Government transparency=Security leaks.

This is the message the major media outlets have been attempting to ingrain into the populace over the last few days. One only needs to input “government leaks and news” in a  search engine and view the results. From NPR to FoxNews the meme of every story and news show was the same; whether knowing what our government does in our name is a threat? Let that question sink in for a moment. It doesn’t matter if the threat is real or not  but that there is a possibility of some harm, never mind, asking whether any government for and by the people should be operating in secrecy at all. This message has been coded into the usual Democrat versus Republican political arguments, which ultimately boils down to some analysis of how does this piece of propaganda helps or hurt either side.

Some would argue that this all stems from the recent New York Times article that offers some exposition in to the imperial assassination program employed by our so called leaders, colloquially now named “Terror Tuesdays”.  Assassination programs have been part of the secret warfare our government conducts since its inception  and special commando units where often employed to do the things what drones are doing today. Delta Force, Navy Seals, Special Forces, CIA contractors  and other military and non military units dating as far back  to the French and Indian war (Roger’s Rangers) have been used for the clandestine operations often involving killing specific people. Special Operations Command has existed in one form or another and throughout the history of this government when news of these type of activities are conducted in violation of international law, the panoptic term of ‘national security‘ is thrown over any questioning of this secret world of  aspiring  “Jack Bauers” and  “Jonas Blanes”. The politicians who are supposed to monitor and report on these programs to their constituents have fallen into this hollywood fantasy as well and see themselves as good stewards of the nation for their obfuscation of what is done in our name. They must lie to themselves and us constantly because “…A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying—to others and to yourself.”— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The lying is not restricted to just the politicians but extends to us, we the people and the lying we are doing to ourselves, for the government is like art and it reflects the society is which it exists. This was the purpose of newspeak in the book 1984, to ingrain the lie into the language so that it becomes accepted truth in the larger society which has become the purpose of the major media outlets.  Here are few examples of newspeak at work today; death of innocent bystanders and unnecessary destruction of  property= collateral damage, anyone who opposes U.S. hegemony in their area or innocent bystander= militant, lying to constituents=moving towards the center, fascism with Christian overtones= American conservatism,  making disingenuous statements= flip flops and these are just  few off the top of my head. The astute reader of the news will be able to find a litany of these terms existing in our media. Ingraining the lies of our leaders into our language and society so that we accept them as truth.

This is not to say that there is some central command of disinformation akin to the Ministry of Truth operating in our government, however with fewer independent news resources with large distribution networks the effect is the same. The way newspeak works in our world is slightly more insidious. Buzzwords are bandied about a news conference or some event where the media is gathered and overtime a meme is created such that the conversation of a certain topic is restricted within the frame of the buzzwords to the point that the conversation itself is a caricature of what is being passed off as intellectual debate. This is the comic theme of the opening act of the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report”. The video montages often demonstrate how buzzwords and memes infect the political and media class to such a degree and integrate into their language so quickly that they are nightly topics of ridicule and mockery. Colbert’s show even has a segment named “The Word” specifically for these type of propaganda buzzwords Unfortunately many don’t even see that simple little joke being played on them every night and don’t understand how after some time the laughter must stop to give way to real self analysis of how this type of propaganda is damaging our society. The damage is that our governments are becoming less transparent when we incorporate these newspeak words in our lexicon which in turns allows for more corruption and as our leaders go so does the rest of society.

The top line propaganda piece today has been the dismal job growth numbers. Secondarily, it updates the previous numbers put out in months prior, revising them downward. In essence, saying that what was put out before was not nearly as accurate as it should have been.  Now if you are conscience of what is going on, then you would remember that it was only a few weeks ago that several states were no longer eligible for federal assistance for unemployment insurance, California and Michigan being the two most populist and populated states being cut.  The most logical thing to do  is to review the economic data that reported these states were no longer eligible for federal assistance of unemployment insurance.  Surely they must have based their findings on the same economic data that was just revised?

The conscience reader will already come to the conclusion that this will not happen.  The simple reason is that this is what American austerity looks like. The bankers are pulling the strings in front of our faces.  In one hand they handle the puppet Obama, in the other, Romney.  The puppets fight over a pile of campaign cash, while we look upon like amused children choosing which puppet we like best.  In the cartoonish drama for what most Americans think of, when they think of  American History ; we are in Act 2 of a cyclic play named ‘US’.  In this scene of the second act the term recession is used . Perhaps the bankers don’t want to frighten the children to much yet with the word depression? That word is left for Act 3 .

In Act 3 the world stage will be filled with all sorts of characters, heroes and villains and many of the children will be asked to join in this play. Many will go willingly, because children want to be like their heroes and vanquish the same villains. The puppet masters tell us that in the story of ‘US’. Human freedom is intertwine with capitalism that at times we must sacrifice even in blood to keep it alive and that we must pray that this sacrifice is worthy enough.  The story ends with many children dieing.

More children are brought into the audience and the play begins again, Act 1. The most troubling aspect about this play is not the dead children but that there are some children in the the audience who have seen this play already and cheer the new children along. The older children sometimes get permanent roles in the play and become puppet masters themselves never asking why. The story of ‘US’ has been told to children around the world.

