NEWSLETTER
#85
August 29, 2006
August 29, 2006
Alien Nation
Edition
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr85.html
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr85.html
So it appears as though the word "burglary," though commonly understood to mean a break-in for the purpose of committing a theft, is actually defined as a break-in for the purpose of engaging in any criminal activity, so the incident at Ruppert's FTB offices does qualify, from a legal perspective, as a burglary. My bad. Sorry about that.
Also, before moving on to other things, I have to note here that several people wrote me to ask, confidentially, who the mystery dissident journalist was. *Sigh* I'm going to give you all the benefit of the doubt here and just assume that these were probably new readers who can, I suppose, be forgiven for failing to appreciate my rather demented sense of humor.
Now then, by a quick show of hands, how many of
you read
the title of this newsletter and got all excited thinking that I was
going to
be writing about alien abductions, shape-shifting reptilians and anal
probes? I
see a few hands up in the back of the room, which means that some of
you are
probably going to be disappointed. But that's okay, because there is
always a certain
percentage of you that are disappointed with anything that I choose to
write
about.
I was shocked to find, for example, that some of you were not the least bit interested in reading about Dick Cheney's penis. One of you actually wrote to tell me that not only is the subject of little interest, but that, in any event, Cheney’s penis "couldn't possibly be any bigger then my husband's." Information sharing can be a good thing, to be sure, but for future reference, that was probably a little more information than I really needed.
Moving on then, I know that I have beat this
particular
horse before, on more than one occasion, but bear with me here because
I feel
that I need to point out once again, for the benefit of the slow
learners in
the crowd, that the basic principle by which this country’s political
establishment operates is - now pay attention! - control through
fear.
Everyone understands
that …
right?
I mean, it’s pretty
basic
stuff – scare the hell out of people and
they’ll obediently follow whatever path they are told is the safe path
to
follow. Of course, it probably won’t really be the safe path to follow,
and there probably won’t really be anything to fear – other than
the motives and intentions of those directing you down the path. But if
you
really scare the bejesus out of somebody,
none of
that is going to matter to them at the time.
There is, to be sure,
a whole lot
of stuff to be scared of in the world today – or at least a whole lot
of
stuff that we are conditioned to fear: terr’ists;
immigrants; emerging viruses; natural disasters; violent criminals; Peak
Oil; Iran; Iraq; North Korea; Osama bin Laden; Saddam Hussein;
Hezbollah; water
bottles on airplanes. All in all, it’s a very scary world out there.
I was reminded of
this recently
when I was called upon, for the first time in my life, to serve jury
duty.
Actually, that’s not quite true; I have been called upon before, but I
was never able to serve because of, if I remember correctly, financial
hardships and medical conditions. But this recent jury notice happened
to find
me in good health and financially sound – which is another way of
saying
that getting out of jury service has become much more difficult – so I
diligently reported for duty, showing due respect for the sanctity of
the
courthouse by arriving only slightly late and with my “Fuck the LAPD”
t-shirt only partly exposed, and then proceeded to sit idly by for
several
hours with little to do other than mentally calculate the odds that any
prosecutor would actually seat me on any jury.
Midway through a very
long day, I
was sent to a courtroom along with about forty other potential jurors.
Before
entering the courtroom, a random draw was held and I happened to pick a
fairly
high number, so my fate, it appeared, would be determined by how many
of the
hapless souls ahead of me in line were accepted as jurors. It soon
became clear
that more than a few of them were going to make a play for rejection,
so I
figured that, if nothing else, I might sneak in as an alternate juror.
There seemed to be
two different
strategies employed by those seeking dismissal, by the way, one that we
will
call the “good strategy” and one that we will call the
“really bad strategy.” The opposing attorneys, you see, are
basically on a fishing expedition during the jury selection process,
and what
they are fishing for is bias. The defense attorney is basically looking
for
bias against his or her client, and the prosecutor is looking for bias
against
pretty much any form of authority. Toward that end, each side will ask
a series
of questions. It’s pretty obvious what they are fishing for, which
makes
it pretty easy to make a play for dismissal.
The really bad
strategy, employed
by more than one potential juror that day, is to reflexively snap at
every
piece of bait that is dangled out there, even if doing so requires you
to directly
contradict a position that you took just a couple of questions ago.
This
strategy will likely provide some invaluable entertainment, but
revealing to
everyone in the room that you will go to hilarious lengths to avoid
jury
service will not necessarily get you booted.
