This may go some way to explaining the shock, surprise, and apparent lack of unpreparedness of the world’s nations to the current events in the Middle East: “The SNAFU Principle”, explained many years ago by Robert Anton Wilson:
It’s what I call the “snafu principle.” Communication only occurs between equals–real communication, that is–because when you are dealing with people above you in a hierarchy, you learn not to tell them anything they don’t want to hear. If you tell them anything they don’t want to hear, the response is, “One more word Bumstead and I’ll fire you!” Or in the military, “One more word and you’re court-martialed.” It’s throughout the whole system.
So the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the more lies are being told to flatter those above them. So those at the top have no idea what is going on at all. Those at the bottom have to adjust to the rules made by those at the top who don’t know what’s going on. Those at the top can write rules about this, that and the other, while those at the bottom have got to adjust reality to fit the rules as much as they can.
More:
So I call this the burden of omniscience: those on the top are supposed to be doing the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and all the sensing, apprehending and conceptualizing for the whole society and those at the bottom have to adjust to what those at the top think based on all the misinformation flowing up in a hierarchy where any speaking of the truth can get you punished.
After the attack on the Congresswoman, a lot of observers are understandably worried about America’s gun culture, and the bizarro personality cun cult that surrounds that grotesque female from Alaska. Many are scared that there’s going to be some sort of insurrection from the pear-shaped people. Fear not, dear reader. There is no threat from that demographic. They’re almost as harmless as a basket of kittens.
The tea-baggers remain the gutless spunkwads that they were the day before this event. They are, as a cohort, cowards – to a degree that is extraordinary. They can talk (and boy, do they TALK) about bullets & guns, patriotism & revolution; they can quote and misquote Jefferson & Paine; they can, eh, polish their rifles, but when push comes to shove, they’re all hot air.
They leave the killing to the occasional nutjob, poor maniacs too crazed to have much of an idea of what they’re doing, or the consequences thereof.
The tough talk from the media chickenhawks goes on, and will continue ad nauseum: the drug-addled Limbaugh, Beck (another mental case), Hannity, O’Reilly, Savage et al are making good coin from whipping up the thicks. Will it translate into anything other than an individual imbecile on a rampage?
Of all the things to lose sleep over, an armed uprising by Palin’s Tea-baggers is the unlikeliest. Those fat sacks are lucky if they can get from bed to toilet without having a heart attack or a diabetic seizure. It’s hard to stage a revolution on a crutch.
In fact, an army of Tea-Baggers would be an exercise in the purest form of comedy. Grand Guignol street theater, as corpulent Lovecraftian horrors blocked intersections, huffing and puffing, adult diapers full to the brim, shooting hither and yon, man boobs a-wobbling, before finally being felled by harpoons.
Thar she blows.
Screw fleeing to Canada: buy a good camera. You’ll be laughing over the footage for years.
One reason why the constant comparisons to the Nazis are so annoying is that they’re an insult to the Nazis. Those bastards at least had the nerve to get out and do the wet-work themselves, instead of outsourcing it to the occasional inhabitant of Arkham Asylum.
One more thing: there’s a strong possibility that Palin will (being not the brightest LED bulb in the box) allow herself to be scape-goated for the deranged shooter’s behaviour. Not that she isn’t vile and reckless – but worse has been said by Glenn Beck & Michael Savage, and many others. So she’s a useful idiot for the Julius Streicher Fan Club.
Blame it on Sarah. Wink, wink. She should change her name to “Miss Direction“.
Will there be more events like this? Probably. Will they constitute an organised collectiveaction that will make the powerful people who own and run the country lose sleep?
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
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Here’s something to worry about:
The most important fish you’ve probably never heard of: Menhaden
When the Pilgrims first arrived in the New World, they were astounded by the abundant sea life. The rivers and coasts were teaming with 6-foot-long salmon, foot-wide oysters, and schools of 140-pound striped bass. There were so many whales criss-crossing bays, estuaries, and the coast that they were a peril to ships.
