEAR plus GULLIBLE MASSES = Thousand Year Reich. Even a year of which being intolerable as it is avoidable.
Because people have been dumbed-down sufficiently (along with the Internet being locked-down sufficiently), no matter how intelligent and clued-in YOU are: you’re forced to play along. The age-old question remains as to which category of twit we blame most: TFIC (who seem hardwired to be that way) for designing and implementing such Evil crap… or our ignorant, gullible, idiotic fucking co-consumers for falling for these scams every single time and therefore making it all possible? TFIC are only as powerful, in the end, as the sheer mass of the billions they can count on to dupe-and-control.
As I just posted somewhere:
We’re witnessing a Pandemic the like of which would have been inconceivable just two generations ago… !
What I’m talking about, of course, is a Global, Media-fed, Chicken-Little-Style Panic.
Oh, it’s a “Virus” alright. Because it’s Viral and spreading faster than a game of Chinese Whispers along the purpose-built Global Panic Network we call “Social Media”.
Logic + Experience + Serious Reading = the best Anti-Viral Medicines possible. Stay Safe by remaining Cogent.
Don’t be a Dupe.
(Oh and: don’t forget to stay warm and dry and wash your hands often because it really *is* Flu Season)
3
“While nowadays less than committed to the sanctity of Freedom of Speech, Americans will, more than ever, defend to the death their right to an uneducated opinion.”––Pastor Prime
4
Today I got to spend time with an old Pro I’m hiring to run a futuristic Ableton simulation of a robot drummer with five arms and impeccable taste. I got to have a cathartic series of laughs with this guy (who looks a bit like Crumb’s Mr. Natural but seats himself in front of an array of long flat screens and jams) because the drummer I was crowing about, just a few short weeks ago, turned out to be a… drummer. Drummers are strange cases in the bestiary: a really talented drummer who can sing, write songs and play a harmonic instrument (e.g. Marvin Gaye, Karen Carpenter, Roger Taylor, Josh Tilman or Jack White) will tend to have a finer sense, of the soul and bones of a song, than most singer/ songwriters who can’t play the drums. But such a unicorn is so rare that almost all of them are already famous. Whereas almost all of the average, mortal, bar-band versions of drum-whackers; most drummers, I mean; are mouth-breathing twats.
I waited quite a few years to bring music out that I actually love (and would listen to even if it weren’t mine) and the last thing I could possibly get off on now is the doing or making of the trite and the obvious. Playing some forgettably mediocre bullshit in a few bars. Whooppee. In the 1980s I had management and a producer and while I was excited by The Psychedelic Furs’ Sister Europe (that majestic, sepulchral sax!) what I was expected to do, by a racially-essentialist American music business, was crappy, ignorant, vision-free party music in shoulder pads and a skinny tie uniform. Couldn’t and wouldn’t. Fled the country. Bided my time.
I learned, after a salutary spate of house-painting (20 years! A generation!), to earn good money co-writing crap (without my face or voice in it) for Germany’s then-biggest Pop Star (among others); that was 2002-2011, during which I earned enough money to settle down with a stunning younger (impish grin) fellow musician and raise a kid with her. I detected thereafter a series of lurching changes in the music biz (birthing-throes of the WWW Global Culture-Dispersion Machine) and thought: hmmmmm. Maybe now? Because: You’re never too old to be the oldest fuckhead to ever do X…
What did “my drummer” want most of all to do? Go bum-chuck, bum-chuk, bum bum bum-chuck in a bar while people chatted loudly over the music, any music, for any piddling amount in a passed hat or for drink tickets. Genius! Visionary! Fuck off.
So my Ableton guy… let’s call him Mr. Natural… he’s been there. With fuckhead drummers and shitbrain singers and shredders who do the devil-sign “ironically,” because that’s what MTV taught them to do while making, day in and day out, the godawful sound of the Uninspired. Jesus, you fucking dopey kids, there’s a Higher Purpose for Music than indulging in fraying clichés and stereotypes; there’s the actual possibility of Art erupting, at any given moment, at any old place, wherever Creative types with wit, intelligence, taste and experience converge.
My Bass Player is still a God and my Cellist is still a Goddess but that mouth-breathing, bar-banding drummer is thenceforth cast into perdition by Mr. Natural’s badass virtual Ableton drumming arms, though Lucifer this paradiddler ain’t.
Closer to a flaming Gumby.
5
I very much respect Activist/Teacher Dr. Denis Rancourt but his Blogger platform is inimical to commentary; one of the hurdles a would-be commenter has to jump is the “prove you’re not a robot” test in which one is shown an 8-panel grid and required to check all the panels of the grid which show, say, a “traffic light” or a “fire hydrant”… simple enough… only, if you look closely, quite often, you’ll notice that a tiny sliver of the traffic light or fire hydrant has overlapped into an otherwise empty panel: is noticing this, and marking the otherwise empty panel, the correct answer or its opposite? Maybe this is merely an artifact of sloppy designing, or perhaps it’s a plausibly-deniable method to disrupt Online Discourse? In any case, my comments never make it through Denis Rancourt’s Blogger filter (despite the fact that he once took the trouble to link to an article, on my site, from his Facebook account), so here I’ll post my latest comment which failed to get through, in response to the article excerpted directly below:
Tectonic Shifts Unnerve Both Factions of the USA Ruling Elite
By Denis Rancourt
Yup. The ruling elite are doing everything they can to divide you. They are doing everything they can to promote hate between you.
