As what was supposed to be a summer passes into history the fall rains begin. We haven’t had a summer in two years, more of a “two months with no snow” kind of thing. It HAS to be time to find a new place to live. HAS to be.
I had the good fortune to read an interesting piece of writing about the debt crisis in Greece. What debt crisis you may well ask… you may have seen the odd TV thing with angry crowds and disappointed Germans who seem to be paying the bill for the this bit of in-the-union-nonsense. Read this and then tell me you are not astounded. I think what you see today in Greece is what you will see in the United States in 10 years……
After a week at the Thought Lodge, my phone was stuffed – doubtless having it’s life essence drawn from it’s vile electronic innards by the peacefulness of the venue. So… I had to darken the door of a phone store to have it sent for repair. It is hard to describe the two hours that have drifted away from my life as a result.
The place was packed, and very intimate, so I was able to insinuate myself into just about all of the counter experiences in front of me. Probably the most amusing was the sudden arrival of a large Hutterite man. He was dressed all in black, and had, as they do, a very heavy German accent. He had a BlueTooth ear piece for his cell phone, and was puzzled why it has ceased to work. The counter girl did a very thorough cell phone triage and eventually asked him when he charged it last. This caused much furrowing of the anabaptist brow, and eventually it was discovered that he did not know you needed to charge the ear piece. He found this astonishing. Further, he became difficult to move on as, once convinced it needed a charge, he required a charger, and this brand was not sold by this phone vendor – so no charger was available….. a result he seemed to struggle with.
What I found odd was the fact that these guys are not supposed to use technology at all, and in many of the colonies, they have retreated on the computer front lest their hard won religious weirdness should be somehow diluted, yet here was grandpa Hutterite gassing away on a cellphone at considerable length. These are the same dudes that drive around with their women in the back of the truck, and their dogs in the front seat.
This all took place while his phone rang every three minutes and we all had to hold in place while we listed to a series of mystery conversations in Hutterisch, a curious German dialect that seemed to be 40% English…..
All in all an entertaining time….
I have been troubled for a long time by the lack of objective media available to people who want to make their own decisions about issues and events. The CBC, has, as long as I have been listening or watching, acted as self appointed guardian of the “truth” and attacking those who held opposite views. Their views have always been urban, metro sexual and extremely left leaning. I have done a lot of driving in my time, and as I don’t (for reasons I am not entirely sure I understand) like listening to music during the windshield time, I like to listen to people talk. Talk radio. Good talk radio is very hard to find in my neck of the woods. Most, if not all commercial talk radio is right wing neocon claptrap, characterized by loose use of the facts and a tiresome lack of intellect and education. I listened to the CBC largely because it was the only talking you could find where there was at least a chance of some amusement or knowledge. Slowly over the years, the quality has steadily diminished to the point where now it is largely a mouthpiece for Toronto based ultra left dimwits. Sucking deeply from the public teat, they feel endlessly empowered to interpret the facts of the world around us through a lense that shares little view with the majority that actually pays the bill.
I had a chance to spend some time this past week with some serious listeners of what passes for radio at the CBC these days. What I learned was a double edged sword – both helping me me understand the problems, and at the me time despair over the reasons. One correspondent was older…. at least as old as I, and a former employee. She shared my chagrin and disappointment over the general collapse of this Canadian institution over the years, and felt there was little hope for the future given the dim lights they have charged with running Canada’ public broadcaster.
The other was a younger man, probably in his thirties, who thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Just goes to show, that if you don’t remember greatness, you will never spire to achieve it.
Seven days…. seven exquisite days of friends, family and bucolic surroundings, comes to an end today. In a few short hours, I must saddle up the old mare and drive to the City and thence home, my experiences here left to the ashes of memory.
Living where I do, where there are no lakes of any consequence beyond a muddy hole, one never gets the chance to just commune on the banks of the lake. I wonder if it heralds back to a time in our genetic memory where we always gathered at the waters edge and built the first communities? Perhaps I am waxing a little wistfully for a life that probably never existed. But it sure has been nice…….