The food chain for all of this cornucopia of life depended on billions of menhaden, once so plentiful that they formed a veritable river of flesh along the Atlantic coast…
Tracing back down memory lane to my experience then: a young man of 25 arriving at The Farm in 1972 with just a backpack; being greeted by the Night Sentry and shown a place to sleep; going for a breakfast at the Community Kitchen, porridge and sorghum molasses, soysage and corn biscuits; then to the field in a horse wagon; harvesting sorghum cane with a machete and piling it into the wagon; at the end of the day returning to my assigned, dirt-floored army tent lit by candles; supper of bean soup and cornbread with pickled japapeños; guitars and song around a fire under the canopy of stars; abiding sense of harmony in the world; community.
2011: off to a strange start. Birds falling from the sky, fish clogging the rivers, strange weather in divers places. At least the fish haven’t started falling from the sky…yet.
“We’re very excited at this latest development involving Excalibur Almaz,” said Tim Craine, Director of the Isle of Man Government’s Business Development Agency. “Bringing the two Almaz Space Stations to the Island is a further exciting development and evidence of the Island’s growing profile and reputation in the space world.”
Sure, why not? That’s one small step for (the Isle of) Man…one giant leap for the final destruction of personal sanity.
“We go to the moon…” (waits for applause) “We go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are freakishly strange and unsettle our preconceptions about the nature of reality. And now, onwards to the Isle of Man, our gateway to the stahs”.
Meanwhile, everyone’s favourite invincible robot, the Mars Rover Opportunity, parks on the edge of a stadium-sized crater, taking a breather. 7 years old, and fighting fit:
IT WILL NOT DIE!
History channel recently aired a roundtable of Doom, featuring James Howard Kunstler, Nate Hagens (for theoildrum.com) and Mike Ruppert. The video below was uploaded by a Randbot, and has a puerile legend “Warning: this contains Propaganda” on the bottom left of the screen. Still:
Military preparing war games for Food Riots in the U.S. “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…”
Get that guy with the ‘FOOD NOW’ sign! He’s a FREEDOM HATER! Dammit, the varmit even UNDERLINED it! For the sake of National Security, DO NOT GIVE HIM FOOD!
Let’s just follow the news today, and cut out main parts too, there’s so much going on from where I’m standing. I mean, interesting things are coming from Europe, “Europe unveils sweeping plans to govern reckless banks”, and “European nations begin seizing private pensions”, but I’m going to have to leave Europe for another day, or before I finish this it will actually already be another day.
And there’s plenty of things afloat in the US of A today to fill a book. Or 10. Thom Weidlich has this gem for Bloomberg, which plays into the Randall Wray piece I talked about earlier this week, which claims that most if not all US mortgages and foreclosures and mortgage backed securities are just simply and plainly illegal.
Regular readers know the drill by now. Don’t trust the banks; keep a chunk of your money in cash, in hand, interest be damned. Have lots of food and water stored. No need to go CRAY-ZEE or nothin, but no need to get caught with your pants down. You’d die of embarrassment before starvation.
A fun Bill Bailey interview. Not your usual stand-up comic:
“My comedy increasingly goes into the most abstruse areas,” says Bailey once we get inside and settle down to tea. And how. In his current show, Dandelion Mind at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre, he develops not only a visual critique of the representation of Thomas the Apostle in western art, but also a counter-factual history (to music) of what would have happened if the Nazis had established their reich in Australia.
He even has a routine about the philosophically difficult issue of dark matter. “I ask my audiences how much dark matter there is in the universe. Nothing I’ve ever done has provoked such a divided reaction. Everybody has an opinion: ’70% of the universe is dark matter.’ ‘No, it’s 80%.’ ‘You’re confusing dark energy with dark matter.’ ‘How do you know dark matter exists if you can’t see it?’ I get a lot of nutters in my audiences,” says Bailey happily.
A milquetoast reporter rides Amtrak, and endures a 10 hour delay…and practically comes apart at the seams. Drama queen histrionics ensue!
