The Noble Lie is in archive mode for the foreseeable future. Far too much going on for me to put it into words. Far too much going on for me to grapple with these topics on a regular basis, though it’s more important than ever for people to pay attention to what’s going on in the world.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading. Sometimes I’ve enjoyed writing. Sometimes, I wrote because I had to.
As Diogenes of Sinope might say, every dog has his day. I think the day of this dog of a blog has come and gone. Goodbye.
Not a huge Jon Stewart fan, but he was in rare form lampooning Keith Olbermann recently.
A broadcasting Republican with a marginal sense of humor could really make gold doing this on a regular basis. If previous attempts are any indication, it might be a while until one of those come around. In the meantime, they can continue to count on liberals poking fun at fellow liberals.
All you folks think you own my life
But you never made any sacrifice
Demons they are on my trail
I’m standing at the crossroads of hell
I look to the left, I look to the right
Hands that grab me on every side
All you folks think I got my price
At which I’ll sell all that is mine
You think money rules when all else fails
Go sell your soul and keep your shell
I’m trying to protect what I keep inside
All the reasons why I live my life
Some say the devil be a mystical thing
I say the devil he a walking man
He a fool he a liar conjurer and a thief
He try to tell you what you want
Try to tell you what you need
Standing at the point
The road it cross you down
What is at your back
Which way do you turn
Who will come to find you first
Your devils or your gods
All you folks think you run my life
Say I should be willing to compromise
I say all you demons go back to hell
I’ll save my soul, save myself
I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate why I am not posting nearly as much as I used to, and this article might do it for me. These are poisoned wells we drink from, and this is nothing new to the Obama administration. It’s nothing new, I’ve been reading stories about angry Muslim kids getting suckered into doing stupid things by FBI provocateurs for ages now. The most effective way to neutralize a resistance movement is to run it yourself.
The first and most important thing to say about this is that nothing in this paper is new or radical. What he calls “cognitive infiltration” is, despite the denial in the paper, only different in available technology from COINTELPRO and other techniques used in the past to bust up wrongthink and ownlife strategies.
The main thesis of this short paper is that conspiracy thinking is caused by “crippled epistemologies”, that so-called “conspiracy theorists” carefully filter out all but a few sources and harden themselves against any orthodox or official sources of correction. He posits that conspiracy thinking is largely a product of closed, authoritarian societies, and that conspiracy thinking in an open, free society with a transparent, accountable government such as ours (I’m sure you can sense the smirk in these words) is destructive because it corrodes our ability to trust our benevolent institutions uncritically. He also suggests that laws like the Freedom of Information Act might do more harm than good, suggesting that the best way to protect our supposed open society is to close it.
My experience has taught me that, if anything, the conspiracy-minded got that way because they were more open to taboo sources of information, not that they were necessarily closed off from the mainstream. The truly “crippled epistemology” is one which does not think critically and engage skeptically any source of information, be it Alex Jones or the Department of Defense. Those people are ripe for “cognitive infiltration.”
PPS: Obama should be given credit for his commitment to diversity. What other president would have an academic slinging vitriol at conspiracy theorists as well as an outspoken 9/11 truther working for him? Of course, who still has their job..?
Firesign Theatre is a comedy troupe that has been releasing albums since the late 1960s to this day. I don’t know what Humboldt County has to do with this, but it is good stuff.
Lady Columbia leads the American pioneers, driving the animals and Indians into the wild
I think this story only ran in the UK. A news search of Obama and “Native American” returned only the reactions of people to some racist horse-shit Harry Reid said. Obama is a savvy internationalist, but he has so far ignored our Indian nations, just as the succession of white presidents before him did. Popular hero Andrew Jackson is especially reviled among historically-literate natives for his monstrous acts of ethnic cleansing.
The US president has pledged to improve the lives of Native Americans. But he faces huge challenges, such as those on Pine Ridge Indian reservation where unemployment is more than 80%, the average wage is £4,400 – and life expectancy is 50
A few days after our little shake-up, which caused minor damage, a 7.0 earthquake hit ten miles out of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, a city of 2.5 to 3 million people. From everything I have seen so far, it is a tragedy of a massive scale. Too sad for words.
What is our planet up to? Two large earthquakes in a few days, in different parts of the world.
UPDATE: powerful links and (graphic) photos from Haiti, found by/courtesy of Bill at HighBoldtage, follow him for more coverage, I’m sure.
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