After a prolonged period of fighting the good fight, and slowly but surely losing the struggle for inner peace…. I managed to wrangle an invitation to the leafy fenns and placid waters of the Kawartha Interpretive Centre, and the hallowed inner sanctum: The Kawartha Thought Lodge.
Words are, in the grander scheme of things, weak vessels to convey the basic truths about this piece of heaven. Cares, worries and concerns melt away as if this edge of the world had some mystical power… some murky local magic that renders the capacity for concerns of the outside world a null force, a gradual but inexorable shut down of those parts of the brain that make our lives a misery.
As the day drays neigh where I must away from this crucial place, I am filled with that dread; a pervasive trepidation that my days after this respite will be darkened by the dross of the world, and I may never know again that aura of inner peace I developed while watching the rain dance on the lagoon. In a few short hours I will drive up that gravel road to the pavement and the cesspool of the world beyond……. and those will be dark days beyond. Dark indeed……….
After a long hiatus, I have returned to the cyber world. Tired of Facebook, and too intelligent for Twitter, I have returned to my small slice of the cyber universe.
Expect my dribblings shortly………..
The Rogue
You may know, from experience, that I am not much of a conspiracy theorist at the best of times. When reviewing the usual suspects – 911, international banking, the Apollo moon landings, the Kennedy assasination…. I am of a view that governments are far too disorganized to organize something like this, let alone keep a lid on it for more than a few days. I have reviewed the “compelling” evidence of a few of these pot boilers, and one can easily see that the only 
requisite to jump on that passing bandwagon and take all the “evidence” as truth – is an overarching need to want to believe.
But…. I was ruminating on my morning constitutional just yesterday on this very subject, against the backdrop of this apparent pandemic of H1N1. I had a number of thoughts about not just the impending health disaster of this vile disease, but some dark thoughts on how this process could be used to accomplish God only knows what nefaris purpose. One can imagine a well dressed bald man with a vaugely eastern European accent in some well furnished penthouse office suite, planning on taking over the world.
Imagine, if you will, a government or NGO or evil society (whatever, just pick one) that manages to develop a drug or a gene therapy that can make a person…. well, pick anything you like: convert into a superman, immune to disease, more docile and more easily controlled, the ultimate warrior, murderous assassin….. whatever. You decide, as leader of this evil cabal, that you need to get this drug into the target market. How to do it….. how to do it… A few simple steps:
1) The 80/20 Rule – Know the market
2) Cultivate Fear – Develop the proposition of doom
3) Develop Hope – Show just a glimmer of salvation
4) Restrict Access – Decide who lives and dies
5) No Time For Anarchy – Punish the non believers
THE 80/20
It struck me, as I wandered along by the river, that this would be the easiest thing to do in the whole world. You start with the 80/20 rule. Populations are no different from just about any complex stable system. You can always count on 80% of the population to be pretty much homogenous – (that is they think the same, act the same, and can be relied upon, given the same data, to come to the same conclusions), and 20% will present varying degrees of difficulty (criminals, early adoptors, unconventional thinkers, anarchists etc). It is precisely the social evolutionary tool that has permitted more than two humans to cooperate and live productively in ever increasingly more complex societies.
You must only define a plan that can be easily sold to the 80% – we will call them the sheep. The 20%, we will call them the anarchists, will be dealt with later and pose no immediate threat to the plan.
CULTIVATE FEAR
The sheep are very easily manipulated in this world of mass media and instant information. Rumors that used to take a lifetime to crawl around the globe, now flash about this mortal coil with the speed of light. The sheep can be gently massaged with “data” to believe almost anything. There is no requirement to burden this data with the ballast of truth. No one really cares, and as soon as you get a talking head on the case from your local news outlet, then it becomes the “truth” anyway. No doubt you can think of examples you have seen around you where this happens almost every day to people you know.