Most amusing; as James Howard Kunstler has said many times, the U.S. has a rail service that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. That said, ABC7Stephen needs to grow some hair on his… or at least, watch some Bogart movies. Men today: no role models worth speaking of. (More on the Bogart Theory of manhood at a later date).
While the general public persists in delusional retro dreams of trans-continental bullet trains (when not imagining flying cars), those who actually travel by rail would settle for – eh – REGULAR TRAINS. For long stretches of the rail system, travel speeds are at ~15 mph – due to lousy track and crappy maintenance.
It’s always amusing to hear or read the common refrain that “We can always take the train” if oil/flying/driving becomes too expensive. That’s a fine plan, as long as the person takes the imaginary train in their heads, rather than the actual one on the rails. If there were two tracks for the entire route, instead of one, and tracks dedicated to passengers (that didn’t criss cross on street level with cars, or cede right of way to freight!) then it might be possible – but you’re talking about a real job putting that in. Yup, welcome to the long descent into third world status.
At least you don’t have to sit on the roof, yet.
Given an intense dislike of flying (and associated security bs), as well as a pretty loose schedule, it makes personal sense to take the train. In this case, it’s the West Coast line that runs N/S. (apparently there are differences between N/S and E/W systems. The trip in question is PDX-LAX (or Union Stations in Portland OR to LA). It can be driven in 14 or 15 hours, but by train takes about 30.
This is why the bullet train delusion is so annoying. It’s not going to happen (the U.S. can’t agree on anything any more – a symptom of a culture in serious decline) – the idea that the political class is capable of agreeing on, let alone funding a trans-continental bullet train is laughable. A bullet/maglev train would compete with air-travel in terms of speed, which would be nice – but most folk would settle for a train service that competed with CARS.
Y’know – pick a technical goal that is achievable. Leave the hard stuff to the Japanese, Chinese, French & Indians. Go gently into the Twilight of Empire, America.
Besides, why build nice stuff? Someone’s only going to blow it up, sooner or later. If you wanted a reason for the slipshod standards that operate in Western society post WW2, that’s as good as any.
Having taken the Amtrak LA-Portland (OR) trip about a dozen times over the last 3 years, some observations:
On three of those trips there was a 2 to 3 hour delay. Delays are NORMAL. One was due to a suicider driving their car into the train ahead. What affects one train has a Rube-Goldberg knock-on effect on all the trains behind, of course. Another delay was due to the train having to stop because of a dead body on the tracks ahead – they had to wait for the coroner. It was another suicide. A third was because the driver took a corner too fast early in the morning, almost causing the train to derail (and necessitating serious repairs to the engine). Dammit, where was Twitter and crybaby ABC7Stephen then, eh?
Friends once experienced a 20 hour delay on a trip from LA to Louisiana, in 2005/6. (If only they’d been ABC journos with Twitter accounts!)
In the event of a problem, announcements over the intercom will be sporadic or non-existent. If you want to find out what’s happening, and it’s early in the morning, you’re probably out of luck. If it’s during normal hours, go to the dining car if the train has one, and ask the Amtrak guy behind the counter. They usually hear everything.
In the event of a serious problem, or a long delay, the electricity is switched off. This is NOT a minor hassle, because the toilets are dependent on electricity. Add a couple of plastic bags and toilet paper to your itinerary, just in case. Also, with the power out, good luck buying snacks – you must bring enough of your own food, toilet paper, etc.
If you have an alcohol habit, bring your own emergency stash. Don’t get caught drinking it, or they might kick you off the train, however. You have to admire the Chutzpah of a company that will kick you off the train for drinking, after driving you to drinking in the first place.
The A/C is always cranked far too high. At night, it can be freezing on those trains. Always have a blanket or layers that you can wear.
Always bring your own food; the Amtrak food is strictly for neophyte travelers.
If you suffer from head-aches or have medical issues, be sure that you have enough meds to cover at least a 24 hour delay.