Question: Is anyone live blogging the events of the Reason Rally going on in DC right now other than the site itself? If you are interested here is a link.

http://reasonrally.org/

Question: Has anyone considered that these recent attacks against women in the political sphere perhaps  be part of a much larger propagandistic scheme of creating an election year narrative where Obama wins/selected due to “overwhelming support by women”? Furthermore does this set up the system to make the next puppet ruler to be a Queen?

Question: Have the powers that be decided already or is the lynchpin Iran for whether Obama continues his reign? Is there a link between the Army’s recent decision to allow women more direct front line combat positions and the war on women’s health?

Any thoughts and comments are appreciated.

“Denial aint just a river in Egypt”

-Mark Twain

As the events in the Middle East unfold and watching the embers for the call of a participatory democracy are slowly being blown across the region, I can’t help but feel nothing but disgust at what is being done in my name as an American. These events have ripped down the curtain for what we call our foreign policy.

Many people often make the analogy that the USA is in a decline and often compare it to the fall of the Roman Empire; I however, prefer to use another more recent empire in which events like these in Egypt were identical. I speak of the British Raj period. We hear  all the pundits talking about this is another “Berlin Wall” moment however none would like to point out who is the “evil empire” in this scenario. Watching American made tanks, tear gas, and other weapons used in order to suppress the voice of the common people is just like watching what the British did to suppress Indian independence. The attempts to placate the people by changing viceroys and other minimally conciliatory steps were not enough to stop the full tide of what was to become a nation governed by its own people.

I hope that these events, which should not have taken anyone by surprise as much as the media would like you to believe, will cause us as Americans to examine more in what is supposedly done in our name. Rising food and fuel costs and mismanagement on a global scale will only incite more “Egypts”.  As Martin Luther King once said, “Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

It seems that we as society have become so collectively obtuse that our media and politics, which are reflections of ourselves, have become functionally blind and functionally illiterate. Our increasing myopia and diminished ability to formulate new answers to old problems has created an era of economic and intellectual stagnation. The most casual of media observers already can predict the behavior of our national media to particular situations that some colloquially call it a “playbook”. The knee-jerk responses to events by the national media are seen as normal in our twitter-fed world because to say something without much thought is an increasing paradigm in our society.

The functional blindness and illiteracy of society and the national media is being laid bare as I write this. When a person who intended to kill a government representative is not at the very least labeled an “alleged terrorist” by the justice system and mass media then a lot of alarms should be going off in people’s minds. The institutional wide disingenuous use of the word terrorist has become such that when used in its proper application to Jared Loughner, that we as a society attempt to almost universally reject it because it would seem that those who would use that label are being disingenuous. To put it more bluntly, the label terrorist and its associated visual and verbal content from the media has etched a very particular narrative into our national conscience. Those of a progressive mind are quite aware of this and are often reluctant to use the word itself even when it would seem the most proper word to use at the time. I believe it is just a reflexive way to not be associated with the truly disingenuous ones who have hi-jacked the word for themselves and used it for state sanctioned terrorism.

An attempt to rationalize terrorist behavior for the sake of not using the word terrorist is often manifested through attempts at understanding the mind of the perpetrator of the terrorist act. Is it not abundantly clear already that the insanity of terrorist is a particular type of insanity and comes in varying degrees and the majority of them are persons who can usually function in everyday society? The particulars of this type of insanity I would leave to the experts. Thus I do support evaluating and studying a person like Jared Loughner and to whomever the label is correctly applied to, but to be done by experts and not by the twitter-fed media.

The question remains, however, what does the words terrorism and terrorist mean? Although there are no universal legal definitions, we can be certain that the phenomenon does occur and given our lexical environment can come up with two common components to be found in the myriad of definitions, politics and violence. Not one definition that I found about terrorism or terrorist does it require a person acting as part of a larger group or that understanding the political motivations of their acts is necessary or that their political motivations need to fit nicely into some political ideological scale. It is those who would use the label of terrorist to foment fear, who has added a third component of religion.  It is those same people who have a vested economic and political interest in keeping the strict narrative of what is terrorism and who are terrorist deeply in grained in the American psyche. Would America be able to accept that we do have a problem with domestic terrorism if we decided to call it ‘politically induced mania?’

Right wing domestic terrorism will never be called for what it really is because the perpetrators of it don’t fit into the corporate media mold and rational persons remain too afraid to speak up.  This has become evident when the Department of Homeland Security was basically forced by the right wing to apologize for the wording of a chilling and so far accurate report on the rise of right wing violence back in April of 2009. Since then we have had Hutaree, A  New York cab driver slashed in the neck for being Muslim, an IRS building destroyed by a plane, guns being brought to political rallies, a man bent on destroying the Tides foundation who was in a shoot out with police in the middle of a California freeway, a mosque burned down, a shootout at the national holocaust museum.

However this is not the focus for us, we retreat back to our old habits of calls to tamp down the rhetoric from both sides, we need to figure out a way to protect ourselves from this, we need to get the guns away from the crazy people and of course the other predictable left versus right arguments.

Would it have been easier for America to understand the events in Tucson if Jared Loughner yelled “Allah Akbar” and killed himself as well? I think so because that is part of the narrative many Americans carry with them.