Are American Politicians Being Brainwashed?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 2, 2011 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011Probably not. But I’m pretty sure the average American voter these days is a cult member.
 Although politicians DO seem to enjoy bizarre rituals like rubbing bundles of cash on each other’s heads for good luck, this should not be mistaken for brainwashing. |
Although it’s easy to assert the idea that voters are for all practical purposes masses of brainwashed individuals, it’s not often that we question whether politicians have been brainwashed. I mean, although the millions of lobby and corporate interest dollars that wash over a politician in their career is a little like brainwashing, at the end of the day, that shower of dollars is really just good old-fashioned lubrication. Or bribery, or whatever you want to call it. So it’s interesting that in spite of the fact that the recent Rolling Stone piece Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators never once used the word “brainwashing”, it prompted enough references to the movie The Manchurian Candidate
If Deficits Don’t Matter, Why Does The Government Keep Taxing Us?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 16, 2011 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011I’m taking the same approach to federal budget discussions that I took with the health care bill. I’m hiding ’til they’re over, so I can smugly observe later that nothing has changed.
 This image really has little to do with the article, but we spent a lot of time on it so we like to use it whenever we can. |
I wish I were the US government, or a bank. Then, whenever I’m broke or actually running at a deficit, I could just say “that’s okay, Deficits don’t matter” or “people of America, if you don’t give me exactly the amount of money I need, life as you know it will cease to exist” and everyone in America (and their grandchildren) would give me billions of dollars, which I could share with my other friends who had been frivolous about finances or made some insanely bad investments. Unfortunately, I’m not a bank or the government, so it is mostly with a detached amusement that I sit and read about the shirtless flirts in Washington that we pay so much to sit around arguing about the annual budget. I mean, we shouldn’t be surprised that congressmen spend all their time looking for dates on Craigslist, when the alternative is actually trying to understand monstrously incomprehensible legislation like the health care bill, net neutrality issues, or for the near future, the federal budget. I mean, have you actually ever looked at the thing? Even when the New York Times creates a clever and relatively simple interactive graphic, it’s mind boggling. But definitely preferable to buying the darn thing, I mean, The basic overview is 216 pages and costs 38 bucks, and the Appendix is 6 times longer than that (1368 pages) and costs 75 bucks. If you bought all the available related publications, you’d have 2448 pages to sift through, at a cost of $214.00. And that doesn’t include the CD-ROM, which thankfully is not an audio book read by Timothy Geithner. If you want to learn more about how the budget is put together without spending 200 bucks, the Wikipedia page goes in-depth. Over 13,000 words in depth in fact. Remarkably, the words “billion” and “trillion” are only used 81 and 59 times respectively. Me? While everyone else sits around arguing about taxes, spending, sacrifice, and responsibility, I’ll be kickin’ back, ignoring the doorbell and the phone as creditors continue harassing me. Why? Because deficits don’t matter. And besides, I oddly find myself agreeing with Fox/WSJ writer Paul B. Farrell’s rant Fed dictator Bernanke needs to be toppled – Forget Mubarak, it’s Fed reign of terror that must end. To distract myself while I sit here broke with it not really mattering, I think I’ll play a few rounds of the poverty survival game Spent. Because virtual homelessness is a lot more fun than real homelessness.
Sarah Palin’s Political Hyperbole In The Crosshairs
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 8, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Saturday, January 8th, 2011We don’t know yet if Sarah Palin’s political hit list inspired Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Gabrielle Giffords, but we do know that the only thing more full of logical fallacy than a Sarah Palin speech is the deranged ramblings of Loughner’s YouTube posts.
Okay liberals. Put on your indoor voices and your thinking caps. Sarah Palin did not issue orders for Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona today by putting Gifford’s name in the cross-hairs on her political hit list. If you take that stance, you’re resorting to the same deranged logical fallacies that both Loughner and Palin rely on; in Loughner’s case to presumably later justify his violent actions, in Palin’s case, to further her self-obsessed and delusional pursuit of political credibility. And don’t go getting all excited about how this is the end of Palin’s career; my only hope in the midst of this tragic event was that it might put a damper on the retarded and infantile rhetoric that infects American politics, and those hopes are quickly being dashed. If you look at both conservative and liberal blogs and their commenters today, you see the same old debates, only escalated to new levels. We don’t yet – and may never – know what Loughner’s motivation was, but it seems safe to say that in the current environment of irrationally polarized debate fueled by prominent figures like Palin calling for executions without trial , using rifle crosshairs to identify political opponents, and constantly posing with guns while fomenting rebellion, you’re going to see more events like the one that occurred today in Arizona. Unfortunately, that’s not what anyone’s talking about so far. Liberals are pointing fingers and creating direct causal connections where there are none, and tea party conservatives are rising in passionate defense of Palin. The weirdest of these two lots can be found on Palin’s Facebook page, where literally thousands of comments were posted today, with an alarming number of her supporters referring to her as “my Sarah”. No joke. If you haven’t taken the time to learn a little about Jared Lee Loughner, take a look at his YouTube account . Which links to another account which is probably also his. There are three videos with text and background music. They all utilize peculiar logical fallacies to talk about “controlling your currency”, the government “controlling grammar”, and weird rambling definitions of terrorism and brainwashing. He often refers to himself in the second person and the past tense, and makes very little useful sense. We’ve included the videos below, with a transcript from the first one, and his reading list, which is fairly predictable for a brainwashed, “Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory
Fashionable Fear-Mongering: World War III With China
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 29, 2010 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010Now that the TSA’s relentless breast and crotch groping has saved us from the threat of radical Islamic underwear bombers, we can focus on new irrational fears. Like war with China.