So… you define a plan that can be sold to the sheep. You start by creating the appearance of danger, fostering fear – which is probably the most powerful and unrestrained human emotion. You develop, carefully and slowly, an atmosphere of suspended doom (as I like to call it). You convince the sheep there is an epidemic coming that could depopulate the earth were it not for the heroic efforts of the scientific few, and your government, who have developed a cure. The more alpha sheep will scour the news looking for evidence that this urge to hysteria can be validated. Where are the deaths? I can’t find the piles of bodies on my Facebook feed…. what’s with that? But the government tells you that yes, people are dying all over the place, not many yet, as the disease is just getting into first gear. The numbers are ridulously low, as any higher numbers would be hard to validate as you would have to show the smoking burial pits and bring out yur dead wagons etc. No one you know is sick. No one you know has died. You don’t know anyone who knows anyone who is sick or dead. Conventional flu kills 10 times more people, but you float the notion that the black hat virus is just that evil. It will decide when the time is right and through some vile perversion of evolutionary effort it will overnight burst upon the earth with an energy for death not seen since the Black Plague swept Europe in the 14 century. You use the word “mutation” a lot as an excuse for the apparent lack of virility of this black hat virus…. it hasn’t killed anyone yet, but oooooh boy – you just wait until it MUTATES. Everyone is terrified of mutants, especially now that they have been getting a dose of micro biology every evenng on the news. There is something vaguely disturbing about attempting to develop a sense of understanding of the mysteries of viral micro biology in a population that can’t even read a book….. disturbing indeed. They are plenty sure, however, that this dipshit virus could pretty much go postal any time it wished, and – in fact, that was probably what it would do.
You keep this entire framework in front of the sheep for about a year. Not too flashy, not too strident. Your drug isn’t ready in sufficient quantity yet so you let the sheep stew on this subject for some time.
DEVELOP HOPE
But…. the cure is elusive. It never seems to be ready, it is always a “few weeks” away. You keep dribbling sound bytes and video clips of foreign “specialists” in aweful diseases who start using the world pandemic for the first time. Start reminders are sifted on our heads daily of the 1918 flu and it’s devastation. You let the weaknesses of our society work in your favor. Our litigious relationship between governments and each other keeps those in power edgy about their culpability should this vile plague devastate the land. They don’t want to be blamed or vilified, so they get on board real quick, reinforcing the sound bites from the talking heads. They quickly give the drug companies liability waivers so that the HOPE can be distributed quickly and not mired in the byzantine review process the politician have devised for every other drug.
Throughout this growing hysteria remains the glimmering in the distance of the vaccine. Everyone says the vaccine is the suit of armor, and if you could just get the shot you could stop laying awake at night wondering if little Timmy will have a mother tomorrow.
RESTRICT ACCESS
Soon there bigins a lot of talk in the media and over the dinner table about who should get it, or more correctly, who really deserves it. At the head of the list is the government, the rich and the powerful, health care workers etc…. a higherarchy is developing. This gets reported unceasingly in the news, and many begin to feel disenfranchised and “at the end of the line” and begin to feed off their own indignation as a driver to get that damn shot. But you are cautioned that there might not be enough to get to “everybody” and you get this sinking feeling that you have probably joined that group. This makes you want this shot all the more. When the vaccination centres finally open up you are down there, pissed as hell, but willing to wait for 10 hours if you have to in order to get THE SHOT.
Before you know it, you have managed to deliver your evil plan to the bloodstreams of 80% of the population.
NO TIME FOR ANARCHY
Now you have to deal with those who haven’t bought the story. These are the sceptics who tend to believe what they can see, and they don’t see this disease anywhere. These are the people that don’t accept the world at face value. They don’t tend to grip other people opinions like they were the very words of God, just because they sound pretty special. You bring the state media to bear on these people – intimating that failure to take the virus is not ony 
irresponsible, but possibly illegal. You make all sorts of dubious connections between reckless endangerment and these unvaccinated people walking among us. Soon you begin to restrict the lives of those who still won’t get on board. They can’t go out wthout proof they have joined the sheep. They can’t work, can’t shop, can’t go to the movies etc. Eventually those miscreants will sign up as a means of getting this nonsense to stop. Soon you have about 90% of the population injected. The last 10% don’t amount to a hill of beans, and with a little more effort you can isolate them as cranks and clealry unbalanced.
And then…. your plan is complete and you have the army of whatever the bald guy in the penthouse office with the vaugely eastern European accent wants….
Good thing I don’t believe in conspiracy.