In this article, I argue that the real enemy is the ruling elite, which manipulates us all. I explain that the Western USA-based ruling elite is desperate these days, and exceptionally adversarial, which is driven by the successful rise of Eurasia (economically led by China, and supported by Russia), and by increased global abundance of extractable energy reserves. We allow ourselves to be collateral idiots and pawns in this saga.
(and so forth)
My Response:
DR!
I agree to a very large extent but conceptualizing a neat division, of the rulers, into a clearly-defined binary, generates not a few contradictions and paradoxes. I think “Republican” and “Democrat” are probably obsolete descriptions (and, after all, they’ve reversed polarity at least once since the time of Lincoln) which linger owing to the power of Brand Recognition w/r/t the audience. For example, were Daddy Bush and Willy Clinton really members of two opposing factions of the “elite”? I think Willy Clinton was a protege of Daddy Bush and he pioneered the clever new twist of a conservative self-identifying as a “liberal” (ditto his wife) in order to get away with murder while smirkingly calling it the “Third Way”. “Republican” and “Democrat” are like saying “Hard Rocker” and “Indie Kid” until you learn they all belong to the same country club, sleep with the same groupies, live in the same neighborhood… and are, in fact, cousins.
So, the “Republicans” and “Democrats” business is Show Biz. I also think that any Intelligence Agency in a developed nation has more to fear from its “own citizens” and own “government” than from rival international agencies… each agency is a kingdom in its own right, in the end… and they probably coordinate their activities out of self-interest, when necessary… (which, in my opinion, explains the very strange case of the Philby/ Angleton episode: Philby was Angleton’s mentor and trained him in the arcana of the triple-cross and double-bluff… would Angleton have really been “blindsided” by Philby’s defection? What I’m positing is that a subset of CIA and a subset of KGB worked together to fend off the common enemy… PEACE… which would have put them all out of business; I also think Castro was being run by an Angleton network, by that’s another topic…)
The topic, in the end, is Power: how it moves, how it shifts, where it hides… very difficult for us to track the hundreds of power-pyramids which compete and/or harmonize, on a given day, to realize myriad goals. The most massive, but disorganized, potential power structure is US, The Serfs, of course, and we are both the source of THEIR power and the greatest potential threat to it, should we ever become self-aware and self-interestedly organized. Perhaps the pyramidal-organization of power is both A) the most effective and B) the most inherently fascist… the structural clue to all our woes? Ie: the instant WE become organized enough to take on all these smaller, nasty power-pyramids (eg CIA, Amazon, the Fed, et al) we have a capstone to worry about of our own?
Maybe the key is to somehow interrupt the production of psychopaths (and maybe the Aristocracy’s byzantine breeding schedule was actually designed to PRESERVE psychopathy?) on this planet?
Oh, and this: quite a few White Supremacists really are rabidly racist Nazis with a visceral aversion to the Other. They’re a tool of the rulers and can NOT be trusted to work with the rest of us to bring about ANY kind of a just and egalitarian order. Let’s not be naive…!
6
Futile (too rational) Comment left on a recent hilarious Orwellian I PLEDGE TO VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE WHATEVER IT IS post on Facebook:
Shouldn’t the message to the DNC be something closer to “WE WILL ONLY VOTE FOR THE NOMINEE WHO CAN DO THE BEST JOB OF PRETENDING TO HAVE SET THE WANTS AND NEEDS OF THE 99% AS HER or HIS PRIORITY”? Assuming, of course, that the DNC isn’t actually working to “throw” the fight to Trump, whose carnival tent show is providing an excellent distraction to the machinations making the super-wealthy (Repub and Democ alike) wealthier every second.
The bizarre pledge to vote, without question, for the Democratic Nominee, essentially nullifies any pretence of the representational function of voting. Which, okay, fine: I guess it rather refreshingly gets right to the Truth of the point. Now whittle that down to UNTHINKING FEALTY TO ANY KING THEY GIVE US, FOREVER, END OF and things get even easier.
7
Somebody on Facebook posted a you-go-girl bit about the recent (staged?) event at which Jill Biden “protected” Joe Biden (shades of Wendi Deng), from feral Vegans, with genteel moves from a Charlie Chaplin edition of The Matrix. I commented***:
Had they repelled the assailant with a KFC drumstick-cannon (while shouting “pronounce it with a short ‘e’ and a soft ‘g’, commies!”) my interest in the hokey sham of this electoral process would have skyrocketed for nearly a day. The next POTUS will be, clearly, either Trump… or a semi-conscious Hillary (in her iron lung). In 2032 it will be an Obama Daughter. 2048, Chelsea Clinton’s as-yet-unborn Gay Blind wheelchair-bound son. It’s all worked out in advance.
I’m sure my 19 Friends on Facebook are glad to have me back.
*TFIC= The Fuckers in Charge
**Btw, it was seeing the very-sloppily done Moulage they deployed in Boston, and seeing also that many people were buying it, that made me wonder if the over-narco-pharmaceutical-izing of Duh Masses wasn’t more about eroding Critical Intelligence than merely monetizing vicious-circle addiction-loops in a national Herd. Because some of this shit you would have to be an idiot with coke-bottle-bottom specs on to miss, folks. Srsly.
***A YouTuber had a good one ready for that:
190
ADDENDUM
related:
THE IMPERIALIST 