by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
“Darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence.” – Terry Pratchett
As we’ve previously discussed in the Propaganda Series, The Sound of Silence, propaganda is not always language or images. Sometimes it is the lack of words. It is just as important to “listen to what is not said” as it is to “listen to what is said”. Sometimes though, propagandists try to time travel. They employ a tactic in an attempt to change the present by attempting to change the past. I say “attempt” for reasons that will be clear soon enough.
When a propagandist tries to pull off this particular trick, they don’t need a fancy machine or a black hole or a magic potion as is the staple trope of science fiction and fantasy time travel. They need nothing more complicated than a pen or a typewriter. In the present, a word processor and some basic HTML coding skills will serve that purpose. Maybe Photoshop or GIMP. When a propagandist tries to change the present by changing the past, they don’t call it time travel. No. They don’t call it anything, because they really hope you don’t notice what they are doing. Silence will work often, but they are not above a bit of misdirection. Well executed propaganda does, after all, have much in common with stage magic.
When we citizens and media consumers catch their slight of hand, we don’t call it time travel either. We call it historical revisionism. Just this week, the Obama Administration was caught red-handed doing precisely that in relation to the Edward Snowden case.
First, let us consider what exactly is historical revisionism. Is the term itself value loaded language? Is it always a bad thing? Is it always propaganda? The term in common usage certainly has a connotative meaning that is not the same as its denotative meaning. As with the word “propaganda“, the connotative meaning is usually pejorative and implies lies, falsehoods and distortions of past events. Also like the word “propaganda”, the term “historical revisionism” has a larger denotative meaning that may or may not be value loaded.
At one level, historical revisionism is simply a scholarly endeavor to rewrite history based on new research or theories that either modify or contradict earlier historical writings. There is nothing wrong with that. Historical revisionism in that context performs a valuable function in the study of history although it is usually hotly challenged within academia as history is an often soft social science where the status quo holds a lot of sway. That challenging environment is also not a bad process by connotation as the process itself of claim and counterclaim often results in a refinement of both theory and the understanding of new evidence in context as well as eliminating false assertions and whole cloth fabrications from being incorporated into our understanding of history as fact. Even so, the study of history faces certain challenges in addition to access to new data. There is (what I find to be most interesting) the challenge that new information from other fields of science present. Genetics, paleoclimatology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, chemistry . . . even astronomy – all can, do and have changed our understanding of history. There is also some psychological and intellectual challenges to the study of history that can impact historical revisionism. In fact, there are two logical fallacies that historians often fall prey to: the eponymous Historian’s fallacy – when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision – and presentism – where present-day ideas, such as moral standards, are projected into the past. Historians also have to contend with the context of the society in which they live. Contemporaneously popular ideology and culture may skew historical revisionism as can political considerations like nationalism. However, as useful as historical revisionism as an academic endeavor can be, it has a dark side and that dark side can most often be seen in how contemporaneous ideology, culture and politics can make history a lie about the past designed to serve the present.
This kind of historical revisionism is what most think of when they use the term as a pejorative. There is a special word for this kind of manifestly bad historical revisionism – negationism. Derived from the French term négationnisme, which means Holocaust denial, the basic idea applies to more than just Holocaust denial, but to making anything a “never was”. This is basic denial as a propaganda strategy/tactic. Negationism also includes the propaganda strategy/tactics of deception, distortion, relativism and trivialization, very often executed to varying degrees as part of the same campaign. The Nazis engaged in wholesale historical revisionism in the form of book burning, altering history and science texts to provide examples of “Aryan superiority”, distorting their history and the history of the Jews and Roma to provide relativistic rationales for their persecution and to trivialize the true scale and horrific deeds done in the campaign of genocide they called “The Final Solution”. This suite of tactics is not unique to the Germans. The Chinese did the same thing during the Cultural Revolution. The Japanese did (and still do) teach revisionist history about the events leading to World War II. The Soviets made historical revisionism into a propaganda art form. In America, we teach grade school and high school kids a sanitized version of American history that does a great disservice to the truths of the effective genocidal campaigns against the Native American peoples.
Clearly, historical revisionism is a value loaded term and, while it can be a good thing for the academic pursuit of history, it can be as a political practice a very dangerous very damaging form of propaganda.
In 2008, Obama had a website that detailed his vision for reform. Until very recently, this website was linked to on the White House official website and provided a valuable tool for comparing Obama’s promises to his performance. According to the Sunlight Foundation, that website in that form could last be viewed on June 8, 2013. Remember that date. It’s about to be relevant. That link to Obama’s agenda and promises is no longer on the White House website and the Change.gov of today is this non-comment of a splash page with a link to http://change.gov/content/home that returns a blank page reading :
Sorry, File Not Found: 404
Invalid URL /content/home
All of the website’s pages are now and have only recently become inaccessible from the site. What was the Obama Administration so interested in making disappear? What needed to be never was? Perhaps they wanted to remove all record of Obama’s campaign promise to strengthen protections for whistleblowers. In case you don’t recall, his promise, once found in the Agenda/Ethics section of Change.gov, went like this:
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.”