Amtrak’s ticket policy is right out of the 1970s. The tickets look just like airline tickets; you even have to sign them and provide ID. This leads one to think that they could be re-issued if lost, correct? Not correct: if the ticket is lost, there’s no replacing it. Which is fine, but it doesn’t say this on the ticket. You find it out the hard way. So, be damned careful with that ticket. “Lost tickets are lost money”. Once the ticket is printed out, it cannot be re-printed by another Amtrak employee. You’ll have to buy a new one.
On the newer carriages, there are electrical outlets on all the seats; this is nice if you bring a laptop with movies, work, etc. On the older carriages, they only have/had 2 or 3 outlets in the observation car. There’s usually a race to see who can hog those. You won’t know what the situation will be until you’re on board. You might want to bring a power extension cable, just in case. (Does Amtrak have one on board? Hahahahaha).
On the very long trips, some people buy a sleeper car. These are incredibly expensive – adding ~$500 to your ticket. When having breakfast in the dining car in the morning, it’s often amazing to find that the people from the sleeper cars are usually pissed off and cranky – much more so than the coach rabble. It doesn’t seem that they get $500 worth of sleep, poor dears. Seriously, some of the whiniest, entitled bitches you’ll ever meet.
So, it’s not a happy choice. Have your genitals squeezed by a TSA grunt, your DNA scrambled by a T-Ray machine, or take the same trip by rail and have it take 3 times longer than would be tolerated in Bangladesh.
Oh, and Greyhound is worse, by all accounts.
Anyhow, happy tRails in the greatest country on Earth!
Sylvie and Bruno, first published in 1889, and its 1893 second volume Sylvie and Bruno Concluded form the last novel by Lewis Carroll published during his lifetime. Both volumes were illustrated by Harry Furniss.
The novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fantasy world of Fairyland. While the latter plot is a fairy tale with many nonsense elements and poems, similar to Carroll’s Alice books, the story set in Victorian Britain is a social novel, with its characters discussing various concepts and aspects of religion, society, philosophy and morality.
Creepy in the extreme: China’s ghost cities. If you build it, they will not come. Unless the sea levels rise as predicted…then, having a few empty cities on hand might be useful.
If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.
One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?
Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.
Water consumed by people in China contains dangerous levels of arsenic, fluorine and sulfates. An estimated 980 million of China’s 1.3 billion people drink water every day that is partly polluted. More than 600 million Chinese drink water contaminated with human or animal wastes and 20 million people drink well water contaminated with high levels of radiation. A large number of arsenic-tainted water have been discovered. China’s high rates of liver, stomach and esophageal cancer have been linked to water pollution.
Before reading this piece about wooly-headed thinking, here’s the lucid George Carlin:
He’s with Bill Hicks now…wherever the Heck that is.
You may have noticed a curious phenomenon: one day, something that you hadn’t previously been bothered by suddenly begins to annoy you. This might be a sound, a building, a taste, a song, a person, or even an idea. This irritant passed by innocently on Monday, but on Tuesday it’s as appealing as fingernails on a blackboard. Critical mass has been reached, and try as one might there is no return to the time when it didn’t bother you.
Many people find the popular idea that scientists will save us through technical break-throughs to be annoying, and rightly so. It implies an external solution or Deus Ex Machina to the problems that humans have brought upon themselves. However, there is another variant of this idiocy that’s even more annoying: the abuse of the first-person PLURAL, or for the purposes of this article, WE-syndrome.
The delusional aspect of WE-Syndrome is nicely demonstrated by the British Comedy duo, Mitchell & Webb. In this sketch, they use the sad (and all too common) example of a sports fanatic:
It works, at the lowest level, as brute tribalism. To quote Gary Brecher:
“Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: “my gang yay, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.”
If only WE-syndrome was limited to sports and tribes. Having spent many a happy hour reading sites like theoildrum.com for analysis of Peak Oil and resource news, WE-syndrome became apparent quickly. Discussions about the looming oil crisis in the comments section would inevitably degrade into:
“WE need to build x amount of solar panels…”; “All WE need to do is switch to Geothermal…”; “Once WE make breakthroughs in thin-film solar panels…” etc. etc. etc.