You would have to have been living in a cardborad house, under an overpass on the highway for the last year to not have arisen one recent morning and wondered to yourself, as you are wont to do of a morning, that these are indeed strange times. We, and probably more so the generation that follows, have become a society of addicts. I am not talking about the drug kind, although with a little thought I am sure there is one of those six degrees of separation things going on with that as well. I am talking about suckling technologies tit, and the separation anxiety this promotes.
We wallow in fast computers, we don’t read books anymore because it takes too long, we fly when we could drive, and we drive when we could walk and we don’t walk unless there is a compelling reason to pry yourself away from Guitar Hero for the ten minutes it would take to actually do something…. anything. We seek ever faster data rates, we insist on new phones every six months that 
are ever more crowded with apps, info, photos, movies, and my personal fave – mobile content. WTF? Mobile content? I suppose to some degree it describes my age in that I cannot even imagine watching a movie or a TV show on a telephone while I sit on the bus. While I loathe going to the movies these days (due to the generally apalling behavior of the many headed), I will always insist that the enjoyment of a movie is proportional to the size of the screen. Squinting at an iPod or a cell phone just seems pathetic to me.
We insist our telephones now take better pictures than my Nikon. We are unhappy if we can’t pass every slack second with a pithy text message or six. I was at the movies the other day and due to the crowd had to sit a fair ways back. To my complete astonishment throughout the movie you could see the sickly green glow of cell phones throughout the audience in front of me while people furiously thumbed text messages to each other about God only knows what. What could be so incredibly important that you can’t wait 90 minutes to report to your crucial social circle. Trying to catch the gold spread in the Asian markets? Closing a big real estate deal while you try and sit through a flick? Movie reviews? I doubt it, since you aren’t even watching it. We just can’t wait for anything. These people have the attention span of a gnat… seriously, a gnat (it’s an expression – as I am not entirely sure what a gnat is although I guess if I had a flashier phone I could browse for some web content that would resolve that gaping hole in my intimate knowledge of the Dipterids)
Why is that? We sure aren’t any smarter than our parents or grand parents generation. When I was growing up, people knew things. They packed mountains of trivia deep in their brains to regurgitate on the drop of a hat. Hell… I could tell you the name of Tony Prito’s boat….. now, despite the wonder of the internet in terms of access to information on absolutely anything…. nobody knows anything…. really. They don’t know geography, couldn’t tell you anything intelligent about politics that they didn’t hear from an Obama speech. They don’t know anything about science, auto mechanics…. take your pick. People have become vacant, and are especially so without web access.
This ready access to information has made us a society that can’t wait for anything, because we don’t have to. We get movies on demand, internet almost everywhere, answers to anything, news at the finger tips. All of this is coming to a bit of a crashing halt. All this crap costs money. Perhaps if recession deepens, it will be money no one can afford. Sony won’t be launching a new video camera every 3 months…. the great leapfrogs in technology we have come to not so much expect – as demand, will slow, and maybe stop for a bit. Research dollars cost, and as the haze over reason, (fluffed up by reckless consumerism funded by ridiculously cheap money and unsustainable growth), begins to fade….. we are going to be waiting for a lot of things.
Or…. maybe the very thing that put us over the edge in the first place – the all consuming drive to own stuff, especially new stuff – will save us. Perhaps when the financial system is finally patched back together, and the weak sisters fall down – we will regain that foolish confidence we had so much of since WWII and restart where we left off, filling our driveways with $100K cars, our desks with laptops, and our asses with those $200 jeans. After all, how could we get through a month where we didn’t all get a new phone so we could squint at tiny screens and under appreciate a good movie….
The Great Navigator wins the Peace Prize. The Peace Prize. What is a committed conservative to think of such a thing? First one has to consider what the Nobel Prize for Peace actually means. I will admit I was intially surprised by this early morning revelation during my sojourn to the office. The Peace Prize? Then, I began to mull this over… what did I actually know about the darn thing. So, I spent a little time and had a look at this thing in some detail. I must admit, that I found my research while not exactly illuminating, certainly entertaining. What I found was that the Prize is awarded along murky, often laughable criteria. I mean… look at the list of who has won this coveted award: General George Marshall – a solid old warrior who did as much for the cause of destruction as he ever did for peace. Al Gore… a practiced half wit
training an army of climate change monkees dedicated to ferreting out any real science on the subject. Jimmy Frigging Carter? I wil assume, dear reader, that the least said on that subject the better. What about Yasser Arafat? It seems to be awarded more on the issue of current press coverage than any real effort for peace. Fact of the matter is that it changes nothing, other than to give the Great Navigator a much needed boost in popularity numbers.