The better strategy,
by far, is
to zero in on a single area of bias that the attorneys are looking for
and then
sell it as best you can. To greatly increase your odds of success, I
would
suggest playing to the prosecutor rather than the defense attorney, who
is
likely a public defender with little interest in actually defending his
or her
client. From what I observed, an anti-police bias will get you kicked
loose in
time for lunch, but a pro-police bias probably will not. Compare these
two
examples (which may or may not be exaggerated to some extent):
Prosecutor: Have you
ever had any
personal encounters with the police, and, if so, would you describe
those
encounters as positive or negative experiences?
Potential Juror #1: Well, I was pulled over once a long time ago by a cop who seemed like he might have had a little bit of an attitude, but overall …
Prosecutor: Judge, I move that this juror be dismissed and then immediately taken to lock-up.
Potential Juror #1: Well, I was pulled over once a long time ago by a cop who seemed like he might have had a little bit of an attitude, but overall …
Prosecutor: Judge, I move that this juror be dismissed and then immediately taken to lock-up.
Public Defender: Have you ever had any personal encounters with the police, and, if so, would you describe those encounters as positive or negative experiences?
Potential Juror #2: Well, my brother is a cop, and my brother-in-law is with the highway patrol, and my dad is retired FBI, and my wife works part-time down at the station as a dispatcher, and I know from talking to all of them that the police have a really hard job, what with having to deal with all the scumbags out there, and with the ACLU-types crying every time one of the scumbags goes and gets himself shot. Speaking of shooting, by the way, did I mention that I’ve been the president of my local NRA chapter for the last ten years? And Grand Dragon of my KKK chapter? By the way, is that nigger over there the defendant in this case? ‘Cuz I'll tell you what, that sumbitch looks guilty as all hell to me.
Public Defender: Your
Honor, I
think we may have found our jury foreman.
As a potential juror,
you are not
told what charges the defendant is facing. But if you pay attention to
the
questions that are asked, it’s not that hard to figure out. In this
case,
a young boy, likely the son of the defendant, was apparently seriously
injured
or even killed while riding a small dirt bike. The boy was too young to
ride
legally, and so the state was charging the man with something along the
lines
of reckless child endangerment.
For the record, some
of the
potential jurors seemed horrified at the thought of a child possibly
maimed or
killed as a result of the negligence of an adult. Others seemed just as
horrified that the state was prosecuting a grieving father who had
likely
already punished himself far more than the state ever could. Or maybe
that was
just me.
All of the
prospective jurors
were asked whether they had ever let their own children do something
that was
potentially dangerous, or whether they themselves had been allowed, as
children, to do things that others would consider dangerous – possibly
even reckless. A few of the jurors allowed that they had ridden dirt
bikes
and/or that they had allowed their own kids to ride dirt bikes or ATVs.
None of
the jurors’ answers ventured much beyond that. My number, alas, never
came up, and that’s kind of a shame, because I sat there for several
hours with nothing better to do than mentally compose my answer to that
particular question. It would have gone something like this:
Was I ever allowed to
do
anything dangerous as a child?! Is that what you’re asking me? Are
you
serious?! EVERYTHING I did as a child was dangerous. EVERYTHING!!
If I
allowed my own kids to do half of what I was allowed to do as a kid,
the
Department of Child Services would have taken them away from me years
ago and
I’d probably be locked away in prison. Negligence?!
You want to talk about negligence? My parents must take the friggin’ cake when it comes to negligence! As
just
one example, our family logged thousands of miles driving all over
Hell’s
half-acre in the family car and never once - not once! - did they strap
me into
a child safety seat. Come to think of it, most of the time I didn't
even wear a
seatbelt. Here's another example: for most of my formative years, my
primary
mode of transportation was a bicycle, and never once did my parents
insist
that I wear a helmet! I didn’t even own one (which is
probably
a good thing, because I'm thinking that if I had tooled around town on
my bike
sporting a helmet in the 1960s and 1970s, I would have gotten my ass
kicked on
a pretty regular basis). And get this: every year, on the Fourth of
July, I was
allowed to set off explosive devices and burn shit up right in front of
our
house! And my parents, if you can believe this, watched me do it and
even
cheered me on! And on Halloween, I was allowed to go out at night with
no adult supervision to solicit candy from complete fucking
strangers. Oops
… sorry there, judge … am I allowed to say ‘fucking’ in
this courtroom? Anyway, as I was saying, I was also allowed to ride a
small
dirt bike, or at least I would have been if my dumbass older brother
hadn't
crashed the damn thing into a chain-link fence before I got my chance
to ride,
deeply cutting his finger in the process. Oh shit! Maybe I
shouldn’t have mentioned that, since the prosecutor over there seems a
little overzealous. Is there a statute of limitations on this child
endangerment stuff? I mean, you’re not going to extradite my dad from
Arizona to answer for letting my brother ride that dirt bike back in
1970, are
you? Anyway, like I was saying, when I was a kid I was actually allowed
–
forced, really – to walk to school, which is shameful, when you
think about it, since everybody knows that any reasonably responsible
parent
lines up with all the other SUV-driving parents to drop off and pick up
their
kids, so that the little ones can be safely transported to their
respective
homes where they can interact with their peers in safe, modern ways
such as
with text messaging and instant messaging, rather than in the dangerous
ways of
the past, which generally involved leaving the house to play in the
great
outdoors. Believe it or not, we were allowed to do
that.