June 8, 2013 was two days after the first revelations were made about the NSA’s phone surveillance program by the then unrevealed Edward Snowden.
Apparently the Obama Administration and their flunkies have no idea how technology really works, but you can’t be held accountable for a promise you made if you (try to) erase all record of it, can you? That’s the whole point of making something never was. Unfortunately for them and their propagandist historical revisionist tactic but fortunately for actual history, memory in the digital age is persistent. The original home page for Change.gov can be seen here and the original content of the Agenda/Ethics page (quoted above) can be seen here.
As noted by Luke Johnson at the Huffington Post, “Prior to the Snowden leaks but after Pfc. Bradley Manning gave classified information to WikiLeaks, the Obama administration launched the Insider Threat program to combat leaks, in part by asking coworkers to keep a close eye on their fellow employees. The program also ordered more protections for those who use proper channels, but four national security whistleblowers have said that they became targets of Justice Department investigations after bringing concerns to the Department of Defense Inspector General.”
I think historical revisionism as a political propaganda methodology is in many ways worse than a simple lie.
Was this an attempt at historical revisionism in the most pejorative sense?
Is there another explanation that defies the timeline of removal?
Could there be other promises made they wish to “never was” in addition to the promised protection for whistleblowers?
What do you think?
Source(s): Huffington Post, Wikipedia, Change.gov, The Wayback Machine Web Archive (1, 2), Sunlight Foundation, http://www.mcclatchydc.com, Firedoglake
The Propaganda Series;
Propaganda 105: How to Spot a Liar
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Streisand Effect and the Political Question
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Sound of Silence
Propaganda 104: Magica Verba Est Scientia Et Ars Es
Propaganda 103: The Word Changes, The Word Remains The Same
Propaganda 102 Supplemental: Get ‘Em Young
Propaganda 102 Supplemental: Holly Would “Zero Dark Thirty”
Propaganda 102: Holly Would and the Power of Images
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Child’s Play
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Build It And They Will Come (Around)
Propaganda 101: What You Need to Know and Why or . . .
Related articles of interest;
Mythology and the New Feudalism by Mike Spindell
How about Some Government Propaganda for the People Paid for by the People Being Propagandized? by Elaine Magliaro
Is Freedom of the Press Dead? by Lawrence E. Rafferty
~submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
It’s funny that you mention all of that off topic junk about economic security that has absolutely zero to do with propaganda. Or does it? Disruption and attempts to change the subject (redirection) are both staple tactics of propaganda trolls.
The subject here is the Obama administration engaging in historical revisionism.
If only the world just had more printers ink, that would surely solve world/USA’s poverty!
Exclusive: Signs of declining economic security
52 minutes ago
By HOPE YEN
Associated Press
(AP:WASHINGTON) Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.
As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused _ on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.”
“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.”
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines “economic insecurity” as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.
“It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position,” said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama’s election, while struggling whites do not.
“There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front,” Wilson said.
___
Nationwide, the count of America’s poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Sometimes termed “the invisible poor” by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America’s heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.
Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation’s most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.
More than 90 percent of Buchanan County’s inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.
Salyers’ daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend’s disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn’t even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.
Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to “buy the kids everything they need.”
“It’s pretty hard,” she said. “Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name.”
___
Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they’re only a temporary snapshot that doesn’t capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.
In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person’s lifetime risk, a much higher number _ 4 in 10 adults _ falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.
Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
“Poverty is no longer an issue of `them’, it’s an issue of `us’,” says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. “Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.”
The numbers come from Rank’s analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.
Among the findings:
_For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
_Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.
_The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods _ those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more _ has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.
_Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.
___
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.
Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites _ defined as those lacking a college degree _ remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.
Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential “decisive swing voter group” if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. “In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for `the middle class’ and `average Americans,'” Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.
“They don’t trust big government, but it doesn’t mean they want no government,” says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.
“They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them,” Goeas said.
___
AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County, Va., contributed to this report.
Still true after all these years:
And speaking of Big Br’er Babbit:
Big Br’er is Watchin’
He says he’d like to tell us
About his endless “war”
But then he’d have to kill us
For knowing just how far
He’s gone to keep us fighting
That baby made of tar
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2013
Looks like the Obama administration had better start “classifying” (i.e., disappearing) YouTube episodes from The Simpsons Movie (circa 2007). Either that, or Big Br’er can simply order us Americans not to view what everyone else on planet earth laughed their asses off watching six years ago. It escapes me why someone hasn’t shown this clip at recent Congressional hearings on NSA spying — preferably with James Clapper and General Keith Alexander sitting in the hot seat.