Perhaps what we are actually seeing is just one more chapter in this bizarre episode of the Experimental President. America has elected a President to the White House by a bare majority, who, despite his often waxing poetic to the world, has accomplished…. not much.
Count them yourself. He made many bold promises during the election campaign…. raised everyone’s expectations on a variety of current issues and concerns – I will end this unjust war, I will develop universal health care, I will end injustice in America, I will bring the Olympics to Chicago…. I will even reopen dialogue with the bully states, and through the power of my personality and the depth of the American wallet, will convince these misunderstood assholes that if we would only give them what they want they would cease to threaten the free world.
So? He has been in office for 267 days, and what has been accomplished? Pretty much nine tenths of nothing. Yes, I can hear the leftards wailing already at the often visited Wall of Waiting. Give the man a chance. He has only been in office for a few months. Fair enough… that is true, but gifted leaders learn early in the leadership game that you PICK YOUR BATTLES… you don’t rush off 
and take on every Phillistine that comes your way brandishing a spear…. you evaluate the benefit of each action, and you take on the tasks that will, as my gifted South African accountant likes to say, move the peanut forward. You DO NOT run around like a lunatic promising everything to everyone, and solving nothing. And that, my friends is what we have seen from this President. He runs about with an inexperienced team, making all of the worst decisions, making a lot of noise and accomplishing not much.
You may despise the Bush years. You might look on the Bush Presidency as years of isolation for the US, years of sending their sons to die in foreign lands, making a game out of provoking the “innocent”. But when you look at where the United States stands today in terms of global security / influence and basic economic might….. I would suggest the peanut has retreated some distance.
Iran has more missiles, more nuke fuel processing, more crazed leadership, more abandoned opposition, more capacity to threaten the world when they fail to appreciate the crackpot Islamic ideology than ever before. Blame this on Bush?… I dare you.
Americans will learn that leadership involves more than just fluffy speeches, more than just speaking directly to minorities, more than gushing about dialogue with bullys. Leadership is about the balls to make the difficult decisions, the smarts to divine the strategy in the first place, and the skin to weather the shrill minority wind that always blows from those who do not have a vested interest in being successful.
Obama, it appears, is none of these things. He appeals to the sort-of-intelligent who spend their evenings watching So You Think You Can Dance, and fundamentally believe that reality shows are actually real. These are American who are weaned on a culture of debt and success without work. They want the world their parents had, with about a fifth of the work. They loathe the realities of the world as a conservative construct – easily ridiculed as they sit around the Starbucks at 10 in the morning when they should be working. So great is confidence in the Navigators great design, that only 44% of Americans believe that gun control laws should be made more strict (http://www.gallup.com/poll/123596/In-U.S.-Record-Low-Support-Stricter-Gun-Laws.aspx) I wonder what that is telling us?…. hmmmmm…. It tells me that a majority of Americans, since the beginning of the year, feel a LOT less secure in the notion that fluffy speeches of hope will make them feel more secure than a President who knows what he is doing.
Obama is the champion of the rest of the liberal universe throughout the world who fundamentally believe that the world can be a fair and just place where America, as the leading economy will take the bold steps of taking US tax dollars and funding the corrupt and broken economies of their respective nations. He will continue to talk the strong game, but the real numbers will increasingly tell a different story. The American dollar will (as it is already managing) to approach the quality of junk status. All that crazy debt from the bail out plan will haunt this economy for years, and if the US manages to recover from it in the long run, it will be a paler shadow of it’s former self, and the Great Navigator will be an unpleasant and distant memory. He will live on, however, on that list of forgettables defined by the Nobel Comittee…….
I actually thought they would give it to Michael Jackson. Pedobear would have approved.
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