We were allowed to freely roam the neighborhood from a very young age,
sometimes on bikes, sometimes on skateboards (with hard clay wheels
that would
stop cold if there happened to be a microscopic particle of sand on the
sidewalk, hence the scar on my chin), and sometimes on foot. And do you
know
why we were allowed to freely roam the neighborhood? Because we
actually HAD
a neighborhood! Believe it or not, there was a real sense of
neighborhood
and community in those days of yore. I don’t live in a neighborhood
today, your honor. Oh sure, I have ‘neighbors,’ I suppose, in the
sense that there are other people who live all around me. But none of
them know
one another. We all live in our own little safehouses,
shielded from the scary world. But in the old days, everyone knew each
other
and everyone’s kids ran the streets together. And the school, well,
that
was the center of it all. There was always something to do at the
school. There
were bike safety classes and an annual bike rodeo. There was the wildly
popular
annual fair. There were various after-school programs. There were bake
sales.
There were paper drives. There was a very active PTA.
There were people staffing the school on weekends who would gladly
provide you with
a carom table, or a basketball, or a football, or all the gear needed
to put
together a baseball game. And finding enough people to field a team was
never a
problem. But if you go by a school now on the weekend, or even fifteen
minutes
after the final bell rings on any given weekday, do you know what
you’ll
find? Padlocked fences and
barren asphalt.
You won’t see any kids playing. And you won’t see any kids on the
streets either. Where the hell are all the kids? And what happened, by
the way,
to the paperboys? When I was a kid, we were all paperboys. We were out
riding
the streets after school delivering the evening newspaper, and then
once a
month going up to the doors of the homes of random strangers, demanding
money
for providing a service, and being careful to always ‘porch’ the
paper during the month of December in the hopes of collecting those big
Christmas tips, and then returning to the usual erratic delivery
pattern in
January, while forever hoping that the one guy who never answers the
door when
you come to collect even when you can see him through the window
sitting there
watching TV and drinking a beer will eventually pay you for the last
three
months of service, so that maybe there will be some kind of financial
reward
for getting up every Sunday morning before dawn and overloading the
handlebars
of your bike with heavy Sunday editions of the local newspaper so that
you can
pedal around town alone and cold in the pre-dawn hours, because your
parents
– and I bet you were wondering where I was going with this, weren’t
you? – have no concern for the way they recklessly endanger your life
on
pretty much a daily basis. Can you imagine allowing
a
child to ride a bike with dangerously overloaded handlebars, with no
helmet or
other safety gear, alone and a couple miles from home at 5:00 in the
morning in a
neighborhood full of strangers, possibly sex offenders? But you know
what,
Judge? We kind of liked doing it, most of the time. And you know what
else?
While my kids have every goddamn electronic gadget imaginable – from
I-Pods to cell phones to laptop computers to portable DVD
players – they don’t have what I had as a kid. They don’t
have it because it has been stolen from them and it can’t be replaced
with e-mail and digital cameras. What they don’t have, your honor, is a sense of
neighborhood.
They don’t have a sense of community. They have been deprived of
meaningful human interaction. They have been conditioned to live in a
world
where trust in others has been replaced by fear of everyone and
everything.
Their world is a world built entirely on fear. But here I may have
digressed a
bit. What the hell was the question again?