Which suggests the question: who, exactly, is this awe-inspiring “WE”?
The commentators wrote as if they were part of a collective, sharing mutual influence and power. In thread after thread, various individuals would have the solution. It always involved “US”…and “OUR” options…things that “WE” would do to solve the problem.
Fantastic! Let US just pick up the phone and explain the plan to Obama…
Unfortunately – and this may come as a jolt, there is no “WE”. There is, as far as modern society is concerned, a disparate collection of atomised individuals (forgive the redundancies), many of them neurotic, who wouldn’t know how to organise a birthday party if their lives depended on it. Try going to any of these futile political rallies, protests or meetings (of any political side). Observe! What you will see is a temporary illusion of WE-ness. Then, the rally/meetup ends, and the particles shuffle off to their McMansion/Apartment/Cube-farm/Matrix XYZ co-ordinates, studiously avoiding the exchange of meaningful contact information. Much better to congregate online, where they can vent on the keyboard.
After all, any of these people might be a serial killer! You hear such awful stories on the news…
Very occasionally, emails will be exchanged. Even more occasionally, they’ll actually be used. Even more occasionally, they’ll be answered. One in a thousand, or ten thousand, perhaps?
WE, indeed.
On the otherwise enjoyable io9.com, this debasement of “WE” thrives like a WEed. At the announcement of a new scientific breakthrough, the headline will almost invariably be a variant of “WE may have made an amazing breakthrough in materials…”, or “WE have found an amazing new planet”.
Correction! WE did no such thing. Scientists and/or engineers, after years of rigorous study, bloody hard work and sacrifice have made the discovery or breakthrough. WE did diddly squat, other than READ about it on the internet – and fund it through a small percentage of total taxation.
Whenever there’s a dark story on the above mentioned io9.com, there’s an abrupt difference in emphasis. A recent example being the accidental destruction of a rare beach ecosystem caused by the filming of the Sci-Fi TV show “Game of Thrones”. The article read
“…one environmentalist is calling HBO real-life (bad guys): They covered a protected beach in Malta with fake sand, resulting in “total elimination” of the ecosystem.”.
Note that it did not read:
“WE may have destroyed a rare ecosystem”.
Why not? Why is it “WE” when something good happens, but “THEY” when something bad happens?
This is the mindset of a child.
If a new Pixar movie comes out, would the headline read:
“WE have just made another animated classic”?
The idea is absurd…and insulting to the animators who toiled for years on the project. It’s no less inane to take credit for scientific breakthroughs, surely?
The reason why this grates may be due to the laziness that it implies. It also suggests a thinking process that’s delusional, if not dangerous. If “WE” are going to solve the problem of fossil fuel dependency, then “WE” should do something about it PERSONALLY. Preferably something that involves effort, time, money, and sacrifice. Else, “WE” are dicking around.
Changing your Facebook status? Putting a bumper sticker on your car? Voting? Going on a march? Sending a – God help us – sending an email to your elected rep? Chances are, you’ll entropically get back a little less energy than you put in. If you invest a minute sending an email to your congressman, don’t whine when you get a form email in reply.
Garbage in, Garbage out.
There are more sinister sides to WE-Syndrome. Stand-up comic Doug Stanhope demonstrates the Xenophopic uses:
And deep ecologist Derrick Jensen (who, ironically, over-uses the first person frequently) does a great demolition of “WE”, and exposes the psychological process of “Identification” that underlies it:
To conclude: this society seems deeply committed to delusional and magical thinking…totem behaviours, and gives every sign of being a latter day Cargo Cult. WE-Syndrome is just one of many symptoms.
Feel free to print that out on a T-Shirt, bumper sticker, or Coffee Mug…or even email this article to your congress(w0)man!
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Observant readers may have noticed the complete absence of first person singular and first person plural on idleworm (unless in quotes) since the relaunch a few months ago.