Plus, btw, our national debt is only about one year’s worth of GDP; the rest of the debt in that chart was consumer debt and business debt. Certainly business debt is almost entirely “productive” debt, and the vast majority of consumer debt (mortgages, cars, home repair, etc) is also “productive” debt. Meaning the benefit of the immediate asset bought with the debt is worth the cost (interest and/or principle) of the debt.
rafflaw: Debt is three times annual earnings.
That would actually be a boon for most families if their interest rate was near zero, and is not a problem for a country that ultimately pays an interest rate near zero.
Another way to look at it, is to debunk the idea that people cannot borrow their way out of debt: They can indeed do that.
If the borrowed money is spent on useful things. For example, student loans that provide an education, housing that provides cheaper shelter, cars that provide the mobility needed to look for and take jobs further away than walking distance, clothing that meets the expectations of employers or clients, and so on.
Most businesses borrow money, and use it to make a profit: Anything that can make a profit can equally reduce debt, thus it IS possible to “borrow your way out of debt.”
The people that hate governmental debt are typically the wealthy, because our debt is paid for by inflating money.
Inflating money is anathema to those that own lots of money, and those that are owed large amounts of money, because the loan payments are usually not geared to keep up with inflation, so the buying power of the money they are owed is reduced.
But the common person does not HAVE a lot of cash, and is not owed a lot of cash. So inflation acts preferentially on the rich as a kind of “net worth tax.”
It also affects buying power of wages, but wages tend to increase with inflation because workers demand it; hence their losses are temporary (perhaps still painful, but temporary). For the rich that own money and debt, the losses are permanent.
For a rather large middle that is in net debt (owes more money than they have cash assets) inflation is a net gain: The purchasing power of the money they owe is reduced, which means they will have to work fewer hours to pay off the debt. But their gain is a rich entity’s loss, specifically the rich entity entitled to the loan payments.
So they demonize national debt just like they demonize taxation; the driving motive is to prevent inflation and preserve the buying power of their wealth (both held, and owed to them).
Too much math for my comfort! 🙁
What did you expect from a guy who thinks Einstein was a mathematician and Alex Jones is a credible source for information, Tony? Good data? 😉
Oky1: Yes, a propaganda blog entry is certainly the right place to post that as an exemplar of propaganda.
What the graph says is that GDP is three times our national income.
What the graph fails to say is that the interest on that debt, for our government, is about 1% or so.
You are correct that economics does not trump mathematics, or in this case, fourth grade arithmetic: 1% of 3 times GDP is 3% of GDP required to service our debt.
And not only that; but the GDP is growing by 2.5% a year, so the net loss is 0.5% of GDP.
And not only that; but the government can (and does) print the money it takes to service the debt, so the result is a tiny, tiny percentage of inflation (NOT 0.5%, because the amount of money out there being inflated, including both cash and all debt of all kinds, is far greater than one year’s worth of GDP).
The article compares the debt to that of a family: Many families have debt (home, cars, furnishings, clothing, entertainment and other kinds of equipment bought on credit) well in excess of their annual income, that is not unusual at all.
The entire article is an unreasoned piece employing a scare tactic of “big numbers.” It has to tell you the “relationships are terrifying.” Why? because, they explain, if it goes on forever the consequences will be bad. But there is no proof whatsoever that it will go on forever; it is going on now because we are in a frikkin’ bi-generational recession that is going to last until 2020 or 2024, and without the debt it would be the bi-generational depression 80 years after the 1929 crash.
The current level of debt is easily sustainable at this time, and until we can work out of the recession, and that is the anti-propaganda truth.
This video shows an example of very detailed drone surveillance that most people might think impossible outside of the movies
My late father turned me on to this about 50yrs ago and I’ve always tried not to get trapped by the forces to be, trying to sell you everything from wars to thing you really don’t need to make you happy. The king of the big P.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
We almost made it out in the late 60 to mid 70s but with a little twist to the words being spoken by the sirens of Madison ave. and the cycle started again only this time being led by the best cycle-0-paths money could buy. Greed is Good.
Tony C., I tried to respond but my post won’t go through. Maybe it will go through later.
Tony C.,
I thought about that also. The problem is it appears that law doesn’t matter. Look at what is happening to Bradley Manning. His prosecution is laughable, except for the fact that he’ll likely get life out of it. It’s all being fixed.
I’m hoping that Snowden’s information breaks through to enough people so that a large enough group of people will object to what is happening. Chris Hedges said this in an interview. I have many problems with what he says but I think here, he has a point: “JAY: Right. Okay. Question number six. Congress seems a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinationals, Obama is pimping for GE in Africa, the Koch brothers have made a down payment on the Supreme Court, and money will control the next federal election and most of the state elections. Is there any scenario you see that will return this government to the people? Now, we’ve been kind of talking a lot about that in the previous segments, but that was the next question.