As I have stressed
before on
these pages, one of the primary goals of the powers-that-be is the
complete
atomization of society – the destruction of all social, cultural, and
familial bonds. It is the ultimate divide-and-conquer strategy: reduce
the
entire population to armies of one, each alone and isolated, unable to
fight
back against the rapidly encroaching police state. As I have also
emphasized
before, technology has played a major role in the process of atomizing
Western
society. Just as the egregiously misrepresented Luddites
warned, the proliferation of advanced technology has led to a rapid
process of
depersonalization.
But just how
successful have the
puppet-masters been at fostering social isolation? I am sorry to have
to report
here that a landmark new study (all but ignored by the American media)
provides
chilling evidence that the psychological warfare campaign has been
wildly
successful. According to a Washington Post report:
Americans
are
far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a
sharply
growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide,
according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social
ties in
the United States.
A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two.
The
comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly
fragmented
America, where intimate social ties – once seen as an integral part of
daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic
benefits
– are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to
suffer alone …
Compared
with
1985, nearly 50 percent more people in 2004 reported that their spouse
is the only
person they can confide in …Whereas nearly three-quarters of people in
1985 reported they had a friend in whom they could confide, only half
in 2004
said they could count on such support. The number of people who said
they
counted a neighbor as a confidant dropped by more than half, from about
19
percent to about 8 percent.
(Shankar Vedantam
"Social
Isolation Growing in U.S.,
Study Says," Washington Post, June
23, 2006;
read the full report here: http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf#search=%22Lynn%20Smith-Lovin%20%26%20social%20isolation%22)
read the full report here: http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf#search=%22Lynn%20Smith-Lovin%20%26%20social%20isolation%22)
The study found sharp
declines in
all non-kin relationships. In 1985, 29.4 percent of people reported a
close
relationship with at least one co-worker; by 2004, that figure had
dropped to
18 percent. Even more alarmingly, the percentage of respondents
enjoying a
close relationship with a co-member of a group dropped from 26.1 all
the way
down to 11.8. Understating the obvious was the study’s lead author,
Duke
University Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin:
“This is
a big social change, and it indicates something that’s not good for our
society.”
Let’s be a bit more
blunt
here and stipulate that a society in which 24.6 percent of the people do
not
have a single close confidant, and an astounding 53.4 percent have no
close non-kin relationships, is a very, very sick society. It is
debatable, in
fact, whether it is actually a society at all, but rather an
essentially random
collection of strangers, unconnected to each other in any meaningful
way, each
going about their meaningless lives in conditioned isolation.
Just how sick is this
society? That
is difficult to say, since we don’t have any data from a healthy
society
to provide a baseline for comparison. It is regrettable, to say the
least, that
the data available to the researchers only covered changes in America
over the last two decades. Lacking earlier data, 1985 serves as a
baseline for
evaluating the data from 2004, but there is little doubt that America
was already a very sick society by the mid-1980s and that social
isolation had
already increased immensely from earlier decades.
What would we find if
we had data
dating back to the 1960s, or the 1940s, or the 1920s? Does anyone doubt
that
that data would reveal a marked pattern of steadily increasing social
isolation
extending back many decades? When was America
last a healthy society? What do the social isolation statistics of a
healthy
society look like? If someone were to finance a comprehensive international
study of social isolation, how sick would the figures from 2004 America
look in relation to the figures from the rest of the world?
Where would America
rank among nations? I’m guessing we’d be dead last.
And what does the
future hold? If
the last twenty years have brought such significant change, through a
process
that appears to be accelerating, then what will we find twenty years
from now,
or even ten years from now? If one in every four Americans now have no close relationships, even within their
own family,
can we expect to see that rise to one in every two Americans by 2020?
Is this
the kind of society you want your kids to grow up in? Because this
isn’t
conjecture or ‘conspiracy theorizing,’ folks, this is the cold,
hard reality of the society we live in. Take a look around as you go
about your
daily activities today; one of every four people you see have no one to
turn
to, no one to confide in, no one to really talk to. And fully half the
people
you see have no social network at all beyond their own family.
But fear not. A lot of them probably have I-pods and personal computers with high-speed internet access. So it’s all good, I suppose.