 I surrender. |
How’s your Mandarin? Do you like Chinese food? These are good questions, because if you’re tired of the same old fear-mongering about radical Islamic terrorists, we have an even more terrifying thought for you. What if suddenly you couldn’t afford a new cell phone or flat-screen TV because China started restricting their exports of rare earth metals? Now there’s something the average American would go to war over. And the idea of war with China isn’t so preposterous; we’re already at war, and have been for a while now. So far we’ve been just fighting about who’s state-controlled capitalism is better for the world. Their brand, in which they cleverly make the Japanese buy dollars by buying Yen to manipulate currency? Or our brand, in which Ben Bernanke just prints more money to manipulate currency? Some think China is flipping off America with their strategies, while others take a more balanced view, pointing out that we need China to do this. And still others take a longer view and suggest we need to turn this “financial cold war” into a new game of Mutual Assured Destruction, only this time based on economics. But it’s not really just the sanctity of our electronic gadgets or the once almighty dollar we have to worry about, because China’s defense minister said yesterday that China is preparing for armed conflict ‘in every direction’. So what would war with China look like for the US? Pretty grim, according to a RAND study published a few months ago. Not only do they have submarines that can pop out of nowhere and a missile that can take out an aircraft carrier, but if you believe the stats on this page, China has twice as many people fit for military service as there are people in the United States. I’ll just be signing up for that Mandarin class now, so I can welcome our new overlords with a hearty Ni Hao! By the way, if you don’t understand why Ben Bernanke likes the money printing solution, see the video below. Read the rest of this entry »
NoLabels.org – A Reasonable Voice, Or A Party By The Sheeple, For The Sheeple?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 13, 2010 by admin in Politics
Monday, December 13th, 2010Is the new political organization “No Labels” a centrist astroturfing operation, a bunch of high-ideal do-nothings, or a genuine voice of reason? Time will tell.
There’s a tasty little morsel of irony in the fact that the politician that said “cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom” is almost single-handedly responsible for driving mine to new heights. My cynicism, that is, not my wisdom. So it shouldn’t be surprising that my first response when I read about the new political organization No Labels the other day was “Great. Finally a party for people who don’t believe in anything“. Of course, I’ve already sort of got that angle covered with my own political ideas, which over the past few months have included the Donner Party and the Punk Party. But after watching a few of No Labels’ video streams and following up on the spin they’re getting in the news cycle today, I think I may give them a longer look. The general reaction in the media so far seems to be that starting a rational dialog about solutions to the nation’s problems is somehow a preposterous idea. This piece on Slate is essentially a lengthy snark on No Labels’ assumed naivete. Politico is grumbling that there aren’t enough Republicans involved. The Christian Science Monitor is trying to spin up the rumor that it’s just New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s vehicle to the White House in 2012. On salon they’re all up in arms about who’s funding things, as if a political 501(c)(4) ever runs around disclosing their backers. They’ve only raised about a million dollars, by the way, which is chump change in today’s politics. I think the problem we’re witnessing here is that the press is so accustomed to feasting on the Nazi/Socialist slander that drives today’s politics that it collectively can’t handle a little sanity. The only tangible criticism I personally have so far is that they seem to have brazenly ripped off their graphics from a New York artist. Which really only means someone in the media department is probably getting canned, and some not-terribly-original artist in New York will probably get a payoff. So is No Labels just an astroturfing operation? I guess we’ll find out with time, but for the moment I think turning the rhetoric dial below 11 for a while can’t hurt. So far the only red flag for me was Joe Lieberman’s presence, but hell, he’d probably show up at a KKK rally if he thought it would keep him in office. And will No Labels’ message of cooperation get anything done? Who cares. As P.J. O’Rourke said, “The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop”.