(between a rock and a hard place)
Sorry about the classical allusion. I hate stuff where every other word is some classical character that I don’t know a thing about.
Being correct is important to me—it always has. It’s why I’ve debated issues on the Internet dating back decades before anybody ever heard of Obama. I guess this essay starts with a question that interviewer Bill Simmons asked President Obama recently:
Simmons: Have you ever said, “Give me the JFK-assassination files, I want to read them. Give me all the secret stuff”?
Obama: I gotta tell you, it’s a little disappointing. People always ask me about Roswell and the aliens and UFOs, and it turns out the stuff going on that’s top secret isn’t nearly as exciting as you expect. In this day and age, it’s not as top secret as you’d think.
I don’t believe that there’s a government UFO cover-up conspiracy. Well, I say that I don’t, but I’ve seen the question put differently: Do you believe that some UFO sightings are actually secret government weapons tests? I think that’s likely to be true and I think that I’ve read that it actually is true, for example tests of the B1 bomber.
I decry right-wingers with their banksters, Illuminati, Bilderberger, New World Order, UN black helicopter, Jade Heml stuff, but I don’t doubt the existence of financial corruption and collusion, and I see the not-so-hidden hand of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch1 and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)1 behind the Tea Party and all sorts of anti-consumer legislation in the states. But I really want to be right about that, and not succumb to errors in thinking and the murmurings of my lizard brain.
I mean there really was a conspiracy of tobacco companies to hide the science linking smoking with disease. I’m ready to believe that there is a conspiracy of energy companies to hide the science linking carbon emissions and global warming. I’ve gotten past any illusion that the US Government doesn’t lie and do bad things. Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake and other whistle blowers taught us that. (See also: Watergate Scandal, Iran-Contra Affair, Tuskegee Experiment, etc.) The dilemma is steering the safe middle course between too much trust in authority and rejecting it in its entirety.
I think I better wind up before rambling any more. Nobody’s perfect, and that means me. I will get some things wrong. I need to reset my expectations, get off my high horse and join the rest of humanity.
1One anti-ALEC web site is ALEC Exposed.
“But I really want to be right about that, and not succumb to errors in thinking and the murmurings of my lizard brain.”
News Flash: Doc Conspiracy admits to being a reptoid!!!
The date on Rupert’s Melbourne flagship paper, the Herald-Sun, for today is Wednesday, December 2, 2105. I wonder what message he’s trying to send…
He’s obviously trying to protect us from the time travellers who will believe they’ve landed on the wrong date and will just go away.
(Last night I dreamt there was a terrorist bomb scare in my hometown and suddenly planes and helicopters started falling from the sky. Way more scary than thinking you woke up in the next century.)
Edit: The plot thickens.
http://rotarymadison.org/?page_id=155
has an event calendar entry for December 2, 2105.
OMG TIME MACHINES!!!!one!!!eleven!!!
Aren’t all Rotarians also Reptoids? That explains a lot. (I’m a Civitan, an organization founded by disgruntled Rotarians in 1917 originally typoed as 1097).
The digit switching reminds me of Lucas Smith’s find of a Kenyan web site where some of the dates were mm/dd/yyyy and others were dd/mm/yyyy–looked like they changed a software setting but didn’t convert old data.
Worth the read and relevant to what’s going on:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-can-t-understand-american-politics-without-reading-this-study
Wow! Fox News is killing hundreds of thousands of low-education white guys. Who knew? Jokes aside, that was a very informative and provocative article.
Not so far-fetched if you’ve ever talked to a guy who used to be a relatively sane R voter, who after Obama was elected turned into a veins-bulging, eyes-popping, spittle-spewing lunatic… and when you ask what he’s upset about, everything coming out of his mouth was RWNJ memes with no basis in reality whatsoever.
And I’ve seen that not once but dozens of times. Sad, really.
I’ve written an article about this at Gerbil Report(tm)
http://www.gerbilreport.com/2015/12/my-advice-to-birthers.html
It is bizarre. and they get furious if you say “wait, that’s not true. he didn’t do that.” It’s like trying to tell a Scientologist that L. Ron Hubbard was a con man.
The Talking Points Memo article is interesting, but the connection he draws between the mortality study and politics is pure speculation. Had the mortality study shown separate results based on political leaning, that would have provided some evidence; but they didn’t, and I doubt the data they’re working from contains that information.
It wouldn’t.
This article has been bothering me as I realized that I hadn’t ever explained what the rock and the hard place represented. So I changed the next to last paragraph to explain:
“I mean there really was a conspiracy of tobacco companies to hide the science linking smoking with disease. I’m ready to believe that there is a conspiracy of energy companies to hide the science linking carbon emissions and global warming. I’ve gotten past any illusion that the US Government doesn’t lie and do bad things. Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake and other whistle blowers taught us that. The dilemma is steering the safe middle course between too much trust in authority and rejecting it in its entirety.”
I hadn’t realized you were on a high horse, it didn’t seem all that elevated to me. Hmmm!
P.S. – you forgot to add MK-Ultra. Ha!