Technology has, to be sure, played a major role in the rise of social isolation. But so too has the selling of fear, for we live in a world, as I may have mentioned before, where control through fear is the basic operating principle of our allegedly democratic government. I am not suggesting here, of course, that this is something new. There was, if I recall correctly, a fair amount of fear-mongering going on when I was a kid. Everyone seemed to be convinced, for example, that it was only a matter of time before “The Bomb” came raining down on America’s cities. To insure that we never stopped thinking about the prospect of nuclear annihilation, public schools held regular “bomb drills” or “drop drills.” When the alarm sounded at my school, we were all expected to take cover under our desks, with our hands strategically placed over our heads. We held regular fire alarm drills as well, but those were a bit different in that they had a real purpose: acquainting students and staff with evacuation plans in the event that an actual emergency should arise. The drop drills, on the other hand, served no purpose other than to induce fear. And I say that because research that I have done as an adult has led me to the shocking conclusion that my hands and a wooden desk would not have offered ideal protection from a nuclear blast.
There were other
things to fear
in the ‘60s and ‘70s as well. Strangers bearing candy were a
persistent problem, though I made it through my childhood without ever
encountering one of these legendary figures – except on Halloween,
when,
for some unexplained reason, it was perfectly okay to accept candy from
strangers, especially if they were strangers who passed out really good
candy
and not the shitty candy that some people handed out, almost as if they
actually wanted someone to egg their house. And then, of course, there
were the
people who just left a bucket of candy on the front porch for
trick-or-treaters
to help themselves to, kind of on the honor system.
While we’re on that
subject, I’d like to take this opportunity to say, to all the kids down
in Torrance, California
who got to those houses after my brothers and I did, that we are very
sorry for
our youthful indiscretions and we plan on making it up to you someday.
Also, we
would like all our former neighbors to know that we no longer see the
humor in
setting off smoke bombs from the local fireworks stand on your front
porches
and then ringing-and-running your house. At the time, I’ll admit, it
seemed really damn funny, especially when you’d come stomping out
through
the cloud of colored smoke to try to find us, while we sat hiding in
the bushes
across the street struggling mightily to stifle our laughter. But now,
looking
back as a responsible adult, I find it only mildly amusing.
Anyway, let’s now
move on
and take a look at the question that I am sure is on everyone’s mind,
which is: what the hell is your point here, Dave? Glad you asked. The
point is
that we are now in a better position to discuss the question posed in
Newsletter #81 (April 7, 2006). As readers will no doubt recall, in
that outing
I basically asked what it was going to take to get a reaction from the
American
people. But as it turns out, I was asking the wrong question.
The problem, you see, is not that the American people are not waking up to the outrages committed by this administration. To the extent that they can be trusted, every public opinion poll in recent years - whether concerning the occupation of Iraq, the handling of Hurricane Katrina, the performance of the 9-11 Commission, or any number of other issues – has reflected the fact that the American people are indeed waking up. And among those who have woken up, there appears to be agreement that the problems we are facing require immediate action.
So the problem is not that the American people don't know what's going on. And it's not that they are too apathetic to care about fixing the problems once they recognize what those problems are. No, the real problem is that what is required to correct the course of this ship-of-state is a massive and sustained social movement. And the real question that needs to be asked is: how does a massive social movement arise in a nation that is almost completely devoid of any meaningful social networks?
And the answer, it appears, is: it doesn't.
We are all products of what is surely the most socially isolated society that this planet has ever seen (except for those of you who are reading this in other parts of the world). And the harsh reality of the sick society that we live in is that the obtaining of real knowledge may be more of a curse than a blessing. With real knowledge comes the ability to see more clearly through the fog of lies, but with that increased awareness comes an inevitable feeling of helplessness. For how is someone to act upon that which has been learned when said person has no social networks to call upon and acting alone is clearly not going to prove effective? Hence the gaining of knowledge often leads, ironically enough, to yet further social isolation.
If I had it to do
over again, I
don’t know that I would have burrowed down this rabbit hole as deeply
as I
have. Unfortunately, it’s a one-way path; once you have dug your way
in,
there’s no way back out. There’s no way to unlearn that which has
been learned. There is a certain satisfaction that comes with being
able to
understand how the world really works, and being able to more
accurately
process new information as it becomes available. But if you are
powerless to
right the wrongs in the world, is it better not to know? Is it better
to live
life comfortably numb?
I often get messages
from some of
you asking why I don’t burrow deeper – why I don’t address
issues like, for instance, those mentioned at the top of this post. And
the
answer is that I don’t find the evidence in support of these ideas very
credible. Or maybe it’s just that I haven’t dug deep enough down
all the various branches of the rabbit hole. Maybe the view from my
current
position is so unrelentingly bleak that I don’t want to find out what
lies beneath.
But then again, maybe
if you dig
deep enough, there is another way out.
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