HEDGES: Mass protests that begin to scare the hell out of these people and begin to disrupt systems that they care about, that really is the only solution. I think they’re very fragile. I think internally they know how corrupt they are, which is why they passed the NDAA, because they want to be able to pull the military on the streets, because I think ultimately they don’t trust the police to protect them. And those are the sentiments of a dying elite.
So I think when we begin to organize against all the formal structures of power, I think that they may crumble as the Stasi state in East Germany, which when I was in East Germany appeared monolithic, fell in about a week, and it fell in a week because Honecker, Erich Honecker, the dictator for 19 years, sent an elite paratroop division down to Leipzig to fire on 70,000 demonstrators, and they refused to do it. And after that, in the same way that the tsar sent the Cossacks in to crush the Petrograd bread riots and they fraternized with the crowd, both Honecker and the tsar only lasted another week in power. And once the foot soldiers of the elite will not protect the elite, they’re done.
And that’s why we have to be nonviolent, because ultimately what we are doing is trying to create a paralysis within systems of power, whereby we speak truth, we appeal to conscience, we expose corruption, fraud, lies by those in power so that when those forces are called into the street to stop us, they refuse to do so. That’s how all revolutions happen. And that’s really in the end what I’m calling for. I’m calling for the overthrow of this system. Let me say that again for Homeland Security. I mean, that’s what I’m doing.
And I’m calling for it through nonviolent means, through mass protests, because as a father of four children, I know that if we don’t stop these forces, they will kill us. They will destroy the ecosystem on which the human species and my children depend for their life. And that is really the stakes that lie before us and why there is an imperative for all of us to take risks. And I don’t like going to jail as I have. Going to jail is more time than I care to donate to my government. But it really is the only option left, because if we fail at this, then it’s not just this particular civilization that will be extinguished but human habitation.
JAY: Okay. Thanks very much.” (realtv)
“Economics Cannot Trump Mathematics”
Extreme Fear Is Reasonable
It is nearly impossible to convince people that an economic ending is likely, perhaps inevitable. It is beyond anything they have seen or can imagine. I attribute that to a normalcy bias, an inherent weakness of experiential learners. For many, accepting something that has not occurred during their time on the planet is not possible. The laws of economics and mathematics may shape history but they are not controlled by history.
The form of cataclysm and its timing is indeterminable. Political decisions continue to shape both. The madmen who are responsible for the coming disaster continue to behave as if they can manage to avoid it. Violating Einstein’s definition of insanity, they continue to apply the same poison that caused the problem. These fools believe they can manage complexities they do not understand. We are bigger fools for providing them the authority to indulge their hubris and wreak such damage.
Apocalypse In One Picture
James Quinn provided the following graph. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this graph is worth millions. The route to economic demise is depicted below:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-27/economics-cannot-trump-mathematics
Jill: No, I understood that, I wasn’t trying to attribute that statement to you.
It just occurred to me if the First Amendment was denied to me, I would leap to the Fifth. I am wondering how they would argue against my doing that.
DavidM: I wonder if President Obama is conscious of these changes.
Probably, but I don’t think it makes a difference. I judge people on their actions, not the goodness or badness of their thoughts. I voted for Obama the first time around, but not the second. No matter what he is thinking, he has done, more than any other President in my memory, the opposite of what he promised to do, even when there was no compelling reason to do it.
I reject the premise that we cannot know the compelling reasons that have to remain secret. That kind of claim is the mark of a charlatan; if the humans in office can understand it, so can the rest of us; they are not geniuses smarter than the millions of professors and lawyers that are NOT in office. And they are not our parents charged with protecting us from ugly truths; we are mature adults that can emotionally handle anything they can handle.
I don’t care what Obama knows. His actions have causes unnecessary pain, anguish and death while preferentially rewarding the already insanely rich, it is his sociopathic actions that prove him to be a truly bad person.
Tony C., I think your argument is valid. I must have forgotten to put things in quotes and I’m sorry about that. This is the govt.’s argument and unfortunately, it has been accepted by the court.
For example, it is possible I heard something, saw something, or was informed about something that I was required by law to report, it is possible I did something illegal in gathering my information or setting up the interview, or during my interview, I might have done something that if revealed could result in a civil suit. What if I blackmailed or defrauded my source? If the prosecution does not have any evidence of what transpired or the entirety of information exchanged, then they cannot know I did not commit a crime. Whatever they already know, they can already use without my corroboration. It seems plausible that if the source is a target of prosecution, then my interactions with the source may also be a target of prosecution or civil suit.